Chapter 36

Her eyes were like saucers as she saw the place. “This place seems really classy. Are we okay like this?” she asked awkwardly.

“You look beautiful,” I assured her and took her hand, leading her inside.

We were greeted by my regular server. “Mr. Russell, there’s a slight problem with your reservation,” she told me apologetically. “This afternoon’s party has run long. We’ll be seating you in the private dining room for this evening though. I apologize for the inconvenience.”

I smiled and nodded. “No inconvenience. It sounds a little loud in here tonight. The private dining room will give us a little more quiet to talk.”

She looked relieved and showed us the way. Gina was looking at me strangely, but waited until we were seated across from each other at the large table with menus. “You come here often enough for them to worry about pissing you off?” she asked.

“Nah, I tip well enough for them to want me coming back,” I laughed and pointed out the items on the menu that I’d tried and that I hadn’t found anything less than delicious.

She nodded and when our server returned, I ordered the same drinks with dinner that I always did.

“They let you order wine here too?!!?” she asked when we were alone.

“It’s an Italian restaurant,” I explained. “A touch of wine is traditional. I never push it though. Never more than half a glass and I frequently leave a little at the bottom of the glass.”

She nodded. “So you treat all your girls like this?” she asked.

“Not all of them have been here, but most have. I was making a reservation for last night for Tricia and me so I added another for tonight. I thought I’d go a little further than normal since I had to beg off on doing it Friday night.”

She nodded. “Can I say something without sounding like a bitch?” she asked, worried at how I’d take it.

“Sure,” I said lightly, wanting to put her at ease.

“Lana and Becky are dumb,” she said certainly.

I laughed, taken by surprise. “Because they let me get away?” I asked.

She shrugged, but then nodded. “We all saw how you paid attention to Tricia last night, rubbing her feet between dances, letting her choose who else could dance with you, showing up in a limo and now I find out you brought her here. This may be the classiest restaurant I’ve ever been in. You’ve been good as gold to everyone that was at the party, all the cheerleaders and Lana says you’re super-nice to girls who break up with you too.”

“That’s all true, but I can be a pain in the ass to get along with too,” I pointed out.

“What could you possibly do to make all that seem like a bad trade?” she asked.

“Well, I’m sure Lana’s told you I’m a sex fiend,” I said dryly. “If she hasn’t, then you should talk to Beck. We were worried for a while she was trying to get a job as my press secretary. With everything that’s happened though, I’m sometimes a little unsteady on my feet emotionally. My parents separated, that rumor, the study, everything that happened to you girls, the cheer thing, the money from YouTube and the malpractice suit I had with the hospital. It’s been pretty non-stop. I sometimes need to step back and get away from my own life.”

She nodded. “I heard about some of that. I also heard that you’re a freak,” she smirked. “That part seems okay, but the rest of it isn’t really you. It’s your life. That part sucks, but it’s no reason to walk out on you.”

“There’s a lot that happened that I’ve had to sort of gloss over. Not that I don’t trust you, but some of it is a story that touches on a lot of lives. The short version is still a long story,” I laughed. “I don’t mind telling it, but part of it really fucked me up for a while and I don’t want to tell it here.”

She nodded, wide-eyed, wondering what mysterious adventure compared to everything I’d already done. “Still, even with that story in the mix, I think they were kind of dumb to not hold on.”

“They think so too, now,” I told her. “We’re working through it and they’re hoping that we can repair the damage, but we still have a way to go.”

She nodded and we talked about cheer. She talked to me about formations and the different roles in the routine and I could tell she loved it. I grinned and thought it sounded pretty good myself. It was a lot more interesting than some sports I could name and on par with most others.

“So what things do you do to step back and get away from your life?” she asked, changing the subject.

I smiled, amused. “Well, when I need to stop thinking, I generally work out at home or stretch. Sometimes I post a video online when I have a day I just need to decompress from. There’s been a couple of times though that when it got to be too much, I just walk away. You heard about that day that Lana and I had the screaming match about a month ago?” I asked. She nodded and I went on. “That was the end for me. I seriously meant it when I asked her to kill me. They’d put me through a lot and that day ... I just reached my breaking point. I took off and wouldn’t let anyone know where I was. When they finally tracked me down, I checked myself into the hospital on suicide watch rather than go home.”

“I didn’t know that,” she said, sounding shocked.

“Ancient history now,” I said dismissively. “But at the time, I knew our parents would try to smooth it over and I would have seriously finished myself off to get out of that.”

“They hurt you that bad?” she breathed.

I nodded. “I don’t want to go into all the details, but most of you girls got out after the party. They didn’t. Patrick and Vance kept them doped on weekends so they could have their way and then kept them dried out during the week when I was around so they’d go into withdrawals and take it out on me.”

“Whoa! That’s seriously fucked-up! I had no idea. Lana just swore to me that she had reason to believe the story about you. I didn’t know the rest.”

“Neither did I for the longest time. Anyway, enough about them. I didn’t ask you to dinner to talk about Lana all night.”

“Well, we’re talking about you. She was a huge part of your life,” she countered. “You can’t talk about you without talking about the people around you.”

“That’s true. But what about you? I barely know anything about you except that you love cheer, figure skating, you watch that Captain America video every day and you’ve been nicer to me than I could have expected from someone I’d only met a few weeks ago.”

“You’re our hero,” she told me. “After that video, of course I’m gonna stick up for you when someone treats you unfairly. There’s not really a lot to know about me that you don’t know already,” she admitted sheepishly. “I was in skating for a long time, but we couldn’t afford it any more, so I took up cheer instead. I like cheer better, actually. It’s something we can do year round and until this year, it was school sponsored. I still can’t believe you paid that much for us to have a team this year.”

I smiled. “So your passions are for skating and cheer, huh?” I asked, passing by the chance to turn the conversation back to me. “Those aren’t bad passions to have. Did you ever do gymnastics?”

“Not really. I mean, there’s some of that in cheer routines if they’re good enough, but I’m not NEARLY at that level! Those girls are crazy-good.”

I shrugged and thought it was a matter of practice and coaching. I hoped that our new coach made a huge difference to us. By the time our meals arrived, we’d talked the topic of cheer to death and were glad of the distraction to get us a chance to change topics.

We ate in silence for a few minutes, both of us famished before starting up conversation again. “So tell me about the other three girls you’re dating,” she suggested as we ate.

“It’s only two now. The third decided this weekend that my age created a problem for her. That was Zoe. Emma, you met. She’s the one that picked me up from practice the day we all walked out. She’s an angel. That day that I had the fight with Lana, she was the only person I knew who I could count on for help. I’d left school without a jacket so I was half frozen, out of my mind with pain and misery and out of options that didn’t lead back home to well-meaning parents forcing us to make nice. Emma promised not to let anyone know I was with her. Unfortunately, I brought my laptop with me so the cops tracked me to the wi-fi at the dorm and picked me up there.”

“They sent the cops after you?” she was surprised.

“I left school without my jacket, without my phone and the last thing I said to anyone was to ask them to kill me. When I got tired enough, I went into a restaurant to warm up and used the wi-fi to tell everyone I wasn’t coming back and said goodbye. In retrospect, they had a good reason to have the police looking for me. That’s kind of what I meant about me being hard to get along with sometimes.”

“It sounds like you’ve been through a lot.”

I nodded. “I haven’t really talked about that day in detail before. It was pretty bad.”

“Look,” she said, biting her lip. “If something like that ever happens again, call me. We don’t have a lot of room, but you can crash at my place when it gets too scary at home.”

I smiled and took her hand, giving it a squeeze. “Thanks. Things rarely ever get that bad at home now, but if they do, I’ll let you know. In any case, that’s Emma. She’s gotten me through the last three months. You wanted to know about both my other girls though. Hanna’s a little more difficult to explain. I met her as a personal trainer. I was told that she hated men, but she doesn’t. She just pushes them to make sure that they’re strong enough to handle her personality. Most men can’t. She’s a lioness. She actually put me through that stretch the first time to punish me. She figured that I’d walk like an old man for a few days and she’d never see me again. I treated it aggressively though and was able to come back for more right away.”

“You surprised her,” Gina said with a laugh.

I nodded. “In any case, she’d made a bet with me that if I could walk after that, she’d give me a chance to break her the way she’d tried to break my spirit.”

“She what?” her eyes got wide.

“She’s into some bondage stuff. That’s why she pushes guys. She wants to find one who’s dominant enough to not be overwhelmed by her personality, but at the same time, she wants a guy who’s sane enough not to be an asshole about it. Amazingly enough, I was the perfect mix for her, so I don’t just date her. She had me put a collar around her neck like a slave and that’s how she wants it.”

“So like Fifty Shades?” she asked, looking shocked.

“That’s as good a comparison as any,” I nodded in agreement.

“Some of that shit was kinky, but it was pretty hot too. How does that work? Just like in the books?”

“Not really,” I admitted. “It mostly works like any other relationship, but with more formally defined roles. Think of our date tonight. I made the dinner reservation, asked you to meet me at the dance class, took you out skating and then when we leave here, if we’re both interested in continuing the date, we’ll go somewhere else. I picked where we went, what we did and where we met up. In most relationships, that’s the case. One person or the other takes the lead a lot more than the other. It’s just how both people feel comfortable. In a dominant/submissive relationship, the people in it formally acknowledge those roles and they carry them into more aspects of their relationship. It can be as subtle as one person suggesting where to go for dinner rather than asking where their partner wants to eat or as obvious as wearing a collar in public and calling her partner ‘Master’.”

“Does she do that?” she wanted to know.

“She wears her collar proudly,” I told her with a smile. “She sometimes calls me Master, sometimes Matt and sometimes Bitch when I’m wussing out on my workout.”

That made her laugh and she blushed. “Does it involve a lot of...” she made a whipping motion and the accompanying sound effect.

I laughed and shook my head. “At first, yes, because that first night was about figuring out whether I was someone she could let be in charge, but after that, it’s been tender and loving and pretty much the same as any other relationship. She just defers to me about a lot of things. She still gives me her opinion and when we’re working out, she’s in charge no matter who wears the collar.”