AllFreeNovel
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It may be the middle of the night, but many of us are night owls. Jagger replies that he’s with Archer, and asks if it’s okay for both of them to stop by. Since Archer is a newer dom, he doesn’t have much experience and tends to hang out with one of the club’s more experienced doms whenever he can.
Instead of learning from one mentor, he’s learning a little bit from all of us. It’s a smart strategy, and if a dominant ever needed to learn anything about the lifestyle, it’s about how to recover from a fuck up. Maybe between the three of us we can come up with a way for me to salvage the remnants of my relationship with Addison.
When I open the door to my colleagues, Jagger thrusts a six-pack at me and pushes his way into the house. “Is it the mom? Did she come back and take the kid?”
I can’t help the chuckle that bubbles into my chest. “No, Caz hasn’t come back for Matty.”
Jagger is terrible with names. Probably terrible with faces too, but he rarely spends enough time with the same one for it to make much of a difference. He’s even worse than me.
The broody fucker makes his way straight to my fridge and helps himself to a poor man’s charcuterie board grabbing a block of cheese, a few packs of lunch meat, and a bag of grapes like he lives here.
With a shake of my head I grab the bottle opener, popping three beers and passing them around. Jagger doesn’t ask where we’re going to sit before he drops all the food onto the dining table and starts tearing packages open.
“Hungry?”
He tilts his head as though he’s contemplating my question seriously. “Snackish.”
Archer sits sipping on his beer. “Have you tried to find her?”
Jagger and I exchanged a confused look before Archer qualifies his question. “Matty’s mother.”
Shrugging, heat creeps up my neck. Not only have I not tried to find her, but I haven’t given her much of a second thought since she didn’t even have the decency to escort our son to my door. She just dropped and ran.
“All I have is her name from Matty’s birth certificate. She must live locally, otherwise Matty would have had to change schools and the transition would have been a bitch.”
“She has to have come to the club before, right? Otherwise how would you have met her? You know as well as I do that our circle is pretty small, all things considered.” Archer takes another gulp of his beer. “You probably could have found her if you wanted.”
He’s not wrong. I just didn’t want to. Does that make me a terrible human being? Maybe. But she knows where both Matty and I are if she wants to see us. She hasn’t made any effort to get in touch, so I’m giving her space.
“Kind of hard when your one-night-stand dumps a kid on your door and flees like she’s on the run.” Jagger carves a piece of cheese from the block with a knife he pulled from his cargo pants.
“That better be clean.” I point at the weapon he’s raising to his mouth with a small wedge of cheese stuck to it.
“My tools are always clean,” he deadpans. For the strong, silent type, he has a sharp, dry wit and a comedic timing that could have him onstage. If he wasn’t a scary motherfucker anyway. “He could have met her at The Cage.” Jagger points the knife at Archer. “Didn’t you used to go there?”
Jagger mentions the other BDSM club across town. Despite my comfortable living, The Cage is somewhat above my pay grade. “Never been. Some of us don’t make enough money to frequent such fancy places.”
Slade has been a few times. He and Austin are friends with the owner. I always thought multiple niche clubs in the same town would be fiercely competitive with each other, but as it turns out, they all play nice together. In fact, sometimes they even exchange staff for training and demos. It’s so fucking weird.
“So it had to have been in Protocol.” Archer states the obvious. A minute later, his brows shoot up. “Did you bang someone when you were on shift?”
“I wasn’t at the club eleven years ago. For all I know I banged her in a bathroom somewhere and barely looked at her face.” I wince. Such disrespect, but also so true. I haven’t always been the nice dom I’ve built my reputation up to be. I’d have fucked anything with a face in my younger days.
I wish I was joking.
Jagger places his bottle on the table with a little more force than is necessary. Story of his fucking life. “If we aren’t here to talk about your baby mama, then why are we here?”
Archer nods like he’d been trying to find the words to ask the question without being rude. He’s the quietest of the house doms, but he has potential. He needs to find his feet and channel his inner dominance. It feels like he’s dominant, rather thanadominant. But he’ll grow into it. I’m sure of it.
“Addison.”
Archer’s brows twitch. “What happened?”
Dropping my face into my palms, elbows on the table, I groan-growl. A pained sound somewhere between frustration and agony. “I fucked up.”
I tell them everything. About the trip to the zoo, about the bubbling anger and frustrations under my skin all fucking day, about Matty having such a hard time, about feeling like a fucking failure as a father. When I get to the point I got back to the house and made the stupid decision to play with Addison when I knew deep down that I shouldn’t have, Archer whistles through his teeth.
Jagger isn’t so kind. “Stupid fucker. You know better.”
