“TELL ME WHAT you see before you, lovely Twyla,” I quiz, pulling the rolling table in front of where she’s seated in the leather chair against the wall of our playroom.
She sits up straight, looking over the different toys I’ve lined up neatly. “Waterproof vibrator. Butt plug. Umm… that sorta looks like an un-rolled-out condom, but there’s nothing in the center of the ring. Aaand… yeah, that’s all I’ve got,” she lists, and I can’t help but smile.
She said all of that without blushing once. She looks much more relaxed today than she did at our first lesson, and I feel accomplished knowing I’ve helped loosen her up around this stuff. Especially now that I know not only has she never used sex toys but has no sexual experience whatsoever.
I pick up one of the products she got wrong, holding it up in front of her face. “This is a cock ring. The primary purpose of wearing one is to restrict the flow of blood from an erect penis to create a stronger erection, or to maintain a hard-on for a longer period of time. For a guy, it creates sensations of tightness and pressure that many find pleasurable, and for a woman… well, let’s just say if a guy has problems keeping it up, this’ll make him last long enough to where she doesn’t want to gut him for leaving her wanting.”
She takes it out of my hand, rolling it onto three of her fingers before testing out how stretchy it is. She looks up at me curiously. “Have you ever tried one on before?”
“Yes,” I answer, watching her eyes lower to the front of my pants as I feel my cock twitch in response.
“It seems like it would be really uncomfortable. Wouldn’t it be bad to cut off your circulation down there? I mean, even a hair tie that’s too tight around my wrist makes my hand all tingly, and not in a good way. Would it be the same for your, uh….”
She doesn’t finish her question, but since I want to teach her to be more confident when it comes to this subject, the only way to do that is to force her to speak the words. “Would it be the same for my what, doll?”
I see her swallow, gathering her courage to ask her question. She meets my eyes. “Would it be the same for your, um, penis? Would it cut off the circulation?”
I give her a small smile in acknowledgment of her working past her shyness. “Newbies should avoid the ones with little to no stretch to them. The cock ring should never be in place for more than twenty minutes. And if any numbness, pain, or coldness occurs, the guy should discontinue use.”
She nods. “Got it.” She places the ring on the tray, warily eyeing the last two things I’ve set out.
“Today, I thought we’d have a male theme. Everything here can be sold to a man for his pleasure. Ladies aren’t the only ones who come into the store looking for a little something extra in the bedroom,” I tell her, watching her eyes widen as they go from the tray of toys, up to me, and then back down to the tray again before biting her lip. “You got the butt plug right.”
“How could I ever forget what one of those looks like?” she murmurs, scrunching up her face.
I chuckle, pushing her hair back behind her ear, and my stomach does something funny when she leans into my touch. “Nah, I guess you wouldn’t, huh?”
She smiles up at me then, and something passes between us I can’t explain. Time seems to stand still, and everything around us disappears. The only thing I see is the marbling inside her blue irises. She looks at me so trustingly, with such admiration. Like she’s hanging on to my every word. This may not be her favorite subject, but it feels almost like she’d be willing to learn just about anything as long as I was the one teaching her.
I can feel her eyes begging me to lean closer, to close the distance between us and kiss her. And God, how I want to. I’ve never wanted to kiss a woman so badly in my life, and not to lead to anything more, but to just feel her lips pressed against mine while I breathe her in.
A vision of our first lesson flashes through my mind.
“I’m a virgin,” she said, and she visibly held her breath, waiting for my reaction.
Stone-faced on the outside, I acted like she’d just told me nothing more than the weather forecast for the day, when inside I felt like she’d smacked me upside the head, with little Tweety Birds flying around in a circle around me.
“I see. Well then, no. You probably wouldn’t want to try out the Wild Orchid.” My voice was completely calm. “Okay, doll. This changes things.”
Her voice came out small, and I wanted to punch myself for making her feel anything less than the perfection she is. “Does… does that mean you won’t teach me anymore?”
“No!” I exclaimed, making her jump a little. “No, Twyla. I’ll still teach you. It just means I’ll have to explain things in more detail because you haven’t experienced the sensations and stuff a lot of the toys I’m teaching you about provide.”
She let out a sigh of relief.
“But it also means I need to ask you more questions about yourself. I need to know what you have done before so I can figure out a way to help you better understand the products.” It wasn’t a lie. I really did need to know her actual experience level in order to know where to start. But I also wanted to know for myself. What would it be like to be Twyla’s first?
“Well, I haven’t done anything, pretty much,” she replied.
“You are a virgin, but… let’s work our way backward from sex. Have you given or received oral?”
No hesitation. “No.”
“Given a hand job, been fingered?”
Her cheeks pinken. “No.”
“Made out with anyone with heavy petting? Breast play?”
She shifted her weight from foot to foot where she stood between my legs as I sat on the padded table inside the playroom. “No, none of that.”
My voice came out deep and soft with my last question, my cock straining against the zipper of my jeans. “Have you never been kissed, Twyla?”
She looked up into my eyes, searching but finding no judgment there, so she whispered, “Not properly.”
In this moment, I’d do just about anything to be the one to give Twyla her first proper kiss. But not here. Not when I know she’s never been with anyone before. I don’t want her first real kiss to be next to a tray of anal sex toys in the middle of one of my club’s playrooms. She deserves more than that.
So instead of leaning down as her eyes implore, as everything inside me commands, I slide my finger up the bridge of her little nose to push her glasses back into place before gently tapping the tip of it. I try without speaking to make her understand I’m not rejecting her, and she seems to get it, because her face softens and she gives me a secret smile.
She’s the one to break the silence. “So um… that one’s kind of terrifying. What’s it for?” She nudges her chin toward the last toy on the tray.
“Ah, sweet Twyla.” I grin wickedly as I pick it up and hand it to her. “That’s a vibrating, ribbed anal probe.”
And I don’t think I’ve ever laughed harder than when I see her toss the toy back onto the tray like it’s a snake about to bite her.
THE NEXT COUPLE of days pass in a steady flow of text messages with Twyla. My phone rarely leaves my hand, and I barely sleep, because when I’m not texting her while I’m working the nightly hours at Club Alias, I’m chatting with her during the morning while she’s at work, when I’d normally be dead to the world. That, and I have no appetite for the buffet of submissives at the club since meeting her, so no time is killed in the playrooms either.
Every spare minute, I’m talking with Twyla, learning more and more about her. Her likes and dislikes. Her favorite music, which she knows much more about than TV shows and movies, because she said she always had her radio playing in her lab at work in California.
I haven’t learned the reason why she and her sister decided to move here, especially considering she’d been a rising star in her industry back home; the subject somehow always changes before we delve too deeply. But she did tell me all about her loving parents. Her mom was a homemaker, and her dad ran his own car detailing business, which apparently brought in a ton of money with the caliber of cars in the area they lived in California, somewhere between LA and San Diego. They sold their large family home on the West Coast once both of their daughters graduated high school, and then moved to Florida to retire. They made sure their girls were set up in college first, but having been in their late thirties when they’d had Astrid then forty when they had Twyla, all of them agreed the move to the slower-paced and relaxed community of Orange Tree, Florida would be wonderful for them.
I asked Twyla why she and her sister hadn’t moved near her parents if they were just looking for a change, but a customer had arrived at the shop. When she texted me back, it was to tell me what she’d sold, and we never went back to the original question.
I might not know what brought the raven-haired beauty to our small town, but whatever it was, I become more and more grateful for it with every passing hour I spend getting to know her. It feels like I’ve known her for so much longer than the week that’s passed, and more than that, I trust her. I’ve told her more about myself than any female on the planet. Only Doc, Corbin, and Bryan know me better, and that’s only because of the years we’ve spent together, more as brothers than just partners. That, and our mercenary business.
What would she think if she found out we kill people for paychecks? Whether we have a code or not, not every girl in the world would be as cool with the fact we take people’s lives as Corbin’s wife, Vi, was. She’d barely batted an eyelash, but she’d been a military wife to begin with, used to the thought of her husband killing bad guys. Sweet Twyla, though—so innocent, so sheltered by her own introverted personality—never having been around such violence, how would she react?
But there was no need for me to worry about it since we hadn’t even shared our first kiss yet. I was getting way ahead of myself.
Yet the fact I was even thinking about it told me she was more special than anyone I’d ever met.