It took me a few minutes to find the spare comm-screen – I’d left it on the hall table beside the front door at some point, presumably distracted when I’d been in the middle of tidying up – and by the time I’d turned it on and checked that it had enough battery, Kade had disappeared.
What happened next, I was forever going to blame on the fact that I was more or less a zombie by that point. A shower was next on my mental list of things to do, so I wandered into the bathroom, not having registered the sound of the water running, or the fact that the light was already on. In my defence, the door had been left open, and I was accustomed to living alone. So there was nothing to jolt me out of autopilot. I stepped into the narrow space and came face to face with the last thing in the world I’d expected to see.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Aiden
Holy fuck, he was naked. But not only naked. He was absolutely fucking gorgeous. Defined muscles, lean hips, and an absolute lack of embarrassment as he glanced over his shoulder at me. Right. So the door had been left open deliberately. He smiled at me from the edge of the shower stall, his hand under the water to check the temperature. “It’s ready when you are,” he said, and I couldn’t quite decide whether the innocence in his voice was earnest or contrived. Was he trying to be helpful, or was he playing me?
“Oh. Um…” He wanted to shower…with me?
If I hesitated too long, I was going to see that crestfallen look I’d glimpsed a few times when I’d fumbled some detail about being his master. But the alternative was to get undressed in front of him and…
It was fine, I told myself, as I peeled my shirt over my head. Dimari were accustomed to doing all manner of domestic chores, and bathing their masters was just one more on a long list of things that Kade likely saw as his duty. I’d already shown him how to cook a meal and implied that keeping the kitchen clean was his job. Maybe he was just following my lead and running with it?
I undid my pants and slid them down my legs. I’d been naked in front of plenty of men before, of course. It was the sort of thing that was impossible to avoid when stationed on a military base.
But the difference here was that there was only one shower stall. And Kade was most definitely breaking the unwritten rule of keeping one’s eyes to oneself. His gaze slid down my naked body, as I tugged the pants off my feet. But before I could figure out quite what his expression meant, he was turning away, gathering shower gel and a wash cloth in preparation for my arrival. There was no fourth wall on my shower; rather, it was tucked into an alcove with just a drain on the open side, which made for plenty of room for the two of us. The water was warm – just on the pleasant side of toohot – and I groaned in pleasure as I stuck my head under the spray, letting the heat drive some of the stiffness in my muscles away.
“Would you like me to wash you, sir?” Kade asked from beside me, and I lifted my head, shaking water out of my eyes to see him standing unnervingly close. At this distance, the height difference between us was more noticeable, and I had to tilt my head up slightly to look at him. Fucking hell, it had been a long time since I’d been this close to a naked man. Particularly one who was bigger than me. The thought sent a rush of desire through me, and I hastily looked away. Did I want him to wash me?
“Yeah, okay,” I said, too tired to find a gentle way to turn him down. Let him fulfil his ingrained duty of washing his master, then we could both go to bed. He did so efficiently, starting with my arms, then my back, my chest. He leaned over me to get more shower gel, his hip brushing mine, his arm pressing briefly against my chest. The shower wasn’t small, but with two people crammed in here, maybe he was…
Nope, I realised, as I opened my eyes. He was very deliberately standing close enough that we couldn’t help but brush against each other. And there was plenty of room on his other side, if he’d wanted more space. He had started washing his own chest now, and I drowsily followed the trail of washcloth and lime-scented suds down his arms, over his chest, and down to his…
My tiredness vanished in an instant, my brain kicking back into gear as I suddenly realised what the fuck was going on, and…
Nope, I had no fucking idea what I was supposed to do about it.
What I did know was that Kade was hard. Really fucking hard. His erection curved up from his groin in a smooth line that ended just below his belly button. And his cock was a bright, ultramarine blue, in contrast to the rest of his body, which was still brown.
“I don’t have scales on my penis,” he said softly, seeing the object of my attention. “I can’t control the pigments there.” He sounded almost ashamed of that little detail.
“Yeah, no, that’s… totally fine,” I said, my mouth filling in the silence while my brain scrambled for some way to make sense of this. Fucking hell, what was I…? What was he…?
I, like pretty much every other human in the Alliance, had quickly and emphatically decided that sex with a dimari was thoroughly immoral. They couldn’t consent. They had no way to ask for their master to stop, if they didn’t like the way things were going. And according to the list of ‘skills’ I’d briefly glimpsed in his operations manual, Kade had already been subjected to systematic sexual abuse at the hands of his so-called trainers. Touching him right now would be about a thousand different kinds of wrong.
He slid the washcloth in his hand down, between his thighs, back up, to circle his weeping erection once, then around, to slide against the curve ofhis ass. And fuck me, but I was getting hard now. A part of my brain was trying to convince me that I should look away at the very least, and probably get right out of the shower, because this was entirely inappropriate.
But meanwhile, another part of my brain was putting two very interesting and unexpected facts together; one, if Kade had been anyone other than a dimari, his actions right at that moment would have been a neon sign that he wanted to sleep with me; and two, dimari were unable to ask for things they wanted. I wasn’t clear on the details ofwhythat was the case, but somehow, as part of their training, they were taught that seeing to their own needs was inappropriate.
But… was that just my own interpretation of the situation? Kade was an incredibly attractive man, but was I using his behaviour to justify my own desires? And to make matters worse, I was not yet anywhere near skilled enough with my sly questions and subtle interpretations of his answers to be able to deduce whether he was experiencing an unfortunately timed bodily reaction, or a conscious desire for sex.
I needed more information. I needed to be doing this when I wasn’t so tired I wanted to pass out.
I needed to damn well not fuck this up.
“Kade? Um…” I swallowed, my throat feeling tight. I forced my gaze up from his groin to his face. “In your, um… training. Were you given rules about sex? About what you’re allowed to do, and what you’re not, and all that?”
I wasn’t entirely sure where my question was going yet, but Kade said, “Yes, sir,” in a voice that sounded half hopeful and half apprehensive.
“And what were you taught about sex?” I prompted him, when he didn’t continue. “I mean, the context of it, not the details on how to do it.”
Kade shuddered. “Our bodies belong to our masters. The master owns all pleasure. The master decides when a dimari should receive the reward of sex. If the master is pleased, he will allow us pleasure. If he is displeased, he will withhold pleasure. He owns every part of us.”
There were two distinct aspects to his answer that caught my attention. I decided to tackle them one at a time. “Your master controls when you’re allowed pleasure. So… are dimari allowed to masturbate?” It was a far more direct question than I’d been expecting to ask him at this early juncture of our relationship. Then again, I hadn’t expected to end up naked in the shower with him anything like so soon. Or at all, for that matter.
“No, sir,” Kade answered me, his eyes avoiding mine as he stared at the tiled wall over my shoulder.
