by Jason Luke
“Do you know him?”
I nodded. “They’re all signed.”
She stood on tiptoes and reached up for one of the thick adventure novels, and the shift in her body only served to further emphasize the slenderness of her and the tantalizing silhouette of her breasts.
She eased one of the books from the shelf, holding it like it was some precious thing and flipped open the cover to the first page.
“For a man amongst men – my friend, Jonah Noble.” She read the inscription aloud, then closed the cover and looked at me again. “Sounds like you have friends in high places. He’s always on the best-sellers lists.”
I shrugged. “He was close to my father,” I said. “I kind of inherited that friendship after the old man passed away.”
She carefully set the book back on the shelf and continued to wander while I watched her over the rim of my glass.
She stopped at the end of the bookcase and reached for a large leather-covered binder, thick with a layer of dust. It was on the bottom shelf. She knelt on the rug and opened the binder. I watched her expression.
Leticia’s brow creased into a puzzled frown. She rifled through the pages, and then looked over her shoulder at me.
“What’s this?” she was curious. “Why do you have copies of all these old newspapers?”
“They were mine,” I said.
“You keep old newspapers you buy?”
“No. I owned the actual newspapers.”
There was a long pause as the realization slowly dawned. She turned on me slowly, the folder still clutched in her hands. “You mean you owned these newspapers? You were the publisher?”
I nodded.
“You let me babble on like a school-girl downstairs, telling you about Saturday editions and four-page spreads when all along you were a publisher?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because you were so enthusiastic and so excited. It was the first time I had ever seen you like that.”
She sat down in the chair opposite and slowly leafed through the folder. The pages were all yellowed with age, their edges tattered and curled. There were a dozen different mastheads from across the country.
“They were weekly community newspapers,” I explained. “Years ago, my father bought them when they were about to fold, and we built them back up into profitable ventures.”
Leticia glanced up at me sharply. “The Examiner is here.”
“Yes. That was the first paper my father bought.”
“But you don’t still own it, do you? You don’t publish the newspaper where I work – do you?” she suddenly sounded very wary, almost suspicious.
I shook my head. “No. We sold every one of those newspapers just before my father died.”
I saw her visibly relax, and some of the tension went out of her shoulders.
“We ran those papers very profitably, but I could see the internet, looming on the horizon and building like a storm that was going to change publishing forever. I could see the writing on the wall for local community newspapers, so we sold them all at just the right time, and changed the direction of our investments into property – where they still are today.”
“But you know the newspaper industry?”
I nodded. “I ought to. I personally ran several of those newspapers you have in your lap.”
“Really?”
“Really,” I said. “Once my father realized I was never going to become a lawyer, despite his best efforts, he decided the best thing I could do was learn the business I would one day inherit. At the time we had just acquired a new free weekly newspaper in the L.A. area. I spent twelve months running the business. In the process I learned about the print industry, and how to manage people.”
Leticia sat forward. “What about women? Does the move to L.A. have anything to do with you becoming a BDSM Master?”
My mouth curled lazily into an insolent smile. “They overlapped,” I said. “The office was staffed by eight women and one other man.”
“How old were you?”
“I was twenty-four, and I was living thousands of miles away from my father’s influence in an expensive apartment.”
“I bet those women didn’t know what they were in for,” Leticia said. Her instincts told her it was time to reach for her notebook and pen.
I inclined my head, but I didn’t smile. “Four of the women in the office were advertising sales reps. They were all attractive, well-presented – kind of like female real estate agents. Two of the other girls handled the accounts, and two were secretaries,” I explained. “A couple of the women were happily married or engaged to guys with names like ‘Skip’ and ‘Tyler’.”
I refilled my glass and poured a little into another tumbler for Leticia. I didn’t ask – I just poured, and left her glass sitting on the edge of the table between us. I got to my feet. By now, she knew what to expect. I saw her shift her weight in the chair, like she was preparing to watch a tennis match as I strode from one end of the library to the other.
“There was one woman there that caught my eye,” I said. “Out of them all, there was one girl who had something special. She wasn’t the prettiest, she was the sexiest.”
Leticia arched an eyebrow. “Define sexy.”
I shrugged. “I don’t think I can,” I confessed. “I don’t have a definition, nor do I have specific parameters. It’s not any one thing about a woman that makes her sexy in my eyes, it’s a collection of things – an intoxicating fusion of the obvious and the subtle that merge together.”
I replayed that explanation back over in my head. It sounded lame, but I had nothing better by way of a definition.
“This girl had ‘it’,” I went on. “She was one of the secretaries. Her name was Sherry. She was my age, but she was so dainty and petite, she looked like a teenager. She was barely five foot tall. She had this waif-like physique: tender pubescent-shaped breasts, delicate little hands. She had long black hair, and her skin was smooth and pale.”
Leticia wrote it all down, and then sat back, gazing at me. Perhaps she was waiting for me to continue, or maybe she was imagining Sherry’s slim body in my arms. I pulled my hands from my pockets and scraped them down my face.
“I was in a difficult position. My father had warned me about the dangers of ‘dipping my pen in the company ink’, and I still had memories of Claire that had stayed fresh in my mind.”
“Claire?” Leticia was surprised. “Wasn’t that years before? Surely there must have been plenty of other women between nineteen and twenty-four. You’re a good-looking man. I can’t imagine you had any trouble with the ladies.”
“I did all right,” I said vaguely. “And yes, there were lots and lots of brief encounters during those years. They were all learning experiences. I gradually began to understand a little more about what women wanted, and how they wanted to feel in the bedroom. But I mentioned Claire because of the blackmail issue. Now I was running a business on the other side of the country, but I was acutely aware that Sherry was an employee. I wanted her – fuck, how I wanted her – but I didn’t want her because she worked for me and needed her job. Can you see the problem?”
“Uhuh,” Leticia said. “But I don’t see how you could have found a way around it.”
I nodded. “I just couldn’t see a way. Even if I invited her out for dinner, she would still feel like she was under some obligation.”
“So…?”
“It turned out I had been agonizing over nothing,” I shrugged. “One Friday afternoon as we were working in the office, Sherry propositioned me!”
“No!” Leticia gaped. “Are you for real?”
“Cross my heart,” I promised, and she leaned forward in her chair conspiratorially as if she was about to hear some juicy new piece of scandalous gossip.
Her eyes were wide and hungry. “Tell me everything.”
I chuckled. Being around this girl made me feel young again. “From the beginning?”
“And don’t leave out a thing.”
I closed my eyes for a moment and saw once again the narrow little office in east L.A. that had housed the newspaper. It was a run down little building wedged between larger, equally run-down buildings. The carpet through the office was threadbare, and the production area where the newspaper was composited was down a set of rickety internal stairs at the back of the building. The production area was a converted underground garage; the floor was bare concrete, and the workbenches were arranged around the walls.
“Sherry worked on front desk reception for most of the day, and in the afternoon she would head downstairs to work on compositing the newspaper – doing the design and layout,” I explained. “She would gather up all the editorial and pieces of ad copy that had been printed throughout the day and take them downstairs. Each weekend, we had a couple of retired old newspaper guys who came in on Saturday and Sunday and laid the paper out, ready for Monday printing.
“Sherry made sure everything was in place, on hand and ready for the compositors. It was part of her job, so I knew when she walked past my office with printouts in her hands, that she was going downstairs for the rest of the day.
“I waited about twenty minutes. It was early afternoon. I had a couple of messages to attend to that wouldn’t wait. Two accounts had gone missing in the computer system, and the business was out of pocket a couple of thousand dollars unless we could find a tech guy to retrieve the information. Then I told Lizzy – the other secretary – that I wasn’t taking any more calls. I headed down the stairs and found Sherry at one of the work benches. She was matching up long strips of editorial copy with a layout design.
She was leaning over the wooden bench, her legs slightly apart, her body tilted forward so that the short little black skirt she was wearing had ridden up across the back of her thighs and pulled tight across the firm globes of her butt.
Her head was bowed over the paperwork. When she heard my footsteps creaking down the stairs she swept the hair away from her face and turned. But she didn’t smile. In fact she looked ill. Her face was flushed with color.
“I asked her if she was okay. She nodded, but then her eyes welled up with tears and I thought she would start to cry. She choked on a little sobbing sound, and then told me she had been the one responsible for the missing two accounts. She was shaking like a leaf. She looked up at me with big swimming eyes and her bottom lip was trembling.
“My first reaction was to get mad. I had spent half the morning trying to find those accounts and who had been responsible. I felt my temper simmering just below the surface. I stalked towards her and she bowed her head. Her shoulders began to shake.
“I stopped myself. I took a deep breath and clenched my jaw. And then, for some instinctive reason, I told her I should put her over my knee and spank her.”
Leticia looked stunned. “How, in God’s name, did you come up with a line like that?”
“I don’t know!” I snatched my hands from my pockets and threw my arms wide in a gesture of wonder. “I don’t know if it was some instinct I was beginning to develop, if it was some kind of sensory perception… to this day, I still don’t understand what signals I had seen in Sherry before that moment that tore those words from my mouth.”
“Did she faint? Did she run screaming?”
“No.” I said. “She stopped breathing for an instant and the tears seemed to dry up in her eyes. She stared at me for the longest time and then she said, ‘that sounds nice. I was actually wondering what it would feel like if you just kissed me.’”
“No!”
I nodded. It was true.
“She brushed at her eyes and then her hand fell away from her face and she put it behind her back. The movement thrust the buds of her little breasts against the fabric of her top. I could suddenly see the faint shadow of her nipples. Her breasts were so small, she never bothered with a bra. She lifted her chin in some kind of an invitation – or challenge – and then tilted her hip. Her gaze slid down my body and then came up again, and when she looked back up into my face her eyes were hooded and soft and dreamy.”
“What did you do?” Leticia sounded slightly breathless. I heard a husky little scratch in her voice.
“I stood there,” I admitted. “I was torn between acting on instinct, and my obligations to this girl as her employer. It was like struggling against a current of temptation and I was drowning. I wanted her. It boiled in my blood, blazed in my eyes – and then finally I crossed the small space that separated us and kissed her with a ferocity and angry intensity because I knew I could not resist.
“Sherry went soft and limp in my arms. The force of that kiss bowed her backwards so that she had to throw her arms around my neck and cling to me. Her mouth opened wide for me and I thrust my tongue between her lips and ran my hands hungrily up between the heat of our bodies until my fingers slid between the buttons of her blouse.”
Leticia crossed her legs and wriggled in the chair. Her eyes searched my face intently, her lips slightly parted, her expression unfathomable.
“I slid my hand over Sherry’s breasts and felt her nipples harden to my touch. She gasped into my mouth, and her body strained towards me. I broke the kiss and lowered my head to her neck. There was a sound in her throat like the purr of a cat and I felt her arms around me tighten and pull me down. I unfastened the first few buttons of her top and slid the fabric from her shoulder. Her skin was pale and flawless, her flesh unblemished and luscious down the tender line of her neck, and then firm and urgent in the almost immature shape of her breast. Her nipples were dark against the porcelain of her body, hard as pebbles, and a rash of tiny bumps rose around the aureole.
“I sucked her nipple between my lips and felt Sherry’s fingers tangle and curl into my hair. I could hear the beat of her heart racing, and feel the pulse of her body change as I licked and teased the delicate pink bud until she was moaning and trembling softly.
“I wanted more. I was overcome with lust for this girl. I felt a red mist rising behind my eyes, and when I eased my mouth from her breast, my breathing was ragged. But it was mid-afternoon, and even though we were downstairs and away from everyone else in the office, there was a risk that one of the other girls would come looking for one of us at any moment.
“I slid a finger under her chin and lifted her face up to mine. ‘What a precious, delicate little thing you are,’ I breathed. She stared into my face with big wide unblinking eyes. I kissed her again and her lips were soft and wet and willing. Her tongue slid inside my mouth and she made soft whimpering noises. My hand went straight to her tiny little breast again and I pinched the nipple. She groaned and I felt her shudder like a tremor had run up the length of her spine. ‘I’m not that delicate,’ she murmured. Her eyes were dreamy, almost like she was drugged. I felt a growl in the back of my throat and I squeezed her nipple a little harder and rolled it between my fingers. She tensed – her body stiff and shaking – and then I stepped back quickly, out of arms reach.
“I felt like I was on fire. I felt like we could consume each other at that moment, and the heat would melt us both. My cock was straining in my pants. I stood back and looked at her, feasting on the slender shape of her body and the jutting swell of her breast. She made a move to cover herself – to pull her blouse back off her shoulder – but my hand snapped out and locked around her wrist. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not until I tell you to.’
“Something flashed in Sherry’s eyes; it was like a flare of electricity. Her hand fell dutifully back to her side and she left herself displayed to me. She lifted her chin, and her gaze was suddenly steady and understanding. ‘Yes, sir,’ she said so softly the words barely left her mouth, and yet they rang in my ears like some great tolling bell. I knew in that instant I had found the woman I was looking for.
“I told Sherry to cancel any plans she had for the evening and to meet me back at the office an hour after work. I told her to wear lingerie. She nodded mutely, and then I gave her my permission to cover h
erself. She buttoned her blouse and prodded at her hair. She was still shaking. I watched her dress, delighting in the way her delicate little fingers moved, and imagining them wrapped around the hard length of my shaft. I looked down at the smooth slim lines of her legs and followed them up to the hem of her skirt, fantasizing about how soft the flesh of her inner thigh would be to my touch, how tight her pussy would feel: how wet it would be, and how sweetly she would taste. Sherry stood obediently while I undressed her hungrily with my eyes. She was like a living, breathing sex doll – a perfect instrument for the giving of pleasure. The rest of that afternoon drifted by in a blurred haze.”
“Did she come back?” Leticia asked.
I nodded. “I went for dinner at a local restaurant straight after work to fill in the time. When I got back to the office, Sherry was standing in the shadows under an awning by the front door, waiting for me. She was wearing a black coat and black shoes.”
“What happened?”
I smiled. “It was the start of an amazing affair,” I teased. “One of the most memorable times of my life – and I’ll tell you all about the wicked ways of Sherry and the erotic BDSM games we played, just as soon as you answer one of my questions.”
Leticia groaned. She slumped back in the deep embrace of the leather chair, like the air had been let out of her. She looked up at me with a silent plea in her eyes – which I ignored.
“When was the last time you had sex,” I asked.
“Do I really have to answer that?”
“Do ut des.”
Leticia sighed, and then her expression became a little guilty. “About five months ago,” she said quietly.
I thought about that for just a second. “So this was after Dwayne, right? This would have been after you had moved to the city to begin your internship.”
Leticia nodded. “I was lonely,” she shrugged. “I guess I missed home, maybe or missed the physical contact with a man.”
“Was it a one time thing, or was it an affair?”