Adam
“Adelaide.”I clunked my forehead on the bathroom door. “I need to know what’s going on in your head. Are you freaking out?”
“Go away,” she grumped.
“No. That’s not an option. Come out. Let me take care of you.”
My stomach was in knots. I’d obviously taken things too far. She couldn’t even face me. Why’d I do that? We’d had a good, fun, flirty, harmless thing going.
That was me. The screwup. The fuckboy. Thinking with my dick, always. My head, sometimes.
“I’m sorry, Baddie. I fucked up. Can’t believe I did this—”
The door flew open. Adelaide’s eyes were wild, almost feral. Her hair was in tangled curls around her face. Her amber skin was flushed, like she’d spent too much time in the hot summer sun. So pretty, my friend was, even when she looked a little crazed.
“What are you talking about? I’m the one who messed up.” She covered her face with both hands. “God, I can’t even look at you. You must think I’m a monster.”
My chest cleaved in two at her apparent anguish. What the fuck was this?
I reached out, capturing her around the shoulders, and pulled her to me. Her feet dragged, but she came, letting me hold her tight. I walked her, huddled against me, to the living room, and sat us both down on the couch. She shoved her face into my shoulder, breathing too fast.
Maybe I knew what this was. I’d seen it in people new to kink. Adelaide was crashing hard and didn’t know how to handle it. That was on me. All of this was on me.
“I should have told you before I strapped you down. I should have explained that some people have a huge emotional response during or after. It’s my fault for not preparing you. It’s my bad for taking things too far. I told you you could trust me, but I didn’t take care of you the way I should have.”
She lifted her face from my shoulder. Her chin was wobbly in a way I’d never seen. I hated seeing this girl sad. She was made of sunshine and wildflowers. Those weren’t sad things. Sadness didn’t belong to her.
“What are you talking about? Everything you did, I consented to. I’m the one who went crazy and—” She hid her face in my shoulder again.
I had to laugh. Not hard, and not for long, but damn, she’d taken me by surprise.
“You’re gonna have to look at me,” I said.
“No.”
“You’re gonna hide your face from me until the end of time?”
“Yes. Forever.”
“Not acceptable. You didn’t do anything wrong, Adelaide.”
“I—yes I did.”
“No, baby. You didn’t. I thought you being tied down was the hottest thing I’d ever seen. Watching you get yourself off in twenty seconds flat definitely trumped that.”
“But you didn’t consent to that, Adam,” she mumbled.
Yeah, this ended now. She wasn’t going to turn what we’d just done into something ugly. We’d had fun, experimented, she’d pushed her boundaries, and it was glorious.
Twisting my torso, I shoved my fingers in the sides of her hair and tipped her head back. “Adelaide, I need you to look at me right now.”
She opened her eyes, and the pain behind them nearly flattened me. I knew without a doubt that pain wasn’t solely mine. Something else was going on with her. She’d been in deep when I’d knocked on her door, and she was sinking deeper as I watched.
“Listen to me,” I ordered with a firmness that pulled her taut. “I liked the hell out of everything that just happened. We had fun in there. You think I want to be the only one getting off? I loved that you did too. It kills me what a tease you are, never showing me anything, but I get that we have lines. Just so you know, nothing we just did crossed my lines. If it crossed yours, then we pull back. I won’t let you hide from me, and I willnotwreck our friendship over a couple orgasms. I can get those anywhere. You’re worth a hell of a lot more than that to me.”
Adelaide flinched, but she didn’t move away from me. I knew I was saying it all wrong, but I didn’t know how else to express her value to me.
“I had a bad day,” she said.