Master Me (40 page)

“I think you need to get on the phone to the Electricity Company straight away, young lady, never mind idle chit-chat,” he growled.

I lowered my mouth obediently over his substantial erection.

“I will see you again next week,” he continued, “and there will be no Final Reminders in your correspondence this time, will there?”

I couldn’t respond with my mouth full of cock, so I concentrated on sealing my lips and moving them up and down his shaft at the speed we had negotiated earlier. His hand clutched at my hair, pulling the roots in time with the rhythm. I felt his tip hit the back of my throat and then there was bitter salt flooding my mouth. Like a good little sub, I swallowed it all up.

“No, Dexter. Goodbye. And thank you.”

I waited for the door to click shut, then I got up—with some relief—and went to listen at the door. The click of his footsteps against the linoleum stairs echoed up through the stairwell and, once it was faint enough to indicate that he’d reached the lobby, I slipped out of the apartment and made my way, on light-soled ballet flats, down after him. I didn’t care what I might find, I was going to learn more about the man who spanked me and ruled my life and my orgasms. Didn’t I have a right to know?

Outside the building, I saw him walking on past the shops to the corner of the street where the tube station was located. Luckily, I lived close enough to the centre of the city to ensure a safe barrier of other people between us, although I was anxious about losing sight of him. His height was good, his head an effortless few inches above most of the throng, so I followed it like a beacon, admiring the close cut hair at the nape of his neck, turning into the tube station and preparing to get my travelcard from my handbag but…he wasn’t in the station. He’d walked past, and I was almost too late to catch him, staring around wildly until I noticed him on a crossing halfway up the next block.

Outside the station, a religious zealot stood handing out leaflets about how we were all doomed, but I waved him away, zigzagging through traffic until I had Dexter in my sights again. He was casually looking at the window display in the music shop—oh, was he a musician? He crouched a little, peering at a score, or a book of some kind, but he didn’t go in. Instead he headed away from the busy streets, out towards the quieter part of town. I wondered, with a shock of excitement, if he was going home, and followed him for half a mile more before he disappeared into a door set alongside a takeaway. Did he really live above a grotty fried chicken shop? I was somehow disappointed, but when I got closer, I noticed golden lettering on the door and realised, deflatingly, that this was simply the main office of the Life Coach operation. He’d returned to work. No clues to be had.

Unless…oh, I knew it was bad. One shouldn’t stalk people, but I couldn’t bear the idea of slinking back home, no wiser than I was when I was determined to pursue Dexter to a place of knowledge and enlightenment. Across the road stood a cafe, an old-fashioned affair that served tea and scones and suchlike, and I liked the idea of spending some time in a place that wasn’t a corporate coffee chain. So I bought a newspaper from the stand in the street and settled myself into the window seat for an hour of undercover observation. After all, it was nearly five o’clock in the afternoon—it was very likely that he’d only gone to the office to collect something, or neaten up some paperwork, or pass on a message before heading home.

I felt like a private detective, sitting behind my newspaper drinking two large mugs of tea—not green—in succession and succumbing to the temptation of home-baked scones with jam and clotted cream—“from Devon” apparently—though I did manage to get most of the jam on my fingers, then the paper, which made for a sticky experience.

By half past five, the volume of tea consumed in a short space of time was having the obvious consequences for my bladder, but I didn’t feel I could leave my seat. If I went to the loo, he would surely emerge at that very moment and I would lose him. But if I didn’t go to the loo…well, my uncomfortable shifting demeanour, even more uncomfortable thanks to that damn paddle, was a dire warning of how this scenario might end. I couldn’t relieve myself all over that poor woman’s lovely rustic-style chairs with the embroidered cushion covers, could I? I nipped to the bathroom, mindful of the owner’s very loud and obvious cashing-up and tidying-away manoeuvres. She wanted to close anyway. I would have to give up.

When I returned, the cups and plates were absent from my table, but the newspaper was still there. And so was Dexter.

I stopped dead in the middle of the cafe.

“Oh. Hello.”

“If you want a drink, I’m shutting up now,” interrupted the owner. “But there’s a Costa down the road. Stays open ‘til eight.”

“Thank you,” said Dexter, aiming a courteous smile at the woman, which he switched off when his attention returned to me. “Shall we?”

Outside on the pavement, I was at a loss for words. When I found some, they were, “It’s not illegal to have tea and scones in a cafe, is it?”

“Not illegal, but it’s not considered polite to spy on people, is it, Miss
Marple
?”

“What? I wasn’t…”

He stopped walking—God knows where we were going, but he’d been leading me up towards the canal—and shook his head at me.

“So much for honesty,” he said.

He picked up the pace again so I had to trot along behind him, all the way down to the canal, where he sat down on a bench and watched a group of teenage boys larking about with fishing rods, his face disconsolate behind the spectacles.

“Okay,” I said, sitting down—
wince
—beside him. “I followed you to the office. Is it so bad that I want to know more about you? You never answer any questions and I…like you. I’m interested in you.”

“These relationships can’t get personal,” he muttered.

“Why not? If you don’t fancy me, that’s fair enough but…”

“It’s not that,” he said, rather savagely, then, noting the fear in my eyes, repeated it more gently. “It’s not that.”

“What is it then? You don’t want to be unprofessional? You’re married?”

“No. I don’t have to tell you, so I’m not going to. And perhaps it’s best you find another life coach. I’m not sure this is working out.”

“Dexter!”

“I wish you well,” he mumbled, then he got up abruptly and stalked swiftly off down the towpath, leaving me to call after him and stare in dismay, while the teenage boys whistled and catcalled.

I was not leaving it there. I couldn’t leave it there.

The next day I called the office, but I got an answerphone the first six times, and a flustered-sounding woman the seventh. She told me that Dexter was taking a few day’s leave—if I wanted to book him, I had to leave details. There was no point doing that, so I apologised and told her it was personal and, as a last desperate gambit, asked her for his mobile number or email. Of course, she didn’t give it.

The apartment fell into dusty disarray, the gym visits went by the board. I reverted to a diet of convenience food and alcohol while my deadlines danced out of sync and merged in my head. Nothing was real to me but Dexter, and his whereabouts, and his problem with me. I walked the streets all day, just looking for a glimpse of him that never came. I thought and thought and thought back to everything he’d ever said, everything I’d ever seen, in a mammoth effort to comb my brain for clues. On the fourth day, I remembered seeing him with a Sainsburys bag. There wasn’t a Sainsburys near here, but there was one, five miles away, out by the new housing estates. Perhaps he shopped there. Perhaps…but my thoughts were barely seconds old before I had moved to the door, grabbed my handbag and made a mental map of how best to get there.

It was one of those super-hyper-mega-markets, this Sainsburys, with all kinds of extraneous services like a dry cleaners and a travel agent. There were many entrances, but only one exit, which was heartening—I supposed the store detectives wouldn’t like it any other way.
Listen to me, thinking like a detective!
I’d obviously been bitten by the private eye bug.

I spent the afternoon moving from the magazine rack to the photo booth to the change machine, occasionally risking the open space by the trolley park when I thought I was about to be challenged by a bemused employee. Streams of shoppers passed me and I managed to amuse myself, at least for the first hour, by studying human nature as seen in the supermarket—bored children, harassed mothers, chattering old ladies, truanting teens swearing at the store detectives for not having ID when they tried to buy beer. After an hour, though, the repetition of it all started to wear me down. What was I doing here? What would I do if I saw Dexter anyway? Rush up and gush, “Oh, fancy seeing you here!” I think not.

But suddenly I was forced to put my plans into focus. There, at the self-checkout, buying a newspaper and a box of green tea bags, was an unmistakable tall figure, all in black, glasses glinting under the unforgiving glare of the strip lights. My fingers lost their nerves, and the magazine story I’d been pretending to flick through—‘I gave birth on a mountainside with a broken pelvis’—blurred before my eyes. Just as well I didn’t want to read it. The magazine fell to the floor, and I left it there, scurrying off to the shelter of the photo booth, praying that Dexter had no plans to renew his passport today.

I saw his feet, shiny polished black brogues, pass by and I gave him half a minute before I darted out from behind the curtain and followed his helpfully high-set head through the crowds on the edge of the carpark, out of the pedestrian exit and into the newly built maze of the housing estate.

The place didn’t seem very Dexterous, I thought, flitting after him through identikit streets and squares of faux-Georgian houses and flats. I had thought he would live in one of those warehouse conversions in the East End, or maybe a big glassy tower by the river. This all seemed very suburban and drab, despite the cheery terracotta-and-cream exterior paintwork and the sloping roofs over the front doors and the effortful landscaping.

Dexter rounded a corner and let himself into a tall, narrow building that seemed to be split into about six flats. They didn’t look very large—I guessed he lived alone. I saw him, through smoked glass, unlocking a ground floor door. The ground floor was good. I could lurk around the windows, under the cover of the gathering dusk, maybe take a peek inside, though they all seemed to have blinds drawn against them.

I scurried across a patch of young grass and sat down beneath one of the windows that faced into the square. I thought it was a kitchen window, for no better reason than its proximity to a large waste pipe, which could have meant nothing. I waited for a light to illuminate some of the grass, but when it did, it was at the side of the house and I had to creep round. There was a tiny crack between the window frame and the blind—if I was very, very careful, I could just fit my eye in that space and take a look…yes. He wasn’t in the room. It looked like a bedroom. I could see fitted wardrobe doors and a small section of neatly tucked dark bed linen. There might have been a paisley pattern on the duvet cover, but it was hard to tell because the bulb wasn’t very strong, sixty watt at most, and…

I screamed.

A pair of hands caught me around the waist and I was swivelled round to face the middle button of Dexter’s shirt—black, for a change—before daring to lift my eyes to what I presumed would be a face of fury.

“Lara,” he hissed. “What is going on?”

Without waiting for a reply, he dragged me through the open door of the block and then into his flat. Even though I was shaking and scared and fighting a massive urge to kick myself to death, I noticed that his flat was very, very tidy and clean, shortly before I was flung onto a pale grey leather sofa and encouraged to explain myself.

“I followed you,” I managed to say, my voice all flutey and shrill.

“Why?”

“Because I like you…I…can’t let you…I miss you.”

“It’s only been four days.”

“You don’t want to see me again and I’m…” I looked away, over to a computer desk and a pot plant. “Gutted.”

Dexter wouldn’t sit down. I wished he would. The way he loomed, stiff-backed and straight-necked, was so very unnerving.

“You’ll have to go,” he said, though it seemed to take him a long time to formulate the sentence—grounds for hope?

“I don’t want to go.”

“Look, there are websites that can hook you up with other people who like spanking…”

“I don’t want other people. I want you.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Don’t tell me what I want!” I bawled, suddenly demented with anger. “I might be rubbish at making lists but I know when I’ve got the hots for someone!”

He removed his spectacles, as if the force of my crazed shouting had blown them off his face, and stared. If I burst into tears, I thought, would that make things worse? Probably. Too late now, though.

“Oh God. Emotion,” he muttered, but then the sofa tilted me sideways, into him, as he sat down beside me and placed an awkward arm around my shoulder. “Lara, shhh. Control yourself.”

“I don’t want to control myself! I want you to control me!”

“Listen!” he ordered, moving my chin in his direction with such strong, sure fingers that my leaky eyes couldn’t escape him. “I can’t give you a reason, but it’s a really bad idea…”

There was a buzz from the intercom and Dexter sighed and went over to answer it. I died a thousand deaths.
I bet it’s his girlfriend! Oh my life! How am I going to endure this?

Instead, over the crackle, I heard a gruff male voice.

“Mr Reilly?”

“Yes, I’m here, I’m fine. It’s no problem, you don’t have to come in.”

“We do have to. Come on. We had reports of a female trying to look into your windows. We have to check it out.”

With a mighty sigh, Dexter pushed the button and waited, flat against the wall, staring at me with what might be animosity. Whatever it was, it had certainly set my stomach off into a riot of cramps.

Two police officers entered the room, looking around for Dexter, then, on locating him, looking me up and down.
Oh my God, I’m a suspect
!