“Why did you tell me I don’t have to be in the contest? I don’t understand.” We’ve been laying on the couch in Graham’s office for a while before I decide to ask this question. Partly because it has taken me longer to recover from sex with him than any other experience in my life. Opening my eyes and realizing that I was still in his arms gives me an overwhelming feeling of peace that I just don’t want to disrupt, but I have so many questions.

Graham looks at me, then touches my face and my heart just melts. “Because I don’t like the thought of you having to humiliate yourself in front of all of those guys who are watching, and voting. It’s so degrading.”

I think about what he says, and I’m not sure if my impulse is right. But I decide if I’m not honest with him now, then what’s the point of me being here and figuring out what I truly want. “You don’t think it’s possible that I might want that?”

He’s silent for a moment and I have a sinking feeling in my stomach that I’ve lost him. That he can’t possibly want to be with a woman who enjoys degrading herself in front of a man. “If being humiliated and degraded is what you really want, it’s not for me to interfere or tell you it’s wrong.” By the way he looks at me I can see in his eyes that he isn’t disgusted. “I just want you to know that you don’t have to do any of it.”

I’m still not quite sure what he’s getting at, so I try to explain myself to him a little. It might even be for my benefit too. “To be honest, it’s not something I ever really thought about before. I have always liked the idea of being submissive, being told what to do, being forced. But unfortunately I haven’t had any good experiences up until now. I came here to try and figure out if being a sub is really was something I want, and it wasn’t until I got up on stage that I realized how much I like being watched. It’s a little weird to admit that, to say it out loud, but it’s true.” I look at him out of the corner of my eye, trying to gauge his reaction. ”Does that freak you out?”

Graham laughs out loud. “Not at all,” he says as he grips me tighter. “I think it’s sexy as hell that you can express what you want. I also think it’s amazing that you did all this to understand yourself better and figure out who you are. That takes guts. You’re a lot braver than I am.”

“I don’t know about that,” I say. “You seem pretty confident to me.”

“Confidence and bravery aren’t exactly the same thing. I can get up in front of hundreds or thousands of people and speak, but there’s no way in hell I’d be able to take my clothes off.”

“But isn’t that the way this whole thing is supposed to end? With the winners getting fucked by the two of you live on camera? In front of thousands of people?”

Graham was silent for a moment. “Yeah, but that wasn’t exactly my idea. Kyle is the brains behind this whole contest. It’s part of the reason I why wanted you to know that you don’t have to do this. You don’t have to go through with the rest of the events and you don’t have to have sex on camera. You’ve already won,” Graham says as he brushes his fingers through my hair and across my scalp. The way his hands feel on my head and the words he says send tingles down my spine. It doesn’t seem like this is just sex. The way he’s looking at me makes me feel like he actually cares about me, which is something I hadn’t expected at all. “Plus I don’t want to share you. I want you all to myself.”

I look up into his dark eyes. They’re so serious and intense and I want them to be on me forever.

“Are you going to change my profile now?”

“What do you mean?”

“Tell them all that I’m no longer a virgin?”

Graham laughs louder than I’ve seen him laugh and kisses my head. “No, that’s our secret.”

I like that we have a secret and I want more. I want to be a part of his life now. But I also have to admit that I’m really curious about what it would be like to be with both Graham and Kyle. I can’t help but wonder what they would be like together. “What would you say if I told you that I wouldn’t mind being shared? Would that bother you?”

Graham looks away and doesn’t say anything for a long time and, once again, I’m afraid I’ve blown it. When he speaks his words surprise me. “It doesn’t really matter if I’m bothered by it or not. If that’s something you want, you should have it.” He looks back down at me. “Is that something you want?”

I know he was talking about the viewers in the contest when he referred to sharing me before, but I don’t think that’s what he means now. “It’s not something that I’ve wanted until recently.”

“What made you change your mind?”

“I don’t know, this whole contest, it’s … it’s made me feel like a different person. Less afraid and more able to express myself in ways that I never thought possible.” I don’t know how he’s going to react, but I have to ask. “Have you and Kyle shared a woman before?”

“Yes.” Graham doesn’t look away this time. His eyes stay on mine when he answers and they continue to burn into mine in the silence afterward.

My breath catches in my throat and I can’t move. The way he is looking at me makes me want to squirm away, but at the same time I’m paralyzed by his eyes. That was the answer I’d been hoping for, but now that he’s said it out loud I’m scared of what that could mean for the three of us. “A relationship or a one night stand?”

“I suppose somewhere in between those two. A lot of the time it would be with women Kyle was dating. The three of us would get together multiple times a week, so it was definitely more than a one night thing. But as far as relationships go, I haven’t been interested in anything serious for a while now. Not since my divorce.”

“When was that?”

“Six years ago.”

I don’t want to pry into his past, but the questions don’t seem to bother him. “What happened?”

“We’d been together since high school and I think we both grew apart. Unfortunately, she didn’t feel the need to tell me that she wanted to have sex with every guy she met throughout the last couple years of our marriage. It was pretty humiliating and sucked the joy out of life for me for a long time. Kyle is the reason I didn’t become an angry recluse. He made me leave my house and go to bars with him to meet other women. Eventually we wound up sleeping with the same one. Then it became a fairly regular thing, but I always kept my distance and never got involved with the women outside of sex, so it always felt … safe, I guess.”

“Safe?”

“Yeah, no chance of falling in love and getting hurt again.”

“Is that the way you still feel?” I can see that he’s going back and forth in his head about something, but he doesn’t respond. I’m afraid I really asked the wrong question this time and I immediately regret it.

“We’d probably better get you back to your room before any of the other girls notice you’re gone. I don’t want them to get any ideas about this contest being rigged,” he says with a slight smile that causes sexy creases to form in the corners of his eyes.

I walk over to the door and get back into my pajamas but I can’t keep my eyes off of Graham as he pulls his underwear on. He looks so incredibly sexy in the dim light that streams in through the windows.

He walks over to where I’m standing and brings his hands up to either side of my face, then pushes them back into my hair. My head falls back and I stare up at him for what feels like an eternity before his lips come down to mine. The second his mouth is on mine a wave of calm intensity floods through me. I feel so safe in his arms, and I don’t want to go back to the room with the other girls. I desperately want to stay here with Graham forever.

I can barely stay upright when he moves away from me and opens the door and I practically have to use the wall to hold myself up as I make my way back to my room. Before I reach the door, I turn around and Graham is still standing there, watching me. I know I want to see those eyes for the rest of my life and I’m going to do everything I can to make sure that happens.

* * *

The next day, the events start up again at nine a.m. I had seen the list of events while I was sitting at Kyle’s desk so I knew what to expect. It’s all pretty hilariously depraved, and I have a feeling that Kyle was the one that came up with most of the events. There are events with dildos and paddles and even an exercise bike event, which intrigues me the most.

Honestly, the thought of doing any of the events on camera turns me on now. It also makes me feel super slutty, but I don’t care. I love that Graham appreciated my honesty and my courage. Sometimes it seems like courage is interpreted as stupidity, but I think that’s mostly by the people who are afraid to take any chances at all.

When I think about Graham watching me in the remaining events with those eyes of his, I can practically feel my insides melting. And while it’s exciting to be watched by the audience, I feel different still when I think about him watching. I’m excited and nervous and turned on the way I am with just the cameras, but now I also feel an overwhelming desire to please him.

We wind up picking up where we left off with the serving tray event, and even though it’s hard to keep everything balanced using no hands and with the vibrator going off inside me, I actually manage to come out in the top three. A couple of girls are eliminated, and we immediately move on to the next event.

I now realize that the list of events on Kyle’s desk weren’t in any particular order because Tied Up and Paddled was last on the list, but it looks like that’s what’s happening right now. And I’m the first one up.

This time, instead of a mask, a black blindfold is tied over my eyes. In order to speed up the setup process, each of the girls is already naked and has leather cuffs attached to her wrists and ankles before she goes out on stage. When I’m standing in the center of the stage, the blindfold is put on and my ankles are attached to the ends of a spreader bar, which keeps them a few feet apart. The hooks on my wrist cuffs are attached to a rope that has been thrown over one of the beams near the ceiling, and when it’s secured, my body is stretched so tight I’m standing on my toes.

I’ve never experienced pain during sex before, and I’m almost shaking while I wait in the dark to see what’s going to happen to me. There is music playing in the background, some Prodigy song, but it isn’t quite as loud as it has been during the other events. I imagine the viewers probably want to hear the noises that the paddle makes as it comes into contact with my skin.

Even before anything touches me, I can feel the vibrations starting up, and I know they’re watching. I know that Graham is watching. Even though I can’t see them, I can feel his eyes on my skin. I take a deep breath and let it out and I can almost feel Graham’s eyes inside me, burrowing into my soul. When I feel the first sharp sting of the paddle on my ass, all I can picture are his eyes burning into me.

Before I come out on stage, Josh tells me that if I want him to wait a minute that I should say the word yellow. If I want everything to stop, if I can’t take it anymore, I should say the word red and he’ll untie me. But the more he hits me with the paddle, and the more I feel the sting on my ass with the tingling of the vibrations inside me, the more I’m sure I don’t want to say a thing.

He also tells me the maximum number of smacks will be fifty, so if I count, I will know how many are left, and I’d be able to decide if I can take it. When he reaches twenty, my hands are balled up into fists and I’m screaming each time the paddle comes down on my ass. The only thing I can hear is the sound of my own voice and the crack of the paddle. The music is gone. The people watching are gone. The girls that I’m competing against are gone. But Graham’s eyes are right there. In my head it’s just me and him.

When Josh reaches thirty, that’s when I stop counting completely. Not because I don’t want to, but because I’m so lost in the way everything feels that the number doesn’t matter anymore. I’m not aware of anything except for the intensity that is building up inside me. An intensity that is punctuated every few seconds by the smack of the paddle. The rhythm is hypnotic and seems to be keeping time with the music that has faded almost completely into the background.

I don’t know how much more time I have but it doesn’t matter because my orgasm rips through me while I’m practically hanging by my wrists. I can’t move my arms or my legs. I can’t see a thing, and now I can’t even think. All I can do is feel.

The sounds that come out of me are more like sobs than anything, and for a moment I don’t understand where they’re coming from. When Josh takes me down and removes my blindfold he practically has to carry me off the stage.

“Are you okay,” he asks as he sits me down in a chair and hands me a blanket.

I smile up at him and nod, but I’m too exhausted to say a word. I’m so grateful to have an hour to recover before the next event because that really took a lot out of me. It’s not even the pain from the paddle that exhaust me so much, though. It’s the intensity of the emotions that are stirred up. Emotions that now have a lot to do with Graham.

In the next event, we crawl back and forth on the floor picking up dildos. We’re instructed to use any method to move them, other than our hands or our mouths. It’s silly and fun and we all wind up laughing in the end. Everyone except the girls that are eliminated, that is.

I’m surprised when the exercise bike event starts and there are only three of us on the stage. It’s been a long day and a lot of girls have been eliminated and I really just want to get everything over with. But when I look around, I realize that this is the event that is going to decide the two winners. Graham said that I was already one of them. So it’s really between the other two girls on stage, even though they don’t realize it.

The music starts up and we all get on our bikes. At first I think it’s just the song X is Gon Give it To Ya by DMX playing over the speakers, but suddenly Call Me, Maybe gets mixed in and it sounds fabulous. When the chorus explodes with the two songs together, I can’t stop myself from laughing. I can feel the vibrations intensify inside me and I’m pedaling like crazy and the music is back to being loud again and it feels incredible. I look around and the other two girls are laughing too, and it seems like we all realize that it’s one of those moments in life where we know there’s not another person on the planet who will ever experience anything like this but the three of us.

I know I don’t need to win, but something inside me pushes me to go faster, and as the crazy mashup song peaks again, I’m pedaling harder than I ever have in my life.