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Chapter 1
Jodie
The contrast between the view from the café and the kinkiness we were planning made me want to laugh in a slightly demented way. Below us, waves washed up the beach then retreated, leaving foaming ripples. Diamond-lace reflections from the gentled parts of the blue, blue sea blinded me – jaw-dropping scenery – and here I’d just signed a document that gave the man opposite me permission to mind fuck me into the next century.
I squinted as a blast of wind came up off the beach and rattled the umbrella shading our table. At least Klaus had a suggestion of handsomeness about him with his short, dirty-blonde hair that could tug at your fingers like bristles on a brush, and the no-nonsense Germanic bone structure of his face. I imagined few women dreamed of being captured by a brute with a pot gut and bad teeth. Klaus would look good on film. We could edit if his acting was awful. Or mine. Only I wasn’t sure how much I’d be acting.
No matter how much preparation and thinking we’d done, this whole exercise was foreign territory.
I took another swallow of my coffee frappe and set it on the little round glass-topped table. My fingers were cold. So were my lips and a spot in the center of my chest.
“You’re insane. You know that don’t you?” Klaus regarded me without bothering to move from his casual position in the wicker chair. Only the mild narrowing of his eyes betrayed…something. He was probably totaling up expenses, though I knew my idea disturbed him.
“Of course.” I mimicked his coolness and smiled. Inside I was going sign, sign, sign. To do this, I didn’t really need him to sign, because I trusted him, but he needed this. He’d only do this with everything under control, and with t’s crossed and i’s dotted.
The day I’d raised this idea came to me in vivid detail. I’d been so nervous my chest had seemed wrapped in steel. Breathing was hard to do simultaneously with wondering how he’d react, or what he’d say.
It had been tax time. Klaus always did my taxes. He’d probably cornered doing the taxes of many of the residents of Magnetic Island. This wasn’t a small place, either. Though close to the mainland of Australia, it had the aura of a faraway fantasy holiday destination even after you’d lived here for years. Tropical climate, palm trees, secluded white-sand beaches, and enough hills and valleys and little roads everywhere to make it ever so quaint. Tourists were the only drawback, but even they were assets if you liked ogling them and bumping elbows with tanned cheerful people in skimpy swimwear.
Klaus’s office was on the main street in Nelly Bay. If you crossed the unsealed road you’d be only a few meters from where the grass sloped down to the beach.
A breeze had riffled in through the slats of his window louvers. The roofing iron above pinged in the heat and a fan swished lazily overhead.
“Done.” He reached over and dropped the final document onto the desk in front of me. “I’ll see you again next year, Jodie. You’ve got to get more engagements, you know.” He raised his eyebrows. “Or you’re going to go under.”
Understatement of the year. Being a comedienne and low-budget documentary maker was close to auditioning to become a street bum.
“I try.” I stared back while assembling my best imitation of nonchalance. Be businesslike and this will seem less…stupid. But truly I was like one of those crazy mice on a wheel. Always, that was me. Today wasn’t that different from my average day. Inside my head, I was running fast in circles, like an insane hamster, while on the outside I acted like a hip sunglasses wearing chick who’d just stepped out of the Ice Age. I’d even gotten a tattoo above my butt this year. I was pretty sure that made me badass.
“Was there something else you wanted?”
I let out that breath. Go. “I have an idea. Performance art of a sort. I want do a film based on me going through the experience of a capture fantasy.” That blank look I’d expected. Men didn’t read truckloads of erotic stories like women did. Or like I did, anyway.
“Capture fantasy?”
‘Nother deep breath, let it out. I rattled out the words like I’d memorized them for a test, which I kind-of had. “It’s a fantasy of a lot of women – where the protagonist of a story is captured and basically made to serve a man sexually and sometimes in other ways. So she becomes his slave or at least under his control. Sometimes it’s permanent, sometimes they end up married.”
Silence. The wind blew. The fan swished. And I was sure I must have distant genetic traces of mouse in my family history. I’d have scurried under the desk given half a chance.
“Sounds like rape.” He picked up a pen and rotated it like a propeller through his fingers while giving me a dead-set black look. Nerves? Had I unsettled him? “How is that performance art? What exactly do you plan to do?”
“Ah. Yes. Crucial point. I plan to have myself mock-captured, but in as real a way as possible. No sex, of course, but I want to show the changes that might occur in a captive subjected to this sort of situation.” I swallowed and imagined shooting all the butterflies in my chest with a dart gun loaded with valium. “I’m aiming to allow a bit of the reality to leak into the situation, but not too much. Women buy stories like this by the millions, so there has to be a mar–”
“No. You are not doing this.” He stamped the words out like a man squashing cockroaches under his boot.
I leaned away until the chair hit my back and I could go no farther, then I stiffened and leaned forward again to show he hadn’t scared me. “Sorry?”
“There is no way you are allowing a man to do this.”
“Ah. Ah-huh. Mmm.” Quailing, but trying not to show it, and to give myself a break from the confronting wrinkles on his forehead which pretty much said, you’re one crazy muthafucka, I reached into the canvas bag on my lap, pulled out my old eReader and tossed it at him. It spun to a halt hanging partly over the edge of the desk just where his lap would be.
His mouth turned down and those sandy-colored eyebrows went a tad higher.
“There. I left a few on there for you to…” I sucked my cheek onto my teeth for a second, “…to study.”
Just imagining Klaus reading those stories, some of which I had merrily masturbated to while reading, made my cheeks heat up. Gah, woman. Get this over with.
He tapped the surface of the eReader with his forefinger, like it maybe contained something suspicious. Which it did if you counted the fading traces of hundreds of explicit erotic romances and BDSM stories and…yeah, um, those. The bondage and fucking and humiliating scenes I’d read had probably scarred my brain. It was a wonder I hadn’t worn out my clitoris.
