Captain Martin vanished back into the cockpit, and I led Kitty by the hand toward the saloon—the living room area near the rear of the vessel. Sliding glass doors enclosed three sides of the saloon, and all three sets of doors were opened, making the saloon open-air. There was a white sectional couch facing a massive television, and a small table covered in a white tablecloth, set with two places, wineglasses, and several white candles of varying heights, lit and flickering gently, with a single red rose in a slender vase near one place setting.
Kitty paused, taking in the scene, and then glanced at me. “Roman…wow.”
I smiled at her. “The couch, for now?”
Her eyes went to the couch, and then to me. “Um. Considering what happened the last time I sat on a couch with you, I’m a little leery,” she said with a laugh, but I could tell she was also serious.
“I’ll be on my best behavior, I swear.”
She eyed me warily. “You made it abundantly clear how this evening is going to go, Roman.”
I sighed, sitting on the couch; Kitty followed suit, sitting near me but not touching, setting her purse on the couch beside her. “Kitty, listen—you know I’m attracted to you, and that I want you. I’m not gonna feed you any bullshit about that, okay? But I’m also not sitting here expecting things to go a certain way.”
The engines rumbled to life, revving as the captain moved us out of the slip and toward the open water, slowly angling away from the marina. After a few moments, the engines revved up a notch and there was a more distinct sense of movement, and a bit of bob and sway from the water. Before Kitty had a chance to reply, a young woman dressed in the black and white of a server entered the saloon; she smiled at us brightly as she approached us, taking a seat on the edge of the couch next to us.
“Hi, I’m Eliza, I’ll be taking care of you this evening. We are a full-service vessel, equipped and prepared to accommodate almost any desire or request, so you only have to ask. Chef Matthias has prepared a menu for your dinner experience this evening based around the freshest possible catches. I’ll go over those in further detail as we get closer to dinner time. For now, I can bring you something to drink, maybe something to nibble on as we get started? I know you’d like to spend as much time alone as possible, so I’ll be as unobtrusive as possible while still making sure your needs are met.” She pulled an iPad out of her apron, opened it, rotated it to face me, and handed it to me. “This is a comprehensive drinks list, arranged by wine, beer, and liquor. Do you know what you’d like?”
I glanced at Kitty, not taking the iPad. “You have a preference?”
She shook her head, shrugging. “Nothing too sweet, other than that I’m fine with whatever.”
I handed the list back to Eliza. “Some red wine then. Surprise us?” I watched Kitty’s reaction, and she seemed fine with my choice. “And a cheese plate.”
Wine wasn’t my thing, but it seemed like a better choice than slugging back whiskey like I usually did. Eliza returned a few minutes later with a bottle of imported Italian wine and a plate of assorted cheeses, along with spicy mustard, crackers, jams, berries, and cuts of meat. After she poured the wine she left, promising to stop by in a while to see if we wanted anything else.
Alone with wine and cheese, I decided I needed to clear the air a bit before we talked about anything else. “Listen, Kitty, about what happened on your couch…I—shit, this is hard, because I’ve never said anything like this before. Um.” I resisted the urge to tug at my tie. “I’m not proud to say this, but I left your place with the clear impression that you’d felt like I’d somehow…I don’t wanna use the word manipulated, but that’s all I can think of. You were pretty upset.”
She smeared Brie onto a cracker, ate it, washed it down with a sip of wine, and then sat back to meet my eyes. “That almost sounds like an apology, Roman Badd.”
“If you felt, or still do feel like I pressured you or tricked you, or in some way manipulated you into doing anything, or letting me do anything, I will apologize for that. But if you were fighting your own feelings for me or attraction to me and I got you to give in to that, well…I sure as hell won’t apologize for that.”
She hesitated a long moment. “I can’t with any honesty say you tricked me or manipulated me.”
“But you’re not happy with what happened.”
She shrugged, cutting a piece of cheese, wrapping it in a slice of meat, and handing it to me. “I don’t know. I’ve always been a pretty in-control person. I drank some in high school and college as most people do, and I had my experiences with getting drunk, and I’ve tried smoking pot a few times. But on the whole, I don’t really enjoy getting too drunk or losing control. I never have.” She turned her warm brown eyes on mine. “And that night, you—you made me feel out of control in a way I’d never experienced before. It’s like you had some kind of remote control to operate my—my entire psyche and body. The things you said, the way you said them, the way you touched me, it was all…so overwhelming, and it just…it short-circuited my ability to think straight, to react like I normally would. There’s just something about you in general that does that to me. You make me feel out of control. I don’t yell at people, I don’t get angry very often. But with you, I just feel like I’m a different version of myself which I don’t recognize.” She shrugged. “I guess it makes me scared or worried or uncomfortable, which only upsets me more and makes me react to you in ways I normally wouldn’t with other people.”
“I get it. I’m outside your comfort zone. Everything I am, the way I am, what I do, how I do it—you’re unfamiliar with it and uncomfortable with me and around me.”
She hesitated, glancing at me. “I don’t like being made to beg. I don’t beg. I don’t find it funny or sexy or cute—it’s demeaning, and if that’s the kind of thing you’re into, you should find someone else, because I won’t be that girl, now or ever.”
I sighed, nodding. “You’re right. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”
“Promise?” she asked, watching me carefully.
“Swear on my soul.”
She held my gaze for a long time—too long. So long I was the first to look away.
I dipped a piece of cheese in mustard and held it out to her, and instead of taking it from me, she ate it from my fingers, which I think surprised us both.
“I’m not sure why I did that,” she said, laughing.
I smiled at her, not bothering to dampen the heat of it. “I don’t mind at all,” I murmured.
She busied herself cutting another piece of cheese. “You said you’d behave, Roman.”
“I am.”
She topped the cheese with a slice of strawberry and handed it to me; I ate it from her fingers as she’d done to me, grinning predatorily, making sure my lips slid along her finger.
She yanked her hand away as if burned. “When you look at me and smile at me like that, I get nervous.”
“Why?” I asked.
She shook her head faintly. “I don’t know. Because after what happened on my couch I know exactly how easily you can turn a look and smile into—into some sort of hypnosis that has me doing things I’d never normally do.”
“Like let a man you barely know get you mostly naked?”
She blushed. “Exactly.”
“You can’t blame that entirely on me,” I said.
She spread more Brie on a cracker and, again, fed it to me. “Sure I can.”
“Why are you feeding me?” I asked. “Not that I’m complaining, mind you.”
She huffed a laugh, shaking her head with a rueful grin. “I don’t know. My hands seem to have ideas my brain hasn’t caught up to.”
“Well, feel free to go along with whatever ideas your hands may have.” I grinned at her lasciviously, so she couldn’t miss my meaning.
Her blush deepened. “Roman!”
“Just saying.” I dipped cheese into jam and fed it to her, and this time, she let her lips linger on my fingers—just for an instant. “S
o, how do you figure you can blame what happened between us squarely on me?”
“Not guilty by reason of insanity?” She suggested.
I laughed. “Okay, well, for one thing, what happened wasn’t a crime—unless you’re claiming it wasn’t consensual.”
“No!” she protested, vehement. “No. It was consensual. I’m not saying that in any way at all.” She hesitated a long, long time, and I waited through the silence. “I knew what was happening every step of the way, and I let it happen. And…and I enjoyed it. Up until you pissed me off and I stopped us, at least.”
“But?”
She sighed. “But I didn’t want to enjoy it.”
“Why?”
She remembered her wine just then and took a hearty gulp. “Um? I guess because it was—and is—easier to pretend I dislike you. To pretend I—I don’t know. Like I have some kind of moral high ground to stand on, or something. To pretend like you did manipulate me into letting you do the things you did.”
I frowned. “Moral high ground? What, like I’m some—some dirty sleazebag or something?”
“No. Maybe.” She shrugged. “I don’t know. I just didn’t want to like you. I still don’t want to like you.”
“But do you?”
Another shrug. “Maybe.” A trace of a smile gave her away, though. “A little. As long as you behave.”
“But what happened…it’s not a matter of blame, because it wasn’t wrong. It wasn’t an accident, or a mistake. I was making you feel good, Kitty. That’s all. No expectations, no promises, just a woman enjoying the pleasurable sensations created in her body by the touch of a man.” I met her gaze steadily. “It doesn’t even have to mean anything, if you don’t want it to.”
“What would it mean?”
“Hell if I know. I’d be guessing if I had to construe what it meant.”
“What would you guess at, then?”
“Hmmm. Maybe that you were promising me more. Like, by letting me touch you, you were promising me more, later, when you may not want more, or maybe you changed your mind about it.” I thought for a moment. “Or maybe you’d think I’d make assumptions about you, about your character.” I frowned. “We’ve both been saying ‘what happened’, like it was an incident. It’s not what happened, it’s what we did. You may not have touched me, but you participated. You were part of it. It was something we did together, not just something I did to you.”
She nodded. “Yeah, you’re right.”
“So… I guess I’m saying regardless of how you feel about it, you have to own it.”
She nodded again. “I know.”
“Are you ashamed of it?”
She shrugged, scraping at the last of the brie instead of looking at me. “I don’t know.”
I touched her chin. “Kitty.” She turned her eyes up to mine. “Are you ashamed of what we did together?”
“Not ashamed, just…embarrassed.”
I pondered this. “Why embarrassed? I don’t get that at all.”
She twisted away from the coffee table and the now-barren cheese board, wine goblet in hand, and sat angled toward me. “Because like I said, I lost control. And it took you making me angry for me to regain it.”
At that moment, Eliza entered with a small black folder containing the evening’s menu, and we moved from the couch to the dinner table. She went over each dish in detail; Kitty ordered salmon and I ordered halibut. Eliza poured us each another glass of wine, brought out salads, and left us alone again. As we ate our salads, we continued our conversation.
“So, why is losing control such a big deal to you, Kitty?” I rolled a cherry tomato to the edge of my plate, watching her reactions. “Seems to me that the whole point of sex is to let go a little bit, right?”
She frowned, considering. “We’ve obviously had different experiences regarding sex, then, because I’ve never thought of it like that.”
“Then explain your experience, or how you think of it, how you feel about it.”
She saw me rolling my tomatoes away from the rest of my salad and reached out to stab them. “I can’t believe you don’t like tomatoes. I love them.” She thought a moment or two before answering. “I guess for me, sex has always been about…sharing, I guess? Sharing an experience. Sharing emotions. Finding a part of the other person in a way that’s just not possible except through sex.”
I nodded, rolling my fork in a circle. “I’m following. Go on.”
“I don’t want to talk about past experiences in any detail when I’m here with you in this setting, but—”
I interrupted. “This is all about conversation, Kitty. You’re not going to upset me, or weird me out. I want to hear what you have you to say so I can understand you better.”
Oh, shit. Did I really just say that? Since when do I want to understand a woman better? It was true, though—I did want to understand Kitty. I wanted it in a way, and to a degree, that I’d never even thought I was capable of.
Kitty seemed just as surprised by my admission as I was. “Wow, okay. You really want to hear about my ex?”
I shrugged. “I mean, only talk about what you’re comfortable sharing. But yeah, I want to know what informs the way you feel about this. Because I feel like we’re coming at it from two totally different places.”
“Well, Tom wasn’t my first boyfriend, but he was my first serious boyfriend, and my only serious relationship.” She hesitated. “I guess it goes beyond just Tom, though, if you want to get into the psychology of how I think about sex and why. My parents aren’t, like, conservative Christians or anything, but they are very spiritual people, and they are conservative about certain things. They raised me to respect my body, to be modest, and to treat the physical aspect of any relationship as…well…sacred, I guess. They didn’t really preach no sex before marriage, exactly, but that was very much their line of thinking. They taught me that sex is very special and very important, and that I shouldn’t enter into a sexual relationship unless I was very sure it was in the context of a meaningful, monogamous relationship. Casual sex was something that was…not wrong, exactly, just…I don’t know. I guess ‘wrong’ is the only word I can really think of that applies. Not morally wrong, just a misuse of sex. They believed, and taught me to believe, that sex is a tool to increase intimacy, not something to just…chase after as an end in itself.”
“I can say with perfect accuracy that I grew up with the exact opposite mindset. But go on.” I extended an arm along the back of the couch, and she shifted, very subtly, closer to me, not quite within the curl of my arm but almost.
She laughed. “That doesn’t surprise me at all.” A sip of wine, a gathering of thoughts, and then she continued. “So, I had a couple boyfriends in high school and in college. I gave my virginity to the guy I dated all through my senior year. We both knew it wasn’t true, ever-lasting love, but we really liked each other and we both knew we were going to different colleges after high school, so I guess it felt safe, because he was coming from a similar background. I don’t think either of us wanted to go to college still virgins, nor did we want to fall in love with someone and still be a virgin.”
I frowned. “No? I thought that was, like, the big thing with people who grew up like you.”
“Well, that was what my parents taught me, yeah. But by senior year I had my own ideas and beliefs, you know? Like, I wasn’t ashamed of still being a virgin at eighteen when all my friends, literally all of them, had lost theirs already. I wasn’t proud of it, either. It was just a thing. I wanted to experience sex, though. And I felt like, I wanted to fall in love, but I didn’t want to fall in love still a virgin because I wanted to be able to experience the whole thing—falling in love, the whirlwind of feelings, staying up all night having marathon sex sessions, that whole romance novel thing, right? And if I was still a virgin, there’d have to be this awkward stage of learning. I knew that much from talking to my friends. None of them had been like, wow, my first time was amazing. That’s not how it works, an
d I knew it.” She paused, sipped, and continued. “I met Tom toward the end of college. I’d had a few boyfriends, slept with a few of them, and was confident in what I thought I wanted in a guy and in a relationship. And when I met Tom, I was sure I’d found it. He was sweet, funny, good-looking, charming, had a good future. Knew what he wanted and where he was going, and that aligned with my life goals, too. We just worked together. We waited until we’d been dating a month to sleep together, and it was…good.”
I winced, and she frowned at me.
“It’s weird to be talking about this with you on a romantic date like this,” she said.
“It’s important stuff, though, right?”
She nodded. “I guess so. But this isn’t how I thought this date would go, I have to admit.”
I laughed. “You probably thought as soon as you got here I’d lock you in the cabin and fuck you up against the wall right off the bat, right?”
She blushed. “More or less.”
“What would you have done if that had been my intention?”
“I—I don’t know.”
I leaned forward, eyes on hers. “Would you have gone along with it?” I held her gaze. “Be honest.”
“I—I’d have tried to slow things down a little.”
I felt my chest swell, and my zipper tighten. “But you wouldn’t have shut me down?”
“You’ve been very open about intending to have sex with me, and—and I guess the more I thought about things and talked to my girlfriends about it, the more I realized I want things that I haven’t been letting myself admit.”
“Like what?” I asked.
She whispered back. “You?”
“Can you be any more specific?” I murmured, tracing my finger down the outside of her bicep.
She shivered at my touch. “I want a lot of things, Roman. More of what we did. More of the way you make me feel.” She lifted her eyes to mine, biting her lower lip. “And to…to make you feel things.”
“Oh, you make me feel things, all right.”
Badd Kitty Page 14
