The Agreement (Unrestrained 1)

"Metal and flesh aren't always enemies. I use steel to cut out tumors, open the skull to let pressure off a swelling brain."

I frowned. "I never thought of that. I was thinking more of war."

"It's all in your point of view. Even in war, metal can save lives. Trauma surgeons like my father worked in hospitals on the front lines in Vietnam using steel and cutting flesh to save lives." He turned back to the drawing once more. "Did you at least get a good grade? This is very good."

Technically, it was good. My prof said I showed excellent use of shading and perspective.

"I got an A."

"Good. But why a couple? If you wanted to show contrast between flesh and metal, if you wanted the war theme, why not a hand holding a sword? Or were you thinking of a different kind of war – the war between the sexes?"

I was silent for a moment, not wanting to admit the melodrama surrounding it.

"It was after a boyfriend and I broke up and I was all upset about it. You know what it's like when you're nineteen. You'd think it would be the other way around, right? The woman would be covered in armor while the man would be naked, so willing to have sex."

He studied the drawing for a moment.

"Oh, very deep," he said. "He can't really touch her even when they have sex because he wears armor to protect himself. It's symbolic of men's psychological armor. There she is, naked, open, and he can't really touch her even when he's fucking her." He turned and looked at me as if for acknowledgement. "Did you study psychology?"

I kept my eyes firmly on the drawing. "Yes," I said. "I took a course in my Freshman year."

"So you're implying that despite the fact that men want to have sex, they're not really touching the women they fuck. There's always that male armor keeping them from intimacy. Am I right?"

I forced a smile. "You're one of the few to get it."

"I have a degree in psychology. I was trained to look for underlying explanations for behavior."

He took a step to the next painting framed and hanging on the wall. An abstract, all greens and yellows and black lines – I bought it from a friend who went to art school.

"Research suggests that men fall in love more easily than women," he said, his voice light. "Do you really believe that men never let down their armor even during sex?"

"You tell me. You're the expert at keeping things compartmentalized."

"What could you possibly mean by that, Ms. Bennet?" he said, as if surprised. "Are you suggesting that I use D/s as a way to keep my distance from the women I fuck? I assure you, it's quite the opposite. I get right into their minds."

"But you don't love them. You're not really intimate with them, despite controlling them sexually."

"I'm exceedingly intimate with them." He smiled, but I could see a bit of edge in his eyes. "It all depends on how you define intimacy. Back to you and your difficulty sleeping with men on the first date." He stepped closer to me so that I was forced back against the wall. "You can't open your thighs without being intimate with a man and it bothers you that men can fuck women without being intimate, without actually caring about her the way you think they should. Am I right?"

I nodded. "My body is private. How can I get naked with someone I don't care about?"

"My heart is private. How can I care about someone who won't get naked with me?" he said, countering my logic, stepping even closer to me, lifting up a strand of my hair, running it under his nose. "What if I was to tell you that your inability to have casual sex was because of your father's and society's influence on you, not because of anything inherent in male-female sex differences? We're both animals with drives, Kate. Society has just controlled women's drives more, redirected them, couched the control in moral platitudes."

I frowned. "I forgot you wanted to be a psychoanalyst. I never did like Freud and his focus on fathers."

"He was right, but in the wrong way," Drake said. "Your father – the generalized father of patriarchal authority – made you believe that if you were purely sexual, if you needed to be fucked, you were bad. Isn't that right? He and the Church made you believe you were a bad girl to just want a hard cock inside of you. So you always held back, using this idea of intimacy as a shield – as armor against just feeling pleasure for its own sake. You use the demand for intimacy as an excuse so you can maintain the façade of being a good girl when really you're just an animal like me."

I just stood there, turning my face away from his. I could tell he enjoyed how his physical proximity made me nervous but he did nothing. Finally, he turned and walked into the living room, the moment ending but the thought still hanging there.

Was he right? Did I demand intimacy as a way of pretending I'm a good girl?

Why was it not good for me to just want to fuck a man?

After taking off his jacket and laying it on the back of a dining room chair, he removed his tie and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt. He sat on the couch, right in the middle so that I either had to sit beside him or pull up a dining room chair. He leaned back, his arms stretched out on the back of the couch, his fee

t up on my coffee table.

He caught my eyes. "Am I right?"