by Cynthia Dane
“Well?” Sloan paid more careful attention to the way she sipped her own alcohol. “Did you have fun?”
Leah nodded.
“What a lovely thing to hear.” Sloan couldn’t say she had “fun” at a party in years. Not since my twenties, and that was a decade ago. She was used to age differences in her relationships, too. It only got worse with every passing birthday of her own. Most of the escorts she hired to be her dates and hotel bed warmers stayed in their early to mid-twenties while Margaret Sloan discovered gray hairs and more cellulite than her doctor could do anything about. Twenty-five had been the first real physical change since puberty. Gained weight if I looked at a cupcake. My joints got cranky if I partied too hard. Couldn’t hold as much liquor anymore. Twenty-five! Nobody told her that twenty-five was anything more than the end of brain development. Now that she was closer to forty than, oh, thirty-five, she realized the whole dating thing was only going to get worse.
Leah was thirty. That wasn’t so bad. At least she wasn’t a fresh from college girl with eyes wide open. The worst were the ones who threw themselves into trying to change the world. A noble pursuit, but vigor and principles were wasted on the youth of the world.
“Did you have fun?”
“What? At your birthday party?”
“I mean, you were a part of my celebration even if you didn’t know it. A whole half hour.” She leaned in across the table, her cleavage bumping against the edge. Does she know what she’s got in her bust? Sloan had never been in the market to get implants, but if she had to take a pair to the plastic surgeon to use as an example, she would be inclined to pay Leah for her time. “How much did a half hour cost you, anyway?”
Sloan waited until the waiter finished delivering their dinners before responding. “A woman should never share those sorts of details. Private, yes?”
“Because you don’t want to talk about how much you spend on women? Or because you don’t want me knowing how much women in Portland charge per thirty minutes?”
What is her deal? Leah fluttered between adorable naivete and a dirty mind that implored to learn more. Sloan could work with one or the other. She could not deal with the constant flip-flopping. She had personally known politicians who flip-flopped less than Leah did. “I’m not shy about my financials. Especially when you can find out how much I’m worth with a simple Google search.” On paper, anyway. There were off-shore accounts full of rainy-day emergency funds that weren’t factored into the totals. Sloan was shameless like that. “But you might as well ask me about the details of the woman I was supposed to meet the other night. Which I will not divulge, by the way. Some things should remain sacred.”
Leah kept her mouth shut, but her bright eyes glistened with more questions. Looking into them made Sloan feel like she was Pandora standing in front of that fabled box. Tip the lid back and see what bursts forth, Margaret. Pestilence. Decay. Sloan’s personal hell. So, Chicago?
Sighing, she said, “Go on. Ask your question.”
Leah grinned so widely that Sloan feared half the restaurant was staring at them – and not because she wore such pedestrian clothing. “Are you a dominatrix?”
Sloan spat her wine back into her glass. “Excuse me?” Leah hadn’t said that too loudly, had she? That better not be something some fuckwit fed to the press the next day. “I saw Margaret Sloan having dinner with some commoner, and she was asked if she was a dominatrix! No, Ms. Sloan was. Not the commoner dressed like a drowned rat with flour on her pants.”
“Sorry, but that’s what I thought you were the other night. A professional dominatrix that my friend had hired to entertain me.”
“You… liked that, huh?”
She hoped Leah would say no. Sloan didn’t need ideas flooding her head. Ideas that could get her in trouble, and not only at home.
Leah’s biggest tell was when she bunched up her shoulders and looked away, abashed. “I may not get out much, but I know what a dominatrix is.”
“That wasn’t what I asked.”
“No. You asked me if I was into it.” Leah contemplated the scenery from their window-side table. A barge ambled its way down the Willamette River. Stars speckled in the dark sky. Lights in high-rise apartments flickered on. Leah stared at them as if she had never seen such sights in Portland before. “I can’t say I’ve ever had the chance to explore that side of myself.”
Sloan cracked her knuckles beneath the table. I have. I’ve explored those sides of myself until I almost completely lost who I was. Relationships were ruined. A promise to only indulge in kink with women who were trained to handle it was what kept Sloan afloat in her personal life.
“You would call yourself a submissive type?”
“I don’t know about that…” Leah poked at her salad. “Like I said. Never explored it.”
“I suppose there aren’t a lot of opportunities for lesbians to get their freak on in this town.”
“Not unless you’re willing to take risks with total strangers from Craigslist. Maybe if I had the kind of money you did, I could hire women to teach me or show me the ropes.” She clamped her lips around her fork. “So to speak,” she said, after swallowing.
“I’m not a professional of any kind,” Sloan explained. Her arms remained crossed on her legs, her pasta untouched. “But I am experienced. It feels like half of my life has been caught up in that sort of lifestyle.”
“Really? That’s awesome!”
Sloan shook her head. Honestly, it felt more like a curse. The worst decisions I ever made was because of my tastes in the bedroom. The bedroom? Bullshit. More like her whole life, because Margaret Sloan was the type to make everything a lifestyle. She didn’t know how to keep things only in the bedroom once her eyes were opened and her body lit aflame with hedonistic desires.
The only difference between her and women with less money was that she could buy her way out of trouble. Rehab. Therapists. Lawyers out of her own ass… she had done them all.
All but the one thing she really, really dreamed of doing.
She popped open her purse, currently sitting in a basket beneath the table. There, in the bottom of her bulbous leather bag, was a diamond ring on a chain.
One day, she would toss that engraved peace of shit into Lake Michigan. Or maybe the Columbia River. Whichever city she happened to be in when she finally had the balls to cut shit out of her life.
“Do you have a girlfriend?”
What a segue, honestly. “No, I don’t.” Sloan said. “I don’t really do relationships. I prefer to keep a certain amount of distance between myself and the women I see.”
“Don’t have time for relationships, huh? Guess I could see that.”
“Sure.” That was a good excuse. In truth, love was too complicated to indulge. “Let’s say I’m too busy jetting around the world going toe-to-toe with some of the planet’s biggest, money-grubbing assholes. You need a certain spine erected when you bust balls in the boardroom. It doesn’t make for good relationship material.”
“Yeah. I know that feeling.”
“Things in your life preventing you from having a happy relationship, Ms. Leah?”
She blushed. “Suppose. Even we plebeians have skeletons in our closet.”
Do you? Sloan would have to look into Leah’s should urges get the best of her. No skeletons allowed around me, thank you. “What a happy accident that has occurred in this town, Leah. You. Me. Two unlikely women who have so much in common but would have never met if it weren’t for the stupidest mix-up to ever befall real life.”
“You think it’s a good thing we’ve met?”
“As long as you’re not trying to get something out of me, I should hope so.”
“Ms. Sloan…” Leah laughed as if the woman in front of her was one of the most ridiculous she could have met. “The only thing I’m looking for in my life is a little adventure. It’s been a really long time since I was able to embrace certain parts of myself. That’s what happens when you work as hard as someon
e else but only make a fraction of the money.”
“It must be true, if you’re working at a little bakery and still living with your parents.” Sloan wouldn’t broach the part about working “just” as hard. Leah surely put in the effort and hours at her job, but did she deal with men who got pissed off enough at her presence in meetings that hitmen made the occasional go at her life? It’s been at least five years since the last one. I think, anyway. Who knows what my security people don’t tell me? She didn’t want to know. Wasn’t like businesswomen weren’t used to assholes trying to take them out. “What exactly are you proposing here, Leah? Thought you said you didn’t want anything from me.”
“Well, that’s the thing. I feel like you’re more likely to be the woman doing the proposing.”
Sloan narrowed her eyes. “How subversive of you.”
“I don’t see the problem, unless you’re not attracted to me.”
Sloan didn’t hide the way she looked Leah up and down. Not like I don’t know what she looks like beneath her clothes. Or felt like, for that matter. Poor Sloan had been staring at that cleavage for half of dinner. So what if I want to bury my face in it again? Didn’t mean she would. Up until that point, she hadn’t seriously thought about inviting Leah back to her hotel room. I have a plane to Chicago to catch tomorrow. You think I’m going to spend half the night having sex with a woman I mistakenly thought was a sex worker?
“If you’re insecure, then you’re terrible at showing it,” Sloan said.
“Usually, I am.” Leah had already finished eating half of her dinner, whereas Sloan still had yet to start hers. “But I figure I have nothing to lose here. This might be my only chance.”
“Only chance to what?”
That grin was what finally killed Sloan – stabbed her right in the heart, like an icepick come to chip her away. It was rare for a woman to grab Sloan like that. To make her look twice and think about what it would be like to go all the way, not once, but twice. Three times.
All night. All year.
Leah went from an acceptable partner to the kind of woman Sloan was willing to kill to have. All it took was one look… and her saying, “To be with a woman like you.”
Chapter 6
Leah had no idea who the woman inhabiting her body was, but it definitely wasn’t Leah. Not the good girl who tried to stay out of trouble. Leah had used up her allotment of trouble in middle school. She was supposed to spend the rest of her life being as boring and safe as possible – or so her mother drilled into her.
This? Returning to Sloan’s car and going back to her presidential hotel suite in downtown Portland? This?
This wasn’t the Leah she had trained herself to be. This was the Leah who fucked up her life. Why? To prove a point? To feel like she had lived a life worth living? What if it really was her nature, after all? What if Leah couldn’t help but be a giant fuckup who took one whiff of sexual adventure and ruined her whole life with it?
Every time she choked on those thoughts, she looked at Sloan and was reminded that she was an adult now. For fuck’s sake, Leah was thirty! She could make decisions for herself. That included deciding who she slept with. Just because she had denied herself for so many years, didn’t mean her brain development had stagnated. She was more mature now. She knew what consequences and responsibility meant. Besides, how much trouble could she get into with Sloan? The woman had an ex-agent driving her around Portland. She took security seriously.
Which was why Leah didn’t flinch when she saw a muscular woman standing outside Sloan’s hotel suite. They exchanged quick pleasantries before Sloan entered the room and pretended the bodyguard stationed in the hallway did not exist.
Until then, Leah and her date had kept their hands to themselves. No coy looks in the car. No grazes of the fingertips or words of seduction. You’re not the seducing kind, are you Ms. Sloan? That’s what Leah had assumed after their dinner conversation.
Then she ended up against the hotel suite wall, a woman five inches taller than her pressing upon her.
“Ground rules,” Sloan said, her cat-like eyes narrowed into fine slits. “Transgress them, and you’re out of here. I don’t have patience to deal with you otherwise.”
What sounded like something terrible to other women was like tracing a feather down Leah’s spine. “I wouldn’t want to displease you.”
“I’m sure.” Sloan backed off now that she had Leah’s attention. “First, don’t go through my things.”
“Why would I go through your things?” It must have happened enough to Sloan that it was the first rule to come to her head. “I mean, no. I won’t do that.”
“Good. I also won’t tolerate drug use in my quarters.”
Leah smelled something she often encountered on the streets of Portland. “Smoking’s cool, though, right?”
“Why? Do you smoke?”
“No, but you do.”
“Third rule.” The edge in Sloan’s voice grew stronger. “Well, suppose the third rule is that I don’t want any bullshit.”
“I don’t have a lot to give.”
Sloan cocked her brow. “Everyone is full of shit. Even you.”
“Even you?”
She removed her jacket and flung it across an empty tub chair. “Especially me.”
Leah remained in the center of the suite, waiting to be told where she could sit or where she could go. Sloan always seemed two seconds away from deciding this was a mistake and kicking her out. Someone that volatile… Leah had no business getting mixed up with her. She didn’t need drama in her life. She could make enough on her own!
Yet Sloan was the woman to come straight from Leah’s darkest, most closely-held fantasies. It wasn’t about the money. Not really. As much as Leah dreamed of being rich one day, knowing that Sloan could rent this large suite in downtown Portland for as long as she liked didn’t do anything for Leah. She was much more attracted to the fire in those eyes and the no-nonsense way Sloan carried herself through public. She didn’t take any shit from anybody, did she? She said so herself. “No bullshit.” Sloan dressed how she pleased and wasn’t afraid to use it to her advantage when conducting business. I wish I could see her in one of her meetings. Those heels on her feet were probably sharp enough to bust a few balls. God knew Portland had enough bigshots that could use a good ball-busting.
Perhaps Sloan didn’t know it, but Leah had been studying her since they met on Couch Street. Every movement she made, every word she said… Leah ate it all up like the fool she was. Did I bump into some Fairy Godmother at my birthday party who decided to make this come true? Even Melissa couldn’t have known how depraved some of Leah’s fantasies were. If her own best friend didn’t know, then how could Leah mention them to anyone else?
Even to… Sloan?
This businesswoman wasn’t in the business of hearing her partners’ fantasies. She rented women’s time so she could enact her own fantasies. The woman was resourceful and didn’t waste a single dollar or minute of time. She got what she wanted.
And she left.
So what the hell was she doing inviting Leah up to her suite on a Monday night?
“Do you want something to drink?”
Leah tripped where she stood. Sloan’s voice was like a snake curling in Leah’s stomach. Calm, passive, but potentially deadly. All it took was one wrong move and fangs would be in Leah’s gut. Poison would drip. Paralysis of logic and reason would commence.
“Sure. What are you having?”
“I’m not having anything. I was simply being polite.”
“Oh.” Leah relaxed her shoulders and helped herself to a plush chair nearby. “Then I probably shouldn’t have anything either. I don’t need any loosening up.” Her uneasy laughter made her realize what her double-entendre really implied.
Sloan did not react to either the laugh or the words. She only reacted to Leah’s bag slipping off her lap and onto the carpet. Before Leah could dive down to grab her purse strap, Sloan was there, snatching it
.
“Th… thanks.” Leah clutched her bag to her chest as soon as it was in her hands again. Sloan abruptly turned, her perfume whipping up a small cyclone of sweet scents.
A different perfume from the other night. This woman mixed it up. I wish I could smell the perfume from when she… Leah hid her embarrassment behind her bag. Now that she was in Sloan’s room, taking up space in her chair and breathing the same intimate air as her… how could she remember getting fingered to orgasm and not blush?
“I’m sorry.” Sloan placed her hand on her hip and scratched the back of her head. Something about her hair reacted unnaturally. Or at least Leah didn’t know how she could rip at her roots and not flinch in pain. “This is so awkward. I haven’t done something like this in a really long time.”
“Something like this?”
“You know…” Sloan scoffed. “Invited a woman back to my place. Not like this.”
“You mean a woman who isn’t an escort.”
“It’s different, isn’t it? Protocol, that is.”
Am I really the one with more experience in this? That was awkward. Because Leah hadn’t been on many dates in her adult life. The few women she had dated either turned into platonic friends or forgettable one-night-stands. She couldn’t say she had been in a real lesbian relationship before. Not that she thought it was possible with Sloan, but someone like her must have had a string of serious girlfriends over the years. She could have any woman she wanted! Even straight ones, if she put her mind to it!
Yet I’m the one in her room.
“How would this go if I were someone you hired?”
“Someone I hired would know what I wanted before she entered the door. I make that clear before I pay a single cent.”
“So… what is it that you want?”
Sloan spared her a curdled glance. “It’s different telling a woman like you. Because it’s about what you want, too. Sexually, that is. If I give you a run-down of what I usually want, you’ll either run or make demands of your own. Maybe I’m not in the mood to deal with another woman’s demands beyond what they serve me.”