Chapter 27
NIA
I ’m nearly bowled over as Katie and her friend barrel past me in a fit of giggles. I laugh, lifting the tray of hot dogs and burgers over my head to keep from dropping them as I move toward the folding table set up in the backyard.
“Girls,” I call out, “we’re ready to eat.”
Dropping the tray onto the table, I take the seat next to my mom and start working on putting together a plate for each of the kids.
“You seem good,” My mom tells me, reaching for my knee with a smile.
“I spent time with some friends last night,” I tell her, focusing on the task in front of me to keep myself from blushing at the phantom sting that rises to my skin. “It was nice.”
“I’m glad you’re getting out some,” she says. “It’s good to do some things for just you.”
Dropping handfuls of potato chips onto each of the girls’ plates, I tell her, “It has been. I’ve been getting to know myself as my own person, and I think I’m starting to like her.”
It’s a beautiful evening, and I don’t just mean because of the cool breeze that wafts over us or the pink hue that makes the sunset look like it jumped straight out of a fairy tale. My daughter is happy, spending time with a friend and her grandparents, and for the first time in a long time, my heart doesn’t hurt.
I’m not weighed down by the things that I can’t control or the things that I’ve gotten wrong in the past few months. I can breathe.
The table is full of laughter and smiles while we eat, and we have enough time to play a quick game of Go Fish together before Katie’s friend is picked up by her mom. It feels like a regular, old-fashioned family dinner, and I’m so incredibly grateful for it.
As wonderful as the evening was, I’m exhausted by the time my parents leave and I get Katie tucked into bed, but she falls asleep before I’ve even finished half of her story. I flick on her night light before leaving the room and trekking down to the kitchen for the box of chocolates that I’ve been saving for myself.
Was it wrong to hide them from my daughter? Sure, maybe, but as I throw on my comfiest pajamas and drop onto my bed with the box, I don’t feel that guilty about it.
Instead, I settle onto my carefully-placed pillows, resting the box on my chest as I reach for the TV remote to click on one of my favorite movies.
Noah is just about to confess his love when my phone starts buzzing against the top of my nightstand.
Moving my chocolates from their place on my chest to the empty space next to me on the bed, I reach for my ringing phone and pull it to my ear, trying to quell the rising anxiety in my veins as brODY – PERSONAL lights up the screen.
“Hello?”
The sound of rushing water fills my ear before his voice does. “What are you doing?”
“Uh,” I stammer, “eating chocolate in bed and watching The Notebook …?”
“Turn off your TV,” he orders, and I comply immediately, as if he can see me. “Do you remember being issued a warning last night?”
“Yes,” I answer with my heart slamming against the wall of my chest.
“Do you remember calling me by my name, anyway?”
“Yes,” I swallow.
“Do you think that I forgot about your punishment?”
“I’m sure you didn’t,” I tell him. “But it’s like, eleven o’clock. I have Katie. I can’t leave.”
“No, you can’t,” he agrees. “Welcome to your first lesson in virtual punishment.”
My mouth runs dry at the gravel in his voice. At the thought of what he could possibly mean. At the ideas swirling around in my head of what he might ask me to do and the disappointment that I would feel if I had to use our safe word and he weren’t here.
My heart thrums in my chest, forcing my breathing to go ragged as the need to please him overtakes me, and I want him to be here.
I want him to bring his skin so close to mine that I can feel the heat radiating off of him, but not close enough to touch. Close enough to tease .
“I want you to spread your legs,” he tells me, and I do, keeping my knees as far from each other as I can. A deep huff comes through the receiver and my stomach flips. He can’t actually be… “You’re going to listen, and you’re going to watch. And you’re going to keep your legs open and your hands to yourself. No touching. No playing. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, Sir,” I breathe.
“Put your phone on your nightstand and turn on your video feed, Nia.”
Scrambling against the nerves coursing through me and the moisture already pooling between my legs, I hurry to set my phone against the base of the lamp, tapping on the video icon on the screen. When the feed opens on his end, I’m looking directly at Brody Montgomery in the shower.
Water rushes over his head as he braces an arm against the shower wall, sending his normally-slicked-back hair forward and into his eyes. The left side of his body is angled to show me a tasteful side view of him, but I can make out the carved muscle that covers his broad frame and the Apollo’s belt which extends above his hip.
The camera cuts just beneath it, leaving the rest of his body a mystery to me, but my mind is more than happy to fill in the blanks with its own images.
His right arm is hidden by the wall of his body, but I catch flashes of the greyscale ink covering it as his forearm moves away from his body and back again.
Another deep huff, this one accompanied by a soft groan, floats through my speaker just before Brody turns his face toward the phone for a brief moment.
“Put those hands above your head, sweet girl,” he orders. “I don’t want to see them move from that spot.”
My eyes refuse to look anywhere but at the man on my phone’s screen as I clasp my hands together and rest them on the pillow behind me.
I watch his chest heave and I listen to his moans echo against the curved tile of the shower while his hand works the length of his cock, and I don’t think I blink at all.
“Can you move your camera, Sir?” I plead. “I can’t see all of you.”
A smirk crosses his features as he angles his head toward his phone once again. “You can see all that you get to see,” he tells me. “You don’t deserve this cock, remember? You don’t get to see it.”
This is torture. In this moment, I would rather have my fingernails pulled off or be forced to squeeze lemon juice into my eyes. I would willingly be pepper sprayed if it meant that I wouldn’t have to endure this.
Waiting. Needing. Aching to feel the weight of his body pressed against mine.
My hips roll against my mattress as he moans again, and I fight to keep my legs apart, joining him with a whine of my own. All I want to do, all I can think about, is squeezing my thighs together to give myself friction and some relief from the fire that he’s setting between my legs.
As another whine slips out of me, Brody’s eyes move back to his phone. “Show me those hands,” he orders.
I raise my clasped hands toward my own phone’s camera, showing him not only that I’m obeying him, but also my white-knuckled grip in the hopes that he’ll tell me I’ve been punished enough.
“They’re right here, Sir,” I pant.
“Good,” he tells me through a moan. “You’re such an obedient slut.”
The smirk on his face and the flush on his cheeks mix with his words to ripple through me with a wave of heat so intense that I think I might burst into flame.
While I listen to the sounds of him pleasing himself, my imagination runs wild. My eyes drift shut as thoughts of what would happen if I were in that shower with him fill my mind. It’s so intense that I can almost feel the hard length of his cock in my hand and his breath hot against my skin.
I think about the ways that he would touch me while I touched him, the ways that he could send me careening headfirst into another brilliant orgasm, and my chest heaves.
“Hands,” he orders firmly.
Reality forces my eyes open and drags me back to the present, where my hands have drifted from their assigned post to pull up my worn, baggy college t-shirt and pinch at my nipples. I consider pulling the shirt back into place, but decide against it and simply clasp my hands back together instead, pulling them back above my head.
Brody’s body shifts and his breathing changes as his hand moves from the shower wall to rest at the center of his chest. I watch, transfixed, as his head falls backward, his eyes drift shut, and a long, heady moan pours from his lips while he comes.
As he turns off the flow of water, he reaches for a towel and holds it over his stomach before turning to move toward his phone, blocking me from seeing the rest of the body that he’d kept hidden from me throughout our call, and I can’t help but feel disappointed.
Water drips from his features as he smooths his soaked hair away from his face and I get a better look at the tattoos that have, up until this point, been a mystery to me. Before he brings his arm back down, I can make out the shape of a hooded woman wrapping around his tricep.
My eyes scan toward the dark hair at the center of his chest, and an actual, physical ache crawls between my legs and makes itself at home there.
“Goodnight,” I quickly tell him before reaching for my own phone.
“No.” The word is low and commanding, as if he’s still being Sir. “If you hang up, you’ll make yourself come, and you’ll have learned nothing. Keep your phone where it is and your hands where they belong.”
“I’m— I need to go to sleep.”
“So go to sleep,” he shrugs. “But you’ll do it in front of me.”
Frustrated, I pull my shirt down to cover my breasts, then bring my hands back to their assigned post above my head. “Goodnight, Sir ,” I tell him, letting a drop of venom spill into my words, which earns an amused chuckle from him.
“Goodnight, sweet girl.”
Morning greets me with the ringing of my doorbell, and I groan as I stretch my back and arms. My phone still sits on its charger, propped against the lamp on my bedside table, and I reach for it.
It’s seven thirty in the morning, and my call log shows that Brody stayed on with me for six hours last night. I don’t know how much of that was spent watching me, but my skin erupts into a shiver at the thought.
A handful of text messages wait for me; some from mailing lists I keep forgetting to unsubscribe from, an appointment reminder from the pediatrician, and one from him, sent at six o’clock this morning. I pull in a breath as I tap to open the thread, hoping in a not-insignificant way that I’ll find a photo when I do.
With a smile, I toss away the bedding covering the lower half of my body and make my way to the front door, just outside of which sits a large pink box, wrapped on four sides with a silky piece of ribbon.
As I bring the box to the kitchen table and pull open the lid, I’m met with an array of pastries from cinnamon rolls to rainbow croissants to danishes and scones. Every flavor blends together to send an absolutely incredible aroma into my nose.
Reaching again for my phone, I type out a quick text to Brody, and he responds almost immediately.
I bite my lip, letting my thumbs hover over the keypad, but not letting myself type. Everything that I want to say is everything that I shouldn’t say. Even if certain things are blurry between us now, he was clear: he cannot be my Dom.
Not for real, anyway.
It doesn’t matter if I want him to be. It doesn’t matter if my stomach flips every time he’s near me, or that he’s the only person I feel safe being around my daughter other than my own parents. It doesn’t matter that he’s the only person I feel safe around, period.
He’s only teaching me.
And in the process, he’s sending my standards through the roof.