Chapter Five Let’s Talk It Out
Chapter Five: Let’s Talk It Out
I lay in bed staring at the ceiling and replaying the whole thing until it stopped feeling like a scene I had walked into and started feeling like a disaster I had personally built with my own two hands.
This was bad.
Not just awkward bad, either, although it was definitely that.
It was the kind of bad that kept getting worse the longer I thought about it, because now Jonas knew I had gone snooping through his private life, knew I had shown up at the club, knew I had stood there watching him like some pathetic creep before turning around and running the second he saw me.
And if he told my dad, I was screwed.
Yes, I was a grown woman. Yes, technically I could go wherever I wanted and make whatever stupid choices I wanted.
But being a grown woman and being able to afford life were two very different things, and the only reason I was still in school at all was because my dad was paying for it.
My classes, my apartment, the version of my life that still had some chance of ending in a degree instead of me dropping out and pretending I had meant to do that all along.
If he got pissed enough to stop helping me, I didn’t have some backup plan tucked away somewhere.
I had a part-time job, summer classes, and exactly zero interest in finding out how fast my whole life could fall apart.
I dragged a hand over my face and groaned into the quiet of the room.
Maybe he wouldn’t say anything.
Maybe he’d let it go.
Maybe he’d come home, go upstairs, and act like none of it had happened, and then I could spend the rest of the night coming up with something halfway believable to say if he brought it up tomorrow.
I was still clinging to that stupid hope when I heard the front door open.
My whole body went tight.
I stayed frozen on the bed, listening to the quiet sounds of him moving through the apartment and trying to guess from the pattern of it where he was headed.
Every second that passed without him coming to my door made me feel a little better, right up until I heard his footsteps stop outside my room.
My stomach turned right back over, because clearly he was just standing on the other side of the door trying to decide what to do with me.
Just forget about it I thought.
Please, please, please.
Then he knocked.
Not hard. Not angry. Just enough to make it impossible to pretend I hadn’t heard him.
“Can we talk?”
I closed my eyes for a second.
There went that plan.
“Yeah,” I called, though it came out thinner than I wanted it to.
I pushed myself off the bed and opened the door to find him standing there looking exactly like he always did, calm and put together and annoyingly unreadable.
If he was angry, he wasn’t showing it. If he was disappointed, he had hidden that too.
All I got was the steady weight of his attention settling on me for a second before he stepped back and nodded toward the kitchen.
“Come with me.”
I followed him down the hall with my stomach in knots, already bracing for the worst.
He moved straight to the kitchen and leaned back against the counter like this was any other conversation we’d had in this apartment, like I hadn’t just shown up at his sex club and watched him put his hand in another woman’s hair.
The thought hit me again so fast I had to shove it down before it could make my face do something embarrassing.
“Do you want a drink?” he asked.
I blinked. “What?”
“Water. Tea. Something stronger, depending on how you think this is going to go.”
That should not have made me want to laugh, but it did, a small nervous sound slipping out before I could stop it. “I’m fine.”
He nodded once. “Alright.”
Then he folded his arms loosely and looked at me for long enough that I started wishing he would just get to it already.
“Do you want to explain why you were at the club?”
There it was.
I opened my mouth, ready with something halfway polished, and then gave up before I even started. I was too tired to lie well, and something about the way he was standing there made lying feel pointless anyway.
“I saw the flyer in your mail,” I admitted. “I was curious.”
He didn’t react right away, which somehow made me talk faster.
“I wasn’t trying to, like, dig through your stuff or anything. I just saw it when I brought the mail up, and then I looked it up online, and then I don’t know, I just…” I blew out a breath. “I was curious.”
“I know,” he said.
That stopped me.
He rubbed one hand over his jaw and looked at the counter for a second before meeting my eyes again. “I understand being curious. I just wish you had asked me instead of deciding to walk into a place like that by yourself.”
I stared at him. “That’s it?”
His brow lifted slightly. “What were you expecting?”
“I don’t know. For you to be pissed.”
“I’m not pissed.”
I searched his face for a second, suspicious on instinct. “You’re not?”
“No.” He paused, then added, “Concerned about the way you went about it, yes. Angry, no.”
I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. “Oh.”
The knot in my stomach loosened just enough for me to think again.
“I’m sorry,” I said anyway.
His expression shifted a little at that, not softer exactly, but something close to it. “There’s nothing to be sorry about. You’re an adult. If you’re curious, you’re curious. That isn’t something you need to feel ashamed of.”
That landed harder than I expected, not because he said it harshly, but because he didn’t. He said it like it was obvious, like this wasn’t some humiliating thing I needed to apologize for or explain away, and that alone made something in me unclench.
He kept going before I could figure out what to do with that.
“If you’re interested in learning more, there are safer ways to do that than showing up alone and hoping for the best. And if you’re not comfortable talking to me about it, I know women in the lifestyle I could introduce you to.
People who would answer your questions, make sure you don’t walk into something unprepared. ”
I looked at him for a second, thrown all over again by how reasonable he was being.
“You’d do that?”
“Yes.”
No hesitation. No weirdness. Just yes.
Something about that, about the fact that he was taking me seriously instead of treating me like a kid who had gotten caught doing something stupid, made my chest ache in a way I did not want to think about too closely.
“Thanks,” I said quietly. “For not making this a huge thing.”
He tipped his head once, like that was all it needed to be.
And maybe it should have ended there.
Maybe a smarter person would have let it end there, gone back to her room, and congratulated herself for surviving the conversation without dying of embarrassment.
Unfortunately for me, I was not a smarter person.
Because he was standing there talking to me like I really was an adult, like this was a real conversation and not some lecture, and that made me feel bolder than I should have.
Or maybe I had already been too far gone the second I saw him downstairs with that paddle in his hand.
Either way, the thought was there before I could kill it.
If he was this open about it, maybe I could ask for more.
“How does that even happen?” I asked.
He looked at me. “How does what happen?”
“A BDSM relationship.” I tucked a piece of hair behind my ear, trying for casual and not at all sure I was pulling it off. “Like, how do people get into that?”
For the first time since he’d knocked on my door, there was something almost amused in his face.
“There are a lot of ways,” he said. “But the biggest thing is honesty. You have to be open about what you want from the start. Expectations, limits, interests, all of it. If people aren’t communicating clearly, they usually end up making a mess of it.”
I nodded slowly like I was considering the answer in some detached, academic way, which would have maybe been more convincing if I hadn’t immediately followed it up with, “What if you don’t know what you want?”
Yeah, I know what I want, I thought. I want you.
He laughed softly, just enough to catch me off guard. “Then you start there. Figuring it out is part of it too.”
I leaned against the island, needing something solid under me while my nerve lasted. “And what do you want?”
That got his full attention.
His brows lifted slightly, and there it was, that split second where he actually looked caught off guard. It was so brief I almost missed it, but I had never seen him without an answer before, and suddenly I wanted to see it again.
“Why do you want to know?” he asked.
I could have backed off.
I should have backed off.
Instead I heard myself tell the truth.
“Because I’m attracted to you,” I said, and once the words were out there was no point pretending otherwise. “To this version of you, and the one I saw downstairs. And I want…”
I had to force the rest out. “I want what I saw, but with me.”
For a second he didn’t say anything at all.
He just looked at me.
Then he dragged a hand over his face, slow and deliberate, and I stared because it was the first time I had seen him look even remotely thrown.
My confidence cracked almost immediately.
Right. Great. Perfect. I had finally pushed too far.
“I mean,” I started quickly, heat rushing into my face, “unless you’re not interested. Which is fine. Obviously. I just thought maybe there was something there, but if I read it wrong then I’m sorry and we can forget I said any of that.”
“Don’t misunderstand,” he said.
I shut up.
He looked at me for a long second, and when he spoke again his voice was still calm, but there was something tighter under it now, something I felt low in my stomach.
“It’s not that I’m not interested.”
Relief hit me so fast I almost went weak with it.
I hated that he could do that to me with one sentence.
“Then what is it?” I asked, trying not to sound as hopeful as I felt.
His jaw shifted slightly. “It’s complicated.”
I let out a small breath and spread one hand against the counter. “Is it? We’re both adults.”
His eyes narrowed just a fraction. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Don’t simplify it because it gets you the answer you want.”
That shut me up for all of two seconds.
“You’re my dad’s friend, not my dad.”
“No,” he said evenly. “I’m your father’s friend, you’re living in my apartment, I’m twice your age, and I have never had a sub living under my roof. So yes, it’s complicated.”
My heart was pounding so hard by then I could feel it in my throat, but none of what he said sounded like a no. It sounded like a man listing reasons he should say no while very much not saying it.
And I was absolutely not letting that go.
“I’m only here for a couple more weeks,” I said. “If it doesn’t work, I’m gone anyway. The age thing doesn’t bother me. None of that bothers me.”
He didn’t answer.
He just looked at me, slow and assessing in a way that made my entire body feel too warm.
I could practically see him thinking.
I was already scrambling for something else to say, something smarter or more convincing, when he straightened away from the counter.
“Fine,” he said.
I blinked. “Fine?”
“We start tomorrow,” he said, like he was setting a meeting and not changing the entire shape of my summer in one sentence.
“If we do this, we do it properly. We talk first. Expectations, limits, what you’re asking for and what you think you want.
Then we decide whether a trial dynamic makes sense. ”
I just stared at him.
He looked almost annoyingly calm about it, but there was something in his voice now, something low and contained that sounded a little too much like anticipation for me to miss it.
And just like that, I knew I hadn’t imagined it.
He wanted this too.
“Tomorrow,” I repeated, because apparently that was all my brain could handle.
“Yes,” he said.
I should have said something cooler than that. Something casual. Something that made it seem like I wasn’t suddenly aware of every inch of my body and the way the kitchen felt too warm and the way his eyes had not left me.
Instead I just nodded.
And he nodded back like we had settled something reasonable.
Maybe to him, we had.
To me, it felt like stepping off the edge of something and smiling on the way down.