She rolled her head back to look at me, and I realized that her hiding her face in her hair might be a stress reaction. What the heck had happened last night?
“He says you and he just can’t get your schedules to match up for sex lately, is that true?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said, and drank more coffee; maybe if I just drank enough of it, I could do this conversation without losing my temper.
“Do you enjoy the sex?”
I drank more coffee. Maybe if I drowned myself in it? “Yes.”
“When he’s really rough in bed, how do you get him to stop?”
“You get him to stop by saying ‘No, stop,’” I said.
She rose up enough to shake her head. “No? I can say no and he’ll respect that? I mean, how do you tell him it’s too rough?”
I fought not to frown at her. “I say, ‘Ow, that hurt, stop it.’”
Jason piped up, “Or my favorite, ‘Do that again and I’ll kill you.’”
“You’re not saying it right, Jason; it’s ‘Do that again and I will fucking kill you.’”
He laughed. “Oh, yeah, I forgot that part.” He leaned against the cabinets, grinning at both of us. I didn’t feel like smiling, so I glared at him. His grin widened, eyes sparkling with it.
I shook my head and went back to huddling over my coffee. Jason was incorrigible; trying to corrige him just irritated me and amused the hell out of him.
“Ow really is a safeword for me,” I said.
“Richard says you like rough sex—was he lying?”
I stared into my coffee, debating on whether to get up and add to the cup, or if I had the courage to look her in the face while we had this conversation. Fuck, courage it was.
I turned to look into those beautiful otherworldly eyes and said, “I like rough sex. I like sex with Richard. Now, what’s up? What do you want to know, or say?”
She sat up straighter, squaring her shoulders. “Well, that is direct.”
“I’m pretty sure I’ve had this conversation with other girlfriends of his over the years, so just say it, Envy. Did the sex get too rough last night?”
“Yes.”
“And what do you want me to do about it?”
“Do you really like sex as rough as he does?”
I shrugged. “Yes, sometimes, not every night, but yeah.”
She shivered. “Fine, Anita, you want to be direct, I can be direct. I had to tell him to stop, or ease up, constantly last night. He’d been great, the sex would be wonderful, he’d bring me to orgasm and then he’d start being too rough again, as if once he made me come he thought it earned him the right to be too rough and hurt me.”
“Most women can take rougher intercourse after enough foreplay,” Jason said. “He wasn’t trying to be mean, just thought he’d done enough prep work to have sex the way he wanted to have it, and you’d enjoy it, too.”
“Well, I didn’t, and I had to keep telling him to stop. I finally told him to get off me, that was it.”
“Do you mean for last night, or do you mean done as in done forever?” I asked.
She looked at me, and her eyes darkened the way that human eyes do when they start to get angry. “Forever. The sex is amazing if he can control himself, but he’s so big that if he just starts pounding it hurts, and it drowns out all the orgasms, or even stops me from orgasming, because it hurts too much.”
“I’m sorry he hurt you,” I said. What else could I say?
“How long has it been since you’ve slept with him?”