Author's Note: A few things. This story came to be because of a request for a certain character type :). It made me a little nervous to post it, but here goes! I hope I did it justice.
Second, it's been noticed from a few sources that I'm terrible with tags (because I am), so I'll put content warnings here. This story is a sadist/masochist and domination/submission exploration story. A lot of fetishes are talked about or discussed (why people might like some harder play styles, memories of things done , etc.), but the ones done are things like bondage, anal sex, impact play, sensation play, and light breath play.
Also, it's a romance, too. And I hope you have fun!
Alex
I could use many different analogies and legends to try to describe a girl who was named Lily Lofton. I could liken her to Scheherazade, being clever enough to avoid death with her storytelling and her silver tongue. Or I could say she's like the mongoose, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, and she's the end of snakes. There's the Japanese legends of kitsune, the fox spirits who are clever enough to outsmart wolves. I could say she's like the lotus flower or any other narcotic, sweet and sedating. There's a hundred stories, but the problem is every last one of them is fucking faulty and doesn't do the real her justice. Scheherazade told stories and Lily didn't need to tell stories. Lily could spin real life into a romantic daydream. Rikki-Tikki had to tussle with the snakes and Lily would never have needed to because she'd just pet the snake into happy sedation with one easy paw while she effortlessly charmed it into harmlessness. Kitsune are closer but they often had to run off when their trickery was discovered and Lily's wasn't something that would ever make you angry.
Instead, I'll say that I'm pretty sure my path was crossed with Lily's by some touch of the devil's. If you figure that God touched people's lives in delicate little manipulations and the devil pridefully tried to imitate him, then he might try that same tactic. Hear me out on the happenstance. I worked IT in the corporation where Lily ran advertising campaigns and most every call I got could be handled over the phone or by remote access portal. But Lily's problem had to do with this wireless printer and by some freak series of events, this printer had been incorrectly set up and then "fixed" to the correct settings in an incorrect way. There was a power flick one night and the printer went to the initial setup, didn't work, and there just so happened to be one of the ad campaign meetings on that day and...
You get the gist. I ended up in the office of this red-haired, high energy, wild eyed demon to fix a printer connection. For every appearance, the encounter was absolutely normal except for one moment. I heard her curse behind me while I was working and looked around to see her crouching to pick up a folder she'd dropped. Her black skirt fit her well, yeah, but it wasn't even anything meant to be sexual and the moment wasn't even sexual. It was just that when she crouched, it drew her skirt up a little above her knee - still long in length - but there was an angry red welt there, low on the outside of her thigh.
I fixed her printer and left, heart beating fast because I'd never seen one of those stripes in person. It was something I had seen on several videos, but nothing really makes you ready for when you see something like a cane stripe in reality, not in a scenario like that. It was so much more vivid than I would have thought, this raised welt that made my blood race. I didn't know why I had always been drawn to the things I was, only knew that I had gone down the paths of stories and videos, enough to recognize that mark easily. It made me even more curious to see it on an advertising executive like Lily Lofton, who was a powerhouse name in our company. She was excellent at what she did, she had endless amounts of energy without the appearance of being overly dominating or threatening, and everyone thought she was the sweetest, most adorable person they'd ever met.
But that's not where the real story started. I never expected to run into Lily again, but something seemed to keep putting us in each other's paths, despite the fact that I'm an introvert and rather reclusive. She was definitely neither of those things and she took over conversations when we spoke to each other, so much so that even I couldn't be overly stressed by the social interactions. I started to like them, started to go along whenever she asked me to go eat lunch or whatever else. I have no idea what she got from these moments because I was a quiet person, but I can tell you what I got from them.
I got a connection with someone that didn't require me to overthink, one of two forms of social interactions that I willingly took part in. And, of course, every now and again she would turn around, having taken her jacket off, or she would walk in front of me to lead the way and there would be another mark. The top of a whip line high on her back, for instance. They were little things that no one would have paid any attention to otherwise and it definitely wasn't the kind of thing that I would bring up to her, but it was the kind of thing that started to have sway in my fantasies, even while I felt guilty about that fact. Even so, I wouldn't approach her on it. It wasn't in my nature. She was the one who initiated most of our friendship actually.
Eventually, she started another freak series of events that would start the real story.
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Lily
After the whole story was said and done, Alex would always say that I was the romantic, but he was full of shit. Later on, he would always be the one to talk about how some force of religion made us cross paths. It wasn't.
It was obviously because of my lucky pencil skirt I wore the day I met him. I had had that skirt so long that there wasn't even a zipper anymore, but I had sewn the skirt rather than throw it away because it was lucky
. It fit just right and everything turned up aces when I wore it. I did always kind of wonder how something bad like a printer problem would happen when I wore that skirt.
"Okay, so what's the most stupid call you've gotten while working for our company?"
I went and found Alex on days before I had things like presentations because he was calm and I wasn't. He was quiet and I never even thought before I spoke. He chose so much as every word and my life was chaos. So when I felt frantic for work meetings or I felt like I was fraying, and I couldn't play my masochism games because I didn't have time or for another reason, then I found him and he always made me think straight. By that point, I had had to experiment with ways to make him talk more, too.
I struck gold with that question and I knew it when he made a face. "I can't actually tell you a single incident, but I can tell you that the higher up the corporate ladder you go, the angrier people seem to be about it."
I laughed and took a drink of beer and that was another thing. I had also discovered he liked IPAs by then and I had to make him try a few different ones at a favorite restaurant of mine to get him to talk more. "Oh, this is good. Tell me names."
He smiled into his beer, his head lowered in this shy way. That was another thing. Alex Horne was cute right from the start. He had this sandy hair set in a crew cut and these gray eyes, but more to the point was his mannerisms. He kept his eyes lowered a lot in this subjugated way. He always let me talk to waitresses, he never fussed when I was too energetic or when I chose things like where to sit without thinking. "I'm not exactly a 'good with names' person, Lily."
"Liar. You just said mine."
"Sure, because even I'll remember them eventually."
"You just don't want to tell me because you're too nice."
He laughed one of those soft sounds again, taking another drink while I took one. "It doesn't feel right." He hesitated. "Okay, I can tell you that one of the accountants last week had me come all the way up to his floor when he couldn't figure out what was wrong with his printer. I went through everything I could think of on the phone and was actually getting pretty confused myself. Then, when I got there, I just had to plug the power cord in."
I choked on my laughter. "Oh, please tell me he had you delete a thousand print jobs after it started working."
He made a face. "Yes."
I couldn't keep back the hysterics. Alex had this sense of humor that was so flat and dry as a result of being a pacifist. It had taken me a while to learn that he really was a pacifist, too. He would go out of his way to avoid and negate confrontation because it stressed him out. So when he talked to people and he felt something like "are you fucking kidding me", his face went blank and his eyes were the funniest part of it. He would hide it so well, except for just a little bit of nihilistic exasperation that he couldn't completely cover.
I drank more so that he drank more, enjoying the company after a high stress day. The problem with this is how impossible it is to tell if a quiet person is buzzed or not. I had made the mistake of adding alcohol to the conversation, for both of us, so he would talk more and then I realized I had a problem when my tongue felt really numb when I was trying to talk.
This led to two things. I lived somewhere along the same way Alex went to get home and he lived farther out than me in the city. We didn't live in a bad part of it at all, but he was the kind of guy who made sure I got home okay. He was laughing those soft laughs at whatever I said too, while I wondered how much I was going to hate myself in the morning when he seemed the same as he always did and I was a fast talking drunk. I apologized when we got to my door while he shook his head and said it was fine and entertaining.
And the second thing was right before I was about to go upstairs. "Wait, hang on, let me see your phone. I just realized you don't have my second social media page."
