He catches my look and laughs. “You like it?”
“Like it? I love it. Holy shit,” I say, laughing down at the pastry. “I wasn’t planning on embarrassing myself by pigging out, but I may have to go back for seconds.”
He looks at me seriously, hand squeezing my thigh and sending waves of heat through my body. “You should never be embarrassed around me. Do you understand?”
Do you understand… His words call up memories of how he was with me as my dom. I’m struck by the overlap. Maybe he is kind at times and maybe he is charming, but I’m starting to realize there’s an undercurrent of expectation beneath his kindness. He expects obedience, whether he favors me with smiles or not. He may not be as extreme outside of the club, but he is still dominant. I’m surprised by how much that matters to me. I don’t even want to start digging into my past to figure out where the switch flipped that made me think I need a man to dominate me, but it’s there. I never felt or saw it before, but after my first night with Logan at Club Crave, it’s so painfully obvious I can’t believe I never saw it before.
I need it. I don’t know yet if I need it in every facet of the relationship, but the small hint Logan just gave me feels right somehow, like a gentle tease and reminder that he may be playing nice, but he still expects me to do as he wishes.
“Emmaline…” There’s a hint of warning in his voice. Don’t make me ask twice. He doesn’t say it, but I can sense it on the tip of his tongue.
“I understand, S--” I clamp my mouth shut, blushing. I was about to say sir.
His smirk says he knows exactly what’s going through my head. He raises the remote and turns the T.V. on and then starts the DVD. I laugh out loud when I realize what movie it is.
“Terminator 2? This is your favorite movie?”
“You’ve seen it?” he asks. The hint of excitement in his voice makes me laugh.
I grin. “I don’t know. Maybe like thirty years ago when it was released.”
He shakes his head. “It was released in ninety one, and you wouldn’t have been alive to watch it if it was released thirty years ago.”
I smirk at him. “I was just trying to see if you knew the release date.”
He laughs. “Well, you caught me.”
We watch the opening scenes of the movie in relative silence while we eat the delicious meal he prepared and sip our wine. It’s not an uncomfortable silence though. I get the impression Logan has seen the movie more than a few times, but he’s still extremely focused on the screen, even leaning forward slightly. It’s another side of him I haven’t seen, and it’s humanizing in a good way. I needed something like this. Something slow and more normal. I feel like I can finally catch my breath. I’m with Logan and it’s not like we’re sprinting full-speed ahead.
In a normal relationship, men are on their best behavior for the first date or even the first few. It’s only gradually that they start showing the many sides of their personality. But with Logan, we skipped the entire guarded phase of the relationship. I immediately saw his deepest and darkest secrets and he saw mine. I guess being careful or guarded felt pointless after that. I’ve seen the extremes of his personality, but not the more everyday moments that build a bridge between those extremes. He can cook. He loves an old, goofy movie. He wishes he was home more often. He likes tennis. And he turns into a sex god with a paddle when he gets turned on.
All joking aside, I needed this. More than I knew. I needed to see he was more than just a beautiful face and body.
He gets up to refill our wine glasses a few times, and either I’m getting more tipsy than I realized, or the movie is actually good. I find myself leaning forward with Logan, wine glass clutched tightly in my hand as I watch Arnold Schwarzenegger get brutalized by the T-1000 in the middle of some apocalyptic factory brimming with molten metal.
Logan catches my interest and smiles. His hand rests on my leg and I look down, biting my lip at how the innocent contact thrills me. I look to him, but he shakes his head, pointing toward the screen. “You’ve got to see how it ends.”
I scowl a little, but I admittedly do want to see how the terminator is going to save John and Sarah Connor.
“Wait,” I say a few minutes later as the final credits are rolling. “Why did we start with Terminator 2? Isn’t there a Terminator 1?”