Jonah Noble - Anticipation Is Everything, Page 3

  I realized this was her solution… and I lay awake, staring at the ceiling, my thoughts fraught and jittering, wondering if it was the answer.

  * * *

  The conversation the next morning at breakfast was stilted and desultory. Leticia was withdrawn, deep in thought so that even the most banal questions seemed to require an enormous effort for her attention. I sat and ate in silence, watching her across the table. There was an edge of embarrassed nervousness in the way she held herself, and in the darting flick of her eyes when she glanced at me.

  Finally I pushed my chair back and stood. Outside the morning was bright and sunny, the sky a shattering shade of blue above the ragged peaks of the distant hills. Long shadows spilled into the kitchen from the big bay window and I went towards the glass doors that opened into the garden.

  “Come with me,” I told Leticia.

  She followed without question, her body seeming to move as if hypnotized.

  The gardens were a manicured oasis, dotted with lush green trees that sprinkled shade across the lawns. Flower beds followed a cobblestoned path that meandered through the grounds, connecting the main house to the swimming pool and beyond – a hundred yards further from the house – a small bungalow that had once been a guesthouse.

  Leticia followed me obediently. It was a beautiful clear day and already the approaching summer could be felt in the flare of the sun’s light. We reached the bungalow and I stood at the front door, waiting for Leticia.

  “This is a lot like my father’s home,” I explained. “The house is not as grand, but there are elements of the layout that bring back memories,” I said. “It was one of the reasons I bought this property.”

  After the orchestrated ‘death’ of Jonah Noble and the rise of Jason Luke, author, Leticia and I had relocated north, further away from the city. It was impossible for us to keep the old home, and I had given the property to Mrs. Hortez and her family. This home was one I had owned for many years. It was secluded, and isolated – yet still within a few hours drive of the nearest major city. It had also given Leticia the opportunity to make a home for us – for her to decorate without trying to cover over the ghosts and the memories of my earlier life.

  Now I was going to re-ignite one of those memories. Deliberately.

  I pushed open the front door to the bungalow and stood on the gloomy threshold for a long moment. The air was stale, the windows all shuttered so that it took several seconds for our eyes to adjust. We were staring at a small, neat living room area. On the far side of the room was a breakfast bar that divided the space into an adjoining kitchen. Leticia followed me inside and I went to one of the windows and drew back the heavy drapes. Dust motes hung thick in the air. Leticia wrinkled her nose.

  “Why did you bring me here?” she asked softly.

  I said nothing. I took her hand and led her down the short passageway to a bedroom and an adjoining bathroom.

  “Remember when we first moved here? We talked about cleaning this bungalow up for guests.”

  Leticia nodded dully.

  “But we never have any guests,” I said with an ironic smile. “Because we’re not the kind of people to have close friends – not the kind of people who enjoy socializing.”

  Again Leticia nodded. It was true. In all the time we had been living here, not a single visitor had come to the home.

  “So I was thinking about this place – what to do with it… and then it occurred to me last night that it reminds me a great deal of the guest home on my father’s property… the place where I first spied on Claire Moreland all those years ago. I told you about her when you first interviewed me.”

  “Yes,” Leticia said with sudden inflection in her voice. It was as if a spark had been ignited.

  I said no more. I led Leticia into the small bathroom. “Around about there,” I pointed to a place on the wall above a shelf. “Would have been the spot I made my spy hole.” I shrugged. “The layout is not the same – there are differences in the design of these rooms… but I think you get the point.”

  Leticia was frowning. “I don’t, actually,” she said. There was a tiny furrow on her brow because her imagination could not make the leap to the destination my thoughts had already arrived at.

  “I was thinking this bungalow would make the perfect place to train a new submissive,” I spelled it out. “She would stay here, away from the main house, and I would train her how to submit to a Master. She would learn to pleasure me, and she would be pleasured when deserving of reward. She would learn submission and discipline… and you would be able to watch it all.”

  It was out in the open now – the subject had been broached in the cold light of day and now it had to be discussed and dealt with. Leticia’s eyes became wide and fathomless for a moment, and then she drifted into the bedroom and dropped heavily onto the edge of the bed, her hands clasped between her thighs, her head hanging so that her hair obscured the expression on her face. I stood in the doorway with my arms folded.

  “Jonah,” Leticia looked up at me with a fraught expression on her face. “I… I just don’t know…” she began, biting on each word. “This whole idea of me watching you with another woman, training someone to submit and surrender to you… it might end up being a crown of thorns, disguised as a garland of roses.”

  I blinked. Leticia’s eloquent analogy startled me. I nodded my head slowly, conceding the truth of it.

  “Yes,” I said. “From a practical point of view I see no real problems, but from an emotional point of view… well that is only something you can answer.”

  Leticia lapsed into long silence. She had her bottom lip trapped between her teeth.

  “It might be too much,” she said at last. She glanced up at me like she was trying to search for the answers by reading my expression. “Fantasy is one thing… now we’re talking about the very real possibility of making this a reality.”

  “We are,” I said. “At last. I wished we had had this conversation sooner. I wished you had talked to me rather than contemplating breaking us apart.”

  “But it might still come to that!” Leticia’s voice filled with alarm and warning and fear. She shook her head. Her face was very pale, her eyes dark and impossible to read. “If we do this – if we find another woman for you to train in sex and submission – it might be more than I can stand.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Leticia stared. “Doesn’t that scare you?”

  “Yes,” I said, and I meant it. “It terrifies me, Leticia. But there is truth in what you said last night. I do feel restless. I do miss the lifestyle, and we are different people with different sexual interests. If we can make this work successfully, it will be the solution to our particular relationship’s needs. If we can’t make it work – if you can’t separate the physical from the emotional – what have we lost that you weren’t contemplating destroying anyhow?”

  Again, Leticia lapsed into thoughtful silence. I watched her expression change and then change again as she wrestled with the consequences of what we were contemplating.

  “What if you fall in love with the woman you are training?”

  I actually laughed. Leticia looked offended, as though I was dismissing the question without giving it consideration.

  “Leticia, you are the only woman I have loved – the only woman I will ever love. I lived with Caroline for three years, trained her, shared a house… but I never fell in love with her. Never. I have a lot of experience at being dispassionate and disconnected. Training a woman to submit is a challenge for me, and a mental and emotional experience for them. For me it’s a matter of discipline and control – and they are things I excel at. Love doesn’t factor into the equation.”

  Leticia was watching me carefully, listening to my voice and searching my eyes. “We would need to establish some ground rules,” she said softly.

  “Yes.”

  “Lots of rules.”

  I inclined my head. “What did you have in mind?”

 
“I… I’m not sure…”

  I frowned. “I don’t believe you,” I said flatly. “I don’t believe you have been considering an idea such as this for some time, and still not thought about guidelines.”

  Leticia shrugged and a wan smile slipped off the corner of her mouth. “Maybe I have one or two ideas…”

  I waited. Said nothing. Leticia suddenly seemed to become aware of the bed she was sitting on, as though the realization that one day soon I might be on this bed with another woman. She stood up and brushed dust from her hands.

  “You have to promise you won’t fall in love,” Leticia waggled a finger at me like a menacing threat.

  “I promise,” I clamped my hand over my heart. “And I think you should find the woman. I think it should be someone you select, not me.”

  “Find a woman?” Leticia arched an eyebrow and propped her hands on her hips. “Jonah I don’t need to find a woman, I simply need to choose one.”

  I frowned again. “Meaning?”

  “Meaning Jason Luke gets a hundred emails a week from women wanting to learn submission from you – pleading for you to train them. They’ve all read the book – and they all want you to train them.”

  I blinked. “I get emails?”

  Leticia shook her head in a kind of wonder. “Yes,” she said. “I have a folder of women who have contacted you.”

  I narrowed my eyes a little. It was another measure of how long Leticia had been contemplating this idea.

  I shrugged. “Okay, so select a woman,” I said. “It doesn’t matter to me who you choose physically, but I will need to interview them and make sure they are emotionally and mentally suitable. I need to know they are truly submissive in nature, and not just caught up in the BDSM phenomenon because it’s popular.”

  Leticia nodded. “What else?”

  “You tell me.”

  “A time limit,” Leticia offered. “A kind of safeguard. Long enough for you to begin working with the woman, but with a definite finish time so that we can re-group and decide whether the whole thing is working… or whether it is tearing us apart,” Leticia pursed her lips and frowned. “A week maybe.”

  I nodded again. “Would she live here for that time, in the bungalow?”

  Leticia shrugged. “I guess it depends on where she is traveling from. I think I would rather we book a hotel room for her – at least to begin with.”

  “Where? The nearest city is three hours away?”

  “Groves Crossing,” Leticia said. The Crossing was a little tourist town about thirty minutes away. I nodded.

  “You’re hedging your bets,” I observed without rancor.

  “Yes,” Leticia admitted. “Of course I am, Jonah. I want to try this, but I also want to be able to restrict the impact if it’s simply too much for me to deal with. I still can’t quite get a grasp on how I am going to feel watching you having sex with another woman and training her.”

  I was nodding my head again. My previous experiences had always been devoid of the weight of emotions such as love. They had been encounters for physical pleasure.

  “There’s one more thing…” Leticia said slowly, and I could tell by the tone of her voice that what she was about to say would be significant. “I don’t want you to orgasm with these women. I want you to train them, teach them, make them submit and engage in the sex you need to do that… but I don’t want you to orgasm.”

  I flinched, replayed Leticia’s words and understanding the point she was making. “You want each training session to be like an extended foreplay – for us?”

  “Yes!” Leticia said. “I want you to keep that one special thing for me, Jonah.”

  I nodded slowly. “Do you want the woman to know that you will be watching – peeping?”

  Leticia shook her head. “I don’t want any secrets,” Leticia said gravely. “The woman needs to know that I will be in the room while she is being trained. I don’t want to spy… I want to spectate.”

  * * *

  Two days later Leticia came to my office and knocked discreetly on the door. It wasn’t an ordinary door, because this wasn’t my old office. Gone were all the familiar furnishings and the dark sense of despair that had seemed to seep from the walls that surrounded me, and in its place was a long, almost unfurnished room that held merely my desk and a chair.

  The door had been built by a local carpenter to resemble something that might have barricaded a dungeon. Made of heavy timber and aged to look ancient, it had an authentic sense of menace and formidability.

  I liked it.

  “Come in,” I said. I shut down the computer and turned in the chair. Leticia was standing on the threshold wearing tight blue jeans and a light sweater. She looked very beautiful – all the more so because she wasn’t trying to. She had a pair of reading glasses perched on the end of her nose so that she looked like every schoolboy’s dream of a naughty librarian. She snatched them off and flashed me an unfathomable smile that could have meant anything.

  “I’ve narrowed the search down to three,” she said. There was a sheath of papers in her hand, and she waved them like a fan.

  “Three what?” I steepled my fingers together and took note of the lovely shape of her figure – the hourglass swell of her hips and the narrowness of her waist. In the two years we had been together she had become even more beautiful in my eyes – a smart and sexy young woman with the probing curiosity of a potentially great journalist.

  “Three women,” Leticia explained. She came towards me and laid the pages she carried out on the desk like a winning poker hand. She pointed at the top page. It was a lengthy email and beneath it was a series of reasonable quality photos.

  I scanned the papers quickly then directed all my attention to Leticia. “Women you feel would be suitable as submissives?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Leticia said. “The woman on top is the one I like most.”

  I looked back down at the pages with new interest. “Why?”

  Leticia shrugged. “I read the letter she sent you and between the fangirl lines, she seems to have a genuine interest in learning the art of submission. It’s there, but it’s not there, Jonah,” Leticia said as though compelling me to understand her feminine intuition. “It’s a sense I get from what she wrote – and it’s backed up by the comments she makes on social media.”

  I looked up into Leticia’s face. “You’ve been investigating these women?”

  She shrugged dismissively as though the answer was obvious… or the question was ridiculous.

  “Of course,” she said. “I’ve even spoken to them.”

  That surprised me. “On what pretense?”

  “I thanked them for their messages of support on behalf of Jason Luke, and then edged into a conversation. This lady…” Leticia took the handful of pages from me and rifled through them. She held up a photo of a woman who looked to be in her mid-twenties. She had a slim figure and long chestnut colored hair that hung down across her shoulders. “This lady and I talked for over an hour. That’s how I know she is the most suitable. It was in her voice, in her words…”

  “Is she single?”

  “Yes, of course,” Leticia frowned. “Otherwise I would not have chosen her.”

  “Has she been single for long?”

  “Seven months. She separated from her boyfriend when she suddenly realized she wanted more from the relationship.”

  “More?”

  “Self discovery,” Leticia said patiently. “She’s on a journey, Jonah. She’s a fan for sure – she loves your writing – but more than that, she identifies with the submissive lifestyle. It’s something that resonates in the depths of her soul.”

  I arched a quizzical eyebrow. “You got all that from an hour long conversation?”

  Leticia took up the challenge. She propped her hands on her hips and fixed me with a glare of defiance. “Couldn’t you tell the same thing from spending ten minutes with a woman?”

  Yes, actually. I could.

  I nodded my
head to concede the point. Leticia was a good journalist. She had clearly done a lot of research. I trusted her instincts because I had to. More than anything else it was important that she select and approve of the woman I would train. Her peace of mind required it.

  I read through the woman’s email message carefully, grunting occasionally as words or phrases seemed to leap off the page. This was much more than a message from a fan. I read down to the bottom of the message.

  “Cameron Wylde?”

  Leticia nodded.

  I frowned. “That’s her real name?”

  “Yes,” Leticia confirmed. “But her friends call her Cam, or Cammy.”

  I looked again at the photo Leticia had found, trying to match the name with the photo. “Where does she live?”

  “Chicago.”

  I nodded slowly then got out of the chair. There was a window on the far side of the room with a view across the property’s back lawns. I stared out at the morning, feeling the warmth of the sun on my face.

  “Did you… say anything to her about what you had in mind?” I asked the question delicately, like I was probing a tender wound.

  “No,” Leticia shook her head. “I thought that might be best left to you. I think you should phone her.”

  * * *

  Tact and patience are not words I am terribly familiar with. I understand the concepts, but lack the delicacy needed for drawn-out negotiation. This doesn’t bother me. It’s in my nature to get straight to the point when I talk to people.

  I picked up the phone and Leticia began to recite the numbers. Suddenly she seemed to realize that it would be me making the phone call. She clutched at my arm urgently so that I stopped dialing.

  “What are you going to say?” she was suddenly red-faced and flustered with panic.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I’ll work that out when I start talking to her.” I dialed the next number and then flashed Leticia a bemused smile. “I think I’ll just be my normal self.”

  “Oh, God no, Jonah!” she seemed to recoil in abject horror. “This isn’t just any old phone call. You’ve never spoken to this woman before. She’s not even expecting you to call her,” Leticia’s voice of protest rose and began to tremble. “Can’t you be… different… more, um, delicate?”