The hours between seeing his message and six o’clock Saturday were a form of slow torture. I considered staying late Friday afternoon, to eat up unoccupied brain time, but I realized if I kept working, I would have even more hours to pad on Monday by using the slowest possible means to complete tasks. Better to save the limited distractions of work for when I needed them to keep me from replaying…whatever was going to happen on Saturday. God, I hoped there would be something to replay that wasn’t me epically striking out. I packed up and went home at five.
Izzy was at her studio painting late, so I cobbled together some dinner and nestled into the couch with a book. The words on the page blurred repeatedly as I fantasized about what was going to happen and I got caught at the crossroads of extremely turned on and incredibly anxious. It didn’t take me long to give up and slip myself a sleeping pill, curl up with some old faithful TV, and fall asleep before ten o’clock. At least I would be well-rested for him.
I usually didn’t dream when I took a pill, shutting up my mind was kind of the point, but I woke sometime in the small hours, panting and sweating, almost painfully aroused. All that was left was a jumble of images. Strong hands pinning my body, stinging skin, the feel of teeth on my neck and my breasts, with Matthew bare-chested and smirking, the architect of it all. I’d liked a bit of rough sex as much as the next girl, but this was something else, something more. I wanted it to hurt. And I wanted Matthew to do it. What was it about him that did this to me?
I spent the better part of Saturday preparing myself for the night I hoped to hell was coming. If he wanted to take me home, I was damn well going to be ready for it. I showered, carefully shaved my legs, and tidied my bush. I hadn’t had sex in actual years, and that level of commitment to personal grooming had long since gone the way of the dinosaur, but I knew I would feel self-conscious if nakedness ensued and I still had a full seventies’ porn muff. Especially if he got anywhere near me with his mouth. And oh, I wanted him to get near me with his mouth.
I tweezed my eyebrows and hunted down the rogue hairs you make your friends promise to tell you about if they ever spot them before you do. I blow-dried my hair for the first time since I could remember and put on a minimal amount of makeup. I didn’t want to risk leaving face prints on his pillows if I could help it. Not that my fantasies involved being shoved facedown in his pillows. Nope. Not at all.
I put on my favorite bra, one that hoisted and shaped my boobs into a fairly impressive display of cleavage, along with the matching panties. I felt like a knight preparing for battle, performing ablutions, donning my boob-hiking armor, the black jersey knit skirt and pale pink silky camisole were my sword and shield.
I drew out each task in a bid to keep my mind occupied on the present, lest I end up a quivering, panic-stricken mess by the time Matthew arrived to pick me up. The snail’s pace kept me busy until almost six, but I still had time to fret and reconsider my outfit fifteen thousand times. When the door finally rang, the pile of clothes I had pulled out of my closet and rejected had taken over most of my bed, and I had to change my cardigan because I already had sweat marks under my armpits.
I ran out of my room, slipped on flats and a jacket, and flew down the stairs. I forced myself to slow down on the last couple of steps and tried to stroll down the hallway at a stately pace, not wanting to broadcast my nerves at full blast. I paused at the door for a steadying breath before I opened it.
“Hi.” Okay, that came out a little breathless.
Matthew took my hand and leaned forward to kiss my cheek. “Jolene. You look lovely.”
He stepped back and, without a doubt, checked out my tits. Score one for my favorite bra. I grinned when he visibly forced his focus back up to my face. With my hand still in his, he led me to the curb and ushered me into the car.
“Where are we going?” I asked once we were moving.
“I thought I’d make you dinner.” He kept his eyes staring straight ahead at the road, but I detected the hint of a sheepish smile on his lips.
“Kidnapping is the second date?” Shit. I bit the inside of my lip lest anything else slip past my filter.
But he laughed and my belly fluttered at the sound. “It’s not kidnapping if I promise to let you go whenever you want to.”
“Uh-huh,” I said dubiously, wanting to keep the joke going. “What if I don’t trust you?”
“I can turn around and take you home right now,” he replied stonily. We’d gone from cracking jokes to deadly seriousness in a split second, and I had no idea why.
“No, take me to your lair. I trust you.”
We stopped at a light, and he looked at me for a long moment. “Good girl.”
Those two words sent a delicious shiver over my skin for no earthly reason I could name. I should have been insulted that he’d praised me like a dog or a small child, and yet I wanted nothing more than for him to say it again, to do something worthy of being called a good girl.
He lived close to the hospital he worked out of, and not unlike Izzy and I, in a nicer apartment than the average overeducated Bostonian, no doubt in some part thanks to his family. His one bedroom in a newly built high-rise wasn’t overly large or lavishly decorated, but he lived alone in a place that might otherwise have had two people sharing the bedroom and a third secretly living on the couch for good measure.
The mismatched furniture looked hand-me-down, but these were probably cast-offs from his parents, not thrift store or curbside finds with stains of dubious origins and sagging cushions. Nothing like the apartment I’d left behind in Vermont with its milk crate coffee table and the couch I hadn’t even bothered to try to sell when I moved. I actually kind of missed the plaid monstrosity. It was insanely comfortable, even if curling up on it had required a rather high level of cognitive dissonance about the origins of its stains.
Matthew didn’t give me a grand tour. We kicked off our shoes and jackets at the door, and he installed me on a stool at his breakfast bar while he did, in fact, make me dinner. I got a small taste of what he must be like in the lab. He followed the recipe exactly, measuring right down to the quarter teaspoon of salt he added to the sautéing onions. He focused entirely on the task at hand. I doubted anything had ever burned in his kitchen with the hovering and setting timers. I wondered how he would react to watching me cook, with my much more haphazard a bit of this and that until it’s done approach.
We ate side by side at the breakfast bar. He talked about work, and I got to enjoy watching him thoroughly nerd out while trying to explain his research in more detail. He talked with his hands, waving his fork around and drawing shapes on the counter with his fingertips. His eyebrows scrunched as he searched for the right non-technical words to explain a concept, and I could see why he had faint crow’s feet the way his eyes crinkled with his huge smile when it clicked for me. He was patient, even if I understood a fraction of what he was trying to tell me about the mechanisms governing neuroplasticity and their relationships with neurobiological disorders. I was slightly awed and a little envious of his passion. Still, when he started to grab a notebook to diagram a rabbit hole about epigenetics and their role in the expression of symptoms following traumatic brain injuries, I had to stop him before my brain fuzzed out.
“Sorry, I get excited.” He smiled at me from under a hank of dark hair.
“No, it’s kind of adorable,” I blurted, and my cheeks heated. “I’m jealous, actually.”
He furrowed his eyebrows at me. “Jealous, why?”
“You care about what you’re doing. I wish I had that. The only reason I go to work every day is because I need the money.”
“What do you want to be doing?” he asked, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, as though everyone out there was able to follow their dreams, paychecks be damned.
“I don’t know. I never had some sort of calling or anything. Not like you or Izzy. I didn’t spend a lot of time as a kid dreaming about what I wanted to be when I grew up. I sort of figured, you grow up, you get a job because you have to, and that’s that.” I toyed with a loose strand of hair.
“I didn’t dream of being a neurobiologist when I was a kid either. But I’m good at it, at making connections in data and visualizing structures, and one day the work I’m doing will help people. I spend a lot of time looking at spreadsheets of data and staring at tissue stains, and even if what we’re working toward ultimately turns out to be a dead end, it still adds to the pool of knowledge that everyone in our field is working from. We make more mistakes and false starts than we have sweeping successes, but ruling out answers by our failures paves the way for success down the line. And those wins feel like nothing else.”
“Yeah, I don’t even know what the company I’m working at does.”
He laughed, though I was being completely serious. I think I was entering customer or maybe patient information, but the company I worked at was a contractor for a contractor. I could have been compiling NSA phone records for all I knew.
“What did you major in?”
“Literature, mostly. Not a lot of jobs that require sitting in quiet rooms reading novels, though.”
“Would you want to work with books? I know a few people at academic presses, and I have a friend who runs a small press that does some niche stuff. I could introduce you.”
“No, thank you.” He was being kind, and I didn’t want him to feel obligated. I certainly didn’t want him to think I was more interested in what he could do for me than I was in him. I knew too well what that was like for Izzy. “That’s nice of you, but it’s completely unnecessary. I think it’s cool that you’re so into what you do. I’m babbling. Please ignore me.”
I tried to duck under the counter. He grabbed me and set me back upright on my stool. His lips curled into a smile and I thought he might kiss me. He pulled back, and his mouth fell as he glanced around the room nervously.
“Listen, Jolene.” He ruffled his fingers through his hair. “I’ve enjoyed this.” He paused, the look on his face questioning. My stomach fell somewhere around my toes.
“But?” If he was going to end this before it even started, we might as well get it over with. I shouldn’t have brought up the work thing and now it was weird, and I wanted to hide under the counter again. I started to collapse on myself. He reached over and cupped my cheek, forcing me to stay upright.
“Please, let me say this, Jolene.” He took a deep breath. “I need to be clear with you on a few things.”
That did not help. “Okay?”
“I work. A lot. My hours can be erratic, and you might have picked up on the fact that I tend to get hyper-focused and absorbed in what I’m doing. I’m not good at being a boyfriend. I’d like to keep seeing you, but I understand if you’re looking for something different.”
“Oh. What does that even mean?”
“Oddly enough, it’d be easier for me to see you on a consistent schedule. That might sound contradictory, but it helps me to be able to be in the right head space when I’m with you, with no distractions.”
“Okay. I guess that makes sense.”
“Good.” He smiled and let out the breath he must have been holding. Before I could relax, he took another deep breath and held it.
“I need things between us to be a certain way, Jolene.”
“Okay…” Wasn’t that what he had just told me?
“Fuck, there really is no way to ease into this conversation, is there?” He glanced up at me sheepishly. Matthew nervous and unsure of what to say was disconcerting, to say the least.
“What conversation?”
He scrubbed his palms over his cheeks and dropped his hands into his lap. “I like—I need—control when we’re together.”
“Control?” My eyebrows shot up.
“I want you to give me your control and your consent to do with you what I please, within your limits, obviously.”
“What does that mean, Matthew? What do you want to do to me?”
“I want your submission, Jolene. I want you to let me take care of you. I want you to trust me to do that. I need you to. But I need to know what that means to you. I suspect our interests are similar, but we need to discuss what we both need and want.”
“Need and want what? I still don’t know what you’re talking about. What am I supposed to be submitting to?”
“I want to spank you, whip you, tie you up, and fuck you until you can’t see straight. And I need you to want it too.” His words came out in a rush.
“Oh.” My brain was having a hard time keeping up. Mostly it was stuck on his saying he wanted to fuck me until I couldn’t see straight. Yes, please.
His eyes went wide and he started to backpedal but I cut him off. “Give me a minute, please.”
I needed to wrap my brain around the idea. If I was being honest with myself, I’d been fantasizing about the man tossing me around and having his way with me from the moment I’d clapped eyes on him. I let out my breath, slowly and carefully, and kept my eyes down, trying to gather my wits without getting lost in the notion that he wanted me.
“You’re into BDSM?”
He nodded and so many things fell into place. His whole cocky, bossy attitude made more sense, and his no-mind-games, no-bullshit approach to asking me out. His meticulousness wasn’t confined to the kitchen or the lab, it was him. And now, he had dropped the possibility of fulfilling every one of my dirty fantasies from the last six weeks straight into my lap. Before I could catastrophize, I asked myself what was the worst that could happen? Hot sex? Or I could hate it and that would be the end of it, but I could at least say I had tried something new. Those were the most realistic possible outcomes. Who would have thought random therapy tricks would come in handy at a time like this?
I glanced up at him, and he looked so sweetly nervous, I wanted nothing more than to climb in his lap and tell him he could do whatever he wanted to me.
“Have you ever done anything like that before?” His face was stuck somewhere between horrified and hopeful.
I nearly burst out laughing from a combination of nerves and the ridiculousness of that notion, but I didn’t want him to think I was laughing at him. “Yeah, no, definitely not,” I snorted.
Matthew relaxed slightly and ran his fingers backwards through his hair, leaving it sticking up like a porcupine. He looked relieved that I wasn’t running screaming for the door. “I’m sorry.” He shook his head, but with a smile. “I’m totally fucking this up, aren’t I?”
“It’s fine.” I should have been freaking out. But for some reason I wasn’t. Maybe it was the simple shock of even having this conversation. Maybe it was him. Maybe it was every secret dream and fantasy coalescing into a tangible opportunity. Maybe I was desperate. I took his hands and cracked the first joke that came to mind. “Is there a contract? Am I supposed to call you Master? Do you have a dungeon?”
That made him laugh, much to my relief. If he’d been insulted, I would have had to consider running for the hills.
“No, there is no contract. I don’t have the desire or the time for that kind of arrangement. My name will do fine, and I don’t have a dungeon, only a bedroom with accessories.”
“Thank god. No offense, I’m sure you’re very dom-ly and all, but I don’t think I could call anyone Master with a straight face.”
“You never know.” The corner of his mouth twitched. “I may ask you to call me ‘sir’ if we were ever to play in public.”
“Wait, public?” I nearly choked. I could not imagine taking this kinky sex show on the road.
He smiled. “Like I said, you never know.” His face turned serious again. “I enjoy testing boundaries, but I’m not interested in traumatizing you. I will never force you to do anything you truly don’t want to do.”
I believed him whole-heartedly, so I squeezed his hand and said, “I know.”
He sighed and raked his fingers through his hair again. “Fuck. There are other things we should talk about, but right now I want to take you to bed, strip you naked, and fuck you senseless.”
Dear sweet Jesus, yes.
“Lead the way, Master.”