“Good evening,” I said.
Leticia yelped and spun round, wide eyed with shock and fear. Instinctively her hands flew to cover herself. She cringed in the half-light, hunting the shadows wildly until she saw the silhouette of me sitting by the window at last.
“Who the fuck –?”
“It’s me,” I said calmly. “It’s Jonah Noble. There’s no need to be alarmed.”
“No need to –?” Fear transformed into outrage, her mood changing in an instant, bursting like a summer storm. “You broke into my apartment?” The tone of her voice was appalled.
I was sitting with my legs crossed, perfectly relaxed, with my hands resting casually on the armrests. I didn’t move.
“No,” I said. “The security guard let me in.”
“What?” she was incredulous and disbelieving. “He let you in?”
“That’s right.”
“You… you… bribed the man?”
“No,” I smiled lazily. “I own the building.”
She shook her head and then scraped her fingers through her hair. She was trembling with the after-effects of her fright, and her breathing was ragged. She started to say something else, then realized she was standing half-naked in front of me, wearing nothing more than a lace bra and a skimpy sheer pair of panties.
She snatched at a robe hanging behind the bedroom door and wrapped herself in it.
“You aren’t going to hurt me, are you?” Her voice dropped and became suddenly tentative. Her breathing was short and quick as if she had run up a flight of stairs.
I smiled wolfishly. “Not unless you would like me to.”
She gasped. “What do you mean by that?”
“It’s just a BDSM joke,” I shrugged offhandedly. “That’s all. You are perfectly safe, I assure you.”
Leticia huffed and her expression became incredulous once more. “Relax? Are you for real? You broke into my apartment.”
“I own the apartment,” I corrected her. “This is just a routine inspection.”
“Inspection? You son of a bitch. I’m standing here half naked!”
“Yes,” I said admiringly. “But only half naked. I could have waited…”
I came up out of the chair slowly. Crossed the room. Leticia edged away like a timid forest animal. I held out my hands and kept my voice gentle and soothing.
“I’m sorry if I frightened you,” I said. “But I wanted proof that you were being as truthful with me as I have been with you.”
Leticia’s breath quickened as I drew nearer. I stopped when we were only inches apart – so close I could almost hear her heart thumping within the cage of her chest and sense the ripples trembling throughout her body. The space between us seemed to tingle with electricity. It was dark outside now. Leticia’s face was turned up to mine, her lips slightly parted, glistening soft and moist.
She swallowed hard. Her eyes searched mine.
“Proof?”
I nodded. “The lingerie.” I reached down and touched the lace cup of her bra with the tip of my finger. “If you had undressed and were wearing cotton hipsters, I would know you had lied to me as you were leaving my house last night. You said you wore lingerie every day.”
Leticia was backed up against the closet. I leaned an inch closer. I could smell the scent of her perfume and feel her nervousness.
She swallowed hard, and then her expression changed again. Her eyes lost their dazed, glazed mist and became clear and sharp once more.
“Thank God,” she said. Her voice was a shaky husk, but only for a second. “I’m glad I didn’t tell you I had pierced nipples and was waxed all over.”
* * *
I left Leticia alone to change. She came from her bedroom ten minutes later wearing a t-shirt and faded denim jeans. I noticed she had touched up her make-up and brushed her hair. We sat across from each other at the small dining table. She flipped through her notebook to a blank page and set it down on the tabletop between us. Leticia looked up at me – the storm of outrage hadn’t passed. I could see tendrils of anger in her narrowed eyes, like lingering smoke after a blaze.
“You had no right to break into my apartment,” she said, and there was tight restraint in the way she spoke the words, like she wanted to say more, but was holding her temper in check.
“Like I said,” I replied. “I own the building.”
She shook her head. “That makes you a landlord, Mr. Noble, and tenants have rights. You can call it a routine inspection and you can brush it off, but I can’t. You broke into my apartment,” Leticia said again.
I pushed myself away from the table and started to rise. I didn’t need this shit. I didn’t need a lecture from a wet-behind the ears little girl. There were plenty of other journalists who would want the story – then I checked myself.
Okay, she has a point. You did break into her apartment, and you didn’t have the right. Just apologize, and stop being an ass, Noble. There are more important things to worry about right now than your injured pride because the girl was offended.
I sighed. “I’m sorry,” I said. I meant it. She must have sensed my sincerity. She did a thing with her mouth like she was trying to decide whether to accept my apology, and then she nodded slowly.
“Accepted,” she said gravely, like we were negotiating a peace treaty across the table. The formalities over, Leticia seemed to let the tension go from her body at last, and shake off the dark clouds that had been building. She smiled suddenly, and it was a shy little gesture, almost like a peace offering.
“I haven’t been able to stop thinking about last night, Mr. Noble,” she said. “I’ve been distracted all day. The story you started to tell me has been playing over and over in my mind. I still can’t quite believe how brazen Claire was.”
“What I’ve told you so far is only the beginning of the story. I assure you, the best is yet to come.”
Her eyes widened a little. She seemed to hesitate for a moment, like she was choosing her next words carefully.
“Mr. Noble –”
I smiled briefly. “Call me Jonah,” I insisted. “Only my employees call me ‘Mr. Noble’. Everyone else either calls me Jonah, or Sir.”
Leticia nodded, then became curious. “I thought your submissive would call you Master? Last night you said –”
I cut her off again. “I don’t have a submissive – at the moment.”
“Oh. That’s interesting.” She scribbled in her notebook. “Why not?”
I shrugged. “Submissives are not slaves, Leticia. A slave is someone who obeys you in all things because they have no choice. In one way or another they are the property of the Master. They have no say. They have no rights. But a submissive is very different. A submissive can choose to leave the relationship at any time, and a submissive-Master relationship is very much one of constant sharing. It’s like most other relationships, even though the dynamic might appear different to an outside observer.”
“You mean someone like me?”
“I mean anyone who doesn’t understand the lifestyle,” I said.
“I’d like to know more…”
I smiled thinly and shook my head. “Not yet. ‘Do ut des’, Leticia.”
She frowned.
“It’s a Latin term,” I explained. “It means ‘I give that you may give’. It’s your turn to answer my questions about you. That was the agreement, yes? Our deal is based on the principle of reciprocity.”
Leticia nodded with sudden caution. “Yes,” she said.
I got up from the table and shrugged off my jacket. I hung it over the back of the chair and began to pace the small room.
“You spent your entire life in a small town, and then ten months ago, you suddenly left and moved here to the city. Why?”
Leticia sighed with weary resignation. “If you know that much about me, Mr. Noble, then you already know the answer to your question.”
I shook my head. “I want to hear it from you. I want to hear the truth, Leticia. And call me Jona
h, or call me sir, if you feel more comfortable. Stop calling me Mr. Noble. It makes me feel old, and I’m only ten years older than you.”
Leticia sat forward in her chair, rested her arms on the tabletop. She stared down at her hands, and then looked up, her eyes filled with dark clouds and distant pain.
“I left my boyfriend,” she said softly. “We had been high school sweethearts. I had been with him since I was sixteen. His name was Dwayne, and we were together for eight years, living and working in a small town. I was doing some waitressing work while I studied to become a journalist. Anyhow,” she sighed, “One day, about a year ago, I suddenly had ‘a moment’.
“A moment?”
She nodded. “I can’t explain it exactly. It was just a moment where I suddenly looked at my life and saw it from the outside. I saw it for what it really was, not what I thought it was.”
“And what was it? Really?”
“It was boring,” Leticia said. “It was my mother’s life being repeated. I could see the next forty or fifty years stretching out ahead of me with every day the same as the last. A small town girl who died a small town woman. The realization scared me. And it frightened the life into me.”
“Meaning?”
Leticia was squeezing and clenching her fingers with anxiety. “I mean it made me take action. A week later I packed up and moved to the city. I applied for an internship with one of the local newspapers and got a twelve month trial.”
I frowned. “Why didn’t Dwayne come with you?”
Leticia made a brave face. “Because I left him,” she said. “I ended the relationship.”
“Just like that? After eight years of happiness?”
“After eight years,” Leticia said. “But it wasn’t all happiness.”
“Did he cheat on you?”
She shook her head, like the suggestion was utterly ridiculous. “No,” she said sadly. “It was even worse than that. He bored me.”
“I see… In the bedroom?”
“In every way,” Leticia said, then hurried on quickly, suddenly feeling the need to justify herself. “Dwayne was part of the problem. He was part of the whole small town syndrome. He didn’t want another life. He had no expectations of anything better than what he was comfortable with. He had no ambition. No fire or desire to achieve anything. I was suffocating.”
She looked up at me. Her eyes were luminous with unshed tears she was fighting hard to hold back.
“Do you feel guilty? About leaving Dwayne?”
“Sometimes,” she said, then added quickly and firmly. “But I have no regrets. I did what was right for me. What I needed to do. Can you understand that?” Her face was pale and serious and her voice full of appeal.
I nodded, and stared hard at her. “Do you ever call Dwayne?”
She shook her head, and a single tear rolled down the soft skin of her cheek. “He’s dead,” she said softly, her voice choked with emotion. “He died in a car crash last winter. I went back for his funeral, and left town the very next day. I haven’t been back again.”
I stopped pacing. I was standing by the front door of the apartment. I turned away. It was difficult to watch her pain. When I turned back she had her arms wrapped around herself as if she were cold.
She stared down at the tabletop, but her eyes were vacant. The silence in the room was heavy, but like I said before, I’m comfortable with silence. I let it stretch out for long minutes until Leticia seemed to rouse herself. She cuffed at the teardrop suspended on her cheek and then dabbed at her eyes. She blinked up at me, long lashes glistening and dewy, and then took a deep shuddering breath.
“Do ut des,” she said, mangling the pronunciation. “I want to know what happened next with Claire. You said your relationship lasted several weeks.”
“That’s right.”
She caught me off guard, and won my grudging admiration. She was tough. The steely resolve of her nature that I had suspected lay just below the soft feminine exterior was there now in the way she dealt with the wounds and scars of her past and was able to move on – still function.
Touché Miss Fall.
“I went back over my notes today,” she said. “You also said initially your experiences were as a submissive. So did your relationship with this woman change – and if so, when and how exactly?”
I started to pace again and my mind peeled down through the memories until I was back on my father’s estate during that summer with Claire. I remembered the smell of her perfume and the feel of her body. I remembered the sound of her voice, and the way her body writhed in the grips of orgasm – and I recalled those first intense weeks we shared; the madness and the dangerous passion of it.
I took a deep breath and loosened the knot of my tie.
“I went to the guesthouse every night,” I said, “And during the days, when she was tutoring me, she became bolder and more reckless. It was like the thrill and the risk was intoxicating for her. I don’t know if it felt almost like an incestuous taboo, because I was so much younger and so inexperienced, or if it was merely the excitement that all older women would feel in the same situation – but she quickly became more aggressive and more demanding,” I said.
“In what way? Surely while you were studying your father would be nearby.”
I nodded. “He often was,” I said. “And we had a housekeeper and an elderly man named Oliver who tended the gardens. There was no place safe during the day, but that didn’t stop her.”
I paused. Leticia was bowed over her notebook. She glanced up at me, pen poised.
“She would brush against me like a cat, or lean so close over my shoulder that I could feel her breasts against my back. She stopped wearing a bra, and started wearing short skirts. I worked at an old desk my father once used, and studying was done in a room on the first floor. One day, after about a week, she came in and locked the door. Her face was flushed; she was trembling with some new excitement. She perched herself on the corner of the desk and stared down at me, her eyes glinting wickedly, her mouth almost twisted into a sneer. She rucked her skirt up around her thighs. She wasn’t wearing panties. Her pussy was glistening with the wetness of her arousal, and as I watched, she slid one of her fingers deep within herself and let out a long low groan. She sucked the taste into her mouth, and then began to pant brokenly, like she was on the edge of coming.
“I got down before her and held her knees wide apart with my hands. She sprawled back across the desk and began to rock her hips. My tongue flicked across her clit, and then I sucked it gently between my lips. It was throbbing – pulsing. Claire began to moan, and the sound of her voice became so loud I started to panic that my father would hear us. I tried to back away, but she propped herself up on her elbows. ‘Don’t you dare!’ she hissed at me, and there was venom in her eyes.”
“What did you do?”
I shrugged. “I did what she wanted,” I said simply. “I didn’t have a choice. I licked her pussy, and a few moments later she came over my tongue.”
“And no one heard?”
I shook my head. “But it set off alarm bells. I started to realize that it was just a matter of time.” I smiled suddenly. “Don’t get me wrong. I was in heaven. The things I learned with Claire were every young man’s fantasy. She was sexy, she was passionate, and she was raw and intense. But she had a self-destructive reckless streak that terrified me. She was addicted to sex. As I told you last night, I couldn’t afford to drag the family name through a scandal. I wanted the sex. I wanted it day and night. I couldn’t get enough of Claire – even her perverse kinks – but I knew it couldn’t be on her terms. I had to get control. I had to find a way to wrest back the power.”
“And you did, right?”
“Eventually, but not immediately. I was still a virgin. For the first week or so I went to her bedroom every night and spent hour after hour pleasing her with my mouth. She would come in a writhing, groaning explosion, and then fifteen minutes later she would insist I do it again. At the e
nd of each night, when she was so sated from orgasms that her arms and legs were like jelly, she would make me stand before her and she would stroke my cock. Sometimes she would lean close and lick her lips, as though she were just about to take me into her mouth – and then she would back away and laugh. Other times she was rough with her hands. When I was near the edge, she would cup her breasts together and present them to me like two soft milky pillows and I would throw my head back and come over her nipples. But that was all. The first time we had sex was when my father went away for a weekend business trip – and that was two weeks after she had caught me peeking at her through the spyhole.”
“Tell me about that night,” Leticia asked with a sudden flare of interest that startled me. “Did you know it was going to happen? Did she say anything to you that day? Why did it take so long, if she was so addicted to sex?”
I shook my head again, and looked up at the ceiling. “In hindsight, I realized that for Claire, the real thrill was the hunt. She was a predator. She was a cat playing with a mouse. She was teasing herself – not me. She was drawing out the moment, and torturing herself with the excruciating anticipation.” I shrugged. It was the best explanation I could come up with.
“So you went to the guesthouse like every other night…?”
“Uhuh. I only realized something was different when Claire opened the door. She draped herself in the doorway, her hips tilted at an enchanting angle, and she was wearing nothing but a pair of lace panties. She was sweating. Her skin glistened and shimmered, and there was a sheen of damp perspiration between the cleft of her breasts. She took me by the hand and led me into the bedroom. It was dark. She had lit candles. I stood there in a state of wary confusion, and then she turned back to me and smiled. ‘This is for you,’ she said. Then she dropped to her knees before me and unfastened my jeans. I didn’t know what to do. I stood there while she took me in her hands and stroked me. Her touch was gentle, and teasing. I closed my eyes, and felt the heat of her lips as she took me into her mouth.”