Michele Zurlo (30 page)

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.

He didn’t know how long he stood there brushing her hair. They’d both surrendered to the simple bliss of this ritual. Eventually, he set her brush on her vanity and kissed the top of her head. When she looked up, he captured her lips in a kiss meant to be searing but probably came off as more desperate than anything else.

She cupped his face in her hands and let him lead her to bed.

Jonas brushed her hair before bed the next night as well. Sabrina breathed a contented sigh and let this take her back to better days. The second time they got married, the first time having been a business arrangement and the second time having been for love, Jonas had begun brushing her hair. The calming strokes settled her stomach, as she’d been suffering from a lot of morning sickness at all times of the day, so that was significant.

On his end, this nightly ritual fed his need to touch her hair. It held an erotic appeal for him that she didn’t understand. Not that it mattered. She didn’t have to understand his attraction to her in order to reap the benefits.

Now things were different. The rules seemed to have changed, and those things mattered. She had to figure out what he wanted from her, and she needed to dig deep to find out if she could give those things to him.

When he finished, she expected him to lead her to bed and make love to her as he had done the night before. She needed to know he still wanted her, that he found her desirable. But he handed her something instead of taking her hand.

She stared at the spiral-bound notebook with the black cover. Eighty pages of paper. She opened it to the first page to find it blank. Glancing up at him, she sought an explanation.

“This is for you to write down whatever is on your mind.”

She looked back down at the vacant white lines. They did not call her to spill her secrets. “Thanks, but I don’t keep a diary. I don’t have time.”

“You’ll make time. It’s not a suggestion, Sabrina. It’s an order.”

Her head snapped up and she stared at him in shock. She thought they were past all that. “An order?”

“Yes. I should have made you do this before now. I should never have let you get away with pushing it off until the end of the week and then pulling this stunt where you refuse to talk until it’s all bottled up inside you. That was my mistake and I’m sorry, but we need to move past it if we’re going to figure out what went wrong so we can fix it.”

His eyes were olive green, a reflection of the dark green shirt he’d changed into after his shower. They were as firm as the rest of his features, and his expression brooked no argument. She felt that place deep inside respond, and it took her by surprise because she was also angry that he’d given her an order outside a scene. Their conversation wasn’t going to lead to a scene either, so there was no mitigating those conflicting feelings.

Yet he’d indicated a desire to fix what was wrong between them. She couldn’t fault his motivation even though she hoped the problem would evaporate like dry ice. “What if I can’t think of anything to write?

“You will.” He moved to lean on the vanity next to where she’d placed the notebook. With one firm tap, he indicated the blank page. “From the beginning, I’ve assumed a lot of things about you. Mostly I’ve been right, and that’s lulled us into a false sense of security. Last week showed us both what a mistake we’ve made. In assuming I knew what you were thinking and feeling, I robbed you of your duty to figure out those things for yourself and communicate them to me.”

She didn’t know how to be that introspective with regard to her own feelings. Sure, she’d learned to embrace her anger, but that was easy compared to this. Exploring the reasons she loved and hated submission might wreck her marriage, and that prospect made it feel like someone had driven a dagger through her heart. “I seriously don’t know what you expect me to say.”

“I don’t expect you to say anything. I expect you to write it down. I’m not grading you, honey. I’m not looking to critique or criticize. Nothing you write in that journal will be used against you. It’s a tool to let me inside your head.” He reached out and ran his fingertips along the side of her face. She closed her eyes to bask in the tenderness in his caress. “It’s a way for you to tell me the things you can’t say to my face. I’m not completely clueless, honey. I know I may not like everything you have to say, but we can’t deal with it if you don’t tell me what those things are.”