FetteredLove

by Michelle Polaris

  For a moment, the loud tick of her biological clock prematurely dwindling down to the endgame grew softer, overcome by the thick, wild sound of her lurching heart racing to catch a future with these men she loved.

  Chapter Three

  The tile halls of the regal old building swallowed too much sound for Kirk’s comfort, making it preternaturally quiet. This was a place people whispered, even when not required. He was still trying to figure out why he’d agreed to meet Sarah here. But the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum was a favorite of hers from years before and she had suggested finding someplace sedate for their talk. As if that would make a difference. Before he knew it, he’d mentioned the historic home turned art museum in Boston, its collection a legacy of a remarkable woman who’d acquired the objects filling its corridors.

  He woke unsettled today, knowing he would face Sarah again by late morning. In bed, after returning from Unfettered last night, Kirk had wanted to shake Evan, rouse him from where he slept peacefully like a babe drunk on whiskey. Demand an explanation for ripping all of his neat, orderly plans into messy shreds, and let Kirk take out the evening’s frustrations on Ev’s body. What the hell did he have to be so relaxed about? She’d stomped over his heart along with Kirk’s. Abandoned them both.

  Kirk realized the depths of his immaturity in his reaction to her. But the slow boil of desire, of need to take her in his arms and hold tight, descended whipcord fast the moment he’d spotted her. He hated that, the ropes that still bound him to her.

  He stood in front of the museum painting now, sick to his stomach after Evan forced him to choke down breakfast earlier. They’d agreed to meet here right after the museum opened. And he knew the second she stepped next to his side, needing no eye contact to identify the warmth and vibration of her body or her unique scent. Sarah.

  Kirk closed his eyes against it.

  “She’s still as beautiful,” her feminine voice murmured.

  Yes, you are, came his immediate thought. Though she’d meant the woman to the center left in the painting.

  “Sargent was a genius,” she said. “Do you see how lost she is in the mood and music? As if she’s in a trance. I like to imagine it’s the wee hours of the morning and she’s been singing, her voice deep and throaty now after the abuse. She’s at the point she can only hum to the strain of notes.”

  Sarah’s soft, rapt description of the painting forced him to look at her. And there she was, her face caught on the picture, lost in her own trance, considering El Jaleo, Sargent’s large canvas that hung in the Spanish Cloister of the Gardner. It had always been her favorite.

  Kirk swallowed around the boulder in his throat. Cleared it so he could speak and not make a damn fool of himself. “Ev looks like that when he’s deep.” He didn’t know where the comment came from or why it didn’t bother him to discuss his lover with his ex. The words rolled off surprisingly easily.

  Her eyes widened until she focused them back on El Jaleo and tilted her head. A tiny smile built on her lips. “You’re right. He looks just like that. Or he did once upon a time.” Her chin dipped lower. “Was he¼ Is he okay?”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  Her lip twisted to the side as her head rose. “I love him, Kirk. What do you think?”

  There was that stubbornness he’d adored, covering a transient look of pain.

  A shot of guilt licked up his spine, but he shook it off. “Yeah. He’s okay. Great actually. He owns his own business creating artsy wooden furniture. Quite boutique. Very gay. He’s been flooded with orders, but the son of a bitch still works as slowly as he thinks a piece deserves, as if he has all the time in the world. He’s lucky he’s so good because people wait.”

  Her shoulders rounded and a smile returned. “He’s amazing.”

  “Yes. Yes, he is.”

  She gestured him on. “Let’s walk.”

  He almost smiled at her unconscious air of authority. A Domme, no question. How had he missed it for so many years? Maybe he hadn’t wanted to see. Fuck, if only she’d just let him take care of her. It was who he was.

  They left the Cloister and started wandering the rest of the collection, passing the cordoned-off Courtyard.

  Their bodies bumped into one another and his muscles tightened. When he watched her lack of reaction from the corner of his vision, his limbs loosened. They continued in what he would have called companionable silence if his hadn’t been full of confusion.

  “What about you?” she asked, as if they were casual old acquaintances catching up at a party. “What do you do with your time?”

  He froze in his steps. “We’re here to deal with Evan’s request, not for idle chitchat.”

  She turned to him. “Look, Kirk, I know you don’t want to be doing this, but we have to at least be civil to pull off a reasonable scene.”

  Fuck. She was right. When he thought about blowing the scene off, saying no to Evan, his heart ached.

  “Fine. Conversation.”

  “Your jaw must throb from all that clenching. Relax, kid, I won’t bite. I just wanted to know what you do. Besides being Evan’s Master.”

  Kid. Her nickname for him growing up. He remembered how she’d teased him over their age difference, and loosened more. “I run an outdoor adventure business for teens. Teach them mountaineering, survival skills, teambuilding. We go out on treks from days to weeks. I focus on kids in trouble. It centers the ones who don’t come built that way. The struggle to survive gets them to let go a lot of baggage and builds self-confidence. It’s not for all kids, but if I help a few it’s worth it.”

  “I knew you’d turn out that way.”

  Her wry voice made him pause. “What way?”

  “A helper. But doing it your own, tough way. No matter how it happens, you’ll make a great dad.”

  He grunted, not sure whether he liked the compliment or not. “I think we need to plan Evan’s evening.”

  Her brow wrinkled and he watched her willingness to transition cross her face. “Have his tastes changed? His hot buttons or limits?”

  “No. Expanded some maybe. He asks for more cock and ball torture. He still likes to struggle, it gets him deep.”

  She paused before the next stairwell, hand on the rail, foot poised halfway to the step. Where had her mind strayed?

  Jesus, this entire interaction was surreal.

  “Our scene should be stirring him up,” she said, brow wrinkled in that way she had when she struggled to solve a problem. “It obviously means something unique to him. We need to deliver something special since this is a one-time deal. Maybe we shouldn’t give him anything to struggle against. Soft. Kill him with love and kindness. I remember how he liked it hard and how tempting it was to give him what he asked for. You’re right that he uses the struggle to build until he loses himself. But I wonder if that’s too easy. He goes under so fast, I don’t think he really surrenders the difficult emotional stuff to get there. Maybe the soft will bring him somewhere else, make him face something else.”

  Kirk paused. Yes. There was something to what she said. His center steadied. He found her unstudied contemplation damn sexy.

  No. No distraction.

  She’d given him an insight to which he’d been blind. Dammit, she knew Evan after all these years. They’d plateaued, he and Evan. To a comfortable place but maybe too comfortable. His job as Master was to break Evan down to his core and use the instincts he’d honed in the scene to identify just what his lover needed most to grow. Failing on the job, Kirk’s only excuse was blindness after falling head over ass in love. But beating himself up wouldn’t get the job done now, would it?

  He refused to let his ego block the acknowledgement of his shortsightedness. His lover didn’t deserve that. So he took a breath and nodded at her. “As peaceful and pleasant as Evan presents himself to the world, I still see glances at times of something darker. I see it when he talks about his mom. I think some of this baby stuff is tied up in it.”

  “So we
start kind and gentle,” she said. “No matter how he begs. What she never gave him and perhaps what he’s not so sure he deserves.”

  They proceeded to the next floor and walked in silence again. They reached a well-known painting of Isabella Stewart Gardner, the patroness, and stopped.

  Sarah squinted at the picture. “The docents say her husband hated this painting. She’d been staying in Venice without him when it was done.”

  “She looks to be in her late forties in the portrait. Done having children and searching for a wild freedom. Up to no good away from ole hubby? If so, no wonder he hated the portrait.”

  Sarah frowned. “Maybe she was just lonely.”

  Her words echoed with a hollowness that dug below his surface and stirred sadness. But Sarah’s loneliness wasn’t his damn problem.

  Still, he couldn’t help himself. The question fell out without planning. “How hard was it, Sarah?”

  She jolted, dipped her head, her lips pressed tight. “Isn’t this against your ‘no small talk’ policy?” She shook her head. “If I start talking about it, I don’t know if I can keep it together.”

  Fuck.

  Every muscle twisted, tightening until he thought they’d snap like brittle strings of a guitar wound too far. “I hate this, you know? Thinking of you suffering.”

  “I know, Kirk.”

  He tried to keep it back. The darker words gagged him, coming up his throat until he let them fly. “It killed me, but it’s also why I’m pissed as hell at you. Why do it that way? Alone and not calling us? Even in college when we lost our easy friendship we still loved each other. How could you treat that love so badly?”

  She whispered back furiously, “I saw no other way back then. I’m not sure I see another now in hindsight. I’m sorry I hurt you, but once I started down that path, it didn’t seem fair to call. You had your own life. And if I stopped and thought about it, what I was doing, I would have lost it then too.”

  They walked ahead, the air a lead brick between them. The beauty around them contrasted with his pain.

  “You know I checked on you,” he finally brought himself to say. “I called a few of the guys back in Bernnod. Found out you were working two jobs, seven days a week. And your mom needed nursing home care, but you kept her home.”

  “We didn’t have the benefits for any place that wasn’t a hellhole.”

  “So you broke your back when I had the money. Everyone knows how responsible you are. You didn’t have to prove it.”

  “Kirk, stop.”

  His fists squeezed hard in the effort to keep his volume down. “You had to care for your family. I get that. I just wish¼”

  Her head dipped. “Maybe it was a control thing. I had to do it. I had to make it all right, or it never would be, you know? Mom was selfish to have us all given how spectacularly ill equipped she was to take care of us. But she didn’t care. Well I did, Kirk. It matters to me what kind of mother I would be.”

  “Fuck, Sarah. I can’t let it go. You want to be part of our lives again, but what impossible task will call superwoman away again? How do I trust it?”

  “I guess you can’t,” she said. “I can only apologize. I don’t regret what I did, but I do regret there were no other options. And how that hurt you.”

  “I want to forgive, but¼ Ev may be okay, but he pined after you for years. I was jealous of your magic with him, the impact you’d made on him for a long time. Jealous of how quickly he fell for you. I can’t risk him getting hurt. And you won’t take another person I love away from me.”

  “I wasn’t planning to take him from you.”

  “I wasn’t talking about Evan.”

  Silence. Everything inside his chest hurt.

  Sarah cleared her throat and stood straighter. “So here we are again. Controlling fools who need to have it our way to feel safe and prove we aren’t the same selfish screw-ups as our parents.”

  Jesus, he wished he could let go. He sucked in a breath and forged on. “I don’t believe Evan’s plan will work, but I’ll give him this gift. And for one night together we’ll blow his mind. So let’s get this goddamn planning done with.”

  Silence again. She nodded. “Eloquent, Kirk. But yes. Let’s do it.”

  They’d reached a set of benches. She thrust out the bag she’d been carrying, a large female thing designed to hold everything and the kitchen sink. Or maybe a small aircraft carrier. “Here. Watch this. Nature calls for even us rusty Mistresses.”

  Jesus, he loved that about her. That she could take their intensity and infuse some humor into what stood to rip them both to shreds. Loved that she took her breaks when she needed them and never apologized.

  “Yes dear,” he drawled.

  She quirked those expressive eyebrows at him. “Since you’ll never be a henpecked husband, chalk the experience up to getting in touch with how the other non-Dom vanilla half of men live. It’s good for your character.”

  “If you say so.”

  The hint of her smile was back. She stuck out her tongue at him, did an about-face and marched off in search of restrooms. Both of their jagged edges needed the respite.

  Kirk sat, all of his bones weighted with fatigue from their talk, and placed the bag on the bench next to him. But the damn thing was so full it fell over on its side, unbalanced. Papers and odds and ends spilled onto the seat. Sarah’s web phone fell out and to the floor with a clatter.

  Shit.

  Kirk bent to scoop it up and his thumb brushed the screen, unlocking it. She’d left it on a browser screen, with the last web page she’d been visiting still featured on the phone. He looked down, did a double take reading the paragraph header highlighted on the screen.

  Premature Menopause.

  His eyes flew over the words again. He read farther, the gears in his head spinning at high speed, processing the implications of why she’d have this particular web page up on her phone. On the wood next to him, an appointment card caught his eye. Dr. Felistar, M.D., OBGYN, Ph.D., Center for Fertility Outcomes. Kirk gazed in the direction Sarah had disappeared.

  “Son of a bitch.”

  The full picture clicked into place and his heart started to beat funny.

  All at once, his clear decisions fogged to fury, heartbreak and a confused mess.

  Chapter Four

  The first surprise Saturday morning was waking with Kirk gone. Although an early riser, his Master usually made lots of noise stomping around finding his clothes or making his coffee or searching for his phone. It inevitably woke Evan. This new stealth Kirk provoked the initial bite of tension to a day that promised to be unforgettable.

  Tonight. Unfettered. Kirk and Sarah putting him through his paces. Heaven or hell? He wasn’t sure and the anxiety tasted damn fine.

  The second surprise when Evan finally roused himself from bed was the printout he found under his carefully laid out mug and cereal bowl. Kirk always set them out on the counter as if he were afraid Evan would forget to eat breakfast without the help. The silly bastard. But he loved Kirk for the gesture. That Dom ego was twistedly endearing.

  Evan shook his head in familiar amusement, took the sheet and began to read. The printout was from a medical website. Curious. The topic was premature menopause. Kirk had underlined those words in red and drawn an arrow to the margin where he’d written one word. Sarah.

  His skin went cold. Holy crap. No wonder.

  Oh Sarah. Mistress.

  An impulse to call her zipped through his body and brain. He found himself reaching for his phone, a need to soothe away her pain a driving instinct.

  No. This was hers to tell. He respected her more for making her proposal without telling them. She’d been born to be a mother, letting it define who she was for years as she struggled to be the very opposite of her own. Had she confided in Kirk when they met to plan their night? He doubted it.

  Evan’s next thought was for Kirk and how he was reacting to the news. Did it change anything for him? So much rode on tonight. No m
atter Kirk’s reaction or his own for that matter, the same things needed to happen. The same healing. And his same wish to taste his dream. Shit, he wanted it so bad. A picture of Kirk flashed against his retinas. He waited for the guilt to rise for still loving Sarah after all the years of Kirk’s devotion. Nothing. Love was bigger than that. Bigger than just their two scraggly souls. Or so he believed.

  What came instead was a quick jag of desolation and a picture of Sarah walking away years ago. The deep sense of loneliness her leaving had triggered had wrapped around him to suck down all he valued in himself. How it had caused a return to the little-boy feelings from years before that. He’d fought through a minefield to come out whole from his childhood and had mostly won until her abandonment their last year of school. He didn’t blame her and he hated that the images flew at him, but they did.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  Kirk ringing the bell of his apartment. Evan stumbling from the bed he hadn’t vacated the two weeks since she left. That first look of shock when Kirk caught sight of him. “Fuck, Evan. What happened to you, man?” His second more searing examination. “Of course. She’s fucked you up. Well, I’m not letting her decision screw up anyone else. You are getting in the shower, and then we get you coffee and food.”

  He’d barged in, swiping up the debris around the apartment with a look of disgust. “No more wallowing. That’s over.” He whipped the words out, all cold, no compassion. But they woke Evan. Or was that the shock of Kirk’s hijacking of his choices and immediate Dom attitude when they’d barely been acquaintances let alone friends? Of Kirk’s launch of a no-holds campaign to bring him back from the edge? It was recognizable as the man’s personal war against the woman who’d wounded them both.

  Although Evan refused to be a war engine, he saw through to the true kindness of the scowling jerk. He let Kirk have his will. Truth be told, he had no energy to fight it.

  And with it came relief.

  Fast forward¾their shared emotion a tornado of impact. Two months later, Evan was on his knees at Kirk’s feet, wrists crossed behind his back, with the two of them caught in the draw of one other after their time together. The history with the same woman building the first bridge that led them to their unique bond. Evan’s astonished need to let Kirk take him over, let him lose himself and float. Give up the emptiness again for something whole, hot, alive and growing more valuable every day. To belong. To be chosen. He liked a male’s harder touch, the deft brutality that he had always craved.