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“I’m not sick, you know. I’m just—” What? I don’t know what to say, what words to use to describe the way I’m feeling. Tired, weak, muddled. But those words don’t feel right, either. Don’t feel like they’re enough.
“You’re dropping,” he tells me.
I look down at my hands. I’m not even carrying anything. “I don’t—What do you mean?”
“It’s called subdrop. And it’s my fault. I didn’t take care of you after we made love earlier.”
There is so much in those few sentences that my head is spinning. I don’t even know where to start taking them apart. I begin with the most obvious—at least to me. “I’m not a submissive.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
“You said this was subdrop. It implies, then, that I’m submissive. I’m not.”
“Okay.”
“And I’ve had sex before. I don’t need to be taken care of like some kind of virgin, you know.”
“All women deserve to be taken care of after sex, no matter how many or how few partners they’ve had.”
It’s not just that he says these things that makes my head spin. It’s that he so obviously means what he says.
“Are you for real?”
“Can I ask you a question?”
“You already did.”
He inclines his head. “Touché,” he says teasingly. “Have you had that kind of sex before? The kind of sex we had?”
Suddenly, the way the bubbles whirl and spin in the bathwater becomes intensely interesting. And infinitely easier to look at than his eyes. “Sex is sex,” I tell him with a shrug I’m far from feeling.
“No, it isn’t.” He steps forward then, pulls me into his arms. “Not even close.”
“I don’t understand.” I start to push against him, to pull away, but he soothes me with a soft hand brushing against my neck. The other one strokes gently down my spine and I relax despite myself.
“I know you don’t. That’s why you need to trust me for a little while. We’ll talk more when you’re better.”
“I’m not sick!”
“No, but you went pretty high earlier. Now the endorphins are gone and you’re crashing hard.” He pulls back, tips my chin up so that I can’t not look in his eyes. “That’s the physiology of what’s happening to you. Emotionally, there’s a lot more going on. And yes,” he continues before I can get out the words that are tripping over themselves on my tongue. “I know you’re not a submissive. And yes, we’ll talk more about all of this later and I’ll answer whatever questions you have. For now, just let me make you feel good. Please.”
It’s the please that does it. He’s standing there in the middle of my bathroom, looking half GQ, half bad-ass and all gorgeous, and he’s asking to take care of me. When I walked out of my father’s house, away from my fiancé and the life that had been mapped out for me practically since birth, I swore I wouldn’t be any man’s plaything ever again. That I wouldn’t let any man take care of me.
But, though I’ve only known him thirty-six hours, I can tell already that Sebastian isn’t any man. And all he wants is to make me feel better, more grounded. And maybe it’s the subdrop or whatever he called it talking, but right now, I just can’t see what’s so wrong about that.
So I do what I’ve wanted to do all along. Since he showed up in the casino. Since he insisted on driving me home. Since, if I’m being honest, I walked out of his office all those hours ago.
I say yes.
Chapter Two
Sebastian
Relief sweeps through me when Aria tells me yes. More so, when I look into her eyes and realize she actually means it. I’m not sure yet why it matters so much with her, but it does. I can tell myself that tonight, it’s because I feel guilty for leaving her like this, for letting her work herself into this state. But the truth is, I want that yes to mean more than just tonight. So much more. And the fact that it matters this much when I just met her, at a time when my life is fucked up and turned around and in more turmoil than it has been in years, doesn’t make any sense.
Or maybe it does. Maybe I want control over her because I feel so out of control myself. And maybe I want to show Aria what true control over herself feels like, because I recognize the same need, the same desperation, in her.
But there’s time to think about that later. Time to think about all of this later. Right now, Aria—beautiful and pliant and needy, so needy—is standing in front of me. And she’s all I want to concentrate on.
