Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 80699 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 403(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 80699 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 403(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
If I didn’t reply correctly, he wouldn’t come to my apartment. I could end this insanity by simply ghosting him—pretending I hadn’t even written the first message.
I could even tell that corporate guy Ben that I would see him again—it wasn’t like I couldn’t get a month of allowance out of him, too, maybe even without sleeping with him. I shuddered at the thought as my mind went back to the date, to Ben L’s reasonably handsome, older face gazing at me across the table, then glancing around the restaurant to make sure all the other men could see him sitting with me—the very pretty young woman in the green romper.
That had flattered my vanity, sure, but I hadn’t lied to Christian when I’d told him that I couldn’t get him out of my head. I had told myself it must be trauma, but to my horror I couldn’t deny that everything Ben L so clearly lacked constituted precisely what Christian had, in my memory. The problem was that I didn’t want to want those things.
I told myself that the billionaire producer had taken advantage of a virgin to get his rocks off doing his kinky shit. I told myself that the probably equally wealthy Ben L’s failure to interest me at all stemmed from self-proclaimed alpha-dog Christian forcing me into a mold that didn’t actually have anything to do with my wants or needs.
At least I could thank Christian for getting a few important things over with. I had still felt a little tug of the impulse not to answer the door that had doomed me in the New Modesty, but I had managed to get myself down to meet Ben without too much trouble. I’d be fine from here on in, I told myself.
In fact I had gone on autopilot, more or less, halfway through the date with Ben. He had put his hand on my hip as he had walked me home to my building. I hadn’t liked it much, but Ben had just bought me the most expensive dinner I’d ever eaten—Christian hadn’t done that, had he? I hadn’t liked the food all that much, but I tried to remember my manners, however bullshit an idea that was. I didn’t try to get away from Ben’s hand.
When he had moved it to my butt, though, as we had neared the front door of the building, the autopilot had ceased to function. Part of me had tried to keep my backside moving in the same direction it had traveled for the last fifty yards or so. The rest of me—mind and body and somehow also heart—had remembered Christian doing pretty much the very same thing, but in an utterly different way, it seemed to me. Instinctively I had jerked my hips to the left, shaking off the hand.
Ben had said nothing. I had tried valiantly to stifle my wayward brain’s response, but it had come through much too clearly. Christian wouldn’t have stood for that.
Outside the building’s glass doors I had turned to him, and I had felt the heat flow into my cheeks at the look of ironic disdain on Ben’s face. For a moment I had wondered if this man, too, had it in him to spank a girl who refused to comply with his reasonable demands—like at least a blowjob in exchange for a fancy dinner. Something in his blue eyes had suggested he might, and it sent the blood mounting in my cheeks.
But that idea had stirred the memory of how things had ended with Christian, of how I had kicked him out for suggesting that he would teach me to do that obscene thing. I had pictured myself kneeling not in front of Ben but in front of Christian, looking up at him as he instructed me in the art of receiving his massive cock between my lips and giving him the pleasure he deserved.
“Yeah,” Ben had said, putting his arms out to give me a hug goodbye, “I don’t think you’re ready for a sponsor like me. You’re lovely, Leah, though, and I wouldn’t mind hearing from you again, if you want to try pleasing me a little.”
As he had walked away, without looking back, my jaw had gone slack. Part of me had wanted to run after him and insist that I could please him. I had turned to open the door, my face scrunched into an angry little pout, so dissatisfied with Ben L, and the building, and LA, and… okay, myself, too… that it took me long moments in the elevator and walking down the corridor to my apartment to understand that Ben had, infuriatingly, gotten it right.
He was a busy man. He worked hard in his office so that he wouldn’t have to work hard to find a reasonably submissive, gorgeous young woman to be seen with at fancy restaurants—and, presumably, to take back to her apartment and fuck. My little squirm of rebellion had told him everything he needed to know about me.