Of Being Yours[another way 2] (25 page)

Will slid his hand up under the hem of my tank and gently stroked my stomach, a welcome weight on my warm skin. I brushed his hair back with my fingertips and sighed into his achingly sweet kisses.

When I was just about ready to shuck off our clothes and have hot monkey sex right then and there, my stomach growled. Loudly.

Will laughed as he broke the contact of our mouths and rested his forehead against mine.

“I should feed you.”

“No,” I said. “Fuck me instead.”

“There’s time for fucking later. You need to eat, we haven’t had anything since breakfast.”

He was right, of course, not that the fact helped to quell my disappointed erection. I pulled on jeans and my softest, most comfortable flannel shirt and left my feet bare as we headed for the kitchen. As we’d spent a couple of days away, the fridge was rather bare, and I contemplated ordering in, but the flights and the wedding had left us a little short on cash for the month.

Instead, we made huge omelets and split the last carton of orange juice. There wasn’t a takeout in the entire city that could make better food than that. And I’d forgotten quite how much I liked cooking with Will.

We fell back into our routine and our lives again. The time away together seemed to have had a positive effect on our relationship; when it was just the two of us in a hotel in Georgia, there was no need for us to worry about everything else going on around us. Just being exposed to that environment turned out to be enough—back home, we carried a little bit of that peace forward.

I could feel that the tone of our therapy sessions was changing to encompass more of our long-term goals, looking further into the future to see how we could move forward. It was almost like we had untangled the most immediate problems and now had to work out what the implications would be for next week, next month, next year.

“Steven?”

I stopped short just outside the marble steps that led into the doctor’s office as a familiar face caught my attention. To be fair, his office was in the same building as Dr. Smith’s, something I had always assumed was how Laura had first learned of our Kinky Shrink.

Our weekly sessions had turned into monthly ones, but we both regarded our time with Dr. Smith as something vital to our relationship. I definitely didn’t see it as something that needed to be rebuilt any longer; we were working on relationship maintenance these days and figuring out how to move past some of the difficulties of the new shape our lives had taken.

“Hey, Jesse,” he said, taking a few strides over and shaking first my hand, then Will’s. “How are you?”

“Not bad,” I said.

“How are the women in your life?” Will asked with a grin that quickly faded at the look on Steven’s face.

“They could be better, to be honest,” he said.

I looked over at Will, who nodded discreetly.

“Do you have time for a drink?” I asked.

There was a sports bar just across the street, and we headed there. It was fairly busy—as I expected, for the time of week—but that was going to be to our benefit.

Will disappeared to the bar to buy the drinks while Steven and I squeezed into a table near the back of the room.

“You two are back together for good, then?” he asked.

I shrugged. “I hope so,” I said. “It’s not been smooth sailing, but he’s worth it. We’ll make it work. How’s Maddie doing?”

He laughed once, then rubbed his face with his hands. “Pregnant.”

“I know that,” I said. “She asked me if I wanted to adopt the baby.”

“Yeah, she did say something about that at one point,” he said vaguely. “It’s a pretty fucked-up situation, to be honest.”

Will sidled up and set three beers down on the table.

“I ordered nachos,” he said. “I’m starving.”

To give us all a moment, I took a long pull on my beer. After the week I’d had at work, it went down well.

“If any of you need a place to crash for a while, we have a spare room,” I offered, to pick the conversation back up.

“Thanks, Jesse,” Steven said. “We’ve got the girls to think about, though. It’s making the whole situation quite claustrophobic.”

“Sometimes distance helps,” Will said gently.

He should know,
I thought to myself but kept the thought unsaid. These things didn’t always help.

“Is Laura okay?”

Steven nodded. “She’s fine. You know Laura, nothing fazes her. I could never understand how she juggled everything before—her career, the girls, our marriage, then Maddie as well, but I don’t think any of us have ever felt like we were battling for her time. Or her affection, for that matter.

“Do you know how we met?” Steven asked suddenly.

Both Will and I shook our heads.

“I was out on a bachelor party,” he said, laughing to himself at the memory. “We had all dressed up as women for the night.”

“I’ve been there,” I said darkly, shooting a look at Will. He just smirked at me.

“She was out in one of her corsets. A red one. With her hair all piled up on her head and red lips and jeans. Sipping some fucking awful cocktail through a straw. Never in a million years did I think I was going to meet my future wife while dressed up in drag.”

“These things happen when you’re least expecting it,” Will said.

They were a striking couple. Laura was slightly taller than average, and her broad shoulders gave her a statuesque, striking quality. For years she’d worn her rusty-brown hair long but had recently cropped it so that it hung just a few inches below her ears. Even from the first time I’d met her, I knew her personality was one that needed someone equally as strong to match her, and Steven was that man.

I personally didn’t find him attractive, but that was probably because he was my former Domme’s husband. Objectively, I would agree that he was handsome, tall, fair haired with green eyes. Most of the time he didn’t bother to shave, but his beard suited him.

I had been Laura’s sub for several years when she fell pregnant with the twins. Our D/s relationship had been about sex on only the basest level—sometimes when I was ridiculously aroused from a session, she’d let me make myself come at the end of it. Other times she wouldn’t. Steven understood, right from the beginning, that our interactions had more to do with control and pain and submission than desire.

“How long were you together before you found out that she was a Domme?” I asked.

Steven smiled. “She told me that first night,” he said. “I made the mistake of calling her a dominatrix. I got told off for that.”

“Why?”

“Well, she told me the men that served her didn’t pay her for the pleasure. She was no whore who could be bought. I never made that mistake again. We got married six months later.”

“From when you met?”

“Yeah,” he laughed. “Shit. I feel old now.”

“Do you want to talk about the Maddie situation?” Will asked.

Some parts of their three-way relationship I already knew about. If it was a triangle, Laura was definitely at the top of it, pulling the strings. Maddie was her sub. Steven was her husband. Any interaction between the two of them was exclusively orchestrated by her. Neither of them had sex behind her back, as far as I knew. If Steven said he had been sleeping with Maddie without Laura’s knowledge, well, I’d likely have to kick his ass.

These things only worked when everyone played by the rules.

“I don’t know what to say,” he said with a long sigh. “None of us thought in a million years that she would get pregnant. We were very careful. To the point where Laura asked her if she had slept with someone other than me. That didn’t go down very well.”

“She subbed for me once,” Will said. “She gets lost very quickly in her subspace. I’ll admit I’ve not seen that much of her since she moved in with you guys, but from what Laura’s said, she’s quite a… free spirit?”

“She’s a fucking airhead,” Steven said with affection. “In the best possible way, of course. She’s fantastic with the girls. If she was just our nanny and nothing else, she’d be worth her weight in gold.”

“If she wasn’t pregnant,” I said, speculating.

“Oh, everything would be fine,” he finished for me. “I like Maddie a lot. We’re good friends. We couldn’t all live together as we do if I didn’t get on with her. She’s very young, though. Or maybe naïve is a better word. Not innocent, but almost. She’s a small-town girl.”

“Is she still talking about putting the baby up for adoption?” I asked.

Will shot me a dark look. Clearly I wasn’t forgiven for keeping that from him.

“It’s been mentioned, yeah,” Steven said and took another long gulp of his beer. He watched intently as a bead of condensation rolled down the side of the bottle, then started to play with the paper label. “She wanted to give him to you two first of all. Now it looks more like we’ll keep him with us. I don’t know if Laura and I will formally adopt him. Getting a social worker involved in our household is a potential minefield of disasters.”

I thought of Laura’s “dungeon” above the garage. However well locked away all of those things were—and there was no way the children would be able to access the room at all—a social worker would take one look at it and come to the absolute wrong conclusion. I knew full well that our lifestyle was considered extremely deviant to society at large.

“She’s having a boy?” Will asked.

“Yeah,” Steven said. “We found out a while back actually.”

“Did you and Laura ever want more children?”

He grimaced at that. “We went through fertility treatment to have the twins,” he said. “Fortunately it never got as far as IVF, but Laura was on a lot of drugs for a year or so. I suppose we never thought that having more children was a possibility, and since the first pregnancy was twins, we didn’t have to worry about whether or not our child would have siblings growing up. It just wasn’t something that was on our radar. Our daughters are amazing. Now there’s another kid on the way and none of us have a clue what to do.”

“I suppose,” Will said slowly, “it all depends on whether you stay together, the three of you. Like you said, Maddie is ten years younger than you?”

Steven grimaced. “Eight.”

“And she’s definitely at a different place in her life,” he continued. “If she joins you now, then she’s making a huge commitment to the next stage of her life. Not just for herself, but for her son as well.”

“None of us can make this decision for her,” I added. “And from a sub’s perspective, I can see how that might be scary.”

“I don’t know anything about a sub’s perspective!” Steven exclaimed.

“I never understood how you stayed so far out of the scene,” Will said. “I mean, I’ve known Laura for ages now, and you’ve always been this mythical husband that no one had ever seen.”

Steven rolled his eyes. “I never had a problem with what she got up to,” he said. “She tried to get me into it a few times, and it just never worked. I love Laura very much, and she loves her lifestyle. It seemed wrong of me to try and insist that she give up something that clearly means so much to her.”

“The thing about being a sub,” I offered, knowing I was possibly the only person who could give Steven this information firsthand, “is that there’s a desire to submit somewhere in there. I know that it sounds obvious, but it can manifest itself in lots of different ways, and that’s what makes each sub different. It’s not always about pain.”

“I learned that when Maddie came along,” he admitted. “She doesn’t get off on pain at all. It’s all about the serving Laura, doing chores, being something like a maid or a slave or… I don’t understand, really. I just let them get on with it.”

“I’m different,” I said. “It’s much more about an exchange of power with me and Will, whether that’s through being tied up or blindfolded or whatever. I need to lose control.”

Steven shook his head. “It’s not like that for her.”

“I know,” I said. “It’s probably why Laura and I wouldn’t have worked in the long term but her and Maddie have.”

“I think it changed for Laura when she had the girls,” Steven said. “And I have a feeling it’s going to change for Maddie too, when she has her baby.”

“Which is why she was fixed on giving him away,” Will finished for him, filling in the gaps.

“Exactly.”

“Maybe it’ll be different after he’s born,” I offered. “Maybe she’ll change her mind.”

“Maybe,” he agreed.

Our server arrived with Will’s food; after a quick glance around, I decided another round of beers was called for.

“I should get going,” Steven said and pushed his chair back.

“You don’t have to,” I said. “Really. We’re good here.”

He smiled and shook his head. “No, this has been great. Thanks, guys. But I need to stop by the store for something for dinner, then pick the girls up. We should catch up again sometime, though.”

“If you want some time out with Laura, just let us know,” Will said. “We’re happy to babysit for you any time.”

“You know you shouldn’t say that to parents,” Steven said, smiling. “We might just take you up on the offer.”

“Seriously,” I said. I’d babysat for them before at their house when he and Laura had been at a work function, and another few times on afternoons when their regular babysitter or Maddie was unavailable. I didn’t mind watching the twins—with Will around too, it could be fun.