I pulled into a parking space behind the dental office. I wanted to take a couple of deep tokes off a joint before I went in. Numb the scars on the inside before I created more. It was the burn of the first hit as the smoke tore down my throat and into my lungs that reminded me that what I was doing wasn’t supposed to be glamorous or celebrated. It was a job, nothing more, nothing less.
I pushed the door open at Brite-N-UR-Smile dental office. The receptionist’s desk was vacant like always. I’d never met the woman and only knew what she looked like because of her family pictures that speckled her desk.
My dentist, an older guy wrinkled with the stress from cleaning and pulling teeth all day, was completely about creative financing. A year and a half ago I had a bad tooth and looked him up online. When I saw he accepted all forms of insurance, I booked an appointment and approached him with a perfect way we could square up with my financing. We both were in the service business, so I’d give him my supreme service and he’d make sure I’d have the most beautiful smile on Geary Street.
“Hello?” I called out.
The chill of the sterile waiting room used to tremble through my bones when I first started coming. A couple of waxy green plants with huge leaves spilled over the counter that separated clients from hygienists. I looked around the room, recognizing the places I reimbursed Danny Carmichael, DDS for my dental work and cleanings. We had our usual places, his desk, counters, walls, floors, and the couch in the front lobby, even the dental chair was our little secret. Closed on the third Friday of every month, he reserved that day for personal service. Never emotional, always business, he had a family with a couple of grown daughters, one my age. Pictures of them sat squarely on his desk and hung from his walls.
Was he a sick fuck? Not really, just an older man who needed more than his forty-five-year stagnant marriage gave him.
“Back here,” he hollered from his office in the very back. “Would you mind locking the door, please?” he added.
I started toward his office; his door was closed. I gave a light warning knock before I pushed it open. I’d come to learn that Dr. Danny had a kinky side, simple fetishes that ranged from role-playing patient/doctor shit to licking the back of my knees while he stroked his junk. But this, well, this was a side of him I’d never seen. An edge I’d never particularly let any date have with me before. He was dressed in a dominant black leather suit, studs poking from a collar wrapped around his wrist, hands filled with a blindfold, handcuffs and a flogger hanging from his index finger. A smile built across his aging face and yet he looked like a teenage boy who just discovered that Cinemax After Dark was laced with porn.
Emotionally, I knew my hardline stopping point and I couldn’t handle giving up so much. Dr. Danny seemed to be challenging the line I drew up with him.
“Hey, oh, wow, is that flogger for you?” I asked.
“Well, Rose, I wanted to try something a little different. Something that maybe I could practice with you and take home to . . . you know.”
Dr. Danny rationalized everything, and I mean everything. From double charging insurance companies for work his patients already paid for with cash-in-full, to the warped excuse he continually chimed in with about how fucking me wasn’t technically ‘cheating’ on his wife. Every damn time we finished, him cleaning my teeth and me teaching him something new, he’d pipe up with his justification of how I was more like a sex therapist for him. How the angles and ideas he got from our ‘sessions’ made sex with his wife so much better. If that was the case, I should’ve started charging therapist fees.
I let him swat my ass a couple of times and even blindfold me, no big deal, but I stopped at letting him cuff me. Personal rule . . . my hands must always be free. Pin me against the wall or a waiting room table, hell, I’d even let him restrain my ankles, but when it came to my arms, it was just a no-go, a deal-breaker.
Like clockwork, when the time was up, the routine of Dr. Danny negotiating with himself and justifying his guilt had begun. Muttering about how much better and more intense sex was gonna be with his wife when he brought home the flogging techniques he learned while fucking me from behind. Always talking about coming up with something that was worth taking home to Mrs. Carmichael. He called our encounters his indulgence; I called it our business arrangement, but truthfully I didn’t care what we called it just so long as we both came out benefiting from the time we invested.
“Good evening, ma’am,” he played in a drawl as he walked me out. His lengthened vowel tones rolling between the consonants froze me in my footsteps and created a single shiver that melted down my spine. His tone caused me to think about the strong, tall, gorgeous man I saw only a handful of nights ago in a dark, dingy alley.