She wrote her answers carefully in neat, cramped handwriting. She would have liked to have been vague or cavalier about some of the questions, like “Why do you want to join The Devilhouse?”
She could have written: Because on that question where it asked for all countries I’ve visited, I couldn’t check any of them, and if I ever had any extra money, I would travel and see what other countries are like.
She could have written: Because when this form asked me to list sexual partners, I wrote down all of them, and I was ashamed that there were so many and ashamed that they didn’t even cover a quarter of the page, and I suspect that I flubbed several of them anyway.
She could have written: Because when this form asked about the most exciting experiences in my life, I couldn’t think of anything at all.
But she remembered Lizzy and Georgie’s admonition last night to be honest, painfully honest, as if honesty were part of the test, so Rae sucked it up and wrote, painfully and honestly, Because I need the money for college, and I have no other way to get the money.
Last night at the party, Rae had met and screwed the The Dom against a wall in a back bedroom without knowing beforehand that he was, indeed, The Dom of The Devilhouse.
After the party, Georgie and Lizzy had been drunk and giggly in the limo on the ride home, and Rae had only told them that The Dom had given her an audition appointment today. They had high-fived and giggled some more, sure that she was shoe-in.
Rae had avoided Lizzy and Georgie in the dorm that morning by dodging out early to study at a coffeehouse. She hadn’t told them that she had screwed their Dom against a wall last night or that she knew his given name because, even though they had worked for him for over a year, neither of them had found out his real name.
On the application, a long list covered three pages and asked about sexual things she had experienced, things that she had done and would do again, things she wanted to try, things she had not tried and might be curious about, things she had tried and did not like, and things she would never try. Rae checked a lot of the hadn’t-tried and quite a few of the would-never-try boxes.
Surely, being a dominatrix rather than one of the blow job artists, as Wulf had called them, meant that she could have opinions on what she wouldn’t do if she didn’t want to.
She hoped she was right.
Rae hesitated for several minutes before she checked one box near the end.
Even the truth had limits.
The door opened.
Rae looked up, startled, when Wulf walked in. His navy blue suit contrasted with his eyes, making his blue eyes even brighter.
She had kind of thought that The Dom of The Devilhouse should wear a black leather vest over his oiled, waxed, bare chest, but Wulf’s business suit fit his athletic shoulders. A sky blue tie was knotted under the crisp, white collar of his shirt. His gold-blond hair was cut short like he was in the Air Force though not as stubble-shaved as the Marines, and he was as clean-shaven as an FBI agent. His high cheekbones and straight jawline looked like he had peeled himself off the pages of a designer suit ad.
His surprised smile warmed her. Sharp sunlight from the long window glinted on his blond hair. “Hello,” he said.
“Um, hi.” She checked the last few boxes on the very last page of the form and flipped it closed.
Wulf said, “Glenda said that you were in here. Very toppy of you to take my office and sit behind my desk for your paperwork.” His pressed smile seemed amused.
“I hope you don’t mind.” Rae managed to make it sound sturdy, like a dominatrix should sound. She had read Lady Macbeth’s lines before she had driven over, trying to find a character. She stood, lifted her chin, and held out the application. “I’m done with this.”
“Excellent.” Wolf took the application from her and looked her up and down, obviously checking out her body. “Nice suit.”
“This old thing?” Her black interview suit from two and a half years ago clung tightly to her butt, and she couldn’t button the jacket across her boobs. She had worn a clingy black tee shirt instead of the white blouse with lace at the throat because she had gained her freshman fifteen and two cup sizes since she had worn this suit for her scholarship interview in high school. Just one semester in the dorm cafeteria had busted her out of most of her clothes from high school.
“It’s perfect,” Wulf said. “You look quite the dominatrix.”
Rae grinned and wished that she had chosen the too-tight suit on purpose, but she had worn her only suit for this oh-so-important job interview. She had slicked back and tied her hair into a tight knot at the base of her neck. “I did my best.” She swished in her purse for the earring box and held it out. “And, while I appreciate the gesture, I can’t accept these.”
Wulf glanced at the box, then at Rae. “It’s a small token.”
“They’re enormous, and I can’t accept them.” She placed the box on his desk to emphasize her point. She swore that she could hear the pebble-sized diamonds inside it clink.
His voice was mild. “I meant no offense.”
“And certainly none taken. It was sweet gesture, but they’re too much.”
“That’s unfortunate. Perhaps I can replace them with something else to your liking.”
“The roses were pretty. Two dozen is a lot of roses, but it was nice of you. I’m not a jewelry type of girl, anyway. I never go anywhere that I’d need earrings like those.”
“That’s unfortunate.” Wulf flipped through her application, pausing only when he came to the lists at the end. He scanned down the fetishes and kinks, and Rae’s face heated as he frowned. “You’ve had no experience with any of these?”
“No. Is that a problem?” Rae was pleased with her strong answer.
“There is always some on-the-job training, but perhaps you will be a fast learner.” He flicked the pages shut. “I encourage you to come to the club on Saturday nights and watch some of the scenes that are performed and, after your medical clearance comes through, to play.”
Rae nodded and tried not to look terrified. If people performed even half the acts that were described on that application, she might gape like a schoolgirl and flee.
Running away from people who were performing consensual acts was just ridiculous, Rae chastised herself. She wasn’t running anywhere. She would be fine. Just fine. She nodded some more.
“Perhaps not tonight, though,” he said. “You should learn a few things, first.”
“Oh, good,” she said, glad for the reprieve.
“Yes, good,” Wulf said.
Again, like last night, Rae thought that he had said goot. His accent distracted her. “Are you German, maybe?”
“No.” Wulf studied her with his blue, blue eyes. His pause and stillness were deafening.
“But you’re from somewhere else, right? Your accent sounds British most of the time, but there’s something else, too. I mean, you weren’t raised here, right?” Rae babbled. Lizzy and Georgie didn’t know anything of substance about him, they had said. They didn’t even know his given name, let alone that mouthful of names that he had recited while Rae had shagged him against the wall at the party last night.
He licked his lips with the tiniest tongue motion and drew his lower lip into his mouth. He seemed to be searching her eyes for something. Finally, Wulf released his lip and said, “I am Swiss, as you Americans call us. We call ourselves Helvetians.”
“Oh, Swiss.” She felt victorious that she had dragged something out of him, and dirty that she had torn something from him when he was obviously reluctant to say anything about himself, and worried that now she needed to keep another secret from Lizzy and Georgie because Rae didn’t snitch. “That’s nice.”
He frowned by dropping one pale eyebrow. “Do I have an accent?”
Georgie and Lizzy had remarked on his accent, too. “British, like I said, most of the time, but sometimes there’s something else, too. Just a little. Not much.”
“Mortifying. We should p
roceed to the interview.” Wulf motioned with one finger for her to leave his desk and come around to a seat in the chairs, the applicant’s place.
Rae walked around the sharp-corners of the desk to the chairs. She hoped she was being sultry as she sat and crossed her long legs. She fit in the chair, she noticed, which was unusual. A lot of office furniture is built small, and her tall body sometimes overflowed pint-sized furniture. The chair under her rump felt solid but soft.
Wulf took charge of the desk and laid her application between them. “Let us be frank. I want you here. We must await your medical release, but I didn’t see anything in here that would preclude you working with us.”
“Great,” Rae said.
“And at least you’ve had some dominatrix experience.”
That was where she had exaggerated her experience, like many actors do when auditioning for a part. You can find someone to teach you to do anything passably in the couple of weeks between an audition and filming, so if someone asks you if you can do anything, heck yeah, you agree. If a director asks if you can ride a horse or speak with a Bangladeshi accent or play a trumpet, heck yeah, you can do that.
She smiled. “Heck, yeah.”
“Well, good.” Goot. “Was it in a private dungeon or a club?”
He must know all the club people around there. “Private,” Rae said. “One of the short-term guys.”
“And you enjoyed it.”
She remembered last night, when she had slammed Wulf against the wall and he had done what she wanted him to. Her body heated, and her thighs tingled. “Yeah, I liked it.”
Wulf appraised her face, looking at her eyes and her lips. “All right. Now,” he glanced at her paperwork, “you say that you have had only male partners, and you are not open to any sexual activity with women.”
“I’m really not interested in that,” Rae said. Shame and fear wiggled in the back of her mind.
“Yet, last night, Lizbeth said that you nearly jumped out of your dress in the back of the hired car, and I watched you dance with two of my best girls. I would have thought that you liked women as well.”
“No,” Rae said, taken aback. “I was just having a good time with my friends.”
“Just a good time, then. For employment purposes, would you do a scene with a woman client?”
“I don’t know.” She had assumed that her clients would all be men. She hadn’t considered a woman might want to be beaten up. “I guess I do have a problem with doing this kind of thing to a woman because, well,” she struggled to put it into words, “slapping a man around would be just a game. It’s almost like the action itself is sarcastic. With women, abuse happens all the time, and it’s not sexual or for fun. It’s violence.”
“Ah, it is commendable and appropriate that you think about such things. However, many women come to us for submissive scenes because, historically, the patriarchal culture denies them authentic sexual experiences. By submitting, they are forced to accept pleasure, even pleasure that would otherwise cause them shame or guilt. Some of them prefer a woman Domme for a variety of reasons, such that they are, as some call it, bi-curious, or they feel that they are not cheating on their partners if no man is involved, or because domination by a man is, again, an extension of the repressive patriarchy.”
Rae blinked. Okay, he had obviously thought that one through, maybe a couple of times in order to compose that thesis paragraph.
The thought of being forced to accept pleasure and forced to have an orgasm bounced around in her head. Rae sat shock-still and didn’t let anything register on her face. After three years of theater classes, she could act at least that much.
Being forced sounded different than rape. Submitting sounded different than rape. Rape was a crime, heinous and violent. Being forced or being willing to submit sounded, somehow, oddly liberating, like it was not her fault.
She could do anything, if someone else did it to her.
Maybe some of the things on that list.
She spread her hands over her knees, smoothing her skirt down.
The night of the Hair cast party, she had blamed the alcohol for what she had done. She would never have done those things if she had been stone-cold sober.
She had been buzzed at The Devilhouse party last night, too. The alcohol had liberated her to do what she wanted to.
Rae’s pussy tingled. She crossed her legs over her throbbing clit.
“That’s interesting,” she said, finally remembering his comment about the patriarchy that had started her whole line of thought.
“So would you do scenes with women, knowing that they are absolving themselves from feeling the shame and remorse that your Puritan-derived culture forces upon them?” Wulf watched her expression, judging her.
Rae composed her face, imagining stone skin. Her childhood church rose in her thoughts. Yes, most of the women that she knew in Pirtleville, certainly her roommate-cousin Hester, would think that sex for anything other than married, procreative purposes was certainly sin. Her Aunt Enid insisted that ladies did not experience the pelvic sneeze that men spoke of.
Sex wasn’t sin, though. Rae had worked through all of that, first in her psychology courses and then in the theater department. The cast party for Hair alone had allowed her to check three done-that boxes on The Devilhouse’s application form.
She should take control of those stupid thoughts.
She wanted to take control of those stupid thoughts.
“I could do scenes with women,” she said.
“Excellent. Expanding your horizons already.” Wulf circled an item on her application. “In addition, everything that occurs here at The Devilhouse is safe, sane, and consensual. That means that the risk for any injury is minimized or preferably eliminated, that everyone is of their right mind, and that everyone has given informed consent for the proceedings. I have some reading material for you. We’ll discuss that in more depth.”
“Okay.” Her Human Subjects in Experimental Psychology class had covered informed consent in excruciating detail. She could probably write the forms.
“Another thing.”
“All right.” Another too-personal question about kinky fetish stuff. Here it came.
“Are you serious about developing a clinic for autistic children?”
Rae’s jaw dropped. “How on Earth did you know about that?”
“Lizbeth and Georgie mentioned it.” One side of his mouth bent upwards, like he had almost smiled.
“Um, yeah. It’s, um, are you sure you want to hear about this?”
“Certainly.”
“All right. Well, my cousin Daniel, who’s eight, he’s autistic. Really autistic. And I’ve seen how much my aunt Alana tried to help him but she couldn’t because she didn’t really know what to do, and our small-town pediatrician didn’t know how to help her. He’s too busy trying to prevent a whooping cough epidemic because everyone had stopped vaccinating their kids because everyone is related to everyone down there and so everyone knows Alana and Daniel. When my professors started discussing autism and therapies, something clicked in my head. This is what Daniel needs. Or needed. He’s eight now, eight. But there are lots of kids like Daniel. Thousands. Millions. Are you sure I’m not boring you? This is way off topic.”
“Please proceed,” Wulf said again. His gaze, once quite aloof, had sharpened on her. Rae had seen lots of people with blue-gray eyes, but the blue of Wulf’s eyes was so dark that it looked sapphire.
She said, “So I came up with this idea: a clinic, one-stop shopping, a place where kids can cycle through occupational therapy and speech therapy and behavioral therapy—that’s me—and medical therapies, maybe even nutritional guidance, and get intensive help, preferably early help, but it would be professional help. I think it could help them. I think we could save them from ending up like Daniel.”
“And how is Daniel now?”
Rae stopped her hands from instinctively covering her face because she didn’t want to smear her make-up
at a job interview, so her hands hung in air, useless and grasping. “Locked in. He’s locked into this terrible place where his brain misfires and everything outside his own head terrifies him. He stims constantly because, when he flaps his hands, that kinesthetic movement feeds back into his brain, and he understands the pattern of the movement. That soothes him. Everything else is too scary and unfathomable for him.”
“I’m sorry. How far have you gotten in your plans for this clinic?”
“I have a name: A Ray of Light, spelled the usual way,” she said quickly when his eyebrows rose at the word ray. “I was thinking about starting off in a strip mall. There are a lot of empty strip malls nowadays. We could expand after that as we get more money to bring more people on board.”
“Interesting.” Wulf nodded and tapped her application with a pen. He pulled his lower lip into his mouth and bit it, kind of like Rae had done to him the night before. “We have a great need right now for a new Domme. You could work one or two evenings a week and Saturday nights, ten to fifteen hours, and most girls earn more than enough to pay for university. I daresay you might save enough for seed money for your venture.”
Three nights a week was less than she was working now at the library, and that minimum wage gig barely paid for booze and books, let alone tuition and dorm.
Two thousand dollars a week, every week. “Really?”
“Certainly. Many of my girls are college students. You know Lizbeth and Georgie. Whitney has been with us for four years, the last two of her bachelor’s and, now, during her sociology PhD. She passed her doctorate candidacy exam a month ago. She has her subs sign waivers so she can use them as research subjects and gives them an insultingly small break on the price. She tried to use pseudonyms for them in her peer-reviewed papers, but they insist that she use their real names. Far more humiliating for them.”
Rae, aghast, said, “Using real names is a major ethics breach. There are strict ethical guidelines. There are laws about using human subjects.”
“Yes, but they insist, so the lawyers drew up forms for them to sign, and some of them have her academic papers framed in their dungeons at home. Now, as I was saying, you are expected to not have sexual intercourse with the clients. Indeed, if they have been a very good little sub, you may allow them to masturbate when you are done with them.”
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