Letting Go 2: Stepping Stones [Awakenings 5] (Siren Publishing Classic)

by Michele Zurlo

  Ellen set an ice-filled drink on the table and settled into the chair next to her. They’d discussed purchasing Elysium in vague terms, both of them agreeing to wait on Alexei and Stefano to finish their investigation of the company. Her stepbrothers had advised them all to wait until they dug up financial reports on the assets and dirt on the Mehlbergs. The Morozovs smelled profit, and they were very invested in making this work for them all.

  Sabrina wasn’t sold on the whole idea. Part of her wanted to put the island behind her and never think about it again.

  “Trouble in paradise?”

  Sabrina frowned at Jonas’s best friend. At times like these, she had learned to tread lightly. Ellen had become one of her closest friends, but Sabrina knew her tightest bond was with Jonas. Sometimes she didn’t understand how the two of them managed to maintain a friendship with the way they argued, but they did. Not only that, but the arguments seemed to cement their commitment to their friendship.

  Taking her cues from Ryan, Sabrina always stayed out of it. She secretly enjoyed watching someone stand up to Jonas. While she could and did disagree with him, she hated fighting. Arguments only made her want to cry, and that felt too much like manipulation.

  “I haven’t heard anything from Alexei or Stefano.” She knew that wasn’t what Ellen meant, but she wanted to open up the conversation so Ellen could take the out she offered. It worked with Jonas. “Have you?”

  “You’ve been back a week. Usually people who have just spent a week having wild sex with their spouse are a little more happy and affectionate than you two.” Ellen spooned a mound of ice into her mouth. The temperatures were in the high eighties, but there was a nice breeze, so it was a perfect day for a backyard gathering.

  “We’re not newlyweds, Ellen. We have two kids and we’ve been together for five years.” She smiled to soften her dry tone. While she wasn’t well versed at sarcasm, she was going up against an expert.

  Ellen leaned closer. “You guys were all over each other before you left. Well, your version of it anyway. I haven’t seen you hold hands or kiss once. You usually find some excuse to touch him every few minutes, whether you realize it or not. Yet I see that you’ve managed to put an entire yard between you all afternoon. Even when the kids were napping and you didn’t have an excuse to be way over here, you didn’t try to get close.”

  “Wow. You’ve been busy. It must be exhausting to spend the day dissecting other people’s seating arrangements to come to that kind of conclusion.” When she’d first met Ellen, she would have died rather than say something like that. I hadn’t taken her long to realize how well Ellen responded to sarcasm. Of course, she expected a comeback.

  She spotted Ethan pulling up grass and throwing it at his sister. Correcting that provided an easy out, but Ellen pounced on her when she sat back down.

  “Sabrina, you’re barely holding on. Jonas is miserable. What happened?”

  Ellen was the kind of person who always pried, but she usually grilled Jonas. It occurred to Sabrina that he hadn’t said a word to Ellen, and he usually told her pretty much everything. She didn’t know what it meant that he’d kept it to himself. Had he forgotten it or filed it away as a meaningless incident? Part of her hoped so.

  Then why did the heavy weight in her chest just grow larger?

  “Ellen, I told you to leave Sabrina alone.”

  Sabrina looked behind her to find Jonas looming over her chair. If his clipped tone didn’t give it away, his entire countenance exuded fury. She shot to her feet and put her hand on his chest, hoping to calm him down enough so that they didn’t fight in front of the kids. Rose tended to cry when Jonas yelled, which was curious because he’d never raised his voice to their daughter.

  But Ellen’s hackles didn’t rise. She looked away, making motions with her mouth as if chewing on what to say next. At last she swallowed and nodded. “I apologize. I didn’t mean to upset either of you.”

  Sabrina felt bad. She hated the tension between Jonas and Ellen, and she couldn’t help but feel responsible for it.

  Ellen stood up and regarded them both somberly, worlds of sorrow in her deep brown eyes. “I just can’t stand to see you like this.”

  Jonas’s jaw set harder and he took a step forward. Sabrina moved at the same time, forcing him to put his arm around her to keep her from tripping over his feet. They’d touched plenty over the past week. He slept with at least one arm slung across her body. They snuggled together on the sofa with the kids. And he fucked her frequently, shoving her against a wall or down on the bed whenever he felt the urge. She craved those moments.

  “Jonas, she apologized and she means well.”

  Ellen, of course, held her ground. Jonas wasn’t violent, and neither of them were in the habit of backing down when they felt they were in the right.

  He gave her a reassuring squeeze. “I’m going to start dinner. Call me if you need me.”

  The way he looked out for her made her heart patter a little faster. She smiled to let him know she was all right. In a way, she felt better than she had all week. Somehow his show of protectiveness eased her anxiety.

  He sauntered across the lawn, and Ellen sat down. She sipped her melting mound of ice and they talked about the offer someone had made for the property housing Ellen’s nightclub.

  Later, Ryan cornered her near the gate to the swimming pool. She’d been in the water with the kids, conducting impromptu swimming lessons with six-year-old Jake, Ryan and Ellen’s oldest, and coaching Rose and Emily, Jake’s younger sister, on practice kicking. Mostly, they hung onto the edge of the pool and splashed with their feet, giggling maniacally with their three-year-old senses of humor.

  Jonas and Ellen had taken the kids into the house for baths to wash the chlorinated water from their little bodies.

  If she’d seen what was coming, she would have run. Ellen was the one who pried into people’s lives. Ryan usually sat back and watched with a contented smile on his face. He didn’t register as a threat, so he caught her with her guard down.

  He was about the same height as Jonas, perhaps an inch taller, which meant Sabrina had to tilt her head back to look at him when he stood nearby. Though it was early evening, the summer sun glinted from his hair, highlighting the multitude of reds in his close-cropped cut. He handed her a bottle of icy water.

  “It’s not easy to be a submissive.”

  She froze, her gaze focused on the drink in her hand. The gate was locked. That safety measure registered in her mind, taking the place of Ryan’s comment. “Thanks for the water.”

  She went to turn away, to head back along the flagstone path to the house, but Ryan caught her arm. “Sometimes it’s easier to talk to someone who has been through the same thing. I’m your friend, too, Sabrina. I’m here for you and I’m a damn good listener.”

  Taken aback, she stared at him. On a normal day, she forgot he was a submissive. Ellen’s dominance was hard to miss, but Ryan’s submissiveness wasn’t the first thing anyone noticed, if they noticed it at all. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and confident, not at all meek or mild. Laid-back, perhaps, but not a pushover. While he didn’t tend to argue with Ellen, he still voiced his opinion.

  He leaned against the fence, putting the sun to his back so that it no longer glinted in his eyes, and took a long sip from his water bottle. “I was with Jonas the last time he went to Elysium. That place blew our minds. We spent the whole time walking around and looking at everything. It definitely makes you question things, forces you to confront what you really want.”

  She continued to stare in silence. While she wanted to hear about what happened because Jonas hadn’t said much about his previous visit, she didn’t want to know about other women he might have met there.

  “When I got back, Ellen was pissed. We weren’t dating yet. Jonas and I had only gone to Elysium to show her we could handle the D/s lifestyle. Jonas had already figured out that he identified as a Dom.” He shook his head. “It didn’t appeal to me. At Elysiu
m, I began to suspect for the first time that I was submissive.”

  Sabrina looked away. She studied the pattern of patio tiles on her side of the gate. Elysium hadn’t clarified anything for her. At home she’d suspected she was more of a submissive than Jonas let her be. She lived for playing the roles that cast her in that light. Even when he played the virgin, she liked it best when he took charge.

  But actually living the part for five nights hadn’t felt right either. Parts of it did, and parts of it didn’t.

  She felt Ryan looking at her, waiting for her attention to return to him. She looked up at him, giving him the signal to continue.

  “As I said, Ellen was pissed. She had a crush on me, but she hadn’t pursued me. She had thought I was submissive all along, but you can’t force somebody to that realization. They have to make it on their own. They have to want it. The first time I knelt at her feet, I knew with every fiber of my being that I was doing it because I wanted to. She gave the order, but I wanted to fulfill it.”

  Sabrina didn’t want to kneel at Jonas’s feet. Did she? Confusion churned in her stomach, and she took another sip of water to calm it down. “It’s not that clear to me.”

  It was the first time she’d admitted her bewilderment aloud, and she wasn’t sure she was talking to the right person. But she couldn’t seem to find the courage to talk to Jonas. The prospect terrified her.

  “I know.”

  “I–I used my safe word. I’ve never done that before.”

  He put his arm around her and guided her to sit on the railing next to him. “There’s a first time for everything. Using your safe word isn’t a bad thing. It’s there for a reason.”

  Sabrina shook her head. “I used it for the wrong reason. I used it because I didn’t want to do what he said.” She blinked quickly, trying to suppress tears.

  Ryan gave her a measured look. She knew she was supposed to only use it if he’d gone too far and she couldn’t manage the pain. He hadn’t hurt her at all. Humiliation washed over her. Even though Ryan wasn’t looking at her with any kind of distaste, she still felt like running away.

  “How did he respond to that?”

  She couldn’t maintain even a semblance of a cool facade. “I didn’t let him. He wanted to talk, but I refused. I told him to get dinner without me, and I went back to the hotel room and locked myself in the bathroom. I took a bath.”

  She thought her behavior sounded horrible, but Ryan didn’t react as if she’d done anything wrong. He nodded thoughtfully, his blue eyes cloudy with sympathy.

  “And you haven’t talked since then?”

  Sabrina shook her head. “I was hoping he’d forget about it. That we’d just put the whole trip behind us and things would go back to how they were before.”

  “It doesn’t work that way.” Ryan closed his hand around her fist. She hadn’t realized she was squeezing so hard. “The longer you wait to talk, the harder it’s going to be to start. You’re both walking around here blaming yourselves, and neither of you knows exactly what’s wrong.”

  Her shoulders shook, a tiny vibration she hoped escaped his notice. “How can I tell him what’s wrong when I don’t even know myself? I’ve thought about it for hours—days—obsessively going over every detail to find out what bothers me and what I liked. But it’s like the more I think about it, the more it gets muddled in my head. I’m a problem solver, Ryan. I hate that I can’t figure it out.”

  He put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her into his embrace. So much for him not noticing that she was falling apart. “Maybe that’s because you need to figure it out together. What you’re going through isn’t easy, Sabrina. Ellen made me keep a journal so she could know what was going on inside my head. It might seem like it, but she’s not a mind reader. Neither is Jonas.”

  It did seem at times as if Jonas read her mind. He frequently seemed to know what she wanted or needed before she did. Did she take him for granted? Was that part of the problem?

  “This happened the last day, right?” She nodded, a small movement against the crook of his arm. “How did your other talks go?”

  She sat up and cocked her head at him. “What other talks?”

  “You guys talk after a scene.”

  Usually they did. Often it happened the next day or later that night after the kids were in bed, but Jonas usually asked her to talk about what she liked or didn’t like. They often planned the next scene during these times. But she’d built the talk into the last day and then she’d refused to talk to him.

  Ryan’s mouth dropped open when she confessed that she was at fault. “I can see where he was coming from in agreeing to that. He wanted you to think about the experience as a whole, not parse it into scenes. But it sounds like you needed to write down your thoughts and feelings every day. It’s a lot to process, especially because putting you in a constant submissive role changed your whole dynamic.”

  And he’d planned to do it all along, even going so far as to confide his intention to Ellen and Ryan. She marveled at her cluelessness. It hadn’t been a spur-of-the-moment thing inspired by the presence of so many D/s relationships on the island. She set her water bottle on the railing and covered her face with her hands. He’d played a big card, one she’d never guessed was up his sleeve, and it had blown up in their faces.

  More than ever, she dreaded talking to him. How could she face him knowing he’d finally come out and asked something from her that he really wanted, and she wasn’t sure she had it in her to want to give it to him?

  * * * *

  Rose ran to him, her wet blonde curls bouncing in little ringlets. The wind ruffled her pink nightgown as she flew barefoot across the grass, heading toward the deck where he stood with Ellen. Jake and Emily played in the kitchen. Ethan sat next to them with a small bowl of Cheerios. Rose had wanted Sabrina to braid her hair.

  When she got closer, he could see that she was upset. Her lower lip quivered and she threw herself in his arms. He hugged her tightly and stroked her back. “What’s wrong, sweetheart?”

  She clung to him, and a single teardrop fell. “Uncle Ryan made Mommy cry.”

  Jonas turned to Ellen, rage boiling in his blood. He’d told her to leave Sabrina alone, so she’d sent Ryan to ambush her while she kept Jonas distracted with giving the kids a bath.

  Ellen pressed her lips together. “Sometimes it’s easier to confide in someone who has walked in your shoes. It’s obvious she isn’t talking to you, and you aren’t talking to me and you won’t let me talk to her. Something’s gotta give, and I don’t want it to be your relationship.”

  “It’s none of your business.” He regarded her incredulously, though he shouldn’t have been surprised. Ellen never minded her own business. He loved that about her and he hated it, too.

  “It is too my business. You’re our best friends. We love you. If you think this is only affecting the two of you, think again.”

  “It’s not a big deal.” As the days went by, it was becoming less and less relevant. The rhythm of daily life had reestablished itself, sweeping them away in a tide of normalcy that seemed to be erasing whatever wounds he’d unknowingly inflicted.

  Ellen shook her head. “Things like this fester. They blow up when you least expect it. Pop the boil now and save you both some serious pain later.”

  The sun would set soon, and parts of the backyard were already cast in shadows. He could just make out Sabrina and Ryan coming toward them along the flagstone path leading from the house to the pool. He wiped Rose’s tears away. “Mommy’s okay.”

  Rose lifted her head and studied him with a stoic expression Sabrina attributed to him. She often said that Rose was exactly like him. “Mommy’s sad, Daddy. Are you going to fix her?”

  That astute observation drove home Ellen’s point. He glanced at her to see if she was gloating, but she just looked worried. He pressed a kiss to Rose’s forehead. “Yeah, baby. I’ll fix her. Why don’t you go on inside and play for a bit?”

  By the
time Sabrina made it to the patio where he could see her face clearly, her eyes showed no evidence that she’d been crying, but she looked defeated and lost. He preferred tears and anger, proof of passion.

  Ellen took one look at Ryan and disappeared into the house to pack up the kids.

  Jonas kept his eyes on his wife. She offered him a hollow smile as she walked past him and went inside. When Ryan tried to follow, he put his hand on his friend’s arm to stop him.

  “What happened?”

  Ryan shook his head. “You shouldn’t have let her go so long without debriefing. She doesn’t even know where to start. I’m not sure she knows what you want from her, and man, there’s nothing worse for a sub than not knowing how to make your Dom happy.”

  Jonas was at a loss. He simply wanted her to be happy. Ever since Ethan’s birth, she’d been headed down a dangerous road filled with more stress than she could handle. He’d tried talking to her. He’d tried letting her be. This was new territory for them. She’d never refused to talk to him before. He had no clue how to break through her wall. “Any suggestions?”

  Ryan blew out a stream of air as if he thought Jonas should have figured it out by now. “If she won’t talk, maybe she’ll write. Give her a journal. Sometimes it’s easier to write things down than it is to say them out loud.”

  Later, after the kids were in bed, he found her sitting at her vanity brushing her hair and staring into space. She didn’t notice him approaching until he took the brush from her hand, and she didn’t protest when he took over the job. He loved brushing her hair. Soft light reflected in a hundred different shades of brown. It was lighter now, after their week in the Caribbean, adding even more depth to her color.

  In the mirror, he saw that she’d closed her eyes. He wanted to turn her over his knee and spank her with the brush, if only to recreate the night that had been so perfect before things had gone so horribly wrong.

  He’d gone over it in his head a million times, and he couldn’t pinpoint a specific moment that would have pushed her past her endurance. As Ryan had said, he should have made her talk to him all along. Now he had no idea what problem had ballooned and tipped the balance.