by Jenna Barton
I couldn’t help but smile. “Shouldn’t you do one too?”
He stepped aside, pausing to check some mechanism on his gun before he slid the webbing strap over his shoulder again, and chuckled, deep in his chest. “Sweetheart, I know what’s on mine. You want me to take charge, let’s work on yours first.”
“Um…well, I didn’t think about submission other than sexually.”
“So you’re figuring out it can be more than kinky sex, huh?”
“Yes, I think so.” I glanced at him and was surprised to find him watching intently. “I like the possibility of knowing what’s expected of me.”
“Yeah well, you don’t like to draw outside the lines much, so that makes sense.”
“And there’s something about you that’s solid. Pragmatic.” I looked up at him again. “I like that too. A lot.”
He nodded, eyes fixed ahead on the trail. Finally, he spoke again. “How many times did your mom move you and your sister around?”
I laughed. “Okay. That question’s valid, I guess.” He joined me, holding up a hand in protest. “No, it is. I’ve wondered about it too. But…growing up with Kathy, and then Dani following in her footsteps, seems more like a cautionary tale against being captive to the whims of a man rather than a reason to eroticize them. And why are you changing the subject?”
“Maybe I’m still getting to know you and they’re part of who you are.”
“Maybe I don’t want to talk about them.”
“Maybe it’s my prerogative to ask you about them.”
“You’re as hesitant to dig out the family history books as I am, Walt.”
His head inclined toward me and he shrugged. “Okay. Fair enough. One for one then.”
“You first,” we said together.
“All right, ladies first.”
Since Walt had brought it up, I stayed on the same topic. “What happened to your mom?”
“Damn.” He winced theatrically, clutching a make-believe wound. “C’mon, Erin, you know this.”
“I know your grandparents raised you. That’s different.”
“Yeah, I suppose.” He scratched his earlobe, as he often did when disarmed. “She had me young, with a guy from high school who never came home again once he joined the Air Force. I don’t know how hard she really tried to find him. And once she got sick…From what my grandparents would say, she kept to herself a lot, and you know, back in the seventies…in a small town…”
I made a small noise and nodded. I knew very well how small towns could be.
“Do you remember her?”
He turned a small, sad smile toward me. “Not really. There’s a few pictures. I’ve got most of them, since we cleaned out the house and my granddad’s moved to senior care.” He brightened a little and added, “Y’know, I look like her.”
For some reason this pleased me and I turned to him happily. “Do you?”
“Yeah.” He seemed to like that too. “She was tall and had the same curly dark brown hair. Wore it long. She liked music. Played piano, and the French horn in her high school band.”
The small detail suddenly swung the emotional scales too much toward him. He seemed too vulnerable to me, and I didn’t want him to feel alone and exposed. I blurted out, “We moved four times when I was in elementary school, twice in middle school, and every year of high school.”
“Ten times in twelve years? Can’t imagine.”
“Occasionally, it was for a job, but I think sometimes a relationship had gotten rocky, and maybe it ended badly. Sometimes, I think she was just bored. Kathy—I mean, my mother.”
“I’ve lived in four places. My grandparents’ house, college, barracks at Fort Campbell during the summer I did air assault school and…and, well, once I graduated, I started with the park service and moved into the cabin.” He quieted, looking into the distance for a long stretch of seconds, finally clearing an unspoken thought with a slight shake of his head. “I wonder sometimes if I’ve seen enough of the world for thirty-seven years of living in it.”
“That’s jumping out of airplanes? Air assault?”
“No, helicopters. With a rope. It’s called fast rope. But we hauled in big loads, too. Cargo, water, and fuel containers,” he said, somewhat hardened.
“Why didn’t you go on to the Army after finishing something like that? It sounds like intense training.”
“Wasn’t for me.” He guided me over a fallen tree. “Brady was the soldier. Not me.”
“But you said you and Brady…” He was too quiet, and his jaw was too tense. “Walt, if you’d rather not…”
“Hey, it’s okay. You don’t know this, and they’re fair questions. Especially considering what you’re carrying around in that backpack.” He smiled down at me. “Brady and me hit it off, right from cadet orientation freshman year at Clemson. We roomed together, ran around together. I spent Christmases and school breaks with his family. Hell, we both even went after Lu when we saw her. Ever heard the saying ‘brother from another mother’?”
I nodded, laughing softly. “I always wanted Dani to be from another mother. And another family entirely.”
“Well, that was Brady and me. And once Lu shattered our illusions about who was going to bring her to the Homecoming game, she was our sister. Me and Lu were sort of orphans in our own way, and the whole Corbin family, not just Brady, took us in.”
“I’ve never been that close to anyone.” I’d always ached for distance from Mom and Dani, not more connection.
“I hadn’t been,” he said. “Not till I met Brady and Luce.”
“But why did you leave cadets?”
“I had to. If I didn’t leave, I would have been kicked out. Out of Clemson, too.”
This was completely at odds with who I knew Walt to be. Expulsion from college seemed too serious—threatening—for him. “What? Why?”
“I was a discipline problem. Or our cadet bat commander said I was. The problem got worse and worse until one night there was an altercation.”
I stopped, raising my eyebrows. “Altercation? This doesn’t sound like you.”
Walt came to a stop too, his hands on his hips. “Erin, it was a long time ago. I’m not proud of how I did it, but what I did was right. These guys, they weren’t much more than kid bullies raised with too much money and too little sense about how to treat people. They pushed me too far one night. I pushed back. Brady got wind of it, jumped in and pushed some more. It was more than bumps and bruises, and that meant real disciplinary action from the school—not just something to be taken care of in the cadre. The other guys had broken bones, jaw, a concussion. I got a separated shoulder and broken arm. Someone had to take the heat for the fight, and the Corbins have four generations before Brady of service. If it hadn’t been for Brady’s dad, I would have been booted out of school too. Leaving cadets was a compromise to keep me and those guys away from each other.”
“Walt,” I muttered. The details were lost on me. I had little interaction with military people, only one man my mother had dated for a time. There was information missing, likely something difficult he didn’t want to share. But what he was saying underneath was critical. He’d protected Brady, taking on the full weight of a loss—his friend’s family’s traditions—that would be too much to bear. Suddenly, I remembered the first night we’d met in Charlotte, his dismissal of the scene name someone else had given him. “That’s why you don’t like being called Ranger.”
He nodded. “Holly started calling me that. She thought it would be some kind of memorial to Brady after he was killed in Afghanistan.” When I looked up at him, confused, he shook his head. “Yeah. I know, I didn’t get it either. But Holly…well…”
“She didn’t understand?”
“No. But Holly romanticized the whole story—the fight, me taking the blame and saving his honor or some shit like that. Him going on to Ranger school and then deployed so many times and married to…to a marine who was also his slavegirl. Shit, it is a story, Brady
and Hailey. And people do that, especially people like her. They fetishize sadness. I didn’t encourage it, so the scene name didn’t catch on much, and well…truth be told, you were right about that other stuff. The guardian, forest is who you are stuff, I mean. It didn’t seem so bad after a while. Tolerable, I suppose.” With red ears, he grinned down at me and squeezed my hand. “Just don’t tell Lu. She’ll laugh her ass off and I’ll never hear the end of it.”
I rose on my toes, looping my arms around his neck. “I promise. Our secret.”
We walked on in easy quiet, up a narrow path that zig-zagged up to the top of a high ridge. After a final few steps, we crossed the ridgeline to the top of the hill. Below us stretched a verdant landscape of massive hardwood trees, punctuated with orange rectangles hung from a number of branches. Walt took several minutes on his own, setting up a digital camera and a hard plastic-covered clipboard in a smaller shoulder bag.
“Once I’m up, you care to hand me that?”
Reaching overhead, he swung himself parallel to the ground, twisting his body with a short, deep grunt. When he was upright and sitting on a thick tree branch, he balanced there and began threading a thick purple rope through a metal clip.
I glanced at the orange, open-sided boxes hanging high in the tree canopy and back to him, dubious. “How are you going to write and take pictures and hold on?”
“Like I always do,” he called down. “By huggin’ a tree.”
“Why don’t you let me help you?”
“It’s okay. I do this twice a month, from March till November. I can handle it.”
“I know you can. But I could make it a little easier for you.”
He watched me for a few seconds, considering. “All right. You’ll need to write the species, date, time of day, and coordinates from the GPS on my watch in that notebook, just like I did on the last page. Here, head’s up.” He passed his heavy black sports watch to me. “I’ll call down and tell you the sample number to record everything with.”
For two hours Walt let me help him. I followed from tree to tree, scribbling down notes for him and alternately clutching his backpack. I winced over his scaling the old hardwood trees with little more than a series of knots and a piece of fallible metal to care for him. Once he was back on the ground, he checked over everything I’d written, nodding with a silent smile when he finished.
“You’re a good research assistant’s assistant. I think I’ll keep you,” he said and tucked me into his arm for a kiss. “Can’t pay you much, though.”
“I’m very willing to barter.”
Laughing, he settled me into his arm and directed us toward a cluster of giant hardwoods. “Willing to barter, you say? I like my odds. Why don’t we have some lunch and I’ll see what I can find for your dessert, then?”
“Not many people other than Tate and Claire, and Lucy—and a couple of other people who aren’t around anymore—know something about me, Erin. But before we talk any more about playing, you need to.”
“Okay,” I said, swallowing hard. Walt often picked up conversations he’d left idle for hours or even days, something I was beginning to understand and follow like my own shifting planes of focus. He had already revealed so much. “What’s this about?”
“When we first got together, you asked me when I knew I was kinky. And I told you I was seventeen.”
“Yes?”
“It was my first serious girlfriend and me. We played quite a bit after we figured out we liked it.”
Walt looked past me into the tree canopy, his eyes fierce. Unsure how much encouragement or silence he needed to continue, I gave his fingers a gentle squeeze.
“It was a mistake,” he said, and shook his head at the conciliatory noise I made. “No, not what we did, but how I handled myself once her parents found out.”
“Oh…God, Walt…”
“And that went about as well as you’d think it would.” His eyebrows rose and he set his jaw. “I loved Melissa. I mean, we were kids, but as much as a kid could, I loved her. And she loved me too. Her friends—hell, even her mom, sometimes—they’d go on about us, how intense we seemed about each other. Before it all came out, they acted like it was a good thing.”
“Oh, Walt,” I muttered again, stupid with dread. We sat, quiet, for a minute. “There’s more, isn’t there?”
“Yeah.” He considered stopping there. I saw a decision before him, and saw him debate it.
“Walt, you don’t have to—”
“They said I forced her.” He looked past me coolly. “And Mel agreed with it. It was bad enough to her parents, us having sex. But the kink? They didn’t understand it. Hell, I didn’t understand it either, and I was doing it. But I knew then I liked it. And I was not ready to explain that to my grandparents. Which is why I spent all of those Christmases and school breaks with Brady’s family.”
“Oh no.” I winced. I knew about his upbringing with his grandparents in rural Tennessee, but not with many details about them. “Walt, I’m sor—I don’t know how you’d…” I looked at his big hand in mine again, lost for the right thing to say.
“Hey,” he said. “It’s okay. Still here, aren’t I?”
“Yes.” I nodded and touched his arm. Under my fingers, a chilly sweat skimmed his skin. “You survived.”
“When her father and my granddad sat me down and accused me of it, that was about the worst thing I’d been through. I didn’t remember much about my mom or when she passed, never knew my dad. So having to look my granddad in the eye…”
“Walt…”
“It was pretty bad.”
“Did they—were the police involved?”
“No,” he laughed humorlessly. “And that’s one of the biggest fucked-up parts of it, considering Granddad retired from the county sheriff’s department. Because if I’d done what they said I’d done, and what Mel let them say I’d done…”
“But you didn’t—” The word turned to putty in my mouth. “You didn’t force her.”
I wouldn’t say it—Did you?—because he had never given me reason to think otherwise. But I wondered, not because of Walt. Because I saw it really happen to Danielle, and then watched as everyone in our lives, even our own mother, told her it didn’t, not really, because Dani was always in the wrong clothes with the wrong boy at the wrong place and time.
“Erin, I didn’t figure that out for three years. I know Mel asked me that first time, and every time after that there was some thing she did or said that made it seem okay. I didn’t know better: that I should ask her outright every time. I didn’t know what negotiation meant. It got bad for me after I left cadets. I figured I’d fucked up at that and fucked up with Mel. I was in pretty bad shape. Depressed. Thinking about ending it all. If Lu hadn’t dragged me to the student counseling center, I don’t know if I could have made it.”
“I’m…Oh, Walt.”
“But, I can tell you every single thing that happened that first time because I’ve been over it more times than I can count since then, and I believe we were on the same page.”
“Of course you were,” I said, much too quickly.
He glanced at me and shook his head. “But she changed her mind. If she’d just said something, we could have stopped. I loved her; that wouldn’t have changed.” His last words hung heavy on his voice. He sounded exhausted, and I wondered how many times he’d repeated the words to himself over the span of his adult life. “I don’t want to be that guy again. I’ve come as close as I care to with you, back when we’d just met. I didn’t do what I knew was right then.”
“Walt,” I said, leaning closer to him. “I’m not a seventeen-year-old girl who doesn’t know how to stand up for her own decisions.”
“No. I don’t suppose you are.”
For a while, we were quiet, nothing around us but forest sounds and wind in the leaves above us. Finally I sat back from him. Reaching behind me, I felt for my backpack, and took Claire’s notebook from it, opening to my checklist. I took a quick br
eath and read. “Bondage by straight jacket. No. Hard limit.”
He looked on, silent and unreadable.
“Bondage by scarves. Yes, very curious.” I shifted the notebook in my hands, placing it on my bent knees. “Bondage by spreader bar. Yes, very curious. Bondage by rope. Yes, very curious. Bondage by rope with suspension. Yes, mildly curious.” I shrugged and glanced at him. “I’m afraid of falling or breaking the rope.”
“Rope’s stronger than it looks.” His voice was different. Deeper, without the accent I knew so well. “If rope can hang trees and pianos, it can hold up a person.”
Walt hadn’t moved at all. Still, the sensation of him so close I couldn’t see or hear anything else was undeniable. “Bondage by tape. No, due to allergies.”
“It would tear up your skin anyway. I wouldn’t do it.”
“Bondage by leather. Yes, very curious.” I rifled through the pages. “That covers bondage, I guess. Um…okay, photography. Unsure.”
“Unsure?”
I looked up from the notebook. “Unsure. I’m…” A surge of panic churned my stomach and I shook my head at it. Walt pushed himself forward, taking the notebook from my hands.
“Hey, what’s that thought?”
“I don’t know. I—”
“Yes, you do.” He pushed at the limp strands of hair fanning around my glasses. “What’s wrong with pictures?”
“I don’t know why.” Every word was lead on my tongue, barely pushing past my teeth. “I’m not sure why anyone would ask.”
“Because they’d want to remember how beautiful you were when they didn’t have you with them. Because they’d want to see your skin all warmed up and pink from their hands. Because they’d want to have proof for themselves they got you to make that face you make when you come.”
He stopped me when I reached for the binder, catching my hand in his.
“But I need my notes—”
“No you don’t,” he said, settling my hands on my knees. “Is it okay if I ask the questions?”
I nodded, swallowing. “Sure.”
“Sensation play with nails, teeth, and lips?”