Not as much as I need to sit up and move my hand from her hair to her throat.
“When I tell you to stop, you stop.” I squeeze the hand around her neck. Not enough to choke her, just enough to let her know who's boss. “No more going against my orders.”
Her entire body quivers like a small animal caught underneath the paw of a wolf. But then she asks, “And what if I don't stop when you tell me to? What happens then?”
Her eyes flash with the question, defiant and . . . something else—something else I think I might recognize.
I tighten my hand around her throat, testing to see if I'm right.
Squeezing off her air.
She squirms, but just as I suspected, it's not fear that flashes across her eyes. More like excitement. Anticipation. And my cock, still semi-erect from having her mouth on me, pulses with new life.
“You like that, don't you?” I say, squeezing even tighter. “You like me dominating you like this. You’re squirming at the thought of me doing the same thing to you in bed.”
She hits me with a wry, helpless look, reminding me that she couldn't answer, even if she wanted to.
I loosen my grip, just enough to let her breathe and talk, but not enough to let her think she can get away from my question.
“Answer me.”
She gives me another helpless look, but this time it carries a hint of her usual dry humor. “Actually, I was today years old when I discovered I don't hate being choked.”
She rubs at my hand as she tells me this. And she's not pushing me away. It's more like a caress.
“Do you . . .” She peeps up at me in that weirdly innocent way of hers. “Do you do this domination stuff often . . . with other girls?”
She doesn't sound jealous or accusatory. But for some reason, guilt turns my stomach into a hard knot. I tell her a semi-version of the truth.
“When the girl’s into it. I used to like it . . . back before I started, um . . . working security. But there are rules on tour. Risks you shouldn’t take without paperwork. And I don’t fuck girls twice, so it was always more trouble than it was worth.”
“But you’re not on tour now.”
Her expression has gone carefully neutral. I can't tell what she's thinking, but the dark, warped part of me has to ask, “Are you into it? Do you want me to do that to you when we finally have sex? Hurt you, make it rough? Punish you?”
Her pulse quickens underneath my palm, beating a rapid little drumbeat against my thumb. “Just as a thought exercise, tell me what all that would involve.”
My dick pulses dangerously at her request for more information. This conversation is just as bad as the blow job. Maybe worse. That BJ’s not going to happen tonight, but I can already feel her body pinned underneath me as I punish her for making me wait.
“We’ll have to establish some ground rules,” I answer, working hard to keep my voice level. “You’ll tell me your boundaries, so I know how far I can go. And, of course, we’ll need to do the whole safeword thing. You know about that, right?”
She gives me a little nod. “I’ve heard of safewords, even if I've never used one. But how about if I don’t know what my boundaries are?”
She says that. Then she looks up at me with those big brown eyes. Jesus. She's the living personification of a bad girl. But sometimes, she says things that make me feel like I'm talking to an innocent. Someone way too inexperienced to line up a bunch of bikers at the bar for a Bird Call or even work at a roadhouse.
I can’t tell if she’s really asking or teasing me again.
Either way, I have to swallow down a lump of lust to answer, “I’d test you out. Establish the boundaries for both you and me.”
“How would you do that?” she asks. “What tools would you use?”
She’s got to be fucking with me. She knows exactly what she’s doing to me when she says stuff like that, I assure myself.
I don’t like getting played. Plus, there are about a thousand legal reasons I shouldn’t even be having this conversation with her.
Nonetheless, I answer. “My words . . . at first. I’d give you a bunch of orders and threats. See how well you heel.”
She looks to the side, giving me a moment of reprieve from what surely must be a faux innocent gaze. But then those big brown eyes swing back right up with a new question. “And what if I don’t do what you say?”
Fuck me. The images that pop off in my head. I bear down so as not to spray again.