I didn’t know what getting punished meant, but I was secretly excited to see that disapproving look on his face. There was something about the way he said it. It sent chills through my whole body.

Mr. Black got out of his chair and walked over to the bed.

“Come here,” he instructed me. The tone of his voice sent chills through my body. Suddenly, I got even more excited than I was before. What the hell was he going to do to me for doing this? I couldn’t wait to find out.

“Take off your robe.”

I hesitate for a moment. This whole time, my feather-trimmed robe has been my protector. My shield. And now, I had to remove it and stand here naked before him in all of my glory.

“Take off your robe,” he says. “Or I’ll take it off for you.”

I consider the option. Maybe I should just make him do it. But in the end, I chicken out. I open the robe and let it fall to the floor.

“Get on the bed on all fours,” he says. “Facing the headboard.”

After I’m in position, he comes over with more restraints. I watch as he snaps on leather cuffs around my ankles, before he ties the black ribbons attached to the cuffs to the bed post. I lay down flat on my stomach as he does this, but he prompts my butt up in the air, making sure that my ass and pussy are fully exposed. Then he snaps on leather cuffs around my wrists and ties those to the bedposts as well. The restraints are pulled tight, but not so tightly that I’m flat on my stomach.

Mr. Black slowly walks around the bed.

“You’ve been a bad girl, Ellie,” he says. I nod.

“Have you been a bad girl?”

“Yes, I have, Sir,” I whisper. Shivers are running down my body and a warming sensation pools in between my thighs. Mr. Black runs his fingers over my back, and gives my ass cheek a little slap. Then he walks over to the side, and cups my breasts. My hard-rock nipples gently fall into his hands. He massages them gently and then a little harder. He squeezes my nipples in between his fingers, taking me somewhere to the border of pain and pleasure.

Then he makes his way to my thighs. I’ve never been in this position in front of a man before. It’s not even the fact that I’m tied, but that I’m so exposed and on display. I try to put all of that aside and stay in the moment.

Mr. Black runs his finger around my butt cheeks and my inner thighs, toying with me. He makes large concentric circles. Quickly, they become smaller and smaller ones. He’s focusing his energy on my vagina and clitoris, but he isn’t touching either. He’s flirting with me, teasing me. I’m not sure how much more of this I can stand. And then suddenly, he presses his finger into my ass. I feel him going deeper and deeper and the sensation is overwhelming. He blows a little on my exposed and aroused labia, but does not touch, making me want to scream.

“Oh my God,” I moan over and over.

Suddenly, he gives me a little lick. His rough tongue runs over my clitoris, briefly going inside of me, while his finger continues to move around in my ass. The sensation is so overwhelming that I feel like I’m going to pass out. I feel myself dripping on his lips.

“Look to the stage,” he says. I open my eyes and turn my head toward the stage. The scene looks very much like ours, except that no one is tied up. The brunette is also on all fours, with the guy’s finger in her ass and his lips on her vagina.

Seeing what is being done to me being done to someone else completely overwhelms me. I feel myself reaching climax. Suddenly, my legs cramp up and my body starts to go into convulsions. I have no control over anything including how loud I scream. When I start to climax, Mr. Black follows my body’s rhythms. He speeds up as I speed up, and I ride a long wave of pleasure until I collapse onto the bed.

“That was really good,” I say after I come back to my senses a little bit. “I can’t feel my legs.”

“Good,” Mr. Black says with a smile and starts to untie my restraints.

* * *

Mr. Black opens the room service menu and asks me what I want. We’re sitting around the dining room table and the sex show curtain is closed. Given the mind blowing orgasm, I’m still a little muddled in my head. I can’t quite decide so he orders the Caesar salad and grilled salmon for both of us.

“So, tell me about yourself, Ellie,” he says while we wait.

I tell him about Yale and my job at BuzzPost.

“Do you like working there?”

“Yes, it’s okay. But I sort of want to do more writing. Right now, I mainly just make up quizzes and fun content, but I really want to be a writer.

“What do you write?”

“Right now, I write mainly short stories. Some essays about my life.”

“Will you write about this?”

That takes me aback for a second. “What do you mean?”

“Well, this is quite an adventure, isn’t it? Going to a luxury yacht party and then being auctioned off to a man you’ve never seen before.”

“If I wrote this, this story would have a lot of sex in it.”

“Yes, but sex sells,” Mr. Black says.

“Would you mind if I wrote about you?”

“Oh no, not at all. People already write and print a lot of lies about me. It would be refreshing to actually have something true out there.”

I stare at him. I don't really know what he means.

“You don't know who I am, do you?” Mr. Black asks, flashing me a crooked, mischievous smile.

I shrug. I really don’t.

“I’m the founder and CEO of Owl. We’re the leading competitor to Amazon.”

“Oh, I didn't know that,” I say.

“That’s okay. It’s nice actually. It’s not every day that I meet a person who doesn’t already have some preconception about me and what I’m like.”

I nod as if I understand. But I really don’t. I really wish I had my phone right now so I could Google him. Who is he really? What is this reputation that he’s talking about?

A knock at the door breaks up my train of thought. Our food has arrived. I dig into it as soon as the delivery man leaves. After a night of all that emotion and pleasure, I’m starving.

“So, how did you get started in your line of work?” I ask.

“Eh, I always loved computers. Girls didn’t really like me so I just spent all of my time in the basement building computers and writing code. I went to Yale as well, but dropped out when I first started Owl. My junior year.”

It turns out that Mr. Black was at Yale exactly ten years before me. I look him up and down as he carefully cuts his salmon.

“You don't really seem like a guy who girls wouldn’t like.”

“You’d be surprised. I didn't always look like this. I never worked out in high school and I was this tall scrawny kid who just knew too much about video games and not much else.”

“So, if I were to google you, what else would I find out?” I ask.

“That I’ve been linked to a lot of models and actresses over the last seven years. That I like to have large, lavish parties that cost way too much money. Maybe I’m just trying to compensate for the fact that I couldn’t get a date to my high school prom so I never went.”

I really like Mr. Black’s authenticity. He’s so honest about himself and his past. He is also not a stranger to psychoanalysis and is quite self-aware. From what I’ve learned, that’s quite a rare thing in a man. Even if some of them are self-aware like this, very few would actually come out and put it all out there. Especially, with a stranger.

“Can I ask you something?” he asks. I nod.

“Have you ever been tied up before?”

“No, never,” I shake my head.

“But you seemed to really enjoy yourself.”

I think about this for a moment chewing my salad. “Actually, I did. There was something about being completely restrained and not being able to move that made the whole thing feel very freeing. It’s almost as if I could finally let myself go.”

“That’s good,” Mr. Black smiles. “Not everyone enjoys it but those who do, really get off on it.”

“Oh, are you talking about me?” I ask, jokingly.

“Yes, I definitely got that impression.”

Taking a sip of wine, I take a moment to think about what he had just said. I’ve never tried anything like that before. It was definitely a new experience. But it was also a very hot and erotic experience. Sensual. Mind blowing. It was hard to think about all the adjectives that would describe it without reliving it. There was something about being restrained that really turned me on. I had to give myself to this man and put a lot of trust in him. But it wasn’t just the trust. Surprisingly, the most freeing thing about being tied up was the fact that you suddenly feel completely free to be yourself. There’s no posing. No pretending. As a woman, you are, a lot of times, the entertainment when it comes to the bedroom. You are the one who is on top or doing a lot of the work. But tonight, I had to be perfectly still. I couldn’t really move. And it forced me to relax and really dive into my pleasure unlike I ever had before. There is no other word for it. It was liberating.

“So, what are you going to do with all that money?” Mr. Black asks, opening another bottle of wine. We’ve had two glasses each and I feel like I’m floating on air.

“I don’t really know,” I shrug. “I haven’t given it much thought.”

“It’s a lot of money.”

“Yes, I know. You want to make sure that I use it wisely?”

“Wisely? Are you kidding?” he laughs, tossing his hair back. I can see the muscles peek out a little bit through his jacket, and I wonder if I’m going to see him fully naked, in the flesh, today.

“What do you mean?”

“You may be surprised to learn this about me, Ellie, but I don't really care about money.”

“Well, that’s because you have a lot of it,” I say.

“Yeah, you’d think that. But I never really cared about money. I grew up in a two bedroom one bath house with my parents and my little brother. My parents weren’t poor, but we were not rich by any standard. And even back then, money never really interested me much.”

“So, how did you end up so rich?”

“I went after what I was interested in. I spent all of my time with computers and I started a company in college. I didn’t start it to make myself rich. I did it because it was what I was genuinely interested in. I’d be doing it if it only grew to $100,000 in revenue or $1 million.”

I don’t really buy it. I’ve met plenty of Mitch’s friends and colleagues who make the same statements while paying mortgages on their three bedroom apartments on Park Avenue and their seven bedroom summer houses in the Hamptons. It’s my experience that rich people like to pretend that they aren't interested in money, when in reality that’s pretty much all that they’re interested in.

“So, what about all this? Why do you have a multi-million dollar yacht if you say you don't care about money?” I ask.

“Oh, I never said that I didn’t enjoy the perks that money affords. That’s the thing about money. I think it’s useless just sitting around in a bank account doing nothing. Life’s short and you never know how long you have on this earth? So, why not live it up?”

I smile. “So, let me get this straight. You don't want me to be wise with the money that I got from the auction?”

“No, I don’t. I want you to be very unwise. I want you to go out there and get something extravagant that you have always wanted but could never afford. I want you to embrace the money for what it is - something that gives you pleasure.”

I shake my head.

“What?” he asks, pushing a strand of hair out of my face. Shivers run up my spine when he touches me and I shudder.

“I don’t think I can do that,” I say. “The main reason why I participated in the auction was that I wanted my student loans to be paid off. I didn’t want to take the money from my stepfather and I wanted to take care of them myself.”

“How much do you owe?”

“One hundred and fifty thousand,” I say. “And I make about thirty thousand and live in lower Manhattan. So, without the auction, I’d be paying off that loan for a very, very long time.”

He thinks about that for a second.

“Okay, but what are you going to do with the money that’s left over?” he asks after a moment. “You’d still have one hundred grand left if you write Yale a big ol’ check for the rest.”

“I don't owe the money to Yale, but to Sallie Mae,” I flash him a smile. “But I see your point. Um, I don't really know what to do with the rest. Probably just put it in savings for a rainy day. It rains a lot in New York.”

“You don't even want to take a trip somewhere exotic? It doesn’t have to be expensive. You could go backpacking in Belize. You can go live for a few months in Barcelona. Or Rome.”

“And what would I do there?” I ask.

“You could write,” he says, without taking a pause. Suddenly, in this moment, I realize that I’ve never had another person see me like Mr. Black sees me. He sees through all my bullshit and posturing down to the core of who I really am.

“But I have my job,” I mumble quietly.

“But then you wouldn’t need it, would you?”

I shrug. I was so lucky to just get this job after graduation that I have a hard time imagining quitting it for no other reason than money. I mean, I want to write, of course. I want to write what I want to write and this money would definitely give me the freedom to do just that. But can I actually just go out there and quit the best job that I could get? I mean, what would I do when the money runs out?

“Tell me what you’re thinking,” Mr. Black says, lifting my chin up with his hand.

I repeat everything that just occurred to me. I tell him every insecurity and trepidation that I have without pausing for a moment.

“Well, by the time the money runs out, you’ll have something written, right?” he asks.

I shrug. “I don’t know. It’s not so easy. I mean, I have a lot of doubts. About myself. About my dedication and my ability to write.”

“Let me tell you something, Ellie,” he says. “Let me tell you something that I have learned getting to where I have gotten. There are a lot of entrepreneurs out there with startup companies. We’re a dime a dozen. It’s a cutthroat business, not so unlike the writing business. When I first got started, I had my doubts too. But I also knew that there was nothing else that I wanted to do. Frankly, there was nothing else that I could do. So, I had to believe in myself. I had to give this a shot. And not just a shot. I had to do it until I could tell all of those people who told me that I needed a backup plan, that they’re full of shit. If you have a backup plan then you’ll end up doing your backup plan and not commit yourself fully to what you need to do. To succeed in anything, you have to do it 100%. And to succeed in a creative career, you have to do it until…”

“Until what?” I ask.

“You have to do it until all of your competition falls away. You do it longer than any other people. You do it despite the failures. You do it despite the setbacks. Failures and setbacks are what make other people drop out and that’s good for you. Because you keep doing it until it works out. That’s the only mindset you can have.”

“But what if I’m not good?” I ask.

“That doesn’t matter. If you enjoy writing, you will find your niche. It may be journalism, it may be fiction, it may be short stories, it may be romance or thrillers. And the other important ingredient besides determination is confidence. No one is going to believe you unless you believe in you. So, if you have to start the day with affirmations, telling yourself that you can and will become a writer, or better yet, that you are already a writer, then that’s what you have to do. Success starts with a mindset and everything else follows from hard work.”

I nod and try to take that all in. I know in my heart that what he is saying is right and true, but my mind is having a hard time processing it. Accepting it.

Suddenly, as if he can read my thoughts, Mr. Black leans over and pokes me in my chest with his index finger.

“You have to believe in yourself right here,” he says. “And everything else will follow.”