Her Savior/Her Doms

I Found Her Pt2

The waiter says, Hi, my name is Alec. I will be your server tonight. What can I get for you this evening?

We will have the best Steak and Potatoes with a side of broccoli, paired with the best wine in stock, and for dessert, a lava cake.

Is it okay that I ordered for you? I am accustomed to being in control, so sometimes I forget my manners on a first date.

It is more than perfect that you placed the order on our behalf. I would have asked you to select my dinner for me. Because you know what is excellent here better than I. And is this a date?

Not really a date. A date will happen when Master Jake is with us. This is an informal meeting by chance, and man, am I glad you came tonight.

After the waiter left the table, I started with the basics.

What is your name, beautiful? And why, oh why, do you look so haunted? Do you like our club?

Well, my name is Destiny Ray, and I really am impressed with your club, but I am not ready to talk about what haunts me right now. I hope you can understand. My friends who seem to have abandoned me have brought me here to try to put life back into me after what happened a few years ago. I am not sure you want to get entangled with someone as broken as me. And what did you mean by you and a partner?

What if I promise you, Master Jake, that I can help you deal with whatever the issue is and make you happy and healthy? We are looking for someone who needs us as much as we need her.

Also, seeing you up at the bar, I took a picture of you and sent it to Jake, and he wants to meet you as badly as I did. You literally took our breath away. We have never been shy. When we see who we want, we go for it. And the fact that you are still here eating and drinking — I hope that means you are thinking about saying yes.

Destiny POV

I turn the thought over slowly, the way you turn over something you are afraid to look at directly. What if they could actually help me? Not in the way people say they will help. With good intentions and fading patience—but in a way that really helps. The kind of help that does not flinch. The kind that stays. But that is the part I cannot get past. The moment I open my mouth and the story comes out — the real story, not the edited version I give to people who ask out of politeness — I watch something change in their eyes. First comes the sympathy, then the discomfort, and then, eventually, the distance. People do not know what to do with grief that has not tidied itself up. They do not know what to do with nightmares that still have teeth, with a woman who can laugh at dinner and fall apart at three in the morning for no reason I can name out loud. I have lost people over it. Not cruelly — no one ever leaves cruelly — but they leave all the same, and the leaving always confirms the thing I am most afraid of: that I am too much, and not enough, all at once.

So what would two Doms do with that? Would the structure help, the way I hope it might — give me something to hold onto when my own grip fails? Or would they look at the full weight of me and decide, quietly and kindly, that this is more than they signed up for?

I do not want to tell it twice. That is the thing I keep coming back to. The story costs something every time it leaves my body — it is not just words; it is weight, and I have to gather myself for days afterward just to feel like myself again. I cannot do that twice. I cannot sit across from Leo tonight and give him everything, and then sit across from Jake next week and do it all over again, watching a stranger's face rearrange itself around the shape of my pain.

So I take a breath, set my glass down carefully, and look at Leo with as much steadiness as I can find. "I want to ask you something," I say, and my voice comes out quieter than I intended but holds. "Would you be willing to wait — to let me meet Jake first, before I tell you anything more? If I meet him and something feels right between the three of us, then I will tell my story once. To both of you, together, at the same table. That way I only have to be brave enough once." I pause, searching his face. "I need to know if they can handle what I carry. But I cannot keep handing it out like a test and hoping someone passes."

Leo laughed — not the polished, controlled kind of laugh I might have expected from a man like him, but something genuine and unguarded, and it changed his face entirely. "Of course," he said, and the warmth in it felt like a door swinging open. He leaned forward slightly, resting his forearms on the table, and his voice settled into something more deliberate. "When Jake gets back, and the three of us have had time together — real time, not a single dinner but enough to know — we will have a contract drawn up. Everything in it. Every boundary, every expectation, every agreement between the three of us written out clearly so that nothing is left to assumption." He held my gaze steadily. "I want you to always know where you stand with us. Not just tonight, not just when things are easy — always. A contract is not a cage. It is a map. It tells you exactly where you are and exactly how to find your way back if you ever feel lost."

I turned my glass slowly in my hands, watching the candlelight shift through it. "When does Jake get back?" I asked. "And when would we all be able to meet?" I paused, and then, because I had promised myself I would not sit quietly with the things that frightened me anymore, I said the harder thing out loud. "I have to ask you something, and I need you to answer me honestly." I looked up at him. "Jake has never met me. He has seen a picture and said yes. How do I know that when he actually sits across from me, it will still be yes? How do I know this is not just about what I look like?" I kept my voice even, but I could feel the old familiar fear underneath the words — the fear of being wanted for the surface of myself and left the moment something shinier came along. "I do not want to be someone you both want right now and decide to put down later because someone younger or prettier walks through that door."