It wasn’t only her song that sexually excited him. The tickle of her breath against his skin drew a soft moan of longing from the back of his throat.
“Kellen?”
He loved the way his name sounded when she spoke it. “Dawn?”
“How long has it been since you last had sex?”
He sat stunned that she would ask him something so forward.
“Uh, why?” he said after a moment.
“I don’t usually have sex with men I’ve just meet, but I want to with you.”
He closed his eyes and swallowed. How could he turn down her offer? It wasn’t that women never propositioned him. They did it all the time—rubbed up against him, shoved their hands down his pants, whispered suggestions into his ear—but he hadn’t been interested. Sara’s memory had given him the strength to say no. Hell, when he was alone with a woman, he found forwardness downright repulsive, but he was alone with Dawn and her words didn’t have the usual effect on him. He wanted her. God, he f**king wanted her.
Promise you’ll never make love to another woman, Kellen. Sara’s words echoed through his head. They were like a slap to the face.
“It’s been five years,” he said.
“You haven’t done anything in five years?”
“I didn’t say I hadn’t done anything. I just haven’t been inside a woman in that long.”
“Oh,” she said.
He could hear the disappointment in her voice. This time he was glad it was dark so he didn’t have to see it on her face.
“What kinds of things have you done?” she asked unexpectedly.
“Alone or with Owen?”
She gasped. “With Owen? Are you g*y?”
“I’m not g*y, Dawn. A bit confused maybe.” He rubbed at his eyebrow with two fingertips while he gathered his thoughts. “Can I talk to you about something? Something I haven’t even talked to Owen about? Something I need to tell him but am so worried about how he’ll react that every time I try to bring it up, I can’t form the words.”
What was it about the darkness that allowed him to open up? Or maybe it wasn’t the darkness at all. Maybe it was the kindred spirit within the woman beside him that made him feel he could tell Dawn anything.
“I’ll listen,” she said. “I probably won’t say the right thing though.”
He doubted there was a right thing to say. “Soon after Sara died, Owen started going to sex clubs and guilting me into going with him.”
“What’s a sex club? Is it like a whorehouse?”
He smiled and couldn’t resist running a hand along the base of her spine. Oh the naughty things he could introduce her to, Miss Sweet and Vanilla.
“No, you pay for a certain service at a whorehouse and that’s what you get. Sex clubs are where people of certain sexual tastes congregate and hook up.” He turned his face to whisper in her ear, and the tickle of her hair against his nose set off nerve endings that sent waves of pleasure to his groin and triggered alarm bells in his head—alarm bells he chose to ignore. “What are your sexual tastes, Dawn? I can tell you where there’s a club for it.”
“I wouldn’t be comfortable hooking up with some stranger in a club,” she said. The muscles of her back were taut beneath his palm.
No matter how much he enjoyed it, he needed to stop touching her. This thing between them wasn’t going to happen. “I wouldn’t want you to hook up with a stranger,” he said, which was the truth, but he had no business saying that to her. And he really did need to talk about what was going on with Owen. Maybe someone outside their relationship could make sense of it. “So one night while I was waiting for Owen to finish up spanking and screwing some chick he’d just met, I caught the eye of a man named Toshi.”
Dawn shifted beside him, squirming slightly.
“I didn’t have sex with Toshi,” he said.
“It’s none of my business if you did.”
“Do you want me to not talk about this? I can tell it’s making you uncomfortable.”
“Yeah, uncomfortable,” she whispered. “We’ll go with that.”
“Toshi is a master in the Japanese art of Shibari.”
“Does that involve swords and disembowelment?”
“No, ropes and release. Toshi spoke of tying knots as if it were a high art form—the way an inspired painter or a poet or a musician talks of his work. I was intrigued. I guess I’m a sucker for an artist. I let him show me a few techniques on one arm. He taught me to tie a couple of knots and then when Owen came to collect me, Toshi told me to keep the rope and if I wanted to learn more, where I could find him.”
“So I guess you found him.”
“I did a lot of research about Shibari on the Internet, even read a few books, but ultimately I did seek him out, because nothing compares to being taught one-on-one by a master.”
“That’s true.”
“He has a studio in San Francisco,” Kellen said. “He binds people with ropes and then he photographs them. For the first year after Sara died, nothing excited me—emotionally or physically. But as I walked through his gallery, admiring his work—flesh against intricate designs in colored rope—I’m not going to lie, I was aroused. The guilt almost made me leave.”
“Why did you feel guilty? It sounds erotic to me. Aren’t we supposed to get excited by things we find erotic?”
He didn’t want to go into that, so he pressed forward in his story. “Yeah, well, I asked Toshi to teach me to be an artist like him, to show me how to tie the ropes into designs that accentuated every line of the human form. He said in order to understand the art form, I first had to be a subject. He told me to strip off my clothes and allow him to bind me.”
Dawn squirmed again. When her hand lightly touched his bare knee, he gasped. He should have skipped this part of the story, he realized too late. That first experience with bondage had been one of the most intense emotional and sexual experiences of his life.
“Did you go through with it?” she asked.
“Yeah. I was scared to death. With each knot Toshi tied, I became more tense, more afraid, more aroused. When he was finished, I was aware of every inch of my body. I was completely helpless. I thought he might force me to have sex—thought I’d be okay with it even though I’d promised Sara. But once he had me bound, he whispered, ‘Now, you are free, my student,’ and then he sat beside me with one hand between my shoulder blades while I fought the rope. Not physically. I couldn’t move if I’d wanted to. But mentally I raged against my restraints for a really long time.”