“What do you see?” I asked, continuing to pepper taps against his most sensitive areas.
“The bruises you promised,” he answered, groaning. “I see the man I love.”
“Silas.”
“I love you,” he said, and I looked up until I caught his stare in the mirror.
He was flushed and tearstained, but earnest as ever.
“I love you,” I said back to him for the first time, thenpopped the fronts of his thighs two more times, harder than any of the other strikes had been. His skin bloomed and cracked, pinpricks of blood appearing beneath the cane. I let it fall to the floor, then I loosened the rope around his collar, slid the hook out, and dropped it beside the cane.
I stepped in front of him, blocking his view, and I slanted our mouths together and kissed him. Spearing my tongue into his mouth, chasing after the high his confession made me feel, I took his thicker than usual dick into my hand and stroked him until he screamed out my name and painted streaks of spend across my knuckles. Silas cried out, whimpered, babbled, and I was careful to undo his wrists from the spreader bar, to take his weight against my chest before he fell. Slowly, I eased us both down to the floor and cradled him in my lap, brushing damp hair back from his face and leaving kisses in the wake of my fingers.
“I love you,” he mumbled against my chest, arms limp but halfway around me. “I dunno why I didn’t say it earlier.”
There were a lot of reasons, I was sure. But those were his, and rightfully so. It didn’t matter he hadn’t delivered the response immediately. The only thing that mattered was he felt the same. He’d let me love him on my own, and he’d let me remind him of his worth. He let me show him that as long as he was with me, his potential would never be wasted. And I needed to know that for myself just as much—if not more—as I needed him to know it.
CHAPTER 33
SILAS
Lincoln traced the bruised stripes across my thighs with the tip of his finger, his touch featherlight.
“These are really hot, Si,” he said.
I huffed a laugh and pressed play on the next episode of the true crime documentary he’d decided we were going to watch over dinner. It was Friday, our newly appointed best friend night, and we were in the apartment, on the couch, my legs sprawled across his lap, his feet propped on the coffee table, and takeout containers within reach.
“I think so too.”
“And this was a reward?”
Humming, I kicked out my left leg when his touch slid to a particularly sensitive bruise on the inside of my thigh. “We were celebrating.”
Lincoln rolled his eyes at me and finished off the pad Thai left in the bottom of his white paper carryout box.
“Are you excited to start work on Monday?” he asked.
“I’m notnotexcited,” I said. “But I’m nervous.”
“Why?”
Marshall’s words were as etched into me as the bruises were. Eight strikes for the eight years of wasted potentialspent working with my father. If I thought about it in hindsight, the accusation was biting, but it was closer to the truth than a lie. Working with my dad had been the easy road, and I’d walked down it happily with both eyes open. Thankfully, because of Marshall’s own name and connections, I’d been able to turn down a different fork in that road, but it was a near thing.
“What if I’m not as good as everyone thinks I am?”
Lincoln rolled his eyes at me and made a point of pushing his fingers into a bruise until I cursed his name and smacked him on the side of his head.
“You’re not,” he said. “You’re better.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I don’t know Marshall, but I doubt he’d risk his reputation on you if you weren’t,” Lincoln said.
“He’s not risking anything,” I muttered.
“Weird thing to say, but if you want to be wrong out loud, go off.”
I flung the remote at him, then tried to pull my legs away. Lincoln managed to catch me around the knees, using his own body as leverage to stop me from extracting myself from his grip. He ended half on top of me, my legs tangled and his face pressed against my stomach. I pushed down against the top of his head, pretending to fight him off.
