Sobia stood looking out of her tenth floor office block watching the Friday evening traffic crawl towards the weekend. She was anxious, waiting for a telephone call before she could go home. Her PA had gone home hours ago and only the cleaners were now in the building. Her brief case was packed, her coat wrapped across the back of her custom designed chair but she could not leave until this call came otherwise the day's business would all be in vain. The client had promised six thirty at the latest and it was now almost seven.
She had promised Phillip she would be back by seven thirty. Isabel would be there as well. If she arrived after eight she knew Phillip would spank her but Isabel would reap the benefit. What had so far been a good day was rapidly falling apart.
Sobia walked in the house at quarter to nine; Isabel and Phillip were both on the sofa listening to some Wagnerian dirge which Sobia hated. Isabel was pleased to see her and called out the moment Sobia came into the room.
"Darling," she called out, "how lovely to see you. You look tired."
Sobia explained the frustrations of the day's end and Isabel was, typically, sympathetic and kind. Phillip stood up, announced that dinner was ready and marched into the kitchen. The two women looked at each other, Sobia's expression and gestures asking the other woman how things stood. Isabel gestured with her hands to indicate she was unsure.
"It's on the table," Phillip called from the kitchen.
The two women walked in together. Isabel walked straight to her chair and Phillip was already standing behind his. Then Sobia noticed there were only two places laid and only two plates of food. All three stood and said nothing. Sobia searched the faces of both for some mediation but it was clear that Isabel's silent gesture of a few moments ago had been a lie. She knew. Phillip spoke.
"You were supposed to be home by eight."
"Yes, I'm sorry but..."
He cut her short.
"Go to your room," he ordered, "and get ready for bed."
Briefly Sobia stood her ground and looked at both faces to see if there was any possibility of a reprieve. Both were expressionless and she turned around and did as she was told.
The spanking, when it came soon after, was not as severe as some. But it was not her backside that hurt so much but that afterwards he left her to go to Isabel. She had so wanted him tonight and to be spanked and then left was cruel. She imagined Isabel laying on the bed waiting for him to return, her slim, perfectly proportioned, milky white body sprawled across the bed. When he came and undressed she would have cooed at scale of his erection that properly belonged to her. She imagined them fucking for hours. She sobbed herself to sleep.
The following morning, only seconds after the sun broke through Sobia's bedroom window, she felt a weight bearing down on the side of her mattress. She turned over. It was Phillip. She lay back and looked him, silently and sulkily. It was one of her talents that she could effortlessly move from young, ambitious, aspiring executive to a sulky girl.
"You were cruel to me last night," she muttered, barely opening her mouth.
He paused before replying, keen not to sound as though he had come to apologise.
"You said you would be home before eight and you weren't and so you were punished."
"I don't mean that. I mean afterwards. Afterwards, when you went to Isabel. I wanted you. I always want you afterwards, you know that. But you fucked her instead. That was cruel, very cruel."
He stayed silent.
"You did fuck her, didn't you?"
"Of course."
"Yes, of course. Anyway," she continued, getting out of bed and going to the wardrobe to remove her clothes, "she's only your whore, isn't she?"
She looked quickly at him to see if she had provoked him but she had not.
"Yes, she is my whore."
"The live-in-whore," she echoed, "how unusual, how quaint!"
He got up.
"We've discussed this before. Anyway, she's going today."
Sobia paused for a moment and was about to register her pleasure at this news and ask if she would have him to herself this evening but decided not to give him that satisfaction, no matter how much she wanted him.
An hour later she kissed him as she got out of the taxi to chair an important meeting for which Phillip had already briefed her.
Just before closing the door she said, "Eight o'clock."
"Eight o'clock," he confirmed. She threw him a salacious smile.
What Phillip had failed to tell Sobia was that her father was one of the delegates attending Phillip's own meeting. Sobia's father had introduced the two about three months ago because he so much respected Phillip's experience, range of contacts and ability; he thought his daughter would benefit from his advice. An old fashioned Asian patriarch he had, rather naively, assumed that his twenty five year old daughter would be safe with a man precisely thirty years older than her. It is just possible that Phillip decided to fuck Isabel last night rather than Sobia because he could not bear to look her father in the face the following morning. Whereas the spanking, for poor punctuality, her father might have approved of.
Business flowed through Sobia's veins. Her father pushed her hard at school from the beginning; every mathematical problem, no matter how simple, he presented to her in terms of money and business. He liked to talk to her about decision making even when she was too young to make decisions about anything. He taught her ambition. He taught her how to win. At twenty five she was already holding a position that most rarely achieved until they were thirty and they were almost always men.
Sobia's father asked Phillip, an old business colleague who he had known for years, to be on hand to offer his daughter occasional advice in difficult situations. He also asked him, as a man of the world, to keep an eye on her in more worldly matters; there were, after all, some unscrupulous men in the business to which a young woman might become fatally vulnerable no matter how clever she might otherwise be. Initially, Phillip demurred on this: he had no desire to play the father figure to over ambitious young women. Until, that is, he met her.
One morning, two days after these requests were made and accepted, Phillip decided to cement this responsibility by calling Sobia and taking her out for lunch. He thought she would not mind -- she did not -- if he offered her the name of some useful contacts as well as some people to be wary of. By the time the sweet course came the business relationship was forged. Afterwards he took her home and fucked her. She was not a virgin, which did not surprise him; she also had an orgasm, which for one of Phillip's women was rare. Within hours the roles of father and lover were entwined. Twenty four hours later she was convinced she could not live without him and the more he fucked her, the more she believed it. When, later, the lover turned out to be a father as well and exercised strict disciplinary measures for wayward behaviour she accepted it without question.
The following evening she arrived home a long time before eight, sorely hoping that Isabel had gone. As she entered the house she looked around for signs of Isabel's possessions but there were none. Beautiful smells wafted from the kitchen.
