by Emily Tilton
That night, the night of Emma’s paddling, Daniel had come in, and Molly had met him. They had spoken in low voices, and then Daniel had come into the den and opened the cage door. “Go get your paddle, little one,” he had said, “and bring it to me.”
Emma’s shaking had grown more violent as she had obeyed, and as she laid herself over the ottoman in the den just as Molly had that first day. Then, for the first time, she had received a true punishment from her master, held down by his strong left hand and spanked hard and quick with her own special leather paddle. Daniel had instructed her in obedience as she wept and struggled under his hands, her bottom on fire with his severe discipline. He had reminded her that Molly was in charge, and Emma must obey her. He had reminded her that she must be tamed and trained if she wished to stay in his house.
Then he had lubed her anus and taken her there until he came in her bottom, pumping hard with his hands around her waist to keep her still for his cock’s pleasure. As Emma cried out to have him so deep in her littlest place, she had sensed Molly in the living room, greatly aroused by the sounds of her master enjoying Emma in that disciplinary manner, and realized suddenly that Molly must have been forbidden to watch Emma’s punishment.
It had confused her, because it had gratified her despite everything: just as Daniel had put her in the cage the previous night, now he had excluded Molly. She had sensed again a greater intent, that her master meant to teach her a lesson beyond mere obedience.
Her bottom aflame and still full of cock, she heard her immortal say quietly, once the spasms of climax had left his body, “Little one, this was a lesson in letting go.”
“Letting go, sir?” Emma had felt her eyes open wide. As Daniel had softened inside her anus, she had begun to know an ache of arousal so great that she hadn’t known if she could go another minute without some kind of touch down there.
He hadn’t spoken again for several minutes, as he had withdrawn from her sore little bottom-hole and had gone to the closet to get her harness, then had put her in it without the plug, thank goodness. When she had felt encased in the leather, bound and possessed, he had begun to rub her bare little pussy, the way a man strokes a small furry creature, though Emma had no fur there now.
She had cried out, and again she had sensed Molly’s exclusion, as her fellow young lady listened to the next, more pleasurable part, of Emma’s training.
“You will let go of me, and I will let go of you, perhaps even before much time has passed. You will be the girl fucked in the bed, while perhaps another young lady is in a cage next to the bed playing with herself.”
Emma had moaned under his fingers, and come, struggling again against her master but once again held down, now by the leather straps of the harness that tamed her.
Daniel had said no more about letting go until the moment he announced that John had arrived. Then, just before John crossed the street, and Emma opened the door and realized she loved him, he had said, “You will choose whether to invite him in, and then I will choose whether to give you to him. We will let go of one another, but whether this man is the right man for you to serve next must be my decision.”
Chapter Fifteen
John Gage certainly seemed to possess the correct characteristics, Daniel thought. Just as it had been many years since he last mastered two young ladies, it had perforce also been many years since he had given one of them away to a worthy, if mortal, fellow dominant. Now, as he watched John trying with admirable self-restraint to come to grips with Daniel’s immortality, he began to recall just how enjoyable it used to be to bestow a submissive house girl on another man.
Indeed, back in the days when girls expected to be treated as property, the idea didn’t have quite the allure it had now for Daniel. The last time he had given a girl to a new master, in the late Victorian period in England, she had felt none of the delicious conflict Daniel now sensed in Emma.
He remembered Pernilla, a lovely, dark-haired young Briton, as he remembered all his house girls, with crystal clarity and great fondness. He had bestowed her upon the visiting Earl of Leicester in 1887. She had experienced the same submissive excitement of objectification Emma felt, but she had not had the same sense of cultural agency Emma had. Pernilla hadn’t felt Emma’s troubled—and thus extreme—arousal at the thought of not being allowed to choose whether Daniel would give her to the man she loved or keep her for himself after letting John fuck her and discipline her on loan for a few hours.
The question was real, too. John might have good qualities, and he might love Emma and Emma love him, and Daniel still would judge that Emma must stay in his house and, alongside Molly, in his bed. Love came and went, and destiny paid it very little heed. Both Emma and Molly would need to find paths that diverged from Daniel’s.
Certainly Emma’s would diverge sooner: her needs were being met in Daniel’s house, under Molly’s tutelage, but before long her intellectual gifts and her natural desire to serve as a man’s principal submissive companion—to be the girl to whom he came home for his blowjob at the end of the day—would grow very much stronger, and her time with Daniel and Molly less valuable to her. If Daniel didn’t give her to John Gage, he would almost certainly have to set her up on her own, in a position to meet other dominants, within a few months.
He had put Emma in the cage while he fucked Molly in bed the previous week as a way of moving her along toward that eventual parting. He hadn’t known John Gage would soon arise, but though Daniel went back and forth on whether he had any power to see the future, he had had one of his clairvoyant feelings that day, and had seemed to sense that someone would come for Emma before many more days elapsed.
He had known he would have to paddle her the next day for one reason or another, too—but that kind of precognition lay entirely in his understanding of submissive feminine psychology. Emma would brat at Molly in some way, and that would let him give her a true punishment, which would help her see that both her terrible arousal at having to hump her blanket in the cage while Molly served under their master’s cock and her jealousy could and must live in her heart and loins, side by side.
Theoretically, that nocturnal humiliation and diurnal acting-out-and-discipline session had prepared Emma to go home with her professor after the fun à quatre they all would have now. Daniel could sense clearly in Emma’s heart and mind the readiness necessary to part from her master and her senior young lady.
But John Gage, PhD, had to prove himself first, and his having begun to puzzle out Daniel’s secret might prove his undoing in the matter of the bestowal of Emma’s young charms.
“That’s right,” the professor said, his own smile very ambiguous. “And I wouldn’t have gotten the joke myself if I hadn’t recognized Holbein’s style.”
He looked over at Emma, then: that certainly counted in his favor, in Daniel’s quickly lengthening book about him. Daniel read his desire to see whether she understood the topic of conversation and to discover what she knew about the man who—Daniel saw from John’s persistent envy that he had correctly concluded—had taken her virginity and introduced her to submission.
More important, Daniel could feel him working to read Emma’s emotions, in the fashion possible for a man who lacked the empathic power Daniel and his young ladies had. A master who didn’t seek to advance the welfare of the girl he trained for his pleasure would never receive the gift of one of Daniel’s charges.
But mere empathy and affection would not satisfy. When Daniel gave one of his house girls away, he demanded something more. According to a wisdom he regarded as at least as ancient as he himself was, he required a gift in return. A price—not in the sense of the word as most English speakers used it in this inelegant modern age, but in its much older sense, when it stood closer in meaning to its sister word prize.
John must give Daniel something of great value, if he wished Daniel to give him Emma Woodbine. With the rather aged Earl of Leicester, the price had been access to the ear of the future Edward VII—th
e Prince of Wales; Bertie; HRH, as most knew him. Daniel had needed support for the preservation of certain works of art he deemed might be as immortal as he—or even longer-lasting, for who knew when Daniel’s strange spark might finally vanish. Pernilla went away as the kindly but masterful earl’s willing, submissive concubine, to warm his December bed, and HRH bought the paintings Daniel advised him to buy.
Certainly John Gage didn’t stand in a position to render that sort of service to the immortal. One couldn’t expect worldly influence from a scholar. But professors as a class had always had in Daniel’s eyes other means of gratifying his special needs. An anthropologist such as John, in particular, could well be in a position to earn even so great a boon as the submissive charms of an Emma Woodbine.
For that reason, Daniel could not simply show the professor the supernatural powers that came with immortality—lift a pencil from the desk, for example, or bend a spoon. If John were to render to Daniel the kind of service for which he might receive Emma in return, he must not be distracted by the strange parlor tricks fate had given Daniel power to do. He must see the phenomenon of Daniel Magus’ immortality, and its relationship to dominant sexuality, with an eye unclouded by the apparently miraculous.
“What would you say, John, if I told you…” He saw the skepticism grow in the professor’s eyes as he prepared to hear the sort of load of horseshit that usually followed the bland opener. Perfect, Daniel thought. His reaction now will tell me a good deal. He went on, “…that I lived in Spain with the last Neanderthals, forty-two thousand years ago or so?”
John’s left eyebrow went up so far toward his hairline that Daniel almost laughed. The scholar thought for a moment, then glanced again at Emma and finally down at Molly, before returning his penetrating gaze to Daniel.
“I’d ask you how fast they could run,” he finally said.
Daniel laughed. The man has an open mind, at least. “You mean because of those short legs of theirs,” he said, reaching out to put a friendly hand on John’s shoulder. “They ran faster than you would think, but, no, they were no match for a human. Really, what killed them, though, was simple human greed and rapaciousness. The colonial story: kill the men and keep the women. Interbreeding was hit or miss—you never could be sure, and I never saw it happen to a Neanderthal woman…”
John had begun to believe, Daniel could tell. Now the professor cocked his head, and looked again at Emma. His skepticism remained quite strong, but it cohabited in his mind now with the academic’s desire to explore and to learn. Daniel’s words had given him at least one burning question, in association with what John had observed in his host’s home.
Daniel chuckled. “No, Professor. You might suppose that young Neanderthal women might make attractive house girls, like Molly and Emma, but although some of them were really very attractive in their own special way, they all actually lacked the need for taming and training I look for in my young ladies.”
He felt the thrill of arousal in John at that, and also in Emma. Perfect. The heart of the matter. Along with the professor’s erotic response, though, came his intellectual one.
“So you regard your… efforts, I suppose I might call them… with Molly and Emma as a sort of civilizing, educational process. Very interesting. And I imagine you’ll assert—with regard to the Neanderthals—that their apparently inborn lack of capacity for civilization made them unsuited for the sort of erotic submission we find in humans.”
“Precisely,” Daniel said. “During the time I lived in close proximity, I had one or two human young ladies in my own cave—sometimes as many as three. The Neanderthals were very promiscuous, but they didn’t form that kind of domestic attachment. I’m no anthropologist myself, though I’ve had a good deal of time to read the scholarship and talk to scholars like you, but my own theory is that whatever is in our DNA that makes us form households created human civilization.”
“That’s hardly a great insight, is it?” John said challengingly. Daniel felt a flare of dismay from Emma, which he soothed away in such a way as to let her know he didn’t mind.
“No, certainly not,” Daniel agreed amicably.
A silence fell, during which John looked around him once again: at the Holbein portrait, at the girl in the cage, at the girl he had come to find, wearing the short lacy nightgown he wanted to reach out and lift, so that he could touch the charms of which he had caught such a fleeting glimpse in the men’s room. The professor’s internal observer took control of him, though, and wrenched his mind around onto the course his life to this point had conditioned him to think the straight one.
“Emma,” he said. “I don’t think I can stop you from staying with this man, despite the fact that he seems to be a lunatic.”
Emma’s brow clouded, and she bit her lip. She turned her eyes to Daniel.
“I will give Emma to you, John,” Daniel said in a calm, measured voice, calculated to demonstrate his essential sanity, “if you give me your honest opinion on something.”
Emma’s eyes went wide, and her lips parted as she drew a little gasping breath. John’s eyes, on the other hand, got very narrow.
“Give?” he asked. “I don’t see—”
Emma interrupted him. “Oh, but… but Professor, he… he does—I mean, he does have, you know, the right to…” Her face had gone bright pink as she realized that she had responded not to John’s words but to his feelings.
Molly spoke up from the cage, because she had felt in John exactly the same thing Emma had, and now she felt the need to defend Daniel against John’s unspoken accusation. He found it very touching, though he knew it would strike John as rather strange, since John still regarded Daniel as a possibly crazy but otherwise almost certainly ordinary human being.
“Daniel owns us, Professor. He can give us to another man if he wants.”
Daniel knew she was thinking of the time when an old friend from the German art world had come over, six months ago, and they had shared Molly in the living room, as she blushed red and then practically swooned with wicked pleasure. At the time, because Molly responded so very urgently to Dieter, Daniel had considered giving her to him to take back to Germany. He could certainly have gotten back the kind of price for which he looked, but though Dieter did a very good job mastering his girls, Molly wouldn’t have been happy in Dieter’s effete world for more than a year or two.
A furrow had developed in John’s brow, as he looked from Emma to Molly, then raised his eyes again to Daniel’s. “Suppose I accept that you have it in your power and even in your right to ‘give’ Emma to me. What is it that you want my opinion on?”
“Emma,” Daniel said, “show John your pussy.”
Chapter Sixteen
John thought for a moment, as he realized Daniel intended him to think, that he was going to be asked to render a judgment of the sweet little cleft Emma now exposed as she raised the hem of her nightgown, her face still blushing scarlet.
“Very pretty,” he said. Then he understood the misdirection, and understood at the same time that this strange man had begun to test him. Well, John knew how to pass tests, at least. He looked from the bewitching sight of the bareness between Emma’s thighs, beautifully set off by the bunched lace she held like a veil out of the way of his gaze, back to Daniel. “And that’s my honest opinion. But I imagine that Emma’s pussy isn’t what you’re looking for a consultant about.”
Daniel crooked a smile, and for an instant John felt completely convinced that the man must be fifty thousand years old, as he claimed to be. A huge host of questions about the diffusion of human culture from the Fertile Crescent rose to his mind. He wanted to test Daniel as Daniel had decided to test him. But the man might well have read a good deal of anthropological research, and really, he would only have to have read one good article to sound convincing as a fifty-millennia-old man.
More important, John had Emma to think about, and Emma did seem convinced that the man she called Master had the right to give her away. If Daniel
weren’t the apparently immortal global wanderer he claimed to be, he clearly did a very good job of convincing his young ladies of the fact. John found himself thinking that he should at least play along, if only to see whether he could get Emma out of Daniel’s house to ask her whether she thought Molly would be alright or whether some kind of intervention might be necessary.
Certainly John’s desire for Emma, and his desire to experience more of Daniel’s extremely alluring approach to household order and erotic fulfillment, argued strongly for playing along. To tear his eyes from Emma’s little pussy, apparently bared for her master’s pleasure just as John himself would have wanted it bared if Emma had somehow come to him after the incident in the men’s room, had seemed to require a huge act of will.
He wanted Emma: he felt sure even that he was in love with Emma. Now that he could see that another man had brought Emma’s submission out fully, the possibility of winning her away from her master seemed like the only goal worth pursuing.
“No, Professor. You’re right about that. But I’m glad you like the pussy. You wouldn’t be averse to fucking it, I presume?”
Emma gave a little whimper, and John turned back to see that her hands had made little fists as they grasped the fabric she had raised to display her charms. Her eyes were closed now, and the furrow on her brow seemed to say that she couldn’t bear to know that John was looking at the place where, yes, he would very much like to thrust his hard cock.
“No, not at all,” John said, working hard to keep his voice suave and even, while his erection swelled against the front of his jeans.
“Go ahead and touch it, if you like. Emma, keep your eyes closed, but turn around and bend over with your hands on your knees so Professor Gage can inspect you fully. Molly, why don’t you come out of the cage now, and fetch your bottom harness, and Emma’s, too. The professor and I are going to do some riding, I think.”