25. Dylan

CHAPTER 25

DYLAN

My legs were still shaking when Alex stripped me the rest of the way out of my clothes and walked me into the bathroom. I didn’t have it in me to fight him on anything, not even when he carefully loosened the straps on my shoulder sling and slid it off.

After he got us both off, he’d pulled his pajamas back up, his cock still half-hard against the soft cotton. He reached around me and turned on the shower, then he sank down onto the closed lid of the toilet, palms resting damp on top of his thighs.

“Can you wash on your own?” he asked.

“No,” I lied.

He arched a brow at me, and I backed away from his scrutiny, one step after another until I was in the shower, water raining down on my head. Tilting my chin back, I closed my eyes and let it spray across my face.

“I can,” I told him without being prompted, “but I don’t want to.”

“What do you want?”

Scrubbing a hand down my face so it was safe to open my eyes, I leveled an exhausted look at him.

“I want you,” I said. “I thought that was clear.”

“I wanted to make sure you meant it when you weren’t trying to get off,” he murmured.

“Am I so untrustworthy?”

“I’m so untrusting,” he corrected, pushing up from his seat and discarding his pajamas into the pile of clothes I’d left on the floor. “But I’m trying.”

“So am I.”

Alex set his glasses on the counter, squinting and scrunching his nose the way he always did when he was trying to adjust his eyes. Without much thought at all, I reached out and grabbed his hand so I could pull him into the shower with me. I didn’t think he really needed any kind of guidance to find his way around his own house, but something had shifted between us in the bedroom and I didn’t want it to go back to how it had been before.

“What happens now?” I asked.

He hummed a little sound I couldn’t make sense of, then he lathered some soap in his hands and set to work cleaning the cum off my chest and stomach.

“Why have you put up with me so far?” he asked, and I felt it was an answer to my own question, but I wasn’t quite sure.

“What do you mean?”

Alex lifted my right arm and slid his soapy fingers over my armpit, around the back of my shoulder, and down my flank. “The eggs, the spankings, all of it…all of me. Is it just because you don’t have any other options?”

I jerked my shoulder so he’d let go of me. “I have plenty of options. I could stay with Brooks and Tate, I could stay home, I could call my parents?—”

“That’s hardly an option,” he interrupted.

“The first two are.”

Alex licked his lips and grabbed my arm again, this time to clean the crook of my elbow, the bones in my wrist.

“Why me, then?”

In the back of my mind, I’d always known this conversation would come sooner or later. I’d been asking myself for weeks, months at this point, and I wasn’t much closer to an answer than when I’d started.

“After our first time together, I went home and got hard while I scrubbed the shower,” I answered. A small smile flitted across his mouth, and he twined our fingers together, cleaning me there next.

“How was that for you?”

“Confusing.”

He chuckled. “I bet.”

“I don’t understand a lot of what you want. At least, I don’t think I do?—”

He cut me off before I could finish. “I think you understand just fine, Dylan.”

Alex dragged his soapy hands back up my arms, across the front of my chest and down, fingers twisting gently around my hard nipples. I groaned, leaning into him and, to my surprise, he took my weight willingly. I flattened myself against his chest, sliding my good arm around his waist. Something had him faltering, and it was a breath, then two, then three before he wrapped his arms around my shoulders in return.

“I know my life is a shit show,” I mumbled against his collar bone, kissing away the words as soon as I said them.

“Mine isn’t much better.”

“I meant what I said before.” I tipped my head back, using my knee to shove him backward and out of the spray enough that I could look up at him. He couldn’t see my face as clearly as I could see his, but I found every answer I needed in the soft wrinkles around the corners of his mouth.

“You say a lot.”

“About wanting to be better for you.”

He swallowed, nodding but not saying a word.

At first, I’d wondered if it was some driven and jealous part of me that wanted more, wanted to mold myself into someone better than the man he was so clearly still in love with. But the first night I’d spent in the hospital had erased that theory right out of my head. I didn’t want Alex to want me because I was better than someone else—I wanted him to want me because I was good enough on my own. I wanted to be able to fight him and know that it wasn’t going to push him away.

My parents, the two people who were supposed to love me unconditionally in this life, had been so willing to cast me aside as soon as I went against their ideas for who they wanted me to be. I didn’t want Alex to be like them, even though he’d never done anything to show me he was.

I didn’t trust it, but I wanted to.

I wanted to trust myself .

I’d made so many bad decisions over the past year, I didn’t think I could bear it if Alex proved to be one more on that list.

“I owe you an apology,” he said, startling me out of my own head.

“For what?”

“The night I used a safe word with you.” He worried his lips together, rubbing them between his teeth, eyes squinted half-closed.

“I was out of line.”

“You were,” he agreed, “and I was within my rights to stop things, but…I shouldn’t have sent you away, I just…”

“You don’t have to apologize,” I assured him, mostly because I didn’t think I deserved it, but also because it made my skin tingle to see a man like Alex struggle to find words for anything.

“I do. I just…” He trailed off. “Let’s get out of the shower. I think I left my brain in the bedroom.”

I laughed at that, an unexpected peal of laughter that echoed around the bathroom. Alex smiled at me easily, almost relaxed, and he finished washing me up in silence. Once the water was off, he dried me with as much attention as he’d used to get me wet, and I padded barefoot into the bedroom while he knotted his own towel around his waist.

Sitting down on the side of his bed, I let my arm hang without the sling, testing the pain in my shoulder and finding it tolerable. If anything, the unexpected bites of heat in my muscle kept me alert and grounded in the moment. I wanted to be fully present for him.

For myself.

“I know you don’t understand the why of a lot of this,” he said, two steps short of pacing. “But what I did that night was wrong. Almost inexcusable.”

“You’re excused,” I said.

He put his glasses back on, which made it easier for him to roll his eyes at me instead of in my general direction, which made me smile.

“I let my emotions get the better of me.”

“I always let mine do that,” I told him.

“You’re allowed.”

“And you’re not?” I cocked my head to the side. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“In this dominant sort of role, it’s a different expectation,” he explained.

“I don’t want you to pretend with me,” I said, standing and taking a step toward him before he walked a hole in the expensive rug. “That sounds like pretending.”

“It’s being mature,” he offered. “Responsible.”

“You are.”

“For you,” he said, covering my mouth with his hand.

My eyes went wide, blood immediately running hot in response to the press of his palm against my lips.

“Being responsible for you.”

I huffed a breath out against the side of his pointer finger, and he put his other arm around my waist, pulling my body flush against his, save for our arms between us.

“That’s why the pills,” I mumbled against his palm. He dragged his hand down to my chin so I could speak and I repeated myself. “The pills, the punishments, the rules.”

“Yes.”

“Keep going.” I put his hand back over my mouth, smiling against his palm when his lips lifted into one of his own.

“I’ve never pretended with you,” he said next. “I’ve wanted you from the first time I saw you. I wanted you then and I want you now.”

I nodded.

“I want you to let me take care of you.”

I licked his palm, and he turned his hand from a gag into a tight grip, digging his fingers into my cheeks until my mouth puckered like a fish. I was so fucking hard, my cock leaking against Alex’s thigh.

“I want it to be my job to tell you what you want and when. To give you what you need.”

My cock jerked, and I shuffled my feet forward, trying to get closer to find some friction. He’d just gotten me off fifteen minutes earlier, but I was ready to go again. Ready to go for him, because when he talked to me this way, about these things, my body responded even if my brain was slow to catch up. I shouldn’t have gotten aroused from the things he said. The idea of being beholden to another person again, subservient in any way…it was exactly what I’d been running from, but with Alex, it didn’t sound scary.

It was safe.

“Settle down, Dylan,” he whispered, leaning in so his breath burned against my mouth. “That’s not what you need right now.”

“Yes, it is.”

He dug his fingers harder into my cheeks and I groaned, knees quaking.

“Are you sure this is what you want?” he asked, eyes searching my face for a lie he wouldn’t find. “You want me, and you want me like this?”

He released my face, stroking his fingers down my cheeks, over my chin, until his fingers came to rest against my throat. I closed my eyes, shivering, though I was unsure if it was from his touch or from a memory I’d been trying to forget. Maybe it was a little bit of both and maybe that was okay.

“I want us like this,” I whispered.

The words were barely out of my mouth when he kissed me again, slanting our lips together and spearing his tongue so deep into me that he swallowed down any other words I’d meant to say. I grabbed his hip with a high-pitched cry, flattening myself against him to search out every physical point of contact I could find.

Alex walked me back until my legs hit the bed, and he slowed then, carefully lowering me down onto the tangled sheets so I didn’t jostle my shoulder again. I scooted back to make room for him between my legs, and I didn’t need to ask what was next. He reached into the nightstand for a bottle of lube, and then slick fingers were between my legs, his hot mouth against mine once again.

“Green, Dylan?” he asked.

“Neon fucking green,” I promised, spreading my legs wider as he pushed his fingers into me.

Arching off the bed, I fought against the weight of Alex’s body, but as with all things, he was a formidable opponent. He pinned me down, determining the angle of his penetration, the pace of his thrusts. His fingers stretched, but I was desperate for more. A cold sweat beaded against my temple and precum smeared across my freshly clean stomach as he coated his cock with lube and replaced his fingers with the thick girth of his erection.

Seating himself inside of me, long and hard and bare, Alex pressed his forehead into the sheets beside my head, moaning my name as a shiver tore through his entire body. He stilled, heart beat pulsing in his cock, stretching my rim with every pump, and I shivered beneath him, wrapping my legs around his waist and silently begging him for more.

Begging him for everything.