Page 12 of After Dark
“How vanilla did you pretend to be?” he asked.
“Desperately vanilla.” Josette laughed again. “But a little slutty, you know. Because I thought maybe that was what I needed. Not all the…” She remembered who she was talking to and did not say the wordbullshit.“Ceremony and drama. Just a whole lot of fucking around.”
“Tell me,” he invited her, and waved his hand.
She sighed a little, but she was careful not to let arch of her back slump any. Laughing was one thing, but protocol was another. “I joined the other apps, for regular people. I went on actual dates, where you text forever and then have an awkward dinner in a restaurant you would never choose for yourself.”
“That sounds right up your alley,” replied the man who had been inside her almost as soon as she’d learned his name, bending her over the bench in a hotel room within seconds of entering it.
There had been no time for awkwardness. They’d been too busy fucking with his hand around her throat. She’d been too busy begging.
They’d understood each other.
“Dates are very boring. There was all that talking, when it was clear there was no spark immediately.” Josette sighed. “Sometimes I would fuck them anyway, because I thought maybe vanilla people didn’t know if they were sparking or not.”
“Did you ever find yourself pleasantly surprised?”
“I did not.” She shook her head. “I did the hookup ones too, where you just show up and get to it. I liked those better, because they were more honest.”
His gaze seemed to catch on hers at that word, and she felt herself flush.
“I know that I’m a liar in this world,” Josette said quietly. “But I think you have no idea how much vanilla people lie to themselves. In their world, I’m a rare and radical being of direct and total honesty.”
“I believe you,” Arlo said. “Go on.”
“Every now and again it would be fun.” Josette considered. “What I mean by that is that it would get rough. And that only happened a few times before I realized that while I like it rough—far more rough, in fact, than it ever got with these men—I don’t like it rough when it’s not within a set, agreed-upon context.”
“I’m sorry you put yourself in danger,” he said. And she could feel another checkmark get added to his list.
She blew out a breath. “I don’t think I was in danger. But it all just got emptier and emptier. And finally I had to accept the fact that everything I was running toward was taking me farther away from what I actually want.”
It was quiet for a while, then. She could see him calculating, assessing, no doubt compiling evidence to use against her in a variety of creative ways. There was nothing she had ever done near him, or told him about, that he hadn’t used.
But hesawher. That was the difference. She knelt before him, fully naked, telling him these truths, and knew that she was completely and totally seen. Whether that ledto punishment or not, it didn’t matter. She wasn’t interchangeable. She wasn’t replaceable.
He knew her name. He knew almost all of her secrets. He knewher.
That wasn’t any less terrifying than it had been before. But having spent eighteen months on the flip side of this coin, Josette knew she had to figure out a way to keep this. To keephim.
Because without him, there was really no point.
“Am I allowed to ask you how many people you fucked?” she asked.
There was a burst of flame in that dark gray gaze of his. “You absolutely may not ask me that. You’ve lost your right, as I think you know.”
She lowered her eyes and acquiesced to that. It was only fair.
Even if it sucked.
“But I’ll tell you,” he said after a moment. “I’ve fucked a lot, Josette. I kept my dick wet and I didn’t play around with any vanilla bullshit. I had my pick of obedient submissives at my feet for the entire time you were gone. And do you know what?”
“What?” she asked, though she suspected she already knew where he was going with this. Because it didn’t hurt. It wasn’t as if he’d rejected her when he’d seen her. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t fucked her up against a wall and then face fucked her into another planet and back.
He hadn’t treated her like a stranger.Thatwould have broken her heart.
It didn’t matter to Josette how many women had cried all over his dick, because they weren’t here now. If he’d replaced her, he would have let her know that.
Immediately, she had to think.
