Dream Chaser (Dream Team, #2)(88)

Okay.

We’d hit the meat of the matter.

Before I could say anything, he went on.

“It’s important, with the situation with your brother, that you get that. It isn’t uncontrolled. I could shift. I could get into bodybuilding or something like that. But I don’t want to. I like how I am, and it works for me.”

“Okay,” I said.

“And straight up, it’s how I am. I didn’t get it until my early twenties, which is good, because when I got it, it helped me work through some things. But it started early for me. We had a teacher in high school. Mrs. Steiner. Chemistry. She was hot. All the guys talked about jacking off, thinking about her. But I never told the guys I jacked off thinking about fucking her tied down to a chemistry bench.”

Hmm.

Maybe time for me to find a teacher outfit.

“I think I’m like I am because I had to have so much control over the other parts of my life, I need to let it go during sex,” I shared.

“Maybe,” he replied. “And I hear that. Especially after watching how you deal, but I think we’re born this way, Rynnie. I think there are things that enhance it, or guide it, but it’s just who we are. It’s not an abnormality or a coping mechanism. Turning it into that kind of thing cheapens it or gives other people a reason to twist it into what they want to believe it is, weird, not right, when it’s not.”

I liked the way he thought of it.

“And I’m the kind of a guy,” he continued, “always have been, who needs to connect sexually with a woman, more even than most guys. It isn’t a hobby. It’s something that feeds me. Like others meditate. I fuck. For the shit that can start messing with my head, I have that, as well as other coping mechanisms. Talking with my brothers. Working out. But sex evens me out most of all because it’s a big part of who I am.”

He shifted so he was resting some of his weight on me and kept speaking.

“Back then, jacking off to Mrs. Steiner, thinking of how I wanted to do that, I thought I was a freak. That’s what people like us learn about our kink. And I thought there was something wrong with me that I could get off with a girl, but I got off more if I held her down. And my mind was always straying to other stuff I wanted to do. Totally did not work for me if I had an assertive woman, not in bed. It wasn’t until I let that shit go after I got out of the military, which, before that, I had some minor scenes with some partners, but it wasn’t anything real because I still had hang-ups about it. I felt trapped in a lot of things I was feeling with what I’d seen and done. And coming to terms with who I was, was freeing.”

“That totally makes sense,” I told him.

He smiled. “Yeah. And it wasn’t like the floodgates were opened, though at that time, they kinda were.”

He smiled bigger, and I returned it.

He kept going.

“It was that I got what was a part of me. Like some guys need to play golf because they need to be in their head about the course and their game and the mental mojo that gives them. They can’t not do that. They can’t not play golf. And thinking on it, I’d put money on the fact there are a lot more people like you and me. But others don’t look on it like playing golf, which is acceptable. They look at it as wrong or deviant. Unacceptable. When it’s really pretty normal. So there’d be a lot of folks who are wound up, who would probably be a lot more smoothed out if they let themselves be who they are.”

“That makes sense too,” I said.

He nodded and continued, “In other words, I’m a guy who likes to have sex like guys like to have sex and I’m a guy who likes to have more sex like guys like to play golf.”

And there was more to love about Boone Sadler.

“Baby, I can keep up with you,” I assured him.

“Rynnie,” he slid a hand up to cup my jaw, “you can’t know that.”

“You’re right, but I’m not telling you what you want to hear, Boone. I really do like sex. And I seriously like it with you.”

He smiled again, this time with just his eyes (still, those green eyes sparkling, it was a great smile) and said, “Good to hear.”

Like he didn’t already know.

“But like you said, we’re new,” he carried on. “If it gets too much for you, it’s not about the fact I’m gonna stray. It’s the fact that we’re gonna have to talk about it.”

I was beginning to worry about what was behind all of this.

“Is there a woman in your past who couldn’t hack it?” I asked carefully.

“Baby,” he murmured, shifting his face closer. “Told you that you were the first woman who slept in my collar.”

“Okay,” I murmured back. “Maybe I didn’t get what that means.”

“The women before you, the ones who were just girlfriends, the ones who were subs, or the couple that were both, they weren’t the ones. I knew that. With the couple that were both, I put in some time to see if that would come. But eventually, I realized it wouldn’t, and I put an end to it.”

Right.

Having trouble breathing again.

“So what you’re saying is, you think I’m the one?”

“I thought you got that with the collar,” he muttered.

I shot up to a hand in the bed, and he rolled to his back automatically when I did.