Chapter Two

I WENT DOWN to Spice Island the next day and watched Stuart’s ship sail, kicking myself for my pathetic sentimentality. The crew were lined up on deck, waving back to their families at the dockyard. I wondered if Stuart had anyone to wave to. I couldn’t make him out amidst all the uniformed men and women, though I squinted hard enough to send me cross-eyed. Off he went, past the Isle of Wight and away to hotter, more dangerous climes. Would he come back? I waited for the hulk of greyness to disappear, along with the onlookers, and went home to plan my first week’s lessons.

Two days later, I was back at work. We were to be eased in gently with a teacher training day, so the usual crowd of scuffling, high-fiving kids was nowhere in evidence as I cycled through the high-rise canyons and into the school grounds.

After locking – or rather, double-locking, given the area the school is in – my bike, I turned around and ran slap-bang into exactly the person I had most hoped to avoid.

‘Oh, Gareth,’ I flustered, picking up my bag and the Biros that had spilled out on to the playground. ‘Have good holidays?’

‘No,’ he said, in his hurt voice, the one that reminded me of a plaintive buffalo. ‘I had a lot on my mind.’

‘Oh well. Good weather though. I expect you played lots of cricket.’

‘It was only the cricket keeping me sane.’

‘Cricket therapy, eh? The crack of leather on willow.’ I had to stop. Leather. Willow. Mmmm. Leather.

‘Stop being so flipping flippant, Chez. You know you broke my heart.’

‘Oh Gareth,’ I said in a hand-wringing tone. There didn’t seem much else to say. I was not about to apologise, or soften, or give him a fight, which were the three options he was hoping for me to choose between. ‘Have you met the new head yet?’

‘What do you think? I’ve only just got here.’

Thank God, thank God, we made it to the doors, and I staggered into the entrance hall, almost sobbing with relief to see Louisa with some of the other girls, comparing suntans and timetables.

I left Gareth to it and was welcomed back into the fold.

‘Hey, Chez, go up to the staff room and get your timetable,’ advised Lou. ‘We’re just waiting for the Big Intro to Mr Superhead. He’s going to be speaking in the hall in about ten minutes.’

‘Right.’ I peered at her timetable. ‘Ouch! 11VY and 9KS. Double whammy! Commiserations.’

‘Tell me about it,’ she mourned, but I was springing away upstairs to the place of orange and brown refuge known as the staff room.

My timetable was the same as ever. I’m the only music teacher in the school, so I get all of them, in small doses, then two small GCSE groups for eight hours of the week. In an area like this, few children are interested in learning about notation or the great composers, but the modules on Popular and World music are slowly drawing a few more to the studio each year.

I raced back down, just in time to see the curtain pulled back from the hall doors and the assembled staff invited in. We sat on the moulded plastic chairs, staring at the lectern on the stage, breathing in beeswax, waiting expectantly for this miracle worker to do his stuff. And he was going to have to be a miracle worker, frankly. Most of the staff had job applications pending elsewhere, and finding replacements for them would be the proverbial hunt for hen’s teeth.

We clapped, not quite knowing why, when he appeared before us. He didn’t look anything like Jesus, but the air of authority was there, as well as the expensive suit and well-cut hair.

‘Not bad,’ whispered Lou. ‘Better than Gilmour.’

‘Anything would be better than Gilmour.’

‘True.’

The Superhead – Patrick Marks, as he liked to call himself – spoke a few words of conventional introduction before launching into his spiel.

‘Here at St Sebastian’s, we all face a substantial challenge. We’ve seen the statistics, and we know the score. Unless we can turn this school around in two years, we close down and the government re-opens it as an Academy with a new staff. Two years. That’s all we’ve got. We need to sail this ship together, one crew, one purpose.’

God, nautical imagery again. Everyone who comes to this city thinks they have to do that. All the same, his voice was exceptionally … something. Lulling? Reassuring? Arousing!

He had the world’s sexiest voice.

How very distracting.

Now I wanted to scrutinise him more closely. I leant forward in my chair, noting the aquiline features, the long, lean nose, his height and elegant bearing. Nice hands. No wedding ring.

He was quite a speaker, using his extraordinary voice to full effect, lowering it to utter words of cunning flattery, raising it to ring out the rhetoric. It was like music, using cadence and rhythm to create an irresistible flow.

It was too tempting to imagine it murmuring wicked words in my ear. I sunk into reverie, missing the entire section on targets, picturing myself bent over at his mercy while he paced the room whacking a riding crop against his thigh and lecturing me on my misdeeds and their penalties.

Oh, he had finished. Applause, a standing ovation, filled the hall, and I hauled myself to my feet with the rest.

‘That voice,’ I whispered to Lou.

‘I know! Don’t you want to have sex with it? His wife’s a lucky woman.’

His wife. He was one of those guys who didn’t wear a ring. Old school. Did that mean he was more or less likely to spank his partner?

The conundrum defeated me. I warned myself against developing a crush on this man, telling myself that he would be too busy to have much to do with a lowly music serf such as myself.

We trickled off for tea and biscuits, girding our loins for a long session of putting our classrooms to rights for the new term.

‘If you are under 18 or offended by alternative sexualities, please leave now.’

I wasn’t under 18, and I certainly wasn’t offended by alternative sexualities, but my finger was positively shaking over the “Enter” button, as if I expected a flashing light to go off at the local police station the moment I pressed it.

‘Pervert alert,’ the desk sergeant would say laconically. ‘At 11B South Parade Gardens.’

‘Oh really?’ His colleague would look up, eyebrows raised. ‘But she’s a schoolteacher, isn’t she?’

‘Yeah. St Sebastian’s.’

‘Well, they’re all a bunch of oddballs up there. All the same, the Evening News’ll be interested. It’ll make the front page.’

‘Yeah, better call the news desk. I’ll get over to her flat and see about confiscating her computer.’

‘Right you are.’

Argh!

I retracted the finger, my heart beating fast.

Counselling myself to stop being so silly, I replaced it. There was no police link to this website for consenting adults to meet up with other consenting adults who shared their particular kink. This was not a school laptop, watched over by Techno Mo, the head of Information Technology. It was my personal laptop, on which I was absolutely entitled to conduct my own personal business. Any personal business, barring criminal acts.

No policemen were going to roll up at the door wielding handcuffs. Though actually …

But I didn’t have time for cop fantasies.

Was I going to do this, or not?

I took a deep breath and stabbed at the button. I was in. The world seemed to look the same. What next?

I cruised through a few user profiles, occasionally stretching my eyes or exclaiming, ‘Wow!’ at some of the photographs illustrating them. I clicked quickly past anything involving intimate piercings or close-ups of cocks or, ew, was that an enema bag? I lingered over the pretty pictures of girls in corsets, or men with whips, or pleasingly-striped female bottoms. This was what I was here for. People like me.

At the top of the screen, the invitation to create a profile and become a member kept luring my eye toward it, like Jessica Rabbit’s beckoning finger. It all looked more and more exciting, the more I read and discovered. The members made cyber-friends with each other and sent messages if they thought they might have enough in common to try meeting up. I looked for members in the local area and found an excitingly long list of them. I could actually do this. Could I?

Stuart’s words revolved around my head: ‘Go out there and get spanked.’ That was an order, wasn’t it? If I thought of this as obeying his order, it would be easier. I imagined Stuart as a benign long-distance dictator, watching me through some kind of Skype arrangement from his warship.

‘Join the site,’ he urged. ‘Get to know a few fellow deviants. You’re bound to run across one you click with. Find him and, when you do, send me a letter with all the details.’

‘OK.’ I clicked on “Sign up”, waited for the confirmation email, then set to work creating my profile.

So. Username. What could I have? Not one of those blatant ones like Cumsucker69 or Slut4U. I wanted something demure that hinted at the submissive longings behind it. What famous submissives were there? I could only think of O from The Story of O– great book, but not such an inspiring name. It took me another hour to list all the possibilities until eventually, frustrated by the unwanted procrastination, I called myself AtYourService and had done with it.

Next I had to tick a vast number of boxes detailing my interests, vanilla and non-vanilla. I only ticked “music” on the vanilla, not having time for fripperies, then moved on to the interesting part. It was like those old adverts for dating agencies, only instead of “Pets” you could tick “Caning”, instead of “Pubs and Clubs” you had “Multiple Partners”.

Having tick-box identified myself as a corporal punishment fetishist with interests in anal sex, humiliation, and bondage, I moved on to my personal statement.

‘I am new to all this,’ I started, wishing I had a pencil to suck the nub of, ‘so I need to be taught a great deal. Are you a strict but caring teacher?’ Fuck, it sounded like something from the Times Educational Supplement. Should I sex it up a bit? ‘If you can help this curious girl learn the pleasures of submission, please feel free to message me. Imagination and GSOH essential, intelligence and cultural knowledge preferred, looks less relevant than natural authority. Thanks for reading.’

Ugh, “thanks for reading”. I sounded so … wholesome. But who was to say that would turn some of these gentlemen off? I wasn’t looking for the kind of man who wanted to surround himself with Cumsucker69s. I was looking for the kind of man who wanted me. A man like … Stuart.

A picture? No. No way. I wasn’t going there.

I uploaded the profile to MasterMe.com and then had to close my browser, aghast and giggling at the huge step I had taken.

In my bed, I imagined my first meeting with a shadowy dominant man. How would it happen? Would he take me to a dungeon club? Would I have to parade past a crowd of people, led by a chain attached to a collar, wearing only a PVC basque with stockings and suspenders that exposed my tits, arse and pussy? Would they slap at my bum as I passed, commenting on my appearance, expressing their hopes that they might get a turn later? Would they watch as the shadowy master fastened me into a pillory and proceeded to whip my displayed backside until it was red and swollen? Would the crowd then surge up and feel the heat, cupping my buttocks in multiple hands, moving their fingers down to wet them in my cunt, making me come in public, over and over again, oh, oh, oh …

No. It probably wouldn’t happen like that. But the fantasy was strong and suddenly I felt more optimistic than I had done in months.

I still felt optimistic even after a long day of making sure none of the instruments managed to walk out of the music room by themselves between classes. During playground duty I’d had to keep the Buckland Boyz and the Somerstown Crew on separate sides of the basketball court as hostilities erupted over somebody disrespecting somebody else’s lunchbox. And my Year Eleven exam group seemed to have forgotten what a treble clef was over the course of the summer holidays.

But apart from that, it was all good.

Looking out from my classroom window, watching Gareth take the first football practice of term (and getting quite angry with his team by the looks of things), I wondered what my inbox would hold for me when I got home. I had had to forcibly restrain myself from switching my laptop on that morning, knowing that my concentration at work would be severely impaired if anything interesting was nestling in amongst the Viagra spam. No, I told myself, it’s too soon. You won’t hear anything yet. You probably won’t hear anything, ever.

But what if Sir Right was waiting for me even now, hanging on for my reply?

I giggled to myself and wandered over to my desk, sternly telling myself that I wasn’t to go home until I had marked these shoddy Year Eleven listening exercises. All awful, apart from Tunde’s, as usual.

Unexpectedly, the door opened after a brief knock and I looked up to be faced with …

‘Oh hullo.’

Patrick Superhead Marks, looking as suave and deadly as James Bond, stood with his hand on the knob, casting his eye around my neglected lair.

‘The music room,’ he declared in those knicker-wettening tones. ‘And you must be Cherry? Cherry Delaney?’

‘Yes,’ I said, thrown into confusion. For some reason, I had stood up when he entered the room, just as I used to as an inky-fingered convent schoolgirl.

He loped across, two swift swishes of his long legs, and extended a hand. Still wedding ringless, not that that meant anything. I took it, rather limply, but he shook it with great enthusiasm and I found myself wanting the gesture to go on and on. This was how handshakes were meant to be, my hand enclosed in reassuring warmth and strength, given no option but to follow his lead. He really was a lot better looking than I had at first thought, one of those men whose attractions creep up and leap on your unsuspecting libido. The voice was just the fanfare for the man. I hoped I wasn’t blushing, but knew I probably was.

‘I’d hoped to get round all the staff a little more quickly, but you know how it is – some of them have a list of grievances that would fill the pages of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Still, better late than never. Please accept my apologies.’

‘Uh, of course.’ You have those crinkles at the side of your eyes.

‘Good. So this is your kingdom, is it?’

‘Haha, yes. It’s a little bit ramshackle. Needs a new king, haha.’ Jesus, what am I saying? I can’t think with him standing this close. He’s so distracting, with his piercing green-brown eyes. I wish he’d go away.

‘Well, I don’t know about a new king – you seem to be doing very well. One of the few curriculum areas that’s been getting halfway decent results. But I do agree that perhaps the physical fabric of your land could do with some … regeneration.’

The truth of this statement forced my attention away from him and on to my sorry domain. One piano, indifferently tuned, stood in the corner, while paint-scratched cupboards housed a variety of ancient and battered instruments. The music stands used to be blue but now they were a gunmetal grey. The shelves on the wall held music scores that were used by these children’s grandparents – dog-eared, ripped and graffitied to hell.

‘Music hasn’t been much of a priority in the budget, traditionally,’ I confided. ‘It’s a bit of a poor relation.’

‘That’s a shame. And I think it needs to change.’

I looked up at him again, catching a breath. Was he going to make me an offer?

‘You’ve worked hard, got good results and I think you should be rewarded. Music is a subject area that could be a real success for our school – most of the kids here love music. Many of them DJ or play in bands in their spare time. Why not capitalise on that enthusiasm? I want to build a decent music suite with a recording studio.’

‘That would be amazing!’ You are amazing. I think I love you.

‘Yes. I think it could be developed as a community resource too. It would be popular, newsworthy, give some of the disaffected youngsters a focus, perhaps.’

‘I agree!’ You’re giving me a focus right now. A highly sexual one.

‘Good. I’ll put it to the Governors. And another thing, Cherry …’

The way you say my name makes me want to come. Say it again.

‘There’s more?’ I laughed, trying to convey in that one sound the enormity of my gratitude for his interest in me and my music room.

‘I wonder if you’d be interested in putting on a production? A musical, something like Oliver!. Or, I don’t know, what has lots of young people in it?’

‘West Side Story?’

‘Perfect! The gang theme!’

He clapped my shoulder approvingly, his gorgeously cruel lips angled up in a broad smile. I nearly fainted.

‘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.

SecretSadist had a wonderful turn of phrase and a wicked sense of humour that set me a-swoon from his first sentence. He was my domcrush from the start. I suggested we exchange photographs. Keen, I know, but sometimes you have to be bold.

The final candidate, VladofWallachia, was so terse his message skirted the borders of hostility, but his photograph was so stunning I discounted this. Shallow, I know, but my eyes were tired and something so easy on them was a rare treat. Plus I needed to look at something pretty that wasn’t Superhead Marks. I needed that man’s image right out of my mind’s eye.

I wrote back to Vlad, thinking that I really ought to enclose a photo myself. Which one should I choose? Not one with Gareth in it for a start. One wearing my glasses or not? I went for a specs-free shot of me on the Isle of Wight ferry with my hair tangling all over my laughing face. It sounds awful, but it’s one of my favourites, and makes me look almost presentable. Perhaps, though, I thought, having pressed “send”, I should have chosen a picture of me looking submissive. Except I didn’t really have any of those. Oh well. If he recoiled in horror and never wrote back, there was no harm done. This was fun, an adventure. I was expecting some bumps and ego bruises along the way.

I forced myself to log out rather than hang around waiting for replies and went to bed.

Wednesday morning (I wasn’t able to resist this time) brought replies from all five. StrictButFair expected me to pay for his exclusive service! The nerve of it. ‘Thanks but no thanks,’ I trilled, dropping his reply into the recycling bin.

MasterAndCommander asked for a photograph.

SirLancelot had written a long rhapsody on a theme by Paganini. Well, not a theme by Paganini, but all sorts of impressionistic ramblings about life, art, culture, touching only tangentially on BDSM. Tangentially was good though. I could see the virtue of taking things slowly. I gave him a mental nod of approval and filed him away for later.

SecretSadist made me shout with laughter and, while he claimed to have no recent photographs, he described himself as having a devilish smirk and a nice high forehead. ‘Let’s get better acquainted,’ he suggested, ‘perhaps in one of these newfangled online relationships before we take the plunge into (the harbour) a meeting.’ OK, you’re the boss, I saluted him, reading further down his list of attributes. Nice eyes, greenish brown. Large nose. White shirt. Olive skin. Mmm, I think I could …

‘You are pretty,’ said Vlad, ‘let’s meet.’

Oh! So soon? Was this wise? Bugger wise. I hit “reply”.

‘Maybe a coffee? Saturday morning?’

‘You can come to my place.’

‘No, I think a coffee first would be best.’

‘OK.’

Shit! Do I mean this? Do I really want this?

‘So you and Superhead are putting on a show.’

Louisa sounded wistfully jealous and a mite suspicious as she placed the Friday evening pints on our table at the Admiral Nelson, our preferred post-school pub.

‘Yeah. Auditions are on Monday.’

‘I know. Sounds like half the school are going to try out for it.’

‘Good. The buzz around this is really encouraging – I didn’t think anyone would be interested.’

‘All the girls are crushing on Superhead. It’s because he’s directing. You’ll be lucky to get any boys. And Romilly is spitting chips.’

‘Hmm.’

Romilly was Head of Drama. It was a highly appropriate job title, given her general demeanour. She was understandably offended that Marks hadn’t left the directing to her. Served her right for being a lazy baggage who hadn’t bothered to put any plays or performances on for three years, then.

‘You weren’t here, were you, for Romilly’s production of Bugsy Malone?’

The legend of Bugsy Malonewas so familiar to all at St Sebastian’s that we gave it a minute’s silence.

‘It was Superhead’s idea anyway,’ I moved on briskly. ‘If she wants to be mad at someone, she can be mad at him.’

‘Hard man to be mad at,’ said Lou wistfully.

‘Yeah, well.’ I needed to change the subject. No more discussion of Mr Marks. ‘I was wondering if I could ask you a favour, actually.’

‘Ask away.’

‘I’m meeting someone for coffee tomorrow.’

Lou squealed annoyingly. It wasn’t that big a deal, for God’s sake.

‘Not Duncan, the new Physics teacher, is it?’

‘No.’

‘Aww. I think you and he would –’

‘It’s not him,’ I said hurriedly. ‘It’s a guy I met on the internet.’

‘Oh! Tell.’

‘He’s a bit keen,’ I confided. ‘I don’t feel I know him that well, so I was wondering if you could, y’know, keep an eye on things. It’s only coffee, tomorrow morning, about 11-ish.’

‘Oh God, yes. I’ll lurk in the wings, ready to pounce if he puts anything where he shouldn’t. What’s his name?’

‘Er, Vlad. I think.’

‘Vlad? Sounds like a vampire.’

‘Well, that would be OK.’ I grinned. ‘Vampires are hot these days.’

‘Order a garlic latte, just in case.’

‘Will do.’

The weather was still warm, and there were swan pedaloes aplenty rippling the surface of Canoe Lake as Lou and I approached the waterside café.

‘I think that’s him, by the ice cream kiosk,’ I whispered.

‘Phwoar, really?’

‘Yeah. You go and sit at that table at the far end. I’ll follow you in a couple of minutes.’

I lurked behind the wooden structure with its smart blue and white paint job until Louisa had been gone for a while, then I peered around the corner.

Vlad’s camera hadn’t lied. He was stunning: cheekbones sharper than anything Mr Gillette had ever marketed, full, lush lips, piercing eyes and a fuzz of dark hair all over his perfectly-shaped head. He was wearing combat fatigues and big boots. Underneath, I suspected he was all lean muscle and sinew.

I felt embarrassed at not being a supermodel, but I swallowed my low self-esteem and showed myself.

He stubbed out the roll-up cigarette he had been smoking and stood up, offering a hand.

‘Hi,’ he said, unsmiling.

‘Hi … Vlad,’ I said. His hand was big, but there were lots of cuts and nicks on his fingers, and the skin felt like sandpaper.

‘My name isn’t Vlad. It’s Andreu.’

‘Oh, right. Well, hi, Andreu. I’m not called AtYourService either.’ I laughed, but he didn’t join in. ‘Cherry,’ I elucidated after an awkward beat.

‘Ah, like the fruit.’

‘Yes. Like the fruit. Hang on, I’ll just order …’

‘No. You won’t order. I’ll order. You want coffee?’

‘Thanks. Cappuccino, please.’

‘No. Not cappuccino.’

What? He wanted to dictate what coffee I could drink? Was that not a bit too much too soon? I watched in bemusement as he went over to the counter, then made a grimace to Lou that I hope she interpreted as “slightly odd beginning, don’t go anywhere”.

He returned with a cup of strong-looking tea.

‘Oh, tea. Lovely.’ I took a sip.

‘You look like a tea-drinker,’ he said, obviously considering this enough in the way of explanation.

‘Oh, right. But you aren’t. Andreu – what sort of name is that?’

‘Romanian. My mother’s Romanian. Like Vlad of Wallachia.’ He drained the dregs of his coffee and then leant forward, watching me intently, so intently that my hand shook and the teacup began to quiver.

‘I know what to do with you,’ he announced.

I put the cup down, fascinated.

‘I’m going to take you to my flat. You’ll get on your knees and suck me until I’m hard. I’ll push you down so your face is on the floor, I’ll take off my belt and whip you with it till you scream. But that’s what you want, isn’t it?’

I couldn’t reply, my half-open mouth and shallow breaths urging him to continue.

‘You want me to fuck you. So I’ll fuck you, hard. You’ll scream, then I’ll call my boys and they’ll come and fuck you too.’

I had to stop him there. ‘Your boys?’

‘My friends. We work together.’

‘And … fuck together?’

‘When there’s a slut who wants it, yes, we fuck together. We fuck the slut until she screams. Come on. Come back and I’ll show you.’

‘Actually …’ I half-stood, looking over to Lou.

‘Don’t play games with me.’ He was snarling, reaching over to grab my wrist. ‘You want this.’

‘Maybe, Andreu, maybe. But not like this. Not so soon. And not with you. I’m sorry.’

I managed to free my wrist once Andreu noticed people looking at us, and I backed away over to Lou.

‘You wasted my time!’ he shouted after me. ‘You stupid slut!’

‘Nice guy!’ panted Lou once we had run around the perimeter of the lake and stopped for breath by the statue of the angel. ‘Will you see him again?’

‘Shut up. He just … It all felt off, that’s all. It wasn’t right.’

‘Pity. What a face. Straight out of an aftershave ad. What the hell did you say to him, to get that reaction?’

‘Just that I didn’t want to shag on the first date.’

‘That’s why I don’t do internet dating,’ said Lou, with an irritating air of conferring great wisdom on the ignorant. ‘Too many guys sharpening their penknives for the next notch on the bedpost. Why don’t you ask Duncan out?’

‘I don’t fancy him,’ I grumped and we tramped off down the parade towards town to soothe our egos at Karen Millen.

Perhaps this just wasn’t for me. Perhaps it was all my fault. Perhaps I should have been up for wild kinky group sex in exchange for one cup of tea. After all, I had been advertising my interest in such things, or Andreu wouldn’t have responded.

I wrestled with the aftermath of the dating disaster, lying on my sofa, listening to Wagnerian sturm und drang. How safe was I in trusting my instincts? After all, I had been happy to bring Stuart back for activities most would consider inappropriate for such a brief term of acquaintanceship – why was he OK and Andreu not?

I supposed Stuart had seemed in control of himself, and considerate of my feelings, whereas Andreu had visibly seethed with all kinds of unsettling qualities. Hostility? Resentment? Hatred? Misogyny? I didn’t know him well enough to understand what might have been behind his behaviour, but whatever it was, it wasn’t my problem, and I wasn’t about to make it so.

I lifted the lid of my laptop. Should I? Could I? Was it best if I just deleted my profile off MasterMe and … No, I was not going to ask Duncan out. No way.

And Andreu was just one man, surely unrepresentative of domkind. I would get better at this. I would learn to sort the wheat from the chaff. The masters from the twats. I sat up, put back my shoulders and logged on.