Chapter 11
LINCOLN
Not only was the door to his apartment unlocked when I finally talked myself out of the elevator at Hunter’s building, it was also hanging open.
That didn’t stop me from hesitating in the doorway, shuffling my feet and rapping my knuckles against the wood just the same.
The door swung wider, and Hunter came into view, no shoes, no shirt, and a drink in his hand.
He didn’t say anything and neither did I.
We stared at each other for a breath, then I stepped inside and closed the door behind me. He made no move to come closer, and I imagined I looked as skittish as I felt.
“Do you want a drink?” he asked.
“What have you got?”
“I’m a vodka guy, but Finn drinks bourbon, and Marshall and Smith drink wine, so…”
“What if I drink rum?” I asked, lip twitching.
Hunter swallowed hard. “I’ve got rum.”
“Vodka soda’s fine,” I said.
He studied me for another breath, and I tried my hardest to not let my eyes wander down to his bare chest. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen him without a shirt on, but that didn’t make the sight of him any less glorious. Hunter had the body of a model. There was no arguing about that.
I held strong until he turned to go to the kitchen, and I finally let my stare drift down the exposed length of his back.
The broad swell of his shoulder muscles and the narrow dip of his waist right down to the perfect little divots over his ass.
I crossed an arm in front of my chest and scratched my neck, following after him.
I hadn’t spent much time in the main part of his apartment the night we hooked up, but while he busied himself in the kitchen, I was able to take a look at his things for the first time.
It was still as broody as I remembered, dark green walls and a ceiling to match, vibrant velvet pillows on a black couch, and a scattering of plants and books on every dark wood surface I could see.
There was a laptop open on his coffee table, a stack of what I assumed to be court notes scrawled illegibly on yellow legal pads.
“You can sit,” he said over his shoulder, and I tried to make myself comfortable on his couch. I shifted some of the pillows around to make room, finally tucking one onto my lap and using it for emotional support.
Hunter came back to me and passed a crystal glass into my hand. He sat down and angled his legs toward mine, but not close enough to touch.
“I don’t know where to start,” he said at the same time as I said, “I kind of hoped we could just cut to the fucking.”
It took a second for what I said to register with him, and his cheeks flushed. He smiled down into his drink.
“Sounds like we’re definitely not on the same page,” he said.
“You asked me to film my face while I came so you could see it,” I reminded him. “I’m not sure what page that is in your book, but in mine…”
“You came over the first time because you wanted to submit. Whatever that meant to you. And you did. And I would love to have closed the door on you and never thought about you after that, but that’s not what happened.
” Hunter took a sip of his drink, the ice clinking against the edge loud enough to sound like a gunshot.
I hadn’t even tried mine.
“What about me kept you up at night?” I asked.
“Besides how attractive you are?” He arched a brow and cocked his head to the side, and I nodded for him to go on. “The way you cried from your chest like your bones were cracking open in my arms.”
Well.
I raised the glass to my mouth and took a swallow of what was mostly vodka with a splash of soda. Hunter watched my mouth, his nostrils flaring when I licked the wetness off my lips.
“Why, though? I hope you don’t think you can fix me.”
“That’s no one’s job except yours,” he said, setting his glass down on a cork coaster on the table that I hadn’t seen, tucked between the notes and the books. “Did you get what you wanted from it? From our time together I mean? Did it answer your questions?”
I snorted and rolled my eyes. “I only have more now,” I admitted.
“Do you want to talk about them?”
I worried the inside of my lip until it bled, biting hard enough—on accident—to grimace.
“What?” he asked.
“I bit myself,” I muttered.
Hunter leaned in closer, moving fast like a predator. My breath caught in my throat as he curled his hand over the top of my shoulder.
“Are you bleeding?”
“Yes.”
With his free hand, he tapped the underside of my glass, lifting it toward my mouth.
His eyes were dark when the glass connected with my lip, and darker still when he tipped a swig of the cocktail into my mouth.
I don’t know how I managed to swallow. I could barely remember how to breathe with his hand on me and his drink on my tongue.
“It’ll sterilize it,” he murmured, pulling back reflexively.
The tension between us snapped like a taut wire, and he reached to take the drink out of my hands the same moment I moved to give it to him.
He set it on the table and then was back, his fingers sliding around my neck and coming together in my hairline, thumbs tracing lines along the underside of my jaw.
“Do you want to talk about them?” he repeated his earlier question, and I could barely think, let alone speak.
“No,” I said.
His thumbs pressed harder against my jawbone. “Do you need to?”
I pulled my lips between my teeth, making sure to not draw more blood. “Probably.”
Hunter groaned, but it sounded like a sigh, and then he let me go.
But at some point, he’d moved closer, our legs finally touching and the proximity to him made me feel like I could breathe, even though I also felt like I was choking.
I was so tired of everything existing inside of me at the same time.
The dominance, the submission, the top, the bottom, the want, the rejection.
It was unfair and it was too much, and there was no way I was going to cry in front of this man again.
Or so I thought until he reached up and quickly swiped away wetness from beneath my lashes.
“I miss my best friend,” I said.
“It sounds like you still have him.”
“It’s not the same.”
Hunter nodded, saying nothing.
“I’m friends with your brother,” I blurted, scrunching my nose. Something flashed across his face, but he stayed silent. “Smith, I mean.”
“He mentioned that at dinner.”
If Hunter knew Smith and I had fucked, he gave no indicator of it, and I didn’t know which was worse. If I was going to have to be the one to tell him, or if it was going to be Smith. Quickly, I weighed the options, thinking about Smith’s earnestness and eagerness and knew it had to be me.
“My older brother is fond of you as well,” Hunter said.
“Just wait until I meet the fourth one, and I’ll win them all over.” I laughed and took a deep breath, knowing there was no time like the present to bare all my truths. “I’ve had sex with Smith.”
Hunter sucked in a breath, the flickering change in his expression hardly noticeable. He was a lawyer after all, I reminded myself. Of course he would have an impeccable poker face.
“Have you now?” he asked quietly.
“Just once. It…” I scrubbed a hand down my face. “If you wanted to talk about a pity fuck—not that I pity your brother, he just…”
“He was a virgin,” Hunter guessed.
“He’d never been with a man.”
The gears turned, almost imperceptible twitches around the corners of his eyes. I rubbed my sweating palms on the pillow, wishing it was a blanket I could crawl into and use to hide from Hunter’s impassive stare.
“Have you and Silas had sex?” he asked me, which was the absolute last thing I expected.
The idea was preposterous.
“No.” It was impossible to hide the distaste from my face. “I’m not attracted to him.”
“You were kissing each other at Marshall’s. I saw it with my own eyes.”
Hunter leaned away from me, resting his back against the arm of the couch and propping one leg up on the cushions. Bent at the knee, he rested his forearm there, and the positioning was so detached I wanted to cry again.
“As friends,” I said.
“Do you kiss Smith as friends?”
“I never kissed Smith…” I trailed off, trying to read his face before continuing.
“What about Marshall?” Hunter asked next.
“I’ve never kissed him.”
“Do you want to?”
“I don’t kiss Silas with any intent,” I said. “There’s no attraction there. We are friends, and we are affectionate. We are physical, but platonically. I haven’t kissed Smith, and I’ll never kiss Marshall.”
“You’ve never kissed me,” he rasped.
I tipped my head back and stared up at his color-washed ceiling.
“No,” I said softly. “I haven’t.”
For a while, neither of us said anything, and it was too much for me to sit through any longer. I shoved the pillow onto the couch between us and leveraged myself onto my feet, but Hunter moved fast, grabbing my wrist and pulling me back down.
“I was just gonna go,” I explained.
“Is that what you really want?”
I shook my head.
“Then don’t.”
I situated myself back on the couch, and Hunter returned the pillow to my lap.
“I’ll be right back,” he muttered, standing up and turning away from me so fast the movement almost gave me whiplash. He walked out of the living room and disappeared down a hall, whether to throw himself out a window or what, I wasn’t entirely sure.
I didn’t know what I’d expected coming over, but it definitely hadn’t been anything this deep. I mean, I’d expected things to get deep, but not conversationally.
Exhaling a long breath, I leaned over and grabbed my glass from the table and finished it in one swallow.
Hunter was gone for well over five minutes, plenty of time for me to stand up and get halfway to the door, turn around, sit back down, and repeat it a second time before giving up and sitting on my hands.
My stomach was in knots, violent churning waves of a dozen feelings I didn’t have a name for.
I was being an idiot.
I’d set out to find someone to dominate me to see if I liked it as much as I thought I did.
What I ended up finding instead was a person I actually liked.
For whatever misguided reason, Hunter cared about me, and I was so caught up in my own shit I was going to lose out on that entirely.
And at the end of the day, wasn’t that what I wanted in the first place?
I was jealous of Silas and Marshall, their closeness, their exchange, and somehow I’d stumbled onto a Covington brother of my own offering me the very same things.
There might be more complicated layers about the dominance and submission, but it could all be taught.
It could all be learned, right? It wasn’t even like I knew what I really wanted from Hunter in that regard anyway.
Because I found the thoughts of kneeling and having him kneel equally appealing for very different reasons.
Hunter finally came back to the living room, and I glanced over the back of the couch in time to watch him flex his hands into fists before shaking them both out and closing the space between the hallway and the couch.
He sat down next to me, eyeing my empty glass before clearing his throat and looking me in the eye.
“I’m back,” he announced, and there was no way of stopping the laugh that bubbled up in the back of my throat and burst out of me at full volume.
I doubled forward, covering my mouth with both hands and laughing so hard my ribs hurt.
Tears streaked down my cheeks, but this time not from sadness or confusion, but absolute astonishment over my situation.
“Sorry.” I sat up, wiped the tears from my cheeks and swallowed back another bubble of laughter. “Sorry, I’m good.”
“Was that particularly funny?” Hunter asked, the corner of his mouth twitching.
“I’m back,” I repeated, trying my best to affect the matter-of-fact tone he’d used, which was enough for his mouth to finally spread into a full-on smile.
Fuck, he was even prettier than before.
“I haven’t been being fair to you,” I said, giving my face one last wipe. I dried my hands on his pillow, which he watched but made no comment on. “I’m just. It’s very messy in my head right now, and you’re trying to be nice about it, and I’m not helping the situation.”
Hunter studied me, that poker face of his back in place, making it impossible to decipher the small changes in his features. I tangled my hands together nervously, wringing them until he reached out and put his hand over mine and sent me into stillness.
I closed my eyes and let out a trembling breath. I relaxed.
“I don’t know much about the things you like,” he said quietly, stroking his thumb across my knuckles. “I know how to play a role, but it’s not supposed to be a role. At least, I don’t think it is.”
“What…” I cleared my throat and blinked open my eyes, staring down at his longer fingers and the way they wrapped over my hands. “What do you mean?”
“It’s a responsibility. Being a dominant.”
“Sounds like you know plenty,” I murmured.
“It’s a big responsibility, and it’s okay to…not want to be responsible all the time,” he said.
“Only some of the time?” I asked, hating the way my voice cracked.
“Only some of the time.”
The way Hunter looked at me was somehow the best and the worst thing that had ever happened to me. Even if he didn’t have words to say what he saw, I definitely got the impression he saw me. Like, he saw me in the ways Silas saw me, and that was…
A lot.
“Do you want to be with me?” he asked, squeezing my hand.
I forced my fingers to unclench, turned my palms up toward him, and he threaded our fingers together.
“I don’t know you.”
“You know a bit,” he said. “I think.”
I knew as much about him as he knew about me, which wasn’t a lot but it was still something.
“Do you want to be with me?” he asked again.
“Do you want to be with me?”
Hunter frowned, shook his head. “Don’t do that. Don’t…don’t be scared of being honest just because it’s unknown territory.”
That was a punch to the chest, enough to cave my sternum in and stop my heart.
I took my free hand and rubbed a circle over the invisible wound, realizing that he’d been holding my hand so long I had already gotten used to the way his fingers felt twined with mine.
He shook me loose, but only to cover the hand on my chest with his.
The barest amount of pressure, and his other hand slid around my back and just like that, he pressed me back into my body, back into place.
“Yes,” I admitted to him. “I do.”