Fuck.
Fuck.
“Ever.” His name was the first word I could push past my tongue. “What? No, I’d?—”
I would never.
The whole point of taking him to therapy with me was to avoid that. But now he had that idea in his head, and I’d helped put it there, even if I’d done it indirectly.
“Ever,” I repeated. He wasn’t looking at me, probably so embarrassed it spoke of his courage that he hadn’t run for the hills and was still in bed. The bed I didn’t want us to stop sharing. Sleeping really was so much easier when he was there, even when shit didn’t feel all that perfect. “Will you look at me, babes? Please.”
The response wasn’t immediate, but I hadn’t expected it to be.
When he was struggling, he wasn’t the kind to be impulsive or lash out. Never had been. No, he got in his head, and he had to measure every single word, test every sound he could respond with in his head before he got back to the present.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I keep fucking up.”
“You don’t,” I promised.
I meant it, too. I wouldn’t lie and say I hadn’t uttered those words plenty of times, regardless of what I actually felt, simply because I couldn’t handle the idea of him punishing himself with guilt or anything else. This time, though? I was the one who should be punishing himself. The one who wasn’t strong enough.
Fuck.
No, none of that talk.
“Come here.”
One novelty that came with this improved version of Ever, the one who wasn’t so afraid of being himself and showing the world what that meant, was that being tactile reached new heights. Physicality had become a way to connect, to engage withthe world, to understand it. It had become a way for us to get back to who we were, and I’d been the one dismissing it, running away from it like it was going to burn me. Like its absence didn’t feel ten times worse.
Fire was better than a complete lack of oxygen.
“Tell me what you need,” I whispered the command.
Barking out orders was not my style. It wasn’t us.
“Just…” Ever’s chin wobbled. He didn’t address it, and I pretended not to see it. It was safer for all of us. “Just you. Just… I just want the warmth back.”
“The warmth?”
Truthfully, there wasn’t a need to ask for clarification. I knew what he meant. I knew it was one hundred percent of me that it had been missing, that anything had been different. It didn’t matter that all the reading material my therapist had assigned me spoke of giving myself grace and allowing my brain time to process. None of that held a candle to the pain in Ever’s eyes.
I had told her my relationship with him came first.
I meant it. I wasn’t going to jeopardize shit if it meant hurting him. If it meant losing him.
“It’s stupid.”
“It’s not,” I argued.
“Would you…” Ever swallowed. I waited him out. “Would you take off my cage?”
“You want me to?”
“I don’t want to wear it today.”
My eyes widened. He’d asked me to take it off before, of course. He liked the idea of not having to deal with his dick at all, the fantasy of it being owned completely by whoever was in charge of it. On a few rare days, he asked to have what we jokingly, or not so much so, called a proper orgasm. It wasn’t the same as asking to take it off for an entire day.
It felt wrong, in a way I probably couldn’t verbalize because it would make no sense. I didn’t know enough about chastity and kinks and Ever’s headspaces for my opinion here to have any weight.
