Of Being Yours[another way 2] (28 page)

“Yeah. Fuck. Yeah. They’re fine.”

Will joined us and rubbed her arm. “And you?”

She gave us a watery smile. “I’ve never seen anyone being born before. My kids came out of a C-section. That was incredible.”

“Is it still a boy?” I asked.

“Yeah. It’s still a boy.”

We were allowed in to see her after the cleaning-up business had been done. Propped up with a bundle of blue blankets in her arms, Maddie looked the very picture of a new mother. Hopelessly in love, and scared shitless.

“Will, Jesse,” she said with a hoarse voice, “thank you for everything.”

Will shook his head and smoothed her blonde hair, now tangled and frizzy, back from her forehead, then laid a kiss on it.

“Any time,” he promised her. I smiled.

Carefully, she transferred the baby into his arms. If he was surprised, he didn’t show it, simply shuffling the baby into the crook of his elbow and rocking him gently.

I stepped up behind him and placed my hands on his waist to keep him steady and rest my chin on his shoulder. Maddie’s little boy had a scrunched-up red face and the white waxy stuff that newborns have on his skin. He was sleeping, his eyelids fluttering peacefully.

“This is it, guys,” Maddie said. “I still think he’d be better with you—you’ve got so much more to offer him than I do.”

I looked at Will. It was always my decision to turn down her offer; he never got a say in that. I wondered for a moment if having the baby in his arms would change his mind, if he’d think that maybe he was ready to be a father after all.

I couldn’t help but hold my breath as I waited for him to answer her, every heartbeat echoing in my chest. Eventually he set the little boy back down in his mother’s arms and shook his head.

“He’s yours, Maddie,” he said softly. “He’s so yours. It’ll happen another time for us, if it’s the right thing for us to do. Not now, though.”

I pulled him back against my chest and held him there with my arms around his waist. He was right, of course. Not now. Just… not now.

Maybe someday.

Chapter 19

A
S
WITH
nearly everything in life, time caused things to change in the fabric of our relationship. I’d spent so long thinking that the Will I loved was lost to me that it all seemed a little bit more precious and a little bit more delicate than it was before.

I never really noticed exactly when Will started making my lunch to take to work again. He didn’t do it every day, but sometimes when I came downstairs from my shower, there was a brown paper bag waiting for me on the counter.

Nor did I really take note of when he started slipping little messages into the bag. Mostly they were Post-it Notes or written on a page torn out of the notepad we used to write our grocery list on. It was never a simple “I love you”—nothing was ever as simple as “I love you” in our relationship. He liked offering words of wisdom from great thinkers or philosophers, music lyrics, lines from our favorite movies—things that meant something to
us.

I didn’t get one often enough to expect them, same as the peace offering that was lunch in the first place.

It was raining in Seattle when I finally sat back in my chair and reached for my lunch, opening a news site in my Internet browser to catch up on the rest of the world as I ate. Some old friends had been in contact, and we’d made plans to meet up with them on the coming Saturday; I had been put in charge of finding somewhere to go for lunch.

I set the green apple to one side, laughed at the snack-sized Kit Kat, and split open the bag of chips.

There was a yellow Post-it stuck to my sandwich, and I pulled it off, smiling.

It’s that man you fought with this morning

The same one you’re going to make love with tonight.

The words were familiar to some far distant corner of my brain, but I couldn’t quite place them. Munching on a mouthful of chicken salad sandwich, I quickly searched the phrase and waited for the page to load.

The search brought up a video link, so I clicked on that and turned the speakers down so it wouldn’t disturb anyone walking past in the hall.

The song hit me with a full sucker punch of memories.

Two terrible drag queens and a third, singing, draped across a grand piano; spidery false eyelashes, a young boy called Jeff whom we’d taken home together….

One night of absolute frivolity, laughter, so much fun in the name of helping a friend.

Being so, so unconditionally in love with him.

That’s truth, that’s love.

That was who we were.

As the music played, I suddenly felt sick, tears pricking at my eyes. I wanted that back… with all the additions that we’d made together over the past few months. We needed to keep all the revelations and discoveries, both of ourselves and of us as a couple.

There was no other way to address this looming panic attack other than to go to him.

I grabbed my keys, locked the office door, and just about remembered to pull on my raincoat as I dashed out to the parking lot. For a moment I considered calling him to tell him I was on my way over, but decided against it. The rain was too hard, which made a call while trying to navigate the city streets not a good move.

His office was in a block as different to mine in the museum as you could possibly get. Fortunately there was street parking, and I threw a couple of quarters in the machine before dashing up the white stone steps that led to the lobby.

“I’m here to see Will Anderson?” I said to security, hoping that they would recognize me and let me through.

“Do you have an appointment?”

“No—” I took a deep breath. “I’m his partner.”

Blue eyes considered me for a long moment. It was always a risky statement to make. In the end, he waved me through.

His office was on the seventh floor—lucky number seven—and I had half a moment to run my fingers through my wet hair as I rode the elevator up. It was almost useless. I looked like a drowned rat.

We rarely visited each other’s offices during the day; there was rarely any need to do so. Still, I’d been there a few times before and knew my way through the maze that was his floor to find his office.

William Anderson. His name was on a small plaque on the closed door, both important status symbols in this industry he worked in. I knocked twice and waited.

“Come in.”

I swallowed and pushed the door open.

“I’m just on lunch, is it important….” His words trailed off as he swung his chair toward the door and spotted me. “Jesse?”

“Hi,” I said lamely.

He laughed and shook his head. “What are you doing here?”

What was I doing there? Was there any sense in me driving halfway across the damn city in the middle of the day just to say—what to him? I didn’t even know.

“I got your note,” I said and shook the water out of my hair, then shut the door behind me.

“Yeah?”

He pushed back from his desk then, carelessly brushing a few crumbs from his pants as he stood. Dark-gray suit, light-gray shirt worn open at the throat. Impeccable tailoring—part and parcel of being a homosexual. No one ever claimed we didn’t have good dress sense.

I strode across his office and caught his softly stubbled jaw in my cold fingers and pressed my lips to his. Will steadied his hands on my waist as I rose up onto my toes to get a better angle, my shirt riding up far enough for him to press his strong palms against my bare skin.

His lips tasted warm and familiar, of the soda he was drinking with his lunch, the one he would have bought from the vending machine down the hall. I knew so much about him. I knew the moment he would hum into my mouth, changing the angle so he was in control, where he liked to be.

Slowly, I lowered my feet to the floor and wrapped my arms around his neck. He backed me up against the wall and pinned me there with a knee between my thighs as our kisses built, never venturing into anything more than appropriate, given our location.

I was breathing hard when we broke apart and he pressed his forehead to mine. His erratic breaths were warm on my cheek as he rocked his head from side to side.

“If I knew one cheesy song from the eighties would have done this for us, I would have played it nonstop for the past six months,” he whispered.

I laughed. “I know. I love you.”

Maybe it was that simple after all.

“I love you too.”

T
HAT
night when I got home, the rain had eased off to a light drizzle, a moment of hope, then descended into a full-blown storm again. I didn’t care.

There was a part of me that was worried that what we’d shared in his office would have slipped away from us in the afternoon, but he met me at the door with another scorching kiss. I laughed into it, allowing him to waltz me away from the rain and the wind outside and into the warm cocoon of this place that was my home with him.

He kissed my neck, up to my earlobe, then told me: “Six forty-five. Don’t be late.”

“Are you sure?”

My breath caught in my throat as I waited for his answer. It was something I wanted so badly I could practically taste it. Part of me didn’t dare to hope. Another part prepared to beg.

“I’m not sure how far I can go, but I want to try,” he said softly. “I want to be that for you again.”

“Okay.”

He nodded and kissed me again. “Six forty-five, baby.”

It was only a little after six, so I had plenty of time to shower and contemplate what this meant. We had decided to rebuild our D/s relationship with baby steps, which was partly our decision, partly at the insistence of Dr. Smith. That was okay, though. It made sense for us not to rush back into anything that we weren’t ready for.

But I was ready now. I’d never been this ready before. We
needed
this, needed to reaffirm what we knew of each other and our relationship. In the shower I had all the confidence I needed to go forward, but the heat and warmth were a false confidence of sorts; after I was done and dried off, the nerves started to creep back in again, and they certainly didn’t abate any as I entered the playroom.

This routine was rusty to me; I hadn’t used it in a long time. The spot in the middle of the hardwood floor was still there, invisible to the naked eye, a beacon calling me back to where I belonged.

Naked, I knelt, folded my hands in my lap, and waited.

“Good evening, Jesse,” he said from behind me, and I heard the door click shut.

“Good evening, Master,” I said.

“I’ve missed you,” he said simply and ran his fingers through my hair.

Something lodged itself in my throat, a thick something that made me blink back tears. This was what we were. This was
who
we were too.

I turned my face against his palm and waited for the gentle caress against my cheek that I knew would come.

“I’ve got a few ideas for tonight,” he said as his fingers finally made contact with my skin. It was just for a moment. Then he moved to arrange some things in the room. “Your safewords apply, as always, and just let me know if you’re not comfortable with anything I suggest.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Come here.”

I rose and stood before the large padded cross that had wrist and ankle restraints at the extremity of each point. There was no point in denying that I was nervous about being restrained—after all this time, we needed to reassess those boundaries.

“I’m not going to lock you in,” Will said from behind me, as if reading my mind. He produced a sheet of stationery stickers and placed two small red dots on the leather at about shoulder height. “Put your hands over the stickers,” he instructed. “Whatever you do, I don’t want to see those dots again until I tell you to move.”

Of course, it was a perfectly genius way of restraining me without using any restraints. I was held in place by the power of my own convictions rather than leather and metal or rope. We both needed to start again gently and build up to the intense sessions of our past.