Taking the Lead (Secrets of a Rock Star #1) Page 10

  STEP BY STEP BY STEP

  RICKI

  I waited a few days before I went out in public. I called in sick to work. I didn’t watch TV. I didn’t look at the newspaper. Paul kept me up to date on what appeared. Fortunately, there was not a word about one Richard Hamilton nearly choking to death or his hospitalization afterward. Maybe it really wasn’t notable that yet another middle-aged rich white man had a drinking problem and was being sent to rehab. My father had ceased to be interesting to the tabloids years ago and I hoped it stayed that way.

  Meanwhile yes, apparently there had been some buzz about the “kidnapping” stunt, with a few write-ups here and there and mentions in post-awards columns. Axel had been on some talk show the next day where he even said he’d “accidentally” picked me up instead of my friend.

  “And I quote,” said Paul, reading from the notes on his tablet while briefing me, “ ‘It was too late to do anything but, you know, run with it. Sorry again, Ms. Hamilton.’ And then he waved into the camera. End of segment. Do you want to see it? I have the video clip right here.”

  “No, not necessary.” I breathed a sigh of relief. I was still angry at him but at least Axel had said exactly the right thing to keep it from blowing up in my face. “Sounds like it died down relatively quickly.”

  “Especially when you consider all the press this guy has done as a result of the win. He’s in New York on a junket right now.” Paul was wearing a skinny black tie and an impeccably white shirt, buttoned all the way up, but with skinny jeans and Doc Martens. “But yes, more of the buzz is about the band than about you. When your name does come up, it’s as an amusing sidebar.”

  Amusing sidebar I could live with. Amusing sidebar was safe. Not laughingstock, not object of pity, and not sex-crazed maniac.

  After that I decided it was safe to leave the mansion. I went to work without incident; not even a condescending joke about it came from my male colleagues. Good.

  I had other things to worry about. Things I hoped Sakura could help me with.

  We met at her favorite sushi joint, Hiro’s. The place had a couple of advantages. For one, it was in an unfashionable part of town and therefore unlikely to be staked out by paparazzi. Two, just in case, they had private tatami rooms. Three, the fish was absolutely fabulous, or maybe Hiro was just that good.

  We were quickly steered to a private table with a sliding paper screen door. Sakura told the waiter to bring us tea, water, and “whatever Hiro wants to serve us tonight.” The man left with a bow and slid the door closed behind himself.

  We made small talk until after he’d returned with the tea, and I ordered a bottle of sake.

  “That bad, huh?” Sakura asked. “You almost never order alcohol.”

  “A little something to calm my nerves wouldn’t hurt,” I said. “You’re not going to make me drink the whole bottle myself, are you?”

  “Of course not! Just, you know …” She gave me a sideways look. “How’s your father doing?”

  “In rehab? Fine, I assume.”

  “You assume?”

  “It’s hardly the first time, Sarah. And it’s not like they call and tell you every day what they’re doing.”

  “What are they doing?”

  The waiter slid aside the door and placed a sake bottle that looked like a bud vase on the table with two tiny cups. They were like ceramic thimbles. When he was gone I filled the thimbles and answered Sakura’s question. “A lot of sitting around in groups talking about how sorry they are. At the end of twenty-eight days, he’ll come out packed with remorse over every little thing he ever did while drunk and swearing he’ll never drink again. I’m sure the staff already have a pool going on how long until he falls off the wagon this time. I’m sorry to sound so jaded about it but it’s happened so many times I just can’t get my hopes up that this time it’ll be different.”

  I pushed both cups toward Sakura suddenly. I’d lost my taste for it.

  She shrugged but didn’t say anything, just picked one up and ignored the other. “Well, if it’s not your father who has you in a lather, which one of the men in your life is it this time?”

  “What kind of an assumption is that? It could be Gwen.”

  “Your sister is the sweetest, kindest person who ever lived and she adores you. I’m betting it’s not Gwen.”

  I tapped my finger anxiously on the shined lacquer of the table. “You’re right. I think Axel hypnotized me.”

  She nearly spat out her sake. “What!”

  I waited until she’d dabbed herself with a napkin before I went on. “Is that possible? For a dom to … to brainwash a sub?”

  “Hang on, hang on. I thought you just had a quickie in the limo, a spur of the moment thing.”

  I had to consciously stop myself from chewing my lip. “We did. But it was, you know.”

  “No, Ricki, I don’t know. What’s up? Did he do something you didn’t want him to?”

  “Well, no. I mean, but he’s got like a … pheromone or magic spell, I swear. It was like my resistance just … melted away.”

  “You resisted, though?”

  “Not seriously. I mean, I knew I could tell him to stop. But I tried to break free, push him away, and … I am not explaining this well at all.”

  “Take your time.” She downed the sake and then refilled her thimble.

  “It wasn’t like he spanked me or one of those things. But it felt like …” I groped for the words. “Like he was in complete control.”

  “Okay, and that was a bad thing?”

  “Yes! Because he made me forget all the reasons why I might want to say no. Like it was some kind of mind control.”

  Sakura gave a little shrug. “Sounds to me like you fell for his dom aura.”

  “Dom Aura? Is that the name of a band?”

  “Very funny. Call it what you want but when a guy, or a woman, for that matter, is dominant—like me—we kind of have an air about us.”

  I thought about that feeling, like his will had wrapped around me. “An air.”

  “You know what I mean, Rick’. Like when a dog trainer walks into the pen and all the dogs quiet down, even if it’s not a trainer they know sometimes. They respond to the air of authority.”

  “You’re saying I’m like a trained dog.” Yeah, he snaps his fingers and you salivate between the legs. Fuck.

  “No. It’s just an analogy. Jeez.” Sakura sighed. “Look, Ricki, I’m your friend. So I have some advice for you. Sometimes a submissive—”

  “I am not submissive!” I was a competent, take-charge woman who wanted to run a movie studio, not a pushover.

  She held out her hands. “Okay. Sometimes the person who played the part of the submissive in a scene doesn’t feel so great afterward. Even if the scene was great, a kind of morning-after syndrome can set in. I kind of wondered if you were having some of that when you first told me about it.”

  She was right: I hadn’t even waited until the next morning to feel regrets. “What’s the cure?”

  “Talking it over with the person who played the dominant role, typically. They feel responsible, after all.”

  That was the word he’d used: responsible. When he’d tried to get me to tell him what was wrong.

  “No way in hell,” I said. “I think he programmed me. Hypnotized me.”

  “Hypnotized?”

  “How else do you explain it?”

  “Explain what? That you did what he said and the result was really, really great sex?”

  Here’s where it gets really embarrassing, I thought. “There’s more. It’s not just the whole … lack of resistance on my part that worries me.” I balled my hands in frustration. You’re not some sixteen-year-old virgin, I told myself. Just spit it out. “Since that night, I’ve been having … trouble.”

  “Trouble.”

  I said the next word so quietly she didn’t hear it. “Coming.”

  “What?” She leaned in, trying to hear.

  “You know, getting there
! Ever since Axel, I … can’t!”

  Her eyebrows eloquently expressed her skepticism. “And you think this means he hypnotized you?”

  “How else do you explain it?”

  “Well, how many times have you tried?”

  “Sarah!”

  “Don’t sound so scandalized! We need data to figure this kind of thing out.”

  “More than enough times to be convinced that there’s something going on,” I said, my cheeks flushed with embarrassment. I wasn’t about to give her the exact details on what I’d fantasized about—or not fantasized about—while masturbating. Though thank goodness I had someone like Sakura to talk to about it. “He put some kind of a dom whammy on me.” It was too embarrassing to tell her the whole corny thing he’d said about there being an on-off switch under my choker, but wasn’t that just the kind of thing hypnotists could do? Make you sneeze every time you said the word “aardvark” and that kind of thing?

  Sarah didn’t seem to think so. “Okay, first of all, there are a lot of folks into hypno-play, but you wouldn’t do it without consent. Just like you wouldn’t do any other thing without negotiating it first.”

  “Oh, like the way he negotiated kidnapping me?”

  Sakura bit her own lip. “Point. But like you said, that was a spur-of-the-moment thing. Far as I know Axel isn’t into hypno.”

  “But it’s a thing that doms do? Hypno means hypnosis?”

  Sakura looked at me seriously. “You’ve really never heard of this?”

  “No.” I could feel my face flushing as if I’d downed the sake, even though I hadn’t. “Look. I know I’ve been acting like I know all about kink because my parents were into it, and the club and all, but you know I’ve never done anything like that. Until now, I mean.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Let’s back up. First of all—hypno, yes, it’s a thing some couples do. I mean, we play with minds as well as bodies. That’s half the fun. But Ricki, like I said, not without consent. Can you describe the scene you did? Any special trigger words or anything like that?”

  “Um, no. Not exactly. He snatched me, we wrestled a bunch, it got really sexual, and then there were things like he …” I tried to say it without blushing but describing it meant remembering in vivid detail what it felt like when he … “sliced my underwear off with a straight razor. And he told me to bend over so he could do it. And well, he told me to say his name.”

  “His name?”

  “Yes. I don’t know. We played around with whether I was supposed to call him Axel or Mr. Hawke, and it never got very … firm, you know? It was just some dirty talk.”

  “Some light role play?”

  “Yeah. Just some light role play and him giving me dirty commands.” And me loving it. How could it make sense that all fear, all resistance, all the usual things I felt during sex without a straight razor, all the things that made me jam my foot on the brake, had melted away when he was in control? Talking about it now, even in the broad strokes I was giving to her, was bringing back sense memories left and right. I remembered how right it felt to bow down, to press my forehead to the carpet and wait for him to reward me. “This really has me messed up, Sakura.”

  “Obviously.” She schooled her expression quickly from concern to a smile though, as the door slid aside again and the waiter put down two tiny plates, one in front of each of us. He was tall for an Asian guy and very slim, with a few blond streaks in his otherwise very black hair. I assumed he was an out-of-work actor.

  “Compliments of the chef,” he said with a grin and a nod and then slid the door closed again.

  I let myself be distracted by the bite-sized serving of some kind of fish that had been crisped on the outside with a blowtorch but was still cool and raw on the inside, almost buttery to bite into. Delicious. But only a momentary distraction.

  “Okay, where were we?” Sakura drank a bit more of the sake. “Last time I’m going to say this: if Axel did anything sketchy, beyond carrying you off for a lark, anything that violated the rules of consent, then his name is mud in the BDSM community and you definitely shouldn’t be inviting him to join your club. But nothing you’ve told me so far really sounds all that sketchy. He carried you off, you willingly had some light role play and heavy sex; you played the submissive role and had, if I’m not mistaken, some of the best sex in your life. And that’s why you’re upset.”

  “Because the sex was good?”

  “Because you discovered that letting someone else be in charge is a turn-on for you. Ricki, let me assure you, being submissive in the bedroom isn’t the same thing as being subservient or second-class to the pushy men in your life.”

  I dug in my heels. “That’s easy for you to say because you’re dominant.”

  She sighed. “The other thing is, really, if something’s going on in your head, it’s probably got more to do with you than with him. The way to straighten it out is to talk it out with him. Axel may be fairly new to serious dom role play but I know for a fact that he knows about aftercare.”

  Aftercare. I huffed. He’d tried to take care of me and I’d kicked him out. Sakura was making sense but I couldn’t quite put it all together in my mind. It was a lot to take in at once. “Okay, I confess. The thing is, when I’m near him? All common sense flies out the window, Sarah. I literally can’t get together with him to talk about this without melting into a puddle.”

  “Ahhh.” She seemed to think that explained a lot. “Well. Have you tried calling him?”

  “Of course I haven’t. I don’t even have his number.”

  “Yes, you do.” She gave me a sly, knowing smile. “I programmed it into your phone before I gave it back.”

  “You sneaky thing!” I pulled my phone out to see if what she said was true: sure enough, there was an Axel Hawke in my contacts now.

  There was also a text from Paul. Schmitt’s pressing me to schedule an appointment with you, his message read. Y/N?

  “Tell him he can have an appointment with me after he gives me a slot to address the CTC board of directors,” I said aloud.

  Sakura sipped her tea. “Huh. Speaking of pushy men in your life. Schmitt?”

  “How did you guess?” He couldn’t want to talk about the upcoming kinky dungeon party. He’d want to meet with both me and Gwen for that. “I have no clue what he wants now. I guess I have to meet with him to find out.”

  “Don’t be silly. Have Paul get an agenda from him. No agenda, no meeting. If the items are too sensitive to put on an agenda, well, that gives you the answer in another way.”

  “Right. Why didn’t I think of that?”

  “You’ve got to stop thinking of yourself as at the beck and call of these guys in suits, Rick’. Start thinking of yourself as the Queen of the Universe whom they all serve.”

  “What are you talking about? I’m already Queen Bitch of the Universe twenty-four-seven these days and I’m tired of it, Sarah.”

  “Tsk tsk. I didn’t say bitch. You do pretty well with your staff; I’ve seen it. You’re firm, fair, but very definitely in charge and demanding your due.”

  “But they’re my employees. Of course I can be all leader-like with them.”

  “And I’m telling you, act like that with these executives and lawyers in the club or they’re going to treat you like Cy’s little girl forever.” She set her sake cup down. “You’re afraid that being a sub in the bedroom means you’ll be submissive to these jerks, too? Don’t let it happen. I don’t care that they’re three times your age. You can buy and sell every one of them. Act like it.”

  “I have a ‘game face,’ ” I said in my defense. “Ice queen.”

  “Drop the ice and just think queen. Think: crown on your head.” She pointed to the top of her own head where a tiara would go and I felt myself sitting up straighter without even trying. “Demand their respect and you’ll get it, Ricki. Axel already respects you a hundred times more than these assholes.”

  “Does he?”

  I tried to imagine what
getting on the phone with him would be like. Part of me longed to hear his voice again. But what exactly did I want to say to him? Could I make him understand the reasons why I couldn’t be with him? Could I make him understand what was going on in my life? “I just don’t know, Sar’. What do you say to a guy who’s turned your whole world upside down?”

  The door slid aside and there was our waiter with a gigantic wooden tray shaped like a boat in his hands, well laden with a display of fish as colorful and gorgeous as a jewelry display at Tiffany’s. He sailed it onto our table, gave us another smile, and then retreated again. The arrival of such a feast distracted us completely from the fact that Sarah never answered my question.

  * * *

  I finally got the chance to pitch my idea to David Meyers after the next development meeting, when I caught him by the sleeve and asked, flat out, if I could meet him later that day. I had been thinking a lot about what Sarah had said about how I was too deferential to the men in power, about how I needed to demand my due. Amazingly, it worked. He said he didn’t have much time but if it was something quick to follow him down to his office right then. I hurried behind him and after stepping into his spacious corner office I closed the door behind us.

  “Now, Ricki, what is it that is burning you up so much you had to come talk to me privately about it?” he asked as he went around to his side of the desk.

  “Oh, nothing bad, I assure you. I just have an idea I’ve been wanting to suggest and I didn’t want to bring it up in the meeting today after that debate about why Polly Girl is screening so badly.”

  “I noticed you were very quiet during that discussion.” He gestured to a chair and I sat.

  “I haven’t seen the movie myself so I wanted to withhold judgment,” I said. “But my proposal is relevant to these issues.”

  “I’m all ears.” He reclined back slightly.

  “I believe the reason there’s the impression that ‘women’s movies’ don’t do well is that, well, Hollywood doesn’t do movies for women.”

  “Romantic comedies aren’t for women?” He looked puzzled.

  “Too often, honestly, they’re not. They’re sometimes about a woman, but they tend to be packed with things that are there for their husbands and boyfriends to enjoy, not the woman who is the ticket buyer to begin with.”