by Paul Pipkin
“My bad, tonight.” She waved me off with a grand indifference. “You can punish me later.” Again, be perfectly clear that I had no basic problem with any of this. I’d once spent enough years around that business as to be jaded to things that most seem to find highly kinky. While I wasn’t sure whether her playing about sexually would be the same rush for me, as in my younger years, I knew for certain that inhibition would be counterproductive.
If I were serious about keeping a youngster like Justine, I’d best be prepared to let her play. Our emotional bond appeared to be a given. Hell, no potential contender had any outside chance of touching the convoluted thing going on between us. My unnatural advantage appeared to be absolute.
Why did it not surprise me when he generously offered her some costume from his office downstairs? She gave me a teasing kiss before running off to change. When she returned, she was adorned deliciously sluttish in a black, thigh-length cover-up, which opened down the front to display her pierced navel and provide a glimpse of the front of her panties. I marveled again at those legs, “You should wear high heels just as much as you can stand.”
Waiting for the music to be cued up, she snuggled beside me. “He sat on the couch in the office, checking me out, while I changed,” she whispered, “so I stripped bare before I put anything back on. Thinks he’s all that, he really does. He’s gonna be all over me. Are we thinking he should get lucky?”
“Justine,” I asked in good humor, “what are you doing?”
Her full lips parted sensuously. “Playing the whore,” she breathed, and playfully grasped my crotch. “Hey, this gets you up, I know it does!” I could hardly deny that, and it had been years since I’d been turned on by anything seen or done in a skin joint. While I had no wonder that this display was largely for my benefit, I’d been learning never to be too sure I knew where Justine was going—with anything.
The music came up, and she went onto the low platform in the enclosure. She moved well, working directly to two guys at a stageside table. I appraised her while she got out of the cover-up; she was good for a novice. In another life she would have made a hell of a strip. Was that also what this was about? Was she demonstrating to me that she could do the dancer bit, as I’d described Linda to her?
I’m aware that some cannot imagine pleasure in watching a loved one in such a role. Some may be appalled, some disgusted. If you don’t understand, I can’t explain it to you; nor would I trouble myself to try. If this seriously repels you, don’t look; and spare me meaningless little judgments.
Moving about a pole at center stage, she was grasping it with both hands above her head. Her high heels helped to throw her torso into an “S-curve,” showing off her firm bottom. She was peeking at me over her shoulder and revolving slowly, reversing her grip but keeping her hands high up on the pole, pantomiming being tied to it. Then she locked eyes with me, sharply twitching her hips and belly to each beat, as if being struck.
I was getting thoroughly into it. Of course, then the operator had to decide to come back and visit with me. One of the very few upsides of age is that date of rank carries the privilege of ignoring idiots and dismissing bullshit. Not father, boyfriend; yes, looks like she’s having fun; no, doesn’t need the money; no, the rent will not change. Christ, he was likely to get laid out of it; wasn’t that enough?
Justine got to her knees and crawled toward the pair at stageside, wagging her butt in cute exaggeration. She sensuously removed her shoes, then, instead of popping her pants, she gradually wiggled them down about her ankles. She left them there as she began the squirming undulations that the girls call “floor work.”
She pushed herself up on her hands, jiggling her breasts, and spoke with the men in front of her. They laughed and looked at each other as she lowered her chest back onto the stage and thrust up her hands to them. Each taking a wrist, they held her as she writhed about and flexed her buttocks, again surely in pantomime of bondage and punishment.
The operator was going on about how she could play on his stage anytime. As she would say, I was way sure of that! She sat up, lost the panties, and thrust her legs with knees bent over the little tables, a bare foot in each guy’s lap. She’d continued to converse, and it was with her clear consent that one reached to play with her labial rings.
When she lifted her hips and positioned herself, the better for him to grasp, I heard a sharp intake of breath from the operator. He was looking furtively about, clearly hoping there were no vice cops in the club. I expected some objection, but supposed he didn’t want to piss her off. I laughed as he rushed to dim the lights way down, recalling Seabrook’s precious line about the barely pubescent daughter of the Druse judge Ali bey Obeyid, “… A DANGEROUS AND INFLAMMATORY LITTLE BAGGAGE IF I EVER SAW ONE.”
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Whatever would he have thought, could he have met this babe?
Everything is relative to the perspective from which it’s observed. Sitting in front of Justine’s exhibition would have done less for me than watching her in profile, viewing the attitude of her entire body as she simulated the offering of her most intimate self. Too many years in joints, I guess.
The music winding down, she leaned back on her elbows, breasts and belly quivering, and gave herself up to the stimulation. Then she got up, gathered her things, and acknowledged some tips. In exciting counterpoint to her recent minutes, she posed her nude body with a gracious, almost stately ease. Without looking at me again, she strolled unhurriedly to the stairs.
As expected, she was gone for quite a while. A couple of other girls danced, and I took a sip of the gin she’d left on the table. It was cheap and metallictasting—how did she drink that stuff? I ordered another Scotch and reflected. I’d little doubt my earlier account of experiences with her great-grandmother had a role in precipitating this. Just which part had inflamed her to act out? Was it the torment of the blonde or the “slave auction” that had followed?
After watching the blonde’s ordeal, I’d known that Linda’s flush was not from anger. She’d pressed our hostess, with near urgency, for the detailed conditions of work at The Château. When informed that we were about to see a girl auctioned, the high bidder having the use of her until the following afternoon, I had thought Linda was about to faint!
Directly, a young woman had been led to the stage, a big girl with the hard musculature of a professional dancer. She’d stripped off her tunic, with unabashed pride, standing with shoulders back to present her large breasts to the audience. She accepted a collar strapped about her neck with a heavy leash-chain. It was forked, attaching both to the collar and to bands that had been locked on her wrists.
The bidding had been spirited and the girl had beamed as her price rose. Members, some who had clearly purchased her before, had shot jokes to her during the process. When a winning bid had stood, our hostess had laughed that there would be no hotel room for her. As her purchaser had led the girl, naked in her chains, to a table with two other men, she’d explained that they were partners in a tree-farm operation. They would take the girl to a bunkhouse they kept there, where they would get a real bargain and she would get a real workout.
The old woman had expressed doubt, though the girl had been young and strong, that she would make it in to work the next night. After all the years, I still remembered Linda’s dazed query whether management took the circumstances into account, and the old woman’s wryly melodramatic response. “But darling, you know the poor dear must get a whipping if she misses work.” With throaty innuendo, “Suffering isn’t nearly as delightful if it’s entirely fair, is it? You’ve always known that, haven’t you?”
While young Justine’s sacrifice on the altar of lust, symbolic and otherwise, was hardly of that intensity, she was real and immediate. That other had been in “another world.” When she eventually returned, hair somewhat disheveled, I eyed her sardonically.
“So, what’s real?” She was smirking sexily, but her voice was very serious, again
somehow changed. “What would’ve you preferred to happen? Teased him or gave it up? Hey, as if I went down on him, how ’bout?”
I’ve been around long enough to know that she was trying to provoke and torment me to her own ends. I didn’t want to burst her bubble but, unlike Seabrook, I had no habit of beating myself up over simplistic Freudian jealousy. My guilt runs a lot deeper than that. “Which makes it hurt so good that it confirms my love for you?” I offered.
She considered, sipping her drink. “You down for that; getting up on me giving it up? Maybe you do love me.” She glanced at me slyly through strands of mussed hair. “Did I amuse?”
“I enjoy watching you offer yourself to others, if that’s what you mean. ‘Amusement’ connotes an undertone of frivolity or silliness. You looked anything but silly. But, babe, in my mind it raises even higher the improbability of a girl like yourself having no other involvements.”
She raised her eyebrow and feigned offense. “There are no other girls like me. Still being insecure? Pos we’re not guilty about something? Those weren’t really my friends at the Marriott, you know. I hired them from an agency!” She giddily threw her arms about me and burrowed into my neck, her mouth working passionately against the side of my head. Once more I felt the sensation that she would open up my skin and crawl inside.
“You’d better believe that tonight, I’ll show you how totally not are offerings to any others, compared to what I wanna give to you.”
While Justine drove very well, she was the bat as if from hell. My determination not to indicate that her speed was well beyond my comfort zone wasn’t solely a matter of ego. I wanted to avoid any interference with her expressions of youthful exuberance. If such a policy sounds redundant considering what had just transpired, know that I then perceived so much about her to be of a wholly different order.
To say this young woman was wise beyond her years would be to minimize. For all her postadolescent energy and mannerisms, I could about believe that she could back up her paradoxical affects of jaded sophistication, a posture often ludicrous when struck by many of her young “Goths.” Even the psychosexual twists that dovetailed my own with such eerie neatness, even her flagrant wildness seemed quite studied.
Maybe I understood the shape of her consuming passion to cast her instincts in a semblance of submission. She had wrested security from a hostile world by means of “owning” everything. Successfully bending and twisting all to her devices, there had been nothing left that could dominate her.
Or protect her, either—nothing she could lean on. It might be that her passion to give herself over was hardly that of a victim. Like a senator who seeks out hookers to bind and whip him, it could be testimony to her very power—power that seemed to burn again from her in a preternatural radiance.
I should mention that, having no natural children, I had helped raise some young cousins, a brother and sister, so had some experience with young people. Most young adults are quite inhibited. Even when they regard themselves as great rebels, they’re typically quite selective in their nonconformity. Otherwise, they tend to be more blindly obedient to values and authority than supposedly sedate oldsters.
Put simply, Justine’s psychology seemed far more complex than her experience should dictate. Her education alone couldn’t explain this. In terms of the usual emotional spectrum, Justine was phase-shifted beyond the visible.
I was aware that the entertainment districts of many major cities had become liberally garnished with leather and chains from one end to the other. Nor was I oblivious to the dark sexuality of contemporary film—I was a fan! But the stretch of Justine’s journey into darkness was not related to any chic system of alternative values of which I was aware. I could get no read other than her own take, that the emotional vacuum of her childhood had predisposed her to emulate those figures she had lately discovered to be her antecedents.
This intellectualizing was avoidance of yet something else. That was the sweet hurt in my chest, watching her in the dash lights while she raced the blue car down the expressways. During her discourse at the Wild Orchid, it had come to me that courtship had gone over into honeymoon. I’d already known that, somewhere in the strange dance of this ritual we’d been performing, in my heart I’d already been joined with her. The only choice I had left was when to confess. I didn’t even really want to have an option.
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STONE MOUNTAIN,THE HIGHWAY SIGN DIRECTED US.
So, I thought, the black heart of Dixie. It seemed that we were going directly on to The Château. About ten miles beyond the loop, she took an exit onto an access that seemed a remnant of some older artery. Hardly slowing, she suddenly careened onto the weed-choked remains of a parking lot. The Del Sol slid a bit on the residual gravel, as she spun it around to park behind a dark edifice.
She retrieved a bag and a long Mag-Lite from the backseat, and we made our way round the front of the building. It loomed monolithic, in the rising fog, as the granite hills around us. The stone wall beside us in the Southern night told me nothing; neither did the preframed metal door, with industrial-strength hasps and locks, which Justine was opening.
I held the flashlight, as she bolted and locked up again from the inside, then handed the keys to me as she picked up her bag. We crossed an empty vestibule to a doorway where another metal door stood open on, I sensed rather than saw, a dark cavernous space.
Years before, searching for potential club locations on the north side of Fort Worth, I’d stopped to look at a wooden barnlike building. It had been a long, tall, and narrow structure, someplace around the old stockyards, before the district was restored. Then I could never find that building again. It had drifted, as though out of a dreamscape, retreating back as I had driven away. Should I return to my hometown’s streets and happen upon it, it would seem as much an apparition as when Justine turned on the lights in the big room.
Not much was left, but enough. The old bars, the railed balcony above, the broad stage flanked by the Grecian-looking columns. Behind it, the reflective paint of the mirrors had decomposed into a mottled iridescence. In light, at once stark and pale, from a few cleanup bulbs near the high ceiling, the faded murals remained just visible on cracked plaster walls. The real clubroom lighting was gone, of course, as were furnishings, bar equipment, and almost everything else.
“It’s so bare.” Justine shivered with an indubitably erotic thrill. “It’s like a Roman arena. This is it?” She looked to me.
I nodded toward the corner of the balcony. “There is where I sat with her while she elicited my life story. Extraordinary that she could listen to all that, recognizing JJ in it, without giving up a hint of anything.”
She had followed my eyes and kept on staring while I spoke, as if straining to make out the old woman. I shared the numinous presentiment, in which the pale light might suddenly warp and twist around the years, tracing a shape of the past.
“Rewind, please. What you did to the blonde girl?” she whispered with a discernible gulp, nearly whimpering.
It had gone down close to where Justine and I were standing. The old woman had invited me to go examine the girl, an exercise most likely marking Linda’s reaction. We’d been watching from the balcony, as members would stop by the chained girl and play with her, testing and teasing her displayed flesh. A latecomer, entering from the nippy fall without, had taken the liberty of warming his hands on her body, furthering her discomfiture.
Approaching her, I could see small bruises appearing on her well-handled skin. When I’d slid my hand between her thighs, she had compliantly hastened to spread her legs, stumbling on her toes on the carpeted floor. As I had gently stroked her sex, she’d smiled tearfully at me, though visibly uncertain what I might do to her next.
On an impulse, I had pulled a chair over to her and placed my foot flat on the seat. Then I had reached down and taken her under her knees and bare bottom, lifting her up to balance on my knee and thigh. This temporarily alleviated the
strain that had been distributed along her body. She had moaned her surprised thanks, but I’d silenced her mouth with mine, then turned the attention of my lips to her hardening nipples, red and tender from being bitten.
She’d stared at me, wide eyed, as I’d kneaded her clit. I’d understood that her astonishment had been at her own stressed body, beginning to move toward climax under those conditions. I’d worked her harder, holding her on my knee as she had writhed uncontrollably. Finally, she had thrown back her head between her bound arms and screamed, as an extended series of orgasms gripped her.
The members nearby had laughed, some applauding her for giving them a good show. Giving her time to catch her breath, I’d considerately continued to fondle all her intimate areas while her spasms had abated. Her downcast eyes had beaded with fresh tears, as I’d restored her to her hanging posture, and I’d slapped her ass hard before returning to the balcony. Our hostess thought the performance inspired, pointing out that, even from up there, we could visibly see the blonde blushing from hairline to toes in her humiliation.
“The gentleness was an unexpected counterpoint. She was wholly vulnerable when she knew her most intimate responses to pleasure had been made into a spectacle, taken from her.” I was working Justine for a reaction, trying to plumb the secret intimated by her demeanor. “When she was carried to have her responses to pain likewise evoked, she went into the agony sexually aroused.”
As in a trance, Justine stepped onto the low stage platform and approached the columns. “And this is where it ended for her,” she murmured, embracing one of the columns with her arms. It still sported the rings to which chains had attached. “This is where they whipped her,” she stated as much as asked. “The other girls beat her till the switches broke.” She recalled the way I had recounted it, while driving through the Mississippi darkness. “What if someone didn’t wanna do it?”