Alasdair Ch. 01

Lyall had talked a lot that evening, and Alasdair bathed in his son's confidence in him and wished, as he had so often, that he had a panacea to hand. He spoke of his girls, followed by a little of his own life, and the running training he had taken up after it had been recommended to him by a friend who had apparently actually strengthened his knees through regular jogs, as well as curing, to a degree, his depression. Lorna's name came up a lot, always with a strong undertow of defensiveness, which made Alasdair wonder what he had said in the past to make his son so protective. But perhaps this wasn't one of his many faults, he thought, but that of his ex's, and this led him to ask after her.

"Lexi's fine," Lyall said, calling his mother by her first name, as he always did when speaking to his father since their divorce. Alasdair wondered if that was the end of the discussion, but his son went on.

"They think Charles might have Alzheimer's. Very early to tell, but he's had some mood issues - Mum says she didn't notice these at first, after years of marriage to you..." They laughed... "But he gets disorientated and a few other things Ma says just aren't right."

Somehow, the fact that Lyall had slipped out of using her name made her seem immediately like Alasdair's family again, and he made a note to call her in the next few days. Again, priorities, he thought, the beginnings of an alcoholic self-loathing starting to permeate and, sensing this, he added more lemonade to his cup. And then more beer.

"He's got a bunch of tests to get through, but as it's California and he's dripping in hard cash as well as medical health care, that should all go smoothly. Ma's offered for us five to go over later this year, maybe August, and, though we hate to take cash, she has plenty and I'm thinking it's the thing to do, right? I mean, I guess it's one of those family-counts moments, when you swallow your pride."

They agreed that it was, and Lyall stayed till gone 11, much later than usual. Lorna must have perceived his need for connection with his father, and, unusually, the 9.30pm, where-are-you text never arrived. After they had finished Alasdair's supply of six bottles of beer, he had been tempted to offer up the whisky, but wasn't yet drunk enough to ignore his instinctive appreciation of the fact that it would a bad move. He hugged his son goodbye and watched through his kitchen window as Lyall got into the front seat of a taxi in the car park.

Alasdair stacked the plates neatly in the sink - tomorrow, he thought - and put the bottles into a bag ready to go out for recycling in the morning. Then he poured two fingers of whisky into a glass, which he downed in one, before topping it up to a centimetre below the brim, and walking through to the bedroom. Putting the glass on to the small wooden table on the left side of his bed, Alasdair undressed his long frame, crawled naked under the purple duvet, and slid the laptop on to his bony knees.

Wow. Just wow, Kindly_Meister. I can't tell you how excited that makes me. I mean, the thought of losing myself to that kind of intense high moistens me immediately. Just wet. I mean, I've always been a really sexual being, but, honestly, I fucked for the first time when I was 17, and I kind of get the feeling, even now, that there's more to it. I mean, really, I want to get into tantric eventually... that whole spiritual thing... but for now I want the sharp in-the-moment-forget-the-world-around-me buzz that I see and feel is out there when I connect with people on PhetX. I think connection is the key to what I'm after.

And now I add that to your obvious personal experience... I just want to know more...

Squirting to one side (the jury is still out on this one, as I have read papers suggesting it's a typically male way of dealing with the quirks of the female body, turning something that only a few woman can achieve - and, again, jury very much out - into a badge of honour for the sexually adept man, etc), subspace fascinates me. I've looked into hypnosis a lot as part of my psychology studies (I graduated last year), and its supposed similarity to subspace came up once. Well, I kind of asked about it in a tutorial, but was swiftly hushed up by the overly staid sex-starved tutor - yes, LOL - but I have never really met anyone who believes it so strongly. Not that, I guess, I've really met you... Tell. Me. More!

You sound amazingly interesting, Meister. I'd love to know everything, but like you say, I need to sleep, so can't really formulate my questions right now. How about you just tell me what you think I might find interesting?

That said, although you mentioned that I might not want to chat to an old man, maybe I'm too young for you - I'd hate to come across as an over-inquisitive, tiresome child. Feel free to gently bat me off, Meister. ;) xxx

The wee tease. She was way too clever to be unaware of the effect her language might have on him, he knew. Shoving the laptop on to the table next to him, he took the drink from the other side of his bed, chugged it, and passed out.

Three days later, and there was barely a pause in their correspondence. His time was, for the most part, his own, and by Wednesday evening LittleGirlLost was Tamsin, a psychology graduate from the University of Kent in Canterbury. And with a sense of inevitability, Alasdair had turned this stretch of bunkering down into an excuse for a bender. He considered it to be a controlled bender, for, although he was in no doubt about his true condition as an alcoholic, he took immense satisfaction in his ability to reach a point of semi-oblivion and go no further, save for keeping himself topped up; it was more a continual surfing of the wave than a messy descent into ethanol anaesthesia.

LittleGirlLost lived, as her profile said, in a small village near Norfolk, currently with her parents, although this, she maintained, was purely a transitory base while she organised herself to move to a city. She'd chosen Manchester as her potential new home, based on a year of weekend visits to an old friend, who had later become an old flame, and in between had, Alasdair ascertained, educated naughty-naughty Tamsin, on paper at least, in the finer arts of the flesh.

LittleGirlLost reminded him of his own youth and the girls he had gazed at from afar. She had an appealing sense of assurance combining total sexual self-confidence with an engaging credulity and candour that left him palpitating for more. Yet as he reeled her lightly in, Kindly_Meister was, uncharacteristically, faintly troubled every now again by the murky nature of the game, by the thought that there was something slightly suspect about the balance of power in their relationship. He was always able to ground himself, to re-establish his belief in his selfless benevolence, by topping up his drink.

Ultimately seeking a career in advertising, for which, LittleGirlLost had told him, psychology might seem a strange choice but was in fact ideal in terms of understanding the human psyche and how best to appeal to it, her options in Norfolk were narrow and she was treading water while gaining valuable relevant CV points in market research. Again, he thought, an illustration of that naivety, for psychology seemed to him an ideal base from which to hawk useless shit to the doltish masses.

She was currently employed gathering data for an infant-milk company, with specific instructions to target only those women clearly in the baby-making field at the moment. In the bluntness of youth, she had told him she habitually found it hard to spot the bull's eye, as, "everyone over 32, maybe 35, looks the same to me". And a breathing space... "No offence."

Alasdair had fleetingly wondered why she hadn't simply deleted the words from her message, as this was not during one of their Skype chats (two so far), but ultimately he recognised it as a vital part of their emerging power play; it was important that he knew his place. In those chats, though, he had been unquestionably in charge, and how ambrosial an experience it was to observe, with the dispassionate air of a true dom, her descent from self-assured and in command to placid and domesticated little girl. And again, he licked his lips.

As the distinctive blips and bloops of the Skype ringtone echoed around his tiny lounge, he had momentarily been convinced that she wouldn't answer. This was a frequent occurrence with first-time calls, and he was girded for this, although desperate to hear her voice, which he assumed would be devoid of the idiosyncratic Norfolk vowel sounds. If they'd ever existed, he suspected they would have been smoothed out by the university years. He smiled as he heard the excited, rather breathy tones that eventually greeted him.

"Oh, I'm so sorry, Gentle, erm, Alasdair. I thought you'd been distracted and I strolled off to feed Toots... erm, my, erm, cat." There were no images, their having opted for a voice-only conversation, which thoroughly suited Alasdair, who by this point had been topping up for 52 hours straight, and was definitively in the zone where he sounded better than he looked.

"Are yer wet, lassie?" He knew his voice, deep and resonant, to be an unmistakable crowd pleaser, and his words were greeted by an emphatically unsophisticated series of giggles, accompanied, he visualised quite clearly, by a slight squirming brought about by a blend of trepidation and passion.

"Are yer wet?" he repeated, slower this time, same tone though - calm, in command.

The giggles died down. His breaths were unhurried and casually measured, a counterpoint to her shallower, lighter not-quite-pants but getting there.

Weeks later, as they lay, strangely separate considering the ardour of their recent coupling, in that king-sized pine bed of his, her wrists and ankles freshly released from the leather restraints that were a permanent attachment there - indeed, his anticipation of this had been his reason for purchasing that specific spindle headboard - she confessed that she hadn't actually heard much of the detail of his words.

Skype had shrouded his salacious mumblings in odd, Tardis-like pulses of noise, but the tone - serious, imposing, dominant - had come through clearly. It was this that had brought her, with the aid of a small gold-tone vibrator that lived in her tartan purse, to a fairly speedy and intense orgasm, irrespective of the content. He could, she told him, have been reciting the menu from the local Chinese to her, so compelling was the timbre of his words. She hoped it had been as powerful for him.

This was not a question and therefore he was not obliged to share the fact that his own tool had remained in a stubbornly inebriated and enfeebled daze so predictable that he hadn't even bothered to unmask it from beneath the flannel dressing gown that had been hanging flaccidly around his increasingly emaciated frame.

********************

It had seemed natural when they settled on Manchester for a first rendezvous; a place they both knew well, having both had relationships that involved the city.

For Alasdair, it was where he'd met and conducted much of his affair with Ella, lasting slightly over two years. She had been, he would slur down the ear of anyone who cared to listen in the wee hours over the tail end of a night on the pish, the one and the only great love of his life. He tended not to share much detail beyond the fact that he had, of course, fucked that one up royally.

Tamsin's had been with a guy she'd met at a party in Canterbury - a little older, 27 to her then 19; enough of a difference for her to feel that here was something different. He was the brother of a guy she'd been flirting with for several weeks, without much counter-encouragement, and was considerably more seasoned sexually, with an effortless sensuality that whited his comparatively amateur younger brother out of Tamsin's thoughts.

Tom worked as palliative social worker, an exacting and exhausting job. He grew and smoked in copious quantities his own Thunderbud, a strain of cannabis that helped to fuel both his need to connect with nature and his commitment to obscuring the pain and suffering of around 10 patients and their families every week.

She had travelled to see him once a month for just over a year, unless asked otherwise, although he never returned the visits. Tamsin simply didn't care. All pride vanished and she had been, she suspected (but never asked as the answer might have meant needing to change a mutually beneficial situation), one of a stable of "sluts", although she liked to think she was his very special one. He was, she told Alasdair, the first man ever to use the word slut to her as a term of endearment, and she clung to the title then and now.

He lived alone in a flat near the station, although more often than not, there were two or three other people there, generally passing through, rarely the same faces twice, mixed gender. She would potter, make tea, order the odd takeaway online when instructed and sometimes empty the oversized dishwasher which came with the rented home and without which the kitchen would have been a jumble, for food, certainly while she was there, was a constant feature. She suspected he didn't eat during the week and made up for it, snake-like, during his days off.

LittleGirlLost lived for the times when, after everyone had drifted off - to sleep, or in a more physical sense - they slithered into bed, door closed, and he showed her what a truly good slut she was.

Towards the end, her last three visits or so, she had watched as a girl, so like herself as to make it almost futile to bother making the change, had slowly crept into her spot. Her last visit involved her sidling into his bedroom to find the two in a position she knew very well and had been assured was created just for her.

Unnoticed, she slunk back out and sat huddled, knees to her chest, by the electric fire in the living room until 6am, when she could finally head for the earliest train to Euston and on to her own shared house in Kent. For a psychology student, she sure was a slow learner about human habits, she thought, as the solemn North whizzed by the train window.

********************

It had probably been around that time when the brief, intense madness that had characterised Alasdair's relationship with Ella had finally imploded and he'd settled down to truly devote himself to drowning his sorrows. Although he was a man who prided himself on his impeccable honesty, what he hadn't told Tamsin, either before, during or after that first meeting, was that the hotel he had booked them into for their tryst was the very same where he'd met his true soulmate, as he thought of Ella.

There was to be no madness about his first encounter with the younger girl. Calm and controlled, Alasdair had planned and worked on the details for days before the actual encounter, and had all but brainwashed himself into a fanatic refusal to touch anything fermented, brewed or distilled.

With Ella, an evening of mutual quaffing as equals with no pre-assigned agenda had led to a conspiratorial mist of shared tales, giggles and a very natural and funny, if somewhat botched, night in her third-floor room; with no expectations, Alasdair had simply been himself, and that was enough. With LittleGirlLost, however, he was to be her Kindly_Meister and anything else was a breach of terms, unacceptable for a man who took a pride and honour in his dom status, if not in himself.

She opened to his sharp rap, wearing the outfit he had chosen and had delivered to her the previous week: thigh-length black lace hold-ups, a tight black PVC minidress, overlaid with a black net babydoll and topped off with a dark velour collar and fingerless black silk lace gloves, which stopped just above the elbows on her skinny arms.

What greeted him was a real little girl lost, barefoot, tinier than he'd anticipated, so that the outfit grazed rather than clung to her slight curves, and this sight kindled his appetite more than he cared to concede. In all honesty, it was rare to meet a woman who looked even as appetising as her online persona, but this wee thing exceeded his already lofty expectations, a state he struggled not to convey too blatantly.

Alasdair handed over the small clump of velvety crimson roses he had carried all the way from Edinburgh station, and her protracted gaze met his eyes with a fragility that, again, he hadn't foreseen in their correspondence.

What she saw was a tall, skinny older guy in a dark grey, well-cut if a trifle overused, suit. His face, which was what she focused on, was like the photos - weary, humane, and with what her grandmother used to call a "kind eye", like that of a cow or a camel, rather than a stallion. His thinning hair, with a light touch of grey-white, was brushed firmly back from his forehead, and he clutched the bunch of dark flowers like a kid who'd been given them to hand over and forgotten they were there. The tired little bouquet embarrassed her: it was an old-fashioned romantic gesture that seemed thoroughly pointless, considering the nature of their electronic communications; as if meeting in a hotel room weren't enough proof of intent. Somewhat incongruous to the formality of his clothing, a small navy backpack was slung over his right shoulder.

There was a genuine benevolent smile on his well-aged face, and as he handed over the roses, he leant in slightly to kiss her flushed cheeks. This coincided with her swiftly half side-stepping and swooping, so that they kind of shook hands instead. She gestured him inside.

Between Piccadilly station and the hotel, a five-minute walk away, Tamsin had paused for provisions. Reading between the endless lines of their correspondence, she had detected a love for all things spiritual - when it came to alcohol at least - and so had slipped 700ml bottle of Jack Daniels into her velvet duffel bag, along with a turquoise short-bobbed wig and a spanking new wet-look catsuit with front zipper. From the minimart en route, she'd added a litre of lemonade, a mango and passionfruit smoothie, some smoky-bacon tiger nuts and a three-pack of Twirls.

He wasn't the first guy she'd met in the past year, but was, without competition, the eldest of a total of four. All had been older, with ages ranging from 31 to 36, but there was something about the photo Alasdair had sent - him standing in front of a ceiling-height pine bookcase, totally exposed - that had touched her.

He'd just looked so damned human, although, again, she'd focused on his face in that shot, his nakedness jarring with her belief - one she was challenging - that someone of this age should be covered up, and she wondered who had taken the picture (this not being the usual bathroom mirror selfie). Nothing hidden, he'd presented a mix of frailty and pride, and Tamsin had seen someone who would instinctively accept her ripening needs and temper his own to meet them. Accept was not quite the word, she thought, as she was hunting for someone with a more pedagogical bent, while she figured out exactly what those needs were.

She'd also received a close-up from the same series: a side-view cock shot, a protractor-perfect 90 degrees, she was sure, the one hand in view placed casually on the lower part of his hip, which thrust slightly forward. She stared at the picture, willing it to turn her on, and rubbing herself as she did so, to create a Pavlovian link between the two things. This was what her mind needed, a skilled master figure who could look after her and teach her, no doubt. The key was to convince her body it agreed.

And so he walked slowly into a room booked and paid for by him in her name, still almost anonymous, but with a whiff of the young girl already drifting in. Her embroidered brown coat lay across the back of one of the two bucket chairs, at least one of which he intended to bend her over before their night was done.