“So you asked what you need to do to sign me for the watches, right?”
The speculative gleam in JP’s eyes brightens and he nods slowly.
“Oui,” he replies with a grin. “Tell me how.”
3
Lotus
“Chase, I said no.” I inject some steel since he doesn’t seem to be getting the hint.
“Why not, Lo?” He cages me against the bathroom counter with his body.
“I don’t have to give you a reason except I don’t want to.” I shake my hands dry since he’s blocking the towel. “I’ve tried to be nice, but you following me in here is not okay.”
“We had a good thing.” He kisses my neck and cups my breast, finding the ring piercing my nipple and squeezing.
“Get the fuck off.” Space in the below deck bathroom is tight. When I shove him, his back hits the door.
“Are you crazy?” Chase snaps, voice low and his face reddening. “You want people to hear?”
“Touch me one more time and everyone will know ‘cause I’ll be kicking your pasty ass all up and down the observation deck.” I step to the door he’s blocking. “Move.”
“Tell me what I did,” he says, his voice and frown softening. “I know it was good for you, too, so why—”
“Chase, I just want something else right now.”
“Someone else?”
“If I did want someone else, that’d be my damn business, but I just want myself. I got shit to figure out. Me shit. Nothing to do with anybody else, and I don’t need attachments, even casual ones, complicating things.”
“Casual? Lo, we weren’t casual.”
“Yes, the hell we were, Chase. You could have fucked all of SoHo twice and started on Hell’s Kitchen—I wouldn’t have cared. We weren’t even casual. We were convenient. I wanted some dick. You wanted some pussy. I was willing and you got lucky, but luck’s run out.”
“And now I’m no longer convenient?”
I sigh, no patience for some needy boy sniffing in my pants tonight. “Don’t act like you haven’t had this conversation a hundred times with girls.”
“Yeah, but this is different.”
“Awwww, is rejection new for you and your dick?” I make a fake sad face. “I feel so bad for the two of you.”
“Is this temporary?” he asks.
Is it?
I have no idea. Chase was the domino that dropped and started this boycott . . . pun intended. That sense of emptiness and dissatisfaction, the ache for something more had been nagging whenever I had sex for a while, but that last time with Chase, fear crept in. He’d held my wrists together over my head, and something changed.
Snapped.
Broke.
He’d held me that way before. Other guys had, too, and it never bothered me. It actually turned me on, but that time was different. I forced myself not to struggle and claw for Chase to let me go. Rationally, I knew he wouldn’t hurt me, but the panic wouldn’t listen. When we were done, none the wiser, he lit his usual post-coital joint, but I ran into the bathroom and collapsed on his shower floor, sobbing uncontrollably.
I can’t do that again.
“I don’t know how long it will take me to sort this stuff in my head,” I finally answer Chase, forcing myself out of the troubling memories.