Page 42 of At Her Will

“They drown.”

"Depending on what you're drowning in, it's not always a bad thing."

His gaze moved around the room. “Your house match the clothes you like to wear. Sophisticated, from a different time.”

It might seem like he’d changed subjects, but this phase included a meshing between what the Mistress or sub wanted, and who they were. Rev was looking at that for her, as much as she was for him.

“In the church I attended growing up, you looked your best there, supposedly to please the Lord, though I'm sure there was some vanity involved, a little competition in the hats and gloves, the type of shoes, the pin just so on the lapel. The color of your man’s tie, his cuff links.”

She smiled as his lips tugged, showing his understanding and familiarity with it. Mostly black congregations hadn’t changed much on that, no matter the “casual dress” approach some churches now took.

“It still serves that primary purpose, I think. Deliberate care with appearance reflects attention to action, thought and words. So as an adult, I decided to do it every day of the week, a reminder that it’s important on all days, not just Sunday.”

“Deliberate care,” he repeated. “Teena Joy taught me that, too. In the way to dress, stay clean and care for your body.”

“I’ve noticed. I’ll send her a prayer of thanks.”

He grinned. “I gotta stay on my toes with you, Mistress. You telling me a lot of things, finding out what I like or might like. Will you tell me what you like?”

She put her hand on the cushion between them, and his gaze fell to it, to the sparkle of her rings. Today she wore threesilver ones. One with a sparkling elephant head, one with a pentacle surrounded by a chain of flowers, and one simple band, engraved with the word Love.

"I'll tell you eventually, but I don't offer that up front. It’s automatic to say you want to do what I like, but that doesn’t help me know what’s driving your desire to submit. Whatever I do in my sessions with submissives comes from understanding what my sub needs. If those needs overlap with mine, then we both find what we need.”

“And if they don’t?”

She tapped a finger on the cushion. “It’s like we talked about before. If I have to have something from a sub he can't provide, it's incompatibility, not failure. I’ll steer him toward someone who’s a better fit for him.”

A frown appeared, and he put his hand over hers. “I want you. I want you to be happy. That means I’d do that thing to make you happy.”

“Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. Because your happiness and what you need is just as important to me. I think no matter what, we’ll be friends.”

His lips tightened.

“You don’t want to be my friend.”

He gave her a half-amused look. “I do, Mistress. But I want to be a lot more than that, enough that the idea of being just your friend isn’t all that appealing right now.”

“The feeling is quite mutual.”

The intensity of those gingerbread-colored eyes, the set of his mouth, his closeness to her on the couch, was distracting enough to make her want to leave it alone for now. After all, it was anticipating something that might not happen. But though it had been a while since she’d initiated a newbie, Vera hadn’t forgotten her responsibility. No matter how much he’d captured her interest, it couldn’t be avoided.

“If something is meant to be, it happens. That’s how I approach the opportunities and disappointments in my life. There’s a path and a plan I may not understand, but I trust the Lord and Lady as I walk it.”

“I submit to God’s will,” he said.

“Yes, exactly. Though I’m not always gracious about it. Especially when I really want something.”

She looked down at his large, chapped hand and cupped it in hers. As he watched her, she felt like the emotions they were feeling were shared, nothing unknown or held back. A strange feeling with someone she’d barely met.

Focus. Do your most important job first. Care for him.

“A lot of things happen when you enter this world. Your defenses get stripped away, and things boil up you may not expect. Just because you have a bad reaction to something doesn’t mean we’ve hit the ‘time to go our separate ways’ point. So as I said from the very beginning, don’t lie to me, and don’t be dishonest with yourself. ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I don’t know how I’m feeling,’ are acceptable answers to any scenario we explore. As long as it’s the truth.”

She lifted her gaze. “I’ll take care of you, Rev, in the ways I know that you don’t, and I’ll look forward to discovering how you want to take care of me.”

Though he still looked tense about it, his shoulders eased enough to tell her that he’d heard her. They’d covered enough preliminaries. She pointed to the rug in front of the fireplace. “Go stand there, and take off your shoes and socks.”

His attention held her for a measured second, his hand squeezing hers briefly, before he rose to comply with her order. As he did, she moved to her antique cherry corner cabinet and withdrew several candles, infused with scents she wanted for this. She placed them on the metal tray on the top of the cabinet.

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