Chapter 12
RIGGS
Iwas not, in fact, ready.
I brought Smith home, anyway, waiting in front of the door to the shop while he parked.
The other times I’d seen him, he’d always carried himself with a sort of unsure tension.
Smith was all frowns and hunched shoulders, posturing and playing pretend when he realized people were looking at him.
But watching him lock his car, pocket his keys, and make his way down the street, he was quite the opposite.
Smith walked toward me like a confident man on a mission, like sex—or submission—was the answer he’d been looking for all along.
“You sure you want to come up?” I asked, shoving my key into the door.
“I came all this way.”
I disengaged the lock, but stopped short of pushing the door open.
“That’s…not a good reason,” I said.
He huffed out an amused breath and smiled softly at me. “I’m sure.”
Well, that made one of us.
It wasn’t that I was unsure about my want to be with him; it was everything else.
There was something about Smith that slipped under my skin in a way no one had since Ev, and if I wasn’t careful, I would get hurt.
It was the inevitable outcome, and I didn’t know enough about Smith to tell if he was worth the risk or not.
I knew he was attractive, I knew he was very sweet, and now I knew what he sounded like when he came.
That wasn’t enough to build anything on, not really.
He locked the door to the shop behind him and followed me up the stairs to the apartment, staying close without being on top of me. Once inside, he took off his shoes and kicked them into the corner, the familiar nerves finally settling back into place on his back.
That, I could work with.
“Don’t be nervous.” I held out my hand for him, and he took it, both of us staring down at the way our palms fit together. “You can still call this off at any time.”
“Just say red,” he repeated.
“Exactly.”
I licked my lips and pulled them together between my teeth, trying to decide what to do with Smith now that we were alone. Back at Rapture, I’d wanted to spread him out and make him come until he forgot his name, so that felt like a reasonable place to start.
“Is this just sex?” he asked.
“As opposed to?”
“Like, the other stuff from the club.”
“The BDSM parts?” I clarified.
He nodded.
“What do you want it to be?” I asked him.
He swallowed hard, chewed his cheek, a dozen emotions flashing across his face at the question. “I thought…watching…what I’ve seen before, one person makes the decisions and the other one just does what they’re told.”
The newness of Smith Covington was not lost on me.
The gift of it.
Of him.
“You make a series of choices,” I corrected, “and then I make the rest within the limits of what you already agreed to.”
“And that’s what you like?”
“Very much.”
“Is there always pain?”
“Not always, but…” I trailed off and took a step backward. He followed, obedient like a puppy. “I think you like when there is.”
“In theory,” he muttered, turning his attention to his socked feet and my wood floor.
“Smith.”
He glanced up at me from beneath the chocolate-colored fan of his eyelashes.
“It’s okay to be inexperienced,” I said. “This is always a learning process, even for people who have experience.”
He made a surprisingly dismissive sound in the back of his throat, like trying new things of his own interests was a novel concept for him. I did remember some of the things we’d talked about while he was in the chair getting tattooed, and I wondered if for him that maybe it was.
“Have you at least been with a man before?” I asked.
“Yes. Kind of.”
“You’ll need to elaborate on that.”
God, I hoped he didn’t tell me I was the first. I didn’t think my heart could take it.
“I’ve been with a man before once,” he said, and I tried to not sway on my feet at the honesty. “He was, he is, a friend of mine. I had too much to drink one night, and we fooled around.”
“Did he take advantage of you?”
Smith’s head jerked up, his eyes wide and worried. “What? No! Absolutely not, it wasn’t like that. I wasn’t drunk, just buzzed, and he let me top him because I wanted to see if I liked it.”
My mouth went impossibly dry. “And did you?”
“Yeah.”
“Have you bottomed? Sucked cock? Had yours sucked?”
His cheeks turned the most perfect shade of pink, and he shook his head.
“Was I the first man to jerk you off?” I asked.
“Yeah. Yes.”
“Did I do anything you didn’t like?”
His mouth pulled into a tight line, and he leveled a serious look up at me. “Yeah,” he answered. “You stopped.”
I chuckled, shaking my head. “I stopped because you finished.”
“I was nowhere near done.”
There was the level set of his shoulders again, the thoughtful confidence.
It was like Smith was on a dimmer switch and someone—maybe him, maybe me—kept adjusting it and turning his submission on and off.
He absolutely felt better about himself when he was leaning into that instead of running away from it, but getting him there and keeping him there was something else altogether.
That was something meant for relationships, which he and I would never have.
“Okay,” I conceded, rubbing my hands together. “Tell me what you want then.”
“I want to fuck.”
The bluntness of it all had me huffing out a breath that sounded a lot like a laugh. I tried to stifle it as to not hurt his feelings, but that was a completely different conversation for a different night entirely.
“We aren’t fucking,” I told him. “But I brought you here with the intent to get you off, and I’ll make good on that.”
“Okay,” he whispered.
“Do you want to submit, Smith?” I asked, taking another step toward my bedroom.
He followed after me, chest first, like there was some sort of tether between us. “I think so.”
“Do you understand what that means?”
“Not entirely.”
“It doesn’t mean you shut up and do what you’re told,” I said, corner of my mouth twitching.
“Well, it can, but…in this case, with us, here, tonight, it means you give yourself to me and trust me with your pleasure. You yield to me because you believe I know how to make you feel good and I know how to do that while keeping you safe.”
He opened his mouth to speak, but no sound came out, and we both took another step toward my room.
“If I hurt you at all, it’s because I know that pain will make you feel good. Maybe not physically, but in some way.”
“I do like pain,” he blurted. “I took a shower and held my arm under the hot water, and it hurt, but it made me really hard.”
“Did it?” It was difficult to swallow, to stay focused.
“I had to masturbate over it.”
“And?”
“I liked it.”
“So when you saw that throuple tonight at Rapture, saw how those clamps dug into his nipples and the way the hook stretched and tugged her asshole…”
“I liked it,” he said. “But it was the rest too.”
“The cane? The flogger?” I asked.
We were in the doorway to my bedroom, the window black for how dark it was outside, the only light in the space a small bedside lamp on Ev’s side of the bed that I never turned off.
“I think I would like to be spanked.”
“Is that one of your choices for the night?”
“Can it be?” he rasped.
“You can have anything you want, baby,” I promised. “You just have to tell me what it is.”
Smith nodded, slow at first, and then more certain.
“Yes,” he told me. “I want to be spanked.”
“Do you want to come?”
“Yes.”
“Do you…” I paused, knowing I had to pick my words carefully, trying to remember as much of the scene from Rapture as I could, as much of Smith as I could. “You want to be restrained, don’t you? You aren’t afraid of the struggle.”
“My whole life has been a struggle.”
“Well, not here,” I promised. “Not tonight. Take your clothes off, Smith. I need to get some things out of my closet.”
More than that, I needed a minute to compose myself.
With my back to the room, I did everything possible to ignore the sound of Smith’s clothing dragging across his skin, landing on my floor in a discarded pile.
I reached into the back of my closet and grabbed a pair of leather cuffs before thinking better of it.
That tattoo I’d just given him was far too fresh for bondage, and while I had no doubt the pain of leather against the raw skin would be exactly the sort of hurt Smith was looking for, I wasn’t the kind of man who deliberately ruined my work—or my toys.
Though it had been so long since I’d had a toy.
In the end, I picked a length of black rope and a thin bamboo cane, though I wasn’t certain I would use the last one.
Spanking was one of those things people were certain of in theory, but not always in practice.
The pain of it, when you were an adult being spanked by another adult, was sometimes far more psychological than physical.
I’d keep it with me to be safe, just to see how the night would go.
I dug out a bottle of lube from the bottom of the bag, and when I turned around, I almost dropped dead on the spot.
Smith stood at the foot of my bed…naked.
Save the fresh tattoo that covered his entire forearm, his skin was unblemished, pale but golden, like it was an undertone not a tan.
He was stocky, muscular but not overdone, and his chest held a spattering of curls that matched the soft brown of the curls on his head.
There was no denying the attractiveness of this man, nor how perfectly the thick cock jutting up from between his legs fit the rest of him.
One day, he would make a better man very happy.
“What do you say to end this?” I asked him.
“Red.” His dick bobbed in agreement.
“And if you say stop?”
“You don’t stop.”
I licked my lower lip, worrying my tongue back and forth. “Is that something you want to do? I’m okay if it happens in the moment, since we are on the same page, but I want to know if that’s on the table before we get going…do you want to pretend like I’m forcing you to take it?”
Smith swallowed hard. “I want to pretend you know what’s best for me, no matter what that looks like.”
“I do know what’s best for you.” I crooked my finger and beckoned him closer. “At least here. At least now.”
“Yes,” he agreed, chin trembling at what I could only imagine was an unspoken honorific.
“Get on your knees.”
He went down so fast I almost missed it, all tightly coiled grace and want sinking down to the floor at my feet.
“Give me your hands,” I told him. “Fold them like you’re praying.”
He did, keeping his stare downcast.
I did a simple series of knots around his fingers, fashioning the rope into finger cuffs that would keep his hands restrained without ruining the fresh ink around his wrists. It wasn’t anywhere near the knotwork I wanted to put him into, but it would have to do.
“You call red if your fingers start to hurt or pinch in any way. Do you understand?”
“Yes.” Another unspoken Sir in the air between us.
I worried hearing the word in Smith’s soft voice would be the end of me, so I didn’t bother to ask him for it. Besides, I had done nothing to earn it. This was a one-time thing, a fun end to a long night. Nothing more. Better for neither of us to get too attached to the roles or the ideas.
Pulling the tail of the rope, I coaxed Smith toward the bed. I sat down at the foot of my mattress and helped him up over my lap. I slip knotted the tail of the finger ties through a long-ignored eye bolt on the corner of my footboard, then adjusted Smith’s burning hot cock between my thighs.
“You can fuck my lap to make yourself feel good,” I told him, and in response he gave me a test thrust of his hips, a tug of the rope. A shaky whimper poured into the comforter, and I gently stroked my hand over the unblemished globes of his ass. “Just like that. There’s a good boy.”
The praise was another test and was met with a roll of Smith’s hips as he thrust his cock toward the bed.
“After I’m done spanking you, I’m going to make you come,” I assured him. “Whether you come all over my thighs first is of no consequence to me. It doesn’t change my plans. Understand?”
“Yeah,” he rasped. “Yes.”
“Okay. As long as we’re on the same page.”
With that, I lifted my hand into the air and brought it down hard. The echo of skin against skin filled the air, and then Smith whimpered, and I was the one who nearly blacked out.