Page 99 of Forever Finds Us
He pointed to what looked like a folding table, but it was black and padded. “See, here’s the table. It’s portable, so I can lay you down and tie you up, and then I push this button”—he stepped to the wall and lifted what looked like a small, flat flap next to a light switch, pressed a button the size of the pad of his thumb, and the ropes hanging from the ceiling began to lift in the air—“and move the table out of our way, and I can fuck you up in the air. Or I can take you with my mouth while you dangle in front of me.
“Ain’t it great? Oh, and this over here is your very own pleasure throne.” He rushed to the corner of the room and pointed to a short contraption. It kind of looked like a camping chair, but King Aurthur style. “It’s just a stool you sit on, but it’s got this opening here, and I lay beneath you like the queen you are and eat you out.”
“Oh my God, Brand.”
“Yeah, I know, right? I can’t fuckin’ wait to taste you like that.”
It still amazed me to see the man Brand had become. No longer was he a closed-off CEO. All the different parts of him had blended into the excited, generous man who had become my husband. And the boy could get down and country like the best of them.
Therapy had helped him tremendously, and learning not to keep secrets had been freeing for him. And for me.
Turned out, I was in fact neurodivergent. The doctors tried to prescribe medications, but I refused. I was learning to manage my anxieties naturally, through breathing and sensory coping mechanisms, and by talking through my thoughts with Brand and Aubrey and my therapist. My family was supportive too. My mama cried when I explained my diagnosis and said it was a relief to hear because it made so much sense and explained so many things she’d never understood about me.
As I turned to survey the rest of our new toys and the king-size bed in the middle of the room, my eyes began to bug out of my head. Something had been crisscrossed over our mattress.
“Those are bed restraints,” he explained. “They go under the mattress when we’re not usin’ ’em, but they keep your arms and legs spread for me so I can fuck you and torture you however I want.”
“Um.”
I hated to ruin the excitement seeping out of him like he was a kid in a candy store for the first time, but I might have been at the beginning stages of a panic attack.
“You don’t like what I picked out for us?” He stepped in front of me, angling his head down to look in my eyes. “If you don’t like it, it all goes.”
“No, I… I mean, I don’t know if I like it. I’ve never done any of this before.”
“Me either,” he whispered, stepping behind me. “We’ll find out together, okay?”
“Okay,” I said as he moved me toward the bed with his body pressing behind mine.
He laid me down and crawled over me, and his warmth eased my anxiety. He lay next to me, and I lifted my head so his arm could slide beneath.
“But the most important thing in this room, besides you and me, is that.” Pointing to a huge, framed photograph taking up a third of the back A-shaped wall, Brand said, “From the day you married me and made me the happiest I’ve ever been. Remember?”
As if I could forget one second of our wedding day, halfway across the world near the coast in Maremma, Italy. Both of our families had traveled all that way for us, and it was the most joyous time of my life.
And the happiness was doubled when Rye proposed to my bestie again at our wedding dinner after the ceremony, and Aubrey cried and screamed, “Yes! Okay? I’ll marry your sexy ass. Happy now?”
Brand murmured in my ear, “When that picture was taken, you were laughin’ at somethin’ Athena said. You were so fuckin’ beautiful that day in the middle of Tuscany, surrounded on all sides by wild sunflowers and our families. All I could do was stare at you. I look like a lovesick fool in that photo, but you took my breath away, Roxanne. You still do. Every day.”
“You don’t look like a fool,” I said, blinking and trying to stop the tears from coming.
When he reminisced about our wedding, which he did often, I always teared up. I’d never heard a man talk so much about his wedding, but Brand did all the time.
We had already begun planning a trip back so we could see more of Italy and France. Anywhere we wanted to go, really. He wanted to take me everywhere. He wanted us to live our lives like an adventure when we could because we both worked hard. We played pretty hard too, and this secret room was definitive proof of that.
Brand hadn’t sold his contract for the new housing project or dissolved Lee Construction. Instead, he made structural changes. His foreman Tweety now ran the commercial contracts division of Lee Construction, and Bea and Clay handled the single-family home builds so Brand could be at home more and work the ranch with his brother and Rye. But the thing he’d become really excited about was a special, nonprofit plan he been working on to build homes for veterans in the area and their families.
Tab worked with Tweety, Bea, and Brand, but most closely with Brand and his new nonprofit. She’d turned out to be a bloodhound when it came to finding funding and donors to contribute money and resources. And she was a very good friend. She’d even joined my book club, and she and I spent way too much time texting and giggling late into the nights about the sexy things we read about in our books.
And just like that, my new family had welcomed a new, fresh iteration of Lee Construction. It was now one more business we all contributed to, alongside Spitfire Ranch, Lee Valley Cabins, and Abey and Devo’s CSA farm, Two Girl Veg.
When my eyes strayed from our way-too-big wedding photograph, they landed on some kind of huge X-shaped contraption just inside the door that I’d missed when we came in. It took up nearly the entire wall, but it wasn’t attached to the wall; it stood on its own, with a heavy metal base and leather-covered planks crossed in an X.
Brand saw me gaping at it. “That’s a St. Andrew’s Cross, or an X-cross. It’s hot, right?”
I whimpered. I was terrified of that thing.
“I built it for us. It’s kinky as fuck. It even spins, but don’t worry. We’ll take it slow.”
