“What else?”
“I don’t know.” Kevin shrugged. “I feel like there’s a thousand kinks out there and we only know about a handful of them. There’s so many things we could try.”
I didn’t think he realized how much he was asking of me.
It wasn’t that I was old and set in my ways, but I knew what I liked. I knew what I was good at. I thought I knew what he liked too. It would have been dramatic to say my world had been thrown off its axis, but it was almost like Kevin had put glasses on me when I hadn’t realized how bad my vision had gotten. I fought down the desire to let myself wallow in my lack of attentiveness and let the words Kevin was saying to me take hold in my brain.
“There are a lot of things we can do,” I confirmed. “If that’s what you want—”
He broke in, “What doyouwant?”
“I want you to be happy,” I answered honestly. It felt like my whole life had been a build up to the pursuit of making Kevin happy. It wasn’t something I was anywhere near ready to abandon.
“Same.” He smiled, the man I’d fallen in love with right there in front of me, asking me so earnestly to keep loving him in the way only I could.
“Do you want me to run things by you first? Or just…”
“No.” He shook his head. “I trust you. That’s one thing that I don’t ever want to change.”
Chapter Four
Kevin
“Med kink?” Ronan glanced up from his dinner with an arched brow.
He’d been home from work for an hour and had barely touched his food. He hadn’t even undressed. As soon as he walked in the door, he’d sat at the table in his scrubs with a pen in one hand and a neatly folded piece of paper in the other. With an agonizingly determined expression on his face, he went through a checklist with me that he’d apparently made on one of his breaks at the hospital.
It had been nearly a week since our anniversary discussion. Things hadn’t been tense, but it was obvious to me that Ronan had been deep in thought about it every day since. We hadn’t played and our sex had been relaxed and easy, like things almost always were between us. But Ronan’s mind hadn’t shut off, and apparently his week of thought had culminated in a checklist like we were some made-for-TV kink couple or something.
I wanted to be annoyed he was putting so much thought into it, but if anything, it just made me love him more. Ronan wanted to do this, like all things, right. He wanted to do right by me, and I couldn’t begrudge him that. So I’d served up his dinner—like always—and waited for him to start talking. The beginning of the list had been pretty mundane, going through things we’d been doing together since the start, slowly easing into new territory.
But med kink?
“Isn’t that a conflict of interest?” I stretched my legs in front of me, my right knee cracking in agreement with what I’d said.
“Eh.” He rolled his eyes, and I adjusted my glasses up the bridge of my nose with my middle finger. It didn’t go unnoticed and he gave me a warning look that sent a shiver down my spine.
“I don’t know,” I answered, words a little breather than I’d intended.
Maybe the idea of playing doctor with my doctor wasn’t such a bad idea.
Ronan drew a line through med kink before I could say otherwise.
“Consensual non-consent?” he asked.
I scrunched my nose. “Isn’t that basically our whole relationship anyway?”
“That would imply I make you do things you’re not sure you want to do.” Ronan set down the pen and gave me a worried look.
“Don’t get like that.” I waved him off. “Can we take a break from this? Are you going to eat your dinner?”
“What?” Ronan blinked.
I leaned over the table and snatched the checklist and pen away from him, using the tips of my fingers to push his barely touched plate toward him.
“Please eat, and then we’ll talk later tonight.” I folded the paper in half and set the pen on top of it in the middle of the table. “I didn’t know you were going to pick today for the great renegotiation party or I wouldn’t have made us plans.”
“What?” Ronan blinked again, repeating the same ask and looking down at his blue scrubs.
