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When she didn’t shuffle off my lap, I settled my hands tighter around her waist and asked, “How do you feel?”
“Like I had an orgasm.”
“You know what I mean,” I chided softly, tracing soft kisses along the sinews of her throat.
“You don’t normally ask.”
“You don’t normally jump on me before you hit the scene of the crime.”
“Fair,” she mumbled, arching her throat to the side to give me better access.
“It always surprises me how you were mistreated in public.”
“Because I didn’t act out? Didn’t rebel to liberate myself?”
“Partially that, but partially the fact that no one helped you.”
“I didn’t have a label on my forehead that said ‘sex slave,’” she countered. “And it wasn’t like that.”
“What was it like?” I questioned gently.
“Do we have to talk about this?”
“I think it’d be good for you. Good for me too. Katina is starting to see a shrink, but we never bothered to find ourselves one. Maybe we can be that for each other.” Oddly nervous, I hitched a shoulder. “Just an idea.”
“You won’t like what you hear.”
“Do you think you’ll enjoy hearing why I disliked having my hair pulled before you?”
She tensed. “No.”
“We both have parts of our pasts that will be painful to share, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about them if we need to talk about them.”
“I’m sorry I keep stroking your hair.”
I clucked my tongue. “I didn’t say that to make you self-conscious. I meant it when I said before you.”
“Why am I different? And don’t say because I’m your penguin.”
“Because you’re my person, Star. The one I’ll always let in when I lock everyone else out.”
She took her sweet time before saying anything, as if weighing the meaning of what I had just told her.
Eventually, she mumbled, “When I was with Hans, among other passive-aggressive moves, he’d control me through food.”
I stilled. “What? He starved you?”
“Gave me food for good behavior. Denied me food for bad. I was so accustomed to having my appetite controlled that it was a miracle he managed to get me pregnant in the first place.
"For the first year or so, I was always underweight. To the point where I was skin and bones.”
Hatred for her fucker of an ex-husband filled me. “If I could electrocute him to death, I would.”
“But then, you’d have denied me the fun of stringing him up,” she said lightly, her fingers automatically moving toward my head where I knew she was going to play with my hair. She paused, though, as if she remembered…
I snagged her hand in mine and plunked it on my head. “You can play with my hair. No one else. Only you.”
She swallowed. “Are you sure?”
