13. Jaime
THIRTEEN
jaime
“ Y ou’re okay with leaving?” I double checked.
Technically, I hadn’t even asked him to leave. He’d just headed to grab his coat after the musical had ended and I’d roused Cece. Seriously, something really bad had happened. Cece, falling asleep while her favorite musical of all time—with her dream cast—was on?
Unheard of.
I ignored the twinge in my stomach. I should be pressing more. And I shouldn’t have shoved Tony in here, with no thoughts to Cece, when I’d seen him at the door.
Cece definitely had had a point about me being selfish and putting myself first, even though I still didn’t agree with everything else they’d said.
“I’m not going to overstay my welcome, pup.” Tony pulled me closer as he spoke. There really was something wrong with the way my body reacted whenever he manhandled me like this. “And you have to take care of your beta, don’t you?”
There was a hint of humor when he said beta. I’d text him about it later, but he had a point. Whenever one of us was not feeling great, cuddling in bed was mandatory. I might have an issue with thinking clearly when Tony was around, but I still kept some functioning brain cells.
I still had to check. “You don’t mind?”
If he said he did, I’d kick him out and lick my wounds or something. Tony had been okay with everything Cece had explained. He’d been fine with Cece telling him not to touch her while we were on the couch, and he’d been fine with me having an arm around her and nuzzling into her hair from time to time.
Not all D-types understood our thing. We’d been burned a few times. Nothing dramatic, but it was the principle of it.
“Do I give you the impression that I’d stay quiet if I minded?”
Fair enough.
“Ugh, just get a room.”
Cece made me jump when she walked past us. She’d gone to the bathroom while Tony grabbed his coat, but I always forgot how eerily quick she was.
I growled at her. A puppy growl. Human growls were not nice, and they were forbidden, but puppy growling was fair game. She was lucky Tony’s arms were around me or I would’ve pounced to bite her.
“It’s not a bad idea.” Tony’s voice cut off my inner fantasies. “We do need to talk.”
Talk.
Right.
We could do that.
“Be right back.”
Or I could get out of his grip, grab his hand, and drag him to my room. He didn’t fit in the tiny space with a bed that was barely large enough to fit both Cece and me and would certainly not work with someone more wide shouldered than we were.
It didn’t matter.
There was a door separating us from the rest of the world, and that was all I needed. The benefit of rushing him here was that he was too busy taking in the mess I had for a room—too busy to keep me from pinning him to said door.
“I wanna fuck you so fucking bad,” I said. I’d never claimed to be one for finesse. “And then I wanna hear you talk some more about punishing me, and being responsible for me, and all that shit.”
Tony’s breath hitched. I smirked. I’d liked what he did to my insides when he’d discussed responsibility with Cece, but I liked having him like this, too. It was a sort of thrill I wanted to keep chasing.
A thrill that died a sudden death when Tony’s expression shifted from that deer caught in headlights look to nostrils flared, set jaw, and intent eyes.
He trailed his hand up my torso to my throat. There was no real pressure, but it was enough to turn the tables, to leave me standing on the tip of my toes with my lips parted.
“Was I not clear earlier when I talked about owning you, pup?”
A whimper escaped me before I could remember I was supposed to be in control here. “But the other day you said?—”
“Keyword there,” Tony interrupted. I squirmed. “ I said.”
I gulped.
Okay, got it.
I moved my hands from his waist to his wrist. I didn’t need—or care—to fight him, but moving my hands helped stave off the panic of being in the position he’d put me in.
He relaxed his hold a few seconds later, lowering me. I swallowed again as the soles of my feet connected with the grey flooring.
“I wasn’t baiting you, pup.” He spoke before I could verbalize the fear that would’ve plagued me sooner or later. “I want you to. I fantasize about it when the idea doesn’t make me freeze completely. But it needs to be on my terms.”
I nodded.
Yeah, that made sense.
“Your body, your pace. Got it.”
Tony pressed me up against him. His heart was beating as fast as mine. I gasped, craning my neck so I could keep an eye on him.
“We can do other things.”
“Yeah?” I went back on my tiptoes, standing just a short distance from his mouth. “Can we make out?”
He was on me before I’d even finished posing the question. His lips, his hold, his teeth clashing with mine—everything about it was aggressive. Everything about it had me scrambling for purchase, feeling like something meant to be mundane was a world-class experience that would get stuck in my head for years to come.
“If you think we’re going too fast, it’s going to be on you to pull the brakes.” Tony growled the words into my mouth.
He could’ve said pretty much anything and my response would’ve been the same—I pressed myself against him until his mouth was back on me.
“We’re good.” I breathed out the words when I didn’t get what I wanted. “Fast is good.”
It was more than good, but words were hard to come by—even harder when Tony walked me all the way to my bed. It wasn’t big enough for the two of us to fit comfortably, but logistics didn’t matter right this minute. What mattered was the way my whole body felt when the back of my calves hit the wooden base of the bed. What mattered was the way his body covered mine, the way my heart kicked up without the itch to run away or to get on equal footing.
I was a bundle of nerves for him to play with, and I couldn’t care less that I was.
“I actually wanted to talk.” Tony paused. “To ask you something.”
His chest heaved as noticeably as mine as he pushed the words out. The idea had me reaching for the hem of his shirt. I needed skin, heat.
“What did you want to ask?”
Tony pulled my hand off him. I was all too ready to scowl at him, to protest. That was before he laid me down on the bed. Before he grabbed both my hands with one of his and kept them above my head.
“I’m hosting a workshop next week.”
I frowned. I knew he wanted me to connect some dots, but I hadn’t checked the events tab in the club’s app in forever, and I wasn’t one to go to many workshops to begin with. It was bad, yeah, but most required some kind of fee for the person running it, and others… just didn’t interest me that much.
“Okay?”
Tony tilted his head to the side, eyes narrowed. He must’ve seen I wasn’t trying to get under his skin for once because he just shook his head. Fondly. I decided to interpret it as a fond gesture, at least.
“I want you on the stage with me.”
Ohhhhh.
I swallowed. He did?
“What’s the workshop about?”
That smirk was not good. It was good for the heat swirling in my lower gut, but it was not good for the part of me still attached to my brain.
“Spanking.”
I breathed out, eyes closed. I might have squirmed. “You haven’t spanked me yet. What if I’m not into it?”
That had to be a rational response. It was better than admitting his spanking sessions got me incredibly bothered but intimidated the fuck out of me, too. It didn’t leave me as exposed. It was too soon for that level of exposure.
“I see you, pup.” He sounded way too smug. “I’m happy to remedy the first thing you said, but don’t pretend for a second you’re not into it.”
I frowned. A protest formed at the tip of my tongue. I was so ready to utter it, but then I opened my eyes. I saw the intent way he watched me. The same way I’d caught him watching me more than once at the club.
He had noticed me when he’d spanked one of the girls, hadn’t he?
“I’m not a hardcore masochist.” The words took raw effort to get out. I licked my lips after it was done. Why did the words not feel exactly true? They always had been. “And I don’t have a high pain tolerance.”
Tony looked undeterred. It confused me. He wasn’t supposed to look like that when I was stalling and giving him all the excuses in the world to?—
Fuck.
Excuses.
That’s what I was doing.
Maybe that was why he looked the way he did—because he somehow knew, too. If there was someone who would fit that stereotype in the media about the Dom who could read their sub’s mind and anticipate every one of their needs? It was Tony. I’d always known it was. It’s what had always drawn me to him, what made me notice him even when he would go out of his way to keep his distance. He just… When he was in a room, he commanded it. You felt his presence, his power, his focus on you.
It was wild and the kind of thing that had left me shaking more than once. Back then, I’d thought I would not survive being in close quarters with him. I wouldn’t be able to handle all that energy solely directed at me.
It was strange. In a way, I was still making sense of it, processing the way it was affecting me. The way I responded to it.
“Are you done?”
He didn’t need to specify what I was done with. I got the gist.
“Yeah.”
I wasn’t done parsing through everything in my head, but that wasn’t what he was asking.
His fingers tightened around my neck. My breath hitched. “It’ll be interesting to test that pain tolerance of yours with an audience. More instructive for them, too.”
“Right.”
The words registered a second later. He wasn’t going to spank me before the workshop? I craned my neck as much as I could. No idea what I was trying to achieve or what I thought I’d find reflected in those dark eyes. Tony had one hell of a poker face. The only thing I could surmise was that he looked serious.
For some reason, I didn’t have it in me to question or fight him.
I didn’t even find it in me to fight him when he slapped my side before getting out of bed.
“And pup? Work on that damned email.”
Or when he said that.