Peer Review, Session Three, Recording Seven

by Tritium

"That is fucking it! I am never lending a lighter to anyone again!" That proclamation was followed by the sound of the lighter bouncing off the bathroom door and hitting the floor.

"What the hell?" The woman was confused by the sudden turn of events, and the girls sudden...violent tendencies.

"That lighter was full this morning, I lent it to a friend during fifth period so he could sneak off and have a smoke, and he gave it back damn near empty. I swear to god, if they don't just steal them outright, they burn up all the gas... It pisses me off." Sam was, however, not thwarted. She had matches in her purse, and used one to light her cigarette.

"Why not just give them a match?"

"I will have none of this... logic." Sam huffs a bit. "It feels good to be pissed off sometimes."

"Then you should thank your friend."

"Fuck that. It's still wrong..."

The woman chuckled a little. "Excuse me; I have to use the ladies room... if I can find it." She got out of her chair and felt around for a few moments until she felt a door knob... She had a mental picture of the room from when it was light out, but that had faded some. Luckily, there was no adjoining room, or closets. Her only options were the door to leave the room or the bathroom, so it was not all that difficult to eventually find. She thought to herself, that perhaps it would be easier if the girl just wore a mask. Hell they could have done the interviews over the phone; surely she could have expensed a burner cell phone for the girl out of the study's budget.

Only after she had closed the door, the woman turned on the light. The image in the mirror was alien to her. She had put on makeup, and worn a dress; nothing too revealing, just a little something she thought could pass as professional or party. It made no sense to her in retrospect; she was dressing to attract a girl who her conscience would not allow her to have anyways, and the girl wouldn't be able to see her in the first place. "What the hell are you doing?" She whispered to herself. It took a minute for her to look away from the foreign sight in the mirror, and get down to the business at hand; doing her 'business'.

While washing up, the same foreign person stared back at her in the mirror. "You're not doing anything, but having a conversation with another woman...she is a woman...about sex. It's nothing you haven't done a thousand times before." A voice played in the woman's mind, and she attributed it to the creature that stood in for her in the mirror. "Just, don't do anything with her, and you will be fine. You're not doing anything wrong... yet." The last word disturbed the woman more than not seeing herself, in a metaphorical sense, in the mirror. She shut off the light and returned, cautiously, to her seat.

"It's your turn." Sam reminded the woman.

"I know." The woman flipped on the recorder. "Is there anywhere you would like me to start?"

"I want to hear about your ex-girlfriend. The one you talked about last time... she sounds steamy." There was amusement and sensuality to Sam's voice that the woman was aroused and, in turn, a little disgusted by.

"Unfortunately, I told you the steamiest story of my life last week."

"You talked about what your relationship was like, but you didn't talk about here almost at all."

The woman thought on that for a moment, before stating her un-answer. "You have to realize something about how a submissive looks at their dominant, be it a mistress-slave or dominant-submissive relationship; the dominant is always bigger than they really are, has less faults than they really do, and did more than they really did."

"That's ... good to know, but it's a little off topic."

"It's not that far off as you would think. You wanted to know about my ex. Well, she was my mistress; my dominant. Everything I remember about her is bigger than life, and better than it likely really was. You won't have a clear picture of her."

"How is that any different than being in love with someone?" There was an honest curiosity in Sam's tone.

The woman had to think long on that one. "I guess 'it just is' will not be a sufficient answer, will it?"

"Nope."

"With a dominant, and I have had a couple in my life, even their rejection doesn't sour your memories of them. I have had vanilla relationship girlfriends, that once we broke up, everything was still bigger than life in my mind, but twisted and perverted into a dark... nightmare. I would think 'How did I survive being with her?' after the relationship ended. That never happened with a dominant, even if the relationship ended in a very similar circumstance."

Sam considered that for a moment, and added it to her minds catalogue of collected wisdom, so to speak. She then remembered something the woman said during the first session. "Wait, didn't you say you never had a dominant-submissive relationship after your first girlfriend? And didn't you say she was your first?"

The woman blushed. She wasn't exactly caught in a lie, but it did need a lot of clarification. "It really depends on what you mean by relationship." She sounded like she had been caught, all the same.

"Go on? I like where this back-peddling is going."

"Something you will find out about a lot of normal girls is...when you ask them how many men, or in our case, women, they have been with, they will tell you a number that really is how many men or women they have considered marrying, or something along those lines. They won't, at first, tell you how many partners they have had, or how many relationships they have been in that were strictly physical."

"Fascinating. And by your logic, what would I tell you?"

"Let's find out. How many people have you been with?"

"I've been with about two hundred males, one hundred forty three and one half females, sixteen domestic animals and three farm animals."

"Wow." It took a moment for that to register with the woman. "Half a female?"

"That's my brother. He is in almost no way male, but only half a girl."

"I see."

"The animals aren't counted against the total male and female numbers. But enough about me, we are talking about you right now. So in your back-peddling, you acknowledge that you had more dominants after your first girlfriend. I take it that they didn't resonate with you emotionally like your ex did?"

The woman hesitated. She could not continue until she thought back to the restroom, and what she told herself; this was ok as long as it stays a conversation and does not get physical. "No. No one, man or woman, has ever hit me emotionally like she did. Before you ask, I have been with only two men, by your counting standard, and I never had sex with them; it was just dominance and submission."

The woman stopped there, but Sam did not ask another question right away; she just waited patiently for the woman to continue speaking. "What was unique about your ex that you haven't found in subsequent partners?"

"To be perfectly honest; she was two people to me. She was a girlfriend in a very vanilla way when I needed her to be, and she was a savage dominant, when she, and I, needed it. I have had girlfriends that I loved intensely, and dominants that have been rightly savage with me, but never mixed in the way she did; never balanced the way I need.

"I miss her, more so now that I have been talking about her. The other day I was considering setting up a meeting with her; nothing overt, just lunch. But I can't do that to my current girlfriend."

Sam thought about how she wanted to ask the next question. If she were asking herself, she would simply request the information she wanted in as plain a way as possible, but this was a normal person, someone who would be offended by such a blunt question. She couched the question in what was discussed earlier. "In ten years, would you count your current girlfriend when asked by a stranger 'how many people have you been with?'"

"No." The woman did not hesitate on that answer. There was no shame in her, and that disturbed her some, but disturbed was a feeling she was getting used to lately. The woman and the girl were thinking the same thing. "I do love here, though. I can't just rip her heart out, and walk away."

"Ok. Will she count you in ten years?"

"You always hope that you will be." She paused, but knew that the girl would not let that answer stand. "I don't know. I don't think so."

"Then what's the point?" Sam didn't let the woman answer. "Look at me and my girlfriend. I can, and often do, have sex with whomever I want, as many times as I want. When I met her, though, I knew she would change my life. She filled something that I needed emotionally and intellectually. She is someone who's impact on my life I can never discounted. You have that with your ex. You don't with your current. What's the point?" Sam still didn't let the woman answer. "You care about your current. I get that, I totally do. If you don't have that emotional fulfillment, do you think she is?" Sam finally shut up.

The woman waited a moment after Sam stopped. This was not a moment of contemplation, or hesitation, but simply to see if the girl would start talking again. When it was clear that the final question had been asked, she responded "She doesn't." Her voice was flat, almost deflated.

"Don't pretend your relationship is something that it isn't. You will just end up hurting yourself and her a lot more. I'm not saying break up with her, but maybe you shouldn't be in a committed relationship with her, if she isn't the one... as hackney songwriters from the fifties would say."

The woman sat in silence for a long moment. "I'm sorry, I just can't think of something sexy to tell you now." The woman's voice was sincerely apologetic, and shaded with building emotion.

Sam turned on the light. "Come here." Her voice was comforting, almost soothing, with the slightest hint of rasp; a side effect of smoking a pack a day for two years.

The woman looked at Sam in complete surprise. "No... I can't. It's wrong..."

"That wasn't a request. Come here." Sam's voice took on a stern quality, while remaining comforting. She was playing off the woman's natural submissiveness. The woman, reluctantly, complied and moved from her chair to the bed. Sam guided her, gently cradling the woman's head against her chest as they lay together.

Sam had no breasts to speak of, and did not wear a bra. Unlike the woman, she had come to the interview in whatever she had on that afternoon, which was an athletic rash guard, and shorts. A few tears rolled down the woman's cheek, creating dark spots on the water-transmissive material of the rash guard.

The woman's world had crashed; she was pining for a former love, was seriously considering breaking up with her current girlfriend whom she still loved, and was surely about to take part in something that she had feared, and was not stopping herself. She had lost control of her emotions and that bothered her greatly; the irony of that did not escape the submissive woman.

Sam kissed the top of the woman's head and caressed down her hair. She considered what to do now; she had not thought that far ahead. All she wanted to do initially was comfort the woman, but now what?

It was a long time before either of them moved. The woman gathered her courage and sat up. She was not going to dismiss the girl, she did not need a boost of confidence to walk away; she decided to give in. She sat up on the bed, and looked down at the girl. Her hands moved to her back and started to unzip her dress. She was stopped when Sam put her hand on the woman's shoulder.

"No. You don't need that." Sam tried to hide the surprise on her face, and did a good job. She could not believe that she was turning down sex; she had only done that with her girlfriend. Perhaps she felt the same things with this woman? Definitely not. There was no question to her, and she was not lying to herself. Then what? Could it have been emotional maturity? Possibly. She would have to think about this a lot later.

"But I need something." The woman's voice was pitiful, as was the way her hands simply dropped to her sides. She felt rejected, and relieved.

"I know. Something about this... what we talk about... burns you up in your heart, not to mention between your thighs. Making love will change all of that. Let yourself burn for a while, and talk."

"Talk about what?" The woman returned her head to Sam's nonexistent chest.

"...The last time you burned, of course." Sam's response drew a chuckle from the woman, though she was far from cheered up.

This scene will be continued in Recording Eight, which is looking like it will be wall to wall steam.