He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket, showing Skye the picture he carried, his mother holding an infant Colt while Tiger stood at her hip.
Skye touched the edge of the photo, then spelled out that word “was” again. With a question mark. A poignant way to ask if his mother was still alive. He shook his head. "Both my parents are gone."
He sure as hell didn’t want to talk about that. Fortunately, she seemed to figure that out. She put her hand back on his chest to give him a gentle, understanding tap. Then she leaned against him, bending her head over her phone to type something else. As she did, he took the intimacy as a measured invitation andtipped his chin down, inhaling the scent of her hair. Brushed his lips over it.
There’d been a poetry reading at the club one night. Tiger was definitely not a poetry guy. Most of it seemed to be flowery stuff, or lines so confusing he didn’t have the patience to sort through what they meant. Authors should write it so people could understand what the fuck they were talking about.
“Yeah, kind of like the lyrics of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody,’” Maryshka had pointed out dryly, hearing his grumblings. She knew his Queen albums were his guilty pleasure. Some of his earliest road trips on his first bike had happened with Freddie Mercury belting out “Radio Gaga” in his ears.
But during that poetry night at the club, a big fiftyish guy with a heavy Russian accent had read something he’d written. The stanzas, rough and not flowery, talked about how a man could fuck a woman, squeeze her tits, fondle her ass. Use every inch of her as if he owned her. That was “all good.” Yet, what took “good to heaven,” overwhelming him, was when his Mistress permitted him the slightest brush of his lips on her hand. Her foot.
“The bliss, unimaginable, of touching her neck, small of back. Holding her as she sleeps. I feel her breath, the bump of her heart against my chest. I am all I ever need to be.”
Other subs had been as impressed by the poem as he was. What lay beneath the words was familiar to all of them. Now, as Tiger touched his mouth to Skye’s hair, he thought of that poem. At the press of her hand on his thigh, he adjusted to see what she’d typed.
“It bothered you, thinking I live with a man.”
He shrugged. “That’s not my business.”
Her silent look said the answer wasn’t acceptable. She wanted a gut-level response.
He sighed. “I don’t have any claim on you, and where my head and life’s at right now, I sure as hell wouldn’t be trying to inflict one on a woman. Let alone one as special as you.”
Clearing his throat, he glanced toward the room with the rubber curtains. “Care to share its current state, before it becomes a total girl dungeon?”
He didn’t know if he’d get the chance to see that, so he might as well see the front end. He didn’t want to talk about the surge of pointless possessiveness. Thankfully, she seemed okay with the distraction. She rose and offered her hand. When he stood to follow her, she brought them around the screens, to the opening in the curtains. Since he was a step behind, he used his longer arm to reach forward and hold the PVC strip curtains back for her.
She tilted her chin, an acknowledgement of service, the kind of approval that subs fed upon, and she knew it. Though she’d used the alcove near this space for her unopened boxes, she hadn’t stored any in here. He suspected she was respecting its intent, keeping it pure.
The first thing he saw made him grin, though. “You really haven’t changed anything yet. Or are you a closet switch?”
Her lips parted on that little huff of breath, her version of a chuckle. She moved to the sign, clicked it on so the crimson light flooded the two words that had prompted the question.
Yes, Sir.
A spanking bench and St. Andrew’s cross were in the space, the basics for an upscale home dungeon. The third piece of bondage equipment was a cylindrical steel cage topped with a piece of polished wood that made it look like a stool, until one noticed the hole in the seat. It was a stock. When a sub was closed into the cage, his or her throat would be locked inside that opening, keeping the mouth accessible.
The size of the cylinder required them to sit upright, arms and knees folded up against the torso. The bars were narrowly spaced, no putting arms and legs outside of them. A Dom could sit nearby, read his morning paper, have his coffee, and feed his pet treats. Like his cock.
A male Dom came to Tiger’s mind because the cage looked sized for a female sub of smaller dimensions. At least he hoped so. “If you want me in that, we’re going to have to employ a shrink ray gun. Most Mistresses aren’t all that interested in shrinking my parts.”
With a smile, Skye moved to the spanking bench and sat down, patting the area next to her. When he braced his ass companionably next to hers, she bent her attention to her phone again.
“Ben told me I could give it away,” she typed. “He had no need of it anymore. I just haven’t gotten around to it.”
“I can put it in my truck and take it to the Progeny warehouse, where they store stuff for the Christmas charity auction. I’ll bet it would get some good bids.”
She considered that, nodded. Then she glanced toward the neon sign and gave him back the same question he’d asked her. “Is that something that’s ever interested you? Switching?”
“You know the answer to that.”
Her expression said she agreed with that assessment, but she wanted him to expand on it. And she prompted him with an easier question. “Earliest trigger moment?”
He grinned. “It happened in a strip bar. A dancer had a Domme routine, and she did it damn well. She was catering to a different male fantasy, but she knew her shit.”
He shrugged. “From there, it was a lot of things I didn’t exactly recognize until they all came together. I’d thought about it, fantasized about it, and one day, I went to a munch and was invited to a play party. I’d left myself open-ended, for the usualreasons. I wanted to see how much shit a guy who looks like me was going to get for preferring the sub side.
“Two Doms walked me through everything, a man and a woman. Darcy was the Domme. After about an hour, she said, ‘so, where would you like to start?’”