Chapter 15
SMITH
The afterglow of my night with Riggs had worn off by Tuesday.
All day Sunday and Monday, I rode the high of our encounter, allowing myself to really think about the things we’d done together and the way they made me feel.
From the bathroom at the club to his bed, his bathtub, there wasn’t a single waking second when I wasn’t thinking about him.
It was probably unhealthy and the Waterman restoration downtown was probably going to suffer for it because even at work I couldn’t stop thinking about Riggs.
After work, I gave up trying to win the battle. I called Lincoln on my way home from work, hoping he wasn’t too busy with Hunter to answer. Thankfully, he picked up on the fourth ring, sounding a little winded.
“Hey!” he greeted, breath puffing into my ear.
“Did I interrupt?”
“Not what you’re thinking,” he said. “Your brother is at work. I was just wrapping up a video.”
My cheeks heated with the understanding of what that meant.
“I hope you didn’t rush through an orgasm just to answer my call,” I said.
“I was coming when it rang.” Lincoln chuckled. “You’re good. What’s up?”
“Well, first, I have to be honest. This is new to me.”
In the background of the call, water turned on, and I imagined Lincoln was washing his hands.
“Talking on the phone?” he teased.
“Asking for help.”
“Are you okay?” The playfulness was gone from his tone, nothing but concern in his voice now.
“I’m fine,” I said quickly. “I just mean that before if I needed to talk about something, I would call Marshall.”
“But calling Marshall became the problem?”
I didn’t want to ruin my thoughts of Riggs with thoughts of my oldest brother and the unhealthy way I idolized him. “I can’t talk to Marshall about this,” I admitted.
There was a silence, and then, “Hunter is working late. Do you want to come over? We can get take-out.”
“I’d like that,” I told him. “And I’d like to check in on Feeny.”
“He is very much alive!”
I smiled, already feeling better. “I’ll be there in twenty?”
“Perfect. That gives me time to clean up. I’ll leave the door open.”
“Okay. Bye.”
Lincoln disconnected the call and I changed direction, driving toward Hunter’s apartment instead of mine.
I used the miles to think about how awful dinner on Friday was going to be.
Last week, all of my brothers knew something was off about me, but Hunter was the only one who knew about my tattoo.
God, they were going to all find out about my tattoo.
Luckily, none of them knew about Riggs, but I was sure once I mentioned it to Lincoln, Hunter would find out, and then it would only be a matter of time.
I could probably ask him to keep it in confidence, but I didn’t want him to lie to my brother if it came up either.
Whatever.
I’d deal with all of that later.
I parked in one of the guest spots at Hunter’s building and rode the elevator up to his floor.
At the end of the hallway, I found his door unlocked and Lincoln in the kitchen, pouring over a stack of delivery menus.
He didn’t even look up when I walked in, only reaching out for me and hauling my chest against his back as soon as I was close enough to touch.
Without thinking much of it, I slid my arms around Lincoln’s waist and rested my chin on his shoulder.
He was one of the most tactile people I had ever met, and that wasn’t even counting the platonic kissing.
Lincoln lifted up a menu for Greek food and I nodded.
He made a happy sound and then turned in my arms, grinning up at me.
His hair was wet from a shower, his skin glowing.
Happiness looked so good on him.
“Give me a kiss and tell me what’s wrong.”
Obediently, I dropped a peck against the corner of his mouth before grabbing the menu and taking it to my brother’s couch.
Lincoln followed behind me, using an app to order our meals and waiting patiently for me to find the words.
He sat next to me, body burrowed into the crook of my arm, both of us facing the black TV instead of each other.
It would be easier to talk without his stare on me, and he must have known it.
“I met someone,” I admitted. “But…I don’t know if it’s a thing or just a thing.”
He chuckled, looping one of his arms over my stomach. “Can you define both of those options for me.”
“A thing like we hooked up Saturday night and that was that, or a thing like we hooked up Saturday night and that’s not that.”
Lincoln bumped his head into the underside of my chin. “What do you want it to be?”
“That’s part of the problem.”
“This is the perfect time for you to elaborate,” he said. “Would it help if I closed my eyes?”
“I can’t even see you,” I muttered.
“Would it help if I closed your eyes?”
I swallowed hard. “I don’t know.”
Lincoln scrambled onto my lap so we were facing each other, his head a little higher than mine. He rested one hand on the center of my chest, the other covering the top part of my face. I could see through the blinds of his fingers, so I closed my eyes, finding the darkness did, in fact, help.
“I met him at Rapture,” I said.
“We can talk about what you were doing at Rapture later, go on.”
“Well, I met him before Rapture,” I clarified, bumping my tattooed forearm into his hip. “I saw him at Rapture and…God, this is…”
Lincoln took his hand away from my face and I blinked my eyes open to find him staring down at me, amusement coloring his features.
“There’s nothing you can say that would shock me,” he promised. “Nothing that will change how I think of you.”
“I was watching a scene in the loft and I was touching myself. I knew other people were there, but I didn’t know he was there, but he saw me and then he followed me to the bathroom and we talked a little bit.
Then he took me into a stall and jerked me off, and after asked if I wanted to come home with him, and I definitely went home with him, and he spanked me, and he caned me, and he made me come some more, like a lot more, and then he let me spend the night, and I woke up in the middle of the night and he was on his couch, not in bed, so I climbed onto the couch with him and he snuggled me the rest of the night and didn’t say anything about it bad or not, and then when I woke up on Sunday I accidentally met his best friend, and I think his friend knew something was up, but then Riggs told me to call him if I wanted to see him again but to wait until after I wasn’t glowy about it anymore, and I’m not glowy about it anymore, but I’m scared to call him. ”
I stopped and sucked in a much-needed breath of air.
While I talked, Lincoln’s brows had crept toward his hair line, and after I went quiet, his mouth fell open, but no sound came out.
“Okay,” he said, sucking his tongue across the front of his teeth in a move that was so decidedly Marshall, I worried for a second I was talking to the wrong person. “Let’s start with…the spanking and the caning, I think. I didn’t know you were into those things? You are into those things, right?”
“I didn’t know I was into them either, but yes,” I said. “I find it grounding.”
He hummed his approval. “That sounds more like the Smith Covington I know. Alright, pain is grounding; you’re not wrong. Did…is he a Dom?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“You think?”
“Well, he didn’t ask me to call him Sir or anything like that,” I explained, leaving out the part about how I’d wanted to. How at some points in the night it would have been natural to do. “But it all felt right.”
“I get that,” he said, nodding agreement. “Not to TMI you, but sometimes I feel that way about your brother, so I know it’s not always something you can explain. It’s not always like Marshall and Silas.”
There was my oldest brother again, the ever-looming figurehead of our family—and my life—in the conversation when he wasn’t even in the room.
“It wasn’t like that,” I said.
“I know,” Lincoln said. “You’re not like Silas.”
It was one of the few times Marshall had come up and I wasn’t compared to him.
“Are you more freaking out about what you did or that you want to do it again?” he asked, rubbing the outside of my arms reassuringly.
“When we were doing it, I wasn’t freaked out at all. It felt like it made all the sense in the world.”
“But after?”
I frowned.
“Okay.” Lincoln clapped his hands together and gave me an apologetic look. “I’m very sorry to do this to you, but there’s no way around it.”
“Oh, God. Do what?”
“Your brother is a switch,” he said, and I screwed my eyes closed with a grimace and slammed my hands over my ears.
It wasn’t enough to drown out the sound of Lincoln’s laughter as he grabbed my wrists and dragged my hands away from my face.
“Your brother is a switch, and so am I, and that makes perfect sense to me now, but it used to scare me before.”
“Why?”
“Because I thought I was dominant. I wanted to be dominant, but Hunter gave me a safe space to not be, and that’s one of the reasons I love him so much. And it sounds like this guy—”
“Riggs,” I interrupted.
“Riggs.” Lincoln smiled at me. “Sounds like Riggs gave you a safe space to be, and it’s okay to want that.”
I exhaled, hating the way my chest trembled.
“What will…never mind.”
He pressed the side of his finger against the bottom of my chin and tilted my face up so I was forced to look at him.
“None of that,” he warned.
“What will Marshall think?” I muttered, even though it shouldn’t matter in the slightest what Marshall thought about my bedroom—or bathroom—activities.
“Is that something you normally ask yourself? What would Marshall think? WWMD?” Lincoln made a derisive noise in the back of his throat that had me feeling silly for ever caring.
“Yeah,” I told him. “It is something I normally ask myself. It’s how I ended up as an architect. It’s how I’ve done a lot of things in my life.”
“How you ended up with a tattoo?” he countered.
I covered my face with my hands and dropped my head against the back of Hunter’s couch with a strangled groan. Lincoln chuckled and climbed off my lap, leaving a cold and present absence.
“Food’s here,” he said. “Hold on.”
I didn’t have it in me to do anything besides stare at my brother’s ceiling while Lincoln went to the door to collect our meal.
He brought everything into the living room and sank down onto the floor beside me, stretching his legs out beneath the coffee table.
When I didn’t join him, Lincoln curled his fingers around my wrist and pulled until I slid down onto the floor.
“What did Marshall think about you having sex with a man for the first time?” Lincoln asked.
“I didn’t ask him.”
“Because his opinion doesn’t matter?”
“Not about that,” I admitted, tearing open the foil on my gyro.
“Then why this?” he posed, glancing at me and reaching for a seasoned fry. He popped it into his mouth and chewed, swallowed, and waited.
“This feels like more of a lifestyle decision,” I muttered, but even as I said the answer, I could hear the absurdity of it. Lincoln seemed to realize because he didn’t say anything until he’d eaten at least ten more fries. “Does it bother you Silas is submissive?”
“No,” I answered quickly.
“Does it bother Marshall?”
I snorted. “No.”
“Then why would you being submissive be an issue? Why would you being with a man be an issue? And I want to remind you that both of those are personal choices that don’t impact anyone at all besides you and whoever your partner is.” He pulled a slice of beef off my gyro and ate it. “Or partners.”
“Just one.”
“For now.”
I groaned again, setting down my food and looking up again toward the ceiling. The setting sun outside cast the whole room in a wash of pink and orange, making Hunter’s maximalist style even more colorful. His apartment was the opposite of Marshall’s, closer to Finn’s, and still nowhere near mine.
“If you want someone to tell you this is okay, I’m telling you this is okay.” Lincoln set his hand on my thigh and squeezed. “It’s okay to be with a man, and it’s okay to do kinky things with a man. Hell, it’s okay to do kinky things with whoever you want as long as you’re being risk aware.”
I thought about Riggs giving me a safe word and me changing it…
I wasn’t ready to tell Lincoln about that.
I didn’t need to tell him.
Didn’t need to tell anyone.
It wasn’t Marshall’s life—it was my life. They were my choices, my decisions. I’d kept the Covington name, found the passion in my job again—even if I was distracted by a tattooer who didn’t let me touch him.
“If you want to see him again, I think you should,” Lincoln told me, glancing toward the front door as a key engaged the lock and a sliver of white light from the hall filtered in at Hunter’s arrival home and the end of my candid confession hour.
“But if you want to keep seeing him, I want to meet him.”
“Trading Marshall’s approval for yours?” I teased, even though there was a bit of truth in it.
“Never.” Lincoln stole another piece of my gyro and grinned after he swallowed it. “I just want to meet the man who stole Smith Covington’s heart in one night.”