Jae

It was easy for her to lace her fingers through his, falling back into the same habits that they had years ago where she would lead and he would follow. It would be a dangerous game her to fall back into that when so much had changed in the last decade, but she found herself being just as stupid around Jae now as she had been back then. She was older and wiser but he would always be her weakness and it didn’t seem like time apart hadn’t changed that. She was silent until they were outside of the hotel and walking down the sidewalk. Her thumb ran across his knuckles. “How are you feeling being back?” Coming back had been its own struggle for her so she could only imagine what he was going through.

Noelle had been trying to give Jae his space during the trip. She wasn’t sure what coming back to the Institute was going to do to his mental state, and she didn’t want to crowd him and make things worse than they needed to be. Part of her had thought about leaving him behind, but she worried that leaving him alone for a week would be even worse. Putting Logan down to bed, she checked on Ferdi first to let him know that she would be spending a couple of hours with Jae before she went to go find the other man, greeting him with a smile once she did. “Hey, let’s go for a walk.” She held out her hand to him.

Ferdi only nodded as Jae very clearly made the connection. “Yeah. She relapsed and it was really bad,” he said softly. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting in Jae’s answer, but it certainly wasn’t that. “Oh Jae,” he said softly, instinctively reaching out to rub the man’s shoulder, “I am so sorry. That’s terrible,” he said softly. “I know there’s nothing that can fix all that, but is there anything I can do to help things moving forward?”

Ferdi sipped his tea and settled onto a chair - it seemed the time was now. “Maybe,” he agreed softly. Maybe they could kill two birds here. “I mean, my biggest issue was this whole thing was kinda thrown on me. She just came home with you one day, I didn’t have time to have an opinion on it,” he admitted quietly, “And then, over the last couple months she’s just been doting on you and seemed to shift her focus to you and that bothered me. Not because I can’t share attention - I can. But…Jae, you weren’t there. You didn’t see what your leaving did to her and how she barely survived it. I did. I was by her side every moment of that and it was something I didn’t like to watch,” he said honestly and raising his eye’s to Jae’s face. “So for her to accept you back without even a thought to it - that part hurt a lot. Like, like everything I did for her didn’t matter anymore because she had you bad and we both know she always had a stronger connection to you. So, I don’t know if I’m owed anything at all, but I’d really like to know…why? Why’d you leave her like that?”

Out of everything that’s happened to him in the past couple of years, this was probably one of the hardest things he’s had to endure. Not the part about the reasons Ferdi was upset with his presence - all of that was fair and valid. It was hearing the effect he had on Noelle after he left Lima all those years ago. “She... what?” He was right, Jae wasn’t there and while he knew his leaving was going to have an affect on Noelle, he didn’t consider exactly how drastic that effect was going to be. Noelle barely survived. Which means she relapsed. Which means he should have felt selfish for leaving and she should have left his ass in that auction house. Jae curled in on himself, pulling his knees up to his chest and trying his hardest to keep his anxiety at bay. The next question caught him off guard, but it really shouldn’t have. He didn’t know where to start, even though back then it all felt so simple. But he would find the words, because Ferdi deserved the answers to his questions. 

Feeding nodded, “you’re another submissive to her, Jae. You certainly don’t have to be waiting on me or doing things for me,” Ferdi said. There was a lot of tension right now but Ferdi very much knew and enjoyed his place with her. He sighed deeply as he tried to find the next words. “I know I haven’t made things easy on you. And I won’t bore you with the explanation unless you wanna hear it. But you’ve always meant a lot to her and that clearly hasn’t changed. So I’m going to try to be more understand about all this.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he hissed bashfully when he realized he’s startled the other man, the words of his Domme floating through his head about where Jae came from and the kinds of things he must have endured. He gave a smile as he lifted the tea cup for a sip, “Actually, it’s pretty perfect, thank you,” he said sincerely. “But…you know you don’t have to do this, right? For me, I mean.”

Ferdi was feeling better after getting some alone time with Noelle the night before. So in the morning, everything felt a lot better, like a weight had been lifted from his shoulders and he knew it was time to try to fix the other side. He went out towards the kichenette area of their room to get some tea, only to see there was a cup already waiting. “Jae?” he asked, “was this you?”