Chapter Two
When the door bangs open and I’m startled awake, there is light coming through the curtains. I must have slept through the night. One of the brunette slaves comes in with a tray. She sets it on the floor beside me, but as I reach for the steaming cup of tea she smacks my hand away.
“Bucket first, then food.”
“Oh, I…” I don’t know what to say about the damn bucket, even though my bladder is full.
“You didn’t use it last night?” Her voice is harsh. “Get up. Pee. Now.”
“But how?”
She purses her lips, then goes to the bucket and demonstrates, squatting over the bucket, facing the wall, her hands braced there. Then she stands and turns to me. “You’ll get used to it. You’ll get used to everything. Well…maybe not everything.”
I straddle the bucket the way she’s shown me, but my body seizes up. “I don’t think I can.”
“You’d better figure it out. He’ll make you do it in front of him, you know.”
“Oh God.”
She laughs. “If peeing in front of the Master is the thing you’re worried about, your priorities are in the wrong place. You have a lot more to worry about, trust me. Just go. And hurry it up. I only have so much time before they’ll expect me to take your breakfast tray downstairs.”
I sigh, but close my eyes and concentrate, my fingers scrabbling at the wall for balance. Finally my body lets go.
There’s a small, wicked smile on her face as she watches me struggle to hold myself up, to pee into the bucket and not onto the shining hardwood floor. I can’t imagine what they’d do to me if I peed on the floor. But it’s such a relief, and I can’t stop. It feels as if it goes on forever, my bladder emptying, the splash as it hits the bucket. When I’m done I go to stand up, then look wildly around.
“Toilet paper is next to your foot, Girl.”
“Oh.”
I wipe myself carefully. I’m still sore and raw, but even touching myself to wipe makes me shiver with desire. It’s something about being here, in the Training House. And maybe even more about knowing what the Master looks like. Smells like. The way he abuses me with his big, beautifully made hands.
“Come and eat before it gets cold,” the Girl says. “It doesn’t do to insult Cook’s efforts.”
She holds out a bottle as I move back toward my rumpled white pallet. When I raise my brows in question, she says, “Hand sanitizer. Keep it next to the bucket.”
I nod. “Thank you. Is it…am I supposed to talk to you? I don’t want to be rude. I don’t want to break the rules.”
“You can talk to me or my sister when we’re alone. Well, to me, mostly. I’m sure you know to speak to the Master only when spoken to. The same for any of his guests, or staff like Cook and Robert, the valet. If you didn’t understand that, you would never have been referred here.”
“Yes, of course. Your sister?”
Picking up the steaming cup, I hold it between my hands for a moment, then make myself wait to feel its heat on my tongue while I add milk. I sip carefully and it scalds a little, but it’s wonderful.
“Yes, my sister. She’s older by a year. She brought me into the life. We came here together four years ago.” She sits on the floor next to me, curling effortlessly into lotus, and I notice for the first time that her eyes are a lovely, pale gray. “Tell me something about yourself.”
I have a piece of real buttered sourdough toast halfway to my mouth, but I pause, my mouth watering for it. I love this little ritual of making myself wait. It’s something I’ve been doing my whole life, even before I knew what it meant—but I have always loved the discipline of it, the enforced denial of both needs and pleasure. I’ve known this sensation since I was as young as five or six years old. I remember sitting in the swing at the park, my nanny—whichever one it was that year—staring at me questioningly while I held perfectly still, not even allowing my feet to sway while my body filled to overflowing with anticipation of that lovely falling and flying, then falling back to earth again. How it felt the same even when I would hold my full bladder. I used to make myself silently count to one hundred before I would take a bite of food. It was all part of it, like making my bath water too hot—oh yes, even at six, after the nanny had left the room and I could turn on the tap without anyone noticing. Everything in secret until I found the kink life. It made this sort of situation, having signed myself over in a full slave contract, so beautiful to me I can barely stand it. I cried in joy when I signed the papers.
But what was she saying to me? Oh yes.
“Tell you something? Like what?” I ask.
“Like anything. Anything but what your name was before you arrived. That’s not important anymore.”
I finally take a bite of the toast, the butter melting on my tongue. Pure heaven as I swallow it, then wash it down with a sip of hot tea.
“Well…I was born in Paris, but raised mostly here. Well, not here in San Francisco, but in Manhattan.”
“Ah, I thought I detected an odd accent.”
“My mother was French, my father is…an American.” And a complete and utter bastard, but I don’t want to think about him now. I never want to think of him.
“How did you get into kink?” the Girl asks as I pause to sip my tea once more, then to spoon some lovely, garnet-colored raspberries into my mouth.
“It sort of started when a friend of my father’s seduced me. I was nineteen, and such a rebellious teenager. I slept around. Drank too much. Dabbled in drugs. Max—Mr. Merrick—offered to set me up in an apartment if I’d stop the partying. And if I slept with him, although I wanted to, so that wasn’t a problem. He was handsome. Exuded authority. Irresistible bait for a girl like me. The sex was rough from the start, and I loved it. He had to be nearly fifty, which seemed so much older at the time, but he was the first man who gave me a taste of what I wanted. I didn’t even have to ask. It was like a revelation, to be fucked so hard it left me bruised. And eventually he began to spank me, to tie me up. I had to beg him to bind me and leave me there in his house while he went to work. To allow me to sleep on the floor at the foot of his bed. He liked his sex rough, but he didn’t quite understand the extent of my yearnings. Well, neither did I.”
“It often happens that way, for a lot of us,” she says.
I nod. “So I’ve heard over the years.”
“How old are you? How long have you been doing kink?”
“I’m twenty-seven, so eight years. But it really started when I was a kid, which I’ve only realized in the last year or two—I mean that the stuff I was doing and thinking about was related to my kink desires. I remember being eight or nine, and there was another girl who lived in my neighborhood in New York. She was a year older than me, and lived in a beautiful house with one of those precious courtyard gardens. Our nannies would sit in the kitchen and drink coffee, and we’d have the run of the house and the garden, free to do whatever we wanted. We’d play this game where she would be the wicked queen from Snow White. She would make me take my clothes off and she’d scratch me with her nails, pretending there was poison on the tips. I would lie on the floor, writhing, pretending I was dying. She always wanted to play the same game. I didn’t mind. There was something about it I loved. Not being poisoned, but…having someone take my power away like that, even if it was all pretend. A part of me wished she really would poison me.”
“Heady stuff, for a kid. A kid with a propensity for kink.”
“Yes.”
An image of the neighbor girl’s young face flashes in my mind, the wicked grin lighting up her big brown eyes, the flush on her round cheeks as I pretended to die.
“Tell me more about Mr. Merrick,” the Girl prompts me.
“Oh, well…I think he really did love me, you know? In his way. He wanted to guide me and it was something I wanted desperately. Something I required in a way that goes far beyond merely needing. Something I never got from my own father.” I pause, biting down on my lip. There was a lot I never got from my father, even before my lovely, sad Maman died—perhaps more than I’ll ever know. And do I really want to know? But the slave girl is watching me, waiting for me to go on. “I have classic daddy issues. I’m such a cliché. But it worked for me. Beautifully. As it turned out, he never got me that apartment—I stayed with him at his flat in London for close to a year. And then he…he died. Heart attack. And of course he’d made no provisions for me, and his grown children took the flat and I was on my own again.”
She looks interested in what I’m saying, leaning toward me a bit. “And then what did you do?”
“Went to Paris. I couldn’t lick my wounds in London, you know? The experience of loss was…pretty rough for me. So I packed some of my clothes and just took off. I met some girls my age and we shared an apartment, four of us stuffed into two tiny bedrooms, but it was fine.” I sip my milky tea. “And then I stumbled into the BDSM club circuit and everything changed almost overnight.”
She nods, picks up my toast and takes a bite, then sets it back down on the delicate china plate. It’s white with the blue crest of the House in the center, edged in gold leaf. So pretty. Like the brand over her breast.
“Am I allowed to ask about you?”
“You can,” she says. “But I probably won’t answer.”
“What about… What do I call you? I know, I know. Girl. I don’t even know how to tell you apart from your sister, how to think of you.”
Her thick lashes come down for a moment, batting at her high cheekbones. “Do you want to think of me?” she asks.
My body goes hot all over as I take in her pretty gray eyes, her long fluttering lashes, her even prettier breasts, the nipples dark and suddenly hard. I am always taken by full breasts, wishing they were mine. Wanting to suckle them. To feel the heaviness in my hands. “Yes,” I whisper, afraid this might not be the right answer.
She leans toward me, her hand slipping behind my neck. I close my eyes and shiver with pleasure. I can feel her breath warm on my cheek as she whispers, “If you’re a very good Girl, maybe I’ll allow it.”
She slides her hand down and pinches the tender skin at my waist very hard, then lets me go so suddenly I have to catch myself. Standing, she picks up the tray. “Breakfast is over,” she says, all business suddenly. “My sister will be back to bathe you. And by the way, you really shouldn’t try to get her to talk unless you want to be punished. She doesn’t like it, and we’re allowed to punish you. And she’s a little mad that the Master is so pleased with you.”
Is he? I file that away to savor later.
I nod. “Thank you for breakfast. And for talking to me.”
Pausing in the doorway, she watches me for a moment, then turns without another word, shutting the door behind her. I listen for the lock and it comes a moment later, making me sigh with relief.
Safe once more.
I am more than a little fucked up, I know. But these long silences, locked alone in a room, are a sort of retreat for me, the way it must be for nuns, or for those Buddhists who go to the Green Gulch Center in the hills overlooking the San Francisco Bay across the Golden Gate Bridge. Kink is my religion. And I am awed at the holiness of this place I’ve come to. I need the time alone to meditate, to absorb it.
As I said, I’m fucked up.
I’m also nervous and completely blissed out at being among my fellow freaks, at being dedicated to them, my year-long contract a covenant to me.
Lying back on my hard pallet, I stare up at the ceiling, at the dust motes dancing in the dim ray of sunlight coming through the damask curtains. I take in a breath, hold it for a beat, exhale slowly, then do it again. I try to let my mind empty, but the only time it’s not spinning in some mad mind fuck is when I am in service. When I’m being beaten or restrained. That’s when I can let my ego go, when I become nothing to the point where my silly little worries or endless loops from my childhood stop whirling through my brain and I can just be.
I am thinking of Master Graham. Does he miss me? I like to think so, which feels a bit childish, since I’m the one who ultimately chose to leave. I inhale, imagine his scent: lemongrass soap and a touch of cherry smoke from the pipeful of tobacco he allows himself once a week. It is the smell of comfort. Of kink, yes, but not enough protocol for me. I am safe only when I know I am trapped. He kept me safe for a while, but I need so much more. To be taken to these frightening heights in order to feel utterly powerless—to know that I am. It is a place out of his reach, and therefore out of mine if I’d stayed with him. But I miss him. I miss him, and yet…
I take in another breath, breathing through the butterflies that have been beating their wings in my stomach every waking moment since I saw him yesterday. The Master. My Master.
My Master.
Oh yes.
Lust floods me: nipples and pussy, stomach and limbs. Every soft, fleshly part of my body is full and plush suddenly, swollen with the need for his touch. I know better than to touch myself—that is absolutely forbidden and one of the first things a slave learns. No, we are meant to suffer in our desires, and our suffering is beautiful. It’s this place getting inside my head, into my body, as much as it is him, I think. The restrictions, the inflexible rules. The contract. So darkly threatening, all of it, which is exactly what I’ve dreamed of, exactly what a slave training house is for. But there is no way to prepare for this, even if you think you know what you’re getting yourself into. And then the Master has to be so beautiful! I suffer for his handsome face, his enigmatic, powerful presence. His big black boots.
I am suffering now, and I have no idea how much longer this will go on, when he’ll call for me again. It could be in five minutes. This evening. A week. I know nothing. But that’s part of it—knowing nothing, deciding nothing, ultimately being nothing. I am here to be completely broken down, and I know it. I want it. Which is perhaps the biggest mind fuck of all.
Several days go by in which I am fed, taken to another room and run on a treadmill, bathed in a cool shower by the silent Girl, and in between I’m left alone in my room to dream about my beautiful, mysterious Master. I do my best not to touch myself, but my thighs always seem to be damp with my juices and I’m ashamed at how often I find myself pressing them together. At night I dream of him—of him beating me, touching me, even kissing me. On the second night, I wake on the verge of orgasm, and it’s a long struggle to get my body and my tortured mind to calm.
By my fifth morning here I’m really beginning to panic. Does he not want to see me? To even order that I be worked? There is nothing but this terrible isolation in which I suppose I am to discipline myself into some sort of meditation, which is what I’ve learned to do and have done in the past. But perhaps I am not such a good Girl, after all, since all I can do in between my meals, my exercise and my showers is dream on my hard, white pallet, my body in a lazy trance.
The sun hasn’t been up for more than a couple of hours when the door to my room opens, and I have a brief, joyous glimpse of him. He’s dressed in dark slacks, a crisp white shirt, the sleeves rolled again to reveal his tattoo work. His dark hair is a little wavy, a little too long, like some hero in a Jane Austin novel. Too perfect.
I begin to sit up but he pushes me back with his rough boot on my chest, and the air goes out of me as my body floods with lust. Those boots! And him. I bite back a moan, trying to resist the urge to press my thighs together to ease the wet, aching want there. He gives a wave and one of the Girls—I still don’t know which one—and an elegant older man with close-cropped gray hair, whom I know from my arrival to be Robert the valet, kneel on either side of me. While the Master holds me down with his booted foot, they slip a leather blindfold over my eyes. Fear is like a siren shrieking in my mind—I hate to be blindfolded. My heart races, making me want to scream. But they seem to have thought of everything. Someone holds my cheeks firmly, then a ball gag is shoved into my mouth and strapped at the back of my head.
The boot is removed from my chest and I’m flipped over onto my stomach, my arms pulled behind my back. I can smell the leather of the cuffs before they’re buckled firmly around my wrists. And my head is emptying out in a way my silly little meditations could never accomplish, as I’m lifted then thrown over the Master’s shoulders. Oh yes, it is definitely him, and it’s pure heaven to feel the muscles working in his shoulder, my breasts resting against the solid wall of his broad back. My nipples are so hard they hurt. I’m so wet I worry about mussing his lovely shirt, but there’s nothing I can do about it.
Nothing you can do.
And so, when I begin to drool a little around the gag I give myself over to it. No tears as there usually are when I’m gagged or blindfolded. Because I can do absolutely nothing. And because it’s for him.
He carries me down a flight of stairs, his boot heels echoing on the wooden risers, then we turn to the right. It’s only a few moments before he makes another turn and I am dumped facedown onto a smooth wooden table, or a counter, maybe. I inhale the scents of coffee and food cooking. The kitchen?
Then his voice—his beautifully modulated voice, so devoid of any accent he must be from California. “Cook. Prepare this one for me.”
“Yes, Sir.” A deep female voice, and I imagine a tall, handsome women, with large hands. I also imagine her tenderizing my flesh with one of those mallets used for steak.
The reality is not far off the mark. I hear her moving about the room and what sounds like utensils being shuffled, and almost right away she smacks my ass with something that feels like a very large, flat wooden spoon. When I squirm she places a firm and surprisingly small, strong hand on the back of my neck and smacks me harder and harder, my tender ass stinging, burning as blood rises to the surface of my skin. She pauses for half a breath, allowing me to swallow a gulp of air before she starts in again with something much heavier this time. And oh God, it hurts as she lands one solid blow after another, hammering deep into the muscles so that sensation goes from sting to a deep bruising thud, yet it still stings somehow. She works the heavy, wooden implement—a rolling pin?—down over the backs of my thighs, silent until she utters a simple, stern order.
“Spread your thighs. Wider.”
I do as she asks—of course I do—and she pinches my pussy lips so hard a tear seeps from the corner of my eye and drool pools in my mouth behind the gag. She holds onto that delicate flesh with one hand while she spanks me with the other, her palm on my flesh almost sweet in comparison to the hard wooden tool she used before. Pain builds, and what begins as something I welcome quickly turns into more than I can process—there is such a rapid build with no warm-up at all. Harder and impossibly harder until I am crying out around the gag, the noise a raw contraction of the muscles in my throat, drool spilling onto my chin.
I am helpless.
Thinking the words soothes me as much as it frightens me. It has always been like this.
Suddenly the spanking stops, although her hard, hurting fingers are still twisting my poor tortured labia. My breath comes in short, gasping pants as I try not to choke on my own salty tears.
I sense her moving nearer, then her breath is hot against my cheek. She says in a low tone, “You’d better learn to take it more quietly, Girl. The Master won’t like all this fussing. Didn’t your previous owner teach you any better? Or are you too hardheaded to learn?”
My heart drops into my stomach. I try so hard to be good. To please. To aim for perfection. But this place is too new and I haven’t been told all the rules.
And suddenly it comes to me that maybe they want me to fail. I’m hoping it’s only to have more reason to punish me and not because they simply don’t want me. That he doesn’t want me. I need so much to belong…somewhere. And if not here, where?
Memories flash through my head, spurred by my panic, a million thoughts rushing by like a film in fast-forward: My arrival at Millbrook Academy, the boarding school that was my father’s answer to having an invisible child who was still somehow in the way, when I was only eleven. How alien the place seemed at first—the long, vaulted hallways, the towering trees on the grounds, the headmistress, Mrs. Brerens, who frankly scared the hell out of me. But then there was my series of crushes—Mr. Curtis who taught math and looked like something out of an Abercrombie and Fitch ad. My dance teacher, Ms. Lordham, who was the perfect blonde English rose, and whom I once caught fucking Mr. Curtis in the stables like something out of a classic porn film. She was naked, her gorgeous, lithe body bent over a bale of hay while he took her from behind, and her shouting, “Fuck me harder!” Oh yes, even though I was only thirteen years old, that scenario fueled my fevered masturbatory fantasies until long after graduation from Millbrook.
And then there were the girls… It was a school for “young ladies,” after all, and we had to do something to keep our raging hormones busy. It was either that or sneak out after curfew and meet strange men in town, ask them to buy us beer in exchange for a quick hand job. If the wealthy and powerful parents of the Millbrook girls had had any idea what their daughters were up to, that place would have been shut down decades ago.
Boarding school was that terrifying and intoxicating combination of fear and yearning. Loneliness and wanting. And it was those things I still sought, always feeling as if satisfaction were just beyond my grasp.
But now I’m here. In the Training House.
Cook yanks me up until I’m sitting on the long table, my ass burning against the cool wood, and I realize I am truly afraid. Will he reject me? Is it possible, once my contract has been signed? But of course it is. I can’t bear it if I’m returned to Master Graham in shame.
Not good enough.
No.
I’m crying in earnest now, in long gulping sobs, the ball gag nearly choking me.
“Hey! Stop that now.”
Cook slaps my face, leaving my cheek burning. But the shock of it calms me down right away. I swallow the next sob and do my best to contain myself.
“Better,” she murmurs, not unkindly. “Here.” A soft, damp cloth on my cheeks as she wipes the tears and the snot and the drool away. “Don’t get me wrong,” she says with a small chuckle, “he likes his Girls to cry, but he prefers to be the one to make it happen.”
I sniff. I’d smile if I could, both because she’s being kind to me along with being cruel, and at the idea that he’s one of those who enjoy a woman’s tears, which is inexplicably hot for me.
Taking a deep breath, I try to breathe out around the ball gag, then inhale again—and swear I smell him before I hear him. He smells of leather and sex and expensive cologne. My body turns to warm rubber, all but my nipples, which are hard as stone.
“What nonsense is this?” the Master demands. His heavy boots ring on the hard floor as he crosses the room. “I could hear you halfway down the hall, Girl. All of this over a spanking from Cook?”
I sense Cook stepping back, but it’s too late to be afraid. The Master grabs my hair—not even close to the scalp, a sensation I love—he simply winds my long strands around his fist and pulls me right off the table. Something goes crashing to the floor and I know it’s my fault, but I couldn’t apologize even if I weren’t gagged. He’s pulling me along and my feet hit the edge of a carpet and I stumble. He catches me, pulling up on my hair, and the tears want to start again because I am being so clumsy. But the Master simply keeps dragging me along, and I keep tripping over my bare feet, blind, with my arms bound behind my back and no way to catch myself should I fall. I’m a little shattered by how he’s handling me. But that’s his intention, I’m sure. Keeping me off-balance, physically, mentally, emotionally. People like him, the real trainers of the world, are masters of the mind fuck. They are the masters of everything, as far as I’m concerned. My Master, and I feel it on a new, deeper level. This is exactly what I wanted. This is exactly what I fear.
This is exactly what I have needed all my life.
Yes.