Geoffrey's Rules (18 page)

I nodded my chin into his shirt, already wet with my tears.

“Okay, first. About Chaser and his video, just so the air is clear and you understand what was in my head. I was never going to let Chaser do the video that way.”

Suddenly, all the emotions of that day, dulled by the passage of time and the grief of losing Geoffrey, returned, and I saw what he meant about resolving them. In a flash, I was spoiling to fight it out again—exactly, I thought, as Geoffrey knew I would be.

“Why didn’t you ask what I thought?”

“Because I
knew
what you thought, you silly, wonderful, brilliant girl.”

“Why didn’t you let me speak my mind?”

“Frankly, because I thought we both could use the money. We know Chaser is a jerk, right? I didn’t think that was even up for discussion. What possible good could your outburst have done?”

“Well, it made
you
pay attention, didn’t it?”

“Certainly. Yes. And it was my fault it got to that point; I apologize. Chaser blindsided me with that, and if I’d known I would have talked with you beforehand. More importantly, I knew that with the semester starting we were going to have to talk very seriously about what you really want. You just seemed so content to put it off. But I should have initiated the conversation, and I’m sorry.”

My thoughts were in a whirl. “Did you just apologize to me?” I asked.

He laughed, ruefully. “Yes. I do actually do that from time to time.”

“Even to a girl you’ve taken in hand?”

“Especially to her.”

“So… now what?”

“Now we have the conversation, when you want, where you want, on your terms.”

“Not now.”

“No, obviously not right now. Right now I hold you until you’re ready to hate me again.”

I pounded my fist into his chest. “Asshole,” I said experimentally.

He didn’t respond.

“Don’t I get a spanking for that, or at least a threat?” I asked.

“You safeworded, Chloe. My policy is that until you tell me you’re rescinding your safeword, we’re two unconnected people who happen to share an interest in how we might relate to one another.”

I realized I was feeling better. I didn’t know if I hated him, though. “What if I don’t hate you?”

“That’s your prerogative, too.”

“What if I were to rescind my safeword and call you an asshole?”

“That would depend on the circumstances, but from the way you’re putting it, I think I’d have to tell you to think hard about what you mean and to let me know when you’re ready to have the conversation about what you really want.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want to play with someone who might not be playing for the right reasons.”

That startled me. He hadn’t used the verb “play” in that way since our very first lunch.

He felt me start. He sighed. “I really have fucked this up, haven’t I?” he asked rhetorically. “It’s not an excuse, but the reason is that you’re so brilliant I’ve just been assuming you understood that every move I’ve made was playful. I mean, everything is playful. Even Sade. But it’s more immediately important that this has all been about me helping you figure out how you like to play. It may turn out that you don’t like to play the way I like to play… for example, I want to play house pretty soon, and if you don’t want to play house, that’s going to put a limit on how long this goes on.”

“Um,” I said, my mind filling with strange, conflicted visions of what he might mean.

“But that’s just an example of what I mean by playing. You need to decide whether your inner professor can let your imagination play the way I know, and you know, it wants to. Up until now, we’ve just been making it clear to you how much your imagination and your body crave it. Now it’s time to figure out what you want for, say, the next five years—or to figure out that you don’t want to figure anything out on that long-term a basis.”

“And if I don’t want to figure it out?” I asked, my heart falling because I thought I knew the answer.

“Then we part ways, painful as it may be. Painful as it would be, for me.” A long silence ensued. “Feeling better?” he finally asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Email me if you want to have the conversation?”

I nodded.

“I’ll give you a week, I—”

“Friday night, at your house,” I said. “Whatever I decide, I owe it to you to tell you in person, and I owe it to both of us to do it quickly.”

It was his turn to nod. He removed his arm from my shoulders and rose from the bench, looking at me seriously. I suddenly felt that something was terribly, terribly wrong—like there was a rip in the fabric of my universe and I was falling out of it into another, much worse universe.

Geoffrey started to walk away, and right at that moment, I realized what the rip was.

“Sir!” I cried out to his retreating back. It might have been the cry of someone who didn’t know the name of the nice gentleman who had dropped his wallet, but to me it felt like I had proclaimed to the world, “I am Chloe Revkin, and I am owned by Geoffrey King, and I don’t want to stop!”

Geoffrey turned around, his expression so sad it left me speechless for a moment. What did it mean? What did it mean for me? I stood up and ran to him. I put my arms around his neck. “I love you, sir,” I said quietly.

“I love you, too, Chloe,” he said, sadly. “I’ll see you Friday.” He gently disengaged my hands from the back of his neck and turned and walked away.

He made steak au poivre, which he knew was my favorite, because we had it at an incredible steakhouse in New York when we’d gone down to consult on a major film production. After the meeting and after the dinner, he had fucked me against the plate glass window of the suite on the 45th floor. I had been gagged with my lacy panties, because before he fucked me he had beaten me with his belt for saying the secret word of the day, which was “water,” and I had been screaming so loud that I needed to be gagged.

All these memories came flooding back just at the smell of the cooking steak when I let myself in with the key he had given me in June. Proust and memory, I thought to myself and smiled wistfully.

He stood in the kitchen, over the stove, his back to me. I waited by the door until he turned around, just enjoying the sight of him. He’d only cooked for me a few times, but every time I’d been overwhelmed by how strongly his personality came through: the way he gently mastered the food, the way he sharpened his knives, the way he had his way with aromatics like garlic and shallots, slicing them transparently fine without any obvious effort. I felt the familiar weakness in my knees when my thoughts drifted to what a girl like me, who knew the value of submission, owed to man like Geoffrey, by right, in the realm of my fantasies.

He turned away from the frying pan and saw me. “Perfect timing,” he called out, with a smile that didn’t seem to make it all the way to his eyes.

He knows I’m going to call it off, I thought. I walked quickly over to him. “Can I rescind my safeword just for tonight?”

Pain seemed to shoot across his face. “Okay,” he said, slowly, “but I can’t promise how effective I’m going to be as your master. To tell you the truth, I’m kind of turtled up emotionally right now.”

I kissed his cheek. “That’s alright, sir.”

“Why don’t you set the table then, Chloe? And pour yourself a glass of the Burgundy over there, and fill mine up? Then sit at the counter and tell me about your week while I finish.”

I chattered about my seminars and my apartment-mates while I watched him finish the steaks and reduce the sauce. A potato gratin, it turned out, was ready to come out of the oven, and I took it out when he told me and plated it. The tone of his instructions to me was sounding more and more like the one I was familiar with—the one that seemed to make little jolts of arousal travel through my belly.

I held the plates to receive the lovely steaks and carried them to the table, and then it was time to sit and for me to serve salad like an obedient spouse. I felt his eyes on me as I played house. I sat down across from him.

Geoffrey raised his glass, full of the Burgundy that I had said was my favorite of all the many wines I had tasted with him that summer. I raised mine.

Geoffrey liked real, old-fashioned toasts. “To the remembrance of things past,” he said. “May it torment us less and less.” His voice was a little husky, but I felt myself starting to cry.

“The remembrance of things past,” I whispered. We touched glasses and sipped.

I put down my glass. “Geoffrey,” I said, “I—”

“No,” he said. “Finish half your steak. Then you may start.”

I looked into his eyes. He was smiling for real now. I smiled back, aching for him. I couldn’t let the ache distract me. “Yes, sir,” I said and ate.

The steak was wonderful, better even than the obscenely priced one in New York. The au poivre sauce tasted like it had been sent down from heaven on the backs of cherubim. I couldn’t help making a little submissive sound as I swallowed. I looked at Geoffrey, who was smiling broadly.

“Oh, sir,” I said, “thank you so much.”

“You’re welcome, Chloe.” While I finished the steak (how could I possibly stop halfway?), he told me about Chaser, who had agreed that the actress not struggle and that there be real aftercare. Geoffrey’s hopes were relatively high for “Baby Needs to Know.”

Then he fell silent. I realized my steak was gone, along with my gratin and my salad. He had managed to get through about half his dinner and now began slowly and tactfully working on the rest.

I took a deep breath. “Okay. I have one question.” He looked up inquisitively. “If I say that I do want to play house…” I saw him fight hard to suppress a look of rising hope, and I tried hard to keep my own face impassive. “Would I be a 1950’s wife? I mean, would I iron your shirts and cook for you every night and if… if, you know, we have kids… would I be the stay-at-home mom and change all the diapers?”

He laughed. “Do I look like Ward Cleaver?” he asked. “And I like cooking for you. And I want to be as big a part of my kids’ lives as my dad was in mine.” I remembered meeting his dad on Nantucket that summer and thinking that Geoffrey would have no trouble being a wonderful dad with his own father as a model—also, wondering where Geoffrey’s dominance came from, since his dad was incredibly easy-going, then realizing that from the outside, to anyone but me—and to me, everywhere but the bedroom and wherever else he had decided I would be taken in hand, like his office—Geoffrey was indeed easy-going.

“But…” I said, “but what if you suddenly decided you wanted to spend more time working? And I said that you needed to come home because, um, Geoffrey junior needed his dad. It’s the kind of thing that I always wonder about in the BDSM novels. It never seems to come up.”

“It all comes down to the meaning of rule one, doesn’t it?” he said. “Does having my way mean that I get to make bad decisions and not get called on them?”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s about the size of it.”

“No,” he said. “It doesn’t.”

“How does that work, then? I mean, rule one, as I understand it, is about how we relate to one another. I know it theoretically only applies to sex and business, but how can that possibly not creep into everything? Theoretically, we would still be working together… so your decision not to come home from the office would fall under rule one, right?”

“Right,” he admitted.

“Remember when you told me to trust you?”

“Yes, of course. The problem now is that I told you to trust me for that night, and you did, and it was wonderful—I can vouch for myself, and I can vouch for what you said, at least.” He looked at me. I nodded with what felt like a wistful smile on my face, thinking about those white lace panties. “But we never talked about it after that,” he continued, “because it seemed like everything was going so well.”

“So I’m not supposed to just trust you going forward?”

“No, you’re not. You’re supposed to give me the benefit of the doubt, as I give you the benefit of the doubt. Really, I think it comes down to what every relationship comes down to, whether it’s vanilla or BDSM or whatever. Are we travelling along paths that lie close to one another? Do we want the same things? Do we understand one another’s needs, and are we willing to work to help those needs get met?”

“Persuade me, then,” I said. “How would that work?”

I meant the challenge not only with regard to whether he could propose a workable solution, but also with regard to whether he was willing to endeavor to do the necessary persuasion. And I wasn’t even sure what sort of answer I was really looking for.

“Let me make a wild guess,” he said. “There’s a part of you that wants me to persuade you over my knee.”

I blushed. He had known. He always seemed to know. “Yes,” I admitted.

“It would certainly make you feel womanly, wouldn’t it?” There was no hint of mockery in his tone.

“Yes.”

“If we do manage to negotiate a settlement here,” he said, “you can be sure that will be on the program.” He smiled. I melted. “I suppose,” he continued, “the real question is whether your heart is willing to make your brain take that paddling.”

I thought for a moment. “I guess that’s right,” I finally said. “My biggest difficulty is that
you
would never let
your
reason take a paddling.”

He laughed. “Never a literal one,” he said.

“A metaphorical one, though?” I asked, surprised.

“Certainly,” he said. “Anyone who refuses to take criticism is a bigger fool than he ought to be.”

“And you’ll accept criticism from me?”

“Of course,” he said. “You’re the smartest person I know.”

“But in that case, what happens to you having your way?”

“Depends on the kind of criticism you make, I guess. If you tell me I should come home to see Geoffrey Junior, I’m going to be a lot more receptive than I would be if you told me I was spanking you too hard, or that you didn’t like my choice of lingerie for you.”

I considered again. I was having trouble seeing that there was a problem. It was just about common interests and about trust. Why was I making it so much harder than that?