Page 41 of After Dark
That made her feel like she might come again.
“What do you think about a life like this?” he asked. “Is that what you want, Josette?”
She sat with that a moment and then she looked up at him, trying to take in the expression on his face. He was always unreadable, but tonight it seemed to her that he was even more so.
“If I pick one or the other, will you be happy?” she asked him.
Something flickered in all of that storm cloud gray. “Yes,” he said.
But her ass was cherry-red. She knew that when she went to the bathroom to look, it would be red with stud marks like bruises all over her butt cheeks. They were always mottled marks now, before and after he smoothed that salve into them in the evenings before bed.
She could feel how tender her nipples were from yesterday’s clamps. Her asshole still felt the effects of yesterday’s butt plug and the hard ass fucking he’d delivered afterward. And her pussy, that had certainly been wet while she was away, had transformed itself the way it always did in his presence.
Because that was what this was like. That pussy was his, and it knew it. She was his, and she knew it too. The only thing she’d ever found concerning was how little she thought she belonged here.
But that didn’t change the fact that she didn’t believe him when he said he would be happy with her defining their dynamic. That was… pretty much the exact opposite of what both of them wanted.
So she looked him in the eyes, that deep gray storm. She summoned up her courage.
“Arlo,” she said, very deliberately and without looking away. “We both know you’re lying. But don’t worry. That won’t be the end of this for me.”
Chapter Ten
For a moment, Arlo couldn’t believe that he’d heard her correctly.
He felt his whole body react as if he was warding off a blow.
But Josette wasn’t looking at him accusingly. On the contrary, her eyes were shining and he could have sworn that the expression on her face was purely tender.
She was looking at him as if she’d never seen him before.
“If I told you I wanted to go vanilla, you would do that, wouldn’t you?” she asked, and again, it wasn’t an accusation. Her voice was filled with wonder.
And for some reason, Arlo Finn, who had stared down some of the world’s most terrifying men and thought nothing of it, felt something like tightness in his chest. And in his throat.
“I would,” he said. “I wouldn’t believe you, but I would.”
Josette stared at him, her pale blue eyes seeming to see right through him. “I don’t think I understand you at all.”
“It’s actually very fucking simple,” he said. She felt restless in his arms, but he didn’t let her move. He didn’t let her stand up or walk away. He took her face in his hand and moved it so she was forced to look straight at him. Those freckles across her nose. Those pale blue eyes. That lush, dirty mouth of hers. “I love you, Josette.”
He felt her shudder. When she opened her mouth, he shook his head.
“When I say I love you, I mean it. When I gave you my collar to wear, I meant forever. You don’t have to run away when it gets hard, Josette. You can runtome. There’s no version of you that I’m not obsessed with.”
“Arlo…” she began.
“I was bored out of my fucking mind at that business dinner,” he told her. “Then I saw you and everything made sense. I knew you were mine the minute our eyes met. That I was inside you barely half an hour later didn’t surprise me at all. And that you like the same shit I do in bed?”
He shook his head, remembering the wild thrill of that first night. Of the days after, as they’d discovered all the ways they matched. “That’s the perfect example of what I mean, Josette. I don’t need you to act a certain way, or be a certain person, or pretend any fucking thing. I just need you to be mine.”
She made a strangled sort of sound, but he didn’t let go of her.
Arlo put his face even closer to hers. “I like you slutty. I like you obedient. I like it when you’re pissed at me and submit to me anyway. I love the fact that you came back to me even though you couldn’t have known how I’d react.” He let out a short laugh. “Hell, I like the fact that you subjected yourself to completely subpar sex out there, because I know you well enough to know that the sex iswhat got you to come back here. You like the way we do it. Because it’sperfect,Josette.”
He could see her chest moving at that, but she didn’t try to argue.
That was a good thing, because he wasn’t done. “You always refused to admit that it’s the emotional stuff that matters more. I knew that back then. I thought it was something we could work on. I’ll admit I didn’t know how deep it went.”
