Page 28 of The Bonds We Break
Halo grins. “Don’t mind looking after my half-sister here and there, but she’s a great reminder of why condoms matter. You deliberately changing the subject, or you want to tell me what that was between you and Spark?”
With a deep breath, I look down the hall. “I deliberately changed the subject.”
“In that case, let me tell you a story. Last night I went over to Dad’s for dinner, and while Dad was taking a leak, Mercy made a pass at me in the kitchen. Stuck her hand down my pants and told me she remembered how good it tasted when she sucked my cock.”
I try to shake off the foreboding from my conversation with Spark. “She’s shacked up with your dad, has a kid with him, and wants to give you a blow job?”
Halo shrugs. “Guess she assumed she could get both Flynn men for the price of one.”
“You take her up on it?”
He barks out a laugh. “Fuck, no. Dad’s a manwhore. And she’s fucked most of the brothers. We’re lucky Lollipop arrived without any STDs.”
Lollipop. Cute nickname for little Lola.
My second thought is if Rae has a nickname.
“I know you wanted to change the subject, and I’ll respect that,” Halo says. “But when you walk into the bar and look at your club, look at where people are congregating.”
When I do as he says, I see a clear divide. Those who voted for Saint on one side of the room, those who voted against him on the other.
I feel a wave of shame that I’ve reduced the club to this.
11
RAE
For all the practical problem solving I’m doing, I’m pissed. I’m pissed I’m here. I’m pissed I got dragged into Saint’s mess. I’m pissed at the snowstorm that rolled in overnight and took out the power at noon. I wouldn’t go as far as to say I’m a doomsday prepper, but every year as soon as I see the first fall frost on the ground in Ann Arbor, I stock everything up. Logs, candles, canned goods, water. I even have an emergency backup generator. But this place has barely anything.
I’m pissed I’m in this shithole of a man cave.
And I’m pissed I’m having to face these kinds of conditions. I’ve done absolutely nothing but live my life on my terms ... quietly, dedicated to helping others ... deliberately avoiding violence and drama.
Yet here I am.
After King left, it took me exactly two minutes to get myself off.
I’m a wizard at bringing myself to orgasm. I’m just shit at helping anyone else understand how to do it for me. There’s a concept of people having brakes and accelerators. Accelerators are all the things that get you turned on. The smell of a lover. A kink. Dirty talk. Watching the way they change gears when they drive stick. How they tug their T-shirt off at night before they get into bed. The feel of fresh clean cotton against naked skin.
Then there are brakes. The things that kill it for you. They’re mostly fears. That your thighs look fat or that your stretch marks are ugly. That it’s the start of your period. That your boobs sag. Or the timing is too close to your kid waking up in the morning. Or morning breath.
Some people have fast accelerators. For them, it takes nothing to get aroused. Some people are slow. It takes time. Some people have fast brakes. Some people have really slow brakes.
All of it is normal.
When I work with clients, it’s one of the things we establish. A husband with a fast accelerator and slow brakes struggles to connect with his slow-accelerator wife who has fast breaks. And it changes throughout a relationship.
Me, I’m a slow accelerator with fast brakes.
That combination needs a sensitive partner who knows how to build anticipation and is willing to work around things that I slam the brakes on.
And that’s the issue I’ve grappled with for most of my life. Sometimes I feel ashamed of it. It’s complicated to align my feminist views and quest for equality with needing to feel utterly powerless in bed to get aroused. Intellectually, I’ve long since reconciled that the dominant and submissive power exchange during sex is not in conflict with being a feminist in life. But shame is a subversive emotion that doesn’t follow logical reason.
I don’t want the kind of exchange where I know the guy isn’t really going to violate me because we’ve talked this shit through ahead of time. It feels contrived, like role-play. I just want to be owned in bed.
To feel powerless.
I grapple with it because the psychologist in me feels there is a link between feeling powerless as a child and needing to recreate that feeling as an adult. But the way I felt in bed with King was the closest I have ever felt to sexual completion with another person in my life.
