Naughty Baby

Chapter Two-2

“Look at me, Clarisse.”

“It’s Claire, not Clarisse. Claire Lawrence, not Clarisse Laurent,” I flipped off, sounding as if I resented the fact that I was not the mysterious femme fatale of my on-line profile. Just a career girl trying to make it in the big city was all the man better expect.

“Look at me, Claire,” he went on undeterred. His focus on me had not wavered but the degree of empathy he displayed made me so anxious that I think every nerve in my body had seized up. “How about you let go the fact of who I am. Let’s just concentrate on you and me, on our first date, on taking our friendship beyond emails and the anecdotes. You think you can do that?” He raised his brows questioningly.

“Maybe if I forget about who you are, or that your picture was on the cover of People a few months back, or that I’m so completely bowled over by your writing. Sometimes I read your stories and I want to throw mine in the trash, computer and all.” I tittered self-consciously. “Of course, if I did that, I’d be throwing away a very good computer that I can’t afford to replace.”

When he laughed something in me seemed to lighten. And when his warm hand disappeared from mine, I desperately wanted it back. Instead, my hand retreated to my lap where it would uselessly remain. Although I could still feel where he touched it and a flutter of desire swelled in me.

Ignoring my disparaging comment and, keeping things light, he launched into a conversation that covered a dozen topics that I think we may have already touched on over the past year. So much about our exchanges seemed familiar, as if taken from the pages of a book we’d both read. For minutes at a time I almost forgot who he was and centered on the friend he had become. When Patrick abruptly announced that he was famished and it was time to eat, small plates of tapas began arriving at the table in a steady stream, and our concentration became centered on marvelous tastes that were as erotic as the aromas that had earlier tickled my senses. Half the time Patrick fed me the first bite from the newest arrival and waited for my response—I found this very sexy even though it wasn’t intended to be. We each had our favorites and he chided me playfully if I disagreed with his. Wine flowed, further easing my nerves and turning me giddy after the third glass. I worried that I was getting drunk, though I didn’t let the worry linger long.

“You know I do have to drive home,” I finally reminded him.

“Or I’ll give you a lift and have your car brought around in the morning.”

My face must have soured.

“Just trying to be gallant,” he defended himself.

I didn’t mind the gesture, but the fact that he could ‘have my car brought around in the morning’ instantly reminded me of the great disparity in our lives. Why exactly was I having dinner with a rich and famous author?

“Sorry, I’m not used to that. I’ll grab a cab if I need to.”

He shrugged, then moved on to dessert, which the waiter had just placed in front of us.

“No, I can’t eat another bite.”

“You’re sure?”

“Absolutely.”

He was momentarily perturbed. “Okay, then you’ll take it home. It’s too good to miss and if you warm it just lightly in the microwave, the sauce will come back to life. I think.”

Regardless of the easy repartee that continued during those two hours, every time my eyes met the chilling intensity of his gaze, I was reminded that Patrick Helms was never going to be the ‘comfortable old shoe’ kind of relationship that I initially expected, especially when the raging lions of my s****l desire were pawing and leaping at my crotch in wild anticipation of pouncing on this sexy man. Just thinking of the intimate s****l subjects we’d discussed in our email conversations made me cringe with fear and an excitement I’d not felt, well, since long before the punishment sessions with Tate began.

While Patrick knew me far beyond any casual first date—he knew me more intimately than Tate ever did—almost nothing was mentioned about those emails, or my kinky website, or anything to do with s*x at all. Was that by design? He had carefully led the conversation all night long. So to the question of what purpose he had in mind for me—for us—I was left to obsess on that until I saw him again, a matter that was handled just minutes prior to his escorting me to my car.

“I need a date for Wednesday afternoon, cocktail hour—if you can get away from work that soon. There’s this little gallery with an exhibit I’d like to see. Hopefully you’ll find it as interesting as I will.”

“Any artists I’d know?”

“Maybe. You’ll see when you get there. Pick you up at six?”

“Or I could meet you there.”

“I’d rather pick you up. Wednesday, six o’clock.” The tone of his voice left no room to quarrel. “Besides, you have to let me be chivalrous.” Another of those killer smiles and I was won over, completely wanting to be won over, in fact. I couldn’t remember when I was last with someone who, for the moments we were together, was absolutely focused on me and little else. This was something to get used to, but something I could grow to enjoy.

By the end of the evening I was smiling as happily as Patrick was, but by Wednesday, my fear of the relationship had driven me into a stew from which I was certain I could not recover in time to make a presentable appearance with Patrick in a public place. I should have asked him if this was a dressy affair. I didn’t know whether to dress up or dress down. Unable to make up my mind, I wrangled over what to wear for nearly an hour, tossing clothes from my closet to the bed, the floor, the chair, anywhere they landed. At six o’clock, I still hadn’t a stitch on, and the intercom buzzer suddenly startled me back to life. I dashed to the console at the front door.

“I’ll be right down,” I said, then I flew to the bedroom and tossed on some clothes, barely caring what it was. When I looked in the mirror, I liked what I saw.

Twenty minutes later after he first buzzed the apartment, I was finally getting into Patrick’s Mercedes. Although he raised an eyebrow at my tardy arrival, he didn’t say a word. I’d seen him drive off behind the wheel the previous night. This time he had a driver and I was forced to climb into the back seat and sit directly next to him. My heart was beating so fast that I could barely catch my breath.

“You look terrific.” He took my hand, then gave me a chaste peck on the cheek and settled back into his seat.

“So do you.” T-shirt, jeans, sport coat, and looking very sexy. My black slacks, layered sweaters and scarves fit his style. I guessed well, or was just plain lucky. I took a nervous breath. “So the exhibit? You didn’t give me much to go on. This isn’t pornographic, is it?” I leaned in, speaking in hushed tones so the driver wouldn’t hear.

Patrick chuckled. “I’m afraid not, strictly mainstream, but I was promised an absorbing look at the dramatic forces of light and dark.”

“That sounds deep.”

He shrugged, as if it seemed odd to him. He continued on about his friend who owned the gallery, and how he’d labored to put the exhibition together. He’d consulted with Patrick several times as he was working out the details. The more Patrick talked the more intrigued I became. Despite the self-effacing attitude toward art, he seemed to know his way around that world, either that or he talked a good line. His lengthy explanation took up nearly the entire trip to the gallery, which meant that I hardly needed to say a word, which was fine with me. I had to get my bearings with this man, find some firm and comfortable footing, otherwise who he was and his startling looks would continue to unnerve me.

From the moment we stepped into the gallery I felt as though I was walking through a surreal dream. Little gallery, he’d said. From the street maybe it gave the appearance of being small, a quaint artifact of an older era. There was just the single door and one small window that looked out on the street. But as I walked through the entrance, I suddenly stood stock still, too stunned to move. Instead of a tiny hole-in-the-wall storefront, my eyes beheld the most beautiful light filtering through the back end of the gallery where the tiny space opened into a much larger one. The ceiling rose at least two stories high and huge canvases hung against the bare white partitions—reminding me that this, like all exhibitions in this building, was just temporary staging. Other paintings hung freely in the open spaces, dangling from chains, swaying slightly, a bit like the subject matter they portrayed. Most were oil paintings from various artists, though there were a few watercolors scattered among them. The subject in each was the same. Rocky, turbulent, stormy and dead calm—the sea gave up no secrets in these paintings. Its angst was rendered in brush strokes, in sweeping lines and curling waves, in dozens of colors, blue, green, brown, black, orange, hues strange and familiar at once. Each painting shed a different light on those tumultuous seas, which pitched and tossed before my dizzy eyes, or lay flat as a pancake, inert, immovable, hiding the kinetic energy beneath the surface of waves not yet formed.

Patrick had led me around the gallery while I followed one step behind him in a perpetual state of awe. “What do you think?” he finally turned to me.

“I think I’m seasick,” I answered. Although we’d finished with the last painting, I would have loved to start over at the beginning, viewing the entire exhibit again with a better pair of eyes and more focus. I was sure I’d missed half of what the exhibition was intended to portray. But by then my mind was a sea of confusing thoughts, although I knew the confusion had nothing to do with the paintings of restless seas. All through our meandering journey through the gallery, I was fully aware of Patrick’s touch; the feel of his fingers when they grazed bare skin; the smell of his breath when he was close. All this was enough to stimulate a jittery feeling inside my bones. The sound of his humming stirred feelings in me that I desperately wanted to experience. The tune was something he made up, at least I didn’t recognize it. I was a basket case of conflicting emotions. Fear mostly. Why I was there with him at all was the biggest mystery of the night.

I admired his attention to detail, the small things about each painting he took time to point out. Things I hadn’t notice. Though he remained intently focused on the exhibit, he was just as attentive to me.

“Seasick?” he laughed.

“You’re not? Feels a little like my life.” I nodded to one particularly brutal scene of crashing waves. I should never had blurted out anything so deliberately leading without checking the implications first. As I feared, Patrick didn’t let the comment slide.

“Your life. Stormy? Or just a lot of rolling waves and rough surf?”

“Humm…stormy I suppose, but not so much now,” I dodged the question. He didn’t know about me losing my job and what a nosedive I’d been on for the last week—and he wasn’t going to know. I expected to be employed by the end of the month if the job with Halsey Lewis came through, and I had every reason to believe it would. Unemployment wasn’t a stormy sea, just a little turbulent water that would resolve itself in a short time. With no assurance that this face-to-face relationship with Patrick Helms would last that long, I was not about to delve into the archives of my life and dig up the worst of my crimes and misdemeanors to share with him civilly over a glass of wine. After all, I knew very little about Patrick’s life. Despite months of on-line correspondence, I wasn’t sure we knew each other well at all. Our email exchanges had been primarily about writing, kinky s*x and safe subjects, like favorite movies, books, food, sports teams.