Chapter Eleven
Then — After
“I don’t want anyone but you, Master. I told you that.”
Ancient shivers of ghostly echoes ripple through me before I can suppress them. “Please don’t make me a promise you can’t keep.” I say it in a far quieter and more somber tone than I intended, and I suppose my sensitive boy picks up on that.
We’re both still coming down from an intense scene that led to some of the hottest sex we’ve ever shared. Now we lie sprawled across my king-sized bed, the endorphins of our play and pleasure making us sleepy and cuddly in the aftermath.
This has become a cherished routine I hope never ends. Nearly four years now since the night of our first sushi dinner together, and I know I’ll never fully reclaim what I lost back in college…but maybe this is close enough. I’m thirty-five, he’s twenty-seven, and this is definitely love.
For me, anyway.
Sweet, beautiful, dark and dirty love. It doesn’t hurt when he calls me Master and I can call him my boy without thinking of another pair of blue eyes every time it happens.
Eventually, as frequently occurs, when he finally speaks, his thoughts turn somber.
“You ever going to tell me more about what happened back then?”
I shrug. “Does it really matter?” He’s good about not asking very often, and I hesitate to slam the door too hard on him over it for fear of scaring him off.
He rolls over onto his stomach so he can look me squarely in the eyes. “Then how about this? In all seriousness, name your hall-pass fuck. Literally. Not some bullshit, what-if game. If the person was standing in front of you, right now, and they were down-to-fuck, who would you bend over the nearest horizontal surface and plow like snowy road?”
I swore I’d never lie to him. I promised myself when I made the conscious decision to let him in and begin trusting him that I would always be honest with him. “For real?”
“For real. Anyone. Has to be a real person, a living person.”
Any other answer would be a lie. “My ghost.”
When I catch the flicker of a frown furrowing his brow before he schools his expression, I realize what he expected.
But I won’t speak his name.
I can’t.
I won’t.
Absolutely, I willnot.
Because I have no idea how much venom still remains in a certain serpent’s fangs, and I don’t want to tempt God by invoking the name of the graven image I cannot stop worshipping in my heart.
Daniel slowly nods. When he speaks, there’s no hint of humor in his tone. “Then that’s who it is.”
Trying to read him right now just isn’t working for me like I usually can. “It’ll never happen. You know that, right? I know he’ll never come back or reach out to me.” It pains me to say it, but I know the reality. “He would’ve done that years ago. He’s a ghost who will stay a ghost.”
He shrugs. “Doesn’t matter what you think might or might not happen in the future. I’m giving you that freebie regardless. Just give me a courtesy notice first to tell me you’re doing it.” He smiles. “And give me the opportunity to change my answer and join in. If you ever want to change your answer, that’s fine, too. Only caveat is if you do change your answer, you still have to tell mebeforeyou fuck them. No bullshit after-the-fact late notice. You don’t get more than one hall-pass fuck, either. Once you cash it in, you can fuck your brains out with them as long or often as they’ll let you. But that’s the only HPF you get, so choose wisely.”
He rises on his arms and brushes a kiss across my lips. “That’s the point of a hall-pass fuck. Giving someone a safety valve means you trust them.”
“Trust them not to cash it in, you mean.”
He sighs and sits up on his knees. “No. If your ‘ghost’”—he uses air quotes—“walked through that door right now, I would not hold it against you if you climbed out of this bed and fucked him in front of me. Who knows? If he’s hotter than my choice, I might change my answer.”
“I thought you were going to claw out the eyes of that waiter we had last night.” I fight the urge to smirk because, seriously, I had to send him out to the car ahead of me while I finished calculating the tip. My boy wanted to scrawl a nasty warning about not eyeing another guy’s man on the check.
I had to order him to hand me the pen, and I wasn’t altogether sure I wouldn’t have to physically wrest it from his hand.
“That’s different. He didn’t have permission to eye-fuck you right there in front of me when we were obviously together. Guy needs to learn how to not be so damned obvious.”
