I received a reply two days later:
boy,
Thank you for your interest. At this time I have no appointments available.
—The Disciplinarian
That pissed me off. Appointments? Like this fuck-cake was in such high demand he couldn’t take a couple of hours out of his day to spank me? I mean, how was this guy still in business? He wasn’t that hot, his attitude was insufferable, and just the thought of his mustache made me want to . . .
Rub off on the fucking throw cushion.
God. Damn. It.
I redid the questionnaire, answering not with what I thought he wanted to hear, but with what I wanted to say.
Dear “Sir,”
I don’t know who exactly you think you are that you can vet potential subs based on a questionnaire, but let me tell you a little about myself—and I do expect you to read this, because I took the time to read your ridiculous profile.
I don’t submit easily. I don’t expect doms to make me feel like shit about that. But I do need someone who’s gonna enjoy keeping me in line. So if you put me over your knee and spank me, I’ll fight you, but I’ll be glad for it later. I don’t consider my childhood your business, so if you’re expecting me to write you a little jerk-off fantasy about the time Aunt Jane took a coat hanger to me, I’m afraid I have to disappoint.
Here’s the thing: No way am I gonna do a CNC scene with you first time out of the gate. I don’t know you. What if your idea of punishment is to smear me with raw beef and toss me to starving Rottweilers? I need a way out of it if you turn out to be really twisted, which, based on your profile, you might be. I don’t mean that as a flirty compliment, I mean it as a “Who the fuck says ‘Under my tutelage, many boys are transformed’?”
I’m down for all the punishments you describe. The outdoors is an awesome thing to look at from inside. Here’s where I am right now: I’m not thrilled with the way you present yourself, but you sound like someone who’s dedicated to the art of discipline. I am dedicated to the art of earning it. So you can either invite me into your secret clubhouse and we’ll see if we’re a decent match, or you can tell me again that you’re the master of the universe with so many eager subs falling at your feet you don’t have time for me. Your choice.
—David
The response came much sooner this time.
Dear david,
I do not own or know any Rottweilers. I am twisted but will respect limits. If you are interested, meet at the Finer Things Café Thursday at 7 p.m. Wear comfortable clothes. We can decide from there whether to proceed to the secret clubhouse. In the event that we do, wear white briefs.
—The Disciplinarian
Oh, Pornstache, I know you did not just lowercase my name.
Wear comfortable clothes? As opposed to what? Chain mail? A hair shirt? As for white briefs, screw you, dude. My underwear, my business.
And if I was getting hard from being told what underwear to wear, that was only because I’d had a long day of hearing from customers at Teamendous why I sucked, trying to figure out how many stamps to put on a birthday card to Canada, and fantasizing about the days when casual sex was easy and fun, the handjobs flowed freely, and no erection of mine had gone untouched by a stranger’s hand.
This was a total stress boner.
I read the message over and over. So far, there was nothing truly odious about him. I’d expected some affronted-ness in response to my goading, and possibly a fuck off. Something to fuel my anger. I would just have to settle for being enraged about the underwear. And the fact that the fucker lowercased my name.
I arrived at the Finer Things Café Thursday night wearing a snug black T-shirt and a pair of black and teal cutout PPU briefs under jeans so tight they had effectively flattened my balls. I’d combed my hair, then artfully mussed it. Adorned my wrist with a leather cuff, and shaved and moisturized my ass.
I glanced around and spotted him at a table for two. Not even a corner table—one in the center of the room. He wore cargo pants and, once again, a long-sleeved polo.
And God, how that mustache gently beckoned me.
Everyone else in the café was either a hipster or a university student busy on a laptop—or both—and he looked like he’d wandered out of an episode of Survivorman. I walked up to him.
“Are you the . . . Disciplinarian?” Dude could’ve provided me with a name.
His gaze settled briefly on my crotch. Game on. He leaned back and grunted softly. I was struck again by his surprising handsomeness given that he looked like the kind of dad you’d find manning the grill at a Fourth of July picnic in khaki shorts and knee-high white socks with sandals. “I am. Nice to meet you, David.”
His voice was gruff, deep. Okay, fine: sexy.
It bothered me that he hadn’t shaken my hand. I wanted, despite myself, to touch him. To see if I got the same jolt of heat and pleasure I did when I looked into his dumbass blue eyes.
He is a man who thinks safewords are for wimps and that you need to be tutelaged. If you get hard for him, you get hard for danger.
I sat across from him and slouched. His coffee smelled good and looked extremely black. Like tar. And he’d gotten it in a real mug, which meant we weren’t leaving for a while. I wondered if I ought to wait to start the brat stuff until we were back at his place. But his online behavior had irritated me enough that I was ready to start the performance right now.
I slouched even more defiantly. A few seconds later, though, I was itching to sit up. It had to do with the way he looked at me—not predatory, not disapproving, but mildly disappointed, like he’d expected something better than this. Or maybe I was reading too much into it. His lips were mostly hidden under his mustache, so it was hard for me to nail down his exact expression.
“Can I get you anything?” he asked, at the same time I said, “You gonna take me home and beat my ass or what?”
His thick eyebrows slanted inward. “Coffee first?”
I shook my head. “Makes me jittery.”
“Jittery,” he repeated. His gaze dropped to my left leg, which was bouncing under the table.
“This is normal. I’ve been known to hover six inches off the ground when fully caffeinated.”
He took a swallow of his coffee. It almost looked as though he was trying not to laugh.
“So do you have a name? Or am I just supposed to call you the Disciplinarian?” I flashed him a sweet if insincere smile.
He set his mug down precisely in its condensation ring on the table. “My name is David.”
“Shut up.” I grinned for real this time and straightened. “Are you serious?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’ll need a nickname so we don’t get mixed up. Can I call you Big D? Or just D?”
“My name will not be an issue, since you will address me as ‘Sir’ from now on.” He spoke slowly, deliberately, but not in that affected commanding tone I heard from a lot of doms. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe he didn’t man the Fourth of July grill. Maybe he was in a coonskin cap, one foot up on a shovel, staring into the middle distance on some Americana postcard.
I placed my chin in my hands and widened my eyes. “Mmm. And what if I don’t?”
“Then we will discuss it.” Something about the way he said discuss made my stomach tighten. I was way more interested in this guy than I’d expected. He wasn’t the sort of waxed and toned gym bunny I’d pursued during my late teens. Or the wrong-side-of-middle-aged biker bear type I’d developed a brief fetish for in my early twenties. He had his own thing going, and he was, physically speaking, the most stereotypically manly man I’d ever considered playing with.
Don’t forget. You’re here to teach him a lesson.
I went up to get a tea. Made sure to lean against the counter and stick my ass out. But when I glanced over my shoulder, he wasn’t even looking. I returned to the table and watched him take a long, slow sip of coffee. Usually by this point I had a potential dom all excited and ready to go. But he seemed like he could sit here indefinitely, holding me with that stoic gaze.
“Warm out tonight, huh?” I asked.
Another slow sip of coffee, during which he didn’t break eye contact. “I dislike small talk.”
“Well, I love it.” My jeans were making my balls itch. I couldn’t wait for the part where we were at his place and he saw that I hadn’t obeyed his stupid underwear rules.
Which suddenly didn’t seem like the best idea I’d ever had. I kept looking at his hands, which were huge. Broad and thick, with long fingers. Even through the ugly shirt I could tell his arms were powerful. He probably spanked hard.
I took a sip of tea and accidentally spilled some down my front. Tried to play it cool. “So if you don’t like small talk, Big D, maybe we should head to the secret clubhouse.”
“It’s not looking promising.”
What? “What?”
“Do you really want to be here?” he asked quietly.
I furrowed my brow. “Obviously. Or I wouldn’t be here.”
“David.” He spoke in that same gruff, matter-of-fact voice. “I am not here to fight you. I have few requirements, but—”
“Few requirements? Just fit and under thirty and not a wuss and totally compliant and obsessed with you and your mastery of the art of discipline?” I lowered my voice. “I guess you’re accustomed to composing lists of stipulations and assuming that because you call yourself a dom, they’ll be obeyed?”
He leaned forward. “If you don’t think you can obey me, you might want to head on home, little boy.”
Nuh-uh. You did not call me “little boy” in public. I leaned forward too. “No way. I wore my tighty-est, whitey-est pair of briefs for you. I wanna see what you can do, big man.”
My breath caught at the almost manic hunger in his gaze. He didn’t want to send me home. He wanted me over his knee—and seeing how much he wanted it made my cock press hard against taut denim. He stared at me, his eyes less blue now than a sharp, dark silver, like a stone slicked by rain. I could imagine his huge hand between my legs, his dick sliding against my hip, his tongue tracing a cord in my neck . . .
“Show me.” He said it softly, but I knew I hadn’t misunderstood.
“Show you?”
“The underwear.”
“Uh . . . here?”
He nodded. “Pull the waistband of your underwear out of those ridiculous jeans and show me.”
My face was hot, I was squirming, and fine, my briefs were damp. Didn’t mean this joker had won. “They’re not ridiculous.”
“They’re ridiculous. Pull your underwear out.”
I glanced around the café. Then I pried my jeans away from my hip, snagged the band of my briefs, and tugged it out.
He looked down for all of a second, then met my gaze again. “David.” His voice held an edge so fine it could have cut me without my knowing it. “Do you have difficulty telling black from white?”
I tried for a cocky smile, but my heart was pounding. “Not at all.”
“What color is your underwear?”
“Black.” A slight catch in my voice. We might have been the only two people in the café in that moment. “And teal.”
He closed his eyes and nodded—an almost spiritual-looking gesture. Opened his eyes again. “Why?”
“Because it’s the underwear I wanted to wear. You earn my obedience, Big D. You don’t demand it. And you don’t lowercase me unless we’ve discussed it.”
I felt “I’m Every Woman” for about three seconds. Then he asked, “Are you hard?”
“Huh?”
“Do you have an erection?”
“Pssshhhh. Don’t flatter yourself.” I swallowed, shrugging with a nonchalance I didn’t feel. “I’m sitting here thinking, this guy’s full of himself, but what the hell, maybe I’ll do him a favor and let him have a go at me, since he’s drooling like one of those old cartoon wolves.”
He leaned closer still, his mustache inches from my lips. “I’m thinking this boy’s cocky as hell, but maybe, just maybe he can be taught to respect his elders.”
“Not a chance.”
“I can try.”
“Go for it.”
“You’ve been spanked before?” he asked.
“Hundreds of times.”
“Ever had an enema?”
“Barium, molasses, saline, and soap. Do your worst.”
“Figging?”
“Never.”
“Never have or never will?”
“Never have. But I would.”
“Soap in your mouth? Fish oil?”
“I’m allergic to seafood. Make it castor.”
“Limits?”
“Canes.”
“Shame.” He raised his brows. “They’d do wonders for you.”
“You think?”
For the first time, I saw a hint of amusement in his expression. “Oh, David. I know.”
I could feel his breath against my lips. If I leaned just a little closer, I’d be kissing him.
I was hard for danger.
He leaned back, breaking the tension so suddenly that I actually sighed with relief.
“You didn’t follow protocol when you messaged me,” he said. “You showed up here in clothes I doubt were comfortable when you put them on, but are probably excruciating now that your little cock is hard. And—”
“My cock is huge. Porn stars and horses got nothin’.”
“—and you haven’t shown me a modicum of respect since we met.”
“I tried to ask about the weather, but you—”
“This is your last chance to go home, son.” It was the loudest I’d heard him speak.
I froze.
Cock, meet jeans. Jeans, please contain cock.
He lowered his voice again. “Otherwise we’re going to my place. And what happens there isn’t going to be as much fun as you think.”
I managed a shadow of a grin. “Take me home, sweetheart. I always wanted to get it from the Brawny paper towel guy.”
He finished his coffee and stood. He was shorter than I’d figured—I actually had a couple of inches on him. But those arms. Those hands. He went up to the dish tubs and placed his mug in the bin meant for plates.
I tensed as he returned to the table, waiting to see what he’d do.
He took my elbow and pulled me up. He was gentle yet firm. I could understand how to everyone else in the café it must have looked like a helpful gesture rather than manhandling.
I planted my feet, pleased to think that if he tried to drag me, it would definitely look like manhandling.
Except he didn’t drag. He reached around, quickly and discreetly, and pinched my ass. I yelped and leaped forward, my thighs slamming the table. How he’d done that with such discretion, and how he’d managed to actually get my ass through my denim force field were mysteries to me, but it stung like fuck and surprised the hell out of me.
Several heads turned.
He raised an eyebrow. “David. You’re in public.”
I glared at him and rubbed the throbbing spot with my free hand. “So are you.”
His grip on my arm tightened, but he passed his thumb lightly over my elbow. My stomach fluttered. The skin prickled where he’d touched it, and heat spread from my neck down. “No more trouble,” he said quietly.
Aw, sweetheart. I’m just getting started.
I hid a smirk as he steered me around the table and out the door.