I was still snuggled into the corner of Domino’s body, his grip across my shoulders holding me in place. The press of his shoulder holster and extra ammo on his belt wasn’t uncomfortable; it was actually sort of reassuring. When you hang around with as many dangerous people as I do, the guns and stuff are just part of it all. I wrapped my arms around his waist to help hold myself up, and wrapping my arms around his waist wasn’t a bad thing. It helped continue to ease that tension that had tried to assert itself and make me start tearing at everything, and everyone, around me. Rage had been almost my only emotion once, and it was still comforting in that dysfunctional way in which people will prefer something unpleasant, but familiar, to something pleasant, but unfamiliar. Sometimes I thought I’d been pushed so far outside my comfort zone that I’d break, and other times I realized that comfort zones were more like prison bars; they protected you, but they also trapped you. I didn’t want to be trapped, not even by myself.
“Yes,” I said, voice a little thick and almost sleepy sounding. I cleared my throat and tried again. “I hear you, Envy.”
“If Richard put his hand back there and pulled your hair, would you enjoy it?”
I blinked at her, studying the intelligence in her gaze, the force of will that was in there. Those were the things that made Envy work for Jean-Claude and for Richard; passive wasn’t something either of them enjoyed.
“Under the right circumstances, yes,” I said.
She shook her head, raised her tea as if to drink it, and then put it back down untouched. “It just hurts when he does it to me.”
“Then he shouldn’t do it,” I said.
“It’s like he needs to do it to someone, or with someone.”
“He does.”
“Why?” she asked.
That made me frown and have to straighten up from the extreme cuddle position I was in, as if I couldn’t think as deeply sitting like that. I patted Domino’s thigh, letting him know that I wasn’t mad, just needed to sit up. I took Nathaniel’s hand off my thigh and into my hand, letting him know, too, that I was all right, and that I wasn’t going to let my discomfort get out of hand and make me lash out again; that was childish, and I wasn’t a child anymore.
“Can I take this one?” Jason asked.
“Be my guest,” I said.
“Enjoying pain with your pleasure is something either you get, or you don’t. If you get it, then you don’t really need it explained, because you know how good it feels, and if you don’t get it, then no amount of talking is going to convince you it makes sense.”
“Sounds like you’ve practiced that speech,” I said.
He frowned, and it seemed to dim his light all the way through. “I’ve been trying to explain it to J.J.”
“Not going well, I take it?”
“No.”
“Don’t tell me you can’t explain it to me, that is not an answer,” Envy said.
“It’s like trying to explain the color red to someone who’s color-blind. You can tell them red is hot, bright, use any word you want, but it won’t really explain to them what the color looks like, it’ll still look sort of gray to them,” I said.
“That’s not an answer either,” she said.
Nathaniel said, “You see bondage as an extra, something to add spice in the bedroom, right?”
She nodded.
“For some of us it’s not spice, it’s the vegetables and fruit.”
“What?” she asked.
He sat forward in his chair, using his free hand to gesture as he spoke, the other hand still in mine. “Think of sex, intercourse, as the meat, but if you eat just meat you’ll get sick and eventually die from complications of a severely imbalanced diet.”
“Okay, I knew that, but I still don’t see the analogy.”
“We can all have sex without bondage and enjoy the hell out of it, but if we don’t have the bondage and submission with it, after a while we get sick and depressed. Sex on its own isn’t a complete sex life for us; we need the kink to be happy and healthy, and without it eventually part of us would sort of die inside.”
She blinked those big blue eyes at him, and then turned to Jason. “Is that how you feel?”
He nodded.