Page 49 of Love By Design

“Does it also make you hard to give up the decision-making? To submit that fully?”

“I’ve never thought too hard about that part,” he said.

“Maybe you should.”

Silas picked up his fork and finished off the caprese I’d served him. I climbed off my stool and went to get him water, since the small serving of wine was more than enough for us both, all things considered at that moment.

“It makes me feel good in other parts of my body,” he finally answered.

“But does it make you hard?”

Silas licked his lips slowly, staring hard at the salad left on his plate. “Yes.”

“It makes me hard too,” I told him. “I like being in charge.”

“Why?” he asked.

“I need the control, I think. It probably has to do with how my brothers and I were raised.”

I thought about how we’d all been given up by our mothers, abandoned to a man who cared more about making more sons than caring for the ones he already had. It created a tension in the house from the four of us toward him, but an irreversible sense of comradery between us. There was no one who would support me more than my brothers would, and no one I would support more in return.

At least…there hadn’t been before.

“Does it get exhausting?” Silas asked.

I huffed a laugh out of my nose. “I’ve never done it long term.”

“Not even in college?”

“Not in the ways I wanted,” I said.

Silas chewed the inside of his cheek hard enough for me to see the outline of his teeth. I reached up and tapped his cheek and he immediately released the skin. I smoothed my touch over his cheek and down to his jawline before letting my hand fall back into my lap.

“So back to it then,” Silas said quietly, his body swaying toward me like he was chasing after the feel of my fingers again. “What do you want, Marshall?”

I’d done nothing but think about the answer to that question since the very first time I saw Silas with his bare ass in the air at Rapture, and the answer remained unchanged.

“I want to know how much you’ll give me,” I admitted, “and then I want to know how much you’ll let me take.”

Silas swallowed audibly. “Have I eaten enough dinner?”

I looked at his nearly untouched plate. “No.”

The unspoken question hung in the air between us, and I knew he was waiting for me to be brave enough to reach out and grab it. There was no question we both wanted it to verycertainly the same degree, but I didn’t want to be the one making the final call and neither did he. Neither of us wanted to be the one who pushed the other too far.

But it had to be, in the end, didn’t it? That was partially my role, my job here.

“Eat some more salad, Silas,” I commanded, and he picked up his fork with trembling fingers, spearing some lettuce onto the tines and lifting it to his mouth. He wasn’t trying to eat in a sexy way, but the fact it was an order he’d been given and an order he’d followed was hot in and of itself. I studied him in silence while he finished all of the chicken salad I’d served onto his plate, and after the last bite, he set the fork down to his right and folded his hands into his lap—the perfect picture of submission.

CHAPTER 17

SILAS

“Did you like that?” Marshall asked me, voice barely louder than my heartbeat. “Being told to do something mundane like eat your dinner?”

The immediate answer was a loud and resounding yes, but the explanation of it was a little more complicated. This level of submission was uncharted territory for me, and it sounded like it was maybe the same for him. Or at least a road very untraveled. I’d spent most of my adult life focusing on the sexual side of submission, of bending over and being spanked, of getting fucked or denied. I liked all of those things… most of them, at least. I didn’t think anyone truly liked denial, but the payoff was always worth it, so it felt like a reasonable trade in the end. But it had always been about sex before. Sitting beside Marshall and eating a salad because he told me to wasn't about sex at all, although my body failed to get the memo that what was happening wasn’t foreplay.

“I did,” I answered, because complicated or not, it was the truth.