Page 179
He smiled at that. “You’re right, I don’t.”
“So if something made you cautious about this… relationship, I’m guessing it wasn’t small.”
Max’s gaze met mine. “No, it wasn’t.”
I swallowed. “Okay. That’s all I needed to know for now.”
He arched his eyebrows. “You’re not going to ask what happened? You don’t want details?”
“I want the truth,” I replied. “The rest can wait until you’re ready. Besides, I get the feeling that if I try to interrogate you properly, you’ll retreat into Very Serious Dom Mode and start deflecting.”
Max bit his lip. “That’s a definite possibility.”
I grinned. “See? I’m learning.”
“What about you? Was there anyone before Grant? Since Grant?”
I rubbed the back of my neck. “I wasn’t completely inexperienced when I met him,” I admitted. “A couple of teenage experiments. Nothing dramatic. Kissing, fumbling, that sort of thing.”
“At school?”
“Mostly.” I shrugged. “It was curiosity more than anything else. Two boys trying to work out what they were doing and pretending they had a clue.”
“That sounds familiar.”
“It wasn’t bad,” I added quickly. “Just… incomplete.” I paused. “I’ve only ever bottomed.”
Max
I didn’t respond immediately, not because the information surprised me, but because the word he’d chosen did. Only, as though it were a limitation rather than a preference. Or worse, a role he’d been placed into without ever being offered the alternative.
Grant again.
I studied him. “Did you want to?”
He blinked. “Want to what?”
“Try the other side.”
Quinn considered the question with surprising seriousness. “I never really thought about it,” he admitted.
“Why not?”
He shrugged. “I suppose because it wasn’t presented as an option.”
“That’s different from not wanting to.”
Quinn tilted his head. “You think I should?”
“I think you should know you can.”
He absorbed that quietly. “I like submission,” he said after a moment. “That part isn’t negotiable. It’s how I’m wired.”
“I know.”
“But I also don’t like the idea of being limited,” he added. “Not again.”
“That’s reasonable.”
