So You Want

"So, you want a lover?" The question came over the clinking of ice on glass as the man set his water back on the table.

"Yes, that's why we're sat here, isn't it?"

"Is it? I thought you just enjoyed a bit of flirting. Playing the field and window-shopping." Damien looked unblinkingly at her, but she matched his gaze, a smirk curling the corners of her mouth upwards. He smiled too, in his head a fleeting image of a chess board, the first pieces having been moved. "So, go on then. What is you want, or think you want, in a lover?"

"Geez, you're a bit arrogant," she laughed at him. "Why do you think you know better than me what I want?" He wasn't jaw-droppingly handsome on any objective scale she thought, but he carried himself in a certain manner, a confidence bordering on arrogance, which was profoundly attractive.

"Sorry," he waved a hand dismissively, the gesture incongruent with the apology. "Of course I don't know better than you what you want. But here's a challenge for you. I promise to hold my silence, but can you set out for me, sentence after brutally honest sentence, what it is you really want? I'm not interested in what you think you ought to say. I don't want to hear air-brushed lip service to desires, overlaid with socially acceptable euphemisms. If I'm your audience, quiet and appreciative, non-judgemental, are you able to sit there in front of me and honestly tell me what you desire in a lover?"

Laine's head tipped back as she laughed, throat exposed, but unaware of herself and that symbolic vulnerability. Damien, however, wasn't. "Blimey. It's funny isn't it. You flirt online with someone and it's easy peasy to make throw-away comments, give free rein to your humour, protected by the anonymity and how fun a keyboard duel is. But, face to face, I don't think I've ever met anyone who cut through the shit and wanted to be brutally honest face to face. Not on a first meeting, anyway."

"Okay." She paused a second. "How about if I promise to do my very best to be absolutely honest? No bullshit, no making it all PC and acceptable to hear for you, acceptable for me to say as a modern woman," here she emphasised those two words with her fingers flickering quotation marks in the air. " I can only do my best though." Her face lit with a mischievous grin. "And you can call me on it if I get all coy and evasive. Deal?"

He smiled at her. "Deal. Go."

Laine pressed her fingertips to the table, pursed her lips, took a sip of her soda, and stared off into the distance. It was several seconds before she spoke, and she appeared more in a reverie with herself than engaged in flirtatious conversation with a near stranger. She didn't look at him.

"I've done this before, used online to find a partner. With varying success. I suppose that might be to do with the fact it's often just so much bullshit. I want a lover though, not a partner. Not someone to share in my day to day life. My day to day life is full, fulfilled, content. I want a man, on the edges of it I suppose. But not completely divorced from it. I want regular contact, and constancy, but not stifling insecure attachment, on either of our parts. I want to know we are special to each other, that we are loyal and committed to each other, that there is no other fucking around going on. For me, it's always been about wanting to be enough, and to have enough. I want a lover who finds me enough to sate what he needs, as I want him to sate me. Not satisficing, but truly enough. Enough sex and contact woven through our independent lives that we never think to look elseplace." Here she paused.

"Actually, no, that isn't true. Not completely. But any extras are negotiated, and after a period of time of us knowing each other very well, and it being about us in it together, not one of us acting alone." She paused again, but he was only looking at her. He wasn't going to speak. He nodded at her to continue, sipped his water. Although she hadn't been looking at him while speaking, he had been watching her.

Laine twirled her glass on the table, ran her fingertip through the puddled condensed water. "Even that's not true I don't think. If I'm totally honest. I'm happy for my lover to take other lovers, but it's the way it's done that makes it okay. Isn't that bizarre. I might want to hear about it." Laine's voice had become very quiet, trailed off. "And I might even want him to make me be with other men, only he's directing it, see. He's in charge." Laine was quiet again. He didn't think she was aware that her fingertip found its way from the water on the table to her mouth.

"I want a man to take charge of sex with me. I don't mean throw me around physically. Although that can be a part of it, and fun. But it's about him being in charge, calling the shots. Leading. It isn't about being domineering or physically overbearing though. That's just crass and what sock-swaddled teenagers camped at their computers think it's about." Damien held his silence.

"Think along the lines of the man being the boss, and me his employee. A boss comes to that relationship with a certain set of expectations of deference and a chain of command. He expects to give instructions and be followed, obeyed, have those expectations met. Or exceeded. The employee expects to be given clear instructions and expectations, and expects of him or herself to obey them. That's how it works for me." Laine cleared her throat. Good, he thought, she's turning herself on, with no input from me at all.

"Imagine you want to have your cock sucked." He noted no artifice or coyness in Laine. She didn't blush or hesitate in carrying on with her explanation. "I don't want a lover to ask me to suck his cock, and negotiate every sexual favour or act. I want to be told, or guided to that position. Again, it isn't about growling commands and forcing me to my knees. I want to be expected to want to get on my knees. I even want to be anticipating what my lover might want from me, and seeking approval for taking actions I think appropriate. Learning when what I want or think is incorrect, so as to be better able next time round to get it right."

"I want gentle but firm pressure used on me, to guide me to positions, change my position. I want a man to take his pleasure from me, and make it known that he is enjoying me. I do want orgasms, of course I do, but I want to be with a man who makes me want to choose his pleasure over mine. Every single time. I want the pleasure for me to be in the pleasing. And I want him to get that. Really get that. And to use it to almost demean me, humiliate me, degrade me. Tease me with his knowledge of how I want to serve and please." A pink flush was rising in Laine's cheeks. Damien would have thought it was the blush of alcohol, had she had any. But she was consuming only sparkling mineral water. He had been glad when she said she didn't want anything more. First meetings were important, to gauge and learn. And alcohol clouded things. He had delighted in the past in showing a woman that she didn't need any alcohol, not one drop, to thoroughly enjoy sex, and sex talk.

Laine fell silent. Her cheeks were flushed, her chest was rising and falling more deeply than it had been before. She took a long pull on her drink.

"Is that all you want, Laine?" Damien asked, having let her sit in silence for several seconds, proffering nothing else, staring at her drink.

"No," came the quiet reply.

"I want my lover to hurt me. Bizarre thing to say I know. But I have this, this thing, inside me. I have this masochistic streak. And I need a little pain, not anything extreme." Laine paused, and the flush on her cheeks deepened. "Actually, that's not even completely true you know. Sometimes, I do want to be hurt in a more extreme way. Marks, bruises, suffering. Suffering because a man takes pleasure in my suffering. Suffering and surviving it, working through it. Growing from it. Being encouraged and praised through it. I want to hear a man proud of what I'm taking for him. I want a lover to tell me I'm a good girl for obeying and suffering. Or for doing what he wants me to do at any given time." Laine went very quiet and seemed to pull back into herself just a fraction.

Damien thought she needed the tiniest push. "Remember what the deal was, Laine. You talk, honestly, and I listen. I am not judging. I just want to hear the truth. From your lips, not your fingertips."

Laine looked long and hard at him. She saw that as a challenge, he could tell. He also knew that she'd take the challenge. More to battle with herself than to play the chess game with him. But he could see a defiance in her, a wish to play the game he'd proposed. She was still looking at him, rather than off into the distance or at her drink, when she spoke again. "And sometimes, I want him to make me cry. Tears of shame. Tears of release. Tears of freedom at being allowed to express my sexuality. Tears of hurt and pain. But really, I want a lover who lets me cry because he sees who I really am. And accepts me through that. Tears of gratitude. And I want my lover to be okay with that. To welcome it even. I want that primal core of connection that most sex, most relationships, never ever have in them. I want to go that deep, be in that deep." Laine was almost whispering, not really talking to Damien anymore.

"I want a lover who absolutely understands that need. It isn't a want, it's a need. It cuts through all the bullshit of life. All of it. I can handle everything anyway, but that...valve, that release...I honestly can't explain it. But that's what I want." Her voice steadied and she sat up a tiny fraction at the bar table.

"I want to be safe to be that vulnerable. It's a form of love you know. To me anyway. I want to be free to be that devoted and sucked in. And it to be okay. Not creepy or freaky. You've no idea how many men I've skirted around the edges of with this stuff. I think only two ever really got it. And only one of those did I ever get lost down the rabbit hole. I found my way out though." She smiled at him, and he watched her bubble up to the surface from the admissions she'd just made.

"And that's it? That's what you want in a lover? Is that all of it?"

"No. I'm greedy." She grinned at him. "I want fun and laughter and common ground too. An intellectual basis and background. I don't do thick." Laine sipped her drink. "So, there you go, that's me in a nutshell. That's the message behind the flirting. I love flirting, am happy to be sat right here across from you enjoying a drink and a chat. You're easy enough on the eye," here a coy tilt of the head and coquettish smile. "But that's the intent behind all my flirting. That's what I seek, if you like."

Damien recognised this humorous retreat into flirtation and banter. Bringing the conversation back to normal realms and boundaries, pulling metaphorical clothes back over that fleeting nakedness.

"You sure that's everything? I mean, not much to ask really, is it?" Damien smiled at her, and Laine's stomach lurched.

"Well, one more thing." Laine swirled the last mouthful of water round the inside of her glass. He could see the grin she was trying to hide.

"Oh, do tell?"

"I'd quite like you to fuck my arse on a regular basis."