Rose #3
He obeys without hesitation, and I watch his mouth close around the straw as he takes a slow sip, his eyes staying on mine because he knows better than to look away.
I reach out and push the hair back from his forehead, an idle, proprietary gesture that feels good in my hand, and he tips his face into my palm without being told.
Then I see it.
Fuck.
He looks like Jackson.
Not exactly. I'm not drunk enough to start putting Jackson's face on random men, thank God, but there's enough there to piss me off. The jaw. The blond hair falling across his forehead. Something about the angle of his face when he looks up at me while I'm looking down at him.
My subconscious has preferences too, it seems, and the bitch lacks subtlety.
My stomach tightens before I can stop it.
No.
Absolutely not.
I push his hair back again, almost like doing it twice will prove the first reaction meant nothing.
This man is not Jackson. Jackson is across town with his wife, doing whatever Jackson does with his wife that I have made a concentrated effort never to picture and therefore can picture in distressing detail.
Wonderful.
The man in front of me is here because his Domme offered him to me and I accepted.
He's attractive, consenting and very clearly enjoying himself.
He deserves better than being turned into the human equivalent of emotional tracing paper because my brain spotted a jawline and decided to become fucking sentimental.
I know what I'm here for tonight.
Control.
Not Jackson.
Those are two entirely different problems, and I refuse to combine them.
“Anything?” I ask his Domme, and thankfully my voice comes out exactly the way I want it to.
Steady.
"Anything you like." She tips her chin, generous, certain. "He's yours."
I sink back into the sofa and drape one leg over his shoulder, the picture of a woman with nowhere to be and nothing to prove, and give the leash an intentional tug that draws him in toward me by the throat. "Lick."
"Yes, ma'am."
And there's not a breath of indecision in him — none of the tentative, asking-permission fumbling I half expected. He's ravenous as his tongue finds the barbell of my piercing on the first pass and sets a rhythm against it that has my spine drawing tight and my breath going shallow.
He's good. So fucking good.
He's been trained well, or he's a natural, or both. Either way, my body responds to competence like it's been starving for it, which, in the only way that matters tonight, it has.
“Fuck.” I let my head fall back against the cushion, eyes half-closing as everything in me narrows down to the steady, knowing work of his mouth. “What a good fucking boy you have.”
“He is extremely talented,” his Domme says from across the booth, and the pride in her voice makes me smile. She knows exactly what she's got, and has no issue letting someone else appreciate the inventory.
“Clearly.”
For the next few minutes, I let the noise go quiet.
David and his spectacularly poor decision-making, Michael's public-relations dick parade, Jackson and his wife and the fact that I have developed the emotional maturity of a territorial house cat around him, all of it gets shoved somewhere outside the room.
Here, none of it matters.
There is only sensation, instruction and the relief of having every variable exactly where I put it. No guessing what someone means. No wondering what they're doing when I'm not looking. No keys handed over in trust and used for extracurricular betrayal.
Just rules.
Clear ones.
And tonight, after the absolute fucking circus my life has been for the last forty-eight hours, I intend to enjoy every second of them.
He wraps his hands around my thighs and jerks me closer, and since I didn’t bother with panties tonight, my bare skin drags across the leather on the way. That tiny sound is the only warning I get before he closes the distance and the first sharp rush of sensation tears a startled moan out of me.
“Shit.”
My back arches off the sofa as another deep pull of suction against my clit sends heat down both legs, my hands roughly tightening in his hair before I can stop them.
And then Jackson is there.
Not physically. Thank God. Just in the one place I absolutely did not invite him tonight.
I try not to want this to be him. I genuinely try, clamping down on the thought the second it surfaces the same way I’ve trained myself to clamp down on every inconvenient thing.
It took years to find something resembling peace inside our friendship, and I will not be the one who sets fire to it over a bad week, a broken heart and one stupid afternoon with his body pressed between my thighs.
Except the thought refuses to stay down.
Maybe it’s David. Maybe it’s watching Jackson leave to go home to his wife. Maybe it’s the simple animal unfairness of wanting the one man I can’t have.
Whatever it is, the harder I shove it down, the higher it climbs.
Jackson’s hands.
Jackson’s mouth.
The way he looked at me in his office.
The way his body reacted before either of us had time to lie about it.
Fuck.
That’s what does it.
Not one clean sensation, not one perfect touch, but the whole humiliating pileup of him in my head at once.
“Oh God. Oh my fucking hell—” I scream out as he slides two fingers inside, curling them in tight, and catching the barbell between his teeth with the same breath. I soak him. Literally, thoroughly soak his face with my release.
When I finally come back to myself I’m breathing like I’ve run somewhere instead of lying mostly boneless against a leather sofa.
The man pulls back looking dazed and absurdly pleased with himself before turning immediately toward his Domme for approval.
“Such a good boy,” she tells him with a soft smile.
His whole face changes at the praise.
I understand that feeling too well.
And there I am, wrung out and unsteady, staring at the ceiling while irritation slowly creeps back in around the edges.
Because I came here to get the want out of my system.
Instead, I just proved exactly how much of it I’m still carrying.
And whose name it answers to.