Free Sample
Preview from chapter one
My son came home slumped and sheepish, resembling every overgrown undergraduate who had ever sidled into my office with a grudge and nowhere else to put it. I had just stacked a fresh pile of blue books on the Chesterfield and was savoring the last of the fancy tea my son gave me for my birthday. When I set the mug on a coaster, his gaze followed it, as if even my minor rituals required full study before he could speak.
“Mom, do you have a second?”
Not “Miranda,” not even “Professor,” as his sycophantic friends had always delighted to call me. I patted the couch next to me. He perched on its edge without sitting, hands knitting themselves into knots.
“It ended,” he said.
For a moment I thumbed through the names of his ex-girlfriends, trying to recall which one had lately annexed his time. I settled on Mallory, the cappuccino-colored TA with an immune response to punctuation. Never my favorite, but that wasn’t the point. He was enthralled by her. Until, it seemed, he wasn’t.
“I’m sorry,” I said. He blinked at this, as if he’d expected an analytic dissection, or as if the notion of simple condolence was somehow beneath me. Perhaps it often was. I let my palm rest against the middle of his back and moved it in a small, slow circle. “Was it mutual?”
“Not really. She said—” He drew in a breath so dense I could practically hear the exhale of his deflating self-respect. “She said I was too ‘repressed’ for a D/s dynamic. Her words.”
I would have laughed, but his wounded pride performed such acrobatics across his face I had to summon sympathy instead. “Submissive, then.” I said it quietly, neither a question nor a diagnosis. He nodded. “Have you always known?” I asked, a clinician’s curiosity layered over a mother’s concern.
“For a long time. No one ever told me it was because I was immature, though.” He trailed off, unsure if I’d want to finish the sentence for him. I did not.
“Saying you are repressed doesn’t mean you’re immature.” Sometimes I was unable to turn off the lectures. “It means you have a guiding force within you that you are unaware of.”
He was quiet for a moment. Looked down at his hands. When he spoke, it was so soft I almost missed it. “My guiding force is that I want to be told how to keep her happy.”