“You mean the submissive thing?”
“I mean all of it.”
All of it. Colby could take that a hundred different ways. He grabbed the towel again to give his hands something to do. He could feel Keats’s gaze on him. “You’re going to have to be more specific than that.”
“The other night you said you couldn’t really know until you tried it.”
Colby scrubbed the towel through his damp hair. “I did.”
“Are you working at that place this weekend?”
Scrub, scrub, scrub. “Haven’t decided yet.”
“If you do, can I go?”
Colby dropped the towel and stood. “Nope.”
“What?” Keats asked, stepping around the bench. “Why the hell not?”
Colby headed toward the kitchen, the garage feeling too small all of a sudden, the air too thick, but Keats followed. “Because unless you have a dom who’s a member to get you in, it’s ten grand to join.”
“Fuck. Ten grand? Jesus,” he said, sounding awed. “But you’re a member and an employee. Couldn’t you get me in?”
Colby yanked the fridge handle so hard, he rattled all the condiments and knocked over a jar of olives. “Only if you were going in as my submissive.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. Oh,” Colby said, pulling out a carton of yogurt and setting it on the counter. He bumped the fridge shut with his hip and tugged the dishwasher open to find a clean spoon, his back to Keats. He didn’t want to think about Keats like this. He didn’t want to imagine what he’d look like naked or chained down or taking the sting of a flogger. And he especially didn’t want to think of some stranger doing that to him. But guilt nipped at him. It’d taken balls for Keats to even bring this up. And God knows Colby had subjected him to an earful of shit over the past few days. If the guy really was curious about kink, he had the right to explore it. He sighed. “Look, if you really want to check some stuff out, there are a few local clubs that aren’t as exclusive. There’s a good dominatrix I know at the—”
A hand gripped Colby’s shoulder, and every muscle in his body went taut. He spun around and before he could process what was happening, Keats braced his hands on the counter on each side of Colby. “Would you do it if I said you could?”
“Do what?”
“Show me what it’s like. You, not some random person.”
Keats was too close and though Colby still had a few inches on him in height, he was not happy being in the less dominant position. He moved Keats’s arm aside and stepped around him. “No.”
“Why?” A hard, determined edge was creeping into Keats’s voice.
Colby groaned and raked a hand through his still-wet hair. “You don’t even know what you’re asking, what showing you would look like.”
“You said you don’t fuck your trainees.”
He scoffed. “You think that’s all there is to worry about? You want my hands on you, Keats? Everywhere? This isn’t goddamned guitar lessons.”
Keats was across the kitchen in three strides. Before Colby could even react, Keats grabbed Colby’s wrist and brought his hand right against the crotch of his jeans. He was hard beneath Colby’s palm. “I don’t fucking get this.” He shoved Colby’s hand away and stepped back, his neck shading pink even though his eyes were full of challenge. “I like women. In fact, I like your woman. Dudes don’t hit my radar. But when you say shit, that happens. And last night when I heard what I heard, I wanted to be part of it. The sound of you . . . hitting her turned me on. So if that’s the whole submissive thing, then I want to know.”
Colby blinked, startled into speechlessness for a moment.
“I hate feeling like this. Off balance. Confused. I feel like a goddamned teenager again when I’m around you. If I’m going to be staying here awhile, I don’t want to live like that. I need to get”—Keats waved his hand between them—“whatever is going on here figured out.”
Colby gripped the counter behind him, trying to will his body’s reaction into stoicism. “And you think I’m the person to help you figure this out?”
“This is hard enough to talk about already. I definitely don’t want to try shit with someone I don’t know. But look, I know you’ve got a good thing with Georgia, and I don’t want to mess that up because she’s great. And I don’t know, I mean, I don’t even know if you’re like . . . attracted to me or whatever needs to be there. I just—”
“That’s not the issue.”
Keats looked up. “Huh?”