I turnedmy wrist over to glance at my watch. It was 11:57 a.m. and our meeting time was for noon. I reminded myself that not everyone believes in my scale of politeness for time. Arriving five minutes before a scheduled appointment is what I considered on time. By arriving less than five minutes prior to the scheduled time, or at the exact appointment time, was less than polite.
Annoyed, I sipped from my water glass off and on until 12:10 p.m. Finally, as my watch neared 12:20, she arrived. I stood to greet her when she approached the table and returned her hug out of politeness. With a thud, she flung her purse down on the chair between us. I watched her as she situated herself; running her hands through her hair, reaching into her purse to grab her cell phone, then typing on it for a few moments before tossing it back into the purse.
Judging by mannerisms, a lot had changed in her life. I had grown impatient.
“So, what brings you to Vegas, Claire?” I came right out and cut through the small talk.
Claire seemed shocked that I wasn’t offering up idle chit chat. She thrust her head back in a shocked gesture and wrinkled her nose. I took a slow sip from my glass, but kept my eyes on her and watched her make childish moves with her body as she pretended to be shocked and surprised.
“Wow, Russell,” she finally said and obnoxiously raised her eyebrows. “No, polite talk? No, ‘hey, it’s so good to see you after all these years,’ or ‘how have you been?’ You just cut right into the ‘why’ now?” she barked.
“Polite talk would have been delightful…thirty minutes ago, Claire.”
“Damn, some things never change,” Claire said under her breath and rolled her eyes. “Well, I guess I’ll follow your lunchtime protocol and answer your rude first question. But don’t let it go to your head,” she warned.
The considerate, sweet woman I once knew was gone. In her place was an arrogant, self-absorbed person. I didn’t blanch or move a muscle. She wasn’t going to get a visible rise out of me with her behavior or tone.
“So, I moved back to Vegas. I took a job at one of the local television stations as an evening fill-in anchor,” she finally announced.
I nodded and congratulated her on the new job.
“Was your husband able to secure employment out here already?” I asked.
She snorted out a laugh and swatted the air, as if I had just told a hilarious joke.
“No, we divorced a few years back. I wasn’t getting what I needed from him.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Claire,” I offered.
And I was sorry to hear that, though not surprised. Claire had needs that I knew could only be met by a strong alpha male. But she had some sexual kinks that most likely would require a Top. To stack the odds further against them, she was a masochist. Way back when I heard she had married a man from the TV station she worked at in Miami, I told myself that the marriage wouldn’t last. The only way it could survive would be if he could meet all of her needs, or if she had lied to herself and pushed her needs to the back shelf, as most do.
Her tone softened and when she looked up at me, I began to see the woman that I knew all those years ago. She gave me a faint smile and then shook her head.
“I still think about what you told me at the end of our last session before I left for Miami. You told me not to settle for just anyone,” she remembered out loud.
“I did. I meant it. Do you know why I said that to you, Claire?”
“I didn’t then.”
“You were moving across the country alone. Loneliness drives people to settle. And I knew that you needed a strong man to settle you and meet your needs without making you feel guilty for having them in the first place. If you had only retained one thing that I ever said to you, I wanted it to be that. I didn’t want you to get to this stage.”
“The divorced, single parent of two, and full of so much pent up shit from wasting nearly twenty years of my life, stage?”
I smiled and nodded.
“That very stage.”
“I did love him, Russell. Sex was okay, though, it was always missing something.”
“That sting, you needed,” I finished her thought.
Claire knew that she couldn’t bullshit with me. I knew who she was deep down, and I knew what she needed all those years ago.
“Yep, you got it.” Claire nodded and sighed. “I tried to push the desire away; the desire to tell him that I wanted it a certain way. I managed to for a number of years. I told myself that I was happy having boring sex, but it didn’t seem to help.”
“It didn’t help because it was more than just a desire for a ‘different’ kind of sex. You have a need for it. Needs are different than desires or something you want. You can’t turn them off easily. Or if you do temporarily, there are two typical outcomes; you either remain unhappy, or it ends as it did for you.”
“After a few years into the marriage and the kids had started school, I tried to get him to try the kind of sex that I longed for. The rougher sex with some degree of pain. That worked for a little while, but it just made me hungrier. I even tried getting him to pretend he was a Top giving me a healthy session like you used to. I bought paddles, floggers, leather impact toys of all sorts and variety out of desperation. Nothing worked.”
