Out of Control (23 page)

Jen wasn’t used to being the anchor. Because she was an artist and didn’t play by ordinary rules, everyone always acted like she needed an anchor, whether it was true or not. It felt surprisingly good to be the grounded one, the one connecting her lover to earth.

Finally, he spoke, still holding her. “I’ve tried all my life to stay in control in relationships, and not just in the bedroom. I’ve set rules for myself, for how much I can push, how much I can share, how close I can get. How much I can feel. And I’ve been shattering all those rules left and right…and it feels good, and I’m fucking terrified I’ll do something wrong and hurt you.”

“Oh, Drake.” She stroked his hair, wishing she had magic words. He sounded like shattered glass given a voice. He wasn’t making sense, but his pain was real.

“I pushed you this morning and even though you ended up getting into it, it wasn’t the right thing to do. You’d think I’d have learned from my fa… Oh, never mind.” He let go of her and looked away, though he stayed close.

“Your father?” Jen realized he’d never talked about his family, other than his great-aunt and her partner. She’d assumed Marian and Judith had raised him, and he didn’t really remember his parents.

“Ancient history. Nothing you need to worry about.”

“Except it affects us now.” She yearned to embrace him again—it soothed her and she thought it centered him too. But she didn’t dare, not when he was so tightly wound. “And I’m not giving up on you that easily. Haven’t you noticed I’m stubborn?”

“I’m messed up. I can do scenes, even edgy ones, because I can plan what I’m doing from one minute to the next. You can’t negotiate every step of a relationship. Things don’t go according to plan, and then I don’t know what to do, or I wing it and overstep boundaries. Part of me wants to walk away, or send you away, before I fuck things up. Fuck you up. But I can’t.”

Jen’s heart wobbled and her stomach heaved, but the situation wasn’t black and sticky and hopeless. Clouded in gray murk, sure, but she could still make out bright colors in the fog, shades of hope. Drake was saying he should walk away, but he wasn’t.

“Whatever is haunting you is in the past. We can work through it.” At least she hoped so. Some wounds went too deep to heal cleanly, but knowing what the damn wounds were would be a good start. “Probably not tonight, but we can get started. I think there may be enough coffee in the house for that.” The feeble attempt at a joke drew, not a smile, exactly, but a relaxing of Drake’s face and the tense lines of his body, the coiled energy.

Drake remained silent so long that the gray murk tried to take over Jen’s perception. When he finally said something, his voice sounded different. Not the secure, if geeky, Professor Hot-Stuff or the commanding man he was in the bedroom, but someone much younger, less confident.

Jen thought, holding back tears, she could come to love this man-boy as much as she could love the other facets of him she’d come to know. But she didn’t say that. Given where Drake was, how scared he seemed to be, she wasn’t going to use the word
love
now.

Even if they both knew damn well they were about three inches from falling in love with each other.

“I learned how not to be in a relationship from my parents. Mostly from my father. My father was a controlling asshole and my mother adored him for it.” He paused. “He adored her too, but he still expected her to wait on him hand and foot, to drop everything to meet his needs. They were happy, in their way. But it wasn’t exactly a good model for a relationship.”

“Were they kinky?”

“I’m pretty sure they were, but they didn’t have a frame of reference for dealing with it. Weird as it feels to say it about my parents, I hope they dabbled in bondage and pain-play and stuff, so they had some fun along with the problems.”

Jen tried not to laugh but couldn’t help herself. “That’s brave. I don’t even like to think about my parents having vanilla sex, let alone my dad wielding a whip. Although my mom would probably be the top.”

Drake smiled a lonely smile that faded on his next words. “Mom died when I was nine. Cancer. Dad mourned for a couple of years, but after a while, he wanted to date again. He wasn’t much older than I am now, and even as a kid, I understood that he was lonely.

“Only he had no idea how to go about dating. He wanted someone who’d cater to him like Mom did, both in bed and in other ways, which might have worked if he’d known about D/s and looked for people who were into that kind of thing. But he didn’t, so he kept scaring women away—and they had reason to be scared off, because as time went on, he got angry at women in general. And when I was about thirteen, he started talking to me about his love life, like I was supposed to help.”

“Creepy, yet inappropriate.” Jen tried to keep her voice dry, sardonic. It was the only way not to show how badly this story shook her.

“Very. And it gets worse. He met someone when I was fourteen, and best as I can figure out, he pushed her sexually in some inappropriate ways. I hesitate to say rape or assault, because I’m talking about my dad and I can’t face that idea. But I can’t help thinking that might have been what happened. There was definitely a restraining order involved.”

Jen shuddered and squeezed him harder but didn’t say a word. She couldn’t. For one thing, if she dammed the flow of Drake’s hard-won words, even briefly, he might not be able to start talking again. Every word seemed painful to him, but he also seemed determined to get the story out at last.

For another, she might start crying if she tried to talk, and tears were the last thing Drake needed. This moment had to be about him.

“When she took out the restraining order, I called Great-Aunt Marian and asked if I could come live with her and Judith for a while. I never went back. Dad’s been arrested a few times for sex-related offenses since then, but the charges were always dropped. I’d like to believe it means he’s innocent of the worst things, but it might just mean the women decided that pressing charges would be more painful than it was worth.”

Jen spoke for the first time, saying simply, “Ouch.”

“I deal. But when I realized I’m a dominant, that I
need
control and pain in a sexual relationship, I told myself I had to find a way not to turn into my father. And that way was rigid self-control.”

“You are not your father. For starters, you’re a dominant. He was an asshole who might have had tendencies that way but never grew up enough to know what to do with them.”

Drake shook his head. “I know. My brain knows, at least. But every time I start to get close to a woman, in the way I
need
to get close to a woman…”

“You pull back or turn it into a negotiation dance because you want to make sure you don’t fuck up. Or you push, not on the sex but on more emotional areas. You’ve done both with me.”

“I don’t know how to be in a relationship,” Drake confessed.

“Neither does anyone else. At least you know you don’t know.”

“I’ve spent my life learning to be in control of myself so I don’t hurt anyone else, but when I’m around you, I lose control. How can I control you, be in charge in the relationship, if I can’t control myself?”

“You can’t, not all the time.”

Drake turned to her, his gray eyes desolate, all pretense of the in-charge, self-contained dominant lost behind fear and pain. “Then how can I take care of you? How can you trust me?”

She felt her love for him in that moment with a brilliant sun-gold clarity that she rarely experienced outside the studio. She adored the confident dom and always would, but this other side, this glimpse into the complex past that made him who he was, made him less intimidating, more real.

And even more worthy of trust. “I couldn’t put myself into the hands of someone who thinks he has all the answers about everything. I couldn’t even put up with that guy. No one has all the answers about their own life, let alone someone else’s. But you’re learning to listen to me, to ask the right questions, to balance my needs and yours. Which everyone has to learn when they get into a relationship, not just doms and subs. That’s why I can trust you.” She touched him gently.

Drake ventured a smile. It was a ragged version of his usual cool grin, as if he was afraid something would break if he smiled too hard. Jen thought it might be the most strangely beautiful thing she’d ever seen in a lifetime of seeking the beautiful and the strange, this broken man trying to smile for her. “So you mean…” Drake started, but didn’t finish.

“Yes, I mean.” She snorted and added, “Okay, that was incoherent yet mystifying. I mean confidence is sexy and attractive, but acting like you know everything isn’t. Having all the answers doesn’t work. I accept that you want to take care of me, help me where you can. I accept that you like rules and order. Hell, I can see where more order in my life would be good. It turns me on to be controlled in the bedroom, and I’m kind of fascinated with being controlled to some extent outside it. But knowing you know you don’t know everything helps. That means I can question and make suggestions and talk to you if you’re trying to fix something that isn’t actually broken. For what it’s worth, I’m a lot more concerned about that aspect of things than about you pushing me too far sexually. I have a safeword for that, and I know you’ll respect it.”

A light dawned, an idea that seemed pretty radical in the context of kink, based on all she’d read, but the light was clear and bright, and that meant it was at least worthy of sharing. “Shouldn’t you have a safeword too? Not for sex, although I suppose you might want one if you feel like you need to slow down, but some way to signal you’re not sure what to do now, or you need to talk as friend to friend, not dom to sub?”

He blinked owlishly. “I’ve never heard of a dom having a safeword before.”

“Don’t think dom. Think human being. Human beings in relationships need to talk things through. Only you’re a human being who needs order and structure. You won’t just spew what’s bothering you. You need a code, something to make it safe to show some indecision or confusion and detangle it before you kind of implode like you did tonight.” She moved closer to him. “If you don’t want to call it a safeword, call it parliamentary procedure or something.”

“That makes sense. Which may be because it’s late and we didn’t sleep much last night for purely good reasons, and I’m functioning on caffeine and adrenaline. But at least it makes sense enough to file away and think about again when we’re more coherent.”

Daring greatly, she play-punched him on the shoulder. “Speak for yourself. I’m plenty coherent. Though definitely overcaffeinated.”

He drew her into his arms. “Thank you for trusting me. I’ll try to be worthy of your trust, and try not to get out of control again.”

She nibbled his neck, then said, “You like it when I lose control.”

“That’s different. That’s sexy. I like it when I make you lose control. I think you like it too. That’s fun. That’s…safe. You’re not a dominant with a sadistic streak. If I let go too much…”

“You’ll stop before you go from good, fun, consensual letting go to the kind of letting go that makes the local news. I know it.”

“What about this morning?”

“You didn’t harm me. You didn’t even piss me off. I was asleep, and you startled me, but I enjoyed it once I caught up.”

Drake folded her in his arms. She sighed and snuggled into the warmth and strength of his body. “I love it when you just run with whatever crazy shit I’m doing in bed. It makes me feel powerful. Turns me on more than I can explain.” He kissed the top of her head. “But please, please don’t just go along with something you don’t like because I tell you to.”

Much as she enjoyed being in Drake’s arms, pressed against his broad chest, Jen needed to see his eyes for this. She leaned back as she said, “I thought you needed that. Needed to be in charge, obeyed. A dom.”

His eyes softened. “Before, sexual control has always been an elaborate dance between my desire to dominate and the ways someone else desires to submit. It was all kinds of choreographed before anyone took their clothes off, but I felt fully in charge when we were playing. I’m starting to believe we can figure out together how to make it work in a relationship, but we’re not there yet. If you’re turned off by something, or just confused, say something. Use the safeword. Or hit me over my head with something.”

Jen tried to control the chuckle but failed. “That doesn’t sound like a man who has to be in charge of everything.”

“I’m changing. I still want…need…to be sexually dominant. But it has to balance with taking you into account. Taking care of you.”

“Not being your father.”

“Exactly. And I’m not sure how it will work.”

“Like I said, no one knows how to be in a relationship. I certainly don’t. But knowing you don’t know is the first step. So we talk a lot…and we have lots of great sex.”

“That, I think I can manage.” Drake drew her close. “And my safeword will be
irrational number.

Chapter Eighteen

The next few weeks were a pink blur punctuated by episodes of red passion. Not as many of those as Jen would have liked, thanks to her large and rainbow-hued to-do matrix for the upcoming show, but she was making it a priority to spend time with Drake.

Along with her other priorities, like getting ready for the Solstice Show, working at the bakery, and keeping up with Etsy and eBay listings and sales.