“So a week after we started hanging out in silence, Owen’s sitting there across the cafeteria table from me, minding his own business as usual, and this fucking asshole, Jasper Barnes, picks up Owen’s chocolate pudding cup and smashes it into his chest. ‘You still going to eat that shit?’ he said. ‘I bet you will, Piggie. Lick it off. Eat your own shit, Piggie.’ And then he starts making those pig-squeal sounds.”
“That’s so mean.”
“I was pissed, not going to deny it, but I probably would have just sat there and tried not to watch, grateful it wasn’t me being targeted. Then Owen lifted his head and he looked at me. I saw the shame in his eyes. Shame. What the fuck did he have to be ashamed of? That fucking bully was the one who should have been ashamed. When Owen started to clean the pudding off his shirt with a napkin, I fucking lost it. I was a scrawny kid and didn’t have a chance against a big jock like Jasper Barnes, so I went after him with my fork. I didn’t even get the chance to stab him with it before the teachers pulled me off him. I got suspended for using a weapon at school and later got my ass kicked by that bully and half the defensive line of the football team, but it was worth it because Owen started talking to me after that. Actually, he hasn’t shut up since.”
Kellen smiled as he thought about Owen’s ceaseless prattle. He was definitely a talker. And something about sitting in the dark with Dawn O’Reilly made Kellen a talker too.
“I’m glad you became friends. I can tell he means a lot to you.”
“I’d die for him. I don’t say that lightly. Owen’s always saying how I saved him by protecting him from the bullying, but he saved me a thousand times over. No telling where I’d be today if it wasn’t for him and his family. He didn’t see the dirt-poor bastard that everyone else in town saw. He never judged me based on my mother’s poor choices. Owen just saw me. It didn’t bother him that his mom gave me his older brother’s hand-me-downs. Owen said great things like, ‘You have no idea how glad I am that I don’t have to try to squeeze into Chad’s old clothes anymore’ and ‘I can’t believe my mom gave you socks and underwear for your birthday. The woman is so embarrassing.’ The woman is a saint, is what she is. I hit my growth spurt in eighth grade and if it hadn’t been for Janine, I’d have been wearing high-waters and ripping the seams out of my Spiderman T-shirt.”
“Did Owen realize that his mom was helping you?”
“He never said anything, but he had to have known. Everyone knew that I’d never met my father and that my mom took a welfare check because it’s hard for a drunk to hold down a job. She’d given up hope for a better life long before I was born. Our lack of money was what defined me. But not to the Mitchell family. I was Owen’s friend, so I was their surrogate son. His mother is a true treasure. Best woman I’ve ever known.”
“So there’s another woman in your life that I’ll never measure up to,” Dawn said.
Kellen chuckled. “No other woman can measure up to you either, Dawn. You are the only woman who sexually excites me with a mere song.”
She leaned in and whispered close to his ear, “I’ll take what I can get.”
It wasn’t only her song that sexually excited him. The tickle of her breath against his skin drew a soft moan of longing from the back of his throat.
“Kellen?”
He loved the way his name sounded when she spoke it. “Dawn?”
“How long has it been since you last had sex?”
He sat stunned that she would ask him something so forward.
“Uh, why?” he said after a moment.
“I don’t usually have sex with men I’ve just meet, but I want to with you.”
He closed his eyes and swallowed. How could he turn down her offer? It wasn’t that women never propositioned him. They did it all the time—rubbed up against him, shoved their hands down his pants, whispered suggestions into his ear—but he hadn’t been interested. Sara’s memory had given him the strength to say no. Hell, when he was alone with a woman, he found forwardness downright repulsive, but he was alone with Dawn and her words didn’t have the usual effect on him. He wanted her. God, he fucking wanted her.
Promise you’ll never make love to another woman, Kellen. Sara’s words echoed through his head. They were like a slap to the face.
“It’s been five years,” he said.
“You haven’t done anything in five years?”
“I didn’t say I hadn’t done anything. I just haven’t been inside a woman in that long.”
“Oh,” she said.
He could hear the disappointment in her voice. This time he was glad it was dark so he didn’t have to see it on her face.
“What kinds of things have you done?” she asked unexpectedly.
“Alone or with Owen?”
She gasped. “With Owen? Are you gay?”
“I’m not gay, Dawn. A bit confused maybe.” He rubbed at his eyebrow with two fingertips while he gathered his thoughts. “Can I talk to you about something? Something I haven’t even talked to Owen about? Something I need to tell him but am so worried about how he’ll react that every time I try to bring it up, I can’t form the words.”
What was it about the darkness that allowed him to open up? Or maybe it wasn’t the darkness at all. Maybe it was the kindred spirit within the woman beside him that made him feel he could tell Dawn anything.
“I’ll listen,” she said. “I probably won’t say the right thing though.”
He doubted there was a right thing to say. “Soon after Sara died, Owen started going to sex clubs and guilting me into going with him.”
“What’s a sex club? Is it like a whorehouse?”
He smiled and couldn’t resist running a hand along the base of her spine. Oh the naughty things he could introduce her to, Miss Sweet and Vanilla.
“No, you pay for a certain service at a whorehouse and that’s what you get. Sex clubs are where people of certain sexual tastes congregate and hook up.” He turned his face to whisper in her ear, and the tickle of her hair against his nose set off nerve endings that sent waves of pleasure to his groin and triggered alarm bells in his head—alarm bells he chose to ignore. “What are your sexual tastes, Dawn? I can tell you where there’s a club for it.”
“I wouldn’t be comfortable hooking up with some stranger in a club,” she said. The muscles of her back were taut beneath his palm.
No matter how much he enjoyed it, he needed to stop touching her. This thing between them wasn’t going to happen. “I wouldn’t want you to hook up with a stranger,” he said, which was the truth, but he had no business saying that to her. And he really did need to talk about what was going on with Owen. Maybe someone outside their relationship could make sense of it. “So one night while I was waiting for Owen to finish up spanking and screwing some chick he’d just met, I caught the eye of a man named Toshi.”
Dawn shifted beside him, squirming slightly.
“I didn’t have sex with Toshi,” he said.
“It’s none of my business if you did.”
“Do you want me to not talk about this? I can tell it’s making you uncomfortable.”
“Yeah, uncomfortable,” she whispered. “We’ll go with that.”
“Toshi is a master in the Japanese art of Shibari.”
“Does that involve swords and disembowelment?”
“No, ropes and release. Toshi spoke of tying knots as if it were a high art form—the way an inspired painter or a poet or a musician talks of his work. I was intrigued. I guess I’m a sucker for an artist. I let him show me a few techniques on one arm. He taught me to tie a couple of knots and then when Owen came to collect me, Toshi told me to keep the rope and if I wanted to learn more, where I could find him.”
“So I guess you found him.”
“I did a lot of research about Shibari on the Internet, even read a few books, but ultimately I did seek him out, because nothing compares to being taught one-on-one by a master.”
“That’s true.”
“H
e has a studio in San Francisco,” Kellen said. “He binds people with ropes and then he photographs them. For the first year after Sara died, nothing excited me—emotionally or physically. But as I walked through his gallery, admiring his work—flesh against intricate designs in colored rope—I’m not going to lie, I was aroused. The guilt almost made me leave.”
“Why did you feel guilty? It sounds erotic to me. Aren’t we supposed to get excited by things we find erotic?”
He didn’t want to go into that, so he pressed forward in his story. “Yeah, well, I asked Toshi to teach me to be an artist like him, to show me how to tie the ropes into designs that accentuated every line of the human form. He said in order to understand the art form, I first had to be a subject. He told me to strip off my clothes and allow him to bind me.”
Dawn squirmed again. When her hand lightly touched his bare knee, he gasped. He should have skipped this part of the story, he realized too late. That first experience with bondage had been one of the most intense emotional and sexual experiences of his life.
“Did you go through with it?” she asked.
“Yeah. I was scared to death. With each knot Toshi tied, I became more tense, more afraid, more aroused. When he was finished, I was aware of every inch of my body. I was completely helpless. I thought he might force me to have sex—thought I’d be okay with it even though I’d promised Sara. But once he had me bound, he whispered, ‘Now, you are free, my student,’ and then he sat beside me with one hand between my shoulder blades while I fought the rope. Not physically. I couldn’t move if I’d wanted to. But mentally I raged against my restraints for a really long time.”
“What did he mean you are free?”
“I didn’t understand until I stopped fighting against the bonds. Physically, emotionally, and spiritually I gave the ropes control, and then I understood what he meant. By giving up control, I became free.”
“That doesn’t make sense at all,” she said.
“It won’t unless you experience it for yourself.”
“Do you do the rope thing now? What did you call it?”
“Shibari. I haven’t been practicing much recently. For about three years, it was an outlet for me. I enjoyed tying women, but I only did it when Owen was with me. I’m not sure I trusted myself to be alone with a woman. They tend to beg for sex after I tie them, and I wasn’t willing to take it that far. Owen had no problem with that aspect. He’d have sex with them if they wanted it and eventually he started helping with the bondage too.”
“So you and Owen tied women up and then he had sex with them?”
“Not always. We left that decision to the woman.”
“But you didn’t do anything sexual with them?”
He took a deep breath. “I would usually…” He coughed. Wow, was he really going to tell her this? “…perform oral sex on them.”
Her breath caught, and she squirmed again.
“But I never penetrated them, never allowed them to touch my cock in any way. No blow jobs. Nothing.”
“You had to have been miserable.”
“I would have been, but Owen helped me out.” His stomach clenched. What must this woman think of him?
“How?” she asked.
“Hand jobs.”
“Oh, but no sex?”
“Isn’t it all sex?” he said. “That’s why I’m so confused. Sara was gone before I was introduced to Shibari, so somehow I convinced myself that it was okay. She didn’t like oral sex—”
“I like it,” Dawn blurted.
A long silence hung awkwardly between them, and he prayed for a bolt of lightning to light her features so he could see her expression.
“I mean if the guy knows what he’s doing,” she said. “Maybe she didn’t like it because you’re not good at it.”
Kellen chuckled. “Trust me, I’m good at it. She was a bit timid in bed.” Kellen rubbed the back of his neck. “That kind of deep intimacy embarrassed her, so she didn’t want me making out with her pussy for hours on end.”
“Dear lord,” Dawn whispered.
“So I convinced myself that oral sex didn’t go against my oath to her.”
“Thank God.”
Kellen chuckled at Dawn’s little asides. “And though I told her I’d never let a woman touch my cock, I never said anything about a man touching it. So I used Owen to get me off because I felt comfortable enough with him to let him touch me. The thought of any other man anywhere near my cock makes me ill, but Owen is different for some reason, and that’s the part I don’t understand. Why am I okay with him touching me?”
“Do you love him?”
“He’s my best friend.”
“So, yeah, you love him.”
It wasn’t as simple as that. “But not romantically.”
“Are you sexually attracted to him or not?” Neither judgmental nor accusatory, her tone was simply inquisitive.
Kellen tried to sort through the jumbled feelings he had for Owen. He was so glad that Dawn was letting him air his filthy laundry without judgment. He’d needed to talk to someone about this for years. He couldn’t discuss it with Owen when he really didn’t understand what was going on in his head, and he obviously didn’t want the rest of the band to know what went on between him and Owen behind closed doors, so he couldn’t talk to Jacob or Gabe or Adam either. Dawn couldn’t possibly understand how much she was doing for him by just listening and forcing him to face reality.
“I don’t look at him and think, damn, I want to fuck him unconscious. It’s more like, please, will someone touch me there? I can’t stand this anymore. So Owen’s handy. Literally.” Kellen’s stomach sank as realization hit him. “Shit, I’m just using him, aren’t I?” His elbows hit the piano keys as he dropped his face into his hands. “How could I do that to him? He must be as confused about this as I am.”
“Do you look at me and think, damn, I want to fuck her unconscious?” Dawn said.
Kellen’s back stiffened, drawing him away from the keyboard as he thought about the way she looked in that loose, shapeless white dress. How she smelled of honeysuckle and the sea. The sound of her voice and the music she so easily drew from the piano before him. He knew he was in trouble when he imagined how she’d taste—as delicious as her sweet, vanilla French toast—and how her supple flesh would feel beneath his hands. Warm. Soft. Smooth. He could almost feel her writhing beneath him as he claimed her with slow, deep thrusts. His cock throbbed and his balls ached with an unbearable fullness. What he wouldn’t give to be able to bury himself inside her. But he couldn’t.
He took a shaky breath and held it deep in his lungs, willing his lust to dissipate.
Torture. This was fucking torture.
“Yes,” he groaned. “That’s exactly what I think when I look at you.” He clenched both fists and rested them on either knee to keep himself from reaching for her. “But I can’t.”
The storm seemed to grow louder as their conversation lulled. He’d never been more tempted to go back on his promises to Sara. He had to leave this house. His convictions were strong, but his flesh grew weaker each moment he was in Dawn’s company.
“Could you tie me?” she asked quietly.
He tensed and scrambled from the bench, stubbing his toe on the piano leg. Pain shot up his foot and shin, and he welcomed the diversion. She was already a work of art. How beautiful would she look with knots and ropes drawing attention to her graceful lines and soft curves?
Kellen licked his lips and swallowed hard despite the sudden dryness in his mouth.
“I’m going to go,” Kellen said.
Lightning flashed in quick succession. Thunder made the house shudder. The wind howled, slashing the torrential rain against the windows in sheets.
“You can’t go out in that,” Dawn said. So matter of fact. So Dawn.
A gentle ping sounded on the piano as she found the keys in the darkness and began to play his song. Funny how he thought of it as his song. He wished Dawn could be his to
o.
He pressed the hard ridge of his cock against his thigh with one hand and closed his eyes, completely giving himself to the melody, even if he wasn’t quite ready to give himself over to the woman.
Chapter Six
Dawn tried to get lost in her music. Tried, but failed. She was so aware of Kellen standing in the dark several feet behind her right shoulder that he might as well have been plastered to her back. She wanted to feel that enormous bulge in his shorts pressing into her spine as he stood behind her. She’d give anything for those strong, masculine hands to reach around her to cup her breasts. For his thumbs to rub the unbearable ache from her stiff nipples. She squirmed on the bench, trying to alleviate some of the matching ache in the swollen flesh between her thighs.
Now that she knew the pieces of the entire song, Dawn needed to write it down so she could scan it and fax it to her agent in the morning. Unfortunately, it was too dark to see score paper and if the lights came on, she feared Kellen would find a good excuse to leave. Even if he refused to give in to her lame attempts at seduction, she didn't want him to go. She found his company inspiring. His interactions with his friend Owen seemed a little odd, but the way he described Shibari—which she'd never heard of before—had her squirming on the bench again. She was squirming so often that Kellen probably thought she had to pee. But her urgency was caused by something else entirely.
As she progressed through the music, she reached the second stanza, the one that had taken on the cadence of the ocean. Of sex.
Kellen released a sensual sigh, and it took every shred of willpower she possessed not to tackle him to the ground, straddle him, and show him the rhythm of her body. She'd never been with a musician before. She'd lusted after Pierre and imagined him making love to her—taking her virginity—but nothing had ever come of that infatuation. Not one of her few lovers had possessed the soul of an artist. Was that why she was so uncharacteristically fast around Kellen? Was it the spiritual connection between the musical part of their beings that made her want him at any cost, or was it just because he was so damned easy on the eyes?
Tie Me (One Night with Sole Regret #5) Page 6
