Page 23 of Praised
ROSE
Five daysafter the best sex of my life, and I’d yet to jerk off without closing my eyes and picturing my cock buried up Flynn’s ass. And I didn’t know much, but I was pretty certain that most men who said they liked to be called Sir didn’t make a habit of getting on their back for other men, especially men like me. But he had, and he’d done it so well, and I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about coming inside of him again or what kinds of things I would have to do to earn the right to call him Sir.
Variety was the spice of life, after all.
But there were some things I refused to budge on, like the whole casual versus serious situation we’d found ourselves in. And half a week later, I didn’t know what had possessed me to leave him my phone number. Maybe it had been in the hope he’d change or maybe it had been wishful thinking. Probably a little bit of both. I’d meant what I told him—I didn’t want him to change just to get me back into bed. That wasn’t fair to either of us, and it wasn’t sustainable either.
Just because he wasn’t on my body didn’t mean I had to keep him off my mind.
After I’d put my number into his phone on Saturday night, or Sunday morning, whenever it had been, I stopped myself from sending a message to my phone from him. Having his number would only get me into trouble, and Cody had proved to bring more than enough of it to my life these days.
My microwave counted down toward zero and I stabbed at the button to open the door when it ticked down to one second remaining. My frozen macaroni and cheese smelled delicious, and my stomach gave a confirming growl at the first whiff of the cheesy, goopy goodness. I had to work later that night and knew getting dinner between tables would be a rough chance, so I’d planned to enjoy my afternoon with some melted cheese and a quick binge of my favorite murder documentary.
Unfortunately, the chime of my doorbell immediately turned any excitement sour because only one person used the doorbell, and it was Cody.
“Go away!” I shouted toward the door, carrying my food into the living room.
The doorbell rang a second time.
And then a third.
“Cody!” I hollered his name. “No!”
“I just want to talk,” he pleaded through the door. “Just let me in and hear me out, and if you don’t like what I have to say, I’ll go.”
I knew enough about the man—who up until a week ago I thought I loved—to know he wouldn’t leave without getting his way, so with a quickly growing sense of dread in the pit of my stomach, I abandoned my meal and shuffled over to the front door.
I secured the chain and unlatched the deadbolt, pulling the door back a couple of inches until the chain went taut. Cody immediately shouldered into the door, his expression twisting from tiredness to anger.
“Let me in, Rose,” he said.
I shook my head, hand still on the doorknob. I used my body to block his view into my apartment, even though he could easily see right over my head. Sometimes I hated how small I was, but more often than that, I hated how being small made me feel. I was the smallest person in my family and I’d always been the smallest kid in all of my classes, and oftentimes it made me feel powerless, and that left me scared.
It wasn’t so much that I needed control as I hated the way I felt without it. Weak, and small, and scared in a way that manifested like sludge in my veins, slowing my thoughts and my movements until I didn’t know up from down. I’d spent a long time trying to work around those feelings or through them, but they weren’t gone completely. Things that made me feel powerful had helped, the lingerie and the lace, for one. The teasing ease of leaning into non-traditional femininity, another.
And it was the prickling unease that registered in my body during Cody’s onceover that reminded me I was in a pair of pink lace boy shorts, the edge of them peeking out over the waistband of the sweats I’d not yet bothered to change out of. I didn’t have on any makeup, and I definitely wasn’t wearing a shirt. I knew what I looked like, and I knew what he thought about it.
“You can’t come in,” I said, squaring my shoulders.
“You haven’t been answering my calls.”
“Because I don’t want to talk to you.”
I tried to push the door closed, but his foot was in the way.
“You’re overreacting,” he said, brows knitting together like he meant the insult as an apology.
“You may think that, but either way…”
“Sugar, come on.” Cody tried to reach into the apartment, fingers dusting across my stomach before I jumped back, out of reach.
“You don’t get to touch me anymore,” I warned. “I’m done talking to you, and I’d like you to go.”
As he sputtered a protest at me, I wondered what I’d ever seen in him in the first place. Sure, he was attractive enough, but he was bossy, and not in a fun way. Not in the way Flynn wanted to be.
Flynn.
There he was again.
