In a little over a week, Best Lesbian Erotica of the Year 20th Anniversary Edition will be released. My story “A Professional” is one of the 17 included in it. This will be my second publication (the first being a story in Best Women’s Erotica of the Year, Volume 1, which came out earlier this month), and I’m stupidly excited for it.

“A Professional” was my favorite of the stories I wrote last year, in part because so much of me is represented in it.

It’s hard to describe what I mean by that. Neither of the two characters are especially me-like, but when I read it, the tone and the atmosphere and the sexuality seem so me that it’s almost embarrassing hundreds of strangers will be sitting in their homes and reading it in a matter of days.

Almost embarrassing, but not quite. Mostly it’s exciting.

Here’s a little excerpt to whet your appetite.

“I don’t usually get female clients,” said Mei. She kept her tone light, not letting on how grave an understatement it was.

She never got female clients, nor did any other pro domme she had ever met. Aside from the rare heterosexual couple (often a cautious but devoted woman seeking to please her male partner, but more common lately was a man looking for advice on how to satisfy his female partner’s bondage fantasies), it was all men: men wanting to submit, men wanting to be hurt, men wanting to indulge an obscure or embarrassing fetish. Women, straight or otherwise, who were looking for the same went elsewhere.

Which was why Mei had been so interested in meeting the one woman in the entire city who was seeking a one-on-one session with a professional domme.

The woman didn’t disappoint. Dark-haired, green-eyed, and light-skinned, probably in her midthirties like Mei, sitting primly on the other side of the circular table, Jennifer Carnes popped the lid off her cup of coffee and curled her red-painted lips into a smirk. A full face of makeup, long brown hair neatly curled and arranged artfully over her shoulders, and she even smelled faintly of perfume and hairspray—she was so femme she probably got mistaken for straight daily, but she wasn’t. Mei’s instincts were never wrong about that sort of thing.

“You mean you never get female clients,” Jennifer said. “The other women I contacted were more blunt about it.”

Impressed, Mei sat back in her chair, which creaked and wobbled. This was her favorite coffeehouse for meeting new clients—she loved the coffee and the privacy the unusually wide spaces between tables allowed her—but she could also admit that it was in poor shape. “So I’m not the first domme you called?”

Jennifer shrugged. “Of course not. You’re just the only one who didn’t immediately turn me down.”