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Also, I’d had two and a half drinks, which left me okay to drive, but with impaired decision making. I wasn’t so drunk that I couldn’t consent or anything, but I wasn’t exactly thinking like a sober person.

Controlled by the wrong part of me, I got in my rental car and drove out to where it told me to go.

It was a parking area along the river that I remembered. People went out on tubes and rafts from this spot.

His car was already there. He was getting blankets out of his trunk. They were just thrown in there, not folded or anything. He had pillows, too.

“Are we going into the woods?” I said.

He didn’t even look at me. “I want to knot you, omega.”

“Yes,” I gasped.

“I know a spot where we won’t be found or disturbed.”

“You want help carrying things?”

He glanced at me, then. “Do you think you ever could?”

What was he talking about? “Could what?”

“Forgive me. Maybe I could earn it or something? Maybe I could do something to make up for what I did. I don’t know what exactly. Something big. Something huge. Or I could… maybe I could hurt in equal measure. I could humiliate myself or something.”

I just stared at him. I didn’t know what to say.

“Maybe we talk about this later,” he said, handing me the pillows.

I followed him into the woods, and we went over a meandering footpath to squeeze between two briar bushes and emerge into a clearing, thorny branches on all sides, nothing but the sky overhead.

How had he found this place? Had he come here with her? Why had he never shown it to me before?

“I hacked this out,” he said. “Probably seven years ago. I wanted a place I could go and disappear. Sometimes, it seems like everyone needs me, and I wanted to be invisible. I’ve never shown it to anyone.”

I felt guilty, then, for thinking the worst of him. And then, no, I thought that he deserved it, because he had trained me to think the worst of him.

He was arranging the blankets all over, layering them on top of each other. “I want to think that things will be different with you, but I don’t know if they will or not. Sometimes I think I made you into a dream, too perfect to exist, and that was why I wanted to escape you, because I was never going to deserve you. Are you perfect, Leo?”

I wasn’t sure what to say to that.

“You, innocent and pure and wronged,” he said softly, smoothing out the blankets on his hands and knees. “You, the one good thing I fucked up. You, the girl I was supposed to be with. You, too much pressure.”

That’s what he thinks of me?

I tossed the pillows down.

“Undo your jeans,” he said, looking up at me, eyebrows raised. He was still on his hands and knees. “Don’t take them all the way off, but pull them down and let me see you. I want to lick you.”

I obeyed him. I wanted him to lick me, too.

“Here’s how it’ll be this time, Leo,” he told me. “This time, you’ll heal me with your pretty little pussy. I’ll lick it until I’m worthy of you.”

I made a mewling noise.

“Fix me right up by riding my tongue,” he growled, up on his knees, face against my mound. “Will you do that, Leo, will you come on my face and sort me out?”

Hadn’t I been thinking I could sort him out? Hadn’t I been wondering if I wanted to?

His tongue was pliant and it lathed its way in to mold around my clit.