Weighted Wires

by Lilia Moon

  He raises an eyebrow. “No.”

  I blink, because it never occurred to me I was reading this wrong. “Shit. Sorry. I made a dumbass assumption.”

  He shakes his head a little. “Right assumption. Wrong words. I would like us to try a scene, yes. You have my rock-solid commitment I’d be your Dom from one end of it to the other.” His eyes won’t let me go. “You need to know that, Bright Eyes. I’d catch you. No matter what.”

  I want to tell him he has no idea what he’s promising, but if he’s spent the last seven years being Randy’s mentor and friend, he probably does. “I’m a lot to handle. I was even before I broke.”

  He just looks at me. “I hate that you use that word to describe what happened, but I won’t take it away from you. I would like a chance to show you that it’s fucking wrong, though.”

  I can feel my eyebrows winging up. “Arrogant, much?”

  He shrugs. “Confident. I know my strengths. Holding a container is one of them. Emotions don’t scare me, even ones as big as yours.”

  They should, but his eyes say he’s telling me the absolute truth as he knows it. And somewhere in the clusterfuck that was me bent over Matteo’s desk, he got at least a taste of what he’s asking to mess with. I squint at him as the wind blows past my eyes, because I’m remembering just how much of a taste he got, and there’s a question I’ve been too addlebrained to ask. “What’s the story with this mindreading thing that you do?”

  He studies me. “It’s more like being an empath. An emotional sponge. I pick up things, which is why I’m particularly good at containers. I needed them for myself, to keep track of where I ended and other people began.”

  Something in his words sucker punches me in the gut. I hunch over my knees, trying not to retch—because seven years too late, someone has finally put words to what happened in that room.

  I lost track of where I ended.

  His hand strokes my hair. Not trying to move me, not trying to comfort. Just there.

  I suck in air, trying to get my lungs to re-inflate. “Damn you.”

  A long pause, but his fingers don’t stop the gentle stroking. “I’m not a mindreader, India. I’m not sure what I just stepped in.”

  It’s somehow a relief that he doesn’t know. “What you just said. It’s a good description of what went wrong with Randy and me. I didn’t know where I ended. I lost track and I blew up a scene and screwed up a really good guy because of it.”

  “That’s your version.” His fingers wrap in my hair. Tugging. Pulling me up to face him. “Want to hear mine?”

  I really don’t. He keeps trying to strip away all I know. “Do I have a choice?”

  Something flashes in his eyes, hot and pissy. “Yes.”

  Shit. I close mine, but I let him see my regret first. “Sorry. I don’t mind having sharp edges, but that was just mean. And totally undeserved.”

  His fingers tug on my hair. Pulling my eyes back open. “I don’t mind your edges, and I appreciate your honesty. I’d also like you to hear mine.”

  Steel traps have nothing on this guy. “Fine.”

  His lips twitch, but then the amusement flees, and I’m facing solemn, steady Dom. “You did lose track. Most subs can’t do that. Most people can’t. But the ones who can—it’s not a mistake. It’s a gift. A kind of surrender that most Doms will never get to touch their entire lives, and their lives will be poorer for it. Randy wasn’t ready to catch you. He knows it, and the woman he’s with now is only just starting to be able to walk into the shallow end of what you hit him with seven years ago with very little warning.”

  His eyes are drilling into me so hard I can’t breathe. “It wasn’t your fault. You did nothing wrong. He wasn’t ready, and you didn’t know enough about who you were and what you needed to make sure he was capable of catching you. But the answer isn’t to hide who you are or to try to make it smaller. You need someone who can hold what you need to release.” He pauses and takes a deep, slow breath. “If I’m not the guy you want doing that, you need to find someone.”

  His sincerity is a ringing bell that won’t let me hide. My throat closes, fighting against the words he’s trying to wrap me in. The ones that say I’m special, not broken. Worthy, not dangerous. I gulp, but I’m a fish out of water, and whatever this oxygen stuff is, it isn’t what I need.

  His thumb brushes against my cheek. “You have the ride home to give me your limits list and your safewords. Then be in the loft bed in the garden cottage in an hour.”

  An anvil lands on my fish. I gape.

  He grins. “I also need permission to raid your studio.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Rafe

  I look down at the key in my palm. It took half the ride home for India to say a single word. The key to her studio came after the limits list—and after she declared “garden gnome” her safeword.

  The woman I’m lusting after is anything but simple.

  I admit, as I let myself into her studio, just how much I want this. Want her. There’s enough Dom in me that I would do this simply because it’s needed. Healing has always been one of the ways I serve, and a sub carrying seven years of scars she doesn’t deserve is more than enough reason to get me onboard. But it’s not my primary reason, and she needs me walking into that cottage in an hour wearing honesty like a second skin. I’m in this because she’s fascinating and she tugs at everything inside me, including all the wires that run straight to my cock.

  I close the door behind me and lean against it, inhaling the emotional stillness. Processing. Letting what lives inside me do the work it needs to do, because I didn’t lie to her on the ferry. What lives inside her is a rare gift, and if she chooses to bring it to my bed, I need to be ready.

  I’ve only known a couple of other subs like her. One taught me most of the important things I know about being a Dom. The other was a visitor. A drop-in from a club in Seattle. Young and blonde and cheerful and it took her about five minutes to have Adrian, the Tangled brat squad, and every unattached Dom in the club ready to worship at her feet.

  I grin. Ari became a friend that day, mostly because I was tending bar and got to stand back long enough to realize that she walked in expecting to leave disappointed. Not in a professional sense. She came to talk marketing with Adrian, and that part left the man who owns the kink scene in Vancouver deeply impressed and cranky he wasn’t able to poach her.

  But the part I saw, and the part that reminds me of India, are the eyes of a sub who doesn’t think anyone can handle her. The eyes of one of our best and brightest and most dangerous. Subs who surrender like oceans and kick up a tsunami if you get it wrong.

  To touch that is an immeasurable responsibility.

  Randy was a good Dom seven years ago and he’s a better Dom with the consequences of tearing guilt and humility and three years of marriage under his belt. But he’s not me.

  I breathe into that. I’ve earned my stripes, my right of entry into the very small group of Doms capable of engaging with the kind of sub India is and holding the container she needs to set herself free—and I didn’t earn those stripes as a Dom. I did it as a little boy who could feel all of everything and desperately needed the tools that would keep him sane. Tools my mom helped me wield until I could do it myself, even though she could only see their handles dimly.

  I push off the door. Enough emotional mumbo-jumbo. I know who I am and what I’m capable of. I’m here to equip that guy with some new tools. I grabbed my gear bag from the back of the plane, and it’s reasonably well stocked, but India’s eyebrows aren’t her only piercings, and I’m a guy who appreciates strategically placed jewelry. Especially if I can acquire myself the right accessories.

  I turn on the lights and head over to the large, flat display box I spied earlier. It’s short and wide and divided into dozens of smaller compartments, some with bits of metal trying to spill out into neighboring slots, some holding only a single ring or a pair of weights.

  I run my fingers along
the wooden dividers. India’s organizational system appears to run to “wherever I happened to dump it,” so this is going to be a treasure hunt. There are lots of rings in various diameters and wire weights. Some eyebrow sized, some cock sized. Bread-and-butter for her business, obviously. Large quantities of all of them, with colorful shimmers that elevate them well above the realm of boring. I pick up one in a resonant teal blue and tilt it in the light.

  Sculpture, although I bet she doesn’t call it that.

  I set the teal ring back down, which is harder than it should be. I don’t have any holes in my body it would fit, but I have a sudden urge to add one.

  I grin. I’m pretty sure I know someone who wouldn’t mind taking on that job.

  I move on to the more esoteric compartments. Curved studs full of attitude and interesting geometric stoppers. I touch pointed ends that looks like spear tips. My personal preference is for rounded, but the points are interesting. My tongue would have fun exploring them. I grin and reach for more points, this time attached to fine chains with clips. Closer to what I came in here for.

  I run my fingers over the cool metal, letting it soothe my Dom. At least half of what’s in this box is intended to be worn in places the vanilla world thinks of as private—but this is jewelry that’s meant to be seen.

  An artist still staking her space in a world her heart never really left.

  I find some simple spheres that have nice weight in my hand and pocket a couple of those along with the points on short chains. And then, because I can’t resist, I go back for the teal ring too. I don’t know why, but maybe it will come to me. Nobody has ever accused me of being a boring Dom.

  Inventive is only part of what India needs, though. I run my hand over the contoured geography of her box one last time, and then I head over to her corner chair. I want to soak in more of the energy of who she is while I do some thinking on how to play this.

  I don’t glance out the window toward her garden cottage. I’ll know if she goes in. I also know there’s a real possibility she won’t. My job is to be ready for either.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  India

  I cuddle into the huge down duvet that covers the bed I’m not supposed to be in yet. I’m pretty sure Rafe doesn’t know I’m here. I came in the back way, through the window. I need the hour, and I need it in a place where I can’t wiggle away from what staying here means.

  I went on a plane ride and it blew up the story I’ve been telling myself for seven years, or at least it tried, and I feel like a plant that just got yanked up by its roots. Not dead yet, not even really breathing hard, but knowing those things are coming unless I find new soil.

  I could plant myself right back in the hole I just got ripped out of, but Rafe turned his steady gaze on all the things in that dirt that might be lies, and I’m not sure I can fit myself back in there anymore, no matter how much I want to.

  I thought I was content with being vanilla. That I’d made my peace with leaving a world that has too much room for abuse when all you have to stop things is a word. A nice, comfortable justification for ducking and running and leaving a whole bunch of people hanging, including me.

  I sigh. That’s probably too extreme. Like most truths, this one probably lives somewhere in the middle, and that’s never been comfortable ground for me. I like extremes. I’m lying in this bed with my boots still on because I maybe like them too much. Because Rafe’s promise, and it absolutely is one, is siren song to something inside me that was apparently just waiting for his kind of oxygen to show up.

  I close my eyes. I truly didn’t know. I somehow thought I was doing okay, that those needs had dimmed living in Crawford Bay, calmed by air that touches mountain peaks and has never visited the inside of a dungeon.

  I pull the covers up over my head. The dungeon has come to me.

  I huff out into the duvet-enclosed dim. Maybe I should let it. He’s not going to stay. Kootenay Lake is just a wilderness version of white-picket-fence suburbia, and Rafe’s a city boy. A city Dom. He’s got the intensity of Vancouver all over him, no matter what Matteo might be angling for.

  He won’t stay.

  I roll over onto my belly, my boots hanging off the end of the bed, stick my nose out into air the small space heater is rapidly warming up, and consider the possibilities. A Dom with a plane and a reason to visit. Someone who can maybe handle enough of me that I can let off some steam without messing up the life that’s holding me steady.

  I grin into the pillow. I can hear my own denial, my avoidance of the tricky parts in that gooey-cute little storyline I’ve just written for myself. But it could still maybe work. I give the arrogant guy who thinks he can handle me a chance to show his stuff. If there’s potential, I invite him back sometime. Let him apply a little flame every so often and dump myself in cold water the rest of the time.

  Kinky fuck buddies.

  The heat in my belly simmers happily. It likes this plan.

  I swallow, because I know gooey-cute isn’t the whole story. I’m out here in the middle of the vanilla wilderness because the heat in my belly lost her way once.

  Or maybe didn’t.

  I shake my head. The idea that what happened seven years ago is not my fault is still alien. A puzzle piece that fell out of some random box, and I have no idea what to do with it.

  I sigh. Rafe’s a smart, confident, insightful guy, but he has no idea what he’s asking to hold. Hell, I don’t have any idea, and that’s the number one reason I should get my ass in gear and roll out of this bed.

  “Nice boots, but you’ll probably be more comfortable without them.”

  My head shoots out of the cocoon I’ve made for it, alarm jangling every neuron I have. “How the hell did you get up here?”

  He raises an eyebrow. “I used the ladder. Which clearly isn’t the way you came.”

  He can think I teleported for all I care. “You’re early. I have an hour.”

  He lays a black bag down at the edge of the futon and sits on the tiny shag rug at the end of the bed, moving my feet into his lap. “I’m right on time. You have your safewords.”

  My brain freaks until it remembers the one I gave him. Which is a bad sign, and even I’m not idiot enough to walk into a scene with a safeword I can’t remember. “I need to change them. I’ll use traffic lights.” I can hear the thready edges in my voice, the ones way too damn close to unraveling. “Yellow. Red.”

  His fingers move to the laces of my boots. “Fine.”

  Something in my belly reaches up and tries to strangle my throat. “I haven’t decided yet, Rafe. I don’t know.”

  He looks at me. “You decided the moment you came up here. You also have the right to change your mind.” His fingers are still working my laces, easing a boot off one foot, and then the other.

  All it will take is a single word. I should be using it. Ending this. Or jumping him where he sits until he gives me what I need. Consent is a clean and clear thing, or it’s supposed to be, anyhow. I have no idea what to do when both answers are a metric fuckton of need inside me.

  I suck in a breath, aware I’m riding a spiral toward panic.

  And aware he’s letting me. Trusting me to decide what my answer is while he peels off my thick, wooly socks, or at least trusting that he can hold the wall I’m about to crash into if I don’t get my shit together.

  Which is embarrassing enough that on my next inhale, I start to feel the spiral heading back down. He’s taking off my boots. I can deal.

  His sets my naked feet down on the end of the bed as his eyes meet mine. “Strip, Bright Eyes. It’s time to let me see you.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Rafe

  Almost, she let herself out of that stranglehold of control she’s held herself in for seven years—the one that says she has to be in charge because she’s far too scary when she isn’t. She stares at me, my order to strip a dart between her eyes that has her paralyzed, her brain racing to try to keep that control in pl
ace.

  I’m amazed and awed she’s pulled it off for this long. She’s not someone who lives naturally in her head. She’s elemental. An artist and a volcano and nothing that should ever be on a leash. Not one of her own making, anyhow. I put a whip crack of energy into my voice. “Now, sweetheart. Clothes off or put your boots back on and leave.” In or out. No shades of gray, because she needs it, and because I’m going all-in on what lives inside her.

  I don’t think it will let her walk away.

  The trembling starts in her hands. Wavering. Hovering. Resisting the pull of needs that are afraid to take form and demand what they deserve.

  With any other sub, I would let her shake. Consent is the defining core of the world I live in, and we both know she hasn’t given hers yet. But her wounds are rooted in that place of not knowing, and she needs to be able to trust that I’ll seek her consent out anyhow and know it before she does.

  I pause one last heartbeat, because I’m about to step into an act of Dom arrogance so big it deserves a moment of quaking. Then I reach forward, wrap my hands around her wrists, and guide them to the buttons of her shirt. I’ve wanted to undo them all day, but it’s her fingers that need to do the work to let me in.

  They move, clumsy with the first button, but making an effort. Fortunately, it’s an old shirt, soft and willing. The red button slides through the hole with little more than a fumbled suggestion.

  I guide her wrists down to the next one. Her eyes stay glued to our joined hands.

  This time, the button lets go to reveal bare skin where I was expecting the band of a bra to be. I hiss out a breath. “Have you been naked under there all this time?”

  Her lips quirk a little.

  Fuck. My cock leaps in my pants, more than happy to try his skill at undoing buttons.