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Joshua skirted around to the driver side and climbed in behind the wheel. He glanced at Gabriele. She was sitting very small and a little frightened in the dark. Her eyes were straight ahead. Joshua was smiling secretly to himself. The garage door whined to the pull of an electric motor and then folded up into the garage’s ceiling. Joshua started the car, and the big engine gurgled with throaty power. He eased out of the driveway and steered onto the quiet suburban street.
“Do you know anyone in this part of the city?” Joshua asked once the car was up to speed, drifting soundlessly through the quiet suburb.
Gabriele shook her head. “No, Master.”
“You have no work colleagues who live in this area? No associates or people you might see during the course of a normal week?”
“No, Master.”
As he had been speaking, Joshua had reached the edge of the community and drove through the welcome sign and gate posts, then pulled onto a busy thoroughfare. He merged into a stream of traffic that was winding its way into the distant horizon of lit skyscrapers.
“Do you wear a bikini to the beach?”
The question was so unexpected that Gabriele turned her head in confusion.
“Pardon, Master?”
“Do you wear a bikini to the beach, or a one-piece?”
Gabriele laughed with hollow derision. “I haven’t been to a beach for several years, Master… but yes, I would wear a bikini.”
Joshua nodded. It was all the information he needed.
Five minutes later the neon lights of a shopping mall emerged out of the dark night. Joshua cut across a lane and then turned across traffic to nose the car into a vast parking lot. Around the perimeter of the mall, the out-facing shops were all closed, except for a take-out store at the northern corner of the building. Above the doors, lighting up the night, was the name of a well-known fast-food brand. Joshua parked the car about fifty yards away from the glass-fronted shop windows and cut the engine.
Through the windshield he could see the silhouettes of a dozen parked cars scattered across the lot. Inside the store he noted three staff members behind the bright red serving counter, and a couple with a small child sitting on seats by the window, waiting for their food order. He turned to Gabriele, sitting with a look of confusion on her face, her features lit by the ghostly glow of the dashboard’s soft lights.
“I phoned through an order of food before you arrived tonight,” Joshua explained in a calm, reasonable voice. “Please go into the store and collect it for me.” He reached into his pants pocket and handed her a wad of crisp new bills.
Gabriele’s eyes flashed with panic and open-mouthed horror.
“Master?”
“You heard me,” Joshua’s voice remained a flat monotone. “I have a food order waiting inside that store. I’d like you to collect it.”
“But I’m wearing lingerie!” her voice shot up an octave and was edged with genuine alarm. As if the words themselves weren’t enough, she made a dramatic gesture with her hands, drawing attention to her smooth soft skin and the bulge of her breasts. Her nipples showed as dark shadows through the red lace.
Joshua’s look slowly transformed into a pantomime of curiosity. “I don’t see what the problem is,” he said. “It’s a simple enough request, and one you should be pleased to obey.”
Still Gabriele hesitated. She peered out through the windshield like she was staring at a daunting two-mile stretch of sewn minefield. She turned back to Joshua, and her expression collapsed into a look of pleading. “Surely, you cannot be serious.”
Joshua’s eyes turned menacingly black, and Gabriele’s sudden fear drove away her apprehension. She slumped her shoulders, then reached for the door handle. She moved in a slow disbelieving daze. She stepped out of the car; her head swiveling in every direction with furtive panic, and then she scurried towards the brightly lit store. The night was cool. Overhead the sky was cloudless, lit by a million stars. Gabriele saw none of it. Her eyes were fixed and mortified. She stepped in through the glass shop door and went to the counter, cringing with embarrassment, her eyes downcast, her whole body trembling.
She emerged a few moments later carrying a paper bag packed with food; her exit watched by the fascinated staff and customers. She all but ran back to the car; the clip-clop of her heels attracting the eyes of people in the other parked cars. Her face was burning, and the blush of color had spread all the way down her torso.
When she got back to the car, she found the passenger door locked. Joshua lowered his window and Gabriele, with her lips pressed tight together by her simmering fury, handed the food through the window.
Joshua opened the bag and casually checked off the order. “Tell me how that task made you feel, Gabriele?” He sounded almost clinical.
“Fucking embarrassed!” Gabriele snapped. She was outraged, seething with her humiliation.
Joshua grunted with disappointment. He drew a deep breath then slowly shook his head. “The staff forgot to include one of the burgers I ordered. Please go back to the restaurant and ask them to check the order.”
“What?” Gabriele was hunched and cowering beside the car’s door, trying to make herself as small and inconspicuous as possible. Despite the dark of the night, she felt cruelly exposed. She imagined each dark car in the lot filled with leering men and quailed at the thought of what the store’s staff might be saying about her. She had never felt so demeaned in her life.
Joshua turned his eyes to her, and it was like the twin dark barrels of a shotgun swiveling onto a target. “Go back to the restaurant,” he said through gritted teeth and straining patience. “And this time I want you to walk like a confident sexy woman on a beach – a woman who is proud of her body, aware of all the admiring glances and brimming with confidence because you know you are beautiful… not some pathetic sneak who is shrinking and self-conscious.”
Gabriele’s eyes blazed with venom, but she straightened obediently and went in stilted, forced steps back across the dark parking lot and into the take-out restaurant. She was there for a just a few minutes, her eyes fixed straight ahead. When she came out through the doors again, she was holding another small paper bag. She walked with stiff robotic movements.
She came back to the driver’s side window and thrust the bag through the window. Joshua looked thoughtful. He was staring out through the windshield as though reflecting on something significant.
“How do you feel now?” he asked at last through the open window.
“The same,” Gabriele was on the very brink of using her safe word. It was on the tip of her tongue and would be followed by a withering tirade of abuse that was jangling around in her head. “Still humiliated,” she spat the words through frosted lips. Her face had an icy sheen to it.
Joshua shook his head and seemed overcome with genuine sadness. “You did better, but not well enough, Gabriele. I’m very disappointed in you,” he spoke carefully, knowing the crushing effect that his displeasure could have on a woman in training. A Master’s disappointment was the ultimate measure of a submissive’s failure.
“I did what you asked,” Gabriele faltered as she defended herself. She wanted to stay angry; she had every right to be furious. But suddenly she wasn’t so sure. Joshua’s reaction threw her into hapless confusion.
Joshua fixed her with his gaze. “You disappoint me because you refuse to accept your role as my submissive. You’re still seeing yourself as Gabriele – the woman who works at an accountancy firm, the woman who lives in an apartment complex and smiles politely to her neighbors. You still see yourself in terms of your own life,” his voice was rising, becoming sharper, “but that’s not who you are. You are a submissive. You are a body for my pleasure and satisfaction. You’re making the terrible mistake of seeing everything in terms of who you are, and not who I am training you to become. In order to be a desired submissive, worthy of a Master’s training and care, you must stop being yourself, and instead be who I am training you to become.”
The sudden realization of Joshua’s words struck Gabriele more powerfully than a blow. It flattened her; crumpled her. She felt the air wheeze from her lungs in bitter understanding. Suddenly she felt crestfallen.
“You’re right,” she hung her head and spoke in soft apology. She felt herself on the brink of defeated tears. “You’re right.”
She looked away because she couldn’t stand to see the disappointed way Joshua was studying her. She saw the blurred neon light of the store in the distance through a mist of tears. She thrust out her chin and pursed her lips together in a flash of defiance.
Gabriele sauntered back towards the fast-food restaurant, taking her time, swaying her hips like a catwalk model with every long-legged step. As she strutted, she turned her head from side to side, her gaze cool and dismissive as she passed each dark shadowed car. When she got to the glass door of the shop front, she hesitated for a moment. Joshua was watching her with keen interest. He thought her resolve had crumbled at the last hurdle, but he was wrong. Gabriele reached for the door handle, then used it for balance, bending at the waist with her legs slightly parted and perfectly straight, like she was touching her toes.
Despite himself Joshua laughed his admiration.
