Page 81 of Dual Surrender

He cut the ignition and got out of the car. I could smell coffee in the air as I followed him to the storefront in question, nearly getting mowed over by a man whose face was as angry looking as Colton’s had been for the past week.

“Watch it,” the guy grumbled.

“Good to see you too, James.” Colton gave the guy a laugh and a quick wave.

“Oh.” James pursed his lips. “Colton. Sorry.”

“It’s fine. Tell Levi I said hi.”

“Tell Levi I said hi,” James mimicked, pushing past me and stalking off down the street.

“Who’s that?” I asked, watching him until he disappeared in a crowd.

“James Motel,” Colton answered. “His family owns that hotel you offered to stay at on the way into town.”

“Is he always like that?”

“Mostly.” Colton grinned. “It’s one of his better qualities.”

“That he’s rude?”

“That he’s consistent.”

Colton ordered coffee for both of us and I grabbed an inside table near the window so we could face the street. Colorado in the winter was pretty brisk, cold and gray, but thankfully no snow.

“Darius spanked me,” Colton said as soon as he sat down. He shoved a coffee cup at me and stared down at the wooden table top.

“I figured. I told him he should do it again.”

“What?” Colton’s cheeks flushed.

“Since one clearly didn’t help with your attitude.” He glared at me and I rolled my eyes. “I know this is a new development because you’ve never liked Ronan, so did you want to talk about it?”

“Not really,” he muttered.

“That’s fine.” I took the lid off my coffee and blew over the rim of the cup, trying to cool it down so I could take a drink.

We sat in silence and I tried to think back to a time when I’d been as conflicted as Colton was now. Kink for me hadn’t ever been a bad or a scary thing. I’d always known what I liked and what I wanted. I tried to imagine what it would be like to have lived your whole life one way, then to accidentally find out that maybe there was something better or more.

“You know,” I said, “you can like some things without liking others.”

He made a noise and drank his coffee.

I leaned back in my chair and stretched out my legs, crossing them at the ankle. Maybe I’d been confused the way he was when I’d been a teenager? The first time I’d stumbled onto the wrong kind of porn…even though it wasn’t wrong for me.

“It’s not a package,” I tried with a shrug. “More like a buffet.”

“An a la carte menu,” he grumbled.

“That too. You don’t have to do everything. You don’t have to like everything.”

“What don’t you like?” he asked.

“Not much,” I admitted. I didn’t need to think about the answer. “But if you’d asked me a decade ago, the answer would have been different.”

“What didn’t you like a decade ago?”

“Do you really want to do this?” I laughed as I asked him the question, but I was being serious. There were a lot of things Colton and I hadn’t talked about, that we’d willingly glossed over to save either of us awkwardness, but things were changing and maybe there were conversations that needed to be had. But the last thing I wanted was to make things worse or weird. The whole week had been pretty miserable and while I didn’t think it could get worse, I also knew better. Things at home were proof of that.