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“I think it’s crazy,” I said at last. “I think you’re crazy.”
Nancy didn’t seem perturbed. Some of the agitation went from her body and her shoulders relaxed. There was a cloth napkin folded before her. She picked it up and wrung it in her hands. The smile stayed fixed on her face, but all her amusement had drained away.
“Are you seeing someone else from the radio station?” she asked me. “Do you already have one of the girls calling you Master – is that it? Cindy, I suppose, or maybe April. I know you have been seeing plenty of her each night during the program.”
I shook my head. “I have barely spoken to Cindy, and April and I are just friends – nothing more I assure you.” I didn’t mention that April was gay. Clearly Nancy had no idea, and I wasn’t about to be the one to betray April’s trust.
Nancy studied my face with her eyes narrowed and then sat back, satisfied I was telling the truth. For a moment she had sounded vaguely jealous.
“So why not, then?” she asked again. It was like a sabre duel. Thrust and parry. “Is it my age?” her tone became stinging. “I’m forty-one years old. I guess that’s over the hill for a man like you. I imagine you like your women young and dumb…”
I shook my head again, ignoring the barb of her accusation. “Age has nothing at all to do with it,” I said.
“So it’s my looks? I don’t look hot enough to turn you on?”
“No, that’s not it either,” I said truthfully. “In fact I think you have a beautiful body.”
Nancy shook her head in bewilderment. She tried leaning across the table again, as if she could somehow get through to me by her proximity. “Then why?”
The sixty-four million dollar question… and I didn’t have a good answer.
I shrugged my shoulders. “Well you are my boss, to start with.”
“So?”
“So it’s a big deal,” I said, and then tried to think why it was. I suddenly recalled something Grover had told me. “You should never dip your pen in company ink.”
Nancy’s face froze for an instant, and then she sat back again and laughed with unaffected delight. The humor reached all the way to her eyes and made them sparkle. “Honey, I’m not company ink,” Nancy said. Her voice dropped and became pointed. “I’m the company – and you can dip your pen into any inky part of me you want.” Her eyebrow went up in a brazen arch of invitation. She licked her lips like she could taste me.
I took a deep breath. “It wouldn’t work, Nancy,” I said. “It couldn’t possibly work. You expect me to dominate you and make you submit to me sexually and mentally, and then we go to the radio station and you’re going to be barking orders and demands… it’s a recipe for disaster.”
My gaze flicked past her shoulder. Nancy stilled the words on her mouth as if by some silent understanding. A waiter appeared a few seconds later with two frosted glasses of Coke on a silver tray. Nancy looked searchingly at me and then down at the glass like it was poison. “What is this?” she asked the waiter.
“Coke, madam.”
Nancy’s eyes drifted to mine as if needing an explanation. I made a wry facial expression. “I thought Sondra was Cindy,” I admitted.
Nancy tilted her head to the side like she was trying to study me from a different angle. Without breaking eye contact she said to the waiter, “Take it away, please. I need a vodka and orange – and hold the orange.”
The waiter snatched up the glass between two fingers like it was infected with contagion and disappeared in a cloud of cheap cologne.
Nancy’s expression went through a series of gradual transitions until she was once again staring at me with mild amusement. “Work won’t be a problem,” she said dismissively. “As long as we keep the understanding that the two worlds are very different, there should be no conflict. I know the game, Jericho,” she became disturbingly pragmatic. “I know what submission is. After hours I will be your wet and wanting and willing slut – I will fuck and suck and swallow and do anything you ask to please you.”
I wasn’t convinced. I thought back to the anonymous calls Nancy had made to the radio station in the guise of Sondra.
“Those nights you phoned the radio station,” I began, altering the directness of Nancy’s approach. “How much of what you said was true?”
Nancy thought for just an instant. “All of it,” she confessed.
“The part about you lying on your bed, making yourself come?”
“Yes.”
“And the rest of the fantasies you shared? Were they genuine too?”
“Yes,” she said again, the word a breathy gasp of air. “I’ve been fantasizing about you since the first time you walked into my office.”
I nodded my head. “So you manipulated me to take Sondra’s calls and to talk to her off the air…”
“Yes,” Nancy said with artless honesty. “I left the decisions to you, but I admit I tried to influence you.”
I smiled, but it was a grin that twisted my mouth out of shape and left my eyes empty. “And that’s why this won’t work,” I said. “Because you can’t submit, Nancy. It’s not natural to you. Your natural instinct is to control and influence. Even if I did agree to become your Master, you would still try to pull the strings in subtle ways.”
Nancy shook her head. “I won’t,” she promised. “Like I said, I know the rules. I’ve submitted to a man before.”
“Yes,” I remembered. “So tell me about that.”
“About the man?”
I nodded. “And the experience.”
Instinct told me this was a subject she was reluctant to discuss, but my intuition also told me she was going to – because she knew I still wasn’t convinced about her ability to submit, or about the validity of the idea.
She sighed and put on an artificial smile.
“His name was Phillipe,” Nancy began softly. “He was French, and he was in America working for a computer software company. I met him in a bookshop when I was nineteen. He smelled nice.”
I raised an eyebrow at that. Nancy smiled wistfully and nodded her head like it sounded so foolish all these years later. “He smelled of old leather and spices,” she said. “And he was foreign. I was turned on.”
“So you slept with him?”
She nodded her head again. “We started a relationship,” she explained. “I thought it was just a summer romance – the kind of thing you read about in books – but it became more serious. One night we were talking about the differences between our countries. I told him the French were an arrogant nation who hadn’t won a war in almost two hundred years.”
I kept my face neutral. I was listening. “How old was this man?”
Nancy sighed. “He was in his forties, twice my age. He grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me onto his lap, then he pulled down my panties and spanked me,” Nancy’s focus faded in and out as she alternated between the restaurant and her memories. “At first I was humiliated. I kicked out and cried. But Phillipe didn’t stop, and after a while the spanking stopped hurting and became almost pleasurable. I started to come. I had this string of orgasms – one after the other, squirming on his lap and rubbing myself against the erection in his pants. That’s when I discovered this secret submissive part of me. That was the night my whole world changed, and I changed as a woman.”
“How long did the relationship last?”
“Two years,” Nancy said. “And for most of our time together I was his willing and obedient submissive. He taught me about domination and the pleasure a woman could achieve from surrendering herself… and he taught me about the sexual thrill of anticipation – of being taken to the brink of orgasm and left teetering there until I was almost crazy mad with frustration and desire. He taught me all that.”
I nodded carefully. “And since then? Have there been other Masters?”
“No.”
“Not one?” the surprise showed in my voice.
“Not one,” Nancy was adamant. “After Phillipe went back to France, I
became immersed in the business world and communication studies. I got involved in radio and found I was good at management. All those secret thrills I had experienced as a woman became deeply buried behind the business façade. That’s where they have remained, until you walked into my office.”
I regarded Nancy’s expression, watching her face carefully as I asked the next question. “What did you like most about your time with Phillipe?”
“Like most?”
I nodded. “What aspects of submission did you find the most arousing… and what parts did you not enjoy?”
Nancy frowned. “Is it important?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
