Page 8 of For the Night

“Are you ever gonna tell me what eventually caused the breakup?” I reached for another slice.

He sighed. “Can’t we leave it at, it was my fault?”

I didn’t believe that for a second. Several of us knew the gist of their problems, and they’d struggled for at least a couple of years, on and off, before they’d split. As a vanilla couple, they’d aced everything together, so they’d taken frequent breaks from kink, where they had very little in common.

I supposed that one bothered me the most. Because for as much as I needed BDSM in my life and identified with my core kinks, I couldn’t imagine a situation where I saw no solution—as long as I felt so strongly for my partner outside of the playroom.

“I pushed him too hard,” Ash admitted. “I felt like we were falling apart, so I lost my shit. I pissed him off at every turn to get him to explode, and in the end, I asked him to choose between kink and our family.”

I winced.

Maybe not the smoothest move, but what caged animal reacted rationally?

“I wanted us to walk away from kink,” he said. “Nate was sure I’d be miserable and grow to resent him. So…” He swallowed hard and tossed the crust back into the box. “I said I was done. I spent that night at my brother’s house, and then I found a place to rent shortly after.”

Fuck. It hurt to hear about it. Way more than when I thought about my own relationship ending, actually. Further proving Ella and I hadn’t been doing okay for a long time.

“I’m so sorry, Ash.”

“Yeah, me too.” He chugged his beer.

I glanced across the pool at Colt and Kit, and Lucas was on his way to join them.

Colt and Lucas had once faced similar problems, in that they were both Doms. They’d been together for nearly a decade before Kit had completed their dynamic, though Colt and Lucas had tried before. No one had gotten close. Colt and Lucas had constantly put each other first, mending every cut before it could get infected.

For Ash and Nathan… Things hadn’t worked out that way. But they had kids, and including another man in that way of life wasn’t the same. Even less so because they didn’t really consider themselves poly.

“Hey, isn’t that the Swedish girl who’s got a crush on you?”

Goddammit. I followed his gaze, immediately knowing he’d spotted Nora somewhere. Sure enough, she’d just joined Ty and Lane at a table on the deck.

I knitted my brows together and eyed Ash. “How do you know about her?”

“Reese mentioned her on the cruise when I asked who Shay was close with,” he said. “We were discussing the brats’ ongoing scheming, but we ruled out most brats who weren’t there.” He tipped his bottle toward Nora. “I heard she’s new here and joined partly because of you.”

I sighed, wishing we could circle back to the previous topic. “She doesn’t know what she wants. She’s young.”

She’d sent me a friend request online after she’d joined us, and I’d declined it. In my defense, I only befriended people in our forum if I already knew them from having interacted with them in real life.

Two friends, Reese and Santiago, had given me a heads-up about her so-called crush.

NoraOfTheNorth was her username. She looked like a petite goth girl, maybe an inch or so shorter than my own five-four. According to her profile, she was a primal brat and submissive, “strictly lesbian, no DMs from dudes about play,” with approximately fourteen exclamation points.

She was fucking adorable. And beautiful. Very much so. But she was barking up the wrong tree. If she wanted a night of casual play, fine by me. No more than that. I was done with relationships.

“How young?” Ash asked.

“Twenty-four, I think.”

He snorted. “So she’s the same age as pretty much all the partners of our cradle-robbin’ friends.”

I grinned, unable to help it. He had me there. Most of us founding members were around forty, except for Macklin. He was in his early thirties—his hubby was, however, older. The rest of them had found younger men in their early- to mid-twenties.

Ash turned to me. “What were you doing when you were twenty-four?”

I bit off a chunk of crust and scowled at him.

He smiled. “You could vote, drink, decide what you were gonna do for the rest of your life, but you couldn’t possibly be trusted with a girlfriend?”

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