Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 80699 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 403(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 80699 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 403(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
Oh, no.
CHAPTER 22
Christian
I didn’t expect it to take Leah the whole two months for which I had paid her allowance to message me. I did expect it to take her more than a week, though, but in the end it only took six days.
Hi! Leah wrote. You busy?
I smiled. The image of her agonizing over those three words—over the capitalization, the exclamation point, the question mark… of the many different ways she’d tapped out the letters on her phone, some of them undoubtedly much, much longer than Hi! You busy?… of her adorable nose twitching as she stared at the little screen, and her sweet brow furrowing as she put the phone down and walked away, then returned to pick it up again…
Well, it got me hard before I had even picked up my own phone to reply, first of all, Always.
I let the word age for about five seconds. Platinum-level membership let me see that Leah had instantly devoted her attention to my message: the software, Selecta said, could actually track the movements of her eyes.
Then I wrote, But I’ve got time for you, Rebel.
Then I tapped the message. The Selecta Arrangements app showed me precisely what Leah R had written as she revised and revised.
I want to… I’d like to… I feel like maybe… I know you’re probably really busy… I actually had a great time, haha… Is there any chance…
For platinum members, the app could do something else, too. I tapped Leah’s profile pic. A red circle appeared around it, almost fully enclosing the thumbnail photo. A number appeared just off to the side: 8. On a 1–10 scale, Leah’s sexual arousal had reached eight, simply hearing that I had time for her.
My smile got bigger. Dots appeared under her pic; she had already started to type a reply. I put my phone down and returned my focus to one of the seemingly infinite number of contracts I needed to review today.
Ten minutes later the app chimed, while I was on a call with an Oscar-winning director. I was sorely tempted to tell her I’d have to call her back. It wouldn’t really serve either Leah’s or my best interest to reply immediately, though: whatever she’d spent ten minutes composing and then had finally sent would, I felt certain, represent the sort of thing that she needed to keep thinking about—and maybe follow up on—without any quick response on my part. Even if she had erased everything she wrote and just sent a message like, Drinks?, instead, Leah should sit with the experience of reaching out to the man who had spanked and deflowered her for a bit before she heard back from him.
My phone chimed twice more before I had gotten off the phone with the director. I reviewed another contract. Then I picked up the phone.
So I went on a date with another potential sponsor, Leah had written, but I kept thinking about you.
My smile, and my erection, instantly returned. I tapped the message. The app told me that Leah had worked on it for the full ten minutes. Even better, it told me she had typed one more word—a word not in the final version of the message—and then erased that word five times before she had finally hit send.
Sir.
The other two messages indicated very clearly just how agonizing, and how arousing, Leah’s writing process had been. She had spent five minutes on the next one, simply typing the same words out over and over before she sent them.
Are you free for a drink tonight?
Again, though, she had originally put sir at the end, but had erased it.
The last message had taken her eight minutes, though the words hadn’t changed much in her revisions.
I know there will be consequences.
I replied, 5:30 at your apartment. Yes, there will be consequences. Nothing but your lingerie. If you want to see me, reply the correct way.
Leah
I stared at my phone. I knew exactly what he meant. Hadn’t I just almost typed it six or seven or twelve times and then deleted it?
I chewed my lower lip, sitting under the palms in the little park near my house, just able to make out the words on my phone’s screen even in the tall tree’s shade. I had already said that I knew about the consequences. Well, I didn’t really know about them, I guessed—and that ignorance represented a pit of anxiety in my belly—but I knew of their existence. And I had acknowledged that to Christian. Shouldn’t that satisfy him, without me having to send him the word that made my heart race?
I tried to imagine what he looked like at that moment. I pictured him in a nice office, probably at his home, maybe on one of the hillsides that loomed above me, on the lower level but still with a stunning view of LA and even the Pacific beyond. I had the distressing feeling that he knew precisely where I sat, reading his stomach-churning message—maybe Christian had a pair of crazy-powerful binoculars, and he had me fixed in their lenses, so clearly visible that he could see the rosy color the back of my neck had just turned as I thought about seeing him again.