Chapter 1
ONE
SLONE
Lights and music pulsed. Drinks and conversation flowed. Kinksters danced and fucked and sucked. And well, all the other shit the kinky fuckers who flowed through the door did on a random Friday night at EDGE.
And me, I…fuck…I should love it. I had once, but…I hated it. Fucking loathed it.
Which, given that I was the owner, was a problem.
A big one.
Really.
A massive fucking problem.
One that wouldn’t leave me alone. Something was missing. Or was it someone? I couldn’t sleep because it haunted me. I searched for the elusive something, even in my dreams.
A shoulder checked mine, only I didn’t bother looking to see who it was. I manned the bar with one person: my best friend, former battle buddy, and business partner, Ewen Grigor.
“You’re fucking scaring off all the littles and most of the boys,” he accused.
My eyes rolled.
Hard.
I know because I not only felt them roll, it fucking hurt.
“Jesus fucking Christ. When’s the last time you got laid?”
He should know. He was…hmm…well, okay, maybe he wouldn’t. It’s not like I told him I hadn’t fucked anyone but him lately.
Ignoring him, I pointed at one of the boys in front of me. “What can I get you?”
“Oh! Hey, Slone.” The kid grinned and preened, and it just made me want to gag. I couldn’t remember his damn name. If I ever even knew it. I knew I’d fucked him multiple times. Even striped his ass with a cat-o’-nine-tails. But…
Ewen hip-checked me, his brows climbing his forehead before pinching together in the middle.
Sighing, I replied, “Hey.”
The boy’s eyes dimmed, and the beaming smile that graced his pretty face fell. “Can I get a Moscow Mule?”
I nodded, waving off the membership bracelet he held out for me to scan, instead scanning my own. The least I could do was buy the boy’s drink after forcing my shitty disposition on him.
“I asked you a question,” Ewen growled in my ear, his hand gripping the back of my neck.
He was the only man who made me feel submissive, but not enough that we’d ever contemplated moving our casual situationship from anything more than hookups.
He wanted a sub, not just someone who enjoyed getting dicked down occasionally.
And I wanted a boy because I couldn’t imagine being a Daddy Dom to someone chaotic like Ewen.
Was it possible for two tops, two Doms to make a go of it and make it work?
Absolutely. Our best friends did it for years, through multiple deployments and tours of duty, but their kink wasn’t ours.
And while it might work for them, it wasn’t replicable, not with Ewen, at least not between us.
“It’s been a while,” I mumbled.
Ewen’s mouth flattened in that weird look he got when someone disappointed him. I’d seen it make little subbie boys cry without him ever muttering a syllable. He crossed his arms over his chest, drawing in a deep breath that lifted the corded muscle by several inches.
“Slone, buddy, you’re a morose motherfucker when you’re feeling needy. Get a boy under you, because I don’t know that I’ve seen you this hard up since our first float.”
The way I wanted to tell him to go fuck himself during that first deployment.
But he was right, and he knew it. He’d clocked this attitude of mine almost instantly.
We had just joined the same reconnaissance team.
I was pushing and shoving and kicking some gear into the tiny ass space it was supposed to be stowed in while at sea.
Yet, it wouldn’t fit. I couldn’t do the job assigned to me if it didn’t.
We were three days of steady sailing off the coast, cruising somewhere around the Pacific.
I was already losing my shit and frustrated as hell when he found me.
He walked up, pushed my horny ass into the narrow space between a couple of pallets, dropped to his knees, and swallowed me fucking whole.
After sucking me off, he stood, gripped my jaw, my chin resting on the webbing between his thumb and forefinger, and fed me my own cum.
“You remember what I told you that first time?” he said, pulling me back to the present.
I nodded. He’d said, “There’s no need to get pissy, pretty boy.” And he’d said it with a smug smirk when he’d released my mouth.
It played in my head every time he took me apart because I needed something I hadn’t been able to find yet, and him forcing me out of my head was the only thing that could screw it on right. I’d wanted to punch him in his stupid ass smug fucking face, but I couldn’t because he wasn’t wrong.
From that point on, Ewen Grigor and I became inseparable: teammates, best friends, occasional lovers, but nothing more.
We’d discovered kink together: exploring, testing limits, and sharing partners.
And we loved one another. Deeply. Just not like that.
It would’ve been so fucking easy if we aligned.
But we didn’t.
“Meet me in the office.”
“Ewen…” I protested, or started to, even though I knew he was right.
“Don’t even. Go.”
Nodding, I ducked my head, walking away from the bar toward the office as ordered, need itching under my skin. At the office door, I keyed the code into the pad, hating myself for needing this. But when I couldn’t find the kink or the person I needed to scratch the itch just right…
Inside, I stripped, folded my clothes…
The sounds of the club washed over me as the door opened and closed. “The folding clothes thing always gets me.”
“Shut up.”
His body crowded mine, his mouth dropped to my neck. Biting and sucking sounds, along with my moans, almost covered the crinkle of foil tearing and then the plastic snick of the lube cap being flicked open.
“Is this what you want?”
The words whispered over my heated flesh, stealing my breath, and I nodded. His hand gripped my chin, twisted my head, and held it there until I met his eyes. “Yes. I want this. I need it.”
His mouth covered mine. His tongue buried itself as deep as possible. The man kissed with his whole fucking body. He wrenched his lips from mine when the need for oxygen overtook the need to continue.
“Good. Safe words?”
“Red, yellow, green.” Simple worked best.
“Present yourself,” he growled, pressing me forward.
Cool leather pressed against my torso as I folded myself along the back of one of the two sofas we had in the office. Reaching back, I spread my ass for him.
“So fucking beautiful.”
Praise did nothing for me, receiving anyway, but giving it fed Ewen’s soul. And mine as well.
“Fuck!” My yell came out in a gasp. Ewen chuckled. His face buried between the globes of my ass. Strong and insistent, his tongue danced over my furled flesh, poking at it, caressing it before nipping and sucking at me.
Our choreography assaulted my senses.
The onslaught moved up over my tailbone.
Ewen’s mouth tickled along my spine to my shoulders.
Leather moved against metal even as he tried to overwhelm me. The heavy buckle of his belt bounced against one hamstring and the leather against the other.
Thick, slick fingers pressed against my still wet, tongue-bathed ass, pushing forward, spearing me open, stealing my breath.
Desperate. He made me desperate—more than I had been.
I pressed back into him.
The hand gripping my hip disappeared for half a blink.
Red-hot pain exploded when it reappeared.
The hot, heavy weight of his cock replaced his fingers with a deep, soul-splitting thrust while I still gasped through the pain of his hand landing on my ass.
His nuts nestled against mine when he stopped, fully buried. “Color?”
“Green.” My answer, a needy sigh that escaped with my next breath.
His hands gripped my hips, pulling me back into him, then pressing me to the top of the couch back. Slow, measured, calm movement dragged his cock from my hole.
“FUCK!”
He slammed into me, over and over, robbing me of breath, thought, and sight. My world narrowed to the touch points between our bodies.
The tight grip of his hands.
The tickle of his hairy thighs rubbing against mine.
The ass-splitting movement of his dick inside me.
The throb of my cock pressed between my body and the couch.
The pinpricks of pain when he pulled my hair.
The molten lava of an ass smack. First one side, then the other.
The press of his palms against my hips, angling—
“Fuck, Ewen. There. Right there!”
One thrust became two, then three, and four until…
“Yes!” I gasped, and he answered with a growl, “Fuck.”
Come shot from my dick and his.
Thirty minutes later, we were showered, dressed, with food and beer in front of us where we sat, side-by-side, on the now clean leather sofa.
Only our breaths disrupted the eerily quiet room, the sounds of us eating and drinking, and…
the one-way glass wall in our office. That wall overlooked the club, giving us a bird’s-eye view of the dance club below like a television on mute—all movement and flashing lights.
Ewen side-eyed me. It made me twitchy. I took a swig of my beer, wiped my mouth, picked up my fork, and wrapped my lips around a bite from the styrofoam takeout container, once filled to overflowing with the best barbecued brisket and sides the city offered.
That had nothing on the shit we got whenever we ventured south to Priest and Cam’s in Nashville or further south to the Holt Ranch in Texas.
I did it all to keep from meeting his eyes or answering his questions.
A hand planted itself between my still smarting ass cheek and the back of the couch. Another hand shoved the container next to mine to the opposite side of the coffee table. Ewen pushed to his feet, rounded the table, and sat down opposite me.
“I’m over you acting like I’m not in the room.”
Sucking in a deep breath, I held it and dropped my chin. The exhale blow-fished my cheeks as the air escaped, loud and slow. The sharp points of my elbows pressed into my thighs, and my head dropped into my hands, which carded through my still damp hair.
“What do you want me to say?”
“I want you to tell me what the fuck is wrong. And don’t say nothing. I’m worried.”
“I’m in a rut.”
“Okay,” he said in that slow way that made it clear he knew that already.
“I’m over this shit.”
“What? Kink, the club, our friendship, life? What are you over?”
“The last two are a definite no.”
“And the first two?”
I sucked in so much air that my lungs burned. “I dunno. Maybe? Probably.”
Like air from a balloon, his body deflated and fell back into the cushions behind him. “Wow. How…umm… How long have you felt like this?”
“It smacked me in the face earlier at the bar. I looked out at the dancing bodies and the flashing lights and thought, ‘I hate this,’ and that spun into ‘I loathe it,’ and I wasn’t the least bit shocked. Guilty, yes, definitely.”
“Guilty? Why would—”
“Because,” I yelled. “This is our place. We built EDGE: Manchester. Yes, we helped Priest and Cam build EDGE: Nashville, and yeah, we owned pieces of it, but this club here in Manchester is ours, or it was supposed to be. I don’t know. Something’s missing, and I can’t put my finger on what it is.”
Ewen looked gobsmacked. I couldn’t say I didn’t get it. I did. Gobsmacked described the way I felt about it as well.
Ewen scrubbed his hands over his face with a deep sigh that huffed a little when he exhaled.
“Well, sounds like a mission to me,” he said with a sigh.
“We aren’t Recon Marines anymore, Grigor. There is no mission.”
His neck twisted to the one-way glass that overlooked our club, a club we’d been proud of, that I’d been proud of. My gaze followed, and what used to bring me joy and pride and satisfaction—professionally and sexually—no longer provided any of those things.
Rarely could you describe anything about Ewen as soft, but his voice as he continued speaking held none of the sharp edges it usually did.
“EDGE is a haven for kinksters. The same haven no matter the city—Nashville or Manchester—they found themselves in. EDGE is supposed to be a place to be as unfiltered and filthy kink-wise as you want, but…”
I nodded at how his thoughts seemed to align with mine.
So I picked up where he trailed off. “This is where we live. Where we work. We fuck here. There’s the gym, the bar, the dance club, the restaurant…
” Mirroring Ewen’s actions from a moment ago, I scrubbed my hand over my face before shoving my fingers through my hair.
“And suddenly, one day, you realize it’s a prison without the razor wire and bars.
” My eyes caught his wide gaze, and I clarified, “I mean…”
Ewen sat up, his elbows landing on his knees. “No. I get it.” He covered his mouth with his fingers, dragging them across his lips. “Yeah. I can see…” he huffed, “I can see what you’re saying. I mean, hell, it’s why Priest and Cam moved their family out of the lofts above the club in Nashville.”
That was new info. “Really?” I asked, not sure if Ewen was trying to spare my feelings or…shit. Yeah, never mind. Ewen’s motto fell in the realm of truth first, feelings after.
He confirmed the last bit with a raised brow and a cocked head, but he still answered. “Yes, really. Priest told me they wanted to build on their life outside kink.”
I nodded. That landed nearly perfectly.
Never would I ever be able to leave kink behind completely. No matter the label someone stuck on me—soft Dom, caretaker Dom, Daddy Dom—they were me. I was them. They all fit.
Just not perfectly.