The satisfied woman in his arms burrowed in closer, her fingers clutching the lapels of his leather vest, her lips rubbing against his bare chest. One hand still ran up and down her spine, the other massaging her scalp lightly, then carding through the golden strands before repeating the process. The repetitive action soothed him and allowed him time to contemplate his situation.
He’d always known he was wired a little differently, although he hadn’t been able to put his finger on how until after an infamous night in the desert he and his friends shared. It was anight he preferred to forget. The event had been necessary, but it had forever changed the entire group.
While they were all protective people to varying degrees, the night they defended one of their own had cemented their futures in some version of a career in law enforcement.
For him, his computer skills had brought him to the attention of the NSA—not in a good way, initially—and he’d left San Antonio to become a private contractor at Fort Meade. For ten years, he’d spent much of his time shut away in a dark room, his primary contact with the outside world being voices on a phone or computer communications. If he saw the people he worked with at all, it was via pictures in a computer legend. Most of the time, it was a file he compiled and created.
He excelled at the work itself. One of the best. But that skill came with a price. He worked himself to the point of exhaustion because someone always needed him. It was always a matter of life or death. So he kept going and kept going and kept going until his body physically gave up and couldn’t go anymore.
He crashed. Hard. He’d always heard of people who worked themselves nearly to death. He’d never understood how that was possible until it happened to him.
He was put on medical leave for almost nine months.
During that time, Cosmos visited him. After three days there, he invited Triumph to Chicago to recuperate. While there, his friend introduced him to the BDSM scene, where he discovered some of what was missing. It wasn’t a fix-all. Only a complete lifestyle change could do that. But it gave him something he could control and allowed him a way to disconnect from the pressures and frustrations regarding his job.
Eventually, he returned to work. He felt better. Fresher. Invigorated. But somewhere along the line, the reset of his body had also reset his brain, including his priorities. Now, the bureaucracy of the job got to him. It tore at the very fabric ofhis need to control situations in order to help people. The weight of responsibility on his shoulders crushed him. In particular, he struggled with watching blips on his screen go suddenly dark and knowing what that meant.
He combated the darkness lurking inside him by acting the exact opposite. He was the golden retriever. Affable. Always had a bad joke and a smile. The same guy he’d been back home. That persona was safer.
Then one day, the persona cracked and out spewed everything he’d held inside.
One of his “projects” was being sent into an assignment she was not prepared for. She was too fucking young. Too fucking raw with her own burdens. Her profile was a figurative minefield of ways that shit could go wrong. Even he could see that this was unresolvable.
He tried to help her get out of it. Subtlety didn’t work; she was too focused on the endgame. Presenting her with scenarios didn’t work; she was too driven in her cause. All he could do was give her his personal phone number and tell her if she needed help to call him. What he’d be able to do was unclear, but he just knew he needed to give her that lifeline.
When he couldn’t make her see reason, he went to his boss and argued she was compromised goods on both sides. His boss said it wasn’t their operative to worry about. She was the CIA’s problem.
He made a personal phone call to her handler, something way outside his purview. The man hung up on him.
He snapped. Went to his director. Delivered an ultimatum. Either the CIA pulled their newest junior operative from the assignment that was going to get her killed, or he quit.
The CIA could not have cared less because they didn’t care at all. They refused to pull her.
He quit.
He was escorted off-site, effective immediately. Didn’t even get to pack his box of personal items, although technically, there hadn’t been any, but the metaphor remained.
No return to his desk or his computers.
No way to warn her.
No way to say goodbye.
That night, as he lay in his bed, staring at a framed poster of Lauren Bacall, his brain imagined her blip on his screen going dark, only he hadn’t been there to see it.
He went back home to San Antonio and went into business for himself. Took jobs where he could make all the decisions. For a while, he felt like he was making a difference.
That was also when he discovered Shadowlands, a BDSM club that catered to those who thrived on CNC. It mirrored his need for absolute control of situations, and he felt as if he’d found the rest of his missing pieces.
Until he realized he was still incomplete. Shadowlands was no longer giving him what he needed, so he cut off the club from his life. But while he denied himself, something wouldn’t allow him to give up his membership there.
His argument to himself was that if he had it, it was there if he needed it. Like airline travel miles—if he needed to go somewhere and he had the miles, great; if he didn’t, no worries.
A deeper part of his psyche argued that if he had the membership, he wouldn’t need it, versus if he didn’t have it, then he’d need it, which was the most fucked-up logic paradigm of all time. But at the time, it made sense in his head.
Then Tilly died.
Now he was here several times a week, using his encounters to gain any semblance of control he could for all the shit tornadoing inside him.
