The Dom Project (3 page)

She grabbed him by the sleeve of his shirt and pulled him into a nearby lecture hall, recently emptied of roughly two hundred undergrads, if the garbage littering the desks and floor was any indication. She fell into one of the end row seats, and he was quick to sit beside her. Hell, it must be bad if she had to deliver the news sitting down. Or maybe her shoes were just hurting her feet.

“I thought with all the algorithms and the detailed profiles it would be a little bit more, I don’t know, precise.” She twisted her lip, as if she was genuinely perplexed by the fact that the world wasn’t as neatly categorized as her collections. “I keep going on...dates, but it’s always the wrong guy. I write down what I’m like and what I want and they don’t
read
it, or they rewrite it in their brains somehow. If they can even fucking write. Half of them are just this side of illiterate. One guy spelled orgasm ‘oargasm’, if you can believe it. Like ‘oar’ that you row a boat with? But even among the ones who can spell—which is already a small pool—I have my profile set for casual encounters, and I’ve got guys wanting to sign contracts on the first date.”

Contracts?

Robin continued, as if she hadn’t even noticed her own bizarre wording. “Or they say they’re buff and then they turn out to look like Kevin James. Or they want to buy me a boob job. Or—oh God—they want me to call them Daddy.” She made an exaggerated gagging sound. Not the sexy kind of gagging sound, either—
oh hell no
,
Johnny Boy
,
do not go down that path now
.

“Well, have you considered just dating the old-fashioned way? You know, in person? Personally I think the internet gives you too much information about people. Like there are plenty of guys you’d probably click with on a first date, have a good time and you’d already be shacking up with him by the time you found out he couldn’t spell orgasm. You know?”

“As you keep reminding me, I’m a boring librarian. The men I meet in person are all extremely old, extremely paunchy and extremely socially stunted. Great when you’re tracking down rare Nazi books, not so much when you want to go dancing.” She had a crooked smile on her face now, which heartened him a little. No, she wasn’t desperately lonely, she was only going through a rough patch. She’d handle it like she always did, with humor and stubbornness, and she’d find someone. Someone right for her, who’d give her what she wanted
and
what she needed.

“You’ll find someone,” he said. “There’s no way you won’t. Shit, I can’t really give you advice based on my own history, but I do know people who’ve had some of the same problems. Just take it slow, be safe, keep at it.”

What a weak-sauce thing to say. Generic. None of his usual verve or flare. He might as well have said
attagirl
or
there’s plenty of fish in the sea
.

Which she could use her
oargasms
to navigate
,
ha ha.

The truth was, he didn’t have any experience in this kind of thing. He didn’t date, he
played
, and it was easy for him to find people who wanted to be played with. Even if he did do the normal movie-and-dinner dating thing, he wasn’t sure he could really be objective enough about Robin to give her helpful advice. Especially not after she’d just dropped the word “contract” in casual dating conversation like it was a remotely normal thing to say. He tugged surreptitiously at his shirt collar.

“That’s kind of cliché, but it still helps,” she said, although he had a feeling it hadn’t helped at all. “Thanks. I’d better go now, but I’ll tell you as soon as I get any news on the collection.” She stood to go, and so did he, and when she tossed her wavy blond hair over her shoulder a strand hit him on the neck, like a trailing fingertip grazing lightly over his skin.

“Anytime,” he said. “Anytime at all.”

Chapter Two

My best friend tells me I need to give up the algorithms and get a little less technical about my love life. Apparently most people, and thus most doms, simply aren’t as dedicated to careful categorization as I am. So my faith in the transparency of online profiles in helping us find compatible partners is misguided. And as wary as I am of the unpredictability of real-life hookups, I’m just about desperate enough to jump clear out of my comfort zone. I hear a local club here in L.A. has a drink special on margaritas this Friday, so I’m going to give it a try. If you’re there, please don’t date-rape me. Although I suppose if you’re the kind of guy to date-rape a woman you’re probably not the kind of guy to respond well to being asked nicely. Oh well.

Love,

The Picky Submissive

On second thought, she deleted the date-rape joke. Even for a compulsive blogger like her, there was a line when it came to oversharing on the internet and she was pretty sure that crossed it. She stared at the blinking cursor for a minute or two longer, then typed:

So if you’re in the area and happen to see a petite sub in Louboutins, come say hi!

As long as you can spell orgasm.

Satisfied with the new ending, she saved the post, closed the window, shut the laptop and put it on her bedside table, on top of her library-bound sexual paraphernalia tomes.

Damn, now she had the opposite problem as earlier today—she couldn’t get
work
out of her mind. No use fighting it. She adjusted her reading pillow, slung the laptop back onto her stomach and opened up the list of Mareau contacts.

She narrowed down the list of leads on the nephew, then stalled out in the next hour, ending up at eight men in their mid-seventies with the same unfortunately common name. She
could
just bite the bullet and call them one by one, but this was a delicate operation, not the sort of thing where you called the guy up and said, “Hello, Mr. Henderson? I was wondering if you were the Henderson who was recently trying to sell sexy photos of his dead aunt?”

If you had the wrong man, you risked him blabbing to the wrong people. If you had the right one, you risked insulting him with your lack of research and discretion. Ugh. There had to be more research she could do. Some way to narrow down the choices. Sadly, it didn’t seem likely she could do this sight unseen.

Julio had seen the nephew from a distance. But she doubted the guy was going to have a facial tattoo or something to make him easily recognizable from description alone. After all, how easily distinguishable could any group of seventy-year-old dudes all named Henderson be? It looked like hardly any of them had public accounts on social media, as well.

She and Julio were going to have to check them out in person. Come up with a secret code gesture or something for Julio to signal if they had the right Henderson or not. And a cover story for why they were there if it was the
wrong
Henderson.

Selling Girl Scout cookies? Boy, would the charming gents of KinkLife.com enjoy her acting out
that
scenario.

Better go with door-to-door proselytizing. They’d start Saturday morning, which meant she shouldn’t have more than a couple margaritas at Miss Kitty’s Fetish Friday. Hopefully she’d meet a few people in the life there—doms to follow up with or subs to commiserate and compare notes with.

It was a shame she couldn’t be more like John. He was the opposite of picky. Back in college, they’d roomed together for a year in a house with four other people and his bedroom door might as well have just had a sock permanently glued to the doorknob.

Maybe she shouldn’t make assumptions about his sex life. For an extroverted guy with an active social life, he didn’t reveal a lot of details about what he got up to sexually. Who knew; maybe he was
incredibly
picky, but he had so many options to start with, it only appeared like he was indiscriminate. After all, what was the real difference, mathematically, between picking one person out of ten versus picking ten out of a hundred? Whatever the case, he was allowed to keep his secrets.

She’d gotten in trouble before, assuming things about John. That was long ago and water under the bridge, but the embarrassment still lingered.

Don’t think about John
.

She pulled up a different tab and thought of the BDSM social event where she’d arranged her first introductory play sessions. Those had been safe, fun, exhilarating...until a few of the regulars started paying her an uncomfortable amount of attention. The worst wouldn’t back off until she mentioned a restraining order. No, that door was closed and she did
not
want to open it again.

Instead, she pulled up a nightclub whose web address she knew by heart, even though she’d never mustered enough courage to go there. The splash page was black with pink lettering and a stylized pink cat that winked at her as she moved the cursor over it. The cat draped over a text box that read Miss Kitty’s Club. 21+ only Click Here.

Her stomach fluttered, and the laptop suddenly felt unbearable, bulky and overheated. She shifted it down to her upper thighs. Oh, there was a new video link for Fetish Friday. She clicked on it eagerly. There wouldn’t be sex—it wasn’t
that
kind of club, she wasn’t bold enough to take that step, not without a dom accompanying her—but the video looked fascinating.

Okay,
fascinating
was probably a pretty generous word, as if her interest in the video was purely academic.

Sexy. Hot. Yeah, one of those.

Sometimes all she had to do was imagine herself as the visual center of the ritual, being properly clothed and positioned for service, and that would take her away, at least mentally—oh God, it was
so fucking good
, even in the abstract. And she’d had a taste of how to make it real with a man. She could do it again. It was worth waiting for, to do it right. The right man. No, not only the right man. The right
dom
.

She just had to find him.

* * *

Dammit.

This was not working. Andy was naked, hot as hell and oh-so-suggestible, but John was hopelessly distracted. Which was not fair. At all. Okay, but he could still save the situation. He needed to satisfy the urge that was distracting him, and then he could get back to the task at hand.

He circled Andy’s kneeling form, taking slow, predatory steps and tracing a palm over the smooth curves of Andy’s slight shoulders.

“Comfortable?” he asked conversationally. “Nothing chafing? Jaw all right?”

Andy gave him two high-pitched grunts through his bit gag:
yes
.

John ruffled his hair. “Good, good. In that case, I’m gonna need you to get down on your hands and knees for me now, back nice and straight. I have a bit of work to do and I need a laptop table. There’s my good boy, be back in a second.”

By the time he’d returned to the living room with his laptop, Andy was on all fours, head down, back pin-straight, arched at just the right angle to make a nice flat surface for John to work on. John would have to make sure to reward him for this later.

He set down his laptop on Andy’s lower back, opened it and took a seat on the couch. “I need to concentrate on what I’m doing here, so that means I need you to be absolutely quiet. Understand?”

Two grunts.

“If you get uncomfortable at all, if you need to take a piss, or stretch, or my computer gets too hot on your back, you safeword out, okay? Show me.”

Three grunts.

“Oh,
good boy
. You know, I think you may get to come tonight.”

Andy replied with a happy whine, which John immediately shushed. He’d let it slide, though; Andy was very good, but he wasn’t a damn saint, and John hadn’t let him come in nearly a week. No wonder he was excited.

And John was excited too, make no mistake. He just needed to do this one thing first, and then Andy could have his full attention for as long as it took. Or rather, for as long as John
wanted
it to take.

He grinned to himself as he opened up his web browser.
Okay
,
Dr.
Robin Lessing
,
time to give up your secrets.
No vanilla lady talks about contracts that way
,
like it’s a completely normal word to use when you’re discussing your love life.

But how to sniff her out?

First instinct would be to check dating sites, kinky and non; after all, one of those was apparently the source of her troubles. She wouldn’t be using any sort of identifiable information about herself, which left him with early thirties, blonde, petite and a possible shoe fetish, a description that fit half of the women in L.A.—well, the ones brave enough to admit they could age past twenty-nine, at least.

He still spent a few minutes scrolling through local KinkLife profiles, and not surprisingly, there were
thousands
of women that fit his search parameters. He doubted her profile would have a clear face pic to help him along either.

That was all right. There were other avenues to pursue.

He and Robin had lived together, after all. They were best friends. He knew her habits. Her vices. Her addiction to blogging.

Back in college, she’d kept blogs for her various classes, detailing her fellow students and her professors. She’d had a shoe blog for a while. A book blog. She had a relatively widely read professional blog about her academic interests. She lived to document things, to discern patterns and make meanings. No
way
she wasn’t blogging about her adventures in kink.

He stroked Andy’s nape as he brainstormed search terms, and good boy that he was, Andy didn’t make a sound, didn’t shift or twitch. John would have to wrap this up soon, though. It was already a little ethically suspect that he was doing this with a sub in the room; it would cross the line into downright unacceptable if it caused Andy undue strain.