The next time Kate saw Owen, she pulled down the V-neck of her sweater and stationed herself by the creamer. Like a totally normal, sane person. They were in the middle of a brief January thaw, and his unzipped coat revealed a green-and-blue plaid shirt covering his broad chest and soft belly. Everything about him was the polar opposite of Ian. The perfect place to start forgetting him.
“Hey, Kate.”
“Hey, Owen. So, this is going to sound weird because we are literally standing in a coffee shop, but do you want to maybe get a coffee sometime? When you’re not on your way to work?” Her belly tensed. She hadn’t asked a guy out in…ever. She hadn’t ever asked a guy out. Unless whispered messages passed by friends in seventh grade counted.
“I would totally be into that.”
Oh, thank god.
“But I can’t.”
“Oh, shit. Sorry. You probably have a girlfriend. Or boyfriend. Or both.”
“Why would I have both?”
“Hey, man. Some people do.”
“True. But I don’t. Have both. Or either. I can’t do coffee after noon or I’ll be awake all night.”
“Oh.”
“But I could do a drink. Or dinner?”
“And if I drink on an empty stomach, you’ll be carting me home because I am the world’s cheapest date. So dinner?”
“Dinner.”
Kate took the pen from her pocket she’d intentionally placed there for just such an occasion and wrote her number on a napkin. “I’m doing the dissertation and semester planning thing, so, whenever. But you can text me when you’re free?”
“Let’s say Friday.”
“Okay. Friday.”
They flirted by text until Friday night when they met up at a pub for dinner. They had determined that neither of them was exactly rolling in cash, so cheap-ish and filling was the order of the day.
He told her about teaching, how he’d started in a program for recent grads working in underserved public schools and ended up getting a job in a local charter school. He also told her about getting pulled into the principal’s office and sternly reminded of the lines between student and teacher when a rash of students had tried to rearrange their schedules to get into his section of US History. She imagined a group of teenagers, following him like ducklings. In a few years the age difference would be rendered meaningless, would even be part of the appeal. She’d always liked that Ian was older, more experienced, established and completely in control. Which was yet another reason why this should be a friend date and not a date-date. There was no way this charming, earnest teddy bear would be what she needed.
But then Owen talked about how important it was to him to teach more than what was in their textbooks, to contextualize and give other, non-colonial perspectives on historical events as much as he could get away with. He was earnest and kind, and he listened with interest when Kate talked about her research, about working with doctors and nurses and hospital administrators who were on the forefront of changing maternity care for low-income women and women of color.
He asked thoughtful questions, and Kate felt a pang of guilt that what had spurred her to ask him out was the idea of proving a point to herself. He deserved better. But she did like him. A lot.
So she took him back to her tiny sublet anyway. She kissed him first and he kissed her back, his beard tickling her chin and her bare neck as they peeled off their winter layers and his lips moved from her jaw to her collarbone, pressing gentle kisses to her skin. She wanted him to bite, arched her neck, pressing back against him, trying to encourage him to be rougher with her, but he never took the bait.
With every layer of clothing, every new body part exposed and lavished with gentleness, he asked her if he could, if this was okay, if she wanted more. As much as Kate appreciated his pursuit of enthusiastic consent, frustration bubbled with the low simmer of arousal as he touched and caressed, and finally slipped gently inside her. Of course it would be different, new, awkward. She hadn’t been with anyone since Ian, who knew her body and her limits like the back of his hand, who could fuck her senseless, pat her on the ass, and be on their way to dinner in under fifteen minutes. Of course Owen didn’t know how to do that.
But Kate didn’t know how to ask.
“Can you…can you do that harder?” She lifted her hips in what she hoped was a clear and encouraging way. He went still above her instead.
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
“You’re not going to hurt me.” I want you to hurt me. I need you to.
She lifted her head and shoulders in an attempt to shift position as he leaned in for a kiss, and their faces smashed together.
“Ow, fuck. I’m sorry.”
Kate was almost willing to accept that the pain of being headbutted was more arousing than sweet, gentle sex when something wet fell on her shoulder. “Oh, shit. You’re bleeding.” He’d somehow cut his nose on her tooth when their heads cracked together. She wriggled away and went to the bathroom for supplies to patch him up.
He had the grace to laugh about it. “I’m so sorry. How’s your head?”
“No, I’m sorry. I…You are the nicest guy I’ve been out with probably ever.”
“But you don’t like nice guys.” With a cotton round pinched to his nose, he looked particularly defeated.
“Hey, I like a lot of nice guys. And this was, I mean, we have less than zero chemistry.”
He sighed. “Yeah.”
“Friends? I could use some new ones.”
“I’d like that.”
“Good.”
He left her with a kiss on the cheek, and Kate fell into bed. She didn’t even bother trying to finish what they’d started, she was so far from turned on. Definitely not vanilla.
Kate woke up to weak winter sunlight streaming through the curtains above her, and her phone chiming the “Imperial March” from Star Wars. She sat up and groaned. Fucking Evie. Was it wrong to associate someone who’d been basically family with Darth Vader? Maybe. Still didn’t make her pick up the phone. She couldn’t avoid her forever, but it was no way to start a Saturday. And definitely not the morning after her experiment with vanilla dating had gone so horribly wrong.
She deleted the message Evie left unheard, rolled over, and went back to sleep. She’d have to deal with Evie—with all of them—at some point. Like Jolene had said, she’d left, and no one had the faintest idea why.
She slept a few more hours and dreamed of Ian, of having his body with its sharp angles and planes over her the night before instead of Owen’s sweet softness. She wouldn’t have ended the night unsatisfied. She woke up turned on and hating herself for it, scenes from the first time they’d met on a loop in her head.
She’d worked up the nerve to buy a ticket to a conference, and she’d spent the day trying to be as invisible as possible before someone realized she clearly didn’t belong. She’d watched demos and ogled vendor tables from afar, too nervous to get close, to touch or feel anything. Definitely too intimidated to participate in any of the workshops.
But she’d paid her fee, and she’d spent some of what little money she had on a cheap pleather corset and fishnets to wear to the evening play party, so she did a shot at the hotel bar, wriggled into what felt like a ridiculous costume, and went in anyway.
Ian had been across the room, sitting in a chair, observing the scene with a woman at his feet. He was dressed like he’d just left the office, in a well-tailored suit and tie and crisp dress shirt. Kate was sweating like any minute someone was going to spot her and kick her out or make an example of her. You want this, girl? Then get ready to take it. Part of her wanted that, but she knew that wasn’t how this worked. No one was going to bend her over their knee, strip her out of her boyshorts, and spank her for trespassing. Not unless they’d both agreed on that.
She had watched the woman kneeling at Ian’s feet, serene and beautiful, sure of her place at the side of this austerely beautiful man. Kate wanted to be her. Desperately. To be owned by someone like him. To be owned by him.
She had watched as he tied the other woman to a table and flogged her until she was pink and red from knee to shoulder. Kate’s whole body had throbbed with want and arousal. She’d never desired anything as intensely as she had while watching an unknown woman be unraveled in front of her. When they were done, Kate had stood and stared as he’d untied her and wrapped her in his capable arms, soothing her back to Earth.
And that’s how he found her. Slack-jawed and staring, desperately aroused, rooted to the spot, watching that moment of tenderness that came after the brutality. He could have been angry that she had been intruding on them post-scene. But he understood. When his partner had come down enough to be entrusted to the care of friends, he found Kate. He’d asked her questions, patiently answered hers. The other woman was a friend, a sometime scene partner. Kink didn’t have to lead to sex, but if Kate wanted it to… And that was it. She had been his.
She lay in bed, parsing her memories of that night and the weekend that followed. The way he’d taken her under his wing for the rest of that night, showing her things she hadn’t imagined, teasing out her needs and desires. Making sure, when they went up to his room, that she had someone who would be expecting her to check in later. He’d been so careful with her.
Kate had burned to be the woman at his feet, but why? She couldn’t untangle her feelings. Did she want the control, to be his pet, his little one, on her knees for him? Or did she want the catharsis of pain? She could armchair psychoanalyze herself and her parental issues all day long, but it didn’t change the fact that last night’s disaster proved she needed someone else to be in control for sex. She didn’t want to take the lead. She didn’t want to have to fumble around in a sloppy tangle of limbs because some sweet guy was afraid to hurt her. She wanted it to hurt.
She reached into the nightstand drawer above her head—the one drawer her temporary landlord had emptied for her—and took out her vibrator. She could hate herself for it all she wanted, but thinking about that weekend, the way Ian had stripped her, spanked her, licked her clean, then bent her over the edge of the hotel bed and fucked her, still had the power to render her as desperate to come as she had been that night when he’d made her beg for it over and over.
Fuck. She still wanted him. A swift, bright orgasm washed through her, bringing with it a tide of shame. She had to get out of bed and stop thinking about him. She had a dissertation to write and a syllabus to finalize.
Her stomach was rumbling anyway, and if she didn’t get caffeine into her system soon, her day would be shot by a splitting headache. She pulled open the bifold door that hid her kitchen, turned on the gas under the much-loved cast iron skillet she’d been lugging around since her first undergrad apartment, and pulled eggs and bread from the fridge. She put water in the kettle for coffee and set it to boil. Toast had to be done in the oven, so she turned that on too. There were days she severely missed Ian’s kitchen. But she had traded an espresso machine and perfectly programmed toaster for independence, so she wouldn’t complain. Much.
With an egg sandwich and a pot of French press coffee, she sat at her tiny table with her laptop and her book list and attempted to divvy up reading assignments that were achievable, but still allowed them to get through the material. Doing the page count math kept her occupied through breakfast, and she was busy jotting down notes for the next chapter of her dissertation when her phone rang with Evie’s tone again.
But she’d gotten a solid amount of work done, and not even a phone call from Evie would derail her. She would get it over with and get back to work.
“What do you want, Evie?” So she was maybe still a little irritated at the interruption.
“Hello, Kate. How are you?” She was as calm and polite as ever.
“I’m fine, Evie. In the middle of something, so can you dispense with the pleasantries and tell me what it is you want?”
“And how is your dissertation coming? I hear you’re teaching again this semester too. I hope that won’t set you back too much.”
Evie could, and would, do this dance all day. She’d been trained for it since her extremely WASP-y birth. But Kate, however, lacked the social conditioning or the patience. She’d only been trained for sweetness when it came to eligible men. Thanks, Mom. “Evie. Tell me what you want or I’m hanging up.”
She sighed, and Kate could practically see the corner of her mouth turn down through the phone. “You need to talk to Ian.”
Then it was Kate’s turn to grimace. She propped her elbows on the table and rested her head in her hands. “I really don’t. And I don’t see how it’s any business of yours, anyway.”
“Katherine. You may feel that you owe him nothing. You may, in fact, owe him nothing. But if he failed you in some way, he should know. If he harmed you, he should know. You owe that much to the women who may follow you.”
“This isn’t a consent violation at a party. It had nothing to do with anything like that. Why does everyone expect me to talk about it?”
“Kate. People like us talk everything to death, why would you expect the end of a five-year partnership to be any different? No one is saying you have to get back together with him, but he deserves to know what happened.”
Kate grumbled into the receiver. She hated when Evie was right, which was most of the time.
“Talk to him, Kate. And come home, already. Everyone misses you.”
Kate had come back to Boston, but Evie was right that she hadn’t come home. She’d peeked in on everyone at Matt and Jolene’s engagement party, and she’d hung out with Jolene that one night, but she’d been holding herself apart from everyone she used to think of as family.
“Maybe. I’ll think about it.”
“Good. Thank you.”
Evie hung up, and Kate dropped her hands to the floor so her head was between her knees. She waited until the urge to throw her phone into the wall had passed before sitting upright again.
She was going to have to talk to him.