Sir would let her have only two glasses of wine with dinner. He said it was for her own good. He said he wanted her relaxed but in possession of her senses; he wanted her to remember what she was going to experience that night. She drank the first glass very quickly, and Sir put his fingers on her wrist and said, "Make the next glass last, Paula." His touch calmed her. She was finding it difficult to breathe. He seemed to know that. He let his fingertips linger on the inside of her wrist briefly.
Sir and Celie drank more, but not to excess. Sir ordered for all three of them, and Paula barely noticed what she was eating. The restaurant was beautiful, dim, expensive. Seventeen floors above was the suite where the three of them would go after their meal. Celie was intimidating—not that she intended to be, but in her blue halter dress, with her bare arms and lightly tanned back and shining eyes, she seemed to be the kind of woman Paula could only hope to be someday. Celie talked about her design business, told stories about some of her more interesting clients, and Sir watched her with amusement and approval. Sir himself told stories about his younger days, ending up with a long description of what he called his "sensual awakening."
"She wasn't the first girl I'd slept with," he said. "She was the fourth? sixth? Something like that. But she was the first one who seemed to crave sex as much as I did. More, probably. And she was older. I was 24, she was 29. And she pursued me, which was very flattering to my young male ego. She pursued me, she got me very drunk one night, and she had her way with me. But the interesting thing was that, to her way of thinking, having her way with me meant serving me. She was an assertive submissive, if that makes sense. Of course at that stage of my life I had no idea what a submissive was, or a dominant, or, frankly, what day of the week it was. I only knew that I had a woman who seemed to live for my cock. She needed to touch it, lick it, suck it, have it inside her, whenever possible. And she talked about it. This was nothing I'd ever experienced. The girls I'd been with were not sexually adventurous; they weren't brought up that way, and they lacked the imagination to break out of their upbringing. But I lacked imagination too. But my assertive submissive—her name was Julie—taught me to get beyond the narrow sort of Puritanical vision of sex I'd been raised with. I'd wake up in the morning with my cock in her mouth, and she'd bring me right to the edge of cumming, and she'd look up and me and say, 'Shoot your hot cum all over my tits, baby, I want to wear you to work today.' And she did. She wore me to work on a regular basis. Hell, she wore me to church once, to a memorial service or something." Sir paused for a moment and sipped his wine. He looked as if he might still miss this girl, Paula thought. "Anyway," he said. "She set me on a journey. And tonight is part of that journey." With that he looked straight at Paula and smiled. She blushed deeply.
"You approached me, didn't you, Paula," Sir said. "Are you an assertive submissive?"
"I don't know," she said quietly.
The waiter came to clear their plates and they all fell silent for a moment. It was true, Paula had approached him. She had seen his blog on Tumblr and liked his posts very much. They were visually striking and deeply erotic without being cheap or vulgar. They seemed to capture people's passion without resorting to the sort of crass, too-brightly-lit porn that her college boyfriends had enjoyed. Paula could tell from the pictures that Sir was a dominant man, but there seemed to be very little in his style of dominance that fed his own ego. His posts seemed to suggest or create a world in which dominance and submission were choices made by people who understood themselves and knew how to achieve a mutually satisfying and profoundly passionate life. Sir didn't suggest that his way was the only way. But he did suggest that if you felt drawn to this world he evoked, if it expressed the longings you felt could not be expressed any other way, then Sir's way could be most wonderfully fulfilling. So Paula sent him a note to say she enjoyed his blog, and they struck up a correspondence. She would tell him when he posted something that touched her particularly strongly. She wouldn't say, "Sir, I masturbated to that gif three times yesterday"—she'd just say, "Oh, I love that one"—but she imagined that he understood. She kept a blog, too, of course. It was a few weeks into their correspondence that he posted one of her images on his blog. When she saw that, a surge of heat passed through her body and her pussy clenched so hard she nearly whimpered. The image was a slow-motion gif of a woman's face—of the changes that came over her face as her man's cock entered her. In reposting it, Sir commented, "I want to be the man who is privileged to have such an effect on that beautiful face."
And now here they were, the three of them, each of their journeys coinciding in this hotel restaurant, with a suite reserved upstairs. Sir motioned to the waiter for the bill, then looked at Celie and said, "Shall we?"
As they walked toward the elevators, Sir holding each of them by the hand, Celie suddenly giggled and said, "Oh, James, I've got another one."
"Let's hear it," Sir said.
"Okay. Cheap steak, flat Diet Coke, and sneers."
Sir laughed and said, "Oh, very nice, Celie."
She beamed and said, "Thank you."
"My turn," said Sir. "Let me see... How about Arby's Horsey Sauce, too many breath mints, and sweaty, stubby fingers?"
Celie giggled again. Paula was flummoxed. Sir, noticing, said, "It's a little game Celie and I invented at the end of a long and tipsy conversation. The object is to name three items that best approximate the taste of Donald Trump's cum."
"Ewww," Paula said, involuntarily.
Sir and Celie laughed, and Sir said, "Try it, Paula. It's fun."
He looked at her with his blue-gray eyes, smiling, and gave her hand a squeeze. She sensed that this was some sort of odd test. She did not consider herself a witty person, especially in this company. Celie was very sharp, obviously, as well as classy/sexy/vibrant/adventurous—that much was clear even on a first meeting. She knew Sir better, having corresponded with him on Tumblr and so diligently studied his sexual aesthetic as he expressed it on his blog. He was articulate, often very funny, and in Paula's opinion possessed of much intelligence, though he did not flaunt it. It just seemed to inform his conversation naturally.
Paula looked down and tried to relax her mind. She couldn't bear to think of Donald Trump in a sexual way, but she realized in a flash of insight that if she thought of him more generally, the elements of an answer began to occur to her.
"All right," she said slowly. "Donald Trump's... sperm." She gave a small theatrical shiver and Celie giggled. She had a very fetching giggle, Paula realized. "I'll say... Cheeto dust, borrowed money, and the tears of a betrayed nation."
Sir stopped in his tracks. "Why, Paula," he said. "You're revealing hidden depths here. That's very good. I mean, yours has a moral component. Celie and I just went for the easy laugh."
Paula blushed again as Celie grinned at her. The elevator doors opened, they entered in great high spirits, and Sir pressed 17. It was a glass-walled elevator. As the car rose smoothly, they could see out over the hotel's atrium, the turquoise pool, and the walls of rooms, some dark, some dimly lit behind heavy drapes. How many people were in those rooms fucking, Paula idly wondered. Then, as they passed the 12th floor, Sir reached out and pushed the stop button. No alarm sounded, which momentarily surprised Paula, and then seemed natural. Sir would never have pushed the button if he knew an alarm would go off.
"Paula," he said. "Please stand facing the glass, as close you can to it without actually touching it, with your feet about a foot apart."
She turned and did so immediately. Her nipples hardened almost as quickly as she turned. In fact, they had been in various states of hardness all evening, which she knew had been evident through her silky top. But now, suddenly, they swelled until they ached.
Now Sir said, "Celie." His tone conveyed instruction. By saying her name, he was initiating a direction they had discussed previously.
Celie stood to Paula's left and spoke softly into her ear. "Before we go into the suite," she said, "James wants me to make sure you're really ready for this. All right?"
Paula nodded. Her legs were trembling. She had dressed exactly as Sir had specified: simple black skirt, sleeveless top (the color of Paula's choosing; she had worn cream), minimal jewelry. She wore only small pearl earrings that had been a gift from her Aunt Donna, who'd never married. Why was she thinking of that now? Also, no panties, no hose. Sir had made that clear.
Celie reached down with her right hand and let her fingers rest on the back of Paula's bare leg, just above the knee. Paula swallowed and tried to breathe from her diaphragm.
"Are you wet, Paula?" Celie whispered, her lips brushing Paula's ear.