Page 11 of Brave
“Puppy,” she whispered.
The corners of his mouth curled, and yet he still both looked and sounded gently stern when he said, “Do you have a safeword you want to use?”
That started her. “But… I-I’m just keeping you company…”
“That’s the plan,” he confirmed. “But if there’s something going on that you feel you have to lie about, then I’d much rather you called your safeword. That way we can stop whatever we’re doing, we can take a step back, change the subject, whatever we have to do, and you don’t have to lie.”
Her chest was still tight, but for just a moment she didn’t feel quite as strangled when she caught her breath. “Okay.”
“What safeword do you like?”
“Red,” she said.
He nodded. “Would you like to pick the place to play?”
“Red,” she whispered, covering her wildly beating heart with both hands and looking around them. All she could see were all the people in this room staring after her—all three of them. Apart from Klara, Spencer, and the woman in pink, there were two men playing at the suspension hoist. They weren’t staring, but it felt like only a matter of time, and she couldn’t seem to make herself ignore the awkwardness.
“Okay,” Carlson said cautiously. “Does that mean you want me to pick the place?”
Rubbing her stomach, she nodded. Stealing a quick glance over her shoulder, she spotted Spencer slowly patrolling around the edge of the dungeon. She didn’t for a second think he was aimlessly strolling through his club. He was stalking her.
She flinched when Carlson touched her elbow. Whether he noticed Black Light’s Dungeon Master watching them from the shadows, she didn’t know, but he bent to pick up his bag and then led her all the way into the far back, into a darkened nook, where no one else was playing.
From here, the bar could not be seen, and neither could Spencer. Especially once Carlson turned her so her back was to the rest of the room, gently forcing her to face both him and the walls behind him.
Sitting cross-legged on the floor, he opened his bag and began pulling out neatly tied bondage rope. He had a colorful array of them, and for a time Puppy stood watching. Red, blue, green, and black. He had more black ropes than any other color. Bundles and bundles of them, the varying thicknesses denoting different lengths.
As engrossed as she was in watching, she didn’t notice anything wrong until his hands stopped moving.
“Do you want to sit down?” he asked when her gaze bounced up to his.
Shyly, she knelt, subconsciously assuming one of Ethen’s favorite positions with her hands lying palms up on her thighs. She quickly flipped them and caught hold of her own knees. If Carlson noticed her mistake, he didn’t say anything. He just removed his own shoes and socks and got to work tying his two middle toes as if it were a human head and the rest of his foot as if it were a rope bunny’s willing body.
She hadn’t done rope play in such a very long time. Relaxing slightly, she watched him work, loving how easily his hands twisted and wrapped as he worked from memory before pulling out an instruction book, flipping open to a simple beginner’s design, and then starting all over again.
He talked to her the whole time, too. About everything and nothing, and it was the most normal thing she’d done in… she couldn’t remember how long.
He had a beautiful voice. Deep and rich, like molten chocolate. She lost herself in listening to it, the tension slowly seeping from her until at last she was sitting on the floor with her knees drawn up to her chest. She hugged them, admiring the motions of his hands even when he made mistakes, and trying so hard not to be jealous when he finally took the rope off and his own foot was coiled in all those beautiful bondage marks.
“Do you want to try?” he asked, offering her a rope.
“Red,” she whispered. She would dearly have loved to have marks like that on her body, anywhere, even if only just on her foot and only because she’d put them there herself, but it wasn’t her place. She really ought to go home.
Except she didn’t.
Turning the page in his book, he continued on to the next simple pattern and she continued to sit, and watch, and listen as he talked about his military life, about the twenty-two years he’d spent as an explosives technician and about how coming home again hadn’t been as easy of a transition as he’d thought it would be. He talked about working fulltime for the military, and now as an instructor training other young soldiers how to do the things he used to. When he wasn’t there, he came here—something his salary would never have been able to afford if the owners hadn’t seen his veteran status and hired him to dungeon monitor part time. Being around people rather than sitting alone in the stifling quiet of his new house helped him keep his head on straight and his mind focused on something other than memories.
He liked it here. When he wasn’t working, sometimes he played; sometimes he practiced, brushing up on skills he used to have—like double flogging (it was not like riding a bicycle; the hands definitely forget the rhythm). Right now, he was taking lessons from Black Light’s Shibari expert, Owen. Knots and the art of rope corsetry definitely kept his mind and hands occupied, and when one had rope skills, one never lacked for rope bunnies. He’d never been married, didn’t have kids, used to have two dogs, but lost custody of them to his last girlfriend when he redeployed overseas a few years back. The next thing she knew, it was four in the morning and the bar portion of Black Light had shut down without her even realizing it.
She hadn’t noticed Spencer either, who’d spent the better part of the night standing silently at the edge of their quiet nook, watching their scene unfold before, just as quietly, retreating back to his office and closing, then locking the door behind him.
* * *
“Did you let her in?” Jaxson said from his end of the cell phone conversation.
“Yes, just like you instructed us to do,” Spencer said. “Although frankly, I was kind of hoping she wouldn’t. I think everyone just wants this whole mess to quietly fade into memory and be done.”
“We don’t always get what we want,” was Jaxson’s sagely and yet maddening response.
