Then a thought occurs to me—I don’t need to do it alone. I have someone who loves to watch me. I’m sure they will love to watch this too.
But first things first, I need to get all these people to leave.
Chapter 52
Derek
I toss my keys into the bowl on my kitchen counter before heading over to the wet bar, calling out over my shoulder as the others finish filing into my house. “Drinks?”
There is a chorus of agreement, and I get everyone’s usuals prepared. Lizzottes was busy tonight, given it was a Thursday. I’m more than a little pleased with how the restaurant isgoing. When I purchased it two years ago, it had been a little mom-and-pop-style Italian restaurant passed down through the family. The owners’ son had medical school ambitions, so his aging parents had been doing their best to keep it alive until retirement.
I brought that reality forward for them by about fifteen years when I made my offer. Lizzottes was with me through my entire academic career, first as a place to eat and then as a staff member, working my way through college and supplementing my first few years as a TA until Newton was paying me an actual living wage.
My parents had covered the cost of my tuition, but that was as far as their support went. According to them, having a college job was a lesson that taught quite a few life skills. I had never mentioned to them that I’d required two jobs to learn these skills. Justin does not have that issue. No TA of mine ever will.
Hudson comes up next to me and takes his drink when I offer it to him.
“How are things going with your gifts?”
He shrugs and takes a drink of the beer, not making eye contact. “Hard to say. Xavier tells me she opens everything and that she is using her journal. But it’s a one-way communication. If I’m lucky, she opens it in front of one of his cameras and he sends me the clip, but not all the time.”
I gather my drink and Darcy’s, while he picks up Xavier’s and we move toward the poker table, where the other two are setting things up for our weekly poker game. “You have that session with Darcy on the weekend, though, right?”
Hudson nods, placing Xavier’s drink in his cupholder embedded into the table. “Yeah, but I’m going to keep things simple. Not going to push or ask her for more than she is interested in giving. So, if all I get to do on Saturday is hold her hand for a few hours, then so be it.”
“You’ll get to help with the aftercare too,” Darcy adds as we all take our seats around my poker table. He picks up the cards and starts shuffling. “Depending on how the session goes and how her wrist is doing, I might try a mid-height suspension so that she is reaching down toward you. Any form of weight bearing seems to be her trigger for getting her to float.”
Hudson nods, a thoughtful tip to his head. “Of course. Might organize to have some food delivered to the warehouse, rather than taking her out again.”
“I like that plan. Trying to get her from the warehouse to Thai Orchid wasn’t a fun experience. If we can have the food ready for her as she comes back to us, I think that will be a stealthy way to get more time when her defenses are down,” Darcy adds as he deals one face card up for each of us.
A jack lands in front of me, and I patiently wait for the other three, ultimately winning the deal. Darcy hands me the leftover cards, and I scoop up the four from the felt top, starting to shuffle once they are organized in my hand.
I’ve just started dealing out the cards when there is a chime from Hudson’s phone, the noise causing him to stiffen and his eyes to widen.
Pausing with a card in my hand, ready to be flicked toward Darcy, I eye Hudson. “What?”
“That’s the sound I assigned to Emery.”
I would prefer to be able to say we all act like the almost-forty-year-old men that we are, but unfortunately, that would be a lie. We all freeze in place.
“Has she messaged you since Obsession?” I question, trying and failing at keeping my voice even, but I feel like my heart is fucking racing. Over a text message. That wasn’t even sent to me.
Is our girl starting to soften toward us?
Shaking his head, Hudson stands to withdraw the phone from his back pocket, his Adam’s apple bouncing heavily. He taps at the phone, and… I did not know his eyes could go that wide.
“Holy shit,” he breathes before he looks up at us, eyes a little wild. “Holy shit.”
“Show us,” Darcy demands, his arm stretching out across the table, palm up, waiting for the phone.
Instead, Hudson spins the phone around to face us.
It takes a moment for the image on the phone to register, and even then, I only get a second before Xavier takes the device entirely.
The main focus of the image was a fairly sizable purple cock, a vibrator, presumably. It was sitting on a white duvet, instructions open to the side, with a pair of naked female legs, one outstretched, the other tucked in.
“Where did she even get that?” Darcy mutters as he rubs his hands over his face and up into his hair, ruffling his top knot in the process.
