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Hopefully, that was the important thing.
But Brian wasn’t responding. He was just standing there, staring at her, poleaxed.
“Um, feel free to chime in any time… otherwise, I can just, like, go back there,”—she jerked her thumb over her shoulder at the door to the bedroom—“and you can leave, and we can pretend like this never happened.” And she would cry herself to sleep here tonight, then never talk about this with anyone again. Sounded like a plan. But if that was the way it was going to go, she really needed him to get out now before she started to fall apart.
Rather than answering, Brian looked around the room. What, did he think someone was going to jump out at yell ‘Pysch!’ at them?
“You rented the room for tonight? To tell me that?” he asked in a hushed voice.
Okay, that sounded promising. He seemed touched. Touched was good. She could work with touched. Hope started rising up inside her.
“Yes?” It came out as more of a question than a statement. The question was whether he would stay. Whether or not she’d done enough.
Whether or not she was enough.
He didn’t answer her. Instead, he strode forward, reaching her in two steps, his hands coming up to cup her face, and he caught her lips in a searing kiss. Rae’s lips parted with a sigh of relief, and his tongue delved between them, claiming her mouth as his own.
But they hadn’t finished talking.
Rae pushed at his chest, squirming back.
“I’m still not calling you ‘Daddy,’ though.” Dammit. Did it have to come out sounding like a challenge? She hadn’t meant for it to. Brian didn’t move his hands from her face, though. His thumb made a slow sweep over her lower lip, holding her right where she was, with her hands on his chest.
“I think…” He took a deep breath. “Would it be okay if I called myself ‘Daddy’?”
She frowned, not because it sounded bad but because she wasn’t quite sure what he meant.
“Like, talk about yourself in the third person?”
A rueful smile twisted his lips.
“I know it might sound a little silly?—”
“No, no, I’m just trying to understand what you’re saying.” Even if it did end up sounding a little silly, she could live with that. The important thing was that he was right here with her, wanting to find a way, looking for a solution. A compromise.
Maybe they couldn’t have it all, but they could have enough. That was life, wasn’t it? Nobody ever got one hundred percent of everything they wanted. Yesterday, the woman who ran Human Resources at Rae’s accounting firm had told her a fun fact about job hiring—they looked for the candidate who came the closest to getting ninety percent of the qualifications they wanted. They could work on the other ten percent from there. Trying to find someone who fit one hundred percent was an impossible task.
That’s what Rae had been doing. She’d been trying to find one hundred percent, but that wasn’t life. That wasn’t people. But she thought she and Brian were well above ninety percent. They could keep working on whatever percent they had left.
“What do you mean, call yourself ‘Daddy’?” she asked, prodding him when he didn’t answer right away. He took a deep breath, and she realized this was a moment where he was making himself vulnerable, the way she had.
To her amusement, a blush was reddening his cheeks. Whatever he was going to say, she might agree to it just for that. It was incredibly adorable. He cleared his throat, his expression altering just a bit, as though he was trying to make himself appear surer of himself than he actually was.
“Well, when we were on Hideaway, I had to hold myself back from speaking the way I normally do. Normally in bed, I would say things like ‘Be a good girl for Daddy’ or ‘You’re taking Daddy’s cock so well.’ I didn’t while we were there, but since we’re talking about it, I wondered if calling myself ‘Daddy’ would also be a hard limit for you.” The blush on his cheeks darkened as he spoke, but his gaze never wavered from hers, taking in her reaction.
No disgust rose, no immediate rejection of the idea, nothing that made her think ‘absolutely not.’ In fact, there was an odd little tingle between her legs at the sentences he’d apparently been holding back for her.
“I think I’d like that,” she said, almost wonderingly. She wouldn’t have expected to, but hearing Brian actually say them… it was hot. Maybe it really wouldn’t hurt to try it herself. “Daddy.”
Oops. Nope. She ruined it. The second she called him that, her entire body flinched.
Ironically enough, so did his. The horror in his expression was almost enough to make her laugh. See? He didn’t want her calling him ‘Daddy’ either.
“That just sounded wrong,” he complained. “You don’t say it right.”
Rae bristled. She’d just wanted to try it, to see if she could. She didn’t like how it sounded, but she also didn’t like hearing that she’d done something wrong… even if it was better that he didn’t like hearing her say it. Yeah, she was a mass of contradictions. So what?
Before she could express her disgruntlement, Brian must have noticed her reaction, and his expression softened.
