Need--Ari & Jackson

by Lilia Moon

  Then I heard the drums and proceeded to spend six years letting them change me.

  I let my fingers work the drum skin Kengali helped me stretch when he decided I’d finally sat still and listened long enough. It’s not the most well-made of my drums, but it’s the one most tolerant of being dragged around a cold, windy city. Its sound is changing as the room warms up. I run my eyes over my audience again, slowing the rhythm of my hands to match the stretchier pose Athena has just called for. I’m learning to recognize most of their names, even the Sanskrit versions. Like the names of most of the drum beats I learned, they sound far fancier in a language that isn’t my own.

  Athena makes a motion with her arms, and her students tip over into something that goes by the innocent name of triangle pose. About half of them make it. The other half grab various parts of their bodies and try not to die. I send them as much empathy as I can with my fingers. I know what it is to be the guy who doesn’t bend the way everyone else does.

  Ari bends, with grace and strength that makes it look like human beings were born to be triangular. It doesn’t surprise me—she makes climbing onto a spanking bench look easy and graceful too. Which isn’t something I’ve watched very often, but every time is seared in my memory.

  I may not have told my band members the whole truth yet, but I’ve said it to myself. Six years in Africa and I’ve been looking for a home ever since—and something deep inside me thinks I might find it with the woman in a simple black tank top, arching over into a backbend on her way back up to her feet. Most of the rest of the class can barely untangle themselves from triangle pose the easy way.

  My fingers tap her a message before the rest of me can get a grip. So beautiful. So freaking strong and bendy and amazing.

  I swallow. She doesn’t speak the language of drums. She won’t know. But maybe the part of her soul where we’re all born with a beat in our veins will hear anyhow.

  One of the guys in the back row topples over into the equally inflexible, very sweaty guy beside him, and half their line goes down. Athena grins, leaves me at the front, and heads into the fray, dodging limbs and sweat puddles like a pro.

  I make a face and free up one hand from the rhythm and drag my shirt over my head. Athena wasn’t kidding about the temperature, and clearly the part of me that got used to hot-and-humid in the jungles of Gambia hasn’t shown up yet this morning. My t-shirt is a sweaty mess, and unlike the poor people falling off their yoga mats, I’m just sitting comfortably in a corner.

  I take another survey of the room, aware Athena is still untangling people at the back, and catch Ari staring.

  Straight at my naked chest.

  Chapter Five

  Ari

  I’ve seen naked men before. Lots of them. More than most women will see in ten lifetimes.

  And I can’t take my eyes off him. It’s not even his chest, sexy though it is. It’s the utterly unselfconscious way he just peeled himself naked. The way he’s holding the container for an entire class of uncomfortable people as they sweat out their crap and breathe in something better to replace it—and while he’s doing all that he just reached up and pulled off his shirt without missing a beat.

  He knows I’m looking. He knows, and he hasn’t looked away or gotten shy or pumped up his muscles or done anything other than meet my eyes.

  I don’t misread people. It’s one of my superpowers, knowing who someone is just by how they land in my foyer. But I’ve totally missed a whole bunch of layers of this man. He’s as sweaty as we are—even his fingers are shiny. But he’s the only one in this room besides Athena who isn’t some degree of uncomfortable, who isn’t having to fight his way into relationship with the heat that’s pressing on our bodies of water, reforming us into differently shaped clay.

  He’s already been pressed.

  I don’t know how I know that, but I do. My superpowers, showing up several months late.

  I narrowly miss getting clocked by the swinging arm of the guy on my right, which means I’ve missed whatever Athena just told us to do. I take a look at the scooping warrior poses all around me and hastily catch up. Then I go back to staring at Jackson’s chest. At his face. At the hands that know so precisely what they’re doing that he doesn’t need to look at them.

  I know this because he’s looking at me.

  Looking, and seeing, and he’s not making the mistake of seeing the slightly uncomfortable sweaty blonde cheerleader. Kinky people are better at looking past surfaces than most, but he’s just barely kinky, so new to my world that he’s still wearing some of the crinkly packaging he came in.

  But underneath that is a guy who just got interesting.

  He’s holding this room, and he’s doing it so smoothly that Athena has ceded control without even realizing she’s done it and the shy gypsy beside me has forgotten she’s shy. That’s a skill that can be taught, and I work really hard with Quint to teach it, but whatever else Jackson might need to learn before he isn’t a baby Dom anymore, holding a container isn’t it. He’s woven himself into this room. Quiet, competent dominance, and it’s sexy as fuck.

  I manage to shift to the next pose without inconveniencing the guy beside me. I’ve lost track of Athena’s words, but that’s okay. My body knows how to do this—and if it forgets, there’s a drumbeat telling me where to go. What to do. How to be right here in my sweaty skin and trust.

  I swallow and bend over toward my toes, a waterfall of sweat running up my face for just long enough to have to run back down again when I stand up. I screw my eyes shut—my eyes have standards for the salty water they’re willing to hang out with, and sweat doesn’t cut it.

  The drumbeat tells me to hold still just a minute longer, that there are rewards for hanging upside down and letting sweat run into my nose.

  Which is such a completely, totally, utterly Dom thing to do, and it’s doing things to my insides that just should not happen in yoga class. He makes me want his hands drumming on my ass or sliding into the wet heat of my pussy, showing me where to stay and where to go and when to do the thing I don’t want to do to get to where I need to be.

  I swallow and try to shift my attention back to whatever version of hell-baked warrior pose this is.

  His drum laughs at me. Tempts me. Calls my blood to something it knew long before it met yoga.

  I growl, which scares the shit out of the shy gypsy and nearly has her taking out half the row. I wince and make apologetic faces at all the eyes that turn my way.

  I don’t look at Jackson, not even when he does the laughing beat again. He’s a freaking baby Dom and he’s scening with me, right here, right now in the middle of four-dozen sweaty people who have no idea what they’re part of, and we’re going to dump all these innocent bystanders on their asses if we’re not careful.

  If he’s not careful. I am so not the one who started this.

  Chapter Six

  Jackson

  I didn’t mean to go here. Not yet. I know I’m not ready, and if I start this before I can finish it, she’s not going to take me seriously enough for this to work.

  I know all that. I’ve repeated it to myself over and over for months as I watch her work the floor at Fettered while I bang on my drums, and I’m saying it now as I watch her sweat to my beat. She’s allowing herself to be taken over by it, which is a gift, because way too many people on this continent don’t remember what their blood was born to do. They listen politely to my drumming. Ari’s letting herself mate with it.

  I breathe. I’m not ready. Kink is a skill, just like drumming, and I spent three years at the feet of the masters, just listening, before I got to touch my first hand drum. Kengali was hardcore that way, but those three years turned me from a white kid who thought he wanted to play the drums into a man who could feel the beat of my own soul.

  If waiting three years to touch Ari is what I need to do, then it’s damn well going to happen. But that doesn’t mean I can’t give her a taste of what lives inside me. I change up the rhyth
m a little, adding a slow, intricate sub-rhythm that eases the more attentive ears in the room slightly off center, invites them to step outside their comfort zone and stretch.

  Ari is one of the first to notice. Her hand, reaching for the mat, goes entirely still. Listening. Waiting for the response that she knows will rise deep inside her.

  A woman who knows, absolutely, how to trust.

  I’m not ready yet. But I want, in every cell of me, to earn the right to that trust. For now, though, it’s enough just to play at its edges. I blur the center rhythm a little. Not much—they’re packed in here like really sweaty sardines, and one jagged beat would send half the room tipping over like dominoes.

  Or so I like to think. You can’t be a good drummer without some ego.

  The woman beside Ari wavers, sucked in by the off-beat and not sure what to do about it. I flutter fingers on the edges of my drum, sending out reassurance, but not bringing the pulsing of my hands entirely back into alignment.

  Athena raises an eyebrow. She might not know anything about drumming, but she can feel what I’m doing. Then she grins and ducks under an errant leg, laying her hands on the hip it’s attached to. Offering steadying. Partnering with my drumbeat and letting it do whatever I have in mind.

  I’m going to like working with her.

  I look back over at Ari. There are three people in the room who’ve solidified into the new rhythm, and she’s the strongest of them. It’s contagious—her confidence is reaching two layers deep into the people around her. Someone who builds tribe, leads it, even when she’s got sweat dripping off her nose.

  I know all this already. She’s strong and generous and wide open and she somehow calls people in past the gorgeous exterior and lets them see all that. She’s amazing. But today, I’m seeing something I didn’t know, because she’s leaning into the beat I’m offering her and for the first time that’s allowing me to see something else.

  Her longing.

  I swallow and start to gentle my hands. I don’t want to. I want to take her deeper, to go where my hands and her soul both want to go right now. I can feel the confidence in my beat. Ready. Ready.

  But I can’t.

  Because I’m holding forty-six people in this room, not just one.

  Because my head isn’t nearly as convinced as my hands.

  Because Ari is already firming back up.

  But she let me see something in these few sweaty minutes, and it’s changed the whole story I’ve been telling myself for months. This isn’t just about me—it’s also about her. About something way down deep she just let my drum touch. Something raw and human and needy and urgent and real.

  Something that says I haven’t got three years.

  Chapter Seven

  Ari

  I set another pile of gear on the floor beside Mattie and take a seat. Doms usually take good care of their personal stuff, but the club gear sometimes gets cracked or dusty or dangerous in subtle ways that need experienced eyes to find them.

  I do it because it’s my job. Mattie does it because a decent number of these tools have been used on her ass, so she’s paying it forward. And because I brought chocolate. A whole plate of stupendously decadent orange-spice dark-chocolate truffles. They’re basically a food orgasm, but every time I suggest that for the packaging, the cute couple in their fifties who make them just blush and pat me on the head.

  The truffles are shaped like bears today, which makes me feel oddly carnivorous as I bite off a head. “You want crops or paddles?”

  Mattie grins. “Paddles. I like oiling the wood.”

  And hiding the mean ones at the very back of the cupboard, but we’ll both pretend I don’t know about that. I’m a switch when I’m actually playing, and I pull out my Domme voice when I have to, but the rest of the time I live in the skin of a club brat. Submissive with just enough tricks in her pocket to keep people on their toes.

  I pick up the crop on the top of the pile and start wiping it down, checking stitching as I go. Quint will be using these for a training class next week, and we have standards to maintain. I pull out the less bendy ones with the big leather ends out first. The small, whippy ones aren’t for beginners, even beginners Quint has deemed worthy of touching a crop.

  Mattie hums under her breath, a totally different song than the one playing over the sound system. And says nothing, which isn’t like her at all. I raise an eyebrow. “What’s on your mind?”

  She grins. “Nice try. Talk.”

  I offered her chocolate bribes to do toy maintenance with me long before I had anything to talk about, but she always knows. “If Milo hadn’t come into the picture, do you think you could have paired off with a baby Dom and made it work?”

  Her oiling cloth freezes in mid-air. “Seriously? Who?”

  So much for leading questions and hypothetical discussions that might not make me squirm. I sigh and reach for another crop. They’re all in good working order, which isn’t giving my squirmies anything to keep them busy. “Jackson.”

  Her eyes widen. “Sexy drummer Jackson?”

  I shrug and rub my fingernail over a fraying thread that isn’t fraying. “Yup. Sexy. Also, baby Dom.” That’s enough shorthand for her to know exactly where my head’s at, even if the rest of me is finding it a lot harder to get in line with where that story ends.

  She eyes me carefully. “He’s interested?”

  Very, although I can’t believe how long he kept it under wraps. I’ve been the object of a lot of trainee crushes, and I always know. Which makes me wonder if this is something else. If he’s something else. I sigh. That’s really dangerous ground, and it lives in the most tender area of my heart. Lands that just recently got stomped on by a sexy Dom from L.A. with skills Jackson won’t have for years yet.

  Mattie’s watching me with a mix of alarm and compassion, not even pretending to oil her paddle anymore. “Are you interested?”

  My fingers wrap more tightly around a crop handle, trying to find the answers my body doesn’t have. “I’m not sure. And even if I am, I’m not sure I want to be.”

  She laughs quietly. “That’s not how it works, girlfriend. You know that.”

  I do. Which is why I’m sitting here with the kind of uncertainty in my belly that I usually walk other people through. “He showed up at my yoga class this morning with a hand drum and quietly owned the room.”

  Mattie’s head tips down, but I don’t miss the flash of delight in her eyes.

  I sigh. Everyone here has been drinking from the same damn fountain of pink-Koolaid love. “Baby Dom, Mattie. Really baby. Like Quint only kicked him out of trainee class a few weeks ago level of green.”

  She looks back up, and the delight is gone. “You think he can’t hold you.”

  “Most can’t.” It’s not arrogance making me say that, it’s truth. Truth, and pure, needy frustration. I’ve spent my whole adult life walking the journey into all of who I can be—and I’ve turned myself into someone most guys don’t know how to handle.

  “I know.” Her voice is quiet, but her empathy fills every crevice of the hallway.

  I let the rest out, because even though we both know it, I need to say it. “I play hard. I need to be pushed, and I need someone who won’t fold at my experience or my self-confidence or because I know more than they do about pretty much everything kinky.”

  Not to mention being a switch. Which is really great for playing the field and really sucky for trying to leave it.

  Mattie leans forward and rests her forehead on mine. “Tank and Eva are getting there.”

  Tank is a really rare find. And even though Eva’s a sub with a lot of experience, her needs are a whole lot simpler than mine. I laugh, because they’re a whole lot louder too. “She just wants to be spanked and make lots of noise.”

  Mattie giggles. “She’s really good at it.”

  She is, and Tank’s finally got that all the way figured out, which is even funnier. I love the two of them together—I just don’t think
they’re me. And with all of the other examples at the club where one person is new, and they are freaking legion lately, it’s the sub who’s green.

  Baby Doms are a whole different ballgame.

  Chapter Eight

  Jackson

  Quint notices me as I walk into the back of his class, but he doesn’t take his eyes off his trainees. New Doms, five of them, all hanging on his every word. “This isn’t about control. If you’re here for that, the exit is right behind you. This is about being a container. About being a safe space for the sub you’re with.”

  He pauses until five heads nod. “The reasons for doing this are different for every Dom. For some, it’s about protecting what’s soft and courageous and open in the world. For others, it’s to be a part of the most beautiful dance there is, the one that happens when a sub makes it to subspace in your hands and takes you somewhere you can’t go without him or her.”

  I’ve never thought subs were weak, but Quint makes them sound like all the power in the universe rests in their hands.

  He scans his five students again. Looking for the unbelievers. “Whatever your reasons are, find them. But no matter why you show up here, once you do, your job is to be a strong container—one that holds steady and doesn’t crack and finds just the shape that your sub needs. Those things all take control, but they also take discernment, which is a fancy word for paying fucking attention. It’s your job to learn and make smart judgments, because your sub is trusting you, and screwing that up is the worst feeling in the universe.”

  I swallow, because I know what these five baby Doms don’t.

  “It will happen.” Quint meets my eyes, like he can hear the thoughts in my head. “You will fuck up, because every Dom does, but my job is to make sure it doesn’t happen because you’re an arrogant jerk who just wants to control another human being.”