“Are you asking me if I’m into kink?”
Andy wasn’t into kink, at least not traditionally. He’d experienced things, wild things, when he was in Berlin, and he knew there were things he liked, things that got him off, and things he wanted to explore. There were things that came so painfully natural to him, but he didn’t know how to find someone who would accept his…newness, who would let him learn with them, on them…in them.
“That’s what I’m asking you,” Leonidas answered, like it was so simple. “I think you are. You could be if you’re not. You have that way about you.”
“What way?”
“You like to be in charge. You like to give orders. Give permission.”
Andy inhaled sharply, hoping he didn’t get a huge erection in the middle of this garden in Paris with a man he hadn’t even known for an entire day.
“I don’t know a lot about it,” he answered honestly. “About what a lot of it means or about what that life is like.”
“But you know enough.”
“I know that I like the things I know about.”
Leonidas lifted his hand and bit at the cuticle on his middle finger, his eyes never leaving Andy’s face. Andy wondered what Leonidas saw there. He licked his lips and looked down at the grass, unable to hold his stare any longer.
“What do you know about?” Leonidas rested his hand on Andy’s knee, the heat of his touch searing through Andy’s jeans and onto his skin.
“Giving permission,” he offered. “Control.”
“So, the basics.”
He swatted Leonidas’s hand away from his leg.
“I told you it’s new. I went to some clubs in Berlin. It’s not something I really knew about before I left home.” Andy felt embarrassed, his skin hot and clammy, and he didn’t want to look back up. He wanted to burrow into the ground and dig through and end up back in Colorado where he wouldn’t need to face Leonidas’s stare ever again.
“Agapi mou,” Leonidas said, his voice low and soothing, “It was new to everyone at some point.”
“Is it new to you?”
“Not anymore,” Leonidas answered.
“You knelt for me last night,” he whispered. “You took instruction.”
“I did.”
“Did you like those things?”
Leonidas leaned in, his lips brushing against Andy’s ear. “I liked doing what you told me to do.”
“Do you like pain?”
Andy hadseenthings when he’d been out in Berlin, and some of them were arousing and some of them were terrifying and some of them he just didn’t understand. But if someone had talked to him about kink and BDSM when he’d been in America, his reaction probably would have been the same to all of it. It was an unknown, a variable he didn’t have an answer for, and nothing about itfitinto his life beyond the fact helikedit.
That had been his goal, though.
The point of this trip was to fuck off and find the things he liked that weren’t sitting behind a desk and doing a job that paid him a fraction of what he earned for the company he worked for. He’d intended to travel, and try things, and meet people, and he’d done that in spades. And he was here now, still doing all of that, wondering how to reconcile all of these new feelings inside of him as a person who lived in a small mountain town that didn’t even have a proper grocery store.
“In the right circumstance,” Leonidas answered like it was the most casual thing in the world. Like they weren’t in public, eating cheese and bread and drinking wine straight from the bottle talking about power exchanges.
Leonidas walked his fingers up Andy’s leg, curling in and around and dangerously close to the part of Andy that liked this conversation the most. “You’ve never done that before, though. Have you?”
“No.”
“But you want to try it.”
