Page 31 of For Real

“Let go.” His breath stirred the fine hairs at the back of my neck. I almost didn’t recognise him because it wasn’t his master voice.

The pressure of his body against mine shoved me into his hand. Made me fuck it, as though it was something I wanted. For some reason, that was what tipped me over an edge I didn’t even know was there, and I came, moaning softly, the closest to surrender I’d let myself come since Toby.

He pulled up his trousers and let me down, checked my circulation, tended to my back a little. I got dressed again, feeling dazed and empty and restless.

As we left the playroom, he turned to me. “Do you want to do this again? I mean, more than once a year?”

I’d been right, then. We had been here before. “I’m not sure. I don’t really do regular or long-term.”

“I know you don’t.”

Something about the way he said it made me stop and look at him. He was probably a handful of years older than I was, handsome, in a square-jawed, iron-haired English way. It was easy enough to imagine him in a boardroom and, if his house was anything to go by, probably not far from the truth.

He shrugged. “It’s no skin off my nose. You can do what you like. I’m happy for you to come home with me once in a while, to be hurt and used. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

I nodded and told myself I was too old, too familiar with this dance, to blush.

We creaked upstairs in our matching leather club wear. Absurd. Utterly absurd. At the front door, he reached out a hand to stop me. It seemed I’d been having a lot of conversations in hallways recently, a reflection that inevitably made me remember Toby and his not-quite-offered mouth.

It had been for the best. I had done the right thing.

But…damn him. He had ruined me in a single night.

“You obey, D, but you don’t submit. And, don’t get me wrong, that’s your choice too. But”—Master Whatever’s eyes caught mine for a moment—“is it what you need?”

I was sure I was usually less transparent. Alarm and a touch of guilt prickled through me and made me snappish. “I don’t think what I need is any of your business.”

“No, but it could be.” His gaze was steady on mine. There was no denying, the man had something, a presence perhaps, now that I was paying attention to him. “I’m willing to make it my business.”

I gave him a sharp look. “Why?”

“Why not? I like fucking you, I like hurting you. I want you on your knees, and I think you want to be there.”

Presence or not, it was too much. Too much from him, anyway. “What the fuck do you know about what I want?”

“Nothing, but that’s only because you’ve never told me.”

I tried to imagine a future with this man whose name I couldn’t remember. What it would mean. What it might be like. But I couldn’t. It seemed impossibly alien. Even the thought of kneeling to him, of offering him that small amount of power over my heart and mind and will, made bile burn at the back of my throat. And the darkest, most confused and desperate part of me wanted to do it precisely because I hated it, and that would—in some twisted, terrible way—be pleasurable. I dragged my dry tongue across drier lips. “And…and what if I did? Tell you.”

“Well, then we’d discuss it.” He made it sound obvious, as if getting what you wanted was simply a conversation you could have. He probably had a checklist we could go through together. But how could I explain that what I wanted was not to have a conversation about what I wanted? “I’d expect to push your limits, though.”

“My…my private limits are very different.”

He nodded. “Most people’s are.”

There was a long silence.

“I don’t—”

“D, I know you were with Robert, and I know you were together a long time, and I think what you really want is something that’s gone.”

This was getting worse by the second. It was unbearable that he knew these things about me. And equally unbearable to know these things about him: that he was perceptive, that he was kind in his way, lonely perhaps, and that he too wanted more. If only one could safeword out of a conversation.

“You can never have that,” he went on. “But you can have something else. If you’ll let yourself.”

“You?”

“Yes.”

---