56. Confusion of Language

“Do you want to?”

Yin Yan leaned in, his face close to Lu Zhengming’s. He hesitated, then cautiously stuck out the tip of his tongue and licked the corner of Lu Zhengming’s mouth.

Shame burned through him. He couldn’t even bring himself to look at Lu Zhengming’s face.

“Do you… want to…”

His voice was faint. Dogs couldn’t speak human language. To be a proper dog, he couldn’t use words like this. He should bark, like a real dog. But…

That was a line he couldn’t cross.

Lu Zhengming said nothing, but his silence pressed against Yin Yan, pushing him to act. If this was what he wanted… Yin Yan felt flushed all over, and in his fluster, he closed his eyes, as though that would shut down conscious thought and absolve him of whatever was about to happen.

He moved closer to Lu Zhengming’s ear, shaped his lips to form that humiliating sound, and just as he was about to let it out, Lu Zhengming slid down from the couch and stopped him.

He dropped to the floor beside Yin Yan and sealed his lips with a kiss. It was rough and forceful, but it extinguished the shame burning in Yin Yan’s chest and replaced it with overwhelming relief.

“I’m seriously fucked up,” Lu Zhengming whispered, holding him tightly, stunned. “I actually want to fuck my own dog.”

Yin Yan laughed, pressing his hands to Lu Zhengming’s chest and pinning him down with a wet, eager kiss, just like a real canine. Lu Zhengming let himself be pushed back until he lay flat on the floor, petting his eager beast.

His hand groped at Yin Yan through his clothes, which reminded Yin Yan that dogs didn’t wear clothing. He knelt up, stripped himself completely bare, leaving only the silver collar around his neck.

Naked, he crawled beside Lu Zhengming, letting him stroke his head, his neck, his spine, even his ass and cock. There was no shame in it. The moment his clothes fell away, so did his dignity and humanity.

For one absurd second, a phrase floated into his mind. What I lost were my shackles. What I gained was the whole world. For a dog, the owner was the entire world. When he cast off the chains of being human, the world embraced him in return.

Lu Zhengming held him tightly, passionately, running his hands over his body.

The feeling was surreal. His arms were touching a dog, but his hands felt smooth, human skin. He was embracing this human-shaped dog, embracing the Yin Yan inside it. Childhood loneliness and adult desire were both soothed by that warmth. The sensations layered and overlapped inside his mind like the stacked panels of painted glass in his work.

Yin Yan let himself be touched. Every pass of a hand seemed to erase his will as a man.

The shame, panic, sorrow, and pain, emotions only humans could feel, faded into nothing as his identity dissolved. In their place came something new: ease, freedom, warmth, and the comfort of being fully accepted. He no longer had to feel guilty for pleasure, or be punished for indulgence.

His desire hung between his legs, bare and unabashed. Lu Zhengming’s touches drew low moans from him, like the whimpering of a real dog being soothed by its master.

And Lu Zhengming felt nothing but tenderness.

There was no pride in being a man touching a dog, nor was dominance and submission the point of this game.

The broken past and the regretful present merged into something strangely perfect. A mere dog could not offer this. A mere Yin Yan could not offer this. Only a man who had become a dog could satisfy both his heart and body.

The same was true for Yin Yan.

Master and lover blended into one, so dreamlike and beautiful that he could finally express himself openly, with his body, his eyes, his bare, honest lust. Anything but human language, that deceitful construct.

A dog could not speak. But a dog would never lie.

He rubbed his face against Lu Zhengming’s neck, leaned close, gentle and shy like a large, obedient dog.

Lu Zhengming rolled him over and gently bit his Adam’s apple, his collarbone, fondling his chest again and again. Yin Yan stretched his neck, baring his throat and arteries. Lu Zhengming’s teeth hovered near his life, and he felt utterly safe.

The only flaw was that hand. They were too gentle, so gentle it made him ache. He had held back for too long, and now that hand was teasing him at a maddening pace, stoking heat in his body and haze in his mind. When a finger brushed his lips, he bit down instinctively and sucked hard. Only when he heard Lu Zhengming laugh did he jolt back into awareness, kneeling anxiously at his feet.

Lu Zhengming was far too forgiving for a proper master, and even his punishment felt more like a caress. He simply tapped Yin Yan’s teeth, then gave his finger back, letting him suck and lick it greedily until his palm was dripping wet.

“Do you want it?”

Lu Zhengming tapped his cock. It had been neglected too long and now stood painfully hard.

Yin Yan’s first instinct was to nod, but that was too human. He didn’t know how a dog was supposed to answer, so he stared at him with burning eyes, begging him to understand.

Of course, Lu Zhengming understood. “You can nod or shake your head.”

Yin Yan nodded twice in quick succession. Even like this, even as a dog, his movements were elegant. Nothing like some rutting beast.

Lu Zhengming sighed and kissed him again, full of longing. He could never feel desire for a real dog, but for this dog, he could not say no.

This was far too passive. Far too unlike a real master.

Lu Zhengming knew what was expected in a game like this. He knew how a master was supposed to act. But he had never regarded a dog as a servant or a subordinate. In his memory, a dog had always been something else, something like himself. A companion who didn’t speak.

With companionship came both responsibility and obligation, including the duty to care for the desires of that companion.

Whether lover or master and slave, neither term could quite define what they were to each other. One man and one dog, yet without servitude or oppression.

The only difference between them was language.

Language created identity. It divided class. It had never been a means of integration. Every time a language was invented, a group of people was cut off. God had divided mankind with language, and mankind had been trapped in misinterpretation ever since.

Thus the Tower of Babel would never be completed. God would forever sit undisturbed above the clouds.

Slaves could not speak the language of their masters. Dogs could not speak the language of men. To do so was to overstep and invite punishment. The power of language was monopolized by those in control. But Lu Zhengming had no interest in monopolizing anything.

He even wanted Yin Yan to retain some fragment of human language. Not speech, but a new kind of expression. A language somewhere between man and dog, one that demanded every sense in his body to receive.

Yin Yan understood without words.

And so they merged in silence.

The body’s response was more honest than speech. Bravado never produced such heat. Feigned pleasure never got this wet.

Yin Yan took Lu Zhengming’s thrusts and, in a haze, realized this too was a kind of binary language, one and zero, in and out. The vocabulary was simple, yet the meanings could be complex.

For example, at first, Lu Zhengming would always go slow, waiting for Yin Yan to adjust to the fullness of his presence before giving more. And then there were moments like now, where he gripped his waist with both hands and drove in as if he meant to split him apart.

This was the language of sex. So simple it had only two actions. So complex that language itself could not contain it.

It wasn’t just release. It wasn’t a “master” using his “dog.” Because every thrust Lu Zhengming gave felt like a transmission of love and desire. Yin Yan used to moan during sex, used to say things like “faster,” “harder,” “feels good,” or “again.” He would translate his lust into words, and Lu Zhengming would translate those words back into lust, responding in kind…

But it was far better like this, with his body doing all the speaking for him.

This was pure. Flesh speaking to flesh. No room for anything else.

Lu Zhengming took off the condom and slid back in. The unfiltered pleasure hit like a surge. In that instant, it wasn’t just his cock that overloaded. His brain short-circuited too. Inside Yin Yan was heat, softness, and a thousand intimate embraces. It gave him direct joy, and the deepest comfort he had ever known.

He responded instinctively, giving that pleasure right back.

Yin Yan came.

“Does it hurt?”

Lu Zhengming was gently rubbing his knees. Yin Yan was still naked, stretched out across the single bed in Lu Zhengming’s room.

Yin Yan shook his head and pulled him in for a kiss.

“You can talk now. It’s over,” Lu Zhengming said, tucking the blanket around him and sitting beside the bed. “Also, even back then, you didn’t have to be so… realistic.”

“Why not?”

Yin Yan’s voice was dry. Lu Zhengming poured him a glass of water.

“Because I never trained it to do anything. Like shaking paws, jumping through hoops, fetching things. It was just my friend. And between us, how do I put it… there was no hierarchy.”

Lu Zhengming searched for the right words, but found nothing that quite fit. He looked embarrassed. “It might sound weird. It was a dog, and I was human, but neither of us was more ‘advanced’ than the other…”

“You’re saying… you were pursuing ‘equality’ with a dog?”

“It’s absurd, I know. But yeah, I really believed that.”

“So now you want to carry that same idea into our game?”

Yin Yan sat up and leaned against the headboard, clearly intrigued by the concept.

Lu Zhengming nodded. “I know what the standard dog-play looks like, but I can’t get anything out of that. That kind of dog isn’t my dog. What I like is the dog, not the slave.”

He paused, then looked directly into Yin Yan’s eyes. “What about you? How did it feel?”

Yin Yan toyed with the collar at his neck for a moment, then smiled. “I felt good. I felt free.”

“Free?”

“You didn’t use ‘dog’ to humiliate me. You just let me experience what it feels like to become another kind of animal. It was interesting. Stripped of my human identity, a lot of burdens disappeared. I could be naked without shame, enjoy pleasure without the weight of moral guilt… It’s like I traded my personhood for a kind of freedom I’d never had before.

But it was strange, too. You gave me pleasure, but in doing so, you dissolved the masochistic thrill I usually get. There was no domination, no humiliation, not even pain. I should’ve felt bored, or even repulsed… Just like that time when you forced me to enjoy myself, I was really uncomfortable inside.”

“I’m sorry,” Lu Zhengming said, flushing with guilt as he offered a sincere apology.

“So it’s odd. This time you used the same logic, doing everything you could to make me feel good, but I didn’t feel any resistance…” Yin Yan paused in thought, then continued, “Maybe it’s the illusion of gentleness you created. It made me believe this was just normal sex… But looking back, I was under your control the entire time. All the pleasure came from you. You could’ve hurt me, but you chose not to… Zhengming, you’re a really good master.”

“And you’re a very good dog. I can’t think of a single reason to punish you.”

Lu Zhengming laughed and pulled him into a kiss.

“In the past, I never liked being the one on the bottom. It was hard for me to come that way. Back then I thought the pleasure of anal sex came from being degraded, from having my masochistic urges fulfilled. As long as there was enough pain, I could bypass all the sexual stuff and go straight to climax. But…”

“But what?”

Lu Zhengming was starting to get turned on again. He could never resist when Yin Yan said those kinds of words in such a serious tone. It turned him on like nothing else.

“You changed everything.”

Yin Yan smiled faintly and changed the subject. “Actually, our relationship is kind of weird. We’re not quite lovers in the usual sense, and not exactly a typical master-slave pairing either… But in a lot of ways, you’ve been guiding me, helping me quietly unravel the knots in my head. Everything feels different now.”

“It really is strange,” Lu Zhengming agreed. “Sometimes I don’t even know what I want. Talking human rights with a dog, discussing democracy with a slave, then playing power games with my lover… It’s like I keep breaking rules. Even my own.”

“And that’s what I like about you.”

Yin Yan touched his face with a gentle smile. “I really, really like you.”

Lu Zhengming’s heart raced. “Can’t you just swap those three words for one?”

“It’s easy to say love. But for me, love is still a fuzzy concept. Right now, I don’t think I’m ready to be responsible for those three words,” Yin Yan said earnestly. “Maybe we still need to explore more… Can you wait for me a little longer?”

“Of course I can!” Lu Zhengming pulled him into a hug. “I’ll wait as long as it takes…”

Yin Yan was immediately pushed down again, his bare body exposed, and Lu Zhengming couldn’t wait even a second longer.

Right now he looked more like a big dog himself, affectionate and exuberant as he explored Yin Yan, kissing him all over and sighing, “We’ve known each other for years, but this might be the first time we’ve talked this much… so honestly, so deeply…”

Yin Yan was lost in the kisses, and before he could stop himself, he blurted, “There’s still… so much I haven’t told you…”

He regretted it the moment it slipped out. But Lu Zhengming sat up at once, eyes focused, even with a very obvious erection tenting the sheet between his legs. “I want to hear it.”

Yin Yan reached out and pressed the tip of that tent. “Not the best time.”

Lu Zhengming refused to back down. “I command you to—”

“You’re abusing your power,” Yin Yan said, laughing as he called him out.

Lu Zhengming tapped the collar. Yin Yan sighed and submitted, but Lu Zhengming’s voice turned serious. “Only if you want to. Don’t force yourself.”

Yin Yan leaned in and kissed him. “I’ll tell you everything. But it’s hard for me… because I’m even more of a mess than you think.”

“I don’t care who you were with other people. With me, you’re good. No one’s better than you. That’s all that matters.”

Lu Zhengming managed to hold a solemn expression for barely half a minute before he burst into a grin, patting the bed beneath them.

“Alright. Now, do you still want to fuck me on this bed or not?”