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"Oh really?" She fished in her purse, pulled out a dollar and set it on the table. "I'll bet a dollar it's not. You seem totally together."
"I'm a Dom. We're all about the illusion of total control." He winked, but set his own crumpled dollar next to hers. He sipped his unsweetened tea then, as if gathering his thoughts. He'd let go of her hand and she curled both in her lap, feeling adrift until he pressed his foot against hers under the table, connecting them.
"Just tell me, Des. Please. I poured my guts out to you. Quid pro quo."
His lips quirked, but he set down the tea and nodded, crossing his arms on the table. "I don't have any interest in in-depth discussions about this. But I owe you what's behind the curtain if we're going any farther. So I'm going to tell you what I need to tell you and, when this meal is over, there's no need to talk about it further. I'm not a disease."
The sudden fierceness in his tone, the set of his jaw, alerted her to the maelstrom of emotions going on beneath the surface. She might lose that dollar. He wasn't as together over this as he'd first appeared.
"Doesn't matter what you tell me. I could never think of you that way, Des."
He glanced over the dining room absently, as if he'd rather be anywhere else than talking about this. She shifted her foot so her toe pressed on his and he brought his gaze back to her. He had some kind of glitter on his shoulder, maybe from the shingles he'd been handling. When she reached toward it to brush it off, he caught her hand.
"It's probably fiberglass. The splinters are nasty." He held onto her hand, resting it on the table, playing with her fingers and studying them.
"I told you I had a bunch of health issues when I was a kid. I was a preemie, and my mom split as soon as they discharged her. They said I wouldn't survive a week, because she was a prescription drug addict and that affected my development. When I made it to age five, I started having seizures. They said I'd be dead before I was ten. Then the diabetes started. So on and so forth."
Her heart skipped a beat as he lifted his gaze to her face. "About the time I hit twenty-five, the damn doctor stopped giving me the doom-and-gloom, 'You won't live past so-n-so.' Probably because I told him next time he said it, I'd feed him his stethoscope through his anus. But there are a couple things I can't beat. I'm insulin-resistant and my kidneys are wearing out. I don't need dialysis yet, but it will come sooner than later. Renal failure. That's the track toward the end, love. I'm not a good transplant candidate because of my medical history."
The waitress brought their food. As she placed the plates on the table and asked them if they needed anything else, Julie watched Des switch gears. His usual genuine charm and humor made the waitress smile and Julie's chest ache. She'd poured open her heart to him, all her worries about pursuing a relationship, and he was giving her the same. Quid pro quo could be a bitch.
"Hey." He drew her out of her head. The waitress was gone. "Don't look like that, love. Nobody knows when it's going to end."
He took a breath. "But that said, I'm not in denial, either. That's why I'm telling you. I have no way of explaining to you, other than this, that you're different to me. I've gotten involved with plenty of women in session. None outside of it. Yet when you look at me the way you do...I like it. I want to spend time with you, in every way I can. But I'm not going to let you get any deeper without knowing what might happen. I wouldn't want to do that to you."
She swallowed and he narrowed his eyes, making a threatening gesture with his fork. "You get teary on me, I'll take your pancakes and eat them myself."
She blinked the tears back. "That's just mean."
"I'm not always nice." He made a stab at her plate and she fended him off with her fork, making him smile and things unknot a bit in her gut. He sobered though, probably because she couldn't entirely mask her reaction.
"Will I have a much shorter lifespan than you?" he said. "Pretty likely, unless you die in a car crash, though I'd be severely pissed if you did."
"I'll keep that in mind."
"You do that." He reached across the table and tapped her hand. "But I'm not going to be gone tomorrow. In the meantime, we can keep going as we're going, figure out where we'll end up together. Or you decide we're friends from here forward, and that's the end of it. Ball's back in your court, love."
His tone, his direct look, said he was ready to be done with the subject. She sensed a withdrawal in him, a closing down, the wall coming back up. He'd put himself out there for her, to let her know, but he must be anticipating rejection, pity, sympathy or her withdrawal. Whereas she'd dealt with her build-up of feeling with an outpouring that made her feel drained, he dealt with the same kind of stress by containing it.
He genuinely didn't like talking about this. But he had, for her. Because he wanted more from her. He wanted to see where this would go.
He'd given her the answer she'd sought, mostly, and now the question was whether she was willing to risk taking this road one more time. Up until the other day, with Pablo, she hadn't given a lot of thought to her mortality. Des dealt with his on a daily basis. Could she really be so chickenshit as to back away from a relationship with a guy she really liked for fear he might hurt her with his death? If nothing else, it was the first time she'd had that risk in a relationship.
"Ball's back in my court, hmm? Thought you said once you had the ball back you wouldn't give it up."
"I did say Doms were all about the illusion of total control. You have to give me the control, love. Every time."
She wasn't sure that was entirely true. When he was exercising his will upon her, she couldn't find her own with both hands. But this was a different kind of moment.
She picked up her fork. "Can you pass me the maple syrup?"
He obliged. "You're not going to tell me which way you're going to go on this?"
"Not until I eat. I don't make any decisions on an empty stomach."
"All right, but just keep this in mind. If I do tear your heart out like those other losers, you'll get the satis
faction of dancing on my grave while you're still young enough to do it without a walker. How many guys can offer a girl a perk like that?"
