As She's Told (16 page)

"Yes, I could tell from your browser. Flipping through Amazon. No wonder you didn't get your laundry done." He leaned back. "And you didn't tell me." The train going through a tunnel, quieter but about to roar into the station any minute now.

"No, sir." My voice sounded shrill.

"Since I can't trust you to be honest, I've put a child minder on there. I'll be able to tell from now what sites you've been on and for how long. What else?"

I set aside the humiliation of 'child minder' for the time being, and thought frantically about what else I might have done wrong. I had been feeling guilty about Sunday; it was almost a relief to tell him, but nothing else came to mind.

"I – I can't think of anything else, sir."

He looked at me a long moment. "All right. Turn around." I felt my hands pulled behind me and quickly tied with a strap of some sort. I started to breathe very hard – fear, arousal, who knows? Real bondage at last, and I was too scared to savour it. A moment later there was a leather collar around my throat. A click, and a leash was clipped to the ring in front. The sound of my breathing and my heart's pounding seemed to reverberate off the walls.

A yank on the leash startled me; I got up as bidden. A second later the top half of me was face down over the table, the leash stretched under my face. I craned my neck and saw him crouched down, fastening the leash somewhere out of sight. I experimented with raising my head, and found I couldn't.

Then he was behind me. My hands twisted helplessly, and I could hear a little whimper rising in my throat.

"Frightened, bad girl?" came the low, accented voice from behind me.

I nodded in an attenuated way and whispered, "Yes, sir."

There was a pause that went on just long enough for my fear to edge into panic. Then the sound of something slicing through the air and a crack, and pain, pain, pain. A second, and then a third. I could feel my cries against the collar at my throat.

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"Why are you being punished, girl?"

That voice! The train roaring into the station at last. I tried to get my breath, and another blow forced a wail out of me. "Why?" he demanded harshly

I managed a confused enumeration of my recent sins, wailing and then sobbing away about jeans, laundry, time wasted, while the blows fell and my body writhed helplessly. "What else?"

He hit a spot for a second time and I screamed, and tears streamed from my eyes. I couldn't think at all. How could I answer him when all I could think of was the pain and the next blow coming?

But the time in the corner came to my aid, all that time stewing in my pit of guilt and shame. "I didn't tell you…and I thought…if you didn't find out…" Another blow, another. They snatched away my breath, and the whip fell twice more before I could force out, "I thought it wouldn't matter! Aah!

Please, sir, please, I'm sorry!"

"You thought it wouldn't matter," he growled. A harder stripe.

"Disobedience. Deceit, concealment. Games." The whip fell again, and I lost it; lost all connection to mind, past, future; there was just the eternal, dreadful now, my existence as a bad girl sealed in anguish. When at last he stopped he stroked the whip threateningly across my burning ass. "Well, girl?"

Please, no more! No more! Out of my mouth spilled apologies, promises, stumbling pleas for mercy. But the voice and the whip weren't satisfied; still they threatened. What now? Be grateful, stupid girl! I choked out my thanks for the punishment. As I said the words I knew I actually meant them, and something about this made tears burst forth from me again.

Then he was there in front of me, releasing the leash, using it to turn me off the table and onto my knees between his legs. I got no chance to see if he had forgiven me, or obey my impulse to throw myself at his feet. He held the leash very short with one hand, and thrust his cock into my mouth with the other. This time he showed no patience with my mistakes. My sore ass was smacked several times, till I was sucking and sobbing simultaneously.

He led me upstairs to the kitchen after that without a word, except, "Into that corner, bad girl," and a gesture to the far wall behind the table. I limped stiffly over and paused a moment. Should I kneel? He hadn't told me to. I pressed myself into the corner, standing, feeling my flesh cringe in case 100

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another blow was coming. Again my ass was on display, but now it throbbed and I could feel the air moving over each painful welt. I was back in the dimness, still miserably in disgrace.

***

Anders set about heating up some the leftover sopa de couves for dinner. Fortunately it was thick stuff, even better reheated; he was ravenous.

Next time he'd make her wait for her punishment until he got some food into him. He set his bowl where he could watch his cowering woman and examine his handiwork. He could still feel the whip in his hand, hear her breathless pleading.

Beneath the adrenalin running through him, the wonder, the almost constant arousal, there was something more. A sense of balance, an alignment of forces. Or perhaps something like an unexpected, perfect chord. It was a harmony that had to do with the sight of her in that corner.

What was it?

Something about domesticity. It came to him that he'd never felt so at home before, not in the apartment he'd shared with Janice, not in Copenhagen as a child, not anywhere. This half finished kitchen with sawdust on the floor felt like home at this moment, because the woman who shared it did so absolutely on his terms.

Perhaps a man, too long a bachelor, just sitting down at his table after his honeymoon and gazing at his bride with delight, would feel as Anders felt at that moment. Life was the way it ought to be. This was how he was meant to live.

Did he really come across as someone who thought he had all the tools for all the renos of the world? Surely he'd got past that. World dictator, benevolent or otherwise, was not on his ambition list, his siblings'

impressions notwithstanding. What he had was a fetish for being an absolute ruler in his domestic life. All he needed to satisfy that was one woman to own, handle and control, completely and absolutely. And now it seemed he had her. His forebears with their dreary portents could march straight into 101

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the North Sea and drown.

Was he controlling his woman because he felt ineffectual elsewhere?

Taking his frustration out on her hide, as Val had snidely suggested? One of those assholes? He considered this, tore some bread, stirred his soup meditatively.

No. His need for this went too far back. Back to childhood, when the world had been a fine place, his for the taking. Maia might get it worse on a bad day, but that was just one of a slave's functions. As long as he was always in control of himself as well as her. Something that went without saying.

Hunger satisfied, Anders took up the little Japanese maple sapling he had established in a bonsai pot, and began the gentle, painstaking process of wiring its limbs. From time to time he raised his eyes to follow the smooth curve of his woman's hips, the dark cleft between the red cheeks, the bowed shoulders. Wire slid slowly through his fingers; he wound it round slender branches, visualizing the shape they would take as he trained and restricted and pared them back, the eventual beauty of the little living artwork that it would be. He was peripherally aware of the slight jump of the woman's flesh at the sound of the wire cutters.

At last, setting the pot and its paraphernalia aside, Anders got up and went to the corner, stroked Maia's back and took hold of the leash, still dangling between her breasts. She turned toward him, her eyes blinking in the light, traces of tears still on her cheeks. Her glance ran over the bonsai, returned to his face. Without speaking he led her over to his chair and had her kneel and be fed. She was still looking at him with a face full of shame and distress. "Punishment's over, sweetheart," he said, and she laid her head in his lap. He felt rather than heard a last little sob, lifted her chin and briskly spooned more food into her mouth.

Then he released her and dressed her and drove her home through the dark streets. Contentment was meandering through him; a slow, sweet tune.

In front of her house he turned to her, asked the usual questions. She shook her drooping head, and then put her face into her hands. For a moment, the notes inside Anders went awry. Perhaps this was it – it was more than she could take after all. Ancestral fatalism vindicated.

But he didn't believe it. Logic insisted that it could be so, especially tonight. But his hands that had handled her, his gut knew otherwise.

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"What is it, Maia?"

She looked up, her face a little desperate in the shadowy light. "Those questions…," she said, "I know they're for my safety, but…."

"But what?"

"But they're about me, what I need."

"Yes. About you." He smiled slightly, knowing what was coming.

"They're –" She raised her hands in frustration, "They feel so beside the point. You need someone who –" She turned her face away. "What I need –

sir, all I need is to know is – are you still angry at me?"

He reached out and took her gently by the ear. "No, I'm not angry any more." She turned her head to touch her cheek to his hand. "But that doesn't mean everything goes back to the way it was. I've learned more about how your naughty little mind works. I'm going to move faster to restrict what you do, since I trust you less."

She hung her head. "I'm sorry," she whispered.

He took her face in both hands and kissed away its distress, kissed and licked the delicate, salty skin beneath her eyes. Then he gave her some orders for the next day, and sent her inside.

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I lay in bed that night on my stomach, hugging the pillow, with sleep as distant and theoretical as an alien lifeform. It wasn't the physical result of the punishment that kept me awake; well, hardly at all. It was the fear still possessing me: the mounting, searing pain, my helplessness to avoid the blows. Anders' angry, implacable voice still resounded in my head, making me cringe against the pillow. I actually held the pillow over my ears to shut it out, uselessly of course. And those long periods in corners, humiliating me down to nothing. My guilt was only barely assuaged by the punishment. I had to keep reminding myself that Anders wasn't angry with me any more.

And he was already stepping up restrictions, which was probably a good thing; less chance for me to get into trouble.

I identified one feeling braiding through my subconscious: a thread of relief. He'd tied me down and beaten me, and I had survived it. More important, my desire had survived it; after that experience I wanted more than ever to belong to him. Fantasy is one thing, reality something else, as JulieB had said during that first conversation (the weblog of which I had saved and repeatedly read). Despite my early assurances, I hadn't known for sure that I really could take it. Or even, after the first blow, almost welcome it. Now it seemed to me that I did know. I forced myself to be honest; there was no "almost' about it. I had welcomed it, had in fact needed it. I was finding out what a fear junky I was. Fear, pain, humiliation: you name it, my body took it in through every pore and nerve and orifice and begged for more.

The beating had been one more giant step toward being owned, choiceless. A state I still wanted passionately, more than any specific piece of bondage or discipline. Though I certainly wanted those, waited with breathless impatience for whatever he would do to me next. Still, the actions and the hardware were only the outward manifestation – intensely arousing, cunt swimming window dressing – for the underlying relationship, in which the seesaw of power tipped only one way.

There was another thread, thin and fragile-seeming, but still unbroken: the freedom to walk away. Here I was all by myself, with nothing but a waist 104

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chain and a sore ass to keep me in line. It felt a bit like standing at the edge of a precipice and reminding yourself that you really don't want to jump. In that situation a guard rail is good, a chain link fence is even better. I slept at last, a shallow sleep crossed with dreams. There was a soup of greenish light and foliage through which I wandered, too warm beneath a glass roof. Each plant bore a big red price tag, bright but somehow unreadable. I heard footsteps coming my way, and suddenly knew I wasn't supposed to be there; exams were coming up and I was reprehensibly wasting my time once again.

The leaves of a slender red-leaved tree were big enough to hide some of me, but my bottom half – the part with no clothes – would show. I tried to pull myself up into the little tree to hide. In the next moment I was on my back holding splintered branches, confronted by welling sap and ruin.

I scrambled up and ran, horrified, my feet sinking in dirt and sand. The sand stretched out before me, and now I was walking, barefoot, miles yet to go. Ocean Beach, with its usual chilly fog that hid my destination no matter how far I trudged. The sea was grey, and the waves were huge, threatening.

Surfers crested the waves with panache and triumphant shouts. I thought that anyone who could take such risks must be a different species from me. Then I remembered that they were a different species, or at least I was. They were human; I was not. What was I? Anders would tell me. Anders was waiting for me. I turned away from the water and climbed up the beach to go back to him, but there was a high wall and barbed wire parallel to the shore, uncrossable. Picking my way painfully over stones and grit, I followed the edge of this barrier, searching more and more anxiously for an opening. The ground was steep and rocky, and there were concrete pill boxes, like on the beach at Normandy, and even gun emplacements.