Slow Surrender (8 page)

“Oh.” For some reason that made it feel quite different. I mean, I was in trouble, but it wasn’t like he hated me for getting it wrong. In fact, I had the feeling he was holding in a smile. “Oh, then so do I.” My own smile crept back a little.

“Good girl. Now, I think getting back into that skirt in the car is a challenge not worth attempting.” He took several things out of his jacket pocket and set them aside, then slipped the jacket off. His shoulders looked lean and sculpted through his dress shirt, and I wanted to slide the shirt off and run my hands over his skin. “Here.”

He wrapped me in the jacket and then knocked on the window. The driver got out and came around to open my door. I looked back at my date, the warmth of his body inside the jacket enveloping me.

“Good night,” he said as I exited the car. “I enjoyed myself thoroughly tonight.”

I leaned back in slightly. “What do I have to do to earn a good night kiss?”

He laughed again, a laugh that sounded like I’d surprised him. “Just lean over a little farther.”

His lips met mine firmly, deliciously, like one small bite from a bursting ripe fruit, and then he pulled back. He sucked in a breath and quite suddenly the driver ushered me away from the car.

The driver accompanied me to the door while I fumbled for my keys. “Listen,” he said, and I nearly jumped. I hadn’t been expecting him to speak. “Be careful.”

“Careful about what?” I whispered back as I found the right key at last.

“Hurt him and you’ll have a lot to answer for,” he said.

It was yet another thing that was completely backward from what I expected. “Wait, me hurt
him
?”

“Just be careful,” he repeated, then stepped away as I turned the key in the lock and went inside.

As if that weren’t enough like something out of a spy movie, as I reached the elevator, a text came through on my phone. I checked it while waiting, wondering if I’d left something in the car. The message was from him and read,
When we are alone, call me James.

When I got upstairs, I was carrying the damp skirt in one hand and I still had his tie bound around the other, I was wearing his jacket buttoned shut, and the heel broke off one of the pumps as I tried to hurry down the hall from the elevator to the apartment. Becks took one look at me as I limped to the couch and collapsed there, and then we both burst out laughing.

“Would you say you had a good time?” she asked with a touch of skepticism.

“Yes! I would say I had a good time.” I held up the bound wrist. “Could you help me with this? Um, and sorry about your skirt. It’s kind of soiled.”

She sat down next to me on the futon and picked at the pale green and silver necktie until it came loose. “But you had a good time.”

“Yes. I had a
great
time,” I said, putting the emphasis on
great
. “That is, he was extremely good to me. We had a fancy dinner and then, well, then some kinky action in the limo on the way back here.”

Becky’s skepticism deepened.

“It’s not what you think!”

“What do I think?”

“You know, that he’s treating me like a whore and just trying to get his rocks off.”

“He’s not?”

“He hasn’t even let me touch him below the waist yet. Well, except once, accidentally.” I didn’t tell her it was with my face. “I know he’s hot for me. He just…when I’m with him, all the attention is on me. It’s all about my needs, my desires. I’m the one who gets off. He said I’m going to have to earn the privilege of his cock.” I could barely say it without giggling. No, that’s a lie. Once Becky started giggling, I did, too. I know, we were twenty-six, not six, but you wouldn’t know it at that moment. We’d both had pretty sheltered upbringings.

“So he’s like a big-time BDSM dom, then?” she asked when the giggles subsided.

“Maybe? I don’t know that much about it,” I admitted.

“Well, do you call him
master
?” She wrinkled her nose at this new mystery.

“No.”

“Daddy?”

“Definitely not!” I remembered his halfhearted suggestion of it. “Nothing like that.”

“You said you were playing the part of sleazy secretary.”

“For about five minutes,” I said. I wondered about the name James. Was it his real name or an alias? “Role-playing doesn’t stick with us.”

“That isn’t like any BDSM I’ve ever heard.” She stood up and got her laptop from the tiny kitchen counter.

“Becks, don’t do a Google search on BDSM right now. Please. All I can tell you is, it’s complicated but feels right.” I took a longer look at her now that she sat in the one armchair we had in the living room/bedroom. She was in electric-blue spandex tights and an oversized shirt with the British flag lined with sequins. It looked like she had been wearing blue mascara and scrubbed it off only partially. “So where have
you
been lately? You said you’d fill me in.”

She looked up from the computer, which added a bluish glow to her face. “Oh yeah, I finally met some other Lord’s Ladies right here in the city! I was kind of afraid to meet them at first, but it turns out they’re not weird at all. They’re really nice.”

My impression of them from that night at the bar hadn’t been so nice, but I was sure Becky had found the good ones. “Are the fan clubs going to keep going now that the guy is retired?”

“Well, see, that’s what I wondered. I read about some groups that were having their last meet-ups the day of the concert, but of course that turned into like a three-day party. The women I met took me over to a scholarly conference where people were presenting pop culture analyses, and then we went to someone’s loft and…what I’m trying to say is that the fan clubs will keep going. In December there’s going to be a release of the concert film and a conceptual film and documentary to go with it. People are so excited for that!”

I yawned. I’d missed part of what she said. “Wait, why are people so psyched for this documentary?”

“Because he’s always been so secretive! No one knows his real identity, like a superhero or something. You know how he always wears a mask or is heavily made up on stage and in his videos? And the concert film, they’re going to do it as a theatrical release, so that’ll be huge. And people aren’t done talking about him.” She closed the laptop and hugged it to her chest. “It means I’m not too late! I thought maybe I was but I’m not!”

“That’s awesome, Becks. I’m so glad for you.”

“I’m thinking of changing my dissertation topic, in fact.”

“Really?”

“Really. This is what came to me while listening to his last album a few days ago. While tipsy.” She blushed at that admission, which I thought was cute. Becky didn’t have any tolerance for alcohol. “The entire thing can be interpreted as representative of a feminist utopia.”

I yawned again. “Becks, I think I’m too tired to wrap my brain around how a bunch of pop songs by a white male billionaire equate to feminist utopia.”

“Okay. I’m going to bed now, too. I’ll explain it to you over breakfast and see if it makes sense then.” She bobbed up. “Good night!” She went into her room. I could hear her singing along to her MP3 player as she got ready for bed.

I popped into the bathroom to do my bedtime regimen and then stumbled back out to the futon. I was too tired to flatten it out into a bed, so I just fluffed my pillow and lay down with my back against it, like lying across a car seat. I kept the jacket on, wrapped around me, surrounded by his scent. She was right. The way he talked didn’t sound like any BDSM how-to article I’d ever seen on the Internet. They were all about how to tie people up safely and master/slave contract negotiations. What we had was a lot simpler than a contract, wasn’t it? It was only a couple of rules. By following them, we could express our interest in each other, as well as desire, respect, and loyalty. I couldn’t care less whether he measured up to some bogus online standard or not. I swallowed, a deep thrill running through me as I remembered the next time I saw him would be to make it up to him. To take my punishment, whatever that would be. Spanking? Flogging? Something else? I slipped easily into vivid dreams of his arms around me, his hands seeking my soft places, for both pleasure and pain.

I
almost didn’t go. By the time Wednesday came, I had done the following: researched sexual harassment cases at the university, hidden in the apartment the whole day afterward, called Jill to tell her about it, chickened out and didn’t tell her anything about Renault, and gone to my part-time job working in the alumni relations office.

The university website had very clear information on how an
employee
of the school should report sexual harassment, but almost nothing about students other than listing lots and lots of places to report it. I could go to the campus police or any one of ten different agencies, but none of them provided any information at all about what “reporting” entailed. Nothing about anonymity, nothing about protection from repercussions or retribution, nothing about how investigations would be conducted or by whom. That was not confidence-inspiring. There were lots of detailed procedures for when the student was the one being charged with any kind of misconduct, but zero about how students could go about charging a faculty member.

I ended up on the rape crisis center page and found it even more frightening: It sounded like if I didn’t have a semen sample, I was up a creek. Looking at the employee guide didn’t inspire hope, either. If grad students were treated like employees, then I’d first have to schedule an interview with an investigator, then wait 30 days after the interview while they conducted a review, which could be extended for another 30 days if inconclusive. Ugh. By 30 days from now, I’d have missed my window to file for graduation. And really, what would the investigator find? I’d say Renault made inappropriate comments, and he’d say he didn’t. I’d say he threw out my thesis, he’d say it was no good. I’d be right back where I was, with no leg to stand on and needing another semester of thesis seminar credits to graduate.

You can see why I hid for a whole day after reading all that. I imagined the procedures could easily be more victimizing than the original comments.

I finally decided to call Jill. My sister was a take-no-nonsense sort. I really didn’t feel comfortable talking to her about this kind of thing, but I at least got up the courage to dial her phone number. Becky was out. I sat on the one rickety stool we had in the kitchen, at the end of the tiny countertop, and put the phone to my ear.

“Jill Casper,” my sister answered. I could hear the sound of something metal banging into something else in the background: kitchen noises.

“Jill, it’s me.”

“Oh, hey, Karina, calling for your job back?”

“Hah, you wish.”

“No, seriously, where the hell did you run off to the other night? The only reason I didn’t worry is Luis told me you came in the next day when I wasn’t here to pick up your envelope. I worry when people flake out, you know.” By
people
she meant our brother. Troy was a stoner who sometimes got so high he forgot the day of the week. He hadn’t lasted a month working for Jill before he moved out West.

“No, nothing like that. I just got fed up and I’ve got a lot to do,” I said.

“Well, Mom’s worried about you, anyway.”

“Oh no, tell me you didn’t rat me out to her.”

“Well, I wouldn’t call it ‘ratted out…’”

“What did you tell her?”

“Nothing, really. All I do is deflect her from obsessing over me by talking about you,” she said.

“So she obsesses over me instead!”

“Of course she does. Come on, Karina, you’re her one real girl-child. She dreams about that church wedding in June. Your dyke big sister here isn’t going to wear her wedding dress, and Troy sure as hell isn’t either.”

“Where is he now? Still in Boulder?”

“He’s beach-bumming in Santa Cruz, at least according to his Facebook. The cell phone number I had for him in Colorado is dead, but at least I know he’s not.” She must’ve shrugged; something made the phone crackle. “Seriously, Karina, you know what Mom wants, but it doesn’t have to be what you want. She wants you to have the perfect man because she doesn’t. You have to learn to ignore it.”

“Ugh, that isn’t even it,” I said. “She wants me to be perfect, because if I were, that’s how I’d get the perfect man. Except her stupid definition of me being perfect is having the right man! It’s like nothing I do matters unless I have a man. What happens if I don’t want a man?”

“That’s the argument I’ve been having with her since I came out, sweetie pie.”

“Okay, okay, you win. But you know what? I bet even if I do get married, she still won’t be happy.”

“Well, duh, I know that and you know that, but Mom doesn’t. We can’t make her happy, Kar’. The best we can do is try to make ourselves happy and hope she comes around to seeing what’s good in our lives. Speaking of which, I’m thinking about popping the question to Pauline.”

“No way! You’ve been together how long? Two years?”

“It’ll be our third anniversary. I’m saving up for the ring. I’m thinking I’ll take her out to dinner for our anniversary and then do it in a horse carriage ride through Central Park.”

“Fairy-tale style!” I hopped off the stool and gave a little twirl. “Oh, you have to make me a bridesmaid then! Oh, except wait, are you the groom in this case?”

Jill’s laugh was low and slow. “We’ll figure it out. For all I know, Pauli will want to wear a tux, too. We’ll have some of each kind of attendant maybe. I’ve got a couple months of saving up to do first anyway, and…let’s not count our chickens before they hatch, okay? You’re the only person I’ve told.”

“Oh my God, Jill, that’s so exciting! Wait, you haven’t told Mom?”

“I haven’t told Mom.” She lapsed into a worried silence.

“You don’t think she’d approve?”

“I’m not sure. She made some comments last Christmas—I don’t even think she knew I could hear—saying things like same-sex marriage is a travesty, a parody of the real thing. I don’t know. She might have been just talking to talk, though, you know? Trying to say what she thinks people want to hear.”

“She does that. She might not have really meant it,” I said, though my heart was breaking a little. I’d never heard Jill sound so nervous before. This must really mean a lot to her.

“I want to ask you a favor.”

“What kind of a favor?”

“I want you to feel her out about the issue. Try to find out what she actually thinks.”

I groaned.

“It doesn’t have to be right away. We’ve got time.”

“Jill—”

“You’re the one on her good side, so you—”

“I am
not
on her good side! Everything I do is wrong as far as she’s concerned!”

“Karina, please. You’re the only one who has a chance at this.”

She was right. And it wasn’t like I’d have trouble bringing up the subject since my love life and marriage were my mother’s two favorite topics when she spoke to me. “All right. I’ll try to see if I can get it to come up in conversation in a couple of weeks. I’ll have to be super casual about it or she’s going to guess.”

“Crap. I know. It’s just that if we’re going to go through with it, I need to know how she feels.”

“Look, if you’re going to marry Pauline, you have to do it for you and her, not Mom. Aren’t you the one who not five minutes ago told me to ignore her?”

“I guess. Look, I’ve got to go. I’ve got a trainee server to deal with.”

“Okay. Bye.” I hung up knowing I had chickened out by not telling her about Renault, but she had other things to worry about. I didn’t want to be the basket-case sibling. That was Troy’s job. I would have to figure out what to do about Renault on my own.

After what she’d said, I was dreading the inevitable call from my mother.

While walking home after my shift, my cell phone rang and I picked it up. The weather had turned chilly again, and I held the phone to my ear inside the hood of my sweatshirt.

“Your sister’s worried about you,” my mother said, which was her way of saying
she
was worried, but my mother wasn’t very good about expressing anything directly except disappointment.

“That’s funny. I just talked to Jill and everything was fine,” I said. “What’s happened to me since then?”

“I don’t appreciate your jokes.” My mother sniffed. “Save them for your fabulous career as a sitcom writer.” That was just like my mother: to tell me not to use sarcasm and then turn around and use it herself. “She said there’s a lot you’re not telling her.”

“Oh, really? Like what? Enlighten me.” I stopped at a crosswalk and jogged in place a little bit to keep warm. The sun was already getting low in the sky and the streets were full of evening commuters.

“She said you didn’t say a word about your thesis.”

“She didn’t ask.”

“Well, I’m asking.”

“Mother, what am I supposed to say? It’s in my advisor’s hands currently. He’s had it for weeks. There’s really nothing to do until he gives me feedback on it.” All of which was true, I thought.

She made a disgruntled noise and changed the topic. “So you can call your sister but not me? You must have loads of time if you’re not working on that dissertation anymore.”

I didn’t even want to dignify that one with an answer. She was baiting me and looking for an excuse to scold me over something. “Jill only calls me when she needs something,” I said.

My mother brushed that aside. “Have you heard from Brad lately? I got a birthday card from him.” She sounded unbearably smug.

“No, Mom, I haven’t heard from Brad. I dumped him six months ago, remember?” I crossed the street with the crowd and then walked along the edge of the park.

“Well, I don’t see why. He’s perfectly nice, polite, a good provider, and he’d take you back in a heartbeat. He’s not a closet alcoholic or something, is he?”

“No, Mom, he’s not an alcoholic. I’m not in love with him.”

“You were in the beginning.” Her voice had the same accusing tone she used to use when I’d lied about whether I did my homework or not.

“And I wasn’t at the end, okay? Why is that so hard to understand?”

“Karina, don’t you take that tone with me.”

“What tone? You’re acting like you’re angry that my infatuation didn’t last.” The problem was I was never really that infatuated with him to begin with, and after a year had lost all interest. “If you think he’s so great,
you
date him. You should be happy I’m not making myself miserable with that self-absorbed loser.”

“Name-calling is uncalled for, young lady.”

“Call me back when you want to talk to me like a real person and not like a dress-up doll you can spout parental clichés at.”

I have to admit it felt really good to hang up on her. Then I wondered if maybe I hadn’t hit too close to the bone: My mother probably would love to date Brad. Since my father left when I was a child, she’d had a constant string of boyfriends, and even one very brief second marriage to a guy named Jerry she now refused to talk about. I met him only once; that’s how brief it was. They had eloped to Vegas in June and were separated by Christmas. I never, ever brought up the fact that she didn’t stay with any of her guys, even when she was getting on me for the same thing. It felt like that would be too low a blow. It wasn’t like she wasn’t trying. And that was the thing: She accused me of not trying hard enough to keep them. It wasn’t about Brad at all—it was about keeping a guy,
any
guy, at any cost. The thing is, if it hadn’t worked for her, why did she expect it to work for me?

By the time I got back to the apartment, I was feeling depressed and angry. My mother never took my side in any argument, whether it was with one of my siblings or with the outside world. Anyone who had a problem with me she took as evidence that I wasn’t good enough or that I’d done something wrong. That was a tough pill to swallow.

For about an hour I tromped around the apartment thinking the last thing I was in the mood for after being scolded by my mother was to be scolded by some guy. But the anger wore off in time for me to think it over a bit more. He didn’t actually scold me. He expressed his feelings about certain matters and then gave me the choice of doing something about it. He told me what he liked, what he expected…

So unlike my mother, who seemed to think I should “just know” what shoes went with an outfit and the right reply to when a man said something at a party, like the X chromosome was supposed to convey inherent knowledge. He wasn’t like that. He told me what his expectations were. And I felt like I could meet them. More important, I could meet them without feeling fake or insincere about it. That was ironic, and I knew it. Even Becky expected us to be doing some kind of role-playing thing, daddy/girl, boss/secretary,
something.
But like I’d told her, it just didn’t stick. When I was with him, I could really be myself.

I wondered if that was why he didn’t want to tell me his name. Because with me, he’d found he could be who he wanted to be, too. Isn’t that what he said at the bar, the night we met? He was finishing a big project and could finally devote some time to himself. And he’d wanted to be alone…

Until he met me. Was James his real name or the name of the man he wanted to be? Maybe in the world we created between the two of us, it didn’t matter. James was who he
was
, I decided, regardless of what the world called him.

Each time we got together, he issued me an invitation to have an erotic adventure with him. An invitation I could decline, if I wanted to.

But I definitely didn’t want to decline. It felt too good. And despite what my mother, sister, and roommate might think, it felt good for me. Whatever this “punishment” was going to be, I wanted to find out. I wanted to pass whatever test he put before me.

I stopped moping around and decided to get dressed. I picked up the card and looked at the address: the Upper East Side. He said not to worry about what to wear, since I wouldn’t be in the outfit long, but there was always someone looking, wasn’t there? What did people see when they saw Karina Casper? I hoped no one really noticed me at all when I took the subway. I put on my urban street armor: black jeans, a turtleneck, plain black waitress sneakers, and my somewhat beat-up leather jacket. I pulled a baseball cap over my hair. If someone wasn’t looking carefully, they might mistake me for a messenger.