by Lilia Moon
I wince. “Sorry. You walked into a kink club and everyone pounced. Including me.”
She leans in and kisses my lips. “I want you to pounce, sexy man. I just need you to do it in lands that I know.”
I crouch down in front of the stool and kiss the fingers she has resting on her knees. “What about hot vanilla sex?”
She chuckles and runs her fingers through my hair. “We figured it out at sixteen. Let’s see what happens.”
That’s exactly the kind of stumbling around blind in the dark that the kinky world tries to avoid, but if there are good reasons to say no to this woman, I can’t find them. I groan and lay my forehead on her knee. “I can’t believe I’m still saying this to you, but I have to go practice my cello now.” So said the text message that arrived shortly before she did. Recording session in thirty minutes. Apparently the worms have learned.
Chloe laughs. Music practice was one of the few reasons we ever spent time apart.
I stroke her arms, loath to let go. “Can I take you to dinner tonight?”
She smiles down at me and nods. We have a date.
Chapter Fourteen
Chloe
Eli opens the door to his condo as I exit the very swish elevator and step onto carpet deep enough to swallow my shoes. I walk the hallway, appreciating the touches of luxury in places they often get ignored.
He watches every step I take, his eyes a little hungry and a lot happy. It occurs to me just how easily I read him. Twenty-six years have changed a lot, but all of who Eli is still lives in his eyes. I hold out the bouquet of wildflowers I bought on a whim.
He chuckles and buries his nose in them, just like I hoped he would—I thoroughly annoyed the flower seller by sniffing all her wares. Then he holds them off to the side and buries his nose in me, running soft kisses up the sensitive skin of my neck. “Thank you for coming.”
I smile and tilt my head to give him better access. “It’s not a hardship. You live in a beautiful part of town.”
He shrugs. “It’s close to work and I like the view.” He tugs me in so that I can see the panorama of trees and lake and far-off green hills through the sweep of windows that are clearly the reason this place was built. “And the soundproofing is really good, so my neighbors don’t hate me.”
They don’t know what they’re missing. Listening to Eli play would be high on my list of great features in a neighbor. I look around his space, trying to learn something of the man. It’s not actually that large—there are thoughtful details everywhere, but this isn’t the condo of someone who needs a lot of space to prove he matters. It’s cozy, under the luxurious vibe. Comfortable seating and warm throws and colors that make it feel very much like an upscale den.
Eli leads me over to a loveseat in plush fabric that has my fingers stroking it as I sit down.
He chuckles. “That’s what I did right before I bought it.”
That doesn’t surprise me. He’s always explored the world through his fingertips. It took me a little longer to catch that bug—to understand the power of the right fabrics and textures to set a mood, or break one. “I like your space. It feels like a place I’d want to spend time.”
He smiles, clearly pleased by the compliment. “I hope you do.”
I can feel my cheeks get warm. I didn’t mean it quite that literally.
His fingers slide under my chin. “That’s an invitation with no strings, shorty. I don’t know where we’re headed, but if we discover the sexual chemistry isn’t a fit or it fizzles on renewed acquaintance, I’d still be really happy to have you bring over one of your books and curl up in a chair and listen to me curse at my cello.”
I laugh, because that memory feels like it’s only days old instead of decades. “You still do that?”
“I do.” He grins. “And after so much time touring in Europe, I can curse fairly fluently in a lot more languages.”
I reach out and stroke his forearm, pleased he’s wearing something that gives me at least that much skin to access. If this chemistry is going to fizzle, it hasn’t started yet.
He hums quietly, harmonic accompaniment to my fingers.
I could do this all night, except for the part where I’m starving. My belly is going to start singing along with his humming. “Maybe we should go eat before we do much more of this.”
His eyes slide open. “I ordered in. There’s a small balcony off my bedroom. I thought we could eat and talk with some privacy.”
It’s my turn to grin. “And a bed really close by?”
He laughs. “That depends on what we both want after dinner.”
I came here pretty sure what I want, but I’ve learned to enjoy the process of getting there. Especially with a man who enjoys his sensual pleasures as much as this one. I stroke his arm one last time and stand. “Take me to your balcony, handsome.”
He walks over to a bar counter that divides his kitchen from the rest of his living space and lifts up a bag. I laugh when I see the label. Thai food, from my very favorite hole-in-the-wall mom-and-pop place. “Lucky guess?”
“No.” He slides his arm around my waist. “I called your shop and asked Mandy for your favorites.”
That’s sweet—and oddly bossy. “You could have asked me.”
He’s watching me carefully. “I could have.”
I can feel my brain trying to decide if this is a lovely bit of caretaking or an end-run around something that matters. And my guilt that I’m suddenly bobbling this. “I’m sorry—I’m not sure why that’s hitting me strangely.”
He kisses my forehead. “Thank you for being honest. Can you tell me more about the strangeness?”
He really wants to know. He’s studying me like nothing in the world matters more right now than whatever I’m feeling.
“I appreciate that you wanted to choose a dinner I would enjoy.” I speak slowly, unpacking the feelings inside me. “I think maybe I’m still feeling a little sensitive to how control and submission are a big part of your life now. Part of me is wondering if that’s what’s going on here. A need to control.” I shrug, my skin suddenly a size too small. “And I’m embarrassed to be feeling this way and causing wobbles between us and getting in the way of a really nice dinner.”
Chapter Fifteen
Eli
She’s still so unflinchingly brave.
I lean back against my bar counter and set down the food. I need both my arms for this. I reach for the woman who’s working herself toward guilt for doing exactly the right thing. “Truth is the sexiest thing there is, Chloe. You’re not wobbling anything. You’re giving us a chance to show up for each other as adults. Thank you.”
I can see her surprise. And I can see the edges of why takeout Thai has caused her to feel wobbly. I debate a moment, because we’re supposed to be hanging out in vanilla territory tonight, but I don’t know how to clean this up as a vanilla guy. “You’re right. Me taking the time to learn your needs without asking you is absolutely a form of control. It wasn’t intentional on my part, and I’m sorry for that.”
She tilts her head, a little bemused. “Some of this stuff goes beyond the bedroom, does it?”
“It can. But this isn’t about kink. It’s about who I like to be in the world. I wanted to let you know that tonight matters to me, and that’s how I chose to do it.” I snug her in a little tighter to my body. “But it might not be the best way to communicate that to you, and that’s what I want to understand.”
Her eyes close, but not before I see the flickers of shame. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t seeing it that way at all.”
No wonder vanilla relationships crash into so many things. “That isn’t your fault.” I put enough firmness into my words that her eyes snap back open, and then I ask the question that matters. “I took control, and you felt it happen. Why is that uncomfortable for you?”
Her head jolts like my words landed physically. Her breath catches, and she pushes back against the clasp of my arms around her waist. Then she stops, looking down
at her hands clenched on my biceps. “Huh. Apparently it still is.”
I chuckle and soften my hold. “Keep following that thought.”
Her hands start to move, up and down my biceps. Which makes it damn hard to concentrate. I focus on the wrinkles that form between her eyebrows as she thinks.
Her hands stop, and she looks up at me again, the bold back in her eyes. “Because when you take control, it takes something from me.”
Almost there. “It gives you something too. If you want it.”
She pushes out of my arms, but she’s not running now, and I let her go. She walks slowly down the length of my bar counter. Brushes her fingers over the bag of Thai food, nodding slowly. Working it through. “Freedom. Space to be here and not worry about making my belly happy. A chance to feel pampered and cherished.”
Thank fuck. I didn’t completely screw up, other than entirely mangling the whole vanilla deal. “Yes.”
She turns her head, looking off into the distance. Thinking again. “That part is really nice, actually.” She takes a deep breath, blows it out, and meets my eyes. “But I think I need to give up the control, not have you take it.”
That’s not a line I hear often. “Tell me what you mean.”
She pushes away from the counter, her feet taking her on a circle through my living room. A faster pace, matching her thoughts. “I have customers who special order things. Some of them have really precise requirements, and some of them want me to surprise them.” She stops and looks at me from the far side of my coffee table. “But they ask me. I don’t just surprise them if they didn’t ask.”
She’s so very sure this is hard—that the words she’s saying to me are some kind of terrible blow. I need her to understand they’re a gift. “So this afternoon, when I invited you to dinner, if I had requested a chance to spoil and surprise you, would that have made the moment when I told you I’d called Mandy feel different?”
Surprise lands in her body before it hits her eyes. “Yes, actually.”
She’s so beautiful right now. I close the distance between us, flanking my coffee table and putting my hands on her hips. “Then you would have been able to see it as being taken care of and cherished.”
She’s nodding, but there’s still puzzlement. “I’m not sure why it makes such a difference, but when you said it just like that, I could feel the tangle inside me relax.”
I take her hand in mine and kiss her fingers. “That’s because you need to give your consent before you give up control.”
Her eyes widen.
I grin and kiss her nose. “Sorry. I promise to be as vanilla as possible for the rest of the night.”
She’s already shaking her head. “No, I hear that this wasn’t intentional. It was my reaction that pushed us here, but you have some way of understanding what just happened that I don’t. I’m still a little confused, but I like where it’s taking us.”
I kiss her nose again and pick up the food, because her stomach is growling, even if she hasn’t noticed. “Food. I’ll explain why consent matters so much in my world over green mango salad.”
Her eyes soften. “You really did quiz Mandy.”
I did, and now it’s landing the way I meant. And I’ve learned something really important about the woman Chloe has become.
Chapter Sixteen
Chloe
I push the pad Thai takeout box back across the table to Eli. “Me and my chopsticks, we’re done.” And still amused that we ignored the plates and very nice table settings he set out and ate straight from the boxes.
He grins down at the three noodles I’ve left him. “Some things haven’t changed.”
I’ve never eaten the last bites of anything. My signature act of two-year-old defiance, and I never gave it up. “I’m full.” And so is my brain. Eli’s explanation of consent somehow made it totally fine that I got my panties in a twist over him doing a really nice thing. I can feel his wise words percolating in me, even now. Control in his world is never taken. It’s given. It may look like it’s being taken in the moment, but that’s just theater. Half my body weight in pad Thai and coconut chicken curry and green mango salad later, that still has its hooks in me.
What kink looks like and what it is are really different.
He leans back in his chair, setting his chopsticks down.
I can feel the air change. I’m ready. We’ve talked about everything else. Now that I’m not distracted by lemon-grass fumes and the sensual joy of watching Eli eat, we need to fill in some of the bigger, more intimate holes of our past. I stretch out my hands and lace my fingers with his. I know about the kink clubs in Europe. Time to learn the rest. “Tell me why you still walk alone.”
His lips quirk. “That’s where you want to start, is it?”
I’ve never been someone who’s tiptoed around things. “Yes.”
He nods and takes a slow, deep breath. “I spent fifteen years on tour with the same three people. They became my family. Romantic relationships were limited and generally died after a few weeks of exposure to my life. A friend introduced me to kink, and that became my way of getting my sexual needs met. I had a small list of clubs I visited. Europe isn’t that big, so we were usually near one of them.”
I let my brain process that. My sixteen-year-old self can admit that it hurts. And that I’m glad he has people who love him. “So, what, you had a girl in every port?”
He grins at my sailor reference. Our army dads frowned on those, so we tended to use them often. “Something like that. No long-term intimate relationships, but I didn’t feel like I was missing out.”
He didn’t. He made the family he needed.
He leans forward and takes my hands. “You?”
Nothing as sexy as a sub in every major European city. “I had two relationships that lasted. The first was back when I was getting my shop started, and he wanted kids and a farm on the coast where he could make cheese.”
Eli chuckles. “You were dating a dairy farmer?”
A very sweet one. “He is now. He’s married with two sets of twins and all the cows he ever wanted.” His wife sends me cheese every Christmas—she’s very grateful I gave him up.
“It’s hard to imagine you in that picture.”
I shrug. It took a long time to make peace with the fact that I hadn’t wanted to try. “I don’t think we were the right people for each other. Not for the long term.” But it had still hurt terribly to put the lost look in his eyes when I ended it.
Eli sighs, soft and sympathetic. “Sometimes it’s hard to let go, even when it’s the right choice.”
That sounds like a man who came closer to a long-term relationship than he admits. “It was. The second one was easier. I met him when he was a junior lawyer, working hard and playing hard just like I was. As he moved up, he changed. He wanted someone on his arm, available at his beck and call.”
Eli winces. “Just so you know, some Doms are like that too.”
I raise an eyebrow. “Are you one of them?”
He takes another one of his deep, slow breaths. “In bed, absolutely. In life, no.”
I tilt my head, watching his face. “Why the difference?”
His thumbs are stroking the delicate skin of my inner wrists. “It’s like my cello—I need to put it down sometimes to be able to appreciate picking it back up.”
“I’m nobody’s accessory, ever.” I smile at him. “But being your cello might be fun.”
He groans, and his hold on my hands tightens. “Vanilla date, woman. You asked and I promised.”
It’s an odd sensation to have a man holding me to my own needs. Especially when I’m not sure what they are in this moment.
He lets go of my hands and refills our wine glasses. He’s only consumed about an inch of his. “So, you left the really nice farmer and the jerk who wanted arm candy. Where does that leave you now?”
No place that felt at all unfulfilled until a day ago. “I have some sex buddies. And really great friends.” Which,
come to think of it, maybe isn’t all that different from his traveling cello family and a woman in every port.
Chapter Seventeen
Eli
She’s opened a door. We both have. Somehow, we’ve connected back together at a time when both of us are free to pursue whatever this is and wherever it’s headed. There are no deep relationship wounds, no partners waiting in the wings, no jobs demanding more of us than a lover might reasonably be expected to tolerate.
And she wants tonight to stay vanilla.
I thought hard about what that means before I invited her into my space. The difference between vanilla and kink isn’t in the hardware. It’s in my willingness to push my partner out of her comfort zone. So for tonight, we’ll stay in Chloe’s. If I happen to use my Dom radar to explore some of the edges of where that is, that seems like an acceptable use of the skills I learned in my various ports.
A history she hasn’t either rejected or swarmed to, and both please me.
I stand up and make my way around the table, never letting go of her fingers. It’s time to have fewer inanimate objects between us. She lets me pull her up easily, and I can see the heat flare in her eyes. She knows where I’d like to take this.
I wrap my arms around her, enjoying the feel of warm skin and curves. My bed might be less than ten feet away through the balcony door, but I don’t need to get there quickly. And I don’t plan to head there without consent. There are some pieces of who I am that I’m just not willing to set aside. “I’d like to take you inside now, Chloe. I want to undress you and lie you down on my bed and take my sweet time getting to know your body again.”
Her skin pebbles at my words. She arches into me, her hands sliding up around my neck. Her eyes are clear and bold as she runs her fingers through my hair. “As long as I get some time to do the same, I’m really good with that.”
I tell my inner Dom to stand down. He’s not in charge tonight. “Sure.” I pull open the balcony slider door. “In fact, you can go first if you want.” I might have better self-control that way. Or not.