Richard and I lay on our sides in my hotel bed looking at each other. He ran his fingertips over my chest and I realized all over again how nervous I was. I looked over at the briefcase and canvass garment bag he had left near the door. My dad used the same bag.
"So no axe in there?" I smiled at him, but I wasn't totally unserious.
He laughed and shook his head. "I'm happy you agreed to meet me. And no, I'm truly, definitely not planning on murdering you."
I sat up and turned away from him, perching on the edge of the bed. I pulled a pillow in front of me and crossed my arms over it. "I still don't know what I want. To do, I mean. But thanks for the reassurance on the murder front."
"Did you like what we just did?" He was lying on his back, his hands clasped under his head, legs casually crossed at the ankles.
I found his confidence relatively infuriating. We had spoken online, through email, on the phone, for a few months. We had long since resorted to using un-anonymous email, mine coming from my school account with my full name, his from a small Swiss asset management firm, with his initials and last name. We were both nicely Googleable. We shared a love of art; I had written on it, he had had his picture taken at openings and was starting a collection of drawings. We were both runners; we had even competed at the same 10K earlier in the year, before we began chatting online. He had gone to graduate school at the same school that I would be going to next year. I joked with him about the whole axe thing, because we had, after all, met through the internet, but really I was nervous about us having different expectations. About letting him down. And I couldn't understand why he wasn't, in some sense, nervous as well. I looked over my shoulder at him. He was so attractive. More attractive than I thought he could have been. "Of course I did."
"Well that's a good start." He slid over and sat up next to me, bringing the sheet up with him and tucking it around me. "Look, I had to be here for a meeting today. I was planning on staying here tonight regardless. I've cleared the weekend. What we just did was fun. I do think you liked it too. I've made us reservations for an early dinner. Let's go and eat and talk exclusively about things that one really must do while fully clothed, and see how it goes."
I was relieved, but also kind of excited to just spend time with him. We had agreed to do things the way we had because if we had met for coffee, I knew that I would have appeared uptight and freaked out and scared, and he thought that he wouldn't have felt comfortable being forceful enough to get me back to a hotel with him. Smiling slightly, I got up, wrapped in the sheet, and went over to put away my clothes that had been discarded on the floor. Tucking the bra and panties that I had been wearing under my arm, I pulled a simple dress out of the closet.
"One more thing before we resort to being merely good conversationalists." He was now in front of me, blocking my way to the bathroom and bending over to get something out of the front pocket of his bag. "If you're going to spend your nights enlivening the early work hours of slightly older men, when they ask you what you are wearing, you should either lie or be wearing these."
I pulled the bra and panties out of their thin cardboard envelope. They were exceptionally beautiful, but exceptionally dirty. They were made out of a shiny ivory taffeta, pleated in some places, and then trimmed with black lace. "Thank you," I said throatily. He was looking down at me from his nearly 6'4" height and I felt very vulnerable again. I looked up and him and cocked an eyebrow. "I mean, kind of eurotrashy. Very French prostitute put up in the Bristol. Very you."
He wrinkled his mouth and his cheeks dimpled in a smile. "No no, they had other ones for that. If you've got a French prostitute surely suspenders should be involved. I thought these would be better suited for disguising an American ingénue. And anyway..." he playfully grabbed my previous undergarments from my arm, tossing them into the small waste bin next to the desk, "those are very repressed. Very you. And it's a credit to the rest of you that I found you the least bit interesting in spite of them."
I shifted nervously in front of Richard, unsure of whether I was supposed to put the new underwear on in front of him and how these sort of teasing but definitely flirting quips were fitting into our friendly dinner plans. He answered my unease by reaching into his bag again, pulling out a stack of clothes, and walking back into the room. I darted into the bathroom and swung the door mostly shut. Dampening a washcloth, I sponged off the fine layer of sweat that had come from him touching me, and stopped to look at myself. My body, newly bare, didn't quite look like mine. My hairless pussy looked disconcertingly young, but it was still edged in moistness from what he had done to me—undoubtedly my most grown up activity so far. I sat on the edge of the tub and brushed out my hair, thinking back to how I had lain with my arms stretched above my head, untucking the sheets as I clung to them, my shoulder blades supporting most of my weight with my head thrown back and my legs open to his mouth. It was not an image I was used to thinking about myself in in any real sort of terms.
I stood up and put on the bra and panties. At first it all seemed too tight, but as I adjusted, lifting the straps of the panties higher over my hips, pulling the band of the bra down lower over my rib cage in the back and altering the strap lengths, bending over, placing my breasts into the cups as I had seen girls do in the locker room at school, my body started to look different. When I stood up the transformation surprised me. My usual underwear just covered things. My bras concealed and flattened my chest. My panties came up high on my waist and low on my hips, squaring my middle. I had never thought about it that way before. In these my breasts sat high and rounded on top of the low cut cups. My torso and legs looked longer, my waist narrowed and hips curved. The panties weren't as stretchy as my normal ones were, and my pussy was tightly cupped. Just as he had cupped me earlier, I thought.
I slipped into the dress, leaving the back open, and gathered my hair into a high ponytail. Slicking on a few coats of mascara and smudging some shiny smoky shadow into the creases of my eyes, I realized that I wanted to look nice for him. I didn't want to kiss him on the cheek at the end of the night and return to my room alone. As I started to wander towards thinking about what I did want to happen, there was a soft rap on the bathroom door and he slowly opened it, bringing the bowl, razor, and towel back into the bathroom. He dumped the water into the sink and turned towards me.
"I'm just going to go downstairs and check in, drop my bag off with the desk." I looked up at him and was unsure about whether I wanted to be bold or not. "You look really pretty by the way. You are really pretty." He had started to turn away.
"I don't want you to check into your room." It came out of my mouth without me really thinking about it.
He turned back to me. "I'm worth what my firm has already charged our client for it. And anyway you're just presently charmed by my cunning good looks and lovely gifts. You might find me terribly boring over dinner and go off me forever."
"Clearly I find your cunning-something-else attractive." I blushed at my own dirty joke and he laughed. He came up behind me and zipped my dress. We both noticed when his hands paused at the nape of my neck.
"Come on, you're ready. I'm hungry. Let's go." I slid into my heels and grabbed a bag on the way out. He slipped my room key into his pocket and we descended the wide marble staircase together, separating to opposite banisters when we realized that we both knew people in the lobby bar. Sometimes the world is small.
I gave him a brief look of panic. Two men came up to us; looking at me quizzically. Richard shook their hands and deftly steered them towards the main desk, telling them that he needed to check into his room but was late for dinner. A high school friend's parents were waving at me, and I went over to them to say hello. They asked where I was going to college and why I wasn't there yet (if I hadn't deferred, I would be in the early weeks of my first semester.) When they pressed me to join them for dinner, I declined and turned towards the main desk, gesturing at Richard. We met halfway across the lobby. The two men that had met him came up to me, shook my hand, and wished me a good gap year before returning to the bar.
"You're a family friend. I'm being nice and taking you to dinner. You were kind enough to let me leave my bags in your room when mine wasn't ready earlier, although you're very lovely and I should try it on with you later when I go up to get my things."
"I'm quite spoiled to be staying in such a nice hotel by myself, and we should join them for dinner because surely it's not appropriate for me to be alone with you in a strange city, even if you are an old friend."
"You are quite spoiled really..." he teased. As we walked outside my phone rang. "And in very high demand," Richard said as I picked up the phone. It was my dad. I had asked him to call at this time. While I didn't really want him to know that I was letting strangers into my hotel room to do unspeakably filthy things to me, I also thought that, were I say being strangled or in the process of being chased around aforementioned hotel room with aforementioned axe, I would happily confess to all of it so long as someone was checking up on me. I spoke with my dad about my trip; Richard led me through the streets. I hung up just as we reached a small restaurant. He placed his hand in the hollow of my back as we walked up the steps and guided me inside.
As we ate we talked about everything that had nothing to do with what I was nervous about. While we met on an internet chat site, specifically one devoted to the kinkier side of things, he had quickly figured out that I was young and had really no idea what I was interested in. He told me later that at the time all he knew was that he wasn't interested in that. He liked doing certain things and found it a lot simpler to find a girl who he knew was interested in that type of stuff rather than broach the subject with girls he met when really he wasn't interested in anything long term anyway. At the same time, we had clicked, and so we kept talking. We clicked in person, too, and found ourselves lingering over our food, then desert, then coffee. We had had very similar upbringings with difficult families that, nevertheless, loved us in a certain way, and even though we didn't talk about anything serious, it was evident that we had a shared understanding about things and hours passed easily.
As we left the restaurant, I slipped my arm into his and he suggested going to get a drink.
