Page 53 of Salt Kiss
“Okay, then it’s on purpose. I agree. I’m in. Whatever other consent you need, it’s yours.” My words are quick, eager. Now that I know he’s not going to make us stop, all I can think about is getting back to it. About him dragging me inside and making me his plaything again.
He looks back at me, a small bracket on the side of his mouth like he’s fighting off another smile. “You’re not very good at self-preservation.”
“Why would I want to be?” I whisper, staring at him. His golden skin and hair, his sharp gaze. His strong throat and long-fingered hands. The part of me that signed up to go to war, that went back to it over and over again, is his in this moment.
The rest of me already was.
“You will want to be better at it, because I can’t be trusted. If I had even a shred more sense, I’d stop this, but I don’t and I can’t. I want it too much. But if we’re going to do the wrong thing, we at least need to do it the right way. I should have made sure of that at Morois House, and I’m very sorry that I didn’t.”
He holds up a hand when I open my mouth to argue. “You’re going to say that you didn’t need anything else this last week, but one day you might, so we must.”
My expression goes a little mulish, and he smiles again. “You saw me with Isabella. She liked struggling, reacting—she could do that knowing I wouldn’t do anything she hadn’t already agreed to do, and she could do that because she knew shecouldstop me at any time. Wouldn’t you like that?” He comes a little closer, his hand on my wrist. Even through the cuff of my button-down, the warmth sinks right into my skin. “To fight me a little bit? To struggle underneath me? To have me pin you down and take something away from you?”
I’m breathing harder now. He squeezes my wrist until I gasp, my knees going soft, his eyes missing nothing. Surely not the flush blooming on my cheeks or the heavy pulse pounding against his wrapped fingers.
“I want that,” I say. “A lot.”
“I want to do it to you. Buton purposemeans a safeword. Limits.”
“I don’t have any limits,” I say automatically.
“So I could peel a piece of ginger root and put it in your rectum before work tomorrow? Make you walk around with it inside you?”
My mouth is open. “What?”
He laughs. It’s a small one, but it’s real. “I would happily fig you if you wanted. But this is why we have to talk about limits beforehand. You remember all the terms and acts you had to review before you even worked here—how much more does it matter now that you’ll be on the receiving end of things?”
“This is like the army,” I mutter. “Paperwork where there shouldn’t be any.”
“It won’t be filed away in an HR drawer, Tristan. It’s just to help me.”
I take a drink of beer and then look down at the river. “Fine. I’ll go over the list of things again. Probably not the...the ginger thing though.”
“Whatever you prefer. Now, your safeword—it needs to be something you can easily remember but not the kind of thing you’d say casually or spontaneously.”
Isabella Beroul’s had been lamer, and the papers I read through prior to working here had used red, yellow, and green as a safe-wording system. I like the simplicity of the last option, but something about it feels too impersonal, clinical somehow. I want this to be mine and mine alone.
Magnolia petals flicker through my mind, white and pink, but with them comes the memory of Mark’s fingertips on a petal, rubbing and rubbing, his eyes blank in a graveyard.
No, notmagnoliathen. But something else there, something else at Morois House.
I think of the hazel tree we sat under. How safe and lovely and adored I felt as he watched my mouth while I read him Marcus Aurelius and Musashi.
“Hazel,” I say softly, and his gaze goes to my face. I see something flicker through his expression before he carefully shuts it away.
He nods. “Hazel it is. There is one more thing—”
I think I must be pouting now because there’s a crook to his mouth again. “I promise it’s short, but it will help me be good to you.”
I tilt my head to show I’m listening.
“I want to know what you like about it. Us.”
Being yoursare the words that push against my lips, but I swallow them back. I can’t say that. I don’t want the humiliation of him knowing how far I’ve already fallen for him. I don’t want his pity as he tries to find a way to tell me that he doesn’t feel the same.
And I don’t totally understand it myself. When I first came here, just the idea of a male submissive disturbed me. Now the thought of going a day without Mark pushing me facedown onto the nearest convenient surface has both my chest and my dick hurting.
So I try for the next most honest thing.
