For the first time in two years I woke up to a bed that wasn't empty. It was so tempting to just sit there in that bed and watch the way that the sun came filtering through the blinds and fell across the lighter portions of Eric's dark brown hair. It was so tempting to just lie there and enjoy the sensation of being wrapped up in the arms of another man for the first time in a long time.

I wanted so badly to just lie there and enjoy the man who had opened up to me to easily last night.

Maybe I should be angry that Eric had been willing to leave me over a text. Maybe that was a conversation that we should have at some point.

But I simply didn’t want to. I had spent the better part of two years pretending that I didn’t want Eric back. Now that he was, I didn’t want to look for reasons to stop a reconciliation.

If last night taught me anything, it was that Eric had clearly been wanting to experiment in our relationship for as long as I had, if not longer. Nobody was that willing to submit during a quickie in the kitchen that easily if they hadn’t spent a while thinking about how much they wanted to be dominated.

I wanted to discuss that with him. But more than that, I knew I needed to get down to the kitchen. Eric had always been ravenous after one of our more passionate sessions, and I knew that last night was definitely in our top ten nights that we had shared together. He would need even more food to get ready for the day, especially for his training that I was sure he would have later on in the day.

Reluctantly, I slipped out of his arms and out of bed. Throwing on a pair of sweatpants, I made my way down stairs and into the kitchen. It was easy to remember that his favorite foods had always been ridiculously heavy foods. He'd never loved oatmeal the way I did, and probably never would.

So bacon and eggs it was going to be for my little fighter. I suppose that made sense; bacon and eggs were full of protein and they certainly tasted a lot better than those nasty protein shakes he was always drinking. There was a general lack of green in my bacon and eggs, too, which automatically made them better in Eric's view, though I'd argue that the fresh kale was the only part of Eric's protein smoothie that wasn't completely disgusting.

Maybe I would forgo the oatmeal this morning and indulge in a little good old fashioned animal protein, too.

I was midway through the scrambled eggs and bacon when I heard Eric stir in the bedroom upstairs. After a few minutes, Eric came running down the stairs, rubbing the back of his scruffy head. Those tight jeans were wrinkled, but not nearly as much as the t-shirt. In the light of the morning, I allowed myself a satisfied smile at the t-shirt. He'd always hated them so much, and I knew that he had to have worn it for me and me alone. Left to his own preferences, the boy would have been wearing nothing but hoodies and sweatpants all year round. How he could stand them in the winter time, I did not know.

He looked awkward, I thought, as I scraped his eggs into the plate. Why was he feeling awkward? I thought we had sorted out all of the awkward feelings last night.

Well, no, I guess we hadn't. We had certainly given it a good shot, I supposed. We had definitely figured out why we hadn't worked out in the past, and while I assumed that was enough to get us to work in the future, maybe Eric had other questions.

I sat the plate down on to the kitchen table. Both of us needed to avoid the island for now, as it was in desperate need of a cleaning that could wait until Eric went to train.

Eric spied the plate of eggs and immediately broke out into a huge grin.

"You remembered," he said, taking a seat in front of the eggs.

"Your favorite breakfast? Of course," I answered. "How could I forget?"

"You're not having your gross oatmeal, are you?" Eric asked. "Because it's been years, and the idea of eating plain oatmeal with banana still freaks me out. Pretty sure it's given me at least one serious nightmare, too."

I laughed and sat down with my own plate across from him.

"I'll keep the nightmare fuel to a minimum," I promised. "At least for today."

He gave a shy grin, but pushed the eggs around on his plate. Well, that was certainly a weird sign. Eric never played with his food.

"Something bothering you?" I asked, taking a sip of my tea. Eric had his coffee, of course. It was always coffee with him, no matter how much I couldn't understand his love of it. I'd rather drink toilet bowl water than suffer though a pot of coffee, I was sure.

"I was just thinking. You lost your job because of me, didn't you?" Eric asked.

I shrugged around a forkful of egg, taking my time to chew and come up with a thoughtful response. "You could say that. But it's more truthful to say that I lost my job because a bigot had a problem with me marrying a man."

"Your co-workers knew about us?"

There was too much surprise in that sentence to make much sense, until I considered the fact that Eric was determined to always be closeted, and that meant keeping both his coworkers and friends out of the loops as much as possible.

"I never hid any part of my life, Eric," I reminded him. "I always wanted everyone to know how proud I was to have you as part of it."

His cheeks tinged with pink, but he finally took a bite of his eggs. We ate in companionable silence for a few minutes, until Eric asked another question.

"What about your current co-workers?" Eric asked. "Do they ... would they know?"

"Of course. Lila and Cassidy are great bosses to work for, and they're married, so they certainly don't have any issues with bigotry. Which would be a little weird of them, considering the work they are in. And the other doms there are equally open with their partners. There hasn't been anyone since you, but if there had been, I would have shared that part of my life with my co-workers, definitely."

"What about your clients?"

Eric tended to blurt his questions whenever he was nervous or upset, and this was definitely such a time. I frowned, uncertain what exactly had him upset at this particular point in time.

"What about them?" I asked carefully, taking a bite of my egg while I gave Eric the time to ask whatever it was that was bothering him.

"You have them," he said, making a vague "you know what I mean?" gesture with his fork.

Unfortunately, I didn't know what he meant at all. Of course I had clients. Was he worried about job security? Or something else, something that I wasn't picking up on at all?

"I do. And it's a good thing, too. You know how much it cost to book a session with me, right? You must know how well my job pays me. It pays much better than my old, "professional" management job at the call center."

"And there are other advantages, too, right?" Eric asked.

"Sure," I said, and I was confused at the way that his face fell at my answer. I clarified, "I mean, my bosses are great – the very friendliest you could ever ask for. It's wonderful working in an atmosphere where I can be myself. Plus, there's a toy company that gives us discounts on certain products, and I have to say that I can see that coming in handy very soon."

Eric frowned, a sure sign that I wasn't getting what his complaint was.

"Look, Eric, if there's something bothering you, I really don't know what it is. So maybe it will be best if you just come out and tell me."

"Your clients must be a perk, too," he said finally, and I watched him swallow half a cup of coffee after making the statement.

It was a necessary distraction, because I knew I needed to make my comments carefully.

"Eric, if you think that I'm going to work every day and getting off on being a dom to my clients, I'm not. Sure, it lets me explore new things and I like it, but I don't regularly take my clients home for sexcapades. You read the manual and you know the rules: no touching of genitals. No exchange of bodily fluids, and you can be sure that the people who are into blood play are very angry about that last rule."

He smiled softly. "I just can't imagine it not being a sexual act."

"Did you think it was going to be before you came in and saw me? Did you think I would spank you a few times and then you'd drop to your knees and blow a stranger?"

He flushed a shade of red that definitely clashed with the green on his shirt.

"No, but it wasn't as though I wasn't thinking about how I could use what we did together in a more private context. You know, if I ever got around to actually dating someone else."

I took a long sip of my tea, and smiled to myself over the cup. I was glad that he hadn't seen anyone else, and I certainly wasn't going to act as though I wasn't. I supposed gloating about it wasn't at all proper, but it made me feel better about my decision not to pursue a relationship with anyone else over the two years we'd been separated. I'd wondered - and been told by many people in my life - that I was just putting my life on hold for someone who had left with no reason. But now that I understood the reason, it was easier to think that I hadn't made a mistake in waiting on him to come back.

"And that's what most of the clients I see come in for," I answered. "Some of them are just lonely and need a human connection. Some of them just want to 'let go.' Some people just want new ideas about what to try out in the bedroom at home."

"But that's all it is, for you?" Eric pressed on, his face openly searching mine for proof that I was telling the truth.

I wrapped my hands around the cup of tea as I propped my elbows on the table, table manners be damned.

"That's absolutely all it is. It's a professional relationship, Eric. I'm not having sex with them."

That seemed to be enough to put him at ease. The tension in his shoulders decreased and the relaxed expression on his face showed happiness.

"But I still get free lessons, right? With the sex included?" Eric teased.

I laughed. "If that's what you want," I answered. "I am perfectly willing to offer all the free lessons you might ever want."

"It is what I want. Samuel... I spent two years trying to get over you , couldn't do it, even when I thought you were off spending your nights with some guy named Vernon who really liked quickies in the bathroom of Jonah's Crab Shack."

"Eric, that should have been your first clue that the message was a wrong number," I said with a sigh. "Both exhibitionism and crab are on my list of hard-nos. Crab is a poor man's lobster, honestly."

His eyes sparkled with barely contained mirth. "I look forward to seeing what else is on that list," he said. "Lobster and paddles? Caviar and riding crops?"

I nodded seriously. "Those are all delightful combinations," I agreed. "And maybe we can discuss them in greater detail after you get done training today."

"Yeah, I should probably get around to that. I have a couple of interviews for the local press, too. I think a guy from the Star is doing a spread for the Sunday sports section."

"And I have a couple of clients that I need to get cleaned up for and meet. First one to finish breakfast gets first go in the bathroom?"

Eric answered me by shoving the entirety of his scrambled eggs into his mouth. Well, that was fine. I could wait. I had done a good job of doing so for the past two years, hadn't I?