But I made it, so there was that.
I managed to squeeze my car into the garage, despite the rows of neatly stacked cardboard boxes, then strolled into my modest little two-bedroom house, my mind still whirling with images of Trent Ramsey staring deep into my eyes while saying all the words I’d longed to hear and doing deliciously dirty things to me in a very public place.
My brain cells were still mushy after that and I had to wonder how many women had fallen for that deep, rich voice and those sexy, dominating words. Probably a few hundred, at least. Maybe a thousand?
Part of me knew I needed to keep my guard up because the man I was crushing on was one of the most famous men on the planet. I mean, come on, Trent Ramsey had been named sexiest man alive at the ripe young age of twenty-nine. Since he was still young, I was sure he would likely get that award again. Seriously, the guy only got sexier with age. Unless they didn’t give it to the same person twice. Did they?
Oh, hell, I didn’t know, and I didn’t care enough to Google it.
Regardless, I had to remember who I was dealing with. Women and men everywhere tripped over themselves to fall at Trent’s feet and offer to have his babies. And being that he was thirty-five and he’d never settled down, I seriously doubted that was in his life plan.
Not that I was looking for that. Seriously. Ending up in a relationship was the absolute last thing in the world I wanted. I knew better than to think a relationship with any man would last longer than a few years at most. I certainly didn’t intend to get caught up in the romance of it only to be shot back down to earth in a blaze of fire when the honeymoon period was over and he moved on to the next best thing.
Nope. Not me.
However, I seriously longed for a Dominant I could spend some time with. I felt almost lost without it. It had been quite some time since I’d immersed myself completely in that world that I was starting to jones with the need.
On the other hand, what Trent was offering sounded far too good to be true. And in my experience, when it sounded that way, it usually was. My pessimistic side was a real bitch at times, but my mother’s failed relationships—along with my father’s and stepfathers’ infidelity—had offered some valuable life lessons. Add my lifestyle into the mix and it doubled the chance of failure, in my opinion. What I wanted and what I would end up getting were always two very different things.
Dominants and submissives had popped up everywhere in recent years, only to fade out soon after, not truly understanding what the lifestyle really was. For whatever reason, BDSM had become a novelty that many people wanted to experience, though few actually wanted the real thing. My core nature was submissive. I craved something few people did. And unfortunately, there were even fewer Doms who could give it to me.
One of my worst experiences had been when I was twenty-four. I’d dated a guy in college. Adam White. He was a pre-med student with a lot of ambition. Not only that, he was nice, smart, funny, and easy on the eyes.
We seemed compatible in every way with the exception of sex. He was very vanilla, preferring missionary over anything else. When I tried to hint at adding a little spice in the bedroom, he had balked. The one time I had convinced him to go to a BDSM club had been the clincher, though. He had broken up with me that same night, accusing me of wanting to be beaten and brutalized.
The man obviously didn’t understand. BDSM wasn’t about abuse. Not for those who understood safe, sane, and consensual, anyway. Being abused or beaten was the absolute last thing I wanted, but I hadn’t been able to convince him otherwise. Since then, I’d kept most of my interactions to Doms I met at clubs, though finding one who wasn’t in it for selfish reasons had become difficult as well.
Some people believed there was a menu to select from when it came to BDSM. As though logging on to FetLife and pointing to a sexy man wielding a flogger would easily have all their needs met. That wasn’t the case. Not by a long shot. The relationship between a Dominant and a submissive was the same as it was between two consenting adults in the vanilla world. A relationship was a relationship and it had to be nurtured, chemistry had to be there, and the two people had to be in it for the right reasons in order for it to work.
