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We were both a mess, but I couldn’t see how to help her more without being with her. For a moment I was angry at Moghul. I’d wanted him to help her get her life back together, not to tell her how to get back with me. Unseeing, unfocused on anything except the confusion messing up my mind, I fumbled my way to my car, and started the engine.
* * * *
There are some things you have to take your time to digest, no matter what.
Believing takes time.
Jodie was doing well. I kept an eye on her via her friends. Adrianna seemed to think it was cute and I’m sure she told Jodie of my inquiries but it couldn’t be helped. Besides, Jodie’s plea had awakened me. I wasn’t willing to say goodbye yet. The connection between us was stretched, and it was thin, but it was still there. I never forgot, on any day, that she was on the island somewhere, within reach.
Until the day she left on the tour.
She was gone. A small panic stewed inside me for three days until I gave in and called Moghul. I invited him to the island. What he’d said on the phone, with the music and laughter in the background, had seemed distant, trivial – like a saying you found in a fortune cookie, or one of those phone-a-friend last resort things you do on a game show. Yet what hinged on his words was so important. I wanted to hear it up close, where I could see his eyes.
We trudged across the cool morning sand at Horseshoe Bay with our surf skis and waded into the sea. The island was protected by the Great Barrier Reef so surf was non-existent. Getting out past the waves was a simple exercise most days. What waves? Surfers just shook their heads in dismay when they saw ours.
I took us out and around to Balding Bay at a good pace. We stopped a fair distance out from shore, paddles across our thighs, breathing hard, sweat beading on our skin.
“You ready to talk now, Klaus?” Moghul straightened and dipped his paddle in the sea on one side to curve the ski round to face me.
“Guess so.”
For a man who said he rarely got the chance to take out a ski, Moghul still had the tight chest muscles of a man who exercised regularly. “You know, most days I have to stop myself calling you Santy Klaus.”
I snorted. “Not Asshole Klaus?”
“That too. On occasion.”
“Thank you for not rushing me.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it. Take your time. Only one thing.” He tapped his fingers on the shaft of his paddle. “Just remember Jodie’s a pretty woman. Some other Dom may snap her up if she decides to dip her toes back in the BDSM community.”
Fuck no. “Huh. Over my dead body.”
Moghul nodded soberly. “Think you’ve already made up your mind.” He dabbed at the water again as a bigger wave rocked under our skis.
I grimaced, thinking some more. Farther out, a sea eagle speared into the water and rose up with a fish glinting in its talons. The rising sun beat flashes of light off the surface. The water was clear and blue, and a school of fish zipped past a long way down.
What if some other man did make a play for her?
“I doubt she could back away from kink now. Or even from TPE. We went at it hard and she was…” I rubbed my chin.
“Loving it?”
“Yeah.”
We shared some more silence.
“Moghul, you’re so patient you’d give a statue a run for its money.
“Nah. It’s important. The mind’s a funny thing. You haven’t asked me again if you’re a bad man or a sociopath.”
“Ah.” I sniffed and cleared my throat. After so many years as a pillar of the community, that was hard to get used to. “It’s the sort of label I will never be sure of unless I try and fail.” I eyed him. “I do not want to fail.”
“Then don’t. I told you how to play it safe.”
“Public BDSM?” I turned the idea over. “I’m not sure it’s for me. What we did with Kat and Damien was about my limit. You know? I’m not that much of an exhibitionist.” I stroked into the water to turn my ski back toward Horseshoe Bay.
We put our backs into the strokes until the skis were sizzling through the water.
