“I think it’s crazy,” I said at last. “I think you’re crazy.”
Nancy didn’t seem perturbed. Some of the agitation went from her body and her shoulders relaxed. There was a cloth napkin folded before her. She picked it up and wrung it in her hands. The smile stayed fixed on her face, but all her amusement had drained away.
“Are you seeing someone else from the radio station?” she asked me. “Do you already have one of the girls calling you Master – is that it? Cindy, I suppose, or maybe April. I know you have been seeing plenty of her each night during the program.”
I shook my head. “I have barely spoken to Cindy, and April and I are just friends – nothing more I assure you.” I didn’t mention that April was gay. Clearly Nancy had no idea, and I wasn’t about to be the one to betray April’s trust.
Nancy studied my face with her eyes narrowed and then sat back, satisfied I was telling the truth. For a moment she had sounded vaguely jealous.
“So why not, then?” she asked again. It was like a sabre duel. Thrust and parry. “Is it my age?” her tone became stinging. “I’m forty-one years old. I guess that’s over the hill for a man like you. I imagine you like your women young and dumb…”
I shook my head again, ignoring the barb of her accusation. “Age has nothing at all to do with it,” I said.
“So it’s my looks? I don’t look hot enough to turn you on?”
“No, that’s not it either,” I said truthfully. “In fact I think you have a beautiful body.”
Nancy shook her head in bewilderment. She tried leaning across the table again, as if she could somehow get through to me by her proximity. “Then why?”
The sixty-four million dollar question… and I didn’t have a good answer.
I shrugged my shoulders. “Well you are my boss, to start with.”
“So?”
“So it’s a big deal,” I said, and then tried to think why it was. I suddenly recalled something Grover had told me. “You should never dip your pen in company ink.”
Nancy’s face froze for an instant, and then she sat back again and laughed with unaffected delight. The humor reached all the way to her eyes and made them sparkle. “Honey, I’m not company ink,” Nancy said. Her voice dropped and became pointed. “I’m the company – and you can dip your pen into any inky part of me you want.” Her eyebrow went up in a brazen arch of invitation. She licked her lips like she could taste me.
I took a deep breath. “It wouldn’t work, Nancy,” I said. “It couldn’t possibly work. You expect me to dominate you and make you submit to me sexually and mentally, and then we go to the radio station and you’re going to be barking orders and demands… it’s a recipe for disaster.”
My gaze flicked past her shoulder. Nancy stilled the words on her mouth as if by some silent understanding. A waiter appeared a few seconds later with two frosted glasses of Coke on a silver tray. Nancy looked searchingly at me and then down at the glass like it was poison. “What is this?” she asked the waiter.
“Coke, madam.”
Nancy’s eyes drifted to mine as if needing an explanation. I made a wry facial expression. “I thought Sondra was Cindy,” I admitted.
Nancy tilted her head to the side like she was trying to study me from a different angle. Without breaking eye contact she said to the waiter, “Take it away, please. I need a vodka and orange – and hold the orange.”
The waiter snatched up the glass between two fingers like it was infected with contagion and disappeared in a cloud of cheap cologne.
Nancy’s expression went through a series of gradual transitions until she was once again staring at me with mild amusement. “Work won’t be a problem,” she said dismissively. “As long as we keep the understanding that the two worlds are very different, there should be no conflict. I know the game, Jericho,” she became disturbingly pragmatic. “I know what submission is. After hours I will be your wet and wanting and willing slut – I will fuck and suck and swallow and do anything you ask to please you.”
I wasn’t convinced. I thought back to the anonymous calls Nancy had made to the radio station in the guise of Sondra.
“Those nights you phoned the radio station,” I began, altering the directness of Nancy’s approach. “How much of what you said was true?”
Nancy thought for just an instant. “All of it,” she confessed.
“The part about you lying on your bed, making yourself come?”
“Yes.”
“And the rest of the fantasies you shared? Were they genuine too?”
“Yes,” she said again, the word a breathy gasp of air. “I’ve been fantasizing about you since the first time you walked into my office.”
I nodded my head. “So you manipulated me to take Sondra’s calls and to talk to her off the air…”
“Yes,” Nancy said with artless honesty. “I left the decisions to you, but I admit I tried to influence you.”
I smiled, but it was a grin that twisted my mouth out of shape and left my eyes empty. “And that’s why this won’t work,” I said. “Because you can’t submit, Nancy. It’s not natural to you. Your natural instinct is to control and influence. Even if I did agree to become your Master, you would still try to pull the strings in subtle ways.”
Nancy shook her head. “I won’t,” she promised. “Like I said, I know the rules. I’ve submitted to a man before.”
“Yes,” I remembered. “So tell me about that.”
“About the man?”
I nodded. “And the experience.”
Instinct told me this was a subject she was reluctant to discuss, but my intuition also told me she was going to – because she knew I still wasn’t convinced about her ability to submit, or about the validity of the idea.
She sighed and put on an artificial smile.
“His name was Phillipe,” Nancy began softly. “He was French, and he was in America working for a computer software company. I met him in a bookshop when I was nineteen. He smelled nice.”
I raised an eyebrow at that. Nancy smiled wistfully and nodded her head like it sounded so foolish all these years later. “He smelled of old leather and spices,” she said. “And he was foreign. I was turned on.”
“So you slept with him?”
She nodded her head again. “We started a relationship,” she explained. “I thought it was just a summer romance – the kind of thing you read about in books – but it became more serious. One night we were talking about the differences between our countries. I told him the French were an arrogant nation who hadn’t won a war in almost two hundred years.”
I kept my face neutral. I was listening. “How old was this man?”
Nancy sighed. “He was in his forties, twice my age. He grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me onto his lap, then he pulled down my panties and spanked me,” Nancy’s focus faded in and out as she alternated between the restaurant and her memories. “At first I was humiliated. I kicked out and cried. But Phillipe didn’t stop, and after a while the spanking stopped hurting and became almost pleasurable. I started to come. I had this string of orgasms – one after the other, squirming on his lap and rubbing myself against the erection in his pants. That’s when I discovered this secret submissive part of me. That was the night my whole world changed, and I changed as a woman.”
“How long did the relationship last?”
“Two years,” Nancy said. “And for most of our time together I was his willing and obedient submissive. He taught me about domination and the pleasure a woman could achieve from surrendering herself… and he taught me about the sexual thrill of anticipation – of being taken to the brink of orgasm and left teetering there until I was almost crazy mad with frustration and desire. He taught me all that.”
I nodded carefully. “And since then? Have there been other Masters?”
“No.”
“Not one?” the surprise showed in my voice.
“Not one,” Nancy was adamant. “After Phillipe went back to France, I
became immersed in the business world and communication studies. I got involved in radio and found I was good at management. All those secret thrills I had experienced as a woman became deeply buried behind the business façade. That’s where they have remained, until you walked into my office.”
I regarded Nancy’s expression, watching her face carefully as I asked the next question. “What did you like most about your time with Phillipe?”
“Like most?”
I nodded. “What aspects of submission did you find the most arousing… and what parts did you not enjoy?”
Nancy frowned. “Is it important?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Compatibility,” I said. “Some women are intensely aroused by physical pain – something I have no interest in. Ever.” There was a significant pause. Nancy arched an eyebrow but said nothing. “Other women are turned on by humiliation, or bondage… I’d like to know the things you explored with your Frenchman that turned you on the most.”
Nancy thought for a moment – but only a moment. It was clear that she had a very definite understanding of what kind of submission thrilled her.
“I liked being humiliated,” she confessed. Her voice dropped to little more than a whisper. “Phillipe would sometimes take me to clubs and parade me around in front of other Masters. He would lift up my skirt and show them my pussy… or he would tell me to spend the day with no panties on…” her voice drifted into silence and then came back like a shifting breeze. “Those times were incredible,” she said. “It was the whole idea of being on display, being inspected, and being humiliated. It made me feel like… like I was a prize, or a special piece of his property…” Once again Nancy’s voice went quiet. These were dark confessions from a long time ago, but it was clear her memories from the past were still intense.
“And bondage… well actually being restrained, I guess,” Nancy added. “We never did anything with ropes, but I enjoyed being handcuffed. Phillipe did that a lot. He would cuff me to the end of the bed or to a table. One time he handcuffed me kneeling to a park bench at night and ordered me to suck the cocks of every man that came past.”
“And did you?”
Nancy didn’t answer. She didn’t need to. I could see the truth in her eyes and on her face.
“Did you enjoy that experience?” I asked instead.
“Yes.”
We sat for a long time silently staring across the table at each other like two poker players, each reluctant to reveal anything more of what we were thinking. Perhaps Nancy sensed my decision hung on a knife-edge.
“Jericho, I’m not asking for a commitment,” she said at last with an impulsive wrench of emotion. “Just a chance. That’s all.”
“I don’t like relationships.” I warned.
“I don’t want one.”
“And I won’t commit to anything beyond the moment we are in…”
“That’s fine. I accept that.”
“And when I say it’s over, I mean it’s over.”
She nodded her head. “If I fail to please you I will understand.”
“And forget about love.”
“I don’t believe in it either – I just want the experiences without all the relationship trappings. Just the experiences, Jericho,” Nancy put her hand over her heart like she was making a solemn pledge. “I want to come home from work and feel like a woman. I want a strong man who will bend me to his will and remind me what it’s like to be feminine and submissive.”
“It would be purely sexual. You realize that?”
“I do,” Nancy said. “I really do.”
I had a premonition then – some instinctive warning – but I couldn’t tell if it was an omen of impending disaster or delight. My face turned to stone.
“Okay…” I said, and the words from my mouth seemed heavy as lead. “Let’s go back to your apartment.”
Chapter 21.
Nancy had arrived at the restaurant by taxi, so we drove back to her place in my car. She lived just a few minutes out of town, but the journey there seemed to take forever. Nancy sat subdued, staring ahead, her face lit by the glow of the dashboard lights. I caught a glimpse of her from the corner of my eye. She had her hands clasped in her lap, her knees together and there was a smug contented smile soft on her lips.
That bothered me.
“You know these kind of office affairs always end badly. You know that, right?”
Nancy turned her head so that she was looking at me as I flicked my eyes to and from the road.
“This isn’t an office affair, Jericho,” she said. Her voice was calm and in control. “This is an agreement by two people – that’s all. We agree that I will submit to you after work hours, and in return you agree to remind me what it is to feel feminine and dominated.”
I smiled wryly. “That sounds all very practical and sensible,” I commented. “But it’s not the reality, Nancy. When it comes down to it, what you are asking for is an emotional connection – it can’t be otherwise. A good Master is going to make you feel things you have never felt before – adoration, devotion… all those awkward kinds of feelings that women tend to get tangled up in.”
Nancy pursed her lips and hooded her eyes. I felt her hand creep across the space between our seats and rest on my thigh. “I’m not like any other woman, Jericho…”
“Maybe,” I said without any conviction, “but you are like every other submissive – and every other submissive I have trained has developed a strong emotional bond – in fact, if they hadn’t, I would know I wasn’t a good Master,” I said. I flicked her a glance as I slowed for an approaching corner. “Submission and emotion are intertwined. You can’t allow yourself to experience the true satisfaction of submission if you don’t develop emotions for your Master. Trust is the cornerstone of a relationship like this… and trust is a pretty powerful fucking emotion!”
I don’t normally swear in general conversation, but I wanted to impress the point on Nancy. She nodded her head.
“I get that,” she said as if only to appease me. “I understand.” She said nothing else for several minutes. We drove through leafy narrow streets with cars parked on both sides of the road. The evening mist was just starting to roll in from the ocean so that the interior of the car became a dark cocoon, detached from the rest of the world.
I felt Nancy’s fingers slide a little higher up my thigh. When I glanced in her direction her lips were slightly parted and her eyes were slanted with sly sexuality. She was leaning towards me. I could see the soft sheen of her breasts lit by the ghostly glow from the car’s dashboard lights. She had slipped the straps off her shoulders. Her legs had slid apart and the hem of her dress was high up on the milky smoothness of her thigh.
Fuck it!
It was time to make a point.
Clearly words were not going to be enough.
I swung the car violently to the curb and slammed on the brakes. The car lunged to a skidding halt. I saw Nancy jerked forward against the restraint of her seatbelt and a sudden look of panic flashed across her face. I turned off the car’s ignition and turned in my seat until our faces were pressed close.
“Take your dress off.” I hissed.
Nancy flinched. Her eyes went wide and then she frowned in surprise.
“What?”
“You heard me,” I flared, bitter with frustration. “I want you out of that dress. Now.”
For a moment longer, Nancy hesitated, and then slowly she leaned forward and reached for the zip at the back of the dress. She drew it down while I waited impatiently. Nancy’s face was a frown of confusion and trepidation. She arched her hips off the upholstered seat and wiggled the expensive fabric down over her thighs. The dress fell around her feet.
She was wearing a black lace bra and panties. Her breasts were larger than I had imagined, and the lace of her bra was sheer so that I could see the dark shadow of her nipples. They were hard little buttons that pressed through the fabric. Her body was trim a
nd pale. The panties were little more than a wisp of fabric and a thin strap around her hips. Despite myself I felt the pull of sexual temptation – the familiar ache of it.
“Now get out of the car,” I insisted.
“What?”
I glanced through the windshield. There was an intersection about two hundred yards further along the road. I saw cars cruising by in the night, the fumes of their exhaust rising like foggy plumes into the dark night. I pointed.
“Walk up to that corner,” I went on remorselessly, ignoring the wrench of anguish that had fallen like a heavy drape over Nancy’s face. “Stand at the traffic lights. I want you on display. I want you to walk there like a hooker.”
She started to shake her head, maybe in disbelief, maybe an instinctive reaction and the prelude to her refusal. I cut her off.
“Up until now you have controlled everything about this situation,” I thrust my face close to hers, my jaw clenched. “You have manipulated me into accepting to train you, and since that moment you have gone out of your way to be flirtatious and provocative. It ends here!”
Nancy’s expression became petulant. Her eyes snapped with an electric spark of outrage. She peered through the windshield.
“There could be police,” she said. Her voice became querulous, small and whining.
I nodded. “And men might pull over and ask you how much it is to suck their cock. I don’t care. It’s about time you learned that I am your Master and you will submit to me. You will obey me… or you can find another guy.” I let the threat of my words sink in. I had nothing to lose. I could walk away from this right now and not glance back once. If it cost me my job at the radio station, then it was a small price to pay for a life lesson learned. Nancy’s eyes were huge. She was biting her lip and I saw – for the first time – fear in her eyes.
Good.
“I’m not someone you can control, and if you think you can, I will break you, Nancy,” I went on relentlessly. “I will break you wide open and leave you utterly wrecked. You don’t want that to happen. If you defy me again, or if you ever try to influence my actions or emotions, I will shatter you beyond repair. Submitting to me isn’t a game – it’s a test of everything you believe – everything that you are. You surrender completely, or not at all.”