Filthy Doctor(55)

“Oh come on,” he cajoled now, following her. “One date with me isn’t so bad, is it?”

She bit her lip and rolled her eyes as she headed into the women’s locker room. You did make a bet, she thought reluctantly. One date—not the end of the world. She would survive. “Pick me up tonight at seven, 1725 Wynwood Lane,” she said.

“Wear something hot,” he called, as the door slammed shut in his face.



“You what?” her father sputtered.

“You what?” her mother gasped.

I probably should have told them, thought Max, now, turning red. She wore a short skirt and high heels and a sequined, silvery camisole top, with a cute little black bolero. It was a far cry from the jeans and sweatshirt that she’d worn earlier that day, and when her parents saw her outfit they, predictably enough, flipped out. And then, when she told them why she was dressed “like a two-bit whore” as her father put it, she thought they were going to ground her or something absurdly childish like that.

“I’m not a child anymore,” she said, which set off another round of apoplectic anger and speechless stuttering noises from them both.

At that moment, though, the doorbell rang, and she could see the conflict: politeness for the stranger, or scolding their daughter for her bad decision? Max didn’t care: she straightened her back and opened the door. “Hi Jack,” she said, as he stepped inside. He was wearing rather tight jeans, she noticed appreciatively, and a simple white form-fitting t-shirt that showed off his slim waist. He carried a black leather jacket over his arm. When he saw her parents, he nodded and said, smiling, “Sam, Darlene, nice to see you—”

“Wait—you know my parents?” she gasped. “Are there any other secrets to you that I should know about?”

He shrugged, grinning. “Don’t worry, I’ll take good care of her,” he said, to her parents, who were still trying to figure out what to say.

“Max,” her father said, now, a low, dangerous anger in his voice. “Can we talk?”

“Dad,” she said.

“Now,” he said.

She looked at Jack helplessly, but he waved her towards her parents, saying, “I can wait. I was expecting this.” He sat down on their living room sofa, while her father pulled her into the kitchen.

“Max,” her father said, before she could protest. “Jack and I have been business associates for most of our adult lives, now. I know the guy—he’s sketchy as fuck—yes, I just said the f-word. That’s how bad he is—”

“Dad,” she said, “I know you think I’m still a little girl, but I’ve been living on my own in LA for three years. It’s just one date, okay? No big deal.”

“You say that—” he began, but she was already on her way back out and she walked out the front door quickly, before her parents could catch up. She knew her father would be trying to run after her, trying to say something that resembled a coherent sentence instead of useless, futile rage. Jack followed her out and opened the door to the car for her.

“What was that about?” Jack asked, as he settled into the driver’s seat and pulled on his seatbelt.

“My dad says you’re a terrible person,” she said.

He laughed. “Yeah, yeah, he would,” he said, softly.

“Well, I don’t think you’re terrible,” she said. “Rude, maybe. Pushy, sure. But you don’t kick puppies or anything, do you?”

He smiled at her. “You know, I knew you’d understand.”

***



For an older guy, he definitely knew where all the fun things were. She’d had her share of men in LA; the younger ones would take her to skanky clubs where the cover was only a dollar and drinks were three for five. The older ones would take her out to classy restaurants and take her dancing. Thirty seemed to be the age of demarcation—she’d never dated anyone older than thirty-five, and now here she was with a guy old enough to be her dad, in a wine club on the outskirts of Bethesda, sampling glasses of wine, olives, figs, and roasted nuts. “I’m not twenty-one,” she’d hissed as they approached the entrance.

“I’ve got that taken care of,” he said.

And he did. Somehow, he merely whispered something to the man standing outside—a bouncer, perhaps, except the place was hardly rowdy enough to need a bouncer—and she was escorted in with him. They took their places next to each other in a booth, and every few minutes someone would come up to the table pushing a cart with a bottle wine and a small plate of food, and they could either take a glass or send it along. It was sort of like dim sum but for wine and tapas, and as she popped a stuffed olive in her mouth she felt Grown Up in a way that she’d never felt before. On her previous dates, the guy would order the wine, and try to tell her how she should swirl the glass, what to look for, how to taste, but Jack would merely say, “Oh, this looks like a good bottle. Shall we try a glass?”

“You’re not going to tell me how to aerate my wine?” she asked now, sipping at the dark, rich liquid on her tongue.

“Why should I?” he asked. “Presumably if the wine needed to breathe, they’d have done it already.”

“Most of the guys that I’ve dated want to teach me things about wine, that’s all.”

“Do you want to learn?”

She shook her head. “If it’s good—like this one—the that’s enough for me.”

“Not a fan of tannins,” he remarked.

“Is that what makes your mouth go dry?”

He smiled at her. “You’re good,” he said, approvingly. “I knew you were smarter than most people think you are.”

“Try telling that to my parents,” she said. “They still think I’m a stupid fourteen-year-old who has her mind in the clouds thinking that she can model. What do they have against you, anyway?”

He darkened a bit, a combination of embarrassment and anger. “My ex-wife. She says that I beat her.”

“Did you?”

“Not exactly.”

She blinked at him, wondering what on earth he could possibly be talking about. He tilted his glass down his throat and gulped it down. “What the hell,” he said, finally, his voice harsh from the wine. “It’s not like we’re going to fuck tonight, anyway, right? I mean, you’re probably still a virgin, right?”

She blushed. Now it was her turn to be embarrassed and angry. “What’s it to you if I am?” she demanded. “Just because I have standards for the men that I will go to bed with doesn’t mean that I’ll never sleep with anyone.”

He leaned back and studied her for a minute, debating whether to tell her. Then he said, “I know what the stories are about me, but I didn’t beat my ex-wife. But my sexual tastes run into the realms of the—shall we say, perverse.”

“Oh my God, you’re not into children are you?” she asked—a bit too loudly, it seemed, because all of a sudden he seemed to panic and tried to shush her. Fortunately if anybody noticed they at least had the decency to ignore her remark.

“No, no—nothing like that. I mean things like—well, blindfolds, whips, handcuffs—that sort of thing.”

She had to stifle a giggle when she heard that. For some reason she always associated “handcuffs” with “pink fuzzy things that never really locked” and it just seemed absurd imagining him with them, his arms above his head—probably getting tickled with a feather duster. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s just—not something I’d expected to hear from you.” He was her father’s age, after all—granted, he was far better-preserved than her father had ever been—and for some reason she never thought of older men as being into anything kinkier than maybe having the woman on top.

He shrugged, relieved that she wasn’t going to blurt out any more incriminating insinuations about him. “I am what I am,” he said, stopping one of the waiters and pointing to the bottle on her cart. She poured, and when she walked away he continued, “My ex-wife thought she would be into it, but when push came to shove, no pun intended, I hurt her—that part is true. But it was always part of the game, you see—for people like me, pain and pleasure go together. Our pleasure is heightened when there is an edge to it. It transcends the act of sex and turns it into an—well, an experience, to put it mildly.” He was getting excited as he spoke and she could feel herself getting drawn into his words, her curiosity making her wonder if maybe she could have done it, after all. When she’d been looking into doing pornos the guys who directed those kinds of videos had surprised her when they said they didn’t pay—they didn’t have to, they explained. Women actually paid them, and that had never made any sense to her—they were getting penetrated, shocked, chained, bound, and gagged—why suffer all the extra humiliation if they weren’t paid? But now that he’d explained it to her she began to wonder if there wasn’t something else to it, after all. “You have to know what you’re doing and know your limits and trust your partner completely,” he said, now, looking into her eyes. “There’s an element of faith involved—there’s no middle ground, no ‘I’ll trust him if’. You’re either all in or all out.”