Total pages in book: 57
Estimated words: 54028 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 270(@200wpm)___ 216(@250wpm)___ 180(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 54028 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 270(@200wpm)___ 216(@250wpm)___ 180(@300wpm)
Nausea crawled up my throat.
Given that I didn’t show my face in my profile, I’d let Tate add “Fetishist, vers, on the submissive side,” but I distinctly remembered feeling too exposed and deciding I was going to delete that.
Please tell me I did!
“You ready to hit the showers?” he asked.
Not one bit. I hadn’t thought this through.
“Sure,” I said.
Now was the time for doubts. Maybe this had been a terrible idea. Boring dinners at Sequoia with Samantha by my side had been much safer than… Than going to the gym alone with Jack, where he mentioned my Tinder profile and stripped down to shower naked, as people tended to do.
I didn’t know how to act. I didn’t know how to be casual in this scenario.
But first things first. The moment we entered the fairly empty locker room, I excused myself to go to the bathroom.
Okay, damage control. Door was locked. I opened the Tinder app, ignoring my four unread messages, and went straight to my profile. I could probably erase those messages anyway, because starting a conversation with a man was a lot harder than it should be. What had happened to my gender? What on earth did we think we’d accomplish with a lazy “hey”?
Oh, sweet relief. I had deleted the more intimate details on preferences. Except… “Fuck.” I rubbed my forehead. That’s right, I’d stupidly replaced that tiny section with a name.
Mclean House.
At the very bottom of my rather brief profile was the name of my new kink community.
What an idiot I was. This was why you didn’t mess around with dating profiles after half a bottle of wine. Now I remembered exactly how I’d been thinking too. Mclean House was more discreet and would only tip off those who were already involved in kink.
Goddammit, why had our profiles crossed paths? What was Jack doing viewing profiles of men my age?
Better question, why had my profile even been visible to him? Because my age range was thirty-five to fifty-five, and last time I checked, Jack was thirty-two.
I might actually ask him. Then pray to whatever deity that he’d never look up Mclean House.
I sighed and clicked on my messages.
hey
u on now daddy?
Hey.
hey there
Nope. I exited the app and left the bathroom.
Jack must’ve gone into the shower room already, so I opened my locker and picked up the pace a bit. The silence around me reminded me why I preferred to work out early in the day. The gym itself had its crowd of stay-at-home mothers and a handful of retirees, but the men’s locker room was, for the most part, empty at this hour.
Once I’d stripped out of my sweaty clothes, I grabbed my towel and my latest obsession of shower products. Was it a known fact that an all-in-one wash existed? Shampoo and body wash in the same bottle—genius.
I’d gone from the cheapest bar of soap growing up to the expensive products Samantha had filled our bathrooms with.
The first thing I saw when I entered the shower room was Jack’s naked ass.
I closed my eyes briefly and shook my head.
His body had to be the definition of perfection.
Fucking hell. I’d been doing so well. He remained in the family box in my head, where he belonged, and I didn’t want that to change.
I hung my towel on the wall and opted for a shower two showers away from his, and I told myself to get my act together. There were plenty of nice asses to appreciate in this world. I had no reason to stare at his. Surely I could summon some self-control.
“If I move back, I’m definitely becoming a member here,” he mentioned. “You have both a sauna and a steam room.”
Certainly a perk. I liked both. “Did you buy a day pass today, or…?”
“Yeah. I’ll get the seven-day option tomorrow.”
So this was happening. We were going to work out together every morning throughout his stay in DC.
“I have a meeting at ten tomorrow, so I have to be here around eight,” I said.
“No problem.”
I stepped under the hot spray and let the water wash away the tension and the worst of my ever-present confusion. These days, I was faster at finding the answers to my own questions, but it seemed I was destined to always wonder about something.
For as long as I could remember, I’d struggled to comprehend the meanings of my reactions and emotions. Being near Jack, for instance, caused the disconnect within me to grow. I felt something, I just didn’t know what. I was frustrated, yet didn’t know why. I was drawn…and peeved at the same time.
I was in a state of shallow denial, and I knew that.
Perhaps if I expended less energy on not allowing my mind to wander freely, I would understand myself even better. But that wasn’t good either. A wandering mind was a dangerous thing, and I was already aware of my eagerness and hunger. As Tate and Kingsley good-naturedly teased me about: I wanted everything at once. I was a newborn in kink with very little grasp of my own boundaries. I was also a newborn in the sexuality I’d suppressed for decades.