“So I should just ask?” Caine said skeptically.
“I would,” Jerry answered. “Communication is one of the most important parts of a relationship like this. It’s an important part of any relationship, really, but it’s absolutely critical if your partner is giving you the freedom and responsibility to discipline them. Whatever you do, you need to make sure that both of you are communicating and being honest with one another. That is an absolute bedrock rule for Elly and me. It is for everybody I know really.”
Caine nodded. “So, how am I supposed to know if I can do this?”
Jerry, bizarrely, burst out laughing.
“I’m serious!” Caine huffed.
“I know you are,” Jerry said. “What’s funny is that you already know the answer. I just told you.”
Caine stared at him for a long moment before understanding dawned. “Talk to Norah?”
“Exactly,” Jerry said. “Tell her what you’re thinking about. Tell her what you’re willing to try and what you’re not. That’s the only way you’re going to know.”
“Right,” Caine agreed. That was the logical next step. He needed to talk to Norah. That was simple enough. Wasn’t it?
Chapter 8
It should have been simple. That was one of the best things about Norah. They had never had any problem talking with one of the other. Caine himself wasn’t much for frivolous conversation, but it had always come easy with Norah. Until now. The closer it got to their regular weekly movie night, the more nervous he became.
What if she did not feel the way he did? What if she wasn’t interested in taking the relationship beyond friendship? What if he brought it up and then ended up sounding like a complete idiot? These questions plagued him for days, growing increasingly intense as the appointed evening grew closer.
Norah was cooking tonight so he did not even have the preparations to distract him. Norah was her usual good-natured self, keeping up casual conversation about her progress on preparations for the store and the movie they were watching tonight. It was Goonies, he thought. He tried to listen, but despite his best efforts, his mind kept drifting back to the things they needed to talk about. Thankfully, Norah didn’t seem to notice and was content just to let him listen and eat quietly.
When they were done eating, Norah gathered up the dishes and took them to the sink. Caine tried to help, but she waved him off. “It’ll only take me a minute,” she insisted. “It’s not like there’s that much to clean with only the two of us.” Caine knew her well enough by now to know when any attempt at argument was useless. He simply nodded and took the opportunity to pour them both a glass of wine, hoping it would help to calm his nerves. Hooking both glasses in one hand, he carried them into the living room, setting them on the low coffee table before settling on one end of the couch and trying to gather his thoughts for the coming discussion. Maeve immediately jumped up onto the back of the couch and demanded to be petted. Caine obliged, rubbing her absently with one hand while he tried to sort all that he was thinking and feeling into some coherent order.
Regardless of the anxiety he was feeling, he knew they needed to talk about this thing between them. Despite his best efforts to keep the relationship just friendly, he desperately wanted more than that. His attraction was growing stronger by the day and unless he seriously missed his guess, Norah felt the same. It was the white elephant in the room, and it had been for weeks. Ignoring it hadn’t helped. If anything, it had only made things worse. Hearing Norah coming across from the kitchen, he took a deep breath to steel himself, and hoped he wasn’t about to make the biggest mistake of his life.
Norah settled on the other end of the small sofa, facing him. He handed her the glass of wine he’d poured for her. She took it, smiling, and murmured a quiet thank you. Caine cleared his throat. “I wanted to talk to you—about us.”
“What a coincidence,” Norah said. “So did I. What they say about great minds thinking alike and all must be true,” she teased gently.
Caine smiled. “Maybe it is.” He gestured in her direction. “By all means, ladies first.”
Norah’s eyes widened and her expression took on the startled, half terrified look of a deer suddenly caught in the headlights of an oncoming car. “No, no, you brought it up. You go ahead.”
Caine shook his head. “I insist.”
For a brief moment, it looked as though Norah would protest, but then something in her expression changed and determination took over instead. She gulped down the majority of her wine, set the glass firmly back on the coffee table, and plunged ahead. “I know you’re not from the community, and I presume that means you don’t share our interests, but...” She paused here and took a deep breath. He could almost see her choosing her words very carefully. “Could you ever see yourself in an HOH type relationship?”
That was the million-dollar question, wasn’t it? He’d been wrestling with that very question for days now. “If you had asked me that a week ago, I would have said no, absolutely not. It was out of the question.” Disappointment so deep it hurt him to see it came over Norah’s face. He had a sudden and intense urge to draw her into his lap and reassure her, but he swallowed it down. Now wasn’t the time. If this conversation went well, maybe they could get to that later, and if it didn’t go well, it was better that he not get any more attached than he already was. “You know how I told you I was raised by my grandparents?” Norah nodded. “Like I told you before, my grandmother – Mamere – was great, but my grandfather was another story.” He cleared his throat and swallowed hard. Benjamin was the only other person he had ever admitted this to, and it wasn’t any easier this time around. “Well, to put it bluntly, he was a drunk who beat me every chance he got.” He picked up his wine and drank deeply. There, it was out. The hardest part was over, just please God don’t let her ask for too many details.
Norah gasped, hands coming up to cover her mouth. Her eyes filled with tears. “Oh my God, Caine, I’m so sorry. No one should ever have to go through that.”
“On that point, we agree,” Caine said wryly. “Logically, I know it isn’t like that for you. Trust me, Benjamin gave me an earful about how what he and Jonathon, or any of you, do around here isn’t like that.”
“It isn’t,” Norah agreed, “or at least it shouldn’t be. I’ve heard rumors that there have been a few abusive relationships, but from what I hear, the community gets rid of them pretty quickly.”
“They are not just rumors,” Caine told her. “At least not all of them. Jerry’s wife Elly was married before, and her first husband, from what I’ve heard, was horribly abusive. He nearly killed her, more than once.”
As fair skinned as Norah was, Caine wouldn’t have believed it was possible for her to go any paler, but he would’ve been wrong. All color drained from her face. “I knew people said Elly was shy, but I had no idea. I can’t even imagine...”
“No, you can’t,” Caine said bluntly, “and you have no idea how glad I am that you can’t. You don’t need to live with that in your mind and on your soul, but I do, and because I do there’s no way I could ever hit you.”
“Spanking isn’t hitting,” Norah said automatically. “It’s not the same.”
“I know it’s not for you,” Caine told her, “but it’s too close for me. It’s not that I don’t believe you feel that it’s different. I do. I absolutely believe it’s different for you. It has to be. Trust me, nobody who felt about it like I do would voluntarily want it. Even the thought makes me want to throw up.”
“I understand,” Norah said quietly. She wasn’t crying, but he heard tears in her voice. He didn’t blame her. This conversation was enough to make him want to cry himself.
He reached out and took her hand. “That’s why I’ve been trying so hard not to let myself be attracted to you. I knew you had needs that my past and my scars wouldn’t let me meet, but the fact is I am attracted to you. As hard as I tried, it doesn’t seem to matter. I really like you, and I would like to see if we could w
ork out some sort of compromise.”
Compromise? Norah’s head was spinning, but even in that state she knew that what Caine was saying didn’t make any sense. How could they compromise? He’d just told her flat out that he couldn’t spank her. She needed a DD relationship. He knew that. He’d admitted that from the very beginning. How could there be any compromise given those two things?
“I don’t see how,” Norah said sadly. “I wish I did. I don’t want this to end like this, but I need an HOH.”
“I understand that,” Caine told her. “I thought the same thing until I talked to Ben. He seems to think we could still have the structure and the rules and the consequences, just without spanking. We could use other types of penalties instead that don’t hold the same issues for me. How would you feel about that?”
Norah couldn’t do anything but stare. She had only thought her head was spinning before. Now it was really spinning. DD without spanking? She’d heard of it before, of course. She knew perfectly well spanking wasn’t the only consequence most people used. She was fine with that, but not being spanked at all? Despite what her logical mind said, her heart felt like that was kind of missing the point. Would the rest of it even work if she wasn’t also getting the spanking she needed?
At the same time, Caine wasn’t wrong about their attraction. She was attracted to him, no matter how hard she tried to deny it. She’d been falling for him for weeks now. If she were honest, they had essentially been vanilla dating since the weekend he went with her to the yard sale. This was only taking it up a notch. It was taking it up a level that he did not need but that he knew she did, and it was very clear that he was only doing it for her. If he was making that kind of concession for her, didn’t she owe it to him to make an effort to do the same? She knew she did, but her heart still tripped over the notion of not being spanked. Could she really give that up?
Caine’s hand brushed over her hair, drawing her out of her thoughts. “Norah, honey, what are you thinking? You’re killing me here. Talk to me.”
“What sort of consequences?” she asked, grabbing onto the first jumbled thought she could.
“I suppose that would depend on the rules we decide on, wouldn’t it?” Caine replied. “Kind of a make the punishment fit the crime kind of thing.”
Norah nodded. That made sense, and she had to admit despite his feelings toward spanking, he really did seem to have a pretty good grasp of how the rules and consequences part of this sort of relationship worked. “For a vanilla guy, you sure do seem to know a lot about this.”
Caine laughed. “Do not piss off Lt. Col. Benjamin Steppings by making incorrect assumptions about his relationship unless you are prepared to sit through a very thorough lecture on just exactly how discipline relationships work.”
Norah laughed. “I don’t really know Benjamin well. I’ve met Jonathon of course. Everyone knows Jonathon. But from what I hear, Ben is extremely protective of Jonathon and will not hesitate to singe the ears off anyone who mistreats him.”
“That is the God’s honest truth,” Caine told her, “and Lord help anybody who—even mistakenly—implies their relationship might be abusive. I swear to you that wasn’t really what I was trying to do just, given the way I grew up, I had some, shall we say, extremely incorrect assumptions. Ben let me know it, fast.”
Norah giggled. “He did, did he?”
Caine shot her a wry grin. “Yes, he did. He explained, in no uncertain terms, how what he and Jonathon—and the rest of you—do is nowhere near what my grandfather did to me. I believe that now. I honestly do, but I’m still not comfortable with the whole inflicting pain part of it. I’m sorry, but I just can’t. So that’s when he suggested non-spanking punishments instead.”
“So what did he suggest?” Norah wanted to know.
“Corner time, writing lines, punishment essays, things like that,” Caine replied. “How do you feel about that?”
In theory, Norah didn’t have a problem with that at all. Frankly, she had always imagined that any DD relationship would probably include consequences of that sort as well as spankings. What she wasn’t sure she could wrap her head around was having only that without the spanking. Would that be enough? After all, being able to openly live in a relationship that involved spanking was one of the major reasons she had moved out here. Could she really give that up? Did she even want to?
At the same time, she had feelings for Caine, strong feelings. She’d been trying to convince herself that she only valued him as a friend, but while that was undoubtedly true, it wasn’t all she felt. Didn’t she owe it to herself—to both of them really—to at least explore what they had between them and see where it would lead? Besides, it was obvious that Caine had gone to a lot of trouble to try to find a compromise they could both live with. Didn’t she owe him the same consideration?
“I don’t have a problem with any of that,” she said finally.
“But...” Caine interjected. “You might as well tell me. I can practically hear you thinking from here.”
“What?” she replied. “But nothing. There is no but. I don’t have a problem with any of that.”
Caine shot her skeptical look. “Are you sure about that?”
“Absolutely,” she insisted. “Those are all fairly typical consequences in DD relationships. I expected all that to be on the table anyway.” That was true enough. She had expected them, just not only them.
That finally seemed to satisfy Caine. “Aren’t we doing this a little backwards though? Shouldn’t we be talking about rules before we talk about consequences? You said you expected punishments like that so clearly you had some idea in your head of how you expected your relationship to work. What did you have in mind in terms of rules?”
Norah shrugged. She hadn’t really expected to have a great deal of input when it came to rules. She figured anyone she dated would have his own ideas when it came to rules. Sure, she had always known she would be able to negotiate and discuss them before agreeing to them, but she had never imagined having to actually create them. Her job was to follow the rules, not to set them. Of course, she had also imagined that she would find an experienced HOH, not that she would get involved with a vanilla guy who was tiptoeing into the DD world simply for the sake of appeasing her. She loved him for doing it. It was truly a testament to how much he cared about her, but she had no idea how to teach him about things like rules that most HOHs seemed to know instinctively. Okay, think it through, Norah. What are the rules that everybody knows and everybody has? She’d lived in Corbin’s Bend for weeks now not to mention all the research she had quietly and secretly done over the years before she moved. Surely she should know that.
“I guess I always assumed the three D’s were pretty much a given,” she answered after a long moment.
Caine raised a questioning eyebrow. “The three D’s?”
“Dishonesty, disrespect, or defiance,” Norah explained. “Those things are grounds for punishment in pretty much every DD relationship I’ve ever known about. They are kind of the bed rock rules that everyone has.” She resolutely ignored the tiny internal twinge that hit her at the mention of being dishonest. After all, she wasn’t really lying to him about wanting to be spanked. They both knew that’s what she would want in a perfect world. She was just trying to compromise, the same as he was.
“That makes sense,” Caine agreed. “Those are important things in any relationship, and they are important to me too. Anything else?”
“Most people have rules about health and safety too,” she admitted reluctantly. Even before they really knew each other all that well, Caine was already totally overprotective about her going places alone. She didn’t even think about how he would be now that they actually had a rule about it. She’d be lucky to get to step foot out of her shop without supervision. Okay, maybe that was a slight exaggeration, but he was still not likely to be reasonable.
“I think we should have that too,” Caine said. “It’s important to me that you take
care of yourself, and that you don’t do things to put yourself in unnecessary danger.”
“Does that mean under your definition of danger or mine?” Norah muttered, unable to keep the frustration and sarcasm out of her voice.
“Mine,” Caine said bluntly, not even bothering to leave it up for discussion.
It took everything Norah could do not to roll her eyes. For someone who was a complete newbie to this type of relationship, he could be damned heavy-handed and unreasonable at times. “Caine,” she protested, hearing the tone that came perilously close to a whine in her voice but unable to stop it, “I’m perfectly fine going places on my own. I moved across the country on my own.”
“Only because I didn’t know you then,” he countered. “Look, it’s not like I’m going to put you under house arrest or anything, unless you do something really dangerous, but I would like to know if you go out of the community and how long you expect to be so that if something happens I at least know when and where to have somebody look for you. I’d also like you to keep your cell phone on you and charged at all times. I don’t think that’s unreasonable. Do you?”
It really wasn’t. It was a perfectly reasonable request in any relationship, DD aside. If she had to guess, she’d bet every couple in this community had similar rules. It was just odd. She hadn’t had to answer to anybody about her comings and goings like that since she was a teenager. There had been days in her marriage to John that he had been so wrapped up in his university duties that she had wondered if he even remembered she was there, much less where she was supposed to be and what she was supposed to be doing. At the same time, there was a part of her that maybe, just possibly, secretly liked that Cain wasn’t like that, that he actually cared about where she was what she was doing.
“Answer me please, Norah,” Caine pressed. “Do you really think that’s unreasonable?”
She hesitated, biting her lip.
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