Interview With a Master

by Jason Luke

  “Jonah?”

  It was Leticia, but then I always knew it would be. I felt the sound of her voice pierce like a blade.

  “Yes.”

  “Jonah, it’s me, Leticia. Please don’t hang up!”

  I stayed silently on the line. I could hear the ragged sound of her breathing loud and anguished in my ear.

  “I wanted to apologize to you,” she said softly, and I could tell by the broken little crack in her voice that she had been weeping. “I’m sorry about what happened yesterday. I… I was very unprofessional. I want you to give me another chance to finish the interview we started. I want to finish writing your story.”

  I stared vacantly into the fire, seeing nothing but flickering light for a very long time. And then the sound of her words cut through the numbed haze and my eyes came slowly back into focus. “I want that too,” I said.

  * * *

  It was still raining hard when Leticia arrived that evening.

  She parked in front of the house. I watched the car pull up in a splash of brown muddy water and the headlights go dark. I saw the driver’s door swing open, and Leticia made a sudden rush for the front door. She came gasping and squealing into the foyer, and stood dripping water onto the tiles while she shrugged off her coat and combed her fingers through her hair.

  She looked like a half-drowned kitten.

  Leticia held out her hand to me like we were perfect strangers. “Thank you for seeing me again, Mr. Noble.”

  I shook her hand stiffly. It was wet and cold. She shivered involuntarily and I led her up the winding staircase and into the study.

  The room was warm – the fire still burned. I led Leticia over to the fireplace and she stood before the flames with her back to me for long moments as tiny tendrils of steam began to lift from her clothes.

  She was wearing a simple white sweater and comfortable jeans. Her shoes were wet. She slipped her feet out of them and nudged them closer to the fire, then turned, barefoot and wet, and smiled at me bravely.

  “You didn’t have to come tonight,” I said. “This could have waited.”

  She shook her head. “No, it couldn’t. I needed to see you. I needed to apologize for what happened. It was my fault. I should have been more professional.”

  I shook my head and sighed. “It wasn’t your fault, Leticia. We both know that. I made the mistake, and I regret it. My hope now is that we can forget what happened – set the whole incident aside – and continue on with the interview. Deal?”

  She nodded. “Deal,” she agreed.

  I went down the hallway to my bedroom and came back into the study holding one of my shirts. I handed it to Leticia.

  “Take the sweater off and put this on.”

  She accepted the shirt. She draped it over the back of the sofa and began to peel off her sodden top. I turned my back and heard the rustle of fabric.

  I walked a slow circuit of the room, halting to elaborately study the brushstrokes of a painting, picking up a book from the side-table and replacing it on a shelf. Finally I paused and turned back to face the room.

  Leticia had changed into the shirt. She had rolled up the sleeves almost to the point of her elbows, and buttoned it all the way up to the collar. It swamped her body, and still she looked good.

  She stretched out the wet sweater before the fire to dry and then sat down on the edge of the sofa. It was dark in the room. I paced in the shadows, and Leticia’s eyes followed me, her face painted golden by the flickering firelight. She reached down to her bag to fetch her notebook.

  “You told me that you had a live-in submissive for the last three years,” she began delicately, her voice brittle. “Could you tell me more?”

  I nodded. “Her name was Caroline,” I said.

  Silence.

  “Can you tell me about her?”

  “Caroline was a woman who initially applied for the job as my secretary.” I said. I heard my own words sounding stilted and forced. “I have a secretary who works from a downtown office, and one day a week she comes here to the house so I can dictate letters and attend to business. She brings the correspondence to me and we deal with it all on one day. That was the job Caroline had applied for.”

  “So she was your secretary initially?”

  “No,” I said. “She applied for the position. Frankly, she wasn’t suitable. There were better applicants.” There was a hollow distant tone to my voice.

  Leticia wrote a brief note and then looked back up at me. Her legs were crossed. Absently, I noticed her toenails were painted bright red.

  “So how did she become your submissive?” Leticia asked with patient politeness.

  I shrugged. “A week later I saw her at a gathering.”

  “A BDSM gathering?”

  “No. Not officially. It was a party at a friend’s home. A lot of those friends were involved or interested in the lifestyle.”

  “Do you attend BDSM functions, or visit BDSM clubs?”

  “No,” I shook my head. “I like the lifestyle. It suits me, but I’ve never been part of the scene socially. BDSM clubs never made a lot of sense to me. I always saw it as like having too many roosters together in the same hen-house. Every man who considers himself a dom just tries to out alpha-male everyone else. It becomes a pissing competition.”

  Leticia bowed her head over her notebook and jotted another note. Her hair was still wet, and it was curling down around her ears in random swirling tendrils.

  “So have you always been private about your lifestyle?”

  “Yes. Up until the moment I began this interview with you.”

  Leticia flipped back a couple of pages into her notebook and then looked up thoughtfully through the tense strain. “So you saw Caroline at a party with a group of friends who were in the lifestyle.”

  “Yes. I’ve already told you that.”

  Leticia looked up sharply and I saw a flicker of anguish drift across her eyes. She took a breath and pressed on.

  “So what happened between you and Caroline at the party?”

  I started to pace, but somehow I just seemed to run out of steam. I stood, like I was suddenly broken, in the middle of the floor for a moment. I tried again. I got as far as the door, but I could feel my anger and frustration rising. I felt a burning lump in my throat – and then impulse took over.

  I turned on Leticia and she must have sensed the tension in my body. “This isn’t working,” I clenched my jaw.

  Leticia lowered her head, tucked the notebook into her bag and stood meekly. “You want me to go again, don’t you.”

  I crossed the room in three strides. Leticia’s eyes became enormous with uncertainty. She stood, frozen, anxious as I hunted towards her.

  I took her arm and she stood rigid. I leaned towards her. Her arms hung by her sides like those of a rag doll. I drew her closer to me and she was unresisting. “No,” I said. “I don’t want you to leave, dammit. I want you back. I want what we had back. I want to talk to you like I did before – not like this. Not like there is something between us.”

  She stared at me, huge startled eyes in her young innocent face. She looked like she might suffocate. I felt her trembling.

  “Let’s get this straight,” I said. “Let me explain what happened when I kissed you – and what happened afterwards.”

  Leticia didn’t say anything. She nodded her head and waited.

  I stepped away, paced the room, hands thrust deep into my pockets, my head bowed, like a shark circling prey.

  For a long time the only sound was the echo of my footsteps as I assembled the words in my head.

  I’m an impulsive man. I don’t think everything to death before I say or do something. That doesn’t mean I’m not thoughtful and deliberate – it just means that I always speak my mind. It’s how I get to sleep at night.

  Only one thing needed to remain unsaid…

  I took a deep breath, and the words spilled out – words from the heart – the raw truth, delivered in Jonah Noble style.<
br />
  “I want you to know this – because it’s the truth. When I kissed you, I didn’t want to stop. I wanted to keep kissing you. I backed away to protect you – not because of anything you did wrong. I wanted to keep you safe from me.”

  I looked to Leticia. She opened her mouth to say something, but I shook my head curtly and she sat back down on the sofa. “I need you to write my story. Hell, I need you in my life. I like the way you smile. I like your sweet beautiful innocence. And I want you around me. I feel happy when we’re together. But I’ll never love you, Leticia,” I shook my head sorrowfully. “I’ll never love you.”

  Leticia looked pale and timid. Her eyes were fixed on mine, following my every move.

  “I’ve never loved any woman,” I said. “I’ve cared for them, protected them, been a Master to them, and lusted after them – but not once have I allowed myself to fall in love. And maybe I never will. I can accept that – but I know you can’t. I know you – maybe better than you know yourself. You’re young, and you can do better than to give your heart to someone like me who will never love you back. I want you – and I need you, but I don’t want you to fall in love with me.”

  “What makes you so sure that I will?”

  I smiled, but there was no humor. “Because I’m fighting with all my strength to stop falling in love with you.”

  Leticia cleared her throat. “Maybe with time…”

  I shook my head again. “We can talk all night, but it’s not going to change the way I need this relationship to be. It can’t be sexual, because, for a woman, with sex comes emotion. It cannot be a BDSM relationship, because you don’t even know what you want from life yet, and I don’t want to be responsible for your safety and welfare. And it can’t be love, Leticia, because I can’t handle that.”

  “Then what – what do you want from me, Jonah? Do you just want me to write your story and have you look at me with dead vacant eyes like I’m just some kind of associate that you know for a few weeks and then forget?”

  “I want your friendship,” I said. “It’s all I am asking for. Anything more is unsafe for you – if it becomes more than that it will end in tears and heartbreak, and I don’t want to hurt you any more than I already have.”

  Leticia sat silently for a long time, her gaze far away and remote. She looked lost and alone and tragic. Finally she nodded. “Okay, Jonah,” she said softly. “If the only way it can be between us is the way that it was, then we’ll make it that way again.”

  I stared at her, and figured that she could not have possibly found a more complicated way of expressing a simple answer.

  * * *

  I led Leticia downstairs and into the kitchen. I felt we needed a change of environment in order to change the mood. She sat at the kitchen table while I scalded myself with hot water making coffee for us.

  I carried the mugs to the table and deliberately sat at the chair beside her.

  She turned so that we were facing each other, close in the soft light of a lamp. She sipped her coffee, made an excruciating face, and then smiled weakly.

  She set the mug down on the table and pushed it away from her like maybe it was poison.

  “You told me in the study that we couldn’t have just a sexual relationship because – for women – sex comes with emotion. Can you explain that?”

  I didn’t drink the coffee.

  “I can,” I said. “The problem with most relationships is a lack of understanding. You see, women need to feel loved in order to want sex. And men need sex, in order to feel loved.”

  Leticia played the words back in her mind, and then nodded with slow dawning appreciation. “That’s very profound,” she said.

  I nodded. “They’re not my words. Someone much smarter and wiser than me came up with that, but I think it sums up the problem between the sexes perfectly.”

  Leticia nodded. “You’re a smooth talker, Jonah,” she said. “Your voice, your words. In fact you’re very smooth at everything you do.”

  Suddenly the suggestion of sexuality in her comment occurred to her, and Leticia fell guiltily silent. She looked down at her handbag and then across at the coffee cup, as if she couldn’t meet my eyes.

  “I didn’t mean it to sound the way it did,” she apologized softly.

  I arched my eyebrow in a roguish gesture of innocence. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, and brushed the awkwardness away. Leticia smiled into my face and nodded. She relaxed again.

  “Caroline,” she began. “I’d like to know more about her, and how you met. I’d like to know about that night at the party. Will you tell me, please?”

  It felt better between us then. The ice had thawed enough so that the memories came freely back to me and I began to talk.

  “Caroline was beautiful,” I said simply. “She had classic features: high cheekbones, and exotic slanted eyes. She looked like a modern-day Cleopatra, with long straight black hair and a figure like a delicate vase that curved and flared in perfect proportions. She was quite tall, and moved with a feline grace. She was simply stunning.”

  “How old was she?”

  “We were the same age,” I said.

  Leticia made a face, frowned, and then wrote something into her notebook. Then she scratched it out and wrote something else.

  “And the party?” she looked up at me. “Tell me what happened. How did you and Caroline become Master and submissive?”

  I sat back in the chair and stared at the far wall. I could see Leticia’s face from the corner of my eye, watching me with some kind of intent fascination. I went back through my memories to the first night I had seen Caroline in a social situation.

  “We exchanged small-talk,” I said. “But she didn’t seem surprised to see me at that party. It was only much later that I found out she had talked herself into an invitation, as part of a deliberate plan for us to meet again.”

  Leticia’s voice seemed to come from out of the shadows. “She must have been very desperate to meet you.”

  I didn’t answer. I saw Caroline in my mind’s eye. I remembered the sights and sounds of that evening. I remembered the cool breeze blowing across the beachside house, and watching Caroline disappear into the fringe of trees that bordered the property. I had followed her down onto the sand, and she stood there in the moonlight waiting for me.

  “We ended up on a beach,” I told Leticia at last. “The breeze was coming off the ocean, and it flattened the flimsy dress Caroline was wearing against her body so that she might have been naked. The fabric wrapped around her hips, and tugged firm around the jut of her breasts. I stood back and admired her, because she was truly a thing of beauty.

  “‘I didn’t know you knew these people,’ I said to her. ‘I didn’t know you were into the BDSM lifestyle’. She smiled at me – it was one of those sexy, seductive smiles that only a woman knows how to deliver – and then she told me that she hadn’t known when she arrived for the interview that I was looking for a submissive, as well as a secretary.

  “She kicked off her sandals and strolled down to the water’s edge. I stood on the beach and watched her. The moon was rising, and the sky was full of stars. Caroline glanced over her shoulder at me and then looked back at the ocean. She slipped her dress from her shoulders and let it fall to the sand. She was completely naked underneath. She stood staring at the waves for a long moment, and then turned back to face me. Her legs were long, her skin the color of caramel, and her breasts were full.

  “She cupped her hands beneath her breasts and squeezed her nipples between her fingers. She looked up at me with hooded eyes, and there was an invitation in her expression, as clear as if she had spoken the words aloud.

  “I went to her, and we stood in the wet sand. I circled her like I was inspecting some exquisite treasure and she stood obediently still. I could hear her breathing as I came up behind her. I told her to get on her knees. She made a small, hissing sound of arousal as though her breath had hitched in her throat. She lowered
herself to her knees and bowed her head submissively.

  “It was like some ancient ritual – some kind of ceremony of possession.”

  I stopped speaking suddenly.

  Did I just say that? The description sounded ridiculous, but I couldn’t find a better way to explain how it had felt that night on the beach. I looked across at Leticia, expecting to see her smiling at me like I was a fool. She wasn’t. She was staring at my mouth, and her lips were slightly parted, glistening and full.

  “I stood before Caroline and put my finger under her chin. She lifted her face to mine and stared passively up at me.

  “‘If you want to submit to me you should know that I expect your unquestioning obedience,’ I told her. She said she expected nothing less. She told me she was willing to give herself to me and learn to please me. I told her to stand and follow me back to the fringe of trees.

  “Did she?” Leticia asked.

  I nodded. “I led her naked to a tree and she put her back against the trunk. I told her to spread her legs, and she shuffled her feet wide apart. Her breathing became erratic. She had her hands by her side. I told her to put them on her head and lace her fingers together. Her eyes were wide, and there was a recklessness in her expression, like this was the realization of some secret thrill for her. I ran my fingers down between her breasts and then drew them lazily up again so they circled around one nipple.

  “Caroline began to squirm. Her hips rocked, and then she tilted her pelvis forward. Her nipple hardened and I slowly lowered my lips and sucked it into my mouth.

  “I heard Caroline groan, and then felt her hand on my shoulder as though to hold me to her breast. I broke contact and my eyes flashed. I told her to put her hands back on her head, and if she moved them again I would take her dress and leave her naked on the beach. She groaned again, but the sound was more like a stifled plea. She did as I told her, and I sucked her nipple back between my lips, and then ran my hand slowly down towards her parted thighs… and then stopped.”

  Leticia looked up in complete surprise. “Stopped?”