“Of course you didn’t.”
“How does that work?”
Grant snorted. “For me or him?”
“Either.”
“For him, you’ll have to ask him. For me, I get to sleep with someone I have strong and platonic feelings for.” Grant shoveled a stack of nachos into his mouth. Adam followed suit, the salty cheese and chip combination proving more satisfying than he would have anticipated.
“That’s fair,” he said. “And I’m sorry. I’ll stop implying there should be more between the two of you than there is.”
“Thank you.” Grant gave him a soft smile, then cleared his throat. “Do you know what you have to do to set things on track with Cooper?”
“I preferred talking about you.”
“We’ve done that. Now life has come full circle.”
“Yes.” He sighed. “I know what I have to do, and it’s a lot of me work.”
Adam knew he had to phrase the conversation carefully. He was still concerned he would put a fork in things if he approached the conversation wrong, but he’d realized that with Cooper’s near-constant submission,hewas also missing out on something that had become important to him. Adam worried Cooper had put his own dominance on the back-burner to save Adam, but he worried about the cost. He didn’t need to tell Cooper he thought Cooper was the one missing out, because that would come naturally in the conversation if it were true. All Adam had to worry about was Adam, and being honest about the way the dynamic was working for him in those present moments. He needed to tell Cooper what he wanted.
He didn’t want to go as far as to schedule dominance and submission into their calendars. He fully believed the truth of how Cooper had presented it in the first place—that it would ebb and flow—but he wanted it to be balanced. Adam found thatheyearned for the balance switching brought him, and what a joke that would have been to him a decade before.
“Do you ever think about it?” he asked Grant.
“About what?”
“Switching.”
Grant rolled his eyes. “It’s very much not for me.”
“How do you know?”
“Because being on my knees doesn’t get me hard unless I’m aftercaring someone,” Grant said. “I find ways to give up parts of myself through my dominance.”
Adam frowned. “Am I a bad dom because I don’t?”
“You’re an idiot.” Grant shoved him and stood, taking the empty plate and dropping it in the sink. “This life isn’t one size fits all. You know you’re not a bad dom, and you’re not a bad sub. To be honest, it sounds like you’re turning out to be a pretty good switch.”
“Yeah.” He leaned back in his chair and stared up at the ceiling fan whirring in a circle above him. “It seems like I am.”
Chapter20
Cooper
Cooper was in the basement when Adam got home.
Though home might not have been the word for it. He’d expected some growing pains with the cohabitation, but things had been a little tense for the past week. That day at lunch, Cooper suggested Adam go spend some time with Grant. It would give Adam a chance to check in on Wyatt and clear whatever was on his mind with his best friend. But more importantly, it would give Cooper some peace and quiet.
Adam wasn’t loud, but he was present.
Always.
And he was so fucking dominant, which Cooper did love, but everything was different from how it had been. Cooper wasn’t an idiot. He knew there were nuances to the kind of relationship they shared that would only come to light when shoved together the way the two of them had been. Simple things, like distribution of chores, or who picked what show they watched, or who turned off the lights at night.
Cooper had lived alone for his entire adult life and those were all things he had done on his own. And that had been fine—until he found himself faced with Adam’sexpectationthat he would do them. Sure, Adam was diligent about checking the windows and doors before bed, about ensuring all the lights were off as he made his way through the house, and Cooper liked that. He thought it was an endearing kind of Daddy thing, and as long as it made Adam happy, it didn’t bother him.
Things just…feltoff.
