by Sophie Stern
“It’s okay,” I said. “They know me there. I’m guessing someone told you I’m newer at this gig. That’s all right. I’ve been here almost six months now, but don’t worry: I’m good at what I do.”
“I wasn’t…I’m sorry,” she mumbled and finally managed to blurt out. “I wasn’t trying to insinuate that you weren’t super good at your job.”
“It’s fine.”
“What made you decide to go for this?”
“Working with wood? Creating beautiful pieces of furniture?”
“Yeah.”
I shrugged. There was no easy answer to that question. At least, there was no way to answer it without being super awkward, or even worse: lying. I was an honest sort of person, and it had only gotten worse since the breakup. Now even the idea of lying to someone made me feel nauseous.
“Well, the pictures on your website and the company’s Facebook page were fantastic,” she said. “So no matter why you started doing this, I’m impressed. You seem really talented.”
She looked like she was being honest and blunt, and like she wasn’t holding back. I wasn’t really sure why she was being like that. It wasn’t often that people complemented me. It was even rarer that they were genuine in their complements.
I had money, and I had for a long time. Most people, once they realized that, tried to take advantage of me, but Blair wasn’t like that. Obviously, she wasn’t, since she was the one paying me. But after I’d sold my house, I’d invested the money, and I’d done well so far with it. I also had an inheritance from my grandfather. Angela had always been begging me to spend money on her for frivolous things, but Blair didn’t seem like the type of person who would care about that.
“Thanks,” I told her.
“Well, I guess I’ll get out of your way,” she said. “I’ll be in the kitchen if you need me, okay?”
“Sounds good,” I said. “I can take it from here.”
Chapter 5
Blair
The sexy guy from the club was in my house.
Raiden.
He was even better looking up close, and in the light of day, it was easier to tell a little bit more about him. I’d gotten my undergraduate degree in psychology, so I liked to think that I was pretty good at reading people. After all, that was important for writers, too. We needed to be able to identify exactly why people were the way they were. We needed to know what was valuable about them, and what was important to them. A good writer knew a lot about people, and was able to look at someone and figure things out about them.
Raiden?
Well, Raiden was just as broken as Carolyn had said. I still didn’t like that word. I didn’t like to think of people as objects to be broken or repaired. It was kind of messed up, I thought, and it was kind of strange.
He looked…sad, almost lost, but he had another look about him.
Excitement.
Pride.
Hunger.
He looked fucking happy as hell when I showed him the office. I could instantly see the wheels start turning in his head. He was busy coming up with some different ideas that he could use to make the office look great, and I loved that. I absolutely loved the fact that he was going to make the space look truly incredible. More importantly, I liked knowing that my bookshelves were going to be strong enough to withstand the sheer number of volumes I planned to place on top of them. Being a writer might not be the easiest job in the world, but it meant I had a good excuse to collect books and stories other people created. The idea of finally getting my space organized felt damn good.
I went into the kitchen as promised, and I started making a couple of sandwiches. It was nothing much, but it was almost lunchtime, and maybe this guy would let me feed him. Then we could chat while we were eating, and I could get to know him a little bit better. I wanted that. I wanted to find out what was important to him, and what made him tick, and what he thought was cool and interesting.
Was he the kind of guy who let stress wash right over him?
Was he the kind of guy who liked to joke around?
I made a couple of cherry limeades, finished the turkey-and-cheese sandwiches, and put everything on the kitchen table. Then I just sort of stared at it.
Was I being crazy?
I was being crazy.
After all, Raiden was just the guy who was building my bookshelves. He wasn’t a guy who wanted to date me. He had shown no interest in me. We had made no promises to each other, and yet…
I wanted him.
I wanted him to touch me and to play with me. I wanted him to tease me. I wanted all of the things I saw people doing at the club on Friday night, and then I wanted a little bit more.
It was wrong, I knew, for me to be objectifying this guy like that. It was cruel, really, if I was being honest. He wasn’t just some man meat wrapped in a beautiful package. He was more.
Besides, I hadn’t been honest. I hadn’t been forthcoming about my reasons for going to the club, and I hadn’t been honest about my job, and I hadn’t been honest about why learning about BDSM was important to me. Maybe I should just drop the charade now before I let things go too far. Maybe I should just tell him, and be like, “Hey, so, I’m actually a romance writer suffering from writer’s block. Can you help me figure things out?”
Yeah, I was certain that would go over well.
“Hey,” he said suddenly, and I looked up to see him standing in the doorway. His shirt was tight and fitted to his body. He was just as covered as he was at the club, but because the lighting was different, I could see him a little more clearly. The shirt stretched over his abs and muscles. No matter what type of field he was in, he worked out. I was certain installing shelving and remodeling peoples’ homes probably used up a ton of energy and required a lot of physical skills, but he did more than that. This guy hit the gym.
“Hey,” I said. “All set?”
“Yeah,” he nodded. “Would you like to look over some of your options? We can determine your budget and go from there.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’d like that.”
“Okay,” he agreed, and his eyes drifted to the table. He raised an eyebrow and looked at me. “Are you having someone for lunch?” He said. “We can reschedule if we need to, or we can discuss this in the living room before they arrive.”
“No, I…”
Okay, it was stupid, but I’d come this far already. I couldn’t back down now.
“I actually made it for you.”
“For me?” He asked.
“Yeah, I, uh…I thought you might be hungry.”
I couldn’t simply pretend that I hadn’t cooked for him. As much as I was tempted to pretend like I really did have a friend who was planning to come over, I knew that I couldn’t do that. It wasn’t fair to him or to anyone else.
“That was really kind of you,” he said, surprising me.
“So, you’re hungry?”
“I’m starving,” he smiled, and he came into the kitchen and sat down at my little table. The space felt too small, suddenly. He had a big presence. I wondered if he knew just how big it actually was. He took up more space than most people did. It wasn’t just because he was a huge guy, either. It was because he was charming, and handsome, and maybe a little bit wild.
And he was a Dom.
He liked to be in charge.
This was the type of guy who could spank women for fun. He was the type of guy who could do things like punish naughty girls and reward good girls. He could do a lot of things, I knew, and he could make people feel a lot of things: fear, excitement, arousal.
I felt all of those things around Raiden, and he hadn’t even touched me yet, but I wanted him to, and the thought was sobering.
I swallowed, looking at him. His eyes darted around the room, taking in everything there was to see. I wasn’t nervous or uncomfortable with the simplicity of my space. My home was simply decorated, and I’d chosen the items carefully. Sure, most of my stuff was second-hand, but that was because I
was thrifty. Raiden didn’t seem to mind.
He was always looking around, I noticed. He had this attention to detail that most people lacked.
I wondered what his job before this one had been. I shouldn’t pry, but I was very curious. Maybe I should have asked Carolyn to give me more information, yet I still felt like asking about this guy behind his back was kind of cruel and unkind. I wouldn’t want people talking about me, so I shouldn’t talk about him, either.
I sat down across from him at the table, watching him. I reached for my own food and began to nibble at it. Somehow, the idea of eating in front of him felt so…personal. Strange. Weirdly sexual.
“It’s not often that somebody feeds me,” he said, reaching for the drink.
“No? I’m a bit surprised.”
“Are you?”
“I would have expected that the housewives would love to feed you.”
“It’s the grandmothers, actually,” he said. “They’re the friendliest ones.”
“That’s good to know.”
“There are some housewives,” he said. “But I would never let them feed me.”
“No?”
“Food opens the doors to sex,” he said with a shrug.
“Does it?” I laughed, almost choking.
“It can,” he said. “Food can be very erotic.”
I raised an eyebrow, obviously not believing him.
“I find it hard to believe there could be anything sexy about a turkey sandwich,” I pointed out.
Raiden didn’t say anything. At first, I thought I’d won the argument, but then he picked up the sandwich. He looked at me as he did. He never looked down at his food. His gaze just held mine, and then he raised the sandwich to his lips. He took a bite, softly tearing into the bread with his teeth. The entire time, his eyes were locked on mine.
I was mesmerized.
I couldn’t look away.
I knew that I was getting caught in a trap somehow, that this wasn’t the way things were supposed to be, yet I couldn’t seem to stop.
He licked his lips a little, and my eyes went there right away. What would it be like to kiss Raiden? Would he be a good kisser? Not everyone was a good kisser, not even if they were handsome. What would it be like with him?
My eyes went back to his, and he looked a little amused. Irritated, I realized he had definitely noticed me looking at his lips. I’d done exactly what he’d wanted me to, and he’d won. He’d proven that food could be sexual and erotic, even if the food was something as simple and mundane as a turkey sandwich.
“Fine,” I snapped, crossing my arms over my chest. His eyes were the ones that moved that time, shifting ever-so-slightly to my breasts, and I realized that in my effort to pout, I’d actually just pushed them up and out for him to see.
Awesome.
“You’re an interesting woman, Miss Hopper,” he said.
“How so?” I asked, dropping my arms to my sides. I looked up at him nervously, suddenly wondering about the war that was raging inside of my body. There was a part of me that wanted me to throw myself at his feet and beg him to kiss me. Then there was another part of me that wanted to tease him. I wanted to play with him, to kiss him. I wanted to make him mine.
Where the hell were those thoughts coming from?
That so wasn’t my style. I wasn’t the kind of girl who fell hard for a guy: certainly not one I’d only met recently. I had been serially monogamous and then serially single and right now…
Well, I was just really focused on my career.
At least, I should have been.
That had been the entire purpose of me journeying to Anchored, after all. I was there to make something happen in my book. What, exactly? That was yet to be discovered.
“You waltz into a club you know nothing about,” he pointed out. “You pretend to be a submissive.” I opened my mouth to protest, but he held up a finger, silencing me. “And now you’re serving me lunch because it seemed like a nice thing to do. For someone as vanilla as you, you really do act like a submissive.”
What.
The.
Fuck.
Was he serious right now?
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” I snapped. “You can’t just go telling people they’re…they’re…vanilla.”
How the hell had he known?
How had he managed to call me out?
He’d pinpointed the fact that I didn’t belong, that I had lied about my experience as a submissive, and he’d done it without so much as kissing me. It angered me, somehow. It embarrassed me more than it should have. I was the one who was supposed to be in control. The entire situation was one I’d concocted myself – with the help of my editor, of course – but I’d managed to get through the application process without any sort of issue. Why was he calling me out now?
This time, he raised an eyebrow, but he didn’t say anything. I realized I’d made a huge mistake in my reaction to him. Raiden was a Dom through-and-through. He was good at spotting submissives and Doms and Dommes and he could tell easily who was a bottom and who was a top and…he’d called me out on it.
And I’d kind of just proven his point.
I really was a submissive who was pretending to be…a submissive. It was a paradox, really. I didn’t need to fake being submissive: there was a deep-rooted part of myself that already was, and he’d seen that in me.
I was acting at the club, but there really was a part of me that wanted more. There was a deep-rooted portion of myself that wanted so very much to know what it was he was involved in and why it was so exciting and wild and seductive.
I wanted to know all of that, and I wanted to go crazy for him.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “That was rude.”
“It was,” he said.
“But you aren’t my Dom,” I pointed a finger at him, reminding him. “This isn’t some excuse for you to spank me.”
“I didn’t say anything about spanking you, Miss Hopper. Why? Do you think you deserve a spanking for your little outburst?” He set his sandwich down on the plate and folded his arms across his chest.
Then he looked at me carefully.
My heart was racing.
“Yes,” I said before I could stop myself. Then I clapped a hand over my mouth. What the fuck was wrong with me? Why would I have said that? “I mean, no,” I quickly corrected myself.
“Well, which is it?” He said. “Were you rude, or were you polite?”
“I was rude, but that doesn’t mean I need to be spanked,” I said.
“I didn’t offer to spank you,” he told me. “I was simply asking whether you think you deserve one for the way you spoke to me.”
I watched him carefully, trying to figure out what my next move should be, and what his next move was going to be. I knew enough about BDSM to know what this was. This little dance was something that always had to happen. It was a negotiation of sorts. Oh, we weren’t sitting down with a contract and we weren’t setting limits, but we were still doing the dance. We were still talking. We were flirting.
And it was making me so fucking wet that I couldn’t take it.
I hadn’t masturbated that morning, and I was the type of person who always, always masturbated. Ever since I met Raiden, the need had been worse. I’d spent most of the weekend with my novels and my vibrator, and somehow, every time I came, I saw him.
I saw his face.
I saw him touching me, teasing me.
I saw him asking me whether I’d been a naughty girl.
And now it was like I had this fantasy coming to life right in front of me, only I had a choice to make, and it terrified me. Was I going to be brave? Or was I going to chicken out? I wondered if I asked him to spank me whether he would or not. Raiden seemed like he was completely in control. He was totally self-aware, and I was a little jealous of just how put-together his life seemed to be.
My life?
Well, sometimes it felt like I was free-falling right into chaos. Sometimes i
t seemed like my life was a nightmare I just couldn’t wake up from.
Other times…
Other times, I realized that everything was going to be okay if I just worked hard enough, if I believed in myself.
“Yes,” I said. “I think that I was rude to you, and I’m sorry for that. I think talking back like that probably deserves a spanking.”
“I think you’re probably right. Blair, how long has it been since you’ve been in a relationship with a top?”
“What?” I almost choked on my sandwich. He didn’t repeat the question, though, because he knew perfectly well that I’d heard him. I was just scared to answer. “Um…”
He waited.
I knew this game, and I understood this play. It was a power play. He was waiting to see what I would do. Would I get uncomfortable? Would the silence drive me to honesty? Would I blurt out the truth before he could stop me?
Yes, yes, and yes.
“I’ve never had a Dom,” I said.
Shit.
I definitely didn’t wake up that morning and plan to admit that I was just as inexperienced as everyone thought I was.
“How did you get into Anchored?” He asked. “The owner doesn’t usually let inexperienced submissives in. The owner definitely doesn’t let them walk around unsupervised.”
“I wasn’t unsupervised,” I pointed out. “I was with Odessa.”
“For part of the night, yes,” he said. “And then you were with two Dommes. I saw that, too. What I mean is that you explored on your own without someone whose sole job was to keep you safe.”
“That bothers you,” I realized suddenly what the issue was.
“Of course it does.”
“Why? You don’t know me,” I asked the words gently, not cruelly. He didn’t know me at all. He knew nothing about me, and yet…he seemed to have some sort of connection to me. Why? What was special about me that someone like him would want to keep me safe?
Or maybe he was the one who was special.
Maybe, despite whatever it was that he’d been through, he had a big heart.
“You’re right,” he said, pushing out from the table. “I don’t know you.”
I looked up at him, confused.
“Raiden?”
