So today is the big day: the end of the two weeks. I know absolutely as much about him as I can find out, and I know what I want in the relationship if I were to become his slave. There’s just one thing I couldn’t figure out, so I asked him today.

“Why me, Sir?” I asked over another steak.

He put his fork down and leaned forward. “Because you make being dominant fun,” he said with a smile. “I’m sure if you’ve done your research—”

“I know you were an officer in the Army and have run countless businesses, Sir,” I interrupted. “I know you’re used to having your way. That’s what confuses me, Sir: you’ve had numerous opportunities to be a dominant, yet you say you haven’t enjoyed them. You’ve had multiple scenes where you spent all your time worried about your sub and none of it enjoying being in control.” I shrugged helplessly. “If you’ve had subs before that you’ve actually played with, why not get one of them? Why do you want to go into this uncharted territory with me? How do you or I know that you won’t get bored of me after a couple of days, Sir?”

“First off, don’t interrupt me, boy” M said, raising his eyebrows and giving me a significant look. His tone softened. “But you bring up good points: yes, I have had people follow my orders my whole life. It has always been about business: in the military, it was just getting the job done. I had a task my group needed to finish, and I gave the orders to achieve its success. It was no different in my charities. The task was different, but my involvement was the same: give orders to achieve a greater good. With Leather, there is no greater good for me. There can be for some, but Leather is my outlet, the time when I get to be selfish and give orders to achieve what I want.”

I started to ask about his scenes, but he continued.

“While the idea of ordering people around just for the fun of it has been intriguing and exciting to me for many years, real life kept getting in the way. As I’m sure you know, I care deeply about others and want them to do well by my actions. Years of serving others through leadership made it difficult to just focus on myself. My subs had desires, and I suppressed my own to give them theirs. You—” He stopped suddenly, hesitating.

“What, Sir?” I asked, leaning forward.

He sighed. “Do not think me awful for saying this, boy,” he said. “Promise me.”

“I–Sir, I cannot promise when I don’t know what you’re gong to say.”

“Hmm.” He pursed his lips. “Well, that’s fair, I suppose.” He cleared his throat. “With you, I trust that you are smart enough to take care of yourself, that if I give you an order that is wildly dangerous, you will call me on it. You have called your previous Doms out on their poor choices, and I expect nothing less from you. Yet at the same time, I could see how much you hesitated when I asked—not even ordered—you to go get the canvas in the nude. I saw you analyzing it, trying to think of a reason not to, and then I saw something beautiful: I saw you do what I told you to do, despite your own discomfort. That is why I chose you. Anybody can be a mindless slave, just doing as ordered. Anybody can be headstrong and refuse to do anything just because he was told to do it. But it takes a very special kind of person to actually think about what he’s being told to do, to consider whether what he’s been told to do is harmful, and barring that, to choose to do what he’s told.”

I sat in silence this whole time, absorbing what he was saying. I have to admit, he’s right: I had called each of my former Doms out on what they had done as the reason for my leaving. Yet at the time, I saw it as a flaw in myself that I wasn’t a good enough sub to just grin and bear it. Hearing it spun the way M put it really made me think.

“Does that answer your question?” M asked, taking another bite of his steak.

I nodded slowly. “Yes, Sir, I think so.” I looked at my steak and deliberately took a bite and chewed it. It was delicious—it was certainly not a condemnation of the cook that I wasn’t hungry—but with so much to think about, my mind was too full to let me really focus on eating.

“What else do you have for me?” M asked.

I huffed. “There’s a saying that goes, ‘if it seems too good to be true, it probably is,’ Sir. I cannot find anything wrong with you, save for a few speeding tickets.” I looked hard at him. “What’s the catch, Sir?”

M covered his mouth and laughed, squeezing his eyes shut in mirth. “That’s why I like you, boy: you’re direct and don’t beat around the bush.” He quickly chewed and swallowed his food. “But to answer your question, I am what I am,” he said, holding his hands out. “I have not tried to hide anything; everything I do is public record, and I only go by M to keep myself out of the press.”

“But with all the great things you do, you should be in the press!” I protested.

He shook his head firmly. “No, that is not what I believe. If someone does a good deed to become a celebrity, it cheapens the good deed that was done. True, the same good did come of it, but doing the good deed becomes more about the person who did it than the deed itself. I take great satisfaction out of my work; that is its own reward. I do not desire praise from others, and frankly, if I were in the limelight, it would interfere greatly with my work. I am busy enough as it is without having to answer to a hundred news reporters every day.”

I nodded. It did make sense.

“To answer your question more directly, though,” he continued, “the biggest catch is that I’m new to this. There is a lot of uncertainty in it. What I am to you now may not be what I am six months or a year from now. As we explore, I may find that there are things I want to pursue that you aren’t thrilled about, yet I will expect you to go along with them as my slave. Rest assured, I don’t envision myself getting to the point of wanting to hack parts off of you or cause you to do things that would truly put your life or others’ lives in danger. That is too drastic a change for me. But the things I demand of you may eventually make you…uncomfortable. By all means, call me out if I order something life-threatening or that could cause permanent injury, but barring that, I expect you to suck it up and do them anyway. I never did anything expecting recompense, yet looking back on all these years of living my life for others, you could say I now feel a bit entitled to having someone live his life for me.”

I took a breath and blew it out. “Wow, Sir,” I said, picking at my baked potato, “that’s an awful lot of pressure to put on one person.” I swallowed nervously. “I–I’m not that giving of a person, Sir. I’m downright selfish, if you really want the truth. I mean, yeah, I walked around naked for you, but it’s not like that was something too terrible. I don’t know that I could ‘suck it up’ like you said and just do whatever you tell me to. I’d rather just walk away.”

M frowned, leaned back in his chair, crossed his arms, and looked at me thoughtfully. A smile crept across his face.

“What Sir?” I asked.

“You say all of that,” he said, the smile getting bigger, “yet one thing you notably did not say was ‘no.’ You offer excuses why you think you cannot be my slave, yet you do not come out and directly say that you don’t want to.” He raised an eyebrow. “You know what I think, boy,” he said, cutting another piece of steak, “I think you want to be my slave—maybe very much so—but you are afraid to do it.” He put the steak in his mouth and began to chew. I started to protest, but a finger from him silenced me. I waited as he slowly chewed his steak, thinking about what he was going to say.

“Yes,” he said at last, “I am certain of it. You are afraid to lose your independence. You are afraid of the unknown. And you are afraid“—he pointed his fork at me for emphasis—”that you cannot live up to it, that you will cut and run, that you will be ungrateful, let me down, and all that.”

I opened my mouth to speak but closed it and sighed. He gave a wry, knowing smile.

“If it makes you feel any better,” he said, “I can help you stick through it.”

I looked at him with hesitant curiosity.

“Oh, rest assured, unless it’s something dangerous, I’m not going to back down on an order I give you, boy,” he said with a chuckle, “but if you’re worried about running away, I can hire someone to keep you prisoner until you wrap your head around it. If you’re worried about not living up to my expectations, I recognize that this is new territory for you, too, and I can be patient—within reason—but I can also come up with ways to enforce compliance, if need be.”

He let me digest that while he began working on his baked potato.

He was right, of course. He was 100% right. It was entirely about fear for me: fearing loss of control while craving it, fearing dependency on others while pining for a life with someone, fearing being unemployed while being unable to find even half-pleasant work. My previous Doms didn’t understand it. They weren’t smart enough to foresee the things I feared. M was. My previous Doms didn’t have the means to keep me. M did. My previous Doms…it didn’t matter. M was on a whole different level than they had been. He was, perhaps, the first person I’d ever met who truly saw all of my concerns and addressed them rather than dismissing them for lack of understanding.

I finally had an answer for him.

“You said that you chose me because you could trust that I would call you out on something dangerous, Sir,” I said slowly.

He nodded.

“And after researching you, Sir, I feel that I can trust you to think through your orders to make sure they’re not going to be dangerous before giving them.”

He nodded again.

“I think—I’m not sure, but I think—that you have my best interests at heart, Sir.”

He smiled and nodded yet again.

“And I know from my research that you have every bit the means you need to do everything you say, Sir.”

He raised his eyebrows and blinked expectantly.

“I was going to ask for an out, Sir, but I think we both know that wouldn’t work in this…particular circumstance. A trial scene with you wouldn’t be real, and I cannot just quit my job without knowing that there’s a new way for me to make ends meet, Sir. As much as I’m afraid of the unknown, Sir, your confidence, thoughtfulness, and goodwill make me think it’s going to be okay.”

He leaned forward and looked at me with breathless intensity. I took a breath and swallowed. “Okay, Sir. I’ll do it. I’ll be your slave.”

As soon as I said it, I felt sick to my stomach. Geez, I must have been out of my mind…

“So, um, now what, Sir?” I asked hesitantly. “What are the rules?”

“Now we celebrate, slave,” M replied. “As for rules, hmm…” He hesitated.

Oh, geez, what have I gotten myself into? My new master doesn’t even know what the rules are going to be!

“Tell you what, slave,” he said, “we’ll start out easy. I promise not to discipline you for breaking a rule you didn’t know about.”

“Erm, that’s a relief, Sir…”

“Rule number one you’re already good at: always call me Sir or Master; I’m just making it official. And I’ll always call you ‘slave’…unless I decide to call you something else, like ‘boy’. We’ll figure it out.”

We’ll…figure it out? “Yes, Sir,” I said nervously.

“Rule number two, you’ll live with me, and as long as you’re in the house and we’re not in mixed company, you’re to be nude…unless I decide to put you in a jock strap. Hmm…” he thought about it some more, and I couldn’t help chuckling in spite of myself.

He was like a kid who got to design his own Christmas or something; now that he had my agreement to be his slave, he could do pretty much anything with me he wanted. I can only imagine his elation. Unbeknownst to him—or perhaps he knew and just didn’t care—his indecision was making me incredibly nervous.

“Sir, um—” I began.

“Yes, slave, what is it?” he asked, glancing at me curiously but with the same excited energy as before.

“I—I’m sorry for speaking out of turn, Sir, but I’m very nervous about all this,” I admitted. “I guess I sort of, I dunno, assumed that you had it all planned out already, Sir.”

He frowned. “You fear the unknown,” he said, nodding to himself. “And this whole thing is unknown, and I’m contributing to the unknownness of it. Is that right, slave?”

“Yes, Sir,” I said.

“Hmm.” He pursed his lips. “Would you rather I came up with the rules and told them to you all at once, slave?”

I nodded. “Yes, Sir. I—don’t mean to make work for you, Sir.”

He shook his head. “No, I appreciate you being honest with me, slave. Enjoy it while it lasts, as I may not always be so open to feedback. But with this being new for both of us, maybe we can help each other navigate a little better, yeah?”

“Sure, Sir,” I replied.

“Very well, slave,” he said. “In that case, just put it out of your mind for tonight. You will have things you need to take care of, such as quitting your job and moving out, and I will leave you to do those things on your own. Monday, we will begin, and I will have a set of rules to you before then so that you know what you’re in for.”

“Thank you, Sir,” I said, much-relieved. But something still bothered me. “Um, Sir? About my phone…”

“Yes, slave, what is it?” he asked, frowning.

“Well, Sir, if I lose my phone, how am I going to explain to my family and friends where I’ve gone?”

He pursed his lips. “Tell them you have a new phone number,” he replied. “I will give you the number when you move in. We’ll get it worked out.”

Okay, I am totally freaking out. I’m in over my head, I’ve got to go to work on—wait, no! I need to quit my job. Crap! I’ve got to leave my apartment! I’ve got to stop the utilities, put in changes of address…shit!