Regaining consciousness now is like waking up from the real world into a bizarre, surreal dream. My real dreams are usually so mundane. I take out the garbage a lot. It's all dark, and at first it seems like I'm completely under some tightly drawn, silky sheets because I feel an otherwise unexplainable softness against the whole of my body, most notably upon my forehead and cheekbones. I blink. It tickles my eyelashes. I open my eyes wide and feel my pupils strain against the outer edges of their respective irises. Blackness. I open and close my fists loosely, and just as I begin to feel a breeze which reveals to me the nonexistence of my imagined silk sheets, I hear voices. A door opens. I reach up quickly, not wanting to be caught too much off guard, and feel at my face. A blindfold. Just then all the sensations are brought together: the silky feeling, the blindfold, and, finally, the glue that binds them to a grain of memory dust in the back of my mind...

"So we're awake, are we?" His voice is like honey on wheat toast. When it all comes back to me, it's as if none of it was ever anywhere else. It's real life. My life.

"Nnngghhh," I say.

"Goooood!" He's delighted, apparently. Who can blame him? I'm such a fun guy, after all. I pull at the blindfold clumsily, leaving it to rest on my chin. In a fit of irrational self-consciousness (vanity, even?), I look down first. I'm in one of his awful, girly silk robes which was no doubt hand-sewn in some third world Asian country, only to be bought for .015% of the monthly income of a tacky, lisping English-American tourist. Things are what they are.

"Good morning, Sunshine!" He throws his head back and laughs. I scowl at him. I don't know where he picked me up, or what he drugged me with, but I'm sure he personally oversaw the changing of my clothes.

"Shut up, you faggot." I pull my robe closed. He is not suprised by my cruelty. It's the only way I can keep him off of me, and he knows it. He comes very close and gazes down at me thoughtfully, with interest. It gives him pleasure to look at me, and I don't stop him. I look around his bedroom, having regained my senses, and generally realizing where I am, but still searching for a clue as to what brought me here. He tenderly pulls the blindfold away, careful not to touch my face. I silently thank him for his care. It's always the same; I try so hard to demonize him, to imagine that he has been doing all manner of intrusive, inappropriate things to me in my sleep, but in the end I know that his feelings are pure and that he is in a constant state of restraint when I'm around. As he should be.

"What happened?" I push myself up onto my elbows, and in doing so I jar the mattress enough so that something clinks behind me. I turn my head to the right, already knowing that I'm going to see a pair of handcuffs with one cuff closed around the bedpost and the other lying limply against it, clanking when the mattress stirs.

"You're asking me? Lord, it took us two hours to clean you up and you slept all the way through it. I was hoping you'd tell---" I cut him off, vomiting out a single word as I fly to my feet.

"God..." My muscles groan as I stumble past him, rudely clearing a wide aisle with my elbows and slamming the door behind me.

"I changed the sheets..." he says weakly from outside. I barely hear him; I'm too busy staring at myself in the bathroom mirror. There is no more blood, but there are cuts at the corners of my eyebrows and bruises on my neck and jaw, on my cheek and brow. I blink. What happened? I ask myself, and seconds later I'm not sure if I did it out loud or if I whispered it with my mind's voice. I blink again and the mirror ripples, waves. I shake my head, but only once or twice, because I discover that it hurts almost as much as my bruised face and my sore muscles.

"What the hell happened to me?" I shout at him through the door. I close my eyes and use the counter to steady myself. His voice drifts in from far away, made thin by having to fit through the crack under the door.

"I don't know." He speaks quietly, having given up trying to trick me into being comfortable. I never know he's been doing it until he screws up, and it usually makes me mad. He's being gentle now, cautious. I guess he expects me to explode with anger; it isn't like he doesn't deserve it. He's lucky, though, because I'm too absorbed in myself to care what he's doing.

"What do you mean you don't know? Where did you find me?" I don't hear anything. I try to imagine what's going in the other room, but there's a fog around my head and some sort of mental buzzing that makes me numb to all but the strongest sensation. It occurs to me that he could have made a response without me hearing. There's a bubble around me, and I'm in another world -- my own mind. I am like Ebenezer Scrooge, observing without being seen all the things that just go to show what a worthless human being I have become. I throw the door open angrily, working through my soreness now, and ready to use violence to defend my honor, if necessary. With the doorknob still in my white-knuckled fist, there is hardly a sound as my bubble explodes and Tommie and his room become parts of my world again. He is looking the other way, and for a second he lets me see him sitting, cross-legged and dainty, crying calmly with one hand over his mouth. It hits me before I even acknowledge the possibility of my having it inside -- the urge to put my arms around him. He seems soft and warm, and he is obviously suffereing... But before I can be drawn any further into his game , my heart fills with rage and a vague sense of betrayal. (Vague because, in what can only be described as an act of self-preservation, it forbids me any further analysis.)

"Stop it!" I scream at him. "Stop it! It's not going to work! Fucking manipulative bastard..." To punctuate the last word, I lunge forward and rip the chair out from under his frailness and have slammed the door behind me before there is even a chance to see him hit the ground.

It's cold outside, and noisy with rain on loose, rusting, oft-patched roofs.