1.
The glass door had a faux-bronze handle and the words "Has Bean's" stenciled on it in some non-specific ye-olde font. "Cute," thought Jennifer Sutcliff, nee Ludlow, as she paused in front of the suburban strip-mall coffee shop; "kind of moronic, but cute." She could feel her heartbeat in the back of her throat. "Oh heck, Jen, get a grip on yourself!" She was neither timid nor indecisive, as a rule, so why was it proving so difficult to open the wretched door. "Just go in and talk to the woman."
She pushed open the door forcefully; too forcefully. It thwacked against a six-foot potted ficus just inside the shop, and a string of carriage bells attached to the push-bar on the other side of the door jangled angrily. Had Jen been given to swearing, she'd have indulged, but instead she contented herself with forcefully expelling a breath she hadn't realized she was holding. Then she glared around the small room—coffee bar with pastry case catty-corner to the door in which she stood, condiments and utensils on a narrow table against the right wall, then two armchairs and a low table in an open space to her right, and two four-tops and three doubles against the picture window to her left—as if defying somebody to complain about the noise.
The place seemed to do a pretty brisk business for three-o-clock on a Wednesday afternoon, and the thwack-jangle had not in fact attracted much attention. An elderly man sitting alone at the closest four-top met her eye for a moment before returning placidly to his newspaper, but the rest of the clientele seemed engrossed in chatter, laptops, lattes, and something new (at least to her) by Mumford and Sons on the sound system. Some half-a-dozen souls had braved the late Spring humidity on a quest for caffeine, or wi-fi, or both. A pair of twenty-something guys in cargo shorts and t-shirts sat in the armchairs and played with identical I-phones. A tiny girl—five-foot-nothing, and rail thin in a white oxford shirt and khakis; dark hair and olive complexion: Italian, Spanish, maybe Persian—patiently explained something or other to a handsome if perplexed-looking young man in jeans, an un-tucked Hawaiian shirt and a haircut that made him look like a Marine. The old man read his paper. And a very beautiful, very tall dark-haired woman in skinny jeans, a sleeveless leaf green blouse, sun glasses and earbuds took the occasional sip of an iced tea, and devoured a scone as if it were the first thing she'd eaten in a week. The tall woman sat at the double furthest from the door. She did not stand as Jen walked past the pastry case and put her hand tentatively on the back of the opposite chair. Instead, she took a paper towel from her lap, dabbed the remains of the scone from a full, almost pouted lower lip, removed the earbuds, and took off her sunglasses to reveal eyes as green as the blouse she wore.
"Jennifer Ludlow, right?" The voice was low with a little rasp to it; a whiskey voice, maybe a bedroom voice, but cool now, polite and a little wary. "It's been a long time. Sit, please." The woman had no discernable accent; she sounded educated, professional. The "Sit" had been clipped, almost peremptory, the way you might address a willing, if not particularly bright beagle. But the "please" had taken some of the edge off the command...some.
"Thanks, maybe I'll grab some coffee, and then I will." Jen tried a smile. It felt awkward, as if she had to order each individual facial muscle into place. "You're Magnolia Sutter, or do you prefer..?"
"Mags is fine."
"So not...um..."
The tall woman sighed. "When I have you handcuffed naked to a flogging post and I'm beating your pretty little ass with a riding crop, you may call me Mistress, or Goddess, or whatever I decide is appropriate. For now, Mags is fine. Is that what we're here to discuss, by the way?"
"Shoot! What? No...um, no it's not exactly...I mean it's not me, or at least...oh heck. Look, this may be a huge mistake. Let me get some coffee, and I'll try to explain. Can I get you anything?"
The other woman smiled, pleased by the offer, although Jen couldn't help thinking that Mags—which would take some getting used to; Jen had never seen a woman who looked less like a "Mags"—might also be enjoying the effect of her little bombshell. Jen didn't much like being laughed at, but decided to let it go. In the circumstances, the question had not been unreasonable. "Since you asked," said Mags, still smiling, "I'll have a large iced tea, sweetened, and another one of these white chocolate cherry scones. Thank you." With the last two words, the smile had vanished. Gratitude, even for something a trivial as a drink and a pastry, was apparently not a subject for mockery. "What a strange mixture of coarse and classy." thought Jen to herself. "Was she like this in school?" She couldn't remember.
"No surprise there," thought Jen, as she got in line behind a couple of middle-aged country-club-y woman who had just come in from a game of tennis, if the white polo shirts and sweatbands were to be believed. She and Magnolia Sutter had attended the same high school for two years. Jen's father, a colonel in the Air Force, had been transferred to a training facility not far from a tony but affordable parochial (all-girls) school during the summer after her sophomore year. But the two girls hadn't been friends. They hadn't been enemies either, although Jen, like most of the rest of her class, had been envious both of Magnolia's beauty and her brains. Everything had seemed to come easy to the tall brunette: grades, sports (Magnolia had lettered in swimming and volleyball), accolades, boys...especially boys. The girl had gone through the local boys' school like...well, heck, like a gorgeous, black-Irish beauty in a blue blazer, plaid skirt, Mary-Janes, and white knee socks through a sea of sexually curious, hormonally-addled, teen-aged males. She'd dated football players and stoners, Goths and geeks, the lead in the school play and the head of the Christian Fellowship. Strangely, while she could hardly have been called exclusive, she never got the reputation for sluttiness some of Jen's less charitable friends felt she deserved. For her own part, Jen had been jealous—of course she'd been jealous—but she'd had the good grace to feel guilty about her jealousy, and she'd made a conscious effort to be polite to Magnolia Sutter, when they'd crossed paths.
Which hadn't been all that often: Magnolia had been a gifted sculptor, and spent much of her free time in the arts studio, fashioned from a converted rectory at the edge of the school's property, while Jen and all her friends had hung out in the choir room in the basement of the science building, under the indulgent eye, and critical ear, of Sister Siobhan. Through the magic of social media and the interwebs—a phrase that her best friend, Cora Bolinger had picked up somewhere—she had remained in touch with several of her fellow choir-members. And one of them, Ashley Carmichael, nee Barnes, had tweeted about running into Magnolia at an exhibition of her work at a local gallery. Ashley had a rich husband and had bought one of Magnolia's more expensive pieces, had posted pictures of the work—an elaborate basket-like confection of brightly painted wooden snakes—on Facebook. And it had taken no more than a basic Google search for Jen to discover that Magnolia Sutter was indeed a promising young sculptor with a growing local reputation, and also that she worked as a dominatrix, under the name Princess Anastasia.
At the time, Jen had been frankly shocked and perhaps a tiny bit intrigued, or at least curious. She was astonished at the ease with which she had discovered her former classmate's...well, could you call it a "day job?" It hadn't taken much ingenuity: Magnolia talked quite openly about her alternate identity in an interview she had done for the local artsy weekly. According to the article, she had made a living as a dom for some time before her art had begun to sell, and since sales of her work were still somewhat sporadic, and since she had a thriving local...practice?...she continued to be involved in the local bondage scene, even accepting the occasional new client; although the fact that she had begun to make money as a sculptor allowed her to be considerably more selective than she had been in the past.
Local bondage scene? The notion had shorted a couple of Jen's circuits. At first, she didn't want to think about it. Then she really
did
want to think about it: she was desperately curious. Who? Where? When? For eff's sake,
how
? Would she have friended Magnolia on Facebook, or would she have proposed a meeting merely to see about satisfying that curiosity? Maybe, but then again, maybe not.
"Can I help you?" The barista's pleasant, slightly bored voice derailed the proverbial train of thought, and Jen took a moment coming back to the present before placing her order.
When she got back to the table, Jen handed Magnolia the tea and the scone. The other woman thanked her again, tore off a large chunk of scone, took a big bite, and closed her eyes.
"Hungry?" asked Jen. The question sounded bitchy and ungracious, and she regretted it even before she saw Magnolia frown. "Sorry," Jen said quickly. "That was...um..."
"Yes, it was," her companion replied, "but since I don't remember you as a particularly discourteous person, and since you have just apologized, we'll let it go." She smiled: "I just love these things. They're the reason I come to this place." And with a contented little hum, she took another healthy bite, and a sip of tea.
Jen had been alternately embarrassed by her own rudeness, stung by Magnolia's blunt rebuke, and a little flattered that the other woman remembered her as courteous. 'She's like nobody I know,' she thought to herself. 'And look at the way she eats! She really is enjoying the heck out of that scone.' Cora would have giggled and muttered something about it going directly to her hips. Ashley would have ostentatiously left half of the scone on her plate, and wailed about carbs. Magnolia Sutter ate with pleasure: eff the carbs, eff the hips, and, if her reaction to Jen's unfortunate descent into snippiness was any indication, eff you too if you had a problem with any of the above.
Jen took a sip of her coffee: "You're making me want one of those things."
Magnolia swallowed the bite she was chewing, and dabbed her lips with her napkin: "Next one's on me then."
"I'm afraid that was the last of them."
"Oh, I'm so sorry!" the woman seemed genuinely distressed, "Would you like what's left of this one, then?" She offered her plate on which maybe a quarter of the pastry remained.
