He hummed his approval. “That sounds more like the Smith Covington I know. Alright, pain is grounding; you’re not wrong. Did…is he a Dom?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Youthink?”
“Well, he didn’t ask me to call him Sir or anything like that,” I explained, leaving out the part about how I’d wanted to. How at some points in the night it would have been natural to do. “But it all felt right.”
“I get that,” he said, nodding agreement. “Not to TMI you, but sometimes I feel that way about your brother, so I know it’s not always something you can explain. It’s not always like Marshall and Silas.”
There was my oldest brother again, the ever-looming figurehead of our family—and my life—in the conversation when he wasn’t even in the room.
“It wasn’t like that,” I said.
“I know,” Lincoln said. “You’re not like Silas.”
It was one of the few times Marshall had come up and I wasn’t compared tohim.
“Are you more freaking out about what you did or that you want to do it again?” he asked, rubbing the outside of my arms reassuringly.
“When we were doing it, I wasn’t freaked out at all. It felt like it made all the sense in the world.”
“But after?”
I frowned.
“Okay.” Lincoln clapped his hands together and gave me an apologetic look. “I’m very sorry to do this to you, but there’s no way around it.”
“Oh, God. Do what?”
“Your brother is a switch,” he said, and I screwed my eyes closed with a grimace and slammed my hands over my ears. It wasn’t enough to drown out the sound of Lincoln’s laughter as he grabbed my wrists and dragged my hands away from my face. “Your brother is a switch, and so am I, and that makes perfect sense to me now, but it used to scare me before.”
“Why?”
“Because I thought I was dominant. I wanted to be dominant, but Hunter gave me a safe space tonotbe, and that’s one of the reasons I love him so much. And it sounds like this guy?—”
“Riggs,” I interrupted.
“Riggs.” Lincoln smiled at me. “Sounds like Riggs gave you a safe space to be, and it’s okay to want that.”
I exhaled, hating the way my chest trembled.
“What will…never mind.”
He pressed the side of his finger against the bottom of my chin and tilted my face up so I was forced to look at him.
“None of that,” he warned.
“What will Marshall think?” I muttered, even though it shouldn’t matter in the slightest what Marshall thought about my bedroom—or bathroom—activities.
“Is that something you normally ask yourself? What would Marshall think? WWMD?” Lincoln made a derisive noise in the back of his throat that had me feeling silly for ever caring.
“Yeah,” I told him. “It is something I normally ask myself. It’s how I ended up as an architect. It’s how I’ve done a lot of things in my life.”
“How you ended up with a tattoo?” he countered.
I covered my face with my hands and dropped my head against the back of Hunter’s couch with a strangled groan. Lincoln chuckled and climbed off my lap, leaving a cold and present absence.
“Food’s here,” he said. “Hold on.”
