It was no simple towel. Sure, this was the towel Laurel used for a day or two after she dyed her hair each month, and the one they fucked on when she was on her period, but it was more than that. It was their little joke—the red cape. Laurel had teased Flynn about being a bull when it came to sex, and that towel was their inside joke. If he came home and found it hanging on the rod it was her way of taunting, Gore me. A red cape but also a green light, one that told Flynn when he exited the bathroom, it was on. The things he craved in the darkest, homeliest shadows of himself were his to take.
They had a safe word but hadn’t used it in ages. Hadn’t needed to. As Laurel had grown confident playing tourist in his fantasies, he’d come to know her limits as intimately as he did her body. He could read her muscles like a blind man read Braille, could tell when their role-playing was riding too sharp and thin a line between arousing and upsetting.
When you had needs like Flynn’s and you wanted them met, intuition was essential. This shit was dangerous and this shit was precise, like whipping knives at a woman strapped to a spinning wheel, circus-style. Get it right or get it very, very wrong.
Which was sort of funny, he thought as he stripped, as his appetites were, after all, so very, very, very wrong.
He spotted a note stuck to the bathroom mirror, an oversized, lined Post-it bearing Laurel’s tidy handwriting. He peeled it from the glass, eyes devouring each word.
I’m a groupie, she’d written. I come to watch you fight every week, infatuated, but I’m afraid of you as well. You offer me a ride home but take me to your place first. You’re sick of the teasing and you’re ready to give me what I’m too scared to admit I want. Maybe I don’t even want it at all. Maybe I’m in over my head. You don’t care. You’ll get what you want, either way.
What Flynn needed in bed was cruelty and dominance. Not every night, not even every week, but the thing that lit him up like jumper cables was the dark stuff, the rough stuff. Ugly stuff it had taken him years to accept, and later embrace. Laurel had always been up for it, willing to go there and able to find pleasure in those dark places too, but over the past couple months she’d begun discovering her own kinks nested inside his.
In the games they played, he craved brutality, but she wanted something more—a narrative. A role beyond mere victim. Flynn was happy enough coming at her like a stranger in a dark alley, but her pleasure deepened with some extra dimension worked in. She wanted layers of emotion—lust clashing with revulsion and fear and surrender. She wanted a character to play, he supposed, and he wanted nothing more than for the thing that set his brain and body on fire to do the same for her.
He twisted the hot tap open and stepped inside the shower, stood under the steaming, scalding water and sighed. He eyed that red towel draped over the rod, growing dark and heavy from the spray. A gash at his temple opened and stung but he didn’t care. Just let the heat soften his muscles, wash the blood and sweat and grime down the drain. Wash his fight persona away and make room for another beast entirely.
A man capable of things few women would welcome.
A man capable of exactly what Laurel wanted, tonight.
2
Laurel stared at her book as much as she was truly reading it, listening to the hush of the water in the bathroom, and soon enough the tap of Flynn’s toothbrush against the sink, the squeak of the medicine cabinet door. She tried to recall the words she’d scrawled on that paper, every detail of the fantasy she’d handed him. Had it gotten him as hot as composing it had done to her? Had he allowed himself a soap-slick stroke of his fist in the steaming shower, or was he saving every ounce of his fight-night aggression just for her?
Flynn appeared in his shorts and tee, silhouetted for a second before the bathroom went dark and the fan silent at the flip of the switch. By the light of the reading lamp his body was glorious, nearly too much, yet so essentially right. A ridonkulous body, to quote Laurel’s roommate, Anne, the one time she’d come along to watch the underground fights. Accurate, but not erotic. Obscene about summed him up.
He looked at Laurel as he crossed the room, kept his eyes on her all the way to his dresser. He must have thought better of the pajama bottoms he’d taken into the bathroom; there wasn’t anything threatening about a drawstring and an elastic waistband. It always helped to have a belt at the ready, and the tease of a zipper or stiff denim never went astray. He seemed to agree, pulling jeans out of a drawer.
Laurel set her book on the shelf behind the bed, sat up and stared back, hugging the pillow on her lap.
Once upon a time, when they’d been all but strangers, Flynn’s body had scared her—she’d not yet known what his intentions were, what lay at the core of his heart and his kink. Physically, he’d been capable of doing for real the things he got off on role-playing, and it had taken a weighing of curiosity versus risk to go there with him. In the end her trust hadn’t been misplaced, and oh, the places he’d taken her.