by Jenna Barton
“Yes, sir. I’m sorry, sir.”
“Whatever it was, it looks like she got her licks in, too. Now, I talked to your granddad this afternoon. This won’t happen again. But if you’re dumber than I think you are, I’m gonna make it real clear to you right now. You just turned eighteen, son. If I see one more thing even lookin’ like a mark on my baby girl, I’ll take you out in the backyard and beat the hell out of you, and then I’ll drop your ass in front of the jailhouse so Ron Carter don’t have to bother himself to drive out from the Sheriff’s department to pick you up. You got me?”
He came awake coughing. His throat hurt, and he wondered if he might have not have been coughing at all, but talking. Walt hadn’t given serious thought to Missy’s father in years. He rolled away from Erin, fighting his notice of her soft, mumbled protest, and focused on making himself alert as possible.
“Hey,” he said, shaking her arm gently. “I need to get back before sunrise. Erin?”
After a long, reluctant breath, her eyelids tensed, and then body turned toward his. “Hmmm?”
“I gotta go. Have to make sure the park gate is open by seven.”
She’d gone back to sleep. And it wasn’t making leaving her any easier, especially on the heels of that old dream. Walt pushed her hair away from her cheek and leaned to her, taking in the warmth and scent of her cheek.
“Erin, wake up.”
She sat up quick, blinking, her eyes wider every time they opening. “Oh no, Walt—I’m—what? I—I—sorry,” she said, too fast. At the sight of her, disoriented and scared, he wrapped his arms around her.
“Shhh. It’s okay.” Kissing her head, Walt tucked her under his chin, gritting his teeth at the residuals of his subconscious and pissed at himself for scaring Erin. “Don’t want to just go without saying good-bye, and you need to come lock up behind me anyway.”
“Where are you going?” Her voice, still slurred with sleep, was muffled into his chest. “Was going to make you breakfast.”
“Make me breakfast when I don’t have to sell fishing licenses in half an hour, okay?” Reluctantly, Walt pushed himself away. “Now, come lock the door after I go, all right?”
Erin followed him down the darkened hallway, mussed and naked and probably mostly asleep too. He paused at the front door for one more kiss and started down the porch steps.
“Okay. Bye, Sir,” she said after him, so sleepy and quiet he barely caught it and immediately doubted he’d heard her right.
Walt swung toward her, nearly tripping himself in the dewy grass under his feet. But Erin had closed the door, leaving him with nothing but the sounds of frogs and early morning birds, and the snick of a lock tumbling into place.
We spent the next month, after our first feverish week, dating. It seemed better that way. We said so to each other, assuring ourselves we should be sensible and slow about what we called that other stuff. Dinners, movies, an outdoor concert in Asheville. And visits to his forest.
When Walt could stay all night, we woke up together in my bed. We made each other breakfast. And often, Walt made me his first breakfast.
No more spankings or those other, still shadowy activities he called playing. Not even in the heat of rather heated moments. We learned the skinscapes of each other, the timbre and rhythm of each other’s sighs and moans. I took him in to my life. He had the proverbial drawer in my bathroom, a favorite little this or that in my kitchen.
After sex, we fell asleep holding hands. Not just on weekends; unplanned weekdays, too. Waking up on a Thursday morning, skin-to-skin, with a shock of cocoa-brown curls nestled against my ear was somehow better, more intimate than Saturday morning.
Everything about Walt was rooting into me. I curled into him, twining, budding.
We talked about it, anyway. Decided it would happen. When I was ready. When we were ready. But things, they still happened. The other stuff we agreed to ignore refused to stay under the rug.
There was already an easy shorthand, even some simple routines beginning to take shape between us. Silently handing him the pepper at dinner, a cup of coffee in his hands as I exited the shower in the morning, the sweetener and milk just right after he’d convinced me my favorite hazelnut creamer tasted like chalk. Often, Walt kissed the top of my head when I sat curled into my sofa, writing shell script for my part of the storage virtualization project, a level of responsibility no female engineer had ever been given at ThinkMine. I couldn’t resist touching the broad slope of his shoulder as I passed behind him and frequently his hand was waiting for mine as I made my way to the opposite shoulder.
Occasionally the hand would grasp and pull. I’d find myself in his lap, find his kisses hard on my mouth.
And that’s what happened. It was more intense from the start, neither of us seemed playful about it: his jaw was set, grinding, and his eyes…well, frankly, they did seem to blaze.
This was not warm, careful, ardent Walt. I responded immediately, gratefully.
As our sex had become more familiar, I began fantasizing while we were together, imagining him finally doing those things to me the way we both wanted. I was hardly dissatisfied with him, just the opposite. Knowing he was this attentive, responsive to me, and appreciative afterward cemented him in my mind as the person I could really try the other stuff with.
Each time his touch or a word spoken tipped the power scales I responded—probably overzealously. When I was with him, I felt more open and sensual than I ever had in my life. I couldn’t give him enough of me and, most certainly, couldn’t be satisfied with single, vanilla servings of Walt.
I toed at the subject again, one Saturday in early June.
“Do you want to come over tonight? We still need to have that talk.”
His laugh filled my ear, making me shuffle lazily as I smiled to myself. Walt had an unnerving ease with distracting me from simple tasks, like finding my keys, which I would need to do before I could lock the front door and get out to Claire before she—
A horn sounded, announcing Claire’s early arrival. Wincing, I swung my front door open and waved to her, parked in the gravel and packed-dirt driveway.
“You might want to come out here this afternoon during my break. I think the only way I’m going to keep you in your clothes long enough to talk is with the threat of Sam walking in on us.”
“Can’t. I’m going to Asheville with Claire again. She’s delivering an order to one of her galleries and then we’re having lunch.” I opened the front door and waved to her, parked outside. “Do you know what she means by mentoring? We’re discussing it during lunch.”
“Really? Huh. I guess Claire’s taking it seriously. Don’t let her talk you into her service brigade.” He went quiet for a moment, then cleared his throat. “Unless you like that sort of thing.”
“You mean actual service?” I shouldered my purse and closed the door behind me, pausing to check the deadbolt. “Volunteering?”
“No. It’s not really…Hey, that was a jackassed thing to say. Claire likes to do things for people. It makes her happy to help out around Tate’s house before people come for the night. And it pleases Paul, I guess.”
I glanced across the front yard, snorting softly at the guilty knot in my stomach. “It’s what makes them happy.”
“Right.” Walt’s voice was leaden with resignation. “’S their dynamic.”
Blindly, we both had strayed to an uncomfortable and unspeakable topic: Claire and Paul. Their relationship—their dynamic, as Walt and Lucy called it—didn’t shine as brightly to me as it did to Claire. But what was I to say about it? Claire had been Paul’s slave for fourteen years—since she was barely in her twenties.
I checked the deadbolt again and waved to Claire. “Is it everyone’s?”
“No,” he said hurriedly. “Nope, not at all. For them, Paul’s always the boss. Claire always says so, too.”
“Right.”
“Hey, how about we go back to that Italian place for dinner tonight? The one with the tir
amisu?”
“Yes, actually, that reminds me—” A burst of static and garbled voices from the mike attached to Walt’s ever-present park walkie-talkie interrupted me.
“Shit, I gotta…Sam needs me down at the campground. I’ll call you later, sweetheart.” The call dropped and Walt was gone. But he’d called me sweetheart. And that was new.
As Claire drove, she chatted to me about the new gallery’s quick sale of the pieces she’d taken them a month before. In the past, her pieces had sat on consignment for more than a few months, waiting for a tourist or new local’s hands to take them home.
“I guess they’re a little different, the new cups I’ve been doing.” She pointed over her shoulder to a deep plastic bin taking up most of the back seat. “Have a look if you want.”
I took a newspaper-wrapped bundle and brought it to the front seat. Under the layers of paper and bubble wrap was a wide-mouthed conical piece of pottery. Though it was heavy, with thick walls and a sturdy base, the cup felt natural in my hand. My wrist curled around it perfectly, and I tucked it to my chest without a second thought as I smoothed my palm around the undulating surface.
“Oooh,” I said and laughed, surprised at how touchy-feely her pottery had made me. “This might sound odd, but it feels good, like a comfort, almost. It’s like this cup wants hot tea in it and wants me on my front porch.”
“Oh? Oh, that’s really nice,” she said, nodding with a pleased smile. “That’s what I’ve been thinking about with the new pieces. Solitude and comfort. Common objects that are meaningful because they’re useful.”
I considered it all, letting my fingertip bump along the emerald and forest green-mottled glaze. “Claire, may I ask you something?”
“Sure, of course.” She said it so readily, with so much enthusiasm, I had to sit back in the seat. My curiosities about the dissonances I saw in her relationship with Paul would be a sharp slap across the cheek. It was their relationship. It was them: their agreements regarding Dominance and submission. Things I didn’t know and wouldn’t understand about D/s, as a…well, a newbie.
I geared back, for easier topics. “Can you tell me more about Walt and Nicole?”
“Nicole? Who’s—” Her brows crinkled as her eyes scanned the road before us. “I don’t…wait, do you mean FiestyFelineFemme?”
Another outlandish scene name. I turned a laugh into my chest, forcing myself to inspect the cup I still clenched. “Um…I guess?”
After we cross-checked a couple of details, we decided we were, in fact, speaking of the same kitty.
“She’s just…I hate to say she’s no one, because everybody’s somebody,” Claire said, nodding. I agreed with a quiet noise, dismissing thoughts of several of my mother’s boyfriends, a coworker or two, and people who hurt animals, children, and the elderly. All deserving of nobody at all status, in my estimation. “But in Walt’s life, she was a play partner. And not even a long-term one.” She glanced at me, shrugging apologetically. “Sometimes Walt and Tate are into their flavors of the month. Well, really most of the time. Except you and—I think you’re different.”
I waved away a second, hesitant shrug from her. Walt had, during a conversation we’d had over popcorn and wine the previous evening, referred to himself as a little bit more hound than I’d like to admit to you and gave me a very similar shift of his shoulders.
“I’m starting to understand the difference between play partners and people you see in the daylight.” I smiled a little over using one of Walt’s phrases. It felt intimate somehow. “Has he had a lot of…partners?”
“Walt?” Claire laughed a little as she turned into a small parking lot behind a brick building, painted in vivid blue and purple swirls. Over the back door hung a sign: Gallerie Nerita. “He’s one of a kind. People like to play with him, you know. He’s one of those people who makes everyone around them feel good.”
“Understandably so,” I said, turning a secret smile toward my window. Popcorn and wine made Walt pretty ardent. And that had certainly made me feel good, in several ways, the night before.
Claire pointed to her latest delivery, still inside her Jeep. “Lady Nerita will send out her boys for that. C’mon in. You’ll love her.”
I stopped inside the raw-brick vestibule, blinking at the difference in light.
“Well, look. It’s the babysub.”
Lucy. Minus her purple foxtail. She was seated on a blocky wooden stool at a high rusted-steel table, the only furnishings in the long expanse of gleaming gallery lights and polished concrete floors. A woman with a wide bundle of steely-silver dreadlocks clasped away from her face turned in my direction, nodding a cool smile to me before it thawed to a gentle welcome for Claire.
“This is Lady Nerita,” Claire said, taking my hand. “She owns the gallery and is also a corsetière. Come say hello.”
It was an invitation to an audience with the Lady. Claire—or Lucy, for that matter, wouldn’t have had to tell me as much. Lady Nerita didn’t simply own her own gallery and corset-making shop. She held court here.
“This Walt’s girl?”
“Seems to be,” Lucy told her and swung her golden hair over her shoulder. “Cute, huh?”
Correction. This wasn’t a gallery. It was a coliseum.
“Hello,” I said, offering my hand as I stepped past Claire. “I’m Erin Proctor.”
“So you are.”
For a second, I held my breath, waiting. I was in a surreal, out-of-my-experience world, in the middle of a sultry, early summer Saturday afternoon in Asheville. Tourists in their sensible earthy sandals and backpacks passed the long windows flanking us. Synthesizer music hummed, nearly indistinct, through the brick walls.
And I waited.
Finally, another nod. This time with a small but gracious smile.
“And I am Nerita,” she said. As her cool, caramel skin slid past mine, there was a single, sharp electric charge in its wake. Her presence was vast, and not because of her tall, powerful body. Even Lucy seemed subdued beside Nerita. “So dear clover has brought me more of her beautiful heart-cups, and you, Erin, have brought me your body.”
I sneaked a glance at Lucy, who, as usual, was watching the proceedings with the interested disinterest of a panther in a tree.
Claire’s voice, behind my shoulder, came with a nearly dreamy sigh. “Heart-cup? That’s beautiful. Thank you, ma’am.”
Her new pieces were a tangible, real-world topic. Easier than even considering I’d been carted along with them as an offering. Quickly I checked for a memory of where I’d stashed my phone once I’d finished talking to Walt, immediately sneering at myself for doing it. Claire was beside me. Lucy, even though she still looked over me with a predator’s eye, was Walt’s best friend. They were safe. Nerita and her as-yet-faceless boys would be safe, too.
Of course she would.
“I came to help with the cups,” I mumbled.
Nerita stood, followed by Lucy. “I understand you’ll need something for Solstice?”
“Solstice?” I turned to Claire, still at my shoulder. She seemed like the appropriate translator. “Like summer solstice?”
She went to Lucy’s side, nearly bouncing. “At the house. We have a Solstice weekend every year. Everyone comes. We all dress up for it and—”
“And you’re not wearing a crappy costume-store corset to Solstice,” Lucy added, barely concealing her smirk. “Time to step up your game, babysub.”
“I assume this isn’t about astronomy.” More mumbling, on cue from my sulky inner adolescent.
Nerita’s head fell back as she laughed, full and deep, and walked to me. “No, baby. No head trips to Mars, unless that’s your kink—but I’ve known Walt since he wasn’t nothin’ more than a big boy with a singletail, and I don’t remember him liking to play spaceman.” She paused, eyeing me. “You want a real corset or not?”
Corset. On display and unable to breathe and looking like…not me. I nearly mumbled, once again sounding more like a sixtee
n-year-old me refusing my mother’s help choosing school clothes than was comfortable to hear on my own adult voice. Walt was used to seeing women dressed for these house parties. It was an expectation.
“Sure,” I said, with my most agreeable smile. “Sounds great.”
Lady Nerita, I learned, was a recent transplant from New Orleans, hence the Franco-centric twist that leaped out occasionally in her midst. She made corsets in her atelier, located over her gallerie, served by her two matous. The tomcats in question were a pair of early-twentyish-looking men who appeared silently, just as she called for them.
For the next hour, Claire and Lucy chatted with Nerita about the upcoming party. The boys prepared vanilla Matevana and shortbread. I stood alone at the end of the long table, silent and horrified, as I tried to concentrate on swatches of velvets and brocades while repeatedly refusing the smaller sample card of supple leathers.
“That purple leather’s hot,” Lucy advised from her perch. Instead of suggesting she match it to her furry purple tail, I dabbed at the sweat turning my neck cold and refocused.
Finally, I placed an order for two. A simple black silk one, because black was…well, it was sensible black. One in a claret-colored embroidered velvet I cleaved to like a favorite old secret I’d forgotten and found again. After paying for expedited delivery the following Thursday, and swallowing against bile as I signed a credit card receipt that exceeded my Passat’s monthly payment by several hundred dollars, the boys showed us upstairs to a bright, high-ceilinged room resembling part dance studio and part fortune teller’s retreat. Claire waited for Lucy and Nerita to choose their seats and I paused, assuming this was the right thing to do. Once they were seated at opposite ends of the deep violet velvet covered sofa, Claire sat gracefully at the edge of a matching armchair. I was free to take my own seat, sip my own lukewarm tea and swish shortbread crumbs from my own apparently generous—according to one of the boys—bustline.