by Lilia Moon
She grins at him, covered in ketchup and clearly unconcerned. “He catched me.”
“A girl after my own heart.” Sam leans in and gives the toddler a big, smoochy kiss on the cheek. “A party’s no fun until you’ve gotten in trouble at least once, right, sugar?”
Evie laughs. Daniel snorts. “Just wait until Soleil starts walking.”
“You hush.” Sam shakes his head. “We’re keeping her right this size for the rest of her life.”
I look around, trying to find the baby in the sea of heads. “Who’s kidnapped her?”
Sam rolls his eyes. “The first person, or who has her right now?”
I imagine he could give me a list, with times and locations of each exchange. Sam is exuberant and outrageous, but he misses exactly nothing—and he adores his daughter with the wild mop of hair and the dark-eyed gaze that matches his. “You might have to search people when they leave.”
Leo swings in to join us, laughing at my comment. “They’ll give her back when it’s nap time. Her lungs are really impressive.”
Daniel backs away, listening carefully to whatever Evie’s whispering into his ear. I grin at Leo. “I hear babies are really good at topping from the bottom.”
Leo laughs again and wraps an arm around Sam. “They are. And she’s got an excellent teacher.”
Sam has a stellar wounded-innocent look. “Such accusations, and after I spent all day teaching her how to blow bubbles just for her Pops.”
Leo’s whole face melts. “Aww, did she finally do it?”
“Nope. She’s waiting for you.” This smoochy kiss is for Leo’s cheek, and then we’re whirlwinding again, Sam dragging me off to parts unknown. “You look hungry. Come.”
I follow him as he heads to the grill. There’s no evading Sam’s tacos, even if I wanted to.
He plucks Soleil out of Mattie’s arms on the way. She just grins and spanks his ass. I shake my head and give her a wry look. Apparently I’m not the only one who struggles with the rules for vanilla behavior.
Sam stops at the grill and snuggles his baby girl under his chin. “What do you think, wiggle bug? Should we feed Uncle Eli the spicy tacos today, or the extra-special body-slam version?”
I hope Soleil knows that my stomach lining is white, Jewish, and a little touchy about being set on fire.
Sam winks at his daughter, picks up a bottle of something hot and red, and squirts it liberally onto the spoonful of meat already sitting on a soft taco shell.
I don’t ask. I watch Soleil’s droopy eyes instead. One baby who feels entirely safe with her daddy.
“So.” Sam scoops toppings from the nearby table onto my plate, clearly not trusting me with my own taco. “Have you tied Chloe up and had your way with her yet?”
I wince. “Does my answer influence what you’re going to put on that?” Sam has used his grill to get even with more than one Dom.
He laughs. “Yes. Don’t lie.”
I wouldn’t have anyhow. “No. She has to choose this freely. Not everyone is meant to be kinky.” No matter how much pressure my inner Dom would like to apply.
Soleil chooses that moment to let out a sleepy, fussy wail.
Sam slides her into some kind of contraption on his chest, bouncing in time to the universal beat only parents can hear. “It’s okay, sweetie love. You can grow up to be straight and vanilla and your daddies will still love you.”
I grin—and then it fades as I realize my answer is exactly the same as his.
I’ll still love Chloe, too.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chloe
I sit on the swinging bench in the back corner of Sam’s yard, cuddling a sleepy girl who didn’t even introduce herself before she crawled into my lap. I can tell from the envious glances being cast my way that I somehow drew one of the really lucky straws.
And it’s giving me a chance to watch. To observe. To see what kinky relationships look like in the wild. Because Ari wasn’t wrong. The flavors could fill a whole ice-cream shop. Gabby, wiping crumbs off Daniel’s face and walking away swishing her hips, entirely ignoring the evil glint in his eye. Scorpio, who I’ve mostly seen owning the heck out of her stage, all soft-eyed and goopy and tucking into Harlan’s side when he arrived like he was everything good in her world. Quint, wearing a sexy apron I’m absolutely sure isn’t his and growling at Meghan as they keep everyone supplied with a rainbow of frothy, tasty drinks.
I see so many things here I could be. So many ways I could walk with Eli through the taco barbecues of our lives. Life on the other side of the cliff wouldn’t be the problem. Which leaves me sitting here staring straight at the hard and scary, completely stripped naked of any excuses I might have tried to cover it up with.
And left holding one daunting, damning realization.
The cliff isn’t what I thought it was. This isn’t about what Eli might ask of me and what I might be willing to do to walk at his side. It might have started off there, but that changed the moment I stood in his dungeon, my eyes glued to drops of falling wax, and heard glaciers crack.
When I look around this back yard, the one thing I don’t see is glaciers. I don’t know who here is like me, who looks at the cliff of their own surrender and wonders if it might be the hardest thing they’ve ever done, who here doesn’t want the cliff but thinks they might need it.
But I know they all got through it the very same way. Just like the small girl in my lap.
They were held.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Eli
She’s been sitting there for more than an hour, swinging gently, with Evie’s far more sedate twin cuddled in her lap.
Nothing else about what is happening on that swing is gentle. I’ve seen subs on precipices before, and this one has spent the last hour crumbling under Chloe’s feet. On purpose. A wildly courageous journey, and she’s doing it without a Dom. Without any safewords. Without a safety net.
Not because she couldn’t have one if she wanted. There are at least a dozen people currently prowling her periphery waiting for permission, and all of them would have to plant me six feet underground first. But Chloe hasn’t asked, and her words from our dinner two nights ago are seared into my brain.
I need to give up the control, not have you take it.
She hasn’t given it up.
She doesn’t want to—but she thinks that maybe she needs to, and she’s holding her own feet to the fire in a way that has half the people in this back yard watching in admiration as she does the most important walk a sub can ever do.
Alone.
She’s holding on to control by her fingernails, but she hasn’t given it up. And until she does, I can’t take it. I know the precipice she’s on—it’s written all over her face. Two days ago she needed to understand my motivation, why I do this. Today, she needs to understand her own. She’s not a classic sub. She doesn’t need to please. She doesn’t desire to be controlled, she doesn’t thrive inside structure, and she’s not a brat.
But for the first time, not one person in this yard is looking at the woman I love and seeing the club’s next trainee Domme. They’re seeing the truth that Chloe is grappling with in the pit of her very naked soul. The part of her that might not desire or want or crave surrender—but is called to it anyhow.
A hand clamps on my shoulder. Quint, helping me hold still a few seconds longer.
“I have to wait.” My voice sounds like I’ve been shouting for three days.
“Yeah.” He watches Chloe, his eyes full of respect. “If she makes the leap, she’s going to be amazing.”
Yes. If.
He finally looks at me. “And she’s going to be a hell of a challenge. She’ll have to trust her Dom a lot.”
That may be the only thing keeping me sane. “She already does.”
He squeezes my shoulder. “Not for this.”
My growl comes out more like a whimper. “Did you come over here to help or to drive me crazy?”
He snorts, but hi
s hand on my shoulder says something different. He didn’t come over to do either. He came to be a friend. One who knows what it is to hold his own demons still while the woman he loves grapples with hers.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chloe
I’m full again, even though all I’ve eaten is taco fumes—and I need to think. But first I need to finish a conversation that started before I got here.
Ari sees me coming and gracefully extracts from her collection of adoring admirers, little and big. She gives me a hug, the kind that says she sees all my confused pieces and honors them. “Got all the data you need?”
I shrug. “Maybe. I think so. I need some time to let it settle.”
Her smile is slow and a little bit sad. “Don’t take too long.”
I sigh and cast a glance at Eli, who’s carefully not looking at me. “Because it’s hurting him to wait?”
She shakes her head. “No. Because it’s hurting you.”
She is so very much like me. “He thinks I’m doing this to protect him.”
She studies me carefully. “Are you?”
“No. Maybe at sixteen, he needed me to protect him. He doesn’t now. He needs me to figure myself out.”
Ari’s eyes shine with sisterhood—and respect. “You are, and you will.” She pauses a beat. “Consider letting him hold you while you do it.”
Her words are the scariest thing in the world. I close my eyes. “I like being the person other people can lean on.”
I hear the compassion in her voice. “Me too.”
I follow the string she’s laid out for me, straight over to the edge of the cliff I’ve been trying to convince myself isn’t mine. This isn’t about protecting Eli at all. It’s about protecting me. About wanting to keep the glaciers of my soul right where they are. I swallow hard and ask the only question I have left. “Is it hard for you?”
She laughs quietly. “The hardest. It took me about a day to become a Domme. The sub part was a lot harder. And a lot more important.”
I nod. “Thanks.”
She kisses my cheek. “Anytime.”
I walk over to Eli, and even though he’s not looking at me, I know he feels me coming. I stop, just shy of his shoulder, and wait until he turns my way, hope and terror in his eyes.
I’m not sure enough of where I am to speak to either. “Can I come see you tomorrow?”
He takes a really long time to answer. An empty space filled with everything neither of us can say. “Yes.”
I nod. I’m going to find myself a taco to eat and hug every darn person in this yard. And then I’m going to go home, pull the covers up over my head, and stare at a cliff.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Eli
I know it’s her at my door even before I open it. Nothing mystical—my ears just know the rhythm of her footsteps. I can’t stop the part of me that loves that level of connection, even knowing that what’s about to walk in my door might wreak havoc with the rest of me.
Watching her slip out of Sam and Leo’s yard yesterday afternoon was hell. The twenty-eight hours since have been a place I didn’t even know existed.
She smiles when I open up. “Hi. I’m glad you’re home. I followed your neighbor in.” She waves down the hall at the elderly man who lives in the condo at the far end and obviously finds Chloe charming. “Do you have some time to talk?”
I’d do surgery on my day if I didn’t. On my life. “Yes.” I back up so she can walk in my door, trying to read her body language. Which is about as effective as trying to stare at the zucchini in my fridge and learn where it grew. Body language needs context, and I don’t have any for this conversation yet.
I do, however, have zucchini. “You hungry? I was just about to make a stir fry.” Which names all the things I can cook, but fortunately stir fries come in infinite flavors.
She grins. “Still making those?”
“Yes.” I tweak her nose as I turn toward my kitchen, stupidly grateful for small comforts. “Still pretending you don’t know which end of a knife is the business end?”
She laughs. “I’m forty-two. I could only delay the inevitable for so long.”
I wish we felt inevitable. The romantic in me wants it to be so, but the man who’s been happily single for the last twenty-six years is well aware we’re two people totally capable of walking away from this. Even if it turns us into emotional spaghetti.
I open my fridge and pull out all the veggies that look decent. Which includes two zucchini, some cipollini onions, and a somewhat questionable eggplant. I put the eggplant back and pull out beef strips instead. The veggies might be a little sketchy, but the tiny woman who runs the Asian market down the street and thinks I need a wife keeps me well supplied in things that stir fry with very little fuss. I reach back into the fridge for the sprouted beans and a bottle of the all-purpose sauce I use when I’m feeling lazy. Or distracted.
Chloe has already found my knife collection and is demonstrating the impressive skills she’s acquired in the last twenty-six years. There’s a nice mountain of zucchini toothpicks, and onion slivers coming up right behind them.
Right. I pull out a wok that might be older than I am. It’s seen as many countries too, and it kept me well fed in most of them. I give it less time than I probably should to warm up and pull the lid off the rice cooker while I wait. Lots there. “Food in five minutes.”
She grins and pushes a cutting board piled high with veggies my way. “Does your place run to a bottle of wine on short notice?”
I shake my head, amused at my suddenly sixteen-year-old manners. “I spent two decades in Europe.” I nod at the end of the counter. “The high-tech contraption for storing wine is under the end there. Pick any bottle you like. French on the top racks, more adventurous stuff lower down.”
It doesn’t surprise me in the slightest when she sticks her nose in the very bottom.
I breathe into that. The knowledge that Chloe has always been brave. The comfort of having her here, perusing my wine collection. I push the beef around, searing it in the high heat. Chloe mutters something I can’t hear and emerges with a bottle. I leave her to it—I assume she’s learned how to boss a cork around in the last couple of decades too.
She sets the open bottle on the counter to breathe just as I pour a cascade of chopped zucchini and onion into my wok, and sniffs appreciatively as the sauce lands a few seconds later. “That smells yummy.”
I grin. “Four ingredients in a jar, and they all love beef.” I kiss her forehead. “Thanks for chopping.”
She leans into me, arms around my waist, hanging on lightly as I push beef and veggies around a wok and wish stir fry took a lot longer to cook. “Thanks for letting me in your door.”
I kiss her forehead again. “Always.” I mean it, in so very many ways I don’t know how to put into words. Which, for right now, I can live with. I reach for the sprouts, which my tiny Korean shopkeeper assures me make for very virile sperm, and drop a heaping handful on top of everything else. “Cashews?”
It takes her a minute to figure out what I’m asking, which is good for my ego. She can get lost in the touch and feel of my chest any time she pleases. “Sure.”
I reach for a canister and throw on some of those and a little more sauce, and then, because this is a really fancy establishment, I scoop the rice straight out of the rice cooker and into the wok. Asian grannies everywhere roll over into their graves, but I want my rice warm and I don’t want to unwind from Chloe to do it.
She grins as I pile two plates high. “You don’t eat it straight out of the wok anymore?”
Not when I want to hold a really sexy woman in my lap while I eat. “Chopsticks or forks?”
She gives me a dirty look. The kind that says a fork will be turned into origami along with my eyeballs.
I laugh and pull out two sets of beautiful ironwood chopsticks with cherry bark overlays that I acquired from their maker the last time my tour bus took a left turn through Japan.
Chloe hums appreciatively and runs her finger along the grain of the wood.
I hold back a growl. I know I’m in deep trouble when I’m jealous of a chopstick.
Chapter Forty
Chloe
The chopsticks are beautiful and precise and intriguing, just as he’s always chosen for his instruments. I take them, along with two glasses of wine, and head for his couch.
He gets there before me, setting down two plates and taking the wine glasses from my hands. An arm slides around my waist as he sits down, and then he’s assembling me in his lap as casually and confidently as he handled the wine glasses.
He’s different now. He’s still the Eli who cooks stir fries and collects beautiful things made of wood, but he also has a calm, rooted self-assurance. A control that balances where he goes with his music. I let myself breathe into that. I was the one who sent him off to find musical freedom once. Maybe I’m here to ask him to complete the circle.
I hand over one set of chopsticks, somewhat reluctantly. They’re beautiful, and my hands have always coveted pretty things to touch.
He picks up a mouthful of my favorite bits and offers it, the ironwood a smooth extension of his fingers.
I shiver. Even at sixteen, those fingers knew how to play me.
He chuckles. “That bad?”
I blink, and the flavors of the tangy-sweet sauce land, somewhat belatedly. “No, it’s really tasty.” Surprisingly so. The ingredients might be similar to the ones teenage Eli used, but he’s gotten a lot better at throwing them together. I chew on beef that has just the right amount of tang to go along with the sauce, and scoop up a far more loaded bite.
He looks hopeful, and I laugh. “Feed yourself, buster. I don’t have your skill with chopsticks and this is too good to be picking up off your shirt.”
He smiles and nuzzles into my cheek. “It’s good to have you here, shorty.”
I can hear what he’s not saying. It doesn’t matter why I’ve come. We’ll get through this. I take another bite and chew meditatively, trying to figure out where to start, and decide to begin at the end. “I want you to play with me. A full-blown scene. A serious one that really pushes on me.”