‘OK.’
‘I’m happy to direct if you’ll organise the musical side of things. Shall we have audition posters done? I’ll announce it in assembly tomorrow.’
‘Cool,’ I said, feeling like an inarticulate teen.
‘Yes. Cool. What is it they say? Wicked.’
I wish you were.
He smiled enigmatically. If I could have gift-wrapped that smile, taken it home and ravished it in my hallway, I would have done. His wife had suddenly become the most furiously envied woman in the Solent area.
‘Yeah. Really wicked! Proper nang! Grimy!’
He looked at me oddly.
‘Grimy indeed,’ he said, then he swanned off.
Grimy? What the fuck is wrong with me? He thinks I’m insane. Oh well. I have my inbox to look forward to, if only he was in it … Stop!
I was still thinking about Marks, and wondering how the hell I was going to spend week after week working intensively with him on a school production without accidentally dropping my knickers or shoving my tongue down his throat when I logged on to my computer at home.
‘Don’t expect anything, don’t expect anything,’ I muttered to myself, mantra-like, waiting for my internet connection to power into action.
I opened the email account I had nominated for notifications from the MasterMe site, purposely looking away so as not to see the number of messages in my inbox until I was fully prepared.
I looked at the screen and breathed in sharply.
Forty-three. Forty-three messages. All from MasterMe.com.
I permitted myself a smile and a quick victory flap of the fingers, then I set to work on the weeding process.
I quickly halved the amount by deleting everyone who wasn’t within an hour’s travelling distance of me.
A further 11 had enclosed alarming photographic attachments. Farewell to them.
That left 11.
‘I don’t usually bother with subs over size eight but I might make an exception for you if you’re fit.’
Deleted. Ten dom bottles hanging on the wall.
‘Suck my cock, bitch.’
And if one dom bottle should accidentally fall…
The next one expressed a desire to pierce my labia and hold a knife to my throat.
That left eight.
The next one – oh, interesting! – was a woman. I chewed my lip over this one for a minute, but regretfully declined her invitation for tea and a caning.
Two more were rejected for their peculiarly hostile and aggressive tone before I narrowed it down to my final five. Each one had his merits. I decided to reply to them all.
StrictButFair was an older gent claiming to be looking for naughty young ladies to tutor in good manners. His techniques were exactly as his name might suggest. It sounded like a bit of fun, if not exactly lifelong-partnership material. I proposed myself as a new entrant to his academy.
MasterAndCommander went into a great deal of detail about his wants, needs, fetishes, likes, dislikes, tastes without asking many questions of me. All the same, his wants, needs, fetishes, likes, dislikes and tastes were all perfectly reasonable and well expressed, as well as largely coinciding with my own. I wrote back with some of my own interests and hoped he would reply.
SirLancelot seemed like a lovely man, almost too lovely to be keen on tying girls up and whipping them, but he liked Vaughan Williams and the Arcade Fire, so I couldn’t not respond to him, though most of what I wrote back was about music rather than masochism.