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When she didn't answer, turning her face away, he nodded to himself. Using the fingers of one hand to keep her pried open, he stroked a light fingertip over the scarring around her anus and the inside curves of her cheeks. He frowned, trying to imagine how bad the burn had been in such a sensitive area, how much pain she'd suffered through during the healing. “If it gives you peace of mind, Connie, the scarring is minimal.” He dipped his finger into her pussy, drawing a moan from her, then pressed it against her anus.
The whimper she gave him almost fractured his resolve. Her hands were white-knuckled in the sheets, the material stretched taut. “Thane, you don't understand. Please, don't.”
“I'm not going to hurt you, Connie. Just relax.” Closing his eyes, he pushed in to just past the first knuckle. Concentrating on what he felt instead of her moans of distress. “Scarred you on the inside,” he murmured. “Lost some elasticity in the muscle. Not insurmountable, but any anal play is going to require careful preparation.” He withdrew slowly, then gave her a slow rub along her rigid spine. “But I'm still not seeing the damaged half of you, Connie. Give me a clue.”
She went limp. Not the response he was aiming for, but a positive one in his eyes. At least she wasn't taking a swing at him. “I'm going back to being vanilla,” she muttered. “Vanilla is so much easier. Missionary for the rest of my life doesn't sound so bad.”
“You'd be bored in a week,” he told her, rubbing her shoulders. “Why don't we come to an arrangement, Connie. One that suits us both, pacifies your friends, and gives you and me what we both need?”
“And what arrangement is going to do all that?” she fired back, shrugging his hands off her shoulders and rolling onto her back.
Oh, he wished she hadn't done that. Now he was craving the taste of those dusky nipples in his mouth, the weight of her breasts in his palms. She had lovely breasts, full and soft. He shook his head to clear it, then smiled down at her, taking no notice of her suspicious glare. “One where you and I trade places on a regular basis.”
“What the hell have you been smoking?” she demanded.
“Don't smoke, don't do drugs, occasionally have a drink or two. I'm not delusional, Connie. You're not the only Switch in Avalon, sugar.” Thane repeated Atticus’s words with a casual shrug. “I figure you need to top someone as much as you need to submit. You've always been either one or the other in a relationship, never a mix of both. So, in private—here or at the club—you'll submit to me. In public, at the club or elsewhere, I will submit to you. If you get comfortable enough with who you are, we can change the parametersof the agreement to encompass that.”
Baffled gray eyes blinked up at him. “You…”
“Switch,” Thane confirmed, amused. “Same as you, only I'm in tune with myself. Public displays of submissions don't stress me out, so you can top me all night long in front of all and sundry.”
“Dominant and submissive,” she said slowly. The wheels were turning in her head, trying to figure out whether he was messing with her, or worse, conning her into something she couldn't get free of in a hurry. “Huh. You hid that well.”
He sat beside her on the bed and picked up her hand, toying with her fingers. “Get out of that mindset, sugar. It's not about hiding who you are. Everyone at Avalon assumes I'm dominant, and that's fine. Dominant is my primary nature. But if anyone bothered to ask, I'd tell them that I'm a Switch. I've had a few issues with members in other clubs not understanding the concept, but Avalon has a different atmosphere completely.”
When the glare faded, Thane hoped she was beginning to understand. The fight she was throwing herself into was just exhausting, in his opinion. From all accounts, Connie was purported to be a woman who tackled things head-on for other people, using her psychologist skills to help and guide, but when it came to herself, she floundered.
“So, we'd be equal?”
Clever girl. Yes, that would be important to her, wouldn't it? It wasn't just about handing over control, but her perceived fear that she would be seen as less in the eyes of the Masters. In the eyes of her family. “It would be an exchange, yes. You'd get the time to express yourself as both Dominant and submissive, and so would I. Since the accident, I've not had many opportunities to submit, and I miss it.”
“You miss being submissive,” she repeated dubiously. “Why?”
Thane stretched out beside her, holding her hand on his stomach as he contemplated the shadows on the ceiling. How the hell did he have cobwebs up there already? “For me, dominance isn't solely about sex, Connie. It's…an opportunity. Whenever I play with someone, it's like taking someone blindfolded through a maze with only my hands and voice as a guide. Taking nerves and anxiety, those little flutters of fear, and shaping them into something beautiful. You're a Domme, sugar; you know how beautiful trust is when it's offered freely.”
Her fingers flexed in his. “There's no other feeling like it in the world.”
“Exactly. But holding that trust safe all the time? It can start to feel like a burden. Constantly guiding and shaping all those different emotions for different people, it drags you down. Especially when you're not in a committed dynamic. When I submit, I get to be the one who has the world stripped away for a little while. I get to wear the blindfold and be steered through the maze. My problems become someone else's for a few hours, and when the blindfold is ripped off, I'm ready to be the strong one again.”
“I never thought of it that way. Being submissive to Evan was what I thought I was meant to be. Eighteen months of being berated and mistreated, taught to be a dog who bided by the boot. When he tried to kill me that night, he didn't succeed in killing me, but he came damn close to severing the submissive part of me. Clinging by a thread,” she whispered dully, then cleared her throat. “Maybe if I hadn't had the dominance to fall back on, I'd have lost all of me. The Domme is…she's confident and assertive, she doesn't take shit from anyone. She saved me, and ten years of being her gave the submissive chance to heal.”
“You know it's okay to be scared, sugar.”
“For anyone else, sure. It's a natural reaction to the unknown. But me…people rely on me to stand up so they can lean on me. At Avalon, at work, at home. Everywhere, all the time. Even when I feel my knees start to buckle under the weight, I don't give myself any option but to force them to bear it. Being scared is terrifying.” Connie's sigh was weary as she let her head roll toward him. “If we do this, I don't want anal.”
“Rephrase that,” he suggested, thrilled she'd opened up to him. “You're terrified of anal. You've set hard limits for blood play, pet play, watersports, and blindfolds because of what Evan put you through. Yet the one kink he used to cause you unimaginable pain, you haven't set a limit on. Think about that. Why?”
“I don't know.”
“You do, you just don't want to acknowledge it yet. I've never been abused, I've never had someone who I've given control to use it as a weapon against me. My guess is anal play is only the shallow end of the pool. It's frightening because you associate it with pain. The psychologist in you wants you to tackle the issue, right? That rational side of your brain understands what the rest of it can't—until you face it, you can't overcome it or the circumstances that brought it into being. It won't let you put a limit on it because it's the key.”
Silence. Thick, tense silence.
As it dragged on, Thane wondered if he should introduce a different subject. Something less…tongue-tying. But something told him to keep quiet, to let the silence play out. Connie wasn't vehemently denying anything he'd said, and she wasn't ripping him a new asshole, which had to be a positive sign. He couldn't help but ponder what doors he'd slammed shut…and which would open.
“I'm supposed to be the psychologist,” she muttered eventually.
Deciding the ceiling was boring now, he rolled on top of her. Oh yeah, this view was much better. Should've taken his shirt off first, he chastised himself. Hell, his pants too. That way, he'd have all that soft, warm, naked flesh pressed against his in all the right places. “I had a difficult job for a lot of years, Connie. Military, classified,” he said apologetically. “Part of my job was to find all the pieces, the tiny shards, and build them into a picture. It revolved around understanding people. How they tick, what they do, what drives them. What scares them. How they react.”
