"Good boy. Can you finish for me?"

The mention of finishing is enough to get him almost on the edge, and he doesn't want any of this but his body sure seems to, and he needs to do what she says and then maybe this can be over. He simultaneously tries to come and tries to prevent himself from coming, and succeeds at the former and also loses all ability to have experiences or form memories for probably a couple seconds.

"Good boy," she says. "My driver will take you home."

Oh yay he's not gonna get murdered after all. He mumbles "Okay thank bye", realizes he just said thanks and hates himself about it, fumbles his clothes back on and gets out.

When he gets home, Eli looks up from what he was doing. "You disappeared."

He had the entire drive home to dwell on the awkwardness and try to come up with an explanation and it was way too long for the former and not long enough for the latter. "Sorry, I--there was this dom who--insisted I leave with her, and, I didn't know how to tell anyone where I was going and Ihopeyou'renotpissedatme."

"...why would I be mad at you. Do you need a hug."

Now that he's somewhere familiar again, Bruce can feel the adrenaline draining out of him and leaving him with the shakes. "I, yes, a hug would be, um, good. And also a shower."

"What's a shower."

"It's what we have back home instead of baths, the point is I feel disgusting. . . . Possibly I will still feel disgusting after a bath."

Well, now he can be hugged. 

"I'm sorry about." Vague gesture.

"You didn't do anything wrong. It would have been worse if you hadn't warned me."

"Doms are like that. Why do we let them run the country."

Weak chuckle. "Probably a coordination problem. Everything bad is either a coordination problem or thermodynamics."

"Well, they're physically stronger than us and they're close to a hundred percent of the people who ever want to be in charge of anything, that probably does a lot. Let's get a servant to draw you a bath." 

"Yeah, that too. Bath sounds good." He needed the hug too much to say anything about it but he's pretty sure he still smells like sex and he really needs to not.

And in a few minutes Bruce is deposited in a warm bath.

Eli hovers anxiously around the door.

Bruce scrubs himself until he's bright red all over and the gross feeling is replaced by nice clean raw-skin pain, and is surprised by how much he appreciates the hovering. Apparently the lesson his lizard brain has decided to learn from this is that losing track of Eli and ending up alone leads to Bad Things.

"...are you going to need someone to stay with you tonight?"

Oh crap, he's being obvious about it. That's pathetic, stop that. "You don't need to? I mean, I get that you have important things to be doing." Oh crap, he probably wasn't offering to stay himself, he was just suggesting asking a servant or something and now Bruce is even more obviously pathetic. 

"I'm your friend. I like you."

Bruce blinks in surprise and attempts a smile. "You're a really good friend."

"I don't mean to insult your past friends but this seems like pretty ordinary friendship to me."

"Well, I appreciate it anyway. Um. Would you mind turning around for a second?" Bruce wants out of this bathtub, and it seems ridiculous to care about Eli seeing him naked given the rest of tonight but also he doesn't want to be looked at even more than usual.

"Sure." He turns around and closes his eyes for good measure.