“Speaking of fucking on my own time...”

“Yes?”

“I have a guest in the house, and I’d like to go check on him.”

“Make it a quickie.”

“Why?”

“You have an appointment in two hours.”

“Oh, yeah, I forgot about that. Rabbi Friedman. Today’s whipping day.”

“Don’t forget Judge B. and Sheridan.”

“I could never forget Sheridan.” Sheridan was Nora’s favorite client and everyone knew it. And Judge B.’s wife always gave her cookies. A dominatrix did not forget her cookies.

“Any instructions for your Little Miss?”

“Tell her to wear pink panties—lacy ones. I want to cut them off with a knife and gag her with them.”

“Why don’t you ever make me wear pink panties for you anymore?”

“King?”

“Quoi?”

Click.

Nora dropped the phone and kicked it across the floor. Entirely unnecessary but wonderfully cathartic. She would have gone over to pick the phone up but someone beat her to it.

“Good morning, Mistress. Did you drop this?”

Nora smiled at the teenage boy standing in the doorway to her office. He was wearing boxer shorts, leather wrist cuffs and a smile. A sheepish blushing smile.

“I didn’t drop it. I drop-kicked it, but thank you.” She took the phone back from him. “How are you this morning?”

Noah, a nineteen-year-old, soon-to-be college sophomore, walked around her desk and leaned against it. She put her legs on the desk, one on each side of his hips.

“I’m...” He paused, rubbed the back of his neck and laughed. Gorgeous kid, dark reddish-brown hair, newly broad shoulders that were probably rail thin two years ago, hazel eyes that could never hide his pleasure or surprise and lips swollen from kisses and bites—her kisses, her bites. “Good.”

“Good,” she said. “Would you like me to take those off you?” Nora nodded at his wrist cuffs.

“I don’t know. I kind of like them.” He stretched out his arms and looked at the leather cuffs on his wrists, turning them this way and that.

“They look good on you. You wear sub well.” She took his arm in her hands and unbuckled the right leather wrist cuff. Such a good boy. He instinctively knew he wasn’t to take off his own cuffs. That was his Mistress’s job. “Did you have fun last night?”

“I did.” He nodded slowly, thoughtfully. “Did you?”

“I woke up sore and smiling,” she said. “Always a good combination.”

“Never imagined I’d lose my V-card to a...you know...”

“Woman with a whip collection?”

“That.”

“If you never imagined that, then you need to be more imaginative in the future.”

“I will be. And here I thought you were just a writer who liked extra whip in her coffee.”

“I like extra whip in my everything.” She unbuckled his left wrist cuff and tossed both cuffs down on her desk. She’d met Noah at her favorite local coffee shop where he worked as a barista and she worked on her books when she needed to get out of the house. He hung out with her on his fifteen-minute breaks and when she asked him yesterday evening if he had a girlfriend, he admitted he’d never had one. College was expensive and his parents didn’t help much. He spent every free hour at work. No time to date. She’d commiserated with him. Having two jobs meant she had no time to date, either. Two hours later Noah was cuffed to her headboard and wasn’t a virgin anymore.

Sometimes, Nora told Noah, you just have to make the time.

“Should I...” Noah pointed at the door.

“You can stay and take a shower with me if you want.”

“You looked busy.” He nodded at her open computer. “I don’t want to interrupt the muse or whatever.”

“The muse knows better than to interrupt me when I have company.”

“Your muse sounds very understanding,” Noah said as Nora slipped her hand into his boxers and started to stroke him gently. He was hard already. Teenage boys—God’s gift to older women. “Very...very...nice muse.”

“Have you ever fucked anyone on a desk, Noah?”

“Until last night I hadn’t even fucked anyone in a bed.”

“Would you like to fuck someone on a desk?”

“If someone would let me.”

“Someone might let you. If you ask nicely.”

Nora stood up, still stroking Noah. He bent his head and kissed her, his eyes closed and his hands nervous and reticent as he reached for her.

“You can touch me,” she said against his lips. She appreciated his reticence, his desire to do what she told him to do, no more and no less.

“I don’t want to screw up,” he said, sliding his hand under her little black slip she’d put on when she’d woken up. “I still have no idea what I’m doing.”

“Me,” she said. “That’s what you’re doing. Now put me on the desk and touch me any way and anywhere you like.”

Nora could tell he was doing his very best to be strong and suave as he cupped her ass and lifted her onto the desk.

“If I drop you do we still get to have sex?” Noah asked.

“Yes, but we’d have to play it as it lays.”

“I think that’s golf,” Noah said.

“Same rules apply.”

He laughed, which was exactly what she wanted him to do. He relaxed and kissed her now with enthusiasm, all nervousness gone. His hands wandered under her slip, massaged her thighs, pushed them wider. He penetrated her with one finger and rubbed inside her. Last night she’d given him a thorough introduction to locating the clitoris and the G-spot and what to do when he found himself in contact with one or the other. The lessons seemed to have stuck because she was soon very, very wet and he was very, very hard and if they didn’t fuck very, very soon she would be very, very put out.

She pushed his boxers down his hips until they pooled at his ankles where they belonged, grasped his cock and guided him inside her. He lifted her slip up and off her and Nora lay back on her desk, naked and happy. When he bent over her to kiss her breasts she twined her hands into his hair, holding him right where she wanted him, pumping her hips against him as he pushed into her.

“This is so much more fun than writing,” she said. “I should tell my muse to fuck off more often.”

Noah laughed as he glanced over at her still-open laptop.

“What were you writing?” he asked, taking her breasts in his hands.

Nora turned her head and glanced at her screen, the blinking cursor, the highlighted text.

You can be Nora with everyone else as long as you are Eleanor, my Little One, with me.

She slammed her laptop closed.

“Fiction.”

23

Theology

NORA GRACIOUSLY ALLOWED Noah to join her in the shower. She also graciously allowed him to wash her body inside and out with his bare hands. Afterward Nora put on her black silk bathrobe and kissed him goodbye at the front door. She didn’t mind if the neighbors saw them. They seemed like nice people and she enjoyed giving them something to talk about at dinner.

He turned to leave but turned back around again.

“This was a one-night thing, right?” he asked.

Nora cupped his face. No scruff. No five-o’clock shadow. Not even a two-o’clock shadow.

“And one morning.”

“So I guess I shouldn’t call you later?”

“It’s sweet of you to offer. If I weren’t me, and you weren’t so young...”

“I’m not that young. I’ll be a sophomore at Yorke this year.”

“You’re young. My life is complicated enough without adding a very sweet, very handsome, very young complication to it. Plus...we have to work, remember?”

“I get it.” He gave her a shy smile in return. “See you at the coffee shop sometime?”

“You’re the only one who gets my order right.”

“Extra whip,” he said.

“Story of my life.”

Noah kissed her one last time and walked out her front door to his car. He hadn’t been the first male virgin she’d deflowered since becoming a dominatrix, and she knew he wouldn’t be her last. Since she was making something of a habit of it, she’d developed a personal philosophy regarding her encounters with inexperienced younger men. She would show them the world of sex had more flavors to it than vanilla, and say goodbye the next morning leaving her boys better off than when she found them. Wiser, more experienced and grinning like idiots.