CHAPTER THREE
(Matthew)
Charlotte found me in the kitchen about twenty minutes later.
“You left.” She gave me a confused smile, then grabbed a pitcher of orange juice from the counter and drank directly from it.
I moved back as juice splashed over my toes. “Hey! You’re spilling everywhere.”
“Sorry!” She wiped her mouth with the back of her forearm. “I’m dehydrated.”
Avoiding the puddle on the floor, I stepped up close and wedged my hand between her thighs, where she was still smeared and slick. She gasped and rose up on the balls of her feet.
I drove my fingers in hard, and she gave me a breathy laugh.
“You are expending a lot of fluids.” I pulled my fingers out, wishing I could taste her. But I wasn’t into the flavor of lube, so I wiped my fingers on my robe while she made a disgusted face.
“Why did you leave?” she asked, her mouth pulling into a puckered little frown.
“I was finished. For now.” I wasn’t about to tell her that my dick needed a break. Twentysomethings she went out and fucked didn’t have that problem. “Go back, have some fun.”
She shook her head. “Nah. The guy was done. The girls were heading down to the main pool to keep going but…”
She twisted her foot on the tile in an attempt to be cutesy, but she’d underestimated the slipperiness of the juice. I threw out a hand to catch her, but she caught herself.
Good thing, because there was no way we both wouldn’t have gone to the floor.
“But…” she started again, walking gingerly around the bar to retrieve a towel. “I thought I would come in, spill juice on the floor, and almost die.”
I leaned heavily on my cane. “You didn’t almost die. I almost died.”
“You’re not always going to get the mileage out of the bear thing that you’re getting now.” She dropped to her knees and wiped up the spill, her sweat-limp hair hanging down and obscuring her face. “It’s wearing pretty thin as it is.”
“What do you care?” I challenged her. “You’re only with me for a week, right?”
She blew her hair out of her eyes to squint at me.
“You made the rules, not me.” Speaking of which. “I thought after some showers and a nap, we could go to the castle and pick out some fun things to try tonight. Just a dragon and his princess.”
She sat back on her heels and looked up at me, all traces of smart-assery gone. “Your princess would love that.”
“Oh?” I watched with amusement as she crawled across the floor the few feet between us to sit at my feet.
“Your princess can’t wait to give you everything you want.” She leaned down and pressed her lips to the top of one foot, then the other. “To let you do whatever you want to her.”
“Whatever I want?” There was way too much for one night.
Her hand slid up my scarred calf, then higher, tickling the back of my knee before winding around my thigh. She clung to me like a woman on the cover of an old fantasy novel and sucked her bottom lip. “How about you pick? Show your princess what you like to do?”
“And if my princess doesn’t like what I want to do?” I asked.
“She’ll tell you.” She leaned forward and kissed my knee, then rose up and trailed her tongue up my inner thigh. “And she trusts that her dragon would never do anything without her permission.”
Trust. She trusted me sexually but remained on the fence about trusting me with her heart.
Maybe one trust would grow into another.
“Let me tell my princess what I’m going to do.” I gripped her hair in my fist and stopped her as her mouth came close to my cock. I held her back, tantalizingly out of reach, while she mewled as if choking herself on my dick was her greatest hunger. “I’m not going to tie her up. I’m going to strap her down so she can’t move a muscle.”
Her lips parted and her gorgeous breasts wobbled as her breathing sped up.
“She’s going to be entirely at my mercy.” I tightened my already rough grip on her hair and tugged up. Without further instruction, she stood. I pulled her head back and plunged my other hand between her legs. She lifted up on the balls of her feet as I drove two fingers deep into her abused cunt. “She’s going to be spread out for me to enjoy her. All of her. Every hole, whatever I want.”
“I—”
“I wasn’t finished,” I warned her sternly. “I’m going to give her a taste of pain. To see what she can take. And so much pleasure, she’ll beg to have that pain back.”
Her tired pussy gripped futilely at my fingers as I pumped them in and out roughly. “She won’t be able to sit down after the spankings I give her. And she won’t be able to walk from coming so hard.”
“Yes, please, my dragon,” she gasped.
“But she’s going to have to follow every instruction,” I continued. “Or else she’ll get nothing. No pleasure. No pain. I’ll ruin every orgasm until she weeps and begs and even then, I won’t let her come. You wouldn’t like that very much, would you, princess?”
“No, my dragon.” She moaned as my thumb pressed against her clit. “I’ll do anything you say.”
“I know you will. Because you’re a good little princess.” I leaned down as if to kiss her, changing course at the last moment to open my mouth wide and press my teeth into the skin of her throat.
She gasped, and I moved on to her nipples, rock hard and flushed on her pretty tits. I gave her a sharp bite, then soothed it with my tongue while she writhed in my grasp. Then I lifted my head. “You’re my good girl, aren’t you, princess?”
Her thighs quaked. She gushed over my hand.
I grinned. “I’ll take that as a yes.”
***
(Charlotte)
“When we’re in New York, can we eat ice cream for lunch every day?” I scraped determinedly at the last traces of mint chocolate chip on the sides of my bowl.
“I can get you more of that,” Matt said, scrunching his nose in disgust. “Or a flavor that isn’t so gross.”
I rolled my eyes. “Sorry, I enjoy a higher ratio of ice cream to random junk.”
“Walnuts and marshmallows are not random junk.” He patted the top of the rocky road in his bowl with his spoon and told it, “Don’t listen to her.”
“Nerd.”
“We can’t have ice cream for lunch every day,” he went on, taking another bite. “Because my trainer would slap me full across my face.”
“You’re working out again?” He hadn’t mentioned that in any of our phone chats. He’d mentioned his frustration at not being able to hit the gym, though.
“Not yet, but I will,” he said, carving out another bite with his spoon.
“You’re not on some strict diet and constantly in the weight room in all your spare time, right?” It wouldn’t be a deal breaker, but I hoped he didn’t expect that we’d be doing five a.m. runs together.
“Don’t worry. I won’t make you work out.” He could already read me way too well.
That ease didn’t surprise me as much as it might have with someone else. It felt like Matt and I had known each other for years, not months.
But we had only known each other for months, and only a few days of that in person. It would be too easy for either of us to forget to check in on foundational relationship things.
“You love me,” I said by way of broaching the subject.
His eyes widened. “I don’t have to prove it anymore?”
“I’m going to make you prove it every single day that we’re together.” And I probably would never fully come to believe him, but that was my problem, not his. “We’re going really fast here. We’ve barely spent time physically in the same room with each other, and suddenly we think we’re in love.”
“I am in love,” he corrected me.
“People in love usually have some important conversations along the way to falling in love, so that they know if their lives are compatible,” I went on.
His lips quirked. “Yeah, I know. I’ve been in relationships before. But every one of them was different. I’ve dated someone for two years before getting engaged, I’ve moved in with people after three dates. Relationships happen according to their own timetable, in my experience.”
“Okay, for example, the fact that you’ve been engaged would have been something you probably would have told me before you ever said, ‘I love you,’ right?” No, I wasn’t going to second-guess myself. It was something I should have heard way before we got as comfortable as we felt right now.
“Okay.” He took a deep breath and set his empty bowl on the coffee table. “Four times.”
“Four… You’ve been engaged four times?” Was that a lot? It seemed like way more than anybody I knew.
“Yeah. Your brother can tell you all about what a bad habit it is,” he said with a sigh, throwing his arm along the back of the couch.
“You can tell me about it right now. We don’t have a plane to catch, yet.” I put my bowl on the table beside his and crossed my arms. “How did you get engaged four times, and how did they end?”
“All right. Once, I was proposed to, the other three, I was the proposer. They were all serious relationships that had gone on for some time before rings became involved.” He hesitated. “As for how they ended…without getting into too much detail? The last one cheated. Numbers one and three wouldn’t sign prenups. Number two and I didn’t agree on something very important. In every case, I didn’t necessarily want the relationship to end, but…”
“They fractured your trust.” That seemed to be the running theme. “So, not signing a prenup. I assume that’s suspicious because you couldn’t—”
“Trust that they weren’t after my money.” He nodded in confirmation.
“Let’s circle back to the disagreement one.” I twirled my finger in the air.
“We had agreed about a year before we got engaged that we weren’t ready for kids. Not right then, not within the next five years. She changed her mind.” He winced. “I don’t want to talk shit about my former partners.”
“You’re not,” I assured him. “you’re explaining what happened to end that relationship. And now I know how important honesty is to you.”
He looked strangely relieved. “That’s a good way of thinking about it. I want to make sure you understand that I’m not saying I think she’s an evil bitch who was trying to trap me with a baby. It wasn’t that, at all. We talked about our feelings, we talked about a concrete timeline for trying to have kids, but we couldn’t reach a compromise.”
That brought up another important question. “You were planning to have kids, then? I mean, with her.”
I couldn’t imagine anyone thinking I would be a good enough mother to have their kids. Not once they saw the state of my bathroom, anyway.
“I was. I would still like to have kids. If it happens.” He shrugged and sounded way too casual.
“It’s okay to say you want to have kids. You’re not going to send me screaming out of here,” I said with a snort of laughter. “Let me guess, you thought that because I’m a sexual deviant, I would never want to be tied down?”
“I think you’d love to be tied down.” He wiggled his eyebrows. “But not in that sense.”
“I wouldn’t mind having a family one day. Not when I’m twenty-five, but one day.” I did not want that last part to be misunderstood. If he planned to have some kind of midlife biological clock crisis, I would have to scram.
No, you wouldn’t, my sense of reality scolded me. And it was right. I loved him way too stupid hard. Maybe that’s why I was suddenly in search of a deal breaker.
To avoid my urge to bring up religion in an attempt to nuke our probably fleeting happiness from orbit, I asked him, “Do you have anything you want to know about me?”
His brow crumpled as he thought. “I know you haven’t been in a serious relationship before. I won’t ask you how many sexual partners you’ve had—”
“Good, because after the other night I don’t know,” I joked.
I hadn’t known before the other night, anyway.
He smiled but turned serious again. “And I know about your family, through Scott. I suppose my biggest question is about living arrangements in the future.”
“Like…” Did he mean we were going to move right in together? He’d done it before, if I’d heard him correctly.
“Like what happens when we decide to cohabitate.”
When. Not if.
“You live in California. Your friends are in California. My life is spread all over the East Coast. Which one of us compromises?” He wasn’t asking for an answer, I could tell. Just musing aloud about a problem that, with another person, a settled person who knew exactly what they planned to do with their life, could have swiftly made being in love pointless.
“Hmm, do you uproot your business headquarters and your apartment and that famous restaurant you own a huge stake in?” I ticked them off on my fingers. “Or do I leave behind my lucrative dispensary job and the luxurious accommodations afforded by my parents’ pool house?”
He gave me a bashful laugh. “Fair enough. I didn’t want to assume.”
“That’s in the future, though,” I stressed.
“Absolutely. I don’t expect you to move in with me right this second.” He patted his chest in an invitation I couldn’t turn down. I snuggled up to him and sighed with a contentment that felt dangerous to the part of my brain convinced that he couldn’t really love me.
Would it be so bad to believe he was in love with me? That he wouldn’t change his mind suddenly and throw me on a plane back home? Scott had been so concerned that Matt would fall for me, and I would break his heart. I wondered if my brother realized I had a heart that could break, too.
The thought of Scott made me groan in dismay. “Dude. We have to tell my brother.”
Matt hissed an inhale between his teeth. “I was trying not to think about that.”
“It’s going to suck so hard when he finds out he was right about us.” I toyed with one of the buttons on Matt’s shirt. “Do you tell him? Or do I?”
“I think I should,” Matt says resignedly. “Rip it off like a bandage.”
“How are you going to tell him?” I was more concerned with what Matt would tell Scott. The two of them knew each other in a completely different context than I knew my brother. “I might be able to pick up some pointers for how to communicate with him as an equal and not as a little sister.”
“You overestimate his respect for me,” Matt quipped. “I’m going to tell him the truth. I’m in love with you, and I’m hoping that we’re going to be together forever, and, if he doesn’t like it, I’ll give him one free punch.”
I laughed. “That’s so immature.”
“I hope you’ll still love me when my jaw is wired shut. Your brother is a beast.” Matt kissed the top of my head. “Can we wait until after our New York week, though? I don’t want to get hit in the face unless you’re absolutely sure I love you.”
“Getting hit in the face for me might prove your love,” I teased.
“There has to be a better way,” he said. “I’m too pretty to get hit in the face.”
I leaned up and blinked slowly, taking a long, dreamy look at him. “You know, now that we’re not pretending not to be into each other that way, I can tell you that you are so fucking handsome.”
“I know.” He laughed and tried to dodge the playful slap I landed on his shoulder. “But it’s still nice to hear it.” He stroked my hair against my back. “Now that I can say it, the first time I saw you, I thought you were the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.”
I sat up and gave him an incredulous twist of my mouth. “In a tank top and cutoffs? So, like, beautiful compared to the alligator?”
“No, just beautiful. Fucking you became priority number one.” He blushed, and my heart melted into goo. “I should have known better. I should have known I was going to fall in love with you.”
“Everyone always does.” That wasn’t necessarily a good thing. “Speaking of… Does this mean we’re monogamous now?”
“Sexually? Fuck no.” He stopped himself. “Wait, is that what you want? Because if that’s what you want—”
“I can be in love with you with some other dude’s cock in me.” I had to set the record straight on that right away. There was too much freaky sex to be had out there, and I didn’t mean on the island. “And you can be in love with me with some other chick’s hand up your ass.”
“Oh, good. Then you’re aware that I’m also able to love you—”
“If your cock is in someone else, yeah. Goes both ways. We’re on the same page there.” I bit my lip. “Romantically, though, are you…”
He shrugged. “I’ve never been in an actual poly relationship. I’ve definitely had group friends with benefits. And I do a Thursday-night circle jerk in New York.”
I couldn’t help my huge, loud laugh. “That’s a thing?”
“It’s an amazing stress reliever. I get together with a few of my more open-minded guy friends, have a couple beers, bitch about our week, and then…circle up and watch each other jerk off.” The matter-of-fact way he described it, like it was a book club, only made it funnier.
“I’m sorry, I…” I wiped tears of laughter from my eyes. “I had no idea that was even a thing people do.”
“It’s cheaper than therapy.” He paused. “I do therapy too. That’s one of those things that I’m not willing to give up.”
“Therapy, or jacking off in a room full of guys?” I joked, and before he could answer, I clarified, “I’m kidding. I’m fine with both.”
“When we’re out in the real world, though, where people aren’t vetted and providing medical records? Safety with partners required, okay?” he asked, fully serious. “And disclosure. If you want to fuck other people, I don’t care. But I have to know you’re going to be safe, and I have to know it’s happening.”
“Always,” I swore, and held up my hand with my pinkie finger raised.
He linked his around mine and we shook on it.
“Romantically, though?” He went back to the other part of the question. “I’m not sure how I would feel if you fell in love with someone else, and I had to share you. It might be different if we were both in love with the same person, but… I’m not sure I would seek it out.”
“Then it’s you and me until further notice,” I agreed.
“Until seven days after we get to New York, right?”
It didn’t sound like a joke, now.
I laid my head on his chest again, listening for a moment to the beat of his heart under my ear. And the gurgles from the ice cream, which made me smile, until I remembered that my inability to accept love was actively hurting him.
“I’m trying,” I whispered.
He took my hand and raised it to his lips, brushing them along the backs of my fingers. “I know.”
“It’s not that I don’t trust you.”
“I know,” he emphasized. “The amount of importance we both place on trust correlates to the trauma having our trust broken in the past has caused us.”
“That’s not your original idea.” I walked my fingertips over his pecs. “That’s from therapy.”
“It is,” he confirmed. “So it’s coming from someone smarter and more qualified than I am. I want you to be able to trust that I love you. But you had a big shock in childhood that made you question the people you love and who were closest to you. I can’t hold it against you if you’re not ready to jump off a proverbial ledge with me.”
I lifted my head. “You know what?”
He raised an eyebrow in question.
“That goes a long way toward making me trust you. I don’t like to be rushed,” I answered.
He squinted at me incredulously. “You gave me a seven-day deadline to prove my love, and you don’t like to be rushed?”
I batted my eyes at him. “I never said the deadline couldn’t be extended.”
“All right, that’s it.” He wrapped his arms around me tight and sat up. I squealed and pushed at him, but he was far stronger.
And I wasn’t serious about escaping him.