Vera came in with hot coffee and we fell silent. When she left, I pushed my phone across the table to him. “Andrew and I texted last night.”
Price didn’t allow me to talk to men on my phone outside of work, period, and when I texted with men, even Andrew, I had to show him our conversations. It was a creepy rule, rooted in his need for control. Did you think I was joking? he’d snapped, the first time he asked for my phone. Do you understand what it means to belong to me?
We’d had a lot of those conversations in the first few days, when he’d piled rule after rule on top of me and told me I had no say in how he ran our relationship. He was in charge, I was not, and he let me know it from the start. He’d warned me, hadn’t he? He’d left me, twice, because he felt he’d be a bad influence on me, too controlling and overbearing. I’d begged him to return and control me.
So that’s what this was, me sitting here with a sore, hurting ass while Price scanned last night’s text conversation with my gay best friend. Of course, I’d had to warn Andrew that his texts might be read, full privacy disclosure. I tried to make it sound fun and kinky, that Price insisted on having my passwords and occasionally checking my texts as a power exchange thing. “So be careful what you say,” I’d warned him.
Andrew definitely found it creepy, but he was in a power exchange relationship too, subbing to his boyfriend Craig, so what could he really say? For all his lectures about red flags, I think he was secretly excited to have Price read the details of his sex life with Craig. He wasn’t so happy about the no-calls-from-men rule.
So I can’t ever call you? he texted when I told him why I never answered the phone.
I see you once a week. We can talk then.
At least your Lord and Master allows that.
Yes, sometimes he lets me out of the dungeon to do things, I texted back, like our thing was cute and okay.
But maybe it wasn’t okay.
Price flicked through the conversation. It had been short. I hadn’t been much in the mood for chatter and Andrew had just wanted to say good night. He slid the phone back to me. It was his phone, on his plan where he could check who I called and how long we talked. He’d taken away my own phone when I moved in.
Was all of this okay? I didn’t know. I touched the truffle beside my plate and decided to eat it first. Milk chocolate, my favorite. I bit into the sphere of ecstasy, brushing away the cocoa shavings that fell onto the table.
“Where do you find these?” I asked. “They’re orgasmic.”
“They’re from Switzerland. That’s all I’m saying, because I don’t want you running off to buy them for yourself.”
“You think I’ll get too fat?”
“No. I think they’re for special occasions, like the morning after a hard punishment, to celebrate the fact that you’re still here and didn’t run away from me in the middle of the night.”
He smiled at me, his hair so blond in the morning sun, his eyes light and shining. He looked different at the breakfast table than he looked in the dungeon, or in his dark bedroom.
“I’m still here,” I said, feeling some of my tension ebb away. “Where was I going to run in that chastity belt? It only comes off with your key.”
His smile widened. We both knew I could take a pair of scissors to the leather straps and have it off within a heartbeat. But I didn’t, and I guessed that was why he smiled at me that way, and wrote me poems that made everything inside me glow.
“When I talked about coming here, about giving myself to you, Andrew tried to talk me out of it,” I said, licking chocolate from my fingers. “I mean, not really talk me out of it, but to think about what I might have to give up. He asked what I’d do if you never let me have chocolate, or only let me have it every once in a while, as a reward for servicing your friends.”
“Servicing my friends?” His smile faded.
“It was a joke,” I said quickly. “Because he sees you as this scary, heartless Dom.”
“Well, it’s a shitty joke. I’d never share you with anyone, not for chocolate or anything else.”
His hand moved on the table, toward mine, but didn’t quite reach me. The serenity of moments before was gone. He seemed agitated and upset.
“Andrew’s a pervert,” I said, trying to diffuse the situation. “He didn’t mean anything by it.”
“Does he think I would do that? Loan you to people? Does Craig whore him out to his buddies?”