I will not be your master - Chapter 1

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#1 of I will not be your master

There will be BDSM (particularly tickling and bondage in the next chapters, don't worry)


Bradley had enough. He didn't want this anymore. He was tired of his dom demanding every second of his life. Of him not hearing his cries, his safewords, when he begged him to stop or even have a break. The muscular crocodile's chest still felt the warm remnants of wax on his body, and his back still tingled from the whips he received. He rubbed his wrists. Though the cuffs were gone, his mind told him otherwise, and the phantom chains were as present as they were before. But most of all, his dick felt sore.. If it were to be edged any more than the torture it took this entire week, it'd fall right off.

"Bryan." The bed beneath his buttocks felt uncomfortable. He couldn't stand to be in the same room as his dom any second longer. "You really went over the top today."

The bare-chested fox stood up from the bed. "See you next weekend, cunt. Don't forget what I told you. Ya know what the punishment is, already." He gripped his shoulders, no acknowledging gaze in his gaze. As the fox walked away from the room, Bradley shed a tear or two before he wiped them away. The thought, "Enough was enough," circled around his head as he put his clothes back on. He swore beneath his breath when he shut down the door that he was never going to enter this place again.

~~~~

The lonely man who lived in a cottage by the riverside was perceived as the village outcast. On weekdays, he worked inside a small library arranging books and helping the elderly on computers. On weekends, he'd simply stay inside his home, either reading through novels and watering the garden. Whenever he spoke, it was always about one thing or another. He hardly, if he ever did, speak about himself. Nobody knew his past. He didn't even have a single relative in town. It was only natural, then, for people to grow curious about the man, and start whispering his origins.

"Maybe he's a murderer starting a new life."

"Maybe he's part of some foreign mafia."

"He does have a very weird accent, doesn't he? The Japanese have their Yakuza and the Italians have their Sicilian Mafia."

"He doesn't look or sound either to me."

"I can assure you." A gray furred feline opened the door. He wore a simple tunic that exposed his cloud white chest and face beneath the sunlight. Everything else about him, though, was a gray color tinged with a bit of brown. It was patterned by a bit of black as well. "I am neither Japanese or Italian."

"What are you then?" one of the children asked.

"A cat," he replied. "That's all I have to say."

"Aww."

His tail swished. With a watering can on one hand, he gently poured water down the roots of his potted plants.

"Why don't you have a wife, Mr. Jeremiah?" an orange furred kitten asked, his head and arms on the fences.

"Well, girls just don't like me."

"Why do you stay inside the house and read books all day?" Another asked, this time a young wolf of deep gray fur.

"I just like doing it."

A chubby deer then asked next. "Do you have cupcakes, Sir Jeremiah?"

"I do not, Jessica. I haven't done my groceries yet."

"Why are you short, Jeremiah?" A brown rabbit in his late teens asked.

"Questions like those are why your parents don't love you, Harold." He rolled his eyes in jest. "Off you all go, now. Oh, Jessica, tell your aunt, Mrs. Gardiner, to return the book she borrowed."

"I will!" Jessica said before running off. And with that, all the children left to do whatever they wanted.

Jeremiah was an amiable man to all children in the small village he lived in. He was too for the ferals. Whenever the sun peaked, and whenever it set, all the feral animals gathered around his home knowing he'd have leftovers for them to feed over. He was a soft man, they all agreed. Soft and harmless Jeremiah.

That was why they were all surprised, ever curious to see a muscular crocodile knock on his door.

"May I help you?" Jeremiah cautiously opened the door. His eyes widened, head looked up. The man in front of him was, by the looks of it, almost twice his size. A six foot five, it looked like. He was a short man in comparison, only five foot one.

"Hey, it's me, Bradley. The one you've been chatting with on Grindr." Bradley had a deep voice to him. His scales were as green as moss, and the blue polo shirt he wore looked as if it were just a tad bit too small for his size.

"D-do I know you?" He gulped. Jeremiah knew no crocodile in his life. Most especially not a muscular one named Bradley.

"You don't know me?" He grinned, as if the cat just pulled out a joke. "Oh, master. I know you said you liked roleplay, but I didn't know we'd be starting right away."

But he shook his head. "'No, I'm sorry. I think you genuinely have the wrong person in your hands. I'm not roleplaying or anything, I swear."

With his raised hands and shaking eyes, it gave pause to the crocodile if only for a second.

"Wait," Bradley paused. He blinked twice, and inhaled a deep breath before he uttered the next word. "You're serious?"

"I am! I'm sincerely sorry for the mistake, but there might be some other-"

"That can't be," he interrupted. He took a phone out of his pocket. He was so nervous that it looked like the gadget would slip out of his hands any second now. "Look!"

Bradley showed him an online conversation as he dragged his claw on the screen to show hundreds of hours worth of text. But the conversation alone was not what surprised Jeremiah. When he saw a profile picture of him, looking absently away from the camera, his heart completely stopped. Beside the profile picture was his real name in full.

"What?" The air around him suddenly thinned, and his lungs began to beg for breath. He scrolled through the conversations, clutching his chest in agony. "This isn't me..."

'Lmfao, bet u'd look so slutty tied up and whipped.'

'Bitch. U like getting called like that'

'Dick pics now, whore.'

"I don't- I don't talk like this!" Jeremiah's body no longer felt his own as his lungs breathed in and out so fast that it hurt. He gave me the phone to Bradley, as he leaned in to the door for support.

Someone was using his identity. Someone took pictures of him and used it without his knowledge. Someone knew where he lived. But most of all, someone was using it to portray him as some creep.

"Hey, hey. Calm down!" Bradley immediately rushed into his side and held him up. With Jeremiah's small body, he had to be careful not to cause some injury or another to add to the feline's distress.

"Someone's stealing my identity!" His eyes were stained with tears. Jeremiah wouldn't stop hyperventilating, even as he rushed to the couch and sat down. "Water." He immediately pointed to the kitchen. "Water, please."

"On it."

It took a while longer than Jeremiah thought he would, but the strange crocodile did return with a cup of water, and handed it to him. "Thank you."

He gulped it down in one sitting. Thereafter, he stared at the glass and recollected his thoughts.

"Are you okay?"

But he couldn't pay attention to the crocodile sitting awkwardly right beside him. Not right now when his first priority was straightening out his head. In his mind, he closed his eyes and counted ten seconds to give his brain a chance to realign. When his counting finished, he inhaled, this time at a much slower pace, before he looked at the crocodile once again. "I have so many questions, but I don't know where to start."

"You're really not the person I've been talking to these past few weeks?"

"No," Jeremiah shook his head, "no, I am not."

"Then who was I talking to?" He leaned back on the couch, and slouched a bit along with its back.

"I- I don't know! I don't know anyone in my life at all who could possibly hate me enough to do that." He groaned. The glass he held felt as if it would break if he gripped it any more than he already did. The big man jumped at his voice, and on any other day, he would have apologized for saying such a thing so rudely. But he needed to calm down. His entire reputation was at stake here, and if things got any worse, the worst case scenario was that he would get into prison, with nothing to defend himself with. Jeremiah knew a thing or two when it came to cell phones and all, but compared to his peers, he considered himself technologically inept. He'd need help from someone far more experienced than him to get to the root of the problem. But if he wanted to do that, it could cost him a lot of money. Money he didn't have. If he didn't resign from his corporate job in the cities, he might have had more than enough. But this wasn't the right time to be thinking about the past.

His thoughts turned to Bradley. Even if he was just a stranger, he was just as much dragged into the problem as Jeremiah. "Erm, I apologize you got dragged into this problem. Believe me, I never wanted this. What did you get in here for, if it's all right? Sex?"

Bradley blushed. Even with his deep, moss-green scales, Jeremiah could see the red beneath his face. "Sort of... It's not exactly like sex, but it's still sex."

"I'm afraid I don't understand?" He cocked his head. "I'm not a very sexual person myself, so I'm not very knowledgeable in that regard. But I may be able to compensate you for your troubles in..." Jeremiah held his breath. "I mean, I don't want to do sex! I don't know you at all, but in other ways like, maybe money perhaps, I can help you."

"No, it's fine!" Bradley chuckled. "It's like I said. Not sex, but sexual."

"Erm," the feline shifted uncomfortably in his seat, "can you tell me?"

"Are you comfortable with it?"

"That doesn't matter. You got involved into this problem just like me, and I don't think that's fair for either of us. We should help each other out."

"Right, uh..." Bradley straightened his back and looked at Jeremiah with an anxious look on his face. "Just promise me you won't judge, all right?"

"I... can't guarantee that."

"Whatever. Here goes." He averted his gaze, and his arms tensed. Jeremiah hated the tension the crocodile was making. It was unnecessary. The faster Bradley would say it, the faster they'd be done with the problem. "I'm here to be your slave."

Jeremiah blinked. "Pardon?"

"You heard that right." He scratched the back of his head. "I'm here to be your slave."

"I don't understand." He couldn't grasp the subject. A simple Social Studies class in High School would tell everyone that slavery is bad. The fact that such a big man came to his home solely for that purpose... He could only think of the sort of things held against Bradley in order to be such a thing. "Were you blackmailed? Is this part of... whatever the deep, dark web is? Is someone holding you at gunpoint?"

"No! Of course not, you don't get it." He frantically shook his hands and head in front of him. "It's... Fuck, how do I explain this?" Bradley paused for a few moments, before he continued. "Okay, it's not that I'm being held hostage or anything. I'm not in any danger."

"Then why would you want to be my slave?" The feline raised a brow.

"It's... a fantasy. A sexual fantasy."

"A fantasy? How so?" This confused him even more. Jeremiah was, and many would agree, that he was the most traditional, most vanilla man in the world. To him, sex was simply an engagement between the bodily organs. A way for people to intertwine and understand each other's bodies in the most intimate matters possible. In those moments, it was a God-given right that allowed everyone to let their souls become one. There was no room for slavery in sex. How could there be?

"It's complicated," the crocodile replied. "I just like the idea of being dominated and ordered around."

"Um, okay." Jeremiah nodded. He didn't understand it, but at least he could respect it. To further complicate things, it was odd that a man as big as Bradley had a desire to be dominated by another man. To him, it made much more sense for a man like him to dominate other people instead.

"So... What did you want me to do?"

"Dunno, the 'you' I talked to kept it as a surprise."

"Ah, okay." He cleared his throat. This was getting more awkward than he anticipated it to be. "I can, erm, compensate you monetarily instead for the problems. I'm not rich, but I can pay for your ride home."

"Ah, sorry dude. Can't do that."

"Why not?"

"I already filed for vacation from work just for this, dude. I don't wanna go home."

"Really?" Jeremiah frowned. His tail swished in the air. He didn't want to dominate any man, even if Bradley was willing to be a slave. Even consent had its limits. What would the neighbors think? "I... I don't know what to do now..."

But Bradley smirked, an arm turned around the couch. "You know, Jeremiah, even if we both caught ourselves in a predicament, I'm deeply in love with you. I can't get out of my head the things the fake 'you' were telling me these past few weeks."

Jeremiah scowled, and his ears turned to his direction. He didn't exactly like the look on Bradley's face. "What are you proposing?"

"I propose we make a deal. I'll stay in your house for one month. You don't have to be my master or anything if you don't want to. In exchange, I'll help you out with your identity theft problem. How about that?"

The feline's irises sharpened. For all he knew, this could be a trap. After all, he didn't know anything about Bradley. A man comes into his house, claims to be his servant, and presents him with information about his online identity, some of which are entirely accurate. It was all too suspicious.

"What if I simply called the police on you?" he replied. "For all I know, you made the information up, and this could all be a ruse."

"Who else can help you then? I'm the one who got tricked by the fake 'you', and the one with the conversation details. We can even investigate it together."

On the walls, the clock turned, and it waited for Jeremiah's answer. The crocodile's foot tapped, waiting for an answer.

"Don't be fooled," the feline finally said. His tail swished around him. The air was still amidst open windows, thick and heavy in the atmosphere like a yoke tied around his neck. "I'm not the Jeremiah you know on the internet."

"You're right." Bradley groaned as he slouched his back, as if he lived in this home for decades. He made a soft grin, and for a moment, it seemed like he was the master of the house, not him. Bradley carried knives behind his back, trickeries Jeremiah just couldn't see. He knew he was stepping on a floor with scattered shards of glass. They were simply invisible, with no way to see them at all. It reminded him of Odysseus, of how he led armies through Troy, blinded a great cyclops, and tricked the goddess Circe. Jeremiah felt like he was all three.

Bradley said, "I don't. You're almost the complete opposite of 'him'. But I already spent a lot of things just to be here, I don't want to back off now. Besides, I'm really curious how this is going to go."

The sound of rushing waters in the river crept up his spine. But the sunlight spilled through the windows and fed his every breath and word. He may be stepping through shards of glass, but he wasn't Circe, a cyclops, nor was he the city Troy. He was Jeremiah, the feline by the river.

"On one condition. I will never be your master or your slave."