CHAPTER 17
SMITH
It made me sad Riggs worried his asexuality would be a hard pass for me, but he was asexual on Saturday night, and I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about him since. I was angry at anyone who had ever made him feel less than for his wants, and as I followed him up to the apartment, I silently promised us both I would do better. I understood Riggs was offering me a gift, and I was not going to ruin that. In his apartment, he straightened his shoulders when I closed the door behind me, like a wave of power came over him after getting everything off his chest.
“Another night then,” he said.
I nodded. “Ideally, uhm, more than one.”
“It’s important that you feel safe to ask for the things you want,” he told me, and for whatever reason, I decided to risk it all.
“I want to kiss you.”
Riggs’s throat bobbed when he swallowed, and I tracked the way his muscles tensed and relaxed. He took a step toward me, then another, and another, until I had to move backward and when my shoulders were against his front door, his chest was pressed against mine. He flattened one hand beside my headand dipped his face down until our noses brushed, until our breath was the same.
“Do you, now?”
“Very much,” I whispered.
“No one is stopping you,” he said.
I searched his face for more of an answer than that. In light of the confession he’d offered me down in the shop, I wanted to be mindful that nothing I wanted pushed past boundaries of things hedidn’twant.
“Do you want to kiss me?” I asked.
In answer, he closed the space between us and slanted his mouth over mine.
The kiss was chaste at first, soft and warm, not much more than a gentle press, but as soon as I slipped my arms around Riggs’s waist and pulled him closer to me, it was like a switch flipped. His tongue demanded entry and I opened for him, and everything after that was a blur. He lifted me off my feet, and I hooked my legs around him so I didn’t fall. The shift aligned my already half-hard cock with his hip, and I groaned into his mouth at the friction.
Riggs swirled his tongue around mine, dropped his hands to my ass to hold me up. I grunted then, the pressure of his fingertips on my still fresh bruises a shock of pain that had me dizzy with want for him. It hurt, and I immediately wanted to know what it would feel like to receive a fresh layer of marks over the ones from the weekend.
“Does that feel good, baby?” he whispered into my mouth, pulling me away from the door and walking us both into the bedroom. He dropped me onto the bed and laid himself over top of me, rutting down against me until I was near mindless with my need for him.
“Yes.” The sir was there again, right on the tip of my tongue, fighting to break free. “Hold on.”
Riggs stopped immediately, pulling away with knit brows, his eyes tracking my face with worry.
“Did I do something wrong?” he asked.
“No.” I slipped my hands up his chest, around his neck and into his hair. “I really wanted to kiss you, and I would be happy to keep kissing you, but I want to talk about the rest of it first…so I understand.”
He climbed off of me and sat on the edge of the bed. I pushed into a seated position beside him, and we both ignored the bulge between my legs—and the absence of one between his.
“I want to call you Sir,” I told him, twisting my hands in my lap. He reached over and curled his tattooed fingers over mine until I went still, until I breathed. “I don’t think I understand what all of that means, or what it could mean. I just know it’s always right there when I’m with you.”
Riggs exhaled heavily, squeezing my hands. “You can call me Sir if you want to,” he said.
“And I can kiss you if I want to. What doyouwant? Doesn’t that count for anything here?”
He sucked in a sharp breath, drawing inward on himself like the question made him uncomfortable. “I would like to hear what it sounds like…coming from you.”
“I won’t stop myself next time,” I said.
We sat together in a longer silence, both of us waiting. It gave me time to process some of the things he said to me in the shop. I understood it had been viewed as a shortcoming by people in his past, but I struggled to make the connection of how anything about the mab beside me could be lacking or less than.
“I like when you call me baby,” I told him.
Riggs stood and paced toward the window, scrubbing his hands down his face before bracketing them on his hips. He turned toward me, eyes curious as he dragged them over me and over his rumpled bed.
