Full Circle by Donya Lynne Page B

road.” He lifted his gaze to hers. “Maybe your
car ran out of gas. You’re miles from the nearest gas station, so
you’re hitchhiking to get there, carrying your one-gallon gas
can.”
    “I would never hitchhike,” she said.
    He smirked. “In my fantasy, you do.”
    Her cheeks flushed pink as she glanced down
at his hands as the tips of his fingers slipped under the satin hem
of her robe. “Okay . . .”
    He dragged his hands back down to her knees.
“So, as you’re hitchhiking, I’d pull up and ask if you needed a
ride. Of course, you’d say yes and hop in my car, even though I’m a
complete stranger and we’ve never met before. We’d talk. I’d ask
you where you were headed. You’d tell me some story about how
you’re on your way to Vegas to become a blackjack dealer or
something.”
    She smiled at his obvious reference to how
they’d met. “And then what?”
    The flirty lilt in her voice reassured him.
It meant she liked the idea of his fantasy. “Then the conversation
would turn more personal. Maybe I would ask you how you plan to
thank me for giving you a ride. Then you’d offer to pay me, and I’d
tell you I don’t want your money. I’d suggest something more
intimate. You might resist at first, but I’d finally wear you down.
I’d pull over somewhere, and we’d have sex. Really hard, feverish,
on-the-side-of-the-road sex that leaves us both shredded. Then
maybe I’d take you to a hotel for the night if I don’t feel you’ve
compensated me enough for my kindness. Tie you to the bed. Torture
you with sex until I’m satisfied. Afterward, I’d take you to the
gas station, return you to your car, help you fill the tank with
your one gallon of gas, and then drive away.”
    “You’d leave me there?”
    “That’s part of the fantasy.”
    “Couldn’t that be dangerous? I mean, where
would we do something like that, and what about—”
    “That’s what the planning is for.”
    She gave him a chagrined smile. “Touché.”
    He winked. “Exactly.”
    Then he gave her a moment to weigh his words
and think about the scene he’d just laid out.
    After a few seconds, she said, “Okay, so how
did you discover that you liked that sort of thing?”
    He cleared his throat and glanced down at the
shallow stretch of comforter between them. He was confessing, so he
couldn’t stop now.
    “I got involved with a woman who was very,
shall we say, adventurous. Nina was older than I was, and she was
bisexual. She introduced me to my first threesome, and then to my
first foursome. I discovered sex parties and fetish clubs through
her.” He cleared his throat again and nervously rubbed his thumbs
back and forth over her fingers. “She was into some hard-core stuff
and got off on role-playing some pretty intense scenes. At the
time, I was so messed up that I didn’t have much of a moral
compass, so I did some pretty fucked-up shit. But as time passed
and I began to reconnect to my moral and ethical side, I grew
uncomfortable with some of the extreme shit she wanted me to do to
her. I loved the role-playing, but sometimes she took it to a place
that was just too dark.”
    “How dark?”
    He shook his head. “Too dark for me to be
comfortable saying much more about it. All I’ll say is she got off
on rape fantasies.” He cringed at the stuff Nina had gotten him to
do to her. He would never be that man again and was glad he’d
gotten out when he did, or he’d be an even bigger fucked-up mess
than he already was. “I’ll admit that much, but I don’t want to
talk about it beyond that. It’s just too much for me.”
    “That’s okay, I won’t make you.” She nodded
compassionately. “How long were you together?”
    “About five months.”
    “Really? That’s a long time for you.”
    He brushed his thumbs over her knuckles. “It
was. But when she hit me up wanting more—wanting a commitment—I
couldn’t do it. It wasn’t just all the hardcore shit she was into.
It was me. I