Slowly, the weight of the city and her sour memories lifted from her—that and breathing crisp, natural, air. Her stomach settled a bit and her sour attitude changed to that of simple annoyance mixed with a sharp spike of anxiety: I wonder what he’ll be like—Max Bloom, watching her pack, had given her a few hints about her life to come—but, by far, few too many. She knew that her life as a Slave rarely had to do with her direct wishes—the whole reason, in fact, why she’d become one—but, still, to fly clear across the country to walk, basically blindfolded about everything that her life would be was a little... well, she was irritated enough with the flight and coming back to San Francisco.
“Yes,” Bloom admitted as he’d supervised her packing (or at least the amount of objects he’d allow her to take with her), “it is rather unusual. But then you are going to California.
“Let me put it this way,” he’d continued, “I’ve heard there’s some very unusual arrangements that get made for Slaves on the West Coast. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if you are going to find yourself in one of them.”
The memory of the auction haunted her through her packing, her trip to the airport, the flight. Her nervousness had been almost physical—no matter how hard she tried she couldn’t calm her body: her memories of the auction vied with excitement and fear. The hall had been a flurry of Masters and Mistresses claiming their purchases—some trying them out with an echoing chorus of trial punishments—but not for Doris. She had stood and waited for what seemed like an eternity until a round little Japanese man in an immaculate black silk suit, all bottle-bottom glasses and little bowler hat, presented her with a small card and a thick envelope and left, without giving her a chance to even blink.
In the envelope was a plane ticket to San Francisco, the note had said in hard courier type (an affectation she’d realized as the card was computer-printed): Leave immediately. You will be met.
So there she was, better—not so miserable—but, still, not completely comfortable at being whisked back to the city of her childhood, her painful adolescence.
At least, she mused, waiting, she was coming back as the Slave she always wanted to be.
“You the new slut?”
At first Doris didn’t hear him—the cold echoes of the terminal drowned out his deep voice. That, and the source being so unexpected: if she had to pick anyone out of the tourists, businessmen, the casual travelers it would not have been him.
Tall, almost disturbingly so. He was thin, almost touching on emaciated—he stared at her from behind mirrored sunglasses, a wickedly lascivious grin breaking across the lower half of his face. A brilliant rooster-crest of a Mohawk leapt from the top of his otherwise brilliantly smoothed and polished head. A spill of silver earrings caught even the crappy fluorescent lights of the terminal and brilliantly flashed.
He wore threadbare denim cut-offs and a stained white T-shirt that might have said something, one time or another, but was now just a pale pink blob of illegibility.
“Hey,” then he whistled, painfully shrill in the closed concrete overhangs, “you. I said, ‘Are you the new slut?’”
Doris passionately resisted pointing to her chest with a stupid Who, me? gesture. Instead she dipped her eyes and folded her hands over her blue-suited stomach. “I’m from the Marketplace,” she said, not wanting to use “sir” in case he was just the punk he seemed, and hoping that dropping it wouldn’t get her in bad graces—if he was, indeed, her new Master.
“Cool. I’m Spunk,” he said, tossing her a small black helmet. “Get on.”
She caught it, clumsily, almost dropping it onto the hard concrete. “I don’t know what you—” she started to say as ‘Spunk’ (her new Master?) stepped aside, showing her a gleaming chrome motorcycle. Doris didn’t know that much about cycles but she knew enough to hold her breath in reverent awe of its elegant power, its erotic, throbbing majesty.
“Excuse me,” she said, trying assertive timidity, as she walked toward him, “but I really don’t know what’s going on.”
“Sure you do, slut—sure you do!” Spunk walked up to her, meeting her halfway, and towering over her. “Marketplace, right? You’re what’s commonly called a ‘slave,’ right? Well, see my Pa is the one that just bought you, which means that you belong to Pa and if you belong to Pa you also belong to me.”
That was enough for Doris. Bloom would have been proud of her: “Yes, Sir,” she said, standing straight and dipping her head down to look at his scuffed, battered combat boots. “I’m sorry, Sir, I misunderstood.”
Spunk laughed, deep and short, like a shotgun blast in the echoing corridors. “At ease, slut. Yeah, you’re property and all that, and, yeah, you’re gonna be used like you’ve never been used before, but, fuck, you’re still... what the fuck’s your name, anyway, slut?”
“Doris, Sir.”
“Doris? Fuck, that’s a slut’s name if ever I heard one,” he said, smiling. “Well, Doris, stick that thing on your head, stash your junk in the saddlebag, and let’s go meet the folks.”
Not in a million years—well, maybe in five hundred thousand... Doris hung onto the back of Spunk’s bike, all conversation, and most of her thoughts, lost to the thrumming power of the machine between her legs—all save for her bubbling incredulity of her situation: Spunk? Pa? Folks?
Spunk wasn’t what she’d call a Masterful type. But, still, she had to admit that she had a certain powerful... attraction to the slim punk. Agreed, a big helping of that was the fact that she had spent the better part of a half hour with her arms wrapped firmly around him, her breasts pressed against his strong back, his throbbing... engine between her legs, thumping stronger than any vibrator ever could.
And his hand. Mustn’t forget his hand.
The trip had started out with a bang—with her heart in her throat. Once she was on and seated as securely as she could, Spunk fired the bike up and tore out of the terminal—a pair of screams echoing behind his tearing sprint: one from the bike’s tires on the abrasive concrete and the other from Doris.
Soon though, sooner than she would have expected, the ride floated down over Doris and her fear dropped down to a dull vibration that closely matched the rumble of the bike—that and most likely because she couldn’t see forward because of Spunk’s back. She could, however, look to the right or the left—but after seeing a few blurring streaks that she realized were cars being passed at their maniac speed she decided it was much better to stare at either Spunk’s back or the inside of her own eyelids by closing her eyes.
The ride, thankfully, wasn’t long—but it was... interesting. About the time she’d decided that watching traffic pass by them (or, better yet, them passing traffic by) was risky to either her stomach—again—or her sanity she felt his hand push its way insistently between her left thigh and Spunk’s back.
At first she thought that Spunk might be trying to tell her something, maybe to get her to stop trying to squeeze his stomach out his back, but then she realized what his hand was reaching for.
A flash of shivering fear blasted through her. Well, actually two, distinct, spasms. One was that Spunk would lose control of the bike and they’d spill—horribly—down onto the freeway. The second was almost as primal—that she didn’t know what her Master wanted, and how to please him.
Shortly, though, what he wanted became clear—and that the bike never dipped or wove even in the slightest diminished her first fear as well—as his hand reached precariously back and under her, cupping her ass.
The drumming hum of the bike, the powerful strength of Spunk; the delightful mystery of what her life was going to be like; the warm return of the sense of being property, of being a slave; all of it—of course Spunk’s thumb curled up and roughly dipped into her cunt and found wetness. Of course—was there ever a question? She was a Slave, he was her Master (at least she thought so).
He stayed inside her for what seemed like ages—because you don’t measure time when you’re riding on a bike (especially not with a th
umb in your cunt), you measure distance: Spunk’s hand stayed inside her cunt for miles and miles.
She didn’t expect to come—not at all. Coming, what with the fear of falling off, the oppressive doubts that ricocheted around in her dazed mind, didn’t feel like a possibility.
But, still, she shivered and shook, a quaking spasm that raced up from his thumb, tapping with the echoing rumble of the bike against her G-spot—if not a true come then a damned good near one.
Just as she was about to reach down—so pleasurable was the thrill that she was about to delusionally risk her balance on the speeding bike—and position his hand and thumb better to push her completely over the edge, he pulled his hand firmly out to replace it on the clutch of the bike.
Dizzy with fear and the near-shattering come, Doris relaxed against his strong back, losing herself in the bike’s throbbing vibration and the sudden tilts and swings as Spunk easily glided them off the freeway and down into the city proper.
Even though Doris had spent a big chunk of her adolescence—too big a chunk—in the city, she couldn’t really tell where they were headed, and where they ended up. Her brain was addled and fried by the clenching fear of the ride and the thumping of her heart from the near orgasm for anything as delicate or right-brain as navigation.
Still, she was able to pick out certain landmarks: a cafe all glass and golden lettering, a shuttered and dark church, the grumble of LRV tracks under the bike’s tires, the sudden, stomach-grabbing lurch of a severe hill... placed her somewhere near Dolores park, maybe touching the Castro, maybe kissing Noe valley.
Then they stopped. Doris had shifted her vision, turned her head to the right so she missed their approach—in fact, she was so rattled both from the ride and Spunk’s thumb in her cunt, that she didn’t realize they’d completely stopped till he heeled the kickstand down and leaned the bike onto it.
“Come on, slut—we’re here,” he said, smiling, as he pulled off his own helmet, then helped her extract her befuddled head from her own. Freed from its almost too-tight headlock, she shook her head—both to clear it and to free the many tangles of her long brown hair—and had the delightful sight of Spunk, smiling, as he sucked her juice off his leather-gloved hand.
Then she saw the house.
Still, seeing it, she didn’t know exactly where she was. The street was like so many, too many, in San Francisco: tall, elegant homes like the sides of a filigreed canyon, a gingerbread gulch. Even simplicity seemed baroque in the ornamental chaos of the street—a window in San Francisco could never escape being just a window. Stickers, age-old political posters, and a citywide delightful kaleidoscope of gay pride rainbow flags decorated or despoiled in colorful confusion.
The house that Spunk nodded her towards was hardly simple. Yet it wasn’t the fractal business of some of San Francisco’s more outré homes. It walked a neat line without falling one way or the other. Not plain with windows colored with signs, posters and flags, and not achingly busy. Its basic form was Victorian, three floors; three bay windows; three smaller, square ones; and one delightful oval peering out of a peaked attic. It was blue—a peaceful, just-after-dawn blue—trimmed with a lighter—a little later after dawn—blue. It looked well-kept and serene without the anal retentive fragility of never-touched china. People lived in this house, Doris knew, but didn’t live for the house.
“Come on, slut,” Spunk said, retrieving the helmet from Doris with a playful grab, “you gotta meet the folks.”
“Yes, Sir,” she said, reflexes kicking the words out of her numb mouth as her—maybe—Master walked up a short set of stairs to the little-after-dawn blue of the front door.
“Jeeze, slut,” he said, turning to smile and gently shake his head, as he fed a key into the lock, “knock it off, willya? Sound like a fucking Stepford slave or something—”
Then the door was open, and Spunk stepped aside, a Mohawked gentleman bidding her to enter and—taking an unconscious breath—Doris did.
The room was surprising, enough to stop her one foot inside. If there’s one thing that never seems to go with ridiculous baroque San Francisco architecture it was austere Japanese—yet that’s what she was facing, in all its meditative simplicity: shoji screens, tatami mats, elegant cabinetry, futons placed with a powerful feng shui precision, leafless branches polished to religious smoothness set in deep islands of oval black rocks, and even a tiny wood-framed alcove—a miniature zen garden filled with immaculately raked sand and focused with elegantly placed stones, brilliant with redirected sunlight.
“Ma! Pa! We’re home!” bellowed Spunk from behind her as he closed the door and dumped their helmets discordantly on the polished hardwood floor.
“Hi, honey—we’re in the kitchen. Did everything go okay?” a chiming, elegant voice said somewhere behind the Asian decorating.
“No problem, man. Found her turning tricks in the garage. Had to wait my turn,” Spunk said, smiling down at her, twinkles dancing in jewel-blue eyes after he took off his glasses. Doris was so shocked by their beauty that, for all of three seconds all she could do was stare—until he took her gently by the hand and pulled her, still shocked and more than a little frightened, through the serenity of the living room and past an open, immaculate, shoji screen and into the kitchen.
Three heartbeats to take it all in: Japanese outside, smooth, cool, crisp industrial inside. A set of absolutely clean windows overlooking a riotous green backyard of vines, painfully brilliant flowers, and a distant, high wooden fence. Simple steel cabinets lining almost every other surface of the kitchen, surrounding a massive wooden cutting block.
Doris liked to cook, so, naturally, her eyes first danced over the equipment: Wolf, Krup, and all their expensive kin. She lingered over the brass pots and skillets, paused at the ornate and beautifully displayed jars of herbs, spices, and dried fruit and vegetables.
Doris was a slave, so next her eyes quickly saw the people there:
“Welcome,” said a large man with that musical voice she’d heard. It would have been easy to call him fat, but not accurate: he was large, tall (though sitting down), broad, and his skin—what Doris could see of it—was smooth and supple, but he wasn’t fat. Bald, eyebrow-less, he had a playful elegance about him, a kind of divine contemplation of the universe. He wasn’t as fat as the Buddha, but he was almost as serenely powerful. He was dressed in a deceptively simple black silk shirt and pants, and sat, contemplative and immobile, on a black barstool. On his feet were a pair of split-toed tabi slippers. “I’m Maurice. You can call me, ‘Ma’,” he said with a beautifully balanced nod of his finely sculpted head.
Then someone slapped her hard on the back, pitching her forward against the pull from her single bag she still carried. She didn’t fall, but she did stumble a bit, reaching, but not needing to catch, the side of the butcher-block table.
“Ain’t she a fine one, hon? Dig this ass—ain’t that a divine ass? Man, can I pick ’em, or can I pick ’em?” said a thunderous voice from behind Doris. Dropping her bag, completing the motion of her near fall, she turned.
If Ma was regal elegance, then this woman was raw power, barely caged. She was tall and evenly distributed, almost as tall as Spunk who was standing behind her, with a face that was hard but not brutal: as if she’d sculpted herself, manipulated her demeanor to hang somewhere between male and female. Her breasts, for instance, were obviously large and well-shaped, but were trapped behind a firm sports bra, under a spotless T-shirt, then behind a shiny leather vest decorated with perhaps a dozen brilliant insignia. On her head was an equally immaculate leather cap, and on her legs were polished leather chaps over a pair of artistically worn jeans. She didn’t have any earrings or jewelry of any kind—but she did have a mustache: it was fine and delicate, a soft brown line that was only a shade or two away from her own butch-cropped color. Roughly, she reached out and took Doris’s hand and shook it firmly. “Put ’er there, babe. Welcome to the house of the rising ass—” She thought that was hysterical,
and laughed like a longshoreman. “I’m Pauline—’Pa’ around here. Glad ta have ya!” Then Pa bent down and picked Doris completely off her feet, touching her head on the ceiling, in a wild hug—laughing even more.
“I’m happy to be here... Sir,” Doris mumbled, shaken (literally). It had all been too much: the flight, her stomach, the ride, Spunk’s thumb, the strange house, the even stranger... masters?... all of it was a jumble, a mad chaos in her mind. She wanted to scream for order, for someone to say Me: Master, You: Slave. She wanted to please, to be what she always wanted to be: Doris the prized property, Doris the cherished object.
She felt like she was on the motorcycle again, tearing through unfamiliar territory at breakneck speed—and she feared she was going to fall off at any second....
Seeing the elaborate play of emotions across her face, the woman who wanted to be called ‘Pa’ smiled, and as she did her mask of roughness seemed to lift a bit, to be lifted to show a thin slice of firm reality beneath it: “You’re among friends here, slut; friends and much more. We might not be the ‘ideal’ as far as the Marketplace is concerned, but we are all skilled Masters, good Slaves, and fine people. It might seem odd at first, but before you know it you’ll know... you’re home.”
Home was a bad word, it kicked her hard in the gut, making her already weak knees even weaker. It was a frightening word, the last word in a thought, a spoken phrase that meant humiliation (of the bad kind), pain (of the bad kind), and sex (of the very, very bad kind) as in “I have to go home now.”
But she wasn’t that Doris, the frightened Doris. She could feel her Trainer behind her, his warm, firm hand on her back, reminding her that she was Slave Doris—and that Slave Doris was very, very special.
Still... San Francisco... family....
“Thank you... Sir?” She put a warbling inflecting in the last word, a slight beg for clarity.
The Academy Page 23