The Denim Dom

Chapter Eight

Shayla couldn’t sort out her conflicting thoughts about everything she’d learned and seen. Upon getting home from the club, sleep did not come after she went to bed Saturday night.

Rather, Sunday morning.

Even after she’d used her vibrator to reach orgasm twice, which was a record for her. It wasn’t uncommon for her vibrator to be useless getting her off, especially since her breakup.

That was something James had in his favor. Despite his failures as a decent human being, he’d been great in bed. At least, he had in the beginning before the porn took over his life and attention.

Damn sure the only thing I miss about him.

Another obvious sign she still mentally kicked herself for missing. As his sexual attention waned, she hadn’t thought much of it at the time. They’d both been busy with work, and didn’t all relationships eventually reach a plateau where sex became secondary and not a primary part of the dynamic? She never dreamed it was due to the fact he had a severe porn addiction.

Nothing Shayla had learned in the class, or the things she’d seen in action at the club, had been even remotely like the hard-core, sadistic, humiliating bondage and abuse videos James had been so fond of. Even the scene between Landry and Valerie had enough tenderness and consideration between the participants to make some little part of Shayla sigh with satisfaction.

Yes, Landry had delivered some pretty hard blows to the woman’s ass, but in retrospect, after Tony’s educated commentaries, she could see the care Landry took not to cause harm or overstep Valerie’s limits.

Then there was Sully and Mac’s scene. That definitely left her panties damp, and she’d never thought she’d be turned on by watching two men together. The thick, delicious sexual tension in their scene was hotter than any raunchy porno she’d ever viewed despite the apparent brutality of some of Sully’s actions.

Clarisse is a lucky woman.

Watching Landry top Cris later had been even sexier.

She lay in bed, tossing and turning until seven Sunday morning when she finally admitted sleep was out of the question.

She got up, put on shorts, a T-shirt, and some running shoes, and headed outside. It still felt relatively cool compared to how hot the afternoon would turn. With thin shadows still draped across the green space, she headed north along a path. It led to a county trail made out of a converted railroad bed.

Trying to escape her thoughts, she walked for nearly an hour. By that time the sun had fully risen and chased away the last of the cool shadows.

And still, answers eluded her.

She didn’t understand why part of her responded so viscerally, so positively, to what she had seen. Every time she thought about Landry jamming the vibrator into Valerie’s crotch and forcing her to orgasm, she felt her own clit throb a little with longing.

Thinking about how Ross made Loren come during their scene. And Seth and Leah.

Pain and pleasure, irrevocably mixed together. Even when Tilly had scened with that guy…Bob? No orgasms there, but when they finished, the gratitude in his eyes as he hugged her, how her tenderness with him contradicted the vicious, hard-edged Domme she’d been only moments before.

Then how Landry took that same dominant, sadistic woman and turned her into a melted pile of submissive jelly.

It proved impossible to reconcile in her mind.

After heading home, she grabbed a cool shower and donned a large T-shirt and nothing else. It was tempting to use the vibrator on herself, but she had work to do and wanted to sort out her thoughts.

With her damp hair pulled back into a ponytail, she sat on the couch with her laptop and started compiling her notes. She wasn’t sure if she had enough information, or maybe too much to sort through, to write her article yet, but maybe putting everything down would help her focus.

The problem was she still had more questions than answers at this point. Certainly a ton more questions than when she started.

It’s not like I can ask anyone for their opinion, either. She didn’t want to admit to any of her friends or family what she was working on, much less that she’d volunteered to take on the project when she could have asked it be assigned to someone else. She didn’t want to have to explain herself to them after all the outrage they’d expressed on her behalf.

And still, the answer she wanted most of all and the one she’d likely never get—why hadn’t she been good enough for James? Had he wanted to dominate her like the women in the videos he watched? Why didn’t he feel he could talk to her? Why had he refused her offers to dabble in it with him after the first revelation?

As she studied her notes, she remembered everyone had given her their FetLife.com user names last night. She logged on to the website, hesitating as she had to think about what user name to create.

Shayla, and quite a few variations thereof, were already taken. After thinking on it for a while, she tried SaraShayla, since she lived in Sarasota. That user name came up as available.

Why not? It wasn’t like she’d be giving out any personal information other than the fact that she lived in the area, along with her age. And anyone she met last night, duh, already knew more about her than she’d give out online.

She filled out the profile, listing herself as just curious right now when it asked how active she was, and friendship under the “looking for” option.

Then, after thinking about it for a few moments, she checked the mentor/teacher option as well. For her BDSM role she waffled between vanilla, unsure, and not applicable for a while before eventually checking the last of the three.

Faced with the blank window to add to the About Me section, she opted to go short and sweet.

Journalist learning about the lifestyle for a series of articles.

She looked up and sent friend requests to everyone she’d gotten to know and realized how bare and boring her profile looked compared to everyone else. Unable to think of what else to put as a picture, she dug out a meme of Grumpy Cat bearing the simple caption, “No.”

Maybe that will keep the creepers away.

She spent over an hour looking through the site. Some of the images she saw scared her, and admittedly, a few intrigued her. The intricate shibari ropework in some of the pictures looked more artistic than sadistic.

She joined a couple of the local groups her new acquaintances had recommended, including the Suncoast Society Munch group. While browsing through different discussions, she encountered everything from thoughtful discourses on current events to sexual trolling. Looking through the lists of groups her friends were members of, she found everything from political forums to health issues to book groups.

And there were even LOLcats pictures posted, although some of them with captions that would likely never be allowed on more vanilla social media sites.

Hmm, it really is a kinky Facebook.

And still, she had no answers to her questions.

Maybe I do need to read some of the fiction. It couldn’t hurt, right? Grab some of the popular books of the genre, now that she had a grasp of the basics, the realities of the dynamics, and see why this was so popular. Or at least take a look at the popular fallacies in contrast to the realities.

After searching Goodreads for reader recommendations, Shayla realized her best bet would be buying e-books. She resigned herself to getting dressed and headed out to Best Buy. There, a salesman gave her a tour of the different brands and models. She finally settled on a Kindle and returned home.

At least the covers are hidden. She’d seen numerous readers report that the privacy afforded by an e-reader was one of the big draws, in addition to the instant gratification.

Once it was charged up and she had the device added to her Amazon account, she ordered her first e-book. Popular according to reader reviews, it was a novella that took her less than an hour to read. Admittedly, the sex scenes were hot enough to make her want to grab her vibrator for some relief of her own, but from what little she’d already learned the story’s setup was so unrealistic as to be laughable.

Using the site’s recommendations of similar books, she bought three more novellas by the same author and started reading.

By the time she finished she was both hungry to eat dinner and had damp panties.

She also understood why Tony had asked her about her reading habits and if she’d read any BDSM fiction. Had she gone into this with nothing but fictional expectations, she would have assumed Tony and the others were lying down on the job as Doms. On the other hand, she now suspected she saw the attraction so many women had to the genre. A hunky, Alpha Dom to love and protect and train her. To take the reins so she could just be for a while.

To make mad, crazy-sweet monkey-sex love to her.

Someone to lay absolute trust in.

She let that stew in her brain and congeal with what she’d witnessed, combined with the information she’d gleaned from her talks with locals in the scene and stuff off the Internet. She didn’t want to write a sensational series of stories just to titillate.

She wanted to do the people she wrote about justice and fairly portray them. Especially since they’d been so welcoming and friendly to her. She also knew what she had to do.

I need to talk to Tony again.

Tony glanced at his phone when it rang. He almost let it go to voice mail until he realized it was Shayla. He answered. “Hello?”

She sounded hesitant. Nervous. Tentative. “Hi, Tony? It’s Shayla. We…ah, from last night.”

He smiled. “Of course. How are you?”

“I’m fine. Can we talk?”

He picked up the TV remote and hit mute. “Sure. What’s up?” She had his interest. She sounded nothing like she had last night.

Now she sounded almost timid.

“I meant in person.”

“What about?”

“This.”

When she didn’t elaborate, he fought the urge to laugh. “I need a few more details than that.”

“BDSM. Can we talk more about it?”

When his cock stirred again at the thought of looking into her sweet, hazel eyes, he shoved that distraction away. This wasn’t pleasure, it was business.

So to speak.

“When did you want to get together?” He imagined fisting his hand in her hair. And about her deliciously spankable ass. A perfectly rounded figure that got his motor running. A woman who could take what he gave her without him having to worry if she’d break on him.

He shook that thought out of his mind, too. He had no idea if she was even interested in dipping a toe into the lifestyle, much less whether or not she was interested in him.

“I don’t know what your schedule is like,” she said. Yep, her voice definitely sounded timid. He didn’t understand why, but her tone more than anything stirred his curiosity. “I know you said you’re busy. I could meet with you tonight, if you wanted. I haven’t had dinner yet and was just trying to decide what to do.”

He did want to meet with her again. Alone.

He wanted to very much.

He just didn’t want her to know how much he wanted to. “That sounds good.” He reached down and adjusted his semierect cock through his shorts. “When and where?”

“Would you like to meet at the Village Inn on 41?”

“Sounds good. Give me an hour.”

“See you then.”

He hung up and smiled. Don’t get your hopes up. She probably wants to talk more for her article.

Still, as he got up to grab a quick shower, he couldn’t help wondering what Shayla looked like without her clothes.

Shayla arrived just before Tony did. She’d nervously changed clothes three different times before settling on a black sundress she hadn’t worn since the previous summer. It hit her just above the knee and with her black sandals, it didn’t look too dressy.

Once they were seated and the waitress took their drink orders, Tony leaned forward with his hands clasped on the table in front of him. “What did you want to talk about?”

Shayla realized she was probably using her notebook more as a crutch at this point and left it lying unopened on the table next to her. “I don’t understand,” she finally said, knowing it explained nothing but with lack of a better place to start.

One of Tony’s eyebrows slid up in a delicious way. “You’re really having a tough time with this, aren’t you?”

She breathed a sigh of relief. “More than you’ll ever know.”

“BDSM is very difficult for someone vanilla to understand unless they recognize deep within them some of those same urges. Even then, it’s something hard to explain. Just like someone who likes vanilla ice cream but loathes strawberry might have a hard time explaining to someone why they loathe it. They might answer, ‘I just do.’ That doesn’t make their answer wrong, and it might not fully explain their reasoning. They might not even know the reason. It might be a legitimate preference, or it could be based in some deep-seated prejudice stemming from an incident that happened in their childhood that they might not even remember.

“Maybe they were eating strawberry ice cream when they heard a loved one died, and since then they’ve loathed it, but don’t remember that connection. Maybe they once got sick soon after eating strawberry ice cream, but while the two had nothing to do with each other, they became entwined in the person’s mind.

“Maybe it’s simply a preference and nothing more. Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar, and not some Freudian symbol. Does that make sense?”

“But people letting someone beat the crap out of them isn’t a simple flavor preference.”

He leaned in and tapped his finger on the table for emphasis. “But that’s just the point. It is. It might not be your thing, but it doesn’t make it any less valid a choice.”

“How is someone enjoying inflicting pain on someone else a valid choice? Isn’t that sociopathic?”

“Not if it’s consensual, no. Have you ever had a massage so painful it hurt, but later felt great?”

“I’ve never had a massage.”

His lips pressed together for a moment as he apparently sought another approach. “Usually the strawberry ice cream metaphor works.”

“Sorry.”

He leaned back and waved away her apology. “No, it’s all right. I know it’s a difficult subject for some people to wrap their heads around.” He thought for a moment. “Are you against gay marriage?”

“No. I could care less what people do with their love lives.”

“Exactly,” he said. “Think of it like that. There are people who object to consensual BDSM on nonlogical grounds, because it conflicts with their feelings, just like they object to gay marriage because it conflicts with some religious or moral point of view they hold. Not because there is any legitimate reason to object to it.”

She chewed on that. “Okay, that makes sense, but I’m still having trouble with it.”

“See, that’s the thing. It’s okay if you have trouble with it. You don’t need to understand it to agree it’s okay for consenting adults to engage in it.”

“It’s not okay when I want to write a fair article about it that can educate others. How am I supposed to educate anyone when I feel like I can’t even educate myself?”

His green gaze seemed to study her. He looked like he needed a shave, stubble filling in the areas around his mustache and goatee. He slowly scratched at his chin for a moment.

“I think,” he said after a moment to gather his thoughts, “that if you are truly dedicated to doing the topic justice, you will. You don’t necessarily have to understand the whys of it. Maybe it even makes you a better choice to write the article, because you don’t have an axe to grind and you are deliberately trying to give it a fair treatment.”

She swallowed a little nervously at that. She did have an axe to grind. A battleaxe of barbarian proportions, as a matter of fact. But she also knew these people had nothing to do with that and she didn’t hold it against them, either.

“Do you think next weekend’s classes will help me any?”

“Probably. You’ll get to see more things, learn more, meet more people. I’m sure Loren gave you her newbie 101 talk the first time you guys met, right?” Shayla nodded. “She’s absolutely right,” he continued. “There are so many different flavors and ways people practice BDSM that it’s impossible to lump them all together. They can’t even lump themselves together without someone inevitably pissing in the pool because others aren’t doing it ‘their’ way. I call them ‘won twue wayers,’ because they can’t accept that there are many ways to do things the ‘right’ way in BDSM.

“If the individuals in the dynamic are consenting adults, and happy with the way things are, and no one’s being harmed, that’s all that matters.”

“That’s almost verbatim what she said.”

“Well, that’s because despite what the won twue way asshats think, it’s all that matters.”

“I feel woefully unprepared and unqualified to write this.” She ran her finger down the spiral spine of the notebook. “I’m scared I’m going to screw it up and piss everyone off that I’ve just met.”

He smiled kindly at her and reached across the table to squeeze her hand. “You’ll do fine. I don’t mind reviewing it for you before you submit it, and I’m sure Ross and Loren won’t mind, either.”

“I’m glad you feel so confident.”

Tony once again got the feeling there was more to it, some deeper issue that she wasn’t ready to reveal. He wouldn’t press her about it, but he wished she’d open up to him. He’d carefully observed her the night before while she watched scenes play out. If he wasn’t mistaken, he’d spotted more than a bit of longing on her face.

And a bit of fear, too.

Fear of what, he wasn’t sure. He knew from years in the lifestyle that people sometimes feared the part of themselves that desired the BDSM lifestyle. It usually flew in the face of what had been drilled into them about how “good” people behaved in life. It was shocking and shameful and a disgusting display of sexuality and against all moral behavior, or so they’d been told.

It was also the most fun some people ever had in their lives.

He did not want to scare Shayla off. “You said you were writing a series of articles, right?”

She nodded.

“Why not start with a general overview, using quotes from me and Loren and Ross, and then lead into deeper topics in later articles? At least it will buy you a little time and breathing room.”

She finally met his gaze. “That’s not a bad idea.”

“You can always feel free to bounce stuff off me. And we’ll have next Saturday to talk more during and after class.” Their waitress returned to take their meal orders. “Deal?”

She rewarded him with a tentative smile. “Deal.”

Their conversation ranged wide afield from the topic of BDSM for the rest of their dinner. He suspected she hovered dangerously close to an overloaded mindset, one where she could easily tip to either side of all-in or fuck-it-all if pushed too hard in one direction or the other. He desperately didn’t want it to be the fuck-it-all side she landed on.

He found himself far too attracted to her to allow that to happen if he had any say in the matter.