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Staring up at the
ceiling, she tried, as she had done for the past five hours, to
understand what, if anything, she was feeling, but without success.
There was a dull, weary nothingness, combined with an ache she
finally acknowledged as hunger. This, at least, she could do
something about. Taking off the short purple dress she had put on
that morning after showering in the hotel room all those miles
away, Tamsin crawled into the banana-yellow SpongeBob pyjamas her
brother had bought her for Christmas and ambled downstairs in
search of sustenance.

The kitchen was tidy
save for a few dishes and scattered morning toast crumbs, which,
out of habit, she began to wipe and clear up while opening the
large fridge and various cupboards looking for precisely the kind
food she needed when she was in this mood.

Taking a tub of
chicken-and-mushroom instant noodles from the larder, Tamsin
switched the kettle on, and put a peach, a knife, fork and spoon,
teacup and teabag, and an open packet of Bombay mix on to a large
tray. After adding water to the noodles, she carried the lot into
the lounge, sat down in front of the television, and, with
deliberation, switched off her mind entirely.

Alasdair, in
contrast, had known he was hungry from the moment he woke up.
Indeed, his suggestion that they go down for breakfast declined, he
had been almost impatient for the girl’s train to arrive so that he
could nip back to the hotel before 10.30am, when they stopped
serving.

He was in luck.

Three cups of weak
black coffee, a fine fresh fruit salad and a superb Eggs Benedict
later, Alasdair had his small backpack over his shoulder once again
and was all but skipping back to the station he had so recently
left.

With his train not due
until 2.16pm, he picked up a copy of The Guardian and set himself
down in the waiting room. Around 6pm, after an uneventful journey,
he walked back through his own front door, splashed two fingers of
12-year-old Dalmore into a crystal glass, added one more for luck,
then downed it.

By 9.30, having
settled into an evening’s drinking of similar gusto, he was aware
that his best was behind him for the night, but there was one more
move yet to be completed before he could retire to the familiarity
of his own bed. Even drunk, Alasdair had a keen awareness of his
own boundaries, and thus he trusted himself enough to sit down and
write, despite his condition.

My dear
Tamsin,

It was an
absolute joy to meet you and I’m glad we had the chance to enjoy
one another on mutually comfortable ground before moving on to what
I hope will be our glorious next stage. I can’t stress highly
enough just how much your Meister was delighted with his first
taste of that delicious wee cunt of yours. You can be very
proud.

But… we both know that
wasn’t enough for you and that your journey has only just begun.
I’ll let you get some well-deserved rest now. You know what you
want and you know how to get it. I’m here when you’re ready.

Alasdair
XxxX

He pressed
send.

Tamsin, meanwhile,
left her phone uncharged so she could ignore all outside
distractions, and settled into the Friday night habit of takeaway
pizzas and puddings with her family. Skirting over her mother’s
seemingly offhand questions about her Manchester trip, in a way
that politely but firmly told her to back off, they enjoyed a
family argument over the choice of on-demand movie before she
eventually drifted off to sleep on the couch while life went
comfortably and normally on around her.

It was well into the
next day before she switched on her phone, still lying in bed.
Eight texts from her friend Ethan, the only other person who had
known of her plans, and the only person, she thought, who would
even vaguely understand her explorations.

“
You there yet,
hun?”

“
So… tell me
the goss….”

“
What’s yer old
guy like? Did he bring the tardis?”

“
Too tied up to
reply?”

“
Sorry, babe.
Don’t mean to take the piss… let me know how it’s going, right?
X”

“
You
okay?”

“
Busy?
Xx”

“
Home? Don’t
tell me… you’ve run off to Scotland… Text me!”

PhetX updates,
voucher offers and Amazon recommendations made up the bulk of her
remaining messages, and then there was Alasdair’s.

She read it quickly.
And then she reread it, before pushing its contents to the back of
her mind and replying briefly to Ethan. His immediate response was
to suggest a drink and debrief right away. For all his
understanding, though, he tended to be pitilessly frank when they
discussed anything that mattered, and she was not sure she was
ready for this yet. To buy time, she suggested Sunday lunch at the
local pub instead, creating the thinking space she needed to work
how what she was actually feeling before being challenged by
him.

In fact, what she
could remember of the night was murky, shaded with a haze of
surreality. She remembered Meister’s voice throughout, and she knew
that she’d drunk way too much, but she also understood that she’d
had to. She was aware that he hadn’t, and that she’d appreciated
that. She suspected she’d talked, and she knew that he had, calm,
patient, like a vet with a frightened kitten. Tamsin was grateful
for that.

She had emerged from
the bathroom a wreck. With no idea of timescale, she remembered
standing there in the room, door still open behind her, trembling
and shivering as Alasdair got up from his seat, came towards her,
and wrapped her up like that very same kitten, stroking her hair
back from her forehead and holding her while she shook and shook
and shook. He told her over and over that things were okay. He
would look after her, whatever that meant; he would be there, like
she’d asked.

And slowly, slowly,
she remembered them sinking down to the edge of the bed, where they
sat in that same human embrace, devoid of sexuality but connected,
as gradually his whispers turned to kisses all over her face, slow,
tender, safe, but kisses none the less, until they stopped, still
and waiting.

And he had stood up as
she sat tranquil on the bed, took off his jacket and placed it
carefully on the chair beside them, and undid the button and zip of
his grey suit trousers. At that point, and unaware of the little
blue pill he had swallowed 47 minutes earlier, she remembered
seeing that same cock from the photos, now unfettered and in a
direct line with her tiny soft mouth, made softer by his calming,
as he leant and whispered in her ear: “Now, it’d be about that time
when you suck my cock, you wee slut.”

As she bobbed back and
forth along his familiar 90-degree phallus, he had continued to
smooth back her hair, murmuring what a clever girl she was, along
with his groans, before tenderly steering her back on to the bed.
He’d told her then, as he repeated in his email, how delicious her
cunt was, and how good and how clever a girl she truly was, and how
happy it made him.

It made her happy to
recall that. So with these thoughts, at least, clearer in her head,
she went briefly into analytical mode and wondered if what she had
been feeling was, perhaps, the submissive comedown she’d heard
about and allowed herself to revisit his email and reply.

Dear
Kindly_Meister,

Let me tell
you where I am right now, because I can kick and rail, and I do...
It’s what causes this confusion, I know it… but, right here and
right now, the reality is this: I AM a strong, independent,
educated, stand-on-my-own-two-feet kind of a woman. I HAVE been
brought up this way, and it’s everything I have ever believed in.
But. But andbutandbut. I want to be coddled. I do. I want to be
special and to be loved and to be a naughty dirty special girl, not
always, but sometimes. Sometimes. Sometimes I get so sick of being
in charge and, yeah, you’re right, I just want to be looked
after.

Hell, in the real
world, I’d punch the guy who told me what to do, Alasdair, but I’m
sick of pretending that there’s not a bit of me, just a bit, that
sometimes wants to be looked after. Guided. Stroked and guided
and... that bit of me that wants to stop thinking, just for a
while. And that’s the bit, the bit of me, that I want to explore.
That. Is. The. Bit. That needs exploration.

And I think about how
I can do that. How do I safely examine a side of me that scares me
because I don’t… can’t possibly yet… understand it…? How do I
learn?

I find a teacher. I
find a guide through this… So, what do I need?

You’re right. I guess
we now have what they refer to as unfinished business, and I hate
to leave any task semi-completed. I guess now that we know we
click, I would like, even if it’s just once, to challenge you to
“take me to subspace”… Extra points available if you can make me
squirt ;)

And thanks. I was a
mess, I know, but proper thanks for looking after me, Meister. I
trust you. If the offer’s still there, I’m visiting a uni friend in
Newcastle in three weeks, and, if it suits, it’s a short hop – it
looks like anyway – to Edinburgh on the train.

LGL x

Alasdair smiled at
her response: she truly was a delightful wee find, that girl. There
were many unwritten questions there he intended to address, and
soon, but for now he placed her email into a folder he had named
“Current”, and logged back in to PhetX, where he sat browsing the
latest entries in the groups to which he subscribed: Scottish
Submissive Women; Subs Without Dominants; Gentleman Doms and
Sensuous Subs; Curvy Women and the Men who Love Them; and 134
others.

Scrabble – dirty,
filthy, smutty Scrabble, with all its new-found connotations –
continued to consume most of her waking thoughts, while at the same
time, impossible to ignore, qualms had begun to shift and twist
their way into her consciousness.

Boyd_Cooper had by now
become Bill. Their friendship, with increasing undertones of a
relationship, remained as addictive as ever, but those doubts were
growing, and as much as she tried to ignore them and focus on the
dizzy heights of the highs, these harbingers simply wouldn’t be
chased away, but circled constantly, waiting for something –
evidence? – to fuel their malevolent appetites.

The highs had become
less frequent, and, although she couldn’t put her finger on why –
and indeed, she had no immediate desire to – the lows were hitting
her with growing intensity.

Sometimes, as when
they had started, they would be back in their online palace,
stomping all their opponents into the cyber-dust before swooping
off into a private chatroom to talk and giggle and sigh and purr.
At others, he’d ignore her messages for days, even though she could
see that he was online.

Why? The questions
kept rising. Why the hell had all of this become so important that
she would spend those precious evening hours sitting and staring at
the little green light beside his name, wondering what he was doing
and with whom?

The photo he had sent
her, taken from a distance, did nothing to reassure her. She used
her fingers to stretch the images out on her phone screen, hoping
to find something of the expression on a face she could measure
only in millimetres; she found nothing. It was as basic as this: as
much as she peered and stared and hoped, that plump, rather
dull-looking man, the man in the photo at his company picnic, did
not look like the witty raconteur who lived in her head. She was,
she told herself, obviously a shallow person, focusing as she did
on the physical when what matters is so much more, and she would
search for a twinkle in the eye that connected her with the man she
might recognise.

Fearful of
articulating these thoughts, lest she burst the bubble, she began
to hunt for pieces of the jigsaw in which the two images – the
photo, and the one she had created – met, or concrete proof that
they just didn’t.

Armed with his first
name, that of his small Arkansas home city, Conway, and his
occupation, it was easy for her to Google-find Bill’s Auto Repair
Service, and although having done so felt unmistakably like a
breach of trust, it was impossible to stop there. Although she
wasn’t sure what she was looking for, she felt instinctively that
it was there somewhere and that she would recognise it when it
appeared. At first, it was only links on directory sites – phone
numbers, maps – but she searched on.

And, bang, there it
was, beaming right out of the screen at her, a large full-face
photo of Bill Atkinson, on page 17 of the
Log Cabin
Democrat
, his local newspaper, dressed in blue overalls and
clutching on to the runner-up plaque he had received three years
previously in the regional local business awards.

It was him, yes,
and he was everything he had said, but… and here her mind stalled
before completing the thought, like a soap opera slap across the
face… she didn’t fancy him. Not one bit. Trying not to take that
thought further, she gagged down the idea of him masturbating to
those shots it had so turned her on to send.

Bill Aktinson,
57, who scooped one of the three runner-up prizes, said he was
“delighted” at the honour and thanked everyone who had voted for
him.

“
I’m very proud to
say that my shop has been serving the community for almost 17 years
now and I hope we’ll do so for a good time to come,” he
said.

“
Mrs Right never
did come knocking on my door and so the loyalty of my customers
means the world to me. They are more like family to me and I hope
to continue to offer them the same excellent service for many
years.”

There was no Mrs
Boyd_Cooper.

As Megan gradually
isolated herself from the Scrabble community, she was grateful for
Bill’s equally waning interest. She upbraided herself about her
priorities and, within less than a week, launched herself back into
total domesticity with a staunch vigour that lasted a month and a
half, maybe two.