Safeword: Mayday by Candace Blevins
Chapter 13
“Is everyone going to assume I’m submissive if I’m with you?” Heather asked Marcus.
“Would that be a problem?”
“I’m not submissive.”
“There’s nothing wrong with being submissive.”
“I didn’t say there was, but I’m not, and I don’t want people to think I am.”
“Would you be bothered if people thought you were dominant?”
“Yeah. I mean, maybe not people in the lifestyle, but if other people thought I was, it would bother me.”
“No one outside the lifestyle knows what I am, so they’re the only ones who’ll jump to the same conclusion as Eric.” He shrugged. “They won’t have to be around you long to realize you aren’t submissive — though there’s going to be a lot of curiosity about a dominant woman who has my affection.”
“I have your affection?”
Kyle answered, his chest rumbling against her back. “Of course you have his affection. He wouldn’t have offered to help us out, otherwise.”
Heather looked at Marcus, wanting him to answer the question, and he gave her a genuine smile. “I like you. I think you’re great for Kyle, but it’s more than that. If we hadn’t spent the day together today, I’d have been disappointed. I want to see you, do things with you. I enjoy spending time with you, and I’m loving this chance to help you explore your sexuality. I don’t know where this is going, but I’m looking forward to seeing what happens.”
Heather wasn’t prepared to take the conversation farther. Declaring that she was starting to like Marcus felt awkward, so she changed the subject. “Eric didn’t know Kyle.”
“No. He isn’t involved in the local scene.”
Heather remembered his girlfriend of the previous year telling him to change clothes before they went out, and she asked, “Kyle, was Margie dominant over you?”
“Yes. Since Margie and I broke up, I’ve driven to Nashville to have those needs met. I’m not comfortable outing myself locally.”
“Have you gone to Nashville since—” She broke off and started again. “When’s the last time you went to Nashville?”
“My last trip was about a month before our first kiss. I had a trip planned for the weekend after, but then you kissed me and agreed to go out on a date with me, so I canceled the trip and haven’t been back.”
That was the exact question she hadn’t wanted to finish — had he been back since they’d been an item. Kyle had understood, and he hadn’t made her outright ask it to get an answer. She might not fully understand this submissive thing, but she grasped enough to recognize it was important to him. Not a want, but a need.
“I want to learn how to give you what you need.”
“We can talk about the things that turn me on, and Marcus can teach you the things you’re interested in learning, but I’m more interested in watching you explore your blossoming sexuality right now.”
She rolled her eyes and reached for her water bottle. “Nothing is blossoming. Exploding perhaps, but not blossoming. Marcus, you said you had reading material for me? I’ll have the brunt of the day to read tomorrow. I’ll fly my contractor guys to New Orleans and then hang out in the plane for the day while they go off and do their thing.” Sometimes, she rented a car and explored a city she’d never been to before, but she’d been all over New Orleans more times than she could count.
“I have a few nonfiction books that explain the nuts and bolts, but you might learn more about the power exchange aspects by reading some fiction books. They give a better idea of the emotions behind it, and the need for trust.” He met her gaze. “Trust is huge in what we do. Understanding the emotions and wants and needs is probably more important than the nuts and bolts right now, so it feels right to start you with the romance books.”
Heather looked over her shoulder at Kyle. “Do you still want me to tie the rope off, so you can walk or crawl to the edge? Or do you need it before you stand up? How are you handling the view?”
Kyle sighed. “I know you and Marcus think you’re helping by getting between me and the edge, but it just makes me afraid for the two of you.” He took a fortifying breath. “But it’s time I started working on this with an end goal in mind. My original aim was just to be able to fly commercially, but I’m in love with a pilot who has her own helicopter. I know there are a lot of things we could do together if I wasn’t terrified to fly with you. It’s time I started dealing with my shit again, so I can work towards flying with you.”
She squeezed the top of his leg. “I love that you want to work on it, but you didn’t answer my question. Are you okay where you are?”
“I’m not close to a panic attack. I’m probably as okay with it as it’s possible for me to be, but I’m not terribly relaxed.”
Marcus wrapped an arm around Kyle. “I think perhaps you should consider doing one of those indoor climbing walls again. Heather can probably make arrangements for us to get you in before or after normal hours, with the goal being to start out at maybe ten feet, and then to increase some amount every time you go — whether it be a foot, or six inches, or two inches.”
“We have to work on my claustrophobia and my fear of heights for me to fly with Heather. We mostly worked on my claustrophobia to get me into a commercial airplane, because I could sit in the center and not see how high up we were. I won’t have that luxury in a helicopter.”
Heather felt Kyle tense, relax, tense again, and he finally changed the subject. “Marcus, I think we need to talk about you and Heather. Something beyond you saying you have affection for her. You called yourself a mentor, but I see you as more than that. I see her developing feelings for you, and I see you starting to treat her as if you care about her. I’ve assured Heather I’m good with it, but maybe if we all talk about it together?” He shrugged and gave Heather a brief squeeze. “It just feels like we need more discussion.”
Marcus looked from Kyle to Heather, and reached across Kyle to brush his hand over her cheek. “He’s right. I’m starting to care about you enough that I don’t think we can say I’m just a mentor. I don’t know what that means for the three of us, but I do care about you a great deal.”
“It feels wrong to have feelings for two men, but I’m starting to care for you, too. I’m not really one for talking about feelings, but I’m glad it worked out for the three of us to spend the day together.”
Kyle chuckled. “My work here is done. Now, are ya’ll getting hungry? Shouldn’t we head back?”
Heather looked back to see if she could see her pack, and realized Marcus or Eric must’ve brought it back to the point, because it was only a few feet away. “I have a few granola bars in my pack if you need energy now, but if you’re ready to go we can certainly head back towards the car. I want veggies, so maybe we can stop and get Chinese at the bottom of the mountain?”
“No,” Kyle said. “We need to get you in a shower and properly clean your leg before we worry about food.”
Marcus stood and offered his hand to Heather. She accepted his help, and they both offered their hands to Kyle. He blanched and asked, “Can ya’ll move away from the edge and help me from the other direction, please?”
Kyle spun around, they helped him up, and Heather dug her shirt out of her pack. Kyle took her pack from her while she put her shirt on, and she reached to take it back, but he held it away from her.
“You said you wrenched your shoulder. I didn’t bring a pack — let me carry yours.”
“It’s a child-sized pack. It won’t fit you.”
“Won’t the straps let out?”
While he was looking at it, she took it from him, slung it onto her left shoulder, angled her right arm into it, and shrugged it up. She buckled the chest strap while Kyle pulled the waist strap around and fastened it. She realized she’d hurt his feelings, but she’d brought the pack in and she’d take it out. Still, she needed to say something. “I’m okay. I like that you offered, but I can handle it. If I was hurting, or if I thought there was damage, I’d tell you. I’m not so stubborn I’ll cause injury to myself to be macho.”
He nodded, kissed her on the forehead, and they headed down the trail. The first couple of hundred yards were hard for Kyle, and they were silent while he navigated his way from tree to tree. She wanted to tell him to stop focusing on the sheer drop, but he knew what to do.
When they finally reached a section of trail far enough from the edge Kyle was mostly okay, Marcus asked, “Do you mind if I ask you some questions about your adoption?”
Yeah, she minded, but she wasn’t surprised. Still, she wondered why now. After a short internal debate on the best way to respond, she asked, “Why?”
“Because it’s an area of your life I don’t know much about, and there are things I want to know. Remember, I’ve helped lots of people deal with adoption issues. I’ve never heard you say anything that would tell me you have any specific issues around it, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to check in with you, see where you are.”
“And pick at it until it bleeds?”
She could hear the caution in his voice as he said, “No, I don’t want to pick at anything. It sounds like someone else has wanted to do that, though.”
“Oh yeah. I’ve seen so many specialists about my sensory stuff, and more than one along the way has tried to convince me that I really do have issues around being adopted, even if I don’t think I do. And the fact that I don’t think I do? Well, that just means I’m repressed. Or in denial. How in hell do you argue with something like that?”
“How old were you when you found out you were adopted?”
She looked to make sure they were both behind her and doing okay, and turned back to the trail. “I’ve always known I was adopted. My mom told me my story from the very beginning — about how there was a room with babies who needed families, and how there were these people who wanted to be parents, so they wrote a letter asking if they could adopt one of the babies and be their parents and love them forever. As I got older, she added in appropriate adoption language. Once, when we were shopping or something, someone asked her if I missed my “real mom”, and she told them she was my “real mom”. I asked her about it later, because it really bugged me.”
Heather stopped talking to navigate a steep downhill grade with loose rocks, and picked back up at the bottom. “My mom said that sometimes people who don’t know much about adoption think my biological mother is my real mother, and they don’t understand that I have two real mothers, not just one. And then when I was older and curious about where I came from, she made plans to take me back to Korea that summer, when I was eight years old, and we visited the orphanage I came from. When I was fourteen, we went again, and I got to spend three days volunteering at an orphanage. Not the one I came from, because they didn’t allow that, so my mom found another one that did. She also made arrangements for us to board with a Korean family, in their home, so I’d get an idea of what it was like to live in a home in Korea. The son in that family spoke some English, so we could communicate with them, and I learned so much during our stay. My mom wanted me to be proud of being Korean and to be proud of being an American.
“What about your dad?”
Heather smiled, even though the guys couldn’t see it. “My dad is just my dad. He talked to me about adoption when I brought it up, but he never brought it up. I’m his daughter in his eyes, end of story. My mom knew I needed more than that, so she gave it to me. My dad has always been there for me, but he’s not really into that whole ‘talking about your feelings’ stuff. Something happens, you deal with it, you move on. I think the way they handled it was perfect. My mom taught me how to deal with crap. My dad taught me that sometimes you just live your life and don’t sweat the small stuff.”
“I wouldn’t call being adopted part of the small stuff.”
“No, but it’s also not something that…” Crap, how to explain it to a psychiatrist? “Think of it in terms of Maslow’s hierarchy. It’s pretty far down on the list of importance when it comes to real life, right? It isn’t a small thing, but once I was adopted and part of the family, all those safety issues were taken care of. If you treat adoption in the past tense, so I was adopted and now I am a part of a family, then the issues only need to be as big as you make them.”
“Some adoptees want to have their own kids sooner rather than later, because they want to have someone in their life who’s genetically related to them.”
Heather wasn’t fooled by the change in topic. No doubt, Marcus would return to the other conversation later. She’d had too much experience with mental health practitioners to trust they’d put any of this to bed.
But, even though he’d said it as a statement, rather than as a question, if she sidestepped the unasked question, he’d give the whole topic more weight, so she told him, “I won’t purposefully get pregnant unless I know what genetic minefields I might be passing on. I don’t know if I’m prone to heart disease, if any of the women in my family have breast cancer, if I should be worried about Alzheimer’s. I don’t know any of that. I can live with it okay when it comes to my own future, but I don’t want to give birth to a child and then discover I’m a carrier for something I’d never want to pass onto an innocent.”
“So you want to find your biological family?”
“No. I just won’t have a child unless I do.”
“So you don’t plan to have kids?”
“I didn’t say that either, Marcus.” She realized she’d snapped at him, so she carefully modulated her voice back to normal and tried to explain. “Look, it’s not all cut and dried, okay? If I ever decide I want to have kids, I’ll make those decisions then. Maybe my husband won’t be able to have kids, so it’ll be a moot point and we’ll adopt. Maybe he’ll want bio kids, in which case I’ll hire someone to find my bio family and get their medical histories. I can’t even see that bridge yet, and I don’t have to make any decisions until I’m ready to cross it.”
“But if you decide to find them, you’ll do it as a business transaction? Hire someone to get the information for you, so you keep everything at arm’s length?”
Heather stopped walking and spun to look at him, but just saw curiosity and not judgment, so she turned and continued down the trail. Kyle reached for her hand and then tugged her to a stop, and she turned back to them.
Kyle wrapped his arms around her as if to protect her from Marcus’s questions, but that wasn’t right either. She met Marcus’s gaze and told him, “I have wonderful parents. My original family chose to not raise me, but I’m not angry with them over it. I mean, sure, I’ve had periods of being angry, but I’m old enough now to know that it wasn’t anything I did. My records say I came into the orphanage at less than a week old, based on the condition of my umbilical cord. One-week-old babies can’t piss someone off enough to make them angry, so it couldn’t have been me personally that they were rejecting. It was circumstances. Either my bio-mom was single and couldn’t raise a child, or my bio-parents were poor and couldn’t afford to raise a child, or... who knows? Whatever the circumstances, they made the decision to not raise me, and someone else did. There are times I think that, if I were to discover siblings, I might want to talk to them, meet them, but I don’t know how to speak Korean, and the odds are that they can’t speak English. There couldn’t be a relationship. There’s an entire cottage industry around people who search for birthparents, so if I ever decided to search, then yes, I’ll pay someone else to do it, and my primary reason will be to get a medical history. I wouldn’t mind hearing the circumstances of why they didn’t raise me, but it’s not important for me to find out.”
She gently pulled herself from Kyle’s arms and turned to walk back down the trail while holding his hand. Luckily the trail was wide enough for two people, but they’d soon be back to single file.
Marcus was quiet for several long moments before saying, “Knowing you as I do, I believe you’ve dealt with your beginnings and you’re telling me how you truly feel. However, I can understand the other professionals who’d doubt you could be in such a good place and not have shit to work through. Honestly, so many of the adoptees who have adoption issues have them because their parents curtailed any discussion of their feelings about being adopted. Or, they’ve gone the other direction and gone overboard and created issues. It sounds like your mom and dad found a nice balance. Kudos to both of them.”
They’d reached a point in the trail where they could run the rest of the way, so Heather took off and assumed they would either follow her or use their words to tell her to stop.
Miles later, when they made it back to Rainbow Lake, Heather scaled a dump-truck-sized boulder and sat on it. Kyle sat on a three-foot tall rock near the trail, and Marcus stood and looked up at her.
She had the sense he was about to accuse her of climbing so high to get away from them, so she started talking again, to finish the conversation she’d run away from.
“My mom became an expert on sensory issues, attachment issues, and adoption issues. She knows more than some of the experts out there. At different times in my life it’s annoyed the hell out of me, but all in all, I’m really glad we ended up together. I wish I could be more honest with her now — she thinks I can’t have a relationship that lasts very long because of some attachment issue somewhere she missed, and I’ve never been able to tell her it’s sensory stuff, not attachment related.”
Heather looked around to make sure they were alone before adding, “My mom’s one big hang-up is that she’s a prude. Sex is simply not talked about. With kids who live with their bio parents, they can be sure their parents have done it at least once. I have my doubts about my parents. I mean, my dad, sure, I can see that — but my mom? No way can I see her letting loose enough to...”
Heather jumped from her boulder to a smaller one, climbed down to a small shelf ten feet above the trail, grabbed a tree branch with her right hand, and used it to swing down off the boulder and land on a soft part of the trail. “If she knew I was saying this, she’d die of embarrassment.”
“Did you ever use sex to try to rebel against her?”
“Of course I did. I was a sensory-seeking teenager. Unfortunately, it never did anything for me. I thought it was gross, but I couldn’t talk to my mom about it, and my friends all thought sex was just the greatest thing. It took me a while to realize it was a sensory thing — that I didn’t enjoy sex because I couldn’t feel enough for it to do anything for me.”
“And now you know that part of you, the sexual part, is in there, it just takes a little more to awaken it. Hopefully after you’ve read some of what I send you, things will make even more sense.”
They cut up and joked with each other the rest of the way back to the car. Kyle opened the passenger door for her to get in, but Heather shook her head. “I rode up front on the way up the mountain, so I’ll ride in the back for the trip down.”
“I don’t really want to see where we’re going. I’ll be much happier in the back. Trust me.”
Heather grinned. “Then that settles it — you’re riding up front. It’s safe, there’s a guardrail, and you’re inside the vehicle. It’s not like you’re going to fall out of the front seat but not the back seat. Perfect opportunity to start getting your senses used to this kind of thing.”
She urged him into the seat and got into the back as Marcus was starting the engine. “She’s got your number, Richardson. I’ll go slow. It’ll be fine.”