Man and Master

by Jason Luke

  Was she making a mistake?

  Would he see this effort as some kind of a taunt and not as she intended it; as a peace offering and an attempt to please him?

  Gabriele saw her nightdress lying at the foot of the bed, and she pursed her lips, torn with indecision. She could simply change her clothes and be asleep within minutes. Randall would never know…

  She got to her feet and then suddenly froze in horror. She could hear a key jangling in the front door lock.

  Gabriele tumbled back onto the bed, flicking the bedside lamp on so that the room was bathed in a soft intimate glow. Then she hitched up the tight hem of her skirt to the top of her thighs and spread her legs wide, laying flat on her back with the pillows propped behind her to elevate her head. She reached up for the strap of the leather belt and wrapped one wrist around it to mimic the illusion of being bound and helpless.

  Quickly she shut out all the distracting thoughts about the next day’s meeting and forced her mind to rehearse all the words and phrases that Randall had complained she never uttered. She drew a last deep breath. Jittering anxiety and doubt made a nerve at the corner of her eye tick.

  The apartment beyond the open bedroom door was shrouded in darkness. Gabriele heard Randall muttering darkly to himself and then the clatter of his keys as he tossed them onto the kitchen table. A moment later she saw a stark shaft of light from the refrigerator as the door was opened… then closed. She listened to the scuffle of his shoes on the bare floor boards, and then their more determined echo as he finally came down the hallway towards the bedroom. Gabriele felt a wild flutter of apprehension and panic. Her heart was racing.

  Randall appeared in the bedroom doorway, his tie askew, his hair disheveled, his jacket somehow loose and ill-fitting.

  Gabriele made her eyes wide and simmering.

  Randall stood, rooted with surprise, for long seconds. Then he came slowly into the bedroom, his gaze clouding with predatory lust.

  “Master…” Gabriele panted like a breathless damsel in distress. She spread her legs a little wider and traced the outline of her lips with the pink darting tip of her tongue.

  Randall stood by the edge of the bed and scraped his palm across the stubble of his unshaven jaw. He was a year older than Gabriele, with a sallow, gaunt face and features that had been blurred by heavy drinking. He gazed down upon her, and the desire was naked in his narrowed calculating eyes. He ran his hand possessively along the inside of her thigh, sliding his palm beneath the stretched hem of her skirt until he was brushing the lace of her panties with his fingers.

  Gabriele gulped dramatically, playing her part, but her eyes were tense with uncertain anxiety. She slowly undulated her hips for him.

  “My tight little pussy needs Sir’s cock,” she breathed the words she had been rehearsing for hours, still tripping awkwardly with the mild profanity. “I’ve been such a good submissive girl waiting for you.”

  Randall’s eyes flashed, triggered with wicked arousal. He leaned over the bed and fisted his hand into Gabriele’s hair. She gasped in shock and pain, but crushed down on the squeal that leaped to her lips. Instead she winced, and let her mouth fall open with a soft moan.

  “Beg me to fuck you,” Randall hissed the words, and there was a streak of gloating malice in his tone. His voice was slurred, but Gabriele could smell no alcohol on his breath.

  Gabriele nodded. With her free hand she reached for Randall’s cock, flattening her palm against his crotch and feeling the impatient lump of his erection strained within his pants. “Please, Sir,” she recited her lines, “my tight little pussy needs you to fuck me hard.”

  “Now say it like you mean it, slut.”

  “I do!” she appealed.

  He was looking down on her, and his face was a mask of cruel power and savage contempt.

  He unbuttoned the front of her dress while she dutifully continued to rub his hard cock through his pants. He was grunting. When the dress was open all the way down to her flat toned navel, he reached inside and cruelly pinched one of her nipples. Gabriele gasped and felt the prickled sting of tears leap into the corners of her eyes. Randall was watching her expression with a bright shiny gaze, in the same dispassionate clinical way a scientist observes a laboratory specimen. Gabriele turned her whimper of pain into a breathless moan.

  Randall stood, sneering but satisfied. He undressed quickly and Gabriele closed her eyes as he covered her body with his. She felt his hands, clumsy with haste, as he tugged aside her panties, and then the weight of him as he settled above her. His cock stabbed against her abdomen, then he forced it between her legs. Gabriele tensed and drew a deep hissing breath. She wrapped her arms around him to feel the intimate connection of their entwined bodies, but he shrugged her hands away, then started to rut and snuffle over her.

  “Fucking slave,” he muttered as his features contorted and strained in the race to his climax. “The only good place for you to be is on your back being fucked!” His words became strangled.

  After just a couple of minutes, he went suddenly limp with a wheezing groan of breath. When he rolled off her, he was panting, gazing sightless at the ceiling until his pulse settled. He got to his feet without another word and disappeared behind the bathroom door. A moment later Gabriele heard the hiss of running water.

  She let go of the leather belt and slumped on the bed, cum seeping slowly from within her. Her body was trembling with a confusing blend of unrequited desire and crawling revulsion. Randall’s orgasm had happened so quickly that she felt only sullied and violated. Her body ached with a vague craving that Randall hadn’t been capable of satisfying, which left her to wonder fretfully whether this was all that sex would ever offer.

  Gabriele shrugged out of the dress and drew her nightgown over her head. She knew the rest of the night would pass slowly; her dreams haunted by her own erotic fantasies, and her soul unsettled by a creeping sense of loathing.

  In the morning Randall ate his breakfast in silence then suddenly shrugged on his jacket and snatched up his keys. Gabriele noticed a packed suitcase at the front door. She frowned, suddenly overcome with a dark sense of ominous foreboding. Randall’s face was stony with impassive resolve. He had his hands deep in his pockets, shoulders hunched. His mouth was a bitter slash across his face.

  “I’m leaving you, Gabriele,” he said callously. “I can’t live the rest of my life sexually unsatisfied.”

  Gabriele recoiled in devastated shock and disbelief. “But… but what about last night? Wasn’t that the kind of sex you wanted?”

  Randall grunted. “Too little, too late.”

  His eyes were dead and black, his face waxen and drained of all color. Gabriele felt seeping cold numbness creep across her chest until it was strangulating her heart. Impulsively she opened her mouth to tell Randall about her plan to meet Master Joshua – but the plea became choked in her throat by a shuddering gasp for breath. With one last scorching look of contempt, Randall slammed the door behind him like he had done a hundred times before.

  By the time she could draw fresh breath he was already gone.

  “But I love you…” she whispered lamely to the empty space where he had been standing.

  For long moments Gabriele stood stunned and reeling. She felt her world begin to crumble down around her but right before she collapsed, a small instinctive voice in the deep recesses of her mind called just loud enough to be heard through the pounding of her heart and the first sobbing tears.

  “Try to win him back.”

  Chapter 2:

  Gabriele had thought they might meet at a public place like a café – that would have made sense to her. She had never visited an art gallery before in her life.

  She caught a cab into the city, paid off the driver on Main Street, and then walked the rest of the way under a warm sunny sky. By contrast her thoughts were dark and troubled. She had wept through the morning and picked up her phone twice to call Master Joshua and cancel. She was torn between grieving the loss of
Randall from her life and the realization that to win him back, she must take urgent and decisive action. In the end, it had taken her an hour to fix her make-up, leaning over the bathroom vanity to touch up her reddened eyes, while the handful of tranquilizers from the night before remained a dark and final provocation.

  The city’s gallery was an imposing old building with tall marble columns that stood like sentry guards before vast open doors. Gabriele went quickly up the broad stone staircase into a high-ceilinged building filled with the echoes of people’s voices and hollow footsteps sounding on the marble floor.

  She paid a token admission fee, picked up a leaflet that promoted the current exhibits, and then began wandering the labyrinth of corridors that were hung with paintings amidst sprinkles of hushed art admirers.

  As she had promised Master Joshua during the phone call, Gabriele was wearing a powder blue sweater and her best pair of denim jeans. She meandered without purpose or direction; one eye on the paintings she passed and the other searching for the approach of a man. Every few minutes she would sense someone coming towards her, and her hands would begin to shake. She was fidgety and nervous, and could feel a flush of color hot on her cheeks. She barely took the time to appreciate the paintings – too distracted by a cocktail of nervous anticipation and anxiety.

  She found herself walking from one great vaulted gallery into another. At the entrance to the vast room beyond was a set of marble columns and draped between them hung a canvas banner.

  ‘The Dutch Masters’.

  Gabriele passed into a magnificent area like the grand ballroom of a palace. The ceiling was arched and painted like a cathedral, and the floor was polished dark timber. The lower panels of each wall were made up of ornate gold tiles, and above them hung a collection of dazzling paintings. There were people lined around the edges of the room, peering and pointing at the artworks in voices hushed by awe and admiration. She cast a pointless searching glance at the crowd around her, and then drifted aimlessly towards a lustrous portrait of a middle-aged man enclosed by a thick golden frame.

  “Rembrandt van Rijn,” a man’s voice suddenly intoned from somewhere close behind her like he was talking about an old familiar friend. “Portrait with Two Circles. Not one of his finest works, but the brilliance is still there in every brushstroke, don’t you think?”

  Gabriele spun on her heel, startled for an instant. The voice had come ghosting out of nowhere without her ever sensing a presence. She turned and came face-to-face with a man in his mid-thirties; a tall broad-shouldered figure in a perfectly cut jacket and white open-necked shirt. He was smiling at her, his eyebrows arched into an expression of mildly mocking amusement that caught her completely off balance.

  Other features pressed quickly in upon her; the man’s narrow face, the firm thrust of his jaw, the dense dark hair, the smooth tanned complexion and the white teeth amidst an intrigued smile. She noted them all in an instant but faltered at his eyes. They were dark and enigmatic, flecked with a sense of thoughtful incisive intelligence that intimidated her. His gaze was utterly confronting, and she had the fleeting realization that those eyes would know her every secret and see through her every lie.

  “Um…?” she was utterly lost for words, gawking and embarrassed. The man’s energy seemed to steal the breath from her. He held out his hand politely.

  “My name is Joshua. We spoke on the phone. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Gabby.”

  She felt herself melt just a little at the cadence and tenor of his voice. It was infused with a rich educated dignity. Numbly she shook his hand, and felt the eclectic spark at the fleeting contact. His hands were strong.

  He was still smiling at her, and she stammered a greeting, flailing under the blowtorch of the man’s intense gaze. A hot rush of color spread across her chest and began to creep up her throat.

  “It’s nice to meet you,” she got the words out at last and then drew a deep breath. The man wasn’t what she had been expecting at all, and the difference between her quailing expectation and the reality left her reeling. In her mind she had visualized a crude brutish man, with a hard face and eyes like stone.

  The shock and surprise showed in her expression as wide-eyed incredulity, and then a slow rising relief.

  Joshua turned his attention back to the painting, standing intimately close beside Gabriele so that she could feel the heat of his body against her shoulder. He pointed to the figure’s face in the painting.

  “Rembrandt never quite re-captured the energy of his early works,” Joshua said. “You can see the looseness of the brushstrokes in the neck and the way he’s described the clothing. I think at this stage in his career, he was all about capturing the face and the personality; the clothing and setting seemed to become of less significance.”

  Gabriele stared up at the painting, frowning. She had no knowledge of art although the name of the artist was vaguely familiar. She tried to see the artwork through Joshua’s explanation, but the deeper significance was lost on her. It was a nice picture. That was all she knew.

  “It’s nice,” she said meekly.

  Joshua turned on her so that their faces were just inches apart and Gabriele went as still as a deer caught in the glare of blazing headlights. Joshua’s expression was distraught, almost disappointed.

  “Gabby… aren’t you a student of fine art?”

  She shook her head, and bit her lip, fearful that she had failed by some secret standard of assessment. “I’ve never really understood art,” she shrugged her shoulders apologetically. “It never really mattered to me.”

  Joshua pressed his lips together, and Gabby felt his eyes studying her face like he was making a decision. At last his features changed with a grunt of resolve.

  He turned to face her while about them other gallery visitors drifted past their periphery.

  His voice was pitched low, but infused with passion and earnest energy.

  “Modern art is a farce,” Joshua conceded, “but the great art of the past masters is at the heart of our culture and civilization.” Despite herself, Gabriele felt herself being drawn towards Joshua by the force of his personality and the strength of his conviction. “Surrounding us on these walls are some of the finest paintings ever to be created, and every one of them – every single one of them – has helped to shape the way we see our world, our society and its people.”

  Joshua paused for a moment to sweep his gaze around the gallery before bringing his eyes back. Gabriele felt her heart trip and flutter. The force of Joshua’s eyes slamming into hers seemed to pin her feet to the floor so that she was unable to move. She was transfixed.

  “Art is critical. And every man should be taught to appreciate it, for it’s only through an appreciation of such cultural icons can he ever truly know how to appreciate a woman.”

  Gabriele blinked. Joshua saw the flicker of confusion in her eyes. He smiled, but it was just a small icy tug at the corner of his mouth.

  “It’s not about the aesthetics,” Joshua cautioned softly. “It’s about learning to appreciate the beauty of things that go beyond appearances. If a man can admire the work of Vermeer or Rembrandt or Jan Steen, and see within their paintings the innate beauty, then he can begin to see the beauty in a woman, beyond her physical appearance. The lesson men must learn is the value of appreciation, not for what it can do for you, but for the beauty that it already is.”

  There was a long moment of silence. Gabriele was overwhelmed, and vaguely aroused… but uncertain why. She wasn’t sure if it was a physical reaction to Joshua’s presence and physique, or if the secret to her awakening sexual interest was hidden within his words and their meaning.

  “I’m not sure I really understand…” she said timidly, cowered a little by how he might react.

  Joshua smiled, and it was the most dazzling charm-filled smile that Gabriele had ever seen. It washed over her like the warmth of the sun as it reached all the way to sparkle in his eyes, stripping away the mask of intensity and changing his fa
ce completely.

  “Good!” Joshua’s smile became a light hearty chuckle. “We can keep talking. Now I know you’re honest.”

  They drifted around the exhibit halls of the gallery, chatting inconsequentially. Gabriele felt herself relaxing with every passing moment. Joshua was urbane and intelligent, talking conversationally about the merits of each painting, and asking Gabriele bland questions about her work, her favorite foods, and her likes in music. For Gabriele, the afternoon seemed to flash by too soon. She felt utterly captivated by Joshua, for he was everything she had dreamed of and like no one she had ever known. He was educated and fascinating, and she felt child-like and awed by his views and understanding of the world. When at last he fell silent and the mesmerizing spell of his voice was broken, Gabriele looked up with a start at the darkening shadows of afternoon and realized the day was over. The gallery’s staff was beginning to usher visitors out onto the wide front steps.

  They strolled to the sidewalk, and Joshua reached into his coat pocket. He handed Gabriele a small white card. On one side was printed his address.

  She tucked the card carefully into her purse and then dared a look into those deep hypnotic eyes.

  “Does this mean you will train me to be a submissive?” she asked.

  Joshua shook his head. “No. This means that I am comfortable you are not a crazy obsessive woman, and that you are welcome to visit my home. That is where the interview about your suitability for training will take place.”

  Gabriele was a little taken aback. She frowned down at her shoes; her lips pursed with confusion.