Chapter 19

A soft knock sounded at my door a little later.

“Come in,” I said, my heart suddenly pounding at the very thought of seeing Rick again after the moment we’d had earlier.

He opened it up a crack and ducked his head through. “Food’s ready.”

I followed him downstairs, forcing myself to put my worries on the back burner at least until I ate something. Without hesitation he handed me a chilled beer and sat down with his own. It was such a normal thing for him to do, but I still stared at him for a second before sat down at the table. Within a few bites of delicious waffles with fruit and whipped cream, the sense of normalcy returned.

“Thanks,” I said, giving him a smile.

“To a grown-up Casey,” he said, clinking his bottle with mine, a twinkle in his eye.

I rolled my eyes at him. “I feel like a dumb little girl right now. Thanks for having patience with me today.”

“My pleasure,” he said. “And you’re not dumb. Just complicated. What we do is not an easy thing to come to terms with—once you figure out what you like.”

I let his words sink in while we chowed. After we finished eating, he opened fresh beers and we relocated to the living room. I got the sense that he was trying to distract me from the fact that Max still hadn’t called, but he was doing a poor job of it. Every few minutes he’d pull out his phone again and check the screen for some sign.

“He’s not even answering you, is he?” I asked. “Do you think it’s bad?”

He gave me a sidelong glance, hesitated, then seemed to come to some kind of conclusion. “It must be pretty serious for him not to call. Tell you what, if we don’t hear from him after a couple more hours, we’ll head over and find out what’s up. Chances are he’s just working things out with Tanya, though.”

He flipped on his widescreen and tuned to a home improvement show. It was perfectly banal and mindless. After having my fill of food and beer, I sank back into the cushions, buzzed and sated.

“This guy’s good,” he said, turning up the volume to listen to the contractor talking about dovetail joints or something.

“He’s cool,” I said. “Not as hot as you, though. You should have your own show.”

“I think you have to be gay to have a show on this channel.”

“You and Dad…er…Max never, ah…” I paused, embarrassed at the question I was asking but unable to stop myself.

Rick barked out a laugh. “Well, I admit the man has his charms, but no, we’ve never been that intimate. We’re both pretty low on the Kinsey scale.”

“Oh, right,” I said, frowning and pretending I knew what he meant. “I just figured since you guys get naked in the same room that you liked all of it.”

He gave me an odd look. “Why do you look disappointed?”

“I’m not! It’s just…” My neck and cheeks grew red hot as I struggled to find an excuse for my expression. “I think it would be really, really sexy is all.”

Rick’s eyebrows shot up practically to his hairline. “How much do you know about ~that~?”

I scowled defensively. “I know what I like! And I’m figuring out I like a lot more than I thought, too.”

He took a slow swig of his beer, his eyes narrowing while he regarded me thoughtfully. Finally, he said, “We’re definitely open minded guys. You have to be to do the things we do, but we know what we like, too.”

“Tying girls up, but not…touching each other?”

Rick tensed. “Tying ~women~ up,” he corrected. “You may be a tad young, but you’re an adult. Old enough to make the decision to do what you want, at least. Age isn’t usually an issue, as long as a woman is over the age of consent. We’ve never had a sub as young as you, but we’ve had older women. What Max did with you the other night was probably poor judgment on his part, I won’t deny it. And if I’d been there it wouldn’t have happened that way. We don’t go into a scenario with heightened emotions. The way he started with you was backwards, but I believe we did the right thing by not letting you try to figure it out on your own.”

“I’m glad you stood up for me then. Thank you,” I said, very conscious that he’d evaded the other half of my question with his little lecture. “But what if I want more than to be tied up and spanked? What if I want to watch you two do things?”

Rick shifted forward to prop his elbows on his knees and turned his head to look at me. “Everyone’s desires and limits factor in, in one way or another. We always outline our limits when we start. Max and I have a few hard limits, and you should, too.”

“So, touching each other is a hard limit?”

Rick’s face turned bright red and he chugged the rest of his beer. “Not exactly,” he said, his voice cracking comically. “Jesus, Casey, is that something you really want?” He stared at me, his eyes wide with a strange mix of excitement and anxiety.

“I’m not sure. I just know I like looking at you both naked, and I saw a video when I was at Sarah’s house and her parents were out…” I shifted in my seat, embarrassed again to share more details of my curiosity with him, but to hell with it. After the last day why shouldn’t I go for broke? I stared him down. “It was a video of two men, fucking a girl. And they were both, I mean their—ah—~hard-ons~ were both inside her at the same time, and they touched each other in other ways, kissed.”

Rick’s lips parted, his tongue darting out. He tilted his bottle to his lips again before realizing it was empty. “Porn tends to be unrealistic,” he said off-handedly, then eyed me with interest. “But you liked that? You think you want to try it?”

I nodded. My pulse hammered in my temples and between my thighs at the very idea of having them both fill me up that way. I already knew Rick had plans for my ass, and I wanted that, too, but this was something I’d fantasized about repeatedly since I’d seen it.

He cleared his throat. “So, now that I have a good idea of what you’re interested in, I can try to make it happen. No promises.” He gave me a stern look. “Now we need to make sure we know exactly what you ~don’t~ want to do. Anything and everything that comes to mind is worth mentioning.”

He proceeded to run down a list of some of his own hard limits, many of which made me grimace and shake my head vigorously, agreeing that those were ~obviously~ hard limits for me, too.

“People ~like~ to be ~peed on~? And ~strangled~?”

Rick nodded sagely. “We are nothing if not a fickle race of creatures. But you can feel free to try anything and rule it out as we go, ~except~ for those things Max and I won’t do. If you really need something like that, then we’ll have to talk about it first.”