“Are you sure?” Drake asked, even as he drew back his hand.
“Absolutely. It would be a nice way to start our day.” She thought for a second. She didn’t want to sound like she was the one giving orders or anything, but there was one bit of information he definitely needed. “My ass is pretty tender, though.”
“It should be. Lucky for you, I’m feeling merciful.” Drake chuckled. “And/or lazy. You wore me out last night.”
“Ditto.”
“But, woman, I lose control of myself when I see your ass. Especially when I’ve already marked it. Especially when I know it’s mine to enjoy.”
“So enjoy it.” Jen wiggled her butt as best she could. “We both have to get to work soon, but we might as well enjoy the time we have.”
At noon, she got a text from Drake: Come home early tonight. Lots to talk about.
She texted back immediately with a simple ??? but got no response.
Oh, he was such a tease! Jen was on pins and needles for the rest of day, waiting to learn what Drake wanted to talk about. It had to be something sexy, she figured, and he’d wanted to tantalize her beforehand. Something that would probably start with, Take off your clothes and get interesting from there. He must have come up with a particularly involved idea and wanted to tease her by talking it through first, maybe see if she had additions to the scenario.
Yeah, that was it.
When she got home after a long day, though, Drake didn’t immediately launch into something erotic. He seemed subdued, anxious. After one long kiss, intense even by his standards, he almost ignored her, fidgeting around his living room and straightening up things that were already tidy. It made Jen anxious just to watch him, the way flower gardens all organized in straight lines did. She found herself pacing along with him, trying to calm her nerves or maybe make sense of his behavior by echoing it. “Sit down,” he finally said, “and listen to what I’m about to say.” Drake’s voice was soft and not especially domly, but she still obeyed without hesitation, plopping onto his sofa.
She’d have obeyed even if he wasn’t her dom. Something was up, and she didn’t like it. She’d do whatever he needed her to do so he could spit it out.
Drake kept pacing until Jen thought she would jump out of her skin in sheer frustration. Finally, she whispered, “Drake? What’s up?”
He glared at her, eyes wild, then folded himself onto the floor with a grace that Jen figured must come from his martial arts practice. He hid his face in his hands, a defeated gesture, though his spine was still proud and straight, another martial arts holdover, she figured.
Jen couldn’t help herself. She slipped off the couch, settled on the floor behind him and wrapped both arms and legs around Drake’s rigid body. He sighed. She thought it was a sigh of pleasure or comfort, but he didn’t relax.
He wouldn’t, she guessed. He needed to say something, and she imagined it would be easier if he wasn’t looking at her. Difficult conversations often were.
But what could possibly be so hard to say? Unless what he wanted to say was that he didn’t actually want to explore a more serious relationship. The kiss and Drake’s strange intensity suggested otherwise, but it would explain why he was acting odd. He obviously desired her and cared about her, but all along he’d been running hot and cold, pulling her close, then pushing her away. Maybe this was just another example. But it felt more serious. His body was stiff with tension.
The minutes ticked off, counted by the old-fashioned wind-up clock on Drake’s bookshelf, a piece that he’d mentioned was an inheritance from his great-aunts. She focused on the ticking to distract herself from her rising fear. Jen realized she was holding her breath and let it out with a rush. The colors inside her head were all mud browns and grays, the hues of a dirty February day when it seemed like spring would never come to the hills of the Finger Lakes.
Finally, Drake spoke. His voice was just above a whisper and sounded as hoarse as if someone had been strangling him. “I don’t know how to do this, Jen,” Drake said suddenly. “I don’t know how to hold you without grasping too hard, don’t know where the line is between being spontaneous and being creepy, between showing I care and being a stalker. It’s too soon to care about you as much as I do, too soon to want to own you.”
“Says who?” It seemed like an obvious question to Jen. She’d spent most of her life having people spouting facts at her that turned out to have little basis in her version of reality.
He sighed. “I have rules, only the rules don’t seem to work with you, and I lose control. I want to say you make me lose control, but I can’t blame you for it. I’m letting it happen to me, letting myself get obsessed, and no matter how hard I try to keep things in perspective, I can’t. This morning just proved it to me. Hell, last night proved it to me. It’s too soon for me to say you’re mine, even if it feels that way sometimes. I can’t trust myself where you’re concerned.”
Drake tried to pull away from her, but she clutched at him, using legs strong from cycling everywhere to keep Drake from getting too far. “Uh, no. You’re not getting away that easily. We’re finally getting somewhere.” Jen did her best to keep her tone light, almost dry and off-hand, to counteract the edge of panic she sensed in Drake. There was something much more going on here than a guy flipping because things were moving fast. That, she could understand—they’d been traveling together at warp speed all along, and she might worry about it too, except it felt so right. “Is this a dom thing, that you should never feel any doubt or confusion or whatever? If you think that, you’re believing your own PR too much. Doms are human. New relationships are fun but also frightening. Deal.”
“You don’t understand. It’s not that. It’s…” He shook his head, and the movement shuddered through his whole body. “I’m getting too emotional, too unclear. This isn’t good.”
This time when he pulled away, Jen let him. Otherwise, she was afraid he might hurt himself or her in his need to escape.
He scrambled to his feet with far less grace than when he sat down, stepped as far away as he could in the room, and turned to face her. “I’m sorry,” he repeated. “The way I’ve been acting with you is inappropriate. The way I feel is inappropriate for how long I’ve known you. It’s real, I think, but it’s too soon, and it’s making me do stupid things.”
Jen wondered if she was hallucinating. Drake made no sense at all, and she told him that.
“I know! I know!” She’d never heard him raise his voice, and she flinched at the sudden fierceness, the anger, although it didn’t seem to be directed at her.
He pulled back into himself almost instantly. “That was definitely out of line,” he said, soft-spoken again, unnaturally calm. “I apologize.”
The inside of her head swirled and pulsed, an accident in a paint factory, and she couldn’t sort the colors out. Her temper flared. “Stop apologizing! You fucking apologize every time you start to get real, every time you show some passion or emotion. If you don’t want to be with me after all, or if you’re uncomfortable because we’re moving too fast and you want to backpedal from last night, just say it. I won’t be happy, but I’ll understand. But don’t run hot and cold and apologize when you run hot. If you’re going to apologize, apologize for the cold!”
Drake looked stunned, like she’d hit him with a brick. Only it must have been some kind of magic clue-brick. He took a step closer, then another and another, until he was close enough to touch her. He pulled her into an embrace that wasn’t, for once, all scarlet and purple lust and need, but a quiet rose with just a hint of desire to prove it was still him. He didn’t apologize, he didn’t kiss her, he didn’t say anything. He just held her, as if without her as an anchor, he might fly away.
Jen wasn’t used to being the anchor. Because she was an artist and didn’t play by ordinary rules, everyone always acted like she needed an anchor, whether it was true or not. It felt surprisingly good to be the grounded one, the one connecting her lover to earth.
; Finally, he spoke, still holding her. “I’ve tried all my life to stay in control in relationships, and not just in the bedroom. I’ve set rules for myself, for how much I can push, how much I can share, how close I can get. How much I can feel. And I’ve been shattering all those rules left and right…and it feels good, and I’m fucking terrified I’ll do something wrong and hurt you.”
“Oh, Drake.” She stroked his hair, wishing she had magic words. He sounded like shattered glass given a voice. He wasn’t making sense, but his pain was real.
“I pushed you this morning and even though you ended up getting into it, it wasn’t the right thing to do. You’d think I’d have learned from my fa… Oh, never mind.” He let go of her and looked away, though he stayed close.
“Your father?” Jen realized he’d never talked about his family, other than his great-aunt and her partner. She’d assumed Marian and Judith had raised him, and he didn’t really remember his parents.
“Ancient history. Nothing you need to worry about.”
“Except it affects us now.” She yearned to embrace him again—it soothed her and she thought it centered him too. But she didn’t dare, not when he was so tightly wound. “And I’m not giving up on you that easily. Haven’t you noticed I’m stubborn?”
“I’m messed up. I can do scenes, even edgy ones, because I can plan what I’m doing from one minute to the next. You can’t negotiate every step of a relationship. Things don’t go according to plan, and then I don’t know what to do, or I wing it and overstep boundaries. Part of me wants to walk away, or send you away, before I fuck things up. Fuck you up. But I can’t.”
Jen’s heart wobbled and her stomach heaved, but the situation wasn’t black and sticky and hopeless. Clouded in gray murk, sure, but she could still make out bright colors in the fog, shades of hope. Drake was saying he should walk away, but he wasn’t.
“Whatever is haunting you is in the past. We can work through it.” At least she hoped so. Some wounds went too deep to heal cleanly, but knowing what the damn wounds were would be a good start. “Probably not tonight, but we can get started. I think there may be enough coffee in the house for that.” The feeble attempt at a joke drew, not a smile, exactly, but a relaxing of Drake’s face and the tense lines of his body, the coiled energy.
Drake remained silent so long that the gray murk tried to take over Jen’s perception. When he finally said something, his voice sounded different. Not the secure, if geeky, Professor Hot-Stuff or the commanding man he was in the bedroom, but someone much younger, less confident.
Jen thought, holding back tears, she could come to love this man-boy as much as she could love the other facets of him she’d come to know. But she didn’t say that. Given where Drake was, how scared he seemed to be, she wasn’t going to use the word love now.
Even if they both knew damn well they were about three inches from falling in love with each other.
“I learned how not to be in a relationship from my parents. Mostly from my father. My father was a controlling asshole and my mother adored him for it.” He paused. “He adored her too, but he still expected her to wait on him hand and foot, to drop everything to meet his needs. They were happy, in their way. But it wasn’t exactly a good model for a relationship.”
“Were they kinky?”
“I’m pretty sure they were, but they didn’t have a frame of reference for dealing with it. Weird as it feels to say it about my parents, I hope they dabbled in bondage and pain-play and stuff, so they had some fun along with the problems.”
Jen tried not to laugh but couldn’t help herself. “That’s brave. I don’t even like to think about my parents having vanilla sex, let alone my dad wielding a whip. Although my mom would probably be the top.”
Drake smiled a lonely smile that faded on his next words. “Mom died when I was nine. Cancer. Dad mourned for a couple of years, but after a while, he wanted to date again. He wasn’t much older than I am now, and even as a kid, I understood that he was lonely.
“Only he had no idea how to go about dating. He wanted someone who’d cater to him like Mom did, both in bed and in other ways, which might have worked if he’d known about D/s and looked for people who were into that kind of thing. But he didn’t, so he kept scaring women away—and they had reason to be scared off, because as time went on, he got angry at women in general. And when I was about thirteen, he started talking to me about his love life, like I was supposed to help.”
“Creepy, yet inappropriate.” Jen tried to keep her voice dry, sardonic. It was the only way not to show how badly this story shook her.
“Very. And it gets worse. He met someone when I was fourteen, and best as I can figure out, he pushed her sexually in some inappropriate ways. I hesitate to say rape or assault, because I’m talking about my dad and I can’t face that idea. But I can’t help thinking that might have been what happened. There was definitely a restraining order involved.”
Jen shuddered and squeezed him harder but didn’t say a word. She couldn’t. For one thing, if she dammed the flow of Drake’s hard-won words, even briefly, he might not be able to start talking again. Every word seemed painful to him, but he also seemed determined to get the story out at last.
For another, she might start crying if she tried to talk, and tears were the last thing Drake needed. This moment had to be about him.
“When she took out the restraining order, I called Great-Aunt Marian and asked if I could come live with her and Judith for a while. I never went back. Dad’s been arrested a few times for sex-related offenses since then, but the charges were always dropped. I’d like to believe it means he’s innocent of the worst things, but it might just mean the women decided that pressing charges would be more painful than it was worth.”
Jen spoke for the first time, saying simply, “Ouch.”
“I deal. But when I realized I’m a dominant, that I need control and pain in a sexual relationship, I told myself I had to find a way not to turn into my father. And that way was rigid self-control.”
“You are not your father. For starters, you’re a dominant. He was an asshole who might have had tendencies that way but never grew up enough to know what to do with them.”
Drake shook his head. “I know. My brain knows, at least. But every time I start to get close to a woman, in the way I need to get close to a woman…”
“You pull back or turn it into a negotiation dance because you want to make sure you don’t fuck up. Or you push, not on the sex but on more emotional areas. You’ve done both with me.”
“I don’t know how to be in a relationship,” Drake confessed.
“Neither does anyone else. At least you know you don’t know.”
“I’ve spent my life learning to be in control of myself so I don’t hurt anyone else, but when I’m around you, I lose control. How can I control you, be in charge in the relationship, if I can’t control myself?”
“You can’t, not all the time.”
Drake turned to her, his gray eyes desolate, all pretense of the in-charge, self-contained dominant lost behind fear and pain. “Then how can I take care of you? How can you trust me?”
She felt her love for him in that moment with a brilliant sun-gold clarity that she rarely experienced outside the studio. She adored the confident dom and always would, but this other side, this glimpse into the complex past that made him who he was, made him less intimidating, more real.
And even more worthy of trust. “I couldn’t put myself into the hands of someone who thinks he has all the answers about everything. I couldn’t even put up with that guy. No one has all the answers about their own life, let alone someone else’s. But you’re learning to listen to me, to ask the right questions, to balance my needs and yours. Which everyone has to learn when they get into a relationship, not just doms and subs. That’s why I can trust you.” She touched him gently.
Drake ventured a smile. It was a ragged version of his usual cool grin, as if he was afraid something would break if
he smiled too hard. Jen thought it might be the most strangely beautiful thing she’d ever seen in a lifetime of seeking the beautiful and the strange, this broken man trying to smile for her. “So you mean…” Drake started, but didn’t finish.
“Yes, I mean.” She snorted and added, “Okay, that was incoherent yet mystifying. I mean confidence is sexy and attractive, but acting like you know everything isn’t. Having all the answers doesn’t work. I accept that you want to take care of me, help me where you can. I accept that you like rules and order. Hell, I can see where more order in my life would be good. It turns me on to be controlled in the bedroom, and I’m kind of fascinated with being controlled to some extent outside it. But knowing you know you don’t know everything helps. That means I can question and make suggestions and talk to you if you’re trying to fix something that isn’t actually broken. For what it’s worth, I’m a lot more concerned about that aspect of things than about you pushing me too far sexually. I have a safeword for that, and I know you’ll respect it.”
A light dawned, an idea that seemed pretty radical in the context of kink, based on all she’d read, but the light was clear and bright, and that meant it was at least worthy of sharing. “Shouldn’t you have a safeword too? Not for sex, although I suppose you might want one if you feel like you need to slow down, but some way to signal you’re not sure what to do now, or you need to talk as friend to friend, not dom to sub?”
He blinked owlishly. “I’ve never heard of a dom having a safeword before.”
“Don’t think dom. Think human being. Human beings in relationships need to talk things through. Only you’re a human being who needs order and structure. You won’t just spew what’s bothering you. You need a code, something to make it safe to show some indecision or confusion and detangle it before you kind of implode like you did tonight.” She moved closer to him. “If you don’t want to call it a safeword, call it parliamentary procedure or something.”
Out of Control Page 17