I’d kept myself busy. My gallery opened in August, in plenty of time to get some traffic before the slow season. In the hope of drumming up business from the locals, I scheduled my first show. I featured several of Jace’s paintings, so it should have come as no surprise to me that Geoff would attend.
Hell, who was I kidding? I’d made the decision to spotlight Jace with at least a little forlorn hope that fate would throw Geoff and me together.
He looked good, despite the fact that he was leaning heavily on a cane and grimacing. Immediately I cursed myself for not providing seating—typically, gallery shows didn’t, in part to encourage people to move around and see all the work on display—and ran upstairs to the office to bring down a chair.
“Here,” I said, setting it next to him where he stood propping up a wall. He turned, narrowing his eyes as he glanced from me to the chair and back again. “Don’t give me that look. I’m not going to make a fuss, but it’s obvious you’re in pain. Even if I had no idea you’d be here, I still should have considered that not everyone can mill around on their feet all night. That was remiss of me.”
Slowly his shoulders inched down, and then sagged as he sighed. “You’re right. I really need to get off the leg. This bleed’s taking a long time to heal, and I don’t need to end up in the hospital again. Thanks.”
He sank into the chair, and I couldn’t help but ask, “How long has it been?”
“I injured it at the end of July.” He grimaced again and met my gaze defiantly.
I kept my tone light and casual. “Wow.”
“Yeah, well . . .” He rolled his eyes, and his lips quirked in a self-deprecating grin. “It was on its way to healing when I aggravated it by moving, so I only have myself to blame.”
“Moving? So you finally got your own place?”
His tone hedged. “Sort of.”
To press for more information or not? I was still trying to decide when someone touched my arm to draw my attention, and asked about one of the pieces. Shit. I was working.
“I’ll be right there,” I assured the potential buyer, and turned back to Geoff. “Look, do you think you can stick around until the show is over? Or can I call you if you need to go?”
He nodded, his voice light as he said, “I’ll stick around. Go make Jace some money.”
I don’t think I was all that attentive to my would-be clientele after that. My attention was constantly drawn to Geoff—if he was still sitting, if he looked like he was in pain, if he looked like he was going to renege on his promise and slip away. Finally people began to filter out, and he was still there, discreetly downing a pill with the sparkling water Jace had brought him. They had a quiet word as I saw the last of my guests out, and then Jace, too, left. Geoff and I were alone.
I glanced around at all the detritus to be picked up and decided it could wait until the morning.
“I have an office upstairs if you want to talk there, or—”
“I can make it down to the marina if we go slow,” he offered, getting me off the hook for deciding how much would be pushing my luck. If he wanted to come back to my boat, things weren’t a total loss.
“That’ll work. I have a house now, but it’s being renovated, so I’m still sleeping on the boat. Let me lock up and we can go.”
The weather was growing cooler, and the night breeze coming off the lake was stiff and getting close to chilly. The haze of clouds approaching across the water suggested the possibility of rain. Geoff hadn’t brought a jacket, tempting me to drape mine over his shoulders, but it didn’t feel like I had the right to indulge in that sort of solicitude.
I let Geoff set the pace for the few blocks from the touristy shopping district that was “downtown” Saugatuck to the marina. He was definitely putting a lot of weight on his cane. I tried not to pry but couldn’t help asking, “You said you’d been hospitalized?”
He nodded, frowning. “For several days. Major bleed in my quadriceps. That happens to be a very hard muscle not to use unless you’re totally bedridden. I was in a wheelchair for over a week after that. I had to get a hotel room because Jace’s apartment isn’t wheelchair accessible. Crutches for several weeks after that, and now the cane.”
He let me take his arm to help keep him steady on the ramp from the dock to the boat deck. Then he sank onto one of the benches in the lounge, rather than trying to head belowdecks.
“So, um . . .” I hemmed, for once at a loss for words. Geoff, thankfully, didn’t have that problem.
“So. You’re a dick,” he announced, leveling a finger at me. “All that bullshit about communication and trust and how I needed to talk to you about shit, and the first time you need to talk something out, you pull a stunt like that? That was an asshole move.”
I accepted the tirade. “I know. I’m sorry.”
“And yeah, I shouldn’t have misled you about the bleed when it started, and I owe you an apology for that, but still—”
“It’s not about that.” I sighed, settling onto the bench opposite him. “At least, not directly.”
“Then what was it about? And you better damn well make this good.”
“I didn’t see it. That you were hiding the bleed before Jace and I walked out the door. I didn’t notice. For us to have the kind of relationship we were discussing, I need to be able to recognize when you’re in trouble, even when you don’t.”
I rubbed my forehead, suddenly feeling the long hours I’d worked the last few days getting ready for the show. I was really too tired to be having this conversation, but now was the time it was happening. “Do you really want me having the responsibility to take care of you if I can’t even see when something isn’t right?”
“What?” He gave me an incredulous look. “You bolted because you’re not a fucking mind reader? Just because you can’t somehow magically intuit when I’m hiding a bleed from you, you’re a shitty dom? Jesus, Robin.”
A very valid point, but still missing the point, because he didn’t know where all this had started. “It’s not the first time I’ve overlooked signs of a problem that I should have picked up on. Maybe someone with that sort of track record doesn’t have any business being responsible for someone else’s well-being.”
Geoff’s eyes narrowed. “This isn’t about me, is it? This is about your ex. Er, Kevin.”
“Kyle.”
“Whatever.” Geoff’s glower clearly said I’d better start talking.
“He was using.” I slumped, both ashamed of myself and too weary to care. “That’s why he embezzled. He’d started using again, and he was into his dealer for thousands of dollars.”
“Again?”
“He was a counselor we’d hired in part to show the kids that things really could get better. A success story.” I couldn’t even manage a derisive smile. “He’d been a street kid, thrown out by his parents when he was thirteen, turned out by a pimp, hooked on drugs, but eventually he got himself off the streets and cleaned up.”
God, it still hurt. Not the betrayal, but my own sense of failure. Unable to stand Geoff’s eyes on me, I shot to my feet and crossed to the railing to look out over the dark lake.
“I didn’t see it. In retrospect there were about a hundred times I should have, but I always managed to rationalize it to myself. He was under stress at work. He’d heard from his family for the first time in twenty years, and it hadn’t gone well. There were plenty of excuses.” I scoffed. “I went everywhere for explanations except to the most obvious place.”
My eyes started burning. I shook my head hard until the feeling went away. “I was his dom. I was supposed to recognize when something wasn’t right. And I totally missed it.”
A soft thud and shuffle of Geoff’s cane, and then he was there at my shoulder, his voice soft. “He didn’t want you to see. You missed it because he hid it from you. And you missed my bleed—in the whole thirty seconds you saw me before you were out the door—because I hid it from you. I’m really damned good at doing that.” He snorted
softly. “You may be perceptive bordering on psychic, but is it possible your expectations of yourself are a bit too high? Just saying.”
I chuckled without much humor. “I never claimed my reaction that day was rational. I was already raw from running into Kyle when I was in New York. I didn’t think to question when you went from drowsy and wanting to go back to sleep to wide-awake and supposedly unable to sleep. And then? Seeing you high on painkillers? It all just sort of— I couldn’t cope with it, so I bolted. I’m sorry.”
“You ran into him?”
Was that a bit of jealousy I heard in Geoff’s tone?
“Well, more accurately, he staked out my lawyer’s office, knowing I’d be coming back to handle some of the paperwork, and waylaid me. He thought he could get my forgiveness for almost ruining my life. Really, that’s the other reason I took off.”
“What do you mean?”
I swallowed, gripping the rail tighter. “I know you said your wrist bleed that day wasn’t necessarily caused by anything we did—”
“It wasn’t.”
“Okay, but the fact is, when I walked through your door, the way I behaved with you, especially that first time—that wasn’t about you and me. I wasn’t paying much attention to what I was doing with you that night because I was still pissed off about running into him.” I inhaled deeply and blew it out slowly. “If I had hurt you, it would have been because I was taking my anger at him out on you.”
“I don’t recall complaining.” Geoff sounded bewildered.
I spun to face him. He was so close, but now wasn’t the time to touch him. Which only frustrated me more, because now that we were on the water, he was practically shivering. And I could have used the comfort of physical contact.
I reached behind me to grab the railing again, just to give my hands something else to do.
“But I know better. You don’t do scenes—especially scenes involving impact play—when you’re upset, for exactly that reason. It’s pretty much one of the first rules of domming.” I closed my eyes, exhaling hard again. “I’m not in control of myself. I haven’t been for months, since all that shit with Kyle happened. I’m swinging like a weather vane, one minute certain I need to just swear off playing altogether, and the next thinking maybe I can do it better this time, avoid all the mistakes I made before. But I’m just adding on new ones.”
“Maybe.” I opened my eyes to peer at him, and he shrugged. “Maybe you are making mistakes. Last I checked, you’re human, so you don’t get a pass on those, right? You suck it up, learn from it, and move the hell on.”
Fuck. He wasn’t getting it. Hell, I wasn’t sure I was getting it. I just knew that right now, I couldn’t pick up where we’d left off. I dropped my gaze to the deck. “If I screw up with someone else, I’m not likely to kill them.”
A beat of silence. Then another. Then—
“Oh, fuck you,” Geoff hissed. “You’re going to go there now?” He stomped away in his uneven gait. When I looked up, he was pacing furiously, or as close to pacing as he could get with the cane. “After what we’ve done, after everything I confided in you, after all your assurances that you wouldn’t let my hemophilia put you off, you’re going to fucking go there?” The swing of his arms was as explosive as his shout. “My medical condition is not. About. You!”
I shook my head, trying to stop the tirade. “That’s not what I—”
“The hell it’s not!” He stopped pacing to glare at me, his shoulders rising and falling rapidly with his breath. I’d seen him bitter and resentful and mistrusting before, but I’d had no idea he was capable of this sort of anger. “I put my life on hold for two decades because my mother made my disorder and everything we did to handle it about her fears and her grief and her guilt. You can fuck right off if you think I’ll do it for you!”
My jaw tightened. “Now who’s making the discussion about someone who isn’t even here?”
Okay, not the most helpful thing I could have said, and definitely not in that confrontational tone. Damn it, I knew better than this.
“Oh, believe me, if I could say it to her, I fucking would!” Abruptly the fight went out of him, and he sagged, planting his weight on both hands where they gripped his cane. “Holy fuck,” he rasped after a moment. “Ling was right.”
My own anger drained away like it had never existed. Keeping my movements careful, I walked to the bench and sat down.
“What was Ling right about?” I asked. I ignored the sheen in his eyes as he looked up at me, though everything about his defeated posture was making me ache with the need to comfort him. I kept my own posture open, inviting. Eventually he took me up on my offer and shuffled over to sit across from me.
“I never let myself be angry with her,” he finally said. “I’ve been taking it out on everyone else for years whenever they showed even the slightest hint of concern, but I always protected her. Defended her.” He turned his face to the sky, letting his head fall back. “And now she’s gone, and I’m never going to have a chance to put all this where it belongs.”
“It seemed to me, based on the discussions we had a few months ago, that you never really gave yourself a chance to mourn her.” I offered the observation gently. “It’s understandable that this would come out sooner or later. Do you think you might have been afraid of experiencing that anger, that maybe that’s why you shut yourself off from grieving for her?”
He brought his chin down and gave me a piercing look. “You’re wearing your social worker hat with me now?”
I shrugged, smiling slightly. “It’s kind of like muscle memory. Eventually you just do it without thinking about it.”
“Can we not? Please?” He scrubbed his hand wearily down his face.
“Sure.” Taking a chance, I crossed to sit beside him, laying a hand on his knee. “Can I get to the point I was making so badly before you got pissed off?”
He dropped his hand and nodded. “Yeah. Okay. Go ahead.”
I took a deep breath. “Please believe me that if your hemophilia were the only issue we were facing, this wouldn’t be a problem. I could do everything I promised you I would and more, and I wouldn’t have a second of doubt about it. Okay? Can you believe that?”
His mouth tightened, and the muscles in his jaw flexed a couple of times. But he drew a shaky breath and nodded. “I’ll try.”
“All right.” I hesitated a moment, searching for the right words. “The problem is that we’re dealing with two issues here. The other one, the bigger one, is my doubt about myself. I didn’t even realize when I made you all those promises that I was full of shit, portraying myself as being so cocky and self-assured. I’m not assured of anything about myself right now. Nothing at all.”
He looked at me, and I let him stare. Gave him every bit of honesty and openness I could put into my eyes and expression. Eventually, he nodded again. “Go on.”
“It’s called risk-aware consensual kink, right? So let’s be totally frank about the risks. If I were to make a mistake with another person—assuming we weren’t doing edge play—I might hurt them. Piss them off enough to safeword or make them refuse to do a scene with me again. But if I fuck it up with you, I could put you in the hospital, or even kill you.” I watched the play of emotions on his face as he started to glower, then stopped himself and nodded a third time, reluctantly. “So, yes, your hemophilia is a stumbling block, but only because I don’t trust myself to play with you at present.”
He dropped his eyes, folding his hands in his lap and staring at them. Eventually he sighed. “Okay. I believe you.” The sharp knot of his Adam’s apple bobbed at the front of his thin neck. “So I guess that’s it, then? For us?”
Now it was my turn to swallow hard. “I don’t know. Is it?” I asked carefully, a hollow feeling in my gut. “Is the kink all we’re here for?”
His head came up sharply. “No.” The haste and emphasis with which he fired that off was gratifying. “At least I’m not,” he added, more subdued, uncertainty creep
ing into his eyes.
“Me neither,” I said softly, but with feeling. His eyes sought mine, his expression somber, but then he nodded.
“Okay.” A slow smile curled the corner of his mouth, and my own face stretched around a wide grin.
“That isn’t to say I wouldn’t like to play with you again,” I added, my voice dropping to the husky growl that made his pupils dilate just . . . like . . . that. “But someday later on. After we know each other more. After I can read you better and we’re both doing a better job of communicating things.”
He licked his lips and rasped, “And in the meantime?”
“In the meantime . . .” I inched closer, sliding the hand I’d had on his knee up his thigh. “How much can you do with that bum leg of yours?”
“Not much.” His mouth twisted ruefully. “Certainly nothing vigorous. I’ve put too much strain on it tonight.”
“That’s okay,” I murmured, slipping to my knees on the deck before him. I reached for his belt buckle. “I’ve got plenty of nonvigorous activities in mind.”
Geoff
Robin had barely finished swallowing before he urged me, still panting and boneless, down the stairs to his berth, keeping a grip on me to make sure I didn’t stumble. There he undressed me and then himself, and laid me on my back to straddle my head and allow me to return the favor.
What followed was a night that made me rethink everything I believed I knew about “careful” sex. I don’t know what made it different, but I never felt shortchanged or like I was being handled with kid gloves, even with all the cautious maneuvering we had to do because of my leg.
Maybe I was outgrowing my paranoia about being seen as weak or fragile. But I’d put my money on Robin being the element that made the difference.
Somewhere in the wee small hours before dawn, Robin asked, “When do you go back to Chicago?”
“I don’t,” I murmured, toying with the light hair furring his chest.
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