“Shit, I’m sorry,” she said, and tried to pull away.

“No, no, no, you stay. If I like pain enough to have these bruises, then I like pain enough to feel you against them.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m a masochist, Sam.”

“Like...a real masochist?”

Kingsley hesitated before answering. He far preferred to keep secrets than to share them. But this was Sam, and he trusted her.

“Nothing arouses me more than pain and fear.”

“Your pain?” she asked. “Your fear?”

“My pain. My fear. And the only things that arouse me as much as my pain and my fear are someone else’s pain and fear. I didn’t know the word switch until four years ago when I found a club in Paris. That’s what I am. A switch.”

“I thought you’d been doing kink since you were a teenager.”

“I was doing kink before I’d even heard the word kink. We didn’t know what we were doing or why we were doing it. We only knew it was what we needed.”

“We? We as in you and Father Eyelashes?”

“He wasn’t Father Eyelashes when we were together. He was a student like me. The first time we were together he was a student,” Kingsley corrected. “The second time he was a teacher—Mister Eyelashes.”

“So that was the teacher you seduced?”

“He was,” Kingsley said with pride. He knew Søren would never have pursued him if Kingsley hadn’t pursued Søren first.

“Did he hurt you like this?” She touched the bruises on his chest and shoulder.

“He hurt me much worse than this, which is why I loved him more than anyone.”

“He hurt you worse than this?” she asked, sounding mildly horrified. “I’m going to be honest—right now I’m struggling with my warring feelings of burning hatred of Søren and total fascination with him.”

“Welcome to the club. But don’t hate him for beating me. I wanted him to. And there were fifty other boys in our school, all of them terrified of him. He was taller than them, stronger than them, smarter than them and had them all in his thrall. And he didn’t touch any of them.”

“So why you, then?”

“They were afraid of him. Some of them might of hated him but it was probably jealousy, not hate. I don’t blame them. I didn’t hate him. I wanted him, and I told him so,” Kingsley admitted without shame. “I stared at him, followed him, sat with him—uninvited—in the library while he was trying to do his homework. I even kissed him. Also uninvited.”

“You devil. Did he kiss you back?”

“He pushed me back on to the bed and held me down so hard I heard something pop in my wrist. It made masturbating one minute after he walked away from me painful. Not that it stopped me.”

“Almost getting your wrist broken turned you on?”

Kingsley took a deep breath.

“It not only turned me on, it turned me on more than anything had ever turned me on before in my life.”

“You were sixteen.”

“I’d been having sex for years by that point.”

“God damn, the French start young.”

“Not young enough. All my first lovers were older by a few years. But nothing prepared me for him.”

“He was your first guy?”

“First person to hurt me during sex, too.” Kingsley laid his hand on the center of Sam’s back and mindlessly rubbed up and down the length of her spine. “He’s the reason I want to build my kingdom. He’s the reason I have to do this.”

“Oh, do tell.” Sam snuggled in more closely to him. Snuggled? They were snuggling now?

“You really want to hear about the sexually deviant escapades of two teenage boys at a Catholic boarding school?”

“You had me at sexually deviant. And escapades. And teenage boys and Catholic boarding school. All of those.”

Kingsley opened his mouth to speak, to tell the story, but the words wouldn’t come out.

“Kingsley?”

“Forgive me,” he said. “It’s... They’re powerful memories.”

“I understand,” Sam said. She traced circles around one of his uglier bruises with her fingertip. “I loved someone when I was a teenager. She smelled like apple. It was her shampoo, nothing mystical, but I think about her every time I smell anything apple-scented. I can almost orgasm from eating one.”

“Søren...he smells like winter. Did you notice that?”

Sam shook her head. “I haven’t gotten that close to him. He makes me nervous.”

“You know when it first gets cold, bitterly cold, and the air has that bite to it? That sting? And the world smells clean and pure? That’s what he smells like.”

“I’ll sniff him someday.”

“You should,” Kingsley said, although he almost wished he hadn’t told Sam about it now. To know the scent of someone’s bare skin was to know that person in the most intimate, primal way. “I would breathe him in when we were in bed together. Drove him crazy. If he caught me doing it, he would pinch my nose and hold it. Bastard.”

Sam rose up and smiled down at him. She pinched his nose and held it.

“You’re in love with him, aren’t you? Still in love with him?”

Kingsley nodded. She released his nose.

“I understand. Continue your story.”