Piece Us Together (Monstrous Survivors #3)

4. Chapter Four

Chapter Four

Maison

“I hope you don’t mind me encouraging him to cook,” Hunter says low in my ear as we watch Nolan move around the kitchen, pulling things out that don’t seem to even go together. I know him well enough to know they do, though. “He looked close to panicking. Less room for his mind to spin if he’s busy. Did I overstep?”

“Not at all. That was a good idea.”

“You, however,” he murmurs, his voice dipping even lower. I hold my breath and keep my gaze firmly fixed on Nolan. “Not sure how to calm you quite yet.”

I release my breath slowly, keeping it perfectly controlled. “I’m fine.”

“Mmm. Sure. Whatever you say. I’ll play along for now.” He presses closer, until his elbow is touching mine on the breakfast bar. Then he raises his voice to address the both of us. “I’ve given your situation quite a bit of thought, but I wanted to make sure I have a few things correct before diving into any ideas. Is it alright if I ask you both some questions?”

Nolan pauses with a bag of bread in his hands, his cheeks flushing as he looks between me and Hunter. “Of course.”

“Sure,” I add, not feeling nearly as certain as Nolan is. It seems Hunter puts us both on edge, but unlike me where I feel like running, Nolan seems to just give in to it. Welcome it, almost.

“Maison providing domination is not an option, yes?”

My face burns with shame, but Nolan doesn’t give me the chance to try arguing. “Right. He hates it.”

“I can try—”

“No,” Hunter says firmly, his gaze sharp as he settles it on me.

I immediately back down. Something warm settles in my gut. Uncomfortably warm. It gets worse when he nods in approval at my silence. I don’t like it.

Well, I don’t want to like it.

“Nolan, in a perfect world, one that allows Maison to be who he needs to be while allowing you to get what you need as well, what would you want?”

Glad the focus has shifted back to him, I allow myself to relax a little as I wait for him to answer. He has his back turned to us. His shoulders rise and fall four times before he finally says, “I don’t know.”

“You’re both awful liars. Shall we just stop wasting time trying, please?”

I bristle, both at the idea that I’m a bad liar—I’m a liar for a living, goddamnit—and at his tone with Nolan. I don’t like the way Nolan flinches either.

Hunter sighs as if he can tell I’m upset. He probably can, the bastard. “I understand this is difficult for the both of you—and I understand that there might be times when you really don’t know something. But I can’t help you unless you’re honest with me. Will you please let me help?”

Nolan and I exchange a look before Nolan turns to him. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I guess—in a perfect world, I’d find a way to get the calm that submission brings me, somehow. There’d be a way to get that piece of myself to settle.”

“It’s that calm that you’re after the most? Not sexual release?”

Nolan’s cheeks darken, but he surprisingly doesn’t look away from Hunter. “I’d like both, but if I had to choose, it’s the calm, yes. The peace. I want that feeling of handing the weight of the world off to someone else. That rush of pleasing someone. Of being good. That feeling of being… owned .” He looks away then, but not at me.

I know the shame he feels about this. I don’t judge him, but I still can’t fully understand why he wants to feel that way. The peace, sure, that makes sense. And I’d definitely love a chance for the weight of the world to be off me too. But to be owned? After what he’s been through? I respect it, I accept it, but I don’t understand it. I’m not sure I ever will.

Hunter doesn’t seem the least bit confused. Then again, he doesn’t know Nolan’s history. Or maybe it’s just because he has dominance radiating off of him when every bone in my body is begging for a fucking break from carrying the weight of control.

“You speak as if you have experience,” Hunter points out. “Have you had a dominant before?”

Nolan turns away again, fumbling with an apple. “Not…exactly. It wasn’t healthy, the situation I was in. But it gave me enough experience to know what I do and don’t want. To figure out what I liked. And now that it’s gone, the good along with the bad, I know what I miss. What I…need.”

“To be owned,” Hunter says, not an ounce of judgment in his voice. “To be cared for, completely. To be controlled, in a safe way.”

“Yes.” He swallows. “And to be good for him—for the—the dom. I want to take everything for him, everything he wants me to take. I want to make him proud. I want to—to earn his praise. I want to earn… him . Pain, pleasure, orders—I want it to be for him. I want to…” He shakes his head, squeezing his eyes shut.

Hunter makes a soft, understanding sort of noise. “You want to be his, completely, and you want to prove that you’re worthy of that.”

Nolan releases a shaky breath before looking at Hunter with tear-filled eyes. “Yes.”

“Lucky dom,” Hunter murmurs. The words are praising, somehow. They make Nolan blush. His shoulders soften. I’ve seen them soften like that before—for Travis.

I hate seeing it.

I love seeing it.

Hunter understands him.

Hunter is going to be able to give him what he needs.

It’s agony.

It’s relief.

This is the man I love, about to get what he wants, what he needs, what he deserves. It feels like the reality of it is about to split me in half and swallow me whole.

“And from the look on your face,” Hunter says slowly, his attention now on me. “You’re not at all interested in providing that for him?”

I flinch. “No. I can’t. I’ve tried—I really, really tried, but I can’t.”

“Okay. That’s okay.” Hunter ducks his head until I’m forced to meet his eyes. They’re incredibly earnest, all warm and caring. A feeling passes through me as I look into them. Something close to how it felt when he calmed me in the alley. “You can’t control that any more than he can control his own wants and needs. The fact that you were willing to try is huge. There’s nothing wrong with the fact that you couldn’t do it. Nothing at all, Maison.”

Emotions clog my throat, making it impossible to respond with anything other than a sharp nod. He thankfully looks toward Nolan then. It’s not long, more of just a glance to check on him, but it’s enough for me to shove everything deep down and get my shit together again.

He frowns when he looks back at me. I don’t let myself care about why.

“Are you possessive, Maison?”

I nearly laugh. “I mean, yes? I love him. He’s my boyfriend.”

“Those things are not mutually exclusive with sharing, despite what societal norms may indicate. I’m asking if you’d be able to handle Nolan belonging to a dom who isn’t you. If you’d be able to handle him being owned by another man.”

No.

Fuck no.

Or maybe…

I mean, if he needs it, then…

If it’s with someone I trust, someone good, someone—someone like Hunter, then maybe…

“Not all the time,” I decide. It feels like a good compromise. Something I can live with, at least. “It’d have to be an arrangement, I think.”

“So, twice a month, or every Saturday—something like that?” Hunter suggests.

“I think so, yeah…”

God, could I really do that? Share him?

I look at Hunter. He looks calm. Steady. Ready to take this—take us— in his hands, if I’m willing to let him.

Yeah. Yeah, I think I could.

“Sexual or non-sexual?”

I curl my hands into fists to hide that they’re shaking. “I don’t know.”

Hunter assesses me, probably determining if I’m telling the truth. Then he nods and turns back to Nolan. “Would something limited be enough for you?”

“Um.” Nolan pauses halfway through slicing an apple, his hand trembling slightly where it grips the knife. “I’m willing to try anything.”

“But would it be enough? ” Hunter asks, emphasizing the last word.

“I—” Nolan pauses. He lifts his chin, looking toward me. I’m a total coward for the way I quickly drop my gaze to the counter. I hate myself for that. I hate myself even worse when I hear the resignation in his voice when he speaks again. “I think so, if it was with the same dom. I think it’d be enough.”

Not ideal, but enough.

I force myself to look at Nolan, my heart in my throat. He’s not looking at me anymore.

“But do you want it to be sexual, baby?” I ask him. Because if I was willing to settle for enough, we wouldn’t be here. I want to figure out a way to give Nolan everything. Or as close to everything as I can get.

“I—I don’t—” He looks at me. His expression crumples the moment our eyes lock. “I’m sorry,” he whispers, his bottom lip quivering.

“Hey, no. It’s okay.” I curl my hands in my lap where he can’t see and conjure my best smile. “I’m not mad. Not at all. We’ll figure this out. It’s going to be okay.”

“It will,” Hunter says, sounding ten times more sure than me. How the fuck does he do that? “I think the best course of action is to figure out what you both can handle, keeping in mind that you can always add things or remove things from your lists as time goes on. Once you have a better idea of what you’re looking for specifically, I can help you find a dominant that matches with you.”

It feels like the world screeches to a halt. I can’t help but glance at Hunter, something cold and almost violent snaking its way through me at how calm and collected he looks. A dominant? Not him?

“The first thing you both need to decide is Maison’s role,” he says, unaware of the spin he just sent me in. Nolan has his back to us, so I’m not sure how he’s fairing. Did he expect Hunter to be the dom to help us too? Was that stupid of me? Why does this plan suddenly feel impossible without Hunter at the head of it? “Will you want to be involved at all, Maison? Will you want to participate? Just watch? Sit outside the room? Do you want to be in the same location at all? Do you even want to meet the dom or know details about what they do?”

The dom is supposed to be you.

I don’t fucking know how to do this if the dom isn’t you.

“Maison?”

“I don’t know. I don’t—I don’t fucking know.”

Hunter frowns, his eyebrows pulling together. “Okay. Take a breath. You don’t have to know right now.”

For fuck’s sake, where’s the man who stood in the alley and promised it’d be okay? Promised he’d figure it out?

Just tell us what to do.

“Nolan, do you know what you’d want?” Hunter asks.

“Um…whatever Maison wants. I don’t want to be picky. It’s a big sacrifice he’s making.”

It wasn’t, until Hunter decided to fucking take himself out of the mix.

It’s not even that I like Hunter or anything—I barely know the dude. But I’ve done extensive research on him. And Travis trusts him.

And, well, he calmed me, that night in the alley. Somehow, despite making me feel all jittery and off-kilter most of the time, he’d made everything stop when he’d put his hand on me and promised to help. I wanted that for Nolan. I wanted that for…

Hunter touches my shoulder. “Maison?”

“Maybe this was a mistake,” I grit out. It feels like I’m going to vibrate out of my fucking skin, especially where he’s touching me. I jerk away from the touch—away from him . “This was a mistake. I can do it myself. I can be—”

“ No, ” Hunter says, his hand gripping the nape of my neck. My legs give out, my body melting into the chair as I stare at him, wide-eyed like a fucking puppy that just got scruffed. He relaxes his grip but doesn’t release it. “You’re not running from this, Maison. Neither of you. I won’t allow it. You’ve asked for my help. Now you’ll take it.”

“Except it’s not your help, is it?” I point out, anger twisting inside of me, chasing away the moment of calm he’d managed to bring just now. “You’re going to hand us off to some other dom to deal with. God fucking forbid you bother, right? Turn my world upside down with all your bullshit and then just walk away, hey?”

Hunter’s expression immediately softens, his lips even curling at the edges. It makes me want to punch him. Or cry. “Is that what’s got you so upset? You want me to be his dom?”

His dom .

Why the fuck does that hurt?

Because I hate that I can’t be that for Nolan, surely. What other reason could there be? It’s not like I’m jealous of Nolan. It’s not like I want a dom. Fuck that shit.

Ache in my chest aside, it is what I want—him as Nolan’s dom, I mean. Not—not anything else. “Yes, I want it to be you. I trust you. Not some fucking stranger.”

Instead of being amused like I expected, his gaze turns intense. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“I wanted that too. I just didn’t want to seem like I was manipulating the two of you to try and get myself some action. It felt right to offer to outsource the help, so you guys don’t ever feel like I was working things to my advantage. This is for you and Nolan—not me.” He huffs a soft laugh. “But if you’re willing to have me, I’d love nothing more than to be the dom that helps you guys.”

“Really?”

“Really.” His gaze lingers on me for a few more seconds before he turns it to Nolan. I look too, finding Nolan standing there with his head tilted, a strange sort of smile on his lips. “What do you think of that, Nolan? Would you be interested in letting me try to be the one to help you?”

Nolan blinks, seeming to come out of an entirely different conversation he was having in his own head to join ours. His smile turns into something shy, then. Shy with a little bit of hope. “That’d be nice, yeah.”

“Alright.” Hunter sits back. He runs a hand over his jaw, eyeing Nolan, then me, then looking down at the counter in front of him. “Well, even though that does change things down the road, it doesn’t change what first needs to happen, which is the two of you deciding what you do and don’t want. There’s a packet that my community uses for new submissives and dominants. It’s almost painfully extensive, but it’s better that way, when starting out. There’s so much to think about, so much to educate yourselves on. It leaves very little room for things to fall through the cracks.”

“We looked at something sort of like that,” Nolan explains, his eyes nervously looking everywhere but at Hunter and me. He turns away from us, back to the food on his cutting board. “I doubt it was that extensive, though.”

“We also looked at it as a guide for what the two of us would do together. Obviously, we weren’t really thinking about someone else being involved,” I add. “So, we didn’t exactly get far with it.”

“How far did you get, if you don’t mind me asking?”

Nolan doesn’t seem interested in answering that, his shoulders hunching as he finishes with the same apple he’s been working on this whole time. There’s a pan on the stove to his left. I find it much safer to wonder what the fuck he plans on doing with a pan and an apple than to think about what Hunter wants to know.

Thankfully, Hunter picks up on the tension and allows us to pretend the question wasn’t asked. “Well, Nolan will have it easiest, as far as the packet goes. All you’ll need to focus on is filling out the packet in a way that reflects what you’ll be willing to do with me. There are three options, which reflect limits—if you’re familiar with those. There will be things you’ll be happy with, things you’re willing to consider—known as soft limits—and things that are absolutely not okay, which are hard limits.”

There’s cheese on the board now, being thinly sliced from a giant block. Apples, cheese—bread earlier—and a pan . What the fuck is this boy making us?

“As for you, Maison,” Hunter says, making me startle. He’s at least nice enough to hide his amusement when I look at him. It’s still there in his eyes, but he can’t help that. “Your packet will be more complicated. You’ll first need to decide how much you want to be involved in what Nolan and I do before you can really tackle it.”

I frown. “Why? What does that matter?”

“It might be best if I can give an example—is there something, just a single thing, that you couldn’t stomach doing with Nolan? Something from the packet you looked at together?”

I look away from him, shame washing over me. He won’t judge me, right? Actually, it doesn’t matter if he does, anyway. His judgment isn’t valid because he doesn’t have all the facts.

I tell him the first thing that comes to mind. The one thing I know killed Nolan, despite how hard he tried to smile and pretend otherwise. “I can’t have him kneel for me.”

I’m not sure who tenses worse—Hunter or Nolan. I can’t look at Nolan, my heart can’t take it right now, so I look at Hunter instead. He manages to hide his surprise just after I catch sight of it, putting on a surprisingly believable straight face. “Alright. So, when you’re filling out the packet, kneeling will be on there. All Nolan has to do is decide if he wants to kneel for me or not. For you, it’s going to depend on your participation. If you’re not in the room, will it still bother you knowing he’s kneeling for me? Or do you not care as long as you don’t see it? If you decide that you want to be in the room, can you handle seeing him kneel for me? Or will that need to be a hard or soft limit, since you’re there to witness it?” He puts a hand up. “I’m not asking you to answer right now, that’s something you’ll need to think about for yourself. It’s just an example of how you’ll have to view the packet differently. Is that making sense?”

“Yeah.” I chance a look at Nolan. He’s staring down at his cutting board, not moving. “Yeah, that makes sense. Like—like a difference between what I’m willing to do to him, what I’m willing to know is being done to him despite not seeing it, and what I’m willing to watch be done to him.”

Hunter smiles. It’s bright. Wide. Proud.

God, that’s—that’s a nice smile.

“Exactly, Maison. So, the first thing to decide is if you’ll be in the room with us.” He shrugs. “That doesn’t need to be decided right now. Take some time.”

“I already know. I’m not leaving him.” I glare at him. He doesn’t deserve it, but it’s just about the only defense mechanism I have left. “I’ll be there the whole time.”

Hunter just nods, seemingly not bothered. “Alright. Then you’ll need to decide if you’re going to participate.”

“I don’t know what I want, yet. I don’t know if I’ll know until it’s happening. Paper is all well and good, but…”

“But until it’s happening, you aren’t sure what you want or what you’re willing to do.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s understandable. How about you fill out your packet in two colors? One color can be what you’re willing to witness and the other color for what you’re willing to participate in. It’ll be like Nolan’s, where some things are for certain okay, while others are soft and hard limits. That way we have a place to start from, at least. I have an excellent memory, which works very well in my favor. I can adapt as we go, depending on decisions you both make along the way. We can always stop a scene and talk things through before continuing, as well. We’ll use safewords.”

I consider all of that, realizing it actually sounds like an okay plan. Maybe even more than okay. “Okay. I can do that.”

Hunter nods, tearing his gaze away from me.

Nolan fidgets with a spatula. There’s a sandwich on the pan now. He’s looking at the sandwich like it holds all of the answers.

“Nol?” I ask.

He releases a shuddering breath before turning to look at us. His gaze barely touches Hunter before it’s settled on me. A tear falls down his cheek. I realize it’s not the first one, seeing that there are more half-dried on his face. “I’m sorry, I’m just—are you saying—I’m sorry—are you saying you’ll—that you’ll be my boyfriend and he’ll be my—my dom? For real? And like, with sex included? I can—that’s a thing? A thing I can really h-have?”

I look at Hunter, feeling lost, feeling like I’ve made the biggest mistake of my life. He just nods at me once, strong and steady. Sure. A dominant in every definition of the word. Then he looks at Nolan and gives him a smile that seems to unfurl the tension in the entire fucking room. Even inside of me. How the fuck does he do that?

I want him to stop.

I want him to do it forever.

“Yes, Nolan,” Hunter says with that smile still in place. “That’s what we’re saying.”

Nolan nods.

And then he sobs.

I’m not sure which one of us reaches him first—me or Hunter. Our hands pass over each other, working in tandem to hold him together. With his second sob, his legs give out and he slides to the floor, our bodies keeping him from falling completely. He buries his face in my neck, one of his hands clinging to Hunter’s shirt. His ass is in my lap, his legs in Hunter’s.

Hunter cups the back of Nolan’s neck, just resting his hand there as Nolan cries against my skin. I lift a trembling hand to rest it over Hunter’s, something warm passing over me at the simple touch.

The next sob is quieter. Softer. He’s melting into me now, his breathing slowing.

I look at Hunter, our eyes locking.

This feels—it feels right . Unbearably so.

Like this is where Nolan and I should be.

Like this is what Nolan needed all along. What the both of us needed.

It scares me, so I look away.

The feeling doesn’t fade though. That rightness.

“It’s going to be okay,” Hunter murmurs, and I know, in my gut, in my chest, in my very fucking soul, I know that he’s not just talking to Nolan. He’s talking to me too.

I don’t want a dom.

He’s not going to be my fucking dom.

But…maybe I can still enjoy a little of his magic too.