The Principle of Desire (The Science of Temptation)

by Delphine Dryden

  Beth looked at Ed’s mouth, the unexpectedly well-shaped lips hidden by his incipient beard, and thought about the kiss, which had been lovely. She thought about the Zen moment during the flogging. She thought of his cock, thick and heavy in her hand, in her mouth, and the way Ed had stroked her hair when she sucked him. Like she’d always wanted Aaron to do, but he never had because he didn’t like to treat her as a pet. She could imagine being Ed’s pet, happy to do his bidding, secure in the knowledge that he would be willing to take turns in that role. Or in something else, where the roles didn’t have to be so clearly defined. A playmate.

  It had felt perfect with Ed. Somehow, implausible as that seemed, perfect. And Beth wanted more.

  Chapter Six

  The talk had turned to the next big role-playing game the group had planned. Their friend Lin usually alternated with Ivan as dungeon master, and he had just finished designing a mammoth campaign. They were all trying to decide whether to begin that Wednesday or hold off in favor of some shorter games they’d been meaning to try.

  “Well, how long does it take to play one game?” Beth asked. “Couldn’t you just play whatever else next week?”

  “Lin’s games usually take at least twelve hours,” Ivan explained. “We limit our Wednesday night sessions to four hours, so once we start the campaign we won’t get to play anything else for at least three Wednesdays.”

  Cami nodded. “The last one Lin did took us two months to finish. Heh. That was before...” She looked at Ivan, then shook her head as if to clear it. “Anyway. Beth, you should come and play with us.”

  Ivan frowned. “With the addition of Ed at the club and Beth in the game, my Venn diagram will become all but moot. Only Lin is left in the friend-not-from-the-club set.”

  “I haven’t made any firm decisions about the club,” Ed insisted, just as Beth blurted, “I don’t even know how to play those kinds of games.”

  He looked at her, they smiled at each other, and a fluttering moth of sheer delight careened around in Ed’s abdomen and chest. “If you want, we could get together Tuesday night and I could help you do a character sheet.”

  “Okay. Yeah. That’d be great, thank you.”

  Wait...was that the date? Did I just arrange the date? Or are we really just gonna sit around rolling a character for her?

  “I’ll pick you up around six-thirty or seven, and we can grab some dinner or something,” Beth volunteered, to Ed’s astonishment.

  “Oh. Okay. Good. You know where—of course you know where I live. Never mind. So, six-thirty?”

  “Sounds great. I’ll be there.”

  The rest of the table had gone suspiciously quiet during this exchange. Uneasy, Ed glanced around to see them all laser-focused on their pie.

  Looking back at Beth, panic mounting in his throat, Ed saw her smirking. She winked at him before speaking again. “Will it take very long, though? Because I’ve got a huge stack of quizzes and case studies to grade, so I really shouldn’t take more than an hour or two for dinner.”

  Suddenly it didn’t sound like a date, the tension at the table eased, and conversation began to flow around them again. But the wink meant it was still a date. At least Ed was about ninety percent certain that was what the wink meant. He didn’t want to think about the possibilities covered by the other ten percent.

  * * *

  She should have expected the Jag parked in front of her house, but her mind had been on other things during the drive home from the pie place. Ed. Pie. Her friends, including her in more non-club activities. Ed.

  It was late, and she was tired. She wasn’t up to Aaron right now. But he’d already be inside waiting for her, so she didn’t have much choice. Her fault for not insisting he give her key back.

  Aaron wasted no time once Beth had closed the door behind her and stepped through the curved archway into the living room.

  “Were you with the doughboy?”

  She had her guard up, this time. She didn’t have to let him have his way with her emotions. “I was with friends. Give me my key back, Aaron. You should not be here. Please don’t come here again uninvited, you don’t have my consent for this anymore.”

  He had done it all the time when they were still together, when he was the Master and she served at his whim. Once upon a time, she had waited breathlessly for Aaron to show up unannounced like this. But for him to do it now was creepy and intrusive, and Beth didn’t have the energy to put on a pleasant face about it.

  After a moment he slid the key across the coffee table toward her, but settled back into the couch. “Did the friends include the doughboy?”

  Use your psychological X-ray vision superpower. Beth wasn’t a clinical psychologist, but she still knew a lot about analyzing people’s behavior and words to get at deeper meaning. She’d always been good at that, and Aaron was kind of transparent anyway. She saw deep insecurity, and a sea of denial.

  “Do you feel that disparaging his physical fitness will make me perceive you as the fitter and therefore more desirable mate?”

  “Perception has nothing to do with it. Empirically, I am fitter and more desirable.”

  Dropping her purse on the table and putting the key in the side pocket, Beth took a chair opposite the couch. She resisted the urge to fold herself up, instead leaning back and using the armrests. Relaxed. In control.

  “If muscles and pretty were all that mattered to me, I’d be with Big Dog. Don’t think he hasn’t offered himself. I haven’t had to polish my own boots in months.”

  Aaron rolled his eyes, shook his head. “Fine. Intelligence, then.”

  She couldn’t help the giggle that popped up, but she stifled it quickly. “Ed’s a rocket scientist.”

  How often did somebody get to say that in real life and actually mean it?

  “So, what, you mean he’s a brainy geek? That whole group is brainy geeks—that doesn’t make them smarter than I am.”

  “Not necessarily, no. But in this case I mean he is literally a rocket scientist. An aerospace engineer. He works for some company that does something with propulsion systems for NASA. I have no idea if he’s smarter than you are, it’s sort of apples and oranges.”

  She’d never seen Aaron lost for words before, but the rocket scientist thing had thrown him for a loop and he took a good twenty seconds to respond. Years of administering controlled assessments and timed trials had given Beth a great internal stopwatch, so she knew her estimate was accurate to within a second, plus or minus. Twenty seconds of awkward, dumbfounded silence, and she couldn’t help but savor every bit of it.

  “Is that what the Professor does, too?”

  Confidentiality fail. “You’d have to ask the Professor, but I think his club name is probably a clue to his occupation, you know? Become his friend outside the club and ask him yourself if you really want to know more. Aaron, I’ve had a long night and I’m tired, so I would like you to leave now, please.”

  “We need to talk,” he insisted. He sounded more whiny than forceful.

  “I did talk,” she reminded him. “Before you left for England. I can’t help it if you didn’t listen.”

  “I thought you just needed some time to get your head straight. I never thought you were serious.”

  “You made that pretty clear. I did need some time, which I got when you left. And I got my head straight. This is me, with my head straight, as a switch who has a date Tuesday night with this rocket scientist I molested in a parking lot earlier. Wednesday we’re going to play Dungeons and Dragons or something with our mutual friends. I’m thinking my character could be an elf. I like elves, and I’m not ashamed to admit that.”

  After another pause, briefer than the last, Aaron stood and made for the front door, shaking his head again. He turned before exiting, giving Beth a wan smile. “Sorry I let myself in. You have every right to be pissed about that. It was just habit, it won’t happen again. Not only because you took the key, I mean I wouldn’t have done it again anyway.”

&n
bsp; Softening, she smiled back, though she joined him at the door and held the knob, making it clear she was ready to close it after him. “How was England, by the way?”

  He shrugged. “Green. Sceptre’d. Good beer. The usual. I missed you.”

  “Not enough to act like it, though. Not enough to mention it in your emails, or indicate in any way that you regretted acting like a tool before you left. You didn’t regret that until now, when you’re back and realizing that you really do not have a sub or girlfriend waiting for you here.”

  At one time she’d been strictly relegated to the sub role, but after moving to Houston to stay with Aaron he’d let her into his everyday life as well. And perhaps that had made the difference. At the club, Aaron was a golden boy, top of the heap, the acknowledged Alpha among alphas. In his regular life, he was unpleasantly divorced, and only well-off because he was a trust fund baby. Not everybody found his autocratic ways delightful, and people were often catty about the fact that she was almost twenty years his junior. His research was also stalled out, no longer as exciting as it had been. His academic career was in decline, while hers was on the rise. Seeing him in that light hadn’t caused her disenchantment, but it had enhanced it and hastened the inevitable breakup. Beth still wasn’t sure what she wanted next from life, but seeing him now only confirmed that she didn’t want a life with Aaron. She still wasn’t sure what kind she wanted instead.

  “I did regret it,” he said. “I just have trouble expressing that kind of thing in an email or over the phone. I came back here intending to ask you to marry me, by the way.”

  It didn’t surprise her. She had to think about that for a moment, how predictable it had been to her. He’d only told her about it once there was no possibility she’d jump at the chance, she couldn’t help but notice. Did he even realize that? “But you didn’t ask. And don’t you think telling me after the fact, as I’m pushing you out the door, is pretty passive-aggressive? Not very Dom-like.”

  “I guess that’s fair. Were you always this healthy and reasonable?”

  She considered it. “No. This is recent.”

  Sighing, he stepped out onto the porch, paused a moment, then turned and gestured dramatically at the door frame as if he’d crossed not just a physical, but a symbolic threshold.

  No more actors, Beth decided.

  “You’re sure?”

  “I have been sure since I told you six months ago.”

  “Understood. I take my leave of you, then. ‘Only I here importune death awhile, until of many thousand kisses the poor last I lay upon thy lips.’ For old times’ sake?”

  No more actors, ever. It was a speech for a dying man, anyway. Unlike Antony, Aaron seemed likely to recover from his current distress.

  “Nice try. I’m not kissing you, Aaron.”

  “I figured it was worth a shot.”

  “Goodbye.” She jiggled the doorknob and he finally relented.

  “Goodbye, Beth.”

  She closed the door, locked it, and felt like all the other doors in the world had just opened up for her.

  * * *

  The sushi bar setting, Ed decided, was like a date. The character sheet and RPG discussion probably were not. At least as far as his very limited experience went with dates. For one thing, because of the gaming stuff, he and Beth actually talked without running out of things to say. Her eyes didn’t even glaze over as he explained the basic mechanics of the game. Ed’s history of dates had always included eye-glazing before. But even when his explanation of rolling a d20 for damage digressed into a discussion of probability as it applied to icosahedral dice, Beth stayed right with him. Not only that, she got ahead of him.

  “Of course, that doesn’t take into consideration that the side with the number one on it must weigh marginally more than the other sides, because it has the least material carved out. So the odds of rolling the opposite face would technically be higher, although you might never have enough trials to know for sure in the normal course of events. It would require controlled conditions, too.”

  “So true!” he concurred, delighted with her acumen. There was just something about a woman with a decent grasp of statistics and research. “And also there will always be minor imperfections in the internal composition of a die that affect the distribution, even though the die itself looks and feels perfectly normal. This is why you should always test-roll your dice before you buy them.”

  “Well, that and superstition,” she added, nodding soberly. “Gotta roll ’em to make sure they’re not unlucky.”

  “Naturally.” But inside his head, he was saying, Oh, apparently you’re not only unbearably hot, you’re also my dream girl. Possibly you don’t really exist and this is all an elaborate hallucination brought on by an excess of screen time or some bad sashimi.

  And for another thing, Ed enjoyed himself. A definite first, for a date. He was usually too nervous to converse when he took a woman out for the first time, but in this case the woman had already gone down on him in a parking lot. He felt fairly assured that she liked him and also reasonably confident about the prospect of sex at some point. It took the pressure off.

  “So what will your name be? Elves and fairy folk are usually, like, Arondiel Leafblower or something. Woodsy stuff or Tolkien-sounding stuff.”

  Beth pursed her lips, considering. “Flaxseed Featherwort? Gladringel Saplingraiser?”

  “You sure you’ve never done this before?”

  “How about Arianna Elfington? Or, let’s see...something less goofy is better, so I don’t forget it. Lark? Larken...Summerjoy. That should work.”

  “Lady Larken?” Ed asked, not really expecting her to get the reference.

  “From Once Upon a Mattress! I love that show. Maybe I should name my pixie Fred, after the princess.”

  Ed was astonished. “How do you feel about My Fair Lady and Camelot?”

  She lifted an eyebrow. “I feel like you know an awful lot about vintage Broadway shows. I think Lerner and Loewe were brilliant, in general. Okay, so give. Are you a closet actor? Because I’m not sure how I feel about that.”

  Ed laughed, a response to the bubbling happiness of feeling understood by somebody this fabulous. “Both my parents worked, so my grandmother used to watch me after school every day, all through elementary and middle school. She listened to Broadway soundtracks on LPs all the time, so I learned them all. Oklahoma, Guys and Dolls, The Music Man, Oliver, Gypsy. She had about a dozen favorites that got more air time than the others, and they’re permanently ingrained in my brain.”

  “You should do community theater,” Beth suggested.

  “Meh. I’m not that into public performances.”

  She pressed her lips together, turning her grin into a smirk. “Really? I find that hard to believe.”

  Ed felt himself blush, and hoped it didn’t look as obvious as it felt. “I don’t like singing in public.”

  “Okay. But you’re okay with...”

  He fiddled with the nearest corner of the character sheet, as one of his legs started bouncing under the table. Did she really have to ask? “Yeah, that was okay.”

  “Just okay. I see.”

  “No, it was—”

  “Teasing. I was teasing,” she assured him. “I wasn’t fishing. I do feel a little awkward, though, because I wasn’t thinking too clearly right then, and, well...” She picked at the opposite corner of the page, folding the paper over and over until it was worn along the seam. “I forgot to ask you about your history. Whether you’re clean, stuff like that. I lost my head.”

  Hehe. Head.

  “I’m clean, as far as I know. It’s been a while since my last girlfriend. Months...almost a year, maybe. I’ve been kind of busy at work and I don’t meet too many new people anyway, so I’ve just been relying on wanking and porn since then.” He almost smacked himself on the forehead once the words left his mouth. She did not need to hear that. Now she’s going to walk out in disgust.

  “God, tell me about it. I hop
e my friends know to delete my internet history if anything happens to me.”

  “You’re the perfect woman.”

  Beth snorted, nearly choking on the swig of soda she’d just taken. “Because of porn?”

  “You just...you are. Because of everything. I can’t even be cool about it.”

  He wanted to do more, somehow, show her that he meant what he said in a profound way. It wasn’t just the falling-in-lust feeling at work—he really, really liked her. That was harder to explain than lust, however. He did the next logical thing, which was to lean over the table and kiss her. In his haste, he pushed on the character sheet, which shoved all the dice to the floor with a raucous clatter just as their lips met.

  * * *

  Beth giggled as Ed bent to scoop the dice from the floor. The irregular shapes had scattered farther than she would have thought, and by the time he had collected them all, the waiter was glaring at him.

  But the kiss had come at the right moment to defuse some of her tension. He’d said she was the perfect woman, and she wasn’t sure how to process that. If he’d said it a few days ago, before she’d gotten to know him, she would have assumed he was just desperate to get laid. Now, though, she suspected Ed was telling the truth; he simply hadn’t had the time to go out and find another partner, and easier alternatives had been at hand for his most pressing needs. She knew how appeal worked, and she knew Ed’s appeal was growing on her. It stood to reason she wasn’t the only one who’d spotted his better qualities through the scruffy, grumpy haze. If he’d really wanted to, he could have probably scored with any number of women since the last one.

  Ed had a good sense of humor, strong hands, a good grasp of his own place in the world. Those things meant a lot. Ed was also cute, in his own special way. Cuddly. A great kisser.

  Even if he was just aiming to get laid, he sounded sincere. Still, perfect woman...it was too soon in a relationship to say things like that, and she was still trying to decide whether there would be a relationship or not. On the other hand, she was beginning to realize how fundamentally her view of relationships had been skewed by her long involvement with Aaron. He hadn’t been her very first, but he’d been the first serious relationship and it had been a whang-doozy. She’d fallen so eagerly into the role of submissive, of trainee, that she’d failed to notice how utterly Aaron’s personality and preferences came to dominate the terms of their affair. There had never been mutuality there, because Aaron hadn’t been comfortable sharing the reins, much less turning them over. That extended far past the bedroom into pretty much every aspect of their life together.