The Drake Restrained Compete Collection: Part 1 - 4 (The Drake Series Book 7) (26 page)

"I know." I was being honest. I knew Kate wasn’t promiscuous. Far from it.

"I'm serious. No sex. I'll think about the goodnight kiss."

I checked my cell phone for the time. Then it hit me – she could call Lara… A safe call was always advised when a Dom and sub were meeting for the first time. We weren’t strangers, but it would make Kate feel safer if Lara spoke with her and reassured her that I wasn’t a psycho-killer.

"Why don't you call Lara and let her know I'm coming into your apartment? Tell her you'll call her in an hour and if you don't call, she should take action. That way, you'll feel safe."

Kate plucked her phone from her bag and dialed Lara.

"I'm standing on the front step of my building with Drake. He wants to come in and just talk, and suggested that I call you so you know I'm alone with him. That I'll call you in an hour to let you know things are okay."

Kate listened for a moment and nodded. Then she turned to me. "Lara said if I don't call in an hour, she'll bring Bruno over."

I laughed at that. I leaned down to the phone in Kate’s hand "Oh, you're threatening to use the heavy artillery. You've never had to use Bruno with me yet and won't have to tonight."

Kate listened to Lara for another moment.

"Thanks, Lara." Then she put her phone away and sighed. "Who's Bruno?"

"Her Rottweiler,” I said, smiling widely.

Kate laughed and I saw the last shred of resistance leave her. "Come on up."

We climbed the stairs to her apartment, stopping at the door while Kate searched her bag for her keys. She said something under her breath but her voice shook with nervousness. Finally, she found the keys and just as she was unlocking the door, Mrs. Kropotkin from across the hall opened her door. I saw her grey hair and kerchief through the narrow crack in the doorway. I smiled.

"
Zdrastvooyte
."

She closed her door.

"Did you study Russian in college?" Kate asked.

"My father had a cassette tape with Russian lessons on it and I used to listen as a kid." My own voice wavered a bit and I was surprised at my nerves. I wasn’t usually this excited about going to a new sub’s apartment.  "I don’t really speak Russian well. Just enough to order in a restaurant or make a few toasts."

Kate opened the door but blocked me from entering. "You'll keep your promise to just talk? No sex?"

I held up my hands. "Kate, it's up to you. You'll be the one to decide what happens. Whatever
you
want."

"We're
not
having sex. Tell me you understand."

"I understand."

She was still hesitant, eyeing me as if having second thoughts. "Come in," she said finally.

I entered, so curious about her and what her apartment looked like, but on first impression, was surprised at how small and dark it was. I turned around in a circle, glancing down the hallway to what looked like the main living room.

"Kate why do you live like this?” It struck me once more how much she had deprived herself of her father’s wealth. “This apartment looks like it belongs to a poor kid, not the daughter of a wealthy judge running for election."

"I don't want his money and I don't earn enough even with the scholarship to live anywhere else."

I walked down the hallway, checking out her place, breathing in deeply the scent to see if it smelled like her. Like Kate – a mixture of floral shampoo and citrus. Kate removed her coat and hung it up and then came to me.

"Let me take your coat.”

I removed it, slipping out of my boots and then I loosened my tie. I hoped I would be removing all my clothes before the night was over, despite Kate’s protestation to the contrary.

"Do you mind if I take a look around?"

Kate shook her head, but said nothing, her face blanched. She was really nervous. I went to her and tipped up her chin with a finger.

"Its okay. I know you're nervous. A bit excited. You know what? So am I."  

I was nervous and took in a deep breath to show her, smiling.  She glanced away.

Still not able to look me directly in the eye. That would have to change if we were to work out as a couple. I’d force her to look in my eyes as she came, as she sucked my cock, as I fucked her, as I ate her. It would break down all the walls between us until there was nothing left but raw lust.

I checked out the rest of her apartment, interested in the art hanging on the walls. There was one piece in particular I examined closely -- a drawing of a knight in armor with a naked woman lying beneath him.

"You did this?"

She came to my side and examined it, tilting her head to the side. She pointed to some initials at the bottom right hand corner.
KMcD.  

"I did it in my Freshman year. I took a fine arts elective."

It was good. Even I could see that. The realism with which she drew was impressive. "It's good. Actually technically skilled." I turned to her. "Tell me about this."

"What's to tell?" she said, shrugging. She didn’t seem like she wanted to discuss it any further. "It's a pencil drawing of a knight and his lady love."

"And why is she naked while he's in full armor?"

She hesitated. "Our assignment was to show contrasts in textures. I thought that metal and flesh were opposites – almost mortal enemies – and contrasting, kind of like male and female, masculine and feminine. My professor said I took the assignment way too literally."

"Metal and flesh aren't always enemies. I use steel to cut out tumors, open the skull to let pressure off a swelling brain."

She frowned. "I never thought of that. I was thinking more of war."

"It's all in your point of view. Even in war, metal can save lives. Trauma surgeons like my father worked in hospitals on the front lines in Vietnam using steel and cutting flesh to save lives." I leaned forward and examined the picture more closely. The detail was amazing. I was even more impressed with her than before. Underneath the shy and sometimes petulant exterior was a woman of real potential. She had convictions and talent. "Did you at least get a good grade? This is very good."

"I got an A."

"Good. But why a couple?” I asked, frowning. “If you wanted to show contrast between flesh and metal, if you wanted the war theme, why not a hand holding a sword?” Then it came to me and I turned to her, smiling a bit. “Or were you thinking of a different kind of war – the war between the sexes?"

Kate said nothing, her hands behind her back.

"It was after a boyfriend and I broke up and I was all upset about it. You know what it's like when you're nineteen. You'd think it would be the other way around, right? The woman would be covered in armor while the man would be naked, so willing to have sex."

Ahh… She thought men were the ones to wear armor.

"Oh, very deep," I said, really getting it. "He can't really touch her even when they have sex because he wears armor to protect himself. It's symbolic of men's psychological armor. There she is, naked, open, and he can't really touch her even when he's fucking her." I examined her face, amazed that she was thinking that deeply about sex and gender for her age. "Did you study psychology?"

She avoided my eyes. "Yes," she said in a soft voice. "I took a course in my Freshman year."

"So you're implying that despite the fact that men want to have sex, they're not really touching the women they fuck. There's always that male armor keeping them from intimacy. Am I right?"

She forced a smile. "You're one of the few to get it."

"I have a degree in psychology. I was trained to look for underlying explanations for behavior."

I moved to the next painting, which was an abstract with different colors and lines. It wasn’t at all in the same vein as her drawing, and when I examined the signature, I saw it was someone else’s work.

Still, I couldn’t get my mind off her picture of the knight and lady. There was another dimension to her that wasn’t apparent on the surface. She thought deeply about things like relations between the sexes, even if she wasn’t very experienced and even if she was repressed. Did she really think that men kept emotional armor around themselves for protection? That sex was different for men than for women?

"Research suggests that men fall in love more easily than women," I said, keeping my voice light for I didn’t want to sound too critical. I wanted to keep the dialogue open so I could learn more about her, open her up a bit more. Well, make that all the way. "Do you really believe that men never let down their armor even during sex?"

"You tell me,” she said, her voice sounding slightly mocking. “You're the expert at keeping things compartmentalized."

"What could you possibly mean by that, Ms. Bennet?" I said in mock surprise, keeping with her tone. "Are you suggesting that I use D/s as a way to keep my distance from the women I fuck? I assure you, it's quite the opposite. I get right into their minds."

"But you don't love them. You're not really intimate with them, despite controlling them sexually."

"I'm exceedingly intimate with them." I smiled, but her assessment of me was irritating. "It all depends on how you define intimacy. Back to you and your difficulty sleeping with men on the first date." I stepped closer to her, forcing her back against the wall. She was getting a bit combative – for her – and I wanted to shut that down right away. Physical proximity usually helped. "You can't open your thighs without being intimate with a man and it bothers you that men can fuck women without being intimate, without actually caring about her the way you
think
they should. Am I right?"

She nodded without meeting my eyes. "My body is private,” she said and I could tell that she was upset that I couldn’t understand. But I did understand. “How can I get naked with someone I don't care about?"

"My
heart
is private,” I countered. “How can I care about someone who won't get naked with me?"

I stepped even closer. I could smell her perfume and her hair from where I stood. It was intoxicating. I lifted a strand of it and ran it under my nose, breathing it in. I wanted to rub my face in her hair, between her thighs and it was getting increasingly difficult to focus on the issue we were discussing with my raging hard on starting to raise its head.

"What if I was to tell you that your inability to have casual sex was because of your father's and society's influence on you, not because of anything inherent in male-female sex differences? We're both animals with drives, Kate. Society has just controlled women's drives more, redirected them, couched the control in moral platitudes."

"I forgot you wanted to be a psychoanalyst. I never did like Freud and his focus on fathers."

"He was right, but in the wrong way. Your father – the generalized father of patriarchal authority – made you believe that if you were purely sexual, if you
needed
to be fucked, you were bad. Isn't that right?” I said and watched her face closely for her response. She blinked rapidly at that, so I knew I’d hit home. I pressed on. “He and the Church made you believe you were a bad girl to just want a hard cock inside of you. So you always held back, using this idea of intimacy as a shield – as
armor
against just feeling pleasure for its own sake. You use the demand for intimacy as an excuse so you can maintain the façade of being a good girl when really you're just an animal like me."

She stood in front of me, her face turned away as if what I said was too hard to face – I was too hard to face. I knew she had probably reached her limit so I turned and went to the small living room filled with shabby furniture and worn parquet floors. I removed my jacket and tie and sat on the couch.

Right in the middle.

She’d have to decide where to sit – beside me, or across from me. Where she sat would tell me if I was going to get her naked tonight or if we would continue to talk with me going home with blue balls. I leaned back, and stretched my arms out on the back of the couch, my stocking feet up on the rickety old coffee table.

I caught her eye. "Am I right?"

"Maybe," she said, staring at the couch beside me, then glancing at the chair across from me. Oh, she was torn. Where to sit? What would it say about her? "But whose approach is more satisfying in the end?"

"I've tried your approach,” I said and shrugged, thinking back to my disastrous marriage. I thought when I met my future-wife that I needed a woman as strong as me so we were ‘equal’. I’d quashed my tendencies towards dominance sexually in order to be a sensitive lover. What it did was ensure I never really enjoyed sex as much as I could, with women who were never really satisfied with me. Performance wise, I was fine but there as a lack of spark. When I tried to push things with my wife, she couldn’t handle it and thought I was too controlling.

It didn’t end well.

“I was married for five years,” I said, not wanting to dwell too much longer on it. “You haven't tried mine.
Yet
. Why don't you give it a chance? Then you'll know."

She looked doubtful. "I can't imagine that meaningless sex can be rewarding in the long run."

I sighed. Meaningless sex was a relief from sex that was wrapped up in anger and frustration and misunderstanding. "It's not. But it's good enough for now."

She stood and stared at me, and I could tell from the expression on her face that I was forcing her to confront issues that were difficult. "I only want to fuck someone who loves me. Is that so wrong?"

"Someone
will
love you, Kate,” I said, for someone would. Kate was not the kind of woman to remain single for very long. I was surprised she’d been single for as long as she had, but there were several traumas in her life to recover from. "Do you really want to wait until he does? Is masturbating all alone in your room at night, for what – a year? Is that really good enough for you?"

As soon as I said it, I knew it was a mistake. I could almost see her wince.

She left the living room and I heard her opening and closing drawers and cupboards with quite a lot of force. She was hurt. I followed her into the kitchen after a moment and stood behind her as she fiddled with a teapot.