Vignettes of a Master

by Luke, Jason

  In those times away from Jonah, she felt lost and alone – she felt like a leaf blown in the breeze. But with him, she felt a sense of inner purpose, as though giving herself to him was the deepest joy she could ever experience.

  She lay on the big bed and spread her legs wide for him. She was completely naked, her wrists tied to the headboard and she stared up at him with a silent plea in her eyes for him to use her – so that she could feel complete.

  His touch was like fire, his gaze enough to make her weak at the knees. When he stood above her, she felt a wild sense of abandonment and recklessness, and she knew without doubt she would willingly do anything – anything at all to satisfy and please Jonah Noble.

  New Paragraph 30

  Jonah alone in a crowded bar.

  Eye contact.

  When a woman looks at a man and holds eye contact for more than a couple of seconds, I’d always believed it was a sign that the woman was expressing her interest. The way this woman looked at me left me in no doubt – her eyes met mine and then casually drifted over my body and then came back to my face and she raised one eyebrow slightly.

  I was sitting alone in a sports bar. When I had arrived it was quiet, but now, an hour later it was full of office workers who had finished a long, hard day and had called in after work for a quiet drink before returning home to their lives. The air was smoky, and full of noise.

  I sipped at my whisky and looked past the woman, idly glancing at the groups of young business professionals in their suits and ties and grey skirts and crisp, white blouses. They were gathered in little groups of earnest conversation whilst above them a bank of television monitors showed highlights of ballgames. I spun on my stool back to face the bar. The guy behind the counter gave me a nod and I nodded back. He came along the counter to me and refilled my glass.

  The voice suddenly beside me was a breathy, little purr. I didn’t move. I felt a woman’s hand rest lightly on my shoulder, and then smelled the scent of expensive perfume.

  “Hello there,” the woman said. “My name is Jessie.”

  I turned on my chair slowly – it was the woman who had been looking at me from across the room. She was tall, with a carefully manicured pile of blonde hair atop a perfectly made up face, complete with cosmetic smile.

  “Hello,” I said politely.

  I felt the woman’s fingers grip more tightly on my shoulder and then move a little down my forearm. “I had to come and say hello,” the woman said. “I have been admiring you from across the room.”

  I glanced up into the woman’s eyes. “Then go back there,” I said.

  And now…

  What follows is the first dramatic chapter of the sequel to ‘Interview with a Master’.

  ‘In love with a Master’ will be published on Amazon in the coming months.

  I hope you enjoy the first chapter of the new book.

  Jason Luke

  “In Love with a Master”

  Interview with a Master 2

  Jason Luke

  Chapter 1.

  The telephone rang, unnaturally loud and shrill in the darkened room – and I felt my nerves screw taut as I stared down at the desk.

  The phone rang again. I watched it, sitting frozen in the big leather chair. The sound of the double note seemed somehow urgent and insistent in my ears. The telephone kept ringing until at last I leaned forward reluctantly and reached out for it.

  The sound stopped abruptly as my hand hung over the receiver. I leaned back, relieved.

  A few minutes later Mrs. Hortez appeared timidly in the office doorway. She was wiping her hands on the tails of her apron. She knocked on the open door and ducked her head into the gloomy office.

  “It was her again, Mr. Noble,” Mrs. Hortez said in broken English, her voice almost apologetic. Then she held up the pudgy fingers of one hand. “That five times so far today.”

  I nodded. The leather chair creaked as I shifted my weight. I propped an elbow on the armrest, and cupped my chin thoughtfully in my hand. My fingers grazed across the unshaven stubble that bristled my cheeks.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Hortez,” I said quietly. “Did you tell her that I was unavailable?”

  “Si,” Mrs. Hortez nodded heavily, like she was somehow saddened. “But she clever girl, Mr. Noble. She no believe me.”

  The silence drew out. I said nothing. After maybe another minute, Mrs. Hortez ghosted from the room, pulling the door quietly closed behind her.

  I sat alone in the dark. Outside my window a grey blanket of clouds hung low over the distant mountains. I could see the faint wink of far away lights like pinpricks in the night. Scudding mist hung like a shroud, smearing away the mountain peaks and wrapping the twilight sky in a heavy grey gloom.

  My eyes drifted back over the darkening shapes of my desk: files, paperwork, a dust-covered statue of the Egyptian deity, Horus. I closed my eyes and sat back wearily in the chair.

  Dust to dust…

  Leticia Fall would make it as a journalist – of that I had no doubt. She had the raw talent, and she had the persistence to hunt down a story lead and pursue it with the tenacity of a bloodhound given the scent.

  Today she had phoned five times. Yesterday it had been the same. Even across the weekend she had made repeated calls to the house.

  I had avoided her for two weeks, but I knew I could not avoid her forever.

  It had been exactly forty-one days since I had sent her away – almost six weeks since I had told her I was dying, and watched her walk, crushed and broken, to her car… watched her drive out of my life.

  Not a minute passed that I didn’t think of her; recall the brilliant, disarming flash of her smile, or the innocent beauty of her features, or the quizzical way she tilted her head and watched me as I had paced the room telling my story.

  Not a minute passed where the pain in my chest and the ache in my heart did not threaten to well up tight and strangle me.

  Sometimes doing the right thing can feel so very wrong.

  Would that line be my epitaph?

  I mused darkly. Would that noble sentiment be the words carved into my headstone – the phrase the world would remember me by?

  I muttered the line out loud, and the words jagged in the back of my throat like broken shards of glass.

  I didn’t want to be gallant.

  I wanted to live.

  Nobility, honor… how much had my moral code cost me? How high the price I had paid?

  The phone rang again, the sound jarring in the tomb-like darkness of the office. My hand reached out for it instinctively – then I snatched it away at the last instance as though scalded.

  Abruptly the sound was cut off.

  I waited.

  Mrs. Hortez knocked on the office door then pushed it open a few inches, looking harried and sounding out of breath.

  I sighed. “Was it Leticia Fall again?”

  Mrs. Hortez shook her head. She looked disturbed. “No, it is someone else. He sound important.”

  She gestured with her head that I should pick up the extension. My hand stretched out slowly.

  “This is Jonah Noble.”

  There was the sound of milling voices in the background and above it all a man’s voice, gravelly and somber. I was suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of doom. I clutched at the edge of the desk.

  “Mr. Noble, this is the Hampson Valley Hospital. I’m calling about an employee of yours named Travis Dickson.”

  Tiny – my driver. My best friend.

  I felt an ice-cold fist of dread deep in my chest. I felt a sudden dizzy sense of vertigo, and my eyes lost focus. Everything in the gloomy room became suddenly dark. My hands became hot and clammy. The blood drained away from my face and an icy sweat broke out across my forehead. I leaned forward in the chair with a sudden sense of foreboding and jammed the phone’s receiver hard against my ear.

  “I regret to tell you, Mr. Noble, that Travis was fatally injured in a car accident an hour ago. He was rushed by paramedics to t
he hospital, but passed away soon after on the operating table.”

  A loud roar – a surging, pounding rush of noise seemed to hiss in my ears. The shock of it made me flinch. The silence drew out until it became deafening, and I felt the searing sting of tears well up in my eyes.

  “Can you tell me how it happened?” I choked the words out.

  There was a brief pause. “It appears as though the car that Travis was driving went off the road on a bend,” the man said. “The police are still investigating.”

  “Was anyone else hurt?”

  “No. The authorities still do not know if there were any other vehicles that might have been involved in the incident.”

  I clung tightly to the receiver feeling the blood drain from my fingers and knuckles. I felt my entire world tilt off its axis.

  “Thank you for calling,” I said numbly. “I will come to the hospital.”

  I threw the phone down. It clattered across the desk. The clenching fist in my chest uncoiled like a serpent and then wrapped itself around my heart. The pain of it came suddenly like a plunging blade that ripped at my very soul.

  Tiny – the one man I trusted. Tiny – the one man who had been a loyal friend for so many years, was dead.

  An unbidden image of the man’s big smiling face played across my imagination. It came wavering from beyond the shadows, taking on detail until it was so real, so true that I blinked in disbelief. I tried to hold that picture in my mind, tried to cling to it and keep it alive, but it drifted and then faded away as a dark shutter flickered over my vision.

  Cold, numb despair seeped into my bones. I felt suddenly very old and forsaken, drained and withered. I slumped back in the big chair and stared, desolate, at the ceiling. Tears spilled down my cheeks. I slowly lifted my fingers and touched at my face, vaguely surprised to feel that the skin there was not as brittle and dusty as old parchment.

  I closed my eyes, and my grief swept me away to the only place that was safe… the darkness.