“Probably too old,” I counter.
His lips come down on the crook of my neck, trailing kisses up toward my jaw while he binds my arms together. “How old?”
“More than halfway through twenty-three,” I answer, and he freezes.
“Hold on. That was after—”
“Yep. My first night working VIP.”
Eric’s not behind me anymore; in less than half of a breath, he’s standing in front of me, his darkened eyes flooded with both rage and concern. His throat bobs and I watch the muscle along his jaw flicker as it tenses. “Did the guy know?”
“It was probably pretty obvious,” I laugh – but Eric doesn’t.
“DidNashknow?”
I shake my head, wishing that I had use of more than just my forearms so that I could touch him and calm the rage swirling through his features. He looks the same way that he looked the night that he killed Ethan, and before he left the table at dinner tonight.
“He didn’t ask, and I was too afraid to say.”
His eyes scan my body, as if he’s checking me for injury, as if there would or should be some visible damage left behind on my body that he should have seen before now. Even though he doesn’t find anything – because there isn’t anything to find, even though I haven’t used my safe word, he digs through the drawer of his nightstand and pulls out a set of safety shears, coming toward me with them, and he grabs onto my bindings.
“Stop,” I tell him, “don’t cut it. Keep tying.”
“Sugar…”
“I didn’t use my safe word.”
He taps the tip of the shears against his palm, thinking, and a proud smile creeps across his face. “Alright. Fair enough.”
After putting the tool back in its resting place, he takes up his position behind me again, continuing the bridge of rope that binds my upper arms together. He follows by crossing my forearms over each other, working to tie a thick portion of rope around them, like a braided wall.
“I want names, you know,” he tells me. “I wasn’t just sayin’ that, before.”
“I know you weren’t.”
Working his way back around to the front of my body, he wraps the length of rope around my stomach and over my hips, letting his fingers graze my skin with every electric movement.
“Especiallythat guy.” As his hands trail over my hips, he leans in closely to me, his voice a low growl. “I’ll take his eyes out for looking at you.” The rope around my hip is pulled down past my thigh, securing my ankle to it, and heat pools between my legs with an ache. “I’ll peel his lips off for kissing you.” A knot is secured, and he moves to the other side. “I’ll cut his tongue out for speaking to you.” The rope is pulled around my ankle in a similar fashion to the first side. “I’ll saw his fucking fingers off for touching you.” His mouth is less than an inch from mine. “I’ll cut his dick off for fucking you. And when I’m done, I’ll turn what’s left of him into ground fucking beef with my bare hands.”
I lean forward, pressing my lips to his with a smile. “I love you, too.”
He doesn’t scare me anymore, when he’s like this. I welcome it. He has become the safety net that I didn’t know I needed, the protector that I didn’t know I’d craved, and the piece of me that I didn’t know I was ever missing.
I’ll never tell him that it was Leonard; because he was nice to me that first night. It wasn’t special or romantic or anything at all that I wanted it to be, but he was nice. It was all of the nights that came after, once he decided that having my virginity meant that he now owned an all-access pass to every inch of my body and the right to make decisions for me. Those were the hard nights.
I’ll never tell him that I had to down my weight in shots to tolerate those nights, or that I went home feeling empty and discarded afterward. There are things he doesn’t need to know. Things he doesn’tgetto know.
“Change of plan,” Eric announces.
I watch as he steps toward his nightstand again, reaching not for the shears this time, but for the magic wandthat I’ve become very fond of. He twirls the handle of it around his fingers like a baton while he plugs it in, and still as he approaches me again.
Flicking the power button fills the space with a soft whirring sound that makes me ache, and I find myself squirming side to side while Eric brings the head of the wand toward the inside of my knee. “You’re gonna come until you can’t anymore, Sugar,” he tells me.
“What areyougonna do?”
“I’m gonna count.”
His mouth moves forward to claim mine, fierce and hungry, his tongue slipping past my lips to tangle with mine. I feed him a moan while he carefully moves the vibrator up the inside of my thigh, painfully slowly, until he grazes my pussy with it before moving it up the plane of my stomach.
