R: The Second Installment

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.

We sat down next to each other in a dark corner of a bar down the street. I didn't really know what to do. I wanted to go back to the hotel with him, to feel the things that I had felt earlier. But kissing him, even though I longed to feel his lips on mine again, seemed hard to maneuver. Even sitting he towered above me. Touching him seemed complicated. There were too many options, surely not all of which were equally cool. Our drinks came and after taking a sip of his he wrapped his arm around my waist and pulled me closer to him, leaving his palm splayed along the side of my hip.

"I'm guessing by the slightly dazed look on your face and the fact that you haven't said anything since we left the restaurant that the ball's in my court?" I nodded. This was our game. It wasn't that I couldn't talk about or do things. I thought about stuff. I think that I think about stuff that most people don't think about. It's just that I can't really initiate talking about the stuff that I think about. He would take over and then once he asked the right questions I would spill out my answers in thorough detail.

"Do you still want me to stay with you tonight?" I nodded again. He lifted his fingers and stroked once over my hip, very gently.

"Have you thought about what you want?" I nodded again. He stroked up my side from just below my hip to my waist and back down again.

He paused and looked down at me. Stroking again. "I want you to..." I turned inwards towards his chest, whispering and stumbling over the last words, "sleep with me." I was the only one of my friends who hadn't had sex yet. Almost everyone else had managed to lose it to someone from our high school or from another school in the city, or on vacation. On their living room couch, at a party in a spare room, after a dance. If it was planned, then only the boy involved realized that. It was very weird to be making this decision for myself.

"Ok." He ran his fingertips over my leg, just above the knee along the hem of my dress. My head was still against his chest and I was softened enough by the drinks to find his hard chest and warmth and the softness of his clothes to be very alluring. "You understand, right?" Understood that at most we had the weekend. Understood that he—we both—had reservations about the age difference. Understood that he was the first person that I wanted to do this with but that for him I could be just one in a line of one night stands and flings. Understood that he was single because he didn't do clingy, and that I wasn't allowed to be clingy after. We had had stopping points in our "relationship." He was what girls call "emotionally unavailable." I was practical and thought the very serious, dating sort of relationships were a silly idea until one was essentially a real live grown up, ready to get married and all that stuff. We were never the online type of people who said that we loved each other, or mapped out futures. Today had been going past a stopping point. I hadn't even wanted to meet for a very long time. But he wanted me to understand that there were stopping points after this one. I nodded.

He pulled the table closer to us, covering our laps and casting a shadow over our legs. "Anything else, or should we see how it goes?" He moved his fingers over to the other leg, and was now making small circles on the inside of my knee.

I jerked a little, and again I whispered against his chest, "was there anything besides not an axe and underpants in your bag?" He leaned back and laughed loudly. I slipped my hand over his thigh under the table.

"Yes."

"Oh."

"We've talked about a lot. Anything you want to happen, more importantly don't want to happen?" Now he was trailing his fingertips up and down the inside of my thigh and I couldn't answer. I was biting my lower lip and gripping the top of his leg, feeling myself become wetter and wetter. He knew. "You were so wet today..." I felt myself flush wildly in embarrassment. "No, it was good. I...you're lucky you got taken out to dinner." I laughed a little and pressed harder into his leg.

"You can do anything." I didn't mean that, and he knew I didn't mean that.

He leaned against me and dropped his lips to my ear. "So the other place..." He knew I didn't like the way some things sounded out loud. Now he was running his lips over the outline of my ear, fingers still circling up the inside of my thigh. My eyes slid closed and I rested myself against him and I could only moan softly in assent.

"You did seem very small," he whispered again and I nuzzled into him, smelling him. Thinking about earlier and the gap between my fingertips when I held him. How my jaw had hurt. Thinking about how I had told him about wanting to be stretched and to have more than one thing in me and to be held open. And how now I was deciding to make it all come true.

"Clamps again," My body became taut. He replaced his stroking with his other hand and wrapped his other arm tightly around my back.

"Crop." Pause. "Whip." Pause and his fingers are splayed, rubbing the insides of both my upper thighs. My legs are shaking and I reach across his arm, grasping him just above the elbow to try to control how far up he touches me.

"Wax" His bicep swells in my hand and he's running his knuckles over the panties he bought me. I feel how swollen I am and the moisture filling me. I moaned against him. "Oh, God," he whispered but his voice was tinged with something else now. It was gruffer and strained.

"Blindfold? Ties?" His composure's regained but still he's running his hand over the panties and the soft flesh where it's swelled over the edges.

I swallow hard and can just force it out of my mostly closed lips. Low and barely audible even to him above the music in the background. "Yes Master."

He stopped stroking when I said that. A little surprised. I didn't call him that. We weren't into that, really. I had said that I wasn't. I was a little surprised that it came out. Now he tightened a little. And then he stood and pulled me up with him and led me outside. We were walking faster than we had before. Everything seemed sharper and more immediate now that we were out of the smoky, loud darkness of the bar. I began to worry, panic even, about what I had committed myself to and what would happen tonight. My face had gotten so hot and it felt cold outside. He felt me shiver and looked back at me and must have seen the fear cross my face. We stopped and he took off his jacket and wrapped it over my shoulders and pulled me against him.

"We don't have to do this. Or we can do some if it. Or we can do what we did."

I looked down at the ground. He stroked my cheek, lifting me up to him by the chin. Then I closed my eyes and his lips came down to meet mine again and we stayed like that for a long time as he stroked his tongue against mine and nibbled my lower lip. Eventually I rose up to meet him and was pressing the length of my body against him and pushing my lips into his, pulling his shoulders down to me. I got hot again and all I could think about was how badly I wanted him. I thought about what I had done for him, stretched out on my bed at home, rows of clothespins ringing my breasts, laying in a puddle of pain waiting for him to call me and loving how it made me feel, how it was impossible to think of anything else and how calm I got. I thought about what I had confessed to wanting, what he knew, fantasies of him tying me and binding a vibrator in me and turning it on and then hitting me, spanking, whipping until I was just a shaking, sobbing mess confused about whether it was a good feeling. Then I pulled away from him.

"What if I can't? What if I'm awful or...I mean I have no idea what I'm doing. What if you try to spank me and I don't like it even though I thought I would. What if you leave me right after and I feel like shit about myself? What if it hurts?"

"Shhh." Now he's hugging me. "I'll be gentle darling. I will." Then we both pause and realize we're idiots. "Ok well, that's not always the point, and it might be a little challenging..." He says in as valiant a voice as he can muster, "I promise to be gentle and that it won't hurt until it's supposed to." We both dissolve into laughter. "You said anything. But this is real now. And when we get to that, yellow. Red. And I'm not going to leave you." He takes my hand and we slowly finish the walk to the hotel.

When we got upstairs he led me through the room to the tiny balcony overlooking the canal. I looked curiously up at him, to which he only answered, "We've got all night." Then I can't bring myself to look him in the eyes, so I just stare slightly down at his chest. His hands are along my hairline and around my ears. He pets along the sides of my head. He touches my neck in every way possible. When I move against him I can feel how hard he is and all I want to do is touch him, but every time I reach out he moves me away. His fingers run over eyelids, my cheekbones, my jaw. Down the length of my nose then back up over my eyebrows. He strokes my hair again. He touches my lips and teases me when I try to take his fingers into my mouth. Then he lets me and I suckle him and I want to be back on my knees in front of him again. I try and he holds me upright with his other arm. Eventually he runs his fingers lower over my body and slides his hands inside his jacket and around my waist and we kiss some more. I'm leaning back against the railing with his hair in my fingers or sometimes I group my fingertips at the base of his neck where I can just feel the tips of sparse hairs from his chest. I wrap my arm around his shoulder and feel how soft and thin his sweater is but how firm he is underneath. I normally feel rather awkward but he makes me feel small.