The Word Master (6 page)

I tilted my head curiously and narrowed my eyes, concentrating on the voice and the words. Everything else around me faded into the gloomy night.

“Tell me,” I said softly.

“I’m touching myself,” Sondra said around an erotic groan. “I’m lying on my bed with one hand down inside the elastic of my panties. My pussy is wet, Jericho, and I’m teasing myself listening to your voice.”

For an instant I said nothing – I just listened to the whispered sounds of the woman’s heavy breathing. “Why?”

Sondra gasped. “Because you turn me on,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about you all day, and last night – after we spoke – I gave myself a crashing orgasm. I did it again today at work. I was so wound up I had to sneak out of the office to get myself off.”

I opened my eyes suddenly and flashed a glance at April. She was watching me with enigmatic, hooded eyes, swinging slowly from side to side in her chair. She had pushed herself back away from the desk and the control console. Her legs were parted slightly and she was sitting deep in the leather. She was twirling tendrils of hair between her fingers.

“I see…” I said to Sondra. “And when you were making yourself come at work today, what exactly were you fantasizing about?”

“You,” Sondra said bluntly. “You and me, our bodies locked together in the tiny bathroom stall, my legs spread wide for you, my body arched and tensed as you took me from behind like the submissive sexy whore that I want to be. I fantasized that you had followed me into the ladies’ room and found me pleasuring myself. You ordered me to turn around and then you hiked up my skirt and pulled my panties down.”

“That sounds like an interesting fantasy,” I said, maintaining a tone of curious professional detachment. “And a risky one. What if your co-workers had found us?”

Sondra giggled but it wasn’t an amused sound. It was more a shuddering hiss of excitement.

“That would have been even better,” she whispered thickly.

“So it was the excitement and risk that aroused you?”

“No,” her voice became clear. “It was the fantasy of you making me submit to you. What makes me wet and wanting, Jericho, is the image of you standing before me and the feeling that I simply need to sink to my knees in obedience. It’s that dark, dangerous look in your eyes that sends chills down my spine and makes me want to melt.”

I raised my eyebrows and glanced back across the gloomy studio at April. Her lips were slightly parted.

“Was the fantasy you were having tonight in your bed the same one?” I asked Sondra.

“No,” she said. “It changed. Away from the office I’m a different kind of girl. Here at home I’m more comfortable.”

“So how did tonight’s fantasy begin?” I asked.

“With a bath, and then lingerie,” Sondra murmured like she was whispering in the ear of a lover. “I’ve been lying on my bed slowly touching myself and wishing it was your hand – your fingers – while imagining what it would be like if you were here now and I was restrained and naked for you to devour.”

“I would probably tease you mercilessly,” I said. “I would want you on the brink of exploding, Sondra.”

“Yes!” she groaned aloud. “I know you would! That’s why I have been keeping myself on the edge, Jericho. I’ve been a good little girl for you, Master,” her tone altered and so did the context of her words. Now she was sliding from seductive into submissive. “I’ve been waiting to hear your voice – waiting for you to give me permission…”

A beat of tense sexy silence.

“… May I come, Master?”

It was a moment – one of those instants where everything hung on a word. I wasn’t sure of the ramifications, but I sensed they were there in the murkiness.

“Yes.”
I said.

Sondra groaned. It was an unmistakable sound that rippled and wavered through the headphones. I imagined a woman lying on her bed with her back arched, both hands frantic between her spread thighs and the swell of her breasts heaving as she orgasmed and gasped for breath. I imagined the phone by her open mouth as her head thrashed from side to side and her hair tangled across a pillow.

For thirty seconds I called Sondra’s name, softly at first, and then more insistently. Finally I heard the scuffle sound of the phone being picked up and her voice, when she spoke, was unsteady and ragged.

“Oh, god…” she whispered.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes,” she sounded dreamy. “Floating, actually.”

Absently, I wondered whether the radio station would play a recording of a woman experiencing an orgasm on the air. I glanced across at April. She was breathing deeply. I could see the rise and fall of her breasts. I shrugged my shoulders and gestured a question. April nodded her head and mouthed, ‘keep talking’.

“Well I am sure everyone listening enjoyed what just happened live on the air as much as we did here in the studio, Sondra.”

“I want to meet you.”

I flinched. The words came out of the night, urgent and insistent.

“Um… Sondra…”

“I have to meet you, Jericho.”

I gestured to April, dragging my thumb across my throat to give her the ‘cut out’ signal. April obediently leaped from her chair and lunged for the console.

“You’re off the air,” she said. “I’ve stopped recording.”

I slumped back in the chair and stared at the darkened ceiling for a long moment, my thoughts swirling, my senses alerted by some distant premonition. Then suddenly Sondra’s voice sliced through the night.

“I want to meet you, Jericho.”

My eyes went wide. I sat upright and covered the mic with the palm of my hand. “She’s still on the line!” I hissed at April.

She nodded. “I stopped recording. We’re playing music, but your caller is still on the phone. Do you want Grover to cut her off?”

I hesitated. “No.” I decided. I uncovered the mic and sat forward.

“Sondra, I can’t meet you. I’m sorry. You sound like… like a very interesting woman… but professional restrictions and the policy of this station prohibit me from making contact with callers at any time outside the limits of the program.”

“I want to meet you,” Sondra said again. She told me her phone number.

And then hung up.

For a long time I stared vacantly into the dark and the silence.

April stepped away from the desk purposefully, snapping my attention back. “We’re going into a fifteen minute block of music,” she decided as I heard The Little River Band start singing about curiosity killing the cat. I slipped the headphones off my ears and scraped my fingers through my hair.

“Good,” I said with a sigh. “I need a break.”

“And I need to go freshen up,” April said demurely. She picked up her handbag and went out through the studio door.

I sat for a moment longer and then shrugged myself out of the chair. I headed for the coffee machine.

I filled a Styrofoam cup with instant coffee and boiling water, and wandered down the hall to the door of the producer’s booth. It was open. Grover was sitting at the desk with the phone cradled in the crook of his neck, talking quietly and typing at the same time. I waited in the doorway until he sat upright and stretched his back.

“Busy?”

Grover turned round, and it seemed to take a second before he recognized me. “Oh, hey, man!” he said like we had been friends for life. “Have you come to see how the other half operates?”

I smiled faintly. “We’re on a fifteen minute break,” I said. “I thought I’d drop in and see if it has been busy with callers tonight.”

Grover shook his head in wonder. “It’s full-on!” he said. He was a middle-aged man who spoke like he rode to work on a skateboard. His fingers were nicotine stained and there were deep creases at the corners of his eyes.

“Busier than normal?”

“A lot,” Grover admitted. “Normally we get this kind of response on breakfast radio, not during the graveyard shift.”

“Have you been a program producer for long?”

Grover hesitated for a moment and something shadowy shifted behind his eyes. The boyish enthusiasm faded from his voice. “Two years,” he said.

I kept my expression neutral. “And before that you were on the air, right?”

Grover nodded. “I did the breakfast shift.”

“And you just… what? Stopped?”

Grover picked up a pen from the desk and fiddled with it between his fingers. There was a sudden nervous twitch that tugged the corner of his mouth into some kind of a sneer. It was an involuntary reaction – one he had no control over. His eyes became darker.

“I got fired,” he said with a deep lamentable sigh. “Drugs… and chicks.”

“Oh,” I said. “I didn’t know.”

He nodded his head and his gaze became distant, like he was sifting through a book of bad memories. “I used to get stoned before going on air. Then one morning Nancy fucking Collett caught me with my hand up a very young girl’s skirt. The shit hit the fan…”

“And she fired you.” It was a statement.

“Fired,” he shrugged, “Demoted. Same thing. She took me off air and gave me the choice of becoming a program producer, or looking for a new career.”

I sipped at the coffee and then set it down. There were little islands of powder floating in the cup. “That sounds decent of her,” I said warily.

Grover sat upright in the chair and grunted. “I guess,” he said grudgingly. “But she’s a piece of work, man,” he shook his head. “A real fucking piece of work…”

I glanced up at the clock – it seemed that every room in the radio station had one. We had just a few minutes left before we had to be back on the air. April was still in the ladies’ room. I stepped over to Grover’s console and looked at the list of callers waiting on the line.

“How many are on hold waiting to talk to me?”

Grover scrolled down a page on the screen. “Seventy-eight,” he said like he couldn’t quite believe it himself.

I frowned. The screen display was different to the one in the studio. “Do you keep a record of the people who phone in?” I asked.

Grover nodded. “The basics,” he said.

“Does that include their phone number?”

“Of course.”

I nodded. “Can you give me the number that Sondra called from?”

Grover leered at me and his face broke into a quirk of a smile, but he said nothing. He tapped at the keyboard and then sat back. He offered me the pen. “Wanna write it down?”

I did. I stood up, and then had an afterthought. “Does every producer follow the same format – the same procedure?”

“Sure,” Grover nodded vaguely.

“So could you tell me what number she phoned from last night, when Cecily was producing the show?”

Grover frowned and attacked the keyboard. A second later I was looking at a fresh screen. He glanced at the display on the monitor, and then at the scrap of paper in my hand. “Same number,” he said.

I nodded, and shrugged. I rubbed my chin ruefully. “You know last night when that woman phoned in, Cecily was clutching a phone, and April had disappeared into the ladies’ room. I honestly thought the mysterious Sondra was one of them.”

“You thought it was someone from the radio station?”

I nodded, but with less conviction now that I thought about it. “I did – at the time,” I confessed.

Grover got up from the chair and tugged at his beard. He drifted around the booth for a few moments, touching things absently. Finally he turned back to face me, his expression serious, his face grey and ashen.

“April’s not the type,” he said. “She’s in the ladies’ room right now getting herself off with a vibrator most probably. She’s like that… she’s the ‘all talk, no action’ kind of cock tease that gets a guy hot and bothered and then backs out at the last moment.” Grover scratched his chin. And Cecily…” he shrugged. “Well maybe….”

I know how to read body language, and I know when someone says something and leaves things unsaid with a significant pause. Grover lapsed into exactly that kind of meaningful silence.

“Say it,” I encouraged.

He eyed me speculatively, like he was trying to decide whether he could trust me. Finally he grunted and averted his gaze as though what he was about to reveal was awkward for him.

“If it’s anyone, it’s probably Cindy,” he said at last in a rush of words.

I flinched. “Cindy?” For a second I was dumbfounded. “The receptionist? She’s only a kid!”

Grover nodded. His mouth was twitching and twisting. “She’s twenty,” Grover said. “When Nancy Collett caught me with my hand up a young girl’s skirt… it was Cindy’s pussy I had my fingers inside.”

What the hell?

“Are you serious?”

Grover nodded. “She was eighteen at the time. I was fucking her every morning after the show. She would meet me for lunch. She’s kinda crazy, man. Know what I mean? She loves sex, and she’s right into this whips and chains stuff you talk about.”

I was reeling. My impressions of young Cindy were that she was an awkward nervous intern, not a committed nymphomaniac with an insatiable thirst for sex and submission.

“How did Collett even find out?”