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“No. That’s not what I meant. I’m so sorry if you counted that, Aleric. I didn’t mean to insult you.”
Oh. He meant that apology. My entire body went soft, and if it wasn’t for the gobs of come stuck to his skin, I would have collapsed against him. “I’ve had relationships before. They just never lasted long. And they were…” I closed my eyes with a long inhale. “It never felt like this.”
He hummed and stroked the side of my face with the tips of his fingers. “I thought so. No one has ever looked beneath the surface, have they?”
They hadn’t, but I wasn’t ready to admit that aloud. He might have noticed and pointed it out, but somehow, admittingit made me feel pathetic. Easing back, I crawled off his lap and made my way over to the kitchen.
I could feel his gaze on me, but I didn’t hurry. I found paper towels and ran the water until it was warm.
“I won’t feel the temperature difference, so I don’t care if it’s cold,” he called out, and I could hear a small grin in his voice.
“I do.” Soaking the towel, I gave myself a cursory wipe down, then wet a fresh one for him. When he tried to take it from me, I smacked his hand away, then went back down to my knees and began to clean him with thorough sweeps of the wet paper.
“You look good down there.”
My cheeks flushed. I wanted to give him a snarky comeback, to regain some of the power I’d given him, but I couldn’t. It would come back to me the moment he was done with me—so I supposed letting him keep it for now did me no harm.
I’d given it to him freely, unlike so many others who’d swept in and taken it.
He touched my jaw again, and I looked up at him. “It shouldn’t be like this with Raul.”
I blinked, startled by his words, and it took a moment for my brain to make sense of them. Raul. Right. The guy I was learning how to fuck when I was playing Camillo.
I cleared my throat. “What should it be like?”
“Awkward. Nervous,” he said. I knew he wasn’t talking about his time with Hugo. Not really. He was talking about the first time he’d seen himself as a man capable of sex. “Uncertain. He’ll take the lead a little bit, but you’ll need to be strong.”
“I can do that. I’m learning from the best.”
With a small snort, he shoved me back but kept a grip on my shoulder and used it to pull himself forward until we were almost kissing. His lips were a breath away from mine. “You learn well, sweetheart.”
That last word was a dagger to my heart. I was lost now. I was going to bleed out—painfully slow, dead before he walked away. But it was welcome.
Because in that single moment, for the first time that I could remember, I was truly happy.
Thirteen
CAMILLO
I toldmyself not to watch him walk away. That was boyfriend behavior. But I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He had a little swagger to his step, and my ego couldn’t help thinking,I gave him that. That look on his face, that was all me.
I felt powerful. I felt larger than my own skin—like one massive inhale and I would explode outside of my own body. No one had ever made me feel the way Aleric had. No one hadevergiven me the power to put them on their knees and beg to stay there.
I’d had lovers in the past who weren’t entirely vanilla, but their expectations of me were that I’d be pliant, submissive, meek. That I’d be willing to lie there like a dead fish and let them do whatever they wanted to my body. Even the other disabled people I knew expected me to be like that.
Even with Roget, it was performative. I knew he didn’t see me as a man who wanted to take charge. He thought I was overcompensating. It never bothered me until now. Until Aleric willingly got on his knees without a second of hesitation and looked into my eyes, waiting for my instructions.
He stared at me, a man who understood me without even knowing me. And that’s when I knew I’d been cheating myselfout of what I really wanted for all this time. I’d been content to take scraps because somewhere deep down, that was the only thing I thought I could have.
Now, my world felt upside down and inside out.
I wanted to chase after him, to tell him not to go. To tell him there was room in my bed, and my home, and my life. But I wasn’t sure that was true.
But I wasn’t sure I had the strength to go through what it took to make all of that happen. And I wasn’t sure that Aleric deserved to be saddled with all the complications that would come from dating me. He was already running from his own burdens.
Why lay mine on his shoulders?
“Your Highness?”