“Yes,” I said.
“So… you didn’t um… touch her…?”
I looked at Leticia like she was insane. “Of course not,” I said. “Not immediately. That would have been a mistake.”
She shook her head and I saw the same insane look I had given her, reflected. She didn’t understand.
“I don’t understand,” she said.
I scraped the chair back and got to my feet. Leticia knew what was coming. She saw me begin to pace, and she immediately flipped over to a new blank page and flexed her cramping fingers in expectation.
“Leticia, one of a Master’s most potent, powerful weapons is…” I left the sentence unfinished, but continued to pace the floor. After a minute, Leticia made a sound like a subtle cough to get my attention.
“Is what?” she asked, frowning with curiosity. “What’s the potent weapon?”
I smiled. “Anticipation.”
“That’s a weapon?”
I nodded. “Anticipation is more potent than a whip and more compelling than handcuffs. The ability to tease and arouse a woman is a subtle skill few men ever bother to learn,” I said. “But learning the art of anticipation can make a woman go weak at the knees with longing.”
“I’m listening…” Leticia said. “But I don’t follow.”
“I’ll give you an example,” I smiled mischievously. “Come over here.”
Leticia rose from her chair obediently and stood facing me.
“Now close your eyes.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m going to touch your shoulder, and then your cheek.”
She looked puzzled. She shrugged and closed her eyes. Then I touched her shoulder gently and slid my hand across the soft skin of her cheek. She opened her eyes again.
“How was that?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Um…okay.”
I nodded. “Because you knew exactly what to expect. Now close your eyes again, and keep them closed.”
When Leticia closed her eyes, I waited for a long moment, until she began to move her head as though listening to some soft secret sound. “Jonah…?”
I reached out and brushed my hand down the soft trembling skin of her throat and she let out an involuntary gasp. I withdrew my hand, and waited, counting out the long seconds. Leticia smiled a little nervously, and then I traced my fingertip down her forearm. She shuddered, and her breath caught in her throat. She opened her eyes, her face lightly flushed.
“Anticipating is expectation,” I said. “It’s the mystery of not knowing, and the heightening of all a woman’s senses. Anticipation draws out the moment so that the moment then becomes exquisite,” I explained. “And it is only something as powerful as anticipation that can elevate an ordinary touch to a breathtaking caress.”
Leticia sat back in her chair as though I had just revealed some profound mystery of the universe, while I continued re-telling my first encounter with Caroline.
“Caroline held her breath for as long as my hand remained unmoving, and then, as I edged it slowly lower, she let out a gasp. Her sex was shaved smooth, and my fingers slipped over the velvety soft lips of her pussy.
“‘You sought me out tonight,’ I said in a whisper. My mouth was just an inch from her ear. Her eyes were closed. ‘Why?’
“Caroline licked her lips. I kept my fingers teasing the flesh of her pussy and used the wetness of her to gently massage her clit. She bunched her hands into tight little fists of restraint.
“‘I want you as my Master,’ she told me. She said she had been involved in the lifestyle for over a year but had left her previous Master. When I asked her why, she said he hadn’t been man enough to dominate her.
“I asked Caroline what made her so sure I would be interested in a woman like her – and then I slid two of my fingers inside her. She arched her back so that her hips and breasts strained forward, her body bowed and trembling. Her mouth fell open in a soft purr of arousal as I played the tips of my fingers around her sex.
“She pleaded for me to take her on as my submissive. She promised she would deny me nothing. I told her it all depended on the taste of her pussy – and then I eased my fingers from inside her and held them up close to my face.
“Caroline’s eyes fluttered open. My fingers were slick and glistening with the juices of her arousal. I slowly licked at the taste, and then slid my fingers into my mouth.
“I narrowed my eyes, kept my expression stern and made her wait.
“You taste like honey,” I told her.
Leticia was fascinated. She had moved as I spoke. Now she was sitting on the edge of her chair, with her elbows on her knees and her hands cupping her chin. “Did she? I mean, did she really taste like that?”
I gave Leticia my serious face. “Leticia, no woman tastes like honey – but every man should tell the woman he is with that she does.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that every woman I have ever known intimately has been inhibited and self-conscious about the way their pussy might taste to a man.”
“Why?”
I shrugged. “How the hell would I know? You tell me. All I know is that women relax and let themselves go sexually once a man reassures her that he loves the way she tastes. I tell women they taste like honey. That’s the line I use, because I want them to relax and I want them to enjoy the experience of my tongue deep between their legs and licking their clit. Good sex isn’t possible if the woman I’m with is tense and anxious.”
“Is that in the Jonah Noble big book of rules?”
“Yes,” I said. “Page two.”
I finally screwed up my courage and sipped the coffee. It tasted like drain cleaner. Somehow I had mixed powdered coffee, milk, sugar and hot water, and created something that was probably toxic. I took the cups to the sink and found a bottle of whisky in a cupboard.
“So what happened with Caroline, after…”
“After what?”
“After… you know… your fingers…”
“No. I don’t know what you mean,” I said. “Say it.”
Leticia looked at me like I was a brute, and her lips compressed into a thin frosty line. “What happened after you licked Caroline’s pussy juices off your fingers and told her she tasted like honey?” she asked, holding my gaze defiantly, but blushing like a schoolgirl as she did.
I nodded, satisfied.
“I put my hand back between her spread legs and rubbed her gently until her hips were rocking with the pace of my fingers. And as I touched and teased her, I spoke quietly into her ear.
“I told her she was to come to my house the following evening. I told her she was to wear lingerie. I told her she shouldn’t make plans to go home until the following morning. Caroline nodded obediently – but by that point if I had told her to steal the Crown Jewels she probably would have agreed. I had her on the edge of her orgasm and deliberately held her there, right on the brink of exploding, but never quite touching her firmly enough to spark her release. Her teeth were bared, her lips pared back like she might snarl, and she sucked in short ragged breaths with growing desperation.
“When I was satisfied that Caroline had heard all of my instructions, and when I was sure she would obey, I left her and strolled back to the party.”
“You left her? You didn’t let her orgasm?”
“No.”
“That was mean!”
“It kept her keen,” I countered. “It told her, without me saying a word, that I had control, and that I made the decisions.”
“Did she come to your house the next night?” Leticia prompted.
“Yes.”
“And did she stay the night?”
“Yes. In my bed.”
“And so you took her as your submissive and she lived with you, right?”
“Not immediately, no. But over the course of a few weeks we grew to understand each other. She was smart, sexy, independent and strong willed. I liked those qualities in her,” I explained. “Final
ly I told her to gather her things from her apartment and to live with me.”
“As your submissive?”
“Yes. As my submissive.”
Leticia chewed her bottom lip as she made notes. I waited in the silence until she looked up at me again. “Did you sign contracts?”
I blinked. Leticia’s expression was intense and earnest.
She was serious.
“No,” I laughed. “What made you ask a question like that?”
Leticia shrugged and seemed to shrink in the chair. “I… I thought submissives signed contracts,” she said meekly. “I thought it was like an agreement – those limits you asked me about. I thought contracts were signed so that everything was spelled out before the training started.”
I shook my head dismissively. “Leticia, what would be the point of a contract – really? Think about it for a moment. If you were my submissive and I wrote down all the things I expected from you, and you agreed with that list – we wouldn’t need a contract, would we?”
“No…”
“Remember I told you everything in BDSM must be safe, sane and consensual?”
“Yes…”
“Well if you signed a contract including an agreement that you would kneel before me and suck my cock six times a day – for example – suppose you changed your mind one day, and withdrew your consent. What would be the point of the contract? If I enforce the agreement, you would do so unwillingly – which goes against the golden rules of the lifestyle.”
“So you don’t ever have a contract agreement?”
“No,” I said. “But I would happily sign one if it gave a sense of reassurance to a submissive. I could understand the idea on that basis. If a submissive was interested in serving me, and she asked me to sign a contract that in some way gave her comfort about her safety and her care, and her right to leave the relationship at any stage she wanted, then I would happily sign.”
There was a brief moment of silence and then I stabbed a finger into the air suddenly, like Sherlock Holmes about to reveal the name of a culprit in a murder mystery book. “But… that doesn’t mean I don’t have rules,” I said. “And I make those rules perfectly clear from the beginning. The rules spell out what behaviors I require and what attitude I expect. If a submissive fails to meet my expectations, they are dismissed. If a submissive – at any stage – no longer wants to adhere to those rules, they are free to leave, no questions asked. That’s the way I do things, because that’s the way it works for me. Other Masters might do things differently.”
Leticia looked suddenly enthusiastic. “Can you tell me some of the rules?”
“No.” I said. “To see the rules, you would need a copy of the Jonah Noble big book of rules.” And then I smiled because I wasn’t totally convinced Leticia realized I was joking.
“The rules vary from submissive to submissive,” I said. “It depends on each woman’s needs, their particular interests within the lifestyle, and the behaviors I feel they should improve in order to become better at submitting and serving. It also depends on their fetishes. I don’t have a generic list, and just change the person’s name at the top of the page. It’s a lot more personal than that.”
Leticia spent a long time making more notes, faithfully recording everything I said. “Was Caroline a good submissive?”
I considered that question. “In some ways yes, and in others she required a lot of training,” I said.
“Was she a good submissive sexually?”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
Leticia frowned. “What made her good in… in the bedroom?”
“The same thing that makes every woman good in the bedroom,” I shrugged, “her enthusiasm.”
Leticia was paying close attention. “Care to explain?”
I walked slowly around the kitchen. I had the glass of whisky in one hand and I stuffed my other hand into my pocket. “I think if you gave most men the choice between a highly skilled woman in the bedroom, and a woman who was insatiable, they would choose the insatiable one more often than not,” I said. “I certainly always have.” I swallowed the last of the whisky and set the glass down on the edge of the table, but I didn’t stop walking. “A gorgeous woman who wants sex once a month is a lot less desirable to a man than an average-looking woman who wants sex every night. Caroline was gorgeous, and insatiable.”
Leticia looked at me, disbelieving. “You’re trying to tell me that it doesn’t matter to a man how good a woman is in bed, the only thing that really matters is whether she is an enthusiastic lover?”
“Yes,” I said. “For most men, their sex life is measured in quantity, not quality.”
Leticia looked up from her notebook, her expression confused. “I need to go back to Caroline,” she changed tack. She seemed extremely curious about Caroline – much more so than she had been about Claire or Sherry from my distant past. “You told me you lived with her for three years?”
“Yes. She left six months ago.”
“And you never loved the woman?”
“No.” I said. I could see by the look on Leticia’s face that she didn’t believe me, and I drew a deep breath and began to pace in circles around the kitchen.
“You need to understand the origins of the relationship, Leticia. When Caroline came to me it was as my submissive. We never courted, there was no romance, and we never fell in love, because it was not the objective or purpose of the relationship.
“Falling in love with your submissive is about the biggest mistake a Master can make,” I told her. “As soon as you start to see the woman kneeling before you with ‘loving eyes’ you begin to moderate everything. Suddenly hard and fast rules are no longer quite as rigid, and all the aspects of discipline and obedience that are the bedrock of a BDSM relationship begin to disintegrate. It is far easier to start a relationship built around the BDSM lifestyle than it is to turn a loving relationship into one.
“It’s been my experience that BDSM play only really has the chance to work when the man can look at a woman with ‘hard eyes’.”
“Hard eyes?” Leticia repeated. “As opposed to ‘loving eyes’?”
“Exactly,” I said. “‘Hard eyes’ is that detached, slightly remote attitude, where the man’s emotional attachment to the woman is suspended, or pushed into the background temporarily – just far enough into the background so he can give the woman the experience she craves without him feeling restrained by any emotional or romantic considerations.”
I paused for a moment, playing those last comments back in my head. “I’m talking about committed couples here. I don’t mean the man needs to see the woman as an object, or have no feelings for her at all – I simply mean that the man has to kind of ‘step back’ from the normal feelings he might have for the woman, temporarily. He can’t be blinded to the woman’s feelings or needs, or safety – just slightly detached.”
Leticia frowned. “It doesn’t sound easy.”
“For a lot of men it’s not,” I agreed. “Right now, guys in loving relationships with their wives all around America are suddenly being asked to spank, whip or maybe handcuff their woman. Most men in a relationship confronted in that way would say something like ‘I don’t want to hurt you’ – and despite all of the wife’s reassurances, the guy won’t budge, because he has always seen the woman through ‘loving eyes’. It’s hard for him to switch, and discover that place where he can become detached just sufficiently enough to make BDSM work without guilt, or inhibition.”
Leticia was still frowning. Maybe I wasn’t doing a very good job of explaining myself.
“If a couple first formed a loving relationship, the guy often has trouble suddenly seeing the woman with ‘hard eyes’. It is something that takes a lot of patient encouragement from the woman to alter the situation. Does this make any sense?”
Leticia didn’t answer for a full minute after she had finished writing down everything I had said. She put her pen down with a sigh and swept hair away from her eyes.
&
nbsp; “I don’t think your explanation is going to end up as an encyclopedia definition. But yeah, it makes sense.”
“What I’m saying is that sometimes women don’t understand where their husband is coming from, and why he might seem reluctant – especially with the more physical aspects of BDSM – to give some of the things she wants to experience a try. Now, maybe this couple we are talking about have been married for fifteen years and all the passion has gone from their marriage. Maybe that’s why the wife wants to introduce BDSM – to put some spice into the relationship. You would think my ‘loving eyes’ theory would no longer hold true after a couple has been together for so long, but it doesn’t really change, even though the way the couple love each other may have altered over the years. The fact is they were in love before BDSM came along and that’s the obstacle the woman needs to address with small patient steps and plenty of persistence.”
“Is that another secret a person browsing through Jonah Noble’s big book of rules would come across?”
“Yes. There is an edited version of everything I just said on page seven.” I smiled and Leticia smiled with me. I felt like we were finally back on the same wavelength, and at the same place in our relationship as we had been before I had made the mistake of kissing her.
I resumed pacing again, but for no good reason. I didn’t have anything else worth saying right then. I glanced down at Leticia’s notebook and saw line after line of sloping squiggles seeming to run up the page.
“You know there was a time where journalists learned shorthand for these kind of interviews,” I said dryly.
Leticia nodded. “Some of the journalists at the paper like to use a Dictaphone,” she said. “Or record interviews directly to their cell phone.”
“But not you?”
She shook her head. “I like to have everything down on paper and everything organized,” she said.
“Can you read that scrawl you have written? You must have a dozen notebooks by now filled with everything I have told you.”
“Eight, actually,” Leticia said. “And yes I can read it all… usually.”
I went back to the kitchen counter and splashed more whisky into the bottom of my glass. I held the bottle up in silent invitation to Leticia. She hesitated with a small look of regret, then shook her head, like she really did want a drink but was denying herself. I sipped at the whisky and enjoyed the silence. The night outside was very still.