The Dawn of Darkness (Part 21)

"He's waking up."

The voice seemed detached, like it was floating over my head. My eyes strained to open. There were rows of florescent light bulbs in the fixtures above my head. I was lying in a bed. People were milling around in the room. There was a nurse taking my blood pressure. I could see her strong hand gripping that little bulb, squeezing it. Her nails were a bright red, a stark contrast to the deep chocolate color of her skin. She looked down and smiled at me warmly.

There were numbers announced. A man who looked like a doctor swooped in close to me and shined a light in my eyes, giving me instructions to look up and down. Asking me if I knew where I was, how I'd gotten there. I opened my mouth to speak but no words came out. I could see an IV affixed to my left hand, the thin plastic tubes taped back. There was an odd tugging at my dick. I became keenly aware that there was a catheter in place. More people filtered in and out. The last set was two male cops. They weren't in uniform, but the sternness of their expressions gave them away.

I was informed that I had blacked out after being discovered by the night security guard at the campus swimming pool. The woman that was found with me was Julie Garvey. She had only once been suspected of foul play in what were now being referred to as the "Deviant Drownings." Apparently, Julie had been raped when she was in high school by a man who was never apprehended. She'd been pulling her little prank for almost 5 years. The night that she was taken to jail after being caught with me, she confessed to the drowning of 7 different college men.

Since there was a confession, the cops informed me, there most likely would never be a trial. She would be cut a deal and serve the minimum amount of time that her lawyer could swing for her. They still wanted my side of the story on the off chance that something fell through. The taller of the two cops looked hard at me and then whispered something into his partner's ear.

Looking back at me, he said, "You're that kid whose girlfriend was killed in that bizarre car crash, right?" He raised an eyebrow. It was the look that someone gave you when they ask a question out of courtesy but already know the answer to.

I just nodded. "Yeah, that was some weird shit. Happened over a year ago now," The latter part was spoken to the partner. "Some fag hijacks his girl and takes her for a ride. Drives the two of them off of a cliff. Kicker is that she was found with his dick in her mouth. She'd bitten it clean off. Nice, huh?" The partner nodded in a grim fashion.

The questions were limited mostly to the yes or no variety and I wrote down the remainder of what I couldn't vocalize, which was just about everything. The doctors weren't sure why my vocal cords weren't cooperating, but the cops really didn't seem to care. They just wanted to get their paperwork squared away so that they could get home and get away from my unlucky ass. The younger of them flinched when taking the notebook back from me.

"Thank you for helping us out, Mr..." he glanced down at where I'd written my name.

My voice suddenly came back to me. "Patrick."

He eyed me cautiously and then repeated my name back to me. "Alrighty then, Patrick. You take better care of yourself. Don't be fooling around with women you don't know."

The two cops laughed loudly at that one and clapped their palms on the end of the bed. I mustered a smile and sank back down into my pillow. For the rest of the day and into the night I was checked up on by the nurses and doctors, all filtering through like I was some kind of wild animal on exhibit. My pulse was checked twice in an hour, and I could plainly see two of the women who had tended to me whispering to each other outside of my door.

"Poor guy. You know he's the one from last year, right?"

"Oh, shit! Yeah, that weird lover's triangle thing! Stuff like that never happens around here, and it's happened again to that poor schmuck. Funny how stuff like that works out, doesn't it?"

Yeah, I thought. Real funny.

I was grateful for the time that I had been passed out, because it turned out to be the only sleep I got in the next three days. They released me from the hospital the day after I came to, but I would lay awake in my bed, searching my head for any sign of Bryan. I poked and prodded my memories, but chunks were starting to go missing. The doctors had warned me that might be one of the side effects of having been deprived of oxygen for so long. They estimated that I'd been underwater for a good 5 minutes or so. Julie had told the police that she'd treaded water, waiting to make sure that I sank to the surface and that I wasn't coming up. It was part of the reason why she'd been so paralyzed when I caught her pool side.

Bryan remained silent and my body eventually succumbed to sleep. It was restless, filled with visions of women trotting naked in front of me, all of them fitted with harnesses. I was leading them around in a circle like a ring master, taking a whip to their buttocks whenever they would slow in their pace. Many would apologize profusely. They all called me master.

I didn't remember the exact details of the dream when I woke up, just the feelings left within me and the hard-on jutting up from my body. I had a sense of power. A sense of control. And it was beyond thrilling. I rubbed one out, lying there that morning, bathed in those senses. It felt damn good.

It was late in the fall semester and people were getting ready to take finals and head home for the holidays. Girls were avoiding me like the plague. I couldn't even get the sympathetic attention that Bryan had warranted. I was deemed a cursed man. I had been elevated beyond the status of damaged and slightly doomed. I was just plain FUCKED. And not in the good old-fashioned sense.

Mom and Dad's house was as reserved as it had always been. My brothers were both there, as was Sam's new girlfriend. She was tall and soft-spoken, her hair pulled back into the perfect twist. Her name was Hope. How lovely, my mother had exclaimed.

That was the highlight of my two week stay.

Upon returning to school, I enrolled in the "Porn in Cinema" class. I had been losing interest in the opposite sex faster than they could point and start saying, "Hey, isn't that the guy..." Bryan was fading from my thoughts every day. The hatred and evil that breathed within him was dissipating as well. I was left with a void. A nothingness. The only time that I would feel any excitement would be in the mornings after I woke up from my dreams. The dreams that I could never remember in the light of dawn. I was simply awash with titillation at something I couldn't place my finger on.

So I just wrapped my entire hand around it instead.

There eventually was a night when I was dragged into a closet by a drunken sorority girl. She'd kissed me hard and slammed me against the back wall of the tiny space. "My sisters dared me to fuck you," she slurred. "They say if I fuck you, one of us is going to end up dead, but I don't think so, do you?" She was yanking at my pants. I helped her with it and she maneuvered to her knees and deep throated me. I couldn't remember the last time that I had felt something that good. Before I lost it entirely, I shoved her up against the wall and slammed my dick into her from behind. Her face was turned into mine as I dug my chin into her shoulder and panted hard. I came within seconds. My forehead rested against the dry wall. She burped loudly into my ear The stench of tequila wafted over me.

"Fuuuuuuuck," she whined and pushed me off of her by bumping her ass backwards. "That's it? That's all I get from scary 'you're gonna die' man? That was !LAME!" She drawled the last word in my face, her breath causing my eyes to water. She threw open the door to the closet and I scrambled to pull my pants back up.

"It was fucking LAAAAAAMMMMMME!" She screamed loudly, announcing it to her sisters lining the hall. "Fucking two seconds! That's nothing to be fucking afraid of! That's just fucking sad!" The girls all started laughing. I nodded to them with a smirk on my face and slunk out the front door as fast as possible.

It was during my "Porn in Cinema" class with the Italian film that I began to connect some of the dots. By that point, I hadn't thought about Bryan for a couple of months. He was becoming less real to me, as if he had been the manifestation and not me. The murders were no longer in my memory banks. I actually believed the information that was gossiped around town. I worked within the realms that were presented to me. I did no investigation. I simply took things as they were.

It never occurred to me just how much like Bryan I was acting.

Over the summer season, I student taught for a professor of mine who favored me. It paid little, but there weren't a lot of expenses and the campus was mostly deserted during the summer. I searched out domination books and videos. I did research on the history, on the taboos within the sub-culture. I learned the rules that were in place and the reasons for them. I read that it was was the submissive who had the ultimate power, because they were the ones who were allowed to control the extent to which the domination was taken.

I started collecting the vintage Betty Page photos of her tied in ropes. No one looked at me any wiser, since she had become such a trendy icon as of late. When I brought a girl back to my dorm room one hot early August night, she'd actually ooo-ed and ahh-ed over the blown-up posters on the walls. "I just LOVE her!" she'd exclaimed.

Still, even Betty didn't make it any easier to broach the idea of submission. The furthest that I could bring myself to going was a smack or two on a bare ass. And never any harder than a cupped palm. If it stung my hand, I knew I could be guaranteed a reproach. So I landed a few smacks and pulled a little hair, but that was all. I couldn't bring myself to being ungrateful, as I was still getting laid more often than any other guy in my dorm, cursed reputation or not. Bryan had kept this body in tip top shape, and for that I thanked him. I did my own part in adding to the bad-boy allure and had a quarter-sleeve tattoo added. Boarding down the street in a wife beater assured attention.

Fall semester began and classes were dull. There was a new crop of freshmen girls to graze over, but most of them needed convincing to suck a dick, so trying to get any of them to bow before me was out of the question. I had given up hope when I met Dawn.

She was a senior like myself, and I'd seen her around, but she never traveled in any circles that I was familiar with. She got along with almost everyone, and you would have been hard pressed to find someone who didn't at the very least know her name. She was well-known without being considered popular. I wasn't sure why we'd never crossed paths in the past. Well, other than the fact that she was what Bryan thought of as too big. Bryan liked them skinny or lean. Most of the women that he wanted to chase after had bodies like young girls.

But Dawn was developed. She had tits and ass. Her body was a walking set of feminine curves. Her waist dipped in deeply, giving her hips the appearance of handles. I could just picture yanking her onto me by those, my fingers digging into her flesh, leaving marks. Dawn was built for riding. She was made to go the distance.

She knew it too. Every move that she made was fluid, every batting of an eyelash, every sigh of mock exasperation. Dawn was used to getting everything she wanted without much work involved. She was a cocky bitch, and I fucking loved that about her. Getting that creature to submit would be a challenge. Getting her to relinquish the control that she so obviously cherished would be a thing of pure ecstacy.

I was in love with Dawn from the moment that I laid eyes on her. It wasn't anything that I'd ever felt before. I had no clue.

But Bryan did.