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He remembered how she’d handed him a flogger, one of the thicker, longer ones, after she’d demonstrated how to use it. She offered to let him try it out on one of the more than willing subs. “But as I stood there holding it, all I could think about was how it would feel against my skin, if she was using it on me.”
He slanted Skye a glance. “My head went shooting straight from there into her ordering me to stay still and take it. I’d already scoped out my surroundings and realized if she did it in front of this big wall mirror, I could see what it did to her, having me at her command. Being at her command.”
Skye closed her hand on his forearm, pleasure in her gaze. She liked hearing him talk about it. “Darcy and I weren’t a great fit,” he continued, “but enough for me to figure out I wanted to dig deeper. That’s where it really started to unfold. It’s like…”
He paused, thinking. “Mechanical stuff interested me early, got me tinkering with cars and motorcycles. Then one day you touch the art of it, if that makes sense. You learn how to talk to the machine, and eventually it trusts you enough to start talking back, because you get each other. It took time to get there, and the learning was a maze, trial and error, but the journey was a hell of a fun trip. Nothing I wanted to rush, because of how much I was learning along the way.”
“Did you ever look for it in a relationship before Darcy?”
He grimaced. “I guess we all do, before we recognize what or how strong it is. We just know what we’re looking for isn’t in the relationships that crash and burn. I also couldn’t look for it with the girls who hung with the Fallen Angels. A lot of them aregreat, but they talk, and stuff gets back. And that… No way in hell my dad would ever have understood that.”
She studied him. Typed. “And yet, it sounds like you’ve never struggled with being a sub. Not the way some alpha males do.”
“No.” He grunted. “When I walked away from Fallen Angels, I was called a coward, pussy, all the usual. A disgrace. My brother said they should cut off my dick since I obviously didn’t have a need for it.”
He waved a hand at the anger that crossed her face. “It was a while ago. That kind of shit says more about them than me, we all know that.”
She made the gesture of a knife in the chest.Still hurts.
“Yeah, maybe, but deciding my own path and ending up where I am now goes a hell of a long way to making it a scar instead of an open wound.” He shook his head. “I didn’t want to be part of a world where getting a mug shot was a badge of pride. Or like I said, having to stick my head in the sand over the collateral damage our business caused. So one day I made up my mind. I went to a tattoo artist and covered the club ink. Came back to my father’s house, collected my stuff, and left my cut on the bed. Then I walked into the clubhouse and told him and Colt I was done.”
It had taken him too many years to get there, an inner struggle that had hounded him before and too long after his mother’s death. But all along he’d known it wasn’t his path, just like he’d known being a sexual submissive was.
He’d always been clear on his hard limits. No heavy restraints he couldn’t get out of himself. He’d only granted an exception to that one once, for a session involving Abby’s special circumstances.
No blood play, not ever. When he was twelve, he’d been eating breakfast at the bar in the clubhouse. A guy who had broken the MC rules had been brought in, and was taken tothe meeting room in back. When it was time to mete out his sentence, he’d bolted.
The struggle had ended up in the bar area, where he was beaten to death. Breaker knew how to use a bat, swift and effectively.
It had happened so fast, blood and brain matter had spattered into Tiger’s cereal, including the spoonful he’d been putting in his mouth. It had been too close to stop it from sliding onto his tongue with the Cheerios and milk.
He could still taste that flavor when he thought about it.
By eighteen he was hardened to it. When he left the Fallen Angels, too many years later, he told himself not to think about any of that anymore. But it had come out when Darcy topped him, so he knew right off the things that wouldn’t work for him. Learning the things that did…well, that had led him to Mistresses like Skye and Abby.
He shared some of that last part with her, but pushed on to other, better stuff. Things that weren’t so much about her original question, but seemed to flow into the conversation.
“I found work as a mechanic, built my way up, saved, and bought a garage from an owner who was retiring. Somewhere in there, Nicole and Colt had Aubrey. I figured Colt never gave a thought to me after I left, except to curse my name. But when Nicole insisted on a relationship between me and Aubrey, I knew she hoped if she could get me and Colt patched up, maybe Colt would eventually do what I’d done and walk away from the life.”
His gut tightened over the load of regrets, paths not taken. The shit nobody could do anything about because people were going to make their own choices. He guessed he hadn’t entirely circled away from the less pleasant stuff, but the words kept coming. “She refused to see it was like this for him. Something too deep a part of who you are to change it.” Rubbing a palm over the spanking bench, he got briefly distracted by the smoothtexture, the firmness. Ben didn’t fuck around. It was a top-notch bench. But the guy was a fancy corporate lawyer. Probably slept on a mattress filled with Benjamins.
“Colt and I were pretty different people,” he continued. “My mother knew it, and that’s why I think she gave me glimpses of other paths, whereas Colt clung to my dad. She’d named him Colt because whenever my dad touched her stomach, Colt practically ‘galloped’ across her womb to get to him.”
A tight smile touched Tiger’s mouth. “He was born to be a Fallen Angel. What crawled up into my dad’s gut was I was the older one. The firstborn son, the one he expected to take his place.”
Skye set the phone aside and offered her hand, a simple gesture. He clasped her hand, and they sat that way, hands knotted on his knee.
He glanced at her. “Care to answer that switch question yourself, Mistress? Because I’m definitely not, but I’d have to be a dead man to not be okay with spanking a beautiful ass if you occasionally wanted that. Behind closed doors, so we don’t tarnish your Mistress rep.”
He was teasing her, and she obviously knew it. He wouldn’t turn down a Mistress request within his own limits, but his heart wasn’t into topping. She picked up the phone again, did the slow, thinking-it-over typing thing. As he read the words that appeared, he understood why she was taking her time expressing them.
“Some people might say that me being mute is why I prefer being a Mistress. But Vera told me she doesn’t think so. She says it’s like being born with a talent. One day a door opens and brings it forth, showing you that you can apply it in a way that fills your soul and spreads that power out to the rest of your life. Which makes you even more sure of your path, and your capabilities.”
She swept her gaze over him, lingering on his shoulders, the length of his braced legs. Coming back to his mouth and eyes. “You are not helpless.” She emphasized thenoton her phone. “No healthy submissive is. Finding male submissives I can communicate with, earn their surrender and trust, and hold that control… Initially, it was an avenue that opened up and strengthened a part of me that had been holed up deep inside, waiting.” She frowned. Typed again. “It’s a circle. Who I am drives me to embrace being a Mistress, and being a Mistress helps expand who I am.”
She’d continued to glance at him as she typed. When she concluded, he put a hand on her wrist. “Do you keep looking at me to see if I’m…” He was about to say listening, but amended it to “paying attention.”
“Yes and no,” she typed. “Some of it is so you can match my expression to what I’m typing. But when I type for a hearing person, the voice app is on, so I’m speaking in a way they’re used to. With you, because you’re having to read it, it can seem a slower form of communication.” A faint smile. “I don’t want to get too wordy. And I’d rather shave my eyebrows than be accused of rambling.”
