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His voice had gotten hoarse, gravelly.
“I love it. The rougher, the better. I don’t care if I can barely sit for a few days. It’s the best feeling in the world and centers me like nothing else.”
Roman swallowed. “How did you discover you were submissive?”
“In my second year of college, I was still a virgin and tired of it. So I went to a gay club and found an older guy, figuring he’d have the experience to make it good for me. Boy, did he ever. When he fucked me, I came so hard that I nearly passed out. We hooked up a few more times, and then he asked me if I wanted to experiment with him with some light D/s play. I had no clue what that was, but I trusted him, so I agreed. Boyd and I were together for a year as he developed his skills as a Dom and I found out I was deeply submissive.”
“Why’d you break up?”
Sadness filled Caleb’s voice. “He got a job offer in Atlanta, and I had gotten accepted for my master’s degree, so I wasn’t going anywhere. Boyd chose the job over me.”
“He hurt you with that,” Roman said.
“Childish to feel that way, I suppose. I mean, I was twenty-one, and he was thirty-nine, so I hardly could’ve expected him to take me seriously, but yeah, I was heartbroken. I thought we had something special.”
Roman couldn’t resist and cupped Caleb’s cheek. “Just because he made that choice doesn’t mean he didn’t care about you. Maybe he was concerned about your age, about you being in too deep too fast.”
“Maybe, but that should’ve been my choice, yes? He had no right to make that call for me.”
“He could’ve done it to protect you.”
“If he did, he failed miserably because that was an absolute low point. I was in love with him, you know?”
Roman’s hands itched to pull Caleb close and hug him. This man before him, brimming with life and so damn open about who he was, was everything he wanted. That honesty, that intensity, was magnetic. And it scared the hell out of Roman because he wanted to dive in headfirst. Consequences be damned.
“How old are you now?”
“Twenty-seven.”
Still so young in comparison. “I’m forty-nine.”
“I know.”
“That doesn’t bother you?”
“Why should it? I like older men. Always have. Not sure you noticed, but your brother, Jesse, Ryan, and Lowell are all around your age. Master Mark is a little younger but around forty, I think. None of them are my age.”
“Hmm.”
The silence stretched, and Roman balled his fists to keep himself from touching Caleb again.
“Tell me about the law,” Caleb said, his gaze direct, piercing. “What got you into that?”
The law. A safe topic. Roman wasn’t sure if he was disappointed or relieved. “Wander and I grew up in a working-class community with its fair share of problems, but my parents always stressed the importance of hard work and honesty. But I kept seeing people get screwed over by the system, and it infuriated me. That’s where that passion for justice developed, I think. I got my degree in psychology first, then decided on law school. I got into Harvard and, after that, never left Boston.”
“Must be tough being the good guy in a city like that.”
“Good guy?” Roman huffed out a bitter laugh. “Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. If you fight long enough in the gutter, you start to look like the trash you’re up against.”
“Still, you do it. You could’ve chosen to be a criminal attorney or even a public defender, but you opted to fight to take that trash out. There’s gotta be a fire inside you that fuels that.”
“Fire burns out eventually.” Jesus, where had that dark, depressing comment come from? It scared him almost as much as the hollowness in his tone. “I think it’s more a case of stubbornness, but the result is the same. I don’t back down.”
“Ever get lonely?” The question slipped from Caleb like silk, wrapping around Roman’s chest and squeezing tight.
“Lonely?” Roman whispered. He felt himself unraveling, the thread of control slipping. “Yeah.”
“You were married, right?”
