"Trust me," Will had said, when leaving David at the door of this bedroom done in a French Second Empire style that matched the architecture. "In the morning you'll start to understand."
The man at the gatehouse had greeted Will as "Mr. Garland," as had someone who could only be a butler, but they had seen no one else. Who lived here? How did Will know them? Why the Hell was David going along with this?
Well, the last question was easy to answer: Will had never steered him wrong. The older man's tastes might run to slightly racier extremes than David's own, but on several memorable occasions Will had introduced David to certain pleasures he probably wouldn't have had the audacity to try on his own.
That was why, David had reflected as he fell asleep Thursday night, the advice to be patient with Maud had seemed so strange. Indeed, that piece of advice was running the risk of being the first bum steer Will had ever given him. After the strange call with the interference and then the second call saying Maud wasn't coming over after all and she would see him Saturday, he had resolved that he would take her out for a nice dinner on Saturday as he had planned, but he wouldn't bring up her submitting to him the way he had thought he might, and then he would stop by her apartment on Sunday and put a regretful end to the thing.
He had given it more than a month since he had confessed to Will that he thought he and Maud weren't going to make it, despite how over-the-moon David had been in November.
"You don't blame me, though, right?" Will had asked over their weekly lunch, the Friday after New Year's.
"Why would I blame you?" David asked, taking a sip of water.
"You know, because I got you into D/s."
"Dude," David replied, laughing, "you didn't get me into D/s."
"Come on," Will said, in a tone of mock-offense. "Don't tell me you would ever have spanked a girl if I hadn't made you spank Monica."
"You didn't make me." David said, feeling a bit of anger rise at the thought. "You suggested it, and I decided to try it, and it worked."
"Okay, okay," Will said, raising his hands above his sandwich in a conciliatory gesture. "But am I right in thinking that you're going to break up with Maud because she's not into it? That you told her she needed a spanking, and some good, hard, come-for-me-you-little-bitch fucking, and she wasn't having any?"
David kept his silence, but he knew his eyes betrayed the accuracy of the guess.
"Don't," Will said simply. "Give it a month. Give it until Valentine's Day at least. I have a feeling Maud will come around. I think you two are good together."
Now here Maud came in her VW. David began to get the feeling that the whole thing was one amazing set up. For what, though? Twenty hours in this bedroom, luxurious as it was and as extensive as was the selection on the bookshelf—featuring some rather spectacular erotica—and on the TV—every imaginable channel including some adult ones David had never heard of—had strained his tolerance of Will's mysteriousness. That strain vanished the instant he caught sight of Maud's car driving up the long tree-lined avenue towards the house. In place of skepticism, though, his curiosity became almost maddening.
Suddenly, without warning, the TV turned itself on. David looked back from the window to see that the screen showed a view at ground level of Maud's car, as someone who seemed to be a parking attendant walked out to meet it, while the butler stood ready a few yards away. Maud got out with a puzzled—or frightened?—look on her face. The attendant got in and drove the VW away.
The butler must have been wearing a mic, because the sound came very clearly. "Welcome, Miss Fredericks," he said.
Maud turned from watching her car driven around the back of the house to look at the butler. "Is this..."
"The Society of Saint Valentine, yes," the butler said. The what? David thought. What the Hell is going on? "Follow me, please."
The view on the screen changed as Maud passed in through the big door. Wordlessly, the butler led her through the foyer to a door that lay beyond the grand staircase he and Will had come up. The butler opened the door, and suddenly the view changed again, to a camera inside the room that lay on the other side, showing the look on Maud's face as she saw what awaited her. She took a step back, but now the butler had taken up a station behind her, and he propelled Maud firmly into the room. He stepped back, and closed the door. The click of a lock sounded.
Maud said, "Oh, no." Her eyes had gone wide, and she had begun to breathe very quickly.
Then the camera panned, and David saw what had alarmed the girl he loved.
The room was a sumptuous bathroom, tiled in marble. Another girl, a beautiful, busty brunette, sat reclining naked in what looked like a cross between a dentist's chair and a gynecologist's exam table. Her legs were spread wide in the knee stirrups, and a third girl, a redhead, dressed only in a pair of pink panties, sat on a stool between the brunette's legs, waxing her cunt.
It took David a moment to realize that the girl in the chair had been strapped to it, and that she also had a sort of gag in her mouth, which appeared on closer inspection to be a pair of lacy panties. Her eyes went wide, apparently at the sight of Maud.
The girl doing the waxing said, without turning around, "Hello, Maud. I'll just finish up Mandy's pussy and then it will be your turn. Go ahead and get undressed for me like a good girl, please."
David Ross took an analytic approach to life. His mind, ever since he could remember, had had the power to observe its own working, and this observer-function, as David thought of it, clicked along whether he willed it or not like an old-fashioned movie-camera, always ready to offer its notes and comments so that much of life felt to him like he was in a movie that, at the same time, he was watching.
Now, the feeling of watching himself watching Maud grew vertiginous for a moment as David's mental observer rendered one urgent judgment: not surprise—a fact that, paradoxically, surprised him—but affirmation. Yes. That's what my girl needs—what I couldn't give her.
Something else clicked into place at that point: the reason he had really from the moment Will told him that he should be patient with Maud rejected the advice and delayed breaking up with her partly to make sure that he could do it gently and partly to humor Will. Only a fool thinks he's always right, he knew—though David tended to be right more often, it seemed to him, than most people. Now he knew that indeed his opinion had held the essential truth about Maud: David didn't have the power to show her how badly she needed to submit to him.
After all, David Ross couldn't force Maud to come to some chateau in Connecticut on Valentine's Day. He couldn't have her boyfriend waiting upstairs, watching on a video monitor as Maud turned around desperately and tried the locked door behind her. He couldn't force the issue that appeared so clearly in Maud's face as, still trying the doorknob she turned to look at the girls behind her: her hope of escaping the preparation she could see she must receive, between her thighs, for the things that she, like David, could only assume awaited her tonight, there in her eyes right alongside her craving for those same things.
Before this moment, David would have assumed that no one could do that, but apparently he had yet again underestimated Will Garland.
The girl in the pink panties continued waxing Mandy as if Maud were not trying to flee, until at last Maud gave up on the door and turned back around as if to see whether this lovely bathroom had another exit. With Maud, David noticed an enormous claw-footed tub in the corner from which he saw steam rising, and a mirror that ran the length of one wall, and—next to the mirrored wall at a right angle from it—a rack upon which hung a marvelous panoply of the sort of lingerie Maud never wore.
At that point, whether because Mandy's cunt and bottom-crack were now entirely smooth and bare—which David could see they were—or because the girl on the stool could sense that Maud's reactions had reached some proper stage for it, she said, casually and still without turning, "Mandy here had to have her clothes taken off for her. I'd ask her to tell you what happened then, but unfortunately
she made too much noise, and the attendant had to put her panties in her mouth, as you can see. Do you want to have to taste your panties, Maud? Whenever a girl gets a panty-gag here, we make sure that the part that's wet goes right on her tongue, to teach her that she must learn not to refuse her master's commands, no matter how shameful."
Maud shook her head wildly, her back against the door and her hands clenched in front of her chest. She had apparently taken off her winter coat for the drive to Connecticut, and then not thought to fetch it from the car when she got out here at the chateau: she wore her usual work outfit, which David always found incredibly cute and even hot, in a sort of fucking-the-secretary way: a gray knee-length skirt and a white silk blouse, with a string of pearls. On her legs, David knew, she wore pantyhose over the modest gray boy-short panties he rather liked though, if she had obeyed him on either of the occasions he had offered to dominated her, he would in short order have required her also often to wear the sort of lacy thong he really preferred. On the rack by the mirror in this bathroom, he saw with a little thrill that went straight to his cock, hung several of those thongs.
"Mandy's lacy panties were soaking," continued the girl on the stool calmly and inexorably. "Come see, Maud." Then, to David's delight, she began gently to rub the cunt she had just bared. "There you go, Mandy," she murmured. "See how nice it feels to be bare down here, the way your master likes?"
Little whimpers came from Mandy, around the panty-gag, and she closed her eyes as if she couldn't bear to look at Maud on the other side of the room. For her part, Maud had taken what seemed a nearly involuntary step forward, and her eyes did seem fixed on what the red-headed, pink-pantied girl did with her fingers, cooing gently all the while to the girl for whose preparation she clearly had responsibility.
Chapter Five: Tribunal
The door of David's bedroom opened, and Will walked in. He wore, to David's surprise, a black robe, belted at the waist, like a dressing gown but somehow of a more official cut. He also wore a Cheshire-Cat grin.
"Sorry to make you wait, man," he said. "Society business, you know."
"Society?" David asked.
The grin widened. "Welcome to the Secret Society of Saint Valentine," Will said. "The strangest, most awesome non-governmental organization you never heard of before." He glanced at the video monitor, and David followed his eyes to see that Maud, with her lower lip between her teeth, had come even closer to the little tableau of the now-moaning Mandy and the redheaded girl in the pink panties, the strange chair and the stool.
"Do you want Alice to teach Maud to eat pussy?" Will asked abruptly. "They'd probably have to whip her first, but I'm telling you, the first time you see your girlfriend kiss another girl's cunt because you said she had to, it's like..." He made an explosion gesture in front of his midriff.
David cleared his throat. The image of Maud on her knees, with the marks of a whip upon her creamy, perfect bottom, made to do the shameful thing between the thighs of a girl she had never seen, made to smell another girl's arousal and use her mouth to please a cunt, had gotten him terribly hard. But Will had a tendency to move things ahead less deliberately than David's analytic mind liked.
"Hold on, Will," he said. "First things first, please. Let's talk about whether I need to call the police."
Will laughed. "Alright," he said. "Just so you know, the video feed is being recorded, so you'll be able to watch everything later, if you have to miss something because of your boring tendency to figure stuff out. And you'll want to watch it all with Maud on her knees in front of you, of course, once you get home tomorrow."
David shook his head to try to clear it of yet another image so arousing it threatened to make a mockery of his analytic ability. The movie camera clicked on, but the images on it seemed so outlandish that he found it hard to make the slightest sense of them. He glanced again at the screen. To his astonishment, Maud had started to unbutton her blouse, her eyes troubled but still fixed on the two other girls. The pink-pantied girl—Alice, Will had called her—said, "That's enough, Mandy. We've got to get you dressed and into the chamber of discipline. The white lace set on the end of the rack is for you." She started to unfasten the velcro straps that bound Mandy to the chair.
At the words chamber of discipline, a shudder had seemed to go through Maud. Her eyes went to the rack: behind the white lace bra-and-panty set hung a black one that David could see immediately would look stunning on her.
He shook his head again, and returned his attention to Will. "So tell me why whatever this is isn't kidnapping and, as seems likely to be about to occur in one way or another, assault."
Will's face became as serious as it ever could, which wasn't all that serious because his eyebrows always seemed on the verge of going waggishly upward. "Have you heard Maud ask to go?"
"What about the girl in the chair?" David demanded.
"When Alice takes Mandy's panties out of her mouth, I promise she won't scream or yell. Mandy Parker will go into her disciplinary hearing like the good girl she wants to be for her master. Just like Maud came here like a good girl despite getting a paddling last night from Officer Liam Miller of the Boston Police and this good society."
"What?" David's mind went back to the strange way Maud had said she would come over and then changed her mind.
"Why don't we watch that now?" Will said. He picked up a remote from the table under the wall-mounted monitor. "What Liam said to Maud will probably help you understand. Also, there's this." From the pocket of his robe he produced a card that looked like a wedding invitation.
David read, and watched, in silence. The video Will called up with a few button-presses seemed an edit of shots from Officer Miller's body-camera and the cameras in the supposed police station. When he saw the paddle for the first time, David had to clear his throat and fold his arms over his chest, but otherwise he managed to keep his gaze stony through all the amazing shots of Maud's beautiful bottom, in the gray boy-shorts, writhing under the stern correction meted out by the police officer.
The video ended. David turned to Will, anger rising in his chest. "I need to say that I'm not thrilled that you, and your friends, took it upon yourself to do that."
"Of course not," Will said, actually looking grave for the very first time in David's experience. "It's never fun for a dominant to see someone else punish his girl—unless of course he's specifically arranged it, in which case, let me tell you, it's awesome." The solemn expression departed for a moment, replaced by an impish grin, which in turn vanished as he clearly saw David's failure to be amused. "But I know you're too honest to deny that you were going to break up with her."
"That's not an excuse!" David said, losing his calm just a little bit.
"I know, I know," Will said, pushing his hands against an invisible table in a settle down motion. "Bros before hos kind of thing. Paddling the girl you broke up with is probably even worse than dating the girl you broke up with, and this was even before you'd broken up with her."
David nodded, his jaw still set with anger.
"I do want to make sure you heard what Liam said about not uncovering her nakedness. With the exception of the preparation you just saw, which Maud is now getting just like Mandy did and is always done by another girl, that's a hard and fast rule here. The next time Maud gets naked it will be because you took her panties off, whether to punish her or to fuck her. One thing we recommend, especially at the beginning, is that you be in charge of your girl's underwear. You'll probably even want to instruct her to call you for permission to use the toilet."
"Jesus," David said. He found it a little difficult to believe how hard that idea got him. He had a little experience of dominating a submissive girlfriend—Monica, who Will had rightly suggested would enjoy getting spanked—but it appeared that this secret society went well beyond hairbrushes and occasional anal sex.
"Look," Will continued, clearly knowing he had a checkmate on his next move. "You and I both know that you couldn't have made this ha
ppen. We both know that if I had asked you if you wanted the society's tribunal to take up Maud's case you would have said no even though you would have wanted to say yes. This is the way it works here—the way it's worked for more than a hundred years. Girls like Maud need taking in hand, and guys like you and me can do it. But the way the world is set up these days doesn't make it easy. That's where the tribunal comes in."
He pushed a button the remote, and the monitor came back to life, showing Maud stepping naked out of the tub, helped by Alice. To his amazement, David saw that between her legs she had already been shaved with the clippers he now noticed on a nearby counter. Her sweet little pout of a cunt peeped out already, saucily and pinkly between the paler outer lips of her pussy that now had only a short light brown stubble remaining upon them. The look on her face seemed that of someone in a trance.
Before he could even react, Will had changed the scene on the monitor, and David now saw what must be the chamber of discipline. Mandy knelt on a sort of little prie-dieu in the center of a room that resembled a judicial chamber: green carpet and green baize upon the long table at which three distinguished-looking middle-aged men dressed in robes like Will's presided.
On the walls hung paintings that seemed to be scenes from mythology: David thought he could make out, though, that the gods seemed to be enjoying themselves with their nymphs rather more wickedly than was usual in such art. An armless, high-backed chair of dark, carved wood stood prominently against the wall to the side of the table.
Behind Mandy stood another, younger, man, also dressed in one of the robes. The look upon his face seemed slightly less assured than the expressions worn by the men who clearly made up the tribunal.
"That's her master," Will said, pointing to the younger man. "Oh, that reminds me. Look in the closet—you should get into your robe and your shorts. Don't worry—I promise you won't miss anything. They're just getting started. "
In the walk in closet David found his own robe, and hanging inside it, a rather mystifying pair of knee-length, tight-fitting cotton shorts. The mystery lay in the way they seemed open at the front, so that his cock and balls would hang free. "Will?" he called. "About the shorts?"
Bound, Spanked and Loved: Fourteen Kinky Valentine's Day Stories Page 59