by Adira August
"Grab the railing, Julia," he ordered softly.
Her eyes flew to his face. Julia. No one called her that. Oh, God, say it again. He leaned over her and she bent back, grabbing the rail.
He ran his nose through her hair at her temple. "Words have power. You taught me that. I can make you come just by telling you exactly what I'm going to do to you." His lips barely grazed her ear. She was panting, eyes closed.
"Have you ever come with your legs apart? With no one and nothing touching you? Have you ever come so hard you screamed - in public? … You want this now, Julia, don't you? … Answer me."
Her hips flexed toward him. "Yes." A barely audible whisper. "Oh, God … "
Her legs were trembling. He put one knuckle under her chin and tilted her head back, staring at her parted lips. He lowered his mouth to hers and stopped a breath from contact.
"Now. Tell me what I don't know about women."
Ben walked away from her, tossing the switch off the bridge, and leaned back against the opposite railing, regarding her like a curious zoological exhibit.
A man's voice reached them, talking to someone. A chubby middle-aged man appeared, dragged along by two black pugs snorfling against their harnesses. He gave Ben and Janet a cheery nod as he passed, chatting away to the dogs.
Janet glared at Ben until the man was out of earshot. "You son of a bitch."
He cocked his head and raised an eyebrow at her. "You're going to make a lot of money with me. But be very clear who is in charge of this venture. This is my business. I'll keep you safe and demand your best. And you'll give it to me."
He let his eyes roam over her body again. "And that'll also be true when I'm not a student and no one can get fired or sued and I do make you come." He shrugged. "Maybe not in public; we'll see."
He walked over to her but stopped a few steps away. "So, you want to be pissed or do you want what I just offered you?"
"Are you offering me sex or a publishing contract?" she asked.
"The sex is a promise not an offer. The contract is ready for your signature," he said and led the way down the path, back toward her office.
"We'll meet tonight and formalize. Save everything you've written and bring it with you. Everything. Make sure you leave nothing on your computer. Basically, you've stored it in the university hard drive. Get it out. Every copy, every backup."
He handed her a business card: RedDeer Publishing ~ Erotic Romance. It had a phone number. An address was handwritten below.
"This is your apartment?" She asked.
"It's the office of RedDeer Publishing," he said and veered off the path toward student parking. "Six."
Janet set a yogurt and banana on the counter separating her small kitchen from the living area of her one bedroom apartment. She pulled herself up on a counter chair and ate, trying to empty her mind of the strange meeting with Ben Hart. But in the corner, her desk beckoned. The desk where all the stories Ben Hart wanted to see in forty-five minutes, waited.
Ben had been mistaken. She didn't keep her work on a university hard drive.
Settling in her desk chair a few minutes later, she placed his card on the desktop, trying to decide whether to call and cancel or take her work to him. She smiled ruefully at his direction to save her work. "Saving" was all she'd ever done with her stories and novellas, never sure what she was saving them for. Never sure why she felt compelled to write them in the first place.
Maybe it was that the books she read and collected never quite took her where she wanted them to. They fell short or sped way beyond. At first, she told herself writing her own erotica was just a vanity exercise. She knew she could write better than the authors she read. Cheap porno paperbacks in the back rooms of used bookstores weren't created by literary lions.
After a year of working at home at night, of never tiring of exploring her subjects, she had to admit she was only seeking an outlet for her own "special" desires. The things she'd never do, with men she'd never find.
She intended to shred and burn these works, but - she was a writer. These were her babies, even if they were illegitimately begotten and hidden away. Besides, she was right about one thing, she was better than the writers she read.
Except, it seemed like the tree falling in the forest with no one around. Her work made no sound. If she did this, she could find out if there was an audience for her kind of romance. But this was her chance? An arrogant twenty-year-old who might decide designing online games was more fun?
In two years and five months I'll be thirty years old. It's time to take a chance.
Making the Deal
It was a corrugated aluminum building in an area of light industry and industrial retail. On the front of the building, over a built-out retail store, a sign read "AmeriAg Feed & Farm." The word "Hardware" added below, an advertising afterthought.
The business closed, Janet sat in her car peering around, surprised by the presence of tractor dealerships and welding services only a few miles from campus. Across from the AmeriAg, a gun shop proudly announced a shooting range inside. Sure she had the wrong address, she turned the car around to leave and spotted a small sign at the corner of the building with an arrow pointing up the side drive: "Red Deer Pub."
"You get a lot of people wandering back here looking for someone to serve them a beer?"
Ben didn't even glance up from the screen he was focused on - one of three large computer monitors that were part of what looked like a very tech-savvy setup of desktop, laptop, printers and something she thought could be an external hard drive.
"I wish people would wander back here and bring me a beer," he said. "You have your files?"
She looked around. His sophisticated hardware sat on a huge empty wooden packing crate that might have held machine parts at one time. There was one other chair, a hard-backed dining chair, scuffed and scratched. At one side of the room were … wait …
"Are those hay bales?" She asked. They were stacked three high in a double row covered by a black canvas tarp.
"Straw. Conference table," he said. "Did you bring your stories?"
"Yeah, they're out in the car. Come help me carry." She dropped her purse on the "conference table." It is pretty solid, she thought, also wondering what sort of multi legged creatures were cozied up inside the bales.
Ben was staring at her. "Help you carry what?"
The three copy paper boxes made quite a load, each being stuffed full of their original contents now covered in ink and the weight of words. Ben stacked one atop the other and hefted them easily. Janet locked the trunk, determinedly ignoring the play of muscle and sinew in his forearms, biceps and back, as she followed him inside.
They opened the boxes, marked with dates the work was done, on the conference table. The dates went back over three years. Ben's mouth literally fell open.
"How many?" he asked, eagerly riffling through the stacks of pages.
She shrugged. "I don't know, I didn't keep track. But they aren't all complete stories. A lot are just sketches, really. Vignettes. Especially at the beginning when I was finding my style. Most of them are short stories, some longer, and a few, well, not full novels - thirty, forty thousand words. Novellas, I suppose."
Forty-thousand is a novel online." He ran one of the pages between his fingers. "This isn't from a printer, I can feel - did you type these? On a typewriter?"
Her chin came up, "Yes, I did. It was my father's. It's how I work."
"There are no computer copies, nothing in Word or PDFs?"
"They were just for me, okay? My … practice writing. Developing characters and story. For if - when - I decide to take up serious writing." She repressed the feeling she was betraying her characters and their worlds.
He took the lid off the last box. "This is a hell of a lot of practice," he said.
"I was trying to get good. No one was supposed to see these," she said, thinking she should not have come.
His eyes scanned across her words. "That would be a tragedy
," he said.
"What would?"
"If no one ever saw these." He kept reading.
A bloom of warmth spread from the center of her chest. He hadn't been bullshitting her; he really thought she was good. And she was just as starving-orphan-needy as the next writer for praise of her work.
She spent half her time wondering why she didn't give up since she was a talentless hack and the other half astounded by her own genius. And so many times she worked into the night, unable to sleep because she couldn't get the ideas out of her head until she saw them materialize as words on a page.
"Take your coat off, we have a fuckton to do," he said, turning a page. "Jesus, no computer files," he mused. He glanced at his splintery desk. "But go find your contract and sign it. Read it. There's an NDA attached."
He began sorting the contents of the first box into several piles.
Janet read and signed, glad of the Nondisclosure Agreement. Essentially, she was working for free, unless he succeeded. But the publishing rights to her work belonged to Red Deer, a Sole Proprietorship. Ben Hart would control whichever of her titles she agreed to let him publish.
"So, is RedDeer just the two of us?" She put a duplicate copy of the contract into her purse.
"There're two more. A computer programmer slash all-around cyber geek, and a graphic artist. They work from home. We all work for a percentage of the profits," he said, putting one of the novellas aside. "Grab the laptop and bring it over here."
"Why the artist?" She set the laptop up at the corner of the table but he dragged it next to himself and pointed to the floor next to him. Stand here. She did, but made sure she was far enough from him to not inadvertently touch him.
"No budget for stock photos. We need covers. Website graphics." He stretched over the table to put another story into a far pile. He noted her stiff stance and the wide gap she left between them. "You're safe, Ms. Johnson," he said. "I'm now your boss and I'm still a student. In both cases, sex is not an option. Relax."
He called up a screen with a list of links to Bedtime Stories, Romance by the Hour and Immersion Therapy. "Each category represents a length of work. Quickies, short stories, novels. Novellas, to you."
He clicked Bedtime Stories and a page with a grid of squares opened. His finger moved over the screen as he explained.
"Each title will be associated with a square intersecting heat level and kink. So, when a user wants a medium heat, MFM quickie read, she clicks the box here that takes her to a list of titles that match her preference in less than a second."
He clicked and a new screen opened, with a mock-up of three book entries. Each had a cover, title, blurb and a short excerpt.
"Every time a user opens a title to read it, her credit card or bank account or Paypal is charged. Fifty cents for a Bedtime Read," Ben said. "Bedtime Stories are about 5000 words each, eighty percent of which is sex. Is that about what your vignettes are?"
"Well, yeah, I suppose. But they have almost no story at all."
"Perfect. Neither do nudie magazine photos, which are classic masturbation aids for men. These will be aids for women. You can punch them up and adjust the lengths. Don't vary more than 500 words from the 5k base."
"Hang on," Janet held up a hand. "You want to use my work as some kind of literary vibrator?"
"No, I want your work to make a reader pick up and use her vibrator. Which I'll sell her, one day. Right now, it's mostly the titles."
"Don't you think that's pretty insulting?" She crossed her arms and took a step back from him. "This isn't mental doodling, this is years of my hard work. And they might only be vignettes, but they aren't just - trash."
He leaned back against the bales and cocked his head, brows furrowed as if she were a bit of modern sculpture and he was trying to decipher what the artist intended to depict.
"J.J., do you think there's something bad about sex?" He asked.
She hesitated at his use of her initials. It was informal, too personal for either student or boss. But it was void of sexual innuendo. It was what her friends called her.
"In your own mind," he went on, "do you think it's dirty or wrong to feel what you feel and want what you want? Do you think it's wrong for our readers to want what they want?"
"No," she admitted. "But …" She was confused.
"But you think I do? You think I believe you're … what? A slut? Because of what you write and imagine?"
Janet's eyes filled for a moment, realizing she was splayed out in the pages on that straw bale table, exposed and defenseless.
"Yes," she said. "Of course that's what you think. You said it on the bridge, didn't you? You said my thoughts and feelings were..." she blushed hard. "Naughty."
He shifted as if he might move toward her, but instead, clasped his hands in front of himself and remained very still.
"I said that because it's part of giving you what you crave. It made you hot. It's a scenario, a play. It's the headspace I'll take you to again, someday. But it's not my opinion outside of that role."
Janet frowned, trying to understand, to get through the lifelong deposit of doubt, shame and suspicion she felt like she was drowning in.
"What I think," Ben went on, "is that you are a complex, talented woman and I'm immensely grateful to be working with you. I also think you're sweet and sexy and I'm even more grateful that you're going to let me give you sexual pleasure, when that time comes. Not to feed my male ego, but because you have extraordinary depth of feeling and I can't wait to feel all your passion around me, like I've caught a breaking wave in my arms and the irresistible surge carries me to ecstasy along with you."
Then he did approach her, and gently moved a strand of hair behind her ears. "Dominant doesn't mean disrespect, Little Sub," he said. "Quite the contrary."
Her face flamed and her cunt heated, a flash fire along her vulva. He'd named it, out loud, all she'd been afraid to believe about herself and what she wanted. All she'd written into story after story, pouring her truth onto the pages.
"I made a mistake today," he told her, backing off a step. "I'm sorry. I think the story made me ... well, I should not have assumed you were an experienced sub. Have you ever had a lover who knew what you wanted?"
She shook her head, unwilling to look at him. Afraid she might either leap into his arms or burst into tears.
"Thank you for telling me. Well," he smiled as if he'd found a big brightly wrapped present under a Christmas tree with his name on it, "now you do. And I'm very much looking forward to taking you on your first journey. I'll go at whatever pace you need. When I decide it's time."
Something broke inside of her and relief flooded her. It was alright. She was alright. She wanted to fall to her knees in gratitude.
And other things, she thought. And smiled.
Ben gave her his dimpled grin and went back to the table. "C'mon. I want to launch at Halloween; we need to get to work."
The Run-up
Ben Hart could type. Like everything he did, he did it exceptionally well. He could type faster than the program could recognize, with almost perfect accuracy. He said he had no choice, he couldn't afford a line editor.
He set her to marking the vignettes, which they now called "quickies," for kinks and heat.
They discussed the heat levels, which was a bizarrely complex intellectual assessment of the relative explicity of "cock" versus "dick" and what exactly comprised the cunt as opposed to the pussy. If you suggest anal penetration but don't describe it, can you include "anal" in kink? Or does any mention raise the heat level?
She put the more problematic ones aside and marked up the obvious ones. She joined him in the typing on the laptop. When he saw her three-to-four fingered hunt and stab method, he told her to start on the rewrites of what he'd already finished. It would be more efficient if he just did all the typing.
She adjusted the stories in places to meet the heat level standards. The kinks needed to be fine-tuned, mostly by enhancing with detail. The writing need
ed to be … simplified was how Janet came to think of it.
"You think our readers are going to be vocabulary impaired?" She wondered, considering the plan involved marketing to college students.
"No," he answered. "I think they want simple images and suggestive actions to fuel their fantasy lives and don't want to wade through George Bernard fucking Shaw to get there. Give them a straight path to orgasm. Clean prose, well-chosen images. A believable scenario. You do that naturally, anyway. Just take out the unnecessary verbiage and overwrought metaphors."
Once she got her ego under control, Janet found she could whip a quickie into shape in about an hour. The trick was to not think about them as her babies, but as titles she edited to order for her employer.
Sometimes, she turned herself on reading her own fantasies on the pages. The simplification actually made them more powerful. She started to think Ben might know what he was doing.
"How did you come up with all this?" She asked during a dinner break.
"Your classes," he said around a mouthful of french fries. He considered. "And your ass, to be honest."
"My ... I'm sorry?"
"I sat in the front row. You'd erase the board from the class before and put up your own notes. You're also not so tall, right? So you stretch and lift up on one foot and - oh, Janet you have a very nice rear-end. It would jiggle and the muscles tighten and loosen and … I had a raging boner before class ever started."
Next time, don't ask, next time, don't -
"Then -"
Dear God, there's more ...
"-you'd talk about business communication. One day, you talked about reaching customers. You said the mistake most businesses make is trying to convince people to want what they have. You said, if they had to do that, they had the wrong product. We should focus on finding the people who already want what we have but don't know about us. I was thinking, 'I want your ass in my hands.' And that led to this fantasy about you writing an ad to sell me your ass."
