"Let me guess – she read those books, right?"
"Who hasn't?" Lara said, laughing. "Don't complain. It's bringing in a whole new generation of material for us, although most of them don't really understand BDSM or even why the book turned them on so much."
"They like dominant men," I said. "I aim to please."
"Did you read them, too?"
"Are you kidding?" I said and grinned. "Of course I did. No self-respecting Dom would have missed seeing how our species was portrayed."
"You're the real-deal, Drake," Lara says, sipping her espresso. "Eligible bachelor, rich, good looking, smooth, smart. All the Dom without the pain."
"And without being fucked up."
She smiled at me. "If you say so."
I frowned, a bit ticked at her innuendo. "I'm not fucked up. I had a good upbringing."
"Whatever you say, Drake," Lara said and smiled even wider. "Have you ever thought about why you like to tie women up and torture them using pleasure? Oh, that's right… you gave up on psychoanalysis so you could study brains."
"I'm just a Dominant. I need control."
She smiled like the cat who swallowed the canary.
I gave her a look. "In the end, it doesn't really matter why something turns you on," I said. "Understanding the reasons for lust does nothing to change it.”
“It does matter, Drake. You can deny it all you want, but as you should know from studying psychoanalysis, the more you keep something hidden, the more you ignore it, the farther down in the darkness you shove it, the more power it has over you. Bring it out into the light and it loses that power. Why can’t you let another woman into your life? Why can’t you trust again?”
I shook my head, not wanting to have this discussion. There was no understanding the human psyche – at least not on a scientific level. I gave that up years ago when I switched from psychology to medicine in my senior year.
“It makes no difference why. It just is.”
“Restraining women – why that in particular?”
“Lara…” I said, frowning at her. “Why do you like to beat a sub’s ass black and blue?”
“Because it’s so pretty like that. We’re not talking about me, Drake. And I could tell you why – because I like to be in control and I enjoy the power I have over men. I like to see them cower at my feet.”
“I like to have control over a woman’s body so I can do what I want.”
“You don’t need to tie a woman up. Many women would let you do whatever you wanted, no ropes or restraints needed. There’s something else going on.”
“It’s not me who needs it,” I said. “It’s them. They need to be tied up so they don’t feel any guilt. I do it so I can enjoy when they surrender. When they do, they can freely enjoy everything I do to them without guilt. They can’t stop it. It’s not their fault they have orgasms.”
“Why not have vanilla sex, with no bondage. I mean, if you don’t need to tie women up for any personal reasons, you could give it up tomorrow, right?”
“I like rope bondage. I like leather.”
“For purely aesthetic reasons? Or is it something deeper?”
“What are you trying to imply?”
“Abandonment issues?” she said and swirled her espresso in the tiny cup. “Mommy left you and so you restrain women to keep them from leaving?”
I pushed back from the table. “That’s far too simplistic. I have no interest in fucking my mother, Lara. I like the way a woman looks when she’s bound and blindfolded. That’s all.”
“If it’s a fetish, it has a history and an origin. If you don’t understand it, it will have control over you instead of the other way around.”
"I like a bit of mystery,” I said, unwilling to concede anything. “I don’t need to know why someone likes to dominate or be dominated. I only want to know how much they need."
"I like knowing why," Lara said. "It makes things clearer."
We sat and stared at each other in silence for a few moments, neither one of us willing to concede any ground.
Back in college when I first studied abnormal psych, I was the rebellious son who was determined not to follow in my surgeon-father's footsteps. I decided to become a psychoanalyst or psychotherapist, making my name by answering Freud's famous question What do women want? After an undergraduate degree in abnormal psychology, and several unsuccessful relationships of the sexual and romantic kind, I decided to give up psychology and take the easy way out.
Brain surgery.
The inner workings of the psyche were far more unfathomable than that of the brain.