The tightness in my chest loosened ever so slightly.
He took another swallow of his drink then settled in, crossing one leg over the other, ankle on the knee. “But you must be exhausted, bird. Are you sure you’re up for this?”
“You’re stalling.”
“Since you’re playing me, it’s only fair that I play you. You went down this road kicking and screaming, if you’ll recall.”
“You fought back with patience. I can be patient.”
“Yes, you can be. You have been.” Acknowledging how long I’d waited for him to open up was already significant progress. An eager anticipation fluttered inside me. Was this what these sessions had been like for him?
God, if so, that man could handle his angst like a statue. As for me, I had to cross my ankles to keep my foot from wanting to bounce.
“All right,” he said, earnestly. “Let me decide where this should begin.”
“If you aren’t honest, I’ll know,” I teased. Though I wasn’t sure that was true.
“It will be authentic, bird. You might not like what you hear, but it will be authentic.” His reassurance was typical Edward—soothing but not soothing enough to get comfortable.
Typical Edward, though, was something I was quite used to. So in my typical fashion, I challenged him right back. “I’m sure I can handle it. If you can.”
He smirked.
Then he grew solemn. “Marion was quite submissive, as I’ve told you. As you’ve seen now. It wasn’t just a bedroom game for her. It was a lifestyle choice. It wasn’t just about being subservient. In every area of her life, she wanted to be molded and instructed and commanded and dominated.”
“And you liked that.” It was impossible to keep the bite out of my tone.
“I...did,” he admitted. “And then I didn’t.”
“You didn’t like being in charge? I call bullshit.” Apparently, reading him was easier than I’d expected.
“Oh, I did like that. I’ll never grow tired of that.” He didn’t wink, but it felt like he had. “I didn’t even really mind the time and energy it required to live like that, though, at the time, I thought I did. I had things that were more important that needed my focus.”
“Your business,” I guessed.
“Yes. And other things.”
Other things. Like planning a takedown of my father.
His revenging certainly had a life of its own. With our different opinions on the subject, I thought it best to avoid that topic. “You were busy. I got it. Making a schedule for her and setting out her clothes got tedious.”
“We are not making this about you,” he said, correctly assuming my subtext. “If I thought it were tedious to do those things for you, I wouldn’t have insisted that you let me.”
“What’s the difference? How can you be so sure you won’t resent it for me when you did for her? I’m sure she didn’t even argue with you about it like I did.”
“That was exactly it.”
“She liked it, and that’s what irritated you?”
He let out a rather hefty sigh. “The problem wasn’t that she accepted those things. It was that she accepted everything. She didn’t ever argue, except when she wanted to bait me into a punishment. She didn’t stand up to me. She didn’t speak her mind. She wanted me to decide all of it, and so I did.”
“How boring.”
He pierced me with an unapproving glare. “You’re being catty, but yes. It was boring after a while. And not always very safe.”
“You mean sex? Did she not have boundaries or something? Did you go too far?” I wasn’t just being catty—I was being petty. I felt like my mother, greedy for the triflest of gossip because, if Marion and Edward had problems in the bedroom, I was going to feel a thousand times more secure in our marriage since our sex was fanfuckingtastic.
“The sex was just fine, thank you.” Ouch. “Brilliant, to be truthful.” Double ouch. “I do appreciate being the boss in that arena.”
“Really? I couldn’t tell.” Add snide to my list of faults. Way to be an adult, Celia.
Fortunately, Edward was grown-up enough for the both of us in the moment. “The problem wasn’t her boundaries. I knew them—better than she did even—and I respected them. The problem was that with no one to challenge me, I was the one with no boundaries.”
My breath lodged in my chest. “I’m surprised to hear you admit that.”
“You’re starting to see why this story isn’t a favorite of mine.” He slid his ankle farther down the supporting leg, fully crossing them now. With his brows knit, he spent silent seconds smoothing away an invisible wrinkle, seemingly lost in a self-analysis.
Then, after a dismissive shake of his head, he went on. “Anyway, believing that you are unstoppable is fun for a while, but it gets lonely. Especially when the other aspects of our life were added in. She didn’t want to share a bed to maintain the separation of master and servant. She didn’t help with family decisions except to praise whatever I’d decided. I rarely knew what she was really thinking about anything. I had a sub, not a wife, and for that reason, I began to resent those parts of our marriage specifically. I no longer enjoyed picking out her clothes, and deciding what she was going to do with her day was, as you said, tedious, and I stopped putting as much effort into it as I should. It put a strain on our relationship, naturally. Those things were important to her. She needed them to be happy. And I wasn’t there for her.”
Something began to shift within me as he spoke, and I stopped listening for things to boost my esteem and started hearing him. Started hearing the story of two complicated people who began down a path together. Started to understand how it must have hurt when those pathways diverged.
“Did she complain?” I asked, quietly.
“No. But I knew. It was my job to know, and I knew. It didn’t change my behavior, but it weighed on me. It was a vicious cycle. The guilt was another distraction that took my time away from focusing on her.”
“Yeah. That guilt shit can be a mighty energy sucker.”
“Yes. You understand.” His smile was brief, lost behind another tip of his glass to his lips. “We’d been married about twelve years, three of them particularly tense, when I decided something needed to be done about it. Actually, that’s not true. I had decided that several times before then, each time promising to myself and to her that I’d do better, I’d be better. I just was never able to follow through for whatever reason. Different reasons. All poor excuses, but I clung to them and went out of my way to validate them. Which didn’t help things. So twelve years in, our marriage on the rocks and knowing she needed to be dominated, believing I couldn’t be the one to do it sufficiently, I took her to Exceso for a week. And I introduced her to a dominant I knew there, Renato Fernandez.”
My eyes widened. “You introduced her to the man she ran away with?”
“Yes.”
“Did you…?” I tried to picture it. Hi, here’s my wife, I can’t fulfill her needs so she’s all yours.
That wasn’t how marriages worked. No matter how subservient she was, she wasn’t property. That couldn’t be how it happened. “I don’t understand. You wanted her to leave you?”
“That hadn’t been my intention, no. That was just how it turned out in the end.”
So if he hadn’t given her away…
Comprehension clicked in. “You shared her.”
“Yes.”
I blinked at him, my mouth gaping. “And she just went along?”
He shrugged. “She didn’t say one way or another. She never did. She trusted me to make those decisions for her and when I did she simply said, ‘Yes, sir,’ and complied.”
“I don’t know what to say.” I didn’t know what to feel. I couldn’t decide if it was sick or wrong. Was it even consensual? If she didn’t speak up to stop it, then...yes?
But if I had been in her place, if I had been Marion...
Edward uncrossed his legs and sat sharply forward. “These were d
ifferent circumstances, Celia. She was a different woman, with different needs. I would never—never—share you with anyone.”
“Let’s not make this about me, remember.” But that was exactly the lens I was looking at this through. If he ever told me to go to one of his buddies willingly, we’d be over. Immediately.
“I need you to understand that before I go on.” His gaze was heavy and insistent. Pleading.
I swallowed down the bad taste in my mouth and tried to focus on what he said. I was not Marion. “I would never go for it, and you know it. You wouldn’t even try.”
“No, you wouldn’t go for it, but that night you and I were on Exceso, you wouldn’t have had much choice. If I had really meant to give you to one of those men, you better believe they wouldn’t have cared if you consented. It’s vital to me that you trust that I would never have gone through with it. You are mine, and no one else’s, is that clear?”
“Yes.” It came out clipped and tight.
“I need you to say that you understand definitively. That you know I would not do that to you.”
He’d told me this that night too, and since, and I did believe him. He hadn’t shared me then, and, like he’d said, he could have. For that matter, except for when we were wrapped up in hating each other before we’d married, everything he’d ever said and done backed up what he was saying now. In fact, he was almost overly possessive of me.
Well, not overly possessive. Since I liked it.
“I believe you, Edward. I’m yours and no one else’s.”
“You are,” he confirmed. Satisfied, he sat back. “Besides, with Marion, sharing wasn’t about sex. Or, it wasn’t just about sex. There was that too, which I was part of when it was happening. At least, in the beginning.”
“Wait, wait, wait.” I pressed my palms together and brought my fingertips to my lips. I was still trying to process that the Edward I knew and loved was not the Edward that Marion had known and loved. “You had a threesome?”
That was it. There was no way I was ever going to compare with her in the bedroom.
He shook his head. “I didn’t participate. I watched.”
“Oh.” Still processing. “Was it hot?”
He chuckled. “Some of it was very hot. When I could get past the seething jealousy.”
“Fuck. Why is that just as hard to hear?”
“Because you believe my jealousy says something about how I must have felt about her. It doesn’t say any more than the fact that I let it happen in the first place. She was my wife. I loved her. I didn’t want her in another man’s bed, but I was willing to allow it because I knew it was the only thing that might help me keep her.”
“Quit topping from the bottom.” This was supposed to be his session, not mine, and yet he was still analyzing me. And still saying things that made it impossible to stop thinking about us. “So you’re saying that you wouldn’t share me with anyone, even if it was the only way to keep me?”
“Bloody hell, Celia, you’re impossible.” He growled with frustration. “That would never be the way to keep you, so it’s a moot point. It seems you may have other similarly arduous demands, though, so if you want my love for you tested, I’m willing to bet you’ll have your way soon enough.”
Because I wanted a baby, and he didn’t.
I wasn’t ready for that conversation again. Not yet. “Okay. You did what you needed to do to keep her. What happened then?”
“It helped, actually,” he said. “Renato helped our marriage, I mean. Not because of what occurred that week on the island, but because afterward I urged them to continue their relationship online, and he overtook the tasks I’d grown to resent. He managed her day. He gave her assignments. He gave her what she needed.
“And, I thought, that would be enough for her. She was happier, and I felt...well, free. We made it through two more years together that way. Then, one day—it seemed like it was out of the blue at the time, but in retrospect, I see that it was little by little that she fell for him. That he became more of her master than I was. That she was less and less mine. She wasn’t even the one who announced that she was leaving. Renato flew in from Turin and told me with her at his side. He helped her pack her bags, told her what to bring, and she left.”
“And you just let her?”
“I was barely in command of her anymore at that point. I should have seen it coming. I wondered for a long time after what would have happened if I’d told her to stay. For the kids, maybe I should have. But asking her to stay would have meant offering to be someone I wasn’t, and I couldn’t bring myself to say the words.”
“Oh, Edward.” I slumped in my chair, the reality of what he’d been through finally hitting me. I ached for him, for the man who had loved and tried. For the man who had been forced to fix his marriage on his own. For the weight he must have felt with that burden, and the greater weight he must have felt for having to make a painful choice, one that ended up only bringing him more pain in the end. One that had repercussions on his children.
His guilt had to be endless.
“It’s not your fault,” I said, realizing that was the reason he’d kept this from me. I leaned forward, my body reaching toward him even as I stayed seated. I wanted to go to him, but also wanted to respect his space. “You couldn’t have known. You did your best. You can’t blame yourself.”
“I know,” he said, softly.
“Do you?”
We’d had this conversation in reverse, him assuring me my role in blame, me saying I understood, but not really. It had been horrendous sitting where he was now.
He studied me, as though checking my expression for wounds, as if I were the one who had been confessing my heartache, because he knew what it felt like listening to a loved one’s pain.
Then, he came to me. Kneeling in front of me, he wrapped his arms around my calves and kissed the inside of my knee. “She didn’t break me, Celia. I know you think she did, but she didn’t.”
“It’s okay if she did. I’ll understand.”
“I know you will, but she didn’t.” His hands slid up, over my knees and glided over the skirt of my dress. “I was devastated when she left, not because of her—not because I missed her more than I should, but because I had failed. I had failed at being the husband she wanted me to be.”
I ran my hands through his hair, wanting to give him reassurance.
“That stayed with me a long time. I was convinced I didn’t know how to do this—this love thing. This commitment thing. Because I hadn’t been what Marion needed.” He looked up at me, his blue eyes bright. “It wasn’t until I met you that I was able to see that she wasn’t who I needed her to be either.”
My eyes pricked. I spread my thighs wider, inviting him closer.
He came, stopping only when he hit the chair. Reaching up, he brushed his knuckles against my cheek. “I don’t want to win all the time, Celia. I don’t want to always be the one who decides. I don’t want to be alone in this marriage. I want you to challenge me. I want you to step up and stand in my way. I want to boss you around and dominate you, but that can’t be everything there is between us. I need you to be with me too. Beside me.”
Tears spilled out over my cheeks. “I am with you, Edward. Beside you all the way.”
He didn’t let me say more. His mouth captured mine, tugging me forward. I slid down to my knees in front of him, pushing the chair back with my body as I did. His kiss grew savage. He devoured me like a hungry man, like he had been too long without affection, without understanding, without love, and now he was starving for it.
Fuck, I was starving too, ravenous for what only he could give me. Together, our hands worked fast, removing clothes at lightning speeds until we were both naked and sprawled out on the floor.
He paused as he perched above me, the head of his cock notched at my pussy, while he traced my swollen lips with a single finger.
“Don’t tease,” I begged. “Fuck me, Edward. Fuck me hard.”
; He pushed inside me then, slowly, ignoring my pleas for speed. Even after he was deeply seated, he didn’t move faster. He took his time, making sure I felt every inch of his cock on each one of his strokes. It was maddening how it prolonged the build of my orgasm, stretching it out like the anticipation of a dawdling sneeze. Coupled with the way he gazed at me, his eyes spearing me with equal intensity, I felt more filled by him than I ever had.
He spoke to me as he fucked me without ever using words, whispering kisses along my jawline, murmuring his hands along my skin, articulating his love through each thrust of his cock, until I was overcome by his discourse, my entire being shivering and trembling with sensation.
I love you, I said without uttering a single syllable, as I arched up, my back bent with the atomic force of pleasure ripping through me. My pussy clamped around him, and he stilled, rooting firmly inside me until my climax had finished. Then, when he resumed his thrusts, he relaxed his tempo further, threatening to drive me even more insane as he leisurely drew another orgasm from my body.
Minutes might have passed. Or hours. I lost all sense of time and space, my focus anchored only on him and the infinite joy that existed in that singular moment. I’d meant what I’d said to him—I was one hundred percent committed to be with him through this marriage, to be by his side, but right now I was perfectly content being underneath.
Later, when we were in our bed, my cheek pressed against his chest, I began to remember the issues that existed beyond the here and now. We’d entered a new phase of our relationship. We’d leveled up, and I didn’t want to ruin the mood when I felt so deeply connected to him, but there was no real progress in our new position if we didn’t face it all.
“What about the other stuff, Edward? The things we talked about yesterday.” The baby I wanted, the revenge he wanted. I was grateful for the dark and that I couldn’t see his expression from where I lay in his arms.
“Well,” he said, his arms tightening around me. “First, we deal with Ron.”
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