Chapter 7
Storm
I really wished I wasn’t so swamped, trying to keep all the balls I had going up in the air, but it couldn’t be helped.
Our evenings and nights were great, though. He let me think during breakfast, but we talked a whole lot at our other meals, and if I’m honest — the morning fuck kind of tied everything together and reminded me our power exchange is as real as it gets when it’s consensual.
But he was cleaning my house for me, and that was… wrong. And yet, it also meant we had longer together in the evenings.
I loved being so damned sore I remembered him throughout the day, but I wasn’t spending time in the shoes, so the sore feet were missing — just my asshole from the plugs, and my pussy from his dick. Also, some bruising around my torso, from the cincher.
No way in hell was I going to bring up maintenance, and yet, it was like this huge thing left flapping in the wind and never talked about. We weren’t officially an item, though, so there was no need in bringing it up. He wasn’t wrong to leave it, for now, but it still bugged me.
One evening, I saw something odd in his open suitcase. He hadn’t ordered me to grab the bar yet, so I could still speak freely.
“What is that?” I asked, and then stepped closer and touched the hard silicone.
“I didn’t know if I was going to use it or not,” he said, pulling it out. He was wearing jeans without a shirt, and he placed the device over the root of his cock, covered by the denim, but the placement was impossible to understand.
“Felt like I should bring it, just in case.” He met my gaze.
“It acts like the donuts men with too-long cocks wear when they fuck their short partners, but none of those are big enough, so I had this custom-made years ago. Comes almost up to the rough part of my dick, so I can fuck women without hurting them, but…” He shrugged.
“I like hurting you when I fuck you, and you seem to get off on it, so…”
He put it back into the suitcase. “I may change my mind, but as of now, I don’t think I’m ever going to put the damned thing on again.”
I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. He had a way to fuck me without hurting me, and he’d told me once that there was a way, but then he’d never shown me how.
Did I want him using this? Yes. No.
Fuck, I wasn’t sure. I was absolutely positive of his meaning, though, when he said he may never put it on again — he was implying that he never intended to fuck anyone else besides me, and that was way too heavy of a discussion for us to have yet.
But he ordered me to jump up and grab the bar, so the conversation was thankfully over without me having to say a word.
The beauty of the whole slave-thing is in giving up those kinds of decisions.
He waited until his fourth day to bring up the near-future over grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup, and he’d made the bread from scratch along with the soup.
He’d also fixed a leaky faucet in a guest bedroom, trimmed my outside bushes so they didn’t encroach on the sidewalk, and cleaned the inside and outside of every window in my house, along with another half-dozen small handyman-type jobs I just hadn’t gotten around to.
“I can come up again three or four weeks after I leave,” he said, to start.
“We can plan it better next time, if you’re open to another visit.
” He set his sandwich down and met my gaze a few seconds before asking, “Are you open to coming back to my place again, once it’s safe?
Work it when you aren’t likely to need to go into DC or New York? ”
“I’d love to come for a visit once I’m not busier than a tax accountant in April. I really am sorry I can’t just stop working, but there are so many different things going on at once, and I can’t just disappear from so many people counting on me to follow through.”
“I’d never ask you to do that,” he said, and I believed him. “If there’s anything I can do to help, feel free to put me to work, but I have a feeling it’s stuff only you can do, or you’d have paid for someone to come assist by now.”
“I have four assistants, actually. People who specialize in the various platforms. No way could I do all of this completely without help, but they can’t create anything, they just compile stuff for me so I don’t have to trudge through every comment.
Some of the info left that way is important, so every single one has to be read, and they have a good handle on the things I need to see.
They also help me stay on top of the rules and algorithm changes at each site, advising me of new trends and things to avoid. ”
We were talking around the actual 800-pound gorilla sitting between us, so I just fucking named it. “We can’t talk about more than visits right now. It isn’t like I’m going to sell my house and move in with you anytime soon. It isn’t off the table, but it isn’t exactly on the table, either.”
I took a sip of the peach tea he’d made us and shook my head.
“Fuck, Magnum. I love having you here, but it isn’t enough, but it has to be.
I should be the one forced into heels and cleaning the windows, instead of sitting on my ass and talking to police all over the country, and to the FBI agents I’ve worked with in the past who aren’t complete assholes, giving victims and their families a voice, dealing with attorneys, collabing with other reporters.
” I sighed. “And now also dealing with a book publisher trying to convince me not to self-publish the book I’m writing about the whole damned thing. ”
Wow, I hadn’t planned for that tangent, so I brought us back on topic. “It’s my house, and it’d be wrong even without our history. I should be cleaning up and being the host.”
“We had kind of a paradisical vacation of sorts, to start, but now we’re trying to figure out how to move that Shangri-la experience into real life. I love being here, and I’m completely fine with handling the domestic stuff while you’re covered up with work.”
He took a drink, settled his glass back on the table with extra care, and met my gaze again.
“Maybe we should just get the real elephant in the room out in the open. I love you with all my heart, and I want to move you into my house permanently. I know that isn’t going to happen in the next three months, and that’s fine.
It’s fine if it doesn’t happen in the next six months. ”
My breath caught and my entire body fucking swooned. Like I was a damned Victorian or something. The room went fuzzy, and my heart raced. He loves me! But that meant moving out of my house. Fuck.
Before I could respond, he kept going. “Longer than that though, and I might start getting annoying about it. I mean, I can buy your house from you and then handle selling it, so you don’t have to deal with the whole showing-and-realtor thing.
I can rent an apartment in Hoboken for a year, a second residence for you when you need to be close to New York.
Or, if you prefer an apartment in DC or Virginia, we can make that happen instead.
I’m here to simplify your life, not complicate it, but I want you living in my house the majority of the year.
Don’t want to interfere with your career any at all, but I want you in my house. ”
I started talking fast, before he could keep going.
“I love you, too, but that doesn’t just automatically mean everything is going to work out.
Look, once it’s safe to visit you, we’ll go for a trial period at your place.
I don’t know how the rules will work, because I can’t do everything around the house I used to do while I’m chasing stories, even after I’m not covered up with this one like I am right now.
I loved the schedule, but that isn’t going to work day in and day out like it did while I was forced offline and couldn’t actually fucking go out and do my job. ”
And now it was out there and couldn’t be taken back.
I’d known for months that I loved him, but I’d also known I couldn’t say it.
Those words are too damned heavy, and they’d seemed impossible, but it turns out they weren’t.
Three simple syllables, and they might cost me my house and my autonomy, but they also might mean living the rest of my life with this man.
A huge trade-off, and I had some really big decisions to make…
but I had time. Nothing had to be decided now.
He’d given me six months to figure it out, and surely I’d know for sure what I wanted to do by then.
“I know the schedule will have to give you time for your career,” he said. “I have some ideas, but it’ll be trial and error to get it right — as soon as it’s safe to bring your ass back to my lake.”
“Okay then, but you aren’t buying my house.
Maybe I work with a property management company and rent it out, maybe I sell it.
I’ll have to do some research and see which is best, but I’m leaning toward the latter.
Either way, that’s my shit, not yours. I let you help me with the attorney because fuck, his fees were crazy, but it turns out he was worth every penny, and it benefited both of us for me to walk in with him at my back — but I’m not going to let your money make my life easier as a habit.
I’ve taken care of myself a long-damned time. ”
“Totally your call,” he told me, his voice low, “but like I said, I’m here to simplify and enhance your life. I have confidence we can figure it out and make it work, but yeah, it’s going to require some patience on my part.”
My phone rang, with a tone I give for important contacts — whistleblowers, informants, victims. I looked at the screen and told him, “I’m sorry, I have to answer this one.”
Magnum nodded and sat back as I accepted the call and asked, “Paulo, are you okay?”
“No! The police were here! My sister told them I’m not home, but they said they understand that I have returned, and that they must talk to me about where I’ve been so they can close the missing persons file! They want me to come into the police station and talk to them!”
“You haven’t done anything wrong, Paulo.
It’s going to be okay.” I considered my options and quickly decided that it’d cause more problems than it’d fix for me to contact the detective over the case.
“I’ll call a victim’s advocacy group in the area, and they can arrange for you to meet the detective at a park, or a restaurant.
Neutral ground, and you won’t be alone. If you don’t want to lie to them, you can just tell them that you didn’t have a phone, so you didn’t know your sister was looking for you, and you feel terrible that such a big deal was made of you not being where she expected you to be. ”
“They want to know where I was!”
“Of course they do, but you don’t have to tell them that. You can just tell them you didn’t break any laws, and you don’t want to talk about where you were. They won’t like it, but they can’t force you to talk.”
I took a breath and said the part Paulo wasn’t going to want to hear, but I had to say it. “It won’t be the end of the world if you tell them where you were, though. You can tell them that horrible, evil people took you to a terrible place, and you don’t want to talk about what happened there.”
“No! I do not wish to talk about that!” His voice broke. “I do not want people to know what…”
He didn’t want anyone to know he’d been raped, and he still couldn’t say it, so the best I could do was reassure him he could keep his secrets.
“Then you don’t have to tell them where you were.
You can truthfully tell them you didn’t have a phone.
Also, say good things about them. Tell them you know they have a hard job, and you’re so thankful they’re doing it, and you’re sorry you created so much worry. ”
I talked to him another ten minutes, hung up, immediately searched my contacts for a local victim’s advocate I knew, and I called her.
She assured me she could get a pro-bono attorney involved as well, and that made me feel so much better.
I thanked her, texted her information to Paulo with a note that she’d be calling him in the next half hour, and then put my phone down and looked around.
I only had a few bites of my sandwich left, and Magnum had cleaned the kitchen. My plate and glass were the only things left to go into the dishwasher.
“You’re really good at that,” he said. “You aren’t just a reporter. You’re almost like a social worker to the victims.”
“Not all of them, but for some, I’m the only person who’s really listened to them, really heard them, so yeah, they call me when there’s a problem, and that’s fine. Sometimes it can add to my story, to the things I report. Other times, it doesn’t, but if I can help them, I do.”
“I haven’t asked you about the dishwashers before,” he said. “Did the house come that way, or did you add one?”
I swallowed my bite and told him, “It came that way, but I love it. Maybe it only saves me ten or fifteen minutes a week, but it’s a chore I don’t mind losing. I mean, I enjoy dusting, right? But the clean dishes aren’t, like, visual. No extra clutter or anything.”
“How do you know where to look for things?” he asked.
I shook my head, not sure what he was asking. “I just go to the clean dishwasher for the stuff that gets used a lot — plates and glasses and silverware. It isn’t like I’m having to search for stuff.”
“No, your favorite frying pan, for instance.”
“Oh, I wash it by hand and put it away. I only run the dishwasher about once a week, and I use my favorite pan way more than that. Everything else, I just know where it is. I look it over before I wash a load and then change the magnets. Whatever’s left in the old clean dishwasher gets put away before I start loading dirty dishes into it, but by then, there usually isn’t much left, so it takes maybe thirty seconds. Not long.”
He shook his head. “That’d drive me crazy, not having everything in its place.”
I smiled. “But one of the places for clean dishes is the clean dishwasher, just as the place for dirty dishes is in the dirty dishwasher. Problem solved. Nothing is out of place.”
He narrowed his gaze at me, and I walked my now-empty plate and glass to the dirty dishwasher and put them in. He was already wiping the table when I turned, and I told him, “Thank you. For fixing such a wonderful lunch, and for cleaning up.”
He stepped to me and drew me into the warmth of his embrace, wrapping his arms around me.
“I have a few hours of work to do for the club,” he said, his voice vibrating against me, “and you need to get back to your tasks.”
He leaned down, kissed my forehead, my nose, my lips. “I do love you, and it feels good to have finally said it.”
“I love you, too, and ditto.”
He released me and patted me on the butt, his voice going all Dom again when he told me, “Get your ass back to work and stop dawdling.”