Purely Professional (3 page)

“
Everyone’s
in my phone.” Helen didn’t look up. She typed a seemingly endless message while Bridget picked at the bacon on her BLT. Helen had no sooner turned back to her salad when the phone buzzed. She exchanged a few messages with this mystery person while Bridget waited, her anxiety fading into exasperation the longer Helen ignored her.

“Why don’t you just call him?” Bridget asked at last. “That’s got to be faster.”

Helen looked up midtext, raising an eyebrow. “Do you want my help or not?”

Bridget sighed, cowed. “Fine.” Her friend turned back to her phone.

“When do you want to meet?”

“He said yes?” Anxiety flooded back in, and Bridget suddenly felt sick. “Um…sometime soon. I have to have this done by Friday.”

Helen looked back down at her phone and kept typing. Finally she set the phone down, still wearing her Cheshire cat grin. “He’s going to meet you at the Starbucks near Union Street at seven o’clock on Thursday night. You’re home from work by then, right?”

“He’s not free earlier? Thursday’s cutting it kind of close.” She’d have to write the article that same night.

“It’s the soonest he’s free. Sorry.” Helen shrugged. “But you can make it?”

“Yeah, that’s fine.” Bridget suddenly realized what Helen had said. “Wait, Union Street where?”

“West Haven.”

“What the hell? Why not just invite him right to Ridgeville?” She couldn’t keep the anger out of her voice. She wanted to interview him; she didn’t want him practically next door to her.

“I didn’t tell him you lived near there.” Helen looked skyward. “Give me some credit. He lives in southern Connecticut too, so it doesn’t make sense to meet in the city.” She lifted her drink in triumph, and Bridget was reluctant to concede that she was right.

“All right. So how will I recognize him?”

Helen wiped her hands on her napkin and sent a few more text messages, then pocketed her phone. “He’ll wear a corduroy jacket.”

“Corduroy? Is he a hipster?”

“I doubt it.”

“How much did you tell him?” Bridget moved on to her soup, a bit of her appetite returning. The gazpacho, at least, was palatable.

“I told him you were a writer doing an article on the BDSM community but didn’t know much and wanted your misconceptions cleared up.”

Bridget swallowed the soup without really tasting it, her mind on the upcoming meeting.

Helen patted her hand. “He’s not a freak, I promise. You’ll like him.”

“Thanks for this.” A little of Bridget’s anxiety had lifted. This would be just like any other interview, and she’d get to keep her job. “You’re a lifesaver.”

Helen took a drink of water, and over the rim of the glass, Bridget saw her smile. “Anytime.”

Chapter Three

Starbucks at seven o’clock on a Thursday evening was not a very exciting place. The parking lot was nearly deserted. Had it been Helen or her mystery corduroy man who had chosen this time? Whoever it was, maybe they chose it on purpose because they knew the café would be quieter.

Bridget went inside, pulse quickening, feeling a little sick and, if she were honest with herself, a little excited. As soon as she walked inside, she couldn’t stop herself from looking around and picking out her man.

It took a few seconds. There weren’t many people there, but she glanced over him twice, perhaps because he was sitting all the way in the back of the café. Then she realized that she recognized the top of his head. How did one recognize the top of a head? But she’d know those dark waves anywhere. He looked up from his book. She spotted the bright blue eyes and the corduroy jacket simultaneously, and her mouth dropped open in stupid shock at the same moment Max gave her his familiar crooked smile.

It wasn’t until a woman pushed past her that Bridget finally noticed she was still standing in the doorway. She moved forward, more so she wouldn’t look like an idiot than out of any desire to approach, and finally stood opposite her next-door neighbor.

“I suppose this isn’t just a coincidence.” Bridget gestured to his corduroy jacket.

“Afraid not.” Max’s eyes twinkled.

“I need some coffee.” Damn, if only Starbucks sold vodka shots.

“It sure seems like you do. I’ll be here.”

Bridget ordered a grande Frappuccino, ignoring the millions of calories, and willed herself not to look back at the far corner where Max was sitting. She knew he was watching her, could feel his gaze against her skin as easily as she could have felt his hands, and swallowed through a suddenly dry mouth.

The Starbucks baristas took a long time making her drink, but not nearly long enough for her to recover her composure.

“Nice choice.” Max admired her whipped-cream-covered concoction when she returned to the table at last. He had set his book aside and folded his hands neatly in front of him. “I must say, you seem a little surprised to see me here.”

“Surprised? Of course I’m surprised!” Her bag dropped to the floor with a thud as she sat down opposite him, trying to put all the pieces together. She pressed a hand to her forehead, her mind spinning.

“Helen never told me she knew you…” Bridget said, thinking but not saying the last half of that sentence: …
all those times I talked about how hot you were.
Now Helen’s smirking made sense.

Max nodded. “I only met her a few times, but we really hit it off. She’s a nice girl. Not my type, but we had some good conversations.”

“Wait.” If Helen knew Max, had she told him about Bridget’s feelings? She tried to suppress her sudden upswell of panic. “What did Helen tell you about all this?”

“Helen’s text said you were writing an article about BDSM for
Sultry
magazine and needed a person to interview.” He took a sip of his own coffee—black, Bridget noticed, nothing fancy or frou-frou—and raised an eyebrow. “You never told me you wrote for
Sultry
.”

“Why didn’t Helen tell me it was you?”

Max paused, seeming to choose his words with care. “Well, there’s not much tone one can infer from a text message, but she implied that you might not want to meet if you knew it was me.” Were those hurt feelings in his voice, or just hesitation? “I think we get along pretty well, but I figured she had her reasons, so I played along.”

“Oh, it’s not that.” She needed an answer that didn’t involve telling him she found him hot. “I think she probably thought I wouldn’t show up…out of embarrassment. My work life and my home life don’t often overlap.”

“Really?” He cradled his coffee mug in both hands. “It seems like it would be so much fun if they did.”

She opened her mouth and closed it again, unsure of how to respond to that.

“So what’s this situation? Why do you need my help?”

“I need someone, um, active…in the BDSM community.” Bridget paused, not sure exactly how much to tell him. Of course, the man was here, willing to talk to her about the very private nature of his sexuality, so she probably owed him the truth. She took a deep breath. “Okay. I was talking out of my ass to my boss. She wants me to write about something ‘edgier,’ something more provocative than my usual stuff.”

“Edgier than last month’s article on the top five best sex positions for female orgasm?” Max grinned.

“I see you’ve been reading my work.” Bridget’s voice was flat.

“I did my research. Continue. You were talking out of your lovely ass?”

“Ah, yes.” She suddenly felt flustered. Her, flustered? She didn’t
get
flustered…except, it seemed, when Max was involved. “Anyway, Marcy—she’s the new executive editor, and I’m not used to having to prove myself, you know? I’ve always just been given free rein. I work from home a lot, my articles are very popular, I meet my deadlines and this new woman comes along and suddenly wants to change everything. I didn’t want to look lost or behind, so I picked something that seemed really edgy and volunteered to write about it.” She was talking too quickly.

“I see.” When she didn’t continue, he prompted her. “And what’s the problem?”

He obviously knew what the problem was, but she answered him anyway. “I don’t know anything about BDSM.” She sipped from her drink to soothe her mouth, which had gone dry again. “I thought maybe I could do some research, but Helen said it would be better to talk in person to someone who actually knows something, someone ‘in the scene,’ as it were. Plus, most of what my research turns up is either pornography or encyclopedic. I don’t want to write a boring Wikipedia page. I want something more personal. Helen, I guess, thought you would be the person to talk to.” She was still talking too fast, so she turned the conversation to him, asking the question that had been at the forefront of her mind since she spotted the top of his head. “So how do you fit in here, exactly, Max?”

He took another sip of his coffee. “You want someone active in the ‘scene,’ as you call it. I’m active in the scene.”

Bridget had hoped he would elaborate on his own, but it seemed he wanted her to ask. She looked around, suddenly self-conscious, glad the Starbucks was mostly deserted. “Active…how?”

“I’m a Dominant. I have some playmates, other members of this community.” He gestured vaguely with one hand. “Nothing very serious. Women who are submissive who enjoy being dominated. We get together for fun.”

“Oh.” Bridget wasn’t exactly sure if she said the word or if her mouth just formed the shape. “So…fuck buddies?”

“Not necessarily. It’s not always sex. But if it helps you to think about it that way, I suppose you could make that comparison. It’s accurate in that I don’t have relationships with these women.”

“I don’t really understand,” she admitted, although she thought that the strange cars in his driveway were beginning to make sense in the Bigger Picture of Things.

“All right, I’ll explain.” When she waited, he gestured to the bag on the floor. “Don’t you want to take notes?”

“Oh, right.” She set her digital recorder on the table between them. “Is this all right?”

He winked at her. “Hoping to keep a record of my voice to play in bed?”

That was so quintessentially Max that she had to laugh. “Of course.” She relaxed a little and turned on the recorder.

“BDSM is a multipurpose acronym,” he began, and it was easy to see that he was a professor. His entire demeanor changed when he was teaching. “It means many different things to many different people. There are stereotypes, but they’re usually wrong. Probably a lot of things you’ve read on the Internet have given you the wrong impression. Shock sells, of course.” She nodded and let him continue. “The acronym breaks down into three different pairings: bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadism/masochism. Not everyone who considers themselves ‘into’ BDSM is into all of those things. In fact, most people aren’t. There are also many degrees of interest. At one end, you have the extremes…live-in slaves, body mutilation, completely constricting bondage. At the other end, you might have a couple who likes to tie each other up with silk scarves once in a while but wouldn’t consider themselves into BDSM. There is a whole menu of options out there.”

“Like religion,” she found herself saying, nodding. “You know, how Christianity has so many subsets?”

He smiled, drawing back a bit. “Well, I can’t say I’ve ever heard anyone make
that
comparison before.”

“Go on.” She continued drinking her Frappuccino.

“There are terms, of course. You’ve probably come across them in your research. Tops, bottoms, switches, slaves and Masters, submissives and Dominants…but it’s hard to find exact labels for people. The more we try, the more complicated it gets. It’s much better to ask someone ‘What are you into?’ than to try to categorize them. We don’t fit into neat boxes.” He sipped his coffee again, his hands wrapping comfortably around the mug. Were his fingers as strong as they looked?

“So what are you into?” she asked after a moment, unable to stop herself.

He smiled, then grew serious as he considered her question. “I enjoy being the Dominant.” His voice grew softer, huskier, and he leaned in. “I find it very erotic to have a woman submit to my will and to give her pleasure that takes her completely out of herself until she can think of nothing but me.” If only she were typing this interview instead of recording it; she was unable to look away from his intense gaze. His eyes never left hers as he continued. “I like to take a woman to her limits and feel that control, that sense of power over her orgasm. It’s…well, it’s heady.” He set his cup down and leaned back in his chair.

“And you have women in your life who like this?”

“Is it so hard to believe?”

Bridget paused, not sure how to answer. “It seems so…” She paused, searching for the right word. “Well, controlling. How can a woman want to give up that kind of control?” Even as she said it, though, she felt a tingle of arousal, a few erotic scenes slipping into her mind unbidden, moments from her favorite kinky fantasies. Being tied down, someone else’s hands running over her sensitive skin…

His voice brought her back. “Giving up control can be very erotic. The idea that your pleasure is beyond your responsibility, that someone can give and take that pleasure away while you’re helpless…” He leaned in again. “Haven’t you ever thought about it?”

She swallowed and noticed him noticing her swallow. “I don’t know if that’s the scene for me. I can’t say it’s something I’ve ever tried.”

“You never had a lover tie you to the bed?” His hand rested on the table so close to hers that she could feel the warmth. His voice felt like a caress on her skin.

Did fantasies count? “No. But back to you. You have…sex slaves? Sort of?”

Max smiled, giving Bridget the idea that she was being laughed at. “I’m not interested in having a live-in slave. I don’t want a woman who submits to me other than sexually. Some people, men and women, have complete Master/slave relationships that make them both very happy. The slave serves all the time, cooking and cleaning, and in return is loved and cherished by the Master. That’s not my particular kink.”

“So only in the bedroom.”

“Oh, not only in the bedroom.” he corrected quickly, still smiling. “That wouldn’t be very fun at all. One of my favorite things to do is to sexualize someone’s entire day, to keep her aroused in everything she does. But it’s always, always about the
sexuality
for me. The arousal, the gratification, the orgasm. Not, however, always about intercourse.”

“So you don’t have sex slaves, you have submissives?” Bridget was still trying to understand without obsessing on the idea of Max keeping her aroused for an entire day.

“No, it’s not like that. I don’t really ‘have’ anyone. There are women with whom I get together when we want to play. Sometimes they get together with other people instead of with me. I’m not exclusive with anyone.”

“But how
would
this work in a relationship?” She leaned forward, resting her chin on her hand.

“That’s a great question.” Max paused, thinking. “It can work many different ways. Again, it’s about what people are into. For me, when we’re not being sexual, I want a partner who can be her own woman, who’d stand up to me, but who would be completely at my mercy in the bedroom.” His eyes seemed to darken as she stared into them, her drink forgotten. “The proverbial bedroom,” he added. “That bedroom might include the backseat of a car or a dark nightclub too.”

Bridget swallowed, mouth dry again. She remembered her Frappuccino and took a sip. “All right. But you’ve never had that kind of relationship?”

“No. None of the women I play with are women I’d want for a relationship. And of the women I’ve wanted for a relationship, none of them are into my kinks.” Max shrugged and took another sip of coffee. “It’s a difficult conversation to have.”

“So you’re not interested in plain old ‘vanilla’ sex? Doesn’t this dominance thing get old?”

“Of course I’m interested in ‘vanilla’ sex, as you so eloquently put it.” Max rolled his eyes. “But the dominance is a big part of who I am, sexually. To completely exclude it from a relationship wouldn’t be authentic to that relationship. Some people with kinks like mine have happy vanilla relationships, able to relegate their tendencies toward milder manifestations—you know, a gentle spanking, silk scarves, dirty talk—or keep them in the realm of fantasy. For me, I’ve never been able to do that.

“See, to me, it’s not right for me to push this on someone with no interest.” He put down his coffee cup again, gesturing as he became more animated. “Usually my partners have been willing to try a few things, but if it doesn’t do much for them, it won’t do much for me, and our relationship doesn’t tend to last long beyond that.” He paused, seeking to clarify. “It’s not just the dominating. I have no desire to dominate someone unwilling. This isn’t at all about rape, and
don’t misunderstand me about that
.” He emphasized each word of that sentence. When Bridget nodded, he continued. “It’s not about just dominating. It’s about dominating someone who loves to submit. To know that I’m making her most erotic, wildest fantasies come true, that’s what turns me on.” He smiled. “I want to know that when she comes, I’m raising her to heights she’s never experienced before.”