It’ll be fun,” she said. “A great way to meet new people, people like you. It’s for charity,” Tara added. Her eyes glinted darkly and she bit her lip. Tara’s a switch, and I’m not. It’s how she wins arguments, every time.
And now I’m kneeling on a padded pedestal in the club she manages and my thighs are shaking under the strain. I’m not the only one; there are eleven of us, liberally sprinkled across the room, like living statues, like dolls in a giant’s playhouse. All of us are naked under long capes. The hoods shadow our faces, and simple, unadorned masks obscure our identities even more. We are color-coded—my cape is blue, marking me as free, but trained. I don’t think it was meant to be humiliating, but to me, it sets me apart as a slave someone grew tired of. Once upon a time. I shiver and press my palms onto my thighs, willing warmth to spread through my flesh.
A thin metal chain connects my collar with the wooden lectern beside me. There are only two names on the clipboard it holds, two small bids. Both, I think, are pity bids. At least it’s almost over; they announced it earlier. We’re in the last half hour of bidding.
It would be fun, Tara said. She’s standing across the room in black leather, looking fabulous and schmoozing some of the richer patrons of this establishment into more and more exorbitant donations.
A great way to meet new people, people like you. I watch Tara; it passes the time. I try to remember that by daylight and out in the real world, we aren’t so different. We both love British period dramas and we like to take walks by the marina. She manages a club and I run a small animal shelter. But in here, she’s gorgeous and confident, and she exudes the kind of magnetism that sets her apart, even among this exclusive clientele.
I’m not glamorous like the patrons, like the other slaves for auction. It doesn’t matter that we all wear the same thing, that the mask hides the lines that have just started to appear around my eyes this year. It shines through; it’s in the way I hold my body, in the lack of tone or tan. I don’t know.
I’m just a girl who’s almost thirty, and somehow the last few years passed me by in a haze of work and books, friends and concerts. I don’t belong here. This is not a place for me to meet new people, people like me. I’m submissive, I will always be submissive—that doesn’t mean I have anything else in common with any of them.
“Reveal, slave,” a stern female voice says to my left. A shock runs through my body and I snap my gaze back to the floor where it belongs. Then I swish the sides of the cape over my shoulders. I suck a silent breath through my teeth and stare at the hardwood slabs, slightly discolored from shoes trampling around all evening. The mask obscures my vision to a degree, but I can see her in the corner of my eye: an elegant woman in a slinky long evening dress, standing next to a man.
She sighs, tapping the leather pad of a small strap against the hollow of her palm. They are not allowed to touch, not before they’ve purchased one of us for the evening. Even then, it’s not a given—that was stressed several times.
“You slouch, slave,” she informs me tersely, then chuckles as I adjust my posture. “Better. Are you sure blue is your color?”
“Oh Lena, don’t tease the merchandise,” the man next to her says, shaking his head. He steps closer, so close I can almost feel his body heat up the air between us. His eyes follow the contours of my breasts and the curve up my shoulders.
“I forgot,” she says, folding her arms across her chest as she inspects my bidding sheet. “You have a thing for rejects and broken things. Quite an eccentricity, my dear.”
He makes a noncommittal sound and tilts his head, his gaze still upon me. I close my eyes under the mask and try to breathe. My cheeks are on fire, and submissive or no, I want to slap her. Or more accurately, a far more courageous and impulsive version of myself does. Suddenly, though, a different feeling emerges, layers over humiliation and anger, and I squirm to try to relieve the aching sensation down between my legs. He is still watching.
“Stand, slave,” the woman called Lena says then. She’s picked up my bidding sheet and is playing with the pen. My jaw trembles as I rise to my feet.
“You want her?” she asks. I push my legs apart and fold my hands around my elbows behind my back. It’s been a while, but even amid all this humiliation and playacting, I have pride enough to show I still know how a slave moves, which positions to assume.
The man doesn’t say anything.
“Have her. It’s on me. Don’t worry, she won’t go for very much.”
“I can pay for my own slaves, Lena, thank you. Give me that.”
I can’t see her, but I want to think she flinched at the sound of his voice. I did. And a hot shiver ran down my spine. I sway, seized by a sudden sense of vertigo.
She says something; I don’t hear it, but her heels click loudly on the hardwood floors when she walks off to inspect the other slaves. I swallow hard; I can’t see him, but I don’t think he’s left. It doesn’t feel like he has.
“You may cover yourself again, slave.”
His voice comes from my side, but I manage to keep looking straight ahead as I pull the sides of the cape back over my shoulders. It doesn’t close in front of me, but it hides my nipples and lends at least a little bit of warmth.
“What’s your name?”
I clear my throat, bite my lip. He’s not supposed to ask that, but I think he knows.
“Elise, Sir.”
“That’s a pretty name.”
“Thank you, Sir.”
I can hear him playing with the clipboard, reading through my limits and kinks. Quite in spite of myself, I feel my heart rate pick up, a little at first and then hard enough to make my voice pulsing and throaty.
“How long since you were last owned?”
I hesitate, lick my lips, and then stare at the floor around my feet. “Five…five years, Sir,” I whisper despondently.
He hums once. But just as I am quite sure he is about to move on, I hear the scratchy sound of pen on paper. I hold my breath, dare to watch him sign his name to my bidding sheet. I can’t read it, but his hands are large and strong. In a flash of mental acrobatics my brain supplies images of these fingers in my cunt, in my ass, closing around my throat.
“It would be a pleasure to win you, Elise,” he says. Then he looks up. For a second or so, our eyes meet. They are blue, dark blue, in a complicated face all angles and sharp planes, lines and bone. I shiver; he sets the clipboard down and turns away.
“Thank you, Sir,” I say when I catch my breath. He pauses, but doesn’t turn around. I watch the back of his neck and the sweep of his shoulders until he disappears from view.
The final shuffling begins soon after; the hall erupts in movement. All of us are told to kneel again, to keep our eyes on the ground. I am jittery and nervous, and not a small part of me is getting tired of the rigid role-play, the overwhelming displays of power whenever a group of dominants get together.
Finally, someone comes around and collects the different clipboards. I hold myself steady, try to keep breathing as I watch their shoes appear and disappear from view.
One by one, the winning bids are announced. One by one, the leashes are unclipped from their lecterns and handed to the winners. The woman, Lena, takes hold of a pretty slave girl, blonde and perky and barely twenty-one. She fetched the highest price that evening, Tara tells the crowd, but when the girl looks at her Mistress for the night, a flicker of fear replaces the pride she felt just a moment ago.
I swallow hard and look away. My heart is pulsing in my neck, my temples, and the crowd moves on to the next slave, a young man, shaved head to toe, and wearing the blood-red cape that marks him as trained and owned. He’s been sporting an enormous erection almost all evening and looks faint and needy. The Master who claims him, though, does not give the impression that he’ll take pity on him anytime soon.
Then it’s my turn, and I can’t breathe. Tara gives me a secret kind of smile, but it doesn’t help.
“Slave number five,” she proclaims as she consults his clipboard, goes for three hundred dollars to Sir”—she pauses for dramatic effect—“Jonathan.”
I dare to look up, and he steps forward out of the crowd. It’s him, with the dark eyes and the complicated face. I shiver, suddenly so far more nervous than I could have expected to be. I want to be anywhere but here, I want to be at home with a book, where it’s safe.
Instead, Tara unclips my leash and hands it to my new owner in exchange for a crisp check. I’m a whore, I think. I’m a piece of meat, and not only that but my friend is watching, facilitating the sale. All that shouldn’t make my clit tingle so hard I can hardly concentrate on the clapping and the noise, but it does. A large hand wraps itself around my chin.
He has a grip like a vise as he forces my face up to look at him. He looms high above me as I kneel on the low pedestal. Behind him, the crowd is moving on. It’s only his eyes now that are roaming over my face. My cheeks feel warm under the mask.
“Follow me,” he says, his voice barely rising over a growling murmur. He allows me a moment to get to my feet and then, leash jangling between us, he leads me out of the large communal hall into a private playroom. Tara showed me these once, while I visited during the day. It was funny then; now I can hardly breathe with nerves.
He picks up a blanket, puts it around my shoulder and then directs me to sit on a low bench he has dragged closer to the bed. I assume it is usually in place for spectators, but we are alone; he closed the door behind us. I clutch the blanket around me, mostly for warmth, but also for modesty and a minute sense of safety. He sits down maybe two or three feet away from me on the bed. It’s covered in crimson linens and still looks freshly made.
“Are you cold?” he asks. I look down at the blanket and shake my head.
“It’s already…getting better.”
“Thirsty?”
This time I nod, a little guiltily. He doesn’t seem to mind, though. He gets up and leaves the room. I close my eyes and try not to faint. It seems like no time at all until he comes back with a glass of orange juice. I gulp it down fast.
All too soon, I’m clutching the empty glass. He is still looking at me.
“Are you nervous?”
“I…I’ve never done anything like this before,” I admit, words tumbling from my mouth faster than I can stop them. “Um…Sir.” The truth is, I haven’t submitted to anyone in years. I had to practice kneeling at home for weeks in preparation of the evening. That almost tumbles out after the rest, but I just manage to close my mouth before it does.
He nods though, hardly moving at all.
“I thought not,” he says quietly. “That’s why I bid on you. I haven’t either. A friend dragged me along; I don’t think you liked her very much.” A crooked smile crosses his face. “Didn’t think I’d take part in the night’s festivities, to be honest.”
I lick my lips, and then finally manage to look up at his eyes again. There’s a dark blue storm brewing in them; it’s hypnotizing.
“Thank you, Sir,” I whisper, “for…for the drink.”
He shakes his head, but takes the empty glass from me, then sets it on a table by the wall. When he comes back, he stops behind me. Slowly, his hands descend onto my shoulders. I feel their warmth, their strength, all the way through the blanket.
“But I did buy you, slave,” he whispers as though I hadn’t interrupted his train of thought. His breath stirs the little fluff in the shell of my ear and a shiver runs down my spine. He takes hold of the blanket and slowly eases it off my shoulders. “Stand and show me what I bought.”
I hold my breath, letting the dizzying sense of vertigo travel through my body. It makes my toes tingle and I wriggle them against the plush carpet. I lick my lips, and then stand. My fingers shake as I try to open the cape where it’s tied at my neck. Finally, the knot gives. I push the hood off my head and the cape flutters to the ground behind me.
I can hear Jonathan breathing on my back. He picks up the cape and blanket and stashes them out of reach. I squeeze my eyes shut under the mask and slowly push my arms back until I can wrap my palms around my elbows. My muscles protest at this; I try not to grunt at the effort. This, too, I had to practice again.
“Turn around, slave.”
I’ve always thought that any nerve-wracking situation is eased and softened by someone telling me what to do. Jonathan’s commands are quietly uttered, without malice, but without any room to disagree, either. That makes it easier when I turn and present my naked body. The metal leash still hangs down from my collar, runs between my breasts and pools on the floor. That’s where I direct my gaze, but like before, he clamps his hand around my chin and forces me to look at him.
“I want to see your eyes, slave. Don’t look at the floor unless I tell you to. Understand?”
“Yes, Sir,” I confirm tremulously. I keep my gaze on his face as he steps back again to look me over. I can see his eyes sweep over my breasts down to my stomach and my freshly shaved cunt. He takes his time while the blood sloshes loud in my ears, a constant stream of white noise and vertigo.
“Interlock your hands behind your head and spread your legs a little further.” It’s like my body reacts to his external command, bypassing my decision center completely. “Further than that. Wider. Yes, good. Good girl.”
I can feel air brushing against my labia, against the slippery wetness between them. He makes me spread my legs until they drag my labia open with them, until I feel the strain of standing this way. Then he lowers himself to the ground, squatting there as he looks up at me. He smiles once, then lets his gaze travel down my stomach and tilts his head to inspect my cunt. My thighs are shaking now. I press my eyes shut until he stands again and I remember his earlier command.
“I am told that I may only touch what I bought if you consent, slave,” he says slowly. His eyes seem to pierce into mine even through the small holes of the mask. I hold my breath. “Do you consent?”
I gasp for air, try to speak but my glottis feels pasted shut. Finally, I give up and nod instead. He clicks his tongue.
“I’m going to need more than that, girl. Take off that mask and speak up.”
Unclasping my fingers, I reach for the elastic and pull it out from under my hair. The mask falls away in my hand. It’s only now that I feel truly naked, and a shiver runs through me.
“I…I consent, Sir,” I say shakily.
“To what, girl?” he goes on, taking the mask from me. He tosses it onto the table where he put my cape earlier. “Just to being touched, or to being used in any way I see fit?”
There is a power in humiliation, like electric charges, and I have almost forgotten how deep it reaches inside of me, how fully it takes hold. I nod, lick my lips. Since I took off the mask, my hands have been hanging at my sides, and I don’t know what to do with them. In this one moment, it’s almost as though the last few years of being alone never happened, like his hands are reaching into the deepest, darkest part of me and have already laid claim to it, far before he ever asked me for consent. Anything other than total submission would be a lie—to myself, to him, to the promise my eyes gave him half an hour ago when he inspected me on the pedestal.
“The latter, Sir,” I whisper, forcing my eyes to stay on his as he told me, even though every instinct inside tries to drag them back to the ground.
“Say it.”
“I consent to being used, Sir, in any way you see fit.”
He nods, just once. Nothing changes. Then everything changes, like sudden static in the air that crackles in my hair. I hold my breath and he takes a step closer.
Without warning, his hand—that strong, large hand with a grip like a vise—disappears between my legs. I gasp, and he grabs hold of my cunt like it’s a new toy he just acquired.
“You’re sopping wet,” he rasps. His cheek brushes over my temple; my breath comes in hard, pressurized spouts. “Is it because I bought you like a little whore? You liked that?”
I nod, blindly, helplessly, as he slips two fingers inside me and a groan escapes my lips.
“Answer me.”
“Y-yes, Sir. I…yes, I think so, that’s part of…yes, Sir.”
He hums, driving his fingers into me so hard I have to rise to my toes with each stroke. I lean my head onto his shoulder, trying not to collapse on my shaking knees as I keen a moan against his shirt every time he pushes into me.
And then he stops, so abruptly that my head is reeling, trying to catch up. I stare at him, eyes wide and dilated as he brings his fingers up to my face. He paints my juices onto my lips, under my nose. Then he turns them around and spreads what’s left on his knuckles over my cheeks. I smell of cunt; my face is burning.
“Be a good little whore and clean them, girl.”
He barely gives me time enough to open my mouth before his fingers invade it hard and fast. I gag once, and then I can get myself under control and start suckling, swishing my tongue and lapping up every last taste of me.
He pats my head, humming his approval; I glow under his praise. After maybe a minute of this, he smoothly moves into finger-fucking my mouth. He leans in closer, so close that I can feel his lips move against the shell of my ear while I splutter and choke under the onslaught.
“I’m not going to fuck you tonight. I’m not going to fuck you for charity. Do you understand?”
I try to nod even though I am not sure I do.
“If I fuck you as my whore, I will pay my whore. And if I fuck you as my slave, then I’ll fuck you if and when you’ve earned it.”
Again I nod. He pulls his fingers from my mouth, and then rests the wet pads of his fore and middle fingers against my lips. His teeth graze along my neck, sending shooting spasms down my spine. I wriggle my toes and my hands to release the tension.
“On your knees, girl.”
He offers a steadying hand as I sink to the floor, eyes huge and needy as I look up at him. Already this is easier, like a line of memory he is slowly replacing with his own. I open my mouth in some instinct to plead; already I want little more than to be bent over that bed and fucked long and hard, forced to take it any way he wants, fucked until he replaces the memory of emptiness. But he doesn’t and I don’t dare request it.
“You are going to watch me, girl,” he growls, pulling down the zip of his pants and unpacking his cock. He is hard and big, more in girth than length, and it makes me shudder, cross-eyed with longing. He has the kind of distinct mushroom head that plugs into you hard and fast, that can invade orifices and lay claim to them with a single stretching stroke.
His hand encircles his shaft and he starts to pump, lazily at first as he watches my face fall.
“Hands behind your head again,” he grunts, breathing a little harder already. I obey, as though if I just heed him fast enough, he’ll change his mind and let me have a taste of him after all. Instead, his hand starts to pump faster.
“Why have you been without a Master for so long?”
I look up, surprised, cheeks reddening even more—quite involuntarily. I swallow hard, try to gather my faculties enough to speak.
“I…I was shell-shocked at first, I don’t know. Getting over my ex.” I suck a sharp breath between my teeth; again I have to force myself not to look away. “Then I just…I don’t know. Maybe I was scared to risk it again. Or…I don’t know, Sir.”
He nods.
“And you don’t submit to strangers.” It’s not a question, but I nod anyway, even though my current condition seems to prove me a liar. But he seems to understand.
“But you miss it.” Another grunting statement, again not a question. It’s obvious from my reaction, I think, and I exhale a shaking breath. Quite in spite of myself, my eyes fill with tears as I nod.
“Yes, Sir.”
“You ache for it.” Every word comes out hard and fast, a sort of staccato sound with each stroke of his cock. “Crave it. You’re hollow without it.”
Again I nod, and the first tear runs down my cheek. That’s the moment when he groans and splatters his come all over my face. It lands in the corner of my eye and on my cheek, on my nose and my lips.
“Fuck, you’re pretty when you cry,” he whispers, bracing himself against the bedpost behind me. Almost gently, he uses his cock to wipe another drop of come into my hair. He sniffs, runs a hand through his hair and then stuffs his softening cock back into his boxers. I bite my lip to stop a keening sound of longing from escaping my throat.
I think he’s long read it in my eyes, anyway.
From his pocket, he produces a business card, and I Iower my hands to take it. It says he runs a business called Leather-Works. I shudder with a pleasant sense of fear.
“You won’t wash your face tonight. You won’t touch yourself. And tomorrow you may call me, and maybe we’ll arrange something new.”
I stare at him, and then back at the card. I nod, cradling it in my hands like a treasure.
“Answer me, slave.”
“Yes, Sir.” I whisper, “I will call you tomorrow.”
“With my come still on your face.”
“Yes, Sir. With your come still on my face.”
“That’s a good girl…Elise.”