Eventually, he asks, “Are you less nervous about Saturday?”
“Yes,” I say, because lying would be pointless. “Excited too. I’m only nervous about you two not getting along. I’m used to keeping my people in separate boxes.”
“Boxes can be opened,” he says. “As long as we talk first. I assume we’re doing a negotiation before anyone starts ordering each other around.”
I sigh with relief. “Yes, that’s the plan. I want to lay out what each of you likes, what you don’t, where the overlaps are. I don’t want anyone kink shaming anyone else because I will drop both of you on your asses if that happens.”
He chuckles. “Duly noted. Text me the time when you have it.”
We say goodbye, and when the line goes dead, I’m left alone with my thoughts and the steady background noise ofThe Mentalistplaying on my TV.
I peel myself off the bed and head for the bathroom. The tiles are cool under my bare feet. I strip and step into the shower, turning the water up until steam curls around the curtain.
The hot water hits my skin, and my muscles sigh. My brain, however, refuses to shut up. I lean my forehead against the tile and let the spray run over my shoulders.
Do I plan a scene for Saturday? Do I choreograph every beat so no one has to guess what I want, or do I just walk into Velvet and let the three of us figure it out in real time?
With Silas, I tend to follow his lead. He’s not cruel, just intense. He loves control, loves knowing exactly how to wind me up and take me apart. He likes finishing inside me, likes watching it drip out, and that particular ritual plays into his own little breeding fantasy. There’s a reason he covers my birth control and my monthly testing without blinking. It’s not just responsibility. It’s kink and care braided together.
Gideon is different. He’s about pleasure and emotion. He reads micro-expressions like a language. He can tell when I’m holding something back before I can name it. He loves to please me over and over before he gets his. He also loves to wind me up, only to tease me repeatedly.
Two men. Two different centers of gravity.
I run my hands through my hair and close my eyes.
Silas also told me once that he’s curious about being pegged. The word sat between us, heavier than it should have. Not because I was judging him, but because I could tell he was waiting for it. The flinch. The joke. The dismissal.
It never came.
I’m not practiced with that particular role. I don’t usually run the show with him. I’m the one who kneels, the one who opens, the one who says please. The idea of standing behind him, of holding his hips and watching his back muscles tense, feels powerful and strange. It would be me slipping into a more dominant position, but knowing him, he would still pull some of the strings. Topping from the bottom like a smug little king, whispering what he needs because he knows I’d give it.
Then there’s Gideon. I don’t want him to feel overshadowed by whatever Silas likes, and I don’t want Silas to feel judged by whatever Gideon doesn’t understand.
I’m going to have to sit them both down and say it out loud.
You like this. You like that. Here is what’s on the table. Here is what’s never negotiable. You will not mock each other or turn someone else’s kink into a punch line because if you hurt each other where you’re vulnerable, you lose me.
The next day, I’m in lecture, and it is like my body stayed behind in the shower while my brain marched ahead without me.
Students file in, the scrape of chairs and the shuffle of backpacks filling the room. My bag sits by my feet. My coffee isalready half gone. I set my notes on the desk, line up my pens, pretend my hands aren’t remembering the feel of Talon’s shirt under my fingers. My bag sits by my feet. My coffee is already half gone.
He walks in a couple of minutes late, which is normal enough that no one blinks. He drops into his usual spot, that lazy sprawl he does when he wants to look like he’s not paying attention. He looks at me once, quick, then away.
It should calm me down.
It doesn’t.
Brose starts the lecture. Words leave my mouth when he asks questions or for more details. I only know they do because people are writing things down, nodding, occasionally laughing when I toss in a joke. We’re talking about family structures today, about how what looks “normal” on paper can be a disaster in reality. I don’t miss the irony.
Every time I glance up, I catch him. Sometimes looking straight at me, sometimes staring at the desk like it personally offended him.
My brain keeps flicking back to the closet.
The way his hand slid under my dress when I let it. The way I redirected him, chose the angle, held his wrist and sank into what he was offering. I was the one who set the pace. I was the one who got off. I was the one who walked away and left him hanging, which is a special kind of power trip I didn’t know I was capable of until I saw his face.
I controlled it. Even if he was the one giving the sensation. I decided when it started. I decided when it stopped.
But there is another layer to it that gnaws at me while I draw a diagram of kinship patterns on the whiteboard. That part where he’s my almost stepbrother and a grown man with a body I should not even think about outside of a neutral, purely visual context.
