Chapter 31 Lincoln
LINCOLN
The more time I spent at Hunter’s, the less I liked my own apartment.
I’d tried really hard to hype myself up about it after Silas moved in with Marshall, but I hadn’t spent enough time there for it to even start to feel like home.
Hunter’s apartment, though, with its soft bed and its dark colors…
that felt like home. He would have had me over at his place every night of the week if I’d agreed to it, but I still didn’t trust things enough to bite that bullet.
Even though I’d been staying over most nights, I still came back to my place during the day.
I filmed content, I fed Feeny, and I stared at the wall wondering if my stubbornness was going to be the death of me or not.
It was a nice routine that Hunter didn’t know about, and I’d made it through the week without cracking.
It was Friday, and he had dinner plans with his brothers after work, and I had plans with Silas to do a whole lot of nothing.
For real this time, not like last week when we’d caved and gone out to Rapture after all.
It was going to be a low impact night, considering Saturday morning I was going to meet the fifth Covington brother for the first time, and then Saturday night all of us were going to the party at Hunter’s office celebrating his new partnership.
It was a lot to do in a short amount of time, and I hoped I’d be too busy to even stop and think about the comparisons people were sure to draw when they saw the two of us together.
His brothers had accepted me because I was friends with Silas, but it was easy enough to wonder what their reactions would have been if we’d just met on the One Night Stand app with no background relations.
After getting all of that out of my mind, I filmed a wank scene, edited it, and sent it to Hunter before scheduling it on the website.
It was a bit of fun between us. Me sending dirty videos to him while he was playing the role of buttoned-up-and-definitely-not-kinky partner at one of LA’s most up-and-coming law firms, and me pretending we were a fair match.
Fifteen minutes after the video left my outbox, Hunter texted me a shaky and grainy video of himself in the bathroom at work.
His pants were undone, his shirt rucked up enough for me to see the bottom of his stomach.
His breathing was hard, punctuated with the occasional soft grunt, and then far too soon, Hunter came all over his knuckles and the recording cut away.
I definitely hadn’t planned on filming two videos, but as hard as watching Hunter had me, I could easily go for two. Before starting, I called him. The phone rang twice before he answered with a breathy laugh. He must still be coming down.
“Hi,” he answered.
I grinned, covering my face with my hand even though he couldn’t see me.
“Hi. Did you like that?”
“Very much,” he said, still breathing hard. “Obviously.”
“I liked watching you like it,” I told him. “I might make another one today.”
“More power to you, but if you expect the same response from me, I might die over it.”
“Oh, come on, Daddy,” I teased. “You’ve got the refractory period of a teenager, and you know it.”
There was a short pause on the other end of the line, and for a breath, I worried I’d done or said something wrong. Those old fears began to close back in around me, but then Hunter said, “I think that’s the first time you’ve called me Daddy outside of the bedroom.”
My heart quickly dislodged itself from my throat.
“I’ve definitely called you Daddy in your living room, and probably the bathroom.”
“In a non-sexual way,” he corrected.
I swallowed audibly, tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth. He was probably right, and that…
“Is that okay?” I asked quietly. “We’ve never really talked about being this way outside of sex.”
We hadn’t talked about it, but I’d thought about it.
I’d thought about it a lot, especially after talking to Keith and Verity.
And especially after being around Silas and Marshall.
Silas was always subservient to Marshall.
Sometimes it was more obvious than others, but the dynamic was always crystal clear. At least it was to me.
“You can call me anything you want anytime you want,” he assured me. “But if you want to start calling me Daddy and meaning it, things between us are going to change.”
“I know, I—”
“I would want you to move in,” he blurted, cutting off my protest. I pulled my arm away from my eyes, blinking my shitty popcorn ceiling into focus. “You what?”
“It’s a responsibility, right?”
“Have you been talking to Marshall about this?” I asked.
“My brother is not the only resource for information about power exchange dynamics, Lincoln,” he said, voice dry.
Of course he hadn’t talked to Marshall about it. He didn’t have anyone he could talk to about it without things getting weird, and I was over here sound-boarding our relationship off what felt like the entire LA kink scene. I was a shit, and I definitely didn’t deserve him.
“I know you’re not a submissive,” Hunter said quickly. “That’s not what I meant to imply.”
“I know you didn’t.” I rolled onto my stomach and buried my face into the pillow, desperate to scream. “I just don’t think this is a conversation to have over the phone.”
“You’re probably right.” He exhaled a laugh.
“I was just calling to tell you how hard it makes me to see you come,” I murmured.
“Obviously the feeling is mutual.”
“I…I wanted to see if you had any requests. If I do film again today.”
My second-round erection had definitely started to flag after the misdirection in our conversation, but if I ignored the words and thought about the end result, it was right back in full force between my legs.
I secretly loved the idea of living with Hunter.
I loved the possibility of him wanting to be more dominant with me.
That didn’t mean I was ready to let go of my own dominance, and I didn’t think he’d ever ask that of me, but still…
“Are you hard?” Hunter asked.
I slid my hand down my stomach and circled my thumb and finger around the base of my half-mast dick. I hadn’t bothered to get dressed after filming or editing, which had turned out to be great now considering the easy access to my dick.
“Yeah,” I told him. Hunter was silent, and I swallowed hard before correcting myself and saying, “Yes, Sir.”
I went from half-hard to rigid enough to facet diamonds in the blink of an eye.
“I don’t want you to come,” he said quietly.
I pictured him at work, sitting behind a desk in his expensive slacks and his crisp button-up.
He had a purple tie on when he’d left in the morning, and I envisioned him smoothing one hand down the top of it like he hadn’t just exploded my brain.
If someone were to see him, they’d think he was discussing a deposition or whatever lawyers did.
They definitely wouldn’t think he was setting my entire nervous system on fire.
“I want you to get close, though,” he said. “I want you to touch yourself until you’re right there and then I want you to stop.”
I groaned, rutting into the blankets and finally letting out the scream I’d wanted to loose earlier. On the other end of the call, Hunter laughed at me.
“Can you do that for me?”
“I’m sure I can.”
“I’ll make it worth your while,” he promised me. “If you come over at the end of the night. I’ll be done with dinner by nine.”
It was barely one in the afternoon.
“That’s an eternity from now,” I whined.
“It’s not so long,” he said. “Prove to me you brought yourself right to the edge, and I’ll make it worth your while after dinner. Deal?”
“I don’t think these kind of relationships involve bartering,” I grumbled.
“Don’t they?”
I bit the inside of my cheek and wanted to curse wherever he was getting all of his extremely correct information about BDSM.
It was almost unfair how naturally it all came to him.
It was much easier for him than it was for me.
Hunter had taken to dominance and submission like a fish to water, and I thought of Keith’s partner Justin.
And that wasn’t to say dominance was work for me, but dominance was safety and it was protection, and I did actually like it.
But submission offered me those things too.
At least, it offered them to me with Hunter.
“Any other requests?” I asked.
“Would you wear a plug for me?”
Heat raced up my spine, and I wanted to throw a blanket over Feeny’s tank for how embarrassing it was to burn as hot as I did at the very simple question. “Are you telling me to?”
“I’m asking if you want to.”
It was almost unfair, I decided, for Hunter to be so accommodating. He had never tried to force submission out of me, and I was certain he never would.
“Will it make you hard?” I whispered.
“Knowing you’re stretching your hole for me all day?” He laughed, rather sardonically. “Yeah, Lincoln. That will make me hard.”
“Then yes.”
“Film your video first,” he said. “Get as close as you can without actually coming and then stop. Edit it however you want and send it to me. Then I want you to shower and prep yourself. And after you’re clean for me, I want you to film yourself putting the plug in and send me that one too.”
“Who are you?” I rasped, precum smearing across my sheets like a Vegas hotel fountain. “And what have you done with Hunter Covington?”
There was the briefest pause, and then he asked, “Was that too much?”
“No!” My voice was so fucking loud. How desperate. I cleared my throat and started again, “No. It was…it was perfect. I just didn’t expect you to be so bold.”
“You bring it out in me.”
My eyes burned, and I rolled onto my back again, digging my fingers against the corners of my eyelids.
“Is there anything I can do for you in the meantime?” Hunter asked.
Only about a thousand things.
“Tell me you love me.”
He exhaled a breath into the phone, straight into my ear. “Oh, sweetheart. I love you so much.”
“I love you,” I said back.
“I have a meeting, Lincoln. I’ve got to go. Do you remember everything I asked?”
“Wank, edit, shower, plug,” I repeated.
“Perfect. I’ll see you at nine.”
It wasn’t a question; it was a statement. It was a command.
The call disconnected, and it took all my strength to not throw my phone against the wall.
I was so fucking hard and so fucking head over heels for this man.
There was no saving me. My defenses? Gone.
There wasn’t a single wall I’d ever built that this man couldn’t knock down with a word or a look.
He knew all the ways to unman me, to weaken me, to hold me.
To be so seen was fucking disconcerting, and I imagined this must have been how Silas felt in those early days with Marshall.
Maybe it was a genetic trait possessed by all the Covington men.
“What are we going to do, Feeny?” I asked my fish, who swam around his tank oblivious to the mental struggle going on inside my skull.
Blindly, I fired off a text to Silas.
Were you ever worried you were in over your head with Marshall?
He answered me quickly.
Not in any ways that were real.
I understood the truth of that statement down to the marrow of my bones.
This fear and this doubt that incessantly tried to tell me I wasn’t good enough for Hunter or that things between us wouldn’t last wasn’t a real doubt.
It wasn’t a true fear. It was a defense and a response, and it had no place in my relationship with Hunter.
“Patron saint of being in too fucking deep and liking it,” I muttered under my breath. Then I set up my phone, slicked my hand with lube, and did exactly what Hunter had told me to do.