in my home office. I was going to make progress on all of that…how?
Maybe I needed to get some of this out of my brain before I tried to tackle my job. I wished today was one of the days Aaron and I met up at Bold Brew, but on the other hand, this kind of felt like something that needed the input of a disinterested third party. Or, well, fourth party, given how many of us were involved.
Fortunately, there was someone here on campus who I could talk to.
I checked my phone. A little after eleven-thirty. A quick check of the class schedule for the Linguistics department showed me he’d had a class at the same time as mine. If I walked over to his office now, I could probably catch him before he went to lunch.
On my way out, I texted him: Do you have 10 or 15 minutes?
I was just walking out of the building when he responded: I’m in my office.
Oh, thank God.
Minutes later, I was at his door, and I tapped my knuckle just below the placard that read M. Demers, Ph. D above Linguistics Department.
“Come in,” Max’s familiar French Canadian accent already had my anxiety ratcheting down few degrees. He was a lot like Aaron in that respect—a calm, soothing presence who somehow always knew what to say to keep me from unraveling completely. Which was ironic, considering Aaron was my sub and I was supposed to be the one who kept him anchored and steady, but since when did we follow the rules?
Anyway.
I stepped into my friend’s office and shut the door behind me. He was in a suit, as he sometimes was. Not just one of the ancient blazers thrown over a dress shirt and tie like some of the other professors on campus. I swear, Max Demers didn’t fuck around when it came to suits. He often dressed casually, but if he did wear a suit, he always looked like he’d just strolled out of a photo shoot for a menswear ad. Between that, his gray eyes, the short beard he sometimes kept, and the way he let his hair get a little longer at times, it was no wonder so many people on campus—including faculty—got a little weak in the knees around him. Aaron’s law partner usually forgot his own name around Max, and for as much as Aaron liked to playfully rib him about it, we both totally got it.
“Hey,” I said. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”
“Not at all.” Max gestured at some papers in front of him. “Nothing that can’t wait. Sit down.” Cocking his head, he studied me. “Something tells me this can’t wait?”
With a dry laugh, I took one of his guest chairs and set my laptop case at my feet. “Am I that easy to read?”
Max shrugged. “When you say you need to talk, I assume you need to talk.”
Okay, that made sense.
“So, uh…” I scratched the back of my neck. “I told you about the guy who responded to our ad.”
He nodded. Max was a Dom as well, one who frequently did demonstrations in the back room at Bold Brew and at local parties. Though we’d never played together, we’d watched each other in action before, and we were both quite open about our involvement with kink. He’d known about my situation with Aaron since well before we’d placed the ad, and he was the only person besides Aaron (and now Kelly) who I could discuss any of this with.
Tapping my fingers on the armrest, I said, “Well, we met him. And we met him again last night.”
An eyebrow flicked up. “Did you?”
“Yeah.” I gave him the rundown, doing my best to fill him in without breaching Kelly’s trust. When I’d finished, I sighed. “Now I… I don’t know. I feel weird about it, and I’m not even sure why.”
“It makes sense to me,” he said, sounding like it absolutely did make perfect sense.
“It does?”
“Of course.” Max leaned forward, folding his arms on the edge of the desk. “You’re a Dom, and you’re putting your submissive in the hands of someone new. Even if Kelly is a submissive as well, he has some control. Some power.” He half-shrugged. “The whole reason you brought him in is that you don’t want to hurt Aaron as much as he needs to be hurt. Anyone would feel strange about letting someone else step in and do for his submissive what he can’t do himself, and for