Page 97 of Regal Feather
“You could?” Vi lit up.
She was cute, with pink hair and pink pretty much everything. Maybe one day I could ask her for fashion advice. My style was still awful. I only survived because of all the matching sets I’d grabbed, but I wanted to experiment, too, without fear that I’d look…wrong.
I shrugged. “Yeah.”
It wouldn’t be much of a transgression, but now that I’d put the thought out there, I lit up at the idea. About testing how much I could spend on kink before someone dared to bring it up.
Well, I could have Santos with me. It wouldn’t be that bad if I wasn’t alone. It was never that bad when he was there.
“Sweet.”
“Are you sure?” Cece asked. “I know it’s hard to say no to that face, but you can.”
I huffed. “I know I can.”
I might’ve grown more confident around the group, but not confident enough that I could quip about how I had so much money it was burning in my pockets.
It seemed enough to placate the pack, though. Maybe I’d text Cece later, before anything was misinterpreted.
“Is Santos going to join, too?” Jaime asked. He had been searching through all the wardrobes in the different-themed rooms for a specific cereal bar he’d had once during aftercare. Apparently, it was the best thing he’d ever tasted. “Since you’re official now.”
“Uh, no. I mean, he hasn’t said.”
He knew I was here telling them about this because he’d been the one to suggest it. He’d used more words, but it had made sense. It was a bit embarrassing that I’d only lasted a couple of months in my resolution to work through my stuff before I considered being a member of the club again, but I supposed it was better to go through this rather than mope for a couple more months for no reason at all. It wasn’t like I couldn’t set my head straight while I was a member. The semantics of it had helped when I was going through withdrawal, but I had a clearer head now.
When I wasn’t freaking out about Santos and wanting to make things better for him without pushing too much, or that I wasn’t at all what he thought, and he needed someone completely different. Someone who could never be me.
I wouldn’t consider changing for him. I had been the one who showed up at the airport with my new clothes, when he hadnever seen me wearing more than clear lip gloss. It would hurt a lot if him healing changed things for us.
It terrified me more than half of the time, but maybe that was another reason to rejoin Plumas. To have a more solid net to fall on if it was needed.
“But you’re kinky.”
“Yeah.” It sucked that alcohol wasn’t a thing here—and that I’d never been a fan of liquid courage. This was the sort of situation where someone else would have said a drink would help. “We are, it’s just not as…high protocol.”
“If it works for you, it works for you,” Erika said.
“For sure,” Rox agreed. Rox and Erika kept teaming up lately. I wondered what that was about, or how much I’d missed. “Most people play with kink much more casually than we do here.”
“That’s true,” Abel said. He didn’t speak up a lot when we were in a big group, so I twisted my whole body to listen to him. He was the biggest Daddy here. Age play wasn’t for me, but there was something about his caregiver energy that held a certain allure. “Don’t let them carry you away if that’s not your speed right now.”
It was, and it wasn’t. I got what he was saying, though. It kind of made me want to go to him and get one of the hugs Sergio enthused about.
The thought just made me think back to Santos’s taunt when he’d first arrived. He’d asked if my new friends knew how touch-starved I was, and I’d shrugged it away. I didn’t consider myself touch-starved. I just liked physical touch when it was Santos. It was familiar. The way it had always been.
Maybe, though…
Maybe.
Today had been enough steps for a bit.
THIRTY-ONE
santos
It was Monday evening.
We hadn’t developed any post-therapy rituals, but we had started to develop some pre-therapy ones.
