Two hours and one extensive biology lesson later and things seemed to be at somewhat of a standstill. Since Maddie’s water had already broken, the doctors were saying that they couldn’t let things go on too long, so they were trying to stimulate her labor with more drugs. To be completely honest, I was bored. The excitement of arriving and things getting started had more than worn off, and now we were just waiting for Laura to turn up and take over.

  She had called when they got back to the city, and since everything seemed to be going okay, we were left in charge at the hospital while she and Steven checked in on their daughters before coming over.

  “Jesse filled me in on a few things,” Will said to Maddie gently. He clearly had no problem taking the daddy chair and was smoothing Maddie’s hair back from her face as he spoke to her. I wasn’t sure if it was the dominant personality he embodied so well, or our friendship with Laura, or the fact that he was simply such a loving person, but Maddie seemed to be responding to him being there quite well.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “My parents own a few apartments on the outskirts of the city. I called my mom earlier, and she has one that might be free for you to rent if you want that. Her rates are very reasonable.”

  Maddie nodded. “That would be good.”

  “That is if you want to move out of Steven and Laura’s, of course. There won’t be any pressure on you to do so.”

  “I want to,” she said. “I love Laura very much, but if I’m going to keep this baby, then I want to do it on my own.”

  “Have you two discussed this at all?” he pressed gently. “I know she won’t be upset. Of course the ideal would be for you to remain living with them, but all anyone wants is for you to be happy.”

  “I will talk to her,” she said. “I will. I just need to get this whole day over and my baby out, then we can make plans.”

  “Okay,” he agreed and pressed a kiss to her temple. “Concentrate on that now. Good girl.”

  It was, of course, exactly the right way for him to approach things with her. She needed options, and focus, and the opportunity to take control of her own future. I didn’t make any assumptions that I knew exactly what the dynamic between her and Laura and Steven was, and as much as I wanted the best for Maddie, my loyalties couldn’t help but lie with my former Domme.

  I wondered exactly how much Maddie leaving would break her heart.

  Laura turned up just as things started to pick up speed with Maddie’s labor. I stayed in the room with Maddie while Will took Laura outside and explained as much as he could. Then with a simple “Right, boys—out!” we were dismissed.

  An hour later, he was born.

  I’m not sure what compelled us to stay once Laura arrived and clearly took charge of the situation. No matter what happened between her, Maddie, and Steven, she clearly cared deeply what happened to the girl who had been her sub.

  Then, when she stumbled from the room, pale faced and sweating, and collapsed back against the wall with her palms flat against it, it came to me. We were here for her.

  “Hey,” I said, rushing over to pull her into a hug. “Is she okay? Is the baby okay?”

  “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 Will’s 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 it. 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

  As 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 had 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 Will Anderson. No one ever claimed he 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.”

  That 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.”

  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 behind my back, 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, Master.”

  “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.

  I leaned forward slightly, testing my weight and how I could redistribute it so that the brunt of it was held on my wrists or elbows or shoulders.

  Master gently gripped my waist and leaned in to press a kiss to each of my shoulders. “I would like to collar you, Jesse. Is that okay?”

  I nodded. “Yes. Yes, please, Sir.”

  Of course, it had been so, so long since I had last felt my collar around my neck, its weight comforting and reassuring me that I was his. I was done with symbolism, I wanted the reality of it now. I wanted the bite of leather on my skin and the hot lick of pain and the sound of his breath as his heart accelerated at the way I looked.

  The feel of the leather around my neck was like a steaming hot bath at the end of a long day. It was the kiss from a lover after a week apart. It was reassurance, safety.

  It belonged to me and me alone. And I belonged to him. In this state, where my mind started to wander and my train of thought ran wild, things became circular, finally ending in peace.

  I could feel his hesitancy. My Master had always been confident to the point of dispassion when he dealt with me before, and though he could be caring and gentle, he knew me and my limits. I knew when I entered the playroom that things had changed. We were both adapting to these new versions of ourselves.

  However much I wanted him to flog me, I could accept that it wasn’t my place to ask for that. More than I wanted him to hurt me, I wanted this again, the connection that we shared that transcended any other relationship I’d ever had.

  His nails scraping down my back had me arching into his touch, forced a curve to my spine to elongate it, drawing out the delicious scratch. With one hand resting on my lower back steadying me) Master swatted my ass lightly.

  I stayed perfectly still while I ached for more.

  He hit me again. A little harder this time. Then three more smacks in quick succession.

  I could feel my cock growing as he started a regular, rhythmic spanking, and as I tried to get my mind to drift into subspace, a persistent thought niggled at my consciousness—this really did hurt.

  Fortunately he deemed my warm-up complete before I started squirming away from his touch, something he surely would have disapproved of. I waited and tried to regulate my breathing as he moved away, giving me time to recover.

  When the long leather falls of the flogger caressed the naked skin of my back, I could have moaned in relief. The familiar weight of the long strands moving from my shoulder to the small of my back felt like I was coming home to something that had been a part of my very identity not so long ago.

  With a flick of Will’s wrist, the flogger fell across my shoulders. It was more sensation than pain, the warmth of the leather as it kissed my skin, bringing the blood to the surface, preparing me for what came next.

  It fell, again, across my other shoulder.

  And then, what I’d been waiting for—the constant, even thuds as he worked the flogger in the circular motion he’d demonstrated for me, hitting first one shoulder, then the next.