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“Shoot,” I said.
“What is your idea of a perfect date?”
The question came out of left field – a question I had never been asked before in my life, and never actually even contemplated.
“Are you asking me as a man… or as a Master?” I said to buy myself a few precious seconds to think.
“As a man,” Gwen’s tone was adamant.
I stared into darkened space for an instant, and then leaned a little closer to the microphone. “My idea of a perfect date is whatever the woman I am with considers perfect,” I said honestly. I didn’t think about the words – I spoke from the heart. “Because to me, what makes any date perfect is pleasing the woman I am with. So if she loves carnival rides, my perfect date would be visiting a local fair ground. If the lady enjoys a quiet romantic candlelit dinner, then that too is my idea of a perfect date. Ultimately, I want the time I spend with the lady to be something that she will enjoy and remember. Her happiness is the way I would measure perfection.”
There wasn’t complete silence – I could hear Gwen breathing. Finally she gasped, “Oh, my…” and then the line went to static.
April swung smoothly into action. She punched at buttons and finally the opening bars to a popular song filled the studio. Then she looked up at me with a dreamy, enigmatic stare.
“Fuuuck!” April said in an awed hiss of breath. “That was hot!”
“Huh?”
April snatched off her headphones and dropped them onto the desk. She swung back in her chair and her eyes sparkled. “That was the sexiest, most sensual thing I have heard you say all week,” she enthused. “It was the kind of answer that will have every woman in Boston swooning.”
“Are you serious?”
“Hell yeah!” she said, then tilted her head a little to the side as if to see me from a different angle. “Most guys would have said their idea of a perfect date would be a baseball game, or a football game… guy kinds of things. But not you, Mr. Fucking Smooth and Sexy. You just gave the million dollar answer.”
She gave me one last lingering look, and then leaned back over the keyboard. She was working frantically. I could hear the song was about to end and I glanced up at the clock.
“Another call, or another song?”
“More tunes,” April said without looking up from the monitor. “I’m just piecing together some background music for when you do this sub-club thing – jazz… that kind of stuff to help set the mood.”
“Okay,” I said, figuring that meant I had a break. It was twenty minutes after the hour. I had ten minutes before the start of the new segment.
I was going to need every minute of that time.
Because I suddenly realized I had a serious problem.
Chapter 12.
I paced the hallway for five fruitless minutes, wrestling with ideas and discarding them just as quickly as they occurred to me. I could see April through the open door, still building a playlist of background instrumental tunes that she would play beneath the sub-club segment.
Only there wasn’t going to be a sub-club segment.
I couldn’t do it.
Finally I went back into the studio and glanced up at the clock. I had three minutes. April turned, saw the ashen expression on my face, and her eyes widened and filled with curious concern. She tore her headphones off and swung round in her chair until she was facing me.
“Are you okay?”
I shook my head. “No,” I said. “I’ve got a problem with the sub-club segment.”
“What?” April spat the word and managed to inflect it with a hint of sudden panic. “You’re telling me this now? What’s the fucking problem?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “I can’t do it,” I said. “I can’t give instructions over the air to these women and make it realistic enough.”
April snatched a glance at the ticking clock and then turned back to me. There was a sudden flare of temper in her expression.
“Why not?”
“Because I won’t be able to visualize everything and concentrate on the instructions at the same time. I can’t hold an image in my imagination and talk about it like it was real.”
April became incredulous. “You do it all the time!” she said, the reedy waver of panic rising in her voice.
I shook my head. “No, I don’t,” I said. “I talk about concepts. I talk about ideas and my beliefs. I can’t narrate an imagined scene and make it detailed and real enough for it to become an actual listener experience.”
April threw her hands in the air in frantic exasperation. “Well what the fuck are we going to do?”
I shrugged. “Cancel it? Cancel the segment?”
April’s face turned to stone. “No way,” she came out of her chair. “Collett would fire me. No fucking way. This is her baby, Jericho. It has to happen… and we’ve got sixty seconds to find a solution.”
Our eyes went to the clock as if it were counting down the final seconds to our doom. I dropped heavily into the chair and pulled the headphones over my ears. April was prowling across the tiny studio floor¸ her hands on her hips, her ponytail swishing across her shoulders like the tail of an agitated lioness. She was glaring at me.
The music finished. I leaned in close to the microphone.
“Welcome back, listeners,” I said, the words sounding somehow brittle in my ears. “This is Jericho, and tonight I have a special segment for you. We’re calling it the sub-club, and it’s an opportunity for everyone interested in the thrill of BDSM to become my on-air submissives, and for me to become your on-air Master. We’re going to begin your training in just a few minutes, but in the meantime I want everyone who wants to join in to fetch a pillow and a candle…” I paused for just a heartbeat. “When you come back to the radio, turn off the house lights and light the candle. I want you kneeling on the pillow, in just your bra and panties… waiting for me…”
There was a block of commercials already cued to play. April leaned across the desk and angrily thumped the keyboard. She glanced up at the clock.
“Two minutes,” she declared. “That’s all we’ve got.”
I sat back in the chair and stared numbly at the ceiling. The air hissed from between my lips like I had been heart-punched.
April was on the verge of blind panic. She was wringing her hands and gnawing her lip in agitation.
“What do you need?” her voice cracked and wavered.
I shook my head. “I need to see…” I said abstractly. “I just can’t visualize and…”
I heard April swear bitterly, then suddenly she peeled off her sweater and stood only in her bra, her chest heaving, the mounds of her breasts barely contained within a flimsy lace of lingerie. She threw her sweater on the floor and dropped to her knees. She gave me a look of pure venom. Her eyes had narrowed into glinting arrowheads and the powder of fine freckles across her nose glowed like flakes of gold.
“The pants stay on,” she thrust a warning finger at me, “and if you so much as touch me, I will break your fucking arm.”
For an instant I didn’t understand, and then suddenly, with a lift of relief, I understood it all. I nodded and snatched at the microphone just as the final commercial’s jingle faded out.
“Welcome back, ladies,” I said. I deepened my voice, made it lower and slower, turning the tempo and cadence of my words into a measured pulsing beat. “And welcome to our sub-club segment. I trust you are somewhere private, kneeling in your panties and bra by candlelight…” I glanced over at April. She was watching me warily, her face flushed and her lips wrenched into a resentful sneer. In the background I heard the soft strain of a saxophone, and realized that April had somehow linked the block of commercials to the mood music she had been arranging.
“I want your knees parted,” I said across the air, “nice and wide for me,” I glanced at April. She took a deep breath and then shuffled on the cushion of her sweater. “That’s better,” I said in a soothing croon. “Now I want you to clasp your hands behi
