Bad Girls by Brooke Stern

hour and twenty minutes to get ready for work every morning. He confessed to checking the oven four times to make sure he’d turned it off, even though he rarely used it, and to having twelve anti-bacterial wipes in his pocket before he left the house every day. He said he had an affection for multiples of four, and he showed me the eight eyelets on his shoes. He couldn’t buy shoes if the number of eyelets wasn’t divisible by four. While I suppose I should have been able to foresee the downside of all this, I just found it totally charming. Not only was he funny about it, mocking his own craziness, but the order also offered a welcomed contrast to the chaos of my own life.
    Finally he looked me in the eye, reached across the table to clasp my hand and asked if I could find it in my heart to accept him the way he was. He tried to make it a joke, but it really wasn’t.
    â€˜Of course, Pete. Like I’m one to judge.’
    â€˜Thank you, Nicole. It’s such a relief to hear you say that.’
    â€˜Can you accept me the way I am, Pete?’ I asked, more out of a sense of parallelism than anything else. I figured it would be nice to be reassured, especially after I had gotten myself into so much trouble.
    â€˜Not a chance.’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜I warned you that I’m rigid and need things a certain way.’
    â€˜But I can accept that.’
    â€˜Good. Then I need you to stop stealing and get out of debt.’
    â€˜But what if I need you to accept me the way I am?’
    â€˜Nicole, sweetheart, you don’t even accept yourself the way you are.’
    Touché .
    â€˜But…’
    â€˜Look, you’re beautiful, smart, sweet and sexy. You have a good heart and you mean well. But you’re screwing up. You’re stuck in your bad habits and it’s only going to get worse.’
    â€˜And you propose to fix me?’
    â€˜Come back to my place and I’ll tell you what I propose.’
    I could have been offended, or gotten scared, or mistrusted his motives, but instead I just let him pay the check, got in the passenger seat of his car, and went wherever he took me. Pete made me very obedient.
    His place was even neater than I had imagined it, totally modernist, black and white, and minimal. Everything had a place. Where it was possible things were set at right angles from each other, symmetry was maintained and multiples were arranged in sets of four. I expected the glass of wine and the awkward sitting next to each other on the couch and the fumbling first kiss, but instead we had hardly gotten in the door when Pete turned to me, looked me in the eye, and gave me the first of many thousands of direct orders.
    â€˜Take a shower. There’s a clean robe hanging on a hook on the door that you can put on afterwards.’
    I looked at him. Was he serious? Did he think I was dirty? Was this his way of bypassing the fumbling scene on the couch? Was he taking me for granted?
    â€˜Nicole, I’ll never tell you to do something if I think you might regret it. You can always do whatever you want, but I think we’ll be happiest if you do what I say.’
    He sounded both kind and menacing. I liked kind, but menacing felt electric. I turned and headed toward the shower, swaying my hips to whet his appetite.
    The rest of the night went better than I dared imagine. I got pretty hot with anticipation while in the shower. I emerged, still wet, in his robe and we began kissing. I wasn’t even dry when he made me come for the first time, licking my clit right through my first orgasm and clear through my second. I had to pull him by the hair to make him stop and kiss me. He put on a condom without asking me any questions. He fucked me frontways and backways and a few ways in between, finally coming missionary style and collapsing on me for a well-earned break. If you pay attention to how he fucks, you can tell whether a guy likes you or just likes