“Wait, dominants have limits, too?” I don’t know why I was so surprised.
“Yes. It’s part of the whole consent thing we were just talking about. So, there are four of us, you, me, Ben, and Andy. We all have different interests and limits. Ben is more into pain, I’m more into control and Andy... well, he likes sex. Especially anal. You will find things you like better and things you like less. If you give it a try. But this isn’t a decision to rush into. You need to think it over. I won’t accept any answer on this for at least two more weeks. I want you to do more research in that time. Let me point you at specific things I think you would benefit from learning about and ask me anything you are uncertain over. Do you agree to that?”
He wanted my consent to not allow me to consent to BDSM for two more weeks? This was getting convoluted. I nodded with a giggle.
“I agree.”
“Good. You can’t give informed consent on something you only found out about lately.”
That was the end of the conversation for the time being. It was several hours later, when I was alone in my room again, when I realised our discussion had taken place on the assumption that I was attracted to Matt, Ben and Andy, and that it was only a matter of time before something was going to happen between the four of us.
Was that true? Matt hadn’t been making a move on me, I was sure of that. If anything, he had told me to take time to learn about this stuff. Was he just trying to help me understand a concept, or was there something more, here? It was so hard to make sense of where I stood with the three of them.
Somehow, everything ended up taking a lot longer than it should have done. Exhaustion from recent life events hit me like a train and I lost interest in everything for a while.
Chapter 4
Bex
I looked in the mirror. I was wearing the dress again. This time, it was ballet-length and made of soft, white silk. The sleeves started off-the-shoulder and ended in points at my wrists. On my left hand, my engagement ring sparkled in the lights. I smiled.
“Don’t forget your flowers.” My mum’s voice surprised me. But then again, why shouldn’t she be at her only daughter’s wedding? In the haze of distant memory, I felt like maybe there was some reason she wasn’t supposed to be here, but I couldn’t remember what it was.
“Thanks, mum.”
“Ready, Bex?”
I nodded. I was ready for this wedding. Couldn’t wait, in fact. Being apart from Adam had been hard. I knew it was bad luck for the groom to see the bride before the wedding, but it felt like I hadn’t seen him for weeks and weeks, and I missed him profoundly.
I got up and walked out of the room I’d been getting ready in. I walked down a long corridor, looking for Adam. I went past room after room, all completely crowded with people, but I couldn’t see him anywhere.
Where had he gone? He was here, somewhere. I knew that. But where? Why was it so hard to find him on our wedding day?
I woke up with a deep feeling of unease.
But in my soul, I knew he’d gone forever. The pain crushed me until I could barely breathe. I’d been doing so well with everything, and suddenly I was ensnared in a net of grief. It wasn’t just the dream. It was whatever feelings had been floating around in the back of my mind. Had I been tuning them out? It seemed impossible to do that, now I had acknowledged them. They were agonizingly loud. Things I should have done. Things I shouldn’t have said to him. What-ifs. And always, underneath everything, why had Adam died while I’d survived? He was stronger than me, and better than me in every way, and yet, I was here, and he wasn’t. What kind of a messed-up universe did we live in?
* * *
Ben
“Is she on the sofa, again?” I asked Andy as I walked into the kitchen after an unusually long Friday at the air base. It was Valentine’s Day, tomorrow, and I’d hoped Bex would have perked up enough to take her somewhere nice.
“Yeah.” He didn’t sound surprised at my question. I think he’d noticed that Bex wasn’t quite herself right now.
“What’s she watching?” Did I even want to know? I wasn’t so sure. It might just annoy me.
“Cash in the Basement.”
I groaned. This was bad. It was about three weeks since Adam’s funeral, and while Bex had seemed to be coping fine at first, she’d fallen into a big slump lately.
“Someone needs to talk to her,” I pointed out.
“Good luck with that,” Andy chucked the teaspoon in the sink then took his cup of tea straight upstairs. I glared at his cowardly retreating footsteps. Then I silently thanked him for making me a cup of tea. I picked it up and went into the living room.
“Hey, anything good on?” I asked her.
“Not really.” Her voice was a monotone. “Just Cash in the Basement.”
“The show where pensioners find old tat in their basements, which they’re convinced to take to auction, only to find out it’s worth about five pence.”
“Life is full of disappointment. It eases the pain to see bad things happening to people’s treasured mementoes.”
She was fast getting stuck in a rut and I needed to help pull her out of it.
“You’ve been here for four weeks. How many jobs have you applied for today?” I asked.
She paused for a couple of seconds too long, and I already had my answer before she spoke.
“None. I didn’t get ‘round to it.”
Suppressing the urge to roll my eyes, I looked over at my laptop, still plugged into its charger and waiting on its side on the carpet, exactly where I’d left it this morning, so she could search for vacancies and apply to them.
“You didn’t get around to the single most important thing in your life right now? Really?” I raised a brow and cocked my head to one side to make it clear I was struggling to believe her.
“It’s been a hard day. You don’t know what it’s like!” she snapped.
“Actually, yeah, I do. My dad died when I was fifteen. I know exactly what it’s like to lose someone you love, and to lose the security of your home. My mum couldn’t pay the mortgage and we got repossessed. Lived in a council bed and breakfast for about a year. It was horrific. And all I could do was keep moving forward, and you have to, too, because if you stop moving right now you will turn to stone and never get anywhere. You will be fixed in this moment forever. You have to snap out of it, Bex.”
My words were probably a lot more forceful than I had intended them to be, but I didn’t want her to get stuck. She wasn’t allowed to just rot on the sofa like this.
“How can I snap out of it? Tomorrow’s Valentine’s Day. Everywhere, online, on TV, in the shops, there are love hearts plastered everywhere, and soppy music, and flowers, and I never want to see any of it again. It’s like the world has got some salt. Or glass. And it’s rubbing it into the burning hole in my chest that used to be full of love for Adam. I am totally alone in the world. My fiancée died.”
“Yeah. He died. Not you. And you’re not alone. You’re stuck with Andy, Matt and me until you get your shit toge—” I suddenly realised exactly why she wasn’t applying for jobs. “Listen, Bex, you know you can stay here as long as you like, right? We’re not going to give you the heave-ho as soon as you get a job offer. I promise.”
She looked up at me, and I knew I was bang on the money. She was scared of being alone again. And I would have bet she wasn’t fully certain she was welcome. Arrgh. We should have done more to make her feel like one of us. Maybe I should have dragged her out to play airsoft every weekend since she got here.
“I don’t know how to start again. How will I ever trust anyone not to leave? And then I get mad at myself, because that’s such a stupid, selfish thought.”
“Adam didn’t leave you on purpose. You know he’d be here forever if he had any say in it, don’t you?”
She broke down in tears. Feeling awkward, because I had pushed her to this point by dragging up the past, I put my arms around her. Neither of us said anything for the longe
st time, and I felt her chest rising and falling against mine. She was little and soft. Vulnerable. And she was so very lost. She needed guidance and a firm hand.
As soon as she had calmed down, I made the decision that I was going to boss her around until she was able to take responsibility for herself again.
“C’mon. Open the laptop, and find three jobs to apply for before dinner’s ready. I want you to forward me the email confirmations that you’ve applied, or screenshots of the application forms all filled in with your details. Go. Go. Go.” I clapped my hands to punctuate my last words and, to my relief, she started moving. It was harsh, but I could see she was on a precipice right now. She needed guidance to get her to where she needed to be.
* * *
Bex
Glaring sideways at Ben, I felt nothing but resentment for the way he was pushing me around. I didn’t need to be told what to do. I just wanted to watch the TV and let my thoughts settle. I’d get around to applying for jobs when I was in the right place.
I hated being made to do this. I opened his laptop and went to the internet browser. After doing some searches, I found a couple of jobs to apply for and screenshotted my applications. They just wanted a CV and covering letter, which was all fairly easy to send over. The problem came when I tried to find a third job to apply for. Nothing jumped out at me as interesting, and I didn’t want to apply for anything stupid because, knowing my luck, it would be the one job I got offered immediately.
I searched all the jobs sites and then started typing in company names. Some of them had well-laid-out websites with a “vacancies” link from their homepage, to make it easy to apply for their jobs. Unfortunately, none of those were hiring for anything I was qualified to do. So I ended up wasting a lot of time faffing around on the sites of the sort of companies with an entire “work for us” page where they just told you how great they were, without any actual link to vacancies or a way to apply to work there.
I heard Ben putting plates out and knew I needed to find one last thing to apply for. I clicked back to the first site I’d been on, and sent an application for a job that was nothing I could actually do, just to tick the box. I didn’t know what Ben would say or do if I failed to get three job applications in before dinner, as instructed, but I didn’t especially want to find out, either.
“Dinner’s up!” he called. I closed the laptop, feeling relieved that I’d managed to get the task done in time.
I was eating my baked potato in silence while the three men were chatting about work when I realised that at some point over the last half hour, my resentment had turned into willingness to do what Ben had told me, and determination not to fail him.
Maybe I did need him to help me organise myself at the moment, after all.
After dinner, Matt and Andy disappeared upstairs and I helped Ben load the dishwasher before he brought up our conversation again.
“Did you apply for three jobs?”
Presumably, he hadn’t had a chance to check his email because he had been busy cooking. I debated lying and saying I had forgotten, just to see what he would do, but I changed my mind at the last moment.
“Yeah. The third one wasn’t very relevant, though.”
“Doesn’t matter. Now you can see how easy it is to apply for jobs, you can do at least three every day in the morning before you do anything else.”
“Before breakfast?”
“No. Breakfast is important. Your morning routine will be, breakfast, three job applications, then whatever else you were going to do.”
“Will you be checking?” I don’t know why I asked, or why I now had my heart in my mouth as I waited for the answer. I didn’t like the fact he was looking so closely at an aspect of my life which I wasn’t doing so well at, but at the same time, I knew I needed him to pay attention to this, otherwise I’d just go back to watching Cash in the Basement.
“Yes. I will check every day. So don’t even think about skiving.”
“Yes, sir.” I teased him with a mock salute, then glanced up at his face, to see how he’d taken it.
“Good girl.”
“And what if I’m bad?”
“You will be held accountable.” His tone hinted at things I still didn’t completely understand. But I hadn’t agreed to any kind of BDSM in my life, so how could he just take charge like this? I wanted to be mad at him, but I couldn’t, because I knew I needed this, and there didn’t seem to be anything even slightly sexual about this.
“Do you disagree?” he added. He was giving me the chance to air my concerns, like he knew what I was thinking and wanted me to say it all out loud.
“No. I consent.” It was so hard to say, and there were so many connotations to the word consent, that my cheeks flared with heat and I had to hurry out of the kitchen before I got emotional over something so stupid and meaningless.
Wait. Was it meaningless?
* * *
Ben
Matt, Andy and I all decided Valentine’s Day should pass without any of us mentioning it to Bex. She was hurting enough. We made the entire house a Valentine-free zone, which meant hiding cards we’d been sent, changing the channel every time anything red or fluffy appeared, and throwing out the TV Guide a day early, because they’d done a nice design around the edge of the page that made it painfully obvious what day it was. Matt was stuck at the air base sorting out a work thing.
“It’s a very important day,” I told Bex when she came downstairs for breakfast.
“No, it’s not,” she countered, glaring at me.
“Of course it is,” Andy chimed in. “And it only happens once a year.”
“I can’t wait to go,” I added.
“Wait... what are you two on about?” she asked, looking from one of us to the other.
“It’s the annual Bucks Defender Rally,” Andy said. “Defender owners from all over the county will be there. This year’s special guest is Richard Hammond.”
“Oh. A car rally. Well, have fun, both of you.”
“You’re coming with us,” Andy told her. She shook her head and tried to protest.
“Bex, it’s a meet up for owners of a very old and awkward to drive car, I don’t think anyone will be flogging hearts and flowers.”
She mulled it over. “Are you sure it’ll be mush-free?”
I nodded. “Absolutely.”
With enough reassurance, we got her to put on her favourite Levi’s, a long-sleeved top and a thick hoodie. Soon, we were on the road and driving to a little field near Buckingham.
“I thought it would be in a convention centre,” Bex said, as Andy’s Land Rover easily covered the off-road terrain to find a parking spot. “It’s just a load of old Land Rovers parked in a muddy field.”
“Yeah that’s basically how all classic car rallies are done,” Andy explained. “It’s a bit easier with Landies because they’re four-by-four.”
“What does that even mean?” Bex asked.
I rolled my eyes but Andy had a lot more patience than me to explain these sorts of things.
“A four-by-four has a drivetrain that can provide torque to all four wheels at once.”
I snorted with laughter.
“What? In English, this time?” Bex asked.
“I hope you’re remembering your manners, young lady,” I told her sharply.
“Sorry. In English, this time, please,” she corrected herself.
“The drivetrain is the thing that turns the wheels,” I explained.
“So the thing that turns the wheels can provide torque to all four wheels at once,” Andy finished.
There was a moment of silence.
“What’s torque?” Bex asked.
“See, Andy, this is why you shouldn’t explain technical stuff,” I told him. “Bex, a four-wheel drive car is one where all the four wheels get turned by the drivetrain. The easiest way to understand it is to know that most cars are two-wheel drive, which means only two wheels—usually the front two—are powered by the drivet
rain, and the other two wheels are pulled along and turn without any power going to them. Whereas in a four-by-four, all of the wheels have power going to them.”
“That sounds silly. Why are any cars two-wheel drive?” she asked.
“Because two-wheel drive cars are lighter and cheaper to make and sell. And they suit most people. You only need four-wheel drive if you go off-road or live somewhere very snowy,” Andy explained.
I nodded. That was a much better attempt at an explanation.
“C’mon, let’s go and see all the other Defenders,” I suggested, before the discussion got too technical again.
“These are all really old Land Rovers,” Bex observed. “Did they only come in three colours?”
“You know, I’m not entirely sure...” I looked around at the sea of red, army green and dark cadet blue vehicles. Was it just a coincidence, or had they only made them in those colours?
“The first pre-production Land Rover series I was in a sage green colour, and there’s quite a lot of white ones out there, too, so those three colours are common, but not the only ones Land Rovers are made in,” Andy explained. “Although they weren’t called Defenders when the series I was made. Look, this is a series I.” He walked toward an old Land Rover whose paint was still shiny. “Can you see the front grille? It’s different to the Defender.”
“It sort of looks like a hamster cage at the front,” Bex pointed out. I snorted with laughter because she was right.
“It was to stop the headlamps being damaged when off-roading,” Andy explained.
“It wouldn’t survive more than a few rocks, though,” I added. “This is the last thing you’d want to drive over an IED in.”
We kept walking around until we finally found one which wasn’t in the same three colours as most of the others. Looking at it, I immediately knew it was something very special.
“Why does this one have a plough attached?” Bex asked.
Andy and I grinned. We had stopped in front of a car with no doors or roof. The very first Land Rover. It was like looking straight at the past. I wasn’t really very interested in old stuff, I couldn’t even remember the last time I went to a museum—probably on a school trip—but this car gave me a chill when I looked at it.
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