Sex in C Major
Chapter 54

It jarred to think he didn't want them, but...

He sort of didn't.

Strangely, the taxi's arrival was a relief. Daz paid the driver before they left, and then Stefan was alone, with only the cuff and his designated phone in his pocket as tethers back to the house.

And yet he felt good. Better. Brilliant, even.

He had an energy that was almost alien to him. It was like that first one all over again-the tower block, when he got home, was a sign of how far he'd come from the homeless hostel and that scrape with alcohol addiction. The cage was just a precaution. The cello in the closet was his, and only his, and its music, when he drew the bow across neglected strings, was a harmony of possibility.

So he had an owner. So he wanted things that made him a freak. So he liked things that made his gender impossible.

So what?

Daz had agreed not to play with his breasts again. The first time had been anal, the way a woman wouldn't do it. He'd been made to work for it, but he had been rewarded after all. And without masturbating, the climaxes he was permitted were so intense that he didn't need to do it again for an age.

Left to his own devices, without Daz to tempt him, perhaps days. Maybe even a week or two.

He could get into a routine, and manage it properly. Service his owner as required, and be rewarded every time for devotion to his purpose. And then the reward would reset him, so that no matter how long until he was summoned to the narrow street of terraced houses again, he would not be so pathetically desperate in the meantime.

This was all-

God, this was all so possible.

And buoyed by the brightness, Stefan played not the classics, or the exercises from half-forgotten lessons, but the adaptations he'd entertained himself with learning in his teens. Pop songs. Music he'd learned from YouTube videos, or downloading the sheets for a favourite song. Music he'd played in school, to earn the tiny shreds of respectability and liking that had kept him from being found out as the complete freak he was.

Music he had, despite the reason he had learned it, enjoyed.

Still enjoyed.

Because while the classics were powerful and epic, great war-cries of emotion and history, there was something even more moving in the simplest of songs. In a pop song by an artist who'd be forgotten in years. Because Stefan never sang, only played, and yet the emotion-the pace, the speed, the defiance, the uplifting challenging demand that the world try harder to put the singer down-wasn't lost. It always matched.

Always.

And so Stefan played not some epic to lift him out of his life for an hour, but a shitty pop song he'd heard for the first time on the radio in a crappy newsagents that sold booze to twelve-year-olds because it was the only way it turned a profit.

He played the music he'd grown up with and, for once, felt fine.

Stefan got sanctioned.

He'd failed to go to a job interview-too busy, he thought sardonically, with an Ann Summers collection up his arse and so his benefits were reduced.

"If you don't go, you're obviously not seriously looking to replace work," the bored drone at the Jobcentre told him.

"I just forgot," Stefan said.

"Right. Right."

She didn't care. And honestly, Stefan didn't either. That defiance from the day before had lasted, and he walked out with his reduced payment without really caring about where that left him. They paid the rent and council tax separately. What would they do now, cut off the electric if he failed to pay the bill again? So what. He only had it for the lights, the fridge, the microwave, and the shower. He could eat cold beans out of the tin, like he had in the hostel.

He owed Dean, though, and the guy was alright but his supplier could get nasty, so Stefan headed to Roundhay Road to pay him off before heading home. He could last a week without. He could hang around the university, the students were always throwing away food. Or he could beg Daz to be used. Daz usually fed him afterwards.

Stefan's dick twitched. Tired, but hopeful.

Dean didn't actually live on Roundhay Road, as far as Stefan knew, but he was always to be found in the area-down by the car showrooms, today, loitering by a shiny BMW with an air of intent. A salesman was loitering nearby with equally determined intent.

Dean was both distinctive and mundane at the same time: tall, thin, battered green coat that had seen better millennia. Apart from the neon orange trainers and the white dreadlocks, he would have been ordinary. And no, not blond dreadlocks. Not even blond-blond dreadlocks. They were dyed the coldest, snowiest white. Dean had a scruffy ginger beard occasionally, but the thick dreadlocks that swayed around his angular face were pure white.