by Jason Luke
After the markets closed, Joshua spent two more hours at his desk, monitoring the overseas currencies. Throughout the day, the wind and rain had been relentless, rattling through the trees and howling across the eaves. The lawn was scattered with the debris of leaves and small fallen branches. Joshua flicked on a desk lamp and turned in his chair for a bottle of scotch.
He started drinking at 6 pm – not with any desire to get drunk, but rather with the need to anesthetize himself against his demons that he knew would come lurking to fill the empty void now that he had nothing to occupy his mind. He drank steadily, idly staring out through the window as the storm crashed and roared across the sky, his mind starting to wander while he fought to keep it on course by calculating a dip in commodity prices and how it might reverberate across the market. Through the big windows the night was a pearlescent mist; an impressionist painting of soft hazy edges and blurred halos around the street lights.
Time crept by and gradually Joshua began to sink wearily deeper into the seat. The level of scotch in his glass ebbed and flowed like the tide with each refill. His head began to loll, and his eyes grew heavy.
Then there was a horrendous sound of splintering wood followed by an almighty crash of noise that jerked him wide awake. He sat bolt upright, the fatigue gone in a second. Instinct told him that the sound had come from somewhere near the front of the house. He snatched a glance at his wristwatch; it was after 9 pm.
Joshua strode purposefully down the hall, peering through undraped windows throughout the house as he passed. He could see a splintered tree-trunk on the opposite side of the road. He got to the foyer and stared out through the curtains. A large tree had been blown over by the storm, tearing up grass and roots and collapsing the trunk across a neighbor’s lawn. There were houselights on all along the street; enough that he could see there had been no damage to any homes or cars, although the concrete sidewalk had been ruptured as if heaved up by the energy of a small earthquake.
Joshua went to the front door and pulled it open. The wind was coming in gusts, spraying rain in misted swirling curtains. Joshua leaned out into the driving rain and the dark storm-filled night…
…and froze in appalled shock.
Kneeling on his doorstep, clad in nothing but a pink bra and lace panties, was Gabriele.
She was drenched, her long hair hanging in thick damp ropes down her shoulders, her makeup smudged and washed down her cheeks. She was shivering with the chilling cold, her eyes lifted to the door, looking as small and frail as a drowned kitten.
“What the fuck?” Joshua gasped the profanity; such was the measure of his shock.
Gabriele looked up at him with her bottom lip trembling.
“What are you doing?” Joshua rasped.
“I’m waiting for my Master.”
“Didn’t you get my message?”
“Yes,” Gabriele gave a petulant nod of her head, and then was gripped by a sudden spasm of shivers. “I ignored it.”
Joshua pressed his lips into a grim bloodless line. For an unholy moment he felt his rage simmer – and then just as quickly the emotion dissolved into impotent frustration. “You’re a stupid bloody fool!” He took her by the arm and hauled Gabriele to her feet. She was small and slender against him. He wrapped his arm around her, and she pressed herself against the warmth of him like he was shelter from the storm. “Get inside the house,” Joshua fumed.
In the warmth of the foyer, Joshua left Gabriele dripping on the floor and dashed down the hallway. He came back clutching two fluffy white towels. He tossed the first one to Gabriele, and she wrapped herself in it like it was a blanket. With the second towel, Joshua began to rub her dry, abrading her skin with coarse rough strokes to get her blood circulating and scrub heat into her cold flesh.
“How long have you been outside my door?” Joshua growled.
“Since before 8 pm,” Gabriele said reasonably.
Joshua fixed her with a withering glare. “Don’t you understand simple English when you hear it?” he didn’t know how to feel. On the surface he was stunned that Gabriele would defy him in such a selfless submissive way, but on a deeper level, he felt buoyed by her stubborn defiance. He had asked her silently once before to fight for her right to be trained. Tonight she had displayed more fight than Joshua had ever imagined.
“I made myself perfectly clear in the message I left on your phone, Gabriele. I can’t train you any more. Didn’t you get the message?”
Gabriele’s skin turned rosy red as the shivering cold was chased away by the towels. She unclasped her bra and shrugged it off, then stepped out of the wet panties and left the garments at her feet. Naked, she wrapped one of the thick towels under her armpits as if she had just emerged from a bathroom.
“I do understand simple English,” Gabriele’s tone carried an edge of belligerence. “But the man’s voice I heard on the message didn’t sound like the voice of my Master. It sounded like someone else entirely. In fact, it sounded like a man who was scared. I knew that couldn’t have been you because you’re my Master. You own my mind and body. So I ignored the message.”
Joshua’s face darkened again. He felt a renewed flush of temper burn on his cheeks. “You think I sounded scared?” the tone in his voice rang with ominous foreboding.
Gabriele seemed undaunted. “Frightened, actually,” she taunted.
Joshua laughed but it was a bitter, chilling sound. He felt affronted and it was an emotion he had never experienced before. The damned woman was challenging him, just as he had cajoled and challenged her every night he had trained her.
“You think I’m frightened of you, Gabriele?”
“No, not me,” she held his gaze although she felt her momentary bravado beginning to slip. Joshua was intimidating. She knew she couldn’t keep up the charade much longer. At any moment she was going to crumble into a mess of trembling tears. “I think you’re afraid of us. Of what’s happening between us. The connection… it frightens you.”
“Bullshit!” Joshua snarled, but the declaration lacked the teeth of any conviction. Gabriele was staring fixedly into his eyes as if trying to see beneath the carefully curated shell he shielded his heart beneath, and he couldn’t face the scrutiny.
He seized her by the elbow and escorted her up the stairs, his heavy feet stomping on every step to display his anger. Gabriele padded softly beside him like a scolded child about to be punished. When they reached the bedroom, instead of heading to the training room, Joshua escorted her to another door and turned her so she was leaning against the wall. He hung over her, like an avalanche of raw masculine power, his face inscrutable but his eyes flecked with fire. Gabriele felt small and quailing in his shadow… yet somehow thrilled by her own vulnerability. She was naked beneath the towel. Joshua had only to reach out and take her, for she would have given herself willingly.
“Take a shower,” Joshua said through clenched teeth. The pulse in the line of his jaw throbbed beneath the flesh like a ticking bomb to his temper. “You’ll be lucky if you don’t catch pneumonia after the stunt you just pulled.”
He pushed open the door, and Gabriele stepped into a luxurious bathroom that was wall-to-wall white tiles. There was a large shower recess and a deep bathtub. One entire wall of the room was covered in mirrors and there were more towels on a heated rack near the shower. “Take your time,” Joshua moderated his voice just a little, leaning just inside the doorway. “And keep the water as hot as you can stand it.”
Gabriele dropped the towel and paused for a moment, standing with indolent grace to remind Joshua of just how desirable and perfect her figure was. She caught his hot eyes upon her in the reflection of the mirror. He had his arms folded across his chest, attempting to look unmoved and still angry – but Gabriele knew better. She had seen the telltale look of lust in Joshua’s eyes before. She saw it again and stepped under a spray of hissing water, satisfied.
The room filled with tendrils of swirling steam, and Gabriele gave herself over to the l
uxury of the hot cascades of water. The heat chased away the last vestiges of chill that had burrowed into the marrow of her bones, and she emerged several minutes later with her skin bright red with new vigor.
She was alone.
Joshua was not in the doorway.
Gabriele toweled herself dry and combed her fingers through her hair in front of the dewed mirrors. Then suddenly she knew that he was back in the room with her before she saw him. She could smell the distinctive scent of his aftershave. Joshua seemed to emerge from the writhing steam like an apparition. He was holding a white dressing gown. He came up behind Gabriele, and she felt him press himself against the toned muscles of her bottom. Every nerve in Gabriele’s body drew tight. She sensed his cock was hard. Joshua stared at her through the reflections. Gabriele clutched the edge of the basin and moved her body with small shuffles until her legs were spread. Then she leaned forward a little, pressing her face closer to the mirror and arching her back in a slow voluptuous movement that was an unmistakably clear invitation to Joshua. He need only unzip his pants and she was there – wet and willing and available.
Joshua’s expression stayed fixed. He set the gown on the long vanity.
“Put this on,” he said.
Gabriele pursed her lips in secret disappointment. She reached for the dressing gown and turned. Joshua took a step back. Gabriele let the gown fall to the tiled bathroom floor and dropped to her knees, instinctively adopting the submissive pose Joshua had taught her with her hands clasped behind her back and her mouth wide open. Joshua’s cock, straining within the confines of his pants, was just an inch away from her lips. She couldn’t be any more blatant.
Joshua felt his body clench almost painfully with desire. Gabriele’s perfection was impossible to ignore. The steam swirled around them like a veil to hide their intimacy.
“Stand up and cover yourself,” Joshua’s voice was hoarse and thick with the effort. “I told you there would be no training tonight – no more training ever, Gabriele. You’re not my submissive.”
Gabriele looked up into Joshua’s stern face from where she was kneeling and at last the audacity that had carried her this far deserted her. She felt tears spill down her cheeks. Her eyes glistened, but she stayed kneeling.
“You have to continue training me,” she muttered.
“No,” Joshua shook his head. “I don’t. I told you, Gabriele. Your training is over.”
Gabriele cuffed at her tears. She felt her breath come in sobs. A sense of total devastation and despair began to overwhelm her. Her shoulders slumped.
“But I need your help to learn. I’m not yet trained. I’m not ready. I know I’m not. You have to finish what we started.”
“You don’t have to learn!” Joshua hissed cruelly, and then regretted his tone almost immediately. His words were cruel enough. “Your ex-boyfriend has been fucking other women for months behind your back, Gabriele. This whole time he has been lying and cheating on you. He’s not going to come back to you, so this whole exercise in learning to be submissive in order to win him back is now pointless. He’s not coming back. You don’t need to learn submission any more. This was all for him, remember? Well now it’s irrelevant.”
“No,” Gabriele shook her head vehemently. “It’s not irrelevant. Now it matters more than it ever has, because now I know Randall was lying to me and cheating on me, I have no one, Joshua. I’m alone – and it’s the thing I fear more than anything else. I’m alone! Now my best chance to find someone who will want me is to learn how to be a good submissive. If I can’t do that, I’m forever lost… and I don’t want to attract a Master and then disappoint him because I can’t sexually satisfy his every need.”
Joshua was shaking his head with rising frustration. He stared into Gabriele’s weeping eyes with incredulity.
“You don’t need to be submissive to attract a man. Hell, you don’t even need a man in your life, Gabriele. Being alone is not something to fear. For a lot of people it’s a choice.”
“Not for me,” Gabriele was adamant. “I want to be a submissive. The need for it aches in my heart. It’s the fragment I have been searching for that makes me feel complete. But it’s only any good if I can serve, Joshua. I need a Master, and you need to finish my training to make me worthy enough for a man to want to own… because that’s what I want. That’s how I want to feel. I want to feel owned and cherished and used… and complete.”
“You’re talking crazy.”
Gabriele shook her head. Through the mist of her tears her eyes flashed with real passion. “No,” she sniffed back the urge to cry again. “Not to me. It’s not crazy. It’s who I am. It’s what I feel.”
Joshua drew a deep breath. He couldn’t overcome Gabriele’s fiercely focused emotions with logic. He scraped his fingers through his hair and realized with a small shock, that his fingers were trembling.
“You’re responsible, Joshua,” Gabriele went on, hitting Joshua in his most tender, vulnerable place; his conscience and his sense of moral obligation. “You’re the one who insisted I disconnect my own feelings from my submissive self. You’re the one who demanded that I immerse myself in the lifestyle. You’re the one who opened the door on this lifestyle and let me get a taste of it,” she battered him with her sincerely. “Well I have. I did everything you asked of me. I overcame every obstacle. You showed me this life and now I know it’s where I belong. I love feeling this way. I love the thought of being owned, prized by a man. I understand myself now better than I ever have before. I am a submissive. That is who I am. It’s how I identify. And I’m determined to be good at it. It’s the only thing I want and the only chance I have. You can’t take that opportunity away from me. You can’t!”
Joshua felt punctured by the barbs of Gabriele’s accusations and her appeal. He didn’t know how to react. Anger and frustration overcame reason. He hauled her roughly to her feet, his fingers digging deep into the flesh of her arms like claws. He pulled her towards him so their faces were just inches apart.
“I can’t train you any more,” Joshua snapped in a thick shaken voice. “I can’t!”
Gabriele’s features collapsed in tortured desolation and a flood of fresh tears. The forlorn despair in her eyes cut and slashed at Joshua’s resolve.
“But you’re my only hope,” Gabriele whispered. “Please, Joshua. I beg you – don’t abandon me.”
Joshua felt trapped; suffocated. He pushed Gabriele from him and reeled away. “I told you last night why this can’t continue,” Joshua’s voice was etched with torment and pain. “I told you.”
“You told me you were starting to care too much for me,” Gabriele shot back, not understanding. She saw something move in Joshua’s eyes, and then a change in the set of his mouth that might have signaled guilt or doubt. But when he replied, his voice retained all its anger and vehemence.
“Yes! That’s why I sent you away, Gabriele. That’s why this has to end. Before it gets…”
“Before what?” Gabriele’s expression was creased with confusion. “Before you fall in love with me?”
Joshua stared at her and the silence between them was deafening. Behind his eyes, Joshua’s mind was twisted in dark torment. Gabriele was gazing at him, holding her breath.
Joshua looked down at his hands.
“Yes,” Joshua said. “It has to end before I begin to fall in love with you.”
The tension seemed to seep slowly from Gabriele now Joshua had been driven to confess his fear. She let out a shuddering gasp of breath and went to him, naked. “Why is that so wrong?” she reached for Joshua’s hands.
He snatched them away as if her touch were fire. “Because my heart’s not mine to give!”
Gabriele flinched in shock, frowning. Her mouth hung slack. Her gaze flicked away uncertainly, then came slowly back to Joshua.
“I don’t understand…” she said carefully, beseeching Joshua to open up to her. “Is it because of your code of honor, Joshua? Is that what this is about? You won’t
permit yourself to fall in love with a student, and for that reason I’m being punished?”
Joshua was slowly shaking his head in mute denial. Gabriele took another step towards him, steeling herself with a conscious act of courage.
“You don’t even know what real love is, Gabriele,” there was contempt in Joshua’s voice, trying to push her away with the bitter derision woven into his words. “You think it’s the fantasy you have been brainwashed to believe in by books and television… but real love and real life isn’t filled with romantic gestures, hearts and flowers. Real love is raw. It hurts sometimes. It tests you. It challenges you. Sometimes it damned well defies you. It’s like mist; you can never hold it closely enough to know it will last.”
“Are you speaking from experience?” Gabriele narrowed her eyes. Her question could have been a challenge. It could have been an offer to listen.
Joshua shook his head dismissively, but Gabriele would not be denied.
“You think I don’t know what it is to love someone and be hurt by them?” her voice was incredulous. “After everything you know I have been through?” She started shaking her head as though she no longer recognized Joshua. “Maybe what I experienced with Randall wasn’t love by your definition. But it was real to me, Joshua. And it fucking hurt when he walked out on me. And it hurt even more when you told me that he was cheating on me. So don’t dismiss what I felt as being superficial just because I’m younger than you.” She was breathing deeply; her eyes slanted into bright little arrowheads of anger. “And I know this,” she thrust a finger at him. “What we shared last night… the kiss… that felt real to me too, Joshua. Real enough for me to want more.”
“This isn’t about you!” Joshua resisted, raising his voice. “This is about me, Gabriele. It’s my decision to end our training. It was my mistake that caused this whole fiasco. When I kissed you, I let my emotions show. I let what was secretly building within me to reveal itself in that moment. I know I can’t take that back… but I can end your training. I can send you away. I can get you out of my life.”
