But tonight was different. Tonight he was angry, and I was all fucked up. And I was coming down the stairs already tied up. Warning bells were going off in my head, different ones than the ones which had been clanging since he'd shown up in the kitchen with the box. These were deeper, from a place that had stayed calmer through all that, but it wasn't calm now. That place was saying, firmly and clearly, Maybe this isn't such a good idea.
There are rules about playing. I break the one about don't be drunk a lot. I learned my lesson about being high, and I keep that one. But the big one is you don't do it pissed off at the other person. You don't play around with punishment stuff when you're actually angry. I guess I could see it in a relationship where you were okay and it was the way you dealt with a fuckup or misunderstanding. But we were fighting about the relationship. Or whatever this was. This was a bad, bad time to play pony or puppy or anything at all.
I was working up to say something when Travis turned around, slid a pocketknife through the binding of the rope, and let the pieces fall to the floor. I was standing just inside the door, and he turned away from me, walked across the room, sat in his chair and looked at me.
“Take off your clothes and sit on the bench.”
He waited.
I did too. That deep voice was really going at me now. Turn. Go. Get out. Leave. Leave now. Go, get in your car, and go. It made a good argument. Except I couldn't seem to move. I just stared at Travis, sitting deep in his chair. He wasn't going to get up and come after me. If I left, he'd let me. Somehow I knew that without being told. And I could tell too that if I said no and stood there, he wouldn't argue. That was still my “safe word.” But it wasn't even needed. He'd given me an order, but he was waiting to see if I accepted it.
We weren't playing. Yet. He was, in his way, asking if I wanted to.
I can't tell you why I didn't turn and go. That voice was still carrying on, and I knew, knew this was not what you were supposed to do, but I couldn't look away from his face, and I couldn't go. And some deeper part of me that didn't have words but knew how to move my body rose up, carried me forward, took off my clothes, sat me on the bench, and kept me there until he rose and came over to me.
I wanted him to give me sex. I wanted him to open his fly and give me his cock. I wanted him to kiss me, lick me, fuck me, suck me. I wanted to pretend this hadn't happened. I wanted him to make it go away.
He gave me none of it. He just reached for a paddle, held it up, and asked, “How many do you want?”
It wasn't a command. It was like he was holding out cupcakes, asking how many I wanted. Like I could say I didn't care for any, thank you.
I swallowed hard, and then I said, “Four.”
Nodding, he stepped back and gestured to the spanking bench. I shook a little as I walked over to it and knelt in place, but though I put my ankles and wrists against the restraints, he didn't close them. He just waited until I was settled, then touched my lower back so I knew where he was.
“Ready?” he asked. I nodded.
The first hit came down.
Paddles feel like blows. Like you should be shooting across the room, which is why, actually, you need the restraints. It was hard to not have them now. Not only did my whole body jerk and rattle as my ass bloomed into flame, but I felt like I was going to fall. After the second one, I summoned up enough breath to rasp, “Please tie me down.”
He did, but the loops were so loose that it wouldn't take much for me to get out, and they weren't fastened. I got the message. He wanted me to be able to go. But they kept me in place enough to receive the last two. My ass blazed. My body shook. But when he lowered the paddle, I felt empty.
“More, please,” I whispered.
“How many?” His voice was both dispassionate and kind at once. It was strange.
“Four.”
He delivered them with patience and skill, and I counted them out. My whole body pulsed when he finished. I didn't feel empty, but I didn't feel okay, either.
“More, please.”
This time he hesitated.
“Please,” I said again. “Just four more.”
He didn't gentle them, but there was less urgency about these. The first four had been angry. The second four had bled his tension out of him. These were for me. But between blows, he touched the small of my back again. Asking me to please be done.
Either twelve was the right number or the touch pushed me over the edge. In any event, when he finished the last one and lowered the paddle, all I said was, “Thank you, Travis.”
I had meant to say “sir,” but his name has slipped out. It made his hand come down again, and he stroked me lovingly. Then he set the paddle down on a table and came to crouch down in front of me. He looked tired. And sad.
“You never ask me about Riley,” he said. “You only did that once.”
Shrugging is hard when you're strapped to a spanking bench, but I did my best. “Not my business.”
That was supposed to be polite, but it seemed to wound him. “Why isn't it your business?”
I sensed a trap, but I couldn't read him properly. I faltered. “He was with you before. Nothing I know about it changes anything between us.”
Oh, and here he was, pissed again. “The same way your family treating you like dog shit doesn't change anything between us?”
I tried to jerk up at that, but of course now I was restrained. I frowned instead. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“What the fuck is you saying everything you do is shit supposed to mean? What is this crap about you being shit? Is that what you think of me? That I'd share my life like this with someone I thought was shit?”
In the trap. Fucking in the center of the trap, and if I moved, it would close. I tugged at the straps again, forgetting that if I turned my hand I could undo them. “I meant that you shouldn't get pissed off that I don't want to—” I was going to say, “give you my garbage,” but I caught myself in time. I let out a frustrated sigh. “I am not as good as you or anybody else. Okay? I get that. I always have. Everybody's just too nice to—” I broke off. This wasn't coming out like I meant.
His eyebrow went up. “Call you a piece of shit to your face?” He had been joking, but when I lowered my head, embarrassed, he reached out and lifted my chin. I gave in and looked at him again. He was surprised. “You really mean it. You really do think you're garbage compared to other people.” When I tried to turn my head away from him, he held my chin fast. “Roe. Monroe Harold Davis. You are not a piece of shit. You are not garbage. You are not less than anybody. In fact, I think you're probably better than most people I know. I know for a fact you're a better person that me.”
I jerked hard away from him and pulled hard on the straps until they hurt. “Stop! Stop! No!”
The word echoed in the room. I'd never used it here. Never used it with him at all, not in a game. Not in sex. Not to tell him to quit.
I said it again. “No. No. No, no, no! Let me out! Let me go! Let me go!”
“You can undo the straps. They aren't tight.” But he reached forward and undid first one hand and then the other just the same. “Except I'm not playing, Roe. And you can't toss a safe word at me when I'm telling you that you aren't crap. You don't get to tell me no when I'm telling you that I care about you. You don't get to say stop when—”
“I love you.”
It took me a few seconds to realize that had been me that had spoken, that I'd said that. Out loud. To him. Now. Fucking now, here with me naked over a bench, after I screamed at him for telling me I wasn't garbage. I hadn't even said that to myself, that I loved him. I didn't even really know it myself until then.
I panicked. I tried to push back to my knees, but my arms wouldn't move. I looked at Travis, who was just staring at me, looking... I don't know. Just looking. Looking weird. I panicked more.
“I love you,” I said again.
I felt small. I didn't ache or hurt—outside of my ass—but I felt so small. Like a
slight wind could knock me over. Like it could make me dissolve and fly away, up and out and over the fields. I didn't say it again. I barely breathed. I just waited. Waited for him to speak. To move. To kiss me. To touch my face. To tell me he loved me too. Something. Anything.
He sat back on his heels. “Riley ran.”
Okay, to say something that wasn't that.
“Riley ran,” he said again. “I went down to Grand Island to pick up a part for a tractor. When I left, he was sulking in bed. When I came back, half the house was cleaned out, and there was a note on the kitchen table. All it said was, ‘Since you hate my drama, I won't put you through an exit scene. Best of luck with the ranch.’ And he signed his name. And that was it. No number. No address. He'd changed his e-mail and his cell phone. If I wanted to be a stalker, I could maybe track him down through the university, but that wasn't the point. He wasn't trying to hide from me. He was giving me ‘quiet’ like I always told him I needed. My space. Space without him in it. And he did it that way because he knew it would hurt. He knew I'd have to explain to people. Knew it would hurt me. And it did. I lied to you. I did want him around. I did love him. At least, I wanted to. I loved the idea of a partner out here in Nowhere. It hurt to have the one I'd chosen leave, especially like that.”
“I would never leave like that,” I whispered. He gave me a sharp look, but I shook my head. “Not like that. That wasn't what I was doing.”
“Oh no? What, you were running because you loved me?”
He said it all snide, but I could still hear the hurt. And I was still scared, but I couldn't bear to hear that hurt in him, so I drew a breath and said very, very quietly, “Yes.”
I was still kneeling. I was still naked, still burning from his blows. He was crouched in front of me, staring, watching, but I couldn't see him now, not clearly. I couldn't see anything. I felt like I was glowing, like the heat from his paddling had bloomed in my chest and opened it up, sending my heart out in front of me, hovering there before him. Except there wasn't any terror now. There was just this. Me. Him. That word. Those other words. The waiting to see what he would do with them.
What he did was come forward, leaning until his knees met the floor, and then he walked to me on them, took my face in his hands and gave me a sweet, soft, tender kiss against my lips.
“Don't,” he said. “Don't run, ever again.” Then he kissed me again. And again.
I forget how we got back upstairs. He may have carried me. I remember that we kissed the whole way. I remember falling onto the bed, his body covering me, and I remember arguing with him when he reached for a condom, saying I didn't want one. Saying I'd been tested before Rapid City and was okay. But he said no, he hadn't been tested in a while, but he would go on Monday.
I remember that he made love to me, sweet love to me. I remember that he whispered in my ear, and then because he'd asked so nice, I turned him over and made love to him right back. I remember curling up beside him, dick and ass humming and happy.
I remember him kissing my ear and saying very softly, “I love you too, Roe.”
The next morning I got the box myself and showed him every piece. I explained what I had meant to do with them. I bit my tongue when I wanted to point out what was wrong with them. He wouldn't have listened anyway. He said they were all perfect. He was touched, I could tell. Pleased.
Loved.
He tried to wear them all at once, the idiot. I wouldn't let him, but he did insist on at least three. I have had to make him four belts since then, because he wears them out like crazy, because they're all he wears. The bracelet with his initials is usually on him too. But the circlet with the brand he gave back to me. He put it around my neck and told me it was to remind me that I belonged at Nowhere and that Nowhere belonged to me. Which I knew was his way of saying he belonged to me.
Which was what gave me the idea.
At Haley's next doctor appointment, I went down the street to the tattoo parlor with a piece of paper in my pocket. I came home with a slightly sore backside. That night after dinner I showed my backside to Travis.
He laughed. But it was a very happy laugh. “You branded yourself?”
“Yep,” I told him. Then I touched the necklace. “For when I have to leave this off.”
I got another kiss for that. Lots of them, actually.
Quite a few of them were on my new tattoo.
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* * *
Chapter Eleven
The phone call came in the middle of lambing.
Literally. I was out in the barn, my hand up a ewe trying to turn the lamb when Travis came in and called my name. “Bit busy, boss,” I bit off, and tried for a better grip on the leg.
“Somebody take over for him,” he said, and I looked up, wondering what the fuck, and I saw his face. And I saw the phone in his hand.
I felt a cold wind blow across my neck.
I shooed off Paul and finished the lamb, but I did it in a daze. My ears rang as I went over to the sink to wash up. I kept my eye off Travis, but my mind didn't need my eyes to see him for it to tumble ahead and try and guess what this was about. I already knew who was on the phone. Well, I knew within three people. Probably two. And the fact that Travis had come into the barn during lambing narrowed it down to some grim options.
I picked took the phone from Travis, still not looking at him. “'Lo.”
“Hi, Roe. This is Bill.”
“It's good to hear your voice,” I said. It was the truth. It was weird, but it was good. I waited for the rest.
“Sorry to interrupt. Lambing?”
“Yep. Had a breech, but it's okay now. Got her out. They can handle the rest without me.” I cleared my throat and fought against the pit forming in my stomach as I gave him his opening. “What can I do for you?”
A pause. The longest, most hollow pause in the world, so loud it muffled the bleating of the ewes and lambs.
“Dad passed away.”
It hadn't mattered that I had been ready for something like this. You can't be ready for someone to tell you that one of your parents is gone. And I found out that it doesn't even matter that you parted on bad terms and had made the decision not long ago that it was better not to restart relations. It doesn't matter, not at that moment. Death changes everything.
When I was able I said, “When?”
“Couple of hours ago.” There was another pause. It was very heavy, and when Bill spoke again, I could tell that each word was a lead weight on him. “I wasn't watching close enough. He got the keys and tried to drive into town.”
I shut my eyes and didn't say anything.
“The good thing,” Bill went on, his voice shaky, “is that he didn't hurt anybody else. You remember that concrete median at the T-intersection down by Coppit Corner? He hit that at about sixty-five. They said he died instantly, or real close.”
He paused, like it was my turn, but I didn't know what to say. What did you say when your brother, whose voice you hadn't heard in five years, called and said your dad had died?
My dad. My dad was dead. I would never see him again. Ever. I stared straight ahead of me, but I didn't see a thing. The last words he'd said to me had been “Get that north forty done.” After that all I got was looks of disappointment and revulsion. They would be all I ever got. There was no more Dad. The thought just kept rolling over and over in my head, stuck. No more Dad. No more Dad. No more Dad.
“I was hoping you would come home for the funeral,” Bill said.
I cleared my throat and shuffled my feet. “Yeah.” Then it hit me what “coming home” would involve. I cleared my throat again. “You sure about that?”
“That I want you home for our father's funeral? Yes, Roe. I'm damn sure.”
But I could tell. I could tell already this was going to be grim from the tone of his voice. I saw Travis move out of the corner of my eye, and I turned, finally, and met his gaze.
Sometimes it hits me how patient Travis is. He knew a
bout my dad, I realized, because he wouldn't have given Bill to me for anything less. And he wasn't leaving my side until he figured out how I was. He didn't know what to say, either. But he was there. Waiting.
“Whatever you need,” Travis said, “we do. You need to go home, we go. Whenever and for however long.” I glanced at the lambs and opened my mouth to object, but he overrode me. “Tory can handle it. If you want to go, find out the details, and we'll get ready to head out.”
We. It hit me that he kept saying that: we. We will go. Not me. He wasn't offering, either. He was going, if I was.
I reached out, fingers shaking. He met my hand halfway, and he gripped it tight. I felt his strength come into me, and I think I took my first real breath in ten minutes.
“Roe?” Bill said into my ear.
“I'm coming,” I said, looking right into Travis's eyes.
We were coming.
Haley came with us too.
She was seven months pregnant and then some, and she had gone, in my mind pretty abruptly, from cute little baby belly to as big as a fucking house. Both Travis and I told her no, as did her mother and her father, the latter with an emphasis that shook the very earth.
She came anyway.
“I have my records,” she said as we got in the truck to go and I tried, one last time, to get her to stay home. “I have my entire medical file. I know the number of every hospital between here and Algona. I have a cell phone. I also have a month and a half to go. You're talking about a few days.”
“Haley,” I said, exasperated, “this is going to be some sonofabitch thing where we're at the funeral and my family starts fighting and you go into labor in the middle of it all.”
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