HostileTakeover

by Joey W. Hill

  He drew a breath, a deep, slow one. When he was mastering a sub, everything went away but his body and her body. There was one singular focus, one intent, everything clear, nothing hidden or obscured. This moment felt like that. Everyone’s focus on the minister, the quiet, tranquil surroundings, but there was a straight line between him and Marcie, connecting them. For the first time he put his hand on it, felt the tautness that confirmed it was tight and true, a true binding. Just waiting for him to have the courage to grasp it. To fight for it.

  As the service concluded, people started filing back into the house for the hors d’oeuvres and to give the family their condolences. Matt saw him, nodded. Ben acknowledged him but stayed where he was. Matt understood, continuing to escort Savannah toward the house, Talia now under his other arm. Nate and the other siblings likewise had fallen in among the guys, or with Steve Pickard and his wife.

  Marcie had turned Cass over to Lucas, but she stayed by her chair, watching them all leave. At first, he thought she knew he was there, but then he realized she didn’t. She looked too alone, too lost in her head. Once everyone was well on their way, she turned and walked away.

  He followed her. She went to the end of a finger dock at the manmade lake, stepping out of her black heels to sit down. Putting her feet in the water, she braced her hands on the rough planking. Taking off his own shoes and socks, he rolled up the legs of his trousers, and then came up behind her, putting a brief hand on her shoulder to warn her of his presence before he sat down next to her, trailing his feet in the water next to hers.

  She kept looking down into the water, the mild wind keeping it rippling with movement. After seeing her in outfits that taunted and teased him beyond bearing, it was unexpected to realize she was even more beautiful to him like this. Her face pale but quiet, her hair drawn back from her face, the dark modest dress against soft skin. She looked both older than expected, and yet more vulnerable.

  “If you could meet God and ask him one question, what would it be?” She had a wistful, sad look, and he knew he’d do anything to make her feel better.

  “I’d ask him if there was anything in the world that hadn’t been done, that hadn’t happened. Not the significant obvious stuff, like world peace. The urban legend kind of thing, what people claim has happened before, but no one is certain about it. Like someone sitting down on the toilet and finding a snake in there.”

  She turned her head to look at him, her brows raised. “You ass,” she said, and then she started laughing.

  Extraordinary. That was the word Jon had used about her maturity, but it fit so much more about her. He couldn’t help touching her face, but when he did, she stopped laughing. As she lifted a hand, hesitant, he waited on her. He knew it wasn’t that she wasn’t sure of his permission. She wasn’t sure of herself, of what she wanted. What he’d done to her, the hurt, was still too close. He had to let her choose. Which meant he also had to swallow down the disappointment when she closed her hand into a fist, lowered it to her lap again. “What would you really ask?”

  “Hell, I don’t know.” He shook his head. “If you’re in the presence of God, all questions are supposed to be answered, right? At least that’s what I’d hope.”

  She pursed her lips. “I wasn’t sure you believed in God. Not specifically. I figured you were more of an agnostic, if not a complete atheist, because of how things went when you were little.”

  “When my mother left me in an alley, I was wearing a plastic rosary with a pressed shamrock pendant, suggesting she was Irish Catholic. Guess that’s the only reason she didn’t abort me. Or maybe she didn’t want to waste the cash she could use on her drug habit.” He shrugged before she could say anything to that. “When Jonas nabbed me for picking his pocket, he didn’t turn me in to the cops. He found me a decent foster home. He checked in on me, made sure I went to school. A lot of things happened in my life, good and bad, but now I’m pretty well off. I worked my ass off for that, but certain things had to happen at the right moments to get me on the right track. It makes sense there’s something out there that will help you, if you’re willing to be helped.”

  “So if love is staring you right in the face, it’d be kind of stupid to turn your back on it, right?”

  Touché, love. But before he could think of a proper answer to that, she spoke again. “I got your flowers. The bouquet. Forget-me-nots. But I don’t want to talk about that right now, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  She sat silently for a few minutes, gazing at the minnows clustering around her toes. “I don’t know why I was thinking about this today. It was so long ago, and it seems somehow disrespectful, with how much further Jeremy came by the end, but I was remembering that night.” Her shoulder jerked, a tic, and his brow furrowed when he saw it.

  “Allen, that was his name. I was thirteen, didn’t know anything. He was nineteen, and he came into my room, started flirting, but then he got mean and pushy. I was screaming for help, and he was tearing at my clothes, and all I could think was, ‘why isn’t Jeremy helping me?’ I never thought…when I realized that he’d been sitting in the other room, too stoned to even pay attention…”

  Ben put a hand over hers on the dock. He wanted to hold her, but recent and past history was pressing in too close, so he settled for that overlap of fingers. Hers were cold. She stared down at them. “Cassie got home just in time, pulled him off me. God, she was… I think about it now, and she was incredible. It was like watching a bear go after something attacking her cubs. A nineteen-year-old guy taller and heavier than she was and she pretty much kicked the crap out of him. All the shit I gave her growing up…and she was always there. But even after that, she loved Jeremy, just as much as she loved all of us.” Her voice trembled. “I don’t know if she’s ever going to get over not being able to save him.”

  “She will. Because she’s got you. And Lucas. All of us. We’re here for all of you.”

  She looked at him then, and her eyes were sheened with tears. “Ben, please hold me. I promise I won’t try to jump you. At least right now.”

  “Christ,” he muttered, but he needed no further invitation to pull her into his arms. Or put his mouth over hers, despite the absolute stupidity of doing so. It was a soft, long kiss, with gentle heat and connection, and he could almost feel that line between them tightening, winding around them both, holding them together. But there was a tension to her, a caution. He’d caused that, and he needed to fix it. It would take time, and a hell of a lot more than a kiss.

  She hadn’t rebuffed him though. She’d asked him to hold her, even made a weak joke that made him hope she still wanted him. He needed her to want him with that same fierceness she’d had before, so he could honor it the way he should have from the beginning.

  But today wasn’t about that. When he finally lifted his head, her eyes were closed. He used his fingertips to carry away the few tears, and then those brown eyes opened, looking at him. “I should get back to the house. Cass will need me.”

  Looking at how pale she was close up, feeling the tremor in her hands, he shook his head. “She’s surrounded by friends and family right now. Let’s take a little bit of time for you.”

  “Ben—”

  “No arguing,” he said quietly. Her gaze flickered up to his face, uncertain. “If I thought she genuinely needed you right now, we’d go back. But she’s all right. Give yourself a breath. You’ve gotten what, probably two hours’ sleep this week?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve been okay.”

  “You’ve been better than okay. You’ve been brilliant. But dim the wattage for a few moments, firefly. Let’s walk somewhere. How about down to the gazebo?”

  “Okay.”

  He helped her up, picked up her shoes. As Marcie watched him with those sad, tired eyes, he knelt, dried her feet with his handkerchief, guided each foot into the practical heels. She held onto his shoulder, and he felt the curve of her fingers in his coat. After he donned his own shoes and socks, straightened
his trouser legs, he took that hand, pressed a kiss to her knuckles. Tucking it into the crook of his elbow, he guided her onto the path that followed the edge of the lake. For a little while she was quiet, just leaning against him, walking together, but then she pointed to the sky.

  “Look at that. See how the sky is blue above the tree canopy, and directly beneath it, it’s white, a perfect segue? I wonder what causes that?”

  “We’ll ask Jon. He knows all the science stuff.”

  “You’re a lawyer. You know how to make up stuff that sounds right.”

  “Light refraction,” he said solemnly. “Caused by the whosiwhatsit interacting with the thingamajig in a synaptic reaction.”

  “That’s total nonsense. Good enough.” They’d dropped to holding hands, and it felt pretty damn natural. Even more for him to pull her under his arm, guide her hand under his coat so she could settle her palm on his waist and he could put his around her shoulders. She laid her head on his chest.

  They followed the boardwalk to the screened gazebo overlooking the marsh. It was a hushed place, a couple white herons fishing gracefully among the waters, the silence punctuated by the occasional sawing cricket or chirping note of a frog.

  “Let’s just sit here,” she whispered. “We can listen and watch.”

  He shed his coat, put it over her shoulders, then took a seat in the Adirondack chair. Guiding her onto his knee, he let her lean back against his body, put her head next to his. The marsh grasses rippled back and forth, like conversations. Seed motes floated through the air. The heron stepped with stately slowness through the water, watching for fish.

  “Do you have a quiet place like this, Ben? A place where everything makes sense?”

  He’d been stroking her hair, carefully removing barrette and pins until it tumbled to her shoulders and he could comb through it, follow the line of her narrow shoulder blades. He could answer her question with more lawyer bullshit, things that sounded right, were somewhat true, but this was the first step. He wasn’t going to be a chickenhearted bastard anymore.

  “The St. Louis cemetery,” he said, with effort. “I used to go there as a kid, at night. I still go there to think. If you sit on top of one of the bigger vaults, you can see most of the place. There’s a sense of peace there, of problems set aside.”

  “Well, yeah. Everyone there is dead.”

  He tugged her hair, though he couldn’t help a smile. He turned his head enough so they were eye to eye. Hers had a soft gleam of tired humor. “Brat,” he said.

  “Do you find it…when you do a scene?”

  “You tell me. I think you already know the answer.”

  She pressed her lips together. “When I was watching you that night at Surreal—the first time—I saw it. You could have been in the middle of an empty desert, because it was just you and those three women. You were focused on finding the true root of their submission, and when you got them into subspace, you were right there with them, in a similar…Domspace, where everything made sense, their very lives, every movement, every breath, in your hand.”

  She nodded out to the marsh. “When I come here, for comfort, wisdom, or to be nothing for a little while, I imagine being held in God’s hand. But the other night, when you took me over, Mastered me so completely, it was one and the same. I was held inside of you, because you had that same strength I sense here. I was nothing, in every good sense of the word, because it also felt like everything.”

  She gave a slight smile then, laced with tears. “How many times I imagined you holding me just like this, so I could lean against you, and you wouldn’t give way.” She looked at him then. “Tell me more about the cemetery. Will you take me there sometime?”

  He had to clear his throat to answer. “Yeah. I’ll take you anywhere you want to go.” He thought about the cemetery, what would interest her. “There’s one particular vault with a statue of a child on it. Just a small thing, nothing extravagant, but the face is soft, innocent, worn down from age. The vault says ‘closed forever’, because when the child died, the parents were too heartbroken to have it used again. Since the last family member died some time ago, I took over the maintenance fee for it.”

  “Why? Other than the fact you’re a good guy.”

  He should have known she’d ask. No cowards here, right? He shrugged, looked out over the marsh. “Not so good. I did it because I envy that kid for being wanted that much, even though she was here for only three months.”

  He could feel her gaze on him, so he turned his face back to her, ran a knuckle along her cheek, kept talking. “When you’re there at night, the statues remind you of silent angels, all white and gray. There’s a guy who comes and plays a sax to his friend, and it’s some of the best sax playing I’ve ever heard. But I don’t go to him and ask him why he plays. Because in that place you whisper your secrets to those silent statues. To the angels of death.”

  “I wouldn’t mind being one of those statues,” she said. “All bathed in shadows, whites and grays, hearing you whisper your heart and secrets to me.”

  “My secrets might make your concrete feathers stand on end.”

  She wasn’t smiling. Those brown eyes met his. “When you go to the cemetery, does it help? Help you deal with what you lost?”

  Or what he never had. “Yeah, it does.”

  “Tell me how. Please?” She sighed, closed her eyes. “Jeremy died, but I lost him long ago. Just the same way we lost our parents. Not through death. Death is different, because it’s over. No chance to hope, or to have hope crushed. Sometimes you can romanticize a dead person as time passes, or maybe remember some of the better things. When it came to you…I set myself up for loss there, I know it, so I don’t blame you for what you can’t give me. But I thought…maybe you could tell me how to deal with all of it.”

  It was hard to let that one stand. Yeah, he’d let her down. They hadn’t hit the nail on the head yet, but he was gauging what she was seeking, figuring out how much she wanted right now. He was used to the guys or her knocking on that door, and him refusing to open it. This was a situation where opening it to her without being asked might be the key to whatever happened going forward.

  He spoke to the sky. “You can’t get it from the self-help shows, all that bullshit about coping with loss. There is no coping. It takes you over, and you’re a drowning swimmer, trying to keep your head afloat, wondering sometimes why the hell you bother, except there’s this compulsion to stay alive, this biological imperative you can’t shake. It’s part of why D/s called to me, the primal, straightforward, fuck-PC-and-all-its-bullshit-terminology.

  “I could control things in that room, could get into the psyche of a woman and open her up, open her soul so I could find that part of her that’s always raw and aching and open inside me. I could find what’s real and not the façade. But each time I get there, I’m still empty. I touch that hand, find that spot, and it’s not what I was seeking. So eventually you decide the point isn’t finding something, but the search. You keep moving, avoid staying still.”

  “That’s what Jon said,” Marcie murmured. “You can’t stay still. You’re afraid of stillness.”

  “Not afraid.” Ironically, Ben had to quell the urge to rise, move, but if he did that, he couldn’t hold her. “Just nothing there I want to be with.”

  “What if I’m there? Can you sit in that stillness with me? For just a moment? See what we find there together?”

  He turned his head to meet her gaze. “Yeah. I can.”

  The simple words kindled hope in her eyes. He wanted to fan it to a full-on blaze, but he let her keep the lead. She brushed his face with those gentle fingers, looking at him with eyes that were old and young at once. “If you died, I’d feel the way those parents did. It would break my heart. I would drown in a loss like that.”

  Jesus, she was ten times braver than he was. What he’d scoffed at as youthful drama and exaggeration was simple, pure faith in her own heart and what it wanted. He stayed silent for a mo
ment, overcome by it, then caressed her cheek. “Why me, Marcie? Tell me why it’s me.”

  When she worried her bottom lip with her teeth, he brushed her chin with his lips, a nip. “You can’t say anything wrong,” he said firmly. “Not in the past, not now, not ever. All right? Just say it as you’re thinking it.”

  “Okay.” She nodded. “Do you remember the weekend Cass and Lucas got married?”

  “Like a minute after they met each other again at K&A?”

  She smiled. “It might have been a little longer than that. They had to wait for Lucas’ adopted family to fly in from Iowa to see the ceremony, after all. But I remember I’d wandered away from the wedding, sort of like I did today. You came to find me. Not Jon or Matt, the ones someone else might expect. You said ‘I’m never going to let anything happen to you’, as if you knew I was feeling uncertain about how fast things were changing. But what struck me was you didn’t say, ‘We’re going to take care of you’.”

  She glanced at him. “Maybe you think it was a slip, but I don’t. Just like I don’t think it was a coincidence that you came looking for me now, when it could have been anyone else. From the first moment I met you, you made me feel safe. I was cold then too, and you put your coat over my shoulders.”

  She took a breath. “I tried having other boyfriends. I pushed them, I yanked at their egos, not realizing at first why I was doing it. I needed them to be stronger than me, to put me in my place, prove to me they could hold the reins and they wouldn’t let go. They couldn’t. I believe in excelling in everything I do, Ben, and I won’t take less than that. It’s always been you. You’ve always been my safety, my laughter, my sense of salvation. I’ve always known you’d be the Dom who will give me what I need. Who I can trust with my secrets. And if you didn’t mean it, about being honest, I’m probably going to drown you in this marsh, right here, right now.”