Chapter Nine
Helen didn’t think she understood, about going to the hotel. They walked there: the grandest hotel in the city rose only two blocks from the restaurant where Mr. Serteau had left her to be gangbanged by the five men whose number had now dwindled to one. At the front desk, the clerk’s eyebrows went up when he looked at what his screen told him about Mr. Lindgren—maybe Mr. Lindgren stayed at this hotel, or others associated with it, a lot?
“Would you like your usual level of suite?” the clerk asked, darting a look at Helen that she found both flattering and embarrassing.
“What do you have at a higher level?” Mr. Lindgren asked, glancing at Helen and making her blush.
“There’s the honeymoon suite,” said the clerk, looking again at Helen and somehow making it clear that he hadn’t thought she might be worth taking to the honeymoon suite, but that if Mr. Lindgren thought so, the clerk’s estimation of Helen’s value would have to be revised immediately.
Value. Somehow all of this—not just the interaction with the clerk, but being taken to the hotel at all—had everything to do with Helen’s value. Not her value as a person, but her value as a sexual plaything. Her value as a cunt, a mouth, and an anus. She felt the heat swell upward until she thought her face might catch fire. Down below, though, a similar fire burned, and she felt helpless to keep it from rising and rising, making her thighs feel terribly slick as they moved together, now that her shameful panties rested in Mr. Lindgren’s pocket.
“I’ll take it. Please have some Veuve Clicquot delivered, too, as soon as possible.”
“Certainly, Mr. Lindgren. No luggage?”
Helen could blush no hotter than she already had, but the tone of the simple phrase suggested so strongly that he understood exactly why this beautiful girl would be brought to the honeymoon suite that her she could not meet his gaze, but looked down at the marble counter.
The keycard delivered into Mr. Lindgren’s hand, they walked to the elevator. Mr. Lindgren put his arm around her waist, and Helen almost expected that he would begin to fondle her openly, the way Mr. Serteau did in public sometimes. Mr. Lindgren did nothing until the elevator doors had closed, but then, as if succumbing to an unstoppable impulse, he turned her to him almost roughly and began to kiss her, his right hand taking firm hold of her bottom, which still stung from her paddling by Mr. Klee.
He held her so tightly, his strength encompassing her little body so completely, that as he mastered her mouth with his she started to wonder whether she would simply faint from lack of oxygen, since she could hardly draw breath at all, even through her nose. His left hand held the back of her neck, with a firm—though not in any way a violent—grip, and he went on kissing her until the bell rang for their floor. Something in the back of Helen’s head registered that neither Mr. Serteau nor anyone else had ever kissed her that way before. The onrushing current of this confusing moment, though, prevented her from considering what that might mean, either for the present or for the future.
The doors slid open, and Mr. Lindgren broke the kiss at last.
“Look at me, Helen,” he said softly.
She looked up at him, still held tightly in his arms, her back against the elevator wall.
“You belong to me until tomorrow morning. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir,” Helen whispered.
“I will return you to your owner when I have finished with you.”
“Yes, sir.”
The elevator doors started to close. Mr. Lindgren released her from his embrace at last so that he could press the button to keep them open, but he did not move, otherwise so that his tall frame still crowded her against the oak paneling of the elevator.
“I am going to be hard on you, I’m afraid.”
His eyes as he said this seemed almost troubled, as if there were something inside him that he couldn’t control, and he wanted to warn her about it, though warning her wouldn’t stop the thing from coming out. What he would do to her in the honeymoon suite had become absolutely inevitable, his eyes said, but in the morning he would apologize, and do what he could to comfort her after what she had endured. That look made her feel so frightened and aroused, in equal measure, that her knees began to shake beneath her.
“Mr. Serteau is hard on me,” she whispered.
“I’m sure he is,” said Mr. Lindgren, and now it seemed his voice, which had sounded calm before, had taken on a kind of hunger. “But not as hard as I intend to be.”
He stepped back a little, took Helen’s hand, and led her out of the elevator to the door of the honeymoon suite. As soon as it had closed behind them, before Helen could even see what splendid things the suite contained, Mr. Lindgren said, “You never got your reward, did you, sweetheart?”
Helen felt her brow furrow. What did he mean? Then it occurred to her: the men in the private dining room had promised her an orgasm, and then they had fucked her thoroughly—mechanically, even—without any thought for her pleasure. She shook her head slowly, looking into his blue eyes. The idea that any orgasm the other three men could have forced upon her might have held a candle to what Mr. Lindgren had done with the crème caramel and his mouth almost made her giggle.
He turned his head to see the honeymoon suite, now, and she could see him evaluating the possible uses of the furniture in the sumptuous living room, beyond which, through glass doors, lay the bedroom with its enormous bed covered in snow white linens.
“Go to the ottoman, there,” he said, pointing, “and take off your dress.”
Helen turned to see the piece of furniture he meant: it was a large ottoman covered in a red velvet upholstery, and as she focused her attention upon it, just as Mr. Lindgren clearly wanted her to do, the splendor of the rest of the suite seemed to unfold around it, so that she had an impression of being drowned in a little sea of elegance. Mr. Serteau’s city apartment was elegant, too, she supposed, but in a much more modern and understated way. This honeymoon suite, where this strange man had taken her to enjoy her, to use her, to be hard on her, stirred very different thoughts from those evoked by her owner’s residence, where Mrs. Foley trained her, and Mr. Serteau possessed her as often as his schedule allowed.
She walked slowly through the gilded scene: a sofa, the ornate chair in front of which the ottoman stood. Gold leaf on the coffee table. Red-striped wallpaper that looked like it must be made of silk. A mirror that showed a pretty girl, her hair in disarray, walking to an ottoman, then taking off her blue dress to reveal only thigh-high stockings and a lacy black bra, as if this were normal for the living room of an elegant honeymoon suite.
“Kneel down in front of the ottoman, and bend over it,” Mr. Lindgren said from behind her.
Helen thought then, as she obeyed him yet again, hardly even wondering what he would do now, not caring, really, whether he would give her pain or pleasure at this point, about her girlhood. She felt the wool pile of the carpet sink beneath her nylon-clad knees and she remembered how she had once lived in a house with beautiful carpets and beautiful furniture, before her father had gone to jail and her mother had died.
The distant impression of a long-gone memory didn’t give her pain, the way it had from time to time in the corporate high school that led to the testing that led to her being singled out at the indenture center as a potential concubine. Instead, it made her wonder about Mr. Lindgren’s past, and how he had come to have so much, and to want so much more; to want to enjoy another man’s indentured girl and to be hard on her.
Helen felt at that moment, and the feeling represented in no way an unfamiliar emotion, that she had once wanted things, but that she had given up not only those things but even the idea of wanting them, or anything. Her body—and, yes, her heart and her mind—had needs and cravings, she knew now, that set her apart and made her valuable to society in a capacity that even in this laissez-faire time of the corporate laws polite society chose to look down on. Those needs, however, might cause desire, but they were not themselves desires.
She bent over the ottoman, grasping the velvet-covered corners on the opposite side, feeling the softness of the fabric and allowing it to comfort her in some obscure way. To be made to lay herself down over a piece of furniture this way might represent a terrible degradation, and her flesh might cry out for that degradation so strongly that it distressed her, but at least the ottoman had velvet upholstery.
“You’re a good girl, aren’t you, Helen?” Mr. Lindgren asked. He had approached noiselessly, it seemed, and now stood almost directly above her, and just a bit behind the ottoman. She pictured him looking down at her helpless form, prostrate for his gazing and his touching and his fucking, and her pussy clenched uncontrollably at the image.
“I try to be, sir,” she said softly to the carpet. Part of her felt desperate to turn her head to see him. Had he taken off his clothes? Was he holding his belt? A paddle? A whip?
His enormous, hard cock?
She felt her nipples tingle inside the black lace as she shifted a little on the ottoman. Her grip on its corners pressed her breasts firmly into the cushioning, and now she had an almost irresistible urge to move her upper body to get a little more of the tingling, or even to reach into her bra with her right hand to play with the nipple there, the way Mrs. Foley liked to make her do when Helen had a lesson in feminine pleasure.
His hand came down on her bottom, holding both her cheeks, squeezing gently, beginning to rub in a big circle that her body cried out must become smaller and more focused—must press further down and further in where she need it so much.
“Tonight this is mine,” Eric said softly.
“Yes, sir,” Helen sobbed. She didn’t really know what it could mean. It helped, when she thought about her indenture to Mr. Serteau, that she knew she didn’t actually belong to him; that the indenture center would come for her if she failed to check in once a week, in person, to let them know she hadn’t suffered any harm.
Her case officer had made it very clear, though, that even ordinary indentured workers were subject to corporal punishment, and had gone carefully over the section in the contract concerning Helen’s sexual duties. Still, knowing that the government could take her away from Mr. Serteau, otherwise considered her owner, if he violated the contract, made it easier to bear sometimes.
But when her owner loaned her to another man, what did it mean for him to say that the part of her Mr. Serteau enjoyed the most, practically as his most treasured possession, belonged to him? That, even for a night, her bottom and her pussy were his, rather than the property of the man who caned and fucked her there every day, who had decided she should come to a restaurant for gangbanging and then go to a hotel with one of the gangbangers, before coming back to him covered in, filled with their semen?