“Really,” I say. “I’m fine with the handcuffs, but maybe we just don’t do the slapping or the name-calling.”

“Oh, what do you know?” she asks.

I’m at a loss.

“I really don’t know what you mean,” I tell her.

“You think it’s so easy for a woman to open up sexually. Well, it’s not. Everything we do either makes us a prude or a freak-slut. It’s such bullshit.”

I actually agree with her, but am having a bit of trouble expressing that with half of my face still numb.

“Why don’t we,” I start, standing up and discreetly looking for my pants, “just get dressed and talk it out. I bet it’ll make you feel better.”

“Oh,” she says, her tone changing completely, “so now you don’t think I’m good enough to have sex with?”

“I really—”

“No, see this is what all you guys do. The handcuffs go on and your balls just shrivel up because you can’t handle letting a woman be in charge for once.”

What’s the word I’m looking for?

“Seriously, if I’d known you were such a pussy, I never would have picked you up—I mean seriously, how do you get out of bed in the morning?”

Flummoxed: that's the word I’m looking for.

“Fucking say something, will you?”

I open my mouth, but can’t find any words to adequately describe my surprise or my terror in this moment, so I do the only thing that my body will allow.

I laugh.

“I’m sorry,” I tell her as soon as I can catch my breath. “Really, I am. I’m not laughing at you. I just have no idea how to even begin to approach this conversation.”

Her eyes start going wide again.

“No, no, no,” I say. “It’s all right. We can figure this thing out. Now, there are some things you want to do, some of which make me uncomfortable, some of which I’m okay with. What would be the ideal situation for you? Let’s start there, and I’ll tell you what will work and what won’t work for me. I’m sure we can find a consensus somewhere here.”

“I don’t know,” she says in a creepily normal tone. “I guess, when I saw your tattoos, I just kind of figured that you were into some freaky shit. Maybe I went overboard without seeing if you were cool with everything.”

“That’s okay,” I tell her. “Now, what would be ideal for you?”

“What I really want to do is tie you to the bed, ride you like a bull and, I don’t know…”

“It’s okay,” I tell her. “Just tell me what you want. That’s how we’re going to find a compromise here.”

My goal for the evening is to find some way to sleep with her and not end up with a black eye.

“I just want to make you my bitch, you know? I want to have you do what I tell you to do and maybe smack you around a little if you don’t do it right. Is that so much to ask?”

“Wow,” I chuckle. “You know, that’s a bit much for me,” I tell her. “Not that it’s weird or anything, it’s just not my particular cup of tea.”

I wonder what Yoga Chick is up to.

“Well, what do you want?”

“Me? I don’t know, I guess I’m a bit more old-fashioned when it comes to the bedroom. I like a nice, pleasant evening where we fuck like bunnies, maybe take a few pages out of the Kama Sutra and see if we can get your neighbors to file a noise complaint.”

“Okay,” she says, giving the situation the kind of thought one would put toward what college to attend or whether or not space-time is a fixed or mutable concept. “Well, I like what you’re saying, but I’m going to need a little more than that.”

“I can offer you light spanking.”

“Who’s spanking whom?” she asks, surprisingly articulately.

“I guess that’s really up to you,” I tell her.

“Oh, I’d definitely be spanking you,” she says.

I’m starting to get the feeling that we may be trying a bit too hard to make this work, but I’ve already put so much into it, I don’t want to just give up.

“I can live with some spanking—some light spanking,” I tell her. “But I’m talking with your hands. No paddles or whips. A riding crop might be acceptable, but that’s really going to come back to the force of the blow.”

“Okay,” she says. “I think I can live with that, but that’s still not quite enough for me. I mean, you’ve really taken me out of the mood here.”

If I didn’t know any better, I’d say that she’s enjoying this more than she was enjoying the sex.

Actually, I don’t know any better.

“What did you have in mind?”

“Well,” she says, “you seemed to be okay with the handcuffs, but you weren’t okay with me slapping you.”

“Yeah,” I emphasize. “Not into the slapping. While we’re at it, I’m also not into either of us drawing blood, head-butting or any phrase that starts with donkey—just not my thing.”

“Well, you’ve got to give me a little more than some light spanking and handcuffs,” she says, her voice most of the way back to what it was when she uttered those memorable words: “Shut up, bitch!”

“This isn’t your first time with any of this, is it?” I ask her.

She shrugs. “Most guys like to hear that sort of thing,” she says.

“Isn’t it funny the things we say to each other, never really knowing if it’s what the other person wants or not?”

“I know, right?” she smiles.

I feel like the term emotional rollercoaster is too slow a metaphor to capture this particular moment.

“Okay,” she says. “How do you feel about adding someone else? If you’re going to veto the fun stuff, we could at least switch gears.”

I lightly clap my hands together. “Okay,” I tell her. “That’s something we might be able to—”

“Yeah,” she interrupts. “I have a friend who’s a dom—”

“You know, maybe we should figure this out between the two of us before we bring a third party into the equation?”

“Okay,” she says and shrugs.

About a minute goes by in awkward silence with me sitting with my pants on but undone, her still naked beside me.

“I know!” she shouts, clapping her hands hard in triumph.

A few minutes later, we’re on top of her roof, she’s up on the ledge, leaning back and my arms are wrapped around her lower back, just trying to figure out a way to get through this without her falling.

Don’t misunderstand; I’m definitely feeling the draw.

Her hands go above her head and she leans back even farther. I have to move my grip from around her back to around her legs, but she’s quick to pull them together and rest them on my shoulder.

She’s not quiet, but that only adds to the thrill of the moment as I enter her, the sound of our skin hyphenating every movement as she falls again and again onto my hard, throbbing cock.

“This is fucking great!” she calls into the night, and I can’t help but agree with her.

I tighten my grip around her thighs as her legs begin to quiver in my arms, and as she erupts into screaming orgasm, I’m checking the windows of the building across the street to see if anyone’s filming this.

We’re in public, so it’s not really an invasion of privacy.

Really, I’d just like a copy for myself.

No luck, though. There are plenty of people nudging their friends and pointing but not one of them is holding a camera.

Lame.

I’m not much of an exhibitionist, but it is a bit of a rush being on display like this, bringing this gorgeous woman to orgasm on the very edge of the building.

As her contracting muscles relax again, I reach up and put a hand on her shoulder.

She gets the idea and grabs my arm with one hand and pulls herself up. Without a word, she hops down from the ledge and turns around, placing her stomach over the towel we set on the ledge—which, by the way, only made keeping her from slipping that much harder—her breasts hanging just over the side of the building.

A few drapes have shut in the building across the street, but even more have opened.

That’s one thing about New York: almost everyone’s a voyeur.

I run one hand down her back while, with the other, I reach around her front and write the alphabet in cursive, print and at one point, I’m pretty sure, Cyrillic over her clit with the pad of my middle finger.