Chapter 35
THIRTY-FIVE
ev
“Are you sure you want to do this?”
“Yeah, of course.”
I frowned.
Something was shifting. I didn’t know what it was, but it had started at some point while my parents were still taking over our entire agenda.
I should’ve made more of an effort to talk about it, but they had been there, and that talk with my mother hadn’t fixed everything.
And now we were in the parking lot closest to Plumas, and he was acting normal, but he’d been holding himself…
straighter, lately. I could see him clenching his fists and holding his breath as if he was waiting for a blow that was obviously not coming, but he wasn’t telling me why.
Not that I could complain. I knew I was abysmal when it came to sharing stuff, but I’d grown used to the two of us, to the idea that we could defy all norms—all the obstacles that usually hindered every attempt I made at building something good.
“No.”
“No, what?” Santos gave me that look that said he was going through every little tidbit of knowledge he had about me to figure out what I’d just said.
“You’re not coming.” Truthfully, I couldn’t quite figure it out myself, but it was important that I spoke up. That I broke patterns, even if I was clumsy at it. “You’ve been weird all day, and you’re weirder now, and we’re not doing anything without your full, enthusiastic consent.”
There.
Erika would be proud of me.
If I managed to get out of the car and into the club without losing it.
“I…consent?” Santos frowned. “I—Where is this coming from?”
“Why do people always ask that?” I huffed. “It’s coming from you being weird. I already told you.”
“Babes, I…” Instead of coming up with some excuse he knew I wouldn’t believe, he ran a hand through his hair before the words could come up.
I watched him. On the outside, I supposed I looked stubborn.
Dead-set on doing this. I’d been told I could nail the look.
Inside, though, was a completely different story of shaky limbs and too many intrusive thoughts to count.
“I’m in my head, yeah, but it’s not about you, or coming here with you, okay? It’s just stuff.”
“Just stuff,” I repeated. I didn’t know if it helped me process, but it had to be better than full-on silence, and repeating was all I got. “I don’t feel comfortable with that.”
“You…” Santos blinked owlishly. It was probably the first time I saw him do that with his face. “You’re not comfortable with me having more shit going on?”
“No!” Fuck. I was screwing this up. “I’m not comfortable with pushing you somewhere I’m not sure you want to be. I don’t know if it’s because of that stuff, or just a general thing, but you’re supposed to be excited about this, and you aren’t.”
“That’s not…” Cursing under his breath wasn’t something he did often, either—at least not in front of me. Or because of me. This was becoming worse by the minute. “What do you want me to do?”
“Uh?”
And now I was going to be the one cursing, because when he met my eyes, his were glittering, and his chin wobbled before he clenched his jawline, and I didn’t know how to cope with those big displays coming from him.
I was a terrible person.
“What do you want?” he asked again. “Do you want me to lash out and push you out of the car while I go fuck knows where? Do you want me to grovel after you? To convince you that there’s nothing I want more than to follow you inside that building? What do you want?”
His chest heaved up and down as he finished talking.
I wasn’t quite sure that I was breathing, or that I was doing it right. Actually, I needed air because my lungs were constricting, and the air in the car was getting too charged, and surely, it wasn’t sustainable.
I swallowed it down, eventually. Digging my fingers against the edges of the leather seat helped some.
“I just want you on my side.”
And for whatever reason, the realization dawned on me that he wasn’t. Maybe it was that stuff he wasn’t telling me about, but maybe it was me, too. Maybe I had managed to ruin things with him. To ruin a lifetime of friendship and promises of forever.
I got out of the car before I could say that out loud. Before I could lose it in front of him and prove all his darker thoughts about me were right.
He called for me, I was pretty sure. Unless that was my imagination.
I wouldn’t know because I didn’t turn back.
It was my luck that he had found parking right by the glass door that led into the industrial first floor of the building—where only the lockers and a small bar stood.
None of us really lingered here after we’d changed into clothes more appropriate for the club’s dress code.
Maybe to grab a bottle of water from whoever was volunteering their time to take care of the bar.
It wasn’t anyone I knew today, so I just bypassed them and crossed fingers that everyone had arrived already.
Well, not everyone. It would be nerve-wracking to walk into a room full of people I didn’t know, knowing they’d been waiting for me. That I’d been inconveniencing them by having my little relationship drama in the car.
“Are you okay?”
Uh?
Fuck.
Carlos.
I’d forgotten he was going to be here with Danny.
León couldn’t make it, but Danny had said that Carlos was curious about both feminization and chastity—and I was going to talk about both things since I couldn’t make up my mind.
I didn’t see Danny anywhere, which was strange, but I supposed I could take advantage of catching Carlos alone.
Well, that was if whatever was going on with Santos had anything to do with the military. He hadn’t specified, and it felt wrong to make assumptions. It was probably irrational, but it felt like I’d fucked up enough with those.
“Are you close with Santos?”
Yeah, because this was the right way to approach someone I wasn’t that close to myself.
I would’ve face-planted if there had been any surface close enough for it.
As it was, I just pretended I wasn’t fidgeting too much while I saw the man grow alert right away, and I had to pretend everything was fine, and I wasn’t fucking up again by making someone else worry.
It would be fine if it was serious, but was it serious?
I still didn’t know. It could all just be in my head, and I was blowing everything out of proportion because that was how I worked.
“I’ve had a couple drinks with him.” The vein in his neck popped as if he was keeping himself from saying something else.
Even though both of them had been in the military, Carlos had the kind of body I associated with it more—the hunky kind with the perfect posture that screamed business. “What’s up?”
“I don’t know.” I cringed. This had been a terrible idea from the start. I shouldn’t have agreed to do this, and I shouldn’t have left the car without him, and I shouldn’t have let this go on as long as it had. “He’s acting weird, and then I act weird, because I’m a fucking mess, and it’s all…”
I waved my hand around. It felt wrong to call it a mess again, but words were hard, and I’d never claimed to have the vocabulary my education should’ve granted me.
“And you’re shocked?” Carlos gestured for me to sit down in one of the couches placed around the rustic open space that gave way to a hallway full of doors for every themed room—from a rope dojo to a Littles room and an orgy room that hadn’t started out that way, but it now was exactly that. “It was about time the guy lost it.”
“What does that mean?”
I knew Santos was struggling. I knew he had reasons to.
I probably knew more than Carlos, because I highly doubted that a couple of beers or whatever they’d had had led to a confession from my bodyguard slash best friend slash soulmate slash Dom without the pressure of high protocol dynamics.
For all his attentiveness with me, and how affectionate and warm he was, he wasn’t like that with everyone.
Not without checking first that he wasn’t about to get hurt or rejected.
“We’re all a mess when we get out.” He sighed. “Well, maybe not all of us, but the ones who aren’t all about the bravado and aren’t surrounded by people with their same toxic ideologies sure do.”
“So what do I do?”
“Be patient?” Carlos frowned. “I don’t actually know. Jimena might be a better person to ask. I’ve never had to be there for someone whose life as he knew it imploded, and now has to accept the world is nothing like he’s been used to for the past decade.”
I hummed. Jimena was Carlos’s sister and María’s Dom, but neither of them were here, because Carlos and Jimena had a split custody thing going on with the club to avoid seeing each other in any compromising position, which made a lot of sense, but I was antsy.
The club banned phones, too, so I couldn’t even text her to get a quick course on how to fix shit when I got back home.
Ugh.
Maybe I could sneak downstairs to send a quick text so that he didn’t think I hated him.
At the same time, I froze at the idea.
I didn’t want him to think that I hated him, but I didn’t know what I felt. What I wanted to say.
I just wanted to go back to the first few weeks of him being here, when it was about reconnecting, and all about following commands and feeding my touch-starved ass in all the ways it could be fed.
I just wanted to understand, to be fully certain, of what had changed between then and now.
Tony would say it was Sir Israel’s presence.
Carlos or León would probably say it was him revisiting the reasons he was here, and the trauma or whatever he was working through in therapy.
It could make me a narcissist, but I kept going back to how it was just me. Me, needing too much. Being too much.
But I didn’t know, and I didn’t know that I could really do anything about it until I did.
“What helped you, then?”
“Time.” He shrugged. “My niece. Knowing that my sister was there and she’d beat me up before I could take anything too far.”