Page 65 of Coiled Tight

It was the same question, but the tone was more cautious.

Regret filled me. I should’ve waited to have this damn talk.

“Because I understand what it’s like to push people away because you feel like you deserve it.” I took an invigoratingbreath before I kept on. “And because you insist that you’re terrible at keeping things to yourself, so it’s only a matter of time until someone tells you about Roy.”

For the next minute, Cam didn’t say anything. I wanted to check in on him, but I wasn’t the brave sort of Dom who just did the thing.

“Um. Why is it different when you do it?”

“It’s not.” I needed to find the nearest service station, stat. Despite the reputation I’d built as a grump of a hermit, I was a tactile person. I needed to squeeze him to me, to tease the mounds of his ass and get a sense of that physical tether before memories dragged me under. “Do as I say, not as I do?”

“This is why brats will keep on bratting.”

I snorted. Even blindfolded, I’d have no problem picturing the pout he had to be regaling me with.

“Okay, darlin’. Brat away.” The break into kinky talk was a relief, but not one I could relish for long. Not if I wanted to maintain some semblance of responsibility. “But another reason why I’m telling you? I might have my issues to work through with people, but when we’re down there? I’m not there to socialize so that I feel better or because I deserve a break or fun. I’m there for the animals only. The ones we have and the ones that need us.”

“Oh.”

I waited a beat, but no more words followed the exhaled sound.

“Can you do that?” I thought he could when I suggested it to him. I wouldn’t have risked it otherwise, but… Could I say I’d been completely unbiased when my suggestion had been in response to the thought of losing him, of being blamed again for the fate of a man in the sanctuary? “Keep your head in the game while we’re down there?”

Again, he didn’t answer right away. The GPS said there was a service stop in half an hour. I had a feeling the distancewas going to feel much longer than thirty minutes, but thirty minutes was better than an unknown amount of time. Certainty brought a sense of calm I could wrap around myself.

“I can try?”

I nodded. It didn’t bring me the comfort I’d expected, but I was rational enough to know there was little more I could ask of him. It wouldn’t be realistic, either.

I just hoped word didn’t reach upward, and I ended up taking the brunt for another person I had misjudged.

“Good.”

“Not good boy?”

Air left my lungs in a loud exhale. I had the feeling that Cam used these sorts of retorts, of the kinky variety, as a sort of coping mechanism, a reflex when he was uncomfortable or didn’t want to process the words that had been said.

It wasn’t ideal, but it was…

I could work with taming a brat better than I could with reopening old wounds I’d been picking at for the last hour.

I hoped I could.

“First rule about being my boy, Cam?” I spared him a quick glance. “Fishing for compliments only gets you a red ass.”

“Not a deterrent.”

Of course it wasn’t.

twenty-three

cam

He’d said I was his boy.

In the truck.

For some holy reason, I’d managed to keep the conversation going and didn’t simply implode, but he’d said the words. I didn’t make them up or hear them wrong or, or…