A Gentlemen's Agreement (15 page)

The houselights were still dark so
the gentlemen never did get a clear look at the slaves who had serviced them.
The best they got was glimpses of silhouettes as they passed in front of the
spot that illuminated Irene.

When Irene saw Nickel walk past
with the red light glowing on her collar, she pulled her into the spotlight and
gave her a long kiss on the lips.

The gentlemen hooted and clapped.

She tasted the salty flavor of
semen on Nickel’s lips. “You saved yourself a caning, penis breath,” she said
and pushed her toward the door.

When the last slave cleared the
door, the houselights began slowly coming up.

“Gentlemen, I hope that you
enjoyed our stars on this midsummer night.”

Irene couldn’t see if the
gentlemen were nodding or shaking their heads, but she was relieved to hear a
few of them mutter happy sentiments. She wasn’t going to starve this time.

Someone said, loudly, “It was a
midsummer night dream.”

He got it.

Someone else said, “The only woman
I fuck in the dark is my wife. This was better.”

Gentlemen laughed in agreement.

 
“Even my own slaves don’t work me like these did,” a third
voice said. “I don’t know how they do it, but Lord Snow could lend them out to
other kennels to give lessons.”

“I’d like to borrow one,” another
voice said.

“Me, too.”

“We’ll have to see about that,”
Lord Snow said from the back of the room.

Irene could hear that he was
forcing a cheerful tone in his voice. He had a tiger by the tail. He didn’t
want to give his secrets away to every kennel in the county. But he couldn’t
refuse to do a favor for the gentlemen in the room, either. Most of them
outranked him.

The lights were now bright enough
for Irene to see the assembled gentlemen. They had been lying with the slaves when
she called
time
but they were
standing now.

“Gentlemen, it is my custom to ask
my lord’s guests to vote on their satisfaction at the end of an entertainment.
I strive to provide more pleasure to you than you usually experience in an
evening. If the majority of you think that I have failed in that goal, then I
will be punished with an enforced three-day fast. I will be sent directly to my
cell to be confined without food until Wednesday breakfast.

“If any gentleman thinks that he
did not receive more pleasure tonight than he receives from the usual
entertainment, please raise your hand now and send me to my cell to starve for
the next three days.”

She was shocked to see three hands
drift into the air. Two of the gentlemen were standing in the part of the room
where she had left Nickel. The third hand was Lord Snow’s.

The gentlemen looked around and
saw who had their hands raised. One of the men voting for punishment was
Marquette Kelly. He shrugged and said, “It was good. But I can’t say that it
was the best that I ever had. The service felt decidedly perfunctory toward the
end.”

One other gentleman frowned and
belatedly raised his hand in agreement.

“Anyone else?” Irene asked. “Then
that makes four votes out of fifteen against me. Not a majority, but I will
consider myself rebuked. It’s not enough to merit three days of starvation, but
I will ask Lord Snow to administer the strap to me to ensure that, next time I
will strive to do better. He does know how to make a slave regret her failure.”

The men lowered their hands.

After Lord Snow led the gentlemen
back to their wives, Irene retreated to her cell and stripped off her
catsuit
. She had had a wonderful time. The two ladies had
had a wonderful time. More than two-thirds of the gentlemen had had a wonderful
time. But it galled her that even four men had claimed that they had enjoyed
other entertainments more than hers.

She counted that as a defeat. Lord
Snow was an expert at bruising a backside with his strap. She had seen the
evidence of that on three of his slaves since she had arrived. She didn’t want
to suffer the same, but she believed that she deserved it.

Lord Snow came to her cell some
time later, after he had bid his guests a good evening.

“Would you like to strap me now?”
Irene asked.

“No. I’m not going to strap you,”
he replied. “Both the
marquette
and I agreed that you failed to provide a better than average entertainment
tonight. In my manor, his vote and mine together constitute a majority. I’ll
instruct the
kennelman
give you a bucket and a pint
of water in the morning.”

He stepped out of the cell and
closed the door.

She didn’t have to try the knob. She’d
heard the lock click.

A moment later, the lights went
out, leaving her sitting on her cot in
pitch blackness
.

She had eaten only lightly at
dinner, being too nervous about the entertainment that she had planned.

Her stomach was already growling.

* * *

The
kennelman
had been brusque.
Quick glance to see if Irene was still breathing, dump an empty bucket into the
cell, and throw a plastic bottle of water on the bed.

The door was closed and locked
again before her eyes had time to adjust to the light. She had to keep them
closed for the entire fifteen seconds and had not even seen the
kennelman’s
face.

She spent her time sitting in the
dark, trying to make herself stop thinking about the unfairness of her
punishment.
Fair
wasn’t a
consideration in a slave’s life. There was no
fair
and
unfair
, only
that which a slave would endure and that which would kill her. She told herself
that three days of starvation wasn’t going to kill her so it was merely another
trial to be endured.

She told her empty belly to be
still and stop growing at her like a hungry beast in the dark.

Instead, she thought about Lady
Linda and Lady Kaitlin. They had enjoyed themselves at her entertainment. That
helped validate her choice to sell herself into slavery many months ago.
A choice that ultimately led to her starvation in a locked cell.
But she now knew that other ladies were also so bored and unhappy that they were
willing to become slaves for a while. It’s true that they only pretended for a
few hours instead of committing themselves to a lifetime – a short
lifetime – of unceasing submission. But even wanting to be slave for a
few hours indicated that, like Irene, they needed relief from being ladies.

If it had occurred to Irene that
she could have merely dabbled with slavery instead of selling herself to the
highest bidder, she would have done that. She was a slave today because she
lacked the imagination to have found another option like Lady Linda had.

She supposed that it is always
true that people are bored only because they lack sufficient imagination to
entertain themselves.

She opened the water bottle and
sipped at it. She was terribly thirsty and she wanted to upend it over her
gaping, upturned mouth, but she controlled her urge. Sipping slowly helped pass
the time for a few minutes. As well, it ensured that she didn’t dribble even a
single precious drop.

After a bit, she opened her
wardrobe and located her vaginal weights by feel. She assembled a combination
that totaled four and a half ounces, inserted it into her cunt, and clamped her
muscles around it. She stood up with her legs apart and concentrated on keeping
the weight from falling out. After a while, she tried to do better than that.
She tried to hold it in with the lower part of her vagina while she contracted
her muscles deeper inside to see if she could pull the weight further into herself
by vaginal massage alone.

She thought that she succeeded but
couldn’t be certain. The flare at the end kept it from actually moving inside.
But she kept trying until her cunt was exhausted.

Then she imagined that it was Lord
Snow’s cock and tried to squeeze it until it turned purple, developed gangrene,
and had to be amputated from his miserable carcass.

That’s when she decided on the
design of the next entertainment. Not in detail, just a general outline, but
that was enough to start planning.

As soon as her concentration was broken,
the weight slipped out and clattered to the floor. She had to get down on her
hands and knees and feel around half the floor before she found it wedged
against the base of the wardrobe.

She cleaned the weights as best as
she could with no water and then packed them away. She would take them out
again in a couple of hours and work more on her control.

Next, she sat on her cot and tried
to remember everything that Cherry, Tamarind, Lime, and Peach had told her
about their early lives.

One was adjudicated into slavery
because she had taken a joyride in an aristocrat’s car; two were pressed by
bankruptcy, one of those because her landlord had lent her more money than she
could afford and the other because her husband had gambled her family into debt;
and one was born into slavery.

It struck her that all three of
the women who had been
enslaved
as adults were lucky
that they were exceptionally beautiful. If they had been homely, they would
have gone straight to the labor auction where they would have been worth a lot
less money and had a much shorter, more brutish existence.

Maybe it wasn’t just luck. Maybe
the creditors assessed the beauty
of a women
before
they decided to lend her or her husband money. Homely women would be a far
worse credit risk.

Something about that idea began
chewing industriously on the underside of her mind. She felt it down there and
tried to drag the thought out in the open to take it to its logical conclusion,
but she just couldn’t get a grip on it and eventually gave up.

When recalling the other slaves’
lives got old, she opened her wardrobe to retrieve her butt plug and lube.

She was locked up, but that didn’t
mean that she could exempt herself from staying stretched and lubed. A man
might come to her cell to bugger her even if she were being punished. It didn’t
seem likely, given Lord Snow’s insistence on her chastity, but it could happen.
Besides, she had been lubing herself every day for so long that it felt wrong
for her asshole to be tight and dry.

But as she was feeling around on
the shelf, her door slammed open and her cell was flooded with blinding light.
Her eyelids snapped shut instantly.

“So, bitch, you want something to
eat? I got something for you to eat.” Nickel grabbed her by the arm and pulled
her away from the wardrobe.

The cell door slammed closed.

“
Git
down on your knees, bitch and get eating.”

Irene was pushed
to the floor by her shoulders
. She heard her cot creak and then felt the
insides of Nickel’s thighs against her ears.

Her eyes were still too sensitive
to open, but she stuck her tongue out and leaned forward until she tasted cunt.
She had done this so often, she could navigate around the
whiphand’s
crotch by feel alone. She didn’t need to see Nickel leering down at her.

Her tongue was barely wet –
a pint of water in the morning didn’t keep her flush all day long – but
Nickel was secreting enough to lubricate her wide licks along the full length
of her slit.

Irene was certainly getting the
full, raw taste of Nickel today.

She couldn’t tell if there was any
lingering semen from last night’s orgy in the mix but she wouldn’t have been
surprised if there was. After she had forced Nickel into the center of the
festivities, the gentlemen wouldn’t have let her alone. They would have fucked
her, but
good
, in every available orifice. And she
wouldn’t have dared to deny any gentleman access to any hole.

She had no doubt that Marquette
Kelly and his friend had voted to punish her with starvation because Nickel had
serviced them with less than full enthusiasm. The word that they had used was
“perfunctory.”

She would not forgive Nickel for
that.

She suspected that, if those men
didn’t find satisfaction in one hole, they would have moved on to the next. And
she further suspected that Nickel would be less than diligent about keeping
herself lubed and stretched than most slaves who expected to be used hard.

While she was licking and
thrusting her tongue into Nickel’s cunt, she ran a gentle finger down below her
chin until she felt the tight, puckered opening below. She pressed her index
finger into it.

The effect was electric. Nickel
screamed in pain and sprang backward, pulling away from Irene’s face and hand.
“What the hell are you doing?” she shouted.

That was an informative reaction.
Nickel’s asshole was damned sensitive. Any other slave would accommodate three
fingers without batting an eye. Irene wondered how badly Nickel had been torn
last night. She hoped it was bad, but she controlled her expression to keep her
satisfaction from showing on her face.

“I thought that you might like a
gentle massage there. You know. Just a bit of extra stimulation to add to your
pleasure.”

“God fucking damn it. You keep
your goddamned fucking finger out of my damned asshole. You try that again and
I’ll whip your pussy right off. You’ll be nothing but raw bone between your
legs. You got me?”

Irene’s eyes were finally adapted
to the light. She looked up at Nickel with an expression of proper
submissiveness. “Yes, ma’am. Some men really like that when I suck their cock.
I thought that you might find it special, too.”

She thought that she could detect
tears in the
whiphand’s
eyes.

“Don’t you ever, ever, ever do
that again.”