The Collectors

by Gowan, Lesley

  *

  It was three in the morning when Jeanne returned from the party. I knew because I was kneeling next to the bed, close to the alarm clock. The carpet in the Ritz was thick and soft, so my knees were in much better shape after hours on it than they were performing the same feat on the hardwood floors back home. Still, it amazed me I did this at all—kneeling quietly for two hours with no one policing me, simply because Jeanne told me to do it. Usually, I would feel a growing excitement as the time passed, but this night had an element of penance in it. I was on my knees hoping Jeanne would not be mad at me.

  As soon as she entered the bedroom I could smell sex. She reeked of it. She didn’t acknowledge me but simply walked straight into the bathroom. Five minutes later she emerged in a fluffy white robe, her hair wet, feet bare. She sat on the bed in front of me.

  “In the past,” she said. “I’ve had companions to whom I’ve explained my simple requirements and who took it upon themselves to unilaterally do or not do something based on their wishes, not on mine. I immediately eliminated those women from my life.”

  “But—”

  “Stop. Do not say another word or you will be among them. As it stands, I’m willing to overlook the fact you announced you would not be participating in this party, even though I was bringing you there for that purpose. I will also overlook the fact you made it even worse by then deciding you would participate, and even encouraging other partners.”

  I bit my tongue. I couldn’t believe she was this upset about such a little thing. I supposed I was going to get punished now.

  “I’m so sorry to not have known your will for me tonight,” I said. I thought it sounded pretty good. “I know I must be punished for it.”

  Jeanne rolled her eyes and stood.

  “Yes, you wish you’d be punished for it. But I’m not going to give you the pleasure. The punishment is for me to not lay a hand or instrument on you. To keep you isolated. And perhaps the punishment also is to make you understand what you’ve gotten yourself into when I brought you into my life. You seem to think there’s still a smidgen of will allowed to you. That you can use your intellect to suss out what my ‘will for you’ is. It’s all far less complicated than you want to make it. You only have to do exactly what I say. Nothing more and nothing less. If you can do that, I am here for you. If you cannot, as in tonight, I will get rid of you. It’s perfectly simple.”

  I was still on my knees. It seemed the right place to be when being talked down to in every sense of the word. Jeanne took several sets of stockings from her drawer and bound me wrist to ankle, pushing me on my side. She tied another stocking around my mouth.

  “You will stay like this tonight. Tomorrow you will be tied up and you’ll stay in the room all day. I’ll decide what you will be allowed to do tomorrow night. I’ll cancel the Balthus tour. Perhaps you’ll spend the time contemplating what the consequences are of your willfulness.”

  The rest of the night seemed very long. My bindings were tight, and my joints already cramped from my hours on the floor. In the morning Jeanne got ready for the day at a leisurely pace, and then spent some time on the phone in the living room. I was still tied up by the bed, dying to go to the bathroom. She finally allowed me to do so, allowed me to shower and get something to eat, and then waited for me by the bedroom window, stockings in hand. There was a built in bench in the bay window. Jeanne had me kneel over it, my arms stretched toward the windows in front of me, my wrists tied to the window hardware My left ankle was tightly secured to a chair nearby, my right leg left free. Within another minute I felt a strap go around my waist and through my crotch. Jeanne put a huge butt plug in me and secured it with the harness so I couldn’t push it out. It was going to be a long day.

  When she left, I counted my blessings. At least I could move one leg around, which made a big difference. And I didn’t mind not tromping around the city again today. I might even be able to sleep. What I hadn’t anticipated was the visitor to the room at two in the afternoon. A hotel maid came in to clean the room. She untied me and allowed me to use the toilet before tying me back up. She ran her hands along my body, tweaking my nipples. She moved the butt plug around side to side. Then she left. I had no idea if she was a Ritz employee or a friend of Jeanne’s in costume, but I understood the importance of the message Jeanne was sending me. It’s her, not me. It’s others, not me. While we’re together, there is no me.

  I was sleeping soundly when Jeanne returned and I didn’t hear her enter. She knelt behind me and draped herself over me, her arms on top of my arms, stretched out in front of us. I started awake to see her face next to mine. I felt her hips move against my ass, rubbing me side to side, pushing against me into the bench.

  “Did you miss me?” she asked.

  I thought it pretty clear she missed me, but I was through trying to be clever or coy.

  “Desperately,” I said.

  “Did you have a visitor today?”

  My face heated as I remembered the humiliation of being untied and then tied again by the tiny French maid, a woman I could easily have overpowered or run from. But I hadn’t. I’d done exactly what she’d asked me to do, as if it were Jeanne herself asking me to do it.

  “Yes.” I looked into Jeanne’s eyes. She looked very happy, and so my worry lessened. “I was so afraid you wouldn’t come back to me tonight.”

  She looked confused. “Not come back? I thought of you all day.” She laughed as she leaned forward to untie my arms. “I thought of how hot this was making you—the waiting, the maid. I had cocktails with a friend and thought I’d combust.”

  She untied my leg and then sat on the window seat as I sat up and stretched. She started to take her pants off.

  “I can’t do anything else until I’ve come.” She slid her things off and cupped me by the back of the head. “Give me your mouth.”

  She pulled my head down to her sex, spreading her legs wide. She was very wet. I used the tip of my tongue to spread some of her moisture around, but that wasn’t what she wanted. She put both hands behind my head and pulled me right into her, my tongue rigid and working itself against her clit. She started chanting, “yes, yes, yes, yes,” and I knew she wouldn’t last long. I could feel her limbs tightening, quivering, and then she came in the most explosive way. I was shattered—exhausted, achy, uncomfortably in need of both water and a toilet—but I lay my cheek on her thigh and felt perfectly contented. Jeanne stroked my hair and my face, her breath slowing.

  “God, I needed that,” she said. I was happy to hear her say anything at all. I still stung from the silence and anger of the night before.

  “You’re not mad at me anymore?”

  “No. I’m not even sure I was mad. Scared, maybe. I worried you wouldn’t be able to be how I need you to be in order for this to work for us.”

  I stopped breathing as my brain tried to process what she said. It was a whole lot of confession for her.

  “I want to be that person. I think it’s how I need to be. But I’m new to all this. I make mistakes.”

  We were quiet for a little bit and she continued to stroke my hair.

  “What do you say to going out for an unbelievable French meal and then coming back here?”

  Was she asking? No wonder I’m confused all the time.

  “I’d say let’s go. I’m starving.”

  We went out for one of those dinners in Paris that people talk about ad nauseam once they return. It was delicious, but we made short work of it, anxious to get back to the hotel. We took a hot, sudsy bath together and then settled into the bed.

  “Lay across my lap,” Jeanne said. She looked somehow regal propped up against the headboard in the middle of the bed, her hair floating onto the snow-white pillows, her face relaxed but her eyes bright. I was naked after the bath, my skin already pink from the steamy hot water. It was about to get pinker still. I lay across, resting my head in my crossed arms, my ass centered on her naked lap. I held my breath, waiting for the first b
low. When it came I was again shocked by how much it hurt. I was aroused, as I had been all through dinner, but not yet in the haze of hormones that, in me at least, deadened the sharpness of pain and made it a more directly erotic experience. As the blows began to rain down on me sharply, loudly, I whimpered, not from discomfort but from the vulnerability, the need for her to continue and the rawness of having her see me like this.

  She paused just long enough for me to hear her command.

  “Touch yourself. Put your fingers there and make yourself come.”

  She waited while I shifted enough to put my fingers to my clit and begin to rub.

  “Good. Don’t stop until I tell you to.”

  I rubbed. She spanked. The countervailing forces were creating a nuclear reaction in me. I was about to detonate.

  “I’m coming!”

  “Don’t stop,” she said, now moving her hand between my legs and entering me. I exploded.

  “Don’t stop.” And she went deep and then came back out and then teased the spot inside that drives me wild, then went deep again, all the while with my own hand pumping away. I wanted more. I usually need to rest between orgasms, but I wanted more and she gave it to me until I came again.

  She pushed me just far enough off her lap that she could get at herself. My eyes were bleary and I felt drugged, but I was able to see her pussy rise up to meet her hand and her fingers slip around her clit. She stared at it with her mouth open, looking as hazy as I felt, and within a minute she cried out, her hand falling away and flopping bonelessly to the side. I think if we’d had the energy we would have started laughing or crying, and I’m not sure which.

  The next day we flew home to the States.

  Chapter Six—Welcome Home

  It was late in the evening when the driver left me off at my apartment building and went on to deliver Jeanne home. I was exhausted from the trip, but Jeanne had been on the phone the entire way in from the airport, making arrangements for a video conference at midnight. Her energy alarmed me, and I vowed to start exercising or taking amphetamines or something to keep pace with her.

  I felt a looseness in the lock on my apartment door and my heart sped up as the door swung open. Lights were blazing, though I’d turned every one of them off before leaving town. The living room was trashed from end to end. I stood in the middle of the room in a state of shock, my mind a complete blank other than to be thankful Martha was staying at the cat sitter’s while I was gone. If I’d had any other thought at all it was to wonder whether I could wait until morning to clean up the mess. I was so damn tired.

  What didn’t occur to me was someone could still be there or they meant me harm, or even that they’d probably stolen from me. I was just annoyed by the inconvenience. But the closer I looked the more I could see that as far as these things go, it wasn’t a terrible trashing of the place. Whoever had done it had flung everything to the floor that could be flung. Few of the items were broken. Nothing had been piled together and pissed upon. The upholstery hadn’t been slashed apart. It didn’t even look like anything was stolen. My laptop was on the floor by the desk and perhaps a little worse for wear, but no one had taken it.

  My bedroom is where I found my anger. I had a wooden chest where I kept my nearly complete and possibly world-class collection of lesbian BDSM fiction. Some of the books were very old and intimate companions of mine. There were volumes in my collection I’d found in the back shelves of countless used bookstores. Others I’d won in competitive online auctions, and still others were rare enough to have required professional book dealers to find. Now they were all toppled onto the bed, many of their covers ripped off and the pile covered in blue paint. Paint that had come from a cupboard in my kitchen, extra from when I’d redone the bathroom. My interest in my collection had plummeted since meeting Jeanne, but still it felt heartbreaking to see it destroyed.

  It struck me as one of those surreal moments when you can’t quite believe something’s happened, despite what’s right in front of you. I had the same feeling the first time Jeanne tied me up. I couldn’t move, but I almost couldn’t believe it either. Soon a tear came as the truth sank in and I felt about the death of my collection the way one would the death of an old friend—one you perhaps didn’t connect with as much any longer but would always have a deep fondness for. It was gone. And I couldn’t believe it.

  I knew it was Adele who had invaded my home. She was already mad as hell that I was seeing Jeanne. Maybe hearing I was in Paris with her put her over the edge. But who would have told her?

  I put the cushions back on the sofa and slept there, unwilling to change the bedsheets in the middle of the night. I was starting to feel furious, but mostly about the damage. My Marimeko bedspread was a vintage one from the ‘60s, in perfect shape, but now covered in paint. And my book collection was an incalculable loss. Did Adele think she was going to make me quit seeing Jeanne because of this? All it did was make me swear to punch her in the nose next time I saw her.

  *

  I heard my phone ringing as I climbed the stairs from my sixth trip to the building Dumpster. The sodden books weighed a ton and kept breaking through my cheap plastic garbage bags. I was miserable. I let the call go into voice mail knowing it was Jeanne. My social world had grown very small since I started to see her. I didn’t get many calls these days.

  The message said: “I didn’t get much sleep last night, but still want to see you this evening. Be here at seven for pizza and a movie—you bring the movie. And, Laura, you don’t have to stop down at the garden apartment any longer. You know what you’re doing. I trust you to come prepared.”

  I groaned. Coming prepared was thinly veiled code for arriving prepared to have every passage, every nook and cranny in my body probed, penetrated, and paddled. Clean, shiny, and smooth was how I thought of the condition I needed to be in, imagining myself going through a sort of automatic car wash for submissives. I’d be attached by the collar to an overhead conveyor, standing in a little car on a track, and machines would swing into place and lights come on for each of the stations along the way. Soap, scrub, rinse. Douche. Enema. Soap, scrub, rinse. Fan dry. Lotion. I would now have to recreate the elements of this in my miniscule bathroom. But worse was the idea of picking out a movie at the video store. Hollywood action films and comedies didn’t seem quite right for a woman who happily watched four hours of New Wave French Cinema while using me as a footstool. I pushed the thought aside and went back to putting my apartment in order. I would do what she asked because something within me automatically bent to her will. I did what she asked not to avoid punishment, but because punishment was my reward for doing so.

  At seven o’clock I arrived with five DVDs and my overnight bag. Two Jane Austens, two American independents, and Das Boot, because it seemed like a safe bet. I brought the bag because I never knew if I’d be spending the night or not. One of the last times I was here I didn’t have a change of clothes, and Jeanne was very amused watching me leave the house in the morning holding together the shirt she’d torn from me the night before.

  Mrs. Kirchberger answered the door and reached for my bag. I held on and she gave it another tug toward her. I didn’t want her to carry it because I was uncomfortable with the idea of servants doing things for me. But it was hard to argue with Mrs. Kirchberger. Ever since Jeanne told me Mrs. K. didn’t have a tongue, it took away my resistance to her. She yanked my bag from me and turned to lead me upstairs, and I swore I saw a tiny smile on her lips.

  Jeanne was in her study, feet up on the coffee table and watching CNN, the remote in her hand. She wore gym shorts and a T-shirt, and I almost didn’t recognize her. She muted the TV and got up to greet me with a kiss. Mrs. K. stood by, my bag still in her hand.

  “Mrs. K., will you drop the bag in my bedroom and then order the pizza?”

  I watched her leave and turned back to Jeanne, who still had me in her arms. “How does she order pizza? Or do you have a complete downstairs staff I’ve never seen?” />
  “No, Mrs. K. is all alone. I sometimes think I should have someone else here to keep her company, but that’s thinking of her rather like a cat. She’ll tell me if she’s unhappy. She’s very straightforward.”

  I imagined that was true. It seemed unlikely you’d be anything but when your modes of communication with your boss were scribbled notes and nods of the head.

  “She has one of the TTY machines downstairs to make phone calls, and she’s online all the time.”

  The secret life of Mrs. Kirchberger. It seemed there were layers to uncover in the people who lived here, even in the house itself. The dominatrix in her shorts and T-shirt, the house with its secret passageways, the silent housekeeper with the huge social network. Things were not as they seemed, including the world of domination and submission. At least this slice of it. What I had read about or fantasized about was a world of 24/7 compliance with the demanding will of a dominant. I hadn’t taken into consideration that twenty-four hours was a long time for anyone to be in strict domination mode. Even someone as energetic as Jeanne might need to put down the whip and pick up the remote control from time to time. She might want to use the flat of her hand to caress a cheek rather than administer a spanking. I’d seen glimpses of this part of Jeanne before, but somehow the gym shorts brought her down to earth in a way nothing else had done before. She looked like a woman to me. Simply that. And all of that. I wondered if I was falling in love with more than Jeanne the dominant.

  My movies passed muster and we spent a pleasant evening watching Das Boot (I knew it). The footstool was used as a footstool.

  “I’m glad you planned to spend the night,” Jeanne said when she clicked off the movie. “I’m exhausted, though. I don’t think we’ll do anything adventurous tonight.”

  “Is that how you think of what we do together?”