“That’s some cloak-and-dagger shit. I’m impressed.” The lazy smile he usually wore did seem more...appreciative. Sincere. When he put his arms on the table, she tried not to let the searing colors and writhing patterns on his right arm distract her.
She looked right in his eyes. “So this is really delicate and time-sensitive, and you can’t tell anyone else. I have to get to him. I have to convince him that Saylor University Special Collections is where the collection needs to be. Sometimes it’s not about money as much as legacy. Although the money’s obviously a factor.”
John nodded, but his eyes had glazed over again. Too much academic jargon. Not enough sexy scandal.
“The appraisal mentions something called insertion images,” she added, keeping her voice cool and disaffected.
He blinked and sucked in a breath.
“And pearl rope bondage. Or maybe it was rope pearl bondage?” It was getting to be more of an effort staying cool than she’d imagined. Oh well. John would assume her excitement was due to the rarity, not the special aspects of the collection. “And something about a silver circle—a napkin ring maybe?—held in her mouth in the same style as a modern-day, umm, let me check—” She’d always been good at pretending ignorance; it was a skill that came in handy when she found something valuable but vastly underpriced at a flea market or estate sale and didn’t want to see that number go up. And now, apparently, when she didn’t want to let her best friend know too much about her sexual proclivities.
“Ring gag. A 1930s ring gag.”
Her face flared with heat, hearing him talk like that, so matter-of-factly. “So you know the right words.” Wait, did she want him to answer that? What was that, an accusation? A question? Was she implying something? About John?
He nodded. And then he shook his head. Strange. John was hardly ever indecisive. He must have noticed her suspicious look and flashed his empty hands in a show of innocence. “What? I watch porn! I mean, that kind of stuff is practically mainstream now. No big deal. Everybody knows about it.”
“Do they?” She drawled, regaining her footing at the sight of his...what was it, distress? Not embarrassment, surely. Not from the guy who’d crashed a spring break bikini contest by competing in a banana hammock and gotten the numbers of several legitimate entrants for his trouble.
“Well, not you apparently. But you could check the course listings for bondage studies.” He snorted. “No, no, no, no need to look anything up, I got it. Kink 102, with a special presentation on, uh, ball gags, by the foremost authority in the world on adult novelties, Professor Dick Lickenstein, PhD—”
“Would you stop it? For your information, I’m planning on reading through several academic histories of sexual paraphernalia tonight. See, my job isn’t boring at all. And where’s the defensiveness coming from?” She gave him a sideways look. “Are you watching porn at work? Again?”
“That wasn’t me! I told you, it was a student assistant who pulled up the tentacle penis thing. They’re all sex-crazed maniacs, especially the anime fangirls. I’ve already asked my boss to put a web filter on the network.”
“Uh-huh. Uh-huh.” Robin nodded, crossing her half-asleep legs. She wished John would be more considerate about where he sprawled. On the other hand, it was nice to just be close to someone. Even John. A warm body’s a warm body.
Ew. Standards.
“Seriously, I’m excited. I mean, I’m excited for you. About your career. And I would love to see more Irina Mareau pictures. She’s an important cultural figure.”
“Thanks.” Even though she wouldn’t say it, she was glad she’d come to see him. He was the one constant in her life after moving to the States and the only friend she’d really stayed in touch with since her undergrad. She trusted him not to air her dirty laundry or tell her any white lies. Sure, he might bust her chops a bit, but at least he knew, too, when to scale it back, when he’d pushed her too hard or in the wrong way.
God, she could trust him with anything, really. Even...
“Okay, I’m starving. Let’s get in line for some burgers, and then you can show me the appraisal.” He put his hand on his heart, tipped his head and cast his eyes to the ceiling, posing like a trickster angel. “I won’t tell a soul, cross my heart and stick a ring gag in my mouth.”
She made a rude noise and kicked his shin.
* * *
John enjoyed her company enough that he’d have walked her back to the library even if she didn’t have a promised treasure trove of vintage dirty pictures. With insertion. And rope bondage. And ring gags. Damn.
Watching buttoned-up-real-fucking-life-naughty-librarian Robin discussing that had been quite the exercise in self-control. Worst part being, he didn’t know whether the control he was exerting was to rein in the urge to embarrass her or launch himself across the table at her.
Not thinking about Carol-slash-Kari sexually was dead easy. But Robin, little don’t-call-me-pixie Robin, didn’t walk or talk like a teenager. He’d known her way back then, and she’d changed with the years, wrapped a silky grace around an iron core of determination. He’d erase that stupid nickname from his vocabulary, if it really bothered her that much.
When a rush of students exiting class forced them into single file and he fell in line behind her, his eyes immediately fell on the practiced womanly sway of her boyish hips as she navigated the halls in her sky-high heels. Other girls would teeter in shoes like that, taking silly mincing steps, but Robin strode around like they were cybernetic implants, enhancing rather than hobbling her.
A woman like her could be a wet dream playing up the gamine with ballet flats and baby doll dresses, but Robin seemed bound and determined to look like a six-foot-tall Swedish model, even if she was in the completely wrong body. Er, not that her androgynous figure was wrong, far (far, far) from it, more that she always seemed somewhat at odds with it. Those platform heels, for example—totally overcompensating.
Not that he would ever say so aloud.
She pivoted seamlessly and turned on him. He worried she’d caught him staring at her ass, but the look on her face was more wistful, preoccupied. “Have you ever done internet dating?” she asked.
“Yes?” he said, tentatively. He felt like he’d walked into a minefield. Sure, she’d talked to him about her ex-boyfriend, and he’d told her highly sanitized versions of his own exploits with women (and men)...not that he’d ever call that dating. If she was at the point of actually asking for his advice, though, she must be in pretty dire straits. No wonder she was on edge today.
“Is it always this bad? Or is it only this bad for women? Or is it just me?” She sighed and looked away.
“Um... bad? How?” He had a quick thrill of fear for her safety, which he squashed. If she were in danger in any way, she wouldn’t ask about it in such a roundabout fashion. Or at least he hoped so.
She grabbed him by the sleeve of his shirt and pulled him into a nearby lecture hall, recently emptied of roughly two hundred undergrads, if the garbage littering the desks and floor was any indication. She fell into one of the end row seats, and he was quick to sit beside her. Hell, it must be bad if she had to deliver the news sitting down. Or maybe her shoes were just hurting her feet.
“I thought with all the algorithms and the detailed profiles it would be a little bit more, I don’t know, precise.” She twisted her lip, as if she was genuinely perplexed by the fact that the world wasn’t as neatly categorized as her collections. “I keep going on...dates, but it’s always the wrong guy. I write down what I’m like and what I want and they don’t read it, or they rewrite it in their brains somehow. If they can even fucking write. Half of them are just this side of illiterate. One guy spelled orgasm ‘oargasm’, if you can believe it. Like ‘oar’ that you row a boat with? But even among the ones who can spell—which is already a small pool—I have my profile set for casual encounters, and I’ve got guys wanting to sign contracts on the first date.”
Contracts?
Rob
in continued, as if she hadn’t even noticed her own bizarre wording. “Or they say they’re buff and then they turn out to look like Kevin James. Or they want to buy me a boob job. Or—oh God—they want me to call them Daddy.” She made an exaggerated gagging sound. Not the sexy kind of gagging sound, either—oh hell no, Johnny Boy, do not go down that path now.
“Well, have you considered just dating the old-fashioned way? You know, in person? Personally I think the internet gives you too much information about people. Like there are plenty of guys you’d probably click with on a first date, have a good time and you’d already be shacking up with him by the time you found out he couldn’t spell orgasm. You know?”
“As you keep reminding me, I’m a boring librarian. The men I meet in person are all extremely old, extremely paunchy and extremely socially stunted. Great when you’re tracking down rare Nazi books, not so much when you want to go dancing.” She had a crooked smile on her face now, which heartened him a little. No, she wasn’t desperately lonely, she was only going through a rough patch. She’d handle it like she always did, with humor and stubbornness, and she’d find someone. Someone right for her, who’d give her what she wanted and what she needed.
“You’ll find someone,” he said. “There’s no way you won’t. Shit, I can’t really give you advice based on my own history, but I do know people who’ve had some of the same problems. Just take it slow, be safe, keep at it.”
What a weak-sauce thing to say. Generic. None of his usual verve or flare. He might as well have said attagirl or there’s plenty of fish in the sea.
Which she could use her oargasms to navigate, ha ha.
The truth was, he didn’t have any experience in this kind of thing. He didn’t date, he played, and it was easy for him to find people who wanted to be played with. Even if he did do the normal movie-and-dinner dating thing, he wasn’t sure he could really be objective enough about Robin to give her helpful advice. Especially not after she’d just dropped the word “contract” in casual dating conversation like it was a remotely normal thing to say. He tugged surreptitiously at his shirt collar.
“That’s kind of cliché, but it still helps,” she said, although he had a feeling it hadn’t helped at all. “Thanks. I’d better go now, but I’ll tell you as soon as I get any news on the collection.” She stood to go, and so did he, and when she tossed her wavy blond hair over her shoulder a strand hit him on the neck, like a trailing fingertip grazing lightly over his skin.
“Anytime,” he said. “Anytime at all.”
Chapter Two
My best friend tells me I need to give up the algorithms and get a little less technical about my love life. Apparently most people, and thus most doms, simply aren’t as dedicated to careful categorization as I am. So my faith in the transparency of online profiles in helping us find compatible partners is misguided. And as wary as I am of the unpredictability of real-life hookups, I’m just about desperate enough to jump clear out of my comfort zone. I hear a local club here in L.A. has a drink special on margaritas this Friday, so I’m going to give it a try. If you’re there, please don’t date-rape me. Although I suppose if you’re the kind of guy to date-rape a woman you’re probably not the kind of guy to respond well to being asked nicely. Oh well.
Love,
The Picky Submissive
On second thought, she deleted the date-rape joke. Even for a compulsive blogger like her, there was a line when it came to oversharing on the internet and she was pretty sure that crossed it. She stared at the blinking cursor for a minute or two longer, then typed:
So if you’re in the area and happen to see a petite sub in Louboutins, come say hi!
As long as you can spell orgasm.
Satisfied with the new ending, she saved the post, closed the window, shut the laptop and put it on her bedside table, on top of her library-bound sexual paraphernalia tomes.
Damn, now she had the opposite problem as earlier today—she couldn’t get work out of her mind. No use fighting it. She adjusted her reading pillow, slung the laptop back onto her stomach and opened up the list of Mareau contacts.
She narrowed down the list of leads on the nephew, then stalled out in the next hour, ending up at eight men in their mid-seventies with the same unfortunately common name. She could just bite the bullet and call them one by one, but this was a delicate operation, not the sort of thing where you called the guy up and said, “Hello, Mr. Henderson? I was wondering if you were the Henderson who was recently trying to sell sexy photos of his dead aunt?”
If you had the wrong man, you risked him blabbing to the wrong people. If you had the right one, you risked insulting him with your lack of research and discretion. Ugh. There had to be more research she could do. Some way to narrow down the choices. Sadly, it didn’t seem likely she could do this sight unseen.
Julio had seen the nephew from a distance. But she doubted the guy was going to have a facial tattoo or something to make him easily recognizable from description alone. After all, how easily distinguishable could any group of seventy-year-old dudes all named Henderson be? It looked like hardly any of them had public accounts on social media, as well.
She and Julio were going to have to check them out in person. Come up with a secret code gesture or something for Julio to signal if they had the right Henderson or not. And a cover story for why they were there if it was the wrong Henderson.
Selling Girl Scout cookies? Boy, would the charming gents of KinkLife.com enjoy her acting out that scenario.
Better go with door-to-door proselytizing. They’d start Saturday morning, which meant she shouldn’t have more than a couple margaritas at Miss Kitty’s Fetish Friday. Hopefully she’d meet a few people in the life there—doms to follow up with or subs to commiserate and compare notes with.
It was a shame she couldn’t be more like John. He was the opposite of picky. Back in college, they’d roomed together for a year in a house with four other people and his bedroom door might as well have just had a sock permanently glued to the doorknob.
Maybe she shouldn’t make assumptions about his sex life. For an extroverted guy with an active social life, he didn’t reveal a lot of details about what he got up to sexually. Who knew; maybe he was incredibly picky, but he had so many options to start with, it only appeared like he was indiscriminate. After all, what was the real difference, mathematically, between picking one person out of ten versus picking ten out of a hundred? Whatever the case, he was allowed to keep his secrets.
She’d gotten in trouble before, assuming things about John. That was long ago and water under the bridge, but the embarrassment still lingered.
Don’t think about John.
She pulled up a different tab and thought of the BDSM social event where she’d arranged her first introductory play sessions. Those had been safe, fun, exhilarating...until a few of the regulars started paying her an uncomfortable amount of attention. The worst wouldn’t back off until she mentioned a restraining order. No, that door was closed and she did not want to open it again.
Instead, she pulled up a nightclub whose web address she knew by heart, even though she’d never mustered enough courage to go there. The splash page was black with pink lettering and a stylized pink cat that winked at her as she moved the cursor over it. The cat draped over a text box that read Miss Kitty’s Club. 21+ only Click Here.
Her stomach fluttered, and the laptop suddenly felt unbearable, bulky and overheated. She shifted it down to her upper thighs. Oh, there was a new video link for Fetish Friday. She clicked on it eagerly. There wouldn’t be sex—it wasn’t that kind of club, she wasn’t bold enough to take that step, not without a dom accompanying her—but the video looked fascinating.
Okay, fascinating was probably a pretty generous word, as if her interest in the video was purely academic.
Sexy. Hot. Yeah, one of those.
Sometimes all she had to do was imagine herself as the visual center of the ritual, being properly clothed and positioned for
service, and that would take her away, at least mentally—oh God, it was so fucking good, even in the abstract. And she’d had a taste of how to make it real with a man. She could do it again. It was worth waiting for, to do it right. The right man. No, not only the right man. The right dom.
She just had to find him.
* * *
Dammit.
This was not working. Andy was naked, hot as hell and oh-so-suggestible, but John was hopelessly distracted. Which was not fair. At all. Okay, but he could still save the situation. He needed to satisfy the urge that was distracting him, and then he could get back to the task at hand.
He circled Andy’s kneeling form, taking slow, predatory steps and tracing a palm over the smooth curves of Andy’s slight shoulders.
“Comfortable?” he asked conversationally. “Nothing chafing? Jaw all right?”
Andy gave him two high-pitched grunts through his bit gag: yes.
John ruffled his hair. “Good, good. In that case, I’m gonna need you to get down on your hands and knees for me now, back nice and straight. I have a bit of work to do and I need a laptop table. There’s my good boy, be back in a second.”
By the time he’d returned to the living room with his laptop, Andy was on all fours, head down, back pin-straight, arched at just the right angle to make a nice flat surface for John to work on. John would have to make sure to reward him for this later.
He set down his laptop on Andy’s lower back, opened it and took a seat on the couch. “I need to concentrate on what I’m doing here, so that means I need you to be absolutely quiet. Understand?”
The Dom Project Page 2