It’s a solid plan in theory. But it gets blown out of the water when I pull into my parking spot, and Grace is walking across the garage from the private access elevator at the same moment.
She frowns. “What are you doing here?”
I shrug.
“Luke…”
“I found a place a stay,” I tell her. It’s the truth.
“Then why are you here?” She’s dressed for work. Faded jeans, long-sleeved t-shirt. A duffle bag slung across her small body. She looks like she did when I first met her, a gorgeous little art student, way out of my league.
Still true.
“I’ve rented a place.”
Her eyes narrow. “Where?”
I shrug again.
“Luke!”
“There was an empty loft on the second floor.” As I say it out loud, it sounds less clever than it felt when I discovered it on the leasing agent’s website.
Grace purses her lips, takes a deep breath, then matches my shrug with a coolly indifferent one of her own. “That’s a choice, I guess. That will get awkward when I start dating.”
My mouth runs dry. “Are you…”
She rolls her eyes. “You have no fucking right to finish that question.”
“Fair.” I shove my hands in my pockets so she can’t see me ball them into fists. “Yeah. I guess that’ll be hard for me. I need to live with that.”
She keeps glaring at me like that will make me back off. Like I’ll be scared of a look. But the thing is, she’s looking at me. I don’t care why. If she’s looking at me, she might see me.
Or maybe I’m hinging all my hopes on something she’s done for two decades that never made a difference before.
You didn’t let it make a difference.
Well, now I’m going to be a different man. Slowly. Over time. I move to the trunk of my car and open it. Giving her the space to walk past me to her car.
She gives me a wary look, expecting me to get in front of her again, stop her in her tracks. Force her to talk to me.
I want to, of course, but it won’t work. The doc’s words reverberate in my head. “She needs to decide what she wants. You can’t make her try to repair the relationship if she isn’t interested.”
“I’m in 2B,” I offer. “If you ever want to talk.”
Then I grab my shopping and head for the lobby.
It feels like I handled that well. I get settled with my reading, and the afternoon passes.
When I hit a rough chapter about the relationship between fathers and sons, and tears prick the back of my eyelids, hot and uncomfortable, the therapist’s words again ring in my head.
Cathartic. This doesn’t feel cathartic. It’s deeply uncomfortable.
Cathartic was letting Grace look at me with anger burning in her eyes. That at least feels like it’s getting me somewhere. Like maybe she could singe me to a crisp so I could rise from the ashes.
Crying just makes my eyes hurt.
I jump off the couch, leaving the book behind. That’s enough reading for one day. I need some food.
I’m halfway to the small kitchenette—these lofts were not created equal—when there’s a knock at the door.
My heart fucking leaps, like God answered my fucking prayer, and I sprint to open it.
Grace is on the other side, still in her studio clothes.
She’s looking down at her phone, rage radiating off her.
My heart sinks as I stand in the doorway, waiting for her to look up, realizing that she’s not going to.
“You fucking asshole,” she hisses, her hand shaking, her face still hidden. “Why does she call you Master?”
And just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, it does.
11
Grace
I can’t believe it took me a week to actually read some of the text messages I’d taken screenshots of, actually read them, carefully, word by word.
Something about the way Luke behaved in the garage earlier made something in my brain go…wait a second. It took hours of sculpting for the thought to surface properly, that instinct to go look again at the text messages.
And there it was, in one message. She called him master.
There’s only one reason for that, and I want fucking answers.
“Come inside,” he says, trying to touch my arm.
I shrug him off and step into the spartan bachelor loft. He’s clearly bought some furniture. A couch, a bed. No table or chair. No TV.
There’s a book on the couch and his laptop and work papers are strewn across the bed. It looks like a nicely finished dorm room.
Oh, how I wish I’d made different choices twenty years ago.
The door clicks shut behind me. I pull a letter from my pocket and hand it over. I’ve already taken pictures of it.
“I went through your stuff last week. Somehow I missed this. Maybe it fell out when you were packing.”
He opens it, then drops it, his face going ashen. Good. I hope he feels like the monster that he is.
I lift my chin. “I’ll find everything. I’m smarter than you think.”
“I think you’re the smartest person in the world,” he says dully. It doesn’t sound like a compliment.
“You claimed you wanted to fix us,” I say, my voice shaking. “While you were writing her shit like that?”
“It’s not what you think,” he says, his voice thick and hitching at the end.
I glare at him. “She called you Master.”
“It’s just a…sex word. A name. It doesn’t mean anything.”
How gullible does he think I am? “And you call her Kitten. With a capital K. Capital M. Capital K.”
“So what?”
Hysterical laughter bubbles up from deep inside my aching chest. “You’re her Dom, Luke.”
He blanches. “What?”
“You’re. Her. Kinky. Fucking. Dom.”
“How do you…”
“Because I know, you asshole! Because I wasn’t born yesterday, because I have the internet, because I read things, because…” God, my mouth is dry. I lick my lips and try again. “Because…”
Heat swarms through me. I can’t do it. I can’t explain to him how I know, when he should know that already.
I stumble forward, twisting around as I move through his new apartment that’s far too close to our loft. The home I wanted to rebuild for him. The space I bought with the erotic art I made, inspired by him.
“Sit down,” he says behind me, his voice distant.
His hands try to land on my shoulder and I turn away from him, dropping onto the couch.
I grab the nearest pillow and clutch it to me. “I want you out of this building.”
“Let me fix this.” His voice is low now, but his breath is harsh and shallow. He’s trying to keep control of this, but he has no fucking idea what control is.
He doesn’t understand me at all. What I want.
“Tell me everything,” I say woodenly.
“I don’t know what you want to know.”
“Everything. I want to know every little perverted detail. You and your slut mistress have secrets, from me, and I want to know them all.”
“It wasn’t as kinky as you think. She liked those words.”