“It looks like personal ambivalence,” I answered. “I would rather you be the focus.”
His cheeks darkened and he tucked his chin down toward his chest. “I noticed that on Saturday.”
I nodded.
“Does this mean you don’t like to have sex? That you don’t get off?” he asked next.
“I’ve had sex before. I get off sometimes, but if I don’t, it’s not the end of the world for me. Like, I didn’t feel like I’d lost out on anything by not also getting off with you on Saturday.”
He bit the inside of his cheek, and I asked the question that had always been the final nail in the coffin, “Did you feel like you’d lost out on anything because of it?”
He made a thoughtful noise in the back of his throat and shrugged one shoulder. “No, I mean, not really. I worried you didn’t enjoy yourself because you didn’t come, but if you didn’t want to come, then…” he trailed off, shoulder sagging back down to match the other one.
“This is normally a dealbreaker,” I told him.
“For you?”
I chuckled, scrubbing a hand down my face. “No, for everyone else.”
“That seems silly,” he said. “If I can trust you to do some of the things you did to me on Saturday, I can trust you to have a handle on your own pleasure.”
The hit I’d been bracing for didn’t come, and it took me some time to realize it. Smith sat patiently on the chair, fingerstapping a silent beat against his kneecap. There was no sound in the shop except for my heart in my ears and the creak of the wheel on my stool when I shifted my weight.
“It doesn’t bother you that if we continue on together, we might never have sex?” I asked.
“I think you’ve already proven we don’t need to have sex for you to make me feel better than anyone else ever has.” He paused, brow knitting together again. “I have a question, though.”
“Of course,” I rasped, still a little in shock things were going so well.
“Does this mean you don’t…God, this is going to sound so crass.”
“I can handle it.”
“Does this mean you don’t like to be touched at all? Like, you wouldn’t want me to jerk your cock or suck it?”
I swayed toward him. “I very much enjoy being touched, and I would welcome you doing those things…as long as you understand the ending of it might look different for me than it does for you. It doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy being with you.”
“And penetrative sex?”
“I don’t feel strongly about it,” I told him. “I’ve done it, but there’s ways I would rather spend my time.”
“And people have had an issue with this?” he asked.
“Often.”
“That seems…I know I said it already, but silly. I don’t understand why people would care about it.”
I laughed, a sound coming out of my mouth that almost felt like relief, even if I didn’t trust it all the way. “I’m glad you think so.”
“I get it if they can’t see past their own pleasure, but I think that, like…I think that getting off from pain sort of already puts me past that normal view of sex, right?”
“That’s not for me to say,” I murmured.
“I don’t think what you’ve told me makes you any less.” He rubbed at his throat as he said the words, forearm muscle bulging and twisting.
God, I couldn’t wait for his tattoo to heal so I could put him into rope.
“Good,” I told him, still nervous but feeling better…feeling more myself. I stood up to my full height, giving me the leverage I needed to steady myself back in my body. I liked that Smith caught me off-guard. He’d done it the day he’d come to get tattooed, and he’d done it Saturday, and he’d done it again now. The only predictable thing about Smith Covington was that there wasn’t a predictable thing about him. “Now that we have that out of the way, we can talk about another night.”
