And the next.
More coupe glasses of champagne are handed out. A woman fucks her sub with a strap-on and I squirm in my seat. We’re given finger foods and hors d’oeuvres.
And still no Rebecca.
I check my phone I don’t know how many times. I send text after text—trying to be easy and calm and not clingy—but I don’t feel easy or calm right now. I feel like I want to cry. I feel like I want to crawl under the table and hide.
Rebecca is never late. Rebecca never sends me straight to voicemail.
I’m fine, she said. Nothing else. No excuses, no apologies, nothing at all.
Am I being stood up? Was I right all this time that she didn’t want to scene publicly with me because she was embarrassed? Does she want to hide me from her friends? I can live without her loving me—I think—but I don’t know if I can live with being an embarrassment.
But maybe I’m wrong? She did allow me to put the two of us on Instagram; we’ve been photographed together countless times at events and out in the city—it would be difficult to get more public than we’ve been in the last month. But then why would it be hard for her to show me off here? Is it because she couldn’t care less about tabloids and social media, but she does care about her peers here at the club?
“Delphine,” Emily says softly. She carefully pries the champagne coupe from my fingers; my hand has been shaking so badly that I’ve been sloshing the drink over the sides. She uses a napkin to wipe at my hand and wrist, and it’s so soothing to be taken care of like this, it’s so comforting. My breathing evens out the tiniest bit.
“Are you okay?” she asks. “We don’t need to stay if you aren’t.”
“I’m okay,” I lie, because I’m not okay, but I also want to stay. I want to see the people here, and I want them to see me. I want to belong to this stylish club of stylish deviants, and I don’t want to wait anymore.
“Let’s go up there,” Emily says suddenly. “You and me.”
I let out a short, inelegant huff of a laugh. “What?”
“You wanted this,” Emily says, leaning forward. “You deserve to have this, and you can have it, even if your mistress isn’t here. I’ll go up there with you.”
“But—”
“Doesn’t Rebecca share you anyway? Sometimes?”
I take a sip of champagne, unable to phrase an answer. Because—yes—there’s Thornchapel, where all of us have kissed and petted and fucked to some extent. And also because—no. Rebecca doesn’t share me here in London. And she hasn’t even shared me at Thornchapel since I officially became hers.
“You should be shown off. Anyone would be proud to show you off, including me,” Emily continues in a quiet voice. “I know she would feel the same.”
“I don’t know about that,” I mutter, taking another sip. If she were proud, she’d be here right now. Or at the very least she wouldn’t have given me the brush-off.
“What’s your favorite punishment?” Emily asks.
“Spanking. But I don’t—”
“Ah, spanking. A simple girl, I like it. Let’s go up there and get you spanked.”
“I can’t,” I say with finality. Even as I think why can’t I?
I’ve been with other people at Thornchapel, and Emily is Poe’s ex and friend, which surely makes her an honorary part of our circle? And it’s not as if Emily and I are going to kiss or have sex. It would be a little platonic spanking between friends.
I’m fine, Rebecca said.
Well, I’m not. I’m not fine. My panic is turning into shame, which is turning into anger. Why shouldn’t I get to have this? Just because Rebecca can’t be bothered? How is that fair?
“Only spanking?” I ask, looking at Emily.
Her eyes glitter with victory in the dim light. “Only spanking.”
I’m the only one who gets to hurt you, is that clear?
The memory of Rebecca’s voice filters through my thoughts, but I push it away. This isn’t what she meant, I justify to myself. She meant about my work—she was talking about taking care of myself at work. Not a harmless light spanking.
“Let’s do it,” I say and then finish off my champagne.
Emily only smiles.
The scene on stage finishes after only a few more moments, and then the emcee for the night asks for any other volunteers while the stage is cleaned behind her. Emily stands, and so do I, and heads swivel as we walk down through the booths and tables to the shallow steps at the side of the stage.
Up here, under the bright lights, in front of all these eager, lust-filled eyes, a giddy kind of joy suffuses me. It’s humming, it’s electric; I feel every cell in my body spark up and hum with energy. And when Emily confidently issues orders and I obey, I spark even more. I ignite like a Catherine wheel, all color and glitter and heat.
I love this. I love being right here.
It should be Rebecca here with me.
The thought barely has time to register, because I’m already bent over the spanking bench—a pleasantly comfortable model with a padded riser for my knees and a second padded surface at waist level for me to bend over and lie on. Once I’m arranged, I rest my head on my folded arms and turn so I can see the crowd. So I can see them seeing me.
Emily flips up my short skirt with flourish, and I don’t even need to see the audience—I can feel their reaction. Their murmurs, their shiftings in their seats. They like seeing my bottom exposed like this. They like seeing me exposed like this, patiently and sweetly humiliated.
There is a stillness that comes, then, after I kneel and after I’m presented to them.
It’s like the stillness before a rifle shot, with fog in the air and damp Scottish heather scratching at my boots. It’s like the pause before the first swipe of lipstick over my mouth.
It’s the first barely-there hiss of water against a boat’s hull, just as it starts to move.
The quiver that shivers through me settles low in my belly and takes root between my legs. It’s trepidation and delight and reckless anticipation.
The first strike is so sudden, so swift, that I don’t even have time to react before the second one hits in the exact same spot. I let out a surprised oh, and the crowd stirs again, watching and watching with eager eyes.
Emily moves to the other cheek, and then back again, alternating sides but stuttering her rhythm so I can’t guess where and when she’ll hit next. There’s no regularity, no certainty, no mental comfort. My comfort will come from her, and only when she allows it.
And she can read me with eerie precision: when I flinch, she waits, when I cry out, she strikes again, faster and harder. Heat stings across my skin and settles beneath the surface. I feel parts of my body that I hardly think about otherwise—the blood flushing up in the shape of her hands, the muscles quivering underneath. The hollow architecture of my skeleton jouncing with each strike. The parts of my body that move when she hits me, and the parts that don’t. My breasts flattened underneath me, my heart beating like a drum behind them, my lungs dilating inside my ribs, my teeth clicking together on the particularly nasty spanks.
The crowd is beyond warmed up now, they’re hot, they’re hot and restless with me. They breathe when I breathe, they gasp when I gasp. When I open my eyes and peer past the lights into the first few rows, I see people openly petting and sucking each other while they watch me.
I am their living pornography—their object of lust and their shameful catharsis all at once.
I love it so much that I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to unfold myself and walk off this stage. Maybe I can stay here, maybe I can live in this moment forever—
Emily finishes with a flurry so fast and vicious that I begin to cry. Big tears, lots of them, spilling effortlessly down my face, and it feels so good, not only for the release from the pain, but for the release from the empty, numb anguish of earlier today. Of yesterday.
It’s a release that’s almost like orgasm, but even more intimate for how vulnerable it is, how wit
nessed it is.
How savored it is.
I cry and the people watching moan—in envy or in appetite or both—and we’re bound together by it. By the witnessing and the savoring.
I’m smiling into my arms as I cry.
Emily smooths her hand over my bottom. It wasn’t a bad spanking—certainly not the kind that calls for cold packs or arnica—but after anything like this, I need to be petted and soothed. I need to be called a good girl. I need to be loved on.
And she does, she does all the things I need. She rubs my sore skin as she leans down to murmur tender appreciations, she carefully rearranges my skirt to restore my modesty, she helps me back to my feet. She doesn’t fondle me, she doesn’t palm anywhere she shouldn’t.
She doesn’t do anything wrong.
And yet the minute I straighten up and blink out into the audience, everything feels wrong.
Guilt comes crashing down onto me; it breaks over my head and shakes me down to my marrow, leaving the rubble of the last ten minutes in a heap around my feet.
Shame comes next, then more loneliness than ever.
And I know exactly why. It’s because the moment I shifted position and stood, the moment my thighs pressed together, I could feel how wet I’d become. I could feel how my nipples pushed and pebbled against the lace of my bra and snagged against my sheer blouse.
I told myself before we came up here that it was supposed to be a friendly spanking, that there was nothing sexual or improper about it . . . and now here I am with a ready body and a racing heart standing next to someone who’s not Rebecca.
The wrongness of it sends me abruptly off the stage, down the steps, and hurrying through the tables to find a way out of here—a way to anywhere, I don’t even care. A hallway, the lobby, the street. I can’t be in here a single second longer, and I only just barely force myself to move calmly, to keep my face serene, before I find the exit at the back of the theatre and take the stairs up to the main floor. I know I left Emily on the stage, I know that might have looked strange, but I’m past caring, I’m past everything—
“Delphine, wait.”
Emily’s voice echoes across the marble-floored lobby. I force myself to stop. I force myself to turn.
When she sees my face, her lips part. “Are you okay?”
“No, I’m—I’m not quite okay.”
She searches my face. “I didn’t push you too hard? Take it too far?”
No.
No, Emily’s only sin was helping me commit my own.
I shake my head. “You didn’t take it too far. You didn’t . . . take liberties.”
“Then why—”
“I liked it too much,” I cut in. It’s impolite, I was raised never to be impolite—or at least to use impoliteness with a certain kind of sophistication if the weapon was called for—but I can’t help the way the truth spills out of me. “I love her, Emily. I didn’t think—I shouldn’t have liked it like that.”
Emily’s face softens. Even with the septum piercing and the black lipstick, she looks kind. Gentle. “It’s a physiological response, Delphine,” she says. “One you’ve been training yourself to have for a long time. It doesn’t make you culpable of anything.”
I’m already shaking my head. “I got up there with you. I knelt for you. I’m culpable.”
Emily takes a step forward. “Don’t flagellate yourself over this,” she chastens. “That’s our job. Anyway, Rebecca will understand completely when you explain it to her. Unless . . . ”
She’s so close now that I can count her eyelashes, that I can pick out the golden striations in her brown eyes.
“Unless what?” I whisper.
“Unless you want to do something you can’t explain.” And then she leans forward and kisses me.
The kiss is warm and assertive. In that way, it’s like kissing Rebecca.
But in every other way, it’s not.
Rebecca tastes like mint, and Emily tastes like coffee. Rebecca peppers her kisses with nips and bites, and Emily prefers to stroke inside my mouth with her tongue. Rebecca loves to grab and seize at me—my wrists, my hips, my hair—and Emily only runs her hands up my arms, as if she’s mapping me for future exploration.
I receive the kiss passively at first, utterly floored by it, but by the time my mind has caught up, my body is already racing ahead, responding to her lips and tongue with matching flickers and strokes, ready to deepen the kiss, ready to press against her.
It’s a nice kiss from a fit woman. But it’s not the woman I want kisses from, it’s not her, it’s not Rebecca. With a gasp, I tear away from Emily and stagger back, my fingers coming up to my lips.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I love her and I—I can’t do that.”
Emily reaches for me, she opens her mouth—now smeared with my own lipstick, pink over black—but I don’t wait to hear what she has to say. I can’t. I wheel around and go outside, where the evening light still hangs in a rosy shroud over the city and where I find one of the club’s footman outside.
“Hello, yes, so sorry to bother you. But could you get my things for me from inside? And help me call my car? I need to leave, and I can’t go back inside.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Rebecca
Everything changed three years ago.
Everything and nothing at all.
When I heard the key turn in the lock that night, I was sitting in my flat with a glass of wine and another two hours of work to do before I could call it a day. Then, as it is now, only one other person had a key, so I didn’t bother getting up. It would be Auden, probably hungry or bored or wanting to gossip, too sober to entertain himself or too drunk to eat a kebab alone. I was used to his unannounced visits.
Which meant I was unprepared for whom I saw coming up the stairs. For the flaxen hair, and the doll face, and the curves right out of some Teutonic milkmaid fantasy.
Delphine Dansey.
Dislike surged instantly: she was everything that made me impatient. She was every vapid, moneyed, horse-owning girl that had nettled me at school. Every effete client too ridiculous and entitled to listen to the reality of soil composition and hill slopes and which climate conditions could support imported tropical plants.
Delphine was emblematic of the whole lot to me. Vain, superficial, callous, and callow. That she was beautiful only made it worse; that she was cheerful only made it worse than that. Everyone believed her to be some kind of perfect English rose, and only I knew the truth: she was a brat.
Luckily for Delphine, and even luckier for me, my thoughts move quickly. And so from the first glimpse of her golden hair to the sight of her face, I remembered she was Auden’s good friend, and I remembered what had happened to her last spring. I remembered the trial.
I got to my feet, but I didn’t say anything.
Auden was behind her, one hand on the small of her back, the other holding his phone as they mounted the stairs. When he looked up from his phone and saw me, his entire body seemed to quake with relief.
“Rebecca,” he said. The flat was all open spaces and hard surfaces, so I could hear him easily, even though he spoke in the quiet, forced tones of someone trying very, very hard to keep it together.
Concern flooded through me. My friend could be many things—bitter, restless, melancholic—but he never, ever looked like he was about to break. Even at his worst moments, the times when I knew his father had hit him, when his mother had caused a drunken scene, when he had worn himself down to the bone to prove himself at school or his new firm—even then, he moved through life with a sepia-toned elegance and genteel control.
More than once it had occurred to me that he might enjoy my same deviant tastes, because that control, that restraint—it wasn’t all inherited Guest decorum and educated finish, oh no. It was innate to him, inborn. Authority, hubris, insolence. Streaks of cruelty. As deep in him as his vision, his discipline, his loyalty. As deep as his fiercely moral view of the world and everyone in it.
; “Do you need to sit . . . ” The invitation died on my lips. It was meant for Auden, but once I saw Delphine’s face, I knew that she wasn’t okay either, I knew that she needed to sit more.
Her luxurious gold waves hung limply around her face, lank with lack of washing and flat with sleeping. Her face was stripped bare of makeup—which wasn’t concerning by itself—but her eyes had deep smudges underneath and her lips were frightfully chapped and split. She was wearing wrinkled rich-girl pajamas—silk and lapelled, with buttons marching up between braless breasts—and a pair of expensive trainers without socks.
I slid my eyes over to Auden’s, and what I saw there was desperation.
“I didn’t have—” His hand left Delphine’s back to stab anxiously through his hair, which settled back over his forehead the minute his fingers left it. “I’m so sorry, Quartey. I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”
Delphine didn’t seem to react to this, not much anyway. She heaved a little sigh and then drifted farther into the room, standing there like the world’s most pathetic mannequin.
“Guest,” I said. “Get yourself a drink.”
“I can’t,” he murmured, looking down at the phone.
“Did you drive?”
“Yes.”
“Are you leaving again?” I looked over to Delphine, who still stood in the middle of the room. It bothered me to see her motionless. To see her dull. Always she was laughing and chattering and beaming, always always, and I’d thought I hated it, but—
This was worse. Much worse.
“Delphine,” I said, my voice coming out sharper than I’d planned. “Sit down.”
I hadn’t meant it to come out like a command, but perhaps I was more upset than I realized. I took in a breath to apologize—to soften the order and make it more of a suggestion—but she surprised me and Auden both when she dutifully walked over to one of the sofas and sat. She stared straight ahead, eyes focused on nothing, her lush mouth in a dead, expressionless shape.
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