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Turning from the stove, he smiled and slid the casserole into a bowl he had waiting for it. "Breakfast is a better wakeup call than an alarm clock. I'm glad you grabbed some extra sleep."
She hadn't been sure what kind of awkwardness to expect, but obviously any felt was all on her side. He wore his jeans and a community college T-shirt with a sailboat printed on it.
"I get it now. You really have outgrown the Goth thing. You just wear the jewelry so the kids you teach think you're cool."
He snorted, poured them both a glass of juice and held out her chair. She slid into it, trying not to think about how that same maneuver had gone last night. Taking a seat across from her, he nudged salt and ketchup her way. "My students range from eighteen to fifty, so there's no way I can convince all of them I'm cool. I gave up. Hope you don't mind that I started setting up."
"Not at all. Did you sleep?"
"Quite well." His eyes caressed her in a way that made her flush. "Though I wish I could have given you the same experience."
"I slept well enough," she said quickly, making it clear she didn't want to talk about that. A puzzled look crossed his face, but he respected the boundary,
backed off. The conversation stayed relaxed and general over breakfast, and then they got started.
She helped him lay the plywood and he put it down with the nail gun she'd borrowed from Tyler and Marguerite. However, the kitchen space was small. It became clear he made more progress without her being underfoot, so she soon shifted to being a gofer and keeping him company. Finding a radio station he liked, she sat on a stool in the living room, discussing music and watching him when he didn't have a task for her.
Once the tile placement started she was busy again. He initially proposed doing the tile cuts with the wet saw while she laid the tile, but he was the one with the tiling experience. When she showed him she was more than capable of making straight cuts with the saw, he pursed his lips in a gratifyingly impressed expression and agreed to let her do the cutting while he laid out the floor.
She thought she could watch him work all day long. As he'd hefted plywood, denim had creased and stretched in a pleasing way, the Florida heat outside quickly dampening his shirt with sweat. When he used the nail gun, she was entranced by the grip of his long brown fingers, the way his biceps rippled with each shot. She studied the intentness of his expression as he measured and judged the distance of the tiles.
They talked about this and that--the music on the radio, anecdotes about his students or her customers at the tea room. Depending on the topic, his lips would curve or eyes sharpen. As he worked on his knees, placing tiles, she thought of him stretched out in her guest bed, hand on his erection, his eyes seeking her in the shadows.
In the bright light of day she wasn't sure she should have done what she'd done last night. Nighttime was when everyone was more vulnerable to foolishness. But she recalled something Marguerite had told her, on a day Gen had snapped at Chloe for trying one too many times to set up a blind date for her.
You're comfortable being alone, Gen, but you're also lonely. Unlike many women, you don't let that lead you. You don't act only on emotional impulse. But don't forget you can also trust yourself to make choices to alleviate that loneliness, if and when you desire to do so.
She thought of what Noah had said last night, about how to understand a Dom/sub relationship. "Can you come to a club just to watch? To learn? Do they frown on that?"
"Not at The Zone. It's as much a nightclub as a BDSM club." He was squatting, putting spacers between the next group of tiles. Glancing up at her, he wiped his forehead with his wrist. His long hair, braided in a tail, had fallen forward over his right shoulder. "You'd be welcome to come with me and Lyda one night as a guest. No pressure. The Zone is one of the best clubs around, both for checking things out and playing."
Since Tyler was a part owner, she had no doubt of that. "We'll see." She nodded to the floor. "I feel like you're doing all the work. You really should let me pay you."
"You're doing plenty. Having to get up and cut tile and do other stuff is half the labor time. You handle that Skil saw like a pro. Most women wouldn't have both the muscle and the light touch to cut the tile without breaking it."
She shrugged, though the compliment pleased her. "My first husband and I renovated our house together. I learned from him. He was a contractor."
"I'm sorry it didn't work out." Noah's eyes met hers.
"A lot of people have the same story." She wanted to move off that topic, fast. "Have you been married?"
She told herself it wasn't a dumb question. She'd met plenty of twentysomethings who'd been married and divorced a couple times before hitting thirty. She'd been one of them.
He shook his head. "No. Only been collared once."
At her quizzical look, he elaborated. "To a lot of submissives, being collared is as serious as being married. The Master or Mistress is accepting permanent ownership."
Marguerite often wore a delicate choker, a double helix of pearls with an angel pendant. She'd given it to Tyler at their wedding. At the time, Gen had thought it odd, a bride presenting a necklace for herself to the groom. Yet when Tyler fastened it around Marguerite's neck, the surfeit of emotion in his expression, and the hushed demeanor of friends Gen now knew were also part of the BDSM world, had told her he'd considered it an immeasurable gift. The gift Marguerite must have been offering him was her willing submission, promised to him forever. A collar.
Finding out Marguerite was a Mistress hadn't been a huge shock. Finding she submitted to Tyler was initially harder to understand. Yet just like Chloe and Brendan, if a person spent any time around Marguerite and Tyler, it made sense. Marguerite could rule the world with a look, but it was Tyler's possession of her heart and soul that had brought the reserved woman true happiness, peace with her past demons.
Maybe that was the mature woman's true Cinderella story. Not that the prince came on his white horse and swooped her away from all her problems, but he got off the horse and stood by her, helped her deal with all of it through an entire lifetime. The thought gave her a wistful twinge. She turned her mind back to the safer, more hypothetical discussion of collars.
"You get a vote, don't you?" she asked. "I mean, a Mistress doesn't just slap it on you without your say-so? And you can take it off when you don't want that anymore, right?"
"Or the Dom takes it off when he doesn't want the sub anymore." The tightness in Noah's voice told her that had been his experience. He? Noah hadn't given her the vibe of being bi. Though obviously he was, if he'd been willing to be "married" to a man, according to the terms of the BDSM world.
"I'm sorry," she said.
