Page 69

Will

I wasn’t mad so much as I was hurt. I’ve never been jealous of whatever happened between Davy and Bubbles, but the idea that Bubbles had to talk him down from a panic attack bothered me. I’d have been okay with it if Davy hadn’t hidden it from me, but he had, and for the first time, it felt like I was on shaky ground with my boy.

I grabbed my tablet, unrolled the funky little keyboard, opened the word processor, put fingers to keys, and started typing.

Promises should count for something. I thought you’d be true, and now my heart hurts. You’re the last person I ever thought would hide something important, and now my heart hurts. I’ve done everything I could to be brutally honest, and then your past comes back into your life and you hide it from me. And now my heart hurts.

It helped to write it out, and it was probably a decent start to a song. Too wordy, but a little shaving would…

Fuck. I was trying to ignore my pain by making a damned song.

I called Panda.

“I need to run. I have an hour until I have to be in my dressing room. Any chance you or Mira can go for a run with me? I’ll do a man bun and wear runner’s sunglasses.”

“Yeah. Mira will be more than happy to run with you, and I’ll follow in the SUV. How long till you’re ready?”

“Five minutes?”

“We’ll come get you as soon as she gets changed.”

Panda drove us to a park rather than let me run the roads, and he moved around so he could keep an eye on us without running with us. Mira always paces me and keeps up, and I have a feeling she’s having to go slower for me, but I’ve never asked. We ran three miles before it was time to head back, and I decided to ask her in the SUV.

“You’re slowing your regular pace to run with me, aren’t you?”

She and Panda looked at each other, and then she turned to look at me a second before she faced forward again. That’s the thing about talking to your security — their first priority is situational awareness and not social niceties.

Which is fine, but it was a reminder these two were here because they were being paid damned good money to be.

And it hit kind of hard. They were here because they were being paid to be, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but it still hit me wrong in the moment because I thought Davy liked me for me and not who I am, but was I wrong?

“Mira runs like the wind,” Panda told me. “I don’t run with her unless I can help it. She’s insane with her running.”

It took me a moment to realize he was answering for Mira without actually answering, so I chose to just change the subject. “I have someone I need Drake security to look into for me. It’s supposedly Davy’s grandfather in Alaska, but I’d like all the information on him I can get.”

“Text me what you have and I’ll get it to our geeks.”

“I don’t actually have very much. Last name Jones, but that’s probably not much help. Does some kind of hunting and cooking show on social media.”

“Might not be doable in New York State, but Alaska’s a different animal entirely.”

“I’ll text you what I have.”

My first instinct was that this was a relationship problem and not a power exchange thing, so there’d be no punishment, but the more I thought about it, I wasn’t certain that was the right way to go.

Later, I had a chance to talk to Ghost about it, and he said, “I don’t know if there’s a right or wrong answer. I’d tan Hailey’s ass if she kept something like that from me, but it might be better for the two of you to handle it differently. Biggest thing is to sit him down face-to-face and have him tell you the whole story. If you believe him, that he didn’t see a problem with holding off a few weeks to talk to you about it when you got home, then maybe just have him write lines about how important communication is or something. If you don’t believe him? That’s a serious problem, a trust issue, and one ya’ll will have to find a way to repair, if you can.”

“Yeah, thanks for that. This came out of the blue, and…” I shrugged. “I was so sure he’d talk to me about anything important, and then to find out that isn’t the case? I don’t like being on shaky ground.”

“Do you love him?”

“I love him so much it hurts.”

“Then figure it out. I don’t know him well, but my take on him is that he’s pretty genuine. What you see is what you get, without subterfuge.”

Ghost was absolutely right. If Davy said he thought it would be okay, then that’s what he thought. It wasn’t okay, and it was my job to reinforce that, but unless he gave me a reason not to, I’d take him at his word.

I nodded to Ghost. “Yes. You’re right. Maybe the ground isn’t as shaky as I originally thought.”

Or, maybe it was.