Chapter 12 #2
“This needs coffee,” I said, shaking my head and gesturing toward the door.
Lincoln huffed out a laugh, but he shuffled out of my bedroom in nothing more than his underwear, already making himself at home in my space.
I would have been lying to say I didn’t like the look of him mostly naked on my couch, so I swallowed down the thought.
I made us both coffee, and we drank half of it before addressing any of the elephants in the room.
Finally, Lincoln cleared his throat and faced me head on.
“I am friends with your youngest brother,” he said. “He knows the things I like, so if he knows that you and I are together, he’s going to know you like those things too. Same with your older brother. Silas and Marshall both know. So if you’re not okay with this…”
“It’s—” I stopped myself, tapping the tip of my nose until the urge to speak had gone away.
“Cute trick,” he murmured.
I let out a breath that made both of my cheeks puff up and deflate, one then the other and back again. “It’s fine.”
Lincoln sipped his coffee and arched a brow at me.
“They can’t out me without outing themselves,” I explained. “And even then, they’d have to prove it.”
Whatever the right thing to say was, it wasn’t the thing I actually said.
It was so unfamiliar for me to feel as unsteady in conversation as I did with Lincoln.
I was used to going back and forth with sharp-tongued lawyers, but one unsteady twenty-five-year-old was enough to throw me off my game entirely?
What were the odds.
“What did I say?” I asked. “I didn’t mean to say the wrong thing.”
Lincoln pulled his lips between his teeth and bit down, clearly fighting a smile as he shook his head at me before looking down at his lap.
“It’s not anything to prove or defend. It’s just…it’s who I am. Who I want to be.” He let out a long breath, then leaned over and set the coffee down on the table in the midst of the chaos I’d brought home from work. “Maybe wanting you isn’t enough. Maybe—”
“I just meant what I do in the bedroom isn’t their business.”
I reached out and grabbed Lincoln’s wrist. He was two inches off the couch, and my fingers wrapping around his wrist brought him back down.
Relief rolled over me, but I didn’t let go of him.
I handed him back his coffee and waited for my heart to slow back to a normal response rate, not so close to fight or flight.
“Free use means that whenever you want to take me, you can,” Lincoln said softly, and my heart was right back at emergency room levels.
“We’re back to that then? And that’s something you want?”
He nodded, slowly at first, and then faster.
“There has to be limits, though, right?” I asked.
“Not with that. I mean.” He shrugged. “Nothing that will get me arrested or put on a list.”
God.
Fuck.
I couldn’t believe this was real.
“Where are there limits, then? What are the things you want?”
Lincoln took a deep breath, held it, then sucked some more in on the top. It raised his shoulders, puffed out his chest, and he cocked his head to the side to study me thoughtfully. “You have all the right words, you know,” he said.
“In most cases, I can handle words better than everything else.”
“Then use them.”
“Elaborate, Lincoln.” I scooted closer and cupped his cheek in my palm. He had the softest scruff I’d ever touched. When he leaned into my hand, it tickled.
“If…” He paused. Cleared his throat, and I slid my hand from his cheek to the side of his neck. “If I’m submitting and I do good, you can tell me.”
I ignored the way my dick pulsed in my sweats. “What if you don’t do good?”
“You can tell me that too,” he whispered.
“Lincoln.”
“You can humiliate me,” he blurted, rolling his eyes back and staring up at the ceiling. “I’ve always kind of wondered. And if you’re submitting, I want you to talk then too. Do you even want to submit? Do you even know what it means?”
“It’s more than just getting on your knees, I know that.”
He made a sound in the back of his throat I couldn’t quite decipher, and I waited to see if he had something else to say, but he remained quiet.
“Last night in bed when you called me Daddy—”
“I was teasing.”
“But you liked it,” I told him. “I liked it.”
He dropped his chin back toward his chest and looked me right in the eyes, much more himself than he had been before, which made me feel much more me too. So, I kept talking. “To me, it meant that you recognized I was looking out for you. That I was capable of taking care of you. Guiding you.”
My cock agreed with all of those statements, and the timing couldn’t have been worse.
“I don’t want a Daddy,” he said. “Not all the time, like I…I don’t want it to be all the time the way it is with your brother.”
Grunting, I scrubbed a hand down my face. It was too early to know this much about my brother’s bedroom habits.
“You just want to play at it sometimes,” I wagered. “When you’ve had a long day.”
“Maybe.”
“I can work with that.”
“And when would…I’m more familiar with this. I know when I want to submit and when I want to lead. How will you know? How will we make it balanced?”
Lincoln was talking faster and faster, and I didn’t know how to make him stop short of kissing him or tightening my hand around his throat.
So, I did the latter.
“The only serious part of this needs to be that we are on the same page,” I told him. “The rest we can figure out as we go, right?”
He swallowed hard, Adam’s apple pressing against my palm.
I couldn’t ignore the burning hot arousal between my legs any longer, and I reached down to adjust myself with my left hand.
Lincoln’s eyes tracked the movement, and he let his whole body lean forward into the collar I’d made around his throat.
“Right,” he whispered. “Yes.”
“Yes?”
Lincoln groaned, so rumbling and low that it vibrated straight to my balls.
“Yes, Sir.”