Interview with a Master (10 page)

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 nodde
d. “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 br
easts 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.