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"That's my purpose in appreciating our waiter," she said. "I like who I'm with tonight, Marius."
She noticed he'd shifted his hand closer. "What do you want to touch, Marius? One thing."
"Your hair." The response was instant, surprising her. When she nodded, he lifted his callused palm to her shoulder, and closed his grip around the fall of slender locs there, fingers stroking, testing the way they felt before he released them, and drew his hand back to his side of the table.
"I'd suggest the potatoes first," he said abruptly. "You can use your fingers if you like. Sometimes it's better that way."
"All right. I like my idea of you using your mouth better." She shot him a look. "But we'd probably scandalize the family diners."
Her playfulness seemed to take him off guard. As she proceeded per his direction, she braced herself, since she didn't care for a lot of unfamiliar spices or textures. Instead her taste buds instantly approved the crispiness of the potato, and the mild blend of herbs flavoring it. Before long she was sampling from all the offerings and folding the shawarma into a piece of fresh pita from the basket on the table.
"This is amazing. I love these little spiced potato things. What's the soup?"
"Lentil." He spooned up some and started to offer it, then rethought that. Before he could return the spoon to the soup and push the bowl her way, she touched his wrist, telling him it was okay. She leaned over to let him put the spoon in her mouth. His hand was steady but the energy bouncing off him was not, his attention on her so intently. She sat back, touching her lips with her napkin.
"Good stuff. I'll take some more of that."
Pushing the bowl in between them, he picked up the second spoon, nudging the handle of the other to point toward her side of the table. "Lebanese food is better shared. Try the spinach puff."
He hadn't answered her question about wanting the date to be over. She'd let that go, crisis averted. He seemed to like watching her share the soup. As she tried the spinach puff, licking the delicate flakes off her lips, she went the casual conversation route again. "Okay, your turn to spill. Tell me how you knew about the tickets. Seriously."
He leaned back. His leg brushed hers under the table when he braced his foot against the bottom slats of the chair next to her at the four-chair table. She didn't move away. The incidental touch created heat, something she was sure he felt as much as she did.
"One night at The Zone, you and some of the other Dommes were hanging out in the lounge. You, Mistress Violet, Marguerite, Lyda, Lisette... Violet jabbed you with a finger and said she wasn't taking any shit about Taylor Swift from someone who owned every Boys II Men song ever performed." His gaze lit with careful amusement. "You started singing one of their songs at the top of your lungs. She covered her ears and howled."
Regina laughed. "I don't recall seeing you. You must have been lurking."
"I was covering the bar. You all were caught up in the girl talk thing."
"Girl talk." Regina snorted, but pulled the concert tickets from her back pocket and looked at them. They'd printed a photograph of the current band trio on the face of the stubs. "Originally they started out as four guys, with Michael McCary singing bass in his wonderful deep voice." She offered a half smile. "He'd already left the band when I discovered them in middle school, but I'd put on my head phones and go to sleep with his voice and the rest of them crooning their ballads. My music tastes are pretty eclectic now, but like most people, the songs you loved in your teens are your touchstone of good memory and nostalgia."
She noticed his face went blank as an empty page. It was a look she wasn't sure how to interpret, but it sent an uneasy tingle through her stomach. Trying to defuse it, she offered the tickets back to him. He shook his head, the expression disappearing.
"You're right, they're yours. If I piss you off before we get there, you can still go."
"Are you anticipating or planning for it, to get out of going to a Boys II Men concert?"
He chuckled. While it was reserved, it was the first true laugh she'd heard from him. She expected an unleashed one would be rolling and deep, and stroke a woman's nerves in the right direction. "Too obvious a strategy," he said. "I can handle one boy band concert if the company is worth it."
"I don't know. You've already told me sex is the point of all this, and you're not getting sex tonight."
"It's an investment in the future."
Shaking her head at him, she put the tickets back into her pocket and took another bite of meat-filled pita. "So who was your favorite band in your teens?"
He spooned up more soup, lifting a shoulder. "Don't really remember. Probably same as most guys."
He kept his eyes on the food, the set of his body language saying it wasn't a topic he wanted to pursue. With a shock to her system, the meaning of the blank look clicked, along with why it had made her uneasy, as if her subconscious had understood it before the rest of her had.
He had no frame of reference for teenage rites of passage like favorite rock bands. What kind of childhood wouldn't have included music?
She thought of Marguerite's words. It's a place that holds no safety for him.
Maybe there had been music, but darkness covered that and the rest of the memories. He clearly kept them locked away, inaccessible.
She'd made a vow to keep this a normal date. But since D/s sessions had different goals, she filed the information away as a key that might get her further into his head during one of those. She gestured to their surroundings.
"How long has this little place been here? It looks like a hole in the wall from the outside. But most good restaurants do."
