The Dom Project by Heloise Belleau, Solace Ames Page B

Submissive
     
     
    Robin posted the entry and clicked the laptop shut before she started obsessively reediting. She’d spent what felt like an hour on those words, wanting to get the tone exactly right. Breezy enough to balance out the sprinkling of pompous capitalized nouns. Without regrets. Not too emotionally tangled. Pleased, but not infatuated.
    Already, she found herself stroking the laptop’s hard plastic case where it lay beside her on the bed, thinking about just one more pass, maybe refreshing and checking her IP logger to see if John had read her post yet...
    “Stop it,” she told herself sternly, set the laptop on her bedside table and wriggled under the covers. Her bottom wasn’t exactly tender, more like extra sensitive, so that she could feel the texture of the sheets rubbing through the cotton of her nightgown. She rolled over on to her stomach and sighed.
    There was one thing she hadn’t been honest about on her blog. The principles of chastity and denial weren’t all that attractive to her. Tonight’s session had proved that, but even before, she’d really been talking herself into it. Consciously turning denial into a sexy ritual seemed so much more interesting and unique than I’m not getting laid but damn , I wish I were .
    But she couldn’t admit that to her readers or to John. Not yet. She’d talk about her change of heart when the contract was up, and write out an entry about how she’d given chastity the college try. She could call it “For God’s Sake Unlock Me.”
    She hadn’t signed away her orgasms, at least. Hmm .
    No. Her thoughts would turn to John like iron to a magnet, and she already strongly associated him with dangerous pleasure. Limits had to be mental too. She couldn’t get obsessed. Couldn’t turn John into her one and only because he absolutely wasn’t . He was a good friend and he’d never wanted her as anything other than a friend.
    Although maybe, considering his high sex drive, he saw her as something less and more...
    She groaned and rolled on to her back. This was the worst. The lowest point of a roller-coaster day, and all she wanted to do was get off, in both senses, and go to sleep.
    The laptop no longer hummed, but she could still sense it lying beside her, quietly emanating heat. There was a porn clip one of her commenters had linked. It was only a few clicks away. She leaned over, opened up the laptop, pressed Play. It was that easy. Don’t think of John .
    A man in a suit gripped the arm of a woman dressed as a maid. He had dark hair, but he wasn’t John. “You’ve been stealing,” he said, in a flat voice. The maid widened her eyes in an approximation of fear. The poor acting didn’t bother Robin—in fact, she liked the ritualistic monotone, the stylized poses. It struck the right balance of conceptual danger and reassurance that it was all a show. Oh yes. This was perfect.
    “Don’t hurt me,” she said.
    “Don’t hurt me,” Robin whisper-echoed. She licked her finger and didn’t think of John.
    * * *
    “You guys gave me a defective machine,” Professor Arkin grumbled. John was already wriggling underneath the shelves behind the podium, tracing cables with his fingertips, following his instincts. He found the problem pretty quickly.
    “Try it again.”
    “Why? It’s only going to fail! I’ve wasted a third of my class trying to fix the damn thing.”
    What a dick . “It’s called a projector. And you got the cables confused and plugged it into itself,” John said, making sure to speak loudly enough so the whole class would hear. As he wriggled back out again, he caught a few muffled laughs coming from the back of the auditorium. “Should be fine now. Give us a call if you have any other problems.” He dusted off his jeans and clambered to his feet.
    Starting with one of the laughers in the back, Professor Arkin’s class started to applaud John, a couple of students even hopping up to give him a standing ovation.
    He took a