Free The Word Master by Jason Luke Page B

answering.”
    “Okay,” Gwen said in a gasp of relieved breath. “What color eyes do you have?”
    I felt myself relax a little. Questions like this I could handle. “Brown.”
    “And how old are you?”
    “Thirty-nine.”
    “And you’re really from Australia?”
    “Yes,” I said. “I was born in Brisbane and moved to the States a few years ago.”
    “Thank you,” Gwen said, and then her voice softened a little and became almost pleading. “I know I’ve taken up your time, but can I ask one last question?”
    “Shoot,” I said.
    “What is your idea of a perfect date?”
    The question came out of left field – a question I had never been asked before in my life, and never actually even contemplated.
    “Are you asking me as a man… or as a Master?” I said to buy myself a few precious seconds to think.
    “As a man,” Gwen’s tone was adamant.
    I stared into darkened space for an instant, and then leaned a little closer to the microphone. “My idea of a perfect date is whatever the woman I am with considers perfect,” I said honestly. I didn’t think about the words – I spoke from the heart. “Because to me, what makes any date perfect is pleasing the woman I am with. So if she loves carnival rides, my perfect date would be visiting a local fair ground. If the lady enjoys a quiet romantic candlelit dinner, then that too is my idea of a perfect date. Ultimately, I want the time I spend with the lady to be something that she will enjoy and remember. Her happiness is the way I would measure perfection.”
    There wasn’t complete silence – I could hear Gwen breathing. Finally she gasped, “Oh, my…” and then the line went to static.
    April swung smoothly into action. She punched at buttons and finally the opening bars to a popular song filled the studio. Then she looked up at me with a dreamy, enigmatic stare.
    “Fuuuck!” April said in an awed hiss of breath. “That was hot!”
    “Huh?”
    April snatched off her headphones and dropped them onto the desk. She swung back in her chair and her eyes sparkled. “That was the sexiest, most sensual thing I have heard you say all week,” she enthused. “It was the kind of answer that will have every woman in Boston swooning.”
    “Are you serious?”
    “Hell yeah!” she said, then tilted her head a little to the side as if to see me from a different angle. “Most guys would have said their idea of a perfect date would be a baseball game, or a football game… guy kinds of things. But not you, Mr. Fucking Smooth and Sexy. You just gave the million dollar answer.”
    She gave me one last lingering look, and then leaned back over the keyboard. She was working frantically. I could hear the song was about to end and I glanced up at the clock.
    “Another call, or another song?”
    “More tunes,” April said without looking up from the monitor. “I’m just piecing together some background music for when you do this sub-club thing – jazz… that kind of stuff to help set the mood.”
    “Okay,” I said, figuring that meant I had a break. It was twenty minutes after the hour. I had ten minutes before the start of the new segment.
    I was going to need every minute of that time.
    Because I suddenly realized I had a serious problem.

Chapter 12.
     
    I paced the hallway for five fruitless minutes, wrestling with ideas and discarding them just as quickly as they occurred to me. I could see April through the open door, still building a playlist of background instrumental tunes that she would play beneath the sub-club segment.
    Only there wasn’t going to be a sub-club segment.
    I couldn’t do it.
    Finally I went back into the studio and glanced up at the clock. I had three minutes. April turned, saw the ashen expression on my face, and her eyes widened and filled with curious concern. She tore her headphones off and swung round in her chair until she was facing me.
    “Are you okay?”
    I shook my head. “No,” I said. “I’ve got a problem