Going to California?

Chapter 3 – Dinner and Surprises

I stepped out of the Uber in front of Vought Tower and tried to control my breathing. After I'd gotten back to my apartment earlier, I'd thrown up bile—my meager lunch already digested—at how close I'd come to him killing me. I would have to be sharp, fast on my feet, and in control of myself to have any hope of coming out of this dinner unharmed.

Homelander hadn't said what to wear, which was unusual for him. After I came back to Vought as Director of Talent Relations, I got an e-mail from him the day after he deafened Blindspot with the subject line "Your clothes."

Your clothes are ugly. You need new clothes for your new job.

I actually typed "Fuck you" before sanity returned and I erased it. Tapping my fingernail against my teeth, I finally came up with a message that I thought wouldn't get me killed.

I'm too busy to buy a new work wardrobe. Madelyn left a lot of things hanging fire that I have to deal with ASAP. If you would have someone send over clothes that are acceptable to you, I'll be happy to wear them.

It must have worked, because three days later I received two big packing boxes filled with clothes. None of them were my style—too many bold prints and low-cut blouses, and I liked the boho hippie look—but they hadn't cost me a nickel and Homelander was out of my hair. I kept the work clothes in the left-hand section of my closet and my own clothes on the right, with a tall shoe rack jammed in between. It never occurred to me to wonder how he knew my sizes.

Tonight I'd decided to wear one of the few dresses on the right-hand side, a long-sleeved, V-necked velvet number with a short skirt and an abstract flower pattern of cobalt and teal on a black background. In deference to the February slush, I'd worn a trenchcoat and black knee-high boots. Their stiletto heels rang on the lobby floor as I headed for the elevator, wishing I'd had some direction from him about what to wear. Maybe this dress was too tight? I didn't want him getting any ideas, even if he did only see me as a talking lamp.

My pace slowed the closer I got to Homelander's apartment until I was standing outside his closed door, wishing I'd just paid attention to my job earlier and avoided the entire situation. If it wouldn't cause more trouble, I'd just turn around and go home.

The door opened. "Are you coming in, Ashley?" asked Homelander.

I put on a pleasant expression and said, "Of course."

"You were sure taking your sweet time."

I ignored that and walked down the front hallway into the living room. A table with a white linen cloth was set up near the windows and my heart sank at the reminder of Timothy. What equivalent he could have found for me I didn't know, but he had something in mind, something unpleasant. I could smell it.

His hands came down on my shoulders and I flinched. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

"Take it easy, Ashley. I'm not going to eat you. Not unless you ask, anyway." I chose to ignore that as well. "I was going to take your coat."

"Okay, I'm sorry."

"Stop apologizing. I don't want you fainting again." I let him ease the trenchcoat off me and stepped away to create some distance between us. I didn't like having my back to him. When I turned around, Homelander was standing there, my coat dangling from his hands, a half-smile on his face. "I do like you better in skirts than pants. I don't recognize that dress, though. Did Vought get that for you?"

I shook my head, relieved that I'd guessed right about his wardrobe preferences. "It's mine. I haven't worn it since college."

"The clothes from Vought are yours too. They aren't like a McDonald's uniform you have to turn in when you quit."

"They're not really what I would wear. But they're lovely," I hastened to assure him.

"I thought they'd look good on you when I picked them out."

Well, that was a shock—I thought he'd just assigned someone to pick out the clothes. In fact, it was enough of a shock to keep me quiet as he held the chair for me when I sat down at the table. He had beautiful manners, when he bothered to use them. And why was he bothering? Was this one of those situations Dr. Winterbourne mentioned that he might be misinterpreting? Oh God, was this a date?

Everything looked expensive: the china, the gold-rimmed tulip glass for champagne and the matching water tumbler, the silverware. Homelander was a rich man, though; he'd hardly play it cheap with anything. A bottle of champagne sat in an ice bucket to his right. "Are you drinking?" That boded poorly for the evening. As far as I knew, he was a teetotaler, and if what he did when he was sober was any indication, I never wanted any alcohol to touch his lips.

"Oh, no, but I remembered that you like champagne." He popped the cork and poured some into my glass.

I took a healthy swig because I knew I needed to get this in as soon as I could. "Before you ask, I want you to know that I'm not going to tell you who it is that offered me the domme job. I don't think it's fair to him for you to know that much about him."

"That's okay," he said easily. "I already figured out it's Adam Bourke."

My eyes opened wide and I spluttered, "How did you…come to that conclusion?"

Homelander grinned. "You were about to say, 'How did you know,' weren't you?"

"Not necessarily. But tell me how you decided that." There was no way he could have deduced that based on what I'd told him.

"Sure." His smile lingered as he refilled my glass. "You've only fucked two men in the last two years, Adam Bourke and Cameron Coleman. From what I've seen, you don't like Cameron very much, and I don't think he has the kind of money to buy a live-in dominatrix. He also lives here in New York, so you wouldn't need to quit your job. That just leaves Adam."

"What makes you think those are the only men I've been involved with?"

He sighed. "Ashley, how many times do I have to tell you that you have no secrets from me before you believe it?"

"There's a difference between secrecy and privacy."

"Did you expect much privacy when you fucked your director in the men's room at the Dawn of the Seven premiere?"

That struck me dumb long enough for him to put Waldorf salad on my plate. "You cannot be serious. I'm not going to deny it, but you have no way of knowing about that. Unless Hughie Campbell told you about it."

"Hughie was silent as the grave about it. I heard you." He returned to his chair and raised a glass of milk to his mouth. I had a very brief flash of what happened before he deafened Blindspot before I repressed the memory. Nothing but death lived down that road.

"I don't believe that. You were in a theater, which was soundproofed. Not only was the theater soundproofed, you were listening to a movie in Dolby sound that was exceptionally heavy on screaming, gunshots, and explosions." Did he really have hearing that keen? I knew he could hear for a long way, but filtering out the movie noise and the crowd noise to focus only on two voices several hundred feet away—it seemed a little much.

"But I still did it." I didn't say anything, just took a small sip of champagne to try to gather my thoughts, and he waited until I was drinking to ask, "Still think Tony Gilroy's a better director than your Adam?"

I choked, as he intended, and had to blink tears out of my eyes to focus on him across the table, looking at me with a little smile. "Were you watching too?" Despite my promises to myself that I wouldn't get angry, that I'd stay calm and quiet, the fury began bubbling up at the idea of the encounter with Adam being entertainment for Homelander. I am not your amusement. "I admit it would have been more entertaining than Dawn of the Seven, but it isn't like you bought a ticket to watch me fuck anybody."

Something changed in his face, but too quickly for me to determine what it was before the mask returned. "I wasn't watching you. For what it's worth, I was paying attention to the movie that I was the star of. Which is more than the director did."

It also explained how he knew I was pulling my hair. I'd thought that might get me off, but it did nothing except cut the stress of the situation, and Adam thought I'd had an orgasm so he wouldn't try to stretch things out. I'd just wanted to go to the ladies' room, clean up, and go watch the damn movie. "Yeah, Tony Gilroy's a better director. Duplicity is one of my favorite movies."

"I haven't seen that one myself. You'll have to come over sometime so we can watch it." I made a noncommittal sound and he said, "Eat your salad."

The main course was chicken paprika, and I wondered which restaurant he'd ordered this from. I'd never had a tour of the apartment, but I didn't even know if it had a kitchen, plus I doubted if he'd cook for himself, much less anyone else. We were about halfway through when he asked, "Tell me about what you do as a dominatrix."

"How much do you know about BDSM?"

Homelander snorted. "I saw Fifty Shades of Grey once?"

That was a lie—I'd seen Stormfront's apartment after they got through fucking—but decided not to bring up the subject of his dead Nazi girlfriend. "Please, that's not real BDSM. The watchwords for real BDSM are safe, sane, and consensual. If Christian Grey hadn't been hot and rich, she would have slapped him with a restraining order pretty quickly."

"Well, how would you do it differently?"

"I wouldn't push people into things they don't want to do, that's for sure." I took another sip of champagne. "You have to be sure of what the other person wants, so it's always a good idea to sit down and talk about it in a nonsexual setting. There's more planning involved than you might think. There's always a chance that unhandled trauma can come up without clear communication."

"What's unhandled trauma?"

"Just as an example—and this is nothing that ever happened to me—let's say I'd been raped a few years ago and there was one thing the rapist did that I absolutely cannot deal with experiencing again, even in a safe environment. If you were domming for me and I didn't tell you about this one thing in advance—let's say the rapist put his hand around my throat—and you did that during a scene, that would probably trigger a flashback for me, which is why we have to be very clear on what's wanted and what isn't."

"So I'd need to ask about things like that."

"Yeah, if you were domming." Nothing bad had happened during the evening, so I felt myself relaxing. Maybe I'd been too anxious. Maybe he didn't want to kill me after all; at least, not at the moment. "It's a good idea to do at least a few scenes as a sub before you start domming, if only to understand what it's like from the other side."

He watched me eat chicken paprika for a few moments. "You said before that I'd forced you to be my sub at work."

I had to swallow before saying, "That isn't actually fair. Really, the sub's in charge in the relationship. If a dom gets a reputation for not doing what the sub wants, pretty soon that dom won't find any subs that are willing to play with them. A work relationship doesn't translate in those terms." I thought it was a good reply off the cuff. The way he treated me at work wasn't anything I would ever have tolerated when I was trying out the submissive role—humiliation doesn't get me off—but I wasn't about to tell him that.

"So you only like domming, then."

I didn't like where the conversation was going, but somehow I couldn't summon up too much concern about it. "I've done both, and I can do either. I don't really have a preference."

"Sooo…you wouldn't be opposed to being a sub for Adam?"

"No, I wouldn't do that with him." The refusal was instinctive. I tried to cover by saying, "That's not what he likes."

"Well, what do you like?"

"Really, I don't have any preferences as far as BDSM goes."

That surprised him. "If you aren't really into it, why are you even thinking about moving to California and being Adam Bourke's dominatrix? I didn't think you were so in love with him you'd make a sacrifice like that."

"I'm not in love with Adam." I drained half the champagne in my glass and Homelander refilled it before I could continue. "I haven't even done any scenes with him yet."

"That is crazy," he said. "At least go for a test drive before you decide to blow up your life."

"You and my psychiatrist agree on that." Too late I realized what I'd said.

He leaned back in his chair and gave me a hard look. "So you're seeing a shrink about this, or life in general?"

"It's for my anxiety—you remember, that thing that made me faint in front of you? And the hair-pulling that you saw fit to make public knowledge in front of A-Train and the Deep." The fury, which had gone away as the meal went on, returned full strength at the memory of my humiliation. "I hope you thought I was properly submissive then, because you will have to kill me before I ever let you humiliate me like that again. I am not your toy."

His hand came down on the tabletop, but he controlled his strength well enough to only rattle the dinnerware. "Maybe I wanted you to stop hurting yourself!" I flinched at the shout. "I knew it was a compulsion, so you wouldn't stop just because I told you to, no matter how afraid of me you are. I thought maybe if people knew about it, you might stop."

Now it was my turn to look at him. "Is that the truth?"

Homelander looked irritated as hell, but the fear wasn't taking hold of me the way it normally did. "Yes, that's the truth, for what it's worth."

"Huh." That took the heat out of my anger. "My psychiatrist thinks it will go away when I get the anxiety under control since it's an attempt to de-stress."

"Why don't you try sex for that?"

"I already did—it's what the Dawn of the Seven bathroom scene was about. I don't have orgasms, so it doesn't work." I almost laughed as Homelander's jaw dropped.

He seemed to be at a loss for words. "I…don't understand why you would think about going to live with him when you won't even enjoy the sex part of it."

"Women can enjoy sex without having orgasms. You know, the kissing, the touching, the intimacy. There are other things besides the orgasm."

"Spoken like a woman who never came in her life." He gave me one of those deadly smiles, but somehow I wasn't scared. "I bet I could make you come."

I started laughing. "I wish you knew how many men have said that to me in my life."

"I'm not just any man."

"True enough." Okay, time to put the brakes on this. "Look, I'm sure you're really good at it, but I don't think that would work out, even if we didn't work together. I just feel like anything you like to do would hurt, and I don't like stuff that hurts. Plus, if I don't have an orgasm with you, there are only two ways I could handle that. One, I fake it and pretend to, which would make you mad as I would be lying to you, or two, I don't fake it and then you get mad at me for not having an orgasm. No matter what I do, there's not a way to handle it where you don't get mad at me, so I'd just as soon not even try it. I think that's the best thing for everyone involved."

He didn't answer me, just kept looking at me with speculation, and it occurred to me that something was wrong. Something was terribly wrong here, because there was no way, no way in all the world that I would be talking to Homelander about my inability to climax, unless…I glanced at the champagne glass sitting on the table. It was full. But he had never let it get empty, so I couldn't keep track.

With a sudden movement that made my head swim, I lunged for the champagne bottle and pulled it out of the bucket. Most of its contents were gone—maybe a third of the bottle was left. "You got me drunk," I whispered. Why did I want to cry? It was just one more betrayal, one more mockery. What he would do with what I'd told him—I cringed away from thinking about it. Then something much more imminent occurred to me. "Please don't rape me."

Something in his face—hurt? Could I have hurt his feelings? He was fragile as a china cup emotionally, so it wasn't out of the question. "I'm not going to rape you. I just wanted you to be relaxed so I could talk to you without you freezing up with fear or turning into a fainting goat."

"Promise me. Promise me you're not going to rape me. Please?" I hated the pleading in my own voice but he might take it better this way, might bestow a promise on me like a king gifting a vassal with a title.

Homelander sighed. "Ashley, I promise you I will not rape you. In fact, the only way I'll ever fuck you is if you come up to me and say, 'Homelander, I want you to fuck me.' Just so there's no confusion here."

"Okay. Thank you." Whether he'd keep his word was something else, but he'd wanted to keep me calm for now.

"Do you want dessert?"

Since I'd realized I was drunk, the dizziness had become a lot more obvious. Maybe eating something else would help. "Sure. That would be fine."

It was brandied peaches, and all I could do was laugh. He smiled as he put some on my plate and took some for himself. "The alcohol's cooked out of it, so it should be fine. It won't make you any drunker."

The dessert was good, but I had the feeling it was too sugary to counteract the alcohol in the champagne. "What time is it?"

"I don't know. Probably around midnight."

I sighed. Figures. I'd have to call for an Uber and hope the driver was a woman and I wouldn't have to worry about getting raped by someone other than Homelander. "I should go home, then."

"Did you drive?"

That got a laugh out of me. "I don't have a car in the city. It would cost more than my apartment to keep it in a garage. I was going to call an Uber to get home."

"I can take you."

That was a surprise. "I didn't know you knew how to drive."

"I don't. We're going to go flying."

That seemed like a hellish bad idea. "It's going to be pretty cold if you're going fast. I heard there might be snow tonight."

Homelander's mouth set in the tight-lipped mulish look I'd gotten quite familiar with. "Then the sooner I get you home, the more likely it'll be that we beat the snow."

There was no arguing with him, so I let him help me on with my trenchcoat and take the elevator up to the roof. The world kept swimming around me and I reminded myself to put a nice big glass of water on the nightstand so I wouldn't have the super-hangover I sensed was in the offing.

Wind whipped across the rooftop and hit me in the face, clearing my head a little. "Homelander, I don't think-"

"No, you don't," he said. "Put your arms around my neck."

I obeyed, and he put an arm around my waist before taking off like a missile. The G-force almost peeled my face off, and I had to dig my teeth into my lips to hold back a scream. My stomach lurched and I started repeating to myself, do not throw up on Homelander. Do not throw up on Homelander. What would he do? Probably something that involved me plunging to my death from thousands of feet in the air. It might have been cool to fly with him if I'd been sober and it wasn't freezing, but I wasn't and it was, so I buried my face against his shoulder to pretend we were just standing still.

Time works differently when combined with alcohol, so I had no idea how long it was before I felt something solid under my feet. "You can look now. You're home."

We were standing on the balcony of my apartment, and I was too drunk to ask myself how he knew which apartment was mine from the outside. "Thank you," I murmured. "Thank you for getting me home."

And I don't know why what happened next happened, what demon from hell possessed me, and it wasn't just demon rum, but it did and there was no changing anything afterward and that was that.

I kissed Homelander.

The first shock—his lips were soft. I hadn't thought they would be, with the tight set of them most of the time, and I hadn't really thought about kissing him before, not really. He didn't respond, either by kissing back or pushing me away, so I kept kissing him and ran the tip of my tongue over the outline of his mouth. As I traced where his lips met each other, he shuddered and opened his mouth, sucking my tongue inside and pulling me tight against him. One of his hands slid over my back and I moaned as he cupped my ass.

Homelander pulled back from me but didn't let go. "Ashley, you're drunk."

"Whose fault is that?" I stood on tiptoe and ran my tongue up the side of his neck and into his ear. He shivered and a wave of sensation hit me. My hand was on the back of his neck and his skin was soft, and I ran my hand into his hair and it was silky and it amazed me that he felt so good when he'd never caused me anything but pain and fear. I put my hand against his face to turn him back toward me and kissed him again. Dimly I noticed no stubble on his jawline, not even what I would have expected from a man who'd shaved that morning. Had he shaved before we had dinner? I didn't have time to think on that before he pulled away again and kept talking.

"It's my fault, you're right about that, but you really don't want to do this right now. In the morning you'll thank me for—"

I wasn't really interested in this speech, so I slid one hand down his chest, over his stomach, to his groin, and started rubbing him. The way he jolted with the feeling made me smile and I made a soft little pleasure noise to match the groan he let out. "Let me get you off, Homelander."

"Are you the same woman who made me promise I wouldn't rape her?"

That wasn't worth answering, so I continued to minister to the fast-growing hardness. "Come on, you're into it. Let me get you off."

His breathing was a lot heavier when he said, "Ashley, I promise the next time we have dinner, I'll let you get me off, but you need to stop this now."

I took my hand away immediately and looked up at him. He looked dazed, as well as surprised that I'd paid attention to what he said. "You need to know that I'll listen when you tell me to stop. You can trust me to hear you say no."

"That's good to know." He took a shaky breath. "If you were sober, you and I would be in your bed fucking each other's brains out, but you're not. You have a right not to be taken advantage of, and I won't do that."

"I know. I'd need to say the magic spell you gave me at dinner in order to unlock the sex power-up."

A laugh escaped him. "Woman, you are drunk off your ass."

I stood on tiptoe again to put my mouth near his ear. "Sure I couldn't interest you in a blowjob?"

In the time it took me to blink he was gone. I knew he must have flown back to Vought Tower, but I had no idea which way he'd gone—up, down, left, right, he was just missing. I supposed I should be glad he hadn't taken off fast enough for a sonic boom to shatter my balcony doors, along with every bit of glass on this side of the building. After I fumbled my keys out of my purse and got the sliding doors open, I stumbled around, pulling off clothes randomly before I collapsed on my bed, unaware of the little voice in the back of my head, almost silent but it would get louder and louder until I woke in the morning to hear it screeching at tornado-warning-siren decibels, "What the HELL have you done?"