Page 71 of Wicked Sin

She bites her lip, her brows pulling tight and raising in a perplexed expression. “No. I mean, let’s be honest, I think of myself as slutty and confused and problematic, and then I beat myself up for that because I know better up here,” she taps her forehead. Then her hand slides over her chest and stays there. “But not here.”

I gently tap my fingertips against the back of her hand. “What’s there?”

Her breath puffs out in a shallow, excited exhale. “Lots of things.” She twists our hands around and pushes them both against my chest. “What’s there?”

I grin. Fucking hell. “Lots of things. Do you want to make a cup of tea and talk about them?”

She pauses. “That depends. Do you…do those things with other people right now?”

“No.” We don’t even need to talk about this in code. “There’s nobody else. Hasn’t been for a while.”

Another pause while she searches my face. “Do you have anything stronger than tea?”

“I sure do. But if we go that route, we’re not going to have sex tonight.”

She drags in a deep breath. “That’s okay. I mean, you’ve got a week of vacation ahead of you, right? Depending on what we talk about, it might be good to sleep on it.”

I cup her face, my thumb brushing against the corner of her mouth. Her eyes dilate then her lashes flutter gently against her cheeks. “I like that plan.” I lean in, hovering my mouth over hers. “I like you. And time is on our side this week. Let’s start with a conversation.”

She turns and leads the way downstairs, where I pull open the kitchen cupboard where I keep my booze. A bottle of Jack, two bottles of white rum my oldest sister brought back from a vacation in Jamaica, and a questionable tequila of unknown origins. “Tennessee whiskey or the Caribbean’s finest rum?”

“Do you have ice?” I point to the freezer. She checks and pumps her fist in the air. “Yes! Whiskey, please.”

Grabbing two glasses, I pour us each a generous two fingers over ice, then hand her one.

“Okay, so… to dirty discoveries?” She holds it out.

I clink the rim of my glass against hers. “To kink.”

Straight. Clear.

She takes a big sip and swallows. “To kink,” she whispers.

I take a drink, too.

Her eyes are bright as she looks over my face. Down my body, then back up again. “Are you some kind of Dom?”

“I wouldn’t use that word, but I like to be in charge.” I hold out my hand, palm up. “To the couch? Let’s get comfortable.”

She slides her fingers over mine. Hers are cool from the ice in her glass, which she transferred to the other hand. I feel like I’m going to burn up, and the way she lets me lead her around doesn’t help.

I had a girlfriend when I was in the Marines who was super submissive. She called me Master, and it got me hard, although in hindsight I didn’t know fuck all about any of it. Over the years, I’ve been curious, read a lot online, and done a fair bit of dating inside the scene. L.A. is ripe for literally any kind of sex, so it’s not hard to find.

“First of all, sex is sex. I don’t want you to think I’m harboring any kind of weird secrets here. But one reason I put the brakes on yesterday was because I’ve learned a lot about healthy boundaries from kink.”

She curls up tight, leaning back into the cushions as she looks at me over the rim of her glass. “The only healthy boundary I’ve learned is to move far, far away from the people who want me to have unhealthy sex.”

“That’s good. That’s great.”

She nods. “It is. But now I’m wondering just what you see in me that makes you think of kink. I don’t want to be degraded.”

“Fuck no. That’s not my thing, either. But I don’t judge those who like that—in a consensual, it works for everyone kind of way. Anyone who gets off on degrading people against their will needs to be taken out back and taught a lesson.”

“You’d be busy in Washington.”

“I’d be busy here, too, if I believed in vigilante justice.”

The ice in her glass makes a pretty sound as she takes a couple more sips. Slowly, thoughtfully. “What would that look like? Consensual degradation?”

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