Chapter 21
Twenty-One
Victor
I wake in the middle of the night, cotton-mouthed and disoriented in the dark.
Jason is a warm weight against me. No, I'm the one pressed against him.
At some point, I'd rolled over and wrapped myself around him like he’s a body pillow.
My arm is slung across his waist, my face buried in the back of his neck, one leg thrown over his.
I should move. This isn't part of our arrangement. Sex is one thing; clinging to him in my sleep like I'm afraid he'll disappear is something else entirely.
But he's still breathing the slow, deep rhythm of sleep, and he's so warm, and it's been so long since I've held anyone like this.
Just a few more minutes, I tell myself. It doesn't mean anything.
I close my eyes and breathe him in. Incense and rain and clean sweat. My hand finds his heartbeat through his ribs. Steady. Calm.
When I wake again, the sun is up and Jason is already out of bed, probably birding before the day starts. The bed beside me is cold. It’s fine. I’m not disappointed.
Despite my hangover, I lead a morning yoga session that Jason and Silas attend but Kelsey and Adrienne don’t. At breakfast, the girls sit with some of their other friends who are here for the wedding.
There aren’t any expeditions planned for today, so Logan, Silas, and I lounge by the pool, Jason goes on a short walk around the grounds with his binoculars, and I swim more laps along the middle of the kidney-shaped pool.
At some point in the midafternoon, I catch Silas and Logan exchanging glances. About fifteen minutes later, they make excuses for going back to their casita, Silas fairly skipping ahead of Logan’s more measured pace.
Jason’s returned from birding and is stretched out on a lounger next to me, reading.
“Looks like Silas just bought himself a one-way ticket to pound town,” I murmur, flicking my fingers at their retreating backs.
“I suspect he bought the weekly pass,” Jason says without looking up from his book.
It’s so unexpected—a dirty joke from Jason Perez, of all people—that I don’t even recognize it as such at first. He finally looks up at me, my mouth hanging open, and winks. I snicker at first, then laugh full out, and Jason chuckles along with me.
“Maybe he got a monthly pass,” I suggest in between wheezes.
I don’t even know what the difference between a weekly or monthly pass to pound town might be, but I’m not letting this opportunity to joke with Jason pass me by.
Jason stifles a snort, then gives up and lets his book fall open in his lap.
He laughs like a hyena until an older couple that we’ve seen around the resort but haven’t spoken with files past us.
They look like they were heading for the loungers on my other side, but after casting sidelong glances at us, still laughing like loons, they keep walking and settle at the end of the pool, on the other side of the little rock-lined waterfall.
A few minutes after we finally run out of laughter, I roll my head on the lounger’s back to look at Jason. “Wanna?” I flick my eyes in the direction of our casita.
He gives me a once-over, honest-to-god checking me out like we’re in a club. “Yes,” he exhales in a low voice. “Go now and be naked when I get there.”
I sketch a salute to him, gather my stuff, and try not to trip inelegantly in my hurry to obey him. When I look over my shoulder, he’s got his book back in front of his face, but his fingers tap the back cover impatiently.
He takes his sweet time, though. I spend a good fifteen minutes, lying naked on the bed, half-hard, changing position every few minutes. I’m pretty sure he’s making me wait on purpose.
A hundred percent sure when he finally enters the casita and does only god knows what in the living area before finally appearing in the doorway of the bedroom. He stops just short of the bed, makes a stay motion with his hand when I start to sit up, and just regards me for a minute.
I flop onto my back. “You are a Dom, you know.”
Jason blinks at me. “What are you talking about?”
“I think you know what I’m talking about. I’m just saying there’s nothing wrong with it. And that I, especially, am okay with it, so you don’t need to hold back on my account.”
“You especially?” I’m not sure whether Jason is parroting my words to stave off coming up with his own or he’s building up a head of steam he’s about to unleash on me.
Maybe I’ll try a different tack. “You know Leah was my best friend, right? I told her pretty much everything. About my work, stuff about my clients, without revealing their names, of course. Guys that I was seeing, that kind of thing.”
“You talked to her about your sex life.” Jason’s tone is flat. Shit, I might have gone about this wrong after all. “And she talked to you about her sex life. Our sex life.”
“Sometimes. A little.”
Jason turns and sits on the end of the bed, his back to me. “Blessed Virgin and all the saints,” he mutters.
I scramble up behind him and put a tentative hand on his shoulder.
Shockingly, he doesn’t flinch away, though he doesn’t turn around.
“Jason, it wasn’t like she was spilling all your secrets all over town.
She trusted me. With good reason. I loved her as much as you did.
Maybe differently than you did, but still. ”
He snorts. “Well, if you’re saying you wouldn’t do for her what she wanted in bed, then yeah, I guess we did love her differently.”
“I’m saying that I—wait, what did you do for her in bed?”
Okay, that causes him to look over his shoulder at me. “You just said she told you.”
“Broad strokes, man, not specifics! I told you, she didn’t spill all your secrets. And besides, I’m asking what you like in bed. Because I think I have some idea, but I’d rather hear it from you.”
He turns away from me again. “Do we have to talk about this?”
Ouch. “Not if we never do anything again.”
A distinct possibility, given Jason’s general skittishness and how I can’t seem to stop pushing him more than he’s comfortable. “But I would like to do more things with you, and I’d like to know what you like.”
I shimmy forward until I can reach my arms around him and slide my hand down over his stomach. His dick is already hard in his swim trunks.
“What do you like?” Turning the question around on me because he wants to know or ducking my question because he’s too embarrassed to talk about his preferences?
You know what? It doesn’t matter.
Okay, it matters because I really think his preferences are much stronger than mine, which is why I’m pushing this so hard, but if he’s willing to do anything with me again, I’ll take it.
“I like lots of things. I like giving head, as you may have noticed.” Jason’s lips, just visible in my peripheral vision, curve into a smile, and I stroke his dick, which makes his smile grow, too.
“I like getting fucked, though I don’t mind doing the fucking, if that’s what the person I’m with prefers. ”
I pause, but Jason doesn’t chime in with his preferences.
Damn. Guess I’ll have to keep going. “I liked it when you fucked my face. And when you told me that’s what you wanted to do to me.
” Jason’s dick hardens a little more and his breath comes a little faster.
“I like it when you order me around. I think you like that, too.”
Jason nods. He leans back against me and lets his arms drop to either side of his thighs, hands open. His eyes are closed and his eyebrows drawn together. He’s not relaxed, talking about this, but he is participating.
Sort of.
“You ordered Leah around, too? You both liked it, I think?”
Jason nods again. “I don’t remember how it started. We were messing around one night, just being silly, I guess. She was teasing me, playing hard to get, you know?”
I don’t know, specifically—this isn’t one of the things Leah told me about—but I don’t need to know the specifics here. I nod and make an encouraging noise, since Jason can’t see me. “What happened next?” I ask. I keep my voice low and light, like it doesn’t matter whether he tells me or not.
His throat moves as he swallows. “I don’t know, I said something dumb and cheesy, like…
that she needed a good fuck and that she’d better lie back and take it like a good girl.
” He squeezes his eyes closed more. “I was, I don’t know, talking dirty or whatever, you know?
I would never have forced her to do something she didn’t want to do. ”
“Of course not,” I say. “She knew that.”
Jason snorts again. “Yeah, well. She told me that if I wanted to fuck her, I’d have to come over there and make her take me.”
“And did you?”
“Not exactly. I told her that if she didn’t behave herself, I’d spank her until she cried, and then I’d fuck her.”
“Ooh, fun. Is that what you did?”
Jason lifts a hand and drags it over his face, then peers over his shoulder at me. “Um. Yeah.”
I waggle my eyebrows at him like one of the Marx brothers. “Sounds hot.”
“You have no idea. It was the hottest thing either of us had ever done. It was like we were completely different people. We just…let go and went with it and it was incredibly hot. And we were kind of laughing about it the whole time, too, like we couldn’t believe we were going through with it.”
“And afterward?”
“You mean, after I made her come three times, then washed the tear tracks from her face and put some soothing lotion on her red bottom?” He shrugs.
“We kept doing it that way, I guess. She’d decide that she wanted me to do something to her, tease me about it until I was on the verge of losing my mind, and then get off when I’d take control and do whatever it was she wanted me to do to her. ”
“A bossy bottom, then. Yeah, that tracks.” God, Leah was so good for Jason. It still hurts so much that she’s gone.
“I have no idea what that means.”
“She was a submissive who liked to have a say in how you dominated her. But you’re most definitely a dominant, Jason. Maybe only in bed, but you know there’s nothing wrong with that, right?”
“It was only in bed,” Jason says, and the combination of guilt and desperation in his voice splinters my heart.
“I would never have tried to dominate her in any other area of her life. I’m not a controlling asshole like—” He snaps his mouth closed and his expression shutters like a gate rolling down over a New York City storefront.
I think I know who he means he’s not like, but decide that I’ve coaxed enough of Jason’s secrets out of him for one afternoon. I plant a kiss on his cheek. “Well, it sounds like she loved every minute of it, and I loved it both times when you took control with me.”
“It feels weird to talk about Leah while we’re…” He drops his head but pushes his hips forward, his dick still in my hand.
“She was your wife for a long time, Jason, and my best friend. I like talking about her.”
“I don’t know how she’d feel about what we’re doing.”
“Well, if she were here to ask, we wouldn’t be doing it.”
“That’s for sure,” Jason says on an exhale that stirs the fine hairs on my forearm.
There’s a long silence before Jason says, “Is that what you are? A bossy bottom?”
“Close enough,” I tell him. “I’m not all that submissive, though, and I’m not very active in the scene.”
“You’re not submissive, huh?” Jason disentangles my hand from his swim trunks and stands. “What if I told you to lie back and keep still while I had my way with you?”
A hot spike of arousal jolts through me. “I could submit to that.”
He catches my chin in a tight grip and lifts it so I’m looking up at him. “What if I spanked you until you cried and then fucked you?”
I swallow hard and shiver. “I don’t know that a spanking would make me cry but you’re welcome to try.”
He lets go of my chin and puts a hand in the center of my chest. He pushes until I fall back and he knees up on the bed. His erection tents his swim trunks and he swings one leg over my thighs to straddle me.
And then he slides his hand up my side and grabs my wrist in a hard grip. “What if I tied you down so that you were at my mercy?”
I’ve been hard pretty much since I got undressed and I’m starting to wonder if he might tease me until I cry. “Would you have mercy on me?”
He chuckles and leans down to hover over me, his lips barely grazing mine. “I don’t know. What would mercy look like in that scenario?”
I’m breathing hard now and my skin is itching for him to do something. Spank me, stroke me, touch me. Somehow. Anyhow. “Jason, please.”
“Please what?”
“Pick something and do it to me. Please.”
He clicks his tongue. “So impatient. I thought you said you weren’t all that submissive. But here you are, begging me to do something to you.”
“I also agreed that I’m bossy. Pick something before I pick something for you to do to me.”
He lifts himself off me and stands at the end of the bed. “By all means, you pick.”
He pulls his T-shirt over his head and folds it, then lays it on the dresser.
He slides his swim trunks down, steps out of them, and folds them atop his T-shirt.
When he turns around, his dick juts up from a nest of black curls.
His hands hang loosely at his sides and he’s got a glint in his eyes like he’s waiting for me to decide how I want to debauch myself.