Nathan
Miranda and I lead Ruby from the dorms to the parking lot, and then halfway across town to a little suburb in the northern valley. Or rather, Oakley leads us there.
Ruby stays on her trail at a careful distance, only occasionally catching up into visual range to confirm that it’s still Oakley we’re chasing. The watch is still with her.
Whenever I worry that Ruby might be getting too scared to continue, she gives me a cute little, “roger that,” or “target is changing lanes without signaling, again, recommend countering with a pit maneuver,” like we’re playing some terrific spy game.
The fact that she’s actually getting mad at Oakley, if only in clumsy, joking flashes, definitely seems to be helping her focus. It’s also disorienting. I’ve never seen Ruby get mad at anyone.
Finally, the GPS tag stops moving right outside of a corner coffee shop, and I tell Ruby to park a few houses down from it.
“Tell me what you can see,” I say.
“She’s parked in the lot,” Ruby answers, and moves her arm just in time for her phone camera to catch the door of the coffee shop closing on someone. “She’s going inside.”
“I’m not seeing movement. Does she have the watch?” I ask.
“I don’t think so,” says Ruby. “It looked like she put something in the trunk. What do I do when she comes back?”
I glance at Miranda, who’s been helping me with every third direction or so.
“That depends on whether this is just a stop, or if this is where she’s taking it to,” Miranda says, and I repeat her words, focusing to make sure they cross the link into Ruby’s mind.
“And if this is where she’s taking it to?” Ruby whispers nervously.
“Then… this is where you’re going to make life difficult for her,” I say.
Ruby puts her head down on her steering wheel — I can’t see it, but I can feel it — and begins breathing heavily. They’re deep breaths at first, intentional, meant to be calming, but they spin off quickly into ragged hyperventilation.
“So, this…” she pants, “this might be… where I have to call her out?”
“Maybe,” I say. “I’ll be right here to help. It won’t be like calling her out on your own.”
Ruby takes in an extra thick breath.
“Oh gods, she’s out on the patio now,” she says. “She’s talking to someone on the phone. They’re… they’re going to be late, and she’s disappointed.”
“Okay, that’s good,” I say. “That gives you some time to feel ready.”
“Right,” says Ruby. Her head is on the wheel again. “Right, right, right, right, oof, okay, yes. Getting ready.”
I can’t help asking. “Are you sure you don’t want me to—”
“I’m sure!” Ruby answers. “Tell me to do whatever you want, but don’t take the fear away. Don’t make me numb.”
“Okay.”
“Just… give me the orders,” says Ruby. “Anything but that. Tell me to be here. Tell me why. Tell me what to do right now. Make me feel you in me.”
I look to Miranda, who shrugs and gestures me onward.
“Stay right there,” I tell Ruby. “Stay there until I tell you to move.”
Ruby breaths a little slower. “Yes, Nathan. I’m staying right here.”
“Sit, and breathe, and listen to me.”
“I’m listening.”
“You’re there because I’m going to make you take the win you deserve,” I say. “And believe me, you do deserve it. You deserve for your stuff to be safe. You deserve to push back on someone who’s taking advantage of you. You deserve to see what happens when you stop covering for her. Believe it.”
“I believe…” Ruby audibly forces the words from her mouth. “I believe… fuck!”
I’m looking to Miranda, when suddenly, she’s gone.
#
Everything is gone.
My room is gone. I’m standing in an endless expanse of swirling grey fog. I look down at my hands, expecting to have to squint to find them in the dense air, but I can see them perfectly clearly. The shape is right, they respond to my thoughts as normal, but a faint glow of light around the edges tells me that they’re not exactly the same skin and tendons and bones that I look at every day.
I look up again, and Ruby is standing in front of me, clothed in nothing but that same faint glow emanating from every inch of her skin.
I look down further and realize I’m naked too. Even the cage is gone.
I suppress the irrational urge to cover myself. Ruby has seen me like this before, and I want her to again.
The thread of magic between us is a visible thing here, thick as my thumb and pulsing with light. Right now, it runs between our chests.
Shapes move somewhere out there in the fog, looming and ominous, just beyond my range of vision.
Miranda’s not here. There’s no one to ask what to do.
“Where are we?” I ask.
“In me,” Ruby answers. “My imagination. It’s a ‘shared vision’ spell.”
“But we’re not even in the same room,” I say.
Ruby shrugs. “I’m pretty good at this one.”
Of course she is. It’s the pinnacle of sub magic, ripping yourself open to take someone else inside. But I didn’t know anyone was this good at it, not without help from a better dom partner than me.
“I need a break,” Ruby explains, before I can get past the how and start asking about the why. “I couldn’t be out there right now, in my body, in the world.”
Panic starts in my chest, pushing my end of the magic thread off to the side until it’s clinging to my left hand.
“I pushed you too hard? I’m so sorry, I’ll never—”
“No, I just need a break!” says Ruby. The fog around us flashes red, and a crack of lightning fills it with the scent of ozone. She looks annoyed. “Can I please tell you that, without you threatening to give up and set everything on fire and never try anything again?”
“Of course!” I say, guiltier than ever, raising my hands in peace toward not just the image of Ruby but the crackling, restless ether of her all around me. “I’m sorry—”
“Stop apologizing!” Ruby almost begs. “I want to go back out there, soon, I want you to keep pushing me, I want to finish this. But first, would you stay with me here? Just for a little while?”
“Of course, of course…” I step cautiously toward her, and as soon as I touch the luminescent skin of her shoulder, she throws herself forcefully into my arms, and I hold her.
It’s almost like holding her in real life. Her imagination is strong, so much stronger than mine. There’s warmth where our bodies meet. There’s friction between our skin that raises goosebumps on mine. The only flaw in the illusion is a vague, amorphous sense that I could probably move through her instead of touching her, if I really tried to.
I don’t try.
“Of course, you can tell me when you need a break,” I say.
She kisses me on the mouth, and now she’s pulling me closer, with arms around my neck, trying to kiss me deeper, but it feels important to get a few more words out first.
“You can tell me anything,” I say. “Show me anything.”
“You make it fucking difficult for me,” Ruby says, biting my lip in time with another thunderclap, and I realize that I want to stay in this place for as long as I can, with her mind splayed out open around me like this. She would never say anything so blunt out in the physical world. Maybe she can’t help it in here.
“I don’t mean to make anything difficult,” I say.
“I know, that makes it even worse,” Ruby growls lightly against my mouth. “I don’t want to hurt you, Nathan. But then how am I ever supposed to let you know me, when every time I try, you fall apart?”
“I won’t,” I say. “I’m sorry. Please, I want to know you.”
“More than you want to make guesses about me, and never hear that you’re wrong?”
Fuck, I really do hate to be wrong. But there’s only one answer.
“Yes.”
“Then come here.” She pulls me forward, and for a moment I’m scared to fall, into the fog, into nothing, into I’m not sure what. Then a bed materializes in the void behind her, and we land on a soft, lacy blue bedspread, with me on top of her. The fabric feels as real as our skin.
“Kiss me slowly, please?” she says. “Along the insides of my hips?”
“Do you want to switch and take the lead?” I ask.
It’s not an accusation, I’m just trying to keep up. To let go of my guesses and listen.
She shakes her head. “No. I just want to lie here and whisper my wishes to you.”
I can get on board with that.
I kneel down on the empty fog next to the bed and trail my kisses up her thighs to those sensitive little side valleys outlining her pussy. She takes in a sharp breath, and twists her fingers into the bedspread. Her whole body shivers, and she spreads her legs farther apart, opening that central valley wider, letting new surfaces glisten with moisture in the dim, diffused light of the void.
“What’s your next wish?” I whisper, hoping it’s the same as the wish this position is giving me.
She sighs. “I wish to wait. I wish to want, and wait, and wait, and want, and not know when or where I’m going to feel your tongue next.”
I keep kissing those valleys on either side of the one I want. The one that wants me. I kiss them slowly, softly, unpredictably, and resist the urge to dive in and give her the strongest sensation I can, right now.
It’s easier to hold back, having heard her ask me to, outright, but it’s still incredibly hard.
I want to hear that extra special gasp when I slide my tongue up her slit to circle around her clit. And also, I want to know, and I want to know now… will it even work? Will this spell really let me as good as touch the parts of her that are locked away in the physical world? Can we touch each other? Is this all it takes? An imaginary playground, and Ruby’s extraordinary ability to share one?
I hold out as long as I can, blowing soft streams of air over her pussy as I switch between her thighs, until finally, I can’t quite make it all the way from one thigh to the other, and I let my kisses fall right between them.
Ruby’s moan sounds as real as her knees feel under my hands.
I lick her, steadily, relentlessly, hoping to make good on this incredible invitation she’s issued, before I can overthink and ruin it somehow.
But I can’t help noticing that I have a full, sturdy erection here that my body can’t possibly have in its cage. Or even out of its cage, most days. I haven’t been this hard without Miranda’s help in months. I’m so hard I feel like I could almost trust it to last, and work.
I don’t ask. I don’t even hint. But after a few seconds, Ruby reaches down to hold my face, and tugs me up toward her.
I clamber to my feet and lean over her. I don’t kiss her right away, not sure how she feels about tasting her own tangy flavor, but she lifts her head and kisses me like it’s nothing. Her legs are still dangling on the floor on either side of mine, her hips hanging just slightly over the edge of the bed. I feel like I need to press closer, just to hold her up, make her comfortable. Or maybe that’s just my excuse.
She reaches down again, this time to grab my cock.
It feels even more real, even more securely erect, with her hand tight around it. She lines up the head with her opening, and I can feel her moisture, supplemented with my own saliva.
She smiles up at me and whispers, “I wish…”
And I push in.
She moans and locks her arms around my neck, to hold me in a longer kiss.
Having my feet on the ground, even though there is no ground, gives me the leverage for long, sure, firm thrusts. I work my way up slowly, but soon find that no matter how hard I go, Ruby’s moans will always sound like she wants a little more.
The fog around us lights up and changes colors, as if with distant fireworks. Less distant with each flash. The air sparkles with ever-shifting iridescent shapes.
In the moments when I can free myself from Ruby’s endlessly hungry mouth, I lick my way down to her breasts, savoring the responsive, shifting texture of her nipples, trying to sense the subtle flavor of just her bare skin.
The moment stretches on, and on, and on, until I have no idea how long we’ve been here, only that it’s definitely longer than our last tryst, which Ruby spent apologizing for taking so long.
I can feel the soft tightness of her walls around me. I can feel a seizing, tingling pressure running from the head of my cock deep into my pelvis, building, building, building…. But it’s an illusion. Like the way a rotating spiral looks like it’s expanding, but stays forever the same size.
The limitations of this shared vision space are becoming clear.
We’re in a dream together. A vivid, lucid, shared dream, but still a dream. One of those dreams you spend searching for something you never find. Waiting for something that never starts. Or even if you do somehow reach the object of your anticipation, it doesn’t satisfy the way you expect it to, because nothing has changed in your body.
I’ve never been able to cum properly in a dream, even before starting at WCLK. I have sex dreams and wet dreams, but the two experiences never quite line up to imitate anything like good waking sex with a proper ending.
I can do almost anything with Ruby here that I could hope to do in the real world. But I’ll never be able to finish.
From the increasingly desperate look on Ruby’s face, I’m guessing she’s hitting the same realization.
She clutches my back and thrusts her hips up against me in the hopelessly frenzied way of someone pounding on a hundred-pound vault door they’ve given up on picking.
“Ugh, I’m so sorry!” she moans. “I thought this might happen. But I wasn’t sure, I thought it might not happen. I thought maybe we’d be able to cheat the system. Maybe it would be as good as the real thing. But then, maybe it would have disrupted our magic just as much… I should have brought it up. I shouldn’t have started this. I’m sorry—”
I kiss her. “Now you stop apologizing.”
“But I’m just so sorry!”
Her nails are raking frantically down my back with how sorry she is.
“I’m not,” I say, slowly forcing myself to pull my dream body out of hers.
She whimpers and raises her hips to hold on to me for just a fraction of a second longer. It’s almost long enough to break my will and make me sink back in. Instead, I lie down beside her and pull her close, resting my still-hard cock on her thigh for comfort. She throws one of her legs over mine to keep just a little contact on her pussy too.
“I wanted to get this close to you again so badly,” she says.
“I wanted it too,” I assure her, and run my fingers through her hair. It still feels so real.
“Even if you’d known we’d end up here?” she asks.
“You’re not a bottle of painkillers,” I tell her. “Wanting you isn’t about wanting relief.”
Ruby blushes and looks genuinely touched, not out there in the world where she can look the way she thinks she should, but right here inside her head. She looks touched by something I said, without Miranda’s help. I can’t help but feel a giddy rush of pride, and double down.
“I’d be happy to spend all day, every day, feeling you, and making you feel, even if I never get off again.”
She smacks me lightly on the shoulder. “And now you’re exaggerating.”
My cock pulses revealingly against her.
“Maybe a little,” I admit, sheepishly.
“It’s romantic,” says Ruby. “But don’t make a habit of it.”
#
Ruby
I’m back in my car, back on the side of the road in front of the parking lot of a coffee shop I’ve never been to before, staring at Oakley’s trunk.
It’s locked, and so am I. My clit is throbbing under its steel cover, hungry for just a few more seconds of the contact it’s still convinced was real. I feel awful for leaving Nathan in the same condition, and more than a bit amazed at how well he’s taking it. I mean, I know I can handle getting worked up and left caged, but that’s not about being tough or anything. It’s just because making a fuss is so much scarier to me than sitting with discomfort quietly.
At least I can make it up to him by nailing the finale of this project with him.
Oh gods, here she comes.
I can nail it, can’t I?
I duck out of sight as Oakley returns to her car. She opens the trunk, pulls out the clear plastic watch box, and heads back toward the patio, where there’s now a man about our age, with sunglasses and a backpack of his own, waiting for her. I must have been checked out when he arrived.
“Stuff’s happening,” I whisper to Nathan.
Get closer, he tells me. It’s almost time.
At least he doesn’t tell me to believe I deserve to win, or whatever the exact direction was that pushed me off the deep end last time. These instructions are physical. Simple. I open the car door and walk up the sidewalk to the parking lot, close enough to hear a bit of Oakley’s conversation with this guy.
“I can’t, you know I can’t!” she’s saying to him. “We’ve got almost another two weeks to go.”
“Or you could ditch that weirdo school, get in training for a real job, and we could fuck as much as we want. Like normal people.”
“You know, you could be just a little supportive,” Oakley hisses at him. “It’s not like I expect you to be chaste with me. How many times a week do I suck you off?”
“It doesn’t count if you look bored the whole time.”
“It’s not going to be the same for me as it is for you!” she yells at him. “I can’t help that.”
“You can, but you won’t.”
“Can we not do this today?” Oakley yells. “I got you something, and I’d like giving it to you to be a nice thing!”
“I’m starting to feel kinda bad for her,” I whisper to Nathan.
She stole from you to try to buy her way out of a fight without buying anything. These two deserve each other.
“I guess.”
Order something cold and fast, and then run into them outside like it’s a coincidence.
There’s no line inside the shop, and in two minutes flat, I’m shouldering my way out onto the patio with an iced hibiscus tea in hand. The pounding in my chest tries to paralyze me, but my body keeps moving anyway.
“Oakley?” I lie more convincingly than I’ve ever lied about anything in my life. “I didn’t know you were into this place.”
“No one’s into this place,” says Oakley. “You just come here if you’ve got some other reason be out of range of a Starbucks.”
Smile and stare at her, says Nathan.
I do.
Oakley looks unbearably annoyed that I’m not offering parting pleasantries and leaving her alone.
“Mike,” she sighs with put-upon politeness, “this is my roommate, Ruby. Ruby, my boyfriend, Mike.”
I greet Mike and offer a handshake before Nathan can tell me not to.
Sit at their table, he says instead, and ask Oakley if she’s seen your watch.
I’m shuddering with embarrassment as I plunk myself down, take a long sip of my tea, and ask this ridiculously pointed question.
“What watch?” Oakley asks through her teeth.
Describe it unmistakably. Keep pretending that you don’t know she took it.
I choke up for a moment, realizing that he hasn’t given me precise lines to recite, but as ever, the spell kicks in and nudges my brain out of its jam.
“Oh, it’s kind of new,” I say. “Black. Touch screen. Vibration. My mom gave it to me a couple months ago, but I might have to exchange it. It’s been acting kind of weird. It’s great when it’s working right, though. So, yeah, last I saw it, it was in its box on my nightstand, but when I got home today, it was gone.”
Perfect, Nathan’s approval is intoxicating. It’s not often I hear approval inside my own head. That’s so perfect, you don’t even know.
Oakley is seething, glaring at me over her coffee. She seems to be waiting for me to back down, but there’s no way I’m giving back that last bit of praise.
Her jaw sets, a decision made.
“This is low, even for you,” Oakley says, and turns to Mike. “She’s always doing this. She takes my stuff and makes up stories to convince people it was hers all along. I normally try not to make it a big deal, but normally, she doesn’t follow me across town to do it.”
She reaches under the table and places the watch box in view, looking for all the world like she has nothing to be ashamed of. I don’t know how she does it without a voice in her head telling her to.
Maybe she has one.
“Ruby found out that I got you something really nice,” Oakley claims, “and she came all this way to ruin it for us and take it for herself.”
I, on the other hand, want to sink into the floor. Even though I know the watch isn’t hers, I feel like a monster.
Mike is sure looking at me like a monster. Although, he’s not exactly looking at Oakley like some kind of angel, either. It looks more like he’s wishing he had never shown up today.
Tell him she’s got it backwards, but that he can have it, says Nathan.
“She’s the thief and liar,” I say, “But you can have it, if it means that much to you.”
Oakley’s knuckles are white against the clear plastic box, but what can she do now but hand it to him?
She pushes it all the way across the table before Mike raises a hand to take it, tentatively, like it’s a snake that might bite him.
“Thanks,” he mumbles to her, with his eyes on me.
Make sure he opens it.
“Aren’t you going to try it on?” I ask.
He takes off his sunglasses, and he’s looking at Oakley now, wondering if she’s going to stop him when he slides the lid off the base of the box.
The moment he touches the watch itself, the screen lights up, and a digital voice begins reading aloud.
“Text message from: Nathan. Hi, Ruby. Can’t wait to see you again. Guess how much I can’t wait? I wrote a song for you! Playing attached media.”
The digital voice gives way to a tinny recording of Nathan’s own voice giving a loud and tuneless serenade.
“Your eyes, your eyes, whoah-oh-oh….”
I wonder for a moment if he’s doing the best he can, and try to get my mind in order quickly so that won’t hear me accidentally think anything uncharitable about his efforts.
Don’t worry, I sound even worse in person, Nathan chuckles in my head, without a shred of self-pity or compliment fishing. Thank gods, he knows he can’t sing, and he truly couldn’t care less.
Why? I think at him. There are a million things you could have programmed it to do, or magicked it to do. You didn’t have to do… this.
It had to be too embarrassing for anyone to think that you put it there to be found on purpose. Nathan reasons. And I wouldn’t let you keep all of today’s embarrassment for yourself.
I have to put my hand over my mouth to keep from laughing out loud in front of the others.
Of course, that would be exactly how someone like Nathan, someone like me, would get up the nerve to be this foolish in public. To dodge the guilt of making someone else do it.
The song wails on.
“Ruby, Ruby, baby, tell me, won’t you pleeeeease…”
He uses my name just enough to make it impossible to miss, but not enough to make it feel intentional.
Mike overcomes his paralysis somewhere into the second verse and seems to decide that he’s heard enough. He, places the watch hurriedly back on its stand, fits the lid halfway over it, and pushes it toward me, still singing.
“Yeah, no, I think you should keep this.” He pushes his chair back from the table and puts his sunglasses back on before glancing in Oakley’s direction. “See you,” he grunts, on his way out to the parking lot.
“Mike!” Oakley starts after him. “MIKE, COME BACK!”
She’s almost begging, but too much anger seeps into her voice, and it comes more like an order, which Mike does not take.
Oakley pauses, with all eyes except for Mike’s on her, and she looks back at me, pinned and torn between which of us she wants to pounce on more.
“You,” she says, holding a trembling finger out toward me.
It seems like there’s going to be more, but then her hand swats the air and drops to her side, and she’s jogging off to catch him.
Come back to me to celebrate, Nathan tells me. Don’t let her see you sweat.
I walk to the car, and as soon as the door is shut, I start sweating instantly, heavily, like I’ve been bottling it up somehow. It’s freezing cold.
“Oh gods, she’s going to kill me,” I say out loud. “She’s going to murder me in my sleep.”
You’re not going to have any trouble changing roommates after we turn in this project, says Nathan.
“Shit, right, people are going to know about this,” I say. “People are going to know that I did this!”
People are going to know that she did this, Nathan corrects me. And that I did this. It’s going to be okay. I’m not going to take off and leave you with the mess.
I take a deep breath, nod even though he can’t see it, and pull out onto the street.
“I know you won’t.”
***
Thanks for reading! If you had a good time, follow me for more, and show me some love with your comments and favorites! And let me know if you’d like to see more of Nathan, Ruby, Miranda, and the Western College of Locks and Keys.
