“He does,” Julien said. “But I doubt your dynamic with Karim would be similar.”
“Not when he looks sweet enough to eat,” Karim said with a fanged smile.
Luis swallowed hard.Yeah. He couldn’t see himself bossing Karim around. Didn’t even have interest in it. When Luis had been on his back and Karim had been holding him down…
He shifted on the couch, trying to ignore the way his cock was getting hard.
Julien’s hand on Karim’s thigh squeezed warningly. “Tred carefully my love,” Julien said.
The back of his neck was sweating.
“Any other questions?” Julien asked.
“Not right now?” Luis said. When his head stopped spinning, he was sure there’d be things. “I’d like to… do some reading.”
Julien smiled. “Wonderful. Let me go get that book for you.” He gave Karim’s thigh another squeeze, and then got up.
The second he left the room, Karim leaned forward, glee sparking in his eyes.
“Last night was fun,” Karim said with a toothy smile.
Luis met his eyes. “You really like it, don’t you? Letting Julien take the reins.”
“I do,” Karim confessed, like it cost him nothing. “But we’ve never had a third, so this is new for us too.”
“I’m still kinda stuck on the ‘why me’,” Luis said, honestly.
“That’s funny,” Karim said, dark eyes drinking Luis in, “because the more time we spend together, the most I think, ‘of course he’s the one we make an exception for.’”
Luis blinked at him, speechless. What did someone even say to something like that?
But Karim was already chuckling and pulling out his phone. “Alright, you look like you need a break. Let’s lose you another game and it’ll take your mind off things.”
Luis gave him the finger, but pulled out his phone.
##
Luis spent the rest of Friday and into the small hours of Saturday reading. Before disappearing with the books, he’d asked if they wanted to go to the bar, but they both put him off. It was obvious they both had much more interest in Luis getting his homework done.
Between the book Julien had given him and the Internet, there was a lot to intake. He prioritized ‘domination and submission’ for obvious reasons. If they ever got to something as complicated as ‘shibari’ he figured Julien would give him a heads up in time to do research.
While brushing his teeth near dawn, Luis typed up a quick summary for Cassie of what had happened and his crash course in BDSM. It was weirdly exciting to have something to share with her that wasn’t work or his mom.
When he got to Julien and Karim’s bedroom near dawn, it was exactly as it had been all the previous nights. Julien was in the bathroom, and Karim was on the bed.
Luis, pointedly, sat himself on the far other end of the bed from Karim. The man looked at him, snorted, and then pulled out his phone. A few seconds later Luis’s phone buzzed.
They did a few lighting rounds of Words with Friends as Julien finished up in the bathroom.
“You seem rather awake,” Julien said when he came to stand on his side of the bed where Luis was sitting. A handreached for him, and Luis automatically tilted into it, letting those fingers scrape back through his hair. “Read anything interesting today?”
Karim snorted, and Luis hummed an agreement.
“Anything you’d like to ask?” Julien prompted.
He met Julien’s eyes. “Should I–ah, pick a safe word?”
Julien smiled, those nails raking lines of pleasure across his scalp. “Eventually,” Julien said. “Right now, you’ll just tell me or Karim if there’s anything you don’t like or aren’t sure about. Best not make it complicated in the beginning.”
