Today had been all right. Nothing unusual, just tiring. Most of my clients were charged with offenses relating to narcotics and alcohol—possession, DUI, low-level trafficking. It was fairly straightforward and meant a lot more plea deals than trials, which I could live with.
Sometimes, the darker stuff came across my desk. Where there were people, there was violence, and there were times when I had to deal with clients who made me question humanity. There was a park in town I couldn’t go to because I knew too many details about (and still had nightmares about) a series of stabbings that had happened there. I avoided a particular street because I’d seen all the graphic images of that alcohol-fueled crash. Whenever I drove by a particular house on the south end of town, I caught myself wondering how the woman who’d lived there was doing after she’d killed her husband in self-defense. Things like that were vanishingly rare here, but they happened, and even if I did this job for a thousand years, I’d never understand why people did the things they did.
At least Laurelsburg is better than Chicago.
I turned my back to the shower spray and rolled my shoulders as the water beat on tired muscles. Today had just been a long day. Just a lot of dull, tedious things that were relatively easy but still managed to be fucking draining. Lots of paperwork. Lots of dense legal briefs. I’d gone to law school with a guy who’d been in the military, and he snarked that legal briefs were about as brief as military briefings: not even a little bit. Couldn’t really argue with him.
Rubbing my lower back, I reminded myself I needed to work on my posture instead of hunching over my desk. Will had been after me for a while to get a more ergonomic chair like the one he used. Maybe he was on to something. He usually was.
I smiled as the water beat some of the tension out of my back. Where would I be without Will? Probably still in Chicago, and probably still running myself into the ground instead of learning to take a break once in a while. When I had a particularly harrowing case in the works, it was Will who kept me upright and kept me moving forward. He was always there with a soft touch on the nights when I needed reassurance that there was still kindness in the world, and he was there with ropes or a flogger on the nights when I needed oblivion. I’d watched a number of people in my profession succumb to alcoholism to cope, and I wondered sometimes if Will was the only reason I didn’t.
And tonight, we’re meeting someone because he’s not enough for me?
I exhaled as the shower continued to beat on the back of my neck. Were we making a huge mistake? Stupidly risking our marriage?
Over and over again, I’d told myself I didn’t need the level of pain Will and I had discovered that one night. I could be happy and satisfied without it. I’d been happy and satisfied without it for decades.
But damn if one taste hadn’t left me craving it. A friend on a message board had likened it to going through life with a mild but annoying chronic pain, like from a back injury that meant low-grade aches and twinges that never quite went away. Then one day, something magically made the pain stop completely for a period of time. One taste of that pain-free euphoria, and suddenly the hunger for that relief was impossible to ignore. The subtle day to day pain wasn’t any worse, but it was a hell of a lot more distracting.
People on the board had argued about whether that made it sound like an addiction, and maybe it did. Maybe it was an addiction of sorts. Maybe pain was a drug for me. But as another user had pointed out, finding a drug that fixes a problem and makes you feel better isn’t the same as getting hooked on a recreational drug.
All I knew was that Will and I had pushed through what I’d thought was the ceiling of my pain tolerance, and on the other side, I’d found a level of subspace I’d never experienced before. A rush of endorphins that made everything in the world disappear, and made me feel completely relaxed and free and utterly blissed out. High, in a way, but when I came back down, especially with my beloved Dom bringing me back down gently, I was calm and recharged as if I’d slept for a week, and I felt like I could take on the world. That feeling lasted for days afterward. Everything was sharper and quieter—like I could concentrate instead of trying to push through the haze of stress while the noise of the world around me dragged my focus away.
Could I live without it? Sure. Could I be happy without it? Probably. But now that I knew it existed, I ached for it, and the longer I went without, the more frustrating it was. Even when I tried not to show it, Will could see it, and now maybe we’d found someone who could take me there without pushing Will beyond his limits.
At what cost, though?
Because I was excited to meet the man who’d answered our ad. I was a distracted wreck just thinking about the things the three of us could do together.
But I was scared shitless too.
This would most likely go one of two ways.
One, he’d be exactly what Will and I needed.
Two, this would be an unmitigated disaster.
And for the millionth time, I wondered if it was a good idea at all.
Five
Kelly
As my car’s GPS guided me through Laurelsburg, my stomach fluttered with feelings I hadn’t experienced in a long time. Excitement. Nerves, but like in a good way for a change. I kind of wanted to speed so I could get to Aaron and Will’s house sooner than later, but I really didn’t need to get a ticket. I wasn’t quite familiar enough with the town to know where all the speed traps were.
That, and unlike in Los Angeles, my odds of getting pulled over by someone I’d blown in the past were precisely zero. At least in LA there was a chance—albeit a slim one—that the cop would recognize me and maybe cut me some slack. Then again, there had also been the chance that the cop pulling me over would be my ex or one of his buddies, in which case they’d probably call in K-9 or something and have my car searched for drugs in between asking dispatch if they were sure I had no outstanding warrants. Ugh. That guy was a dick. You know those guys who become cops just so they can be bullies with guns and badges? That was him in a nutshell, I discovered six weeks into dating him and precisely two days before I dumped his ass and made myself persona non grata in his precinct.
Anyway.
I tapped my thumbs on the wheel as I followed a street lined with houses and leaf-heavy trees. My momentary distraction about the number of cops I had carnal knowledge of in Los Angeles vs Laurelsburg had killed all of about two minutes, and the route guidance said I still had eighteen to go before my destination. For fuck’s sake. My wandering brain had passed hours on end while I’d been driving across the country—I swear I spent like three hours in the desert having a lively internal debate about some random comment I’d overheard at a rest stop about legalizing weed. I was pretty sure there’d also been a stretch through some endless cornfields that had been a bittersweet mental montage of all the pretty and kinky men I was leaving behind in Los Angeles (some of whom I’d miss tremendously, others who could go fuck themselves).
And that little tangent about my previous tangents consumed…another two minutes.
“Oh my God, come on,” I demanded of the car, the GPS, and the road. “Can we just get there already?”
It wasn’t that much farther. It really wasn’t. After driving all the way across the stupid continent, I shouldn’t have been losing my mind over a short drive through this tiny town. Though, okay, that transcontinental drive had been at an average of eighty-five-plus miles an hour—cough, I mean, seventy-five miles an hour, since that was usually the speed limit—and this one was between twenty-five and thirty-five. Legally, anyway. So it was slow as balls.