“Noah,” I growled, stalking closer to him. And what the fuck was all the distance he’d put between us, anyway?
“It’s fine,” he repeated, his voice going higher. “Everything’s fine, Gage. Ithasto be fine. I’mfine. I’m… I’m… I’m f-f-fine.”
Uh………….. No.
He wasn’t.
“The fuck you are,” I said the minute my shock about him lying to me like that wore off enough to speak again. I mean, sure, there obviously hadn’t been a shooter or a salmonella outbreak or a meteor strike or whatever, but did he think I was blind? Something had clearly gone down, andfinewas the last thing he was. “What happened?” I demanded.
Instead of explaining himself, though, Noah just made a choked little sobbing sound and started scrabbling at his collar, his fingers finding the buckle and—
“Oh,hellno,” I said, yanking his hands away as soon as I realized what he was trying to do. Hadn’t we been through this already? But—
“Stop it,” Noah gasped, batting me away and then backing toward his bed as he kept fumbling at the collar. “I need to… to take this off. Give it back to you. Quit wanting it, because I… I don’t get to keep it.”
Each word sounded like someone was stabbing at his heart with a rusty nail… which made me want to go find that fucking person and send their fucking balls through a motherfucking meat grinder after stabbingthemwith that rusty nail. But also, seriously, what the actual hell? Noah didn’t backawayfrom me, not ever. One of the best things about him was how he was always draping himself all over me like I was a goddamn superhero and he was my cape, and when he was upset? He usually turned into one of those barnacles, the kind that attached themselves to whale asses and ship hulls and whatnot and were almost impossible to remove. So yeah, this new personality transplant of his threw me for a minute, which explained why I let him get as far as actually unbuckling the thing before my natural instincts kicked back in.
I lunged for him.
“I saidno,” I snapped, spinning him around, yanking him against me, and using one arm to pin him there—his back to my chest, a perfect fucking fit despite our size difference—while I re-buckled his collar with the other.
Doing that shit one-handed was awkward as fuck, not gonna lie, but I managed anyway, because I fuckinghadto. He may have originally put the thing on during poker night, but him wearing it wasn’t a game to me. It meant something that I was too shit with words—and too goddamn upset abouthimbeing upset—to figure out right now. I just knew it needed to stay on.
Noah didn’t fight me this time, thank fuck, but then—
“You’re not the boss of me,” he whispered, shredding my heart into strips of raw meat, because he said it… but slumped back against me like saying it had hurt him. He said it, but he sounded like he was about to cry again when he did. He said those words, but we both fucking knew that they weren’t the right ones. Not betweenus.
“Pretty sure this right here says I am,” I said, hooking my finger into the collar and turning him back around to face me.
He still wasn’t fighting me, but seeing him chew on his lip, those big brown eyes of his swimming as he stared up at me, was almost worse.
“Noah?” I rasped, definitely fucking flailing inside now.
His chin trembled. “What am I going to do, G?”
Jesus, the expression on his face killed me, but the question… the question helped. It let me get a fingerhold of a fucking grip, because telling Noah what he was going to do?Thatwas something I could handle. It didn’t mean that shit was suddenly all well and good or that we were back to normal yet, not when I still didn’t understand what the hell had caused this breakdown of his in the first place, or why he still looked like his heart had just been run over by a Mack truck, but at least him asking me what to do got us heading back in thedirectionof normal. It gave me something to grasp onto. A goddamn anchor. A place to start from.
“First, you’re gonna sit your ass on my bed,” I said, walking him over to it. “Then you’re gonna eat some chocolate, calm the fuck down for me, and tell me what the hell happened with your parentals.That’swhat you’re going to do.”
There also needed to be some goddamn consequences delivered for him having ghosted me earlier like that, but I was gonna need to wait to address that particular infraction until we sorted out the rest of this shit. And until his face… Jesus. Until the expression on Noah’s face wasrightagain. Until it stopped making my heart feel like it had been twisted into a pretzel and then fed to a rabid dog.
I gave him a little nudge. “Sit.”
Noah sat—still listening to me, thank fuck—except he didn’t justsit, his legs fuckingcollapsedunder him, like he’d been barely holding it together until he got back to the room here, but now had nothing left.
Which wasn’t true. He had me. Always.
I stood over him and ran a hand over his hair, because… because I just had to, and when Noah leaned into my touch, something inside me finally settled a bit.
“Okay now?” I asked, even though I knew we weren’t actually anywhere near “okay” yet.
“Yes, Master,” he answered with a shaky sigh that punched me in the chest but also made me want to slay some motherfucking dragons for him.Allthe dragons. Especially because he’d gone with “master” this time instead of that “you’re not the boss of me” bullshit he’d pulled a minute ago.
The whole master-slave thing had been nothing more than a hot sex fantasy of mine before last night—one that Noe had fulfilled in fuckingspades,even though a drunken hand job probably should have felt downright tame compared to the kind of kinky shit I used to jerk off to while fantasizing about having someone submit to me like that—but hearing “master” from him now wasn’t about filthy sex fantasies or kinky role play, or even about my cock at all. It was exactly what I’d spent all morning at the gym thinking about. It was just...right.
“Don’t move, slave,” I said, weirdly unsettled by the idea of stepping away, even just far enough to grab the Hershey’s bar I’d picked up for him from my bag. Calling him my slave helped, though, and when he whispered another “yes, Master” and stayed right where I’d left him, that helped a little more.
Whatever the fuck had gone sideways today, Iwouldfix it, but first things first.
