by Chloe Liese
I exhaled heavily and signaled for the check. “We’d get to know each other plenty. I’d have to know things about you that no one else knows, not your mother, your best friend, former inadequate lovers.”
She stiffened at that. I understood, it sounded radical. That’s because it was. You had to know each other inside out—triggers, history, limits, no-go zones.
“As for the physical aspect, normal…it’s not satisfying. Take a gay guy fucking a woman. Some can get it up and follow through. Doesn’t mean he derives pleasure from it. And frankly, based on how you just responded, I’m going to call into question whether you’ve actually ever found standard-fare fucking that pleasurable either.”
Her cheeks reddened as she shook her head. “I’ve enjoyed pleasure plenty, thank you very much. I tend to value things like egalitarianism and consent.”
I leaned in and tucked an errant mahogany strand behind her ear. “Value them, yes. Doesn’t mean you get off on them. Plenty of sex can happen that doesn’t look like consent but foundationally relies on it.”
“What do you mean?”
I was going to blow my load if we sat here much longer talking about bedroom games and anything that reminded my cock how much it wanted to be balls-deep inside her. “I’ll explain later.”
“Zed.” She looked impatient, frustrated.
“Nairne.” My thumb grazed her jaw. Her chin. Her skin was porcelain. Flawless. Breakable.
I don’t want to break her. I want to possess her.
“Tell me something,” I whispered. “Have you done this before? Let a man touch you in public, unprompted? Make you come while you drink your wine and watch the sun set over the harbor?”
She rolled her eyes.
Roll your eyes at me again and see where it gets you.
“Not exactly,” she hissed. “All right? No. Doesn’t mean I’m some sexual deviant.”
“Precisely.” I smiled and slid my thumb down her throat. It landed in the divot at the base, where her pulse tripped. “You’re a scientist. Tell me what we are?”
“Who?” she whispered.
“Us. Humans.”
Nairne cleared her throat and straightened as if talking science was incompatible with arousal. “Bipedal stance. Complex reasoning. Highly evolved animals, in essence.”
“Exactly.” I nodded. “Some of us are just a bit more in touch with our roots. You ever seen a stallion mount a mare? The tigress surrender to the big cat?” My lips ghosted along the shell of her ear as I leaned in. “Teeth sink into necks, claws into skin. Eyes soften, bodies open. A blissful flood of hormones that induce one thing—pleasure. They give in. And it’s good. That’s who we are. Animals. Some of us fuck like it.”
“Christ, man.” She sat back and shook her head at me.
“You’re not fooling me. You’re freakier than you let on.”
She stared at me and bit her lip. Hard. “Perhaps, but not like you.”
I would have bet you my Ferrari I couldn’t get harder, but I did. “Okay, we’re leaving.”
The check slid onto our table. I didn’t have time for a card. I threw down a handful of hundreds and stood.
Nairne backed out and I followed her, watching the muscles in her arms flex as she spun the wheels forward. She had a long, willowy body and arms that looked like a dancer’s. A million fantasies of how I’d take that beautiful physique, tease and build her to desperation, swarmed my thoughts.
The valet pulled up, traded me keys for a fifty, and left us alone. As I opened her door, Nairne frowned and stared into my car like it was the gate to hell.
“What am I doing?” she muttered.
I crouched down because I needed to look into her eyes, and my hand slid to where her heart thundered in her chest. “Exactly what you want to do.”
She glanced from me to the car, then transferred in.
I stood and grinned down at her. “Time to test my theory, madam scientist, that you are a kinky freak. Way more than you let on. Tell me, Ms. MacGregor, how one tests a theory.”
Her auburn hair hit the headrest and she glanced over to me. “Experimentation, Mr. Salvatore. And god help me as I do.”
I pushed her door shut, set her folded wheelchair in the car, and walked on air to my side. Door closed, engine on. Window cracked, because she smelled too damn good and made staying level-headed ridiculously difficult. “God’s got nothing to do with it, MacGregor. And for the record, when you come, he doesn’t get the credit, either.”
I floored it onto Atlantic Avenue and sent us on a centripetal swing along the water’s edge. Nairne laughed and threw her head back. When I shifted two more gears, she was clutching my wrist, her eyes dancing with adrenaline. She looked exhilarated. Alive.
I’d given her that thrill. Her high and her joy were mine. Mine.
Eleven
Nairne
Zed pulled in front of my flat and stepped out, smooth and silent, into the night. He seemed to look around, eyes sharp as he scanned the night. When he seemed satisfied, my door opened, and he caged me in.
“I’d like to come inside. Discuss some things. But I don’t know what’s too late for you. This shouldn’t be talked over when you’re tired or buzzed.”
I was neither. I was high on adrenaline from the drive and a number of other neurochemicals that had lots to do with erogenous zones. “You can come in.”
My flat was the bottom half of the house, so we went right in through the front door. Elodie had left for France on Sunday, so the place was back to its usual, unexciting quietness. I tossed my keys on the counter and headed straight to the kitchen for water. Leveraged the counter and stood. My legs were tired, and I had to lock my elbows so I wouldn’t drop, but I steadied myself and reached for the cabinet.
The only warning I had was an intake of breath before Zed’s body moved unnaturally fast. He was behind me, hands on my hips, and he looked both frightened and angry.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“What’s the matter? You almost fell on your ass just now. Scared the shit out of me.”
I laughed. “That was smooth. You should see me first thing in the morning.” I hated any form of preferential treatment. But for some reason, I knew he respected me too much for his concern to be tinged with pity. I liked his hands around my waist, his unfiltered worry over my unreliable legs.
“I’m all right,” I whispered. “Sit, why don’t you?”
His arms reached over mine, grabbed the glasses, and shut the cabinet. “Let me.”
He was close. And he smelled like sex in a thunderstorm. I leaned back into him and felt his cock flush against my arse. His nose dipped to my hair and slid against my cheek. “Innamorata, please, sit. Let me do this.”
His lips trailed along my neck and settled against my shoulder. One faint kiss. I wanted thousands more.
“Fine.” I sighed. “But only because you bribed me with that mouth. Kisses and Italian.” I didn’t understand the word he’d used, but I was a scientist who knew her Latin so I could guess. Enamored? Lover?
He laughed against my skin and swatted my arse. Gently. He was obviously capable of more, but I liked that he’d been cautious. He didn’t know my body yet. He barely knew me. I let him take over because he was clearly a man you picked your battles with. I curled up on my sofa while Zed joined with two waters. He set them down and cuffed his sleeves while staring at me.
His gaze was too much. It belonged to the intensity I’d lived for in my old life. Verbal sparring. Rough, belligerent sex. The friction and sparks of iron sharpening iron.
I drank a sip of my water and set it down. “What do you want to discuss?”
He shook his head. “You first. You like this, but you’re wary. I want to know why.”
My head quirked to the side as it so often did with him. He chronically skipped the first three steps in polite conversation. I liked his directness, but it still caught me off guard.
“I’ve had…bad experiences with being
sexually impetuous. I want to get to know each other before we get intense. Take it slow.”
He stared at me. “Elaborate.”
I sighed, folded my arms. “No.”
He scrubbed his hair. “Fine, for now. But I need more from you at some point on that. Next.”
“No anal.”
A nod. “Keep going.”
“You’re very high-handed. When you talked about being animals…” I swallowed thickly. “I don’t like the idea of surrendering power.”
He waved his hand like shooing a fly. “I’m pushy, but you can always push back. I don’t want to control you. I simply demand a heavy hand in our dynamic. I need cooperation to keep my environment ordered. That make sense?”
I couldn’t figure out if it did or not. He drank his entire water in three slow gulps, and the bobbing of his Adam’s apple was more erotic than it should have been. The glass landed silently on the table and he peered up at me. “You have just as much power as me. It’s expressed in the bedroom differently.”
If he meant passively, the idea made no sense, but this was the point of going slow. I’d have time to figure out what he meant, if it was a crock of shit or just a complicated world that I was ignorant of.
“I have an important condition,” I said. “No falling in love.”
He grinned at me. “Something we can agree on. Though, I’m curious. You think people choose who they fall in love with?”
“I think you can choose what you do with your feelings for someone. What about you?”
Zed stretched his arm along the sofa. Hand splayed over my tartan throw. “I think the heart wants what it wants. I can’t promise not to fall in love with you, but I can promise that your smart mouth is plenty disincentive. And if not even that works, and I do fall hard and fast, I won’t tell you. How’s that?”
I stared into his eyes. “That’s not a very clear answer.”
He grinned again and revealed a dimple in his left cheek. “Persuasion and evasion are gifts of mine.” His smile disappeared as he leaned in and whispered over my lips, “No falling in love.”
One kiss, a chaste pledge. I pulled away first and tried to distance myself from his gravitational pull. “Now, sir, your turn. Let’s hear it.”
Zed sat back, eyed me carefully. “I need a partner who lets me do what I want to her, and does what I say when I touch her.”
I snorted into my water, but he went straight on.
“When we start having sex, I own your pleasure and when you come. If you need pain, I own that, too. I give you what you need, and your trust and compliance give me everything I need. I’ll be attentive to you. Make sure you take good care of yourself. And I’ll be demanding.”
My glass landed on the coffee table with a soft thunk. “Why do you need to own it all? Why can’t you just enjoy it with me?”
Zed quirked his head to the side. “That’s how I enjoy it. That I can elicit responses and pleasure from you, that I know you that well. That I can trust you’ll obey my directives as a means of ensuring safety and order. It…calms me. Makes my mind quieter.”
“You need it.”
“Yes.” His eyes held mine. “It’s not a choice for me.”
“Zed, I…I’m my own person. I’m highly self-reliant.”
He gently pulled my legs onto his lap. Started kneading my muscles like he knew their spastic witching hour was coming. “You’re on your own?”
I nodded. “I don’t count on others easily.”
Those hands. Flexing as they loosened my muscles. Strength and gentleness conjoined. He pursed his lips, nodded, like he was deliberating over my words, weighing their implications. “Try with me. See how it feels. Let me think about things, take care of you. You just have to be flexible. Do some of what I ask without giving me shit about it.”
My nipples hardened and I was wet. I liked giving him shit. “I’ll consider it.”
He rolled his eyes. “We’re off to a brilliant start then.” His hands paused. “I need to know what happened. What hurts.”
“You mean, my spinal injury?”
“It’s your spine?” His hands stilled entirely now.
“Yes. I’m paralyzed. Incomplete at my lumbar region. I have uneven sensation. Don’t fold me backward or flog my scar, and I’ll probably be fine.”
He didn’t laugh.
“I was joking about the flogging.”
“Noted.” His hands slid up my legs and ghosted my knickers again. “Discussing your body is more complicated than that. But we’ll talk it out as we go, learn along the way.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“You’re not…you don’t want me because I’m paralyzed, do you?”
He stared at me, didn’t blink. “You think I have some kind of fetish for you? That I get off on a woman being in your situation?” He swallowed and his face darkened. “You’re really asking me that?”
I shrugged. “You don’t seem at all perturbed by my situation. You’re not weirded out by having this kind of dynamic with a crip.”
He flinched when I said that word. Most people did. Fuck other people’s sensitivities. It was my word for my reality. Reclaiming language signified power in the resilience of my disability. I used the word when I wanted, and I tended to click with others in my boat who did, too.
“I hate that word.”
“I love it. Get used to hearing it from me. Back to my point. You’re not fazed by this, so it gives me pause. I think most men would be.”
He took my jaw. “I’m not most men. And you’re certainly not most women. You’re a warrior, a queen. Unrelenting, powerful, tenacious. Fucking gorgeous. When I saw you, I had no idea you were in a wheelchair. And when I realized you were, it didn’t make a damn difference. Your intellect. Your beautiful body. That wiseass mouth. I wanted that. I want it all. Mine, entirely. But if you ever accuse me of objectifying you like that again, sexualizing your body’s trauma, you and I will be done. Am I understood?”
I blinked and swallowed. He still had my jaw in his grasp as I searched his eyes. He wasn’t lying. He didn’t like that I had to live this way. He didn’t pity it or get off on it either. He wanted me, and my paralysis happened to be part of who I was.
“Understood.” My voice was thin from the sharp angle at which he held my face. Slowly, his grip shifted. His thumb slid along my lips and the hand that had stopped on my thigh now drifted higher once more. I sighed as his fingers teased my slit. I couldn’t feel it all entirely, but I saw his hand move, watched his eyes darken.
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” I said.
“Then we won’t.” He kissed my neck, the base of my throat, the top of my breast. “In fact…” His finger dipped inside me and I gasped. “Right now we’re not going to talk at all.”
I liked my water so hot that the steam almost choked me. The powerful sensation of heat overrode pain for a brief time in my day. I sat on the bench in the shower and tried to psych myself up for getting out. My hair dropped water in a steady tattoo on the shower floor.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
My mobile rang. I kept it on the ledge of the shower and spun it to read the screen. Zed.
I tapped the speaker button and leaned back against the shower wall. “Good morning, sir.”
A heavy pause. The noise of traffic on the streets. “You said that ironically, but it still made me hard.”
I laughed, snapped a towel off the ledge, and threw it over my hair. “I dunno. I was raised with manners. Sir comes easily enough.”
“See, this is what I mean. You’re a natural in denial.”
I wasn’t submissive. We both knew that. I was too strong-willed. Opinionated. Independent. And I liked rowing with him too much to ever be the dominated type. Yet when his voice dropped, when he said what was being done…that was that. My mind might object, but my body sang. I liked some parts of his high-handedness, and not others. He’d just have to deal with my preferential
contradictions then.
“What do you want, Salvatore?”
He laughed. “There she is. Spitfire and sass. I want you. Tonight.”
I frowned. “It’s game one. Wherever we are, I want to be watching.”
“You think I’d miss it? I like you. A lot. But I’m not missing the Sox in the World Series for anything.”
I smiled. “Excellent. I’m all yours then.”
“That you are.”
That note of possession. That I didn’t understand—how possession made him feel in control. To me, such a responsibility was the antithesis of control—attachment to someone who could be ripped away from you.
I could die. I could reject him. I could disappear. Why yoke himself to that vulnerability? If I could help it, I would never do it in my whole life.
Over the phone I heard the lock of his Ferrari chirp and the hum of water nearby, most likely the harbor. “Wear jeans and don’t forget a sweater. The temps dip below fifty, and you shiver like it’s your job. Save your appetite, and I’ll get you at five o’clock.”
“Now, Mr. Salvatore. However will you manage to have your fingers in my coot when I’m wearing the dreaded denim?” I transferred over to my chair.
He let out a burst of air that was either a laugh of amusement or exasperation. In the background, men’s voices echoed in lilting Italian.
“Innamorata,” he said on a sigh. “It’s a cunt.”
That word on his mouth was sin. I shivered and it wasn’t because I was cold from the end of my shower.
“And don’t underestimate me, Ms. MacGregor. I have my ways.”
Twelve
Zed
I really tried to avoid patronizing my family’s restaurants because my relationship to them was complex to say the least. But when you have as many cousins as I did, it was pretty hard. Especially when Mike, first cousin on my mom’s side, made the best fucking burgers.
Grease dripped down my wrists while I chewed and watched Nairne slide a French fry right between her lips and grin. We’d just had the conversation about her birth control and swapped clean bills of health. So naturally, every possible way that my bare cock could be in or on some portion of her beautiful body was blinding my thoughts from much else. And she certainly wasn’t helping that. Dragging a thick, long fry against her lips was damned provocative and one hundred percent intentional on her part.