He stood. “All right.” He nodded. “I never expected one woman to fulfill both roles. A couple of years ago, I couldn’t even have imagined it. The girls I take as pets are never ones I’d want to marry. Rocurt muddied the waters by falling in love with one. Now she’s both wife and pet.”
“You mean Melsint still lets him treat her like a pet at times?”
“Every day. It’s the role she’s more comfortable with, but then she was suited to being a pet.” He returned to the kitchen area and retrieved his mug. “I’ll wait until after the wedding. Then I’ll begin the search for a new pet.”
She stared at him. “No.”
“Yes, it’s necessary.”
“Haven’t you been without a pet for longer periods of time?”
“Yes, but not indefinitely. And not when I thought it necessary.”
“What makes itnecessarynow?” she demanded. “When you’ll have a new wife in your bed? It should be less necessary than before.”
“I want you as a wife and as a pet. Do you not see that sneaking you into the wing with the playroom and locking you in a pet’s chamber was partly a maneuver to test your response to the unconventional part of my life? That’s the same reason I interspersed your punishments with pet play two nights ago. To see whether bending you to my will would excite you, the way it excites me to do it.”
“Being around me makes you want a pet more?” she asked, frowning.
“No, it makes me want you that way, and the urge is so strong it’s hard to suppress. Harder than it’s ever been. I need an outlet for these cravings.”
“I don’t understand why that would be. Two nights ago, I could’ve been anyone. You had me face down on the bed. You never said my name. All the talk was generic. It had nothing to do with me.”
He looked away, with an almost imperceptible shake of his head.
“Ev, what? We’ve come this far. You have to trust me. Tell me what you’re not saying.”
“It’s always about you now. Even when it’s not you, it’s you in my head. When I’m most caught up in fantasies, it’s you.”
“You mean that sometimes when you’re with someone—a pet—you imagine it’s me instead? Before I even went to the center?”
“Yes.”
“For how long?”
“More than a year.”
It gave her the strangest thrill to hear him admit that she was the girl in his fantasies. He had certainly been the man in all of hers for much longer.
“So when it finally was me, why didn’t you say my name or acknowledge that it was?”
He exhaled, looking at his mug, then at his hands on the counter, but not at her. “The explanation isn’t logical.”
“Tell me,” she said softly.
“I didn’t want to say those things to the girl I care for. When I told you about that party with the statues and watched you change your mind about wanting to marry me, it was difficult to endure.” He glanced over at her.
“It wasn’t disgust that made me turn away from you. I was shocked and not thrilled, but I was also jealous. That you’d experimented so thoroughly with other women. That there would always be a part of you that others would have that I couldn’t.”
“It’s a dark part of me.”
“I know. But I care about you in spite of it.”
He nodded slowly.
She stood and crossed the room. She moved his arms to wrap them around herself.
“You’re my friend,” she whispered. “And my lover. How much luckier are we than so many?”
