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She swallowed. “I think Nicole’s death and stuff from his past have combined with the hearing loss, and now he can’t seem to find himself. I’m also afraid we made it worse.”
Maryshka looked down at her hands, gripping one another on the table. “For a little while, we were doing a couple things in the two bays that aren’t as damaged. Mostly just clean up, and trying to pull Tiger in on it. You know, he's the boss. We’re used to him taking the lead, but he’s not doing that.”
She shook her head. “Larry’s the newest on our crew, so I think he’s more impatient with not knowing what’s going to happen. So he goes into Tiger’s office to talk about a job that came in. Just a regular who stopped by. He had a problem that didn’t need a lift, so we agreed to give it a look. Even if we’d needed to send him on to a fully operational place, we try to take care of our customers. That’s the way Tiger taught us.”
Maryshka took a breath. “Anyway, Tiger’s back office is down a hallway, but we still hear this crash, then Tiger yelling and cussing. Larry comes back looking shook up, but pissed, too.”
She remembered how Red had told him to settle down and Larry had shaken him off. “Doesn’t fucking matter if I shout, man. He can't hear. He got so frustrated with what I was trying to explain to him, I felt like I’d made a mistake bugging him. So I just grabbed that pad on his desk and wrote ‘never mind, I'll handle it.’ He put his fist through the wall next to my fucking head and told me to get out. So fuck it, I’m out.”
As Maryshka summarized that for her, Skye’s expression flickered with emotions she couldn’t decipher. But they increased the tightness of her gut, her sense of helplessness and worry. Her short nails bit into her palms. “When Red and I came back to the garage the next day, we found an envelope for each of us. Tiger wrote out checks to cover us for several weeks’ pay, and the names of two garages who’ve agreed to take us on as temporary help. Larry, too. Red took his check to give it to him.”
She shook her head. “Tiger also put a note in there saying if we get a chance at a permanent job, we should probably take it, because he doesn’t know when or if he’ll be reopening the garage. That he might just take on a few regulars out at his place to pay the bills and leave it at that.
“I tried his office door, and he’d locked it. I banged on it, and he didn’t answer, though I swear to God he had to feel the vibration.” Maryshka fought back tears. “It’s like he’s just telling us all to forget about him and piss off, go on with our lives. He told me once we were like family to him, but Andrei says…” She took a breath. “He says since Tiger sees himself as head of that family, he thinks he isn’t worth anything to us anymore if he can’t act like that. That’s such total bullshit.”
She should have known Andrei was keeping tabs on her, because he was sliding into the booth, putting his arm aroundher. She looked at Skye through the tears that stubbornly insisted on welling up. “I mean, from who we are here, you’d think he’d realize that. Sometimes you have to let people help you, take some of the control.”
“It’s easier to make that decision from a position of strength. Especially for an alpha, whether male or female.” Skye typed out the words in her Southern voice, even as she reached out with her other hand to squeeze Maryshka’s arm. “You’re a good friend. You haven’t betrayed his trust. It’s all right.”
Maryshka sniffled. “Any advice? I don’t want to go back there without a game plan. Red says I should just leave him alone for a while, and maybe so. I don’t know what to do.”
Skye pursed her lips, typed. “I’d like to visit him. See what’s going on from a different perspective. As his friend, his family,” she met Maryshka’s gaze, “would you be all right with that?”
“Yeah. I think so. Just…be careful. What he did with Larry, that wasn’t like him. He’s not himself. I mean, Tiger will jump our asses for being slack in a heartbeat—he’s a tough but fair boss. He looks like the type of guy itching for a fight, but just the opposite is true. He’s ultra-careful about his temper. But right now…not so much, I think.”
“Tell me the best way to get to the back office,” Skye typed.
After Maryshka and Andrei left, Skye sat in the smaller booth for a few minutes, thinking.
Never mind.
Larry’s note had made her wince. The worst two words to say to any person with communication issues. Whether the motive was a well-intentioned effort to help, ignorance or lack ofpatience, the subtext translated to a face punch.It’s not worth taking the time to explain it to you.
Even worse was the deeper message.I'll handle it, making you feel more alone and useless than you already do.
She wasn’t deaf, but so many times in her life people had talked “around” her, or avoided talking to her at all, when they realized she didn’t communicate the normal way. Even when she’d shown she could capably handle a conversation with her phone and other digital methods, she’d often had to be tiresomely persistent—sometimes aggressive—to get them to engage. To stop them from retreating, backpedaling. Working around her.
Maryshka’s surprise about Tiger’s unwillingness to let anyone help him wasn’t surprising to Skye at all. Dominants could be control freaks, but in the outside world submissives were Olympic champions of the trait. Tiger’s need to go through two to three Mistresses in one night spoke to it. The man did have knee-weakening sexual endurance and a fierce need to serve a Mistress, yes. However, even as he was surrendering to that need, he was proving he could handle anything thrown at him. Proving he hadn’t fallen short of his expectations for himself.
Nothing wrong with that, as long as he didn’t take it down a self-destructive path in scene, and he never had. People came here for different reasons, with different needs. He could push back, be playful. Stubborn, sometimes willful. Tiger used his scenes to manage some personal demons, but he had no desire for a Mistress to take over that demon management. He kept his sword and shield firmly in hand.
He needed the submission, but he needed to experience it inside a safe sphere, which suggested out in the world he’d needed his walls. Needed to be the boss.
What Skye had found increasingly intriguing about him was how deep he could go in session. He’d recognized what parts of him it could save, and he routinely let it. But by the next week’s session, that well needed filling again.
She thought of Maryshka’s comment, about how carefully he controlled his temper. And what Abby had once said about him.He knows what waits in the shadows.Though the statement had been influenced by Abby’s schizophrenia, Skye had felt the truth in it.
Every Mistress who dug into her own control issues recognized a sub who held back, not taking that full leap of trust. It wasn’t a judgment on the Mistress; if a sub didn’t need a soul-stripping experience, if they were good at another level, that was fine. Tiger gave and received pleasure wonderfully, and everyone went home satisfied.
Abby had been comfortable with that, and so had Skye, mostly. But as Abby had stepped back from sessions with him, Skye had found herself interested in reaching deeper.
When she’d built up a history with a sub, learned his tells, a Mistress could zero in on the less obvious ones. The last time she and Tiger had played, she’d switched it up, chosen things that exhausted the physical body, then gone after his emotional defenses, alternating offers of intimacy and care with her demands.
He’d fallen asleep with his head in her lap, a fond memory she’d revisited frequently, especially when she’d heard about his troubles.
Tiger was a confident man who’d built a world for himself he was proud of, that he operated with tremendous competence. Having it all dismantled by a terrible trauma, a violent loss,andlosing a key sense? Yeah, he was going to flail like a drowning swimmer for a while.
Sometimes it was best for friends and family to stand back and wait it out, let the person realize they could swim out of the deep water. Or give them time to put their feet down and realize they weren’t in over their head after all.
