The Bully Found My Photos, So Now I Kneel on Command novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Count
Tate Hatchett holds Judah's phone up in the church bell room, deletes one photo of himself for a kneel and a bark, and says he is keeping the last one.
Tate Hatchett held Judah's phone up between two fingers, and on the screen was a photo of Tate asleep at his own window.
The lamp was on behind him, and one bare arm hung over the sill.
Judah had taken it at two in the morning in June.
He had been in the hollow behind the Hatchett house, with a lens as long as his forearm.
Now he stood with his back flat against the plaster of the bell room, and the door was bolted.
Below them, the last of the Wednesday youth group was singing its way out of the sanctuary.
"Two hundred and fourteen," Tate said.
He did not raise his voice.
He thumbed to the next photo and the next.
The screen lit his green eyes and the white scar through the corner of his lip.
"I went through them all. You started the week you turned eighteen."
A thin blue bar crossed the top of the screen and filled.
"And now I have them too," Tate said. "I sent them to my own phone while you stood there breathing."
"Give me my phone."
"You've got me at the creek with my shirt off."
Tate smiled at the screen.
"You've got me in my truck at red lights. You've got me asleep."
His smile stayed where it was.
"That's a lot of pictures for a boy who has never said a word to me."
Judah's mouth was dry.
He was Reverend Redmayne's son, the top of his class, the usher who handed out the bulletins.
Nobody in Corbin County had ever looked at him twice.
Tate Hatchett was the sheriff's son, a linebacker in a letter jacket, and everybody looked at him once and then looked away.
"Say what you want," Judah said.
"I want a deal." Tate crossed the boards slowly, one boot at a time. "I'll delete them depending on how obedient you are."
He stopped close enough that Judah smelled cold air and cut grass on his jacket.
"You do everything I say. If I tell you to get on your knees and bark, you get on your knees and bark."
"That's insane," Judah said.
"You don't want Hannah to know what a dirty little creep you are."
Tate said her name gently.
"You don't want your daddy to see them on the church screen."
Judah's hands closed at his sides.
Hannah Ostler had sat beside him in the front pew since they were in diapers.
She thought he was good.
"If I say no, you show them."
"I don't have to show them." Tate tipped his head. "I only have to wait. You'll say yes by Friday."
Judah looked at the phone.
He looked at Tate's mouth, and he hated that he had spent seven months looking at it from a hundred and fifty yards away.
He hated more that now it was three feet from him, and his body had noticed.
"I have terms," Judah said.
Tate's brows went up.
"Hannah never sees. Not one photo, not a hint, not a word."
"I don't want her."
"Say it," Judah said.
"Hannah never sees." Tate's eyes held his.
"Mine are simple. You don't look at me at school. You don't speak to me. You don't know me."
His voice dropped.
"And nothing leaves this room."
"Deal."
"Good." Tate slipped the phone into his jacket. "Kneel."
The word sat in the quiet of the bell room.
Judah did not move.
His heart was going hard enough to hurt.
Under it, low in his belly, something he had been hiding for seven months turned over and woke.
He thought about the plywood blind in the sumac and the nights he had sat without moving for six hours, because a hunter waits.
Then he went down.
The boards were cold through his good church trousers.
He knelt with his hands on his thighs and looked up, and he did not drop his eyes.
Tate looked down at him for a long moment, and the look went through Judah, hot and slow.
His fingers took Judah's chin and tilted it, and his thumb pressed hard on the scar there.
"Look at that," he said softly. "Preacher boy on his knees."
"Go to hell."
"Bark."
Judah's face burned.
"Hatchett..."
"I said bark."
The thumb slid up over Judah's lower lip and pushed, and his mouth opened on it.
Heat poured down his spine.
He was hard, plainly and shamefully hard, and Tate's eyes dropped to it and came back up, and he knew.
Judah barked.
It came out low and flat and furious, one short sound in the dark bell room.
Tate laughed under his breath, and the sound went straight to Judah's cock.
He took out the phone and tapped it once.
"Photo one," he said, and showed him the empty space where it had been. "Good dog."
Then he bent until his mouth was an inch from Judah's ear.
"I'm keeping the last one. Whichever it is, you'll never be told."
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