Gen shivered. “I can’t…what is this?”
“It’s kind of subspace and sub-drop, all at the same time.”
“Sundrop? Like the soda.” A hysterical laugh bubbled up. Noah was squatting by the chair, his hand on her knee. She gripped it as if she thought she might fall off a real cliff if she let go of him. She wanted to seize Lyda’s other hand, but Lyda had straightened. As a result, Gen’s hand landed on the soft linen of her shirt, Gen’s fingers curling into the waistband of the riding breeches, thumb fingering the zippered side. Lyda was beneath, cool flesh, a bare hip bone. No underwear. Would she ever see Lyda naked…and not just physically?
“Sub-drop, dopey. Not sundrop.” Lyda stroked her hair from her cheek, then took a firm hold on her chin. “Sessions bring up a lot of shit in a submissive’s subconscious, things that can overwhelm you, because you’re too emotionally drained to process them. No shields to contain them. That means it’s working the way it’s supposed to work. Don’t fight it. Just ride it out. We’re here to watch over you.”
Easy for Lyda to say. She’d caused that earthquake inside Gen, yet she looked unfazed, steady as a mountain. Detached. It hurt. Gen drew away, closer to Noah. She clenched his hand. “You said…I could keep him tonight.”
Lyda’s beautiful face became expressionless. “Yes I did. He’s yours.”
The way the skin pulled tight over Lyda’s cheekbones bugged Gen, but her fuzzy brain couldn’t process that. Lyda’s gaze shifted to Noah. “Take her home, Noah. Care for her properly. I’m done with you both for the night.”
Noah began to say something, but Lyda put a quelling hand on his shoulder. “Do as I say. Take care of her. That’s what she needs tonight. We’ll deal with the rest later.”
Chapter Ten
Done for the night. That described Gen as well. She wasn’t aware of the ride home, though she didn’t ever let go of Noah. She kept her arms wrapped around him while he drove, his own arm circling her as he stroked her hip. He even carried her to her front door, only letting her down to unlock and open her door. When he took her into her bedroom, he undressed her, his touch a misty memory of pleasant caresses. But her bedroom, her solitary place of retreat, to think and dream, to find her center, brought some sanity back to her.
“I want you to stay, but in the guestroom. Close, but not in here. Please…” She cleared her throat, looked up at him in the direct way Lyda did, so he knew it wasn’t a request. “Don’t come in unless I tell you to.”
Her voice quavered, draining any real authority from it, but Noah simply nodded. Brushing a kiss over her forehead, he tugged on the oversized sleeve of the Snoopy nightshirt she’d wanted to wear. “I’ll be close.”
The need to feel in control was overriding the euphoria. Ordering him away from her, which was against what she was sure they both wanted, felt right. She had to be sure she still had a brain, a will of her own. The things she’d done tonight were beyond what she’d ever thought herself capable of wanting, let alone experiencing, yet she’d embraced so much of it. And she wanted more, even with no idea of what lay beyond the curtain, or the end destination. She wasn’t the type who took the unmarked path.
Not anymore, because when she had been that kind of person, she’d always chosen the one that had the hidden sign screaming “path of sure self-destruction”.
Sliding into the bed, she burrowed herself under the covers. Her gaze slid toward the nightstand, where she had a small vase of dried flowers and a little plaque she’d bought from a secondhand store. The simple mantra Be true to yourself was printed on it. Had she done that tonight?
Commanding Noah under Lyda’s direction had been amazing, incredible. His responses, her own. Lyda, commanding both of them. I can’t get enough. Gen remembered Noah quivering, just the way she had, when their Mistress had said that. Lyda’s desire for them had been so clear, no conflict. So why was Gen now curled up in a ball, wishing Noah was here beside her and afraid to think too much about Lyda?
She couldn’t succeed at a normal guy-girl relationship. She’d picked two wrong men. They’d reduced her to poverty, stripped her self-esteem, and made her doubt her ability to find love. She’d watched Marguerite, followed by Chloe, find an amazing man any woman would want. As a result, Gen had concluded finding love wasn’t magic, no presto, I’m here. It was something certain people had mapped in their destiny, like DNA. The rest were doomed to spend their lives seeking it like a drug, exhibiting all the irrational behavior of addicts to get and keep it. Or they compromised themselves to have merely a shadow of it. The alternative was figuring out how to be happy and enough by yourself. She’d settled on that course, hence the plaque.
Why did she keep falling into the trap of thinking she could step back, treat this as a kinky, fun adventure, no harm done? She wasn’t built that way.
Lyda represented the greater risk of the two. Elusive, remote and mesmerizing, she was fully capable of destroying Gen’s heart. The more she wanted Lyda, the more frightened she was of wanting her. But she couldn’t discount the peril of Noah. He’d stepped into her heart the first weekend and yet, as accessible as he seemed, he was as elusive to define, in terms of a relationship, as Lyda. Gen had no doubt the two came as a package. Even if they hadn’t figured that out between them yet, she could see it, feel it, whenever she was around one or both of them.
Long and short, she was a vanilla girl who was in way over her head. Wrapping her arms around herself, she started rocking. She wasn’t going to call Noah to do it. She had enough respect for herself and him not to use him that way. The decision made her resent her conscience like hell. It took a long while to fall asleep.
When she did, it was a sleep punctuated by distorted memories from her past. A fist raised, hitting her in the face. It had hurt, but the shock of it, the utter betrayal of love it represented, was the true horror. She rolled away from the blow, but found herself standing, bound to the frame the way Noah had been, her feet in the boots, arms stretched up, so she had no defense as her first husband came at her again. He hit her in the face, bouncing on the balls of his feet like a boxer practicing at one of those balloon-like punching bags. Her other husband sat on the floor, tossing handfuls of money in the air and laughing like a child. God, dreams sucked.
She’d been a tool, a means to an end. No, worse. Betrayal meant you were nothing to the betrayer. Insignificant, unworthy of love. No matter how horrible the betrayer was, that was the poisonous seed they embedded in a soul, never to be dug out again.
She saw Lyda watching from the corner. She begged her for help, but why should Lyda help? Gen had turned away from her. Suddenly Gen was standing beside her, but Gen was locked in a box, invisible. Noah was chained to the frame, and Gen’s first husband was hitting him. Her other ex approached, bat in hand. Though she screamed in protest inside that soundproof box, he brought it down on Noah’s fingers. She heard the crunch of bone. Blood drained from Noah’s face, body giving way before the blows, but his burning eyes remained on Gen and Lyda. Not asking for rescue, not asking for anything. But needing everything.
Gen kept screaming, wondering why Lyda did nothing. She was a statue, made of smooth concrete. All except her eyes. Gen saw pain there. Now, instead of being right beside Gen, Lyda was watching from a remote mountain, far away from Gen and Noah. Yet Gen could still see that pain in her face, and she wanted to ease it, take it into herself. But the only way she could help either one of them was if she could get out of the box. If she could touch them both, she’d break this nightmare, the solitary confinement into which they’d placed themselves, fighting their own personal demons alone. But she needed their help to do it.
“Help…help me…please…”
Just as she was despairing, she began to hear music. A guitar, strumming out an aimless, wistful ballad. Slowly, too slowly, it started drawing her away from the nightmare, coaxing her on a short drift through dark clouds of sleep, and floating her down into fantasy. She was in a stable. A bard sat on a ha
y bale in front of a horse stall. He’d been given this place to sleep, after playing for his supper in the great hall. Now his music had a much smaller audience. It had wooed the attentions of a kitchen wench and the lady of the house.
The kitchen wench sat on another bale close to him, the lady of the house in the shadows, watching. He played to their hearts, making them both long for him. Gen stared at Noah’s beautiful, unbroken hands, his long fingers plucking and stroking the strings. He had the musician’s irresistible lure, as if the way he sang or played telegraphed what kind of lover he would be, his ability to make music with one’s body the same way.
Gen realized then she was in a hazy half-sleep, banishing the nightmare by consciously weaving more details around this preferred stage. As a teenager, she’d attended a heavy metal concert, and the tickets had put her close enough to the stage to watch the visceral way the guitarist pounded on his instrument, cradled against his leather-clad pelvis. The ultimate bad boy, who’d pound into her in the same wild, untamed way.
The bard’s music was a different, spiraling, clouds-in-the-sky feeling, but no less seductive. She was the kitchen wench, in a peasant smock that barely held her breasts, pushed up by the waist cincher she wore. The bard’s gaze slid over them. Often.
He’d had his supper, and was now playing for dessert. That undercurrent of male interest dampened her cunt, made her breasts ache for touch. The lady of the house came and sat next to her. When she stretched out an arm behind Gen, Gen leaned into her body, the side of her breast pressed against her Mistress’s as they both listened. Her lady’s long hair was already unbound for the night. She wore a velvet robe over her nightrail, which made her no less imperious yet so sexually mesmerizing it was impossible not to be drawn to her. She stroked Gen’s hair, the bare line of her shoulder, as they both watched him. His eyes, the color of a dark ale, followed the movement, intensified at the implication.
Gen remembered her station then, giving her lady the hay bale, sinking down to the floor at her lady’s knee. Yet her Mistress kept her hand on her. She stroked Gen’s throat so she lifted her head, met her lady’s mouth for a long, sweet kiss. Her slender hand caressed Gen’s breast, so accessible in the blouse. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d shared her lady’s bed, for her Mistress had appetites as strong as any man’s, but tonight it would be a threesome. The bard missed a chord. Her lady smiled against Gen’s lips.
“We’ll have to punish him for that, won’t we, rabbit?”
Gen came out of the smoky fantasy. She had her hand between her legs. The music hadn’t been part of fantasy or dream. She was hearing guitar music. Noah apparently had retrieved the instrument from her craft room. He’d had more music lessons than her, enough to strum out the tune that had guided her fantasy.
She wished Lyda was here, in bed with her. But it was hard to envision Lyda in Gen’s simple bed. Seeing herself in Lyda’s opulent tester bed was much easier. The Mistress would tie Gen’s hands to the rails, move down her body, feasting on Gen’s cunt while she begged for mercy the woman would wait a long time to give. Noah would be locked beneath the bed, listening to Gen’s moans, his hands bound so he couldn’t touch himself. Lyda wanted him to climax from nothing more than listening.
Was this part of subspace-subdrop as well, one’s libido bouncing back faster than a boomerang? Gen turned on her side, listening. Just as she’d ordered, he hadn’t come into her room. He was humming along with the guitar tune, sitting in the hallway, perhaps leaning against the wall next to her door. Had she cried out, such that he’d known she was having a nightmare? No. If that had happened, he would have come to her, all bets off. Maybe he’d just anticipated her sleep would be restless. As Chloe had said and Gen was learning firsthand, he excelled at anticipating a woman’s needs.
She rose, padded across the floor. Opening the door to a welcome touch of air from the A/C, she looked down at him. He didn’t stop the song, or his humming, though he tilted his head, gazing at her through the darkness. Sliding down the wall, she sat next to him, put her head on his bare shoulder. He brushed the crown of her head with his jaw, kept playing. His biceps flexed under her breast where it pressed against him.
“I’m not a Domme,” she said at last.
“No,” he agreed. “But you’re great at working with one.”
“You’re like that too, aren’t you?”
“Sometimes. I like feeling in control, under direction, if that makes sense.”
It did. “Is it because it feels safer that way? Like you can’t screw up or take responsibility for anything that goes wrong? Puts it all on her?”
His fingers stilled a moment, then resumed. A different tune now, but still pleasant to the ears. “No. Don’t try to work it out in words. It doesn’t work.”
“I screwed up with her tonight, didn’t I? At the end.”
“You can’t screw up something like that, Gen.” He touched her knee, a brief caress. “She knows how crazy it gets after she scrambles your brain. It takes time to process it all, especially at first.”
“But you knew. You tried to talk to her about it, and she told you to take me home, that we’d ‘deal with the rest later’.”
“Yeah. That’s Lyda.”
Now that her eyes were adjusted to the dim illumination in the hallway, she could see his hair was tousled enough to suggest he might have slept some. He wore jeans, but when her hand crept beneath his arm, slid across his rib cage and down, her questing fingers found the top button had been left open and he was bare beneath. She played with the metal disk, brushing the firm flesh beneath.
“I was dreaming about rock bands. A girl can’t help thinking about guitars like phallic symbols, the way they play with them in front of a crowd.”
He chuckled, and she imagined the light in his sleepy brown eyes. Then he sobered. “You were dreaming about other things too. I was about to say fuck it and come in, wake you up. But the music seemed to calm you down. At least, I hope it did.”
“It did.” She propped her chin on his shoulder and stared down the pleasing terrain of his body, to where he cradled the guitar in his lap. “What should I do, Noah?”
“Go see her tomorrow,” he said simply. “The more you want to avoid her, the better it is when you go see her. Doesn’t make sense, but that’s the way she works.”
“I dreamed about you too,” she said. “You were being hurt, and I couldn’t stop it. Neither could she. And she stood on this mountain, and she looked so alone. It frightened me, seeing her like that, and you… It was like I was the one who could fix it all, but I couldn’t move.”
He slid an arm around her, resting his other hand on the guitar’s face. He didn’t say anything. She gazed at his profile. “Noah, why do you have that tattoo? The one that says Yours Unconditionally?”
“It was a promise.”
“Made to whom?”
“Someone.” His expression reminded her of the wistful tune the bard played in her dreams. “I put it there when I didn’t belong to anyone, thinking it was a call to the universe. You know, fishing.”
He gave her that oddly distant look he sometimes had, as if he were an otherworldly being, tapped into currents she couldn’t sense. “I’m still figuring out if it’s been answered.”
“Do you think you belong to someone now?”
“I belong to Lyda. And to you, because she says I do.” He gave the strings a light strum. The music vibrated through her skin.
“What do you think you deserve, Noah?”
“Whatever my Master or Mistress tells me I deserve.”
As if he detected the way his answer discomfited her, he lifted a shoulder. “I don’t ask too many questions of the universe, Gen. I’m a speck of dust on the eye of an atom in all of it. Whatever happens, happens. Most of the time, what happens are good things.” Sliding a knuckle along her cheek, he gave her a look that made her flesh tingle beneath his touch.
“I can’t figure out how you do that.” She shook her head.
“You fluster me, just like Lyda, but in a different way. It’s like she comes at me from above, you come from below, and between the two of you, I turn into goo.”
“Good thing?”
“Most of the time,” she allowed. She wanted to pursue the other topic, but she’d had enough of serious and intense tonight. She wanted to leave that first dream behind. Way behind. “Chloe said she’s seen you in full Goth gear. Still have some of the clothes?”
“Like tight shirt and pants, buckled boots, long coat and the eye liner?”
“Dog collar, spiky bracelets?”
“And pewter rings with skulls and bats.” He nodded. “Nope, don’t have any of that.”
She elbowed him. “Dress up for me sometime?”
“Whenever you want. Anything you want.” He ran a thumb along her lip.
“I woke up…aroused,” she whispered.
“Wet?” he murmured. His thumb passed over the flush in her cheek. “Want me to do anything about that for you?”
“Yeah. But Lyda said no.” She caught a strand of his hair, the movement causing others to spill forward over her knuckles. She twisted them around her fingers. “Remind me what happens if we do something she says not to do?”
“It depends. Being disrespectful, a brat topping from the bottom, trying to force a Dom’s hand, isn’t good for anyone. It’s sketchier when your Mistress has set you up, knowing you won’t be able to resist getting in trouble. If she thinks we did it to incur punishment in a good way like that, then she’d do something like what she did tonight.”
She sighed. “Under the word irresistible in the dictionary, there’s a picture of you. She knows it. Sadistic bitch.”
His expression reflected fondness, as if Gen had used an endearment. In his world, it probably was. “Maybe she intended for me to get into the ‘good’ kind of trouble when she offered to let me take you home tonight. But now I feel like I owe her something. I need to clear the air with her.”
Nature of Desire 8 - Divine solace Page 26