Pinch Me

Chapter Twenty-Six

There wasn’t a girls’ day that week because Leah, Tilly, and Loren had a meeting for a charity project they were involved with. When Laura awoke shortly before dawn, she returned to the journals.

At seven she called Steve and told him she wouldn’t make it in and why. By eight o’clock, she’d worked her way to her junior year of college and had progressed from simple daily events to interspersing poetry and snippets of fiction. The writing improved as well.

Sunlight on the water,

gulls over the beach,

magical, a moment forever suspended in time

by the sheer power of its renewal

We should be so lucky

that nature could bring us back

to such beauty on a daily basis…

It was different from the magazine articles she’d already read. This was real and held a raw, magic quality that couldn’t have been evident to her as a teenager, or even as an adult fresh into college. Maybe not ever. Why else would these have been sitting buried in the warehouse?

Perhaps before she didn’t realize how good her writing was.

She?

Laura wondered if this was how people with multiple personalities felt. Even with most of her childhood intact, as well as other memory fragments returning, she still saw herself before as a different person whose mind she couldn’t decipher other than what she read on the paper in front of her.

She also read, yes, about the guy she’d dated back then. A professor older than her by fifteen years. So at least that part of Don Kern’s story matched up.

When Laura took a break at ten to stretch her back, she realized while she was trying to get her memories back by going through her old writings, she’d yet to look up any of Shayla’s.

After a quick search on her laptop, she found the website for the magazine Shayla worked for. She started with the most recent entries. One was about a marine research facility in Sarasota, Mote Marine.

A few memories trickled back as she read, something about a charity dinner.

She closed her eyes. Rob was there, dressed in a nice suit, as were their friends. Tony and Shayla, Seth and Leah, and the others.

But nothing more than a few stray memories from that night.

Still, she’d take the win.

She kept reading the articles, regardless of the subject matter, hopefully desperate for another recent memory including Rob to slide home and lock into place.

It felt like all she did lately was search for elusive clues to who she used to be. Like trying to find a missing person standing right in front of her.

Maybe that’s another reason Shayla and I are such good friends, because we’re both writers.

That made sense. Even better, it felt right.

She spent two hours working through the magazine’s online archives, sometimes getting sidetracked from Shayla’s articles by another article that caught her eye.

Unfortunately, nothing she read was enough to trigger a lot of memories, but stray fragments gathered like dust to static electricity. That gave her hope.

Then she accidentally closed the search result page and had to run a new one on the site. She typed in Shayla’s first name and hit enter before thinking about it.

Several new articles appeared, with a different last name of Pierce, but showing earlier dates than the first batch of articles.

Oh, stupid. That’s her maiden name.

She immediately giggled as she realized what she’d thought, adding one more hash mark in the win column for the tiny victory.

I remembered her maiden name!

Pleased with herself, she continued reading, latest articles first and working backward through time.

When she reached the last several articles, apparently some of the first ones Shayla wrote for the publication, Laura realized they were part of a series.

She froze as she jumped back farther in time to open the first in the series.

Part of her wanted to close the browser window, forget she ever saw it.

And yet, something kept her reading. Refused to let her stop.

As her heart pounded, thudding hard and heavy in her chest like a gorilla trying to break free, she took a deep breath and started over from the beginning.

Last weekend, a group of friends gathered around a table at a local restaurant and discussed their week, their jobs, their lives, graciously inviting this writer into their inner circle. Nothing distinguished them from anyone else in the restaurant.

Except that an hour later, after dinner ended, they all met up at a local private BDSM dungeon club to continue their evening…

She wasn’t an idiot. As she read, despite the way Shayla had disguised the identities of the people she met and talked with along the way, she easily recognized them.

Mental pictures flashed through her mind, of her friends, dressed in a wide variety of sexy clothes.

Or maybe I’m remembering?

Now she wasn’t sure if that was a good or bad thing.

Her mind pulled her back to finding the corsets in her closet.

A numbing chill settled over her.

And the description of the man Shayla had paired up with—mentor and teacher at first, progressing into Dominant—left no doubt in Laura’s mind it was Tony.

Several times during reading, she caught herself feeling at her throat for the necklace no longer there.

A necklace much like Shayla’s, which Laura now suspected was a day collar.

Information and memories and emotions flooded into her brain, small chunks interconnected by their topic.

Confusion set in, overwhelming. As she finished reading the series she didn’t realize she’d stood. It felt like she’d climbed almost to the top of an incredibly high stone wall hiding the answer to her prayers on its other side, and all she needed to do was get a little nudge to make it over and finally see what lay hidden.

She had difficulty trying to pull all her thoughts together. But she knew she couldn’t talk to Rob about this. He’d never mentioned any of this. And Shayla had obviously been in on keeping this information from her.

As had their other “friends.”

Of all of them, she suspected there was only one who would give her an unvarnished, completely truthful telling, answering any and all of her questions with blatant, perhaps even painful, honesty.

She grabbed her phone, which she put on silent mode and shoved into her purse, and her keys, and headed out the door after walking Doogie and setting the alarm.

She had to stop and buy a street map, the tiny map app on her phone confusing her even more. After looking up the address, she headed north to Bradenton until she turned in at the driveway and pulled up to the guard shack marking the main entrance of the sprawling campus housing the national headquarters for Asher Insurance.

The guard held an electronic tablet. “Name and photo identification, please.”

She swallowed hard, fighting back the panic struggling to take hold in her brain as she handed over her driver’s license. “Laura Spaulding.”

“Reason for your visit?”

“I…I’m not expected. I’m here to see Tony Daniels.” It struck her that maybe she should have called first. What if he wasn’t there? Or in a meeting.

She didn’t care. She needed her questions answered by someone other than Rob.

By someone who, at an instinctive level, she trusted would not lie to her.

By someone she trusted, period.

She didn’t know where that trust in Tony stemmed from, but it felt right.

For now, she’d go with that.

The guard tapped her information into the tablet, walked to the back of her truck, presumably to note the tag number, and then snapped a picture of her driver’s license with the tablet’s built-in camera. “Just a moment, please.”

He disappeared into the guard shack and returned less than minute later with a plastic ID badge. He handed it and her license to her, along with a paper parking pass. “Put the pass on your dash. He’s in building C, which is that one there.” He pointed it out, along with where to park. “Make sure to wear the badge while you’re on campus. When you leave, we take them both back from you here.”

“Thank you.” He opened the gate for her and she found a parking spot not too far from the building.

Why am I here?

Now she wasn’t sure if this was the greatest idea. So many things floated through her head, confusing, emotions and memories and overwhelming loss and need.

It threatened to swamp her.

She suspected of the people she’d met so far, it would be Tony who could help her make sense of it all.

Honestly.

The unvarnished truth.

Before she confronted Rob about any of it.

She left her phone and purse locked in the truck and made herself walk to the building. The front door was locked, but a man working at a reception desk raised his head and hit a buzzer when she rang the doorbell.

The lock clicked and she had to force herself to tug on the handle to open it. Somehow, despite no longer being able to feel her feet, she managed to walk across the lobby to the desk.

The man immediately frowned. “Are you all right, ma’am?”

No, I’m less all right than I can ever remember being in my life.

She choked back a snort of laughter at that, considering she could only clearly remember the last couple of weeks since waking up, with everything else disjointed and shattered across the realms of her mind.

Tears threatened. It was all she could do to force the words out. “I need to speak with Tony Daniels, please. It’s…important.”

He kept a wary eye on her while he grabbed a phone and spoke into it. “He’ll be out in a minute,” he said. “You can sit over there, if you’d like.” He pointed to three chairs lined up on the other wall, but she shook her head.

“I’m okay. I’d rather stand.”

Laura hated that she involuntarily flinched when she heard the inner door latch click loudly before it swung open and Tony walked out. When he spotted her, he immediately crossed the room to her side.

“Laura? What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

Tears were imminent. She shook her head, not trusting her voice.

He grabbed her by the elbow and led her to another door. “No interruptions,” he barked over his shoulder as he opened the door to what was a small conference room. He flipped on the light and closed the door behind them before guiding her to the nearest chair.

He pulled another chair around so he could sit in front of her. “Laura, what is it?” he asked, grabbing her hands. “What happened?”

Ragged sobs broke through. “I…read. I read Shayla’s articles…” That was all she could choke out before she lost it, her fear and anger and loss pouring out of her like the rushing tide through the Boca Grande pass.

He let out a deep sigh but said nothing. Instead, he gently put his arms around her and let her cry on his shoulder. She didn’t know how many minutes passed while she cried the worst of it out, until she finally sniffled back snot and tears and slowly sat up.

She let out a sharp laugh when he glanced down at the wet spot on his shirt before smirking at her.

“Does Rob know you’re here?”

She shook her head while wiping at her cheeks with her hands.

“Stay here. I’ll be right back.”

He left the room. Alone with her thoughts, she realized this was probably not the greatest idea.

Ironically, it didn’t escape her that she had no clue whether or not it was her worst idea ever.

He returned a few minutes later with a laptop case slung over his shoulder and a handful of tissues, the latter of which he passed to her. Then he held out a hand. “Give me your keys,” he softly said.

She passed them over without comment.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“To talk. I told them I had a family emergency.” He shoved the keys in his pocket and held out his hand to her again. “Come on, sweetie. Let’s go.”

She felt a deeply embedded trust in him. She took his hand and let him lead her out of the building.

“Where are you parked?”

She pointed and he changed direction to lead her there. “What about your car?” she asked.

“Shayla can bring me back later to get it. Or she can bring me to work in the morning. You aren’t an employee or a vendor. If we leave your truck here tonight, they’ll tow it.”

He walked her over to the passenger side and unlocked the door for her, waiting until she was in to close it. Then he walked around to the driver’s door, put his laptop in the backseat, and climbed behind the wheel.

After turning in her parking pass and visitor’s badge, he drove. She didn’t speak, unsure what to even say.

Somehow she felt it was better to wait until he could give her his undivided attention.

He stopped at a convenience store, where he bought them a couple of cold bottles of water, as well as a small box of tissues. After another twenty minutes of driving, turning off a main road and into a residential area, they pulled into a park. It felt familiar, but the sign at the entrance identifying it as the De Soto National Memorial rang absolutely no bells in her memory.

There weren’t many cars there, so he had no trouble finding a shady spot to park a ways from everyone else. Still feeling no need to fill the silence, she grabbed a wad of the tissues and followed him as he carried the bottles of water and led her toward a shaded bench near the water overlooking a bay.

Once they were settled on the bench, he cracked the top open on one of the bottles and passed it to her. “I texted Rob,” he said. “I told him simply that you were with me and safe and that I’d call him as soon as I found out what was going on.” He took a swallow from his own bottle. “And that he needed to not panic.” A wry smile curved his face.

Laura had no trouble recognizing what Shayla saw in Tony. He exuded a presence that calmed her simply by being near him. Steady as a rock, ready to deal head-on with whatever he had to face.

Much like she felt about Rob.

Volume deserted her voice. She pushed the words out. “I need to know.”

“We need to back up. You read the articles Shayla wrote about…?”

He didn’t finish. She made herself look up at him. “BDSM.”

He slowly nodded. “And?”

There wasn’t any reason to try to hide her tears. “I need to know.”

“About?”

“Can’t you make this easy for me?”

“No,” he gently said. “I won’t lie to you, but I won’t spoon-feed you your past, either. If you want me to tell you about my relationship with Shayla, I will. If you want me to tell you what I know of you and Rob, I will. If you want me to detail what happened between you and Rob, I can’t, simply because most of your relationship happened beyond my view.”

Carefully drawing in a shuddering breath, she asked, “How did I really meet you and Shayla?”

“Now that,” he said in the same gentle tone, “is something I can tell you.” He recounted, from his point of view, how Laura had emailed Shayla only a few months after they’d married. She’d read Shayla’s articles and, like many others, finally grew the nerve to reach out for more information.

“We invited you to join us and Ross and Loren at dinner one evening. You looked like you were frightened out of your wits.” He smiled. “Shay draped an arm around your shoulders and it was like the two of you had been sisters all your lives.

“We sat there talking for several hours, until nearly midnight and the restaurant was trying to close. You and Shay and Loren exchanged phone numbers and email addresses, and you were texting and calling each other until that weekend, when you came to Maria’s Submission 101 class at the Venture.

“That’s the name of the club,” he clarified. “Shay and Loren met you there, and you went to dinner with all of us after class.”

He took another swallow of his water. She didn’t interrupt him while he gathered his thoughts. “You really wanted to throw yourself head-first into BDSM. Fortunately, the girls helped you temper that. Shay asked me if it’d be okay to offer for us to step forward as your protectors.”

She had to ask. “What’s that?”

“In terms of protocol for some, it means people had to go through me or Shay before they could play with you. That we were the ones who vetted your play partners. It didn’t stop asshats on Fet from trying to contact you, but you had no problem dealing with and blocking those creeps on your own.”

“Fet?”

“FetLife.” He frowned. “You don’t know any of this?”

She shook her head.

He slowly nodded before continuing. “Shay and I, jointly, gave you a collar of protection.” He shrugged. “Again, just a formality. You didn’t answer to me like a submissive, but it was an easy out for you to blow off people who gave you the creeps in real life. And it gave you a sense of safety.”

Her hand once again went to her throat. He noticed.

He pulled out his phone, tapped and swiped through it, then held it up so she could see it.

It was a picture of her, Shayla, Loren, Leah, Tilly, and Clarisse. All of them wore bright, happy smiles, and they were dressed in corsets.

And they all wore collars.

Her hand went to her throat again as he took the phone back.

“I played with you a little. Nonsexual play,” he quickly added. “No orgasm play. Landry did a little of that with you, but that was only at our private parties, not at the club. Panties on,” he amended. “Fairly tame stuff. I did shibari on you, because you really enjoyed rope. Landry, Tilly, and Ross played with you some, impact play. You asked Seth and Leah to use a singletail on you.”

Her hand stayed at her throat, her fingers wrapping around and resting there, a poor imitation for the ghostly feel of the collar she knew with certainty had been burned into her soul.

“After about six months, Rob started coming to the club with a friend of a friend. The two of you met. Even though all of us were cautious at first, we knew you’d met someone special. Rob was new to the scene but eager to learn. Responsibly. He took every class he could fit into his schedule. If work interfered with him going to a class, Ross, Seth, Landry, and I included him in some private parties at my house where we could work with him, and you, together.”

“And?”

He smiled. “Shay said it best. Said she got the good kind of chills watching the two of you figure this out together. And even better, he didn’t resent you deferring to me and wearing my collar of protection. He didn’t ask me to hand you over, he didn’t pressure you to say something to me. He just…”

He rubbed his goatee and moustache with his hand, apparently pondering his next words. “You two did start dating. I waited a couple of weeks after that to have Shay invite the two of you over to our house for dinner. Just the four of us. While you and Shay were in the kitchen, I took Rob out to the playroom on the pretense of wanting to show him some techniques. And he and I had a talk.”

He took another swallow of water. The day was warm despite their shaded spot and the cool breeze. She watched as a small bead of sweat trickled down his temple.

“I cut right to the chase and asked him what he wanted to do with you. His answer was that he was willing to wait as long as it took for me to decide he was worthy of you. That he wasn’t going to ask me, or you, to uncollar you. That he wanted to know you wanted him, and that I felt sure he was safe enough of a player to not to harm you.”

A soft laugh escaped him. “In other words, he wanted you badly and was afraid of screwing it up. So I called you and Shay into the playroom and had you kneel in front of me and I point-blank asked you what you thought about Rob.”

Another laugh, this one a little louder. He met her gaze. “Your face turned the deepest shade of red I’ve ever seen. Your voice got really soft and you said you were attracted to him. When I asked you why you hadn’t told me before, you said—”

“I didn’t want to make a mistake,” she whispered. The words had magically appeared in her brain, even though she wasn’t sure yet if she was truly remembering the night or just reliving it through Tony.

He cocked his head at her. “Yes. Go on.”

She didn’t think about it. She opened her mouth and let the words surprise her. “I wanted to wait until you said something to me about him because I was so attracted to him that it scared me.”

He nodded but didn’t interrupt.

The words continued. She didn’t want to stop them in case the memories ceased. “I feel safe with you, and Landry, and Ross, and Seth. But I can’t be with any of you and I know that. There’s something in me that doesn’t want to leave Rob’s side after we play.”

She closed her eyes, reliving it, looking up even as she’d looked up at Tony that night. “I was scared to ask you because of how right it always feels being with him. I was afraid he didn’t feel like that about me. Or that I was mistaking sub frenzy for real feelings.”

“Tell me what he said to you.”

Tears squeezed out from under her closed lids and rolled down her cheeks. “It was a question. ‘Do you think you can trust a noob who still isn’t sure he knows what he’s doing?’”

“And your response?”

“I trust Tony.”

His voice sounded like it came from down a long tunnel. “Then what?”

She was no longer sitting on the bench. She was kneeling on the floor of a room she’d never seen, yet knew was Tony and Shayla’s private playroom. “You reached down and uncollared me and said you felt perfectly safe entrusting me to his protection, if that was what I wanted. But that if I ever didn’t feel safe, I was to come back to you, or Seth or Ross or Landry or Cris or Sully or Mac, any of you. I was to come to whoever I could get to first and tell one of you. That if you found out I wasn’t safe and didn’t say anything or come to one of you, that you would personally ensure that I would definitely regret it.”

“Then what happened?”

“You turned to Rob and told him he had your full blessings and permissions.” She laughed, finally opening her eyes. “You also told him they’d never find his body if he harmed me.” She looked at him as she wiped at her eyes.

He wore a gentle smile. “And then?”

She started crying again. “He held out his hand to me and asked if I’d please consider being his submissive. And I said yes.”

The large, gaping void of her memory was still there. Now, however, it felt like a safe, sturdy outcropping had suddenly appeared, holding the treasured memories safely in place, no longer swirling and lost in the abyss with so much else.

He opened his arms to her and she collapsed against him, sobbing again. “I said yes,” she whispered. “I said yes and he pulled the necklace from his pocket and put it on me right then. He’d bought it a few days earlier to have it in case he ever got the chance to be with me.”

Tony gently stroked her back. “Go on,” he urged.

“We…” She stumbled, the memory a little blurry for a moment until locking firmly in place. “You and Shay stepped out for a few minutes,” she said. “He promised to own up to mistakes, that he’d never violate a safeword, and he’d never lie to me. Then he admitted he thought he was falling in love with me.”

She closed her eyes. “We hadn’t had sex yet. And he promised to wait as long as it took, that he wouldn’t pressure me to do anything I didn’t want to do, and that he wouldn’t control who I could or couldn’t see or talk to, as long as I never lied to him.”

Her eyes flew open. “Oh, shit!”

He laughed. “Yeees?”

She sat up, feeling heat fill her cheeks. Her hand flew to her mouth as she stared at Tony. His green eyes twinkled with devilish amusement.

“You came in to tell us dinner was ready and caught me giving him a blow job. I’d pushed him onto one of the spanking benches and yanked his zipper down.”

He nodded, roaring with laughter. “Yes, you definitely weren’t in a mood to wait. Lucky for you, he’s perfectly happy with having a sexually aggressive submissive.”

Her hand didn’t move from her mouth. “Holy crap.”

He reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Sweetie, in the past couple of years, believe me, that’s one of the tamest things I’ve seen the two of you do at our private parties.”

She finally dropped her hand. “That’s what Shay meant.” She realized she was calling her Shay now.

“Meant by what?”

“In the hospital, after the chaplain had left, I asked her if I was religious. She made a comment about…” She laughed. “Now I understand.”

Tony smirked. “I’ve heard a lot of, ‘Oh, gods!’ come from you group of ladies. And some of the men.”

She nodded, still laughing. “Yeah. I get it now. And now I get why she looked freaked out. Like she’d spilled the beans.”

“Please don’t be angry at Rob. Or Shay. Just like with the poly stuff, he didn’t want to overwhelm you. I told her to handle this however Rob thought was best. That’s what we all did.”

Laura felt tears close again. It still surprised her that her moods could swing so wildly. “I’m not upset. I get it.”

He glanced at his phone. “Speaking of, wait here.” He got up and walked a few yards away before answering his phone and talking. After a few minutes, he ended the call and returned. He held out a hand to her. “Come on.”

She let him help her up. “Where to?”

“Home. My home. Rob gets off at six and he’s going to come straight to my house for dinner after he walks Doogie.”