Page 14 of Bound and Branded

I know better than to push. I know that if I leave it here, she’s going to come to me. And when she does, I’ll do a more clear map of what I think would be a good starting scene for her. I don’t want to give everything away, necessarily. But there’s a fine line between expectation and rehearsal like it’s a performance. And a lot of people like performance. That’s just not me. I don’t do this in a club for a reason. I have, but I don’t get off on being watched. It’s the practice for me. The meditation.

And the pleasure.

I can’t pretend the pleasure doesn’t have a lot to do with it.

I don’t want to go back to the house right now, not while Avery still there and my mind is on this, but I have a 3 o’clock business call I have to take and it’s going to be on video so I need to be in my office. I finish up with the horses, and head back toward the house. Thankfully, when I go inside I don’t see her. I make my way upstairs to my office and I’m about to get started on the video call when the next message comes in.

I want to meet.

Fuck.

I can’t respond to her right now. Because I have to do this phone call and I really never resented this business that pulled me out of poverty more.

The entire time, I’m thinking about her. And as I listen to the general droning of the call I start slowly typing out a response on my phone. It’s not that this doesn’t matter to me. It does. But it won’t soon. I’m going to be hands-off and only involved anymore as a shareholder, and once that happens, I’ll be free of bullshit like this.

I didn’t get into development because I love it. I got into it because I was good at it and because I could make a lot of money doing it.

People say that money doesn’t buy you happiness, but those people have never been fucking homeless because they didn’t have the money.

If they did, then they would understand that money is pretty much the only thing that makes you happy.

But I’m busy constructing a scene to see if she’ll agree to it. She wants to meet, and I need to make it clear I’ll train her and I’ll be careful, but it is going to be a full-on scene. Again, I’m imagining it in my head, and it’s Avery. Tied up and helpless,laying on the bed on her knees, her ass in the air. Powerless to do anything as I…

No. That’s enough.

“Thank you for sharing all of this,” I say. “It was a productive meeting. I will see you all next quarter.”

I end it then and walk out of the room, finishing the last few words in the message, and then I hit send. And as I stand there in the hallway, from behind a closed door I hear the sound of the Club app chiming.

I freeze, everything in my body stopping. Going still. Is it possible that what I think just happened… Happened?

In my head, this little sub has been Avery the entire time, yearning to be instructed, yearning to be taken in hand, but I thought that was my fucking perverse imagination. My completely inappropriate obsession with the woman next door.

Now I think it might’ve been an instinct that I was ignoring.

One that I was telling myself I couldn’t trust, because after all, you want to question your instincts when you think that the object of your obsession might have kinks that line up perfectly with your own.

No. It wasn’t a good thing. It was actually the worst case scenario. It was her…

The door opens and she comes out, her eyes connecting with mine and her mouth dropping open. She gasps. “Oh. Sorry. I didn’t… I didn’t know you were here.”

“You didn’t think I’d be in my house?”

“I mean, it’s your house,” she says. “Of course.”

My playroom is behind her and she’s backlit perfectly by all the windows. I like that room because of all the natural light, and it’s also more of an oasis than my actual bedroom. It’s a place where only encounters happened and it’s the closest thing I have to a retreat. If she had any idea she would run away screaming.

Or maybe not.

I’m already questioning what I think I heard. Questioning everything.

She swallows, and moves past me. “Did you want me to clean your office?”

“Sure,” I say.

I wonder if she’s been in there yet. At all. If she’s seen what the books on my shelves are, many of them guides and schools of thought to BDSM and different techniques. I’m a completist in everything that I do. And when I’m interested in something, I’m all in. If I don’t care about it, I can’t make myself read even one sentence about it. But this? It’s pretty much the defining interest of my life. The amount of books I have on ropes and knot tying is probably pathological.

But then, I’m pretty fucking pathological.

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