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by Clarice Clique

  ‘I managed to get raw chilli over my cock and it burnt so much I didn’t feel up to driving up to Yorkshire. Was that interesting enough for you?’

  I laughed, loud enough that a few people looked around. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be a big, tough iron man? And you get taken out by a tiny little bit of fruit?’

  ‘You need to have chilli rubbed over your delicate parts before you have the right to tease me, see if you’re still laughing then.’ Joe’s whole face beamed with delight at the idea.

  ‘I don’t think I’d be laughing, but I suspect I might enjoy it.’ I looked at his whole body from his feet up to his eyes. ‘And the fact you didn’t like it is one of many reasons why us having sex was a one-off.’

  He stared back at me, slightly defiant, obviously desirous. He parted his lips to speak, but I shook my head and waved him away. He backed away from me, making me feel like I was either a dangerous bitch or the most regal of queens.

  I turned back to my computer and knew what I needed to write.

  Slut, you’ve disappointed me yet again. You know you belong to me, but you break the trust between us and take stupid risks with your person. I warned you when you met the mistresses that you should meet in a safe place first. Why the fuck did you ignore me and go straight to a man’s flat after only the briefest meeting online?

  Do not dare to reply to me with any of your pathetic whining excuses. You will buy the hottest bottle of chilli oil you can find, you will drink a capful of it and then pour another capful on to your hands and rub it over your genitals and anus.

  Just as I pressed the “send” button, my boss appeared in front of me.

  ‘Could you come to my office.’ It wasn’t a question.

  I clicked out of my email and followed Marcus’s long strides to his office. He opened the door for me in a manner that was more like herding me in than courteous. He closed the blinds and then went to sit behind his desk. I remained standing.

  ‘Do you enjoy your job?’ Marcus stared for a moment into my eyes, then his gaze travelled down and stopped at my breasts.

  Such blatant behaviour was uncustomary for him, and unnerving for me. In all the time I’d worked for Marcus, he’d treated both men and women as genderless creatures who were only interesting to him in a strictly professional way.

  ‘Sometimes.’ I looked at Marcus in the same manner he was looking at me.

  Other women in the office giggled about him being a silver fox. Probably he was. We are, after all, only what other people say we are, aren’t we? I was more interested in the power he had, sitting behind that desk, and the lecherous smile on his face that made him look like a different man to the one I thought I knew.

  ‘In these austere times you must be glad to have such a good position.’

  His tongue lingered over the word “position”. Or maybe it was just my sexually charged mind transforming an employment word into images of sweaty, naked bodies twisting around each other at painful angles in an attempt to experience the whole Kama Sutra. Women and men constantly searching for the next thrill, something that bit more exciting, however much it hurt, whatever the cost.

  ‘What do you have to say?’

  My attention jerked back to Marcus. My mind wandered too much lately. No. My thoughts were always the same. Sex. Pain. Sex. Pain. My lover.

  ‘You have nothing to say.’ He nodded slowly; judge, jury, prosecutor all in one body, but it hadn’t yet been stated what I was being accused of. ‘That seems unusual for you. Even today I’ve seen you talking away to Joe as if neither of you had any work to do.’

  So that was what it was about. What it’s always about. Uncontrolled passion. Recklessness. The yearning to be alive. The eternal fight against our essential loneliness. Joe’s body pressed against mine, the hungry hardness of his cock, the welcoming moistness of my cunt.

  How did Marcus know, though? And how much did he really know? Was he guessing? Marcus was an astute businessman – did his negotiation skills translate to a Jedi ability to know about office sex?

  I gazed into Marcus’s eyes. He looked away. That surprised me. Shouldn’t I be the one to show shame? I hadn’t worked out what my role was supposed to be yet.

  ‘I’m sure you don’t have any problem with my performance.’ My words were stilted, an uncertain tone undercutting the attempted confidence of my words.

  Marcus still didn’t look at me. He opened a drawer in his desk, pulled something out, and held it out for me to take. I forced myself to walk over to him and take it. It was only when the object was in my hand that my conscious brain acknowledged what my gut had known instantly; the knickers I’d lost that day in the office with Joe had been found. I’d forgotten about them. How had I forgotten about them?

  I swallowed hard. ‘Why are you giving these to me?’

  ‘There’s nothing unusual about returning a lost item to their owner.’ There was something guilty and furtive about his manner, something that I couldn’t quite single out, but it seemed more than natural embarrassment.

  ‘These could be anyone’s.’ I intended to drop them back onto his desk, but the idea of my underwear being kept in his drawer made it impossible for me to let go of the flimsy piece of material.

  ‘Are you aware there are security cameras throughout this office?’

  I tilted my head to the side. Was he bluffing? Were there cameras? I’d never noticed. I’d never looked. ‘I don’t believe anyone could have such a sad life that they’d need to fill the lonely hours up by watching people doing boring, mundane office work day in, day out.’

  ‘They are security cameras, for monitoring those times when mundane office work isn’t what is going on, my dear.’

  Pain shot through the core of my body. My dear. Those words belonged on the tongue of my lover, not emerging from Marcus’s mouth. What had happened to my life? Everything so wrong and misplaced.

  I still wasn’t certain what I needed to do, what I was expected to say. I was adrenaline-frozen in place, waiting for the trigger of whether to run or fight. Or cry. If I was going to be disciplined, shouldn’t there be another person present to verify what was said? Perhaps there was one of these mysterious security cameras in Marcus’s office? I couldn’t think clearly. I needed to talk to my union rep. I needed someone to speak for me, to transform the blurred fears of my mind into clean, official words typed up in formal files.

  It was a fact that I’d had sex in the office with Joe. If Marcus had proof of that, would we both be fired? But what proof did he actually have?

  I thought of my knickers in my boss’s hand, his fingers touching the material that had touched my cunt. Was that sex? The slave spending the night trying to force his fingers into his virgin arsehole. Was that sex? A room of shadows, me naked, tied up, the weight of my master crushing my breasts as he whispered into my ear all my most forbidden desires.

  ‘You know nothing.’ The words spilled over with a disdain and pity that emerged from the depth of my being, emotions so deep I hadn’t been aware they thrived inside me until that moment.

  His chest puffed out and he met my gaze. ‘I’ve spoken to Joe.’

  ‘Did your mother not warn you about what happens to little boys who lie?’

  ‘Do you want your boyfriend to lose his job?’

  ‘Joe is a big man, more than capable of looking after himself.’

  Marcus stood up and stepped closer to me. I remained still and strong. He opened his mouth and I smelt the sharp tang of mouthwash and the fire of whiskey. He closed his lips and took a deep breath before he spoke.

  ‘I have the power to fire you and to fire him. This is your only chance to keep your and your boyfriend’s CVs clean. You’re a clever girl; you know it’s an employer’s market out there at the moment. If you and Joe want your futures to include anything that can be called a career, you’ll take this one opportunity I’m giving you.’

  I moved my body a fraction closer to his. ‘Explain this chance, this opportunity, you’re kin
dly giving me.’

  ‘You’re going to be my whore. You’ll do everything I tell you whenever I tell you.’ His voice quivered.

  I smiled. ‘You and I watch the same porn films, Marcus.’ I rested the tip of my nail on the bow of his upper lip. ‘Maybe not quite the same. I do admit that I enjoy the ones where bosses indulge their whims with buxom, flexible secretaries. I like it when he pounds the breath out of her and her big, preferably natural, breasts are shaking and bouncing. But I much prefer the ones where those same big, preferably natural, breasts are bound with thick ropes and pinched with a dozen metal clamps.’ I moved my hand and caressed the lace of my knickers across the crotch of his trousers. Then I jerked my hand away and took two steps backwards. ‘Undress.’

  His fingers went to his belt buckle, then paused. ‘I’m the one with power. I tell you what to do.’

  I laughed a short, hard laugh. ‘If this isn’t what you want, keep your clothes on and I’ll go and clear my desk.’

  I turned around and listened as I heard the expected sound of his trousers falling to the floor.

  ‘I’m going to fuck you so hard.’ His voice was a growl, a holiday camp mimic of the force and authority of my lover.

  ‘I want you naked.’ I looked over my shoulder at him.

  Marcus leant on his desk and pulled his right shoe off. His legs were muscular and covered with dark hairs. He repeated the manoeuvre with his other shoe but left his black socks on. He removed his tie, undoing the knot completely and laying it carefully over the back of his chair. Next his jacket went, then his shirt. He started at the bottom button. This little idiosyncrasy was the first thing that had endeared him to me.

  When his shirt was removed, his torso fully revealed, I turned completely around and gazed at him. A red, raw scar split his chest in two. He hunched his shoulders in, pushed his shoulders back, hunched them in again, neither one thing or the other, not proud or ashamed. Or rather, both proud and ashamed. He’d survived. He was disgusted by his own mortality.

  I stepped forward. My fingers traced down either side of the scar. ‘Why didn’t you tell anyone you had heart surgery? Which business trip did it happen on? Are you older than you look or very young to have heart problems?’ My questions came out as a succession of soft whispers.

  He opened his mouth to reply; I put my hand over his lips and shook my head. ‘I don’t care about the answers. I’m not your wife, or girlfriend. I never intended to have sex with you. I was just going to humiliate you; that’s my thing lately.’ I dropped my hand from his mouth and put it gently around his throat, applying no pressure, just letting it rest there. ‘I get it now, though. I understand. Why you’re being so different, trying on a different personality. You needed the power thrill of blackmailing an employee into sex; you thought it might make things feel better.’ I moved my fingers to his shoulders and pushed him back a few steps and into his chair. ‘My father died of a heart attack.’ I let my fingers hover in the air above his scar, then down to the crotch of his Calvin Kleins before drawing my hand back to my side. ‘I do pity you. Not in a bad way. In a kind, sympathetic way. I would give you a handjob, but you’re married, and although I do a lot of things, I don’t do that.’

  I smiled a private smile at discovering a sexual limit within myself. Marcus looked at me with wide eyes. With fear? I winked at him and lightened my tone. ‘If your wife ever wants a threesome, feel free to phone me out of office hours.’

  There were tears in his eyes. He was crying. Marcus, the tough emotionless robo-boss, was crying. What kind of twisted, fucked-up world was I living in? The kind of world where I undid my blouse, slipped my breasts out of my bra, and pressed his head against my naked chest. I held my nipple out for him and he took it and suckled on me as I stroked my fingers through his hair.

  The moment lasted an eternity, as all moments of raw emotion do.

  Then the end, when we both looked at each other and remembered we were nearer strangers than lovers. Abrupt and awkward.

  He searched for his clothes; I found the guilty pair of knickers that I’d dropped on the floor at some point.

  He muttered excuses in a voice so low I couldn’t make out the words, just one long murmur of embarrassment and regret.

  I found something inside me and held on to it long enough to turn to him before I scuttled out of his office. ‘I think that over our lives we forget 99 per cent of the things that happen to us. And great, important events that are at the very core of our being fade away into watered-down, pastel colours within our memory. We continually rewrite and restage our lives depending on the time of the month and who we’re talking to. This thing that just occurred between us was something. But in the years of life it is nothing. We can cut it out, and before too long it will cease to exist.’

  I didn’t know what I meant, but Marcus nodded at me and I nodded back at him.

  At night I took a couple of painkillers with water. Fifteen minutes later, my head still pounding, I downed a couple of glasses of wine.

  I kept thinking of being in the office with Marcus. I couldn’t cut the incident out of my mind. My nipple in his mouth, wet with his saliva, warm with his breath. A minute after I’d told him I wouldn’t do anything sexual with a married man. It hadn’t felt sexual at the time. It had been natural and real. But removed from the moment, alone in my kitchen, there was no emotion here but guilt. Marcus’s shame was contagious.

  What had he said?

  “You’re going to be my whore. You’ll do everything I tell you whenever I tell you.”

  That was my line, that was my identity, and he hadn’t known it. If he hadn’t been scared of his own desires. If he’d delivered his order the way I imagined he’d practised it many times in the mirror, with firmness and authority. If he’d asked earlier, before I’d found the distraction of Slave, instead of waiting to build up his courage and passion. Would I have dropped to my knees? Would I have become his willing mistress?

  I went to bed with the phone in my hand. I dialled my lover’s number. When it clicked into the answer machine I listened to his message, not hearing his words, just pressing his voice against my ear. I breathed into the receiver. Then I hung up and dialled again. And again. And again.

  Chapter Eleven - Three

  I woke up and decided I wasn’t going to bake a cake for my lover today. I wasn’t going to write a letter declaring that I was eternally his possession. Simple. A new tactic for gaining his attention under the guise of being independent, moving on, and obeying him.

  What was I learning from all my new experiences?

  That men wanted what they couldn’t/shouldn’t have.

  That either I was a sexual magnet for subs, or a surprising amount of men wanted to be dominated.

  Work passed without incident. I read through a few of the emails that Slave had sent me and I hadn’t been bothered to look at before.

  Mistress, I am so sorry. I didn’t mean to endanger your possession by meeting the man. I only thought how I was pleasing you. I have brought the chilli oil but I fear this is a test. I read in the paper yesterday about a chef dying from a heart attack after eating too much chilli. I don’t mean to whine or complain. I only mention this as you are punishing me for not taking enough care of myself as I am your property. Please let me know what you wish me to do.

  Your humble and blessed slave.

  Damn. You could die from eating chilli? Surely that had to be a freak event? I hoped it was a freak event. If I had read the email when he sent it I would have changed his punishment.

  But I didn’t. There were more emails from him, hopefully not written from a hospital bed.

  I almost vomited when I drank the chilli. My stomach is swirling, I am dreading going to the toilet as the chilli stung my bottom much more than I anticipated.

  Your punishments are always so apt. I am in awe of your wisdom.

  I wanted to cry. What sort of life it is when you’d be in awe of someone telling you to put chilli on your arse and
mistaking that casual command for wisdom? I forced myself to smile.

  Marcus might have been avoiding me. It might have been an ordinary working day. We didn’t generally see much of each other. When I did spot him walking across the other side of the office, it made my chest tighten. He appeared engrossed in a sober discussion with his PA and didn’t look in my direction. For a moment, I didn’t want him to ignore me; I needed some acknowledgement of what happened yesterday. I yearned for the thrill of being desired. I wanted the option he laid before me.

  Then it passed and I only wondered if that business-focused man had really ordered me to be his whore. Was it all a figment of my wistful, warped imagination?

  I’d told him that you could forget things, cut them out of your memories. Was that possible? You could be so close with someone and then … Nothing.

  I knew this. There had been people before my lover, people whose names I could barely recall, their bodies, voices, scent, all lost. But at one point I had trusted them with my naked desire. And they had trusted me.

  Why did it feel so revolutionary, hurt so much and so deep, thinking about how effortlessly sexual passion transformed into indifference?

  I looked over to where Joe was typing away at his desk. He lifted his head and gave me a half smile, then a more confident wink.

  Joe and Slave both claimed to love me. Neither of them knew me. The last thing I received from my lover was a text telling me he liked my cakes. I got my phone out and read through the text just as I had read through it hundreds of times before, as if it was a missive directly from God above offering me eternal salvation from all my sins.

  My lover did know me, better than I knew myself. He had told me to go out into the world and experience it. I’d stumbled into someone else’s fantasy, a fuck-the-world-and-don’t-worry-about-hurting-the-one-you-love fantasy. It wasn’t that easy, though. Was it? It was a riddle that I hadn’t solved, a test that I hadn’t passed. Yet.

  I realised I’d been staring at Joe and he’d been staring at me as my mind whirled. His face was now serious, asking me a question that would be clear to anyone who looked at him. I bit down on my lip and went back to my computer.