MASTER

by Eden Bradleyeden Bradley

  I shut the door behind me and go into the living room, where Master Christopher waits. He is spectacular in tight black pants and black dress shirt rolled up at the sleeves. His bad-ass black boots are intimidating.—they make my dick go hard, as does his exquisite face, with his high cheekbones uplit by the dim lamps in the room.

  “Aimée,” he says.

  She steps forward and holds out a heavy wool coat, her green gaze on my face, concern in her eyes. When I take it from her delicate hands, her fingertips brush mine in a subtle offering of comfort and support.

  My heart hammers. My cock pulses. For them both. I should be used to this by now, but somehow I’m not. It always comes as another shock, how insanely turned on I am simply being in their presence. Is it my current submissive role that’s adding to it? The overall dynamic between the three of us? I’m certain that has something to do with it, as well as the fact that they are truly two of the most enticing human beings ever born.

  Our Master moves around me, trailing one hand over my arm and across my chest, before he stops next to me, leaving his arm draped across my shoulders. Leaning in, he takes my earlobe between his sharp, white teeth, and bites down, sending a shock of pain and lust quivering through me.

  Then he says quietly, “I suppose you’re wondering where I’m taking you, Damon? Ah, but that’s the best part.” He pauses just long enough to make me squirm inside. “We’re going back to San Francisco. I don’t believe you know I have a house not too far from The Training House, do you?”

  My pulse spikes hard, like a jackhammer in my veins.

  No. God, no.

  “Oh yeah,” he says, as if he is able to hear my thoughts, and at this moment, I’m not entirely certain he can’t. “Back in the city, only a few blocks from your home, from the place where you call yourself ‘Master’. How fucking delicious is that?”

  He kisses my cheek, bites it hard enough to make me flinch. But otherwise I am frozen. How the fuck can he do this to me? And how brilliant that he is doing it?

  More ultimate mind fuck. He truly is a Master, in every sense of the word. But something in me wants to bolt. Needs to, maybe. Sweat breaks out on my forehead.

  “What? Afraid of your own home town? Well, you fucking should be.” His hand goes into my hair, pulling hard at the base of my skull. “But you can handle it. You will, for me. In case you haven’t already understood this down to your bones, that’s the only way I’ll have things. Which means it’s the only way you’ll have us. In case you’ve forgotten, I am the one in control now—the decisions are mine to make, the shots mine call. So buck the fuck up, Damon. Things could be worse for you. Much worse.”

  When I tense all over, he seems to relent for a moment. Kissing my cheek again, he brushes his thumb over my jaw, until pleasure and need and the desire to please are surging hard through my veins, through my cock once more.

  “It’ll be all right,” he whispers in my ear. “You can do this.”

  My system nearly purrs at his tender touch, his kind, bolstering words, and the need to learn to be his blossoms anew in my chest. Kindness and cruelty—what a powerful elixir, and I am no more immune than any other slave.

  He snaps his fingers. “Both of you, come.”

  Oh, my cock jumps, but I am not quite so foolish, regardless of how addled my brain is with lust and his command, to think any relief is in sight. I stand up straighter, as does Aimée, and we follow him out the front door and get into the dark, shining car waiting at the curb.

  A few hours and another short chartered flight later and we’re in San Francisco, driving north from the airport with Christopher at the wheel of a black Hummer as the rising sun peers through a layer of fog. Aimée sits quietly in the front seat, while I am left alone in the back to simmer in my whirling thoughts. For a while, anyway.

  Christopher turns down the heavy, blaring music and says over his shoulder, “Damon, tell me what you’re thinking about.”

  I am startled into silence. What the hell? What does he want to know? What am I to say?

  “Damon,” he repeats, a low threat in his tone, and I find my voice.

  “Am I to speak freely?”

  “Ha! To a point.”

  I clear my throat, buying a moment to get my rushing thoughts in some sort of order. It doesn’t work terribly well. “This may be pushing the boundaries, but…I’m thinking this is some kind of sick joke, and I know damn well it’s supposed to be. It’s working, on some levels, at least, which I’m sure you know. Sir. Master Christopher.”

  “And?”

  “And I don’t think the fact that I nearly forgot to use your proper title went unnoticed.”

  He chuckles. “You think not?”

  “No, Sir.”

  “Hmm, ‘Sir’ is fine, for now, since I don’t officially own you. What else?”

  “My head is pretty fucked up being back in the City. Thinking about the fact that we’re driving toward my House, and how odd it is that it still is my House, given my present circumstances.”

  “And now you know some of the dichotomy that rules my existence.”

  “I do. I am also beginning to understand that until now—well, until recently—I’ve never experienced mind fuck in its truest form. And I don’t say that to flatter you—it’s simply the truth.”

  He nods, his profile illuminated by the wan early sun, all fine jawline and high cheekbones. He is so beautifully exotic, and I never fail to be affected by him. Not that I’m so entirely shallow that beauty alone is enough for me. No, it’s the aura of his power, as either slave or Master, that draws me in. But the exceptional bone structure and lush, cruel mouth don’t hurt.

  He is quiet again, leaving me in my own head. I try to keep my pulse steady, using breathing techniques taught to me by my first Masters years ago, and used by me on the slaves I’ve trained.

  Don’t think about that now.

  But it’s not easy with Aimée sitting there in the front seat, her hair shining softly in the dim morning light. I can see the lush curve of her breast. I want to touch it. To suck on it. Bite it. I want to remember what it was like to have her in my suite of rooms in the Training House. At my mercy. Under my hands. Under my whip.

  No.

  I nearly groan aloud. Being here, in this city—my city—is already getting to me. How will I bear it? Is this some sort of test, issued not only by Master Christopher, but by the universe? By God? Oh yes, I believe in God, in my own twisted way. It’s an element of the taboo part of kink for me. My struggle, whether as Master or slave. Perhaps it is a test on every level, the struggle itself. I am damn well determined to pass it, then. I spend the rest of the ride with my head bowed in contemplation, perhaps in a sort of prayer rather than the subservience I’m supposed to be immersed in.

  When the car stops, I look up. We’re across the street from the Panhandle end of Golden Gate Park—Fell Street, I believe—in front of a three story stucco home, gray with white trim. There is a garage at street level, with a gated entrance beside it, and the top two floors are all tall shuttered windows. It looks perfectly ordinary. But it’s his house, and I know already there will be nothing ordinary about it.

  We’ve stopped in the driveway—I can’t imagine there is any way a vehicle the size of the small Hummer will fit into the garage of an old San Francisco home—and our Master shuts off the engine.

  “Damon, help our girl from the car.”

  Biting back a flash of annoyance at being told to do something I’d do on my own, I get out and walk around to open Aimée’s door. When I offer her my hand, she takes it and gives it a squeeze, smiling at me, but I swear I see a flash of something in her lovely eyes. Fear? Doubt? Or is it nothing more than a reflection of my own?

  We follow our Master around the Hummer, and as he unlocks a heavy door next to the garage, it hits me in some impossible new-again way that Christopher is my Master, that I belong to him for whatever term or trial period this is. That my heart wants this as desperately as my mi
nd struggles against it. How did I end up in this strange place that feels so horribly alien to me, and yet so familiar that I’m doing these things—following instruction, taking the beatings—as if I were made for it? I am so afraid that if I allow myself to pause and truly ponder these ideas, I will fall apart, or explode in some fiery blast, like a dying sun.

  I am no longer making any sense. Ah, my beautifully wicked Master definitely knows what he’s doing.

  I give myself an internal shake as we step through and walk up a narrow wood staircase, and finally into a living room filled with morning light. The wood floors are polished to a high sheen. The arched doorways and crown moldings hold the original plaster elements of the 1940’s architecture, but nearly everything else is sleek and modern. A pair of large gray suede couches flank a fireplace, facing each other, with a table between them made of an enormous slab of thick glass set on a stone base. Modern art decorates the walls, and I recognize what I believe is an original Dali among the black-and-white photography, along with a few pieces of mounted ancient stone carvings and contemporary abstract paintings.

  I am astounded—not that Christopher should have such sophisticated tastes, but by the realization that it simply never occurred to me to wonder how he lived on the outside.

  “Sit,” he orders.

  Aimée and I both obey, settling side by side on one of the sofas like submissive bookends, which amuses me in some small way.

  “We’re going to talk now,” he says. “All of us, I think we’re overdue, but I wanted to get you into the necessary headspace, to see if you were able to do it, before we went any further into this. I want you both to put aside the deeper part of the roles of slave and submissive. Do you understand? I want to know where you’re both at.” He looks directly at me, that searing golden gaze on mine. “Damon. You start.”

  My skin feels as if it’s closing in on me, too tight for my body. Why is the talking more frightening than anything else he does to me? “I…am not exactly certain where I’m at. I’m still in shock, almost constantly questioning myself. I don’t know when that will go away, if at all. No, I know it will…if we continue.”

  “Are you saying you’re still not sure you can?”

  Now my entire body tightens all over—stomach, chest, even my fingers—and the words catch for a moment in my throat. “I don’t know. To be honest, there’s very little I’m sure of at this moment.”

  He shrugs, muscle rippling beneath the dark shirt. “Fair enough. Go on.”

  “I’m still fighting it. It makes sense to me that I would, given the complete turnaround in roles. It’s a lot to wrap my head around, no matter that it feels good, that it admittedly fills a need. It’s still fucking hard. Confusing. I have to question everything I’ve thought I was all these years.”

  “It’s a small identity crisis, yes?” Aimée interjects, touching the back of my hand.

  I glance at our Master, and see him give her a small nod of permission before she takes my hand fully in hers.

  “Yes,” I agree, lacing my fingers through hers, “except there’s nothing small about it. “

  He nods. “Of course.” Pausing, he rubs a hand over the dark stubble on his scalp, and even this simple motion, in this insanely intense moment, is pure sex to me. “Tell me about Master Stephan, about what your life was like before you became a slave. You’ve never talked to me about that except in passing.”

  My fingers tighten on Aimée’s. “I’ve never really talked to anyone but Master Stephan about my life before I came to him, other than my experience in the kink world.”

  “All the more reason to get into it now, with us. You understand how crucial this is?”

  He’s right, and I don’t like it. But I have to do this, to reveal myself, in order to give myself to him in the way I must. I want to fidget, but I resist, and the struggle is a sharp pain in my gut.

  “I don’t like to discuss these things,” I tell him, as if he doesn’t already know. Perhaps it’s more for my own benefit than his. “But then, we all have our secrets, don’t we?”

  “Not me,” Master Christopher says with one of his glorious little smirks. “I’m a fucking open book. I like to air my dirty laundry. I take a certain pleasure in it.”

  I smile. “That’s true. All right, then—I’ll try to take a cue from you.”

  I fidget a bit, then. I can’t help it. The world is closing in on me once more—the world and my tight, tight skin. Attempting to talk about my past feels like a loss, in some weird way, bringing old pain sharply to the surface.

  Daniel.

  Do not want to do this.

  Aimée gives my hand an assuring squeeze, so I take a breath and begin, though dread is coursing through my body. “Well, to start with, there was…my brother.”

  “What?” our Master demands as Aimée gasps sharply. “I never knew you had a brother.

  “No one does. Not anymore. I think even my parents have forgotten Daniel, but I haven’t. I keep him tucked away in a safe place, this impenetrable vault inside my mind. Impenetrable until now, I suppose.”

  I have to stop and take in a deep, gulping breath as goosebumps rise all over my body. I’m surprised at how much it hurts to say his name out loud, and I’ve only begun to tell the story.

  Fuck.

  “So…I had a little brother. And God, I hate to say those words—I had him—because it makes it even more abundantly clear that I don’t anymore.” I take another moment to collect myself, rubbing a hand over my jaw, massaging the back of my neck. It’s too damn hard to look at either of them now. I simply have to survive this moment. “He was two years younger than me, and we were the best of friends and occasional enemies growing up, as brothers often are. He was…I always thought he was so much like me. My sidekick. But looking back after, I realized I had no idea what his life was like, what went on in his head, how he felt about anything.”

  “After what?” Aimée dares to ask, her voice soft.

  The dread deepens, and I bite the inside of my cheek until there is blood on the edge of my tongue, then swallow some of the silvery-mercury flavor, focusing on the sensation as it slides down my throat. It helps a little. A very little, but I’ll take what I can right now.

  Just get the words out.

  “After he killed himself,” I say through numbed lips.

  “Oh!”

  I catch Aimée’s expression from the corner of my eye, but I can’t stand to see it, so I shift my gaze to Master Christopher’s stony face. It’s easier to look at him—the only change in his expression is a narrowing of his eyes, a slight tightness to his lush mouth. I’m grateful for his controlled demeanor, his lack of reaction. Perhaps he knows I need it. Yes, I’m certain he does.

  “He was only thirteen,” I continue. “Only thirteen, although I’ve heard a lot of people say that was the hardest year of their life. It’s that in-between space, when you’re no longer a child but not yet an adult, the first teen year. It’s a transition. I remember it myself, because that’s when I first admitted to myself I craved boys as much as girls. But for me, it was more about sexual discovery, and something in me was rebellious enough that I didn’t care what my conservative family would think. I liked being different from them. But Daniel…”

  I shake my head pensively, still so damn clueless after all these years. “I don’t actually know what the hell happened with him. Was he bullied? If so, I never saw it. Was he gay? If so, why didn’t he come to me? Was he depressed? If he was, he hid it so well I never knew. The mystery of it tortures me. I should have known something was wrong, that he was keeping secrets. I should have fucking known, but I didn’t.”

  In my mind’s eye I see his young body hanging from our father’s leather belt in the closet in his room. The absolute worst moment of my life. Master Stephan succumbing to cancer in my arms was nothing in comparison. I feel so shallow even thinking it, comparing the two terrible deaths, but it’s simply the truth. Perhaps that’s why I haven’t been able
to admit to my love for my former Master? But this moment is about my brother.

  “I wasn’t the one to discover him—no, that was our maid, who went screaming through the house. But I was the only one home, which happened more often than not, even when we were little. Death is always an ugly thing, and there’s nothing uglier than a suicide. Fuck.” I have to stop, biting my cheek again to chase away the pain of that awful word. “Just…fuck,” I repeat helplessly.

  Aimée slips her arm through mine and hangs on, and I lean into her comfort even as my body wants to reject it. I don’t deserve it, do I? I am the survivor, after all. It’s not fucking fair. I can’t even look at Christopher any longer. Instead, I cast my gaze to the floor as I whisper, “He was just a kid. And I was the big brother. I was supposed to protect him. I should have known something, done something, been more. I think…I’ve spent my entire life trying to make up for it.”

  “And so you took over the House, even though you didn’t really want to,” my Master says, not unkindly, despite the brutality of that truth.

  “Yes,” I whisper. My head is pounding, the hot, thready pulse beating in my temples. “Yes,” I repeat, perhaps to convince myself of the depth and veracity of this statement. “I’ve always known losing him—and even more, losing him in that way—has affected me. Profoundly. But until this moment… Well, I don’t know that I was ever fully conscious of exactly how it’s driven certain things in my life.” I have to pause, to think back on what has just come out of my mouth, what Christopher’s hit on so squarely. “I’ve never said the word ‘survivor’ aloud before. But that’s the whole thing, isn’t it? Wrapped up in that simple word. Jesus.”

  There is an opening sensation in my chest, and I understand instantly this admission has freed some part of me, even if it ripped my flesh and my soul on the way out. But is it enough to allow me to go on? To accept finding what I truly want, with my beloved Aimée, with Christopher as our Master? How can I possibly know? All I know is I have torn myself open, exposed the most unsightly, raw, aching part of my being. Is it any easier because I’ve done so with the people I love?