Interview With a Master Read online

  “Interview With A Master”

  Jason Luke

  Copyright © 2014 Jason Luke

  The right of Jason Luke to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any other means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the author. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  She was smiling, and there was something smug and self-satisfied about the expression that pissed me off. She had no right to be smiling, and she certainly had no right to be satisfied.

  “Is that it, then?” I asked flatly. “Is that all you want to know?”

  The woman set down her pen, leafed back through her notebook, and then looked up at me. She looked relieved.

  “I think so…” she said carefully. She sat back in the chair and crossed her legs. “Unless there is more you want to tell me.”

  I stared at a spot on the wall an inch over her head.

  More I want to tell? Fuck, the questions she had asked were the kind of questions I would expect a child to ask, not a journalist.

  “Mr. Noble…?”

  “Huh?”

  The woman was watching me, suddenly curious. Her eyebrows were knitted together, her expression anxious and uncertain.

  She was wearing a loose-fitting open-necked red sweater. She was tall, with the figure of a girl who swam, or maybe played tennis.

  She had short blonde hair, the tips seemingly bleached, which again made me think she might be a swimmer. She had a nose that wasn’t too large and below it, her mouth was twisted, her bottom lip trapped between her teeth in consternation. She wasn’t wearing any makeup. Her lips were pink – the color of coral – and there was a soft dusting of freckles across her nose.

  She brushed a tendril of hair from her face and tucked it behind her ear. It was a distinctly nervous gesture that matched perfectly with the wide-eyed expression in her eyes.

  “Is there more about your BDSM lifestyle my readers should know – or is there more about your background…?”

  I sat forward on the sofa and sighed. “Miss Fall, the questions you’ve asked me were superficial and quite frankly immature. I don’t know what I’ve told you in the last thirty minutes, but whatever it was, it was the same thing I’ve told a thousand other journalists over the past five years. You didn’t need to interview me for the information you got – you just had to read what everyone else has written.”

  The woman blanched. She blinked her eyes and the smile slid from her lips.

  Good.

  “I beg your pardon…?” she asked softly.

  I stood up. Thrust my hands into my pockets. “You heard me,” I said. “While you’ve been asking your idiotic questions, I’ve been thinking about you. It’s the only reason you’re still here. Because I haven’t quite made up my mind about you yet.”

  I started to pace across the room. I reached the side table near the door and lit a cigarette.

  She followed me with her eyes. She was scowling.

  “Made up your mind about what?” she asked.

  I exhaled a feather of blue smoke at the ceiling. “Whether you’re wearing lingerie,” I said honestly. “I still haven’t decided.” I saw her blink, and then a sudden flush of color spread across her cheeks and neck. “And what you would look like with a submissive’s leather collar around your neck.”

  I ashed the cigarette and turned to the window for a second. Outside, the afternoon light was fading quickly. I could see distant car headlights winding their way along the mountain road. I turned back, frowning. “With some women, you can just tell – you know instantly whether they like to be dominated, or not. As for you…? Well I’m still not sure.”

  There was a long, stunned silence in the room.

  Fuck it. I like silence.

  The woman got to her feet and snatched at her notebook. She stuffed it into her handbag and ran her splayed fingers down the length of her thigh to smooth out her skirt. She was angry now, not embarrassed. Maybe even outraged. She was making rapid little panting sounds like she was having a hard time controlling her breathing.

  “Mr. Noble, I resent your language,” she said stiffly. It sounded like something she might have been told to say at a sexual harassment in the workplace course.

  I shrugged. “I don’t care,” I said – and I didn’t. “The door is right there, Miss Fall. You can walk out right now for all I care, or you can sit back down and we can do a proper interview.”

  She paused, like a deer suddenly caught in the headlights. “Proper?” she asked suspiciously. “What do you mean? Exactly?”

  I came across the room – three quick strides so that I was standing close to her. Close enough to smell her cheap perfume and see the discomfort and panic beginning to rise in her eyes. I stared, neither of us speaking or moving for several seconds.

  She was taller than I had initially thought, her head above the level of my shoulder with long sculpted legs beneath a sensible skirt that brushed across the tops of her knees. She had a small narrow waist, and the shape of her breasts beneath the loose fabric of her sweater was an ample promise.

  I studied her more closely. She wasn’t a child, she was a mature woman in her mid-twenties, and behind the eager nervousness of her I sensed there was an underlying resolve.

  I changed my mind. She wasn’t ordinary. She was attractive, but not in the obvious way I was accustomed to. Her beauty was much more subtle – like a gentle scent that lingered and took time to appreciate.

  “I mean an interview like you’ve never had before,” I promised. “An interview that no one has ever had before. I mean the works, Miss Fall. You can ask me any question you want, and I will give you the honest truth. Any question at all.” I said it again, to make sure she understood that I was offering her the opportunity of an ambitious young journalist’s lifetime.

  A career-making interview with America’s elusive, notorious BDSM Master, Jonah Noble.

  I saw the instant the realization struck her. It showed as a flicker behind her eyes – a dazzling split-second of understanding.

  “And in return?” she asked me softly, and there was wary caution in her voice.

  “Simple,” I said. I reached out for her then. My hand cupped under the soft smooth skin of her chin. It was a distinctly intimate gesture, presumptuous and possessive, but I’m often like that with women. Her breath hitched in her throat and I felt her whole body begin to tremble.

  I stared into her eyes and smiled. It was one of my better efforts – one of my slow, sexy smiles that starts at the corners of my mouth and spreads slowly across my face until it sparkles in my eyes.

  “In return, you will answer the questions I have about you,” I said, still holding the smile, still staring into her eyes. “For everything I tell you, you must tell me something about yourself – an exchange of secrets and information.”

  She went stiff. Her back straightened. “That’s not fair,” she said.

  The smile stayed fixed on my lips. “I think it is,” I countered comfortably. “After all, you still have the advantage, Miss Fall. You can publish my story. I merely get to know yours.”

  * * *

  “How old were yo
u when you first became interested in BDSM?” Leticia asked me.

  We had moved into the study. The walls were dark wooden panels hung with old seascapes, the drapes heavy velvet. The chairs and sofa were all upholstered in hand-crafted leather, and over the polished wooden floorboards were deep-piled Persian rugs. It was getting dark. I lit a fire and spent a long time staring into the flickering flames, while the warm orange glow lit the walls and filled the room with leaping shadows. I considered the question for a long time.

  “Can I call you Leticia?”

  “Sure,” the woman said, still guarded. “Can I call you Jonah? Or do you prefer to be called Master Jonah?” There was a hint of challenge in the way she asked. I ignored it.

  “You can call me Jonah,” I said. “If you were my submissive, you would call me Master. If you were a submissive, but not under my care and protection, you would call me Sir.”

  “Is that some kind of a BDSM rule?”

  “It’s my rule.”

  She made a note of that. She scribbled for a few moments into her notebook and then looked up at me expectantly. “Okay… Jonah…. So back to the original question. How old were you when you first realized you were interested in being a BDSM Master?”

  I got up and started to pace. I do that a lot. I do it when I’m dictating letters to my secretary too. It’s just the way I organize my thoughts, I guess. I stared down into the comforting warm glow of the fire and then turned suddenly.

  I knew where I should start.

  “When I was eighteen, I was in a car accident,” I said. “It was pretty bad. I was a passenger in a vehicle. One of my buddies was driving. We were stopped at a set of traffic lights. The driver of the truck behind us must have fallen asleep at the wheel. He crashed into the back of our car. My friend was killed instantly, and I was hurled through the windshield. I landed on the road, twenty feet clear of the car in the middle of the intersection – or so I’m told. I don’t remember anything of the crash. I was in a coma for over twelve months.”

  The woman gaped at me. “Twelve months?”

  I nodded. “And then another six months of rehab before I was discharged from the hospital.”

  She wasn’t making notes. She was staring up at my silhouette, framed against the firelight.

  “My father was one of the wealthiest men in America. After my mother died, he devoted himself to his business and made a fortune. So when I went home from hospital, he arranged for me to have a live-in tutor. I was a long way behind in studies, and my father had ambitions of me studying law. The tutor was a woman.”

  Leticia made a face of slow realization. “Was this woman your first sexual encounter?”

  I shook my head. “No,” I said. “But she was my first serious encounter.”

  “And you knew instantly with this woman tutor that you were naturally interested in BDSM?” Her tone was incredulous. “At the age of nineteen?”

  I laughed. The sound of it rang out in the gloomy room and seemed to echo off the walls. “No,” I admitted. “I had no idea about BDSM, and not much of an idea about sex in general. I learned a lot from that woman – but initially the lessons I learned were ones of submission.”

  There was a long pause. I could see Leticia’s expression change from understanding to puzzled confusion. She shook her head and frowned. “I don’t think I follow.”

  I spelled it out.

  “My first introduction to a sexual BDSM relationship was as a reluctant submissive to an older woman.”

  I started to pace again, eyes down, hands buried deep into my pockets, footsteps muffled by the deep carpet as I sifted through my memories, the images still clear and fresh in my mind after almost sixteen years.

  “Her name was Claire Moreland,” I said. “She was twenty-six when we met. She moved into a one-bedroom guesthouse on the grounds of my father’s estate. She said she was divorced. She had long red hair, and the most amazing green eyes. When she stared at me, it was like she could see right through to my soul.”

  Leticia raised an eyebrow, but said nothing, and I went on quickly, the memories tumbling in my mind, each one like a clip of footage played on a screen.

  “We didn’t get along initially,” I explained. “She was a tough woman, and she was serious about her tutoring work. I, on the other hand, was a nineteen-year-old young man. All I could think about was her; the way she walked, the purring sound of her voice, the aroma of her perfume when she leaned close to me, and the press of her breasts against her blouse. Each time she leaned over me to see what I was working on, I would feel the warmth of her thigh brush against my side. It drove me to utter distraction – and I’m quite sure she knew what she was doing.”

  “Really?”

  I nodded. “Claire was a very unique woman,” I said abstractly. “I didn’t understand at first, because I was young and naïve, but she had a fierce perverse sexual energy that began to reveal itself after she caught me.”

  “Caught you? Caught you doing what?”

  I smiled ruefully. “Spying on her.”

  Leticia Fall almost laughed. I could see it in her eyes and the touch of a grin at the corner of her lips. And I suppose – now – it was funny. But at the time…

  “Claire had been living on the estate for about three weeks,” I explained. “And every day we studied together until midafternoon. When study was finished for the day, her time was her own. We had a pool on the grounds, and she often swam laps while I was off learning boxing and martial arts.”

  Leticia interrupted me. “You learned martial arts?”

  I frowned. A cold gust of annoyance stirred my temper. “Yes,” I said curtly. “And boxing. It was part of my rehab – but it’s not part of the story.”

  “Sorry.”

  I took a deep breath. I hate being interrupted.

  “One day I cut martial arts classes and came back home early. I could hear Claire outside. She was swimming, and I went to the kitchen window and watched her for a long time. She was wearing a tiny bikini and she was stunning – she had a sensational figure; her breasts fascinated me. I couldn’t take my eyes off them – the shape, and the way they pressed together and glistened and heaved each time she came up for breath. I was in lust! I watched her swim half a dozen laps and then I went out through the side entrance of the house and skirted the gardens. I went to the guesthouse. I had a key. I let myself in and went to the bathroom. She had three shelves stacked with lotions and potions – women’s cosmetics. I’m sure you know the kind of things I’m talking about.”

  Leticia nodded.

  I stopped for a moment and smiled contritely. “I drilled a peep hole through her bathroom wall,” I confessed. “And then disguised it behind some bottles of cosmetics. There was a bushy garden alongside the building. I went out and crouched in the shadows, and waited for her to finish swimming.”

  Leticia was following me with her eyes as I moved around the room. I returned to the fireplace and stood there for a moment, lost in thought until I heard her clear her throat discreetly. When I turned around she was looking up at me with her pen poised over her notepad and a curious expectant expression on her face. Not one of approval, but one of intrigue.

  “And she caught you?”

  I shook my head. “No. Not the first time. But the next afternoon, when I went back to the garden and waited for her to finish her laps, I was surprised. She normally swam for an hour. This day, she was back, standing wet in her bathroom with a towel wrapped around her, not thirty minutes after we had finished studying for the day. I didn’t think anything of it at the time – but I wasn’t thinking, not with my brains anyhow.”

  “What happened?” Leticia’s voice was suddenly hushed.

  I lit a cigarette, and then went to the bar, dropped ice into a tumbler, and splashed whisky over the top. I held up the bottle in silent invitation. Leticia shook her head.

  I sipped thoughtfully at my drink, and swirled the ice round until it clinked against the sides of the glass.


  “When she unwrapped the towel, she still had her bikini on. Her nipples were hard. I remember that clearly. They were stiff little lumps against the shimmering fabric of her bathers and I gasped out loud and almost gave myself away. But she seemed not to have heard. She was humming to herself.”

  “And then…?”

  “And then her hips began to undulate like she was in the midst of a slow erotic dance. Her breathing became harder and faster. She backed herself up against the bathroom wall and closed her eyes. Her head was thrown back, and she began to touch herself – gliding her fingers up and down her body. Then she slid one hand down inside her bikini bottoms and rubbed her pussy until she was moaning through an orgasm.”

  I finished my drink in a single gulp while Leticia sat staring blankly at a spot on the far wall, as if she were hypnotized. When she stirred again, there was a husk in her voice I hadn’t recognized before.

  “And then what happened?”

  “She disappeared from sight for a long moment,” I explained. “I heard the water in the shower running. When she stepped back into view, she untied her bikini top. She stood on tiptoes, with her hands cupped under her breasts and she pinched the nipples until they were hard little buttons. I was amazed at how large and firm her breasts really were. She stood admiring herself in the mirror – twisting and turning so she could see herself from every angle.”

  “And so you could see too.”

  I nodded. “Exactly. Then she disappeared from my sight again. I thought she was in the shower. I was just about to head back to the main house when something dark moved across the peep hole and I heard her voice.”

  “Oh, my God!”

  I nodded again. Even now, I could remember exactly that moment of dire panic and horror – the moment I had been discovered. It came to me like a relived nightmare, detailed and textured. I remembered the hot flush of fear, and then a near-fainting sensation as all the blood drained away from my face.

  “What did she say?” Leticia unfolded her legs and placed both her feet flat on the floor, leaning forward attentively with her elbows braced on her knees and her chin cupped between her hands.