If only I could see his face. Maybe he’d been joking? His manner was so controlled, it was hard to tell sometimes. Or maybe he’d meant for me to hang up politely and then proceed with the solitary vice.
“Yes.”
Oh phew.
Except shit.
I’d never done this before. And now I felt silly and unsexy and very conscious of the fact I was wearing a pink Superman T-shirt and a pair of leopard-print boxers. Rather than, say, a silk dressing gown or rouge and a leather collar or whatever else would be exciting for him.
“Um now?” It came out a weird little squeak.
“Unless”—I imagined the sardonic arch of his brows—“you’re otherwise engaged?”
“N-no, I’m good.”
“Take off your clothes.”
I mustered my failing bravado. “How do you know I’m wearing any?”
“Take off your clothes, Arden.”
“Yes, Mr. Hart.” I meant to sound cheeky, but it didn’t come out that way at all. Turned out he’d been wrong when he’d said I liked it when he told me what to do. I loved it. It made me feel everything he’d promised. Safe and taken and filthy and free.
I put the phone on my pillow as I dragged off my T-shirt and shimmied out of my pants.
“And no hiding under your duvet.”
How had he known? I pushed the covers out of the way. And settled gingerly back on my bed, completely alone, yet feeling more naked than I ever had in my life before. My skin prickled with a kind of wild awareness, heat rushing everywhere, making me shudder and flush and gasp.
“Are you ready?”
I nodded. Before remembering that nodding was stupid. “Um, yes.”
“Here are my rules.”
“I…I do what you say?”
“You do what I say. You touch yourself only to my direction. Your body is mine, your pleasure is mine, your hands perform my will, not yours. You don’t come until I allow it.”
I was already breathless. Already ridiculously aroused, my cock bobbing about like a superfan in a mosh pit.
“Put the phone on speaker and keep it close by.”
Fumbling, I did as he said, damp fingers sliding ineptly over the touch screen. “Okay.”
“Oh, and, Arden?”
He sounded farther away, a little tinny, and I missed the odd comfort of holding on to the thing that connected us. But probably he had other things he wanted me to hold.
“Yes?”
“Don’t keep anything from me. I want it all. Every sound you make.”
His voice was rough with need and power, but there was the faintest trace of…I suppose I would have called it uncertainty. Which was when I realized that even if he wasn’t arranged starkers on his bed with a raging hard-on, he was—in a way—just as exposed as I was. It was so close to being ridiculous, what we were doing. So impossibly tenuous. But he was trusting me. He was trusting me to listen, to obey, to accept.
To believe.
To let this be as real for me as if he was here in the room.
