Total pages in book: 108
Estimated words: 103010 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 515(@200wpm)___ 412(@250wpm)___ 343(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 103010 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 515(@200wpm)___ 412(@250wpm)___ 343(@300wpm)
“I don’t know. It felt good, obviously. I don’t want him the way I want you, though. He gave me his number, and I took it. But I told him…I told him I had someone, but I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know if I should say I have a boyfriend because you’re not that to me. You’re my Sir, but what else does that mean? I didn’t like not having the answer to that. I think that weighed on me with the party too, like…what do I mean to you? Is this a secret? It made me feel insecure and like maybe you really are ashamed.”
I had definitely failed him in this, and I hated that. I should have seen it coming. He should have had answers to these questions long ago. But the truth was, I didn’t know how to reply. “This is something we need to break apart, I think. First, you need to figure out if you want that boy.” The words were hard to push out, but I needed to. And Finley deserved that, if that’s what he wanted. I had always known this day would come.
“Not like I want you…never like I want you. I don’t think he could give me what I need anyway. But maybe as a friend? We can like, study together or hang out the way I do with Ian. I’ve never had that…not with anyone else. I’ve never even studied with a friend before.”
I’d told myself I was giving him what he needed, that I was making sure he had a life outside of me, but in that moment, I realized I was doing a shit job of it. Why hadn’t I pushed Finley to make friends? “Invite him over. Or go out with him. That’s an order. And if you decide you want to sleep with him, or anyone else, you come to me.”
He nodded. “But what do I tell him about us?”
That was harder to answer. I thought maybe…a part of me wanted to tell him that whatever he needed, I would give him. Whatever he desired was his. Still, old habits die hard, and the thought of giving myself to someone enough that they had the power to hurt me…I wasn’t sure I could do that. “I’ve never had a boyfriend, Finley.” Christ, even the word felt weird on my tongue. I was a thirty-nine-year-old man having this conversation with a twenty-year-old boy.
“Neither have I,” he replied, the feisty little thing.
“Good point, but I think there’s a difference between you and me. I don’t know that I can be what you want.”
“And I do? I didn’t know if I could be the submissive you desired, and sometimes I still don’t. I don’t know if I know how to be a boyfriend either, but I’m willing to try. Does anyone ever know these things? Isn’t that what relationships are? Trying?”
He was right, of course, to the extent that I felt it hard to breathe. I was nearly forty years old, and he understood this better than I did.
“I want to really belong to you,” Finley added.
“You do.”
He looked up at me then, his eyes watery with tears and so much fucking want and heartbreak that I felt it to the marrow of my bones, deep down in my soul. It was different seeing him cry now than when I wanted his tears. Then they were cleansing; now they were debilitating. “Does that mean you don’t want to try?”
“I…” Shit, I did want to try, didn’t I? It wasn’t something I had ever considered—that I would have someone permanently, that I would be someone’s partner, because I still wasn’t sure how I felt about the word boyfriend.
Even thinking it made my heart kick up and my palms sweaty, but when I looked at this sweet, strong warrior of a boy, it helped. He soothed something inside me I hadn’t known ailed me, which was why I opened my mouth and took a risk. “We can try, yes.” I almost told him I couldn’t make any promises, but as he’d said, that’s what relationships were. Who ever knew if they would last when they went into them?
“Really?” Finley asked, with heart and hope on his tongue.
“Don’t get too excited. I’m not sure it’ll be much different than what we’re doing now,” I teased, which was another dose of reality I hadn’t let myself swallow before.
“It matters to me, Sir…my Sir.” The way he said my made me realize how much he’d needed something to hold on to. Finley had spent his life feeling like he didn’t belong to the world around him, without any sense of security. Even when his mother was alive, they’d struggled to make ends meet. This, what we had, gave him something to hold on to. Made him feel secure and tethered to something in a way he truly needed.