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“Good to know.”

I appreciated Will’s answer. It was a response that clearly said he wanted more of an answer from Davy without demanding it outright.

Davy blew out a breath. “I don’t know how to answer, Master. Being a slave to two Masters in a scene is different from everyday life. I look forward to experiencing it, but within the scene, all I have to do is follow orders. I know there’ll be times I won’t be the focus at all, while the two of you enjoy yourselves, and there’ll be times I’m the focus of both of you at the same time, so it’ll probably all balance out, but even if it doesn’t, that’s the life of a slave, Master.”

“It is, but communication is essential in a poly relationship, so it’s important you talk to us about how you feel. Tiny little hurts can grow into big ones.”

“Thank you, Master.”

It seemed to come out of nowhere, but while I was trying to figure out how to tactfully ask him why he was thanking Will, Davy added, “No one’s ever cared about how I felt before. I was taught that was the life of a slave, but you’ve shown me a whole new life. I love you more than I know how to say.”

Will gave Davy a full-on hug, and then his hand was on my hip, just holding and touching. It was nice. Proprietary, but not as if he was my Master. We were partners, and he wanted to make sure I felt included.

“I promised ya’ll an answer on the bridge, about growing up in the mountains. The thing is, a lot of the towns in Western North Carolina have cashed in on the tourist trade, but there’s still a whole lot of mountain acreage that hasn’t. I grew up without electricity. No phone, and certainly no internet, but I had a magical childhood without them. Hard, but good.”

* * * *

Will

I never share information about my childhood with anyone. I would’ve told Davy if he’d asked, but he never had. Technically, I guess Micca hadn’t either, but she’d asked where I’d grown up, and it felt like just telling her where wasn’t an answer.HowI’d grown up was the answer.

“Do you ever go back?” Micca asked.

Ah, the more difficult part of the story. She hadn’t signed an NDA, but if I couldn’t trust her with this then we had no business trying to move forward. Also, she was clearly used to keeping secrets for Drake Security, and selling my information to the gossip mongers would probably get her in hot water at work, even if it wasn’t part of her NDA with them.

In for a penny, in for a pound. “My dad died my last year in college, and my mom grieved herself to death and was gone a few months later. My sister and her husband are in the little two-room cabin we grew up in. They had electricity ran to the house for a refrigerator and some lights, but they still heat and cook with the wood stove.”

The memory of trying to help them still made me hurt inside, so I took a few seconds to breathe through the pain of it before I told them, “Her husband got so offended when I visited after I hit it big and brought them computers, video game consoles, and a big flat screen TV, I’m not welcome back. He took it as me saying he wasn’t providing for his family well enough, so I hadto go. I tried writing letters a few times, but there was never a response, so I eventually gave up.”

Davy moved closer and wrapped both of his arms around me, his head on my chest. “I’m sorry he had that reaction, Master. I’m also sorry I never asked about your history. I guess I thought you’d tell me if you wanted me to know, and I realize now, that’s a carryover from the things I learned from Carlos and Adam. I’m sorry I never asked. Can we put you back in the middle please, Master?”

He went over the top this time. I moved back to the center, and we all settled in. I pulled them both closer to me, one arm around each, and told my boy, “It’s okay, Davy. Lots of things to unlearn, lots of new things to learn.”

“Yes,” said Micca, “like the fact he doesn’t like Belgian quad beer even a tiny bit.”

I appreciated her injecting a little humor into the moment, but then Davy asked, “What happened to get you into a city, Master?”

“Our school was small and poor, but we had some good teachers. One of them helped me with the paperwork and applications, and I got a full-ride scholarship to Appalachian State University. I have a marketing degree with a minor in music, and also an MBA. This teacher helped me a great deal with my music, but he stressed that no matter what I do, I’ll need to understand the business world in order to succeed, and he was absolutely right. With my minor, I had plenty of courses to teach me the business of music as well as the art of it, but without the marketing classes or the MBA, there’s no way I’d be where I am.”

“I’ve read about how you got started on social media and in bars, and grew yourself to a big following,” Davy said.

“Right, and then you decided it was lonely at the top, according to the gossip mags,” Micca said, “and wanted to be part of a band where you could all share the spotlight.”

“Not the way I’d word it, but it’s basically what happened.”

“You don’t have a mountain accent,” Davy noted. We’d have to work on his confidence, so he was comfortable asking me questions, but not now. His statement was enough I understood what he wanted to know.

“I dated a girl at Appy who was in a Master’s program for speech-language pathology, and she used me as part of her thesis, helping me lose the accent and speak mostly without one. I worked hard to keep my non-accent, because people reacted so much differently to me when I spoke without one.”

Talking about exes isn’t appropriate first-date material. Or was this our second date? I wasn’t sure, but it wasn’t good either way so I changed the subject. “I’d already formed a big following on social media before I graduated. One of my marketing professors helped me come up with a blueprint kind of early on as part of a project I was graded for.”

“Where did you learn about all the foods and wines, Master?” Davy asked. “And what about your comfort foods? I’ve been making you mine — PB&J, grilled cheese sandwiches, chicken noodle soup, chicken and dumplings.”

Perhaps he’d figure out it’s okay to ask me questions all on his own if I just kept answering them. “We ate a lot of deer, wild boar, and squirrel meat. We also ate a lot of cornbread and beans with plenty of pork fat in them. We grew beans, onions, carrots, and potatoes. Mostly root vegetables that would keep in the root cellar. We dried the beans, so they kept, too. Mom made this apple stack cake when the apples were in season that was…” I closed my eyes at the memory of it. “I guess that was our big treat of the year. We didn’t go hungry, but we mostly ate off the land, other than trading deer meat for cornmeal to make thecornbread, but a sack of it lasted a long time. We traded meats and furs for things like salt, bullets, boots, fabric, and thread to make clothes. Our goats gave us goat milk, and we made butter. We had chickens, which means we had eggs, and we’d eat the ones that stopped producing.”

“But you know all these foreign foods, and fancy wines, and every kind of pasta ever imagined, Master.”

One of Davy’s pet peeves is that every shape of pasta has its own name when it’s all made out of the same stuff, and I leaned to the side and kissed his nose. “I learnedsomuch about the outside world in college, and then shortly after I graduated, I had an opportunity to travel to all the places that had fascinated me — the Great Pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, London, Hong Kong, the Alps. I wasn’t playing huge venues yet, mostly festivals and bars, or opening for other artists, but with every show in a different city, I picked up more people watching and listening to my stuff online, and that translated to more dollars. I went to a lot of big cities to perform in bars and small venues, but I also stopped off on all my bucket-list places if I was anywhere close to them. I paid guides to show me everything in those cities, and especially the various foods the city was known for. A year or two later, I spent most of a spring and summer touring the vineyards in Italy, France, Spain, and a few other countries. I shot a music video in a vineyard, and I wrote a song while at another one, which let me make the whole trip a business expense.”