few minutes of making out to the point of breathlessness, I was already good for rounds two and three, depending on him—but before we could make any headway, his phone started screeching.
I growled against his lips, trying to keep him focused as he reached for his phone on the arm of the couch. “Ignore it.”
“It’s my alarm, it won’t stop,” he told me. As soon as he looked at the screen, his face went blank. “Oh, shit. I forgot, I have a munch in an hour.”
“A munch?” I asked, leaning back for a better look at him. “You mean that freaky club you all belong to?”
It was no secret Dante and Cash spent lots of time at Skyn, one of the many “speciality” clubs in downtown LA. I’d always thought those clubs were just for people looking for hookups, but evidently they had all kinds of “playrooms” and equipment. Shit I really didn’t want to know about in the context of our lead singer and drummer’s Daddy-boy romance, as much as I loved them both. Cash had literally saved Dante’s life, and they were stupidly happy together, which meant I was happy for them.
There were just certain mental images I did not need.
“Yes, that club,” Rafael said dryly, pushing me off his lap so he could zip up his leathers.
“Can’t you just bail?” I asked, pulling my jeans back on even though my head was still spinning. “It’s just a party.”
“It’s not a party, it’s a munch,” he corrected. “It’s an event where everyone meets in a vanilla setting to talk and arrange sessions. And it’s an important one.”
“Oh, right,” I snorted, falling back against the arm of the couch. “You’re looking for a new sub.”
His last two had flaked when they realized the reality of dating a world-famous rock star wasn’t what it was cracked up to be. The endless tours, the long stretches with terrible reception that allowed jealousy to flourish in the imagination, the crazy hours in the recording studio when they were home…
Then there were the groupies.
It was one thing to hook up with a rock star and another to actually date one.
Why Rafael kept trying to date normal people, I didn’t know. I wasn’t even sure what he did qualified as dating so much as having fuck-buddies he whipped and dripped hot wax on from time to time.
At least, I assumed that was what he did. I’d had enough time to let my imagination run wild, but when it came to actually picturing him doing that shit with someone else…
He shot me a look over his shoulder before he went back to fussing with his hair in the mirror. “We’re not on the road anymore, so yeah, I’m gonna at least try to move my personal life forward before I end up a washed-up middle-aged rock star with nothing but a string of one-night stands.”
I pulled my feet up onto the couch and my knees to my chest, watching him. “You could just date someone you like and do weird shit with them. I don’t get why it has to be all formal.”
The contracts boggled my mind. No way that shit was legally binding. I mean, who went to law school in the hopes of arbitrating the finer points of butt plug etiquette?
Again, I had to assume that was what went on because I didn’t really have any direct experience. I would’ve been down for trying whatever, but evidently, it didn’t count as intimacy to Rafael unless he tied me up while he fucked me.
He’d gotten way more serious about it ever since Dante and Cash got together, but I liked imagining the reason behind that even less than I liked imagining him fucking other people. We’d fucked plenty of people together, but that was different, and it was usually hot goth chicks. I wouldn’t have minded sharing him with one of those, but apparently me and my imaginary Morticia impersonator girlfriend named Raven Riot weren’t enough for him.
“You wouldn’t understand,” he said. “I’d never be happy in a vanilla relationship, and it’s not fair to drag some normie into it and expect them to be what I want.”
“So what do you want?” I asked, figuring I could get away with asking that since there was little we hadn’t talked about while trashed to one degree or another. Hell, he might’ve already told me and I just didn’t remember, but I doubted it. “What’s your idea of the perfect sub-slash-partner?”
He hesitated, and I was worried