Abby felt particularly drained after her meeting with Madam Charlotte and when she got home she stripped out of her clothes and crawled into bed. The last thing she had expected when going to the meeting was to feel so emotionally challenged and to be left feeling open and raw like her skin had been stripped away. The words that Madam Charlotte had spoken had resonated deeply within Abby and it had worked like a release valve opening up all the emotions and guilt she had locked away. She had tried so hard for so long to be a strong independent woman, and for the most part she had succeeded, but there was always that small voice inside of her that yearned to have someone help carry the burdens.

Would she have felt this way of she’d grown up in a loving home with both parents who had cared for her? Or was this some intrinsic quirk of her genetic makeup? What made a person want to strike out and achieve on their own or conversely make them want to create something with another person, a life partner? Was it nature or nurture? Whatever it was, she would never know because she couldn’t go back in time and change what had happened to her. Her path had been set and all she could do was walk it and hopefully find a happier future.

It had felt good to have someone wrap their arms around her for no other reason than to give comfort. It had felt good to have permission to cry, to grieve and to wish for a life different than the one she was living. To an outside observer, Abby had it good. She had a successful career and didn’t want for money. She lived in a lovely apartment and had even begun to make some new friends and she had felt guilty for wanting more, what that more was, she hadn’t understood until now. That more was someone to share her life with, someone who she could turn to when things got tough, someone who could wrap her in his arms and tell her it would all be okay. Someone to care about her.

Abby had lived a solitary life for so long, avoiding emotional entanglements because she had learned that they only meant more responsibility. She didn’t want to be responsible for someone else, she barely wanted to be responsible for herself. She had always pulled away when people got too close because they always wanted something from her, something she hadn’t been prepared to give. Abby had learned the hard way that her caring nature meant that she was far too often used and taken for granted.

The juxtaposition was that she liked to look after people, but that meant that she was always giving and never receiving. In a perfect world, there would be balance. As she took care of someone, they would take care of her, but that had not been her experience. In self-preservation she had stopped caring, stopped giving and had shuttered herself away from people because it hurt less. But Madam Charlotte had opened the door for her to hope that maybe, just maybe, she might be able to find a relationship where her needs were met.

She wondered what that would be like, to have someone care for her, really care for her and not just give it lip service. If what Madam Charlotte said was true, then it was her Dom’s responsibility to take care of her needs. Abby wasn’t under any misconception that the relationship would be perfect, but she wasn’t looking for perfection, she just wanted balance. It was in her nature to serve, to look after someone with her actions and deeds, but in return, she needed someone to take care of her emotionally. That was where the balance had always been unevenly tipped against her. Too many of her prior relationships had been all about giving, leaving her empty, like a dried out husk. No one had taken the time to fill her emotional well and with nothing replenishing her supply, Abby had eventually run out of caring.

Would that emotional well be filled by DomMPF? Madam Charlotte had seemed to think so. Whether that proved to be correct, only time would tell.

As Abby drifted in that twilight sleep place, she wondered what being in a D/s relationship would be like. Would he demand she obey him at all times? Would she have to wear a collar and call him master? She’d read books and seen movies that portrayed Doms in a less than flattering light, but that wasn’t the way Madam Charlotte made it seem. What was the reality and was there a consistency or did it depend on each individual pair? There was so much she didn’t know, so much to learn. She was worried about making mistakes, about angering DomMPF. He’d already said that he wasn’t into punishment, but he’d also said he would if he had to. Was there a time of grace when she was still learning or would he expect her to be perfect all the time? And how did all this equate to taking care of her?

Her head swirled with too many possibilities, too many variables, too many unknowns. While she had been with Madam Charlotte, it had all seemed so perfectly reasonable, but now the realities seemed, well, unreasonable. She took a deep breath and pushed all the confusing and frightening thoughts that her mind had conjured in a dark corner and closed the door on it. Now was not the time to dwell on things that she didn’t know the answers to. She needed sleep. Her exhausted brain needed a respite and if she kept ruminating on things she didn’t have the answers to she was going to psyche herself out. There were things she couldn’t know until she actually experienced them and Madam Charlotte had assured her that if she felt uncomfortable about any requests her Dom made, she had the right to use her safe word.

Abby took a deep breath, held it for a two count and then let it out slowly. She needed to sleep. She took another breath, forcing her mind away from everything else except the path of her breath. She held it again and then let it out slowly. With a few more meditative breaths, she drifted off to sleep, her body relaxing into the bed and her mind drifting to thoughts of Mason.

Mason dragged himself through the last of his meetings and finally put his office behind him as he drove home. He was eager to contact Abigail, NewGRL549, and set up their first date. He needed a release and not one that involved his hand, and their first date was one step closer to achieving that. There wouldn’t be physical contact on their first date, he wanted to ease her into it, make sure she was comfortable before they took that step. So it would be dinner, wine and conversation, maybe a kiss or two if the situation led to it.

Feeling better about himself, he parked his car and took the elevator to the top floor. As he stepped out, he saw Abby coming down the stairs. She was dressed in leggings and an oversize sweatshirt, her hair piled on top of her head in a messy bun and her eyes dark ringed like she hadn’t slept for a week. This was not the same woman he had given a lift to this morning.

“Hey, Abby,” he said gently so as not to startle her.

She looked up at him and her eyes widened. “Oh, hey Mason,” she said, but her voice was listless.

“Are you okay?”

“Sure,” she said, “Just exhausted. Big day.”

“Where’re you going?”

She held up her purse, “To get some take out. I’ve no food in the house and I’m suddenly ravenously hungry.”

Mason looked her up and down and was convinced that she shouldn’t being going anywhere.

“Come on,” he said, taking her arm and turning her back towards the stairs, “I’ll cook you dinner.”

She struggled weakly to get out of his grasp, but he didn’t let her go. “No, it’s okay. I’m just going down to the Chinese place.”

“Abby,” he said in his best Dom voice, “You look like you’re ready to collapse. Let me cook you dinner.” What he had wanted to say was, “let me take care of you,” but that would’ve been inappropriate no matter how much the sentiment was true.

She looked up at him and her eyes welled with tears, but they didn’t fall. She swallowed and cleared her throat and then nodded, “Okay,” she said softly, leaning in to him.

He led her up the stairs and into his apartment. He sat her on the couch and fetched her a glass of water before sitting down near her and looking her over closely.

“Did something happen today?” he asked, needing to understand what had caused the vibrant, sassy woman he’d seen this morning to be reduced to this.

She sighed heartily, “No, not really.”

“You said you had an appointment this morning, did it not go well?”

She looked at him as if she were trying to decide how much to tell him, which told him a lot. “It was not what I expected,” she said, “And I walked away feeling a bit too emotional.”

He nodded, although he didn’t really understand, how could he when he didn’t know the context of the meeting? What he did know that for tonight she needed a friend and he wanted to be that friend.

“Come on,” he said, “You can help me with dinner.”

She pouted up at him, “You said you were going to cook for me. If I’d known I was going to press-ganged into kitchen duties I would have gone and bought take out.”

He laughed, glad to see a bit of her sass back. “Come and at least talk to me while I cook,” he said, “Surely watching me do all the work would be satisfying for you?”

She smiled and stood, “That is exactly what I need.”

Mason got her situated on a stool at the kitchen bench and poured her a glass of wine while he pulled ingredients from the fridge. He wasn’t an accomplished cook, but he did have a few recipes that he had mastered, more out of necessity than because of a love of cooking. He’d eaten enough pizza and Chinese take out to last a lifetime and had taught himself a few simple recipes so that he didn’t have to ever eat them again.

“What are you making,” Abby asked as he cut some onion and peppers.

“Chicken stir fry,” he replied, turning to grab a wok out of his cupboard and put in on the burner to heat.

“I could’ve gotten you some when I bought Chinese,” she said before taking a sip of her wine.

“And then you would’ve missed out on witnessing my amazing kitchen skills.”

He added oil to the hot pan and then the onion, some garlic and ginger and tossed them around. He added in the chicken and let it brown while he took a sip of his own glass.

“It smells wonderful,” she said, closing her eyes and taking a big breath.

Sebastian jumped up onto her lap and she giggled with delight, the sound shooting awareness through him.

“Aren’t you gorgeous,” she said as she stroked the cat and Mason had never before wanted to be a cat as much as he wanted to then.

“I find him down near the dumpster when I moved in,” he said, “We kind of adopted each other.”

He watched her for a moment as she scratched a purring Sebastian under the chin. The darkness around her eyes had diminished some and there was colour back in her cheeks and Mason had the almost uncontrollable desire to kiss her sweet mouth and taste the wine on her lips. He had never wanted a woman like he wanted Abby and it was even more reason for him to not have her. He would get lost in her, he knew he would. She called to him, soul to soul, and he knew his obsessive personality would take to her with little encouragement and he couldn’t let that happen. He would destroy her, crush her under his possessiveness.

He turned away to remove the cooked chicken from the wok and replace it with the vegetables he had prepared. As he finished the dish, he fought the desire to have her. Knowing what he did about himself and knowing that together they would be a disaster, did not in any way diminish his desire to have her. Whatever it was about her that drew him, was more potent than any other desire he’d ever encountered. The only way he knew to excise her from his psyche was to replace her with someone else and for that reason he knew that Thursday could not come soon enough.

Abby left Mason’s place soon after dinner. The food was delicious and so was being in his company, which is one of the reasons she left when she did. It would’ve been too easy to spend the rest of the evening with him and that would lead to secrets being told that she needed to keep secret. Besides, being around him gave her so many story ideas and she was itching to get them down.

Abby had never had a muse before, her stories had always come from within her. It was scary to think that the horrors she wrote about had been buried somewhere in her subconscious and she often wondered whether it made her a monster. What kind of sick person did she have to be to think up these things? But over the years she’d come to realise that getting the horrors out of her mind were what kept her sane.

When she’d moved in here and met Mason, she’d been struggling with the manuscript she’d been working on. The beginning had come to her with ease, as it always did. Usually her opening scenes played in her head like a movie and all she had to do was write them down. This one had been no different, but then after that opening scene… there’d been nothing. She hadn’t been able to pick up the thread of the story and she’d struggled to write her daily word count. The story had seemed to disappear through her fingers like smoke and the more she tried to grab onto it, the less corporeal it seemed.

The first night that she met Mason, when she had been dragging a black garbage bag full of a dismembered pig after one of her experiments, had kick-started her story brain. He was the perfect anti-hero - dark and brooding and nocturnal. When she was safely back in her apartment, she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the encounter and the story of the serial killer had simply appeared, fully formed, in her mind.

The next day she had shelved her original story and her fingers had flown over the keyboard as she built this new character, a man who was the non-dominant personality of an oblivious host. The host had no idea he had another personality loitering in his mind and he had no idea what that other personality got up to. Meanwhile, the other personality, Hyde, was murdering his way through criminals, satisfying his blood lust with the worst members of society. And Mason had been her inspiration.

She let herself into her apartment and sat down to write without any preliminaries. She didn’t need rituals and practised routines, not now, not when she had just been with Mason. There was something about him that just got her creative juices flowing and the next few hours flew by as she lost herself in her story.

Abby had thought that maybe she had been losing the magic, when her previous story had abandoned her, but she was coming to realise that perhaps it was just time to move on from that series. It had been responsible for her career, and the first six books had been a dream to write, but with each subsequent book, it had gotten harder. The publishers had originally given her a two book deal and then another three books and finally a five book deal which had brought the series to ten books, but after six, her heart just wasn’t in it anymore. Being given the permission to write something new had revitalised her, as had having a sexy neighbour who inspired her in surprising ways.

An email notification popped up on her screen and her fingers halted their rapid stream of typing. She should ignore it until she had finished her writing session, but she’d caught a glimpse at the name and it pulled her from the story more effectively than anything had ever done before.

DomMPF had contacted her.

She tried to get back into the story, tried to finish the sentence she was on, tried to complete the thought that she’d had, but it disappeared and all she could think about was that email and what it might contain. Madam Charlotte hadn’t given her any indication of what she would be saying to DomMPF when she spoke with him, she hadn’t given Abby any hint of whether she had passed the test or not. All Madam Charlotte had said was that DomMPF would be contacting her, and now here it was.

A few clicks of her mouse and she was over into her email screen and she saw his email sitting in her inbox, bold and calling to her. She had a moment of anxiety, what if he was turning her down? What if her falling apart at Fetish and crying on the shoulder of Madam Charlotte had destroyed her chances with him? What if…?

There was no sense borrowing trouble. The only way she would know what was in the email was to open it.

She clicked on the email and took a deep breath to read.

Dear NewGRL549,

I suppose I should be calling you Abigail now, though.

I spoke with Madam Charlotte and she was impressed by you, which I am very happy about. I can’t wait to meet you and after reading through your questionnaire, I can’t help but think we will be a good match. I know this is a big step for you and I want to put you at ease. We will take it slow, and there are no expectations for our first meeting other than to get to know each other better.

I have reserved a private room at Fetish for this Thursday night where we can share dinner and conversation. After we have met, we can decide where we go from there. The main club opens at nine, but I’d like to meet you there at seven. If you’re interested in checking the club out after our meal, we can do so, although it’s not really my scene.

Please let me know if you will be coming… if you’ve changed your mind, I will understand.

DomMPF

Abby breathed out the breath she’d been holding and smiled. This was exactly what she needed to get Mason off her mind. She typed out a quick reply and hit send. Now she only had two days to prepare herself to meet her potential Dom. It was exhilarating and completely terrifying at the same time.