Of Being Yours[another way 2] (16 page)

“Where is he?” I demanded, giving in to my urges, damn them.

“He’s asked me not to tell you.”

“Then damn him to fucking hell,” I said and hung up on her. I’d pay for that later, and it wasn’t nearly as satisfying as slamming a phone down used to be, but it did the job.

I childishly turned the phone off and grabbed my keys and jacket, locked the house behind me, and headed downtown.

My little Chinese restaurant in the International District was still being run by Yan, who greeted me warmly when I wandered in to the smell of rich pork and five spice. I’d found a book in the car and then a table at the back of the restaurant where I wouldn’t be disturbed, and spent a few hours reading, going on a journey in my own head that distracted me from the drama in my real life.

When a shadow fell over my table, I expected Yan to be back with more tea.

I did not expect Maddie.

“Hey,” she said softly. “Can I sit down?”

I nodded, shut my book, and set it down on the table. “Would you like tea?” I asked and when she agreed, flagged Yan for another pot.

“Laura said I could probably find you here,” she said, fiddling with a spoon.

“I guess my hiding place has been figured out. I’ll need to find a new one.”

I wanted to be vile to her but couldn’t. Maddie and I had history—Will had been the one to assess her potential as a sub before passing her on to Laura, and it had sent me into a fit of jealousy at the time. Even now there was some friction between us; I had been Laura’s submissive for a number of years before leaving her for Will when she had her daughters. It was probably natural for me to be protective of Laura, and I couldn’t help but see her sub as a potential danger to her happiness.

“I’m pregnant,” Maddie blurted suddenly.

I gaped at her.

“Who—” I started, then stopped. That wasn’t my place to ask.

“Steven,” she answered anyway.

“Laura’s husband Steven?” I asked incredulously.

It took that moment for me to realize how separated I had been from Laura’s life in the past few months. Even before the crash, we had grown more distant, and considering the state she’d been in when she came to us for advice, that was unforgivable. Clearly there had been decisions made in their relationship and I was only now learning the extent of it.

“Yeah,” Maddie said. “It wasn’t planned.”

“Does Laura know?”

She nodded.

“And?”

Maddie shrugged. “She’s quite confused. I think we all are. No one wanted this.”

It was probably the longest conversation we’d ever had. It was certainly the most intimate. In public, Laura mostly kept her subs silent, and Maddie rarely joined Laura and Steven when they came to dinner with Will and me.

“Are you going to keep it?” That wasn’t my place to ask either, but I figured it was a valid question.

She gave me a wry smile, stood, and pressed her loose dress flat against the curve of her belly. The swell of her pregnancy, like this, was evident.

“It’s not really an option,” she said. “I’m too far along.”

“So you can’t have an abortion,” I said, “but you could still put the baby up for adoption when it’s born.”

Maddie fiddled with a napkin, looking uncomfortable as she settled back into her seat. “It’s not my place to decide,” she said eventually.

“Bullshit!” I exclaimed. “It’s your body, your child, for fuck’s sake.”

When her eyes fixed on mine, she looked on the brink of tears. I’d never been great with very female displays of emotion, so I backed off.

“I thought,” she said slowly, then met my eyes and folded her hands in her lap. “I mean to say, I’d thought of offering the child up for adoption. To a couple who couldn’t have a child themselves.”

It dawned on me very slowly what she was referring to.

“Maddie, do you know the situation between Will and I at the moment?” I asked. “Because I don’t know right now if we’ll still be together next week, let alone in a position to raise a child together.”

“I thought maybe if you had something worth staying together for….”

“The last thing our relationship needs is a Band-Aid baby,” I said gently. “I’m flattered that you thought of us. But I don’t think that will work.”

She nodded. “Okay. You don’t have to make a decision yet. I just wanted to give you the option.”

We both sipped at the tea that had been set in front of us while she’d been talking.

“Is this why Laura sent you down here?” I asked.

“No,” Maddie said with a smile. “She wanted me to talk to you, sub to sub. And human to human, I suppose. You know that you shouldn’t speak to a Mistress the way you did. But you also really shouldn’t speak to a friend like that, either.”

A hot ball of guilt lodged itself in my belly.

“She’s been talking to Will nearly every day,” Maddie continued. “But you haven’t spoken to her at all. She knows how much he’s hurting and how desperate he is to fix things. But she doesn’t know what you’re thinking. Don’t shut her out, Jesse. She loves you more than you know.”

I walked Maddie back to her car, then drove home in silence, thinking about all the bombshells she’d dropped on me in such a short space of time. Her situation was so different to ours—her whole relationship with Laura was so different from mine with Will. But still, she was the passive one. Waiting for her Dominant to make the decision for her.

And as much as I wanted to protest that that wasn’t me, I wasn’t doing that, I was. I was sitting at home, waiting for him to come back to me. To tell Maddie to take control of her own future when I couldn’t do the same was hypocritical.

By the time I’d made my decision, I was breathing hard and my palms were sweating.

I sat in the car, staring out at the dark street, for long minutes. Then pulled my phone out of my pocket and dialed his number.

“Hello? Jesse?”

“Yeah,” I said, then cleared my throat. “Yeah.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. I want you to come home, Will.”

“Jess—”

“No, I’m serious. It’s been a whole week. If you’re not home by the end of the week, then I’m leaving. I’ll go, Will, and you won’t know where to find me.”

He was quiet for longer than I expected. I could hear his breathing through the phone.

“Okay,” he said eventually. “I’ll see you soon.”

Chapter 11

I
WANTED
to make it up to Laura for my outburst, but more than that, I wanted to spend time with her again. Our lives had moved on so much from when I was so totally innocent to the entire D/s scene; she had been the one to take me under her wing and gently show me what I needed to know.

With the developments in both our lives, we hadn’t exactly grown apart, but the amount of time we had free to spend together had been reduced. She was pretty much my only friend who knew all sides of me: I’d confided in her about the tangled mess that was my mother; she had been there for me through all the ups and downs I’d had with Will. And she was calm and steady enough to be around my vanilla friends too without me having to worry that she would let something slip.

Will’s job still required him to work late some nights, and these were the best ones for me to go over and hang out with the
McAlder family.

For the length of time that I’d known them, all it took was a quick phone call to let them know that I was on my way and they were fairly happy for me to turn up almost unannounced. By the time I’d finished work and driven across town, the girls had eaten their dinner and were in the bath.

“Hey,” Laura said as she answered the door, then pulled me into a tight embrace.

“How are you?” I asked as we held on to each other.

“Not bad,” she whispered. “You?”

“Better.”

That was all either of us needed.

Steven too had picked up a few clients who needed physio treatments later in the day, so he wasn’t home either. It was quiet in the house apart from the sounds of two girls splashing in the bath upstairs and the low music coming from a radio in the kitchen.

Laura made tea, and I settled into one of the big armchairs in their family room.

“So,” she said, and gave me a wicked grin. “How’s your sex life?”

I blushed and laughed. Then sighed. “Me and my hand are very happy together, thank you.”

“Still not getting any?”

“We’re going to try and rebuild things at our own pace. It makes sense, you know. Will had a fairly big emotional breakdown. He needs time to work things out and not rush into something he’s not ready for.”

“And you? What about what you need, Jess?”

“I need my Dom,” I said, because I knew admitting it would help. “But I also need my boyfriend. And I need my best friend too. It might take a while to fix all of those sides of him, but we’re trying. We’ll get there. It’s just taking a while.”

As she nodded in agreement, the rumbling sound of two small people racing down the stairs reached us. Familiar with the two people in question, I moved my mug of tea and braced myself.

Moments later I found myself with Carrigan and Sawyer in my lap, laughing and talking at me a mile a minute. They were undeniably beautiful children, having inherited their mother’s striking hair color and their father’s good bone structure. Maddie had followed them downstairs at a slightly more sedate pace, the round curve of her pregnancy now pushing the rest of her clothing aside. She gave me a slightly shy smile, kissed Laura on the cheek, and excused herself to her room.

The kids were allowed to put on a movie to chill out before bedtime, giving me time to talk to Laura about the more vanilla aspects of our lives and a little more about their unusual three-way relationship, although in slightly more vague tones.

I’d always wondered how much Carrigan and Sawyer picked up on the fact that their mother was essentially having two relationships, one with their father and another with the woman they saw as their nanny. Then again, they had their own version of “normal” in their household, so it probably didn’t trouble them at all.

I was pulled out of my thoughts by one of the twins—on closer inspection I decided it was Sawyer—pulling at my sleeve.

“Would you read us a bedtime story?” she asked.

I laughed. “Sure,” I told her.

“And can you braid hair?”

“Not at all,” I said.

Sawyer huffed but turned to her mother to have her hair fixed for bed. Over her daughter’s head, Laura laughed silently as she managed to do a ridiculously complicated spiral that looked almost like a halo when it was done.

“Go brush your teeth, please,” she said softly.

I waited for the tantrum, but Sawyer just kissed her mother’s cheek and complied. I must have been gaping, because Laura rolled her eyes at me.

“Don’t worry. The other one fusses enough for them both.”

As promised, it took Laura several minutes of good old-fashioned threats, bribery, and blackmail before Carrigan would get ready for bed. I followed them upstairs and stayed out of the argument about what book I got to read to them.

Spending time with Laura’s kids was an eye-opener for me. Although when I was younger, there were always plenty of other children around to play with, only a few of my friends had taken the scary steps into parenthood. My babysitting skills left plenty to be desired, but my story-reading skills were, apparently, sufficient.

On my way out of the twins’ room (story finished, twins almost asleep), I noticed Maddie’s door was open wide enough to clearly be an invitation. She was lying on her bed, propped up on a few pillows and sketching in a huge notebook resting on her softly swelling belly.

I stopped and leaned against the doorframe. “Hey,” I said softly, not wanting to disturb her.

She smiled but didn’t look at me, then pulled her headphones from her ears. “Hey,” she said back. “You have a very nice reading voice.”

“Thanks,” I laughed. “Sorry if I disturbed you.”

“It’s okay. Steven usually does all the voices to whatever he’s reading. It tends to get quite loud.”

I hovered for another moment, and she gestured me in.

Her room was furnished incredibly simply. A large iron-framed bed dominated much of the space, and she kept it piled high with cream-colored pillows in a variety of patterns and styles. Other than the bed, the only furniture in the room was an oversized chest of drawers that looked like it was probably an antique.