Elysia eBooks - Part Two

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CHAPTER FOUR: ELYSIA EBOOKS - PART TWO

Phil turned to Sam. “When did you first meet Fischer?”

Sam took a deep breath and nodded. “About four months ago—”

“Four months!” Jenna shouted. “You’ve been seeing this married man for four months? How have you been keeping this from me?”

“Jenna,” Phil scolded, making her tense lips thin. He turned back to Sam, urging her to go on.

“Four months ago,” Sam continued, “I met Fischer in a forum for Steele’s Edge. I’d read the book and wanted to know how much of it was real and how much was just fiction.”

“Did he message you or did you reach out to him?” Phil asked.

“He responded to a post I’d made about one of the scenes in the book,” she said. “Where Gregor spanks Helene until she cries. I didn’t really understand why anyone would like that, so I’d asked about it.” She shrugged. “Fischer answered that it was about making yourself vulnerable to another person and could be very freeing and that it was something a person had to experience to understand.”

Phil fought the urge to snort. Looked like the oldest trick in the book worked just as well in the kink world as it did everywhere else. “And from there?”

She tilted her head one way and then the other, her gray eyes thoughtful. “We exchanged messages for a couple of months, mostly just me asking about things from the book at first but eventually we began talking about ourselves and our lives.”

“Did he tell you about his wife?” Jenna asked under her breath.

Sam’s jaw tensed as her nose twitched. “Yes,” she answered simply, not rising to her mother’s bait, “her name is Lisa and they’ve been married for eleven years in an open relationship.”

“He’s not going to leave her for you,” Jenna snapped. “Believe me,” she said, “they never do.”

Phil shut his eyes, thinking of all the rocky relationships his sister had been in over the years. Yeah, she was right, none of them had lasted very long. It’d been a hard lesson for his sister to learn.

“I don’t expect him to,” Sam said, surprising him. “And I’d never ask him to.”

Both he and Jenna just stared blankly at her, the words she was saying inconceivable. “If you don’t want him to leave his wife for you,” Phil asked, “what do you want from this relationship?”

“He’s smart and romantic and intense.” Sam shrugged. “And I like being with him. The same reasons that anyone gets into any relationship, I guess.”

“But it’s not going to last?” Jenna said, the sentence sounding like a question.

“Maybe.” Sam gave a contemplative lift of her shoulder. “Maybe not. But, like Pip says in her podcast, if you end every relationship because you’re afraid it might not last, you’ll never be in one long enough to make it last.”

Phil shut his eyes as he felt Jenna glare at him. He was really going to have to talk to Will and Nita about the age restrictions on Pip’s podcast. “Sam,” he said, “you do know that Pip’s advice is for older people?” He looked her in the eyes, trying to explain. “People who’ve,” he struggled to find the right words, “had more dating experience, who are a little more set in who they are and what they want.”

Sam shook her head. “I would think that, like everything else on the Infommunity site, it’s there to give answers to anyone who has questions. You didn’t exactly raise me to believe that knowledge had must be this tall to read limits.”

Phil winced. Normally, he’d agree with her; if a person was old enough to ask the question, he’d always figured they were old enough to look for answers.

But this was different.

Right?

He took a breath, sat back, and crossed his arms over his chest. “What kind of questions were you asking Fischer?” Phil asked, thinking a topic change was for the best.

“Just things like how you get into BDSM, how to do it, who does it, where and when.” She ticked them off on her fingers. “He’s been doing it since college, so he knows a lot of stuff.”

Phil was sure he did. “So how did Fischer get into it?” His lips thinned.

“He bounced at a strip club to pay for school,” she said. “The dancer he was dating was the club’s mistress.”

“What a great role model,” Jenna muttered.

Phil bit his tongue, trying not to mention all the men Jenna had dated in her youth—like the drummer who’d left her outside of Illinois after he’d left on the tour bus with a gaggle of groupies or the con artist spiritualist who’d taken most of her savings in cult donations.

Instead, he chose to stay on topic. “And exactly what does he do?”

“For a job?” Sam asked a little indignantly.

“That too,” Phil said. “But I was talking more about the things he’s teaching you.”

Sam sniffed. “He sells and installs phone systems for large businesses for a living,” she said. “And Lisa is a middle school teacher.”

“And the rest?”

“Is none of your business,” Sam said simply. “I told you, I won’t answer questions like that. I would never ask you about your sex life,” she said—and thank God for that, “and it would be inappropriate for you to tell me. How are the rules different with the roles reversed?”

“So you are having sex with him.” Jenna let out a dramatic sob.

“I won’t say one way or the other,” Sam replied evasively, “but you really shouldn’t ask questions that you aren’t ready to hear the answers to.”

Which was a confirmation without confirmation. “He’s thirty-six,” Phil pointed out. “You’re barely eighteen. You’re still in high school and still living at home. That’s practically statutory rape, Sam.”

“Maybe,” Sam said, almost smugly, “if you could prove sex was happening. Can you?”

Phil was almost proud. Would have been, of her linguistic tricks, if they hadn’t been talking about some adult man abusing his teenage niece. “He’s taking advantage of you, Sam.”

“How?” she asked. “Just by being older than I am?”

“You’re young,” Phil said, “and inexperienced and just starting to figure out boys and dating and sex. And you grew up without a father—”

“I had you,” Sam pointed out. “And, even if I didn’t, what difference would it make?”

Phil shook his head; he’d done some of his own research on this too. “Many psychologists think that women who find comfort in the rigid and exaggerated roles of S&M,” he said, recalling the studies he’d found, “are filling gaps in their development left by a lack of male influence in their formative years.”

Sam’s gray eyes narrowed. “What?” She gripped the table’s edge and pushed away a bit as she stared at him confused and offended. “Where did you hear that?”

“It’s not the most studied topic, but there have been studies done on BDSM and more fringe types of sexual deviancy,” Phil said. “And, from what I’ve read, it’s not surprising that a girl with your background would find it intriguing.” He scooted forward in his seat, reaching out to clasp her hands in his. “But there are other ways to deal with those types of issues. You can always talk to us. Or a professional, if you’d rather have a separate, unbiased person.”

“You think I need a therapist?” Sam asked, her voice squeaking indignantly as she snatched back her hands from under his. “You think I’m crazy?”

“Not crazy,” Phil assured her. “I just think that you may have some,” he tilted his head as he searched for the right words, “emotional issues that you have to deal with. Ones you may not even know are there.”

Sam stood up from the table, pushing her chair back. She shook her head. “I—” She shook her head again. “I don’t even—” She stepped back, looking at him with wide and disbelieving eyes. She huffed and shook her head. “You just don’t get it.” She turned to walk away. “And, what’s worse, you don’t want to.”

———

Pip jumped as Phil threw his pen at his computer, only to have it bounce off his screen and tumble to the floor. She reached down between their cubicles to retrieve it. “Having trouble with your article?” Lord, she felt tense herself from all the stress he was giving off. “Or just nervous about the press conference Monday?”

“Among other things,” he muttered, smoothing his hand over his slicked back hair.

“Anything I can do to help?” She handed him back his pen.

“I talked to Sam yesterday.” He sighed. “It didn’t go well.”

“About Fischer?” Pip winced. Yeah, that was a talk that couldn’t have been anything other than awkward.

“Yeah.” He shook his head. “I swear,” he hissed through gritted teeth, “if that bastard wasn’t off on some conference, I’d happily rip him apart right now.”

She’d bet. “How long is he supposed to be away for?”

“A week.” He made a frustrated sound. “Not nearly enough time.” He placed the pen back in its holder with a loud clank against the ceramic. “He’s got her all turned around,” he said, frowning, “and wrapped around his finger.”

“I don’t know.” Pip pushed her office chair away from her desk to look at him more directly. “Sam seemed pretty confident and self-possessed when I met her.”

Phil huffed. “I always thought so.” He turned in his chair to meet her gaze. “My sister and I did our best to make sure she turned out that way.” His brow wrinkled with irritation. “I just don’t know what happened.” Leaning back in his chair, he sighed. “Like I said, we tried to talk to her, but she just doesn’t want to listen. Thinks that we just don’t get it. Whatever that means.”

Oh, Pip knew exactly what that meant. The last people a young woman exploring her sexuality wanted to talk openly to was her family. Especially if that family wasn’t exactly sex positive. “My offer still stands,” she said. “She might feel more comfortable talking to someone else. Someone who’s been there before.”

God knew, Pip could have used that when she was just starting out. It’d taken a while for her to find the right people and get into an established community. That would have been amazing if she’d been able to bypass all that and get introduced to that world at Sam’s age.

“I suppose.” Phil shrugged. “Do you want to come over tonight? Or we could all go out to dinner or something.”

“It might be better if I meet her alone.” Pip pursed her lips. “Just the two of us.”

He frowned, his eyes narrowing suspiciously. “Why?”

“She’s already not talking to you,” Pip pointed out, “and hasn’t for a while. And, considering what she’s getting into, she really needs to talk to someone. She’s not going to talk to me, if you’re there.” Otherwise, Sam was just going to see Pip as an extension of her mom and uncle.

Sam didn’t need another nagging parent-figure; she needed to see that someone was on her side. Pip knew what it was like to have people who thought they knew best poking in on things that were none of their business.

Pip’s mother had been—still was—a bit of a snoop. She saw parenting as a game of constant supervision. Pip often wondered if her mother’s eagle eye had been the factor that had kept her away from some of the riskier temptations of youth, like drugs and youthful indiscretions. Unlike many of her peers, Pip had never been the type to go against convention for purely rebellious reasons.

Not to say she was normal. Pip looked down at her vintage peach lace, ballet-inspired dress that had once been a bridesmaid’s dress that she now paired with a thick, black belt that matched her black, silver-tipped pumps. Yeah, this badass ballerina wasn’t exactly normal in any respects.

Rather, Pip had spent most of her youth just trying to fit in, to hide and deny the parts of her that were innately different. That had felt flawed and unfixable. It’d taken her years of rather miserable searching to realize that she could hide from herself—pansexual, kinky, and just a bit quirky—and be unhappy, trying to fit herself into molds never meant for her. By dating overly aggressive, jock-y boys who aped at dominance through pointless, unmindful, and uncontrolled violence and aggression. Or by dating meek, shy boys who never quite knew what to do with her. Wrapping herself in the trendy trappings of normal.

Or she could just be herself. After all, living in fear of people discovering that she was different hadn’t helped her. She was pretty sure they could see it behind her bland clothes and her attempts to play by their rules. She remembered her mother watching her worriedly, even as a child. She’d always believed her mother’s overprotection and tight rein on what Pip did and where she went and with whom had been in response to that knowledge that her daughter was different, was—as they used to say—not quite right.

Looking at Phil now, Pip saw that same worry. It made her heart hurt and, if she was honest, made her feel disappointed in her cube-mate even as she understood far too well. “Just let me talk to her, Phil,” she said. “I’ll see what’s up and make sure that she’s okay.”

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