“Thank you, darling. Had a midnight session with some rock god, or so he tells me. Haven’t changed clothes.”
“Anyone I know?” Simone asked.
“You ever heard of Nine Inch Nails?” Mistress Nora asked.
Simone jaw dropped again. “Yeah?”
“It wasn’t him,” the mistress said.
Simone playfully shook her fist at Mistress Nora. “Sadist,” Simone said.
“Ma’am, I’m Jason,” Jason said. He thought he better introduce himself. Mistress Nora gave the impression she was a woman who liked men to mind their Ps and Qs.
“I figured,” Mistress Nora said, shaking his hand. Firm grip for a woman with very delicate hands. “Let’s go in. Blondie ought to be here any minute.”
“The singer?” Jason asked.
“Mister S,” Simone translated for him. Right. Mister S was blond. Jason hadn’t noticed the man’s hair color as he’d been too busy not being murdered by the guy two nights ago.
“Wagons ho,” Nora said as she snapped her fingers and pointed at the door.
Jason turned the key and opened the door for Simone and for Mistress Nora as well.
As the mistress passed him at the door, she paused, looked him up and down over the top of her sunglasses again and said casually, “If you break her heart, they’ll never find your body.”
Jason swallowed. “I guess you know people,” Jason said, trying not to look terrified. Mistress Nora seemed like the sort of gal who knew “people.”
“No,” she said. “I am people.”
With that she sashayed into a long corridor. Jason took a deep breath and followed the women inside.
“You have interesting friends, Spanky,” Jason muttered into Simone’s ear.
“Isn’t she fun?” she asked. Jason didn’t answer.
They walked down the dimly lit hallway on faded red paisley carpeting past old wood panel walls. Tarnished brass chandeliers hung from the ceiling. It was ten in the morning and it seemed they were the only ones in the building.
“What is this place?” Jason asked as he took Simone’s hand.
“Old hotel,” Mistress Nora said. She led the way while he and Simone followed her into the labyrinth of corridors. They went down a short staircase, through a set of doors into another long hallway. “Used to be called The Renaissance. Then it was sold, almost condemned. Then Kingsley—”
“That’s my old boss, Mister K,” Simone explained.
“King bought it,” the Mistress continued. “It’s been The 8th Circle for years now. Very hard-to-get-into kink club. Unless you know somebody who knows somebody, you probably won’t get in.”
“Good thing I know somebody,” Jason said and squeezed Simone’s hand.
“Two somebodies,” Mistress Nora said, raising two fingers and smiling. “Having an obscene amount of money will also do.”
Mistress Nora brought them to a door at the end of the hallway. She knocked once and opened it when no one answered.
“Welcome to the junior dungeon,” Mistress Nora said as she waved Simone and Jason inside the room.
“Junior dungeon?” Jason said as he stopped in the doorway.
“Because you’re a little junior dominant.” Mistress Nora pinched his cheek. Jason allowed it. He didn’t like it. But he allowed it.
“It’s the training dungeon,” Simone said as she slipped past him and into the room. “Has all the basics plus good lighting.”
“And the library,” Mistress Nora said as she walked to one of those fancy glass-front bookcases on the far wall. Jason saw it was packed with nothing but guides to BDSM play. Not all books, though. Quite a few DVDs as well. He might like to watch a few kinky DVDs. For educational purposes only, of course. “This was my idea. But if you check out a book, you better return it. We fine in floggings.”
“Nora makes a very sexy vicious librarian,” Simone said. “I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”
“I can picture that,” Jason said and promptly pictured that.
“Picture what?”
The question came from the doorway. The question came, specifically, from the tall blond man standing in the doorway. He wore jeans, a black shirt with sleeves rolled to his elbows, and he carried a long black bag over his shoulder.
“Nothing,” Jason started to say. “Not a thing.”
“Jason was picturing Nora as a sexy librarian,” Simone said. Jason glared at her. He hoped there were gags in this training dungeon.
“No, I wasn’t,” Jason said.
Mister S only said, “Why not? I would if I were you.”
Then Simone’s mysterious Mister S did something Jason never expected the man to do.
He laughed.
Simone put her arms around him and went up on her tiptoes to kiss him on the cheek. Mister S dropped the bag on the floor before turning to kiss Mistress Nora on the lips.
“Wait,” Jason said, pointing at Mister S. “Has he actually been nice this whole time, and y’all just been messing with me?”
“No,” Mistress Nora said. “Definitely not nice.”
“Not really,” Simone said. “But he’s friendly enough when you get him in a good mood.”
“And nothing gets him in a good mood faster than being spoken about as if he weren’t standing right here,” Mister S said, and pointed at the floor.
“Sorry,” Simone said.
Mister S poked her nose. “You are not.”
“True.”
“Shall we get started?” Mister S said. “Our flight’s at one.”
“Sure,” Simone said. “I just wanted Jason to get a Flogging 101 lesson from a couple of experts. So…Master Jason, Mister S, Mistress Nora…flog away.”
“Can I call you something other than Mister S?” Jason asked. He felt kind of weird calling a grown man the same kinda goofy nickname his girlfriend called him.
“S is for Søren,” Mistress Nora said. “Danish. S, O with a slash, R, E, N. Almost rhymes with Burn but put an extra U in there. You sort of have to hold your lips weird.”
“Forget it. Mister S is fine,” Jason said. He wasn’t sure he could hold his lips weird enough to say “Søren” correctly.
Mistress Nora said, “Or Professor S. He really is a college professor. I suppose that makes me his T&A.”
“T.A., Eleanor. They’re called T.A.s,” the professor said. Mistress Nora winked at Jason.
Jason ignored both Mistress Nora’s wink and her T&A.
“Professor? For real?” Jason asked, skeptical. “What of?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Professor S said as he made a circuit of the room, inspecting the premises and the flogger selection, it seemed.
Jason said, “Try me.”
The professor looked at Jason. “Pastoral studies.”
Jason closed one eye, left the other open, thought about that long and hard.
“Yeah, I don’t believe you,” Jason said. “But Professor S at least sounds official.”
“‘Sir’ would work as well,” Professor S said.
“Behave,” Simone said and lightly swatted his stomach.
“I don’t want to,” the good professor said to her. Simone furrowed her brow at him and made the meanest, angriest face Jason had ever seen her make. She hissed like a snake. It worked. Professor S folded. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll behave. But only for you, Jellybean.”
“All right, all right.” Jason interposed himself between the two of them, his hands up. “Enough. You—” He pointed at Mister/Professor S. “Stop calling my girlfriend cute names. That’s my job. You—” He pointed at Simone. “Don’t go making mean faces at people and hissing likes snakes when they’re trying to help me out. And you—” He pointed at Mistress Nora.
“What about me?” Mistress Nora asked, her head slightly tilted to the side and a feral smile on her face. Her voice was pure velvet, pure seduction. It was the last voice you heard right before the knife slipped between your ribs and into your heart.
>
“Nothing,” Jason said immediately. “I have nothing but respect for you, and I just want everyone present to know that.”
“He’s a keeper, Simone,” Mistress Nora said. Simone wrapped her arms around Jason’s waist and kissed his neck.
“I agree.”
“I’m going to flog someone now,” Professor S said. “Volunteers?”
Simone raised her hand. Jason took her arm by the wrist and lowered her hand.
“I’ll do it,” Mistress Nora said. Jason could have kissed the woman. But respectfully only, and not on the mouth. Just the hand. Maybe one finger. The pinky. The tip of it.
Without any hesitation at all, Mistress Nora began to undress and nobody seemed to mind. In fact, Professor S didn’t pay much attention to his lover getting her top off as he was too busy with the big black bag he’d set on a table. He’d unzipped the bag and went digging through it while Simone looked on.
“Jason,” Professor S said.
“Yes, sir?”
Simone gave him a look.
“I said ‘sir’ because I was raised to be polite and respectful to my elders,” Jason said. “Not because he’s a whatever. Dominant.”
“And sadist,” Professor S said.
“That,” Jason said. “What am I doing?”
“You see all those floggers on the wall?” the professor said, nodding toward the almost two dozen different floggers hanging on hooks along the wall.
“I see ‘em.”
“Pick one.”
“Which one?” Jason asked.
“Anyone you like. Try them all. Test the weight. Tug the tails. One will feel better than the others in your hand. That will be the flogger you should train with. Then you can experiment with other types when you’re more proficient.”
“Simone said you’re really good with the big buffalo floggers,” Jason said.
“I’m also six-foot-four and two hundred ten pounds,” Professor S said. “And you are?”
Not. Jason was not six-foot-four and two-hundred-ten pounds. He was five-eleven and one-seventy pounds wet. As a bull-rider he didn’t usually feel intimidated by other men. This was a new experience for him. As lean as Professor S was…Jason knew that two-ten had to be all muscle.
And ego.
“I’ve ridden twenty-five hundred-pound bulls,” Jason said.
“But did you flog them?” Professor S asked.
“Søren,” Mistress Nora said.
“It was a reasonable question,” Søren said. He winked at Jason. Suddenly Jason knew he was among friends.
Very, very strange friends.
Simone helped Mistress Nora out of her corset top while Jason tried to pay attention to anything but Simone helping Mistress Nora out of her corset top. When he plucked the first flogger off the wall, a black one with supple tails and a light easy weight, Jason felt a jolt of pleasure and power run through his body.
“Oh, yeah,” Jason said as he slapped the tails of the floggers against his calf. “I’m going to like this.”
“I knew you would,” Simone said. Her voice was full of champagne bubbles. She was having as much fun as he was. “You can play around with all of the different types, and then we can go shopping later when you know what you want.”
All of them. That’s what Jason wanted. He picked up flogger after flogger—red ones and blue ones and ones with sharp tails and knots in the ends and ones with tails soft as suede.
He picked up one and laughed, recognizing the material of the tails immediately.
“This is horsehair,” Jason said.
“Very itchy,” Simone said. “Very stingy. But fun.”
“I could probably make my own horsehair flogger just from brushing Rusty’s tail. Although,” Jason said. “That would be weird.”
“I don’t think Rusty would mind,” she said.
Jason took a flogger off a silver hook and as soon as he held it in his hand, he knew he’d found the one.
The grip was red and black braided leather and the weight was heavy but not too heavy, the tails supple but thick, the whole thing a little over two feet long. It felt good in his hand, felt like it belonged there, like he’d been born to hold it, wield it, whip it.
“This one,” Jason said. “I like this one a lot.”
“Let me see,” the professor said. Jason held it up. Simone giggled.
“What?” Jason asked to her laugh.
“Of course you like it,” Simone said.
Professor S explained, “It’s a bull-hide flogger.”
“Hmm…” Jason said, nodding. “I wonder if I’ve ridden his cousin.”
“Can we get started, please?” Mistress Nora asked. “I’m getting chilly.”
Mistress Nora stood naked from the waist up facing the big black leather St. Andrew’s Cross. Her wrists were strapped to the tops of the X. He enjoyed, more than he would admit, watching Simone standing behind the mistress, pinning her long hair up and off her back. Jason could have watched The Mistress Nora & Simone Show all day.
“We’re starting,” the professor said. “Jason, come. Bring your flogger.”
Jason walked over to the cross where Mistress Nora was waiting. Simone had also pinned a white towel to the wall several feet away from the cross.
The professor pointed at Mistress Nora’s long lovely naked back.
“That,” he said, “is what I’ll be flogging. That—” Professor S pointed at the towel, “is what you’ll be flogging.”
“Understood,” Jason said. Nobody started bull-riding by riding a bull. Better to start out hitting a towel than hitting a person.
“The first thing you need to know about flogging,” the professor began, “is that a flogging doesn’t begin with a flogger. It begins here.”
He held up his hand and placed it gently on Mistress Nora’s back. She shivered and smiled, and Jason could swear he saw her visibly relax. Her head went down and her eyes fluttered closed and for a split second she almost looked submissive and happy about it.
While the mistress had a large presence, the second Professor S’s large hand lay on the center of her small back, Jason saw she actually wasn’t a very big woman. Petite, really. And yet she’d been putting up with this giant blond brute for years supposedly. As they said down in Kentucky, God bless her.
The professor stroked Mistress Nora’s back over and over.
“You want to touch the person you’re flogging first,” the professor said. “Establish contact, comfort them, warm their skin, relax them…”
“I can do that,” Jason said. He could already picture playing this game with Simone now.
“And talk to them,” the professor continued. “Flogging isn’t a punishment, but a pleasure. It’s not something you do to someone. It’s something you do with someone. Many dominants will thank their submissives for playing with them. The top can ask how the submissive is feeling, what they’re feeling, what they want to feel…”
“Or,” Mistress Nora said, “if you’re old like we are and you’ve been doing this forever, you’re lucky to get a ‘Brace yourself’ before the blows start.”
“Do as I say,” Professor S said, grinning, “not as I do.”
Jason smiled as Professor S dropped a quick kiss on Mistress Nora’s shoulder. They could pretend to be old and over it as much as they wanted, but Jason could tell real love when he saw it. They were crazy about each other. Jason and Simone were going to be just like that ten, twenty years from now, too.
“If you were to visually represent a flogging,” Professor S said, still stroking Nora’s back, “it would look like a long mountain chain with a series of ever-increasing peaks and plateaus. You start on the ground and work your way up a bit in intensity, then stop and rest. Let her rest,” he said, nodding toward Simone who stood back, watching intently. “Let yourself rest. A tired top is a dangerous top. You don’t want to lose control of your aim. Rest and check in. You can do as Eleanor does and ask ‘What color?’ when she’s flogging.”
“Color?” Jason asked.
“Red means ‘stop’,” Mistress Nora said. “Yellow means ‘slow down.’ Green means ‘Go, go, go.’ It’s a quick easy way to check in and make sure things aren’t getting to be too much for your sub.”
“I only have two people in my life now that I ever flog,” Professor S said. “And I know them well enough we don’t have to stop and check in that often. If I go a little too far with Eleanor, I know she’ll say something to the effect of—”
“Asshole!” she said.
“Not that ‘Asshole’ counts as your safe word,” Professor S said.
“Yeah, usually at the point I’m yelling ‘Asshole’ is about when I start having fun,” Mistress Nora said.
“You don’t get to yell ‘asshole’ at me,” Jason said to Simone.
“Dickhead?” Simone said.
“Master Dickhead,” Jason said. Simone blew him a kiss.
“Now for the actual mechanics of flogging,” the professor said. “We’ll focus on the three basic throws. A single throw, a figure eight, and a whip throw. Are you ready, Eleanor?”
“Hit me,” she said.
Jason watched intently as Professor S demonstrated how to hold the flogger handle for a single throw, then with a shockingly sudden flick of his wrist, slapped Mistress Nora’s right shoulder with his flogger. A red rose bloomed on her back.
Mistress Nora hadn’t even flinched.
“That was a single throw for obvious reasons,” Professor S said. “One throw, one hit. Now figure eight—you’ll be hitting the spot twice, once coming in high with a forehand, low with a backhand.”
Professor S demonstrated, hitting the same red rose on Mistress Nora’s back with impressive accuracy.
“If your submissive or bottom prefers a stinging sensation, then you’ll want to use the whip throw,” Professor S explained. “Hold the tips of the tails of your flogger like this…” He stood with the handle in his right hand, the tips of the flogger in his left hand, “And snap.”
Professor S snapped the flogger against Mistress Nora’s back so hard she jumped and so did Jason.
“Asshole!” Mistress Nora muttered.
Now they were having fun.
“Your turn,” Professor S said.
Jason turned to his towel. Here goes nothing, he thought.
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