Rediscovery Read Free

me. Besides, I got there while they were setting up, before anyone else had arrived yet. I’d already offered by the time everyone else got there. If my booth gets busy, I send the kids back, and everyone’s happy.”
     
    “Good evening, gentlemen,” the waitress said, interrupting their conversation. “I’m Holly. I’ll be your waitress tonight. Can I get you something to drink? A beer, a cocktail, a glass of wine?”
     
    “I’ll have a Heineken,” Michael said.
     
    “Just water for now,” Lee said.
     
    “It’s a con and you aren’t drinking?” Michael joked. “What’s wrong with you?”
     
    Lee laughed. “I don’t need alcohol to have a good time, and watching the drunks around me is always entertaining.”
     
    “I’ll remember that,” Michael said. “Fortunately it takes more than one beer to get me drunk, but maybe I’ll switch after I finish this one.”
     
    “Give it a try tonight,” Lee proposed. “Let me show you the world through a different lens.”
     
    Michael hesitated a moment, remembering the things he had seen at clubs in college, but despite the leather earlier in the day and the fetish gear in the booth, Lee wasn’t giving off the dominant vibe Michael had gotten pretty good at picking up after he’d decided that life wasn’t for him. “Okay, you’re on. Can I drink the beer I already ordered?”
     
    “You can do whatever you want,” Lee said. “Like you said, one beer probably won’t get you drunk. Then after dinner, we’ll paint the town red, my way.”
     
    The last two words gave Michael pause, but he pushed the nerves away. Lee hadn’t given him any reason to be nervous other than making leather items, and his kindness to the children was plenty of reason to give him a chance. “We should look at the menus. The waitress will be back soon.”
     
    Almost as if summoned by Michael’s comment, the waitress returned with their drinks. “Do you have any questions about the menu?”
     
    “What’s the soup of the day?” Lee asked.
     
    “Chicken tortilla soup,” the waitress said. “We also have an entrée special. This evening, we’re serving cocktail de camarones. If you’re ready, I can take your order now, or I can come back in a few minutes.”
     
    “I’m ready if you are,” Michael said to Lee.
     
    “We’ll go ahead and order,” Lee told the waitress. “I’ll have beef fajitas, please, with extra guacamole.”
     
    “I’ll take the special,” Michael said. “That sounded really good.”
     
    When she had left, Michael leaned forward. “So, do you have a shop somewhere?”
     
    “I have a workshop where we do all the cutting and sewing,” Lee said, “and I do see customers there if they’re local and want to come in, but I do most of my business at shows like this one and online. That way I don’t have the overhead of a huge stock or the cost of retail space. I converted a barn on my family’s property into the workshop so the only cost is electricity and then the equipment and supplies, of course.”
     
    “Of course,” Michael said, his own business background adding to his curiosity. “It seems like an odd profession to get into.”
     
    “I learned from my grandfather,” Lee explained. “He was a leather worker, all the way from the tanning to the finished product. I don’t tan the hides myself. I always hated that part, but I learned to love the finished leather and everything that could be made with it. The problem is that fewer people use leather regularly these days than in my granddad’s day, so I have to be creative with the products I make. People don’t want to spend enough on wallets and purses these days to make that profitable, but when I was first starting out, an acquaintance referred me to a local BDSM club. Talk about a shock for a poor country boy, but once I got over that, I started looking at the gear in the room. Ninety percent of it was made of leather, so I looked a little closer, and it was