Caleb collapsed on me, laying kisses along my cheek and neck.
“Jesus, Erin, you were wonderful.”
“All I did was lay here,” I joked.
“No, you did so much more than that,” he said. In a small voice, he added, “You trusted me.”
For the rest of the night, we made love. He soon unlocked the cuffs and took me again staring down into my eyes. Then I rode him and finished him in my mouth. By the time we both collapsed around five-thirty, we were exhausted and fell into a deep sleep.
Jackson
Though I was disappointed that I got stuck at work and didn’t get to see Erin, I was ecstatic he got to spend some one on one time with her. Especially considering he took the initiative, asking me if I minded, and then setting up what sounded like a fantastic and sexy date.
I did everything I could for Caleb, tried to be there for him for everything, but there was still only so much I could do. Sometimes there were certain things a lover could do that a best friend couldn’t. That’s why Erin was becoming more and more vital.
After I dealt with the work crisis that prevented me from going out with Caleb and Erin–an angry vendor who’d mixed up invoices and blamed us–I had some free time to kill and decided to comb through the documents Mike had attached to the email that contained his report.
First I reread the report, finding myself taken aback that I’d somehow missed the fact that Erin’s father was in the service before he became a lawyer. He’d suffered from PTSD too and died when Erin was just thirteen.
It seemed like kismet, like fate that this woman who had firsthand experience with PTSD would waltz into our lives during the very moment we needed her. But things were still so early into our relationship, if you could even call it that, that it was so hard to tell.
Would Erin be able to put up with Caleb’s nightmares and all his quirks? Many women in the past hadn’t been able to, if he even let them in enough to give them a chance.
I sighed. At that point, only time would tell. In the meantime, I decided I wanted a little one on one time with Erin myself.
I remembered that, on the day we met, she told us she was staying at the Golden Gate Hotel. After I left the club that night, I headed over to her hotel and saw a cute young woman working behind the front desk. I added a bit of a swagger to my step and walked over to her, giving her my sexiest smile.
“Hi,” I began, “I was wondering if you could do me a favor?”
It took less than a minute before she agreed to pass along my phone number to Erin, along with a message that asked her to get ahold of me.
It was about midmorning when Erin got ahold of me. While I wanted to take to her an extravagant dinner, something told me Erin wouldn’t want that. No doubt everything was already overwhelming her with the whirlwind of the last few days. So I decided to see if she wanted to meet me at a coffee shop near her hotel instead.
I was already there when she walked in, sitting at a table far from anyone else. She smiled when she saw me and wasn’t afraid to give me a kiss. We each ordered a coffee and sat back down at the table.
Before I even had the chance to say anything, Erin said, “You know, something has been bothering me since that first night in the Dungeon.”
I gulped. Busted!
“I know that I didn’t tell you I was a lawyer, and yet you decided to do a scene in which I was one. At first I thought it was a coincidence, but the more I thought about it, the more I don’t believe that it was.” She gazed at me over her mug, eyebrows raised.
“Well,” she went on when I didn’t say anything, “Caleb never slipped and revealed more about me than he was letting on, only you. Based on what I know of you two, which I know isn’t a lot, you seem to want to protect him. So my guess is that you know certain things about me but Caleb doesn’t.”
I sighed. “I suppose I could bullshit you and say I found it out on Facebook, but considering you never told us your last name, that would be bullshit too.”
We continued to stare at each other for a moment, coffee mugs in hand. There was no point in keeping things from her if she already had her suspicions. “You’re right, I do know things about you. I asked a buddy of mine to look into you after the night we met. Caleb doesn’t know anything about it. He’s had a hard time lately and I didn’t want anyone around him that would make things more difficult for him.”