The velvet of the tied fabric leaned in towards each other, trying desperately to shield their master from the cold, bleak winter months outside, thou...h in these parts the worst that could chill him were the rains. The rains and that eternal poison of a lover. When the wind through the willows had bored his purposefully blank conscience, he ambled back towards the desk, folded the paper, and neatly slipped it into a gold-washed envelop. With a heavy, rubber seal he stamped the envelope shut. That evening I got a text from him but it was just a link to a BDSM website. Curious about it, I clicked on the website and began reading. My thoughts about it were all over the place. After a while, I realized that I had been reading and going over all of it for hours and it was late. I put my phone down and headed off to bed. The next day after work I decided to go back to the park. I sat on the bench with my headphones on and continued to think about what I had read the night before.The. .. even Sara. We hadn't really talked about what we were,what we meant to each other, and it seemed too early to have that talk,but at the same time my being pregnant was kind of accelerating thetimetable.All these thoughts swirling in my head made this run completelyunenjoyable, which was actually a familiar feeling for me. Back when I'dbeen a football player, I'd hated running. I was easily the slowest guyon our team - even slower than the 350-pound nose tackle who barely gotoff the bench -. ” Dad is one of the best peacemakers I’ve ever seen. I’ve never heard him raise his voice, even in his classroom. He had Mr. and Mrs. Anderson in tow with him and Mom and waved the three of us off to the games.I looked at Melody and Lissa and all three of us heaved a sigh of relief.“Well, that went better than I expected,” Melody said, rolling her eyes to clue us in on her sarcasm. “What a shit!”“Mel, honey,” Lissa soothed, “we knew from the phone conversation a few weeks ago that he was going.