“I’d say you’ve graduated with honors. You’re ready for them.”
I stood naked for a moment, still dripping, peeling off my shower cap. “If you like what you see, then—”
“No,” he said.
I didn’t understand. He wanted me. It was obvious. He had been inside me during my “training.” Didn’t he enjoy it? Was it the kink that was the issue? He needed now to whip me each time or to have me humiliate him like the boy? I remembered he had kissed and petted me in the back room of the shop before we started all this.
Maybe it was fear of a different kind of intimacy. Once he requested what he needed, I would be in his head, understand him, know him.
I’ve never understood that mind-set. My lovers have always said I was open and free. I would say I was natural. Identifying your tastes doesn’t make you vulnerable, it only makes you human. It’s when I’m out of bed that I have problems, coming to grips with the attitudes and BS I face over having more than one lover or occasionally being with a girl.
“Come here,” I whispered.
And still he held back.
I glided up to him and linked my arms around his neck. “Tell me. What do you need?”
“I’m good,” he said, holding his ground but not moving to take me in his arms.
“Oliver, I like you.”
“I like you too, Teresa. It’s just…”
“Just what?”
It was like a curtain of darkness fell down over his face, his mouth grimacing, eyes looking everywhere but at me. “If we do a scene,” he said, slipping into the lingo, “I can come. But if you want straight again, then…” He threw up his hands. “There, okay? Satisfied?”
“What do you need?” I said, my voice soft and low, comforting. I kissed him reassuringly. “We can play whatever way you—”
“No!” he said, gently pushing me away. “You think I like being like this?”
I was stunned. “Nobody’s judging you! If this is you, then okay, we’ll—”
“It’s not me!” he thundered. “It didn’t used to be me.”
He was embarrassed. He was ashamed. And I was flabbergasted at first. Then I realized I had been right. His core self-image was threatened every time genuine pleasure or tenderness was on the horizon. Fucking someone, doing someone—he could handle that. He did them. He fucked them. It was masculine in his head. He had relegated orgasm to just biology, barely feeling it in vanilla sex.
But when he paddled me or humiliated me, he came alive. Release and the great weight lifted, and then he was back in control. Except for the guilt over the role-play. I would have asked him if he was Catholic if I didn’t think he’d get offended.
I know, I know—there are thousands and thousands of people out there who don’t think twice about this shit when they practice BDSM. I had grown to like it myself. And what the hell is normal anyway?
But doing it wasn’t his problem. It was how he thought about it.
What haunted him was what also troubled me: the idea that you had to keep upping the ante, taking things over the edge.
“Oh, Oliver,” I whispered. I kissed him once, and then I walked out to his guest bedroom.
I had found Oliver as my first link to infiltrating the group, and while it had worked out better than I expected, I had to wonder now what the next step was. After all, he had dropped out. It wasn’t like he could bring me by to make friends, could he? Turns out it was something close to that.
“Isaac expects me to compensate him,” he said tartly, “for my leaving. He’s started to get impatient because it’s been months and I haven’t brought him anyone worthwhile.”
“Oh, oh,” I said. “Let me get this straight. So you were thinking about ‘bringing’ me to him even when we were flirting in your store?”
“No!” he protested quickly. “You’re not listening. I said he’s getting impatient. It’s been months. I couldn’t do that to a woman, you know what I’m saying? Not after I know people are just gone, like your friend Anna. And Kelly.”
“So I’m a rather brilliant piece of good luck for you, aren’t I?” I asked suspiciously.
“Teresa,” he tried again. “You came to me, remember? You want a way in—this is it. Like I said, from Isaac’s perspective, no, it’s not lucky. He’ll say, ‘About time, man.’ You’ll be tribute.”
He crossed his arms and leaned against the kitchen counter. “We pull this off, I won’t see you again for weeks. I can’t contact you. I don’t have their full trust anymore, so if we hook up they might think I got you in there to spy for me. I bring them you and then forget all about you, Isaac will accept that. He’ll think, Okay, Oliver’s cool. He wants out, but he can’t be too pissed off about whatever we’re doing if he gives us a fresh sub. So best we keep our distance from each other for a while. And, hey, if you end up liking it there…”
“I have a life to come back to,” I said. “Plus I’m a foreign national, remember? It’s not like I can stay.”
“They find ways around that for the right devotees.” He stepped forward and gently touched my hair. “You just be careful.” It was the most sincere expression of feeling he’d given me.
I have to believe there are fruit flies that have a longer life expectancy than some Manhattan clubs.
Oliver made a couple of calls, and so that things didn’t look blatant or obvious, we were joined by a couple of his…friends. Three girls from Brooklyn, who couldn’t have been any older than twenty-four at best, who had to tell you their names were spelled with an I or ee. I was sure I would forget them the next day. I certainly wanted to.
One was a white girl who finished her sentences with “yo” and did her best to use every latest bit of African-American slang. She set my teeth on edge. One of them kept her iPod earphones on even an hour and a half inside the club. “How do you know these ditzes?” I asked him silently in the cab.
He leaned in very close to whisper into my ear, “I know, I know! Okay? I slept with the sister of one of them. They buy from my store. They’re camouflage.”
They can read?
“I never knew bookshop owners had groupies.”
They did a pretty impressive job of snubbing me—like I cared. But Oliver was host, and Oliver spoke to me. When he and I started talking about dialects in Africa while waiting in the queue, you could smell their fear of the grownups. Airhead snobbery can’t beat genuine life experience.
I was telling Oliver about the Nuba and the roving militia bands in the Sudan when one of the girls suddenly cackled, “What you goin’ on about, girl? You never done that shit!”
I turned around and smiled in amusement. “Now, why would you think so?”
“Why wood aye theenk sew?” said the girl, mimicking my accent—badly. She got adolescent giggles from her friends. “You like us, honey. You tellin’ us you been to Africa?”
First thought: I suppose it was a perverse compliment in a way. I was a few years older than them but not by much, and it was kind of nice to be reminded that I didn’t look my age. Second thought: Americans. Don’t get me wrong. I like Americans. But it boggles my mind that when you talk to them on their home turf, they reject anything that contradicts their own experience or Fox News. And now I was holding up my passport to shut up this reject wannabe for America’s Next Top Model.
“Shit,” she muttered.
We didn’t have to wait long to get into the club. The bouncers nodded to Oliver. He wasn’t A list, he was on the secret triple-A list.
Throbbing bass first, always. Silhouettes in darkness. Lights. DJ playing a good mix of favorites and stuff by some up-and-comers. I like to dance as much as anyone, but the days of shouting myself hoarse over speakers, watered-down drinks, and indulging the BS playa lines I hear in dark nooks and crannies—ugh, they’re long over. I’m not getting old—I just have a lower boredom threshold. But this was on the clock, for the job and the greater good, etc.
Oliver leaned into me about two hours into the night and sai
d, “There he is.” He pointed out a large muscular guy of deep mahogany skin and very close-cropped hair, with a nose that looked like it had been broken a couple of times and a half-moon scar above his upper lip. This, I was informed, was Trey.
“Uh-huh.”
“Last chance.”
“Get things started,” I said.
He did. He wandered over, and I watched, sipping my drink, as Oliver talked and every so often, Trey moved his head in what passed for a nod. It was more like he flexed his neck muscles. If you liked beef, this was your man. I expected attitude when he lumbered up to me, but he smiled shyly, and we danced for a while.
“Oliver says you want to be treated like a princess.” Obvious code, but direct enough.
“You know how to do that?”
Oliver hadn’t fed me any responses to use, and so I guessed I’d better play at least a little hard to get.
“You’ll have to prove you’re worth it.”
Any guy who said something like this to me back home would be watching my back as I left. But I wasn’t supposed to be “me.” I was Teresa Willoughby, wannabe sub, ripe for princess training.
And, yes, I was borrowing Helena’s surname.
I’ve borrowed lots of things from Helena in the past. Her car, occasionally a room in her house, books. She wasn’t using her name in America at the moment. She was my friend. She’d understand—if I ever told her.
My logic was that if Oliver could flush out my past so easily, manipulators like Isaac Jackson and Danielle Zamani would have me made in an afternoon. If they did choose to check on me, the address and phone number I was using for London traced back to a Kensington flat that Helena’s male escorts used for special occasions.
They’d think I had money, or came from money, and that might sweeten their interest in me.
But first it was time for Trey. I didn’t have a clue what he had in mind for me to “prove I was worth it”—that I should meet his fellow princes. He took me by the hand presumptively and led me up a circular staircase. There were private rooms above the dance floor they must hold for just this purpose.
He shut the door, and I heard the distant bass and my own breathing.
Oliver couldn’t help me in here. He had walked me through part of the drill, but I was flying solo now.
“This is a test,” said Trey quietly.
“I understand.”
“Then do as I say. Make yourself ready.”
I took off my clothes, all of them, and then knelt down in front of him. He assessed my body coolly, with that same detached look I had seen in Oliver’s face.
“Good. Are you ready?”
“Yes.”
He undressed in front of me with these languid, theatrical motions. His chest was wide and he had this bullish masculinity about him, more of a brute. His penis looked like it was starting its arousal, thickening but not yet hard. I kept my eyes low, but I watched him take a deep breath as if he had to remind himself what he was supposed to be doing.
There’s no sex at these tests, Oliver had explained to me. Well, not regular sex anyway.
“Do you want to be clean again?” he asked.
“Yes, please. Cleanse me.”
I rested my palms on the floor and assumed the position on all fours. I heard the whrrruppp sound of his belt being yanked from its loops. He stepped behind me.
Waiting. Waiting for the strike of the loop.
I felt the soft, slow kiss of leather between my legs, teasing me. All at once—
Smack. “Uhh!”
One second, two. Smack. “Uhheee!”
My ass burned.
Smack.
Oh, God. I was wet.
Smack.
“Do you want me to fuck you?” he demanded. “Is that what you want instead?”
Another blow whipped across my buttocks, making me flinch, prompting another squeal. “No!”
“I think you want my cock inside you!”
“No.”
“You do. It’s better than pain. You can’t take this pain. You want to be fucked!”
And smack, smack—two quick blows. I wasn’t sure I could hang on. I was getting those purple lights in front of my eyes. But I managed to offer the correct response: “I don’t belong to you.”
“Yet,” he growled through gritted teeth. His hand came down and cupped my ass.
“Aaaahhh…”
I arched my back and shut my mouth tight, the sound escaping in a mournful “mmmmm.” Smack. And then the return of his hand on my ass cheek, and I felt the sweat on my body and hung my head a little because I was coming. I couldn’t stop the shiver of my body, and when the next (“Uuuhhh!”) blow came, it took all my self-control not to touch myself, not to say, Give it to me now. I heard a creak on the floorboards and was confused for an instant. I couldn’t look back, not allowed, but out of my peripheral vision I caught him turning away.
He was struggling to calm down, to stop himself from creaming all over. God, he was huge too. There was no way I could have taken in that thick brown bar.
When he won his quiet battle for control, he barked another order to me. “Come here.”
I turned around on my knees, knelt close. An inch or two, and my tongue could flick out and lick that impressive pole. If I did, he would have gladly let me—and then I’d be rejected. They don’t look for a ho, Oliver had told me, not sure how to explain.
They want…And he had searched for the words. They want demure but suggestible. They want to mold a girl but also see a spark of her own sensuality. You’re going to have to get creative.
I could do that.
If a Nubian prince climaxed during a test, he was considered bested by the girl. He had to admit it and suffered a temporary minor reduction in “rank.” I asked Oliver what was to stop these guys from simply lying through their teeth. He had looked at me, appalled. They just can’t. They’d never do it.
I thought: Oh, yeah? If a bunch of immature morons can lie about sleeping with a girl or screwing for hours, I could easily see guys lie about their staying power in a game like this.
“Please me,” ordered Trey.
Be creative.
Still kneeling, I slid my fingertips up the back of his thigh, tracing the muscles, finding the exact point. I began to knead it under the pads of my fingers—a spot within his inner thigh, close to his balls but not touching. My other hand began a feathery piano progression up his spine. Here. Here he was, sensitive between the blades. And down here, near the small of his back. Here was where he kept all his secrets.
Imagination is everything.
“Stop, stop,” he whispered gently. He moved off and snatched a handkerchief out of his shirt, turning his back on me. Putting one hand out to steady himself on the cracked plaster of the wall, he shot into the cloth. I saw he was slightly embarrassed.
He went into the toilet off this little room and cleaned up. Then he came out and told me brusquely I could get dressed.
“Do you want to be taken care of?” he asked.
I played innocent, kneeling back down in front of him. “By you?”
He smiled and shook his head. “Not just me. There’s a place. I think you might like it there. You should come out and meet some friends of mine, and we’ll play. We’ll see how you get on.”
He asked me if I worked or was a student. I told him I had stayed past my visa, doing work under the table, waitress shifts and sometimes au pair work. He said that if things worked out, I wouldn’t have to scrounge anymore. They—his friends—would take care of me.
“You got anything going on tomorrow? No? Good. Meet me down at the Lighthouse Museum at eleven. Don’t be late.”
Better not to say anything back. Just nod. Like a good girl. Obedient, submissive, with lots of potential.
I had found my way into the temple.
7
I arrived early to the Lighthouse Museum to make it look good. And there he was, big muscular guy with close-cropped hair, the broken nose
, and the half-moon scar above his upper lip. Trey. He had actually instructed me before we parted last night: “Be on time. We are always punctual.”
It struck me as a surreal comment. He might just as well have told me: We are a secretive cult that engages in aberrant sexual practices and mystic rights. And we value good penman-ship.
“Hey, babe,” he said, and kissed me like a boyfriend, a quick peck on the lips. “You find it all right?”
“Yeah, no trouble at all.”
“Oh, man, I love that accent.”
Jeez.
Oliver had given me the address of the temple mansion, but I still got a flutter of anticipation as Trey and I took the Staten Island Ferry. A black sedan picked us up on arrival. I’ve never been comfortable out in the ’burbs, whether it’s a day exile beyond Cockfosters for God only knows what reason or here where I could see fields past the ribbon of highway. As we left the ferry behind, Manhattan was reduced to a postcard skyline.
The mansion stood on several acres of land, and the car took us through a buffer zone of lawn and neatly cut hedges that held back the curious. The house itself made me gasp—pretty impressive. I don’t know American architectural styles, but suffice to say the place had wings to it. Multiple fireplaces, logs of wood stacked in an impressive pile in an open shed nearby. What looked like a hobby farm on an ambitious scale was in the back, where I saw pens for pigs and other farm animals. My guides said they grew food that they distributed to soup kitchens and the like in the poorer neighborhoods back on Manhattan and in the Bronx. Then I was led into the house. I crossed my fingers, hoping they hadn’t ruined the inside with some hideous avant-garde decoration.
The guy who had picked us up had his head shaved. Lots of guys shave their heads. Now inside the house, I saw almost every guy here did.
“Shoes, shoes,” Trey chided me gently.
And I dutifully kicked off my sandals. Most of my African and West Indian friends and I all had a strict no-shoe policy in our homes back in London anyway.
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