“I’m loving you staying here with me for a bit, but is it okay with you?”
They pulled on one of the ringlets that had fallen over their eye and switched their weight between each foot. “I mean, I really like it, but if you’d rather I went home…”
“That is not at all what I meant.” Guilia pulled Tay toward her and kissed them, cupping their face in her hands. As she continued talking, she dropped kisses all over those delicious freckles. “I think that I would like it if you spent the next few days with me. It will be good for both of us to see what it’s like working and staying together.”
She was deliberately avoiding the phrase “living together” but Tay could see what she meant.
“And if we are… intime—intimate—then I would much prefer you spent the night.”
“I would like that very much.” They blushed, and their freckles stood out even more. Guilia was worried that she might be getting a little bit obsessed with Tay’s freckles. “Falling asleep with you was… is… nice. More than nice. It’s amazing. I slept really well.”
“Do you not, usually?”
They threw themselves onto the couch, flopping their arms on the floor and pulled a face at Guilia. “Is this where Daddy tells me that I need to be in bed at a decent hour every night?”
“Stop avoiding the question,tesore.”
Tay sighed and ran a hand across their face. When they dropped it, they weren’t in Littlespace anymore. “Sleep and I have a love-hate relationship. I like to sleep, and I like to sleep well, but my body clock is a bit fucked because of work. So sometimes I just… don’t.”
That would explain why sometimes Tay was silent in the kitchen, almost sleepwalking through their day.
“Okay, so what helps you sleep?”
“I slept really well last night,” they admitted. “Kink usually helps me sleep, because it empties my head, gives me a brain break.”
“That makes sense, so who’ve you been playing with since you’ve been at Rawhide Ranch?”
Tay was silent, and Guilia’s mouth dropped. “Tay, tesore, are you really trying to tell me that one of the only ways you can sleep is by doing kink… and in the time you’ve been here, you haven’t done any kink?!”
“That’s not true, I did kink last night!”
CHAPTER 19
Tay
Tay wasn’t sure that they’d ever seen Guilia look so unimpressed. Not even after the heist. They giggled nervously but Guilia did not smile.
“Did you not explain this to Signore Derek? Did you not ask for someone to help you with some maintenance kink?”
Tay was certain that they looked as sheepish as they felt. They hadn’t wanted to be a burden on anyone, and they really didn’t want someone to do some kink with them because they had to. They’d tried that in the past and it just felt unanchoring, discombobulating.
Unsatisfying.
“It’s not quite as simple as all that,” they explained. “I can’t relax into a scene if I don’t have a connection with a person, and so maintenance kink sometimes makes me feel worse about myself.”
They’d tried it in the past, before they came to the Ranch, and they’d slept worse than ever, lying awake, feeling empty and lost.
But last night, with Guilia, everything had been different. Their Daddy had pushed them, pushed what they could take, and they’d reveled in it. Wanted it.
Wanted more.
“But we have a connection,” said Guilia.
“Yes, Daddy,” said Tay with a grin. “We certainly do.”
“So if we did kink before bed each night…”
Tay wanted to jump up and down on the spot and yell “yes yes yes”. Partly because they figured that they’d have the best sleep of their life, and partly because if the previous night was anything to go by, kink with Daddy was going to be phenomenal.
