Discovering Daisy (The Protectors 5.60)

The next morning, I’d left Sage and Daisy in bed as I’d showered and when I’d gotten out, they’d been cuddling and talking much like they’d been the morning after I’d told Daisy the truth about Sage’s and my pasts. I’d kissed them both like I had that first morning, then we’d had breakfast together.

The same exact thing had happened the next night.

And the next.

Things with Daisy never went beyond some light petting and those searing morning kisses. She always waited until after Sage and I had made love to join us in bed. On the one hand, it was driving both me and Sage crazy because we wanted more, but on the other, we were just so glad that she was the one coming to us that we were reluctant to question it.

Our days had fallen into a comfortable routine as well. I’d asked Memphis not to schedule any jobs for me and Sage for a little while, since I wanted to make sure Daisy was comfortable staying alone in our house before we left for any overnight assignments. While I wasn’t worried that she was in any kind of danger, she was still struggling with the fact that Dylan hadn’t been found. She and Mav had been able to work together to find out some more information about Dylan, but it was sparse and it hadn’t helped locate the young man. But there’d been signs that Dylan had logged into his gaming accounts several times since his disappearance, so it gave Daisy hope that he was alive. She’d tried repeatedly to contact him via the games’ interfaces, but he’d never responded and had ultimately closed his account. Ronan had promised that we’d keep looking for him, but unfortunately, the leads were starting to dry up.

Besides the Dylan thing, everything was flowing along seamlessly. Sage and I had enjoyed getting to know Daisy. She’d opened up to us about her childhood with her mother which, while chaotic, had also been proof of how close she and her mother had been and what losing her in such a violent way had done to Daisy. The more Daisy opened up, the more she came out of her shell. Instead of escaping to her room every night to read or play one of her online games, she watched television with us. On her days off, we’d shown her around the area and had even gone hiking to explore the limestone caves and hot springs that northwest Arkansas was known for.

Every night after we turned off the television, Daisy said her good nights and went to her own room. Sage and I kept hoping she’d come to bed with us right away, but she’d seemed intent on giving us alone time. And while Sage and I made love every night, Daisy’s absence was becoming more and more noticeable, which was insane because she’d never participated in our sexual activity even once – not since the night of the wedding more than two months earlier.

Sage had been doing well, though he still had moments where he needed me to step in and give him a reprieve from the shit that was happening in his head. Fortunately, he always told me if I wasn’t quick enough to pick up on it, though I usually was. I’d stopped worrying about what Daisy would think. If I noticed that Sage was struggling or seemed on the verge of getting lost in himself, it didn’t matter where we were or what we were doing, I’d send him to his knees or I’d give him some other order that was meant to snap him out of it. The first time it had happened, I’d expected Daisy to flee the room, since it had happened while we’d been eating dinner. We’d had the TV on and there’d been a story on the news about a little girl being abducted and when they’d flashed her image on the screen, Sage had frozen. I’d ordered Sage to turn the television off instead of turning it off myself. When he’d tried to excuse himself from the table, I’d refused the request and I’d ordered him to finish his food. Daisy hadn’t interfered and she hadn’t looked down on either of us as I’d used every opportunity to occupy Sage’s mind with something else. When we’d finished dinner and Sage had cleaned everything up, I’d taken him to our room and used a mix of pleasure and pain to send him to that quiet place in his head that he craved. It’d taken a good two hours before he’d come back to himself completely. When Daisy had joined us in bed, I’d given him the chance to talk to us about what had set him off, but he’d declined.

Though he’d promised he’d tell us both soon.