He'd left the shirt off. When he made motions to put it back on for dinner, she'd asked him not to do so. He hadn't said anything about that, but the flicker of his gaze as he complied had made her focus on her lasagna intently for the first few minutes of their dinner. Now she studied the smooth expanse of his back. As she expected, he did have tattoos. Between his shoulder blades was a blood-colored heart with a Celtic triquetra overlay done in black. Below it was the infinity sign, the sideways figure eight, intertwined with a rendering of handcuffs. Below that was script.
Yours, unconditionally.
When she'd indicated he was merely a tool for his Mistress, not genuinely interested in Gen for her own sake, his negative reaction had been emphatic. And yet it niggled at Gen, his level of compliance to...everything. Yours, unconditionally. For herself, it was a highly alien concept, agreeing to give oneself to a complete stranger, just because someone else ordered it.
"What if I wanted to tie you up and drown you in my bathtub?"
"You have a shower."
She made a face at him. "You know what I mean. Smartass."
He grinned, pulling ice cream from the freezer. "I draw the line at being murdered. Unless my Mistress convinced me I'd done something that really deserved that. I hope that won't be the case this weekend."
She couldn't tell when he was joking. Holding off on further questions for the moment, she indulged herself in a study of the taper of his waist, how his jeans rode his hips, the shift of his buttocks. He'd shed shoes and socks, so he was barefoot. He'd taken off the silver-and-black double-wrapped choker before dinner, though he still wore one of the bracelets.
He brought her a small dish of sherbet, decorated with a couple vanilla wafers. Taking a seat on the floor next to the couch, he braced his back against the foot of her easy chair and drew his knees up into a bent position, his body angled so he could see her. She was willing to make room for him next to her, but he indicated he was good where he was.
"Is sitting on the floor a sub thing? Or you just like the floor?"
He lifted a shoulder. "Habit is part of it. At home or in a club setting, my Mistress often requires me to kneel or sit on the floor, so my head isn't higher than hers."
"That seems really egotistical."
"Not in that context. She's honoring what I am by letting me act as her submissive in every way. When she makes me act like her equal, often she's punishing me."
She digested that. "You don't strike me as a cringing slave type."
"It's not like that, either." He gestured with the spoon. "It's hard to explain. You sort of have to feel it, or have a sense of it."
"So you could explain all night long and I wouldn't get it." That gave her in inexplicable sinking feeling, but Noah touched her foot.
"No, not necessarily. You don't have to be as deep in it as Brendan or Lyda to figure it out. All of us have Dom and sub tendencies. Think about your job. Who would you say is the alpha dog there?"
"Marguerite," she said without hesitation.
"Yeah, no brainer. Okay, how about between you and Chloe? When push comes to shove, who defers to who? And why?"
She was about to say neither, but then she gave it some thought. "I guess...me. I don't know if that's an age thing, since I'm older than she is, and I'm not saying she does everything I say--I'd fall over dead in shock if that happened--but..."
"But you have an intuitive sense of authority over her that you both accept." He shrugged. "We're animals, and we organize ourselves in a pack mentality, whether it's in a family setting, work setting, even in social groups."
She shifted. This was starting to feel like an academic discussion, where the verbiage might get above her head, but he defused her tension about that by bringing it back to specifics. "That's the day-to-day, vanilla side of it. High level and general. If you want to understand the way it happens specifically between people like Lyda and me, or Chloe and Brendan, you do kind of have to see it in action. But I'm not pushing you to go to a club or anything."
"It's like being in the ocean versus standing on shore, looking at it," she guessed.
"Exactly." He looked relieved that she understood, hadn't become defensive. "But there are different grades to us. Like Lyda. She's pretty much all Domme. Even when she's interacting in the vanilla world, you see it, feel it."
"I hadn't noticed," Gen said dryly.
He grinned. "Other Dommes are only that way at the club or in their own bedrooms. In the real world, they might hold what you'd consider more subservient roles. Secretaries, convenience store clerks, things like that. Being a Domme in the bedroom balances that with a power shift. You see that with men as well. It's why the stereotype exists about the CEOs wanting to be tied up and spanked. There's a lot of truth to the idea of powerful men wanting to be subs in the bedroom. Whereas the guy who picks up your trash might be a hell of a Dom.
"But you can't paint everyone with the same brush," he added. "Sometimes what you see on the outside reflects the inside as well. A powerful CEO might be a powerful Dom, and the garbage guy might like being tied up." His lips twisted wryly. "And I obviously fall in the latter category. I have been a garbage man once or twice."
"I bet that can get confusing. Or cause conflict. People like being able to classify things, keep them neat."
"Yeah. Sometimes people have trouble accepting something as truth, when it's different from what they expect...or want it to be." A shadow crossed his countenance.
"Like Lyda about Brendan and Chloe." Gen ventured the comment when he didn't say anything else. "You okay?"