"You promised you could keep his photo and name out of the papers," Hardesty growled. His fist came down hard on the assistant district attorney's desktop.
"I know, we tried. But this has dragged on for months. Mr. Drake isn't a minor, you know. He may look like one, but he isn't. We were doing this as a special favor to your unit. The accused have a right to face their accuser, you know. We just didn't know there would be press at that exit of the court house."
"You just didn't know. You don't know the trauma this young man has gone through. He was dragged into this." Hardesty was improvising off in lala land now, and he knew it. The vice cop inside him told him that Toby walked into it all willingly. The number of times he had to cock Toby still—in the day and all through the night—screamed what Toby had willingly done for the cock.
But Toby was his Toby.
They'd been good for well over eight months now as the trial formed up. Freddie's advice had been right on. If Hardesty kept his cock inside Toby through the night, Toby was just as normal for the rest of the time as he could be.
It was a losing battle, though, Hardesty realized. The siren song of the street kept working on Toby. Maybe the best Hardesty could do was to make it safer for Toby, to lift him to where, if he had to sell it, it wasn't on the street.
The blond Mohawk was gone. Even the blond was gone. The eyebrow ring was gone. Hardesty had asked him to keep the nipple and navel rings, though, He liked to play with those himself.
Toby had admitted that he had done all of this punking up to himself just so that men on the street would notice him and want him.
"I don't think you have any trouble with men wanting you," Hardesty had answered. "What you need to do is regiment what you are willing to give them."
Hardesty had been quite clear in not demanding monogamy of Toby, and although Toby seemed to have appreciated his suggestion that they might become monogamous with each other to the point of agreeing to the dispensing with condoms, he had only mentioned that the one time. And he was secretly relieved that Toby hadn't wanted to carry through with that. Hardesty had no idea whether Toby was being fucked by other men when he wasn't there. But he hadn't stopped fucking other men himself. Hardesty couldn't make the same pledge, not only because sex was a possible need in his job, but also because he occasionally had to have some variety himself. He had met with Freddie in the motel room four times in the eight months, for instance. Freddie amused him. Freddie fed his ego, and he gave Hardesty a great ride. He also initiated expert and inventive positions that were completely out of the realm of Toby's experience.
Most of all, Hardesty wanted Toby to know that he could make his own decisions, that he wasn't trapped by Hardesty in that regard.
The gecko tattoo was still there. Hardesty had said that Toby probably would have had a continuous orgasm and die of sex in the process of someone trying to eradicte it. Toby had laughed. And then Hardesty had touched the tattoo and rubbed it and Toby had wrapped his legs around Hardesty and ridden him down onto the bed and begged for the fuck.
So, the effect of the gecko was still there—and Hardesty used it occasionally, often when Toby showed signs of despondency, especially at the slow movement of the trial and all of the statements he had to give.
When Toby had shown up to the trial to testify in person, the press had waylaid him outside the courthouse and splashed his name and photo across the media.
Toby's response was to withdraw into the house and refuse to see anyone but Hardesty. That's when he had let his hair grow on the sides and he'd stopped coloring it.
Hardesty knew that this was not a good turn of events, but he was wholly unprepared for the evening he came home from work—and Toby was gone.
He'd taken practically nothing with him. But this was the Toby of old—the Todd who had escaped from adversity, had been willing to shut Hardesty out, to not think twice about what Hardesty wanted and needed in the relationship.
"Some relationship," he muttered to himself on the third evening alone in the house. He wasn't completely alone, though. He had a bottle of bourbon to comfort him.
It wasn't long, though, before all of the liquor in the house had disappeared down his gullet. He was enough in control to realize at this point that liquor wasn't the answer for anything.
He sought Freddie out at the club, and Freddie willingly accompanied him to the motel, where he babbled happily while Hardesty fucked the stuffing out of him.
After they were done, though, Freddie said, "You fucked with anger and panic this time. This time it is about Todd, isn't it? That he's gone again?"
"Toby. His name's Toby. And, yes, he's out there someplace."
"Did he tell you he was leaving?"
"No, but he didn't do that before either."
"But that's when he was Todd. As you said, now he's Toby. What did he take with him?"
"Nothing."
