I blinked at her, dazed. “What?”
“That’s Verity,” she said. “They’re one of the owners.”
“Right.” My tongue smashed against the roof of my mouth again, and I took another drink of wine. “This place is…”
“Amazing, right?”
I cleared my throat. “That’s a word for it.”
Asha frowned at me, her worried eyes searching my face. “Is it too much? We can go. I really thought you’d like it.”
“I do,” I said quickly. “I do, it’s just a lot.”
“Let’s stay here a bit then.”
She nestled beside me on the couch, and I found myself thinking about Lincoln again, thinking about how he would have no hesitation about crawling halfway onto my lap to make himself comfortable. Thinking about the easy way he existed in his own body and the way his confident touches encouraged others to do the same. I tried to pretend I was him, sinking into the already warming leather of the cushions and the press of Asha’s body against my arm.
With the exception of my once and probably too drunk interlude into bed with my friend, my sexual experience was beyond limited. I’d been too surly in high school to be of much interest to the girls I was interested in, and I hadn’t given boys much thought at all. It wasn’t until college that I had my first real date, my first real relationship, my first everything.
Darie had been beautiful and sweet—she still was—but I had been far too focused on being just like my oldest brother to do anything besides that. I threw myself into coursework and job hunting like it was a six-figure job, and Darie wasn’t too happy about coming second place to all of that. We’d parted on good terms, but I hadn’t garnered myself enough experience sexually to feel good about my future prospects.
Finding Lincoln that night on Marshall’s couch had been a blessing in disguise because not only did he give me a safe space to explore a burgeoning interest in the male form—and exactly why I came so hard when Darie accidentally dragged her fingers across my asshole during a drunk blow job back in school—he also, unintentionally, helped me become more comfortable with my own skin. I would have to call him later and thank him for that.
“Why do you come here?” I asked Asha finally, stretching my legs out in front of me and crossing them at the ankles. The longer we sat, the easier it became to be there, and the enjoyment she’d hoped I’d find there finally started to envelop me like a hug.
“Are we going to have that conversation now?”
I laughed and sipped at my Pinot. “I can’t imagine you thought you’d bring me here andnothave it.”
She chuckled her agreement and clinked the edge of her glass against mine. “Do you know the basic terms? It’s not 1982, so I assumed everyone knows what a dominant and submissive are.”
“I’ve watched movies,” I murmured.
She arched a brow at me.
“And seen porn,” I amended. “Yes, I understand dominance and submission.”
My understanding was rudimentary at best because it wasn’t something I’d ever thought to dabble in myself, but I knew submissives kneeled and dominants were in charge, andeverything else that happened between there was a big gray area for me.
“I’m sub?—”
“Actually.” I covered Asha’s mouth with my hand. “I don’t want details.”
Whatever Asha wanted to do in her free time was up to her, and I found I didn’t want to know the details of it. Just like I didn’t want to know what Lincoln and my brother did behind closed doors…or Silas and Marshall. Asha grinned against my palm, and I dropped my hand back into my lap.
“What we’re doing right now is called voyeurism,” she said instead of finishing her original statement.
“I know, Asha.”
She hummed and nodded, pointing at the big X in the corner. “That’s called a St. Andrew’s Cross.”
She flicked her wrist toward the sawhorse looking thing. “That’s a spanking bench.”
Embarrassment burned my cheeks, and I stared at my reflection in my quickly emptying wine. “I don’t think I’ll ever need to know the names of those.”
“Flogger and paddle,” she said next. “The one with the leather strips and then the?—”
“Asha, I’m begging you to stop,” I said.
