by Jenna Barton
“Yes, Miss, please,” Gala moaned after a wicked swat to the sweet cleft between her ass and thigh.
“He was right,” Lu whispered. “I didn’t think a sweet little thing like you would be, but you are, aren’t you? You are a pain slut, cupcake.”
Gala smiled up at Lu, her face a sweaty smear of makeup and tears and who knew what all. “Yes, Miss.”
A fucking beautiful mess, that’s what she is.
Walt cleared his throat as quietly as possible, and bounced his legs. Erin’s fingers were almost a vice around his and her arm had gone stiff. He glanced down and found her looking back, her eyes pinched.
I’d like to go now, please, she mouthed silently.
Nodding, Walt guided them toward the door.
“No, wait, please.” Gala’s voice echoed through the still room. Walt turned, half-expecting to see the girl’s hand reached toward them. But she was reaching for Lu, who had left Tate to his aftercare with his girl and was starting to gather her things. Gala’s fingers splayed wide toward Lu, hovering in the dimness around her and Tate. It was obvious Lu was at the point of a decision, and she froze before it, looking across the room at the couple for a long stretch of seconds.
This was too close, too much intimacy for a bystander.
“Let’s go,” Walt whispered to Erin.
He was behind me. He didn’t reach for my hand or try to speak as we climbed the stairs, but he matched each step of mine.
We passed small groups and couples at each turn. The house was full now, dimmed to golden evening light and nearly pulsing with sexual energy. It pressed against my skin, taunting with a siren’s crooked finger. I saw and understood the something all around me, but I was not allowed to do more than acknowledge its presence. And that gulf—my newness and inexperience—once again keeping me from being part of, rather than observing, made me fist my hands at my hips.
I had to get out of there.
Walt knew. Or felt. His hand came to my elbow, respectable and non-threatening, not possessive and most certainly not forceful. “Let’s head down the hall there, toward Tate’s study.”
Once we were inside, he closed the door behind us. “What’s going on?”
“I want to go ho—back to my house.”
“Okay.” He stared down at me. Why hung in the air around us, even though he gave me the consideration of not asking.
My skirt twisted under my fingers, the rough tulle digging into my palms. I forced it from my fingers, huffing.
“I don’t know what to call this. I don’t know who to be here.”
“Huh? Erin, you don’t have to be like anybody. It’s okay if this isn’t for—”
“No, it’s not that. Walt, I think I’m more like all of this,” I said, arcing my hand across an imaginary scene in front of us, “than some of these people think they are.”
His chin dipped a little, and he grinned at me. “It’s a lot to take in. I forget about that.”
“No, they thought I don’t belong here. And I wanted to be her,” I stammered, tugging at the thing compressing my ribs. Thirty, maybe forty minutes of actual, real-life observation and words were failing me again. Finally I crossed my arms over my waist and huffed out a hard breath. “I know this is an important night, Walt, but I need to leave.”
“Hey, it’s just a party.” His thumb went to my wrist as his fingers closed around mine. “Let’s get you out of here.”
I heard Walt speaking to a number of guests, and I went through the social pantomime of saying good-bye to some of them as well. I followed him down the quiet hallway toward the kitchen, waiting silently as he retrieved his own belongings. At the sound of footsteps behind me, I stepped aside instinctively. Tate passed me, his arm wrapped close around a very disheveled, very dazed Gala, who still clung to Lucy’s hand. Without a word to me, or Walt as he approached, they climbed the same back staircase he and I had ascended earlier.
Outside, in the cooling night air, we walked to his truck in self-contained silence. Separate. And I needed to feel his skin on mine so much.
Once we were clear of the house and on the main road, Walt took my hand.
“What happened?”
Nothing formed on my lips, but I let it wither there. Even in the dim interior of his truck, the concern on Walt’s face was apparent. I could have revived that airless nothing and let him glide away, and if it wasn’t Walt, I might have done that. Something about the man made me tell the truth. Likely, he knew it anyway.
“I felt awkward,” I said. My voice sounded small and too young, and it piled on another layer of frustration. “I didn’t know what to do.”
“Didn’t look that way. Thought you did fine.”
I watched the road turning before us for as he drove back to Callahan, replaying snatches of interactions with Alex and Nicole, the sight and sound of Gala as Tate caned her. Lucy’s voice telling me I was lucky to know them, that the wicked people have a mountain. All of them part and participant in something that was still little more than a tidy list of concepts to me. I had little fact to base my presence on.
“Why haven’t we done anything since the night you spanked me?”
Surprise radiated from him. Walt shifted his body and inhaled, deep into his chest. “For a lot of reasons. Some of them were probably bullshit.”
“Such as?”
“Kept telling myself you weren’t ready.” Before I could speak he added, “That was one of the bullshit ones, by the way.”
I couldn’t help but laugh a little. “Thanks for admitting that.”
“Can’t let you take the heat for everything.” He turned into my driveway and parked a few steps from the front walk. “Look, Erin. I don’t believe all that mystical crap about being called to Dominance, like it’s some kind of damn knight’s quest.”
I slid myself around, leaning against the cool glass behind me as I faced him. “What do you believe?”
“I’m not an owner, you know? I’m not one of these guys who wants you to question your every breath to jack up my own ego.” He pulled his keys from the ignition and bounced them against his palm a few times. “What I do know is that the idea of you on your knees for me gets me hard. I know the thought of pushing your body and telling you to do things that fuck with your head hasn’t left mine since I met you.”
“I want you to,” I said quietly. “Why worry so much about something I want too?”
“I’m worried about it because some of those thoughts aren’t pretty and romantic, Erin, and I feel like that about you too. If we start down this road and I scare you, I lose you. I’m not ready to consider that happening.”
“It won’t.”
“Sweetheart, you just asked me to take you out of one of the best-run private parties around because you said you didn’t fit in there, but you think I won’t scare you away.”
I reached for him. Everything I knew about myself told me not to risk it, but I took Walt’s hand in mine anyway and drew myself to him. “I’m not scared. I didn’t belong there because I didn’t…” I studied his hand in mine, the wide palm, and his long, thick fingers. His thumb rested, naturally, on my wrist, stroking across my thudding pulse. “Walt, I didn’t belong there because I didn’t know how to be there with you. And for you, too.”
“What?”
“Everyone keeps referring to me as your girl, and Lucy seems to know more details of our sex life than I would tell my best girlfriend, if I had one. There’s this assumption that I already belong to you, and I don’t know what belonging to you really means.” I took in as much air as I could and said the hardest part. “And I want to, Walt. I’m not scared about that.”
“I know.” He looked out into the darkness, shifting his jaw as he usually did when he turned serious. “I care about you, Erin. I haven’t…cared about someone I’ve played with—cared like this—in a while. And it’s not easy. It doesn’t work out well for me when I get serious and mix it with kink.”
“Then we won’t do it.” I s
ounded stupidly optimistic and nearly shook my head at myself because of it. “There aren’t many people who make me feel anything more than superficially for them, Walt. You do. I’ll take that over…other things.”
His hand rose from mine and cupped my cheek. “You are something,” he said softly.
I shrugged. “I’m a near-sighted thirty-five-year-old woman who’s reasonably good at telling servers what to do. I have squishy thighs and live in a rented house in a town where I only know four people beyond the most cursory details.”
“No,” he said as his palm settled closer to my skin. “You’re a hell of a lot more than that.”
I turned my lips into his hand, my eyes fluttering closed as I inhaled his scent at his wrist. I kissed him there, and as it happened, I remembered Claire seated at Paul’s feet, hours before, doing the same thing. Walt’s arm stiffened under me. He’d remembered too.
Sitting back, I raised my eyes to his. And the same crashing vacuum claimed the air between us.
“Can I…” he started, but caught himself and went quiet over something. Finally, he continued. “I’d like to stay here. Tonight. Not go back to Tate’s.”
“Okay—I mean, of course. Sure. I hoped you would, actually.”
“I will then.” His fingers trailed over my lip as they passed, moving down the length of my neck until they came, gently, to rest at the base of my throat. Around us the light was dim, but I still saw his smile. “Gonna stay here.”
Chapter Eleven
THE NEXT MORNING, I woke up after him. Walt usually stretched himself over my share of the sheets once I surrendered them, taking up the expanse of my queen bed with six-and-a-half feet of dozing, snoring man. But the morning after we left the Enclave, he was up first—well before me. He was showered, dressed, and had made me breakfast.
“This was a huge mistake, you know,” I said as I munched a piece of bacon. “Where did you learn to bake?”
He glanced over his shoulder at me, grinning, as he pulled a tray of blueberry muffins from the oven. “Damn, you really think I’m just a big, dumb guy, don’t you?”
“I hoped so, but you keep surprising me.” I wrinkled my nose at him and managed to scoot my legs away from the tea towel he snapped in my direction.
“I need to run around a little this morning. Want to come with me?” He took a seat beside me. “Gotta go check my traps.”
Checking his traps was Walt-speak for sweating profusely and serving as a buffet for mosquitoes while walking many miles uphill. His traps, I’d learned soon after we met, weren’t for a large and ferocious predator, but something far more dangerous.
As part of his ongoing studies—something he dismissed as more of a hobby than what amounts to a real master’s degree—in conservation biology, Walt was tracking a dangerous moth’s infiltration of the forest around Callahan. Without a natural predator, the harmless-looking gray moth could munch away, undeterred, at the old-growth hardwood trees in Walt’s forest.
“Um…sure.” I would happily sweat and bleed again, just for the view of his legs and shoulders as they moved in front of me. “Promise you’ll take your shirt off again?”
His calf curled around my chair, drawing me into him. “Ask me nice and I’ll take my shirt off right here,” he said with lips that tasted of bacon and blueberries and the familiar mint of my toothpaste. “Could take yours off too.”
Humming, I sank into him, rasping my fingertips over the spiny stubble on his jaw. His breath warmed my neck as his hands delved inside my T-shirt, pushing it toward my shoulders, his fingers skating over my skin. Before I could draw his bottom lip between my teeth, Walt cleared his throat and gently pushed himself away.
“But…”
“Traps,” he warned, chuckling as his eyebrows rose. “I’ll make us some lunch. Go on and get dressed.”
After our third hike together, I realized the trend for what it was. I was going to be outdoorsy with a man. But the man was Walt, so I willingly accepted his influence. New, more accommodating shorts would probably be wise. When I returned to the kitchen, wearing them—simultaneously regretting the larger size in the same thought that I was grateful I’d purchased a sensible, streamlined black—Walt scowled.
“Where’s the brown ones?”
“Do you mean the khaki ones? They’re too tight.”
“Too tight? They show off your legs. Looked just right to me.” Swinging his daypack over his shoulder, he stuffed a lone surviving piece of our breakfast bacon in his mouth. “Ready?”
Nodding, I hoisted my own new bag, accepting a full water bottle from him. The contents of my daypack would feel like they weighed three times their actual weight by the time we reached the stand of hardwood trees Walt was observing for gypsy moth infestation. Opening the contents, though, would be worth the burden.
Introduced species, I’d learned, didn’t follow wide, well-maintained trails like those at Walt’s park. We climbed from the banks of Sawtooth Creek, passing a primitive trail marker, and headed into the many acres of land still owned by the family who once ran Callahan Paper.
The trail we followed was little more than tamped-down grass, decaying leaves and mud, spotted with what he identified as deer tracks and the occasional offering of scat. Once we were on the trail, I twisted my hair into a top-knot again, huffing at the already damp strands escaping around my neck.
“Now that was bear,” he said as I skirted stepped around one particularly impressive piece of evidence.
“Bear?” I froze, and looked up at him stupidly. “You mean real bears?”
“Yeah, and now you know why I’m carrying the real shotgun.” He glanced away from me, slanting his head toward the firearm hung from his opposite shoulder.
“Hope you brought the real bullets too.” I followed him, once more adjusting the weight of my daypack.
“Shells. I got them.” He pushed a sapling aside for me. “To be honest, we’d be more likely to have trouble with humans than bears. A wild animal would smell us and take off before we knew they were there. Stupid humans, though…”
“Really? Why so far from the main roads?”
“Seclusion.” He scanned the elevation before us warily. “This far back from the state road, on private property, you can bet most of the folks you meet aren’t up this way for a picnic.”
We were quiet for a time as we continued along the path meandering diagonally to the top of a ridge. He poked a mossy rock, a little heavily, with his age-smoothed walking stick as we passed.
“So what’s in the book?”
“Book?” Quelling my hand before it could race to my backpack strap, I made a fist and tucked it in my shorts pocket instead.
“Seemed a little heavy when I got it out of the truck for you. Either you’ve got a book in that bag or you’re carrying a couple of bricks.”
I had planned to discuss Claire’s notebook with him over lunch. When I wasn’t winded and smacking at gnats and sniffing at sweat plinking from the end of my nose.
“You’re too observant for my own good, you know.”
His eyebrows wagged toward the brim of his faded blue baseball cap. “Gotta stay sharp when you’re around, Miss Reboot.”
“It’s something Claire gave me,” I said, accepting his hand to steady me as I stepped over a fallen log. “And a couple of notes I made.”
“Notes?”
“Okay, a checklist.”
After a moment’s silence, he said, “I assume it’s one of those Internet checklists.”
“Yes.” I sniffed defensively. “Claire suggested it. And I’ve looked at them before. Why? Does that bother you?”
“It doesn’t.” He passed his hand over my arm, squeezing gently as it came to rest above my elbow. “Just didn’t realize you were so far into this. What’s the thing of Claire’s?”
“It’s a workbook, journal kind of thing.” I looked ahead, even though I felt him peering down at me. “About being a submissive.”
“Hm. Well, Claire would
know about that.”
We crossed a dry stream bed. “Walt, why don’t you call yourself a Dominant?”
“Well, there’s more to it than just calling yourself Dominant, for one thing.”
“But we…I mean, you said the first night we had dinner at Trattoria Stella, and again, after—you said it felt that way. Between us?”
“It does.” After a second of too-long silence, he reached for my hand. I ignored it, walking forward and enjoying a bit of petulance. Walt’s footsteps stopped. “Erin, come back here.”
I stepped back to him.
“I think you have this idea of what a Dominant and submissive situation is, and that seems good to you, but do you know what you really want out of it?”
“You.” The quiet in my voice surprised me, nearly as much as the surge of tension rippling over my shoulders. “I want to…I don’t know—please you? And be guided? I admire the way you live, so relaxed about things. I want that too. And I did like it that time when you…er…”
He leaned away from me, carefully propping his rifle against a tree. When he beckoned me closer, his hand came to rest on my jaw.
“Y’know, that relaxed disposition you speak of is what some people like to call selfish and lazy.”
“Surely you don’t believe that about yourself.”
Walt’s eyes, startling blue under the faint shadow of his hat, watched me. “For a long time I’ve told myself just because something feels good or looks appealing doesn’t mean I should get into it. That’s not selfish, from where I’m looking at it. It is probably a bit of self-preservation, but for the better part of it, I’ve chosen not to get involved in D/s. Mostly because it’s not felt right with the girl, and eventually that would cause a problem.”
“But…?”
His thumb passed over my cheek, the weight of his touch dissolving the importance of everything around me but him. Finally he said, “So what’s on your checklist?”