Saddled, chapter 29 (Patreon)

Clive lay on his side and watched John sleep. The sun wasn’t even up, but the pre-dawn glow stained the sky and let in enough light for Clive to see the general shape of John’s features. Others described Clive as having an almost supernatural ability to understand others, but Clive suspected his good judgment was far more flawed than he had understood. When he’d been part of the rescue, he’d expected that to end his arrangement with John. After all, John had been helpless to protect himself against Robinson, and dominant personalities rarely dealt well with vulnerability.

His wife hadn’t.

Every time some director or script editor demanded that he get involved as the man in the marriage, she had hated him a little more. At the time, the unfairness of that had driven him nearly mad. Now that he was older, he could intellectually understand her anger.

And he had expected John to be the same. Wrongly, it turned out. Even when Clive had lost himself in the lust and had fisted John’s hair, John had never pulled away. He’d never demanded that Clive respect boundaries or made comments about Clive’s sexuality being too crude, too rough, or too offensive.

Clive was surprised to find he still carried the scars of his marriage. Sharon had died four years after their wedding nearly thirty years ago. If someone had tried telling Clive that he still carried emotional wounds from the disaster that had been their sex life, Clive would have laughed them out of the room. Yet he had expected John to turn on him for no reason other than Sharon had.

John turned in his sleep and his breathing grew a little quicker. Clive held his breath and waited for the moment of restlessness to pass. However John threw an arm out and started to stretch. A few seconds later, his eyes fluttered open.

“Mornin’,” he muttered.

“Good morning. You’re up early.”

John squinted one eye open and studied Clive. “You were up earlier.”

Clive grinned. “Touche.”

John squirmed around and got one arm under him before he pushed himself up into a seated position. Then he studied Clive more. “You have your thinking face on.”

“Do I?” Clive had no idea what that meant. Most of the time people told him that he had an inscrutable poker face. Then again, most people didn’t share his bed. Clive supposed that gave John a certain perspective others lack.

“Yes.” John’s tone allowed not one iota of doubt.

“And you know me well enough to recognize it?”

John snorted. “I recognize the face you make right before you do something creative and kinky. I’m assuming you aren’t up for anything involving leather and whips this early in the morning.”

“Not really,” Clive said, but then he quickly added, “Not that I couldn’t be persuaded if you’re interested.”

“If we’re in here and not the stables, then coffee has to come before anything requiring thought or athleticism.” John scrubbed his hand across his face and scooted back until he could lean against the headboard.

Clive sat as well. He pulled one leg up under him and studied John. He’d spend hours watching Spirit, calculating the exact speed required to stress him, watching his muscles strain when Clive applied the whip. But in a very real sense, Spirit wasn’t John. “That’s a reasonable rule.”

John gave him a strange look before getting out of bed and heading for the door. He didn’t bother even looking for clothes, and Clive followed him. The view from behind was gorgeous. Hard work had chiseled John’s body. At the top of the stairs, John turned, one eyebrow raised quizzically. “So, what has you thinking so hard that I can hear the engine chugging away from here?”

Clive considered obfuscating. If he were counting hours, he had not known John long. Instead he followed his gut and went with brutal honesty. “I was thinking that you are less like my wife than I had assumed.”

“My dick might take wicked offense to that. You did notice it when we were playing break-the-stallion, right?”

“I certainly did,” Clive said with a laugh. “You have an excellent dick. Quality flesh there.” One glance down, and Clive could admire the flesh in question.

With another horse-like snort, John headed down the stairs. “Now I’m offended. So, how did your dead wife become part of this conversation?”

Clive appreciated his bluntness. It made sharing easier when he trusted his listening to avoid maudlin sentimentality. “In some ways you two are a lot alike—strong, independent, willing to go through hell to reach a goal. You made Elena get your mom into that program, didn’t you?”

“I asked her to take an interest. No one makes Elena do anything.” John padded across the tile floor and opened the refrigerator. He studied the contents for a time before pulling out juice. 

Taking that as his cue to be a good host, Clive started the coffee. “I suspect you did more than ask, but that’s your business, and I have no interest in getting between you and her. But your ability to plow through obstacles and your hatred of being in the submissive position made me assume you were very similar to Sharon.”

John grabbed his cock. “Except for the dick.”

“Yes, except for that,” Clive said dryly. Apparently John was in an either teasing or crass mood, he wasn’t sure which. “Do I need to apologize to your cock?”

“It wouldn’t hurt,” John said with a shrug. He opened a few cabinets before he found the glasses and grabbed two. “So, where is this conversation going? If you want me to make inferences, that definitely requires coffee.”

“You’re not nearly as quick to take offense. I’ve been operating on the assumption that you were going to react like her, but she never would have admitted being scared or feeling out of control and murderous.” 

John paused in the middle of pouring orange juice. “So… I am still not connecting any dots here.”

“Have you ever been married or had a really serious relationship?”

“What, is there one detail about my life Elena didn’t tell you?” Bitterness stained every word.

Clive held up his hands in the universal sign of surrender. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I have no business demanding more when I already know too much.”

“Actually, I was complaining about Elena,” John said in a cranky tone before it turned more resigned. “Although now that I think about it, she probably doesn’t know or she would have told you. When I was nineteen, I married a girl I knew from high school. It lasted seven months.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, me too. They were not a good seven months.” John’s grimace spoke volumes.

“How long did it take you to get over her?” Clive asked. Yesterday, he would have told someone he had spent two or three years getting over Sharon, but now that he looked back on his life, he was fairly sure that would have been a prettily crafted and carefully tended lie.

“A season on the crabbing boats up in Alaska pretty much did the trick. Actually, I was up there on the boats when she left, and I was so happy to be home after that hell that I didn’t care. But I was gun shy about dating anyone for a while.”

“Losing Sharon drove me to give up sex for a long time,” Clive said softly. Ironically, they’d been in an open marriage and he’d had a number of lovers who had wanted to continue, but sleeping with them after Sharon’s death had felt like infidelity more than it had before she’d gotten ill.

“Debbie and I were in lust more than in love. The sex wasn’t even that good, but when you’re nineteen…” John finished the thought with a shrug before pushing one of the orange juice glasses toward Clive.

“Sharon has been gone almost thirty years and we were only together for a few years before the cancer showed up. But I keep expecting you to storm out of here the way Sharon would have if I’d gotten her into the middle of shit like this disaster with Robinson.”

John narrowed his eyes. “That wasn’t your fault.” 

“A small percentage is my fault, and I’m the one close enough for you to strike out at.”

“You’re surprised I’m not angry with you.”

“I’m surprised about a great many things: your lack of anger, your sexual flexibility, your willingness to go off contract and have a quiet evening together, your acceptance of my sexual quirks.”

“I’m not about to say anything about other people’s sexual fetishes. I happen to like getting bridled. It lets me avoid awkward conversations.”

“Like this one?” Clive guessed. He really should drop the whole issue.

“I wasn’t going to say it, but yeah. Are you always this weird and emotional in the morning?”

“Almost never,” Clive said. He prided himself on being logical, but lately that had been difficult.

“Good. I was starting to think I’d gotten stuck with a pig in a poke.”

Clive pinned John with a flat and unamused look. “Charming.”

“Yeah, you hired me for my ability to fight back, not my social graces.”

“True. So I suppose I only have myself to blame.”

John finished his orange juice while studying Clive. “What’s really bothering you?” he asked the second he put the glass down.

Clive considered brushing off his odd feelings, but that seemed unfair when he’d been privy to so much of John’s life. Hell, John was seeing Elena’s pet psychiatrist, and that was partially Clive’s fault, no matter what John claimed. Clive rolled his empty orange juice glass between his palms so the bottom of the glass slid across the granite. “I’m starting to think I never did recover from my wife’s death.”

“What?”

“Why else would I make assumptions about you based on my fears and assumptions about how Sharon would have reacted?” Clive demanded.

“This is getting weird.” John came around the kitchen island to stand a few feet away from Clive. “Why are you afraid of my reactions? I might try to stomp your toes when I’m in harness, but you have those damn whips, so it’s not like you’re helpless. And I would never attack someone outside a game.”

“I’m not afraid of physical violence,” Clive quickly explained, “but I did assume you would avoid me or distrust me after I pushed my way into your life.”

“I thought Elena dragged you into it.” John voice was desert dry, and he did have a point. Clive hadn’t controlled that situation any more than John had.

“Nevertheless, I ended up hip deep in your family business.”

“Sharon wouldn’t have reacted well, huh?”

That was an understatement. In the same situation, she might have castrated him. As much as he had respected her, and as much as he loved her, he also remembered the mutual hate that had started growing between them. “Your wife… did you ever have that one area where you pissed her off even when you were trying to avoid it?”

“Try every area. We were not a good match.”

“Neither were Sharon and I. I would try to protect her, and every time she would get furious with me. She saw me as trying to turn her into the helpless little girl that would match my sexual fantasies.”

John turned his back to Clive and fixed a cup of coffee. “You don’t strike me as someone who is sexually attracted to weakness.”

“No, but she didn’t understand me any more than I understood her.”

After pouring a liberal amount of sugar in the black brew, John used his finger to stir it quickly before sucking it. Eventually he said, “There are times I hate how helpless I feel. My knee injury, my mother’s cancer, watching my little brother disappear under the weight of his drug addiction—life has kicked me in the teeth more than once. If you got in the middle with the shit with Robinson, it’s because you had grabbed a shovel and started digging out the pile of shit that had landed on me.” When Clive started to respond, John held up a hand to stop him and added, “And yeah, if you’d called for me to come up here the next day, I probably would have screamed at you for something. But give me some time to look at it logically, and I needed the help.”

“The fact that I’m surprised by that leads me to think I’m not over Sharon, and that makes me feel inadequate in ways I can’t explain.”

“Go see Noah.”

The last person Clive would speak to would be another dominant. In some ways it was easier to talk to John because John had already given Clive his trust. He had submitted to John’s harness and care, so he had made himself vulnerable in ways that no uncomfortable confession could match. Clive certainly didn’t have the strength or the inclination to ever submit. “I think I’ll skip it. I don’t need to talk about my late wife with another dominant.”

“He pulled a pony cart in some of those competitions.”

Clive’s brain refused to process the words. “He what?”

John grinned. “Yep, he was on the submissive side.”

“And he’s a psychiatrist?”

“Yep.”

“I need coffee for that to make any sense.” Clive went for the cupboard with the cups, although he also pulled out a spoon so he could stir his milk in. If he tried stirring coffee with his finger, he would have a second-degree burn.

“He’s easy to talk to. Unassuming. And he doesn’t ask stupid shit, which makes it easier to be open,” John said.

Clive fixed his coffee before broaching the next potential relationship bomb. “In the spirit of openness and rational communication, I should admit that I talked to your mother.”

John’s coffee cup hit the granite so hard that Clive flinched. “You what?”

“She called and asked me to come to the hospital. I tried to call you, but I didn’t have your number and Elena refused to give you a message. She said you were busy.”

“I was probably with Noah. Can we get back to the part where you went to meet my mother?”

“Your brother gave her my number, so I thought it was an emergency. She said she needed me down at the hospital immediately, and when I got there, she gave me a lecture about not letting you push me away.”

John’s thunderous expression slowly turned to incredulity. “Wait. Are you telling me that you called and made and appointment for bondage and pony play because my mother manipulated you into it?”

“No, because if I said that, I would psychologically scar myself. I’m saying that the desire to avoid disappointing your mother might have convinced me to call sooner than I would have otherwise. I am normally good at avoidance. In my defense, my own mother was a kind and generous woman who couldn’t outthink a fifth grader, so I was unprepared for my conversation with your mother.” Clive had walked in expecting an elderly version of his own mother, and he got a fast-talking negotiator who could have represented one of his stars.

“My mother scared you,” John said with entirely too much joy.

“You don’t have to use that tone.”

“Yes I do. My mother has terrified me for years.” His voice quivered with a hint of hidden laughter. “However, I don’t need my mother to set up play dates for me.”

“No, you don’t. And I’m trusting you’re not going to explode at me for getting backed into that corner.”

John rolled his eyes and picked up his coffee again. “Hell, my mother has been backing men into corners for eighty years. I sometimes wonder how Fawn managed to miss every gene for manipulation in Mom’s DNA, but then again, Logan inherited all of them.”

“He certainly is… interesting.”

“That’s one word. A pain in the royal ass would be another. Do you have siblings?” John asked.

“No.  Sharon had three sisters, but I avoided that headache.”

“Most of the time, I love the hell out of them.”

“But?” Clive asked. From John’s tone, he could tell there was one in there somewhere.

“But they’re all so hard to have a conversation with. Fawn is invested in being the perfect housewife and having no opinions that might contradict her husband. It makes me hate the asshole. And Logan is Logan.”

“He does have a strong personality,” Clive agreed.

“To say the least.”

“In his defense, you can’t survive Hollywood without a whole lot of attitude. I’ve known brilliant actors and writers who ran away from their careers because the place was chewing them up. And I’ve had to hold the hands of others to shield them enough that they could finish working while I dealt with the bullshit flying at them.”

“Yeah, you do like to protect people.”

Clive drew himself up. “I am every bit the sadistic dominant, thank you.”

John had the audacity to roll his eyes. “Sure, keep telling yourself that.”

The challenge made Clive want to retrieve one of his whips and prove himself. “I am.”

“Uh huh.”

“Just you wait until I have you in that harness and bridle again. I’ll show you how dominant I am,” Clive threatened.

John leaned forward on the kitchen island. “If you can avoid getting your toes broken, you can.”

Clive gave him a dangerous smile. “Challenge accepted.”

John’s grin was equally deadly. “I’ll see you in the stable. Well, you will after breakfast, anyway. I’m hungry. What do you have around here?”

Chapter 30: https://www.patreon.com/posts/saddled-chapter-20863456 

Chapter 31: https://www.patreon.com/posts/saddled-chapter-21626100 

Chapter 32: https://www.patreon.com/posts/saddled-chapter-21733699 

Chapter 33: https://www.patreon.com/posts/saddled-chapter-21751005 

Chapter 34: https://www.patreon.com/posts/saddled-chapter-21913468