The books Mal said he’d send him, of course. Before he replies, he hauls himself out of bed to wash his hands and his stomach and put on a fresh pair of briefs. When he’s done, he types out a quick reply.

[RC] Thanks! I’ll check those out

He looks over the list again. The last title surprises him. After all, isn’t loving kind of the opposite of what you’d want from a Dom? Sure, some people might be into that, but from what Mal has told him and from their few times together so far, it seems like he wants Rowan to be rough with him. Aggressive, almost. Make him beg and work for his release.

He pulls out his laptop and searches all the titles on Amazon, starting with The Loving Dominant, and adds them all to his cart, barely blinking at the price. He still has a few days left on his thirty-day Prime trial that he’d started a couple weeks ago, so thankfully he gets free two-day shipping.

Biting his lip, he picks up his phone, contemplating sending something else to Mal. He wants to text him more. Wants to have a conversation about how Mal first found the books, when he read them, how often he seeks out new material, if at all. Wants to ask him what else he likes to read besides kink books. But instead, he gets a brief flashback to the gangbang, to something Mal had said to one of the men, and he laughs to himself a bit and doesn’t think before he types:

[RC] I recall you saying something about fifty shades at the gb, that any good?

He punctuates the text with a smiley face emoji wearing sunglasses.

Mal’s response comes immediately.

[MS] fuck off

Rowan laughs, a pleasant lightness spreading through his chest imagining Mal rolling his eyes at the text, but it’s cut short when he realizes that he fucked up, because now there’s really nowhere for this conversation to go without Rowan forcing it.

So instead, he settles on sending another trusty emoji—this time a hand making an ok symbol—and laments not trusting himself and asking Mal more about his reading, or anything else that would keep them talking.

Sighing, he rolls out of bed and heads to the bathroom to pee, brush his teeth, and wash his face. He skips a shower because it’s Sunday, he has nowhere to be, and he’d showered last night at the club.

He makes his way to the kitchen, lured by the scent of freshly brewed coffee, thanks to the timer on his coffee machine. It might not be the fanciest model, but he’d grown up with a dingy, yellow-stained coffee maker that you had to slap the side of halfway through brewing to get it to stop sputtering. Now he has a milk frother, though he’s only ever used it a couple of times.