Page 38 of At Her Pleasure
The warehouse was a nondescript place, no signage. If she’d become a serial killer, it was a suitable venue for her victims. Biting back a smile, he punched the code she’d given him into the security panel and heard the door buzz.
When he entered the building, he came face-to-face with a snarling wolf, nearly ten feet tall. As he blinked and settled from that start, the door clanged shut behind him. From the dozen or so parade floats he saw, including the wolf, he deduced she must rent out the space as overflow storage for Mardi Gras organizers. She was smart that way. He knew she’d pulled in six figures last year through investments and her salary and commissions at Thomas Rose Associates.
The girl in the cemetery had come a long way. But as he well knew, revisiting a memory could bring you right back to the person you’d been. What you’d felt and wanted. Worried about and feared. What you’d lost, that nothing in life would ever replace.
“That first night, when I saw you, you reminded me of a wolf. You still do.”
He turned toward her voice, though he didn’t see her in the shadows clustered around the floats. She never sounded uncertain, never fearful. Even back then. It fascinated him. If she lost control, it was to anger. She refused to be cowed. Everything she was came through her tone, and it changed depending on what the moment required—or she desired.
What he heard now was the sultry drawl of a Mistress. “I want to see how you handle submitting, when I control the setting. Did you eat lunch?”
“I wasn’t hungry.” Remembering his initial text, he added, “It’s what you do. Offer to take someone to lunch.”
“Figured. Don’t do that shit with me. I’d rather you send me a text saying what you really want. What did you really want, Mick?”
“I wanted to see you.” He’d woken with an ache inside. She was the knife that would cut even deeper into that desire.
“Why?”
“You know why.”
“To fuck.”
“No. Yes.”
Her shoes made a crisp scrape sound on concrete, moving past the wolf, behind it. Now her voice came from the other side. He shifted, keeping his back to the door, aware of every echo, where it came from, what caused it. Light filtered through the warehouse’s high windows.
She was goading his predator instincts. Ceiling fans rotated in the rafters, bringing him the scent of paint and plaster from the floats, metal and dust.
“You’ve asked about my reputation at the club,” she continued. A statement, not a question. “What do they say?”
“You’re an amusement park’s scariest ride. One trip is usually enough. It’s not just the pain. You find out what their threshold is and blast past it, farther than they thought they could go. You do it with mind fucks or a force of will they can’t resist.” That they didn’t want to resist. “Most end up safewording, because others tell them that’s what you wait for, to end the session. Your mental and physical stamina is the stuff of legends."
Her scoff raked his ears. “And that’s your thing. Pitting yourself against me, testing yourself?”
“No.”
“Why not? Think you’ll get tenderness from me? The romance novel, the beast changed by the beauty’s love? You’re not that pretty.”
“Come out of the shadows, Mistress.”
“Answer the question.”
He turned in the direction of the voice. “There’s a Washington Irving quote. ‘He solicited not her tenderness, but her esteem.’ I seek your esteem, Mistress. That’s a bigger gift to me.”
It was truth. But he also knew, though she avoided softer emotions, she had them. He’d felt it, when she put his palm on her face, or laid her cheek on his back during the drive back to her truck. She walled herself away from softer things. Except in those rare moments, she saw tenderness or care as a weakness, a trap. It didn’t matter if it could bring her pleasure or a different depth to the relationship. She didn’t want that depth.
Even so, years ago, he’d glimpsed her limitless need to be with a man who could let her dive as far into that side of herself as she needed. A part of him had answered, like the sun yearning for the moon. It might be the only thing he could point to and say, yes, I did that right. Something that wouldn’t be forgotten by the world.
She’d stayed in his head ten years. And he’d stayed in hers. Last night had proven that feeling hadn’t been wrong.
He avoided softness as well, but for other reasons. He couldn’t indulge the fantasy that he deserved tenderness or care. It was why he wasn’t looking for a Mistress to punish him for his sins. That was self-serving. He just sought pain. He could give her that.
“Tell me the real reason you don’t choose an orientation at the clubs.” Her voice was flat like an interrogator’s, nothing revealed. His gut stirred with apprehension and anticipation of where she wanted to take them.
So he gave her a different answer, one truthful enough to fit this moment. "I'm seeking whoever speaks to me, in whatever language calls to me. Sometimes that's made me the bottom, sometimes the top. When I look at you, Cyn, I see someone who saved herself because she had to, because she had to become something more than what she came from. I want to honor that strength, surrender to it, even as I want to give you everything you had to deny yourself to get there. Does that make sense? I can't classify that.”
A long pause.