by Vina Jackson
There was no sound in the room besides the dripping of water from the brush and the relentless scrape of the bristles against stone. Her knees began to ache. But she enjoyed the rhythm of the simple back and forward motion of her arm and hand moving the brush and she quickly became acutely aware of each and every bodily sensation. The way that her muscles extended and retracted, the dampness of the water on her skin, the pressure of her cotton vest top against her breasts.
She had the vague sense that she no longer existed as Aurelia. As if, since she had been with the Network, she had shed the skin that marked her as an individual and now she was a mass made up of flesh and bones and sometimes thoughts and feelings, but none of those belonged to her. The idea was freeing, and the strong emotion that had gripped her when she woke dissipated in the act of labour.
For the first time in her life she enjoyed simply being without worrying about what she should do next. With that realisation another tattoo bloomed: a red and black winged ladybird on the pad of one of her fingertips.
That evening, after a light supper of a warm liquid that was vaguely but not exactly tomato flavoured and reminded Aurelia of barbecues on warm afternoons by the seaside, Madame Denoux entered her bedroom and advised her that she was now ready.
Aurelia did not ask her for what. It now seemed unimportant.
Her next day’s bathing routine took longer than usual. After being washed and dried, perfumed oil was massaged into her skin. Each time she moved she caught a faint whiff of her own scent. She smelled sweet and summery, like a combination of freshly squeezed lemons and the petals of a pink rose. Her hair was brushed out and left unadorned. Her attendants did not dress her and Aurelia waited expectantly for the sound of a decorative jewellery clasp snapping or the touch of a razor against what remained of her pubic hair since she had last shaved before her arrival in Seattle, but nothing came. She was led naked, with her eyes closed, out through the glass doors and into the garden.
The grass was soft and wet and Aurelia imagined that she could feel the pressure of each blade caressing the soles of her feet. She smiled as a gentle breeze ruffled her hair and she did not stop to tuck back the stray locks that flew over her eyes. Unable to see, she could not be certain how many people were around her but she believed that she had been led to the centre of a small crowd. There was a faint hush of inward and outward breaths and the occasional whisper of conversation.
And the faint but unmistakable scent of pomegranate.
The fragrance was like a bell to one of Pavlov’s dogs. Aurelia’s breath caught in her throat. Every cell within her came alive with desire. The tattoo over her heart burned even brighter. Her whole body began to shudder but, just as an orgasm was about to rock through her, a voice said: ‘Stop.’
And she did. Aurelia could not be certain whether she had prevented herself from coming or if the voice itself contained some kind of power that had doused her arousal like an icy blanket. Her power and the power of the other had blended into one.
She knew, without being told, the owner of the voice: Walter.
‘Get on your knees.’
Aurelia dropped down. The earth was damp against her legs. A cool draught brushed her skin as Walter stepped closer and loomed over her.
His palm was warm against her cheek. Then he pulled away and an almost imperceptible current of air drifted across her face as he lifted his arm into the air.
Without thinking, Aurelia braced herself but when Walter’s hand came crashing down again and caught her cheek in a sharp slap she still exhaled in shock. She fought away the desire to blink and nestled into the pressure of his fingertips, which now rested gently against her skin.
She heard a sharp hiss in the crowd. Andrei? Was he watching this?
Thoughts like bubbles floated gently to the surface of her mind. The slap hadn’t hurt, she realised. Nor had she felt any instinct to draw her own hand up to protect herself. She trusted Walter. Trusted all of them. She felt safe here. Accessing this knowledge made her even more relaxed. Aurelia sank into the earth. Allowed the blades of grass that she rested upon to take the weight of not just her body but her mind and any stray worries that arose as Walter moved around her.
‘Get up,’ he instructed. Aurelia rose to her feet almost before he had enunciated the words, as if even her limbs were eager to follow his instructions without needing the input of her thoughts. Her arms were raised over her head and bound at the wrists and her legs bound at the ankles.
Fingertips – still Walter’s, Aurelia believed, not that it mattered – trailed softly up her ankles and over the crevices on the backs of her knees and the soft skin of her inner thighs. Her body responded to his touch and she felt moisture gathering at her lips and as he neared her opening. He did not enter her, though Aurelia struggled against the bonds that tied her ankles to indicate that she would like him to. She was steadily becoming more and more aroused and she longed to feel the wonderful release that followed being filled.
When release came, it was in a different form to any that Aurelia had ever experienced.
There was that change in air pressure again as Walter’s arm rose into the air, but now it was not his hand that came crashing down but something else that felt both hard and soft at the same time and landed with a thud on her buttocks and then her back and between her shoulder blades. With every impact and exhale she felt as if some other part of her old life was departing her, disappearing with the vapour of each outward breath. Each blow was harder than the last and when Walter’s whip fell for the final time with an almighty crack, Aurelia’s whole body jolted forward and she cried out.
All of her thoughts and memories had drifted away and Aurelia felt nothing but the sense of existing in the present moment, a sensation of incredible lightness as if her body was floating in mid-air and not bound at all.
‘Yes,’ Walter said with a distinct note of satisfaction. ‘Now.’
He rested his hands on the back of her neck and a rush of heat and energy bolted through Aurelia’s body like an explosion that started at her feet and stopped as suddenly as it had begun at the points of Walter’s fingertips and with no escape began to burn beneath her skin with the same fiery throbbing that had accompanied the arrival of the other tattoos.
She was unbound and immediately collapsed to the ground. Andrei was by her side in a moment. Aurelia’s eyes remained closed, as she had been instructed, but she knew him in the same way that she had always known him. By his touch, his scent, the very particular way that he cradled her in his arms and rocked her back and forward, somehow absorbing all of her pain and confusion with the strength of his embrace.
Aurelia didn’t need to glance in a mirror to know what had happened, but when she did, she was unsurprised to see the now faint outline of another tattoo, this time around her throat.
The marks resembled a thick iron chain, decorated with a coil of tiny red and white petals, just like the ones on her Bonsai tree. And she realised this signified she now knew the power of pain and the precise intersection of that pain with pleasure.
She slept like the dead, and when she woke the next morning Madame Denoux was sitting in her usual place at the foot of her bed, notebook and pen in hand, ready to write down Aurelia’s thoughts as if the whole thing had been some sort of academic project.
No one had come to bathe her that morning, Aurelia realised. Unless they had sponged her down in her sleep. She raised her arm to her nostrils and sniffed. She still smelled faintly of the perfumed oil that had been massaged over her body the day before. The daily ministrations of her attendants had come to an end, then.
‘Is it over?’ Aurelia asked. ‘Am I trained?’
‘No,’ Madame Denoux replied. ‘You’re only just getting started.’
Aurelia nodded. She had long ago surrendered her existence to the Ball. Whatever was planned for her next and however long it would take was irrelevant. She was Mistress and so she would do it.
She brought her hand to her neck
. Touched the place where she knew that the iron collar with its chain of flowers encircled her throat.
‘Does this mean that I belong to Walter?’ she asked. Since her association with the Ball and its staff she had seen many men and women wearing collars of different descriptions, including the marionettes who had danced at the exhibition. Of course, she hadn’t known what the collar had represented at the time. That it was a symbol of ownership willingly worn by a submissive and represented a heavy weight of responsibility to the submissive’s dominant.
‘No,’ Madame Denoux replied, ‘you do not belong to Walter. Nor anyone else. You belong to the Ball. The appearance of the collar indicates that you have surrendered fully to your responsibilities, to your place. That you have accepted your position and your future. You are now owned by the Ball, Aurelia.’
‘Can it be removed? Like a regular collar?’
‘It’s not a regular collar, of course. It’s etched into your flesh.’ A bemused smile lingered on Madame’s lips, as if Aurelia had asked a very stupid question. ‘You will never be able to erase the Ball from your life, Aurelia, but all of these things only operate with your consent. The collar cannot be worn unwillingly. It is conjured from within. Not foisted upon you. So yes, if you decided to leave your position, you could do so. The chain of iron is a symbol of your voluntary surrender, not your entrapment.’
Aurelia nodded.
‘What’s next, then?’ Laying in bed felt strange to her now. She had become accustomed to physical work and following instructions. Being idle made her uneasy.
‘Now you must learn how to direct others.’
Of course, Aurelia mused. It must be her turn at domination, now that she wore a submissive’s collar.
Madame Denoux dipped a hand into one of the pockets on her long robe and produced a tiny ornate brass bell intricately carved in the shape of a Chinese dragon’s head. The tongue of the bell was also the tongue of the dragon. It produced the most beautiful sound that Aurelia had ever heard, like the echoes of glass raindrops falling into water.
Within minutes a young man appeared and immediately fell to his knees in the centre of the room with his eyes downcast. Madame Denoux motioned for Aurelia to get up and approach him. She did so, curiously.
He was naked from the waist up and in his bent-over position the muscles in his shoulders and back were clearly visible beneath the covering of his taut, tanned skin. From the waist down he was covered by a white, flowing skirt-like garment, something like a toga. His feet were bare.
Despite the nature of his submissive posture, there was an obvious strength about him that didn’t just come from his physicality. There was nothing feeble about the persona that he projected. His manner resembled that of a soldier kneeling in front of a monarch.
Standing in front of him unshowered, barefooted and still in her nightgown, Aurelia felt shorter and more foolish than ever before. She desperately wanted him to stand up.
She was not averse to the idea of dominating another, although she couldn’t quite imagine causing a person pain, which she knew was sometimes involved in such activities. But if ever she mentally put herself in the role of a dominant, then she always imagined lording it over someone who was slighter than her either in stature or in presence.
She’d seen slaves and servants at the Ball and they hadn’t seemed like this man. They’d seemed small both in size and in personality. Aurelia could have easily ordered one of them about, but she was not sure if she could do the same with the man at her feet.
She coughed and looked around at Madame Denoux for some sign of what she was expected to do next.
‘He’s awaiting your instruction,’ Madame replied.
Aurelia looked down again at the back of the kneeling man. She was possessed by an instinctive desire to run her fingertips over the curve of his spine.
‘May I touch you?’ she asked.
‘Yes, Mistress,’ he replied without looking up. The tone of his voice was familiar. A dull memory struggled to surface in the back of her mind like a diver coming up for air. She knew him from somewhere.
Aurelia trailed the pads of her fingertips over his skin as if she could read his identity through his rippling muscles. He shivered in response to her touch and his response sparked a jolt of excitement within Aurelia. She brushed her hand through his dark-blond hair and then along the length of his jaw until she reached his chin and lifted his head so that she could meet his eyes with her own.
Then she remembered. ‘Persephone,’ she whispered. ‘PJ.’
‘At your service, Mistress,’ he replied, grinning.
The last time she had seen him he had been dressed as Peter Pan and hand in hand with Siv at the party in the Bristol chapel, shortly before she had made love with Andrei for the first time. Reminded of Siv, Aurelia felt a pang of guilt. She missed her friend. Once she became Mistress of the Ball, would she be in a position to have her back by her side?
‘You’re the connection between the Network and the funfair?’ she asked him.
He nodded. Aurelia was still clasping his chin and when he moved his head, the stubble on his jaw scratched against her fingertips. His hair was only just beginning to grow and the sensation was soft as well as prickly.
‘Shave,’ she said to him. ‘I want you to remain shaved.’
Uttering that first simple command made her heart beat faster. She was trembling, but trying not to show it. Giving an order to another human being was at the same time deeply exciting because it seemed to Aurelia to be so forbidden, but it was frightening for precisely the same reason.
She exhaled with relief when he immediately stood up and walked to the bathing area. He knelt down and began to splash water over his face.
Madame Denoux approached her.
‘You’ll need to provide him with a blade,’ she whispered into Aurelia’s ear. Aurelia blushed when she realised her error. She knelt down and fished through the compartment cleverly concealed underneath the futon where she kept her personal belongings until she found a clean razor and a pocket mirror and she handed both to PJ with all of the authority that she could muster.
‘Well,’ said Madame Denoux drily, ‘you appear to be getting the hang of it.’
Aurelia followed her to the door.
‘Wait,’ she hissed under her breath in an attempt to avoid letting PJ know how far out of her depth she was. ‘What shall I do with him?’
‘That’s up to you to work out. Walter will be assisting you with some of the finer details.’
More questions bubbled to Aurelia’s lips, but Madame Denoux had already walked through the door. Her long, deep-blue velvet dress swished around her ankles as she skipped across the paving stones that led from the pagoda to the Network’s offices.
Aurelia let out a sigh and tried to banish the worries that crowded her mind. She needed to get on with the task at hand. Though at first it had been difficult to resign herself to being ordered around by others and truly find peace in submission, she already missed the ease and relaxation that came from simply following directions.
PJ was still kneeling on the hard stone floor and scraping the razor over his face, although by now she knew that his knees must be hurting and his face already smooth. She caught his wrist with her hand to stop him.
‘Stand up,’ she said.
PJ complied immediately. As he stood, the hem of his toga caught beneath his toes and slipped from his waist to his ankles, exposing the full length of his naked body. His knees buckled as he bent down to retrieve it.
‘No,’ Aurelia snapped. ‘Leave it.’
He straightened up again, though this time with less surety in his movement, unnerved by his own nudity.
Observing the flush that crept into his cheeks, Aurelia stood stock still with her legs spread apart in the provocative pose that she had so often seen Siv adopt when she was at her most aggressive and let her eyes deliberately roam over his body.
He was shorter than Andrei, a little leaner an
d much more muscular. Wide in the shoulders and narrow in the waist with the strong thighs that come from regular exercise.
PJ did not have the perfectly symmetrical model’s body that Tristan possessed, nor the overwhelming height and bulk of Andrei, but there was something distinctly appealing about the inherent imbalance in his physique that aroused her. As the flush on his cheeks deepened in response to her stare, his cock began to stiffen. Aurelia watched as he developed an erection that was straight and long and jutted out from his body at an impudent angle as if it had a mind of his own and refused to be governed by his thoughts.
He grew harder as he became more embarrassed and Aurelia took advantage of this interesting quirk in his psyche by making him walk laps around the room and watching his cock and balls bouncing awkwardly with each step.
She soon grew bored of this game, though, and commanded him to stop and face the wall as she bathed and dressed herself in the most regal attire that she could find amongst the rack of clothing that had appeared overnight now that she was tasked with dressing herself and no longer had her attendants to pick her costumes out for her.
She selected a floor-length, sheer robe in deep red, which closed with a single tie beneath her breasts but swept open to reveal the rest of her body when she walked. Wearing it made Aurelia feel both queen-like and deeply sexual. That feeling faded rapidly when she turned away from her makeshift wardrobe, glanced at PJ’s back and remembered that she was at least temporarily in charge of him for the rest of the day. Perhaps even the foreseeable future. She had no idea what to do with him and so she turned to the place where she had begun.
And so Aurelia’s understanding of domination began in the same way as her understanding of submission had. With the Bonsai tree. She explained to him how to care for the plant just as Florence had all those weeks ago and then left him to it as she considered what tasks she might occupy him with next.