Page 89 of Ashes of Sin and Stardust

“Reuben... I wrote out a whole list of questions in my notebook to ask you today, but I don’t think I’m going to need them. I want you to tell me your story now.”

“You wrote out questions for me,” he asked, almost shocked that I would be considerate enough to think about him.

“Yeah. ’Cause I had verbal diarrhea yesterday, and today I planned to make you do the same.”

He wrinkled his nose at my description and set his fork down.

“So... tell me your story. How did you get into kink and BDSM, and how did you become a world-class chef that I’ve never heard of?”

And why did you release seven submissives and a slave six years ago?That was the question I wanted to ask, but my gut told me to hold on that one.

He stared at his mostly clear plate, took another sip of red wine, and stood to collect his dishes. He took mine as well and didn’t even give me shit for not finishing my vegetables. Setting the plates down in the kitchen, he returned to the table and offered me his hand, guiding me to my feet. He stood in front of me as he refilled our wine, his expression guarded, but he seemed to make an internal decision, and the tension faded from his face.

“When I was eighteen, I was arrested for assault, kidnapping, and rape.”

Chapter 23

Twenty-three yearsago

High School was supposed to be the period of your education that started to matter, but to me, it was one step deeper into the trenches my daily misery.

Every morning I got up at the crack of dawn, went down to the bar with my dad, helped prepare for the day, and then caught the bus to school. I never paid attention in class. It was pointless because I didn’t have time to do homework or study. After class, I went straight back to the bar to work until close, usually around midnight, and then went home and passed out. I woke up at five the next morning to do it all again.

My teachers threatened to fail me, and I didn’t care. School was an opportunity for me to sleep. I usually skipped class, or slept through it in the back of the room.

I had one teacher who was considerate. Mister Buckner knew why I slept all the time, because he was an alcoholic who drank at dad’s bar all night. He didn’t leave a tip, but he was giving me a passing grade in Math and History. He was probably the only reason I wasn’t expelled from school so far.

Mom was in a wheelchair after a fall. She’d slipped on ice and hit her back, and her legs hurt all the time. She could get up and move around a little when she needed to, but she was about as useful as a sack of potatoes. Gone were the days of her joyfully cooking in the kitchen, teaching me to make delicious meals while she told me stories about her life. After her accident, dad fell into depression and drank more in a day than we sold in a week at the bar, so he was equally useless. That meant the meals of the house were on my back. With the little downtime I had at the bar, I prepared single-serve meals for us to heat up on demand. Because if I didn’t, we wouldn’t eat.

I honestly didn’t give a rat’s ass about much of anything by my Junior year. I knew everything I needed to know to be successful in the world: that hard work didn’t matter unless your boss liked you, and that no matter how much of a shit you were, good food always made people happy. Those were pretty much the only two things I could count on in life.

Everything changed when I met Savannah.

The Thornburg’s were new in town and moved into the house closest to ours. We were all the way up on the mountain in Cullowhee, and the road to our house didn’t even have a name. But there was a little river that fed down into a lake a mile away from our house that had a beautiful view of the sunset, so most people called it Sunset Lake.

The house next door wasn’treallynext door: it was through the trees and across the stream, about a half a mile away. There was a little bridge that went over the stream, and I remember the old house being rickety and infested with snakes. Some strangers showed up a few months into my Junior year of High School and started gutting it and doing some work on it. A few months later, the Thornburg’s moved in.

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