Chapter 7

“Just lie with me and listen, what I have to say is important to me, and to us I think.”

Andrew shrugged off his robe and slid into bed beside her. As always, they settled into their usual and favourite position.

“Can we talk about last night? As I lay in the bath being washed and cared for by you I was overcome with a lot of emotions. You are the only person that I could possibly trust in a situation like that, you know that, don’t you? I have been thinking about my sexuality a lot since Rome, trying to understand what turns me on and why.”

Suzanne looked at him and thought for a second before carrying on.

“I have had sex five times in total with four different guys other than you. Twice with my first guy before we first fucked, one other time with someone when I was still at school and then two one night stands with guys last term. You had sex with me more times in one day on holiday then everyone else combined. I am telling you that because what I am feeling and what I have to say is almost entirely as a result of us rather than anyone else. You have let me define my sexuality and it is always you that I think about when I am alone.

“Andrew, I don’t know why I am the way I am, it just is. Just like you are tall and I have big breasts it is something that is part of me. What we did last night was so wonderful I nearly wept. You had me tied to the bed and you could do anything to me and yet I felt completely safe and loved. Giving that control to you, knowing that you are going to fuck me any way you want to, you are going to torment me both physically and mentally, it is like a key in a lock. It was a wonderful combination of being relaxed and letting go and yet exciting at the same time. Six months ago, even three months ago, I was freaked out about this. I wanted to be ‘normal’ to just get off on regular fucking. That’s is not the right phrase because I do get off on regular fucking but I also need more. All the time? Probably not but if you controlled my sex life I think I would adapt very quickly. Not that I am suggesting you do that but it is what I feel. When it comes to sex you can do anything you want to me and with me.

“And yet, like earlier in the evening when Brian and Mary were here, the rest of the time you are my friend, my best friend and my equal, and you treat me the same way. I don’t feel the need to be like you, to do what you say, in a lot of ways in our day to day life you let me set the lead. I wasn’t joking last night; this place feels like my home. Don’t panic I know it is yours but this is how I want to decorate my first flat, you just let me do it to yours. You listen to me, make me feel valued, understand me. I am a more confident and happier person from having you in my life. And it has been like that for four years. From the first meetings you treated Paula and me with this incredible confidence. You decided that we could do the work and just helped us get to the point where we were doing the coursework with limited help and guidance from you. You taught me the value of routine and consistency, as well as putting the time in. Remember that very first day when I came to see you in the library? I remember you telling me you wouldn’t do my homework and you couldn’t sit my exams.”

She laughed.

“All the movies have the big chested girl getting a geek to do her homework for her, the guy happy just to be in her presence.”

She laughed again.

“What did I get? The one guy who made me more like him, studious and fit.”

The sparkle in Suzanne’s eyes was magical as Andrew looked at her.

“All I am trying to emphasise is the two sides to me, the confident student enjoying university, finding it surprisingly easy so far and wondering what she is going to do when she qualifies. Happy to get into a spirited debate about most things, including the changing role of women in society. I will sit with some of the other women in the dorms and we worry about what the job market will be like, will we be treated fairly, all these things. But behind the bedroom door there is the other me, that wants someone, you at present, to control me, to do what they want to me. To let go, it is intoxicating. These two sides of me are both integral parts of me. There is not one without the other. What did you say this morning as you lay on me, I am so complex? It is true. So there you go, I know it is a lot to just blurt out at you, but there is nobody else that I can talk about this with.”

Suzanne looked at Andrew intently, clearly gauging his reaction. He did not know what to say. So he took his hands off their usual resting place and pulled Suzanne up his body so he could both hug her properly and kiss her. Those two things, more than any words, helped relax the nervousness in her eyes. He opted for humour.

“So let me get this right. My best friend, someone who is clever, funny and adorable also needs me to force her to do whatever I want in the bedroom, whenever I want? And this is terrible how?”

Once she stopped trying to tickle him he became serious again.

“I understand what you have told me, how you feel that this is part of you and I am not going to question any of that. I could see the ache in your eyes last night, I have felt the way your body responds to my whispers and torments so I know that this is real. I suppose the more pertinent question is what now?”

“That is why I am telling you all this Andrew, I don’t know either. We are both only 18 years old, this seems post grad sexuality.”

He snorted at her attempt at a joke.

“Yes, it does seem to be some weighty stuff to be dealing with as an 18 year old but you seem sure that this is who you are and given my history with Fran and Nikki then I am not going to question it. They said they knew as teenagers that it was women they were attracted to, so let’s talk about you and your needs in more detail. Don’t think I am denying how you feel but do you think that it is different than the hooker fantasy you had. Your reaction to the reality was different to what you thought it would be. Do you think there is a difference?”

“Yes, I do based on the way we changed it that night, what we did later on the holiday and last night. When it was just the two of us I melted inside. I have thought about the night at the balcony, you let me wear a shirt but you could have just had me there naked, exposed for anyone to see if they looked up. It is one of the scenarios that I keep coming back to in my head. You could have just pushed me out onto the balcony, stood in the shadows fucking me and there would be nothing I could do. Sorry, that is not true, there is a lot I could do but there is nothing I would do. It is the feeling of helplessness that triggers it.”

Suzanne looked at him before carrying on.

“I am a big woman. Stop, let me finish. I have always been big, I was a big kid and it only got worse when I started to develop. By the time I was at Heriot’s I was fat. As I went through puberty I was fat, all tits and arse as the guys so kindly said. Of all the things that amazed people about you Andrew, one of the most confounding is your total lack of a type. From Tanvi to me, that is quite the range Andrew. Tiny, beautiful Indian girl but with the figure of a stick, to me. So I have been conscious of my weight probably all my life but definitely over the last six years or so. Then you and I learned to date, fun, incredibly nerve-racking every time, but I learned so much as a result. Then the following year we just settled into this incredibly close but mostly platonic relationship where we were with each other every day. But then when you finally fucked me in 5^th year you just hit me head on with my body, made me stand in front of that mirror which had been my personal hell for years. You fucked me so hard in front of that mirror and just made me stop worrying, okay maybe not stop, but worry less about my weight. But then you threw me around the bed like I was Tanvi’s size, that insane day when you lifted me onto your shoulders and ate me out. Every time with you I felt light and sexy and desired, but I also felt helpless in the face of your strength and power. Don’t freak out because you are such a gentle pussycat most of the time but that is where it started. Helpless in the arms of a strong man. What did you say yesterday? A beast, capable of doing beastly things to me. Neither of us are remotely qualified to understand or diagnose what happened but my guess is I reacted to the way you made me feel and treated me, especially physically, and it grew from there.”

As Suzanne said neither of them knew what the hell they were talking about but the way she described it made sense.

“What about my role in all this? As you talked about when describing day to day life, I am relaxed and normally easy-going. To be this demanding person controlling you is not who I am. Let me talk about last night. I hated spanking you, absolutely hated it. I know that we had done it a couple of times before but even then, when it was more jokey, it still felt wrong somehow. It took a long time for me to get into the mindset that this is what you wanted, this was driving you wild for me to even tolerate it. Hell, half the time I was spanking you I was thinking this was a scientific experiment not foreplay. I never considered my hand would start to get sore or what a bum looks like as it is smacked. It took you moaning and demanding for me to hit you harder for me to get my head into it. So I worry about that, but I also worry about the, I don’t know, the excesses of what you need. You want to be tied up, you get off on possibly being seen, naked or being fucked, you demand that I spank you harder before I fuck you in the arse. Then afterwards you want me to leave you tied up so that I can wake you up by popping the head of my dick into your arse with no warm-up, foreplay or warning.”

Andrew drew breath and Suzanne looked like she was about to cry.

“Suzanne, you are 18, that is a pretty heady list of things that you get off on, and that is ignoring the hooker roleplay in Rome. I want you to be happy but I worry that in two years’ time this list will seem tame and you will want to do something more extreme, whatever that is. Do you get off on regular sex anymore?”

Suzanne tried to calm down but Andrew could see that she was upset.

“Yes, I do Andrew, I know that you are asking important questions and part of the reason I am so upset is because I don’t know. I know that asking you to put this conversation on hold until tonight is crazy and unfair but I think we both need to process this morning. You have asked questions about me and what I think I need that I would like to consider. You, on the other hand, have to go downtown and talk with Mhairi and Leslie with all that swirling in your head.”

Andrew hugged and kissed her.

“I am going to have a quiet day, I will go for a swim later and I will try and salvage the bedding from next door. Do you think you will be late at your parents?”

“I doubt it. Unless they have changed beyond all recognition I don’t expect it to be hours of heart to heart conversation. This is more of a ‘mending fences’ visit, try to see what a relationship looks like going forward. I have no idea how it is going to go. But I should be home by 8.00 I would guess. I will call if there is any change to that.”

What Andrew really needed was an hour at the Commonwealth Pool, with an empty lane. Long endless laps of thinking time. But it wasn’t going to happen. When he got to Mhairi’s office they were meeting in the conference room. Mungo Drummond, the senior partner of her firm, came in to say good morning and spent five minutes oddly assessing the room. Andrew didn’t get what he was doing and when he left said so.

“Andrew, the three of you individually and the two Trusts are together one of the top two clients of the office. It is through my work with you that I made partner so young. He was just doing a quick meet and greet, he wants to get to know you better. You” Mhairi pointed at all three of them. “Are very important to the firm. Our other top clients have several partners assigned to them.”

Andrew’s patience was more than a little frayed since coming back to Edinburgh and Mungo Drummond suddenly became the relief valve.

“Show me where his office is please Mhairi.”

Her initial hesitation eventually gave way and Mhairi showed him to the big corner office with a view down Queen Street. Drummond looked up when his secretary announced that they were there. Andrew was brutally blunt.

“I came here four years ago, next week in fact, so almost exactly four years ago. You attended the meeting at the request of Brian Campbell. I was introduced to Mhairi Connelly that very day and she has been my lawyer ever since. I don’t want anyone else involved in my work or the work of the Trusts. She treated a 14 year old boy with respect from the very first meeting and has been nothing but helpful, professional and trustworthy ever since. I have no interest in dealing with anyone else from your firm. Oh, and just to be clear, this was my decision, and Mhairi had nothing to do with it. Good day.”

Once they were back in the conference room Andrew turned to Mhairi.

“Sorry about that but I have too much crap going on in my life to have to deal with middle aged Edinburgh lawyers trying to muscle in on you and this professional relationship. Fuck them.”

So it took a few minutes for the day to get back on track. Doug, Creighton and Julian were smiling while Leslie and her Dad, who must have arrived while Andrew was with Drummond, were quietly chatting. He presumed she was filling him in on what had happened. He could go and see Mungo later and deal with him.

“Well, now that Andrew has finished telling my boss off, maybe we can get to the purpose of the meeting. CMS Investment Trust had three million pounds to invest. So far you have spent £215,000 on a quarter share in the distillery, and you have a commitment to spend another £250,000 over the next ten years. So 15.5% of the Trust is invested. We are here to talk about several new proposals.”

Over the next six, long tedious hours they reviewed 10 proposals. The original six Andrew had looked at during the term together with four more, including the marine engineering one that had originally been an individual investment. Andrew sat quietly and listened carefully as different people presented the proposals. Leslie, Creighton and Doug all took turns presenting the proposals and equal delight in playing devil’s advocate when it was not their turn. Two of the proposals were for small scale manufacturing but for parts for automobiles, one for cars and one for trucks. They listened to Doug who demolished the arguments for this investment.

“Linwood is closed and there are no other car plants in Scotland. The Leyland truck plant in Bathgate is under threat. These are two great proposals for products that no one will want. Buyer first. Think about what the three of you did. What can we sell? Not what do we want to make or would be the most fun, what can we make money doing?”

Well that was that then. Every meeting with Doug Somers was an education, and a blunt, sometimes brutal education. He lived and worked through the 1970s in the UK when the government had to go to the IMF for a bail out and there were endless strikes. He came across as apolitical, he hated all sides equally, but knew how politics could fuck up everything. He told them about how the Linwood car plant had been built outside Glasgow while the rest of the company was in the Midlands of England. No experience and a supply chain that was all concentrated 250 miles away meant that the cars were awful, the quality was poor and the place never made any money.

They then talked about three investment proposals for supporting the oil and gas industry. One was the marine engineering one that had originally been an individual investment. They ended up investing in that company as well as a stevedoring company in Aberdeen. Both received the £50,000 they asked for. It was nerve racking spending so much money on the unknown. The third proposal was turned down as it involved competing with the established helicopter companies and they felt it had very little chance of success.

The sixth proposal was probably the most interesting of the day because Andrew learned a lot about something he knew nothing about. It was from a tiny company well north of Lerwick in the Shetland Isles off the north coast of the Scottish mainland. They had managed modest success in shellfish farming, aquaculture, and they wanted to expand. They showed that there was a demand for mussels and oysters and it would provide employment in an area that was not benefiting from the oil and gas boom that was affecting the southern part of the islands. Their request was for £20,000 and it was also granted. This investment was the one Andrew was personally most interested in, just because it was so unusual to him.

Finally, and this was the group that took the longest time, they had four computer investment proposals. All software, all utterly unrealistic in what they were trying to achieve. This was where Julian and Andrew spoke up for the first time and played the role of Doug. All four of the proposals were for software companies designing a new computer game. This had been Andrew’s first dream when he started coding himself, before realising the complexity of producing something good as well as the deluge of games that were coming from the United States.

“I don’t support any of these proposals, they are not sufficiently thought through and I don’t see any of them having what it takes to make an impactful computer game. If they find other funding and prove me wrong then great for them but I don’t think it is for us. What I am thinking about is something different. We walked away from the computer industry, from designing software, when we sold the rights to AIMS. We are good at what we do, have someone who is the business brains to stop us wasting our time and have a track record of success. I have found myself wondering why I have been so resistant to returning to designing software. We are sitting here precisely because of that skill. Listening to the proposals today has got me wondering if we should not just set up another computer company, interview the people behind these proposals and hire the ones we think are the best. We can run the company but we get other people to code for us. Structure it so that people have a chance to share in any success, although I will leave all that kind of detail to the experts. What do people think?”

There was an excited silence. Andrew’s impromptu suggestion was being considered favourably. Julian was the first to speak.

“I am all for it, I think it is a way for us to get back to doing something we loved and were successful at without it being a time soak.”

“What? You thought I didn’t have enough to do?”

Leslie had a big smile on her face so Andrew assumed they were three for three. It was gratifying to see the faith that everyone had in them, even Doug who they made give them the speech about lightening not striking twice in the same place. But he rather negated his warning by extolling the virtues of new technology. Before everything wrapped up, Brian and Doug asked if they could talk about something. Doug started.

“We both have spoken to a lot of our friends and colleagues over the last six months. What the three of you are trying to do has captured the imagination of several of them. When they realise how young you all are, it only piques their interest further. We have had several people approach us to ask if they can join the Investment Trust.”