For the next two days I basically ignored her.
I wanted to keep her waiting, and also to see how eager she was, whether was going to make special efforts to try and attract my attention and be disappointed that I hadn't gotten in touch with her again yet. It's not easy to try and think about other things when you know you have a woman downstairs who's basically prepared to drop her knickers for you any time you go down there and ask, but that wasn't the way this relationship, or whatever it was, was going to be played.
The next time I saw her was on the Monday evening, the best part of a day and a half since our exertions in my flat the previous day. I got home late from work, tired and a little irritable, although my heart still leapt slightly when I got into the main hallway of the building in which I lived and saw her there, just about to enter the doorway of her own flat. I wondered whether she'd been waiting there for a while, just trying to catch me as I got back from work and pretending she happened to be there by chance, hoping to catch my eye. She was wearing tight blue jeans and a loose white top, and looked as gorgeous as ever, bright and perky and sparky.
"Hello!" she greeted me enthusiastically as I closed the main door behind me. I looked at her for a second, thinking through all the things I could say, but I elected to treat it as just another chance meeting between two people who happen to be neighbours. I responded in exactly the same way I would have done any time before Saturday.
"Hi."
I didn't even hang around to see what the look on her face was like, simply heading up the stairs to my own flat. She seemed to pause there by her door for a few moments longer though as there was a brief interval before I heard her own door open, and she headed back inside.
If she was hoping for a friendly chat, or a Monday evening session of game playing, then she was going to be disappointed. We couldn't do this every day, after all – not simply because it would lose its magic, but because I wanted to keep her waiting, aching and yearning. It would also make it all the more difficult for her to keep her promise that way, too.
Nonetheless, I thought about her a lot, of course. How could I not, after the weekend we'd had? I thought about her pretty much all the time, remembering, fantasising, trying to decide how I was going to play this, what I was going to do next. I'd been in a daze at work that day, my mind spinning with all of it, and I still half-feared that I was going to wake up and find that it was all a dream.
Tuesday morning I saw her again – this time before work, as I noticed out of the window of my flat that the postman was exiting our building. Heading downstairs to check to see if I'd had anything delivered, I saw that she was already there by the door, scanning through the envelopes. She had a purple top and a long grey skirt on, the top low cut giving me a good view of her cleavage once more, the gap between her breasts accentuated today by a dark pendant she wore, which hung down so low around her neck it was almost between them.
"Good morning," I said to her as I stood mere inches away, looking through the discarded letters that she'd left on the mat, not for her.
"Morning," she replied casually, clearly having realised that we were supposed to be pretending to barely know one another, even though there was nobody else around. Had there been, there was no way they could ever have guessed the things we'd done together only days beforehand.
This time she didn't wait to see if I said any more, merely heading back into her flat as I went back upstairs to mine, to finish getting ready for work. She'd made a good show of seeming supremely indifferent towards me, and at work that day I began to worry that perhaps my attitude had put her off, and she assumed that I didn't want to have anything to do with her any more.
Those fears were dispelled on Tuesday evening. She wasn't around when I arrived home, but after I'd been back in my flat for a little while I emerged from the shower and was walking through to my bedroom when I noticed a little slip of white paper on the floor by the front door. Curious, I walked over to it and saw that it wasn't paper but an envelope, left blank with no writing upon it. Bending down I picked it up – it hadn't been sealed, but left unstuck with the flap tucked in to the main body. There was a letter inside, a short one written neatly in black ink on a sheet of lined paper that seemed to have been torn from a notebook.
It was, of course, from her. She must have slipped it under the door while I'd been in the shower, or perhaps earlier in the day and I'd simply missed it when I'd come in from work. Either way, I read it with a mixture of curiosity and excitement.
Ian –
I just wanted to say, if you don't want to carry on with what we've started, that's fine. I've enjoyed it, and I hope you have to. But I want to carry it on, more than anything else in the world.
Do you?
I hope so.
I'm yours, I hope you know that by now. Anything you want to do to me, you can. Anything you want from me, you can take.Anything
.
Your obedient slut,
Jane
I was always going to get back in touch with her anyway, of course. But something about way she signed off, 'Your obedient slut', just did it for me. I was hard for her even from that brief little note, and I knew that the time had come to put her out of her misery.
A quick phone call put the arrangements I needed in place, and then I dialled her number. I didn't know it, but as I knew the address and the name of course it was easy enough to get from directory enquiries, and mercifully she wasn't ex-directory. I felt my anticipation grow as the tone dialled, and I just hoped she hadn't gone out.
Click.
"Hello?"
That wonderful voice, soft and gentle but at the safe time refined and articulate.
"Hello slut."
"Hello sir!"
Even her attempt to sound submissive couldn't disguise the excitement and the glee in her voice, but I didn't mind that. I was grinning myself – this was again a rather more playful moment, perhaps.
"I hope you've been behaving yourself, like a good girl?"
"Yes sir," she replied enthusiastically. "Although it is very difficult."
"Of course's it's difficult. If it weren't, the rewards wouldn't be so great, would they?"
She sighed in pleasure, doubtless from the tacit confirmation that there would be some sort of a reward for her eventually, and whispered a croaked-voice little:
"No sir."
"Good. Anyway, I can't talk for long. The Cantina, Mexican restaurant, St Philip's Road, do you know it?"
She seemed surprise at the question.
"Yes sir, I do," she replied, the curiosity evident in her voice.
"Good. Friday, eight o'clock. Table for two. Don't be late. Oh, and wear a nice dress."
I hung up before she could reply, having given all the relevant information. Three days to wait – that wasn't long. Now, I just had to hope everything went according to plan with the other arrangements I had in mind for the evening…
To her credit she was very good at keeping up the pretence of no acquaintance as those three days ticked past. We met a couple of times in the hallway and despite a look of longing, some desperate desire for a spark of recognition from me in her eyes, she said nothing other than the most cursory of 'Hellos' whenever we saw one another. I ached to be with her as much as she did for me, but I'd set my mind for how to play things, at least for the time being, and I wasn't going to deviate from that. If things developed further between us as the days and weeks went by then… Well, we'd see how it went.
I didn't see her at all during the day on Friday, not in the morning, not when I got back from work, not once. I showered and changed and left the building at about seven thirty for the walk down to St Philip's, but whether she left before or after me I didn't see her at all on the journey, enjoying the walk through the pleasant summer evening.
Nevertheless, there she was waiting for me outside the restaurant once I got there, standing looking a little nervous with her hands clasped around her handbag, clutched tightly to her stomach. I almost didn't recognise her at first, as she looked positively ten years younger – radiant, really. She'd had a haircut, her hair was a little shorter now bobbing just around the level of her cheeks, and she was wearing the most gorgeous little red dress – short hemline, low cut, showing off both her wonderful legs and her shapely arms. In short, she looked absolutely gorgeous. She broke into a grin as she saw me approach, and walked a few steps towards me along the pavement in her matching red shoes.
"Hello sir," she said quietly, nervously, looking furtively around at the other people walking along the street. I appreciated the gesture, and was really quite touched by it – a demonstration of subservience out and about in public. However, that wasn't really why we were here, not tonight.
"I think we can dispense with the honorifics tonight, don't you?" I suggested as I leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. She smelled gorgeous too, and positively giggled with surprise and delight at the way I was treating her.
"Ian then?" she asked, unsure.
"And Jane," I confirmed, offering her my arm which she eagerly took, and I led her into the restaurant.
Very soon we were seated at the booked table, a nice little spot in the corner by the window. It was a busy night, but we had some degree of privacy there, which I was grateful for.
"I hope you don't mind," she said, indicating her shortened hair.
"Not at all," I assured her. "You look lovely."
She smiled bashfully, seeming like a teenager on her first date, despite the fact that she must surely have done this sort of thing many times before, unlike the other activities we'd recently been indulging in together. Now though, we were simply on a date – a man in his mid twenties and a woman in her late thirties might not be the most usual of pairings perhaps, but it was not the most outrageous of age differences. Besides which, I didn't give a damn for that – she was by far the most attractive and most interesting woman I'd met for some time.
We chatted idly about all sorts of things over the starters, and it was not until a few glasses of wine had flowed and we were well into our main courses, relaxed and chatting and laughing, that I began to think about pressing her a little on the whys and wherefores of what we were doing, and just who she was really. I was glad that we seemed compatible outside of sex, anyway – we seemed to share a similar sense of humour and interests in some similar things. Speaking comfortably and happily like that, it was incredible to believe that the previous weekend she'd been tied down bent over my living room table having her sex spanked. It was as if that Jane and Ian were two different people – we were now a separate couple just getting to know each other for the first time.
"So when did you first become interested in bondage?" I asked her quietly, with false confidence – despite everything I felt as if I were prying a little. She was just swallowing a mouthful of wine as I asked her, and she almost choked on it. I smiled at her surprise, but as she looked around to see how near the other diners were, she knew that despite her surprise and embarrassment she had to reply.
"I suppose I've always known, really," she explained, toying with the stem of the wine glass as she held it in her hands. "You know… When there were films on TV that had scenes like that… I'd always be interested. Excited. I'd think about it sometimes…"
"But you never tried it?"
She shook her head.
