Red Hot Obsessions (164 page)

“Mortifying. We should proceed to the interview.” Wulf motioned with one finger for her to leave his desk and come around to a seat in the chairs, the applicant’s place.

Rae walked around the sharp-corners of the desk to the chairs. She hoped she was being sultry as she sat and crossed her long legs. She fit in the chair, she noticed, which was unusual. A lot of office furniture is built small, and her tall body sometimes overflowed pint-sized furniture. The chair under her rump felt solid but soft.

Wulf took charge of the desk and laid her application between them. “Let us be frank. I want you here. We must await your medical release, but I didn’t see anything in here that would preclude you working with us.”

“Great,” Rae said.

“And at least you’ve had some dominatrix experience.”

That was where she had exaggerated her experience, like many actors do when auditioning for a part. You can find someone to teach you to do anything passably in the couple of weeks between an audition and filming, so if someone asks you if you can do anything,
heck yeah,
you agree. If a director asks if you can ride a horse or speak with a Bangladeshi accent or play a trumpet,
heck yeah,
you can do that.

She smiled. “Heck, yeah.”

“Well, good.”
Goot.
“Was it in a private dungeon or a club?”

He must know all the club people around there. “Private,” Rae said. “One of the short-term guys.”

“And you enjoyed it.”

She remembered last night, when she had slammed Wulf against the wall and he had done what she wanted him to. Her body heated, and her thighs tingled. “Yeah, I liked it.”

Wulf appraised her face, looking at her eyes and her lips. “All right. Now,” he glanced at her paperwork, “you say that you have had only male partners, and you are not open to any sexual activity with women.”

“I’m really not interested in that,” Rae said. Shame and fear wiggled in the back of her mind.

“Yet, last night, Lizbeth said that you nearly jumped out of your dress in the back of the hired car, and I watched you dance with two of my best girls. I would have thought that you liked women as well.”

“No,” Rae said, taken aback. “I was just having a good time with my friends.”

“Just a good time, then. For employment purposes, would you do a scene with a woman client?”

“I don’t know.” She had assumed that her clients would all be men. She hadn’t considered a woman might want to be beaten up. “I guess I do have a problem with doing this kind of thing to a woman because, well,” she struggled to put it into words, “slapping a man around would be just a game. It’s almost like the action itself is sarcastic. With women, abuse happens all the time, and it’s not sexual or for fun. It’s violence.”

“Ah, it is commendable and appropriate that you think about such things. However, many women come to us for submissive scenes because, historically, the patriarchal culture denies them authentic sexual experiences. By submitting, they are
forced
to accept pleasure, even pleasure that would otherwise cause them shame or guilt. Some of them prefer a woman Domme for a variety of reasons, such that they are, as some call it, bi-curious, or they feel that they are not cheating on their partners if no man is involved, or because domination by a man is, again, an extension of the repressive patriarchy.”

Rae blinked. Okay, he had obviously thought that one through, maybe a couple of times in order to compose that thesis paragraph.

The thought of being
forced
to accept pleasure and
forced
to have an orgasm bounced around in her head. Rae sat shock-still and didn’t let anything register on her face. After three years of theater classes, she could act at least that much.

Being
forced
sounded different than
rape
.
Submitting
sounded different than
rape
. Rape was a crime, heinous and violent. Being
forced
or being willing to
submit
sounded, somehow, oddly liberating, like it was not her fault.

She could do anything, if someone else did it
to
her.

Maybe some of the things on that list.

She spread her hands over her knees, smoothing her skirt down.

The night of the
Hair
cast party, she had blamed the alcohol for what she had done. She would never have done those things if she had been stone-cold sober.

She had been buzzed at The Devilhouse party last night, too. The alcohol had liberated her to do what she wanted to.

Rae’s pussy tingled. She crossed her legs over her throbbing clit.

“That’s interesting,” she said, finally remembering his comment about the patriarchy that had started her whole line of thought.

“So would you do scenes with women, knowing that they are absolving themselves from feeling the shame and remorse that your Puritan-derived culture forces upon them?” Wulf watched her expression, judging her.

Rae composed her face, imagining stone skin. Her childhood church rose in her thoughts. Yes, most of the women that she knew in Pirtleville, certainly her roommate-cousin Hester, would think that sex for anything other than married, procreative purposes was certainly sin. Her Aunt Enid insisted that ladies did not experience the pelvic sneeze that men spoke of.

Sex wasn’t sin, though. Rae had worked through all of that, first in her psychology courses and then in the theater department. The cast party for
Hair
alone had allowed her to check three
done-that
boxes on The Devilhouse’s application form.

She should take control of those stupid thoughts.

She wanted to take control of those stupid thoughts.

“I could do scenes with women,” she said.

“Excellent. Expanding your horizons already.” Wulf circled an item on her application. “In addition, everything that occurs here at The Devilhouse is safe, sane, and consensual. That means that the risk for any injury is minimized or preferably eliminated, that everyone is of their right mind, and that everyone has given informed consent for the proceedings. I have some reading material for you. We’ll discuss that in more depth.”

“Okay.” Her Human Subjects in Experimental Psychology class had covered informed consent in excruciating detail. She could probably write the forms.

“Another thing.”

“All right.” Another too-personal question about kinky fetish stuff. Here it came.

“Are you serious about developing a clinic for autistic children?”

Rae’s jaw dropped. “How on Earth did you know about that?”

“Lizbeth and Georgie mentioned it.” One side of his mouth bent upwards, like he had almost smiled.

“Um, yeah. It’s, um, are you sure you want to hear about this?”

“Certainly.”

“All right. Well, my cousin Daniel, who’s eight, he’s autistic.
Really
autistic. And I’ve seen how much my aunt Alana tried to help him but she couldn’t because she didn’t really know what to do, and our small-town pediatrician didn’t know how to help her. He’s too busy trying to prevent a whooping cough epidemic because everyone had stopped vaccinating their kids because everyone is related to everyone down there and so everyone knows Alana and Daniel. When my professors started discussing autism and therapies, something clicked in my head.
This
is what Daniel needs. Or needed. He’s eight now,
eight
. But there are lots of kids like Daniel. Thousands. Millions. Are you sure I’m not boring you? This is way off topic.”

“Please proceed,” Wulf said again. His gaze, once quite aloof, had sharpened on her. Rae had seen lots of people with blue-gray eyes, but the blue of Wulf’s eyes was so dark that it looked sapphire.

She said, “So I came up with this idea: a clinic, one-stop shopping, a place where kids can cycle through occupational therapy and speech therapy and behavioral therapy—that’s me—and medical therapies, maybe even nutritional guidance, and get intensive help, preferably
early
help, but it would be
professional
help. I think it could help them. I think we could
save
them from ending up like Daniel.”

“And how is Daniel now?”

Rae stopped her hands from instinctively covering her face because she didn’t want to smear her make-up at a job interview, so her hands hung in air, useless and grasping. “
Locked in.
He’s locked into this terrible place where his brain misfires and everything outside his own head terrifies him. He stims constantly because, when he flaps his hands, that kinesthetic movement feeds back into his brain, and he understands the pattern of the movement. That soothes him. Everything else is too scary and unfathomable for him.”

“I’m sorry. How far have you gotten in your plans for this clinic?”

“I have a name: A Ray of Light, spelled the usual way,” she said quickly when his eyebrows rose at the word
ray
. “I was thinking about starting off in a strip mall. There are a lot of empty strip malls nowadays. We could expand after that as we get more money to bring more people on board.”

“Interesting.” Wulf nodded and tapped her application with a pen. He pulled his lower lip into his mouth and bit it, kind of like Rae had done to him the night before. “We have a great need right now for a new Domme. You could work one or two evenings a week and Saturday nights, ten to fifteen hours, and most girls earn more than enough to pay for university. I daresay you might save enough for seed money for your venture.”

Three nights a week was less than she was working now at the library, and that minimum wage gig barely paid for booze and books, let alone tuition and dorm.

Two thousand dollars a week, every week. “Really?”

“Certainly. Many of my girls are college students. You know Lizbeth and Georgie. Whitney has been with us for four years, the last two of her bachelor’s and, now, during her sociology PhD. She passed her doctorate candidacy exam a month ago. She has her subs sign waivers so she can use them as research subjects and gives them an insultingly small break on the price. She tried to use pseudonyms for them in her peer-reviewed papers, but they insist that she use their real names. Far more humiliating for them.”

Rae, aghast, said, “Using real names is a major ethics breach. There are strict ethical guidelines. There are
laws
about using human subjects.”

“Yes, but they insist, so the lawyers drew up forms for them to sign, and some of them have her academic papers framed in their dungeons at home. Now, as I was saying, you are expected to
not
have sexual intercourse with the clients. Indeed, if they have been a very good little sub, you may allow them to masturbate when you are done with them.”

“Okay.” She had talked herself into being a whore. Wasn’t sex the whole point of being a whore? “So what do most of them want to do?”

He shrugged. “About a third have a foot or boot fetish. That’s the most common kink we see. Another third wants spanking. After a few months or years of such treatment, most of our clients branch out, become more adventurous, jaded, and those people will make up the majority of your client list.”

Rae nodded. She still wasn’t sure what those euphemisms meant.

Wulf studied her application. “You speak French and Spanish?”

“Some. College French and Border Spanish.”

Wulf looked up. He smiled with one side of his mouth. “Border Spanish?”

“Just what you learn when you grow up near the Mexican Border.” Like how to speak respectfully to drug lords lest you end up buried in a shallow grave out in the wide, unsearchable desert. “I can get along in most social situations, but I couldn’t hold a philosophical debate.”

“All right. Vernacular conversational Spanish. Excellent. Some of our clientele is from outside the States. Border Spanish may be just the language to use while you rough them up.” Wulf looked at her application again. He asked her,
“Comment bien parlez-vous français?”

She replied, “
Comme ci, comme ça,
but I’ve never been anywhere that people actually speak French.”

Wulf switched back to English. “What is that accent?”

Rae wished she sounded like an elegant Parisienne. “Cajun. My French conversation TA was from Louisiana.”

“Border Spanish and Cajun French. You will scare the dickens out of your clients, and they will love you for it.”

Rae couldn’t imagine that.

“One last thing. There is no pressure in this.” Wulf smoothed her application on his desk. His studied smile became more jolly, like he was mocking himself. “Like some other male-oriented businesses, I’m not only the owner, I’m also a client. When I utilize the professional services of a consultant, she is paid her standard rate, and the scope of services is limited by this.” He pointed to her application where Rae had detailed which absurd things she would and would not do, which now felt like a contract with the Devil since Wulf, who was The Dom—who Rae had tentatively diagnosed as a psychopath from Georgie’s and Lizzy’s descriptions—had pinned it to the desk with his finger. He said, “Consultants may opt out of entertaining me as a client. Dolly has opted out, but you don’t know her yet, so you can ask Georgie or Lizbeth that she is treated no differently than anyone who has opted in. You can also opt out at any time in the future, no reason necessary.”

His professional smile was unflinching.

Rae asked, “Is that what you were doing when you took Lizzy on a date?”

“Dates are different. This would be a business arrangement, for around a half an hour.”

“No,” Rae said. She didn’t even think about it, and she should have thought about it before she said anything because he might not give her the job and she might have to leave college. She had been ready to jump on the casting couch with him. She wanted to slam him up against a wall again or entice him to bend her over this glass and steel desk that separated them. Yet, even though she was turned on, even though her panties were damp with wanting him, she didn’t want to be a whore for him. “No, thank you.”

“I’ll make a note of it.” His smile did not waver.

Rae wondered if he was relieved, and her heart sank.