by Emily Tilton
Was she hot? In jeans and a sweatshirt, with no makeup, trying to look invisible? 5′5″, auburn hair in a ponytail, green eyes, freckles? Her face felt like the sun.
She fled into the quad. She saw the lights on at the faculty club. A confused idea of Professor Gage instructing her came into her head.
Emma didn’t remember actually crossing the distance to the faculty club. She didn’t remember entering the cavernous hall where the well-dressed professors milled about with drinks in their hands, talking very loudly and very rapidly, in words that without really hearing them Emma could tell were polysyllabic.
The next thing she remembered after seeing the lights from across the quad was seeing Professor Gage going into the men’s room.
Later, she felt fairly sure that her body must have been absorbing the alcohol from the third drink the whole time, and the third drink, mixed by Carol, must have been very strong. Carol didn’t admit to this, but the look on her face on hearing the story the next day seemed to confirm that she had had a role in the disaster—perhaps with the intention of helping Emma get over her distressing awkwardness in romantic matters.
After that, thankfully, the fog made it impossible really to feel that she had been the girl who took her clothes off in the men’s room at the faculty club. And it was definitely another girl who had knelt on the floor, waiting for Professor Gage to turn around and see her. Another girl who had seen the astonished, lustful, furious look in his eyes. Another whom he was trying to help get dressed when another professor walked in.
At least he wasn’t married, Emma always thought, when remembering the foggiest of the foggy events. She wouldn’t have blamed his wife, if he had one, for not believing the truth that Emma herself had acknowledged to the dean, before voluntarily withdrawing from college with the understanding that she would not return, ever. She took the tiniest solace in the fact that she hadn’t ruined his life, too.
And Emma had the fog to keep her insulated, if not warm. Earrings or milkshakes: she might even have her choice of what to sell at the mall, if they didn’t ask why she had quit college.
Now, Molly Jackson and her ‘master.’ Molly didn’t work, she had said, causing a surge of envy in Emma’s breast. Would Molly want to come with Emma to the mall, to keep her company while she turned in the applications? Maybe Emma could find out more about Molly’s mysterious master: how they had met, what he did ‘in the arts’—what it meant to have a master that way.
She slept restlessly, fitfully. She wondered if the dulling fog had started to lift; just that morning she had felt she couldn’t hold onto a thought if she tried, but by the next morning she couldn’t think of anything but Molly Jackson and the tall man with whom she lived.
She watched him drive away at 7:30, wearing an elegant gray business suit without a tie. Her father went to work at the electric plant half an hour later, not bidding his wife or daughter goodbye. Emma didn’t think she’d heard her parents say more than twenty words to one another in the three days she had been home. They didn’t know what had happened at college, thank goodness, so she hadn’t had to endure any recriminations about those dirty things from her mother, but the icy stares were bad enough, seeming to imply that her mother had always known that any product of those dirty things, even between man and wife, could only ever be a disappointment.
“You’ll want my car to go turn in those applications, Emma?” Mrs. Woodbine said as Emma finished a bowl of oatmeal.
“Yes, please, Mother,” Emma said. Then, just to see if she could recover even the slightest bit of the affection her mother had once seemed to have for her, before Emma’s body started to change, she tried, “I think I’ll ask Molly Jackson to come with me. She came over to introduce herself when you were out shopping yesterday.”
She should have known better. Joan sniffed. “Those people are strange, Emma. When they moved in I tried to be friendly.” She said no more, but Emma could tell that if she felt she had any influence over her wayward daughter she would have delivered an earful of vituperation on the subject of men in Jaguars and young women who lived with them under mysterious circumstances.
Emma wanted to cry out, I tried to be a good girl. I want to be a good girl. But she could see in her mother’s eyes that even though Joan Woodbine didn’t know what had happened at Reynolds College that had sent her only child back home, she felt sure it must be dirty.
Mrs. Woodbine was picked up by her friend Mrs. Murphy at 8:55, for a day of cosmetic refinements. At 9:05 Emma rang Molly’s doorbell, wearing her depressing dress-for-success blue dress, with a little makeup on to show she cared and her favorite earrings to show the earring shop she at least knew how to accessorize. The door opened almost immediately.
“Emma!” Molly exclaimed. The happiness to see her new neighbor seemed genuine, but something in Molly’s voice seemed very slightly false in a different way—as if the surprise to see Emma was feigned, and Molly had somehow known Emma would ring the doorbell.
“Hi,” Emma said, a little awkwardly because she seemed to have far too many thoughts at once, including trying to figure out why Molly might have been expecting her. She found herself attempting to get a glimpse over Molly’s shoulder of the subtly elegant interior beyond—not at all like her own house despite all the houses in this suburban development following a cookie-cutter template: Molly’s house and Emma’s were mirror images of one another architecturally, and there were only three other very similar layouts in the little neighborhood.
Emma’s house looked like a regular house you might see in a movie or on TV show about suburbia: slightly mismatched furniture, slightly worn rugs, lots of beige. From what she could see in Molly and her companion’s house, everything was silver or gray or black. She didn’t know how she could have this impression about a place where people lived, but it all seemed sleek, somehow, like the man who resided there and like his silver Jaguar. Molly herself with her blond good looks didn’t look out of place, really, but she did seem set off quite dramatically by her surroundings.
And then there was the little nightgown she wore, which made Emma want to look past her new friend rather than at her. How could a girl wear something like that, only coming down to the middle of her thighs? Emma worried with a hot flush that she might even catch sight of Molly’s underwear—then she realized that the fabric of the nightgown was so sheer that she could see the nipples of Molly’s little breasts. Is she even wearing panties? Emma though wildly.
If Molly was expecting her, somehow, wouldn’t she have put on some real clothes? Even if she wasn’t, wouldn’t she have put on a bathrobe when she heard the doorbell?
Desperate to interrupt the spinning cycle of her thoughts, Emma said, finally looking into Molly’s face again after long moments studying the sliver of a black leather armchair she could make out in the living room that lay past the front hall, “I wondered if…”
Molly smiled, and despite the strangeness of her greeting and the embarrassment of her little nightgown and its terrible translucence—she must be wearing panties, Emma told herself, relieved, since I can’t see her hair down there through the nightgown—the smile made Emma feel much better.
“Come on in,” Molly said. “Tell me inside.”
Chapter Three
Daniel knew that Molly’s crush on Emma would probably lead to complications. Really he had no objection to such complications—above all when they involved a pretty young woman. He had not expected though, to get a call at work from his house girl, telling him that she had Emma naked in a cage and asking could he please come home right away.
“Molly, what did we talk about last night?” he asked, having a little difficulty in keeping an entirely straight face.
He had no worries about Emma, having felt her repressed submission so strongly just on seeing her across the street the day she had come home; she would be fine in the cage until Daniel got there. He certainly would have to return home, though; if the complications were on balance going to prove
more pleasurable than irritating, his intervention should occur as soon as possible. Emma would stay in the cage for a while, but Molly’s protector needed to be present, and Daniel needed to clear his calendar.
Molly spoke in a whisper, as if worried Emma might overhear. “We said not until Saturday, but she came over, and she saw the cage, and then I kind of unrepressed her by mistake and she kind of took her clothes off, and then I told her to get into the cage and she did.”
In the background, Daniel heard a female voice call, “Molly? Where did you go?”
Daniel’s struggle not to chuckle grew greater. “Go back to her, little one, and sit with her until I get there. Her shame is still there, and it’s going to come back very soon.”
“I know, Master. Can I give her my pink blanket?”
“Yes, little one. And you should be naked too, to make her feel better.”
“But Sir…”
“No buts, Molly. You’ll get a chance to play mistress later—and so will she. No sex until I get there, understood?”
“Not even kissing?”
“Not even kissing, little one. It would confuse Emma even more.”
“But Sir. She’s so pretty!” Molly sometimes liked to brat just for the sake of defiance.
“You heard me. Do you want Emma to see you get a paddling when I come home?”
“No, Master.” He pictured her adorable little face, twitching mouth twisted to the side.
“Are you going to obey me?”
“Yes, Sir,” Molly replied, a little sulkily.
“Alright. I’ll see you in half an hour.”
Daniel’s office downtown served him as a place to meet prospective donors and prospective recipients of his foundation’s grants. The vast majority of the wealth he redistributed came from his own accumulated fortune, much of which he had already had by the end of the English Restoration period.
He hadn’t truly worked for a living since the Black Death in the fourteenth century had wiped out his initial fortune, made as a general of the Roman legions. Even then, the basic acumen in the exploitation of supply-and-demand that had made the Roman fortune his fourth, ensured that by the outbreak Hundred Years’ War Daniel had diversified sufficiently to ride out the succeeding three hundred years of conflict as a peaceful patron of the arts, his lovely young women at his side and in his castles and palaces.
Now, in this exceptionally peaceful time, his wealth underlay thousands of corporations large and small, and also thousands of works of art, literature, and humanities scholarships, through grants both enormous and judicious. The Magus Foundation wasn’t well known, because it gave most of its money anonymously and because Daniel himself lived very simply, but its reach was global and highly consequential. Daniel foresaw a catastrophic collapse of civilization within three hundred years, but though a life of fifty millennia (so far) tended to make one a fatalist in such matters, he did what he could to push the darkness back.
He felt sure that his young ladies kept him interested. For whatever reason, the other two immortals, Mei and Lily, had been content for thousands of years now to have sex only with one another. Immortality, as far as the three of them had ever managed to puzzle out—for they had only one another, that they knew of, and none of them had the slightest desire to submit their body to examination by a mortal—came through orgasm. Lily had discovered that during the Mediterranean Bronze Age, when she had started to age very rapidly after living alone for several months near the Black Sea, during which time she had lost interest in masturbation.
Mei and Lily lived in the Middle East now, together, engaging in a more activist version of Daniel’s philanthropy. Their charity received a good deal of money yearly from the Magus Foundation, in honor of the moment they had found him, in the very first village to stand on the site of Babylon, and led him wordlessly to their pavilion—for he could sense, just as they could, that they three were the same, that they shared the strange gift—and removed his robe and his breech-clout and shared his manhood between them for a day and a night and another day.
His two elders had traveled together by then for more than a thousand years, having found each other in Egypt. All three of them truly had no way of knowing how old they really were, but they estimated that Mei and Lily met when Mei was eight thousand years old and Lily was five thousand. Daniel, when he met them in the Fertile Crescent, had only lived about six hundred years.
It would be a very long time before they discovered anything about the secret of their apparent immortality—they still considered it apparent because although they didn’t age past a certain point, didn’t suffer from disease, and their bodies healed quickly and entirely, they of course didn’t know for sure that they couldn’t die. The one key fact discovered by Lily, about the orgasms, lay far in the future simply because it was many thousands of years before any of them could go more than twenty-four hours without at least masturbating, if not—the preferable course for all of them—finding one or more sexual partners.
For Mei and Lily now, tens of millennia later, that meant daily sex with one another in a gated compound in Jordan. From what Daniel could gather from their occasional emails, their sex wasn’t in any way perfunctory, but he did sometimes wonder whether a millennium from now he might want to settle down with his fellow immortals; perhaps their extraordinary libidos had undergone some sort of transition through which his had not yet passed.
Lily’s adventure by the Black Sea, at least, had proven a blip she eventually decided must relate only to how interesting she had found the local wildlife. As soon as a local warrior had wandered by and taken advantage of the young woman he discovered bathing naked (for Lily had perhaps aged from an apparent twenty only to an apparent thirty), the problem had resolved itself and Lily’s bloom had returned.
She sometimes claimed that she had been the inspiration for Medea, who had met Jason and the Argonauts by the same body of water, but Daniel, who had at one point made a study of mythology, debunked the idea every time it came up; mortals had enough silliness in their heads to make up whatever they wanted, and people had sex near the Black Sea all the time. He believed that the three immortals (and any others they might meet, though by the time of Julius Caesar they had decided they must be the only ones, having wandered the entirety of the inhabited world without meeting a single further immortal) could very well influence the course of history, but that the human power to make up stories needed no inspiration from them.
So, though his young ladies often brought up legends like the Wandering Jew, Prester John, and the Flying Dutchman, he always told them that they should be grateful he wasn’t the inspiration for such stories, because those mythical men always tended to have much more on their minds than sex and teaching their house girls important lessons about their bodies and their responsibilities to the man who had taken them under his protection.
Because his young ladies, for many thousands of years, had been drawn exclusively from the ranks of such girls as would benefit from submitting to the most experienced dominant in the world, this demurral made good sense to them. A hundred years ago, a girl named Victoria had countered that if he were not the Flying Dutchman perhaps he was Don Juan, and he had slyly confessed that he had no objection to being associated with that legend, at least—so long as it was the version of Don Juan according to which his seductions all lay in the realm of consent.
As he stood up from his computer after finishing his final email cancelling the week’s appointments, he thought of the way Molly had consented, a little more than a year before, when he had invited her into his Jaguar after she finished her shift at the Mexican restaurant.
Daniel had certain rules of a standing longer than the age of the Pyramids of Egypt. The first of them was that a young lady about to be in training should not be lured into a closed conveyance before she understood, without the benefit of Daniel’s magic, what he meant to do to her before the sun rose on another day—that is, that if she entered the closed conveyance,
Daniel would take her virginity in a place and in a manner of his choosing, that very night.
He could sense repressed submission in a young woman more clearly than any of the other things he could sense about the world around him. It had of course taken him millennia to realize exactly what it was that made his blood feel hot in his veins when he looked at a girl like Molly, that made his heart pump when she defied him or when she blushed; in the early days it had simply felt like some supernatural power was telling him, This one: this one needs your mastery as you need to master her.
In those years, he hadn’t even known he was using his magic on them—hadn’t even known he had any magic to use. When he told them to bend over so he could deflower them, they did, their thighs already slick with desire. Their cries as he ripped through their maidenheads had as much gratitude in them as discomfort. When he told them to lay themselves over his knee to pay the price of some disobedience, they cried, but they obeyed, and the sex he enforced on them afterward was wild and rewarding, as the girls climaxed under his pounding cock over and over.
With Molly, though, as with every young lady he had taken under his protection since the days of Pericles, when his closed conveyance was a particularly splendid ox-drawn wagon, he kept his power of desire in check as he spoke from the shadows of a doorway.
“Hello, young lady. Do you remember me?”
She had just turned toward the bus stop, and she stood under a streetlight on a main drag down which the cars raced, uncaring. Daniel had picked the restaurant, of course, because of her—because he had felt her there, calling out her need. It happened dozens of times a day, of course, but having observed his week’s solitude after bidding Alicia farewell, his yen for enchiladas suizas and Molly’s need coincided, and she became the lucky girl who would receive training as an immortal’s house girl.