in his.
“You don’t have to say it. I understand.”
A random note sounded on the piano as her fingers found the keys.
He squeezed her knee.
“I didn’t realize how alone I’ve felt,” she whispered, “with nothing but my music to fill the days and nights. I thought it was enough.”
He knew what that was like. With the exception of Owen, he hadn’t allowed himself to care about anything but music since Sara had passed and if he hadn’t known Owen before meeting her, Kellen wasn’t sure he’d have ever let anyone close again.
“What about your friends?” he asked. “Your family? Don’t you see them?”
“From time to time,” she said. Her hand moved to cover his on her knee, as if she feared he’d move it away. “They have their own lives. I’ve never been a priority to anyone.” She laughed, a dry empty sound. “When I was little, my mother spent a lot of time trying to wring a bit of talent out of me—ballet, gymnastics, art, if they had a class for it, I was in it. When she discovered I had a natural affinity for the piano, she handed me off to the best teachers my daddy’s money could buy and made sure they pushed me. It was almost as if she was relieved that she didn’t have to bother with me anymore. Daddy…” She inhaled a deep breath and pushed on. “Daddy always made appearances at my recitals to show he was proud of my accomplishments, but there just wasn’t any warmth in him. I never felt close to either of them, not the way I imagined other daughters felt about their parents. I thought that the only way I could make them love me was if I was perfect.”
He heard the pain in her voice and wished he could see her face. He probably should have encouraged her to find those candles. “What about your siblings?” he asked.
“Only child,” she said.
“Me too. Well, until I met Owen, and his family treated me like one of theirs.” He laughed, because even thinking about the Mitchells brought him joy.
“Tell me about Owen,” she said, her hand tightening on his. “I was homeschooled by the best tutors money could buy, so I never got to be around anyone my own age until I became an adult. Piano isn’t a team sport. More than anything, I would have liked to have had a childhood friend.”
“Your family must be very wealthy,” he said quietly.
“I never wanted for anything as a child,” she said. “Except affection.”
Kellen hadn’t had a surplus of either wealth or affection. His grandfather had been an important part of his youth, but he’d been old and age had done terrible things to his memory. He hadn’t lived long after they’d put him in a nursing home for his safety. Grandfather simply hadn’t thrived away from the brushy wilderness he loved to wander. It was as if taking him away from his land made him give up on life. It wasn’t long after his grandfather had passed that Kellen had met Owen. It was as if destiny had known how much Kellen would need him in the coming years.
“Living in the middle of nowhere, I didn’t have any close friends as a child either,” Kellen said. “I met Owen on the first day of seventh grade. We’d gone to different elementary schools, but they bused us to the same junior high. I was hoping for a fresh start. New school. Only half the kids there would know where I came from. Even then, no one would sit next to the poor kid who’d done a really bad job of trying to cut his own hair the night before, and no one would let the pudgy kid in orange and white horizontal stripes sit next to them. So Owen had no choice but to sit next to me. He’d given my bad haircut one long look, but he never said anything. He never made fun of me like the other kids did. Owen sat next to me on the bus every day for a week and we didn’t say a word to each other. We had the same lack of popularity at lunch and sat at the same table, both trying to be invisible, because when you’re thirteen, invisible is better than being noticed for being different.”
Dawn squeezed his hand. “Thirteen is an awful age. So I guess you two finally started talking to each other. Or do you still just sit in silence, trying to be invisible?”
Kellen chuckled. “We started talking after his mother stood up for me in the principal’s office.”
“Principal’s office? Were you a troublemaker?”
“I only made trouble when I couldn’t ignore it any more. And there’s just something in Owen so pure and good that I wanted to preserve it. I hated that those assholes would walk up behind him in the cafeteria and squeal like pigs as they shoved him against the table. I hated how they treated him far more than I hated how they made fun of my clothes, my shoes, my haircut, and the trailer I lived in with my mother and her welfare check. Owen had never done a mean thing to anyone in his life. Where I came from didn’t matter to him, and he wasn’t upset that he was forced to sit next to me on the bus and at lunch. He seemed grateful.
“So a week after we started hanging out in silence, Owen’s sitting there across the cafeteria table from me, minding his own business as usual, and this fucking asshole, Jasper Barnes, picks up Owen’s chocolate pudding cup and smashes it into his chest. ‘You still going to eat that shit?’ he said. ‘I bet you will, Piggie. Lick it off. Eat your own shit, Piggie.’ And then he starts making those pig-squeal sounds.”
“That’s so mean.”
“I was pissed, not going to deny it, but I probably would have just sat there and tried not to watch, grateful it wasn’t me being targeted. Then Owen lifted his head and he looked at me. I saw the shame in his eyes. Shame. What the fuck did he have to be ashamed of? That fucking bully was the one who should have been ashamed. When Owen started to clean the pudding off his shirt with a napkin, I fucking lost it. I was a scrawny kid and didn’t have a chance against a big jock like Jasper Barnes, so I went after him with my fork. I didn’t even get the chance to stab him with it before the teachers pulled me off him. I got suspended for using a weapon at school and later got my ass kicked by that bully and half the defensive line of the football team, but it was worth it because Owen started talking to me after that. Actually, he hasn’t shut up since.”
Kellen smiled as he thought about Owen’s ceaseless prattle. He was definitely a talker. And something about sitting in the dark with Dawn O’Reilly made Kellen a talker too.
“I’m glad you became friends. I can tell he means a lot to you.”
“I’d die for him. I don’t say that lightly. Owen’s always saying how I saved him by protecting him from the bullying, but he saved me a thousand times over. No telling where I’d be today if it wasn’t for him and his family. He didn’t see the dirt-poor bastard that everyone else in town saw. He never judged me based on my mother’s poor choices. Owen just saw me. It didn’t bother him that his mom gave me his older brother’s hand-me-downs. Owen said great things like, ‘You have no idea how glad I am that I don’t have to try to squeeze into Chad’s old clothes anymore’ and ‘I can’t believe my mom gave you socks and underwear for your birthday. The woman is so embarrassing.’ The woman is a saint, is what she is. I hit my growth spurt in eighth grade and if it hadn’t been for Janine, I’d have been wearing high-waters and ripping the seams out of my Spiderman T-shirt.”
“Did Owen realize that his mom was helping you?”
“He never said anything, but he had to have known. Everyone knew that I’d never met my father and that my mom took a welfare check because it’s hard for a drunk to hold down a job. She’d given up hope for a better life long before I was born. Our lack of money was what defined me. But not to the Mitchell family. I was Owen’s friend, so I was their surrogate son. His mother is a true treasure. Best woman I’ve ever known.”
“So there’s another woman in your life that I’ll never measure up to,” Dawn said.
Kellen chuckled. “No other woman can measure up to you either, Dawn. You are the only woman who sexually excites me with a mere song.”
She leaned in and whispered close to his ear, “I’ll take what I can get.”
It wasn’t only her song that sexually excited him. The tickle of her breath against his skin drew a soft moan of lo
nging from the back of his throat.
“Kellen?”
He loved the way his name sounded when she spoke it. “Dawn?”
“How long has it been since you last had sex?”
He sat stunned that she would ask him something so forward.
“Uh, why?” he said after a moment.
“I don’t usually have sex with men I’ve just meet, but I want to with you.”
He closed his eyes and swallowed. How could he turn down her offer? It wasn’t that women never propositioned him. They did it all the time—rubbed up against him, shoved their hands down his pants, whispered suggestions into his ear—but he hadn’t been interested. Sara’s memory had given him the strength to say no. Hell, when he was alone with a woman, he found forwardness downright repulsive, but he was alone with Dawn and her words didn’t have the usual effect on him. He wanted her. God, he fucking wanted her.
Promise you’ll never make love to another woman, Kellen. Sara’s words echoed through his head. They were like a slap to the face.
“It’s been five years,” he said.
“You haven’t done anything in five years?”
“I didn’t say I hadn’t done anything. I just haven’t been inside a woman in that long.”
“Oh,” she said.
He could hear the disappointment in her voice. This time he was glad it was dark so he didn’t have to see it on her face.
“What kinds of things have you done?” she asked unexpectedly.
“Alone or with Owen?”
She gasped. “With Owen? Are you gay?”
“I’m not gay, Dawn. A bit confused maybe.” He rubbed at his eyebrow with two fingertips while he gathered his thoughts. “Can I talk to you about something? Something I haven’t even talked to Owen about? Something I need to tell him but am so worried about how he’ll react that every time I try to bring it up, I can’t form the words.”
What was it about the darkness that allowed him to open up? Or maybe it wasn’t the darkness at all. Maybe it was the kindred spirit within the woman beside him that made him feel he could tell Dawn anything.
“I’ll listen,” she said. “I probably won’t say the right thing though.”
He doubted there was a right thing to say. “Soon after Sara died, Owen started going to sex clubs and guilting me into going with him.”
“What’s a sex club? Is it like a whorehouse?”
He smiled and couldn’t resist running a hand along the base of her spine. Oh the naughty things he could introduce her to, Miss Sweet and Vanilla.
“No, you pay for a certain service at a whorehouse and that’s what you get. Sex clubs are where people of certain sexual tastes congregate and hook up.” He turned his face to whisper in her ear, and the tickle of her hair against his nose set off nerve endings that sent waves of pleasure to his groin and triggered alarm bells in his head—alarm bells he chose to ignore. “What are your sexual tastes, Dawn? I can tell you where there’s a club for it.”
“I wouldn’t be comfortable hooking up with some stranger in a club,” she said. The muscles of her back were taut beneath his palm.
No matter how much he enjoyed it, he needed to stop touching her. This thing between them wasn’t going to happen. “I wouldn’t want you to hook up with a stranger,” he said, which was the truth, but he had no business saying that to her. And he really did need to talk about what was going on with Owen. Maybe someone outside their relationship could make sense of it. “So one night while I was waiting for Owen to finish up spanking and screwing some chick he’d just met, I caught the eye of a man named Toshi.”
Dawn shifted beside him, squirming slightly.
“I didn’t have sex with Toshi,” he said.
“It’s none of my business if you did.”
“Do you want me to not talk about this? I can tell it’s making you uncomfortable.”
“Yeah, uncomfortable,” she whispered. “We’ll go with that.”
“Toshi is a master in the Japanese art of Shibari.”
“Does that involve swords and disembowelment?”
“No, ropes and release. Toshi spoke of tying knots as if it were a high art form—the way an inspired painter or a poet or a musician talks of his work. I was intrigued. I guess I’m a sucker for an artist. I let him show me a few techniques on one arm. He taught me to tie a couple of knots and then when Owen came to collect me, Toshi told me to keep the rope and if I wanted to learn more, where I could find him.”
“So I guess you found him.”
“I did a lot of research about Shibari on the Internet, even read a few books, but ultimately I did seek him out, because nothing compares to being taught one-on-one by a master.”
“That’s true.”
“He has a studio in San Francisco,” Kellen said. “He binds people with ropes and then he photographs them. For the first year after Sara died, nothing excited me—emotionally or physically. But as I walked through his gallery, admiring his work—flesh against intricate designs in colored rope—I’m not going to lie, I was aroused. The guilt almost made me leave.”
“Why did you feel guilty? It sounds erotic to me. Aren’t we supposed to get excited by things we find erotic?”
He didn’t want to go into that, so he pressed forward in his story. “Yeah, well, I asked Toshi to teach me to be an artist like him, to show me how to tie the ropes into designs that accentuated every line of the human form. He said in order to understand the art form, I first had to be a subject. He told me to strip off my clothes and allow him to bind me.”
Dawn squirmed again. When her hand lightly touched his bare knee, he gasped. He should have skipped this part of the story, he realized too late. That first experience with bondage had been one of the most intense emotional and sexual experiences of his life.
“Did you go through with it?” she asked.
“Yeah. I was scared to death. With each knot Toshi tied, I became more tense, more afraid, more aroused. When he was finished, I was aware of every inch of my body. I was completely helpless. I thought he might force me to have sex—thought I’d be okay with it even though I’d promised Sara. But once he had me bound, he whispered, ‘Now, you are free, my student,’ and then he sat beside me with one hand between my shoulder blades while I fought the rope. Not physically. I couldn’t move if I’d wanted to. But mentally I raged against my restraints for a really long time.”
“What did he mean you are free?”
“I didn’t understand until I stopped fighting against the bonds. Physically, emotionally, and spiritually I gave the ropes control, and then I understood what he meant. By giving up control, I became free.”
“That doesn’t make sense at all,” she said.
“It won’t unless you experience it for yourself.”
“Do you do the rope thing now? What did you call it?”
“Shibari. I haven’t been practicing much recently. For about three years, it was an outlet for me. I enjoyed tying women, but I only did it when Owen was with me. I’m not sure I trusted myself to be alone with a woman. They tend to beg for sex after I tie them, and I wasn’t willing to take it that far. Owen had no problem with that aspect. He’d have sex with them if they wanted it and eventually he started helping with the bondage too.”
“So you and Owen tied women up and then he had sex with them?”
“Not always. We left that decision to the woman.”
“But you didn’t do anything sexual with them?”
He took a deep breath. “I would usually…” He coughed. Wow, was he really going to tell her this? “…perform oral sex on them.”
Her breath caught, and she squirmed again.
“But I never penetrated them, never allowed them to touch my cock in any way. No blow jobs. Nothing.”
“You had to have been miserable.”
“I would have been, but Owen helped me out.” His stomach clenched. What must this woman think of him?
“How?” she asked.
> “Hand jobs.”
“Oh, but no sex?”
“Isn’t it all sex?” he said. “That’s why I’m so confused. Sara was gone before I was introduced to Shibari, so somehow I convinced myself that it was okay. She didn’t like oral sex—”
“I like it,” Dawn blurted.
A long silence hung awkwardly between them, and he prayed for a bolt of lightning to light her features so he could see her expression.
“I mean if the guy knows what he’s doing,” she said. “Maybe she didn’t like it because you’re not good at it.”
Kellen chuckled. “Trust me, I’m good at it. She was a bit timid in bed.” Kellen rubbed the back of his neck. “That kind of deep intimacy embarrassed her, so she didn’t want me making out with her pussy for hours on end.”
“Dear lord,” Dawn whispered.
“So I convinced myself that oral sex didn’t go against my oath to her.”
“Thank God.”
Kellen chuckled at Dawn’s little asides. “And though I told her I’d never let a woman touch my cock, I never said anything about a man touching it. So I used Owen to get me off because I felt comfortable enough with him to let him touch me. The thought of any other man anywhere near my cock makes me ill, but Owen is different for some reason, and that’s the part I don’t understand. Why am I okay with him touching me?”
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