Certain Requirements

by Elinor Zimmerman

  Certain Requirements

  Phoenix Gomez wants nothing more than to be a full-time aerial dancer, and after years of hard work, her dream is coming true. That’s until her Oakland rent spikes and her roommate moves across the country with his boyfriend. Desperate for a way to make a living, she accepts a position with a woman looking for a live-in submissive. Phoenix has always kept her love of kinky submission strictly behind the bedroom door and inside the bounds of romantic relationships, until she meets Kris Andersen.

  Why would Kris--a dapper butch, seasoned dominant, and tech hotshot--be interested in such an arrangement? Because in her rigidly ordered life, she has no time to fall in love. When Phoenix challenges the rules Kris thought she wanted, their connection grows only to be put to the test when Phoenix’s career threatens to take her away from the Bay.

  Certain Requirements

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  eBooks from Bold Strokes Books, Inc.

  http://www.boldstrokesbooks.com

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  Certain Requirements

  © 2018 By Elinor Zimmerman. All Rights Reserved.

  ISBN 13:978-1-63555-196-9

  This Electronic Book is published by

  Bold Strokes Books, Inc.

  P.O. Box 249

  Valley Falls, NY 12185

  First Edition: May 2018

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  Credits

  Editor: Cindy Cresap

  Production Design: Susan Ramundo

  Cover Design by Melody Pond

  Acknowledgments

  I am an incredibly fortunate person with wonderful people in my life. I could go on for quite a while with gratitude, but I’ll try to keep it simple. Thank you, Angel, for being my “writing dominatrix” and making sure I saw this through, for being an early reader, and for years of writing friendship. Thanks to Caitlin Hernandez, for being hilarious, encouraging, an insightful early reader, and an excellent writer. Thanks to my mom and my sister for always believing in me. Thanks to all my trapeze and lyra teachers, especially at Wise Fool New Mexico and Paper Doll Militia.

  Thanks to Bold Strokes for welcoming me in the writing family and getting this novel into the world. Thanks to my editor, Cindy Cresap, for making it better. Thanks to Kathleen Knowles for coming across the Bay to give me advice and talk about books.

  Most of all, thanks to Kasey, my first reader, who was a good sport about listening to me type at six a.m. every day when I wrote the first draft and who took our baby on adventures so I could edit it. I love you, like you, and appreciate you.

  Dedication

  For K

  Chapter One

  I’d never been so happy in all my life. Every morning since I’d given notice at my job, I’d woken up smiling. I recited the affirmations my New Age friend and performance partner, Sasha, had insisted I try months earlier, but unlike in the past, I believed the hokey words I told myself. The whole drive to the office, I calculated how many hours I had left before I was free from my job. When I got bored at work, I imagined what I would be doing in two weeks, when I was done with nine-to-fives forever. Nine more days and I’d be a full-time aerial dancer and not a receptionist spending all her free time rushing between trapeze classes and the occasional performance gig. Finally, after three and a half years of saving and struggling to be an aerialist without a day job, I could live my dream.

  It had been a long slog of classes, rehearsal space rentals, and many years of training, but it was over. At last, I’d devote myself full-time to aerial dance. I’d never make it into Cirque du Soleil, but I could have a career teaching my skills and dangling upside down off a trapeze at corporate parties. I’d lined up a few teaching gigs at studios around the Bay Area and arranged two afternoons a week working the front desk at my favorite aerial school, Kirkus Radix, in exchange for open studio time for practicing my routines. I’d created an extremely tight and creative budget. Dining out, alcohol, recreational shopping, and using plastic baggies only once were to be things of the past. With my savings and the half dozen classes I was teaching, I had about eight months to start making better money from aerials, or else find another nine-to-five. But I had an absurd amount of optimism about the number of performing gigs I’d book and how much they’d pay.

  Nothing fazed me. I wasn’t bothered by the snooty clients, the tedium, or the flickering fluorescent lights of the office. I beamed all day at everyone. I sang along with the radio on the way home. I skipped up the steps of my battered West Oakland apartment building. Humming, I grabbed our mail. Even the junk made me happy.

  Halfway up the stairs, I stopped in my tracks. A routine-looking letter from our management company revealed that our rent was going up in sixty days, and it was jumping fifteen percent.

  “Fuck,” I hissed.

  “What, honey?” asked Mrs. Lester from down the hall, fiddling with her purse as she passed me.

  “Did you get one of these?” I held up the offending letter.

  “Oh, that,” she said with a sniff. “We saw that.”

  “Are you going to stay in the building?”

  Mrs. Lester shook her head. “We might move in with my daughter. They have a cottage in the back. This building is going to get filled with San Francisco people.” She said “San Francisco” like a slur.

  Fucking hipster techies, I thought as she lumbered down the stairs. I dragged myself through the door to my apartment and started calling for John.

  “Cooking,” he answered cheerily.

  His boyfriend, Ollie, added, “He’s making blondies.”

  I burst in with the letter held above my head. John was wearing his bright blue apron, his shoulder-length dreads held back by a rubber band. Ollie was still wearing his tie from work but had rolled up his shirtsleeves, glass of wine in hand. They looked so perfect and happy, Ollie with his bright gap-toothed smile and his hazel eyes set against his brown skin; John tall and handsome, his dark poreless skin and his seemingly endless muscles. They looked, I thought, like they should be in an ad. I ruined the domestic scene by blubbering, “Did you know about this? They’re hiking our rent up by hundreds of dollars!”

  Ollie and John froze.

  “What are we going to do?” I screeched. “I just quit my job.”

  One of my favorite things about Ollie and John was that they were untroubled by my lack of preamble or social graces. Maybe they were just nice people, or maybe being my roommate for almost six years had made John immune, and being John’s boyfriend for three of those years had done the same for Ollie. But that evening, they exchanged a long look, the kind that was a silent conversation.

  “Actually, Phoenix, we have something to tell you,” John said gently.

  “Ollie’s going to move in, yeah, I know,” I said impatiently. “You guys have been talking about it for a year. So maybe that will solve the problem, but really, if they’re raising it this much, they could do it again. Do you think we need to look for another place? Everything’s getting so expensive.”

  They shared another look, and John set aside the batter he was mixing. “Maybe we should all sit down,” Ollie suggested.

  “Huh?” I stared at them, not understanding.

  “Come on,” John said. He took me by the arm.
>
  Once we were all settled on the couch, John held my hand. In his gentlest voice, the one he used with his rowdy preschool students, John said, “Ollie and I are moving in together, Phe. But the thing is—”

  “I got a librarian job,” Ollie interrupted. “It’s really great, at a public library, with a focus on the young adult section just like I wanted.”

  “That’s awesome!” I cheered. I jumped up and hugged him. “Congratulations!”

  One more look between them, and finally John said, “It’s in Boston.”

  “What?” I whispered.

  John squeezed my hand. “I love Oakland. I’m always going to love Oakland. Ollie’s going to keep an eye out for librarian jobs here. Hopefully, we’ll be back soon. But right now, I think moving is best for us. I’ve got a couple of interviews lined up, one at a school that looks like a really good fit. We just decided for sure yesterday, and we were going to tell you tonight, you know, with food. I’m sorry we had to tell you like this.”

  My eyes welled with tears. “But there’s snow in Boston!”

  “I know.” He put his free hand on my arm.

  “Your family, your community, it’s all here. How can you leave that?”

  “I want to try something new, Phoenix. I’m excited. I’m nervous, but I’m excited.”

  “But what about me?” I said softly, and selfishly.

  “We’re sorry,” Ollie said sadly. “We’ll miss you like crazy.”

  That did it. I burst into tears. “I’m going to miss you both so much. I’m proud of you, Ollie, and I’m happy for you guys, but I’m going to miss you.”

  “I’m going to miss you too,” John said. He blinked away tears of his own. “You’re going to be okay. We aren’t leaving until the end of September. We can cover our share of the rent while you find another roommate.”

  I shook my head. They couldn’t really afford it, especially with the rent increase, but of course they would offer. “What am I going to do without you?”

  They wrapped me up in a hug, but none of us had an answer to my question. My aerial dreams, my plans, vanished.

  Chapter Two

  “I’m going to be homeless,” I whined to my dear, patient friend Meghan the following Saturday.

  “Actually?” She sighed.

  “No, I’m being hyperbolic. But I am fucked. I just gave notice at work and now my rent’s going up fifteen percent. Fifteen percent! Can they do that?”

  “Not if you have rent control, but in Oakland new construction is exempt. Your building isn’t new construction, is it?” Meghan tapped her chipped coffee cup with her nails and raised her eyebrows.

  “The building’s old, but it used to be a house. They converted it to apartments like in the eighties.”

  “New construction, then.”

  I choked back tears when I added, “And John’s moving out.”

  “Wasn’t that always the plan? He and Ollie have been talking about moving in together for, what, a year? You knew that was coming.”

  “I knew they were moving in together, but I thought Ollie was moving in with us. My share of the rent was supposed to go down. I had it all figured out. But they aren’t just moving out, they’re moving to Boston.” I laid my head on Meghan’s kitchen table.

  “Oh, Phoenix, I’m sorry,” she said.

  “What am I going to do?”

  She patted my back. “Have they hired someone else yet at your job?”

  “No.” I braced myself for the advice I knew was coming.

  Without my roommate and with the increased rent, I’d need a steady paycheck months earlier than I’d planned. Because of the competitive job market, I’d need to start looking almost as soon as I stopped working.

  “If you can’t afford to do this right now, then why don’t you work a little longer? Save a little more?” Meghan was my most sensible friend.

  I turned to face her, my cheek still pressed against the table. “Because I already lined up all these teaching jobs and a work exchange at Kirkus Radix. It took me months to get everything arranged. People have signed up for my classes, and if I cancel, it could hurt my teaching reputation. If I stay at my job, I can’t do any of the things I arranged. A normal job wouldn’t work around my teaching schedule because I’m teaching at all these different times.”

  “Waitressing? It can be really flexible.”

  I groaned. “Teaching an aerials class and then waiting tables for a whole shift? That sounds awful. And who would even hire me? I haven’t waited tables since college, and I was terrible at it.”

  “You do what you have to. You can make it work, Phe,” she said firmly but not unkindly.

  “Okay, but first I get to complain about it. I can’t believe this, Meghan. I’ve spent the last year training five days a week and performing every weekend I can and teaching Saturday and Sunday. I can’t keep up this pace. And I’m twenty-seven! If I don’t start soon, I don’t think I’ll ever do this.”

  Meghan knitted her eyebrows together. She was, as always, dressed more like a high school student than the respected and fierce lawyer she was. With her bright pink pants, ballet flats, and her second-hand cardigan over her T-shirt, I had trouble believing that she’d actually been working on cases until I came over. She was a do-gooder, an immigration rights lawyer, rather than the better-paid kind who wore dry-clean-only clothes all the time—not just when they had to go to court. But still, with her plastic glasses, makeup free face, girlish freckles, and her long red hair in a perpetually messy ponytail, she was often mistaken for an intern, despite being thirty-two.

  “You’ll need another roommate,” she said. “Maybe you can find a couple willing to pay a little more?”

  “Who?” I asked. “The only couple I don’t hate besides John and Ollie is you and Bill.”

  She patted my hand. No way she and Bill would leave their sunny, rent-controlled Berkeley apartment for my crumbling place with an inept building manager who never fixed anything correctly the first time. “Craigslist?”

  “So I can get murdered?”

  “You’re being ridiculous.”

  “The last time I had a Craigslist roommate, he used to throw his dirty socks in the backyard and leave them there until we threatened to kick him out. I had a whole yard filled with rotting socks! And then he got a girlfriend who’d once dated my girlfriend at the time and they hated each other.”

  “When was this?”

  “College. Sophomore year. I’d just started seeing Carolena.”

  “That was a long time ago and now you can be more discerning. Besides, you don’t have a girlfriend, so you don’t have to worry about that.”

  I glared at her and grumbled, “Very helpful. “ I lifted my head finally, brushing my hair out of my face. “What was that financial domination site you used to be on?”

  In addition to lobbying for the rights of undocumented immigrants while dressing like a teenager, Meghan was the most dedicatedly kinky person I knew. Long before we met, back when she was in college, she worked as a phone sex operator, a verbal dominatrix. This was hilarious to me, since Meghan generally sounded even less commanding than she looked. But she was a domme to her core. She told me when we first met that she’d never had a vanilla relationship and never wanted to. I was still in college at the time, bruising from my breakup with Carolena, and a little naïve. I was kinky too, but I wasn’t basing my relationship decisions on it. I’d asked Meghan what she would do if she met the perfect person and they weren’t kinky at all. “If they weren’t kinky,” she’d said calmly, “they would not be perfect for me.”

  When we met, she was in law school at Stanford, dating mostly via internet, using profiles that made her tastes clear from the start. Meghan was bisexual, and she was more concerned with an interest in submission than somebody’s gender. She messaged me on OKCupid because I hinted at BDSM experience and because I spoke some Spanish. She said she was learning the language and wanted a conversation partner, so we went on a date. As it
turned out, I didn’t know how to talk about legal issues en español, she was only marginally interested in the kitchen-oriented New Mexican Spanish I grew up with, and we had no sexual chemistry. We did, however, get along well enough to become friends.

  Meghan told me that though she preferred kink for play than for pay (“it isn’t about what I want when they’re paying me, and I like it to be about what I want”), she dabbled in pro-domme (professional dominatrix) work. At the time, she did financial domination, something that was very lucrative. Through a website that hosted a variety of fetish-focused independent phone sex operators, Meghan had set up a profile offering her services as a domme, one who’d also use up your wallet as a financial dominatrix. After establishing what a client wanted, she’d answer his calls with a curt, “I don’t have time for you,” and put him on hold for fifteen minutes, charge him two dollars a minute for it, and then taunt him and demand gifts of cash via PayPal. Some of her clients barely interacted with her at all and did nothing more than pay her bills. Others doled out big bucks to have her berate them on the phone or via email. Thanks to this, she finished law school with less in student loans than I owed for my BA.

  As soon as Meghan got a job as a lawyer, she quit her paid domme work. Around the same time, she met Bill, a nice, responsible guy who worked at a bike shop. Bill was also happily submissive, with kinks that lined up pretty neatly with Meghan’s. They’d been together ever since, and she’d never looked back at her old job.

  I’d always wondered if I could make money like Meghan had, but I’d never told her this before. Her response when I did was laughter that lasted several minutes.

  “You are way too submissive to be a findomme.”