Holding the Cards

by Joey Hill

  She wanted to close up. She wanted to say no. She wanted to tell herself it wasn't a problem, that she was on an island in the middle of Paradise, and she would walk away in two days and never see him again.

  "His name was Jonathan." It was funny, how little she had said his name aloud since he had left her. It got clogged a bit in her throat, so she had to clear it, and it came out sounding garbled, but she didn't repeat it. Her fingers had tightened on the arms of the chair, but she didn't realize it until Josh's fingertip whispered over her big toe, and she loosened her grip on the grooved plastic.

  "I like control, but I'm healthy with it. Control is just a dance; you can lead the dance, but your partner has to know how to match your steps, know when to go left when you go right. A lot of it is imagination, wishful thinking. You only hold power as long as those you hold it over want you to have it."

  It helped to work from the general to the specific, like the absurd practice of dipping one callused toe in the water before plunging all the far more sensitive extremities into it. There was a reason that the crotch was the hardest part to submerge without shrieking.

  She kept her eyes on the horizon and thought, as she often had, that subs were braver than Doms, ultimately. They obeyed when the Mistress demanded they meet her eyes while they answered a difficult question. She could not have looked at Josh now without the aid of a stereotaxic device.

  "Sometimes, someone can be sneaky, exercise power over you in a way you don't notice until you're too deep in a pit to get out. The worst ones can put you there and you think you don't want out, even though you're abandoning everything you value about yourself." She shook her head. "Maybe I should stop."

  Josh trickled warm sand from his cupped hand into the spaces between her toes. It made her toes wiggle, dislodge the sand. He repeated the action. It had a comfortable rhythm to it. "I want to hear your story," he said.

  Lauren felt his attention centered on her every word, every movement, the working of her throat. Most men didn't look at a woman that closely. Most didn't want to hear anything about a woman's past lovers. To a man, it infringed on his sense of possession, whereas for a woman, it was a way of revealing what she wanted and needed in a lover. She wanted to tell herself that Josh and she really hadn't had time to develop a sense of possessiveness, but she saw the tattoo on his back again, and felt the rise of white anger again at the woman who had inflicted it upon him. She watched the sand roll over the arch of her foot, his fingers hovering just above it. She was lying to herself, protecting herself.

  He was a different type of man. For him, intimate knowledge of her past might be a type of possession. It was something Jonathan had never wanted from her, but she had desperately wanted to give him. Josh wanted it, was asking for it.

  "I met Jonathan in my favorite club, of course. I played with him. Nothing serious, just safe play. The D/s form of first date. But he was different. He had these brown eyes, these lips… ah, dammit," she closed her eyes, fought the moisture back. "My soul opened up to him like a flower to sun the moment, the second, I saw him, breathed him, touched him."

  Neither man said anything, and Lauren sat in darkness a few moments, just feeling Josh's touch on her foot, hearing Marcus shift to her other side. She inhaled the comfortable normalcy of tanning oil and the sea and tried to get it to banish the dark shadows that had risen out of her heart the moment she gave voice to the name of her demon.

  At length, she made herself open her eyes, watch the horizon again. "I should have known he was an obsession more than anything else, because I felt so damn drawn to him from the beginning. Why would I feel that way about him if he was the wrong person?"

  She pushed down the sudden ice of fear in her throat. It was impossible to ignore the similarities in the picture she was painting with what was happening between her and Josh.

  She swallowed the shards of glass. "I ignored all the danger signs. He didn't want to meet outside the club, not even for a cup of coffee. I thought he was just being cautious.

  "Over time, even when I finally coaxed him into living with me, it should have told me he was only interested in the physical. Especially since that only lasted about a month, and he moved back out. He didn't want anything between us but the game. But he had such a way of making me feel like the center of the universe when I was playing Mistress to him. It's hard to explain, even to myself," she admitted. "I wanted him to fall in love with me as I had fallen in love with him. I assumed it was just something I would have to work harder at to make happen. At my home, he would play, but he gave me nothing more than that. After sex, he was always retreating to the study to work, or having to go out without me. We spent weekends in the dungeons. I devised so many ways to break him down, make him open to me. I'm a good Mistress," a smile touched her eyes as she curled her toe around one of Josh's fingers. "I believe a person plays a submissive because there's something inside they want you to break open." She noted the finger tensed a bit under her grasp. "I did break him open. I thought I opened up every room inside him, made him vulnerable in a hundred different ways. I stroked all those vulnerabilities, collected them to me and cherished them as gifts, the way a Mistress should, and gave him the best of myself."

  She raised her arms, caught hold of the back of the chair, bent her elbows and stretched the muscles, tightening her fingers until the knuckles whitened.

  "I wanted him more than air," she said, low, her throat choked with it. "Doesn't that sound like a pathetic cliché? All I wanted was to look in his eyes and see that connection I was sure was going to eventually be there. I can't explain now how I got so desperate. I had a full and happy life, career, family. All I lacked was a Mr. Forever, but that wasn't something I was obsessed with having. But I had weak points. A Mistress ultimately has to be as vulnerable to the sub as they are to her, and the sub who knows how can push the right buttons, make the Mistress the slave of her own vulnerabilities. And Jonathan did. Everything I wanted deep in my heart he dangled in front of me, just enough to make me keep grabbing at it. I neglected my work, my life. Every day came to be about getting to the club that night.

  "I was going to make him love me," she said softly. "And the D/s game became the chess board, the strategy to make it happen. The more I craved his love, a sincere gesture of intimacy, the more he withheld it. I had never been aware of being lonely, and suddenly I was. I felt inadequate. My self-esteem plummeted and I didn't even notice. It's funny, how someone you love can break you down, take away your identity and recreate you, before you even realize that's what they're doing."

  A sun-browned hand covered her left knee and she made herself look at Josh. It took such effort that her eyes felt glassy. He squeezed her, his thumb stroking the protrusion of bone, and his eyes were tranquil gray pools, strong and understanding. She had a sudden urge to crawl into his lap.

  "I should say you don't have to go on, but I really want to know."

  She tried for a smile, failed, managed a grimace. "You have this image of yourself," she murmured, shifting her gaze to her knees, "as someone competent and smart, someone somebody would like, not because of what you would do for them, but because of who you are. Then you let someone inside, they get your number. They can tear it all down."

  Josh understood all too well what she was saying. She could see it in the shadows in his eyes, the flicker of comprehension.

  "What happened to end it?" Marcus asked. Lauren tilted her head to look at him. He had drawn close to her chair, so Josh and he were coiled around her like two wolves protecting a member of the pack, their affection and anger for her palpable. She should have felt surprise, but sex, or sexual situations, did tend to create the impression of intimacy quickly, though it was often built on no more than the lust of the moment.

  No. She wouldn't let Jonathan make her timid. This was more than that. The bond that had developed between the three of them in less than thirty-six hours defied description, even with the facilitation of their island paradise setting.
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  "A mirror." She moistened her lips. "One night, as I was getting ready to go meet Jonathan, I realized I couldn't meet my own gaze in the mirror. I had become ashamed of myself, so much that I couldn't face who I was. So I did the hardest thing in my life, because I knew how it would end. I went to the club that night, and told him I loved him, and I wanted more."

  In her mind, she was back there, and the pain gripped her, such that she could not speak for several moments. She was vaguely aware of the two men exchanging a concerned glance, some slight movements of their hands upon her, comfort or encouragement, it did not matter.

  "He put on this amazed expression," she said, her tone flat as stagnant water. "But there was this little smile around his lips. And I knew." Her voice shook and she clenched her jaw, forcing it to stop. "I knew. He had been playing me from the beginning. True subs don't do that. The whole point is trust. Even if there isn't the intimacy of lovers, there should be the respect of friends. He had used me, twisted me up, and then when I broke, he dumped me. That's what got his rocks off. He had loved having me as a Mistress, but he didn't want Lauren, the woman. He never had. He was a sick, sociopathic son of a bitch and I had been totally gone over him."

  Josh rose up on one elbow. With a gentle thumb, he pressed the tear from the corner of her eye, the rest of his hand cradling her face. She shut her eyes, leaned into his touch a moment, let his palm shut out the light so she could focus on the tranquil darkness.

  "I stayed away from the club for months after that, but Maria said he never came back after that night. She heard he had gotten some Mistress over at another competing club tied up over him."

  She backed away from Josh's touch and he let her, dropping his hand back to her foot.

  "I almost went vanilla. I ran from the truth. I wrote off the whole D/s set-up as destructive. Kinky games had destroyed our relationship, destroyed me. But if your blood runs with it, it's hard to shake." A painful smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. "I got over that. As time passed, I realized it wasn't any different than a failed vanilla relationship. He's the guy who says he'll call and doesn't, the girl who says she loves a guy until she finds out he's borrowed the company BMW rather than owning it himself. Some people just fuck with your heads. Jonathan did that to me. It pissed me off, on about ten different levels, because he destroyed my confidence.

  "I cried when I saw you with Thomas," she shifted her attention to Marcus. "Because I realized what the difference was between the two of you, and me and Jonathan. You and Thomas cherished each other. You could feel it. You, as his Master, adored him, were enthralled by him as much as he was by you. That's why I had kept hanging in there so long with Jonathan. Like anyone else, I wanted to believe I had found that love to last a lifetime and dammit, I thought endurance would manufacture it. But I learned the most important rule of D/s play; if there isn't already a spark of it between you in the mundane world, it ain't going to happen in a dungeon."

  She turned her eyes back to Josh, whose hand was now curled around the arch of her foot. "You remember that kiss, last night?" she asked. It flashed through his eyes, and she nodded. "That's what that was all about."

  He leaned forward, and touched his lips to her foot, gently, with an overwhelming reverence. Lauren made a soft sound in her throat, a sound of pain and longing at once. He lifted his gaze, looking at her with warm sympathy in his eyes and something else, something that fanned the spark within her into a shower, like firecrackers going off.

  "I would have torn his fucking arms off for you," he said calmly.

  It pulled at something low in her gut, something primal and right, and made her reach out and touch his face.

  "So," she cleared her throat, tossed her head back, and risked a smile. "This is the moment when Obiwan is supposed to rivet us with some words of wisdom."

  Marcus chuckled, though his eyes carried some of Josh's heat. "Relationship games always carry a risk," he managed lightly. "D/s can be dangerous, because it explores the most primitive sides of ourselves. Those involved must have a high degree of trust and a very, very healthy devotion to one another. Like religion, it can be a spiritually enlightening experience, or it can be an expression of psychosis. And somewhere in between, it can be tremendously fun." Gathering his composure around him, he lifted his shoulder in a shrug. "Like chocolate."

  Lauren looked at him blankly. "I was following until that moment, Obi."

  Marcus glanced up as clouds darkened the sun. Lauren could have lifted her sunglasses, but her eyes still felt too vulnerable and open.

  "Imagine how it feels to eat one piece of Belgian chocolate," Marcus suggested, moving to pack up the contents of their basket. "You inhale it, savor it on your tongue. The flavor of it is something that you can choose to let linger in your mouth, building your body's reaction to it, for once you swallow it, it's gone. The pleasure is not in the consumption, but in the sensory experience. To bring it to its fulfilling conclusion, you will eventually swallow it, but the longer you draw it out…ah, the more satisfying that swallow is." He grinned at her expression and pulled a small tin from the cooler. "Bon bon?"

  Lauren shook her head at his wicked ways, her mood lightening, and took one. "Okay, is this metaphor going somewhere?"

  "Always," Josh predicted.

  Marcus shot him a reproachful glance. "Now say you eat another. And another. Somehow, you still want them, you're still cherishing that experience, but the more you stuff in your mouth, the more elusive that sensation gets. But you eat them even faster, without really noticing how they taste anymore. And then, you're sick.

  "This is the first piece," he leaned over to Josh, ran a fingertip down the man's throat and along the collarbone.

  A flush rose in Josh's face as he made a visible effort to keep himself still. Lauren's breathing hitched, the chocolate melting on her tongue, as Marcus's touch trailed down the center of Josh's bare chest, stopping just above the heart, where his ribs met the surface of the sand. "That's how the game was meant to be played. Savoring, drawing it out, cherishing, never taking for granted the gift that has been given to your senses. You must appreciate it, worship it, even as you run your tongue over it and melt away the outer casing to get to the cream beneath. You hold it captive as long as you can, intending on bringing out its richest flavors before allowing it to explode, and be consumed.

  "Jonathan," his lip curled in a sneer, and his eyes flashed back to Lauren, "had a serious eating disorder."

  A drop of rain spattered on Lauren's knee. Thunder rumbled lazily in the distance.

  "How about we take lunch inside?" Marcus offered. He jerked his head toward Josh, a twinkle in his eye.

  Chapter 14

  They went to the Salerno house. The rain had begun to come down in earnest, their house was closest, and it had the hot water heater the men wanted to check. Isabel came when Josh called, but there were no detours this time. Once depositing them at the Salernos, the elephant vanished into the forest. According to Josh, she was not likely to be seen again until the rain ceased.

  The Salerno home was like Lisette's, built to blend into the forest. However, their house had the air of a medieval period country home. The first and second levels had outdoor walking galleries with open archways, rather than porches. The siding of the first and basement floors was done in stonework. Most charmingly, a creek ran by the front of the house, and the head and coils of a bronze dragon rose out of the water, creating the impression of a guarded moat.

  Lauren paused at the stairs and turned back, her eye caught by the creature. She went to the water's edge to get a closer look. The dragon's features had been enhanced with different colored metals, the play of light making it into a living, breathing creature. She eased out one canvas toe into the creek, and laid her fingers on the dragon's face, felt the satin curves of the jaw, the rough texture of the scales on the neck, scales that had some movement to them, for they were separately fused, as scales would be. The neck and jaw connections also had a little p
lay to them, so movements of the wind brought slight motions to the dragon's head, increasing the eerie impression of life.

  "You're going to get wet," Marcus said, having followed her.

  "It's not too bad yet," she smiled and slanted a glance at him. "Have you ever thought about how absurd it is, the way we run inside from the beach when it starts to rain? I mean, we were swimming, immersed in water, and then it starts to rain, so we hunch our heads and flee. This is incredible."

  "We need to get inside," Josh called from the first floor. "Unless you two want to drown."

  "It's amazing," Marcus agreed, taking her arm to help her step back onto the bank. "Wait until you see what they have in the house."

  "So which one of the Salernos is the artist?" she asked, moving toward the stairs.

  "Neither," Marcus replied. "The Salernos are New York Italians. Mrs. Salerno is a cosmetic company CEO, and Mr. Salerno is a retired police chief. You feel like you're in an Italian restaurant commercial around them. Lots of shouting, quick-to-anger, quick-to-forgive personalities, devoted to each other in a very practical manner. They have three almost-grown children we've never met. I doubt the kiddies have ever been here," Marcus grinned, a look to his eye that suggested there was a reason for that. He pressed her up the stairs and continued his casual dialogue before she could pursue the mystery behind that look.

  "They're not artists, but they're an artist's best friend. They're very generous patrons of three of the artists that have homes here. In the house, well, I'll let you see for yourself."