Loading...I stand and watch her walk toward me. Her fingers are cool and dry as she places the collar around my neck, nimble as they buckle it in the back, the leather touching my skin all the way around, not tight, only touching. I feel her breath stir my hair.
A snort of laughter escapes me and I stifle it quickly. She pauses, her hands still on the buckle, and leans around to look at my face. “Yes?” she inquires, lifting an eyebrow, that same slight half-smile barely curving her perfect dark lipsticked lips.
I school my face and take a deep breath. “Nothing. Sorry.”
I take another deep breath and will myself not to laugh. Come on, Cara, she’s a professional, let her do her thing. Don’t be an ass.
Slowly she withdraws her hands and steps in front of me. The smile is gone now, vanished as though it never existed. “What?” she asks me. Her eyes are so green they just kill me. I feel like such an asshole. I focus on her eyes, forcing my mind away from the ridiculous absurdity of the leather around my neck, stop it, don’t go there, stop it, a collar, are you kidding me? beat me, whip me, make me write bad checks! lick my boots, you little worm! and a second, loud, hopelessly unsexy snort bursts forth again, I can’t help it.
“I’m sorry,” I manage just before I dissolve completely into gales of laughter, real, deep, hilarious, rib-aching, stitch-inducing belly laughter pouring out of me. I lean forward, hands on my knees, taking a deep breath and holding it. Stop it, stop it now. I look up at her gorgeous face, sculpted out of some other-worldly substance, motionless, unresponsive, unblinking, and oh gods help me I’m laughing again, stop it! Dammit! Oh.
Oh. I gasp. Oh. Heave one last shuddering breath. I straighten up.
“It’s ok now, I’m good. I’m sorry. OK. All done. I’m good.” I steady my breathing and smile up at her, with what I hope is a suitably apologetic and contrite and cooperative expression.
Not a flicker of anything crosses her features. She continues gazing down at me.
She’s not so very much taller than I, just an inch or two, really, but those unbelievable stiletto heels that would cripple me if I even thought too long about wearing them have her properly towering over me. She’s close enough that I have to tip my head back to keep looking in her eyes and the elongation of my airway helps me get a good purchase as I sit firmly on the laughter, my control returning to me, feeling stronger now, much better, allowing my smile to fade as I return her gaze, better now, oh much better, I can do this, I can really do this.
“What?” she asks again, in exactly the same tone, exactly the same inflection as before. Her eyes never move.
“Nothing, it’s fine. I’m ready now,” and I am so pleased with myself as I hear how steady my voice is, not the slightest little trickle of laughter leaking through now. Back in control. Yes!
The faintest hint of a line appears between those impossible eyes. Oh crap, I’ve hurt her feelings and offended her professional pride and now she’s pissed. Shit, Cara, you could fuck up a self-starting coffee maker.
“I’m really sorry. I have a little trouble focusing sometimes, just at the beginning, this is brand-new to me, but I’m better now. I’ll do better, really. I just—you know, I… my sense of humor is kind of … unruly, and childish sometimes, I know, it’s stupid—”
Her silence is beginning to operate like a vacuum, sucking more and more words out of me even as the seed of awareness forms in the darkest backest recesses of my brain that I should really stop talking—
“—you know, too many dumb—movies, I guess, with the stupid caricatures,” brilliant, idiot! mock her profession, that’s a super plan—”I mean, just ignorance, people making stupid… images, unrealistic images, and I’m sorry but I’m OK now, and I’m really sorry I laughed,” just shut up, dumbass, what is wrong with you? “and I won’t do it again, I mean… I won’t do it anymore, now… just…” my voice cuts out like a CD on pause, then my lungs remember to exhale and I go on with absolutely zero input from my brain, “it won’t happen again. Sorry.” I stop. “I didn’t mean anything.” I add. “By it. I didn’t… you know. So,” I say, fresh and brisk and all business, “so, let’s… let’s go. I’m ready.” I nod reassuringly at her. “All set. All… all good… now…”
Silence pools around me as I finally dry up. It expands, spreading out around my feet until it fills the room. Still she stands, merely looking at me, not moving. How can she hold herself so steady without blinking for so long? Don’t her eyes start to sting? Has that line above the bridge of her nose deepened slightly? Is it just my imagination? Am I just more aware of it now, now that my babbling has ceased and there’s no other sensory input?
My chest suddenly feels funny. Not the kind of funny like before. I’m not tempted to laugh again. That crisis has passed. What is that? Why does my chest feel like… like it’s almost… not itching, exactly, but … tickling? on the inside?
… my exhale takes me by surprise. I breathe. What the—why am I forgetting to breathe?
“Cara,” my name inside this stranger’s voice is bewildering to me, and for a moment I am disoriented and lost and I can’t understand how I came to be here and how she knows my name.
“… yes?” I am watching her now, brain racing. How do I help her get us back on track? I really don’t have any idea how the mechanics of this operate, how one goes about restoring a Domme’s authority after laughing one’s ass off at her.
“Cara,” she says my name again, as though repeating a cue for me. I’m supposed to know what to do now… but I don’t, I mean I really, really don’t. “Cara, answer me.”
Answer what?
Oh.
Oh, man, we don’t want to go back there, I think. Come on, I’m behaving now. Let it go, sweetie, let’s move forward, what do you say?
“Cara. Answer me.”
The unexpected shhhhhinggggg of cold drawn steel in her voice snaps my head up. Ohhhh, yes, I purr silently, that’s more like it. Mmm, yeah. I run my widening eyes over her gorgeous form. Desire sends a slim finger of dizziness rising rapidly from my belly to my brain and instinctively I check that my knees aren’t locked. I breathe deeply and wait for my head to clear. I shift my weight slightly.
“Don’t move,” her voice cracks out like a shot. Not loud, no louder than she’s spoken since I arrived. But its intensity immobilizes me. She goes on without missing a beat, “just listen.”
I stand there. I wait for whatever it is that she will say to me. I will listen, yes, of course I will listen, I owe her that, it’s the least I can do after… after behaving like such an imbecile. Yes, I’m listening, I don’t speak, I at least know better than that, I listen, I’m listening, straining to tell her I’m listening with my ears, my body, my eyes on hers, she still hasn’t blinked, how is that possible? I’m blinking like crazy, I must look like I’m having a petit mal seizure, my eyes are stinging and dry and I’m blinking up at her, willing her to feel how hard I’m listening.
Breathing. Motionless. The room is comfortably cool. I don’t feel hot. Sweat has formed in the little divet at the bottom of my spine, there where my lower back ends and the swell of my hips begins. It pools, there in the small hollow, beneath the soft waistband of my summer skirt, swelling and rising and finally spilling over to run down, finding the crack of my ass and sliding secretly across the soft skin there, deep in the cleft, the muscles clenching in involuntary reaction.
Only the slightest catch in my breath. I only feel it, I don’t hear it. I have made no sound.
She can’t have heard it. There was nothing to hear.
Was there?
No. Nothing. My ears are straining in the silence. If there had been a sound I would have heard it, and I’m certain I didn’t. My muscles clench again, convulsively, harder this time. I will myself not to move.
Her voice is low and smooth this time, the folds of my mind like warm butter that she slides into with terrifying ease and precision.
“What do you hear?”
Wildly, I cast about as though my ears are antennae, long extending feelers that can search and find something, anything that I can bring back and give her, show her. I listen. I breathe, still on guard against the dizziness that I’m afraid will return.
My voice answers her, not even bothering to check with me first.
“My breathing.”
She nods. Once. “What else?”
The silence closes over our spoken words like water over the head of a drowning swimmer.
“The air… the air-conditioner. Air moving through the vents, into the room.”
Again she nods, once. “What else?”
“Traffic. A truck… down the street?”
Nod. “What else?”
A long, long moment. “The clock. On the wall.”
Nod. Slower, this time. “Good.” Her voice has not changed. Her expression is exactly the same. I feel the faintest warmth, as though a gossamer-thin layer of palest pink has laid itself over the bones underneath the skin and muscles of my face, the very barest suggestion of flush at this, the first word of something akin to approval since I laid eyes on her.
The sound of the clock—snick, snick, snick—keeps its beat. Unchanging. Relentless. Like her. No louder, no softer, no faster, no slower, even and inexorable. Wonder surrounds me for a moment and I gaze in rapt fascination at the thought that I have only just now become aware of this sound. It’s so clear, so present. Snick. Snick. Snick. How could I not have heard it until now? How could I not have felt it, gently tapping, tapping, against my eardrum?
“That sound… Cara,” my name again, spoken as if the syllables belonged to her, as if all my life they had been only borrowed from her voice, “Cara, that sound… is the sound of your money, falling drop by drop into my bank account.”
What?
Amusement touches her eyes in the first alteration I’ve seen in her in what feels like a very, very long time. Her lips purse slightly. “It’s your dime, Cara. So you can, if you choose, continue to—humor me” and her voice, her eyes, her entire being leave no doubt that she is not humored—faintly amused, perhaps, but not at all humored—and she goes on, “you can, if you wish, continue just as you have been, until our time runs out.
“Or you can stop this nonsense, show some courage, and do as you promised.”
What promise? Startled now, I rack my brains.
“We had a deal, you and I. You committed to something, before we began.”
To what? What did I commit to, other than the fee, paid in advance?
“Remember?” Her voice has deepened, the whisper of amusement gone now and replaced by… something. Something else. Something that for some reason raises my flight awareness, makes my scalp draw suddenly tight and my ears feel hyper-sensitive and my heart ready itself to begin pounding, hard, for dear life, any moment…
“I told you that the only thing I demand, the one thing I required from you,” breathing is beginning to become difficult as she holds my gaze locked in hers, “is that you be…” there is not enough air, “… honest.”
I’m breathing, I am, drawing down deep for my breath and there’s nothing there, nothing, I can’t get—only snatches, droplets, random wisps of oxygen into my helpless lungs—what is happening? What—
“Look at me, Cara.”
If I didn’t know it was physiologically impossible, I would swear that my heart stopped right then. My heart, my lungs, the blood in my veins, my liver and kidneys and every other system and organ and cell in my body arrested, suspended, held up and dangling by a single shining strand that she has raised, easy and effortless, between her finger and thumb, watching me in detached interest as I turn slowly, off the ground, swaying slightly in the invisibly shifting currents of the air I can no longer feel.
I have to breathe. Have to. I will die if I don’t manage to feed my oxygen-starved body something, anything, and I try, desperately sucking in what I know must be air all around us, gulping in through my open mouth, gulping air like a fish on sand and it is sand that is in my mouth now, down my dry throat and I choke on the sand rushing into my trachea, my lungs, gasping for air, choking again, water running from my eyes, frantically sucking in air that turns yet again to sand only to cough it out, my lungs rejecting the unbreathable substance, coughing, blind, fighting off the panic.
Through my struggling I hear her heels against the hardwood floor as she walks away and returns after a moment, holding a tumbler of water that she has poured from a pitcher on the sideboard across the room. I reach for the water like a lover and she pulls it away, just out of my reach as my shaking hands follow it blindly for a moment. I cannot even see clearly. I feel the smooth comfort of the glass gently rest against my lower lip and her hand at the base of my skull, cradling my head as the water slowly eases into my mouth and tentatively touches the back of my throat and I cough, swallowing, coughing. Her hand supports my head and another blessed bit of water runs softly over my tongue and this time I hold it there a moment, going slow, and I swallow a few drops without choking. A little more, this time, just a little more as my body remembers how to swallow.
Her voice flows into my ear, “That’s it. Good girl. Another sip, now.” I swallow, grateful, swallowing more, more.
The tumbler disappears from my mouth and her hands and voice are all around me, “Breathe. Through your nose. Close your mouth, swallow, breathe in through your nose, Cara, breathe out now, good. All the way out. Hold. In through your nose, yes, like that, now hold. And out. Slowly. Good girl.”
As my lungs begin to slow, I feel her bringing the water back to me and her hand, so gently, tipping my head back just a little further so I can drink from the now half-empty glass. My eyes close with relief and I breathe and my body gives up some of the tension it has been wrapped around, and for a moment I rest my head in her hand.
In that moment, she breaks me before I even know what has happened.
My eyes fly open in terror and I straighten up, lifting my head out of her hand, holding, holding myself, still and hard on the outside as I rush to fortify the barricades within. All the while holding myself perfectly, perfectly still and looking at the wall opposite me, the wall that holds the door through which I entered her room. She is silent beside me for a moment, and then turns away from me and walks toward the corner behind us. I follow her progress out of the corner of my eye, angling my head to see the stiletto heels slow and turn as she sets the water down on a little table at one end of the loveseat. She settles herself at the other end, and smoothes her hand over the cushion in a gesture that draws me reflexively in and I have taken three or four steps, more than half the distance between us, before I stop myself.
Afraid.
I cannot look at her.
“Come sit,” she says. It is not a request, exactly, but it is not a command. It is… an invitation. An offer, an extension of… something I cannot name. Still afraid, I hesitate, and I try, I try to look at her, to see what she is thinking, to assess this bewildering foreign landscape, I try to look, just look.
I can’t. I stand, caught in hesitation, unable to choose a direction.
Her voice reaches me across the void.
“It’s ok. Cara, it’s ok. It’s all right, Cara.” Her hand continues to stroke the cushion, softly, steadily, as though comforting a frightened child. Back and forth, stroking, gentling, around and slowly around again. “Come on. It’s all right.”
Unable, still unable to look at her, I watch her hand on the cushion lift up as I step closer, coming to rest on the back of the loveseat as I slowly come to her and sit, still tense, on the edge of the cushion, leaning forward, forearms on my knees, eyes on my fingers laced tightly together.
“The water is on the table next to you,” she says gently.
I nod. I know where the water is. I know she has put it there for me.
“Cara. Cara, look at me.”
I lift my head and I cannot do it. I concentrate, hard, breaking down the task into incremental steps, the way I learned to do with any daunting challenge. I am a problem-solver, a mess-fixer, an analyze-and-plan expert: Step one, breathe in; step two, turn your chin to the left as you breathe out; step three, breathe in; step four, raise your eyes to her face as you breathe out. That’s all there is to it. Cake. Just do one thing at a time. One thing, then the next thing, then the next, until you’re there.
It’s easy, and I cannot do it. My fingers itch beneath my gaze.
My cheek itches beneath her gaze.
This was supposed to be fun, the thought swirling and floating in the air around me like an elusive and annoying fluff of cat hair. I watch it, irrationally angry at its insistent, weightless, careless dance. Why can’t she just do the Domme thing? Why is she making it so hard?
She’s not. You are, the infuriatingly rational part of my mind speaks. You laughed at her, and when she asked you why, you freaked out like a little bitch. This is all you, it goes on, prissily haughty.
Shut up, I reply to myself.
“Cara.” My eyes close, briefly, then open again. My fingers are still there, right where I left them. “Cara, do you know why you’re feeling this way?”
I shake my head. I wish I could answer her. I wish I could say, “no, I don’t,” speaking aloud, like an adult, like a person with some notion of manners and civilized social exchange. But I can’t. So I shake my head.
“Because this is new, that’s why. That’s all. This is brand-new to you. You said it yourself. And Cara, I know that. I knew that going in. You told me, remember? When we first spoke, on the telephone,” she always says that, telephone, never just phone, it’s a funny thing, I wonder if I ever say that, I think I almost always say phone, don’t I?
“… where are you? Cara, where did you go? It’s all right, just tell me. Where did you go, just now?”
“Telephone,” I mumble. I clear my throat, trying to do it silently. “You always say, ‘telephone’…” My voice sounds odd to me, a soft rasp like a blues singer.
“Water?” she reminds me. “Telephone…” she says, like she’s tasting the word, running her tongue over it to see if it’s familiar. I glance over at the tumbler to my right, standing patiently as a watchman. Water. Means I have to untangle my fingers, unclench my hands. I take a breath and slowly peel my fingers apart from each other, turning away from her to hide the process, the damp skin of my hands and the trembling that goes clear up to my wrists. I take the glass in both hands and drink a bit. I turn and face straight ahead once more, the glass in my two hands, feeling the dependable, unyielding sides of the vessel containing and protecting and holding the formless liquid up, giving it shape and location and a place to be, itself and still and whole.
“Telephone,” she says, again, and I hear the smile in her voice. “Yes, I suppose I do. Do you like that? That I say ‘telephone,’ rather than ‘phone’?”
“Yes,” I answer her, with what would be surprise if I were not so emotionally winded. An odd sensation rises around my mouth. I realize I am smiling. “I do like it,” the words falling so easily from me that I forget anything else for a moment.
“That’s nice to hear,” she says, and the warmth in her voice rises into my face, from my chin and under my jaw up to my cheeks, spreading across my nose and filling my forehead all the way up to where my hairline begins, and she says to me, “Let’s go for a walk,” standing and reaching over to where my jacket hangs on the coat-tree.
“A walk?” startled into looking at her, forgetting the impossibility of ever meeting her eyes again. She smiles back at me, holding my jacket.
“A short walk, yes. Just around the outside of the house and through the garden. We need to get your blood moving a bit. Come on.” She hands me my jacket as I stand and cocks her head at me, pointing toward the door with her chin. “It’s lovely out, let’s go.”
Pulling my jacket on, I walk with her, so bewildered by now that my mind has given up, like a housewife collapsing on the couch after a marathon spin on the stationary bike. When we reach the door she pauses briefly to let me go through it ahead of her, and once on the other side I look quickly around for her, not sure where to go. She leads us down the short hallway to the right, through a small bright room like a breakfast nook, and slides open a glass door that leads outside, again waiting for me to step through before following me and sliding it closed.
“This way,” she says, and we take to a broad, smooth path bordered on each side by river rock stacked close and tight, just high enough to make a nice place to stop and sit, if one were so inclined, and look at the beds of flowers and ornamental grass.
The sun is warm and the breeze soft and I do feel better, walking outdoors, but this is a residential neighborhood, and even though the houses are spaced well enough apart, I am not sure about talking out here. “Siobhan…” I begin, but she shakes her head, reassuring me. “We’re just walking, right now,” she says, “getting your blood back circulating. Don’t worry. Don’t worry about anything right now.”
The path curves around the side of the house and then doubles back. The backyard is not overly large, but the path has been laid to wind around, back and forth, and we walk. I wonder briefly how she is able to set such a brisk pace in those insane heels, but the thought is chased away by another growing concern. “Listen, I’ve completely lost track of time, and I don’t know what your schedule is…”
She shoots a look at me, as though I’ve begun reciting Mother Goose or the periodic table of elements or some other damn random nonsense, but she doesn’t break her pace at all and she doesn’t answer me. My concern doubles. “I mean… it’s just that… I’d like to come back, sometime, make another appointment, if that’s ok. If you’re still willing to work with me, I mean. It’s just, today… I can’t today.”
“Is there someplace you have to be?” she asks.
“No, it’s not that, it’s just—” I stop walking. She stops, one step ahead of me on the path, and turns to look at me. I put my hands in my jacket pockets. I feel foolish. “I didn’t bring enough—to pay for second session. Today.” The ghost of that faint line between her eyes is back. “I mean, I can—I’d like to, maybe next week, or whenever you have time, I’m sure you’re busy, but whenever you have time, or when you think would be a good time, it’s just today I don’t—I don’t have it. For an extra session.”
“Did I ask you to pay for another session?”
“No! No, you didn’t… I just thought…”
“You thought I would? Without discussing it with you beforehand?”
My mouth opens and closes. Wordless. Me, the nerdy wordy wonder. Bereft Of Words, opening today at a theatre near you.
“Now that,” she says, and looks away for a moment, then back at me. “That is not cool.”
Well. Didn’t see that coming! Not the sentiment, not the uncharacteristic wording, not the—what is that in her eyes? Not irritation. It looks like… like anger, oddly. Not Scary Domme Anger… just regular, everyday, now-hold-on-one-damn-minute anger. I am too surprised to feel afraid, or guilty, or contrite even. What the hell?
“Siobhan, what? I’m just trying to be fair.”
“Well, how about you try listening, Cara, and give ‘fair’ a rest for the moment.”
“Listen to—”
“I said, very clearly, not to worry.” She steps closer to me and her voice softens but her gaze does not. “That it was all right, and not to worry about anything right now. Have I done, or said, anything—anything to make you think me dishonest?”
“No, of course n—”
“Fees are always agreed upon up front, and paid in advance. We went over this, several times, before today, before you set foot on the property. We don’t manipulate clients, we don’t slip something in that you never agreed to and then demand more money.
“That is not . Who. We. Are. And I—” she looked away again, briefly, took a breath and released it. Looked back at me. “The only demand I have made, I made up front and explicitly, the first time we spoke. I said I expected your honesty. Did you think I would return anything less to you?”
With no clearly informed intent of anything, my hands are out of my pockets now and reaching out to her. “No, Siobhan, no, never,” I say, and seeing the progress of my hands and the flash of her eyes I stop them and let them fall to my sides. How can I make this right? “No, it’s… I expect… I expect to pay for your time, your… work. I respect you, and your professionalism, and I don’t… I’m not looking to get something for nothing, that’s all. That’s all,” I say, hoping she’ll understand me, that I’m sincere about this, that I never ever meant to hurt her or insult her. “I’m sorry, Siobhan. I apologize if I hurt you.”
Instantly the anger is gone and the quizzical look is back, as though I’ve suddenly started spouting word salad. “I … am not … ‘hurt’,” she says in words of one syllable, enunciating as though to a non-English speaker or a wild animal or an exceptionally dull and very confused child.
Well again. There’s really no way for me to respond to that. I’m certainly not going to argue with her about it. I know for sure that no one ever admits they’re hurt until they’re good and ready. I sigh, but only very softly. There’s only one thing left I want to say, and then I can go. It’s disappointing, but… it’s not the end of the world. And it’s a long, long way from the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, or even the worst thing I’ve ever done. It’s just… disappointing. I look at her for a long moment, and smile, a little sadly.
“Look, I… I just didn’t want to take advantage of you. That’s all.” I smile again, briefly, and look over at the house. I can see the outline of someone at the sliding glass door we came through. The silhouette pauses for a moment—looking out at us?—then retreats, and disappears.
I glance back at Siobhan, one last time before I go.
She is… smiling.
Smiling?
No, wait. That’s… that’s a grin she’s holding back. In fact, she looks like—it looks like any second she might—
Siobhan never, not once in her life, I am absolutely convinced, ever produced any sound that even remotely resembled the disgraceful snort I burst out with earlier, but with a shock that shakes me from head to toe I realize that the tables have bizarrely turned and she is standing there fighting with everything she has not to explode into gut-wrenching convulsions of mirth.
She manages it much more gracefully than I, and with only that bare hint of a suppressed grin she asks me, in a perfectly level and well-modulated tone, “Cara. Oh, Cara. Do you,” and she pauses to firmly push the struggling grin back down and into submission, “do you really imagine that you could?”
I stare at her, utterly lost now. Did I black out? What are we talking about? “Could what?”
The look she casts is one of exasperation tinged with growing and irrepressible affection. I feel, again, like a tragically dim-witted toddler. I just shake my head. I’ve got nothing.
“That you could,” she says again, speaking very slowly, encouraging me to keep up. “Take advantage.” I’m staring at her now, dumbstruck and thoroughly befuddled. “Of me,” she says, looking hard at me, into my eyes, staring at something truly incredible, something she never would have believed if she were not standing there witnessing it for herself.
“Well…” I stammer, “I mean… it must happen, sometimes. At least, I imagine… you know… I would imagine people try, from… time to time. And I wouldn’t… I would never, you know… do that,” verbally limping across the finish line and mentally collapsing to the ground.
“Do what?”
“Take advantage,” I say.
And there it is, the look in her eyes like she’s just seen it: an actual square egg, or an honest-to-pete leprechaun. “Ohhh kaaay,” she says, and in the infinitesimal moment between the syllables I hear the bubbles of her suppressed laughter. “I would like,” she goes on, speaking with great and evident care, “to invite you to come back inside with me. You still have thirty minutes left in the session for which you have already paid. You are my last client this morning, so my time is flexible; if you choose to leave early, there will be no refund—”
“I know, I understand that—” I interrupt and she holds up one hand to stop me.
“—and if I choose to extend the time allotted for our appointment, that is my business and not your responsibility.” Her hand comes down and she holds it out for me to shake. I respond automatically. Her grip is warm and dry and very, very firm.
“Good then,” she says briskly. “Come along.”
I flog my beleaguered brain as we return to her room, trying to suss out what just happened.
“Now,” she says as she closes the door behind us and holds her hand out for my jacket. I take it off and my collar catches on the leather band buckled around my neck, startling me. How on earth did I manage to forget it was there? She sees my eyes widen but makes no comment as she crosses the room to hang my jacket once more on the coat-tree by the loveseat. My hand goes briefly to the thing encircling me, my fingers making the barest tentative contact before jumping quickly away as if they might be burned. My flesh beneath the leather is active and alive and astonished, all in that instant. It is utterly bizarre, and somehow no longer the least bit funny.
She walks to the desk in front of the far wall and leans her hips back against it, crossing her arms and looking at me speculatively. “Come here, please,” she says politely.
I go to stand in front of her.
“I want you to tell me,” she says, “about what happened for you, earlier. When I first fastened the collar around your neck.”
I look away. Swallow. I can’t explain it. I remember it, but it’s as though it happened a very, very long time ago.
“Just tell me, Cara,” she says, and I look back at her quickly. She’s not laughing anymore either, but she doesn’t look angry, or ferocious. Just… she just looks… oh gods, she’s so beautiful.
“Words, Cara,” she says, placing me back in the present, back to where I stand in front of her, ending any attempt to escape, insistently, gently. “What was it?”
I sigh, glance away again, then back at her. “I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know what I expected when I came here today. I didn’t know what to expect. And then, the… when you got this out, and came over with it…”
“When I got what out?” she asks, her eyes beginning to probe me like an accountant looking for an elusive error in the books.
“The… when you got… the…” now this is very, very puzzling. I know the word, I haven’t forgotten it, or what we’re talking about. It just won’t emerge from my throat. It’s the oddest thing. I look up at her, frankly stumped.
“This,” I say finally, gesturing toward my neck, then feeling my hand fall back down to my side. It’s so strange. I don’t feel nervous, or giddy, or dizzy, or any of the things that made it so hard to speak coherently earlier.
She continues to study me like a report. She nods faintly, as if to herself. “Then what happened?”
“Well… I just… I don’t know. I started laughing… and I couldn’t stop. For a while.”
“What set you off, do you think?” she asks.
“I don’t know—”
“Oh, come on,” she says, laughing a little herself now, but gently, affectionately almost. “Most people pay someone in a club a pile of money to make them laugh that way, and then spend the next two weeks repeating the joke to everyone they see. You saw the collar in my hands, then what?”
“Oh, Siobhan, it was just…” I’m relaxing a little now; it’s beginning to feel like we’re just talking. “I guess it was just that it was the very first thing, when we started, and out comes this… this… you know, this iconographic thing, and it just seemed—it was—unreal. And then, when you—when you put—when it was actually on me, it was just too… much. I guess it seemed sort of… cliché. I’m sorry,” I add quickly, “that’s not a cut, I’m truly, truly not passing judgment on anyone’s… it was just the image, and it just happens that the image of… that image… just has always made me… giggle.” I smile, more at the memory of myself laughing uncontrollably than at anything else. “I am sorry.”
“Why are you sorry?” she asks me, still probing, and in that moment something shifts away from the comfortable familiarity I was just beginning to feel.
“Well,” I say, again, for the millionth time, it seems, since I arrived here, how long ago? Didn’t she just say, outside, that there were thirty minutes left? That just can’t be right, I’ve been here forever, all morning, it must be getting late by now, and I turn my head to look for the clock on the wall—
“Stand still.” And I do. “Well, what?” she asks me.
For crying out loud, what is the big deal? I laughed, OK, it was stupid and immature, I’ve apologized, can’t we move on? I am paying for this, and while I don’t want to take advantage of her, I don’t want to waste time either.
“Cara.” I look up at her again. “What are you sorry for?”
“For laughing,” I say, beginning to feel a little exasperated myself.
“Why are you sorry for that?” she asks, relentless as a cat.
“Because it just seems… rude, that’s all.”
“Rude.” She repeats the word as if she’s never heard it before. “Rude?”
“Yes, rude,” I say, standing up a little straighter. “I did not intend rudeness, but, I think it was… rude, and inconsiderate. I don’t want to offend you.”
“Offend me,” she repeats, and now she stands up, no longer leaning back on the desk. “Cara, I want you to listen to me very closely, because there is something here that you don’t understand yet. And it’s very important.”
“Ok,” I say.
“Look at me,” she says, and I nod. “Listen. Are you listening?”
“Yes,” I tell her, “I’m listening to you.”
“Cara.” Her eyes have grown dark and impossibly deep and I hear her words but I don’t understand them.
“You cannot ‘offend’ me.”
“Yes, I know. I’m sorry,” I apologize again.
“No, you don’t know. You are not understanding it yet.”
Not understanding what?
“It is not possible, for you. It is not possible for you to ‘offend’ me. Even if you tried, and I don’t think you were trying, but even if you did try… you could not do it. You are simply not capable.”
Not capable? Not capable of what? What am I not capable of?
“Listen. This is very important, Cara. Listen carefully. You cannot ‘offend’ me.”
Silence.
“You cannot ‘hurt’ me.”
I don’t understand.
“Can you hear me, Cara? Listen again.”
The clock, on the wall, the clock I cannot see. Snick. Snick. Snick.
“Cara, outside this room, this house, there are many things you do, many things you can do, many responsibilities that you have chosen to take on. There are people who depend on you.”
Snick. Snick. Snick.
“In this house, in this room, Cara, you are capable of nothing—can you hear me?—nothing that could possibly ‘hurt’ me. Even if you want to. Even if you try as hard as you can.
“Listen. Listen, Cara.”
Snick. Snick. Snick.
“You cannot take care of me,” she says.
“I know that,” I say, puzzled, and for some reason I cannot fathom, afraid.
“No, Cara.” She shakes her head. “I don’t mean that it’s not your responsibility. I mean, that you cannot do it. It is not possible.” She pauses. “Listen. Listen, Cara.
“You cannot. Take. Care. Of me.”
A tiny, tough, thick-walled little bubble rises up and breaks, and the broken place burns, deep in my chest, and I swallow, hard, pushing, pushing it down, back down into the dark where it belongs. “I know,” I say in a very small voice.
“No,” she laughs—she laughs—”no, you don’t. Look at me,” she says and I raise my eyes to hers and I am so confused and nothing makes any sense and I don’t understand what she is saying to me and I don’t know anything anymore except this one thing and that one thing is I will not cry. Will. Not.
With one hand she reaches around to grasp my hair at the back of my head, a good big handful, tilting my head back as she steps in closer, and with the other hand she reaches down to brush a stray lock of my bangs away from my eyes and traces the outline of my ear with her fingers and I shiver, suddenly feeling her touch humming along my nerves, branching and blossoming in places I never would have thought to imagine: the left side of my middle back, skin flaring out in a starburst burning itch; the heel of my palm just under my thumb suddenly twitching, one tiny muscle jumping and dancing like a marionette on an invisible string; a pinpoint of white electricity piercing the flesh behind my navel from the inside, sharp and hot.
Her eyes hold me locked in tight to her, my thoughts and my feelings and my will flowing up toward her, drawing out thin and light, softly curling to coil gently around her finger, tracing my ear, just there.
“That’s right… yes.” The sound of her, running down into my ear like warm syrup, sending pleasure rippling through my body, that voice easing through the delicate eardrum, over the bones, unhurried, undeniable, her words running down and down into and past the back of my throat and down, down, deeper, deeper, down into the darkest secret place where they pool and swirl and coalesce into dark wet heat gathering, growing.
Her fingers lightly now, so lightly over the side of my neck, running along the edge of the leather thing she has fixed around me, making the skin jump and shy like a scared horse, now tracing around and over the artery, there, right at that place where only the fewest filmiest membranes lie between blood and air. Some escaping, climbing tendril of liquid flame has come seeking up from the gathering black sweetness inside me, rising through my throat, seeking her, homing in to her as it rushes forward and opens my mouth and the sound is the highest softest breath of moan. Something like a sub-audible growl answers from behind her tongue and my bones are heavy and full of something hot as she leans closer and the scent of her carries her words straight to the heating, juddering mass I am slowly becoming, “oh, yes… that’s it, Cara, yes, that’s it…” her hand in my hair pulling harder now, tipping my head back and back and her other hand sliding down from my neck, over my side along my breast as I gasp and around the small of my back, pulling my head back farther and farther and her arm the only thing holding me up, my neck stretched and bare and… and… naked, the collar somehow stripping me, exposing me, as her lips touch and press and suck hard and the dark wetness explodes up and out to meet her.
Pain, sudden and sharp, clears my head as my eyes snap open. She is holding the fingers of my right hand in her left, bending them backward. I freeze. She eases the pressure on my fingers but retains control of them. Her face is not angry but it is dead serious. “None of that,” she says, and reaches up with her other hand to encircle my left wrist where my palm is flat against her shoulder. As she pulls my hand away from her I realize I had just been… I had just been pushing against her. Trying to push her away. I didn’t even know I was doing it.
Gazing into my startled eyes, a slow, knowing smile eases her lips apart as she brings both my hands down and behind me. She places my hands back-to-back and wraps her left hand around both my thumbs. Her right hand traces up my arm, over my shoulder, to that naked flesh at my throat. Her thumb on my jaw turns my head to the side, exposing my throat to her even more.
I am trembling. Her lips touch my throat, briefly, before her tongue, oh gods, her tongue touches my pulse which leaps and bucks beneath her, stroking me there, probing harder now, and then her teeth close over the skin surrounding the vein… I can feel the blood coursing, throbbing, harder and harder as she holds me there, holding me immobile, trembling, breathing in gasps and pants, eyes closed, feeling, feeling. Her teeth close just a fraction more and she rolls that vein between them. Her hand, still holding my thumbs captive behind me, presses into the small of my back, holding me as my knees suddenly turn liquid and I moan, aloud, startled by the sound. I clamp my lips together to hold back the sound of my submission. I can’t help it. I want this, but I can’t. I can’t.
Suddenly her mouth is sealed to my throat there and she is sucking, hard, sucking my flesh and blood and body into her hot mouth. I gasp, a soft cry breaking from me this time, and I am struggling now, my hands locked behind me and barely able to stand but struggling still, because the pleasure is rising up to engulf and overtake me now. Everything I want in the world is there where her mouth is pulling the rising tide of hot wet pleasure through my body. I cannot stop it, but I cannot give in to it either, and it feels as though something inside me is being pulled apart as she rakes her teeth over that spot and releases the vein so the blood surges through, hot, rushing to my head as her other arm comes around my waist now, pulling me so tight against her body. My back arches, pressing my body against hers, into hers.
I am crying out and her mouth at my ear now, pouring her hot breath into me, “You cannot hurt me. You cannot help me, you cannot, Cara, in this room, you cannot do anything to me at all. You are mine to do with. You. Can. Do. Nothing,” and her teeth sink into the flesh just below my ear at the back of my neck and the deep howling wave enfolds me and lifts me up and pulls me under and I come, I come so hard and hot and drenching I really know this time I am dying.
She turns with me still in her arms and lifts slightly so my thighs meet the desktop. She releases my thumbs and her arm slides up to support my shoulders, dragging the fabric of my tank top with it; her other hand briefly cradles the back of my head before stroking down through my hair and across the top of my right arm, raking the nails lightly along the flesh as I struggle for breath. “Yes…” she breathes into me, her fingers seeking, sliding underneath the shirt bunched beneath my breasts as my back arcs uncontrollably and her fingers find the place where the tissue changes and swells and softens, moving over the curve of my breast, her hand turning to slip her thumb between the tank top and my body and dragging it up and up and over until she strikes, lighting the incendiary fuse of my nipple, sharp and hard and hot and my nipple flashes, detonating, consuming itself yet still living, rigid and whole and pulsing between her merciless finger and thumb, pressing harder, harder, harder as I shake and shake and shake and only her hands and arms surrounding me and her leg pressed between my thighs and her voice around and down and inside and filling me, only she holds my body as one single intact organism, shuddering and cascading and falling and rising and falling again.
Moaning. I am moaning, I am the moaning pouring out of me.
Her voice is relentless and indefatigable and endless, reaching inside me, stroking and running along all the hidden defenseless places, “yes, that’s right, there, that’s right, you’re almost there, Cara, that’s it, don’t stop, yes… you’re almost there, almost seeing it, almost hearing, keep listening, let the sound reach you, Cara…” pulling me in toward her again, my feet find the floor and her hand from my breast reaching down to gather my skirt and roll beneath and behind it to stroke the round heaving softness of my belly and her touch there annihilates all breath, all thought of breath, of ever breathing again, ever. Pressing her palm flat against me there, “Breathe,” she tells me and my eyes open to her, wide and wet and open to her, “Breathe,” she says again and pushes in hard and the breath I am holding expels itself and “good girl,” from deep in her throat as the wind rushes into me once more. “Breathe,” again, the word caressing, coaxing, that voice impossibly soft and warm and inescapable, and I feel it again, larger this time, that creaking great cracking breaking apart of everything as I am devastated by the catastrophic force of her tenderness.
I feel it now, the rippling crash after crash upon crash as her words continue pulling down every single constructed bit of me, “oh yes, yes, baby, that’s it, you’re almost there” her hand stroking down over my belly, pulling down my panties and rising, rising with her words which are turning into moans, my moans, “that’s right, yes, yes… see it, Cara, now you’re ready, you’re ready, baby, see it now, come on, that’s right, oh yes, oh Cara, that’s right, see it, open up, open now” her hand sliding straight through the hot wet soft to where my heart is beating there between and up and inside me, stroking and stroking and hotter and hotter and “yes, yes yes yes, that’s it, baby, so good, come on, yes, open, open up, more, like that, yes” and then oh oh oh deep deeper inside, all the way inside and “open, more, open more, so good, so good Cara, see it now, right there, baby, right there, there, there” and suddenly I’m through, through the black hole and inside out on the other side and oh my gods yes yes yes please oh gods yes, everything lets go and comes apart and she is there at the center of me and all the way inside taking taking taking me and she will not stop, will not ever, I cannot stop her, she takes me and turns me and strips me and I am panting now, panting and writhing and moaning and heaving and “more… more… more… now… Cara… now… you’re here, now, baby, you’re here, give up, give it up, give it up to me, give up, yes, yes you’re here now, yes, give up you’re giving up giving up Cara yes you’re giving, giving it all up, Cara so good giving it up, don’t stop, you can’t stop Cara, you’re giving up and you can’t stop and you can’t stop it and you can do nothing at all to stop so good so good yes, more, more baby, give it to me, give it all to me” and I am coming shrieking, wailing out coming coming coming “all of it… all of it… Cara, give, Cara, Cara, give me all, all of it, Cara give me everything now, now, yes now now NOW” and her thumb rubbing my clit and her fingers there, there, stroking and pinning my g-spot against the wall of my cunt, yes, only the thinnest stretching thread holding me together against the monstrous pleasure ravaging my body and as her words “now you’re mine, now I have you, I have all of you here and there’s nothing you can do, nothing, Cara, I have you, all of you now and it’s so good, so good so good, that’s right, all of you” everything explodes in my cunt, rolling and barreling and bursting up and out of my throat in howling sobs, and as that very last thing slips past me, the sweet stretching string snaps and orgasm takes me, completely, having me, owning me as my body screams in impossible pleasure, wracking me over and over and over as everything pours out of me, out of me in great heaving waves of ecstasy and loss and excruciating shattering pleasure, again, still, again, still, again. And she catches me, falling, in her arms, until she finally slows, slowing, holding me, gently lowering my shivering shaking body down, bringing me down with her, safe and slow and sure until it is only me again, with her, shuddering rhythmically against her fingers stroking very, very slowly, so softly inside me.
My sobbing and howling have subsided; her soft murmuring voice in my ear has slowed and deepened my breathing. But the tears continue falling from my eyes, flowing as steadily as the wet flowing from my sex around her gently, imperceptibly moving fingers. “Ohhhh, Cara,” she sighs, and grazes her lips across my hot, wet forehead. “I’m so proud of you, baby.” I don’t understand, but it doesn’t matter anymore. A very small sigh makes its way up from my lungs, unimpeded.
She leans away from my face to look at me. “You did it, Cara. You saw, and you understood.”
Scalded, I lower my face. Shut my eyes. If only I could finish disappearing. There’s nothing, almost nothing at all left of me, please just let me disappear all the way.
One hand under my chin holds me here, chained to her. “Don’t do that, Cara. Don’t ever hang your head. Not with me, not for that.” I don’t think I can bear it, but I know she was right and I can do nothing. I know it now. But I wish… I wish she would just let me go. Let me slip away, all the way away.
Her fingers on my face. “Stay here, Cara. Stay here with me. Listen. You are so amazing. Brilliant, and brave. That was hard, Cara. That was so hard for you and you were incredibly brave.” I see her smile; it fills the empty space with wonder. “You did it. You let it reach you.” Her arm tightens around my shoulders and she kisses my closed eyes with that terrible, terrible tenderness.
“So good… so good.” The wonder is warming now and slowly spreading, lighting and restoring my limbs.
“So good,” she murmurs, again, and “now… now we can begin.”
Oh?
Oh… oh.
Oh, shit.
She has me now.
Siobhan has got my number.
I shiver. Defeated and glad and grateful and afraid and aroused. I shiver, again. She laughs softly. Withdraws her fingers from me, slowly, watching my face, smiling. Approving with the slightest of nods when she feels me tremble as she carefully unbuckles the collar and draws it away from my throat.
The sensation is indescribable. I feel utterly naked and exposed and it sends a fresh hot surge of wet gushing from my sex and I squeeze my thighs together, my face burning.
“Now that,” she murmurs, “is very, very nice. Very nice, Cara.” One finger tucks the hair that has fallen over my face back behind my ear, exposing my face to her, and I gasp helplessly. “Good girl.”
She moves to the coat tree and takes down my jacket, walking across the room to stand by the door. We’re done for now. I follow her to the door. I reach out tentatively to take my jacket from her, but she holds it for me, waiting. I turn my back to her and she captures my hands in the sleeves, pulling it up onto my shoulders and then rests her hands there, holding me for a moment, feeling me tremble as her mouth comes close to my ear once more.
“I look forward to seeing you again, Cara. When you want. When you’re ready.”
Ready? Who is she kidding?
Ready is not an option. No way am I waiting around for ready.
But want, yes, want is already brewing. Oh, yes. Yes.
I want.
Siobhan has most definitely got my number.
Oh my, yes.