by M. S. Parker
“Yes, really. I’ll need to talk to Ashlee and see if she has plans for us this weekend. I promise that I’ll truly consider it.”
“That’s great. Really, Nate. I hope you two can make it. It’d be good to see you again.”
“You too, Mom.” I meant it. When things happened with Joshua, I’d put her in an awkward, impossible position, but I held no anger or bitterness toward her for taking his side.
“I’ll let you go now,” she said. “I’m sure you have work to do.”
“Thanks for calling,” I said.
“I love you, Nate.” She quickly ended the call before I had to decide whether or not to return the sentiment.
I would’ve said it back.
Slumping back in my chair, I closed my eyes. I’d been so angry when I’d heard Joshua had come to my office; would I be able to deal with seeing him face-to-face? I believed that Ashlee believed it when she said that Joshua hadn’t flirted with her, but I also knew it was entirely possible that she just hadn’t registered it. She would’ve hated to think of my own brother hitting on her, knowing who she was.
Then again, Mom said he had a girlfriend coming too. Even if he had flirted with Ashlee, he wouldn’t do it in front of his new girl. That was a good thing, but him having a girlfriend there might bring up bad memories. I had no desire to be with anyone but Ashlee, but Joshua might not be willing to believe it.
Not that I could blame him. I’d really fucked things up when I’d slept with Calah. I couldn’t go back and change anything, but I could show him that I wasn’t that man anymore.
I could show them all that I was trying to change.
I doubted we’d ever be close, but at least we could patch things up to the point where we could stand to be around each other for family events. Dad and David would hold their tongues if Joshua and I didn’t butt heads, at least for Mom’s sake. She could have all of her kids together and not have to worry about one of us blowing up at the other.
I could have a family again. Finley had been my only family for so long that the thought of having everyone in my life again was almost dizzying. I needed something to ground me.
No, not something. Someone.
I reached for my phone and tapped out a message.
Would you be interested in dinner tonight? I can pick you up after work.
I drummed my fingers on the desk while I waited for a response. Technically, I could’ve called her or gone to see her, but I was trying hard to keep professional and personal separated. It wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t only the sex aspect of it. The time I’d spent with Ashlee when we weren’t having sex had been great too. She was genuinely enjoyable to be around.
My phone dinged, and I picked it up.
I can’t tonight. If I don’t do laundry, I’ll have to come to work…never mind. My boss’s boss might not mind that ;) Is the invitation valid tomorrow evening?
I was disappointed that I’d need to wait, but the fact that she was teasing me made me smile. She was only half-right. Her boss’s boss wouldn’t have minded her not having anything to wear, but only if no one else saw her.
Half the time, I wanted to wrap her head-to-toe so others couldn’t see what a gorgeous body she had, and the other half, I wanted to put her into something slinky and sexy to show off what only I was allowed to enjoy.
The invitation is indeed valid tomorrow evening. I’ll pick you up at your place at six o’clock. Will you have clothes to wear? I’m certain I can find somewhere we could go where they’re optional.
I was only half-joking about that last bit. Club Privé, the hottest BDSM club in the entire northeastern part of the country, allowed members such as me to more or less create their own dress code. At any point in time, members could be dressed in a full latex bodysuit or nothing but a collar.
I intended to take her there at some point, but she wasn’t ready for it yet.
My phone dinged again, and her reply hit me with a wave of desire.
Six is great. Yes, I will. As to exactly what those clothes will look like, I’ll leave that to your vivid imagination.
Twenty-Four
Ashlee
I’d spent the entire night before trying to figure out something to wear for my date, and I’d come to a conclusion.
I needed more fancy clothes.
I’d bought a few when I’d gotten my promotion since I knew there would always be the possibility of attending events, and I hadn’t wanted to make the label look bad. I’d never once thought I’d use them on dates with Nate Lexington, or that I’d need to buy new ones, so it wasn’t the same three all the time.
The one I wore now was a rich, mossy green velvet, with three-quarter sleeves and a sweetheart neckline. It reached to mid-calf and was form-fitting enough that I had to take smaller steps than usual. I doubted Nate would mind needing to shorten his stride since he seemed to like my curves, and this dress enhanced every inch of them.
The weather had taken a turn this week, reminding us that even though, technically, spring was here, New York was among the places that didn’t relinquish its grip on winter easily. That was how it seemed at times, that winter had tried to leave, but the city wouldn’t let it.
I tried looking at the positive side of the brisk wind and dropping temperatures: I could wear velvet without having heat stroke.
As I waited for Nate by the door, I pressed my hands against my stomach and forced myself to take slow, deep breaths. I wondered if there’d ever be a day when I didn’t get these butterflies at the thought of going out in public with him. They weren’t as bad as before, but they were still there, the nervous ones lurking among the excited ones. I hoped the excited ones never went away.
He knocked, and I answered immediately, eagerly drinking in the sight of him in another suit. I’d always thought men pretty much wore the exact same suit all the time. Not the actual suit but the same style, cut, etc. It had only been since I’d come to work at Manhattan Records and had the opportunity to see men in suits more often that I realized the truth of the matter.
Some did have identical suits but rotated different-colored dress shirts and ties, and some had similar suits with small differences. Nate must’ve had an entire closet of suits, ties, and shirts that he could mix and match because I had yet to notice a repeat. He must have repeated combinations eventually, but always far enough apart that no one could remember.
“Keep looking at me like that, and we won’t make it to the car,” he said, his eyes dark and full of all sorts of depraved secrets.
“Would that be such a bad thing?” I asked, not at all surprised by how breathless my voice was.
He caught me around the waist and yanked me to him so that we were standing in the doorway to my apartment, bodies pressed together, and completely oblivious to whether or not my neighbors were watching.
“Don’t tempt me, le soleil,” he growled.
Damn. That sound always made me wet.
“I have other plans for you tonight.”
I shivered. “What plans?”
He smiled and released me. “Get your purse. When we get to the restaurant, I’ll tell you all about the little game you and I are going to play.”
I half-expected him to tease me in the car, fingers straying to places he couldn’t touch in public, but he simply held my hand, his demeanor more at ease than I’d ever seen him. It was nice, sitting like this. I enjoyed the sexual part of who we were, but I didn’t want us to only be about the physical. His previous relationships had been so focused on sex that I sometimes worried he wouldn’t be interested in anything else.
I was pleased to see I was wrong.
“How’s your mom?” he asked suddenly.
“Good.” I smiled, warmth spreading through me at his question. He wouldn’t have asked if he hadn’t sincerely wanted to know. “More than good, actually. She’s been asked to research the Quaker movement, and it’s not one she knows much about, so she’s really excited about learning new things.”
&n
bsp; “It must’ve been nice when you were in school, having a historian for a mom. I’ll bet homework was a breeze.”
I shook my head, laughing. “Not at all. If anything, she made it worse. No help, but she always insisted on checking things over. She’d mark whatever I got wrong and tell me to do it again but wouldn’t help me find the right answers.”
He whistled between his teeth. “Yikes.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Were you good in school?”
He held up a hand and wiggled it back and forth. “I could’ve gotten better grades if I’d applied myself to school half as much as I had to making money.” He grinned at me. “I was determined to be one of those people who made my first million before college.”
“If I remember correctly, you graduated from NYU.”
“I did, but just like in high school, I spent more time trying to come up with get-rich-quick schemes than caring about my grades. I paid attention in the ones that I thought would help me make money, but in everything else, I just made sure I passed.”
I tried to mesh the picture he was painting with the hard-working man I knew now, and it was hard to do. Though I supposed he hadn’t really changed. He’d just streamlined his life to only focus on the things he cared about. Anything he thought of as useless went by the wayside, and he determined what percentage of his attention he gave to everything else.
“Does all that hard work mean you weren’t a fraternity guy?” I asked.
He rolled his eyes, and I laughed.
“No. I didn’t belong to a fraternity. I also wasn’t a jock in college. I didn’t even really go to many parties.”
I found that a little hard to believe, and he must’ve read that on my face because he held up his hand in a Boy Scout salute.
“Scout’s honor.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“I was a Boy Scout,” after a moment, he added, his face perfectly sincere, “for three weeks.”
“You quit?”
“I was ‘asked to leave.’” He made the air quotes with his fingers. “My scoutmaster didn’t take kindly to me taking bets on how long it took various scouts to earn their badges.”
“Somehow, that doesn’t surprise me.”
We pulled up in front of a restaurant, and Nate got out of the car, walking around just as Angus opened the door. Nate helped me from the car, and we hurried inside, wanting to get away from the drizzle as quickly as possible.
As much as I hated the scorching summer heat, the back and forth of seasons in New York drove me crazy. Pick a temperature and go with it.
We were led to a private table without the hostess asking for Nate’s name. What would it be like, I wondered, to be remembered pretty much everywhere you went? I’d always been the easily forgettable sort. People I’d gone to school with rarely placed me in their memories. Some of it was because I’d spent a lot of time taking care of Mom when I was in high school, but a bigger part was because I wasn’t someone who stuck out in people’s minds. Quiet, unassuming, shy – those were words used to describe me, and they’d applied even more back then than they did now.
“Is something wrong?” Nate asked.
I snapped back to the present. “No, I was just thinking about how everyone seems to know you wherever we go.”
He tilted his head, his gaze searching, as if he was trying to figure me out. Considering how different I was from the women he’d been with in the past, that probably wasn’t too far off the mark.
“Is that a bad thing?”
I shook my head. “Just different from my experience is all.”
I perused the menu as Nate ordered wine – without seeing a wine list – and an appetizer. By the time he was done, I’d already decided what I wanted. We both ordered and handed over our menus.
I wondered if I’d ever get used to places so fancy that they didn’t list their prices in their menus. I wasn’t entirely comfortable with how much Nate was probably spending on me, but if I wanted him to trust me to tell him when something was bothering me, I had to trust him to do the same.
Besides, it was clear he’d been here before, so it wasn’t like he didn’t have an idea of what things cost. Also, it wasn’t as if he’d been raised with a lot of money. I was sure he’d had his own learning curve when it came to things like this.
“You have that look again,” he said. “What are you thinking about now?”
“Just wondering how long it took you to get used to eating at places like this.” I smiled at him.
He leaned forward slightly, a playful smile on his lips. “Honestly, it’s still strange to me. Sometimes, I ask places like this to do something for me just to see if they will.”
Like a little kid with an adult who spoils them, I thought. It made sense, actually. He had a poor relationship with his family and didn’t really have a lot of people he could trust in his personal life. Finley, and now me, seemed to be it.
Of course, he’d be a little child-like when it came to certain things. People who came across as confident – or arrogant – and larger than life often had insecurities they hid from the world.
I suspected Nate wasn’t any different.
He leaned back as the wine was brought to the table, along with our appetizer. After our glasses had been poured and we’d both enjoyed a couple minutes of food and drink, he leaned forward again and caught my fingers. He gave them a quick squeeze before releasing them, but it was the heated expression on his face that made me realize that we were about to start playing the game he’d mentioned earlier.
“You’ve heard of the game Never Have I Ever?”
I nodded and hoped we weren’t about to play it. He and I came from such different worlds that we’d go through a lot more than a single bottle of wine.
“We’re going to play a version of that,” he said. “One without alcohol.”
My relief must’ve shown on my face because he chuckled.
“Here’s how it’s going to work,” he continued. “I’m going to say something sexual I’ve done, and if it’s something you’d be interested in trying, you say next, and I move on to the next one. If it’s something you aren’t interested in trying, you say ask, and you have to answer any question I ask you.”
“If I say I’m interested in something, does that mean I can’t change my mind about it in the future?” I was fairly certain of his answer, but I needed to hear it from him to make sure we were on the same page.
“Not at all,” he said. “I’ll remember the things you’re interested in and will most likely bring them up at some point, but we’ll always talk about them, and you can always use your safe word.”
“And what if you think I’m lying now just so I don’t have to answer questions?”
His smile widened. “You won’t.”
I could’ve taken it as him being all alpha male, but that’s not what I saw on his face. It was trust. He was trusting me to be honest and play by the rules. Even if I hadn’t been intrigued by the game itself, wanting to be worthy of the trust he was placing in me would have made my answer the same.
“All right. Let’s play.”
“Excellent.” He took a long drink of his wine. “I’ll start off easy.”
I was nearly positive that his version of easy and mine wasn’t the same thing, but I didn’t protest.
“Gotten a woman off in a near-public setting where we could be easily caught.”
I flushed, the memory of how he’d made me come on his fingers the first time we’d ever gone out. We hadn’t been literally out in public, but we hadn’t been shut away in a hotel room or at one of our places.
The grin on his face told me he was remembering too.
“Next.”
“Used something non-traditional as a sex toy.”
My blush deepened. Every time I saw the remaining hair chopstick on my dresser, I remembered the feel of the other one in my ass.
“Next.”
“I still owe you a replacement.” He gave me the same smug,
self-satisfied smirk he’d had back then, and it made my stomach clench the same way.
I understood now why he’d decided to ‘start easy.’ By reminding me of the things we’d already done, he was drawing me into the mindset I needed to play his game.
“Fucked a tight ass.”
The crudeness of his words flipped that switch in me that loved it when he talked dirty. That, combined with me imagining what it would feel like to have him take me that way, had me nodding my head even before I said, “Next.”
“Had a threesome with another woman.”
My stomach dropped. It wasn’t a surprise that he’d been with more than one woman at a time, but hearing it stated flat-out like that, when I was supposed to tell him if that was something I wanted…
“Ask.” My voice was barely a whisper as I fought to keep my face expressionless.
“How old were you when you had your first kiss?”
“Seventeen. My senior prom date dropped me off at home and kissed me.” I tried to recapture the excitement I’d felt when we’d started this game, but I didn’t know if it’d be possible. Not if I couldn’t stop thinking about how I wasn’t going to be enough for Nate, how he’d want to bring someone else into our bed.
“Had a threesome with another man.”
I suddenly remembered something he said when he’d been using my hair chopstick in my ass. He’d said that he’d show me one day what real double penetration felt like. At the time, I’d wondered if he wanted to share me with another man, but I hadn’t asked. I hadn’t even been sure we’d make it past that one encounter. Now, I was wondering if I should have brought it up.
I hadn’t heard him move, but suddenly he was kneeling in front of me, gathering my hands in his, oblivious to what anyone around us might think.
“Look at me, le soleil.”
It was an order, no matter how softly spoken, and I did as I was told.
“I don’t want anyone else to join us, man or woman.” He put his hand on my cheek and wiped away a tear I hadn’t known I’d shed. “But I would bring someone in if that’s what you wanted. Yes, in the past, that’s been something I’ve enjoyed, but from the moment I saw you, I’ve wanted to…possess you. I’m a selfish bastard, and I don’t want to share you with anyone. Ever.”
