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I twisted one hoop between my fingers. I should’ve thought of that. Granted, I hadn’t been expecting him when I put it on.
“Was he just your dom in the bedroom or everywhere else as well?” Of course, he’d get it.
“We have a color coded safety system,” I explained, my voice barely audible to even me. Talking about it out loud was uncomfortable. No one but Killian, myself, and the couple that taught us the lifestyle knew about it. “Outside of our sex life… sometimes I don’t know how to function in the world. There’s a lot of… I just… it’s just… in my past…”
“You don’t have to tell me,” Cade cut in. Leaning forward, he reached for my shaking hands and pulled me closer. The sincerity in his eyes wrecked me—like he knew all the things in my past, even though I couldn’t say them.
“Sometimes, I freeze up.” I swallowed hard against the lump in my throat. “Sometimes just functioning isn’t… easy. He helped with that. It was easier to let him tell me how to take care of myself and let him take care of me.”
“Your whole dynamic with him suddenly makes a lot more sense,” he commented. His gaze drifted back to the necklace.
“Don’t touch it,” I told him.
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Cade whispered. “It’s not my place. That’s something intimate between you two.”
“Is it stupid that I still feel safe wearing it?” I blurted out. Maybe I just needed someone to tell me it was okay that I still wore the collars he bought me when no one was around. I wasn’t even his anymore, but that weight around my neck brought me more comfort than anything else had in three years.
“How long?”
“Almost ten years.”
“That’s not stupid, Ginny. And I’m going to guess that, with how things ended abruptly, there was no closure or dissolution on his part. He didn’t properly end his role and authority over you, did he?” he asked, and I shook my head. “It doesn’t surprise me. I don’t know much about that lifestyle, but ten years of it with the same person, I know it’s not something that you pretend never happened. I won’t say shit about your marriage, but I will say, he disrespected his role as your dom and disrespected you as his submissive by just walking without a word. He needed to handle his relationship with his submissive better than that. For your mental and emotional well-being.”
Yeah, well, that applied to how my whole marriage ended.
“How did you handle the abrupt transition? Or have you?”
“I’ve been okay on my own,” I said with absolutely no confidence. “I have to be. It’s sink or swim.”
“And are you sinking or swimming, Ginny?” Cade replied.
“Both,” I admitted. I sank a lot more than I swam, but people didn’t need to know that. I couldn’t be the pathetic woman who needed her husband to help her sort out the complicated trauma bits of her life. Killian had kept me swimming—taking over when I didn’t know how to deal with the world. Without him, it was deep immersive therapy while attempting to heal. I didn’t do that. Instead, I made band-aids and excuses.
“That’s okay.” Closing the distance between us, he hugged me tight. I leaned into him for a brief moment of comfort. “I’m proud of you. You should be proud of yourself too.”
“Well, now you know my dirty secret, so you have to tell me one of yours, Mr. Sex Club,” I said with a shaky laugh as I pulled away. Granted, if he was anything like Raven, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what his thing was—or things. He considered me for a long moment.
“I’ve never kissed anyone,” Cade told me quietly.
“What?” I exclaimed. My eyes widened. There was no way Cade Alexander Locke had never kissed a man. “But you’ve dated people!”
“So?” He shrugged. “I’ve never kissed anyone. It’s too… intimate. I may have issues with intimacy. Sex? Sure. But intimacy? Nope. I’m good without it. Hell, I’ve never had sex looking at someone either.”
“But you’ve dated people…” Unfathomable. How could you date someone without ever kissing them?
“I’ve dated James and only James,” he corrected. “And he understood my issues. Only at the end when he decided he wanted to get married did it start to become a problem between us, so I ended it.”
“So, you’ve really never kissed… anyone?”
“No.”
“But what about open mouth guy?”
“I said he came at me,” Cade reminded me. “I never said he kissed me.”
“But you said you deserve a damn good kisser,” I said.
“And I do because if I do ever kiss anyone, it should be a damn good kiss. I’m thirty-three and never fucking kissed a guy. Put dicks in my mouth? Oh, definitely. But kissed? Nope.”
