Page 131 of Whirlwind

Chapter 2

Carla

Carla ran his fingers over the hole in his worn kitchen table again. It looked a bit like a storm cloud, but he wouldn’t let that feel like an omen. He loved this table. Loved his cheerful little apartment.

Now he just needed Charlie inside of it.

He wondered, for the hundredth time, if he should have gone to pick her up instead of just texting her his address. She hadn’t texted back, but he could see that she had read it.

He rearranged the decorative plates on the table. He’d already put the food back in the oven to keep warm, but it would dry out if it stayed there much longer.

He tried to remain positive that Charlie would show up. It was 7:30, and they hadn’t exactly agreed on a time. His apartment was only a five-minute walk from the bar, but she could have gotten held up by something. She could have even gone home first to change.

He wasn’t usually this nervous on dates. He’d been through the normal rounds of awkward dating website encounters, forgettable hook-ups at clubs, and playful flirtations with friends to see if they evolved into anything more. If there was a spark, he went for it. If it didn’t work out, no harm done. He was open about his kinks and usually had subs flocking to him.

Charlie just threw him off his game. She was just so mature and confident and… ugh.

Usually he knew exactly what he wanted in a partner. They’d talk about their interests, in bed and out of it, and scenes would start to form in his head.

With Charlie, it was all nebulous. She was so stern and stoic sometimes that he thought maybe, just maybe, she could be the person he switched for. But then again, he often got a hint of something else, something fragile… He’d love to have her on her knees or decorated in rope, her body blissed out in relaxation or eager with arousal.

He was probably getting his hopes up for nothing. At best she was probably vanilla, and he would be happy with that, he thought, if it was what he could get. At worst, she just wasn’t interested at all.

Sometimes he felt like she was just humoring him. She certainly mentioned his youth often enough, though working with teenagers all day definitely let him know just how old he really was.

Charlie, though, made him feel just as awkward as his students, unsure all over again. With anyone else he could shift easily from a low-key vanilla flirtation to Dom mode, depending on the person and the situation. With Charlie, he had no idea what he wanted or how to get it.

He just knew that he wanted her with a passion that burned.

It had started out slowly. He’d felt an immediate attraction based just on the commanding way that she held herself and that short-cropped hair, but he’d pushed it back as they became colleagues.

What had grown instead was something sweeter and deeper. He’d stick around to chat with her after closing and listen to her stories about the bar. Under her gruff demeanor, she had so much conviction and life, so many challenges she’d overcome and people whose lives she changed.

Then he’d started to notice her eyes. Her lips that he had to remind her to put balm on during the winter.

One day last year, he’d walked into Whirlwind, saw her standing behind the tap chatting with a regular, and discovered that he was in love.

Only then had he realized that he hadn’t dated anyone in half a year because she was all he could think about. He lived for those chats after trivia night. For the way that her face lit up when he walked in the room before she carefully buried it. For the way she became curt and maybe just a tad nervous when he stood too close.

So, of course, he immediately started making a fool of himself. He couldn’t decide whether to play it cool or flirt, whether to keep it businesslike or try to cozy up together.

He was sure that he ended up looking ridiculous most of the time. The other employees teased him mercilessly, as well as some of the regulars who knew him from the kink club around the corner.

Until today, he hadn’t even been certain that she was interested. He still wasn’t entirely convinced. She shut him down so quickly most of the time, hurrying off into the kitchen and responding to him in monosyllables when he got too close.

He would have stopped completely, assuming that she wasn’t interested, except for the way that her eyes followed him sometimes. He’d caught her in the mirror over the bar watching him, eyes commanding and full of fire.

It helped that the whole damn bar was rooting for him, and he’d had several people swear that Charlie blushed every time his name came up.

He got regular reports every time that she looked at his ass or gazed at him adoringly while he stood on the small stage reading trivia questions.

That was pretty much all that kept him going when his flirting fell flat. He’d spent months agonizing over asking her out and now he was sitting at his kitchen table alone.

He wondered if he should text her again.

Their conversation earlier had revealed a whole slew of things that he’d suspected about her but hadn’t been sure about, and he was beginning to increasingly think that her rejection wasn’t about him but about her own insecurities.

He didn’t want to scare her off, but maybe she needed some encouragement.