Deposition and a Dare

by Evelyn Adams

  “Open it, and then start talking. Or better yet, talk while you open. What the actual fuck, Alex?”

  “I don’t know why he sent the box here.” I hadn’t given him my home address, but with the resources his offices had, I was sure he had it already. And if he hadn’t wanted to send it there, I knew he had my post office box. It was on the contact on my website. That he’d sent the box to Charlotte meant one of two things: either he was trying to poke at me and wanted witnesses or, more alarming, he read me well enough already to know seeing my friend would be one of the first things I did in the morning. Bolstering my courage, I picked up the box and carried it to the small sofa, letting it rest on my lap while I worked up the nerve to open it. I didn’t know the store but it wasn’t likely to include sex toys or anything. And if it did, I could explain them away. It would be a lot more comfortable to have Charlotte think Erik was making fun of my profession than explain why he’d be sending me thoughtful gifts.

  “Let’s revisit the where,” she said, sounding like her patience had started to fray. “And move on to the why.”

  “I don’t know that either.” Honestly, the only thing I had a real shot at was the what. Setting the lid of the box to the side, I peered inside. Nestled in the palest green-blue tissue paper was a collection of glass bottles filled with liquids the color of sea glass. The elegant handwritten labels with words like Aphrodite’s Pearl and Mermaid’s Dreams wrapped the slender bottles, and there was a huge natural sea sponge tucked into the side of the box, with a card resting on top. Ignoring Charlotte’s impatient noises for a moment, I slid the pure white cardstock from the envelope.

  THANK YOU FOR THE GIFT. USE THIS NEXT TIME AND IMAGINE IT’S MY HAND, OR TONGUE. YOUR CHOICE—THIS TIME.

  I shoved the card back into the envelope and buried it under the tissue paper. Not that it was likely to deter my friend from finding out everything. My face was scorching hot, and I knew I must have blushed beet-red. I’d sent Erik the picture of me in the tub on impulse. Regardless of what I might think about whatever this thing was we were doing, I wanted to at least try. There was no reason to pretend and about a dozen great ones not to go through with any of it. If I was doing it, I was going to really do it. The one orgasm in the elevator hadn’t done a thing to satisfy me, so I’d taken matters into my own hand again in the tub. Per our agreement, I sent him a text letting him know. The picture had been an afterthought. It only showed my calves and feet extending out of the sea of bubbles. I thought it might be a way to spread some of the torture around. Apparently, it inspired him.

  “I’m going to rephrase my question and you’re going to answer it. Where did you go after you left the deposition?”

  I paused, knowing there was no way I could tell her what happened without her going ballistic.

  “He cornered me in the lobby after the deposition and dared me to take him through a session.” I said the words as quickly as I could, like ripping off a Band-Aid.

  “You didn’t.” She shook her head in a way that made it clear she already knew the answer.

  “I did,” I said and braced for impact.

  “Please tell me you didn’t have sex with the man,” Charlotte said, coming out from behind her desk to sit next to me.

  “No. Of course not,” I said, ignoring how much I’d wanted to and opting for righteous indignation instead.

  “So what did you do?”

  “We walked around a bit, had beignets and talked.” I distilled the encounter down to as few words as I thought my friend might accept.

  “You talked? Talked about what exactly?”

  “Nothing much really. A little dominance and submission. That’s about it.”

  “Did you talk about the case? Tell me the truth, Alex. It’s important.” She shifted to face me, and I saw the concern clear in her eyes.

  She’d give me shit because it’s what she did, but she loved me so she’d always look out for me. I reached for her hand and gave it a squeeze. I didn’t want to tell anyone about what happened with Kyle. I’d been replaying the conversation in my head, catching myself thinking about the timid man wielding a cane. I didn’t need Erik to tell me I bore some responsibility for what happened and it didn’t sit well. I’d told him the truth when I said I wanted to help people. The money was nice—hell, great—but I’d felt like I was providing a service. Not exactly a naked Dr. Ruth but helpful.

  “He told me why he took the case and why it was personal.”

  “And? God, it’s like pulling teeth with you this morning.”

  “Does attorney-client privilege protect him too?” We hadn’t talked about not sharing each other’s secrets. The fact that we both had them made the conversation unnecessary. But the same wasn’t true for Charlotte. I had to tell her something. She’d never let me out of her office if I didn’t and when I thought logically about it, I wanted to talk to her about what I’d found out about Kyle. Get another perspective from someone who got paid to look at things objectively. But I didn’t want to out Erik, and I didn’t want anything he’d told me to come back and bite him in the ass.

  “Privilege covers you, Alex. My job is to look out for you. Jensen can take care of himself.”

  “Promise me that what I tell you stays between us. You won’t use it.”

  I could tell by the thin crease in her forehead and the set of her mouth that she didn’t like it, but she nodded.

  “Erik is a member at a BDSM club.”

  She arched an eyebrow at me. I was pretty sure it was over my use of his first name and not the BDSM bit.

  “A client of mine was a patron at the club. Things got out of hand and the dungeon monitor had to step in.” I swear, even after all these years, I couldn’t think those words without replacing monitor with master and remembering the tiny Lord of the Rings figures I’d had in junior high. “He’d caned a woman to the point where he broke her skin. When they were throwing him out, he said he knew what he was doing because Lexi taught him.” I let the words hang in the space between us. I wasn’t about to try to sugarcoat them or pretend what happened was less horrific than it actually was.

  “Jesus.” Charlotte blew the word out on a breath and then jumped up and headed to her desk. “You’re going to need a new attorney.”

  “What? No.”

  “Alex, if this dungeon or anybody else involved in this tries to sue you, the liability could be huge. Listen, I know you. I get that you feel responsible, but this isn’t something to fuck around with. I don’t think there’s grounds for criminal charges, but you need somebody who knows about this kind of liability to handle it,” she said, reaching for the phone on her desk.

  “There’s nothing to handle.” A new kind of fear settled in the pit of my stomach. I didn’t think the antacids would make a dent in this kind of anxiety. “The dungeon isn’t going to sue. They’d be opening themselves up to some kind of liability too, right? Not to mention the extra scrutiny, which I can’t imagine they’d want.” I thought back over what Erik had told me about the submissive. “I don’t think the woman will sue either. Erik—Jensen said she egged my client on. She’s into that kind of pain.” I fought back the shudder. I wasn’t about to judge someone for whatever turned them on, but I’d always had a hard time understanding extreme masochists. Walking the pleasure/pain line—sure—but cutting, needles, pain that left permanent marks? That I didn’t understand.

  “And your client?”

  “No way. He was crazy private. There’s no way he’d call that kind of attention to himself. He’d never initiate it anyway.”

  Charlotte looked skeptical but she let go of the receiver and dropped into her chair.

  “I don’t like it.”

  “I don’t love it myself.” That was the understatement of the century.

  I moved the box from my lap to the empty seat beside me and smoothed my sweaty palms over my skirt. Charlotte’s gaze shifted to Erik’s gift the way I imagined a hawk tracked a rabbit’s movements.

  “
What does Jensen want with you?”

  Lots of things I was pretty sure I didn’t want to explain to my friend, no matter how close we were. I went for the easiest one.

  “He says he’s a Dom. I think he wants to teach me stuff.”

  “I don’t even know where to start with that. Naked stuff? I thought you worked with a guy before you started seeing private clients.”

  I thought back to the Dom I’d met with before I opened the Gentleman’s Submissive. Whatever he may have been, he and Erik weren’t in the same league. I’d felt more fully clothed with Erik than I’d ever felt with Master Whatshisname. I was starting to realize some of that might have had more to do with my attitude and willingness to let go of control than the men involved. I remembered Erik’s voice in my ear when I’d been blindfolded. His hand warm and strong through his jacket against the small of my back.

  Some of it was the man.

  “I did, but that doesn’t mean I can’t learn more. I won’t say it out loud, to anyone but you, but I do feel responsible for what happened with my client. I don’t want to let something like that ever happen again.”

  She smoothed a hand over her already perfectly smooth chignon, and I got a rare glimpse at her internal struggle. Charlotte made a living hiding her thoughts and feelings and only showing people what she wanted them to see. We had that in common.

  “So what kind of things did you and Jensen do? Naked things?” Her lips curved in the barest smirk, and the band around my chest relaxed a fraction. If she could tease me, I could believe things were going to be okay.

  “He put my clothes on,” I said, remembering the way the backs of his fingers brushed my breasts as he’d fastened the buttons on my blouse, the silk adding its own kind of sensuality to his touch.

  “You stripped for him?”

  “Naked is my best battle armor, and the lack of blood flow to the brain usually works in my favor.”

  “But it didn’t with Jensen?” she asked, smiling for real this time.

  “Nope. It did not.”

  “Are you going to see him again?”

  “He already paid for a second session,” I said, thinking of the ease with which he’d dropped another grand into my bank account and the pressure it relieved. Financial pressure anyway. His don’t come without telling me thing added its own kind of pressure.

  It seemed like a lot of money, and it was, but with the rent on my studio, my personal living expenses, and no money coming in, I was going to have to stretch to make it work.

  “Is it okay for me to see other clients?”

  Charlotte shook her head and my spirits dipped a notch. “Jensen is defying his own order by paying you. Although he’s on shaky enough ground for the stunt he pulled during the deposition. I doubt he’d breathe a word about it. The cease-and-desist is still in place. For now,” she added when I blew out a breath. “I put a call into Jensen’s firm to see who would be taking over for him. I haven’t heard back yet.” She paused for a minute, thinking. “If whoever takes over doesn’t have such a hard-on for you”—she smirked at the pun, and I managed to smile back—“maybe I can get them to settle the whole thing. The push to go to trial didn’t make any sense before, but if it was Jensen and not the client pushing, we should be able to make it go away quickly.”

  I felt my smile widen. Whatever else might be going on, getting out from under the lawsuit would be a relief.

  I DID YOGA, MOSTLY BECAUSE in order to eat everything I liked and not weigh three hundred pounds, I had to do something. I walked a lot. Living in a city like New Orleans necessitated it, but if I wanted to indulge in pralines and Erik’s beignets, I needed to do more. Stretching, even adventure stretching like Meredith and I did at the yoga studio downtown a couple of times a week, was nothing compared to the kind of hell the personal trainer seemed intent on putting me through.

  Apparently a session with the trainer was part of the new member welcome package. The gift membership a client gave me was set to expire in a couple of months. Despite owning a string of gyms and having the body to show for it, the man had been surprisingly reticent. I helped him boost his confidence and the last I’d heard, he and his new wife were expecting their first child. And I no longer had the excuse of being too busy with work to put off going.

  “Push, push, push,” said the twenty-something drill sergeant in perfectly pressed flat-front chino shorts and a white polo with the club’s logo embroidered over what I bet was an impressive pec. The stupid uniform made it impossible to know for sure, which was wrong on so many levels. If I was going to do something that made me sweat so much and hurt so bad, I ought to at least have something nice to look at. Motivation and shit.

  I pushed against the bar over my head, giving it everything I had, and watched it move all of two inches before I let go and it slid back to its starting position.

  “That’s okay,” he said, more like he was trying to reassure himself than me that I’d eventually get it. “We’ll lower the weight and up the reps. In a couple of weeks, you’ll be hitting the top.”

  I couldn’t think about doing this for a couple of weeks. I’d rather be flogged by a firm full of accountants than spend that much time in the gym trying to make weights move for no good reason. I let Commander Ken lead me through a series of leg exercises. They were easier for me than arms and by the time we finished, some of his will to live seemed to have come back even as mine had seeped away. I made it through a minute of plank and called uncle when we hit V sits.

  “That was fantastic,” I said, trying and failing to hide the fact that I was gasping for breath. “Just great. Thanks for showing me around.” I struggled to my feet, ignoring my trembling legs so I could escape while I had the chance. I stuck out my hand to shake and after a moment, he took it.

  I could tell by the confused expression on his face, he hadn’t been ready to finish. I kept my smile glued in place and he had no choice but to push for more or shake my hand. I watched him wrestle with the options before finally deciding to take my hand.

  “Great job today,” he said with an amazing amount of generosity.

  I arched an eyebrow at him and his can-do façade slipped for a moment. He gave me a genuine smile. I might have worked harder if he’d shown me that instead of the rah-rah, push harder cheerleader stuff we’d been doing for the past forty-five minutes. I thought about telling him, but it probably wouldn’t have made a difference and it seemed better to let both of us off the hook as soon as possible.

  I needed a shower, but after all that time heaving weights around, I needed sustenance more. I’d remember seeing something about an apres workout café. I doubted they’d have anything as fortifying as a decent donut, but made right, a smoothie could be almost as good as a milkshake. Not the chocolate or salted caramel kind but better than wheatgrass. Making my way past the workout-driven minions to the mezzanine level, I placed my order for a berry smoothie, ignoring the look the girl behind the counter gave me when I asked if it could be made with whole milk yogurt and honey instead of agave.

  Given her expression when she handed me the glass, I might as well have been asking her to smear butter on my thighs. With all the straining I’d done, I had to at least have worked off some yogurt. If not, I didn’t want to know. Ignorance is bliss and all.

  I found a seat at the bar looking out over the machines below, and sucked a swallow of my full-fat berry extravaganza through the wider-than-normal straw. At least they didn’t make it hard to get to the good stuff. I could maybe even get used to this. I could sit on my barstool, sucking on smoothies for a couple of weeks and call it using my gym membership. Of course, that would be going in the wrong direction where the size of my ass was concerned.

  Ignoring the way my abs ached as I leaned forward, I scanned the crowd below. If only people watching burned calories. There was a guy—broad shoulders, great ass—pounding the treadmill like he was running away from something. At this distance, it was hard to tell but it looked like he was wearing ea
rbuds. I wondered what kind of music he listened to that made him run like that. Erik could probably run like that. He had the body for it. I mean, I hadn’t seen all of it, but I’d felt a lot of it and I had high hopes for the rest. He wouldn’t run in a place like this. Regardless of how high-end it might be, it was still too public for a man like Erik. He probably had a treadmill in his loft, where he could run looking out over the Gulf.

  My mind drifted from Erik running to Erik naked in the shower, washing the sweat off his completely lickable body. Taking his heavy cock in his hand and running a soapy fist down the length. I inadvertently sucked harder on the straw and coughed when I choked on the berry smoothie. I should have tried to find a way to make our text me before you come arrangement reciprocal. Even as I had the thought, I heard Jack Nicholson ala A Few Good Men, saying “You can’t handle the texts.” Nicholson was right. I probably couldn’t handle knowing when Erik was getting off. What if it was with someone else?

  The thought did uncomfortable things to a place deep inside my chest. And then it twisted itself around and a little slice of genius was born. I slipped my phone out of the nifty Lycra sleeve I’d gotten to hold it while I pumped iron and scrolled to the contact for Sir.

  YOU DON’T NEED ME TO TEXT YOU IF I’M HAVING AN ORGASM WITH SOMEONE ELSE, RIGHT? THAT WOULD JUST BE WEIRD.

  The reply came so fast; he must have been staring at the phone when he got the text.

  DON’T DO IT

  It would be easy to let him off the hook, but honestly, where was the fun in that?

  K. I WON’T TELL YOU

  NOT WAT I MEANT AND YOU NO IT

  If the typos were any indication, I’d succeeded in getting under his skin at least a little.

  YOU’RE A LAWYER. YOU OUGHT TO BE BETTER AT COMMUNICATING.

  The pause before my phone vibrated was so long I’d almost convinced myself he’d given up.

  I DO NOT WANT YOU TO HAVE ORGASMS WITH ANYONE ELSE.

  NOT OPEN FOR NEGOTIATION. HARD LIMIT.