Chapter 25
Chapter Twenty-Five
Morgan
“Are you upset with me?”
Apparently, her ‘eventually’ talk with Brian was happening her first night back, and she wasn’t sure how she felt about that.
She didn’t want to be on the outs with him.
She wasn’t used to confrontation, though Mistress Julie had told her it would get easier the more she did it, especially with people who were safe.
People who wouldn’t hurt her.
People who wouldn’t reject her because she objected to something they’d done.
Brian was both of those. She was almost sure of it. There was always that little voice in the back of her head, though, the one that said she should never let her guard down because she couldn’t be sure.
She’d confronted Asad about it, and she didn’t live with him. She should be able to say something to Brian.
Squaring her shoulders, she turned around from the sink where she’d been doing the dishes. His eyes widened when she faced him.
“Oh, dear. I am in trouble.” Sliding onto the bar stool on the other side of the counter, he rested his elbows on the granite. “What did I do?”
Now that she was here, she might as well face it head-on. She knew he wouldn’t let it go. At heart, he was a fixer, which was probably why he’d been drawn to her in the first place. Well, now she was mad, and he needed to fix it. Morgan took a deep breath.
“Did you have anything to do with Master Asad being told he couldn’t have sex with me this past week?
” She fixed her gaze firmly on him. She wasn’t always the best at reading expressions—she hadn’t even been allowed to look Master Richard in the face—but she could immediately tell that yes, yes Brian had.
There was no confusion, only guilt and the realization of being caught. “And you decided not to tell me?”
“No one told you?” There was the confusion that his previous expression had been missing. “I thought Lexie was going to tell you.”
Morgan shook her head and crossed her arms over her chest, glaring at him.
“No one told me. I got there, thinking I was going to have a week of fun and hot sex, only to be told we’d been put on a sex moratorium, and no one had bothered to inform me.
” She glared harder. “I thought I was supposed to be able to make my own decisions about my life. That’s what I was told.
That you were all trying to get me to a point where I made my own choices, right? ”
Brian stared at her helplessly, his arms moving to spread his hands out in front of him, palms up, in a gesture of penitence.
“I’m sorry, Morgan. Lexie was supposed to tell you.”
Shaking her head again, Morgan let out a sigh of exasperation.
“Telling me isn’t the problem. I mean, it’s part of the problem that no one told me, but the real problem is that you all think you had the right to make that decision for us!
It was none of your business! Not yours, and not Lexie’s, and not Patrick’s.
” She was practically shouting by the time she got to the end of her diatribe.
Now, it wasn’t her head that was shaking; it was her whole body.
She was trembling all over. Partly from anger and partly from fear, waiting for the retribution of daring to speak to him in such a manner.
Her father would have already cut her off and slapped her across the face.
The one time she’d dared raise her voice to him, he’d hit her so hard in the stomach, she’d lost her breath.
Master Richard would have put her in the cage for a day if she’d tried such a thing.
Run, all her instincts screamed at her. Run!
But there was nowhere to run to.
“You’re right.” Brian took a deep breath. “You’re right, Morgan. I’m sorry.”
The sheer relief that flooded through her, the realization that nothing bad had happened, was too much to bear. Her knees crumpled beneath her, and she found herself on the floor, curled in a ball, sobbing.
“Morgan, sweetie, shhh, it’s okay,” Brian soothed, warm, firm hands pulling her onto his lap. “It’s okay, sweetie, you did good. You did so well. I’m so proud of you. You were completely right. It’s okay. I’m not mad. You did good, sweetie.”
He kept murmuring the words of encouragement as she sobbed into his shoulder, crying hysterically without knowing why.
All she knew was she couldn’t stop. If he’d screamed at her, if he’d decided to punish her, if he’d lashed out at her—all of that she could have understood. That wouldn’t have made her cry.
But his acceptance? His apology?
It broke something inside her, and she cried like a child, finally safe in someone’s arms, able to release the torrent of emotions that had been bottled up inside her for so long.
The whole time, Brian soothed her, rubbing her shoulder as he rocked her on his lap and holding her the way she’d wanted to be held so many times growing up.
Eventually, the emotions and tears were finally drained, leaving her soggy and empty. She was limp on his lap, whatever little energy she had left gone.
“I’m so sorry, sweetie. If I’d known a week without an orgasm would do this to you, I never would have agreed it was a good idea,” Brian joked hesitantly.
Morgan snorted out a laugh, then her hand flew to her mouth and nose to cover them in shock. She’d never snorted before.
The giggles came then, almost as hysterical as the crying, but without the jagged edges that had cut into her insides. Brian laughed, too, hugging her tightly before releasing her and helping her to her feet. She still felt a little shaky, but she could stand.
“I really am sorry. I’ll talk to everyone, and I’ll find out what happened that Lexie didn’t tell you.”
Morgan shook her head again, wiping her tears away.
“No, I’ll talk to Lexie. And Patrick.” She needed to do it herself, or no one was ever going to believe that she could. She needed all of them to see that she could do things on her own if they were ever going to trust her to do things on her own.
Brian nodded slowly. She didn’t know if he was actually going to listen or not, but either way, she was going to talk to Lexie and Patrick as if he wouldn’t. As grateful as she was for all of their support, she wanted to live her life on her own terms.
Mistress Julie was going to be so proud of her.
Asad
Sleeping alone sucked.
That was a thought he’d never had before in his life, but here he was, rolling around over and over again, then hugging his pillow because… because he couldn’t hug Morgan. Because he’d gotten that used to having her in bed with him.
Rolling over again, he reached for his phone and checked the time.
Quarter ‘til midnight. He never had this kind of trouble getting to sleep. He laid down, he fell asleep. That was how his life was.
Until now.
He had to go to work in the morning. He needed to sleep. He should have been asleep an hour ago. While he might still stay up late on weekends, on weeknights he was responsible about getting his seven to eight hours.
Maybe he should invest in a teddy bear. Or a body pillow. ‘Cause his little pillow that he was trying to snuggle with wasn’t cutting it.
Or maybe he just needed to get over his shit and get used to not having something or someone to cuddle with because that wasn’t who he was.
He didn’t do sleepovers, and he wasn’t going to start.
It had been a temporary situation, a tiny blip in his usual routine, and now it was time to get back to reality.
Rolling onto his back, phone still in his hand, he turned it on, not entirely sure what he was looking for. He ended up on the clock app, scrolling, and it took less than a minute for Morgan’s current livestream to pop up on his feed, as if the algorithm knew what he really wanted.
She was smiling and tapping her nails against a piece of beeswax paper that was resting on her microphone.
The sound was oddly soothing. Or maybe it was just that seeing her was oddly soothing.
The comments coming up on the bottom of the screen were a little distracting, so he swiped them off so he could just watch her.
As always, her makeup was perfectly done, her hair falling in curls around her shoulders, pushed out of her face by the large blue and silver headphones she had on.
They matched the dark blue shirt she was wearing.
She looked good. Happy. A slight smile curved her lips as she looked at the camera.
Even though he knew it wasn’t true, it felt like she was looking directly at him.
Rolling onto his side, he put the phone down on the bed next to his pillow. It wasn’t the best angle, but he could still see her while he lay there. A huge yawn cracked his jaw, his eyelids fluttering.
It was like now that he was trying to watch something, he was struggling to keep his eyes open.
Which was the point, right? He needed to sleep. Which meant he should close his eyes and stop watching Morgan.
A moment later, she stopped tapping on the beeswax and moved it to the side.
“Okay,” she whispered, her voice so much lower and softer than normal.
“Thank you all so much for the warm welcome back this evening. This week, I’m back to my usual schedule—yes, HappyGirl, I had a wonderful trip, thank you.
Now, we’re going to do a bit of reading from Pride and Prejudice.
I’m picking back up where we left off, then I will see you all tomorrow night again.
Don’t forget, my schedule is Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday nights, and I have my video channel for the other nights in-between.
I’ll be getting more content up on there this week as well. ”
The whispery quality of her voice and pacing of her words was almost hypnotic. Asad yawned again.
She laughed and responded to several more comments that must be going up, and for a moment he considered swiping them back to where he could see them, so they would make more sense to him, but then she said she was turning the comments off while she read.
Picking up a book, she tapped on the cover, then traced the letters before opening it up and starting to read.
He’d read Pride and Prejudice in high school, but he didn’t remember much of it, and she was picking it up in the middle.
Not that it mattered. Her voice washed over him, soothing some of the jitters he’d been feeling.
Yawning again, he hugged the pillow to him, sleepily watching as she whispered the story about Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth.
The fact he wasn’t all that invested in the book and he knew how it ended probably helped. Each blink of his eyelids felt heavier and heavier. He didn’t want to stop looking at Morgan, yet her whispers were making it impossible for him to keep his eyes open, which was the point.
He couldn’t help but think about the fact he missed her, as her voice sent him off to sleep.