Claiming Raven

The Meeting

I sat in the Pavilion, waiting. I looked up at the atrium of rooms, the various carts scattered about, the maids pushing open doors to change the sheets, sniff the sheets and collect the pool for who had the most rooms with sex in them. The thought bounced around inside my head and I pulled my eyes down from those lurid heights and scanned the sprawling area where the management placed the restaurant.

I saw her.

My heart kicked me in the ribs. I struggled to my feet. She stood still, scanning me back. I almost waved in that inane way that makes you shrink instead of standing out...so I didn't. She saw me, her hunter's eyes catching my standing motion and knowing it wasn't usual movement for the space and her eyes locked onto me. Shit, I felt it. Huntress? I smiled at that. She'd say she was the prey and I was the hunter, my submissive coming to be claimed.

I could have gone all day and not had that thought, all my marrow drained out of my bones, making my ankles swell. Crap. This was no time to be nervous...like hell, it was the perfect time to be nervous! Except good Doms don't get nervous! Another thought I could have gone all day without having.

She saw me, the woman I'd been communicating with online for months...and months. She'd boarded a plane in Melbourne (Australia for the geographically handicapped) (and that was mean), and flown to the US. She walked towards me and she'd been right, she does clean up nice. My mind cast an aura around her, of her words and mine, mixed up in my mind like a swarm of bees contending with a swarm of locusts in an empty field. We met online...can you meet, really, online? You do something more profound than meeting, more than just meeting. Right, I'd throatfucked her and taken her in a dozen different ways, seduced her, with words, telling her things she longed to hear, titillating...she'd used that word first! Titillating. My word! The...crap. Crap. I can't think like this, about her kneeling for me!

I looked around. I felt like all the vanilla people were going to gasp at just the thought of this...of a woman kneeling before a man and looking up at me and waiting for me to do something. She was drawing closer. I was jumping out of my skin but not moving. You know that feeling you get when the adrenaline kicks in and you feel like there's a space between your hair and your scalp? Vanilla people...I was vanilla people, at least until I met Raven. Well, before her I had...I'd developed kinks but virtual kinks, writer's kinks. I was no more a kink than Stephen King was a murderer, a killer, a psychopath...well, maybe that last one made sense. I shuddered a little and all that adrenaline celebrated that it was finally getting to me.

She was almost at the table.

I found myself wondering what to do when she arrived. She'd said this was our first meeting, and we'd be like on a first date, act...normal I think she said. Fuck me, I didn't normal. I acted like it was first date like I'd agreed. You agree to all sorts of things online and then, this happens. She gets on a plane, flies halfway around the world to the US, to Colorado and insists she had "other business" to attend to and that she "could see me, if you wanted". See me? Fuck me more like, ride me like a rented mule! Suck my cock until my balls shrank...Raven took pride in sucking cock and had told me so in numerous ways and at numerous times, in text mostly, words, the crawlly things that get in your mind and then don't leave, like poor in-laws who think they have a right to live in your guestroom. Fish and visitors, three days and they smell, no, stink and you want them to leave. Words are not nearly so polite or obvious. I hadn't even met Raven, in real life and I was thinking of fish. My stomach knotted and I wanted to punch myself in the gut to have something else to feel.

She arrived.

She stood there, elegant, just like she described. Okay, that's a lie. She did ask me what she should wear, Mr. Retarded Fashionista and yes, that works...I appreciate good fashion but when I pick clothes for a woman, my hooker sense shows up and I can't fix it. This is all distraction and I was distracted, trying not to think of her on her knees, her mouth open, tongue extended waiting for my hard cock to slide through her lips, my hand to knot in her hair and then the throatfuck, like I'd never experienced, world class...!

"Raven McGinnis!" I said softly, seeing if my voice worked, if it was cracked beyond repair and would expose me as a fraud and she'd turn on her heels and stride away, disappointment stiffening her back. Insecurity is such a constant pleasure, oh, and so is sarcasm.

Her lips smiled but her eyes were tight, the pupils, little pinpricks of darkness in the blue blooms of her irises. She held out her hand.

"Hello Clark." She spoke and sounded like the Queen greeting the thousandth guest at an appallingly boring social event, or worse, the thousandth American colonial hayseed at some event she couldn't wriggle out of. Insecurity is such a wonderful thing and I fancy myself as Dom! Raven says I am, so I must be. That thought soothed me. Would a real Dom need soothing? If he's human he would, Raven would say that and I'd be soothed. Crap, there's no escape.

I reached for her hand, stepping around the table a little so nothing was between us. Instead of just shaking it like she anticipated, I turned her knuckles flat in my fingers and lifted her hand, bending slightly from the waist, pulling it towards my lips. I felt it, that little twitch of anticipation, and the conscious, strict relaxation of her hand and arm, releasing it to me so I could kiss her hand like some gallant of a bygone age...except I kissed my hand, the swell of my hand beside the thumb and then let hers drift away, unkissed.

Her eyes flickered. She stared at me for a moment and then she laughed, almost a relaxed sound, relieved somehow. She looked at her hand and then offered it again.

"Try again." She said, her eyes twinkling with amusement. I'd made her laugh, right here, right now! I took her hand and this time touched my lips to it, softly at first but then I licked her with just the end of my tongue as I let it go.

"My god, you look beautiful." I said. What had she written me she'd wear, asking then telling me in her wisdom so she didn't get stopped at the entrance by the major dromo or whatever you call the guys that fend off hookers in a hotel...oh yeah, security. She wore...matching underwear. Oh god. That's what I remember? Duh. The woman was coming to meet me physically to be claimed. She was the ultimate in sure things. She was mine, my woman, my Raven, her cunt was mine. Tits, ass, lips, fingers, toes, nose, all of it. Mine, mine, mine.

That thought made me shiver. I looked around. Did anyone notice I was raving? A lunatic escaped from Bedlam?

"Won't you sit, please? You look radiant. When I flew around the world like this, I always looked like hammered shit."

I moved towards her and felt her stiffen. That's when I noticed it, a smudge just at the corner of her lips, errant lipstick that somehow evaded her notice. I reached out a hand towards her face. She flinched back away from me and I went cold and still. My invading hand swerved, bending back to my own face, the corner of my mouth.

"You have a little lipstick out of place," I said, wiping at the corner of my mouth with my thumb, staring at the corner of her mouth like she was drooling or something.

"Oh." She said. Not the "Oh!" that means something else, that she used to signify that some comment had slithered down into her knickers and made her wet...no, that's not right. Some comment had touched her soul, caressed her loneliness and made her wet. Yes, that. How many times had she sent me a text online, "Cunt surge." That's British for "loin rush" or maybe just Raven for same. I heard loin rush from another woman, an American woman long washed away from me by the floods of life that had rushed around me. I knew that loneliness, personally. Can loneliness be shared?

"Please, sit down." I moved around behind her chair and pulled it out like a right proper gentleman, this hayseed from Kansas, the place where when I grew up er older anyway, where most people didn't even know the word "debonair" much less know what it meant or aspire to being what it meant. I was trying. "There is no try, there is only do and not do." Yoda's words rattled around in my mind as I pulled out her chair, trying to be a dominant man so she'd think about kneeling to me.

Raven sat with grace and I took my chair.

What she wore, garter belt, stockings, black, not seamed, too much for the first date. Date? I knew this woman's mind like I knew my own, so okay, not so well since I am a moody and capricious bitch sometimes, when the creative clarity eludes me. Crap. Not bitch. Don't say that word, not in any sentence! It's first on her list of no nos.

I looked at Raven and wisely didn't speak but took a nice, long, albeit quavering deep breath. My mind flashed on my favorite image of us, naked in bed, her on her back, her legs open, me planted between them, inside her, but still, her knees crooked up beside me her heels touching my thighs, penetrated by my cock, me balancing on my elbows her arms draped around my neck, smiling up at me while we talked about...I don't know, existentialism or Fight Club or Dogville or The Police. My heart kicked at my chest again, I could feel my sternum give a little. Shit. I blinked...well, it was so slow it surely looked like I was closing my eyes, taking a little mini nap, but I was blinking my eyes to clear this image and I was too, too successful.

My mind went utterly blank. Completely.

When I tried to restart my blue-screened brain, all I got was a blinking sign reading: "Submission". I looked around to see if anyone else noticed the flaring red letters. Nope. I was being so ignored I felt insubstantial. The world went placidly on as though I didn't exist or worse, I was furniture, usefully ignored. I felt it then, Raven waiting on me. I shivered. My mind was blank!

"God, Raven, my mind has gone completely blank." I didn't get the reaction I'd hoped for. No smile, no indulgent twinkle in her eyes, nothing, she just stared at me her lips too red for me not to stare but elegant. Then, in that moment, it struck me, she was tense. The pinprick pupils, the tight lips, the silence...this woman, this stupendously amazing woman whose mind and heart and soul if she had one...that really doesn't sound right...I mean I don't believe in the soul, a construct to make us feel better about things that go bump in the night or really about death in that existential darkness at two in the morning when the shittiest thoughts seem logical...so like that, she would have a soul if there were souls to be had but...aw fuck it. She was tense, nervous, on edge. That soothed me for some perverse reason, so I knocked over my water glass.

Since there was water in my water glass, it spilled, splashing everywhere onto the table, ice cubes skittering.

"Oh fuck." I said. Standing, grabbing my napkin from the table and intercepting the flow dashing towards Raven. Success. She didn't get wet. Oh. Oh! I un-projected. She didn't get wet from the outside. I used a hand to push water back from the edge of the table so it didn't dribble on my gay red shoes...a story that goes back to my ex-wife, #2. They cost $350 so I can't throw them away.

A waitress arrived, flustered by our misfortune, two rags, one in each hand and my mess was soon mopped up.

"We'll just move you to another table." She said.

I shook my head.

"No, that makes no sense. I made the mess, no sense in making you do more work. This is fine. I like this table," I squinted at her breast, no, at her name tag, "Ellen." My mind clicked and suddenly the busty brunette with curls and pudgy cheeks was transformed into Ellen Collier a character from my MILF List series, snarky, short, small boned, no tits—she'd smack me for pointing that out, well, she'd smack Sonny for that—a helmet of red hair and fearsomely smart. And just like that Sonny came to my rescue, my favorite alter ego, the witty self-possessed youth I'd never ever been who lived inside the lurid imagination of my stories, making me laugh with narcissistic delight.

"Thank you, Ellen. I'm so sorry."

She was gracious and seemed a little flustered. She brought new napkins and then laid another, extra beside my left hand.

"Just in case." She said with a coquettish smile, laid the menus on the table and walked away.

"She likes you." Raven said. Her pupils had relaxed a little and I could see some of the darkness behind them flooding out. I like the night, the coolness of it and Raven's eyes were letting some into the space between us.

Settled once more, I handed her the menus. She handed one back.

"Look at the menu." I said without missing a beat. "Unless you want me to order for you." I was just being gallant or maybe flippant but the words left my lips before I could reel them back and replace them with something else. The command was there and I saw it. Raven's teeth appeared, a picket along her lower lip. I know she hissed a little but I couldn't hear it. God. I wanted to curse more loudly, more roundly, more completely.

Like I said, we'd met online and began what blossomed into a very satisfying submissive dominant relationship. It felt real, it was real, to us both but online, so there is an argument to be made that it wasn't real. In my world, there'd been no kiss so I knew nothing for certain. Unless the kiss "did it for me" there would be no sex, no kneeling, no submission...I'd made that promise. And no "us". That thought made me queasy but I didn't flinch before it. If there was no chemistry, if something didn't change inside me when I touched her, when I kissed her, then this was a mistake, truly just a video game played for free and I'd tell her no, no thanks, this was not happening and we'd never speak of it again, perhaps never speak again and the entire sand castle would be smashed by reality's wave. The thought made my stomach wrench, some big hand was wadding it up like a piece of paper torn from a typewriter.

I was too old for this sort of thing, a first date with a woman I'd told to suck my cock more times than I'd told her she looked pretty, which isn't a good ratio in conventional terms or in mine to tell the truth. She was ten years younger than me. At sweet sixteen, she'd have been six and not a blip on my radar, a bundle of bother and not this woman dressed in the black silk dress, V neck, fitted to hug her sides and stomach, flared down to just below her knees, sleeveless so I could see her skin. She wore silver earrings and a necklace, also silver not quite the collar of my dreams but emblematic because it pulled my eyes to her neck, the skin there where I'd kissed her so often in my mind, then sucked at her there, marking her while she lay quiescent in my grasp, her body compliant to my every desire, demanding my demands of her so she could comply, the kernel of her growing submission, taught to me in snippets because she wanted me to know, know how to "dom her".

Even now the nomenclature of the ds world didn't fit me well and not just because I hate conventional language in any venue, a writer's rejection of abstractions in favor of descriptions that titillate the mind and make it feel more than know. No, it didn't fit me because I was that vanilla guy she'd been so disappointed with so often in her many liaisons, fucking them for her own reasons and then shuffling them off like a blouse at the boutique that just didn't feel right...but that makes her sound...sordid somehow and in my mind, there was nothing sordid about this woman. Nothing. She was ultimately sexual and yet if that's all you saw, her sexuality, you'd miss the woman I knew, the woman I...owned. That needs an explanation. I like to love but love most of us will agree has a lot of baggage so in our mutual wisdom whenever I felt like saying "I love you", I said "I own you" instead. Her explanation? Ownership is easier to revoke. That may sound bad to you vanilla folks but to me, I understood. At 58 I know that things are temporary or worse, their effects on us change, fade, vanish and then what? If its owned, you trade it in for a new model or change hobbies or something but if you love it, shucking it off makes you wonder if you can love at all. Is your heart this shriveled thing that you cannot ever give away because no one would want it? Oh yes, I understood. So I owned her...which made her wet by the way, so it was all okay, win win as she likes to say.

That thought brought me back to the menu that I'd been studying as though it were written in Chinese and I was just trying to figure out the pictures. I peered across the top of my menu, a brown leather folder of faux something at Raven. She felt my eyes on her and she looked over the top of her menu, like a sniper peeking out of a bunker.

She smiled.

My heart lurched in my chest like a Chevy pickups transmission bucking when the hand brake is still set. Even her eyes smiled. I had no idea what I'd done. I must have looked mystified.

"Do you charm everyone." She asked.

"No." I said automatically.

She didn't believe me.

"Well, you charm me." She said.

Jesus, I felt like I'd stepped out of an airplane with just an umbrella and I'm no Mary Poppins...I really should see that movie if I'm going to reference it, shouldn't I?

The waitress, Ellen, returned and took our orders. I don't know what I ordered. Raven is the foody and could likely tell you. I never even taste food when I eat with someone else, which is why I don't mind eating alone that much. It sounds worse than it is. I'm an empath. I'm so busy feeling them, I can't taste anything. I feel what the person with me feels and when they are uncomfortable I am. I still can't explain how that manages to fit with being a dominant man for a submissive woman. It works for me though. Raven said so. I believed her and so far so good. Well, sitting there at the table with her like that, watching how she moved her body and with every action, wondering how it was going to feel to take off her clothes and lay her on the bed and have her, take her as she wanted to be taken...I looked around the room.

They were all still ignoring me. I felt a little twinge of irritation. This woman flew halfway around the world just to be sitting her with me. Oh, she'd deny it, she had other things to do in the US besides to lay down for me so I could do her. My mind snapped shut. That was my inner cad talking but then again, at the right moment, that would surely make her smile. My Raven. I looked around again. The thing about the dominant submissive environment is that peering in from the outside, you can't understand. It's like going to the temple of a religion you weren't raised with. It's like being in an amusement park or a museum. Interesting maybe but it has nothing to do with you. You don't go home and move walls around to duplicate it. It's a curiosity.

A year or two ago, the idea of a woman actually, physically getting on her knees to me would have made me retch. Now, it made my gut wrench and my spine tingle and...yes, my cock gets hard when I think of Raven on her knees looking up at me. It hasn't happened and the fact that she's "submitted" to me online means nothing, not now, not here. That was play, but this, this is real. But it isn't, either one. The odd juxtaposition of our full knowledge of one another's emotional world and this physical meeting piqued my writer's interest but made the human part of me cringe, not out of revulsion you understand but because of the dissonance and the drama inherent in this moment. Could all the talking and texting and sexting and cyber sexing and roleplaying and bandying about of concepts and jokes and laughter and heartaches and pains really be meaningless if the kiss has no magic? The grandest fear is that an online connection can come to naught because you wear the wrong perfume. Does it make any sense that something so insignificant in cosmic terms could invalidate months of delighted communication? If so, those fuckers who say "communication is everything" in a relationship should all be turned out into the street naked in a hail storm. But then again, maybe they're right. I sincerely hoped so.