She gave a slight smile then, laced with tears. “How many times I imagined you holding me just like this, so I could lean against you, and you wouldn’t give way.” She looked at him then. “Tell me more about the cemetery. Will you take me there sometime?”

He had to clear his throat to answer. “Yeah. I’ll take you anywhere you want to go.” He thought about the cemetery, what would interest her. “There’s one particular vault with a statue of a child on it. Just a small thing, nothing extravagant, but the face is soft, innocent, worn down from age. The vault says ‘closed forever’, because when the child died, the parents were too heartbroken to have it used again. Since the last family member died some time ago, I took over the maintenance fee for it.”

“Why? Other than the fact you’re a good guy.”

He should have known she’d ask. No cowards here, right? He shrugged, looked out over the marsh. “Not so good. I did it because I envy that kid for being wanted that much, even though she was here for only three months.”

He could feel her gaze on him, so he turned his face back to her, ran a knuckle along her cheek, kept talking. “When you’re there at night, the statues remind you of silent angels, all white and gray. There’s a guy who comes and plays a sax to his friend, and it’s some of the best sax playing I’ve ever heard. But I don’t go to him and ask him why he plays. Because in that place you whisper your secrets to those silent statues. To the angels of death.”

“I wouldn’t mind being one of those statues,” she said. “All bathed in shadows, whites and grays, hearing you whisper your heart and secrets to me.”

“My secrets might make your concrete feathers stand on end.”

She wasn’t smiling. Those brown eyes met his. “When you go to the cemetery, does it help? Help you deal with what you lost?”

Or what he never had. “Yeah, it does.”

“Tell me how. Please?” She sighed, closed her eyes. “Jeremy died, but I lost him long ago. Just the same way we lost our parents. Not through death. Death is different, because it’s over. No chance to hope, or to have hope crushed. Sometimes you can romanticize a dead person as time passes, or maybe remember some of the better things. When it came to you…I set myself up for loss there, I know it, so I don’t blame you for what you can’t give me. But I thought…maybe you could tell me how to deal with all of it.”

It was hard to let that one stand. Yeah, he’d let her down. They hadn’t hit the nail on the head yet, but he was gauging what she was seeking, figuring out how much she wanted right now. He was used to the guys or her knocking on that door, and him refusing to open it. This was a situation where opening it to her without being asked might be the key to whatever happened going forward.

He spoke to the sky. “You can’t get it from the self-help shows, all that bullshit about coping with loss. There is no coping. It takes you over, and you’re a drowning swimmer, trying to keep your head afloat, wondering sometimes why the hell you bother, except there’s this compulsion to stay alive, this biological imperative you can’t shake. It’s part of why D/s called to me, the primal, straightforward, fuck-PC-and-all-its-bullshit-terminology.

“I could control things in that room, could get into the psyche of a woman and open her up, open her soul so I could find that part of her that’s always raw and aching and open inside me. I could find what’s real and not the façade. But each time I get there, I’m still empty. I touch that hand, find that spot, and it’s not what I was seeking. So eventually you decide the point isn’t finding something, but the search. You keep moving, avoid staying still.”

“That’s what Jon said,” Marcie murmured. “You can’t stay still. You’re afraid of stillness.”

“Not afraid.” Ironically, Ben had to quell the urge to rise, move, but if he did that, he couldn’t hold her. “Just nothing there I want to be with.”

“What if I’m there? Can you sit in that stillness with me? For just a moment? See what we find there together?”

He turned his head to meet her gaze. “Yeah. I can.”

The simple words kindled hope in her eyes. He wanted to fan it to a full-on blaze, but he let her keep the lead. She brushed his face with those gentle fingers, looking at him with eyes that were old and young at once. “If you died, I’d feel the way those parents did. It would break my heart. I would drown in a loss like that.”

Jesus, she was ten times braver than he was. What he’d scoffed at as youthful drama and exaggeration was simple, pure faith in her own heart and what it wanted. He stayed silent for a moment, overcome by it, then caressed her cheek. “Why me, Marcie? Tell me why it’s me.”

When she worried her bottom lip with her teeth, he brushed her chin with his lips, a nip. “You can’t say anything wrong,” he said firmly. “Not in the past, not now, not ever. All right? Just say it as you’re thinking it.”

“Okay.” She nodded. “Do you remember the weekend Cass and Lucas got married?”

“Like a minute after they met each other again at K&A?”

She smiled. “It might have been a little longer than that. They had to wait for Lucas’ adopted family to fly in from Iowa to see the ceremony, after all. But I remember I’d wandered away from the wedding, sort of like I did today. You came to find me. Not Jon or Matt, the ones someone else might expect. You said ‘I’m never going to let anything happen to you’, as if you knew I was feeling uncertain about how fast things were changing. But what struck me was you didn’t say, ‘We’re going to take care of you’.”

She glanced at him. “Maybe you think it was a slip, but I don’t. Just like I don’t think it was a coincidence that you came looking for me now, when it could have been anyone else. From the first moment I met you, you made me feel safe. I was cold then too, and you put your coat over my shoulders.”

She took a breath. “I tried having other boyfriends. I pushed them, I yanked at their egos, not realizing at first why I was doing it. I needed them to be stronger than me, to put me in my place, prove to me they could hold the reins and they wouldn’t let go. They couldn’t. I believe in excelling in everything I do, Ben, and I won’t take less than that. It’s always been you. You’ve always been my safety, my laughter, my sense of salvation. I’ve always known you’d be the Dom who will give me what I need. Who I can trust with my secrets. And if you didn’t mean it, about being honest, I’m probably going to drown you in this marsh, right here, right now.”

It was crystal clear to him. She didn’t know how to let go, a power submissive on turbo charge. The way she pursued him so relentlessly, the way she over-excelled at school, getting ahead of her grade levels. In essence, she’d been “topping from the bottom” all her life, with utter focus and determination. She craved a stronger hand to tell her it was okay to let go, to surrender. In return, she was the type of sub he’d always desired. A hundred percent devoted, loyal. Stubborn, independent, defiant. And overflowing with love to give, something he hadn’t anticipated wanting so much.

“Keep going,” he said softly, holding her gaze.

She nodded. “So often in my life, people told me I’m too young. When Cass had to take over from our mom, I was pretty young, but I was next oldest, so I helped Cass however I could. And then, when it was clear our father was never going to be around, and Jeremy got strung out on drugs, and his friend tried to attack me…all these different things, they give you a sense of fear, that the world isn’t a stable place. You learn to be careful, and watchful, and you don’t trust easily, though you keep hoping for something. You don’t know exactly what it is, but you feel it… Maybe in the beginning all you know is it’s a feeling you want to have and keep, to get more of it. But then, eventually, you realize what it is.”

Ben stared at her. It echoed his own childhood experiences in a way he couldn’t deny, resonating in the tightness of his chest. She was on a roll, the words tumbling out faster.

“It’s a feeling of comfort and safety so strong, you know that’s the place you’re meant to be, your haven in the world. Whenever you were counseling me, or playing games with me, or carrying me piggyback to throw me in the pool in the backyard…I felt that. You didn’t realize how much I liked the way your shoulders felt under my hands, how you felt against my body. You know I dreamed about that, the way it felt to have my legs wrapped around you?”

“I’m not surprised.” He tried for a humorous note, but his voice was too thick. He had his fingers tangled in her hair, and he stroked his thumbs along her temples, holding her, just holding her and listening to her. Really listening, perhaps for the first time. Seeing the truth instead of pushing it away.

“I felt safe with you, but more than that, I felt I was where I needed to be. When we were together, everything was right and balanced. When things happened, and you wrote to help me, you were telling me about yourself at the same time. I wrote to you about losing my virginity and you told me how it was supposed to be. How, the first time you had sex that meant something, you’d wanted to hang onto that feeling of closeness, no matter how much of an illusion it was, because you’d sensed that was the important part, the seed of what it was really supposed to be like.

“You didn’t use those words, but the meaning was there, between the lines. I’ve become a master of reading between the lines. I know I became the confidante that you were to me, no matter how you want to deny it. Then there was the most important thing. The way you—”

She bit her lip, coming to a full stop, cheeks flushing. “I’m sorry. I went into pushy mode, and I wasn’t trying not to do that. I promised myself…after the other night, I was never going to do that again.”

“Hmm.” Cupping the side of her neck, he let his thumb play over her windpipe, watched her register the constriction, get short of breath not from the physical reaction but the psychological effect it had on her. “You know 1 Corinthians 13 also says ‘It does not insist on its own way…’”