Closer and Closer Read online

  Cover

  Title Page

  Closer and Closer

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  Jenna Barton

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  Omnific Publishing

  Los Angeles

  Copyright Information

  Closer and Closer, Copyright © 2015 by Jenna Barton

  All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior written permission of the publisher.

  ...

  Omnific Publishing

  1901 Avenue of the Stars, 2nd Floor

  Los Angeles, California 90067

  www.omnificpublishing.com

  ...

  First Omnific eBook edition, February 2015

  First Omnific trade paperback edition, February 2015

  ...

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

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  Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

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  Barton, Jenna.

  Closer and Closer / Jenna Barton – 1st ed

  ISBN: 978-1-623420-71-0

  1. Love—Fiction. 2. Power Exchange—Fiction. 3. BDSM—Fiction. 4. Dominance and submission—Fiction. I. Title

  ...

  Cover Design by Micha Stone and Amy Brokaw

  Interior Book Design by Coreen Montagna

  Dedication

  For my Old Man,

  who has always known love is a journey, not a destination.

  Chapter One

  FOR NEARLY SIX MONTHS, my dental hygienist fascinated me. Actually, it was her neck. Or, rather, it was what she wore around her neck. I knew what it was, because I’ve seen people in collars that looked like they weren’t really collars. Before I moved to North Carolina, I saw the full range of human coupling—everything—in San Francisco. I’d watched, safe and distant, all the years I’d lived there.

  Claire Saldino’s torso hovered over mine as she clasped a blue paper bib in place. “So, think you’re settled in now that you’ve been here awhile?”

  This afternoon, her nearness, my interest and something about the two mixing, made her smooth actions…They were too smooth, bordering on a façade.

  I couldn’t respond. After thirty-four years of side-stepping the everyday intimacies most people found simple, I knew too well the sound of my voice skipping and stuttering as I searched for the right thing to say. Instead I held my breath, crimping my lips closed.

  Claire pulled away, leaving a faint wash of something spiced and exotic in the air she’d just occupied. Patchouli. Just like my sister Dani. Specifically, Dani, version 3.7, when we were twenty-three and she decided she would move downstate to a place called the Peaceful Valley collective. Version 3.8 followed, four months later, when Dani left the collective and began bartending at the latest in a long succession of restaurants where our mother, Kathy, waited tables.

  Claire’s gaze met mine again and before I could prevent it, my eyes skipped away, betraying me. The sight of the thin, woven black leather band around her neck was a siren’s song. It called me to gaze at the creamy skin around it like a malnourished succubus. And I was too clumsy with my fascination to hide it.

  Claire cleared her throat.

  She knew. She knew I was drawn to that thin woven-leather band. And she knew why I couldn’t distract myself from it.

  “I am so relieved to see the end of winter. Aren’t you, Erin?”

  A polite question about the weather? She knew. Of course she did. Of course.

  Probably, she’d started to wonder during my last visit, when she prepped me for the temporary crown. Today, though, I stumbled right into confirmation when I yanked my eyes back to hers a sliver of a second too late.

  She knew I knew that delicate strip of braided leather was more than a trendy artifact she might have picked up on a Saturday afternoon trip to one of those artsy shops in Asheville. Our eyes met for a second longer than necessary. And she knew I knew that she knew.

  After three visits to the office of Dr. Paul Saldino, DDS, Claire Saldino and I had been silently taking each other’s accounts. There was an unspoken curiosity, but no words confirmed it. Yet.

  I met Claire when I came to her husband’s practice, nearly whimpering with pain, for an emergency repair to the broken molar I’d given myself somewhere between Oklahoma City and Maumelle, Arkansas as I tried to simultaneously open a bottle of water and maneuver a fully-loaded U-Haul. That stretch of Interstate 40 was particularly jagged, and apparently I’d worn that tooth into fragility. By the time I reached the tidy two-bedroom house I’d rented via Skype with a Callahan-based Realtor, I could hardly move my jaw. TMJ was as much an occupational hazard for system engineers as carpal tunnel.

  That was in November, two days before Thanksgiving. I’d moved myself across the country to direct a team of system engineers at the new East Coast data center for ThinkMine, an Internet giant that spawned its own verb. Web browsers “mined” for information now, thanks to the company—and culture—where I’d spent all of my post-MBA years pushing myself to work longer and harder, making two steps to every male engineer’s one. One of two female engineers in my management acceleration group. Two out of sixty-five selected from ThinkMine’s sites—called houses in our organization’s unique jargon—scattered from Finland to India to New Zealand.

  And now, at a new data center in Callahan, North Carolina, too. In California, the final destination on my mother’s long and dogged trek to the West Coast with her twin girls in tow, I was a sober set of legs, a source of extra cash to make Mom and Dani’s PG&E bill. Someone had to be more sane, more sensible, more grounded. Kathy had never moved Dani and me south, sticking to New York and the Midwest before she got enough traction to get us to northern California, where she’d always intended to land, even before Dani and me. The opportunity—and my move east—was about more than my profession. It was my chance, finally, to arrange my life with the comfort of enough distance between me and them.

  After five months, spring arrived. April. I’d spent my first winter in North Carolina. Survived? Acclimated? Nothing much about the everyday mechanisms of me had actually changed. But, even without a notable shift, I was still here. On my own. In a town I chose for myself, a house I picked because I liked the clean hominess of it.

  Beside me, Claire inhaled minutely. I swallowed at my own telltale gasp, blinking to cover how I forced my line of sight from the braid circling her neck. I smiled evenly at her.

  Question…she was asking—ah, right. Nice weather; tired of winter.

  When in the throes of awkward, mention the weather.

  “A few of the locals at work keep telling me this winter was unusually warm, but those two storms were enough for me,” I said.

  “Just wait for summer. Hot and humid around here.”

  Mercifully, her husband appeared behind her and Claire rose without further comment. As he settled in, checking the progress of his repairs, I sank a little against the chair, relieved to be not a person with a voice, available for conversation, but a silenced, open-mouthed observer. Dr. Saldino—never something more friendly like Dr. Paul or Dr. S—hardly spoke to his wife, but she orchestrated every step of his examination. Glancing between the curve of her cheek above me and her green-flecked hazel eyes, I turned my studies to watching her watch him.

  She anticipated each movement. It was mesmerizing, a dance of sorts. Their breath settled, in concert. She was ready with an answer for each of his needs a half beat before she was required.

  And she was aware I was w
atching them work together, how these mundane actions from each of them were part of a much deeper sense of tandem. I felt it. As irrational as I knew it was, I felt a warmed current of energy radiating from Claire.

  “Suction, Claire.”

  She blinked, heavy. Were her pupils really as dilated as they seemed?

  “Claire?”

  “Sir?”

  Sir.

  My face flamed. A bloom of pink rose around that thin leather band on her neck.

  She called him Sir.

  Claire recovered quickly, and what she said didn’t really give anything away. Given the environment, it wouldn’t be unimaginable to answer her employer so. But he was also her husband. She dodged the instrument at my gums and I played passive, the good patient allowing her to do her work.

  For the rest of the my appointment, reclining in Dr. Saldino’s dental chair, I counted my breaths, clenched my toes, and told myself—repeatedly—that a surprised, breathy voice answering Sir did not turn the gusset of my sensible white cotton panties sodden, that my thighs weren’t aching-tight from controlling this quick and ferocious arousal.

  Over a word. Sir. Not him, Dr. Paul Saldino, DDS or Claire, but a word. Over what it meant to say it.

  That word, and those slim strips of leather. All that it implied and how long I’d hung around the edges of it all, too curious and too fearful in turns to commit. I did little more than lurk in the anonymous safety of the Internet. When I was still in California, the closest I came to gathering my courage was spending four separate evenings parked outside of a restaurant, watching people go in and out and berating myself because I knew I’d never follow them inside and join the group meet-up there.

  This something. It had a name. I had known the name, but now I had relatively familiar faces to attach to it.

  Dr. Paul Saldino, DDS and his dental hygienist, his black leather necklace-wearing wife Claire, were Dominant and submissive. Or Top and bottom. Maybe Master and slave. But they did that something.

  After Dr. Saldino declared my tooth in good order, he left without another word. As I tucked the generic toothbrush and mouthwash sample into my purse, Claire lingered. She offered an extra toothbrush. A little hesitant, she kept a respectable but available distance. Something—yes, something again—told me this was unusual, not up to form of how they did things. I was supposed to find them, or people like them, on my own. But Claire and I had chatted pleasantly since my broken molar and I arrived in Callahan, even after I noticed what she wore around her neck. It seemed like our conversation was based on real ease—more than geniality between dentist’s assistant and patient.

  “I’m glad you’re doing so well, Erin.” She smiled. Her round cheeks lifted. There was encouragement there.

  “Me too.” I had to do it. I knew enough from playing sidekick to my adventuresome sister that the requestee was responsible for starting the dialogue in underground conversations like the one I was about to open. Claire’s shoulder lifted, beginning her turn away from me. “Oh, um…Claire, I’ve been meaning to tell you. I—I like your necklace.”

  Her hand rose to it, her index finger tracing lightly over the strands. Something, a taut awareness of each other that had been growing between us during my exam, eased.

  “Necklace?” Claire’s smile broadened a little as she nodded, a soft laugh rising from her throat. “Oh. Thanks. It’s a favorite. I never really take it off unless we’re going somewhere special.”

  I wondered where that somewhere special might be. A rush of disjointed images snapped to life in my mind’s eye. Did he gather her auburn hair in his fist and pull? Were there orders? Threats? Promises? Hard metallic clamps, sharp stings from leather? The scald of his gloved hand on her bare skin? His voice in her ear, telling her in careful, succinct detail, how he planned to use her and how she would feel when it happened? That he was the one in control?

  Did she know who she really was for so long—for years, like me—before she found herself on her knees before him? Was it all new? Her latest fad?

  The melodrama of my imagination hit me, full and without warning, and suddenly I giggled. I kept giggling too, even as I raised my hand, still clutching the extra toothbrush, to my mouth and fought at the anxious laughter that was as pedestrian and obvious as a discussion of the warmer-than-usual western North Carolina winter just gone.

  I rousted my sensible adult and hoped I could muster a semi-intelligent observation. “Um, well…it’s really pretty. It looks so intricate. And…pretty.”

  “You know, my friend who makes them lives in Charlotte. I—” she glanced over her shoulder, then slanted her head toward me “—I could introduce you if you’re interested in this style of jewelry.”

  I didn’t consider how unusual, how much of a risk this was for her, offering a more personal connection than my broken right molar. I didn’t think about how accepting the dentistry practice’s appointment card with her personal email address and cell number might alter the landscape of my life in a month, or a number of months.

  She did know. And she was offering to show me.

  I’m not the only Proctor sister who’s tenacious. And, I swore to myself, I wasn’t the only one who could be brave. I was making a new, different life on my own, a coast away from anyone who knew me.

  “I’d like that.” I took the card from her and promised to call soon.

  “Come.”

  “Beg your pardon, Madame?” Settling back into the gimpy government-issue office chair, Walt stretched his legs past the corner of his desk, chinned his phone, and started to work at his muddy bootlaces. After a full workday that began at seven in the morning, Lucy’s exquisite diva-Domme act was the very last thing he wanted to hear.

  “You heard me, Wanda,” she all but snarled. “You are coming with me.”

  Lucy Johns had no patience for excess when dealing with the simple bitching and moaning of mere mortals. Lucy, Lu, Doma Lucia—or Walt’s own special nickname for her, Louis—all were facets of the same very complicated, very intense woman. Doma Lucia consumed all of her excess-related resources. The single-mindedness of her in Dominant headspace made understanding her easy. Do what Doma Lucia says and do it now. Simple. Unless she was trying to order Walt around and calling him Wanda, which she usually was. That could get complicated.

  “Busy.” Walt nudged one mud-caked boot from his foot, groaning. Both a second boot and happy grunt followed. “Damn, that’s better.”

  “Not better and not busy. You’re acting like a fucking old lady.” She huffed. “Damn it to hell. Hang on, I need both of my arms for this dress.”

  From the dull thunk in his ear, Walt figured she’d tossed her phone aside, relieving him, for a moment at least, of her own skewed version of heartfelt encouragement. He’d never been able to reconcile the sound of Lu’s molasses-dipped purr growling her suspicions about his work ethic, his intellect, or his manhood. That low and raspy voice of hers—it was hot. Everything about his best friend, from her death-trap stiletto heels to her sleek, tricked-out Range Rover, would make a man break his neck to get a second look at her, and as the nameplate at one of Charlotte’s most successful boutique architecture practices, she brought more than a spoonful of brains to the table. But all of Lucinda Johns’ charms were intended for the ladies. Hapless males need not—and should not—apply.

  “There,” she said, announcing her return over the swish of a zipper. “Damn, I’m hot. And you’re acting like such an old woman, you won’t be there to appreciate it.”

  “I’ve been working all day. Laboring. Outside, like a man with thirty-eight hundred acres to look after.”

  “Waaah-waah.”

  “Tonight I’ll be writing up an incident report, which my job requires, because I relocated a milk snake from a stall in the women’s showers it was sharing with one of our campers, who hopefully won’t sue the state parks for having too much nature in our nature. After that eye-opener, I led three hikes—and not the granny-walks, either, so don’t start
with me. And if you didn’t notice, it was ninety-four degrees this afternoon. I stopped five times to wring sweat out of my shirt—polyester, your tax dollars at work, thank you—oh, and I redirected three separate groups of crunchies from Asheville back to the campground because their new REI gear was going to get a bit muddy if they stayed off-trail.” Walt’s stomach growled at the mention of crunchy, reminding him he’d spent his lunch hour away from civilization.

  “Okay, okay. Quit your whining, Wanda. Speaking of snake, I’m wearing the red snakeskin Louboutins…”

  Rustling through a pile of invoices and budget requests scattered across his ancient metal desk, Walt located a protein bar stashed there within recent memory. He could say no all he wanted; Lucy would catalog each piece of her ensemble for him anyway.

  Walt tucked his phone under his chin again, buying conversational time with a grunt or two so he could rustle with the protein bar’s noncompliant metallic wrapper. It refused to budge. Maybe Lu was right—if his fingers, as battered as they were, were unable to grasp a protein bar wrapper and wrench it open, damn old might just be right on the money.

  “…and the last time Tate spilled lube all over my python Daffodilles—Hello? Are you even paying attention to me?”

  “No. Don’t need to hear any more about your outfits. I’m trying to eat dinner,” he grumbled, tugging at the compressed foil ends between his fingers.

  “Predigested whey protein isn’t a meal, Wanda.” Behind her voice, a bass-heavy techno song blared from the premium speakers she’d installed in her SUV.

  “It’s doing a fine imitation of one right now.” The wrapper wrenched open, revealing one long, pale, unappetizing piece of apple cinnamon-flavored meal replacement bar. “Ha! Hell yes, victory is mine.”

  Grunting, Walt bit into lunch…dinner, whatever. This was nourishment. A hot meal, maybe an actual meat and two vegetables, along with a soft, pretty face smiling back at him from across the table were not dietary requirements. They were set dressing…fantasies. Not his reality. Which was fine. The personalities behind most of the soft, pretty faces he ran into lately were some variety or other of bat-shit crazy anyway. CPEP was wall-to-rafters packed with it.