by D. L. King
“Good boy,” she says. “Good boy gonna come for Mistress Alexa?”
“Yes, Mistress,” I say.
“Not yet,” she says. “Not until I say you can.”
“Yes, Mistress.”
And my body is floating, it’s flying to the edge of a cliff. It’s the cliff at the end of the world—of this world of excruciating pain and exquisite pleasure. From that edge, you can leap; you can take a lover’s leap into a sexual universe where everything is everything and we all are one, where there is only now and you and me and we’re all in this together in one huge orgasm of release.
“Come now,” she says, and I do, I explode into that orgasmic cosmos.
Every story has a lesson to be learned, and here is mine. So long as there is CBT and there are pro-dommes like Mistress Alexa, a cock—even a big, bright-blue one—is not such a bad thing after all.
THE AUCTION
Tamsin Flowers
It was my own fault. I’d signed the contract and there it was, Clause 93, clear as day. My lawyer didn’t point it out to me because he was a coward. But the truth is, even if I’d seen it, I’d still have signed. Anchoring the evening news on the biggest network in the state was my dream job and the fact that they demanded the right to auction me off once a year for charity—well, it’s the sort of shit that comes with the territory.
But that didn’t stop me hating it. Called up on stage like a prize heifer, paraded in front of a room full of the entitled twerps who’d already paid more than seven hundred dollars a plate to come to the dinner, and then the worst part, praying silently that some idiot would bid more for an evening with me than they would for the weather girl. Most years I beat the weather girl easily. I had the experience—this year was my tenth auction. Compared to me the ever-changing rota of weather girls were mere children. But just occasionally one of them would give me a run for my money.
And then, after the humiliation of the sale, came the horror of the purchased evening. Seven out of the nine men who’d bought and paid for me so far assumed that the price included sex as well as my scintillating company over dinner. Two of them were sent home with severe bruising to the testicles, one with a slapped face, and the rest were just verbally lashed. One year a man brought his wife, which was fine with me because she was a helluva lot more interesting than he was. But, no, I never had sex with any of them. Just dinner, with me minding how much I drank and pretending to be interested in why they’d spent tens of thousands of dollars just to bore me rigid. At least I got to choose the restaurant every year.
Until this year. It’s been different in nearly every respect. In fact, cut the nearly. In every respect.
To start with, it was the first year the whole shebang was going to be broadcast. Some suit up in the boardroom thought it would be a fun idea to make my annual ritual humiliation public. Ha! And, of course, if we were going out live, then yes, why not extend the bidding to the whole television audience. I was really thrilled about that, as you can imagine. Some serial killer from New Jersey would just be able to toss in his bid at the very last moment if he fancied having me for dinner.
“Relax, Lisa,” said my boss. “He’d have to be so fucking rich to outbid the dinner guests—and all the rich people in town are coming.”
“So, an out-of-state killer. Fantastic.”
The new system made me more nervous than usual and the new weather girl was a doll. I felt twitchy all through dinner—part of me couldn’t wait for the auction to start, just to get it over with, but part of me just felt sick. I really didn’t eat much, so the two glasses of wine I drank were making their effects nicely felt.
Fuck the high heels. Though some people subsequently hinted that my slight stumble onto the stage could have garnered me some sympathy points when it came to the bidding. Who knows and who gives a fuck?
The weather girl was being auctioned off second to last, me last. Several pretty news boys had made reasonable sums before us but nothing like the amount we were expected to raise.
“Break a leg,” I hissed to Cindy Cloud-Brain as she pushed past me to get up to the stage. Only I actually meant it.
Cindy was as pretty and as vacuous as a weather girl was supposed to be, so I wasn’t surprised when the bidding quickly leapfrogged what I’d made the previous year. There were a few phone bids, early on, but pretty quickly they fell away and it came down to the wire between three guys who obviously knew each other and had each been seated at a table close to the front. The big spenders, in other words. I knew two of them and I’d been bought some years back by one of them. God, I prayed he was successful in buying Cindy because I didn’t think I could stomach another dinner with him. In the end I didn’t see who bought her because I was texting someone I actually would have liked to have dinner with. Cindy went for sixty-five thousand dollars—big money as far as the network and the charity were concerned—and she came off the stage flushed with pleasure as she went to shake the hand of whichever corpulent cash cow was shelling out.
Then it was my turn and, as I mentioned, there was that slight stumble as I climbed the steps to the stage. Bob Moss, the auctioneer, caught my arm and averted a catastrophe, but he whispered in my ear at the same time.
“How d’you rate your chances against that, Lisa?”
“I’m relying on you, Bob,” I said as I strutted away from him to show off the goods.
The bidding got underway but—and maybe this was just me and my nerves—it didn’t seem to be going so fast or so high as Cindy’s had. There was a mixture of telephone bids and bids from the floor and it crept up agonizingly slowly. Cindy’s show had been all over in ten minutes but my bids went on crawling up for fifteen minutes before they even reached fifty thousand. To give Bob his due, he was wheedling every last cent he could out of his recalcitrant audience but it didn’t look like I stood a chance of equaling Cloud-Brain’s total.
Damn!
I hollered at the bidders to keep it coming but it looked like it was stalling.
“Okay,” yelled Bob. “Going once . . . going twice . . . ”
You could have cut the silence with a knife.
“Wait . . . I have a final telephone bid.” We waited, watching his smile grow wide. “Ninety-five thousand dollars. Going once. Going twice. Gone! Gone to the telephone bid for ninety-five thousand dollars.”
Bob was screaming by the end of the sentence and the audience went crazy.
Great. My serial killer had come through for me. And so generously.
I was intrigued but all the more nervous to discover that the bidder had requested we eat dinner in a private suite in the swankiest hotel in town.
“Apparently, this person is hugely famous and doesn’t want to be seen out with you in public,” said my boss with a snigger.
“Do you know who it is?” I said.
“No.” He shook his head. “It’s all being handled by some mega PR company. Here are your instructions.”
I followed them to the letter and presented myself at the door of room 3029 at the allotted time. I knocked. I waited. Eventually, when I’d knocked again, twice, the door swung open and a kid in leather pants and an AC/ DC tank looked me up and down. I stepped past her into the suite.
“Hey, kid, where’s your dad? I have a dinner date with him.”
She closed the door and followed me into the most expensive hotel room I’d ever seen the inside of.
“My dad? He’s back in Nebraska with my mum.”
There was no one else in the room so I turned round and looked her up and down. It takes a lot of time and hair product to keep short hair looking that messy—that was my first thought. And I wondered if she worked at being so skinny or if it was natural.
“Maybe I’m in the wrong room,” I said, heading back toward the door.
“No, Lisa, this is the right room.”
I did a double take.
“And you are?”
“I’m the one who paid ninety-five thousand dollars for an evening
with you.” She threw herself down on an oversized leather couch. “You don’t know me, do you?”
I was looking at her hard by now and, yes, her features did seem vaguely familiar.
“You’re in that vampire show, about the teenagers?”
She nodded. I knew her now—Darcy Chandler—and I knew how much she was worth. At least a hundred times what I was.
“And you paid ninety-five thousand to have dinner with me?”
This wasn’t making any sense.
“Let’s have a drink,” she said, walking over to a well-stocked wet bar.
I followed her and climbed up onto one of the bar stools.
“You even old enough to drink?” I said.
“Twenty-five,” she said easily. She was used to being asked. “I just look young enough to play a teen. Remember, I’ve been playing her for five years.”
She poured red wine into two glasses and handed me one.
“Dinner with me?” I prompted.
She took a sip of her wine and I saw a slight tremble to her hand. She looked eighteen rather than twenty-five.
“It’s not dinner I want.”
“That’s what you bought.”
“Have you ever been tied up?”
I nodded, noticing my own tightened grip on my glass.
“Disciplined?”
I nodded again.
“Does ninety-five thousand buy me that?”
“You want to discipline me?”
“Nothing would give me more pleasure, Lisa.”
Maybe it was the tilt of her nose or perhaps the sprinkling of freckles across its bridge. Or maybe it was the way, when she smiled, one corner of her mouth pulled up higher than the other. Or the way she said my name, slowly rolling it off her tongue. Lisa. I don’t know. But at that moment, ninety-five thousand—to the network boss’s wife’s favorite charity—was enough. Hell, I would have given myself to her for nothing.
My no sex with the bidder policy appeared to be flying out the window, but that might have been because she wasn’t middle-aged, paunchy, and entitled. Or it might have been because she wasn’t a man. Either way, shit was going down.
I put down my glass and stood up. I pulled my black dress up over my head and draped it on the stool I’d just vacated. Darcy smiled and took my hand. She led me across the vast living room and into an equally sumptuous bedroom. But it wasn’t the richness of the décor that caught my attention. This room had been set up ready for a scene. There were restraints on all four corners of the bed, there was a padded bench with a variety of steel anchor points and, on a highly polished walnut console, there was a long line of crops, paddles, canes, floggers, and whips. Carefully arranged in order of size, which spoke volumes to me about their owner.
Darcy was standing behind me and she draped a lazy arm over my shoulder. I could feel her breath on the back of my neck, warm and damp, and I pushed my head back as her hand broached the cup of my black lace bra. She nuzzled the sweet spot at the base of my jaw and the thrill of it made me grind my hips against hers. She stepped back from and slapped my ass with a flat palm. Was this going to be better than dinner? I laughed and she slapped me again, harder.
“Go to the bench.” Her tone brooked no argument.
I walked over to it and stood beside it, waiting for her next instruction. It was so unlike me to hand over the initiative to someone else. And to a young girl I didn’t even know?
“Bend over,” she said.
When she’d asked me those questions and I’d nodded, I’d been lying. This was way beyond the realms of my experience. I mean, yes, I’d slept with women—probably more often than men—but bondage and discipline, never. I looked at the bench, and then I looked over my shoulder at her.
“Is there a problem?” she said.
“No, no, it’s fine.”
I bent over the bench and blood rushed to my head as I leaned forward. My heart was racing and, though I still had my underwear on, I felt exposed. Positioned for inspection, for chastisement. At the margin, it’s hard to tell fear from excitement. I heard her crossing the room, coming toward me.
“I wonder,” she said as she got close, “will I need to restrain you?”
I didn’t know if this was a rhetorical question.
“Well?”
“No,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
I flinched at her touch as a single finger traced a straight path from the back of my neck, up over the curve of my back, across one buttock, and down the corresponding leg. As it reached my calf, she used her other hand to slap my ass, completely without warning. I yelped and bucked against the bench.
“I think you need to be restrained, Lisa. Do you agree with me?”
“Yes.”
She produced a pair of leather cuffs and secured my wrists to steel anchor rings set into the legs of the bench. As she did up the second one I experienced a moment of panic.
“No . . . I . . . ”
She drew back and looked up at me, and I noticed for the first time how very green her eyes were.
“I want you to enjoy this, too,” she said. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to—just say and you can leave right away.”
She waited while I took a couple of deep breaths. Two things held me in position—curiosity and pride. I wasn’t going to let this slip of a girl intimidate me and I genuinely wanted to know what would happen next.
“I’m fine,” I said, offering her my second wrist to be cuffed.
She did it up without saying another word, and then went round to the other side of the bench to secure my legs. A hand trailed across my back, making my stomach muscles clench.
Goosebumps rose on my arms, a shiver skittered down my neck. Desire blossomed low in my belly.
“Will you need to be gagged, Lisa?”
I could tell from her tone that she knew the answer to this, but this was where I had to draw the line. I suffered another moment of panic, as she approached me with a ball gag hanging from one hand.
“Why me?” I said, playing for time. “Why not Cindy, the weather girl? She’s cute.”
She paused.
“I’m not into cute. I’m into you. You were my first girl crush—watching you reading the news . . . ” She sighed theatrically. “Every evening, never missed it. You opened my eyes to a world of possibilities. You make a train wreck sound sexy. A budget announcement.”
Now I had my in. I was on familiar territory—I’d always used my voice as a tool of seduction.
“Let me read the news to you now.”
“While I . . . ?”
“Why not?”
Darcy scurried away and returned a few seconds later with a crumpled copy of the Washington Post. She flattened it with her hands and placed it on the floor underneath the bench.
“Okay,” she said. “You read while I do my thing—let’s see who can keep going longest.”
I wasn’t sure that was going to be very long, but I was game for this.
Darcy stood directly in front of me. My head was hanging down, so the only part of her in my line of vision was her feet, in battered black Chelsea boots. I heard the jangle of a belt buckle and raised my head to see her drawing a wide black leather belt out of the belt loops round the top of her leather pants.
“Safeword?”
“Cumulus.”
“Start reading.”
I took a deep breath and began reading the first story on the page.
“On Thursday, for the first time since 1987,” I read, “the Supreme Court will hear arguments on whether software—or more exactly, programmer-implemented . . . ”
The next sound I heard was unmistakable. The whistle of leather through static air. Followed instantaneously by the crack of leather against my panty-clad ass. The first blow stung like crazy and I stumbled on the next word— but I carried on reading without losing my place.
“ . . . in . . . inventions—can continue to be patented.”
But if I t
hought this was going to be easy, I thought wrong. The second blow hit me in exactly the same spot and an arc of pain radiated through me, leaving a residue of after-burn on the surface of my skin. I grunted loudly and stopped reading for a second.
“The case in question focuses on . . . ”
The third blow came quickly and made me yelp. The pain that radiated from the point of impact seemed to cut through me more sharply, traveling farther, and the echo on my skin was even fiercer.
“Breathe through it.” Darcy’s voice reached me through a haze of pain.
I gulped and refocused on the page in front of me, wondering how long it would go on for.
“ . . . programs designed to increase payment security in exchange and banking transactions where cash . . . ”
That was as far as I read. Darcy worked harder and faster and soon the only sounds coming from my mouth were gasps and sobs. She stopped for a moment, but that was only to hurriedly rip away the shreds of my panties. And then the next blow fell harder. I tried to bite my lip to contain my cries but each time she struck me, my body would jerk against the bench and my mouth would fly open with a yelp.
Then at some point the nature of the pain changed. My hips pushed back to meet the belt. My cries became moans as each sharp sting of pain was tempered by a surge of pleasure as the endorphins kicked in. Now I wanted it to last. I wanted Darcy to slow down so I could draw out the experience from each caress of the leather. I embraced the pain, the sensations that cut through me, and it was like nothing I’d ever known. Intense. Hot. It wasn’t like sex— it wasn’t about the shared experience. This was about the physical response within my own body. I forgot about Darcy and was only aware of the touch of her belt as it cut against my skin.
When her hand touched me rather than the leather, my body bucked against the restraints. Cool fingers stoked the fire, smooth against the curves of my buttocks and then pressing down to send another spasm of pain and pleasure ratcheting through me. I whimpered as she undid first the ankle restraints and then freed my wrists. She pulled me upright by my shoulders and let me lean against her chest, as I fought for breath. Her hands caressed my back and snapped open the catch of my bra. As my breasts swung free, she bent her head to catch one nipple in her mouth, nipping with her teeth, pain echoing pain and making me gasp all over again.