Free Submission Revealed by Diana Hunter Page B

inside the city limits, so this couldn’t officially be called an Indian summer, but the warmth of the sun promised a pleasant turn to the day.
    “That’s the first member of your family I’ve met.” Sarah slid into the passenger seat as Phillip held the door for her. She loved that he did that. While she was perfectly capable of getting her own door, and did most of the time, the fact that Phillip cared enough to take the extra steps meant a lot to her.
    “Uncle Irv has been a Dom longer than I’ve been alive.” He shut the car door and came around to the driver’s side, sliding in and buckling his belt before starting the car. “He was the first one I confided in when I was a young teenager.”
    “How did you do that? I can’t imagine telling anyone about…” She left the sentence unfinished. Heck, she didn’t even have the words to express it to Phillip, how could she ever tell a family member she liked to be tied up and dominated?
    “I still don’t know if it was by accident or design on his part.” They pulled away from the shop and Sarah glanced back. Such a lonely building that held such wonderful secrets. She sighed. Like she used to be before she found Phillip.
    “I was about fifteen and had just discovered girls,” Phillip continued. “Or rather, they had discovered me.” He grinned that rakish grin that Sarah suspected had something to do with girls falling all over him.
    “My dad was away a lot on business and hard-ons are definitely not something a boy talks to his mother about.”
    Sarah giggled. “It’s hard enough for a girl to talk to her mother about sexual feelings. For a boy it’s gotta be downright impossible.”
    “Uncle Irv and Aunt Tess were my favorite aunt and uncle. They’ve always lived above the shop and there’s a separate entrance in the back. We kids weren’t allowed into the store much back then and certainly never in the back room. He sold a lot of other jewelry back then. Stuff he’d buy from a wholesaler and then resell. Once Aunt Tess died, he sold off all that stock and went into semi-retirement. Now he only sells what he makes himself.”
    “So how did the two of you get to talking about sex?”
    “I had walked over to see them—” At Sarah’s look of surprise, he smiled. “This neighborhood used to be pretty middle-class. A mixture of cultures, really. Great place to grow up. There were the Steins living next to us, the Washingtons across the street, the Riveras two doors down. The American melting pot right on my own street.”
    “What happened?” Sarah gestured to the row of abandoned houses they were passing.
    “The suburbs.” He shrugged. “Upward mobility meant moving out of the crowded city and into identical houses in subdivisions. Everybody left. The donut effect, as you so recently called it. And where there’s a void left…”
    “Crime moves in,” Sarah finished for him, looking out the window.
    “One of these days I’d like to do exactly what you said before—buy up an entire block, both sides of the street, and start again.”
    “Why don’t you?”
    Phillip looked at her. “Guess I just need the right woman beside me egging me on.”
    Sarah grinned. “I bet I can find a cattle prod somewhere if you need it.”
    He laughed out loud. Sarah loved that laugh. So rich and rolling it always made her chuckle in response.
    “If you’ve already found it, I think I need to find a better hiding place!”
    She looked at him in mock horror. “You don’t really have one, do you?”
    He waggled his eyebrows at her but didn’t answer as he turned onto the expressway that would take them out of town and back to their cozy nest in the middle of the woods. She changed the subject.
    “Okay, back to your story. You walked to your aunt and uncle’s and…”
    “Uncle Irv was in the store and Aunt Tess was out grocery shopping. With no customers in the store, we shot the breeze for a while, then I asked him about girls. Specifically, I