Chapter 1 — A Firm Hand
I ring the bell.
I’ve checked the number several times. It’s right. I look again at the slip of paper in my hand and, just to make sure, at the bag of pastries I was instructed to bring.
I’m very nervous—but excited too.
The street is a quiet residential road, a mixture of old brick villas, aging boxlike houses and newer suburban homes. One villa stands slightly back from the road, two stories above a high basement. A white box with dormer windows, black glazed roof tiles, and a garden that rolls down toward the lake behind it.
A steel gate blocks the driveway, which is covered in finely raked gravel. Number twenty—20—is written on a large enamel sign beside a post with a button that must be the doorbell.
I look around and hesitate before pressing it.
I’ve imagined this moment many times since making my decision. I took the day off without telling Emma. I showered, shaved and put on freshly laundered clothes. I went to the bakery, then took a train out here to the northern suburbs of the City, the patterned bag sitting awkwardly on my lap and my head full of thoughts I couldn’t organize at all.
Every time I closed my eyes, the images appeared.
The envelope on my desk. The dark eyes. The smile. And that utterly undeniable aura.
Controlled, quiet, but insistent.
Like an arrow through a pudding.
An arrow through me.
I wait, and I’m just about to ring again when the steel gate slides aside with a low hum.
I straighten up and walk toward the front door of the white villa. It’s closed too, but after I’ve spent a few seconds looking around for another bell, the door opens quickly and decisively.
There she is.
As beautiful as I remember her, and Asian in appearance. Not very tall, but lithe and curvaceous at once. Her long black hair is gathered into a knot at the nape of her neck, and her dark eyes flash at me like obsidian pearls as she studies me.
Long lashes, high cheekbones—and large, full lips marked by deep red lipstick.
She waits.
Just looks at me, and I don’t know what to think.
Despite the tigerish force of her presence, there’s a small smile playing at the corner of her mouth.
I stand paralyzed in the doorway. I don’t know whether to speak or wait for the woman—my Mistress, as she wrote—to do something.
She wears a full skirt beneath a tight, strapless lace bodice, a kind of corset top that reveals both the beautiful swell of her breasts and her muscular shoulders. Long black gloves cover her arms and hands, and in her left hand she holds an old-fashioned rattan carpet beater.
Her face is oval and very beautiful, lightly freckled, but completely dominated by those commanding tiger eyes, which somehow seem to smile a little through their dark smolder.
She looks at me again.
I feel foolish, shift my feet, and look down so I won’t burn myself on her gaze.
“Well. I see you came as ordered. So you wish to apply to become my slave.”
“Yes,” I say, trying to smile cautiously at her.
It feels strange to say yes to a question like that, but I came here of my own accord, and besides, something about this woman makes any other answer impossible. If she had asked me the same question in the middle of a street in the City, I probably would have answered exactly the same way.
I met the beautiful woman with the kissable mouth and commanding eyes in a bar in the center of the City a little less than a month ago.
I was out with some colleagues from my department. We’d had a “team-building” day and ended up getting drunk together to recover from the experience.
I was fairly drunk when I suddenly found myself in the middle of a conversation with a very beautiful, vaguely Asian-looking woman.
The next day, I couldn’t remember what we had talked about, but one exchange remained in my mind.
She had looked at me with a brilliant smile, but at the same time with a direct gaze that bored into mine like an awl.
“Most men dream of the woman taking control,” she had said. “They thrive under a firm hand. A strict and consistent education. Don’t they?”
She smiled at me, and I smiled back.
I don’t remember what I’d said that led us down that particular path, but I asked if I could buy her a drink. She declined, and apart from those few words, I remembered nothing else from our conversation.
At some point she disappeared from the table, and I went off in search of whatever other adventures the night might offer.
Her words were the only thing I could remember the next day.
They stayed with me in an unsettling way, and in my imagination I tried to reconstruct the woman who had spoken them. But all I could remember was her smile, the long black hair, the large mouth, and the dark tiger eyes looking straight into me.
I went about my work for a week, strangely restless whenever I thought about that drunken night, unable to understand why I kept seeing those obsidian eyes in my mind.
Then, in the middle of the following week, an envelope suddenly appeared in my mail slot at the office.
My name was written on it. Nothing else.
The handwriting was in fountain pen, elegant and well formed, with large, emphatic strokes and flourishes.
I opened the envelope and took out a heavy sheet of eggshell-colored handmade paper.
It has come to my attention that you wish to apply for the vacant position as my slave.
You are therefore summoned to a trial lesson on xx.xx at 10 a.m. at xxxxxxxxxxxxx 20, xxxxxxx.
The candidate shall bring a pastry to the trial lesson and shall, naturally, be well groomed and freshly washed.
The letter had been typed on an old-fashioned typewriter and signed in the same fountain pen and the same handwriting as the envelope.
Your Mistress.
And, a little farther down:
A firm hand.
I asked in the company mailroom if anyone knew who had delivered the letter. Nobody did.
I was completely alone with my thoughts.
The date of the “summons” was two weeks away, so I could simply ignore the letter, I told myself. But by the next day I realized it wasn’t going to be that easy.
There was something exciting about the directness of it.
It has come to my attention…
What could that mean?
How did she know where I worked?
And what did any of this mean?
…the vacant position as my slave.
I had only recently moved in with Emma and, God knew, I had no thoughts of being with another woman.
Emma was sweet and soft and, in many ways, the girlfriend I had always dreamed of. The path had led from student housing, parties, dancing and long Sundays together to the co-op apartment, jobs, dinners with other couples and an altogether pleasant life.
Her parents seemed to like me, and our days together were easy.
We woke up together, ate breakfast, brushed our teeth, kissed each other goodbye and went to work. In the evening we cooked, watched television, read, or went to bed together.
Easy.
The letter that had made me so restless lay in my desk drawer at the office, and every morning when I came in, I took it out and looked at it.
Your Mistress.
What did that mean?
I liked the way she had written the capital M. Two strong vertical strokes.
Temperamental.
After a few days, I began to think of the letter as an adventure.
A possibility. The chance of an entirely unique experience.
What could be waiting at the other end if I showed up as the letter instructed?
A firm hand.
What did that mean?
Orders?
Obedience?
Not much came to mind when I searched my past for something that might explain it.
There was a comic book I liked. Vampirella. A long-legged, big-breasted woman in tall leather boots. I remembered that she had made me strangely hot, but then so had Playboy at the newsstand in the train station.
There were no other images inside me.
And what could happen if I played along?
She had been truly beautiful. I remembered that much. And if it wasn’t her, if it was something completely different, if somebody was playing a joke on me, I could simply turn around and leave.
I didn’t really have anything to lose, I thought.
And surely I could allow myself one small exotic adventure.
Emma was sweet, but she wasn’t erotically adventurous in any way. She shook her head at the annual advertisements for an “erotic festival” not far from where we lived, and when we made love it was always with the lights off.
I didn’t mind.
I liked that we could only feel each other.
But sometimes I missed something.
Something I couldn’t quite identify.
There was no doubt about that.
Gradually, the thought ripened inside me.
I had to show up on the specified date, at the given address, at the appointed time.
If nothing else, I’d have a good story to tell one day.
