IN PROGRESS
J. Richards

Irealize now that at the beginning Colette was simply taking things slowly, being easy on such a wild stallion as myself. She thought if she moved too fast she might scare me off and into the arms of another, less-focused Mistress. And she was right. Had she spooked me with constant discipline, with too-soon, too-hard punishment, I would have fled. But instead, she teased me, taunted me, until I found myself asking her for it. Begging her for it.

Standing in front of the refrigerator, reading over Mistress Julian’s comments in a column cut from Bad Girl, feeling the heat and wetness start to flow at my core…that’s when I began to understand the structure of a D/s relationship. Lowercase s, always, head bowed, eyes lowered. Humble. I wasn’t humble, clad in tight black stretch pants and a Lycra running top, my hair a jumble of windswept curls, my cheeks flushed from my morning run. I wasn’t humble as I poured my juice into one of our vintage jelly glasses and prepared to make a single slice of toast.

Humble means getting Colette’s meal first, bringing it on a tray to her bedroom, serving her with head bowed and then asking, in my softest voice, if there is anything else I can get for her. Humble means sitting on my heels on the floor by the bed, shoulders back, body arched, waiting for her to choose to feed me a bite of her toast, a bit of her muffin, a sip of her juice.

No, I was not humble. I was wild and spirited, unbroken and untamed. But I was searching. My day job, my real world, my nine-to-five life is perfect for that type of personality—though I lie, it’s never nine-to-five, it’s all-consuming.

I’m an artist, fairly successful for one so young, my work shown in many of the downtown galleries and quite a few of the private, wealthier estates in our community. I have a luminous quality to my art, they say, I have a free-flowing hand, a lack of inhibition when it comes to paints and brushes and colors in tubes. I have no fear of light or dark, of shading, of muting, of brightness, of screaming.

On the canvas, that is.

But alone, in bed, with my Mistress, I am out of control, all over the place, my strokes too heavy or too light, my body contorting in a vain effort to find peace. I need control here, where I have none. My breathlessness of art does not serve me well. My constant moving, shifting and gliding, my colors as they burst free—each one a different shade, a different hue—these take me further from my goal, not closer to it.

Colette sees this all, and she knows, and she ponders the best way there is to rein in a free spirit without damaging the soul. Her blue eyes flash with ideas, with concepts, but she doesn’t rush into anything. She would not have me destroyed; she would not have the filament that glows inside me damaged; she would only have me tamed, when I am in her arms in bed. She would only have me find the peace that I so crave.

I used to be envious of those who possess that peace. I used to talk to girls on the bus who ferry themselves from job to home to TV dinners without so much as a thought to art or life or pleasure or pain. They were the lucky ones, I thought, without the need inside them that burns inside me. The fire that causes me to toss and turn restlessly in my Mistress’s embrace—the inner rage that never lets up, that never finds its mark.

Sometimes, I’d talk to them, asking what they did for fun, flirting casually, easily, searching for the answer. Why were they so different? They seemed like creatures in a zoo, under glass, pinned down. I wanted to observe them, wanted to find out what was missing inside them that could enable them to enjoy watching soulless movies, empty TV, overly bland theatrical performances. What was it? What was it?

Ah, maybe you’ve already guessed. It wasn’t a lack in them, wasn’t something they’d been born without, but something that I had been born with. Something that I had no control over, the heat, the fire, the need to create. And creating takes that extra bit and builds it up until it is a constant vein of life pulsing beneath the skin. You can’t turn it on when you’re in slump, you can’t turn it off when you want to sleep. The paintings call you, the paintbrushes speak, the tubes of color wake you up.

Come and create, they whisper. Forget food. Forget sleep. Forget love. Forget life. Come and make things of us. We need freedom. You can give us that freedom.

Doomed, head bowed, for me my Mistress is my art. She calls to me and I go. She beckons me, and I am hers. I walk on heavy feet to the studio and open the door. The light is just right, streaming through the window in curtains of yellow and gold. The paintings stand against the wall, mocking me, howling at me: Finish us! What do you think you’re doing? Sleeping? No sleep. No time. You don’t have enough time.

There is too much art in my head.

It must come out.

Colette knows this, she strokes the side of my face when I sleep, she kisses my lips and tastes the life there; she uses a cool rag to wash the paint from under my nails. She bathes me. She feeds me. She keeps my outer workings in healthy order so that someday, sometime, I may find peace.

No peace while those voices call to me.

Come to the studio, there are ideas here. You can let them out. You can be free of them.

The stallion inside me bucks and raises its head. I moan and look at the clock. “It’s too early,” I say to no visible creature. “Too early to start work.”

No, those voices chide at once. It’s too late.

I pull on my robe and wander to the studio, opening the door and staring at my works in progress. They call to me, like hungry children, Feed me, finish me, use yourself up to make us whole. I find strength as I begin to mix the paints, my palette a ray of sin and light, of dark and heat, of wet and dry. I do not think in terms of colors, do not know the names of the tubes, but, instead, the feel of them in my hand. How much of this one has been used up, how much of that? The crinkly metal folds and condenses, that looks so strong, but, once empty, is weak and brittle.

I gather my strength and I begin to paint, the moonlight playing melodies on my ghostly form. The sound of my feet as I shuffle on the wood floor a rhythm that matches my heartbeat.

Colette knows—her blue eyes appear on my canvas, watching—Colette knows, and she tries, so hard, to understand. But she is not one of the artists, the few, the chosen, the cursed. She is not one of us. But she tries, she comes to stand in the doorway of the studio, her nightgown hanging long and loose down her body, her hair a tangle of gold spun from straw. She watches me work, never speaking, never interrupting, and I know—in a split second of wisdom—that she is as envious of me as I am of her.

She is complete. She is finished. She will never be anything but who she is.

While I…I am a work in progress.