Matchmaking for the Shy Ch. 05

Matchmaking for the Shy is a six-part chain story written by members of the Author's Hangout in the Literotica forums. Previous chapters have been written by Mrs_Mackenzie, Devinter, Joy_of_Cooking, and Kelliezgirl. The final chapter will be written by KumquatQueen. Thanks to everyone who has written and read this chain story. Apologies to anyone who has been waiting for this chapter- it took way longer than it should have! Special thanks to Joy_of_Cooking, Mrs_Mackenzie and KumquatQueen for their feedback during the production of this chapter. It's been a lot of fun.

Matchmaking for the Shy

Chapter 5

"Alright," said Diane, pointing the camera towards the happy couple. "Arms round each other. Closer. No, closer still. Cassian, maybe look up towards the new love of your life. And try to look spontaneous even though I know how much you hate spontaneity."

"I can be spontaneous," said her brother completely deadpan, "given enough warning."

"Sure you can, bro," said Diane. "But... and here's the million dollar question... can you smile? Here we go... three... two... one cheese!"

She pointed, clicked and flashed.

"And another one, maybe with Heather leaning up to kiss Cassian?"

Click. Flash.

"And one with you both holding a cup each," said Diane.

"Do you want us to clink them together, Wallace and Gromit style?" asked Heather.

"I think that maybe going just a bit too far," said Diane. "Just hold on to them and give me a look that suggests 'this is damn fine coffee.'"

She clicked again then pressed a button on the camera which then deposited three photos in her hand.

"A Polaroid?" asked Heather. "I haven't seen one of those for years. I didn't think they still made them."

"They didn't for a while and then they did again. You know, for the nostalgia crowd," explained Diane.

"For those with more money than sense," said Cassian, in a voice that suggested that for however much money he undoubtedly had, no one could ever accuse him of one iota less sense.

"Right," said Diane, shaking the photograph dry, although with the modern version there really was no need, "I think these will do. Hey, Bree!" Where do you want this?"

Brianna had been half-watching, half-serving during the impromptu photo shoot. She now put her tray down fully and came over. "On the board here," she said. "Wait a mo..."

She took a rubber band off an A2 piece of paper, unfurled it and pinned it to the board. At the top, it read 'Coffee Pages Dating - Success Stories,' beneath that were the names 'Zach and Emma' and 'Cassian and Heather' with each couple having their own little banners.

It took a few minutes for to Brianna get the enormous poster lined up with the plywood board, but eventually, Diane was able to come in and pin each of the three photographs under the appropriate section, each one at a jaunty angle and slightly overlapping the one above it.

"Adorable," Diane said finally, admiring her handiwork.

"Indeed," agreed Brianna. "As for couple number two... Zach! Any word on Emma?"

Zach looked up from the coffee machine and then reached for his phone. "She says she's just around the corner."

On cue, the door swung open and Emma rushed in. "Sorry! Sorry!" she apologized. "I've been behind all morning. First Callia wouldn't get out of bed. Then Jonas started to tell me about how he'd been bullied in science class and..."

Zach came out from behind the counter and just put his arms around her. All the women in the cafe made an "Aw," sound except for Diana who just said "Snap," while taking another picture.

"Right," said Emma, calm for just a second. "Coffee. Photographs and then, I've got to get all the way over to Chelsea Market because Etta needs..."

"One thing at a time," said Zach.

"You're right," said Emma, calming again. "And that one thing is coffee."

Zach picked up an already-made cup from the counter. "There you go," he said.

"You're an angel," said Emma.

"Isn't he just," affirmed Brianna. "For me as well as you."

Zach had been working at the coffee shop for nearly a month now. It made sense. He was there every day waiting for Emma anyway and he'd offered to help Brianna so many times that she'd started to feel guilty about him not being on the payroll. And it helped him get out of the house and avoid what he called LDAR syndrome. That had been a new one on Brianna -- it stood for Lay Down and Rot. Before meeting Emma he'd been spending all days playing video games in his room as though it was a full-time job. Zach was a great employee even if it was a bit strange to have to give someone who worked in a cafe a couple of hours off at lunch. Brianna was still trying to piece together how their relationship worked, even though she'd been the one to introduce them. What was unarguable though was that it did. Emma was calmer since they met. Zach was, in his own words, more energetic.

"There's someone I'd like you to meet," said Brianna after she'd given Emma time for at least a few sips of coffee. She guided Cassian and Heather over. "I believe you know Heather," she said.

"We've passed each other a few times around this place," said Emma, standing up to shake Diane's hand.

"And this is Cassian," she said.

"Charmed," said Emma. "Wow, so me and Zach weren't just a one-off! You know, Brianna, you really are New York's answer to the question of where all the good men have gone."

Brianna reached over and tapped the board. "Well, today is all about success stories. Thanks for coming in today. Look, I was going to ask you, I'm asking some of the girls to help out with Coffee Pages..."

"Help?" asked Emma. "How? You know I don't have much time."

"I know. I know. Well, it's mostly about the dating service, but it's also about general promotion as well. We'd really like to start to get more guys in here. You know, make the place just a little less feminine without making it any less pleasant. I'm going to set up a whole new shelf for books to attract guys."

"Such as?" asked Emma.

"I don't know. I'm hoping it's not going to be all six hundred-page espionage thrillers with the numerical stopping power of sixteen different types of hand-gun on each page. But it might be. I also thought it would be good to get some events going. Invite some local authors in or, I don't know, the occasional band."

"Can you fit a whole band in here?"

"Well, a singer-songwriter, shall we say. Anyway, we're going to start having informal committee meetings every Wednesday..."

"I can't. I really can't," said Emma immediately. "I'm sorry. You know how it is."

"I thought you'd say that. I also know it's nice to be asked. Especially as I've already asked Heather and Diane and they're both on-board. I just didn't want you to feel left out."

"How about recruiting Zach?"

"I'll pick his brains, but he'll need to be running the cafe while I'm in the meeting. Besides, however macho we're making this place, we kind of wanted to keep things female-run"

Emma looked at her watch as if to stress her point. "I'm really sorry. I'll keep supporting you as a customer, but that's about all I can do."

"Well, you're already doing enough by agreeing to these photos. Oh, and loaning us Zach. Thanks again. Shall we?"

They picked up Zach by the counter and wandered back to the staging area. Cassian and Heather pulled their chairs round to watch the new set of photos being taken.

"Do you want apron on or apron off?" asked Zach.

"Apron off, I think," said Brianna. "Otherwise it just feels a bit like... I don't know... insider trading, would it be? Rigging the deck? Something like that."

"Oh, but the candid photo I took just now is perfect and has his apron on," said Diane.

"Well, stick that one on and have aprons off on the other two," said Emma, "that way it won't be too obvious, but we also can't be accused of cheating anybody. Zach will be around the place serving anyway, so it's not like people aren't going to put two and two together."

"Good point," said Brianna. Zach slipped his apron off and slung it over an empty chair.

The couple posed, then posed the other way and then posed closer together. Diane snapped repeatedly.

"Right," said Emma. "Coffee - check. Photos -- check. Am I forgetting anything?"

She said it more to herself than anything but Zach took the opportunity to chime in anyway. "Us?" he said hopefully.

"Sorry," said Emma. "' Us' had to make way for the photos. I'll make it up to you, just not today." Then she thought for a second. "And not tomorrow. I've got Etta's performance to go to. Which reminds me of about ten other things I need to do this afternoon."

At the very least, she took the time to give Zach a long kiss, one passionate enough to get the attention of the assembled ladies of the coffee shop again and then headed back out in to the jungle, dumping her half-finished latte into her love-struck boyfriend's hand before she went.

"Never mind," said Brianna, sympathetically. "You've found yourself a good woman."

"The best," said Zach, somewhat too dreamily. Then he seemed to snap out of it. "Here, before I forget, I've got a few things for the shop."

He started to rummage around his backpack. Finally, he found what he was looking for and handed a wrinkled brown envelope to Brianna. "From Jake," he explained.

She looked at it confused for a moment and then opened it. "Oh, the gym photographs! Great!"

"What's this?" asked Diane, peering over her shoulder.

"Oh, this was going to be one of the items on the agenda for our first meeting. Zach's friend said that if we set up Zach right, he'd help out by recommending the dating service to the guys he trains at the gym. We're doing like a cross-promotion. We advertise the gym and they advertise us. A first step in Operation More Men. And there are a whole bunch of sign-up forms in here as well. Let see... God! Seventeen! He really does believe in doing this in bulk."

"Bulk is right," said Diane taking a photograph out of Brianna's hand. "These guys are buff. I think that photographing the wildlife in its natural habitat was definitely a wise choice."

"What was the other thing?" Brianna asked Zach.

"What?" said Zach absentmindedly, then remembered himself. "Oh, yes, this." He went back into his backpack and pulled out a large box set of books. "Sparks of War," he said almost proudly. "Jake mentioned you were asking about it and I thought it would be good for the cafe to have a copy if you want to attract more young guys."

Brianna took the box off him and turned it over in her hands. "Wait!" she said. "This is new! We only really wanted people to bring in second-hand books. These must have been expensive."

"Oh," said Zach. "It's nothing. I couldn't bear to part with my own copies and I'm always interested in spreading the word about Sparks. It's such a great series."

Brianna turned the box set over in her hands and then started reading off the back. "The first three volumes in the iconic fantasy epic. There are more? Since you've been good enough to gift this to us, I could always go onto Amazon and grab the rest."

"Oh, yeah," said Zach, "that's kind of it for Sparks. Well, not exactly, but it's complicated and it didn't ever quite get finished. Let's just say the first three will be perfectly fine for the cafe."

"Do you mind if break this open?" Brianna asked. Zach smiled. Brianna grabbed a pair of scissors and dug them into the plastic fold at one corner. A moment later and she'd ripped off the wrapping. She slid the first volume of the series out of the lushly illustrated box and inspected the cover. At first glance, it was a portrait of a woman. It was a standard fantasy depiction although more tastefully done than most. The artist had skillfully indicated nakedness and the inevitable enormous breasts without actually showing anything too tacky. Your eye was first drawn to how attractive she was, and only secondly to the fact that she had scales where her hair should be and a forked tongue.

"She's got it going on," said Brianna approvingly. "Tell me the story."

"Don't you want to read it yourself?" asked Zach, his eyes full of a rather adorable betrayal.

"Of course," she said quickly. "I absolutely will when I've got time. But just give me the general outline for now. The elevator pitch if you will."

"Well, it starts with the King who has been recently widowed being driven mad by these sexy dreams. He's convinced that he's being targeted by some kind of enchantment, so he sends his heroes out to kill every female monster in the land."

"The female of the species is more deadlier than the male," commented Brianna. "So, it's a pretty horny book then?"

"Not at all," said Zach quickly. "It's all done in the best possible taste. Nymphs dragging heroes underwater to their deaths, sirens crashing their ships against the rocks, medusa turning people to stone. It's a modern take on classic Greek myth with the odd bits of Jewish folklore thrown in. It was written at the start of the nineteen-sixties so there were limits to what he could put on paper."

"I hadn't realized it was that old."

"Yeah, they modernized the covers for this edition. They are well done, but it doesn't quite fit with the overall vibe."

"So, you said the series wasn't finished. If it was published in the nineteen sixties I'm guessing this guy, Houston Rambold, is dead?"

"Not at all, he's in his nineties now, but he's still keeps on trucking."

"We'll have to invite him to one of our book signings," said Heather.

"Yeah, right!" said Zach with a laugh.   

"So how come the series never got finished? Is it one of those George R. R. Martin-type deals?"

"No, actually the complete opposite. What happened was..." Just as Zach was about to launch into a full explanation, a woman who had been staring at the advert board quite intently for a few minutes came over to the counter.

"Can I help you?" said both Zach and Brianna at the same time.

"Yes, just let me take a look at what you've got in the dessert section. Oh, and, just out of interest, these guys in the photographs on the board over there... they're actually members of the dating service, are they?"

"They are. That is to say, I have their forms just come in right here and am about to go through and process them all. What's it to be?"

"A slice of the blueberry cheesecake and mocha, please," said the woman. "And, um..."

"Would you like a form for the dating service?" asked Brianna.

"I suppose it couldn't hurt to sign up," said the woman casually. "You know, just on the off-chance."

She was practically salivating, although in fairness the cheesecake did look pretty good.   

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Heather and Cassian sat in a late-night ice-cream parlour in the East Village and examined their plunder.

"That is one heck of a lot of books," said Heather.

They'd spent the afternoon raiding the second-hand bookstores. Heather hadn't had much time to explore the city and had been Amazoning all her most recent purchases just through laziness. Cassian, of course, seemed to know every bookstore owner in Manhattan personally and had been directing her hither for classics literature, thither for historical romance and yon for contemporary fiction. Then they'd passed a little art cinema that was showing a season of Fellini's work, and they decided, then and there, to watchEight and a Half.

It was three weeks after they met, and this scavenger hunt was just another watershed in a relationship that was progressing at a very healthy gallop. They had slept together, in the intercourse sense, then, a few days later, they had slept together, in the slumber sense, and then later they had gone on a series of increasingly cultured dates. Today and tomorrow would be the first time that they had devoted a whole weekend to each other. The impromptu movie had been a great demonstration that they had moved from formal dating to just hanging out together.

They both loved books, but they were very different shoppers. Heather just wanted something interesting to read, preferably cheap. As far as the condition went, she liked her used books with all the pages and hopefully not too covered in unidentified stains, but after that, she wasn't fussy. Cassian, on the other hand, was acollector. A book, he said, should be well-loved, but it should be well-looked after as well. He would scan shelves quickly, but when he found something he was interested in, he would pull it down and then forensically examine it to see if it met his standards. The standout moment, as far as grasping his character went, was when he found a copy of Vikram Seth'sA Suitable Boy and announced, with a very refined glee, that as it was in noticeably better condition than the copy he had he would be making the purchase. Heather then made the mistake of commenting that he must really like the book, to which he replied that he'd never gotten round to reading it, but this pristine, almost new copy was just what he needed to motivate himself to finally get round to it.

They were still at that stage of the relationship where she found this adorable, although she couldn't say that her indulgence would continue if the relationship continued on longer term. As it was, she smiled as he put down his spoon and carefully wiped his hands on a napkin before picking up another purchased volume to flick through.

"Indeed," he finally replied. "I shall have to get another bookshelf at this rate."

"I'll have to get a bookshelf," said Heather, without thinking.

"Oh?" said Cassian, suddenly interested.

"Actually, I haven't really gotten my apartment anywhere near straight yet, and a bookshelf is near the top of the list of things I kind of need to get sorted, but can survive without. Just about," she explained hurriedly. "You know how it is."

Cassian raised an eyebrow, and Heather cursed herself. Cassian lived for 'getting things straight'. That things could be allowed to be other than they should be was an anathema to him. She hadn't thought of it until now, but it was probably fortunate that he still hadn't really seen the apartment properly. That first night, they'd been so wrapped up in each other, and then he'd had to leave so quickly that he probably hadn't worked out exactly how much of a dump it really was. And afterward Heather had always angled to stay over at his. Cassian's place was so much nicer than hers, and, by and large, so much closer to anywhere which was fashionable in the city, that it just made sense that it had become their base.

"I thought you'd been in there a good while already. We've been dating for nearly a month, and I thought you'd been in New York for a month or more before that. And you do most of your work at home, don't you?" He wasn't really chiding her; he was just confused.

"I don't know," said Heather, trying to cast her mind round for an excuse better than pure bone-idleness. "It's just that I'm still getting used to life post-divorce. I'm not sure that I've really accepted that that place is my home, and I've been putting off choices about how to decorate. I want to make it mine, but that's kind of hard because I'm not sure who I am anymore and having a home that is all your personality and no one else's is kind of depressing."

"So, where are your books at the moment?"

"They're in boxes," Heather admitted. "I bought two bookshelves from Ikea, but I just haven't put them together. Eric used to do all that stuff, and I'm sure I can figure it out, it just always seemed like the kind of big job that I never quite wanted to do right this minute, you know?"

"I understand. It might be the kind of job that is..." He paused, seemingly choosing his words. "... easier for two people."

Heather had been sure he was about to say some variation of 'man's work'. She supposed it was positive that he hadn't. Still, she found it hard to envision him as a handyman. She was sure he'd never set foot in an IKEA unless his company had helped to build one.

"I'd really appreciate the assistance. Although, is half ten at night the time we want to be starting a project like that?"

"And once we've put it together," Cassian said, smiling and avoiding her attempt at dissuasion, "I can help you put all your books on it."

There was something about the way he said that. Something that suggested there was nothing in life happier than arranging a set of well-curated books into their proper place on a shelf. Her books. All of them. Not restricted to the highlights, not just the essential classics, not only the intellectual cream, not merely the sophisticated deep-cuts. Everything.

Including...

No, it was fine. There was one saucy volume on her bedside table, but she'd boxed up her library by genre.   Everything else overtly erotic was packed in that box she'd gotten from her neighbour, the one that had been filled with dog biscuits. Give her thirty seconds alone the minute they stepped foot in the apartment, and she could grab it and stuff it at the back of her wardrobe. It'd be fine.

Then she'd just have to suffer Cassian's appraisal of her common-or-garden taste. But her taste was fine. Classy, even. They had already gelled over a great number of cultural classics.

No, it would, in fact, be completely fine. She was worrying unnecessarily.

A short taxi ride after they'd finished their evening treat, and then they were standing in front of Heather's apartment door. She fumbled around for her key and eventually got it open.

"Well, here we are!" she said, taking a deep breath for Cassian's first step down into her social class.

"Er, Cassian...?"

His attention was somewhere else - across the hall. "Excuse me," he said vaguely. He wandered over to the emergency cabinet, in which there was a long, rolled-up hose and a fire blanket.

"No axe," he said, muttering to himself.

"Oh, yeah, I don't think they're required to have them anymore," said Heather. "The chance of someone going psycho with one being way higher than the chance of it actually saving anyone's life."

Cassian didn't immediately say anything. He appeared to be tutting under his breath. He wandered over to the window in the shared landing, opened it and stuck his head out.

"Laundry on the fire escape," he said.

"It's just a few bras and panties," said Heather. "It's nothing that would get in anyone's way."

"Well, it's just a few bras and panties tonight," said Cassian, "but who knows what it might be tomorrow night when there might actually be a fire? God forbid!" He paused for a second. "Sorry," he said. "I come from a family who make their money from construction. I have these kinds of concerns drilled into me from a young age. I have difficulty switching it off."

Heather was finally able to guide Cassian into her tiny apartment and then firmly into the kitchen area. She filled up the kettle and set it boiling.

"I'm sorry. I'm going to be very rude," she said. "Would you mind sorting the coffee out yourself while I just go and... um... attend to something?"

"Not a bit of it," Cassian replied. "I'm sorry. Maybe my coming round unarranged is an imposition."

"No, not at all..." Heather hesitated. "Just... I'll be right back."

She rushed from the kitchen across the living room and into her bedroom. The boxes of books were piled up across and on top of the wardrobe. She grabbed the box with the dog biscuits on the side and bundled it into the back of the wardrobe. Then she stuffed the book she was currently reading inside a convenient underwear drawer. There, easy! She even had enough time to go over to her dresser and check her makeup in the mirror. In less than one minute, she was back in the kitchen. The kettle hadn't even begun to whistle.

If Cassian had objections to the brand of coffee she bought or the mug she served it in, he kept them to himself. Instead, cup in hand, he wandered into the living room.

"Are the shelves going in here or in the bedroom?"

"In the bedroom," Heather said. "It may sound weird, but I like to keep my books close by."

"I can understand that," Cassian acknowledged. "Nevertheless, it's probably best to assemble them in here and then move them through. Far more space here. Assuming they're not too tall. Do you want to show me where they are?"

Heather opened a storage cupboard and together they manhandled two identical flat-pack wardrobes into the middle of the living room.

"Now," said Cassian, "should we have some music to work by?"

"Oh, absolutely," said Heather. "Except, well, my CDs are still in boxes as well."

"CDs?" Cassian smiled. "Now, who was mocking me last week for being old-fashioned? It's okay, I have a selection on my phone." He inspected the speakers sitting on the windowsill and then connected them via the headphone jack. "Now, what do you fancy?"

"Let me guess," said Heather. "You have exclusively classical music on your phone."

"Oh, no," said Cassian, "I've also got lots of baroque and some of the less egotistic romantic composers as well."

"No Mahler, then?" Heather asked with a weak smile.

"Oh heavens, no!" Cassian frowned. "All that Romantic stuff is far too overblown for me. Why even Beethoven is a bit... well, you know." Heather was pretty sure her face said clearly that she didn't know. Cassian pressed on. "We won't need anything quite the length of a Mahler symphony anyway. Thank God! Why, if we put our heads together, it should barely take a brisk Vivaldi concerto."

"Of which you have everyone he ever wrote just a button press away," said Heather.

"Modern technology is wonderful, isn't it?" Cassian smiled again. "But you know, I can't help but feel like you didn't quite pick up on my sarcasm earlier, given how you keep stereotyping me. Actually, I have a wide range of musical tastes, not just art music, but jazz, folk, even the better sort of pop music."

"Oh, really," said Heather with a playful smirk. "And what exactly counts as the better sort of pop music? In your view?"

"Well, lots, but I'm particularly partial to a lot of eighties early synthesiser stuff. The Eurythmics, Thomas Dolby, Huey Lewis..."

"Huey Lewis! My, I hadn't realised just how hardcore you are!"

"Yes, Huey Lewis," Cassian said. "Even though The News have become something of a joke with the release of American Psycho, their music is a particularly adroit mixing of smart lyrics and upbeat tunefulness. And I defy anyone not to start dancing when 'The Power of Love' starts playing loud."

"Well, that sounds like my choice then," said Heather.

Cassian did dance, although only once he had safely deposited every screw provided into an appropriate saucer. Together, and even with the occasional gyrating interlude, they made short work of the bookshelf. Cassian picked each one up and arranged them against the back of her bedroom wall.

"Now, the fun stuff," he said. "The books..."

"Here," said Heather, "Let's start with this one." She grabbed a pair of scissors and split the tape holding the cardboard box shut.

"Let's see," said Cassian. "Austen. Dickens. Hardy. The Brontes... Hmm, no Hugo or Tolstoy?"

"That's just British literature," she said quickly. "That cardboard box over there is American, and behind it, I have mixed European."

"Ah, a woman with a system. It warms my heart," observed Cassian.

They did those three first. Heather had thought it would be a nicely uncontroversial start. There was one dicey moment when they clashed over which Dickens' books were classics and which were too long and preachy for their own good. Still, eventually, everything from the first three boxes ended up on the bottom three shelves of the first bookcase.

"Here," said Heather, handing Cassian the scissors. "I'll get us some more wine. You get the next one open. You'll like it. I call that one 'Books that Prestigious Literature Prizes Lied to Me About'. No, not the one with the washing powder on the side. The kitty litter one."

"Right," said Cassian, starting to attack the tape with gusto. Heather left, got another bottle of wine from the fridge and struggled with the corkscrew. As she walked back, her blood froze.

Cassian had picked up a volume out of the box. It had a pitch-black cover with a woman's stocking, and heeled leg stretching across a definitely male torso that was only half-wearing an expensive business suit and had a tie undone and hanging around its neck.

"What's this?" asked Cassian, confused. "He's the Boss?" He opened up the thick volume and scanned a few pages in the middle. "Oh my! He certainly is!"

"Hey!" said Heather, trying to grab it from him. He held it playfully out of reach for a second before yielding to her.

"Either the Nobel Prize for Literature has seriously gone downhill recently, or perhaps this is the wrong box?" Cassian said.

Heather gave a shy little laugh.

It had come back to her seconds after seeing the book. She'd started by putting all the pretentious crap she'd been tricked into buying over the years in the kitty litter box as her own personal joke, but then her collection of, ahem, romance stories had proven rather too big for the dog biscuit box. She'd swapped them right at the last minute before the moving van had arrived.

"Look," said Cassian, "I'm sorry. I feel like I crossed a line just now. Would you like me to tape it up again?"

"Thanks," said Heather. "I'm not sure I've actually got any tape, though. There's a lot of household stuff that I just haven't gotten around to getting yet. Not until I need it. Just leave the box there for the moment."

"Sure," said Cassian. "Shall we do the actual prize-winning box now?"

Heather shrugged, went over to her closet and pulled the box down from its hiding place.

"Sorry," Cassian apologised again.

A lot of the joy seemed to have gone from the evening. Cassian tried to get another argument started about V. S. Naipaul, but it fizzled out almost immediately.

"Look," he said finally. "You won't like this, but there's nothing to be ashamed of. Not everything we read has to have extreme literary merit, and I don't want you to think you have to censor yourself into only ever talking about the good stuff. The reason why I wanted to help you with your book collection is because I want to know who you are. There's no point in me telling you how much I love Mozart or the Beatles -- everyone loves them and rightly so, but it doesn't tell us anything particularly revelatory about each other. It's the quirky, flawed stuff that we love anyway that is what I'm really interested in. A love of Saint-Saens or Huey Lewis. The stuff we love not because we should, not because it's unarguable, but because we just do. And I think that what's in that box over there will tell me far more about you than me asking who your favourite Bennett sister is or whether you cried at the end of Charlotte's Web as a child."

Heather didn't say anything but turned a little redder.

"I'm not going to push, but... we are in a relationship, a romantic one and a sexual one, and, if those books are part of how you want romance and... well if they represent certain fantasies, it's probably good for me to know about them in the long run. I don't want you rushing round piling them at the back of the closet every time I come round. Show me, and I promise I won't make fun of you."

Heather still hadn't said anything.

"Not too much, at least," Cassian added.

Heather suddenly burst out laughing. "Fine. Fine," she said. "They're probably not nearly as bad as you're imagining now, anyway."

She went back and got the box.

She closed her eyes, dug a hand in, pulled out a book and then opened them out again. "Right, for starters, we haveHostile Takeover." She flipped the book over and read from the back. "When Annabel Lovelace inherits her father's failing business, she has to fight to keep it safe against predatory investor Trenton Reed. But it's not long before Trenton has more than just her financial assets in his sights."

"Any good?" asked Cassian.

Heather laughed. "You're asking the wrong question. The right question is 'Which pages are any good?'"

Cassian reached over and took the volume from her. "And which pages are good?"

"It's chapter seven, I think," she said.

Cassian opened and flicked through the volume, fast at first, and then slower when he found the right place. "Right," he said, "that is certainly something we can do!"

"We can?" asked Heather in surprise.

"I mean, probably not in my actual boardroom and not ten minutes before the deal of the century takes place, but I've got a pretty big desk in my office at home...," Cassian laughed. "My turn."

He dug a hand in. "Executive Decisions. When part-time secretary, Faith Appleby overhears the details of a secret business deal in a boardroom she should never have been in, she becomes the target of the attentions of the handsome but ruthless Gordon Power, who offers her everything in return for her silence. Pages?"

"None," said Heather. "Alas, Gordon is the wrong kind of prick."

"And what is the right kind?" Cassian asked.

"Next!" called Heather, ignoring the question and picking out another volume. "Ooh, A Very Personal Improvement Plan. A classic."

She tossed it to Cassian. He turned the cover over. "Is it me or does this mark a certain step up in intensity?" he asked. "Our businessman here is described not just as ruthless or predatory, but actually sadistic?"

"It's a little further away from the purely romantic end of the spectrum, yes," said Heather, blushing.

"But I do see a theme emerging," said Cassian.

"What's that?" asked Heather.

"Don't play innocent." Cassian smiled.

"They're not all business-themed if that's what you are suggesting," said Heather. Cassian's expression told her that it was. She started to root around the box. "Um, I know there's one here somewhere."

She tossed another volume out at him.

"Crescendo." He scanned the blurb. "So, a world-renowned conductor and the meek freshly graduated third violinist. Technically, you win, but it's not hugely different, is it? Is this one a favourite?"

"Not particularly," admitted Heather. She rooted some more and found another, considerably older book. It had a barbarian standing proud on the cover and a girl in chains kneeling at his feet.

"Now, here's one I had heard of. Slave Girl of Gor! Considered a classic by some," Cassian smiled.

"My brother got this one during his fantasy phase. I'm not sure he was quite ready for it at the time. I liberated it without telling him one day, and he never suspected that it was me. I'm pretty sure that the unsolved theft marked the start of the end of his Dungeons and Dragons group, but I always kept shtum"

"So, barbarians, then?"

Heather sighed. "No, I quickly realised that while there were a lot of elements I liked in it, especially some of the more 'manly' stuff, I like my barbarians showered, shaved and wearing an expensive suit. Armani for preference."

"So I might be jumping ahead and spoiling the surprise here," said Cassian, "but do any of these books involve a woman who is higher up on the org chart than the man she sleeps with?"

Heather blushed again. "No, I guess probably not."

Cassian paused. "This is a dangerous question that you don't have to answer. You left your husband because he cheated on you?"

"Yes," said Heather very, very slowly.

"With his secretary?"

"Yes," said Heather even slower.

"And you yourself have never really worked in a corporate office?"

"I see what you're implying," said Heather quickly. "But, honestly, that's just a coincidence. I've enjoyed this kind of... literature long before we broke up. Since..." She stopped.

"Since what?" asked Cassian innocently.

"Alright, don't laugh," said Heather. "Since this..."

She went back into the box and pulled out a volume that clearly wasn't so much well-loved as it was cherished and not so much well-looked-after as completely beaten to death.

"Ah," said Cassian, taking it off her and turning it round in his hands, "a seminal, nay, foundational work in the genre."

"You promised you wouldn't mock!" cried Heather.

"No," said Cassian, raising his hands. "I'm not. And I shouldn't, since I've never actually readFifty Shades of Grey. Maybe it isn't as bad as it's reputed to be."

"No," said Heather with a sigh. "It is! It really is! It's just like a McDonald's hamburger. You know it's terrible for you, but it just hits the spot sometimes."

"Say no more," said Cassian. He flicked through the pages of the book, several of which fell out. He gingerly put them back in, then put the book down on the shelf as if he were handling hazardous waste.

"Next," he said and pulled out another book without waiting. He turned it round and round in his hands. "Oh, is this the sequel? No, maybe not. It's just another copy of the first one, isn't it?"

"Yeah," blushed Heather, "well, the first copy I had got pretty banged up, as you just saw. I was carrying it around my handbag for a few weeks while I was reading it, and I hate it when books start to fall apart."

"I see," Cassian deposited the second copy next to the first. "That's not a problem, but there's no way that counts as my pick." He pulled another book from the pile. "And again!" he exclaimed.

Heather blushed. "Just when it was really blowing up, everyone was talking about it, so I got a copy for my friend Sophie to borrow. She wasn't really into it, so she gave it straight back."

"You didn't just lend her your copy? The undamaged version, I mean."

"I was kind of still using it," said Heather. "This was at the very height of Greymania"

"Moving swiftly on," said Cassian. He winced at the next selection. "This is getting ridiculous."

"That was the movie tie-in edition," Heather explained. "I really just got it for the cover with Jamie Dornan on it. So hot." She mimicked fanning herself.

Cassian's hand hovered over the open box. "Any more?"

Heather darted in front of him and rummaged. "Only this one. The tenth-anniversary edition. Which, before you say anything, was a gift from my sister because me having a million copies of Fifty Shades was already a running joke with her. Oh, and the five sequels, of course. She kept buying me those even when it was clear that E. L. James wasn't ever getting her lightning back in her bottle."

"Of course," said Cassian. "I suppose I really have to read it now. I'm sure I'll find a lot of inspiration in it."

"Okay, take one," said Heather and she reached down to pick up a copy to give to him. Her hand hesitated over which one long enough that they both broke into laughter. She then scooped up what had been Sophie's copy and handed it over.   Cassian accepted it, holding it up as a little salute of thanks before depositing it on the bedside table. As he did so, his eyes went to the clock.

"Gosh, it's two o'clock!" he said. He scanned the room for how many unopened boxes were left.

"Perhaps we could leave the rest to the morning. I'm having fun, but I doubt we'll top that last box any time soon." He came and held her. "And it seems like the perfect moment to segue into our own brand of eroticism"

By way of reply, Heather leaned up and kissed him. At the same time, his hand came down and planted itself firmly on her behind. Cassian, she'd quickly discovered, was an ass man. This manifested in two ways. The first was innocent enough. A lot of his manly touching seemed to hone in on her derrière, leaving her breasts or legs relatively ignored. At first, she'd wondered if there was something wrong with her rest of her - were her breasts sagging too much these days? But she'd come to realise it was just how he was built.

Their lips separated, and she found him looking intensely into her eyes. Cassian was not an openly lustful man. He was sexually very powerful, but his eyes usually betrayed little. This time, however, he seemed to be actively calculating.

Then, without any change in expression, he moved his hand back and clapped his palm over her ass in one swift move. She yelped with the shock of it. It wasn't that she hadn't been half expecting it. It was just that, when it came, Cassian's gaze hadn't even wavered.

That was the other the other aspect of his ass obsession - the spanking. It couldn't be called a fetish. It wasn't even its own separate activity. It was just, sometimes during kissing or foreplay or sex, if the position was right, he'd give her a firm slap on her bottom. Even that first night, he hadn't been able to stop himself, hadn't even bothered to ask. Which was just as well, because, if he had, she would have been duty-bound to say no. As it was, though, she hadn't objected. She even liked it. Neither of them had said anything about it. The orgasm she had experienced that first night after he set about her ass had kind of been its own green light.

The slap just now was different, though, not physically but in terms of intent. He hadn't been getting off on it. He was studying her, daring her this time to respond. "You like being spanked," he said eventually.

"I do," Heather replied.

"That wasn't actually a question," he said. There was steel in his eyes for a moment, but it faded just as quickly as it had appeared. "I feel like I've learned a lot about you tonight, but I haven't processed any of it yet. One thing you've said that got me thinking is about 'the wrong kind of prick'. I think my goal is going to have to be to avoid being the wrong kind of prick, to be the right kind of prick in controlled and agreed roleplay and to make sure I'm never any kind of prick in our romantic life together. Does that sound like a plan?"

"I guess," said Heather. Then she realised that being wishy-washy right now would only see her chance of getting what she actually wanted from this relationship slip out of her fingers. "That actually sounds great!"

"So, the rub is going to be finding that line between good prick and bad prick, isn't it?"

Heather found her hand reaching towards his trousers in answer. He gently swatted it away.

"It's okay," he said. "This sort of thing is not just about sex. Roleplaying, domination, it can really be about forming a deep spiritual bond with someone. Honestly, if I just wanted sex, it's no problem. I'm rich. If I see a girl I like, I just start kissing her. I'm like a magnet. I don't even wait. And when you're as rich as I am, most women will just let you do it. You find you can do anything. I just grab them by the pussy. They love it..."

Heather took a step back. "Don't make me vomit," she said.

"See," said Cassian with a smile. "A nice easy one for the bad prick column to get us started. But I'm also interested in exactly what makes it so bad. After all, your books, they have confident men, conspicuous displays of wealth, and blurred consent. No? Let's keep going. Let me see. Suck my cock."

"What?" asked Heather, taken aback. "For real?"

"Yes, I'd like you to get on your knees and suck my cock. Now please."

"And you expect me to do it? Just like that?" she said. She was trying to sound indignant, but she also couldn't help laughing.

"I don't know what I expect. I'm seeing your reaction to direct commands."

"Well, if you're a very good boy, I'll see what I can do for you later," shrugged Heather.

"So, in other words, you might end up doing what you were going to do anyway since you've performed oral sex on me at each of our last three evenings together, but you are going to refuse a command out of principle. So far, so not very kinky. I think you need to be punished."

"For what?" said Heather. "For having a sense of my own self-worth?"

Cassian smiled. "For what?" he mused. "For what indeed. Does it even matter what the punishment is actually for? For refusing a direct order. For being a bad girl who reads dirty little books. For your truly dreadful coffee. Take your pick and then bend over that table, so we can set things right."

"And if I don't?" asked Heather. "What then?"

Cassian considered. "Oh, I can't force you, and I won't force myself on you. The consequence of refusing my request is simply this: our evening together will be over."

"What?" cried Heather. "You're not saying you would leave?"

"I'm saying exactly that," said Cassian. "Just this evening, mind you. I will call at a respectable time, mid-morning tomorrow, and I will invite you somewhere. We'll have a nice romantic time together, assuming you accept my invitation, and I'll forget I ever saw your special book collection."

"This was supposed to be our weekend together!" Heather cried. As it came out, she cursed herself for sounding so desperate.

"I will stay if and only if you bend over and let me spank you," Cassian said firmly. "Now, let's be clear. You are a woman who spent actual dollars for a book calledSpanking the Competition, so I don't feel I'm too far out of line here. You know, most young boys dream of being the hero and killing the dragon, but then if they really came face to face with a giant fire-breathing lizard out in Times Square, they'd wet themselves. I guess what I'm trying to find out is if all this kinky stuff is just fantasy or if it's actual, unrealised desire. Part of that fantasy/desire spectrum is clearly wanting a man who acts like a certain type of prick. So what do you truly want?"

"Umm," said Heather.

"Good night. Thank you for a lovely and fun evening." Cassian bent down, gave her a chaste peck on the cheek and then turned to leave.

"Okay," said Heather, starting to follow after him.

"Okay?" asked Cassian.

"Okay. Five spanks. Just to try."

"No," said Cassian. "However many spanks I decide, and because you deserve it."

"Okay... I guess... okay," said Heather, now wilting completely. She turned to the dresser, bending over and raising her posterior high up. She felt Cassian's hand there rubbing her up and down.

"Higher," he ordered.

She tried to get her arse even further up in the air without much success.

"Right," said Cassian. "Your safeword is 'incolumitas.'"

"Inco..." Heather faltered.

"Incolumitas. It means 'safety' in Latin," Cassian explained.

"Right, incolumitas," repeated Heather.

"If it gets too much, just say the safeword and I'll stop," said Cassian.

"And you'll leave?" asked Heather.

Cassian didn't reply. Instead, he just asked, "Ready?"

Heather had dreamed about this moment for years. Masturbated about it. Now it was here, she didn't feel excited. She felt scared, just like he'd predicted. Things had seemed to be going so well with Cassian. He had been nice, cultured, respectful. Now, suddenly, he wasn't. He was a prick who was giving her a safeword she couldn't even pronounce. And she was suddenly afraid that she was never getting the original Cassian back.

Still, she also couldn't bear the thought of him just walking out that door. He said that tomorrow everything would be forgotten. She couldn't believe that. Tonight would clearly be the beginning of the end.

"Ready," she said.

"One." Cassian brought his hand down on her backside. It was a firm slap that made a noise, but for all that, it wasn't actually particularly hard, nor was it particularly painful. "Ow," she said, but mostly because she thought it would be what he expected.

"Do you want to use the safeword?" Cassian asked.

"No," she said. "It's okay."

"Right," he said. "You can stand up now."

"What?" said Heather, confused.

"Your punishment is over," Cassian explained. "You can stand up."

"But..."

"I said you would take as many spankings as I decided, and the number I decided was one. Your coffee isn't actually that bad, and I quite like your mucky literature. Please stand up."

Heather stood up. "Prick," she muttered under her breath. Cassian must have heard, but he ignored it.

"I think that should be sufficient to correct your errant behaviour," said Cassian. "But there's only one way to find out, so I'll tell you again -- suck my cock."

Heather considered her options. She could refuse and have him spank her again. That is what some of the 'brattier' heroines in her books would do. She'd been scared just now, but then in the stories, the ladies always started off scared. And a one-spank punishment was ludicrous. She couldn't quite place the reason for his heel-turn just now. Had he realised that he had gone too far, or was he playing some kind of mind game? If it was the former, his save hadn't particularly worked. He'd have been better just giving her ten of his best and calling it a day. At least that way, she'd have a much better idea of if she actually liked it. She was unsettled.

She could suck his cock. As he'd rightly pointed out, that was something that was always likely going to have happened anyway. It wasn't, from a physical point of view, anything that bad, but the lack of consent... that made it morally wrong.

Was there a third way? She desperately needed one.   

"This is a roleplay?" Heather asked, clutching at the only straw she could find.

"Yes," said Cassian.

"So, the safeword is still in effect?"

"Yes," said Cassian. "I suppose it would be."

"If this is a roleplay, like in my books, we should have names, shouldn't we?"

"We're not roleplaying as ourselves?" said Cassian. "I suppose that would be boring."

"I will not suck your cock," announced Heather. "Davina Winterbottom, small town girl come to the big city in search of secretarial work, will suck the cock of Brent Hardinger, CEO of New York's largest law firm."

"This is..." Cassian floundered a little bit. "That is acceptable."

Davina dropped to her knees. She quite enjoyed sucking her boss off. She'd wanted to do it ever since that very first interview. He was so urbane and worldly. She didn't even mind when he came without warning in the back of her throat.

And afterwards, Cassian had come back to Heather. There's been a moment, not instantly after his orgasm, but about two minutes later after she'd gotten back on her feet and after they'd cleaned up when he'd said "Okay, enough, let's stop," and from that moment on he'd been the same great guy he'd always been.

It was late, they were both tired, especially him post-orgasm, but he snuggled up to her in bed and put his arms around her, and as she drifted off to sleep, she felt an immense sensation of safety again. Incolumitas, she thought to herself.

Given the night they'd had, she should have slept soundly, not waking until an indecent hour, but instead, she found herself groggily coming to when it was still dark. She realised immediately that the reason she had woken was precisely because that feeling of safety was gone. Cassian was not holding her. It took her a second, but she confirmed he was not even in the bed. She felt panic rising. She looked over to her alarm clock, and it said it was nearly a quarter past four. She turned over one more time to make sure absolutely sure the other side really was empty and then sat up.

Cassian was standing naked on a chair in the middle of the room, reaching one arm up to the ceiling.

"What are you doing?" she asked, stifling a yawn as she spoke. It took her eyes and brain a moment to adjust, but then she was able to supply her own answer.

He was checking the fire alarm.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Brianna lay in bed with her reading glasses on, a stack of papers resting against her knees. Her husband Charles finished brushing his teeth and came to join her in bed.

"You're a well-read man," she told him. "Literate, I could say. Can I ask you a question? Or rather a series of questions."

"Shoot," said Charles, picking up his own book from the bedside table.

"Well, firstly, what do you understand by the word 'fuckboy'?" Brianna asked.

Charles considered for a moment. "Not a word I'm terribly familiar with, but clearly a portmanteau whose meaning can be easily derived from its two constituents - 'fuck' and 'boy' - thus a boy for fucking, one presumes?"

"That was my presumption as well," said Brianna.

"Is the second question going to be trickier?" asked Charles.

"Maybe," said Brianna. "What, if any, is the difference between the word 'fuckboy' spelt with a 'y' and the word 'fuckboi' spelt with an 'i'?"

Charles again considered, this time for considerably longer. "That is considerably less transparent, isn't it? I often find," he said eventually, "that when faced with these kinds of lexical uncertainties, it's often best to look at the words in the context you encountered them in."

Brianna handed over one of the dating forms from her stack.

Charles took his reading glasses from the table and, peering at the form, read aloud "What are you looking for? There are no wrong answers. Answer: a fuckboy. Well, I would say the context pretty much matches with my own initial rather reductive reading. And the variant spelling? Is that equally brief?"

"It is not," said Brianna handing over another form. Charles skimmed the text which spilled out into the margins from an already generous box.

"Oh my, this is considerably more effusive, isn't it? While your first client achieved clarity through simplicity, your second has achieved the same through exhaustiveness. Both are to be congratulated. I guess the real question is do you actually have a fuckboy or indeed a fuckbo-ee for either of them?"

"I have a multitude," replied Brianna, picking up a form from a different pile, this one with photographs.

"Timothee Charlamet eat your heart out," said Charles giving the photograph an appreciative whistle.

"Or alternatively..." Brianna handed over yet another piece of paper.

"Arnold Schwarzenegger eat your heart out," said Charles. "Gyms are really booming with the younger generation, aren't they?"

"So you can see my dilemma," complained Brianna. "Of course, these are my premium fuckboys. I was wondering if I could possibly fob some of the thirstier ladies off with a more entry-level garcon du baisier. An example..."

A fourth bit of paper crossed the bed.

"Nobody eat your heart out," said Charles. "Let's see. What are you looking for? There are no wrong answers. Answer: A young hot MILF, preferably with no kids. Well, strictly speaking, neither of the two women specified intelligence as a prerequisite..."

"They didn't," said Brianna and then sighed. "You know, when I set up Coffee Pages dating, this really wasn't what I was aiming for,"

"And yet for your first two matches, you set up two women - elegant yes, refined yes, but of a certain vintage and you set them up with two.. now let's see, what is le mot juste, ah yes, you set them up with two young fuckboys, didn't you?. And then you pinned the photos of the happy cougar holding her catch of the day on a big board under the words 'Success Stories' for the whole milfing world to see. I can't help but feel that you are reaping what you sowed."

"This has gotten out of hand," said Brianna. "You know, I matched one of our clients with one of Jake's gym rats last week and he actually had the gall to ask the lady for money to sleep with her!"

"He didn't!" cried Charles in genuine shock.

"He did. Two hundred dollars! And he expected her to give him a blowjob first!"

"The gall of it!" replied Charles. "I'm guessing she said no and reported him to you?"

"Actually," said Brianna, "the customer was Diane. She offered him two thousand dollars if she could do whatever she pleased to him for the next hour."

"And?" asked Charles.

"Well, she didn't say what it was that actually pleased her, but she did say he lasted three minutes before he gave the money back and fled in terror."

"That's nice," said Charles. "But it's not like Jake to slip up like that. He's usually so good at vetting for scumbags."

"That's the thing," said Brianna. "We've been working on a 'Tell 'em Jake sent you' basis and I took that on faith. When I got back to Jake about this guy he recognized the guy's photo immediately, if not the name he gave me, and said there would be no way in a hundred years he'd have put his name forward. Word is getting around about this place and not in a good way."

"What to do?" mused Charles.

"Indeed, what to do​?" echoed Brianna. Just then her phone pinged. She scanned the message.

"That's a pity," she informed Charles.

"What is?" he asked.

"I asked Diane to network with her publishing contacts to see if there was any way we could get that author Zach likes to do a guest reading for us. She's just written back saying there's not a snowball's chance in hell he'd come and we wouldn't want to host him if we did. She is suggesting a whole bunch of other more available writers. None of which I've actually heard of and I pride myself on having heard of everyone."

"Oh well," said Charles. "Nothing wrong with shooting for the moon. That's what I love about you after all"

"Yeah, I'll just check my e-mail and we can turn in for the night."

Brianna tapped a few buttons on her phone. "Oh!" she said rather suddenly.

"What?" asked Charles.

"Well, after I asked Diane, I had another look at those books and I did find an e-mail address for the author at the back, so I sent off a quick invite. Nothing I thought would get past an agent. He's just written back to me saying he'd be delighted to come next Wednesday."

"That's great news! Just goes to show, sometimes shooting for the moon bags you the moon."

"Yeah," said Brianna. "I wonder what Diane meant by 'we wouldn't want to host him if he did say yes?'"

A few quick text message questions soon became shared links which then turned into a video call.

Turning in for the night quickly became staying up until 3am and panicking.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

There were times when the planets aligned. It wasn't that uncommon for four or five planets to be visible in the night sky at the same time, but all seven? That was special and you waited years between occurrences.

Similarly for Emma, an evening when all four children were occupied and she had her own completely free time was a very rare and special thing indeed and it needed to be treasured.   

Callia was out at a movie with her friend Lexie. It sounded like a trip to the ice cream parlour was on the cards afterwards as well. Etta was going to her first sleepover at Daisy's. Jonas' friend Robert had gotten a new telescope that he was keen to show it off and tonight was a clear night. Caleb was still at the school, the chess club making final and extensive preparations for the city-wide tournament next week. There had been a lot of ferrying to and fro and there would be a lot of collecting in a few hours. But, astonishingly, and without having really tried, she had a few luxurious hours from seven till ten, maybe eleven at a push, all to herself.

And not just to herself. With Zach as well.

She could smell the food as soon as she entered her apartment. Whatever it was was rich and meaty and alcohol was probably involved in its preparation somewhere. As she came into the kitchen, Zach was up on a chair, putting the last of what had clearly been a very extensive shop into the cupboards.

"I got everything you wanted," he announced proudly. "I also picked up a few more items for tonight, just to make it extra special."

Emma wandered over to the counter, interested in Zach's idea of special. She instantly found herself smiling. There was a bottle of wine, scented candles, bubble bath, Belgian chocolates, fresh strawberries, a tub of expensive ice cream and a single red rose.

It was funny because, thoughtful as it all was, Emma couldn't help feel that it was all just camouflage for the one item Zach really wanted to push. Tucked discretely and casually in the middle of the collection was a set of twelve, supposedly 'elite' standard, condoms.

They had condoms. After their initial under-prepared first date, Zach had never made the same mistake again and had proudly presented a perfectly serviceable pack of three at a not entirely inappropriate stage of date number two.

Somehow, on the nine separate occasions they had spent time together since, they had never quite gotten around to using them. Well, last Wednesday, Emma had gotten as far as putting one on Zach, and his excitement had been palpable, but then she'd tied, teased and touched so much that he'd filled it without getting it anywhere near her devirginization area. There were definitely still two prophylactics left in the box, so buying a whole new and much bigger box was far more of a nudge than a precaution.

She had run out of fingers to count how many times she'd made Zach cum over the past month and he worked twice as hard on her. The virginity thing though was kind of getting weird. She couldn't shake the feeling that, if they did it, the relationship would somehow become less unique. They'd just be an ordinary couple going at it. As things were, she was constantly having to find new and exciting things to do in bed. She stayed clothed and he got naked. He got blindfolded and she recorded everything. Her backside never left her comfy chair and his knees never left the floor. Every encounter was a game and the best thing of all was she got to write the rules and, indeed, rewrite them on the fly as her fancy took her.

It wasn't that she didn't want to have sex with him. Well, not exactly. But somehow, given the choice, on any given evening she found she wanted to look at her delicious slice of cherry cake more than she wanted to eat it.

She was aware that this was driving Zach wild in both senses of the word. She was sure when the relationship finally ended, Zach would go back into the world with a cornucopia of sexually deviant experiences that would serve him well with women for decades of his life. On the other hand, he was also clearly chomping at the bit to actually 'lose it.'

Although, at the same time, he wasn't, was he? Imagine any other guy having their penis out on nine separate days, not getting 'any' and neverhteless remaining as restrained as Zach was. He was still the perfect gentleman.

No, he was the perfect submissive.

That, she couldn't help but feel was the problem right there. They said that the habits and roles in the first few weeks of a relationship got solidified forever. Between the age gap and the time pressure and the fact that Zach had a lot of rather special personality traits, the relationship was growing out all wrong. For all that it was great, it was also kind of weirdly misshapen.

Something needed to be done about it. Big decisions needed to be made.

But not tonight. She was far too tired and tonight was her special night.

Zach finished arranging the cupboard to his satisfaction and climbed down off the chair. He came over and gave her a great big hug. "Right," he said, "we've got the whole evening to ourselves. What do you want to do tonight?"

There were a million and one answers she could give to that question and still have a good time. Some simple variation of "I want to spend it with you," would probably be the words Zach deserved. That would be the nice thing to say. He'd probably also quite like "I want you to throw me on the bed and ravish me repeatedly, you stallion!" Instead, and without quite knowing why, she made it about her. Again.

"I want to be treated like a queen," she said.

Zach smiled though perhaps not as broadly as he might. "Of course, your Majesty!" he replied.

"Sorry," she found herself saying. "I've had one hell of a week. I'm rushed off my feet. I know I should do more with you, but I'm so stressed and tired what with everything, that when I have a few hours I just want to collapse. It might be selfish, but I just want to be pampered this evening."

"I am and shall always be Queen Emma's loyal servant." Zach gave a particularly medieval bow.

Emma paused. "That doesn't sound right. Has there ever been a queen called Emma, I wonder? They're usually all called things like Catherine or Elizabeth."

Zach went from his usual 'nerd in the presence of a woman' bearing to his 'nerd with his teeth in an obscure topic' bearing in the space of a millisecond. "There was a Queen Emma actually. Married to two kings. The first was Ethelred -- he of being unready fame."

"Unready for what?" Emma asked.

"Vikings mostly."

"Fair enough," said Emma. "They did tend to turn up at some inopportune moments."

"Queen Emma was decidedly more ready though. She married into those self-same Vikings as soon as her perpetually under-prepared husband popped off."

"The old 'if you can't beat them, join them' strategy."

"Her second husband was King Canute - he of holding back the waves fame. She then became the mother of Edward the Confessor"

"Of confessing stuff fame," added Emma glad to be able to contribute something finally. "Honestly, how do you remember all these facts?"

"I just like history," said Zach with a shrug.

"And engineering, science, maths, literature, geography, languages and art apparently," said Emma. Somehow Zach seemed to have crammed twice as much knowledge into himself as Emma had in about twice as long of a lifetime. "Anyway," she sniffed wanting to regain control of the conversation, "this Queen Emma seems unduly defined by her male relatives. I'm feeling like a queen in my own right. Besides I definitely want a bath, and I'm guessing the 11th century was a bit early for proper facilities, even for a queen."

Zach was off again. "Well, there were always the Roman baths. For actual plumbing, you have to wait for Henry VIII to install a full heating system and tub into Anne Boleyn's ancestral home of Beaulieu in around 1525ish."

"Now you are just showing off," said Emma.

"Sorry," said Zach chastened. "I caught the end of The Other Boleyn Girl on TV while I was cooking last week and then, whenever I watch a historical drama, I always check out what part of the history they got right and which they alter for dramatic purposes. I hate it when they do that. And that film is a great example of particularly bad history. About the only thing they got factually right is that if a gentleman has the good fortune of having to choose between Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman, the answer is of course both, but Johansson first."

"Be that as it may," said Emma. "I think it should be very clear that decapitated queens aren't going to cut it as role models for this evening. I don't suppose the bath was inherited by Elizabeth the First was it by any chance. Now she was a proper queen."

"She might have been proper, but barely bathed at all, apparently. There was a belief that unnecessary sweat led to disease. Mind you, the other famous thing about her is that she rarely did anything to get sweaty."

It took Emma a second. "Oh, right, the Virgin Queen."

"Speaking of which..." started Zach.

"It's no good," said Emma, rushing to shut down Zach's interruption. "I'm going to have to take inspiration from fantasy queens. What about Game of Thrones. Who was that queen? Khaleesi?"

"Daenerys," said Zach instantly.

"There you go," said Emma. "That's what I'm talking about. Strong, powerful and with three dragons at her beck and call, I doubt hot water was ever an issue. I'll have some of that. Mind you, didn't she go mad in the end anyway, baths or not?"

"We never ever talk about the ending of Game of Thrones," said Zach.

"Oh, sore point?" said Emma. "You have a better suggestion?"

"Well, you could always go with Queen Acantha."

"Is that another Sparks of War character?"

"Book two, yes," said Zach.

"So, I suppose it's story time again."

"Sure," said Zach. "Acantha had a whole Helen of Troy thing going on. Married to one king she gets kidnapped and seduced by another one during peace negotiations and carried overseas. There is going to be a war, but then she works out an agreement where she spends six months as the Queen of one kingdom and then six months as the Queen of the other."

"Queen as in getting regal shit done or queen as in king's broodmare?"

"Well, that's all part of the story. The two kings are gearing up to go at each other for round two of fighting, she tries to persuade them to knock it off, but neither listens and in the end, she manages to get rid of them and rule both countries on her own."

"I love a happy ending."

"Well, not quite," said Zach. "The two kingdoms end up at war regardless. It's in the diplomatic best interest of too many powerful people that it happens. People that she had to strike deals with to get on the throne. The whole absolutely power corrupts absolutely type deal."

"So what does she do?"

"She decides that if all the men really want to kill each other that much, they should get on with it and she withdraws from the world of men to a life of solitary pleasure. Fin."

"Solitary, eh?"

"Well, maybe not completely solitary," said Zach with a smile. "But I can definitely imagine baths being a big part of it."

"Okay," said Emma firmly. "Let's have less talk of baths and more actual baths. Get it running."

"Already done," said Zach. "I might need to just perk it up a bit, then we're good to go."

"Wow," said Emma. "I think your name just found its way into my New Year's Honours list."

"I live to serve." Zach grinned and bowed again.

Fifteen minutes later and Emma was soaking. She was sure that even in Buckingham Palace baths were never prepared to such perfection. She lay back and enjoyed the sensation of the water and bubbles.

If there was an issue, it was that Zach was hovering, still eager to serve, but having not missed anything out that might actually require his services.

"Maybe a glass of wine?" Emma said, just to keep him busy.

He disappeared and returned a minute with a wine glass on an ornate silver tray. That was interesting because Emma didn't actually own an ornate silver tray. She refused to comment on this but took the wine. She would have to find more for Zach to do.

The bath wasn't big enough for both of them nor was it positioned particularly well to order him to actually do anything. Still, he couldn't just stand there.

"Take your clothes off," she ordered. "It is not right for your Queen to be naked and you to be clothed."

Zach practically pulled his clothes off, but then halfway through realized how unseemly he was being. He slowed and then delicately folded each item, setting them down on the radiator. Finally, he was fully undressed.

He was, oh so predictably, also hard.

Emma felt that while the onus was nominally on her to take care of that, she was enjoying her bath too much to do anything for too long.

"Come here," she instructed. "Closer."

With Zach standing right up against the bathtub, his erection poked over it and into Emma's space. She took a handful of studs and wiped them over his cock. She then ran the warm water from the tap into her cupped hands and washed it off.

"Tell me, has your penis ever been inside a woman's..." she paused for just a tantalizing second, "... mouth."

"You know it hasn't, Your Majesty," Zach replied.

Emma sat up, leaned over and formed her mouth into an O-shape. She then took it in her mouth, ran her lips two inches down his shaft and then mentally counted to five. She then pulled her head back and sank down in her bath again.

"Well, now it has."

"Your Majesty is most kind," said Zach. He had been in heaven for those five seconds, but the second she withdrew, he was back in his butler stance. He remained where he was until Emma flicked a hand, to signal him away. She was also regretting introducing the whole royalty stuff, but if she told him to knock it off, she'd have to find another game to replace it with. It was all so tiring. She stayed in the bath for another five minutes, ordered Zach to shave her legs and then sent him off for a towel which arrived, very suspiciously, just nicely warmed.

"So did the bath help you get back some of your energy back?"" asked Zach as Emma sat at her dressing table drying her hair.

"Not completely," replied Emma. "I'm still exhausted."

"Okay, I have another suggestion," said Zach. "How about a foot massage?"

"That sounds pretty great actually," Emma answered immediately.

"Erm, honestly, I was going to save this for your birthday, but while I was out today, I got some packages of stuff to add to the water. Salt and minerals and herbs and stuff. There's this Chinese guy who has a YouTube channel about how to give a proper professional foot massage. Honestly, I'm still working my way through the advanced material but I think I could do a reasonable job with the basics."

Emma's reaction probably wasn't everything Zach had hoped for. She burst into laughter.

"What?" he said, clearly hurt. "Doesn't that sound good?"

"It sounds great," said Emma. "It also sounds a lot like you. If this guy gave out certificates I'm sure you'd have a Ph. D. in feet by the end of the month. You really are going all in on this relationship, aren't you?"

"Naturally," said Zach, as if only a complete fool wouldn't.

He bustled off again, still completely naked, and as Emma finished drying off, he came in and out of the room, rearranging the bedroom slightly to give more space at the end of the bed. A small stool brought from the kitchen appeared and, finally, the big surprise -- a large barrel-like tub about a foot tall.

"Where did that come from?" Emma asked.

"As I say, I was planning a birthday surprise. I had it gift-wrapped and squirrelled away underneath the sink. You never look in there."

Emma was about to protest but then she realized he was absolutely right. Under the sink was the space for all the cleaning stuff and she hadn't touched any of that at all since meeting Zach.

The foot tub was already half filled with water when he brought it in, but Zach added more from a basin and then added an extra kettle to it, testing the temperature as he did so. Finally satisfied, he ripped open a packet and mixed it into the water. The room immediately filled with a particularly herbal humidity.

"Right, come and sit here," Zach instructed, indicating the edge of the bed. Emma wrapped her hair in a towel first, then obeyed.

"This will be a little hot at first, but your feel with soon adjust," he said. He was right. She almost withdrew her after dipping a single toe in, but trusted him and pushed through the heat till her legs were in up to her thighs.

"We'll let them soak for five minutes," Zach told her. Then he got up onto the bed behind her and started to massage her, laying his palms down on her shoulders and pushing his thumbs into the base of her neck.

"Mmm," moaned Emma. The bath had been good, but this... this was really getting to the source of her tension. "That feels great."

Zach didn't reply at once. Instead, he kept doing what he was doing only stronger. Then he switched, letting all ten of his fingers dig into her hair before again working their way down her neck and round to her shoulders. He cycled between her scalp, neck and shoulders before starting to hammer with two fists down her spine and then kneading her flesh as he came back up again, almost as if he was making bread. About thirty seconds into the experience, Emma had closed her eyes and put herself entirely into his hands. It was heavenly and, while she completely lost track of time, she was sure her feet got more than the promised five minutes of soaking.

"Okay," said Zach eventually, climbing down from the bed. He sat on the little stool, pulled Emma's left leg out of the tub, and placed it on his own lap. He picked up a small white towel and dried her ankles, before performing a complicated folding and wrapping operation which finished with her whole foot delicately encased in the towel. Emma watched in silent amusement. That little trick had probably been a whole YouTube video on its own.

He repeated it, no less adroitly, on her right leg and then ordered her to lie on her front. This had been sold to her as a foot massage, but he went to work on her whole body "just while your toes are drying off." As he returned to hammering down her spine, Emma couldn't help but wonder at his professionalism. He was on top of her. She was beneath him naked. He could have started to kiss her neck. His hand could have wandered to her pussy. He could have forced her legs apart and he could have entered her. She probably wouldn't even have tried to stop him, floating as she was. Instead, Zach concentrated absolutely one hundred per cent on giving the best damn massage he could.

And, in due course, the towels did come off her feet. There was another brief moment of rearrangement and she ended up lying on her back with her legs at just the right position off the bed. Zach again went into his extensive collection of massage-related products and this time when his hands came to her feet it was to rub some kind of lotion on them, expertly covering both the soles and top of her feet, moving his palms up and down them and then grabbing hold to rub his thumbs in a particular location. He then set to work on each of her toes, making sure that the gaps between each piggy were not left out. Once the lotion was applied to each valley he would grab each toe firmly between his middle and index finger, right up at the knuckle and pull away sharply, pulling her bone just a little away from its socket.

Emma was getting used to how Zach worked, so it wasn't a surprise that, once every possible part of her foot had been attended to, he still didn't start the massage in earnest. Instead, he went back to his collection and started all over again. By this time, Emma had her eyes completely closed and wasn't too far away from sleep, so she only registered a slight change in fragrance and a sensation that suggested this product was more oil than cream.

It was absolutely marvellous. Any stress she had from the week had faded. She was left completely alone with her thoughts.

Again, her main thought was that this evening shouldn't just be about her.

She needed to let him fuck her even if it would end up changing the relationship. Maybe for the better, maybe for the worse, but the relationship did need to change. Working Zach like this and giving him so little in return wasn't fair.

Still, if she did pop his cherry, would these multi-hour massages start to get shorter. In six months' time, would he just be rubbing her feet for five minutes, pumping her for three and then falling asleep two seconds later?

The status quo had its attractions.

No, the very least she could do was sleep with him. It wasn't as if the prospect was even unpleasant. And if it had to be done, tonight was the night to do it. It would be the end to a perfect evening. It was time to step it up a bit.

After the third separate care product was applied, Zach did start the massage properly. Emma allowed herself the luxury of glancing at her bedside clock and noted that they were about an hour into the session, bath not included. He took her left foot firmly in both and, using both thumbs, pressed solidly into the arch of her foot. She was taken by surprise at how sensitive it was, and let out a gasp. There then followed the same type of negotiation about exactly how hard he should press which ended with her insisting that he continue to do it 'properly' and that she'd get used to it.

This bit of conversation though started up Zach's inner nerd again. He began telling her about how, in traditional Chinese medicine they believed that every part of the body was connected to a nerve somewhere on the sole. Massaging, therefore, wasn't just good for your feet, it could cure serious issues with your kidneys or liver or whatever.

Emma really didn't care. It felt good, but she wished Zach would shut up again. She'd been in the zone just now and he'd knocked her out of it. Still, if things were going to happen tonight, it was probably just as well that she was no longer comatose.

"Which part of the foot is connected with the pussy?" she asked suddenly.

"I don't know," said Zach. "It was an age-appropriate video."

That had the effect of shutting him up for a while, which hadn't been her intention. She should have known that the come-on would sail completely over his head. She'd have to take a step up in obviousness.

"Zach, be a sweetheart would you and get my vibrator from the drawer," she said, eyes still closed.

A moment later she felt plastic being pressed into her hands. She turned her favourite toy and pressed it between her legs.

"Mmm, that feels good," she moaned, deliberately leaving it ambiguous to which part of her she was referring to.

Zach continued to work, adjusting the position of his stool to account for the fact that her legs were now further apart.

She let him and the device work their magic, just occasionally adding another moan. About five minutes later it was pretty obvious that the transition from massage to sex wasn't going to happen. A real man would, of course, have made it happen. Either directly by jumping on her and knocking the dildo out of her hand in the process, or subtly by moving to work on her calves then thighs before taking the toy gently out of her hands and using it himself.

The problem was that Zach wasn't a real man. Not yet. It was, Emma reflected, her job to make him one.

At some stage of that process, she'd probably end up needing to make him a YouTube video. For now, plan B would have to be to order him directly to put his penis in her. Had she just done that, things might have turned out differently. Unfortunately, she chose to have one last little bit of fun with him first.

"Zach?" she said, making sure she had his attention.

"Majesty," he replied instantly. God! He was back to that again. It had been fun for about five minutes over an hour ago.

"You want to fuck me, don't you?" she asked.

"Of course, your Majesty."

"What would you do if I said I was never going to let you?"

There was hesitation just for a second. "Do, Your Majesty? I wouldn't do anything. That is to say, we'd continue exactly as we are now."

"Zach, you are never going to fuck me."

She said it sternly but she had a smile running across her face. Admittedly, that face was half buried in her pillow.

The answer came back immediately. "As it please, Your Majesty." His voice cracked only a little as he said it. "I understand that my penis is too small to give you pleasure."

Jesus, men and their insecurities. They would need a talk about that as well. His dick was fine. "Yes, tiny," she answered.

"Very good, Mistress. Of course, if you wanted to make love with better-endowed men, I would understand completely."

Emma caught the laugh in her throat. Silly kid! I haven't even gotten enough time to spend with you! When on Earth is it do you think that I'm going to be able to run a herd of bulls through this bedroom?

"Be a dear, would you? Take those condoms you bought earlier and put them in the trash." She hesitated for just a second. "And once you've put them in there, tie up the bag and through it down the shoot."

Zach let go of her feet, stood up and bustled out of the room. Emma took her vibrator away from her clit and waited in earnest for his return. She still found herself absolutely amazed by what she could get away with with him.

She waited until she heard the door slam and then she leaned over and rooted through her handbag. Zach wasn't the only one who had come prepared. She's brought her own set of rubbers the very next day after she'd met Zach. When he came back he would find her spread-eagled on the bed ready for him. Welcoming but also mocking him for being such a wimp. She'd give him the rest of that blowjob she'd teased him with earlier and then they would fuck each other's brains out.

She'd probably end up on top, obviously.

Then the phone rang.

When Zach returned he found her not ready and willing, but sitting up and concerned.

"Right... right... okay... no... that does sound bad... thank you... nothing you could have done... I'll be right there."

Then she was standing up and reaching for her clothes even before she'd hung up.

"Look, Zach, I'm really sorry," she apologized. "Could you just hand me my bra? Callia slipped and fell messing around on the escalator after the movie and might have broken her ankle. I'm going to need to go to A and E. Right now!"

"I'll..." started Zach.

"It's okay," interrupted Emma. "You don't need to do anything. I'm sorry. Look, just go and I'll be in touch."

Her dress and shoes were on before she was able to fully get her panicking mother instinct back under control. "Look," she said, "I didn't mean what I said earlier..."

"It's okay," said Zach. "I'm glad you were finally able to tell me. I'd been wondering why we hadn't done it yet and having it out in the open now is actually a weight off my mind. We can talk more later."

"No," said Emma. "No, no, no, I was only joking... Look." She rooted through her handbag again and pulled out the condoms. She threw them at Zach.

"Should I put these in the trash as well?" asked Zach confused.

"No, I really wasn't..." Emma started to try to explain but then that parental panic took over again. "We will talk," she said. "Really. From scratch. Soon!"

And then she ran out the door as fast as the mother of any injured child would.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Emma was running late as usual and Diane and Brianna were already waiting for her in the lobby of the Grand Emerald Hotel. She apologized, but still took a moment to stare up at the luxurious Renaissance-style painted ceiling and chandelier.

"This place is suh-wank-ee," she whistled. "Remind me again why you are holding your coffee shop committee meeting here rather than in your own coffee shop, which has all the amenities necessary for a successful meeting -- i. e. coffee?"

"I'll fill you in on the way up," said Brianna, pressing the button for the elevator. "We're meeting in Heather's room. She insisted we see it. Well, she insisted I see it and I really need to talk to you about... well, not about Zach exactly... but... stuff tangentially related to Zach."

"I've already seen the rooms," said Diane helpfully. "They're fabulous."

"Wait? Heather has a room here?" Emma asked. However much she'd refused, Brianna had insisted that she come. There was some kind of emergency, but the cafe owner had been particularly tight-lipped about what it actually was.

"She does now," said Brianna. "Cassian was worried about the fire safety in her current apartment and persuaded her to move here until he could resolve the issues with the management to his satisfaction."

"That is..." Emma was lost for words for a moment.

"Really sweet?" suggested Brianna.

"It's really something, anyway," replied Emma, failing for the moment to find a word that sat in the right part of the boundary between sweet and creepy.

"Talking of sweet," Brianna said. "How are things with Zach? Is everything okay there? He has seemed a bit off at work these last couple of days."

"Everything is..."

Emma paused. Callia's ankle hadn't actually been twisted, but still, with an all-nighter at the hospital and then the knock on effect of having to pick up three other kids from whichever friends' families had been imposed upon, she hadn't exactly needed to find fake excuses to avoid Zach. Then Brienna had called insisting she come to this meeting 'if humanly possible.'

She'd texted apologies but not started to address the heart of the issues. He'd texted back a picture of a cock-cage and a note saying that of course his mistress had the right of refusal on any purchases of that nature. The answer to what in their relationship she could get away with was turning out to be 'everything.' She wished he'd show some spine, like he had with at the end of that first day. If she tried to break up with him, he'd show that spine again, she had no doubt, but as long as they were together, he'd would be subservient to her wishes. Which meant that she had better work out damn fast what those wishes actually were.

"... absolutely fine."

"Sure?" Brianne asked.

"Sure," replied Emma and then she cast around for a way to lighten the mood. "You know, Brianna, I'm happy with Zach. I am. Really happy. So this is in no way a complaint. Things couldn't have worked out better. I do just have to wonder exactly what your thought processes were which meant I ended up getting paired up with the unemployed virgin and Heather got...," she gestured at the golden Art Deco arch around the doors of the elevator. "... the Grand Emerald Hotel."

Brianna chuckled and gave a theatrical shrug. "Yeah, sorry. He applied just fractionally after I'd already made your first match. Ditch Zach, hope Heather ditches Cassian and maybe you'll find the golden ticket in your next chocolate bar."

"Hey, that's my brother you're passing around willy-nilly," cried Diane. "He's not a ticket anywhere." The women came out of the elevator and Diane let them in the direction of Heather's suite. Emma glanced at a fire extinguisher tucked neatly into a discrete alcove.

"It's okay," said Emma. "I'll stay on the Zach train. It's not particularly fast and I've no idea where it's going, but it runs on time, the service is refined and it has an excellent buffet car. Anyway, I presume this chain of hotels meets all of Cassian's stringent safety requirements?"

"It should do," said Diane. "He built them."

Brianna gasped. "Built? As in owns? Wait! Did I say golden? Should I have said platinum or diamond meal ticket?"

"Sorry, when I say 'built them', I don't mean the hotel, not exactly. I mean the safety requirements," laughed Diane. "This was one of Dad's big projects right when Cassian was doing his combined Architecture and Business major. He spent a lot of time looking over the plans for this one and the one in L. A. and Dad even snuck him into a few high-level meetings as 'the heir'. He made a number of good suggestions for improvements that were finally adopted."

"He is an architect by training?" Brianna asked.

"Yeah, he called his Masters 'Architects versus Arsonists'. Oh, it had a long academic subtitle right after a colon, but that was basically the idea. See, our dad was pretty old-school. He didn't believe much in corporate social responsibility or billionaire philanthropy or DEI initiatives. But he did always used to say that our one job was to make sure our tenants didn't burn alive in a deathtrap we'd built and that we sure as hell had to take that one job seriously. So when we were children he took us to view the remains of a big apartment block after a fire. I think I got the point he was making at a purely intellectual level, but Cassian, well, he was a couple of years younger and... he really took it to heart. It was a pretty scary experience for him." Diane looked at their faces. "No, there wasn't anything gruesome exactly, the place had been cleaned out by the time we got there, but we're talking charbroiled teddies and plastic dollies with their bodies fused to the wall. That kind of stuff."

"I see," said Brianna. "I guess we all have our little emotional panic buttons."

"Yes," agreed Diane, "and my brother's is in a little red box with the words 'in emergency break glass' written in big letters on the front. Sorry, I probably shouldn't be telling you all this, but this whole Heather situation might seem deeply weird if I don't." She stopped outside a door. "We're here," she announced, knocking on the door.

A muffled 'coming' was shouted from behind it and then a few seconds later Heather opened the door. She was wearing a stunning blue evening dress but was clearly only halfway through getting her make-up on.

"Brianna. Diane. Emma. Come in. Sorry," she said indicating her face. "I have a date with Cassian immediately after the meeting."

"Going anywhere nice?" Emma asked.

"Actually, I'm not sure," replied Heather. "He was being all mysterious about it."

The three women were ushered in. The first and most obvious thing about the hotel room was that it wasn't just one room and they didn't come straight into the bedroom either. The official-looking desk with eight chairs around it right in the centre suggested that 'meeting room' wouldn't be an inappropriate moniker for this room. Emma and Brianna looked in awe at the whole place.

"Yeah," said Heather sheepishly. "One of my objections to Cassian moving me in here was that I just couldn't work from a hotel room. Cassian just brushed that aside by simply upgrading me." She sheepishly bit her top lip. "Do you girls think I should have put my foot down?"

Brianna was still examining a particularly fine and enormous Chinese vase placed in a position of no great importance halfway down a wall. "It's difficult to say. I'd need to know more about the relationship dynamic."

"My brother can be very insistent over certain issues," Diane said.

"Yes, I'm starting to learn that," said Heather. She indicated a cardboard holder and four cups on the table. "I ordered coffee in," she said. "A rival shop I'm afraid, but just call it market research. Just give me a minute while I finish putting my face on."

It took the three women way longer than a minute to finish looking over the suite, each corner revealing an extravagance bigger than the previous extravagance. Heather smiled at the highly audible reactions from the other room as she worked on herself in the mirror.

Ordinarily, she would have said no straight out to Cassian demanding she move just like that. They'd been getting on well enough for a while now, but they were nowhere near close enough that he got to tell her where she did and did not live. But after that evening, she'd been feeling both more amenable to his requests and more desperate to keep hold of that sense of safety.

And as Cassian kept saying, it was all about safety. He'd laid it out... no, not like a business proposal, it was more like this was business ethics. This situation was unacceptable and it was his responsibility to make it acceptable. There had also been an unmistakable air of concern, panic even, over the situation and he seemed to know what he was talking about when he said it wasn't safe, even if Heather couldn't help but feel he was blowing it all out of proportion. So, she'd given in, and the sheets here were so soft and the view so magnificent that she could only feel so trapped by it.

Finally, she was satisfied with her make-up and went back into the meeting room. Brianna called the meeting to order by saying, "Right, let's get on with this."

"So," asked Heather. "Emergency meeting. What's the crisis?"

"It's this book signing I've arranged with the Sparks of War guy. It sounded like a good idea at the time. Now, from what Diane is telling me, I'm starting to get seriously worried. Diane?"

Diane stood up and wandered to the head of the meeting table, almost unconsciously slipping into business presentation mode, it seemed. "So, Brianna asked me if I could network with my friends in the publishing industry and see if there was any chance of getting Houston Rambold to come and do a signing. They laughed. They laughed a lot and then, when I interrupted to tell them I was serious, they laughed even more."

"Okay, so write it off as a bad idea," said Heather. "We've all had worse. There are a ton of up-and-coming authors who wouldn't say no to a signing even at Coffee Pages. Oh, sorry, Brianna."

"That's the thing," said Brianna. "The books that Zach brought in left a contact e-mail address for Rambold and, even though I wasn't sure if it would get any response, I just wrote him a nice invitation, told him who we were at Coffee Pages and what we were trying to do with the dating service. I even sent him a photo of our success board with you and Zach and you and Cassian. I told him that we could probably get a lot of the fans of the book to do a bit of cosplay and even some of the girls might have fun with it. He wrote back almost immediately saying he would be delighted to come and would read extracts from the latest unpublished Sparks of War book."

"Oh, brother," said Diane. "Yeah, about that. My editor friend walked me through the publication history of Sparks of Wars. It's something that she had to study during her publishing degree course."

"As a success story?" asked Emma in a voice that suggested she already knew the answer.

"As part of the Supreme Court's rulings on obscene publications."

"Obscene?" said Emma. "According to Zach, it's all good clean fun. Just a remix of all the old myths and legends. The occasional saucy nymph here and there."

"The first few books maybe. Even then there are undertones."

"Undertones? Such as?" asked Emma surprised. Zach hadn't mentioned anything like that.

"Hmm," mused Diane then turned to address the group as a whole. "How best to explain it. Have any of you ever heard of the Gor series of books?"

"No," said Heather instantly.

Emma smiled. "I think I've seen some of those on Zach's shelves. They're a pretty 'Me Tarzan, You Jane' kind of fantasy series, aren't they?"

"Yeah, well, the Sparks books are kind of like that in reverse. It's all about strong women controlling weak-willed men. It's kind of closet BDSM, all dommes and subs, but all wrapped up in fantasy to give it some plausible deniability. The series started in the sixties so there were limits on exactly how explicit the writer could be, but there were nods and winks, even from the start."

"Such as?" Emma asked slowly.

"For example, one of the major characters is a jeweller who provides exquisite pieces for his customers. Over a couple of chapters, it comes out that he only produces pieces for male customers and these pieces are only ever seen 'by their wives' or else at 'special events.' It's pretty much agreed by so-called Sparks Scholars that he's talking about cock-cages. Then there's a whole bit about how visitors from the next tribe over didn't follow the custom of wearing this kind of jewellery but took part in a competition anyway and displayed their ears and noses and such other places -- nudge, nudge, wink, wink - where the jewellery was worn but they had none, but the Queen praised 'their manhood' anyway and gave them first place. And, ahem, all the wives were happy and the husbands were happy because their wives were happy. If you catch my drift."

Emma frowned. "That sounds like the sort of thing..."

"... that Zach absolutely wouldn't mention?" Diane smiled. "It's more subtly done than I just made it sound and only one or two lines here and there in a five hundred page book, but it does kind of colour the rest of it. A lot of strong women in these books, you might say, which normally I'd approve of, but... well, anyway. It's the second book where things start to get interesting. The first book was kind of set in the desert and avoided a lot of the typical knights in armour tropes of the genre. The second book made things more explicitly biblical."

"It sounded all Greek to me," Emma observed.

"Well, that's kind of the thing," said Diane. "He's borrowing from all over the place. There's this theory that says that a lot of the Jewish and the Greek stuff gets mixed up anyway, the Greeks having conquered Israel. Humbold is a bit more direct in borrowing directly from anything he thinks is cool in the Old Testament. For example, have you heard of Lilith?"

"Wasn't that something about Adam's first wife?"

"Exactly. One of the little weirdness of Genesis is that it mentions women being created twice. Once along with Adam on the sixth day and then again later when Adam gets lonely and God helps himself to a rib. Well, there's this tradition that Adam's first wife was actually a completely different woman called Lilith. There's also a tradition which says she got thrown out of the Garden of Eden for being sex mad and insisting that she be on top when they fucked. Then Rambold introduces the snake from the Genesis story, but of course, he never saw a scary monster that he couldn't feminize, so she's a sexy demonic piece of work called the Lamia. Then finally we have good old faithful Eve."

"Rambold basically divides all women into three types. Lilith whose sexuality is her own and for her own pleasure. The Lamia who uses her sexuality as a weapon to manipulate men and Eve, the good wife who tries to repress her sexuality but always gives into sexual temptation anyway. He tends to regard Lilith as being in the right, his ideal woman, maybe. Most of his female character arcs involve starting as Eve, going through a Lamia phase and finally reaching an outcast happiness as Lilith."

"So, the second book is mostly about this queen, Acantha, who ends up as a mash-up of Persephony and Helen of Troy. Stage one -- Eve -- gets abducted, objectified, and generally passed around. Then she gets seduced by the actual Lamia character and has to try using her sexuality to persuade her two husband-kings to keep the peace. Finally, she listens to Lilith, gives in and decides she doesn't care one jot what happen to the armies, revelling in the death and destruction wrought by men over her while she parties in her own secret world of drugs and lesbian orgies."

"I hadn't heard about any lesbian orgies. Zach just said she retreated from the world of men and... oh... right!"

"Again, more implied than stated in book two," said Diane. "But, the way Humbold writes it, it's pretty clear he regards 'women party, men die' as the happy ending. So in the third book, the Lamia is back again and she has developed this whole thing about eyes. She has a whole room full of beautiful eyes kept in ornate wooden boxes. Our hero leaves his lover behind to go and fight the demons. He gets caught and imprisoned by the Lamia inside the gates of hell. Then the snake monster pops over to visit the poor girl and tells her that her true love is in hell. She naturally takes this to mean he's actually dead and begs for at least having something to remember him by."

"The Lamia offers her his eyes in return for her own and tells her that she will be blind. What she doesn't know is that her love is still alive and can actually still see through her eyes. Indeed, he can't close them or even look away unless she does. This becomes a real problem because the Lamia then makes sure that the girl doesn't stay in mourning for very long, if you get my drift."

"The problem was that by the time the third book was published, it was the late sixties and Rambold was a superstar in certain circles around the hippy scene. Things are starting to get more permissive and he's taking some of the sex scenes further. Where it all really falls apart though is the drugs. He starts taking LSD with the Haight-Ashbury crowd. You can certainly see the effects of it here and there in book three, but sometime during the writing of book four the drugs took over completely.

"It's semi-coherent pornography. Which might have been okay, if Rambold's timeline hadn't moved out of combining Jewish and Greek tradition and moved into combining Roman with the New Testament. By which I mean positing a world in which Jesus of Nazareth and the Emperor Caligula were the same person. Imagine putting burly Roman soldiers, equally burly fishermen, prostitutes, horse Senators, horny lepers, Vestal Virgin births, stables, group bulimia, reanimated corpses, the blood of Christ and a very, very graphic and very, very naked crucifixion all in the same stream of consciousness fantasy.

"His publishers refused to publish book four in its original form. He refused to change it. A few super-fans got permission from him to have a limited edition print run done in Britain and it immediately got pulled under their Obscene Publications Act. Those copies are highly sought after as curios, but there's a digital copy floating around the Internet. Most fans seek it out at some point and most of them go 'holy shit' and nope the hell out after a couple of pages or a chapter or two. It is, as they say, a trip.

"And that's the book he's reading from is it?"

"Oh, no," said Diane. "Well, maybe. The thing was, during his long recovery, he continued to work on and finish book five sometime around the mid-eighties. He's more lucid these days, so it's possible that the book is an improvement. Or not. No one knows because he refuses to let anyone see it until, and I quote, 'the time is right.'"

"And that time is seven o'clock and the place is Coffee Pages?"

"Possibly. Every Sparkhead in the country is going to show up on the off-chance of even an brief extract. And in full cosplay. Which, if you've all been paying attention, you'll have already realized isn't always very 'full' when it comes to Sparks of War. Did the invitation you sent him specify that he had to wear clothes to the signing?"

"That didn't really occur to me," said Brianna.

"That's usually the first thing anyone does when they deal with Rambold these days. Which they rarely bother to do."

"I don't get why he even agreed to come?"

"I'm guessing something about your dream of older women hooking up with young fuckboys spoke to him on a deeply personal level," said Diane "Perhaps he saw a touch of Lilith somewhere, but in Heather or Emma's eyes, who can say?"

Both mentioned ladies were about to protest when there came a knock at the door. Heather rose to enter it. There stood a man in a neat tidy uniform, although it didn't seem to be the hotel's.

"Mrs Heather Morgan?" asked the visitor. "Mr Stafford asked me to escort you to him."

"Is that the time?" Heather said looking at her watch. "Could you perhaps wait for a moment? We're just finishing up here. To be honest, I was kind of expecting him to come himself actually," said Heather.

"Indeed," said the man. "However, I believe that Mr Stafford has particular plans tonight, a surprise, the preparation of which requires his absence. And, I'm very sorry, he did stress that these plans were very time-dependent. If you come with me, all will become clear."

Heather was uncertain. The members of the committee were rising behind her.

"It's okay," said Diane. "Go. It sounds like Cassian has another of his very unique ideas and while as a sister it's sometimes fun to flick at them and watch his whole house of cards tumble, I suspect he's going to be putting on something rather memorable for you tonight that you won't want to miss."

"Should we come along?" asked Emma. "See you to the car or whatever?"

"Sure," said Heather, grabbing her handbag. On the way out, she took the key card from its holder by the door. "Here. So you can get back in. Sorry to bail on you."

"It's okay," said Brianna. "I'm sure we'll work something out about Rambold."

The man led the four women to that oh-so-magnificent elevator. He held the door until all four were aboard. Then he pressed a button and the elevator started to ascend.

"We're going up?" Brianna observed uncertainly.

"Indeed," said the suited man.

"We're not going out of the hotel?" Heather asked.

"We are," said the man. For all his formal dress and polite neutral language, Heather couldn't shake the feeling that he was enjoying this. Looking around, she also noticed Diane was smiling.

"You know something about this?" asked Heather.

"No, but I think I've worked it out," Diane replied. "We're going to the roof."

"What? Do they have a restaurant on the top floor or something?" Heather asked.

"Or a swimming pool," suggested Emma with a cheeky grin. "Booked for private skinny-dipping, perhaps?"

"No, your man here said we were going out of the hotel," said Brianna.

The doors opened. They were not on the top floor, but indeed on a roof very open to the sky. A helicopter stood on landing pad, its rotors starting to power up.

"Your carriage awaits, ma'am." said the man. The women groaned. "Sorry, Mr Stafford insisted I say that,"

"A helicopter ride?" said Heather "To where?"

"This is probably the point at which Mr Stafford would want me to say that 'sometimes the journey is more important than the destination'. I believe that this weekend is going to be a high-class adventure through some particularly low-class literature. I am to give you this document. He asks that you read it fully during the trip and sign it before you land."

He handed her a document that looked for all the world as if it has been produced on an actual typewriter. It was only about five pages long, but it had been neatly bound together. On the front were simply written the words 'Sub Agreement.'

Heather's face turned about fifty different shades of red.

"I'm going to kill him," she muttered, making sure she was loud enough that her friends could hear her, even over the din. "I'm actually going to kill him."

Nevertheless, she got in the helicopter.