We sat on the couch for hours, he on one side and I on the other with my feet in his lap, and just talked. I told him all about the meeting and how I was brainstorming ideas for the first post. He was always a good person to bounce things off of.
He started a sensual massage of my feet while I explained the details of the position and how things would work. When I’d finally told him everything, he grew serious.
“I’m proud of you, Abby. I think this is going to be a wonderful opportunity for you.”
“Thank you. I’m really excited about it.”
“As you should be.”
I took my feet from his lap and shifted so I was beside him. “How long do we have until we have to leave?”
He slipped an arm around my shoulders. “Todd was going by the estate when he got off work, so another hour or two.”
“I have an idea on how we could spend that time,” I murmured, drawing close to him.
His hands entwined in my hair and his breath was warm against my skin. “Come here and tell me all about it.”
“There’s a phrase writers use.” I traced the button on the top of his shirt, circled it a few times before unbuttoning it. “ ‘It’s better to show, not tell.’ ”
His breath caught as I continued undoing his shirt. “I think I’m going to like your new job.”
Hours later, we were at home and the kids were in bed. Nathaniel asked me if I wanted to go for a swim since I didn’t head for bed like I typically did, but I told him I needed to get my thoughts together for my first post and do his required meditation. I didn’t plan to write it yet, but all evening my fingers had been itching to get something down on paper.
I took a blank journal and curled up in the library on a couch with Apollo at my feet. I wrote down a few things, planning to later look over all the ideas and decide which one I wanted to do first.
My phone buzzed and I looked down in surprise to see it was Christine, the wife and submissive of the man who had mentored Nathaniel.
“Hey, Christine.”
“Abby! It’s been ages! How are you?”
In the early part of my relationship with Nathaniel, he’d taken me to Paul and Christine’s house in New Hampshire for a weekend. Though we had been in a power exchange relationship for months, that weekend had been the first time I’d ever seen anyone else play. It had been an eye-opening experience for me in many ways.
One of the things I’d taken away from the weekend was the knowledge that I wanted to mentor new submissives. Now, as I chatted with her on the phone and we caught up with each other, I realized that the blog would be another way for me to mentor.
I told her as much.
“It sounds like a wonderful opportunity,” she said. “I think it’s important to show the public what BDSM is and what it’s not.”
“I hope I can do that.”
“There was a case here recently where a submissive was stalked and later assaulted as she left a club one evening.” There was a rustling of papers. “I printed out the newspaper article on it because she came to one of our meetings about a year ago.”
I vaguely remembered Nathaniel mentioning the incident. But I never heard what happened.
“Here it is,” Christine said. “They didn’t find the man who did it. The sad thing is the way the media painted the woman. They twisted it so much, it came out sounding like the woman had asked for it.”
Nathaniel hadn’t told me that part. “That’s horrible. That poor woman.”
“Assault is never justified, but to hear some people, it wasn’t that bad because she was kinky.”
“What the hell does that have to do with anything?”
“Right? That’s what Paul and I said. We had a group discussion about it.”
“Let me get my hands on the person who said that.”
She laughed, but with a touch of sadness. “How about instead you get your hands on a keyboard and work on fighting the battle that way.”
“Kind of like the mighty keyboard instead of the pen?”
“Exactly. If you can educate just one person, then maybe that person will tell someone else and they’ll tell another person and before you know it there won’t be any more stories like that one in the newspaper.”
“The sad thing is, some of the public might see the assailant as what a Dom is like,” I said. “When I worked at the library, I once overheard a group of women talking about BDSM. Two of the ladies were trying to explain the difference between BDSM and abuse. It was so hard not to jump in and give my opinion. After all, that was the first time I’d ever come across a group talking about BDSM in my library.”