Chapter 17 Gaining Tempo #2
It isn’t like I can’t say it. Dominant. I’m a modern woman.
I’ve listened to Lana Del Rey, and I’ve read the filthiest romance novels imaginable for Renata and my’s two-person book club.
Things happen that could bend time and space.
But, okay. It’s different in real life. With a man beneath my thighs, staring up at me, waiting.
Faust’s jaw shifts. “Arcadia.”
I don’t think I’ll ever get used to him saying that. “Please?”
A second passes and he seems to realize that he’s doing me a favor, saying the truth first. “Yes. But I can—”
“No.”
“It can be as much as you want.”
“I want it all.” I tug at his hair, and his eyes flutter shut, lips parting. Briefly, I wonder if there’s more to his fetish playbook that he hasn’t told me, then his hand finds my wrist and circles it. He isn’t turned on by the hair-pulling. He’s annoyed.
It’s getting harder and harder to not get dizzy again.
“We would need a safe word.” His jaw is clenched tightly, his words sharp.
“Sure, yeah. ‘Lights out’? ‘Safety car’?”
“And we can’t until—we can’t.”
My heart falls. “Not now? Not with just this?”
Faust makes a noise that’s half-thoughtful, half-painfully-frustrated. “It would be worse.”
“Why?”
I’m aware that I’m asking him to dom me without sex, which is objectively weird, but I want to understand every neuron of his fascinatingly strange brain, and we’ve already passed the Rubicon of sexual strangeness, in my opinion.
What is a little platonic BDSM between friends?
Some Secretary (2002) meal prepping? I rest my arms on his shoulders, feeling strangely more emboldened by the limits we’ve built up.
And less platonic, as he slowly guides his hand all the way around my hip to the outside of my thigh.
“You’d have to trust me. It’d make you trust me.” His voice is low, tempting. “And I don’t want to force that.”
“Because you’d be telling me what to eat?”
“Because I would take what I want from you. Over and over.” His fingertips skirt up my leg.
“You would be mine, and there wouldn’t be any sex to make you think it was just sex.
No excuses. No hiding. And I would make you take such good care of yourself, every day.
I would make sure that you’re fed, and you’ve had enough water, and that you’re happy.
Every day. You would—God. You wouldn’t get rid of me. Is that what you want?”
Do I? I’m breathless, a deer in the headlights.
“It feels like sex, when you do it right. Like love.” Faust traces the hem of my loose shorts.
Doesn’t try to move them, only runs the fabric between his fingers, teasing it.
“You’d feel fucked, just by doing what I tell you to do.
I’d be all over you, in your life. And I don’t think you want that, sweetheart. We’re playing by your rules.”
Horrible. He is hot and respectful, and I am going to dream about taking such good care of myself, aren’t I? My skin surges with heat, almost painful, and I pull him into another kiss to let some of it out. If I’m going to burn up, he can, too.
“I think you’re unwell,” I whisper after.
He smiles against my mouth. “A compliment, from you.”
“And if I ever want to do what you said? The, um. The dom thing.”
“You’d have to ask.” There’s that smirk of his, brushed against my cheek. “In a full sentence. And not tonight.”
He might be an actual mind reader. Another minute of human sexuality studies, courtesy of Doctor Fausto, and I might’ve asked for something I know I’m not ready for.
Because it’s… alluring. And not just trying his brand of kink, though that’s quickly making me rethink how well I know myself.
I want to know what makes him tick, map out the constantly evolving puzzle that is his mind.
He keeps so much on the surface, out in the open.
How could I not want to see what he doesn’t show anyone else?
“Okay,” I relent. “Then what’s tonight?”
His chest rises with a breath, and he slips both of his hands around me, his fingers curved around my lower back. “Whatever you want it to be.”
Strange. What’s in it for him? A quiet falls between us, though, and it isn’t uncomfortable.
It’s kind of nice. Minutes pass, and I settle deeper into him, my palms resting on his shoulders, the side of my forehead against his cheek.
Then I slip down, and I’m burrowed into him.
He readjusts us—pulls my arms in front of him, taps my side so that I shift into a seated position, the pressure off my knees.
We’re basically hugging now, only I’m in his lap and I’m not really hugging him back. I’m kind of just… here. Held.
And weirdly, I’m getting tired. Though I never get tired, and it’d be so, so cruel and unusual that after years of trying sleep hygiene and blue-light blockers, this is my insomnia cure. “Am I hurting you?” I mumble. A coded warning: You might be here for a while if you don’t complain.
He lets out a small laugh. “No.”
“Do you do a lot of training? To drive?”
“Yes.”
He smells as good as he feels, too. Being close to him had been a preview. The jacket, a tease. “You can’t call me Arcadia in public. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Okay. What gave me away?”
“Lying about the wedding. Your sense of humor.” He pauses. “You always finish your food.”
I think back to Grandma’s restaurant, the years of not having enough. How deeply being a model fucked with my head. “Oh.”
“I have a list,” he says quietly. “If you want to see it.”
“A list.”
“I keep a journal.”
Things that shouldn’t be hot, but are. “Weirdo.”
“Wounded.”
Slowly, I trace my fingertip over a muscle in his torso, near his clavicle. “Are you getting off on this?”
He doesn’t immediately reply. “Mentally. You could say that.”
Heat rises in my cheeks. “Is it physically impossible for you to lie?”
“I don’t like to.”