Geoffrey's Rules (2 page)

The girl on the bed hadn’t thought she was going to be fucked, but now Geoffrey King was fucking her from behind, doggie-style, the dirty way I had never had the courage to ask for, and she was screaming in pleasure as she had never screamed for her boyfriends.

With a noise in my throat like I was being strangled and muscles spasming on my desk chair, I came, then panted for a few moments and saw on my screen,

Noon, tomorrow, at Rialto. Rule: no panties.

What had I done?

Rialto was not crowded, but at a first glance around the place, I didn’t see any men sitting by themselves. That at least spared me the embarrassment of trying to match anyone up with the picture of Geoffrey King I’d found on the ‘net.

“May I help you?” asked the hostess.

“Um, yes. I’m supposed to be meeting a, um, Mr. King?”

She looked down at her clipboard, then brightened noticeably. I wondered for an instant if Geoffrey King brought naughty girls here often; I even wondered if the hostess was herself a naughty girl who had been brought into the bathroom for a spanking. I felt rather like I was losing my mind. Hostesses always brighten noticeably when they see that the reservation you think you have actually is there on their clipboards, after all.

“Ah, yes. Mr. King hasn’t arrived yet. Please follow me.”

She sat me facing outward at a little two-top. The table made it impossible for me to cross my legs, something I was under current circumstances desperate to do. When the waitress came by, I ordered a glass of the house red, hoping to calm my nerves, which were making me worry from moment to moment as to whether I would stay seated or would get up from the table and run for the door.

I turned to look out the window, trying to make sure I couldn’t see anyone I knew, and when I turned back, he was there, wearing a blue blazer over a white button down and tight (not indecently, but pretty close) jeans. His dark brown, slightly wavy hair was shorter than in the picture on the web, but it was the same man, and he looked even more intelligent in person. Also, in person he looked just a tiny bit older, as well. Thirty? Thirty-five? For the first time in my entire life, I felt myself grow warm between my thighs at the mere sight of a man. It must have had a great deal to do with the strange prelude to this moment that I had already played with him—the moment at the café, the business-card, the email, (the self-pleasuring). Honestly, though, it felt as if my arousal was simply in response to the thought that this gorgeous man had brought me here, with perhaps the tiniest hint of a notion that the reason he had brought me here was that he was going to spank me.

“Chloe,” he said, holding out his hand, “it’s very nice to meet you.”

His voice was a rich baritone, almost in the bass-range. There was not the slightest indication that he had ever seen me doing anything disreputable.

I reached my hand out in response, and he took it inside his own very firmly but not painfully, gave it a very small, gentle shake, and released it.

That was when I looked into his eyes for the first time, just as he was sitting down opposite me. They were gazing at me as if their owner had just seen a valuable object—a painting, or a sculpture—that he had heard a great deal about, and was now trying to decide for himself whether it really was as worth seeing as he had heard it was.

“It’s nice—”

“Did you follow rule number one?”

Had he really just interrupted me? I felt the blood rush to my face. I couldn’t think at all for several moments. I found that I was looking down at my fork. With what felt like an enormous expenditure of will, I raised my eyes to his and saw a look of amusement on his face, which made my blush grow hotter.

“Are you going to answer, Chloe? Not answering would be a mistake, where your bottom is concerned.”

There was a part of me that was trying to decide between screaming, “You fucking asshole, what the hell?” and simply getting up and walking away.

There was another part that was melting, to put it mildly.

“I did,” I whispered.

“I think you should call me ‘sir’, young lady.”

I couldn’t help it: I whimpered, very softly, and I saw his smile grow as he heard it. I felt, literally, like I was dreaming. There was still a part of me that was resisting, but Geoffrey’s mere presence, his reality and his absolute assurance, seemed to conquer that part effortlessly.

“I did, sir,” I said, trying to speak a little louder and with more of my own assurance, but instead, just making my voice crack. My embarrassment grew, it felt, fivefold, at the weak sound of my own voice.

Suddenly, I thought I was going to cry. Why the hell was I doing this? Why had I put on the short black skirt over nothing in obedience to an email demand from a man I had never actually met? I was making an absolute fool of myself—an educated woman without underwear because a man had made a rule for her. And now I had just called him “sir,” that word from my fantasies that, I had decided so many times, must never be thought of in the real world.

“May I please have your hands, Chloe?” Geoffrey asked, with a civility so refined it almost seemed sarcastic. I looked into his eyes, but there was no sarcasm there—only, I thought, concern. Slowly, I lifted my hands above the table where his own were waiting. He took mine and held them lightly.

“This is your first time?”

“Yes… sir. I mean, I’ve had boyfriends…”

“But you never told them you wanted to be disciplined.”

“No.” I was blushing again, but I forced myself to keep looking into his beautiful eyes.

“Listen carefully. I don’t know whether what I felt yesterday in the café and what I feel right now is real or not. I don’t know for sure whether you’re even a graduate student, as I gathered from what you were reading—or rather, really, not reading—in the café.” (I tried to pull my hands away at that, but he held them firm.) “Or where you are from, or what you like to eat. And you don’t know if I’m a creep, or a loser.”

At that I started to shake my head, because it was evident from the restaurant he had chosen and the way he spoke that he wasn’t.

But he said, “No, there are creeps and losers who dress this way and eat at Rialto. I mean, you don’t even know if I’m going to pay the check.” He smiled, and I couldn’t help myself: I smiled with him, more sure of him.

“I do know, though, with absolute certainty, from what I saw and heard yesterday, that you should be taken in hand, and though I don’t know if I’m the right man to do it, I want to try.”

My blush had faded a little, but now it returned, like a bonfire in my cheeks.

“Chloe, I don’t give this kind of compliment lightly, but you are the loveliest blusher I have ever seen.”

“Oh no,” I said, despite myself. Geoffrey had spoken those words in a tone so confident, and even possessive, that I had actually felt the muscles of my loins respond to him. The feeling was so unexpected and strange—that another person could almost literally command such a response from my body—that it didn’t even occur to me to disbelieve him when he said I should be taken in hand. From my perspective at that moment, he was simply correct; yes, I should be taken in hand. More, yes, it was his duty as a man who could recognize the signs of a girl who needed to be taken in hand to make the attempt.

And then it occurred to me that I didn’t even know what the phrase meant; more precisely, I didn’t know what it meant to him. It always seemed to mean very different things to the different heroes and heroines of the BDSM stories.

“Um… sir, can you tell me what take—” I found I couldn’t even say the phrase, when it came to it “—that means… to you?”

He smiled a half-smile, the left side of his mouth turning up in a way that struck me as mischievous. It was beyond charming, and I realized that the standard romantic feelings (let’s go to the park, let’s go to the movies, let’s go dancing) were following along behind these more potent, more dangerous, erotic ones.

“Later, Chloe,” he said, letting go of my hands and taking his napkin to unfold it. I couldn’t figure out how anyone could unfold a napkin sexily; it must have been something in the fingers. “Let’s spend some time figuring out whether the positive impressions that brought us here can be trusted enough to move that part of things forward.”

I looked down, feeling chastened, and he chuckled. “You have no idea how much I want to start playing right now,” he said.

That brought my gaze right back up to his face. I wondered what he meant, whether he was thinking of spanking me in the restaurant. The thought, accompanied by the kind of salacious image that had given rise to so many sessions of self-pleasuring, made the muscles of my thighs tighten yet again. Now I felt that my pussy was growing sticky, and I wondered whether I might actually be in danger of soaking through the back of my skirt by the end of lunch.

“No,” he said, very softly, “not the spanking—yet. For instance, I could say, ‘Are you wet, you naughty girl?’”

The words were like some sort of enchantment. Without even thinking, I looked into his dark eyes and replied, “Yes, sir.”

He broke the spell abruptly and signaled the waitress, leaving me with the dawning realization that he had been playing the whole time and had given no sign that he would ever stop.

Lunch was ordered. I half expected him to order for me; I wouldn’t have protested—it’s such a staple of dominance and submission narratives—but he didn’t, and I ordered a burger, to his Steak Caesar Salad.

“What are you drinking?” he asked.

“House red,” I replied.

“Yuck.”

“No, it’s good.”

He ordered a bottle of $60 Bordeaux. That was when the “He’s rich” thing kicked matters up a notch. Rialto is nice, and by inviting me there Geoffrey had already landed himself in “He’s prosperous,” but $60 wine at lunch took it to another level.

“So, impressions,” he said, when the waitress had left. “I’m going to tell you about me first, alright? Then if you don’t like what you hear, you can just get up and leave.”

I nodded.

It turned out that impressions were very important to him in his work as well as in judging the beginning of a new relationship. His work concerned a very specialized sort of impression, though; he had an immensely valuable book of business with clients who wanted to incorporate dominance-and-submission elements in their digital media presence, “and above all, spanking.”

His manner was so affable and self-deprecating that he had put me at ease over the course of no more than two minutes. I felt perfectly comfortable saying, rather sassily, “You’re making that up.” The situation was so unusual, though, that as I listened to myself, I realized that I had sassed him in a certain way, and so I wasn’t surprised to see a playfully stern look come into his eyes and to see him raise his finger in a mock warning.

“No, I assure you. Dominant and submissive elements are all over advertising, and they always have been. Don’t tell me you haven’t seen those 50’s magazine ads with the wives getting spanked for the housework not being well done or the coffee being bad.”

I remembered those ads, glimpsed on the internet; I remembered the way they made me feel. The blush returned.

Geoffrey shook his head when he saw it, as if to forbid himself from moving too quickly. I wanted to say “Please, move too quickly!”

“Anyway, these days, things are so much more confusing, right? Part of what I do is simply navigating the swamp of internet marketing in general—and that was my whole business in the beginning—but all my clients these days are chasing the success of this one thing I did, where a woman was looking at a hairbrush.”

I instantly knew exactly what he was talking about. It was an animated gif that had gone viral. The woman was holding an old-fashioned, wooden hairbrush in her right hand and looking at it, while with her left hand she rubbed her left bottom cheek as if remembering how someone had spanked her there. I think I had probably accounted for at least a hundred of the millions of views it had gotten on various sites.

“But that wasn’t even an ad,” I said.

He laughed. “No? What did her t-shirt say?”

“Sweet Tooth,” I said instantly.

“Guess how many hits Sweet Tooth candy got per day at the height of the campaign.”

“The number wouldn’t mean anything to me,” I said. “But I get the point. Wow.”

“Everybody wants that kind of campaign, or they want the power that seems to imbue it for their own stuff—movies, videos, whatever.”

“You just said ‘imbue’,” I said, shaking my head.

Geoffrey gave me a quizzical look.

The words rushed out of me. “At this moment, I have a distinct, though undoubtedly entirely false, memory that I once said that I would marry the first man who used the word ‘imbue’ when talking to me.”

He laughed and shook his head again. “Proust. Memories—they’re reliable and they’re unreliable, but they’re all we have.”

“Did you seriously just say Proust?”

“Do I need to buy you a little cake? A
madeleine
?”

True, the moment of recollection with the
madeleine
cake is probably the most famous moment in all of Proust’s
Remembrance of Things Past,
and it happens very near the beginning of a massive multi-volume work, but I was overwhelmed to think that the rich, dominant consultant even knew that much. “Oh, good Lord. You can’t actually have read Proust, can you?”

“Well, not all of it.”

I had thought I had known what romantic feelings were, but something completely unfamiliar seemed to be happening in my soul. My heart seemed to cry, “I love him,” as my mind desperately screamed, “You
could
love him.”

There was a long pause, then, “This is dangerous,” he said.

I took a deep breath. “Yes.”

“But you want it.”

I lowered my eyes to the table, then raised them to his again. “Yes.”

The food came then, and the tension dissipated—thank goodness.

As he put his fork into his first piece of perfectly-dressed romaine lettuce, Geoffrey said, “Okay, let me get the nitpicky details out of the way; then it’s going to be your turn.” He chewed for a few moments and swallowed, then continued, “Born Boston, 1980. Private schools. Harvard. Entrepreneur.” Another piece of lettuce, another pause. I realized at the same time that he was a careful man and that I wanted him to be careful of me. “Lifelong dominant and spanko. Done it for real for the past ten years.”