Page 1 of Damian & Jun: Episodes 1-4
Prologue
Damian
Damian jogged over the tree roots lodged firmly in the forest grounds. His breath came in white puffs of air. Despite the heavy melanin of his skin, he was good with the cold—as long as he took Vitamin D year-round. If anything, he welcomed the low-temperature wind in his face. It made his thoughts clearer, the emotions behind them sharper. The end of December was always difficult, but this year more so than usual.
He needed the crystallization of frost to sort out the heated storm within. Thoughts and urges twisted together through him, tangled up in loops that fed into each other and led nowhere. Wants. Needs. Fears. And all of them circling the same yawning empty place inside that had once been so hidden he’d thought it healed. For months, it had been approaching, but now it was right there, pressed up against his ribs inside his chest, drumming through his own heartbeat, the yearning he could no longer ignore.
For all that he loved Richard, trusted Émeric, and adored Collin—the other three members of The Residency, his family for all intents and purposes—none of them were his person. And he hadn’t needed that, hadn’t wanted that, not until a little less than two years ago. For years, he’d filled up any space in his life with becoming a lawyer, rising to be one of the best, studying abroad in Seoul, achieving fluency in Korean, working international contracts, and setting up his own law firm with his business partner. Any room left in his life had been taken up by Richard as his dom or Matthew, his best friend, and all the extended relationships beyond that.
There was more to it, though. Because growing and becoming was never easy. Right after that first wonderful night that had opened up this ache inside him, the confusion had been greater than the need. He’d needed time to understand what the ache was telling him. He’d needed space to come to grips with the fact that while he submitted to Richard, while he loved and needed to be Richard’s pup, he wasn’t submissive.
He was dominant.
Damian blew out a breath, pumping his lungs in time with his legs and flexing his fists inside his gloves, making sure nothing was too stiff and cold. He turned on the trail, heading for the outer loop. He’d go over the bridge by the waterfall and past the old oak tree, the one so large it had swallowed a boulder in decades past. Yes, maybe that would be far enough to calm the churn in his head.
The submissive identity he’d carried with pride through his twenties no longer fit him. It happened to some people, but he’d never truly considered that it would one day come to him. Sure, he’d switched a little now and then, been a second pair of hands for a dom or dommed another submissive to give them what they needed, but he’d never thought I’m no longer a submissive. Not until the night he’d met Jun.
For months after meeting Jun, he hadn’t been able to form words in patterns that made his new urges and needs make sense. Not to himself and not to Richard. Being Richard’s boy, his pup, meant everything to him. The Residency was his home, something so precious he never wanted to change in a way that would shake his place in it.
But he had. Or had he always had something inside him in addition to his submission? If you grew into something, had you always been that, or had you changed into it?
Being with Jun had all been instinct and naturalness, a sort of animalistic honesty. Loving Jun was like loving air. It didn’t require language to be real. And he hadn’t let himself think of what the future held for him or Jun. They belonged to different worlds. Jun would lose everything if he openly accepted Damian’s love. So Damian had sealed up any thought of the future between them and lived for the next text and tryst. He was free to sleep and date who he wanted. Richard and Émeric had never asked him to be exclusive. And it had been Damian’s life, unexamined and precious.
Until Collin had crashed into The Residency in an ambulance, putting cracks in the quiet, regulated atmosphere and unintentionally rebuilding it around himself, reawakening Émeric from the staid melancholy of old grief and rousing all the creativity and fierceness of Richard’s dominance in new patterns. Witnessing Richard and Émeric fall in love with their submissive together had been beautiful and terrible. Beautiful because Collin was precious and owned a piece of Damian’s heart as well and terrible because Damian knew the looks on Émeric’s and Richard’s faces when they looked at Collin. It was his face when he thought of Jun. But Jun was on the other side of the world. Jun was tangled in contracts and laws and traditions that precluded anything from happening. Anything open and permanent.
Richard, Émeric, and Collin loved Damian. They were his family. Family he sometimes slept with and kissed and looked after and received care from. They would all go to the wall for him. Had gone to the wall for him. Still, the ache in his chest had grown stronger over the last weeks. Perhaps it was the strain of holding everything together while Richard, Émeric, and Collin had been hospitalized following a vicious attack. Maybe it had been the fear that had driven him during that awful time. But now that the crisis was over, there was distance. Even as they reached for him, even as they loved him, even when he lay with them in bed, they had something between the three of them that was more. Something so subtle. Or perhaps he was the one creating the distance because he wanted what they had.
He wanted them, and he wanted what they had but with someone else.
Damian’s feet made drumming sounds on the snow-wet boards over the creek. The sound echoed hollowly in the small gulch. With a grunt, he drove his legs up the incline ahead. All he could smell was trees and cold.
If Damian hadn’t known what Jun smelled like, hadn’t heard his private laugh, then he might have gone on not feeling this ache, unaware of any lack.
But he had met Jun. He had heard that laugh. He did know what the dancer’s hands felt like on his body. His skin was raw with need.
Need and fear.
Jun hadn’t texted back in days. His manager, the one who owned his contract, was a tyrant and puritanical, but Jun typically wrote at least a few times a week.
It had been days now and not a single line. Much longer and Damian was going to go out of his mind and do something rash like fly to Seoul himself, to haunt the streets looking for his lover. He shouldn’t. Jun had an unpredictable schedule.
So instead, Damian was running in the cold, late-December morning in the woods outside Richard and Émeric’s rural estate. Whether he was chasing something or running from something he couldn’t say. Sometimes it felt like he’d been fleeing and chasing his whole life. Chasing a mother who didn’t stay, chasing a father who wouldn’t love without payment, chasing a sister who always reminded him he hadn’t done enough. Running from the hate, from the sermons, from the fists.
It only worked sometimes.
What if Jun had disappeared and Damian was wasting time? What if Jun had worked so hard he was in the hospital? That happened with K-pop idols all too often. What if Jun had decided Damian wasn’t worth the risk?
What if he wasn’t enough again?
Damian’s feet churned faster. He wanted like a physical wound burned. Wanted to drag his beautiful boy home out of the dark and the secrets and lay with him surrounded by the rest of his family, all the pieces of his heart in one place.
But Jun was a K-pop idol with a contract that didn’t let him date women, let alone a man, and a manager that didn’t let him rest.
And Damian was an out and proud lawyer from a different country. The divide might as well be as great as the Pacific Ocean currently between them.
Damian slapped the old oak tree as he ran past. Too much longer and Richard would come looking for him.
Episode 1
