Chapter 9 #2
Who was only a temporary part of your life?
I hug my hand with the puck ring from Robyn against my heart.
Then I turn to D’Angelo and grin. “I bloody love you.”
I bound across the observatory and leap into his arms.
D’Angelo looks floored by my enthusiasm and stumbles back a step. He’s wearing a pinstripe suit and had been adjusting his sleeves.
I wrap my arms tightly around him. “Thanks, thanks, thanks…”
He laughs, although his lips curl into a pleased smile against my neck.
When he pulls back, our gazes meet.
The moonlight bathes him in a silvery light that catches on his black curls and makes his piercing blue eyes look like chips of ice.
“When I was a kid, I drew a room just like this in a picture of my dream home,” I say in a hushed tone. “I never knew that it could become reality.”
D’Angelo leans forward and kisses me. “There is equipment in the cabinets over there. Anything else you need, just tell me and I will order it. If this had been a cocktail bar or the playroom downstairs, then I would have stocked it properly. But I’ve probably filled it with microscopes, Bunsen burners or, Christ, rectal thermometers.
Science is all the same type of thing, right? ”
I pull back, fixing him with a flat stare. “Do you want to bring out my geek side? Because the scientist in me is about to hand you your arse for that comment.”
“Hot as that sounds to watch you try…” D’Angelo’s eyes glint dangerously.
He turns and trips me.
My stomach flips in the best way as it always does when I take corners just a touch too fast on my Harley.
Then D’Angelo catches me, carrying me down to the rug so smoothly that I almost don’t notice it happen.
Where did he learn moves like that?
I lie on my back with wide eyes, staring up at D’Angelo, as he cages me.
His silky curls fall across my cheeks; our noses touch.
It feels more intimate than the times that he’s been balls deep in me.
Breathlessly, I murmur, “Now that was hot.”
When D’Angelo chuckles, his breath gusts across my lips, and I wish that I would always be able to feel it. “Should we take up wrestling as well? Just the two of us? Coach would probably have a heart attack to hear that you’re doing yet another dangerous sport on top of your surfing lessons.”
“I’m getting better at surfing. Code is a brilliant instructor. I haven’t drowned yet.”
D’Angelo nips my lower lip in retaliation. “I’m glad that the bar is set so high.”
“Plus, I haven’t given myself a black eye with the board for over a month.”
“As I said, high bar.”
“Anyway, back to this wrestling. Shall we add in some mud or oil? I’d suggest chocolate, but then our Robyn would dive in too and lick it off before we got to the throwing or pinning. Second thoughts, let’s definitely use chocolate.”
D’Angelo scrunches up his nose like he’s in pain. “You are not making my house any messier. Vetoed. But if you want to be pinned…”
He snatches my wrists between his large hand and drags them above my head.
I don’t struggle. This is exactly where I want to be.
My chest rises and falls.
D’Angelo nudges my legs apart. Then he slowly…achingly slowly…rubs his clothed knee over my swollen cock.
“Unfair,” I grit out, squirming.
D’Angelo sucks on my neck, glancing up at me through his eyelashes. “And who said that I care about being fair?”
Then he grinds his knee down harder.
I arch, pushing up into his tormenting touch.
“I’m almost there, darlin’,” I pant. “I’m about to…”
To my horror, D’Angelo lets go of my wrists and casually rolls off me. He lies on his back, pillowing his head on his hands.
I suck in startled breaths, struggling to get myself under control at being denied my orgasm at the last moment.
Fuck.
My hands drop to my sides. My fingers twitch, desperate to deliver the final stroke that I need to crash over the edge.
Yet I’ve been D’Angelo’s personal sub for enough months now to know that touching myself without permission is breaking the rules.
I ache with that particular painpleasure that I bloody love since I know that I am being denied because D’Angelo wants me to be.
He is in control of both my pleasure and pain.
My breathing is ragged, as I turn my head to glare at D’Angelo. He is sprawled looking up through the domed roof at the stars like he hasn’t just wrecked me.
“You’re stopping there…?” I gesture at my painfully hard cock, unable to keep the edge of pleading out of my voice.
D’Angelo’s lips twitch. “Problem?”
“Cruel man.”
“Luckily, I have a pretty man who loves my cruelty.”
My hand moves toward my desperate cock, but again, I press my palm to the floor to stop myself.
“Good boy.” D’Angelo entwines his fingers with mine, as if to help me resist the temptation.
As if we’re in this together like he always makes me feel, whether in a scene, punishment, or on the ice.
D’Angelo is always holding my hand.
Both the feel of his hand in mine and the good boy floods me with a warm, fuzzy feeling that makes up for the ache in my balls.
Almost.
D’Angelo gazes up at the night sky. “I wanted to share the stars with you tonight. Robyn and Eden already do regularly. I hoped that you would be able to share this side of yourself with me as well.”
“I wasn’t hiding the stars — this side of myself — from you,” I rush to explain.
“It’s just…” I stare up at the endless stars.
It’s easier to talk like this lying side by side with him as boyfriends.
He may be dressed, and I may be naked, but that’s how we’re both most comfortable.
It’s not the same twisted dynamic as my past relationships.
“All my life, stargazing has offered me a sanctuary. A place that I could be my own person without my twin. It’s been new to me, sharing that with Robyn.
I had a place like it in college. Blythe tried to force me to tell her where it was.
She beat the shit out of it when I wouldn’t.
It was the only time that I didn’t obey her. ”
D'Angelo turns his head to meet my gaze. “You can ask me to leave. This truly is your room.”
I cling tightly to his hand. “You’re not going bloody anywhere.” Then I glance down at my cock. “You need to take responsibility.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” D’Angelo replies, airily.
I stare back up at the moon.
It helps me to say something that my therapist has been suggesting I discuss with D’Angelo for a while.
I’m not good at this shit. But the stars help.
“I know now that Blythe was an abusive dom,” I whisper.
“I’m still processing it but I can still say that out loud.
I didn’t know it at the time. You’ve shown me how things should be.
But back then, I was only eighteen, away from home for the first time, and just figuring out my submissive side.
Blythe was older, wealthy, and so bloody glamorous.
She showered me with attention, taking me out to restaurants and showing me a new world that I’d never seen before. ”
“She love bombed you.” D’Angelo’s voice is hard.
“Yeah,” a wave of sadness washes over me, “but why did she choose me?”
“Cucciolo, it’s not your fault—”
“I know, but she must have seen something in me, right? Something that she could use?” My chest is tight with pain.
“Within a couple of weeks, she started criticizing me and being cold, always giving me this silent, disapproving stare, no matter how hard I tried to please her. She’d find something to pick on and then just go on and on about.
She’d demand things like: Why are you late?
Even when I was certain that I was early. ”
“And now the gaslighting.”
“The thing is,” the stars’ light fractures, as my eyes swim with tears, “she only used how fucked up I already was. She saw how much more it hurt me to beat me for not trying hard enough in a scene, to punish me for being lazy and weak, or to demand why can’t you be more like your twin?
And I took it because I thought that I deserved it.
I’d heard all those things before from my teachers. ”
D'Angelo wipes a tear away from under my eye. “You’re the hardest working person I know.”
I give a laugh that is more like a sob. “Wish you’d been there to tell my teachers that I was bloody trying hard enough.
You know that I struggle to concentrate.
In the first few years at school, there was some sympathy.
Well, more like pity. When Dee picked up reading like a bloody prodigy, however, while I remained an idiot—”
“Stop it.” D’Angelo firmly grips me by the chin and turns me to face him. “You don’t get to talk like that about the man I love.”
“I just…I tried my bloody best…and it wasn’t good enough. I tried so hard to please them because not pleasing adults meant pain, hunger, or being sold. I just…I tried.”
D’Angelo hushes me, dragging me against his chest.
He strokes my hair. “I know you did, cucciolo.”
He kisses the top of my head like I truly am something precious.
Like this, beneath the starlight in a room that D’Angelo made for me, I can almost believe it.
“It’s why I know that there is something wrong with me.
” I voice my biggest fear, which I have never spoken out loud to anyone else.
“It’s why I let Blythe… She told me that she was a dom and since I was a sub, this was how it should be.
I messed up, and she disciplined me for it.
I believed that I was lucky to have her because I was such a trainwreck.
So, maybe I needed someone who would hold me accountable like she did. ”