He gave her a searching look, as if ensuring she was okay with the conversation, not just placating him. "I'm okay," she told him. "I want to know. You just took me off guard. You didn't do anything wrong. But more wine might be good."
His eyes twinkled, and that made things feel better. When he pressed the glass into her hand, she dared herself to follow her feelings on that. She wrapped her fingers over his, holding them to the glass so he didn't draw away. She wanted to know what he would do.
A peculiar stillness took over his expression, a look that stole some of her breath, such that she had to find it again to sip the wine. He adjusted his movements to her, so she could raise the glass to her lips with her fingers still overlapping his. His gaze was on her face as she lowered her eyes to what she was doing, took a reassuring gulp. When she loosened her fingers, he took the glass away, set it aside. Reached out and brushed a drop of the wine from the corner of her mouth.
"You didn't answer my question," she said. "Why me?"
"Lyda asked me how I felt about you," he said. "I said I would be anything she agreed to let me be for you this weekend." He gave her an amused look. "It was the Goth discussion. It made me hot."
She snorted at that, then made herself push him away. His proximity made it hard to think. She really needed to think. "Can we just...ease back? Please? This isn't my world, and to say I'm over my head is an understatement."
"Sure. Why don't we eat?" He moved back to the chair, pulled it out for her. In answer, she pointed him to his chair.
"As much as I appreciate the gentleman routine, I'm safer getting my own self seated."
He grinned at that and complied, moving to his chair, though she noted he waited until she was seated to take his own chair. Her little dining set was a four-seater, small enough that his foot brushed hers before he adjusted his legs out of her way.
She was thinking of something else he'd revealed, close up to her like that. "Do you have a tongue piercing?"
"I do." Fortunately, he didn't open his mouth to waggle it at her, something she found quite non-appealing. When she remarked on that, he made a face of agreement. "Yeah. Women enjoy what I can do with it more than the looks of it. Not so different from another part of the male anatomy, right?"
His comical look toward his lap made her chuckle. "I think women tend to find it more exciting...aesthetically, when they're aroused," she agreed. "When they're not, it does look a little odd. But that's not casting stones. I'd say the same about female genitalia. Wouldn't you?"
"Absolutely not." He used the tongs to dish salad into a smaller bowl for her. "I could stare at close-ups of pussy all day long."
"Which explains a great deal about cinematography in the porn industry," she said dryly.
He winked. "True."
They worked on the salads. After finishing most of her wine, she felt ready to dip her toe back into more uncertain waters. It was helpful that Noah didn't push, staying with general discussion of her plans for the kitchen, questions about the neighborhood, her collages. She sat back.
"How did Lyda react to you saying you'd be anything I wanted?"
"She agreed." Noah rose to get the plates of lasagna, which he'd put back in the oven to stay warm. "You might think of me as bait, Gen, but I'm thinking Lyda was considering me a less intimidating tour guide. She suspected you'd like to learn more about us."
"You didn't call her Mistress that time."
"She's not completely hung up on that. She always says I'll know exactly when to call her Mistress. She's right about that."
The statement was fraught with images Gen could bring into focus far too easily. As Noah put the plates on the table, her gaze coursed up his body, back to the base of his throat, the part of his body that seemed to be her particular obsession. "You know, I really have no idea what to think. Whether to feel appalled, intrigued, nervous...or send you away."
"The most important thing to remember is you're in charge, Gen. You can do whatever makes you feel best."
"But I don't know how to do that, how to ignore your feelings."
"You're not." That emphatic note entered his voice again, commanding her attention. He met her gaze. "When you touched me at the chair, why did you do that? Only because you felt like it?"
"No. The way you looked at me, I thought..."
"I wanted you to touch me. I did. I do. You may not think of yourself as a Domme, Gen, but here's the thing about them. They only do what the submissive truly wants or needs, even though sometimes they have to help us understand what that is, because we bury it under a lot of other crap. My crap's been excavated for quite a while." His gaze flickered, making her wonder what that meant for him. "I'm not confused about how I feel, and I don't want you to think my reaction to you is some kind of generic program that happens for every woman who crosses my radar."
"I didn't mean to be cruel," she said hastily. "I--"
He shook his head, covered her hand. "I wasn't criticizing you. Just making it clear because, like you said, you don't know much about it. Sometimes even Doms and subs get it fucked up. So maybe we should talk about it some, answer those questions you've wanted to ask Chloe and Marguerite but haven't. Okay? Kind of like I'm a live search engine."
While she appreciated the encouragement and understood he was obviously at ease being grilled about it, they both already knew that wasn't the problem.
"Yes. But maybe later. I need to breathe. And eat."
He gave her hand a squeeze. "Fair enough. Will you tell me more about the craft room? It looks like a major studio in there, a little bit of everything. Do you do more than collages?"
"Yes. I do beading, scrapbooking..."
Chapter Three
After the earlier intensity, dinner was surprisingly low key. He got her talking about her collage projects, how she started doing them, the local craft and bookclub groups she socialized with. She and a dozen other women rotated responsibility for hosting crafting parties the first Thursday of every month. Everyone brought a current project and they chatted, ate a potluck dinner. She tried to take one course from the community college every semester. She also volunteered for an animal shelter, walking the dogs and cleaning out the cat cages a couple Sundays each month. She told him about a lean, black-and-white, seven-year-old tomcat who had come in recently, with scarred face and a bad attitude.
"I'm thinking I may adopt him. He's starting to like me. But I wanted to get the kitchen done first. I figured he wouldn't appreciate all the noise and dust."
In turn, she found out Noah had an eclectic employment history. In New Orleans, he'd worked multiple jobs, sometimes holding as many as three at a time. Stocking at grocery stores, park cleanup, mowing right of ways, construction. But his last job had been as a waiter in an upscale New Orleans restaurant. The tips he'd earned there were substantial enough he'd dropped to one job. He'd done that for about a year before coming to Florida to be near his grandmother.
"Dot's still pretty spry and determined to live alone. She's far more likely to offer help to a neighbor than ask for it in return, but she has to use a motorized chair to get around. She and I have always been close, so now that I'm nearby, if she's not feeling well or needs something done at the house, she'll call me. I've built her ramps and helped fix things in the house so it's easier for her to navigate and get things done in the chair."
His fondness for her was obvious. On the flipside, when he asked Gen about her job at Tea Leaves, she could tell he registered how much she loved working with Marguerite and Chloe.
"It's funny about Chloe," he said. "We all know she's not a Domme, even Brendan, but she's adapted herself to him in so many right ways, even Lyda's come around about it. At first she was sure they were going to crash and burn."
"Has she seen the two of them together?" Gen was offended for her friend. "Who could possibly think that?"
"That's part of why she's come around," Noah explained. "Seeing them together more often. But Lyda's witnessed relationships where
someone without a true Dom/sub orientation hooks up with someone who has a strong one, and Brendan is a down-to-the-bone sub. Those relationships have a hard go of it, long term. But the way he and Chloe feel about each other, it's obvious there's something there, above, beyond and below the Dom/sub thing. That gives it a far better chance of survival."
He smiled. "Beyond that, it's impossible not to love Chloe. Brendan would ride a bicycle to the moon for her."
Gen thought about how Chloe had thrown herself in Noah's lap, his easy affection with her. She wondered if Noah defined himself as a down-to-the-bone submissive.
At this point she'd moved into the living room and was curled up on the couch, watching him clean up the kitchen. He'd shooed her out, refused to let her help.
He'd left the shirt off. When he made motions to put it back on for dinner, she'd asked him not to do so. He hadn't said anything about that, but the flicker of his gaze as he complied had made her focus on her lasagna intently for the first few minutes of their dinner. Now she studied the smooth expanse of his back. As she expected, he did have tattoos. Between his shoulder blades was a blood-colored heart with a Celtic triquetra overlay done in black. Below it was the infinity sign, the sideways figure eight, intertwined with a rendering of handcuffs. Below that was script.
Yours, unconditionally.
When she'd indicated he was merely a tool for his Mistress, not genuinely interested in Gen for her own sake, his negative reaction had been emphatic. And yet it niggled at Gen, his level of compliance to...everything. Yours, unconditionally. For herself, it was a highly alien concept, agreeing to give oneself to a complete stranger, just because someone else ordered it.
"What if I wanted to tie you up and drown you in my bathtub?"
"You have a shower."
She made a face at him. "You know what I mean. Smartass."
He grinned, pulling ice cream from the freezer. "I draw the line at being murdered. Unless my Mistress convinced me I'd done something that really deserved that. I hope that won't be the case this weekend."
She couldn't tell when he was joking. Holding off on further questions for the moment, she indulged herself in a study of the taper of his waist, how his jeans rode his hips, the shift of his buttocks. He'd shed shoes and socks, so he was barefoot. He'd taken off the silver-and-black double-wrapped choker before dinner, though he still wore one of the bracelets.
He brought her a small dish of sherbet, decorated with a couple vanilla wafers. Taking a seat on the floor next to the couch, he braced his back against the foot of her easy chair and drew his knees up into a bent position, his body angled so he could see her. She was willing to make room for him next to her, but he indicated he was good where he was.
"Is sitting on the floor a sub thing? Or you just like the floor?"
He lifted a shoulder. "Habit is part of it. At home or in a club setting, my Mistress often requires me to kneel or sit on the floor, so my head isn't higher than hers."
"That seems really egotistical."
"Not in that context. She's honoring what I am by letting me act as her submissive in every way. When she makes me act like her equal, often she's punishing me."
She digested that. "You don't strike me as a cringing slave type."
"It's not like that, either." He gestured with the spoon. "It's hard to explain. You sort of have to feel it, or have a sense of it."
"So you could explain all night long and I wouldn't get it." That gave her in inexplicable sinking feeling, but Noah touched her foot.
"No, not necessarily. You don't have to be as deep in it as Brendan or Lyda to figure it out. All of us have Dom and sub tendencies. Think about your job. Who would you say is the alpha dog there?"
"Marguerite," she said without hesitation.
"Yeah, no brainer. Okay, how about between you and Chloe? When push comes to shove, who defers to who? And why?"
She was about to say neither, but then she gave it some thought. "I guess...me. I don't know if that's an age thing, since I'm older than she is, and I'm not saying she does everything I say--I'd fall over dead in shock if that happened--but..."
"But you have an intuitive sense of authority over her that you both accept." He shrugged. "We're animals, and we organize ourselves in a pack mentality, whether it's in a family setting, work setting, even in social groups."
She shifted. This was starting to feel like an academic discussion, where the verbiage might get above her head, but he defused her tension about that by bringing it back to specifics. "That's the day-to-day, vanilla side of it. High level and general. If you want to understand the way it happens specifically between people like Lyda and me, or Chloe and Brendan, you do kind of have to see it in action. But I'm not pushing you to go to a club or anything."
"It's like being in the ocean versus standing on shore, looking at it," she guessed.
"Exactly." He looked relieved that she understood, hadn't become defensive. "But there are different grades to us. Like Lyda. She's pretty much all Domme. Even when she's interacting in the vanilla world, you see it, feel it."
"I hadn't noticed," Gen said dryly.
He grinned. "Other Dommes are only that way at the club or in their own bedrooms. In the real world, they might hold what you'd consider more subservient roles. Secretaries, convenience store clerks, things like that. Being a Domme in the bedroom balances that with a power shift. You see that with men as well. It's why the stereotype exists about the CEOs wanting to be tied up and spanked. There's a lot of truth to the idea of powerful men wanting to be subs in the bedroom. Whereas the guy who picks up your trash might be a hell of a Dom.
"But you can't paint everyone with the same brush," he added. "Sometimes what you see on the outside reflects the inside as well. A powerful CEO might be a powerful Dom, and the garbage guy might like being tied up." His lips twisted wryly. "And I obviously fall in the latter category. I have been a garbage man once or twice."
"I bet that can get confusing. Or cause conflict. People like being able to classify things, keep them neat."
"Yeah. Sometimes people have trouble accepting something as truth, when it's different from what they expect...or want it to be." A shadow crossed his countenance.
"Like Lyda about Brendan and Chloe." Gen ventured the comment when he didn't say anything else. "You okay?"
"Yeah." He shrugged it off and addressed her comment instead. "Lyda can be pretty black and white on certain things. She knew Brendan was a hardcore sub, and couldn't see how Chloe, who's basically vanilla adventurous, could make that work. The answer was she couldn't. Not by herself, and not under the terms Lyda defines being a Domme. But Brendan and Chloe bring a lot of things to one another that enhance and define the Dom/sub side, and that makes it work. Sorry. I'm probably going too deep here."
"No. I'm following." This was really what she'd been seeking. An in-depth exploration without the self-consciousness of the spotlight. "It's like Chloe and me. She loves me and she's afraid my life is boring, humdrum. She thinks she needs to save me from it. Her life is so vibrant, it's hard for her to realize most of the time I'm happy with mine not being that way. My experiences...have made me value quietness."
She told herself to be honest, despite the worry she was coming off as colorless as her beige carpet. "I don't need to travel the world or jump out of a plane. To me, working in my craft room, listening to music and knowing, for the next few hours, nothing's going to disturb that, that's a gift."
He'd set aside his empty ice cream dish, had his fingers linked over his knees as he listened to her. "I need to take you sailing sometime. Have you ever been?"
"I went on a big boat one time. One of those tall sailing ships."
"Those are cool, but there's a quiet on a smaller craft I think you'd like. Will you go with me sometime?"
He'd understood, and made her viewpoint, who she was, feel right. "If you don't do something that makes Lyda murder you this weekend," she managed.
He chuckled at that, d
ipped his finger into her dish and stole some of her ice cream. "Lesser miracles."
"Hey." She fenced him away with her spoon, making that grin wreath his face once more as he licked his finger clean. When she was done with her dish, he took it and returned to the kitchen to finish cleanup. Since he'd encouraged her to do her usual things, she went to her craft room. Once there, though, she quickly realized she wanted to hang out with him. So she called out, encouraged him to join her after he finished, if he still wanted to see how she did the collages. To her great pleasure, he did.
She showed him how she collected paper and employed different mediums to give the collages textures. She particularly liked using colors and patterns to create smaller pictures and patterns inside larger ones, like the cat in the hallway.
"I went through a religious phase. One of my first collages was of Jesus' face. I had this great idea of putting together a bunch of faces. Young, old, different races, sexes, species, and that would become the shape of his head, the crown of thorns."
"So how did it turn out?" His brow arched, eyes fixed on her face.
"Close up, it was interesting enough. But unfortunately, two steps away it turned into a man with a lot of tumors on his face. Not the effect I was seeking." She laughed at herself. "I'm babbling, I'm sorry. I'm sure this isn't anywhere near as fascinating to you as it is to me."
"On the contrary. Your face lights up when you talk about the things that interest you. It's like watching a garden bloom in moonlight." He nodded to the corner, where she had a guitar propped. "You play."
When his gaze slid back to her, expecting her answer, she was still trying to untie her tongue. "What was your major at college?" she asked at last.
"Horticulture, poetry. Philosophy. Mechanical engineering for a semester or two." He gave her a wry look. "I only had the money for the first couple years, and then I shifted to auditing classes or paying for them one at a time. I like reading just about anything, learning anything new."
"Okay." That explained how he'd been able to deliver such a beautiful line as if it was commonplace talk. "As far as the guitar, no, I don't play. I bought that for five dollars at a yard sale and then took a couple lessons, but it didn't grab me. I should probably sell it, but I haven't given up on the idea of starting my own bluegrass band yet."