Everyone at the company was a little afraid of Victoria Hale. She was forty-two, the youngest partner in the firm's history, and she ran meetings the way a good conductor runs an orchestra: calmly, precisely, and with absolutely no patience for wrong notes.
Jonas was not afraid of her. That was the first thing she noticed about him.
He was an architect from another office, in town for a project, and after their second meeting he waited until everyone else had left the room.
"May I say something unprofessional?" he asked.
"You may try."
"I think you like being obeyed. And I think I would like to obey you. Outside of this building."
She looked at him for a long moment. "Ninth floor of the Ambassador. Eight o'clock. Bring a pen."
The contract
The pen was for the contract. She wrote it herself on hotel stationery while he stood in front of the desk, because she had not told him to sit.
What he wanted. What he didn't. What she would never do. A safe word – red – and a promise that using it would never make her angry. Rules: he would call her Ma'am. He would ask before he touched her. He would tell her the truth, always, even when it was embarrassing.
"Especially when it's embarrassing," she added, and watched him blush.
They both signed. She folded the paper and put it in her bag.
Kneeling
"Kneel," she said.
He did, on the thick hotel carpet, and something in his shoulders relaxed – as if he had been holding himself upright for years and had finally been allowed to stop.
She walked around him slowly, heels quiet on the carpet. She made him wait. She made him describe, in detail, what he had thought about in the meeting that afternoon. She lifted his chin with one finger when he looked away.
The rest of the evening followed the contract to the letter, and some of it was not on the contract at all, but only because he asked – properly, with please and Ma'am – and she said yes. She was in control of every minute. That was the point. That was the gift.
Morning
At seven she was dressed again, hair up, the woman from the boardroom. He was still on the floor beside the bed, wrapped in a blanket, watching her.
"Thank you," he said.
"For what?"
"For taking it seriously."
She crouched beside him and, for just a moment, let her voice go soft. "That's the only way to do it."
They still meet on the ninth floor once a month. The contract has been rewritten three times. Each version is longer.
