Doctor's Orders: The Complete Series (16 page)

“Gentlemen, I open the bidding for the gloves at five dollars!” Gerald bellows. “A paltry sum, so little for such a memorable experience, and a fantastic memento. Do I hear five dollars?”

I cannot move. I cannot betray my nervousness, my desires, my humanity. I have to let this play out, even while I scream on the inside. It’s only now that I realize how much comfort Cedric has been during all of our appointments, how much of a difference it made to know he was out there, watching me. Still, I can do this. I can be brave.

“Gentleman? A bid of five dollars, gentlemen, five dollars, will get you these lovely gloves, and the right to remove them.”

Being blind is forcing me to think differently. I can’t see what’s happening, so I have to imagine myself in their place, in the crowd. They are nervous, and unsure. No one wants to be the first one to act. But someone must, or it all falls apart.

“You sir!” I hear Gerald cry, and then a localized chorus of laughs and half-articulated comments from the right side of the crowd. He must have spied a group of friends. I can hear them, urging each other on, a gaggle of male voices, each trying to be heard above the rest. Finally, a burst of applause.

“Five dollars!” a young male voice calls out.

“Five dollars going once, going twice. . . .” Gerald allows for a theatrical pause. “All right, we’ve got more lots to move, so let’s keep this rolling. Five dollars in the jar, sir, and then you may go collect your prize.”

I try to hide my initial disappointment. Five dollars is crap. But, really, the price is not the point, not even a little bit, and now I can almost feel the energy of the crowd change. They’re into it, now that someone has broken the ice. The applause and cheers follows my first buyer up the steps, so that I can nearly track his progress; near the edge of my marble stage he does something I can’t see, some hamming for the crowd – they cheer. I swear I can feel it when he steps onto my marble stage. A change in the air, a thickening, a swirling eddy in the currents between us. I am about to have a stranger’s hands on my body.

An electrical thrill courses through me. It’s just my hands, I know, but there’s the promise of so much more.

It’s chilly enough that I think I can feel the heat of him when he’s near. His friends get excited, hooting from below. I realize he’s getting a good look at me for the first time, that my dress is almost completely see-through up close. That he can see the gooseflesh rise on my arms, that he can see the muscles strain in my neck, that he can see my chest flutter as I try to hide my excitement.

“You must be freaking freezing.” The voice comes from behind me, on my right side. I hadn’t thought much about interacting with my buyers – it feels weird. Still, weirder to ignore him. I bite my lip again, and give the slightest nod.

“Come on, Jason!”

His friends are getting impatient, clapping their hands together, laughing. They want to see how the rest of the auction plays out.

So do I.

He comes around me and goes for my left hand first. I inhale at the shock of his touch; I was expecting him from my right. He pauses, but I maintain my poise.

His warm fingers slowly work away the glove, unsure at first, then steady, rolling it down my wrist. He grasps my forearm with one strong hand, and tugs, one after the other, on the tips of my gloved fingers. He is deliberate, and slow, and the thought of any man paying such minute attention to even one part of my body quickens my breath.

“Attaboy!”

This cry is louder, ruder, out of place. I imagine that I feel Jason flinch.

“Sorry,” he murmurs, and strips the rest of the glove away with little ceremony. I hear it flutter as he raises it aloft, like a trophy. The crowd cheers again.

He wastes no time moving around to my right side, where he is confronted with my hip. And my ass, I imagine, fairly visible in the fluttering of my sheer dress. My hand is resting very comfortably on that hip; he’ll have to touch me there.

I feel a slight shiver race up my spine, but I’m able to conceal it.

Then he slips his own hand underneath mine, cupping the curve of my hip, the heat of his palm burning through my flimsy dress to my bare skin.

There’s no hiding the shiver now.

He lets his hand rest there for the tiniest moment, a tiny squeeze, and then he tears my hand away and strips the glove in one fell swoop.

His friends cheer. Polite applause spreads to other areas of the crowd.

“Worth every penny!” he shouts down, and I have to stop myself from smiling.

“Now that you see what fun can be had, ladies and gents, it’s on to the bigger ticket items,” Gerald calls out as I hear Jason bound down the steps. I’m alone again, on stage, minus one set of gloves and five dollars richer. Everything is going according to plan, except for one thing: where is Cedric?

“The next lot we have here is a bit more exciting. . . .” Gerald pauses, either for dramatic effect, or because he can’t believe what I wrote. “Claire’s bra, and the right to remove it!”

There’s a brief hush, and then more laughter, more applause: they see it’s for real. And it’s all ok, because it’s art. I’ve set this thing in motion, and I don’t know if I could stop it, even if I wanted to. The thought sends a shudder down my torso, ending in a flutter of contractions in my abs, and then lower, curling around my pussy like a python. I have to breathe deep.

“Start the bidding at fifty dollars! Do I hear – yes, I do, from the gentleman in the leather jacket! Do I hear sixty?”

The bidding moves fast now, but I find I’m only listening for that one word that I want to hear more than any other. But the bidding comes to a close without any mentions of prisons. I don’t even know what the final price was.

“Sold, to the gentleman in the leather jacket! Congratulations on your purchase, sir!”

There’s less applause this time, and the awkward change in the crowd’s energy is almost palpable. This is different from gloves. Decent people probably can’t believe this is about to happen in a public place; no one wants to admit their enthusiasm, their arousal. I used to be like that once. Now I can revel in the insistent growing pressure around my clit, in the wetness seeping onto my thin panties, at the pull I feel down below. All because of a man who isn’t even here.

There are fewer cheers this time, fewer cues for me to follow as the man in leather ascends to my little stage. Not knowing where he is or when I’ll feel his hands on me sets me to hard, fast little breaths.

His breath comes hot on my neck.

I inhale quickly, involuntarily; it’s all I can do to keep from moving. The muscles in my pelvis clamp down, as though gathering together in preparation, and I struggle to appear nonchalant, unresponsive.

But then I feel his hands part the stylish folds of my dress where it plunges in back, and my gasp is audible. I know it’s audible because I know he hears it, because his fingers spread out around my back in response. The rough pads of his fingertips caress the delicate skin on the sides of my body as his thumbs feel for a clasp in the back strap of my bra. He has big hands.

I give up on poise, take a deep breath, and think of Cedric.

“It’s in the front,” I whisper.

His hands slide around my shuddering ribcage, brushing the tender skin just below my breasts, feeling the stiff wire encased by fine, soft lace. He flirts with the edges, with pushing his fingers under and up, ever so slightly, encouraged by the rapid rise and fall of my chest and the undulating contractions of my stomach. Finally his thumbs reach the clasp, and he pulls the hooks towards each other expertly, crushing my breasts together more than is perhaps strictly necessary, and just like that my bra is slipped around my back and off of my body.

The man in leather has had some practice at bra removal. The crowd explodes.

It’s only male voices I hear, and the loud ones at that. It sounds like the crowd has gotten bigger, as though I’m attracting an audience, and the blindfold allows me to imagine that audience as I wish. In my mind’s eye it has ceased to be just a performance piece; it is alternately a fantasy, of being bought and owned by and sought, and is more purely a love letter to the man who inspired it, to the man who has the truest claim on me.

Please, Cedric. Please come.

“Our next lot,” Gerald announces, quieting the crowd, “is for the last of Claire’s undergarments. You heard that correctly: we’re opening the bidding on Claire’s underwear, and the right to remove it!”

One man calls out, “Everything I own!” The crowd laughs, but soon after someone calls out a number. Then another, and another. Gerald doesn’t have to do anything at all, from what I can hear. He remains mostly silent, until this:

“You’d think none of you had seen a woman before,” he calls out teasingly as the bidding goes on. “Did you all just get out of prison?”

The joke falls mostly flat, except with the one person who is meant to hear it: me.

Cedric is here.

Cedric is here.

If I thought it took self-control to maintain my ice-princess facade before, it’s nothing compared to what it takes to maintain my composure now. As soon as I can quench the desire to rip off my blindfold, to see for myself, I’m beset by worry: why hasn’t he spoken? With the card I gave him, he could put a stop to everything right now. He could claim me for his own, right now, and supercede all bids.

He does not.

“Three-fifty!” Gerald yells. “Three-fifty to the best group of friends a guy could have. What’s the lucky guy’s name?”

I’ve been sold. Suddenly I’m very attentive again.

“Simon,” says a mildly embarrassed voice, accompanied by more laughter. My best guess is that Simon’s friends pooled their cash for him, on his birthday. That or he’s a stockbroker or something; who else carries that kind of cash for no reason?

Well, Cedric might. Goddammit, why didn’t he claim me?

This is where my mind wanders as Simon makes his shy way to me, buffeted by the encouraging shouts of his buddies, the unsteady applause of the crowd at large. I should be fully present for this moment, for this stranger who is about to remove my clothing, but I am with Cedric, wherever he is standing. In full view of me? He must be. Watching. And suddenly it’s clear: this is my final lesson with the Doctor.

I think – I hope – that it’s a lesson in faith.

Or maybe he knows me too well, and he just wants me insanely turned on before he finally comes and gets me.

The catcalls and claps intensify, and a sharp breeze cuts through the plaza, ruffling my flimsy dress and lashing my sensitive breasts. When my dress settles back down, already practically transparent, it rests on the hard points of my nipples. I must verge on the obscene.

Suddenly there is a warm hand flat on my back.

“Simon’s not my real name,” he says.

What is meant as a confessional only adds a hint of danger, and my pulse thuds harder against my clit. I wonder at the kind of man who’s embarrassed enough to give a fake name to the crowd, and how I can possibly reconcile him with the confident, aggressive hands that swarm over my body, out of sight of the crowd. They roam down the ridge of my backbone to where I begin to curve, teasing the border of my ass before veering off to the swell of my hips, down the sides of my thighs to the hem of my dress.

The crowd applauds. Simon is making a show of it. Of me.

And Cedric is watching.

The man who isn’t really called Simon lets his fingers flick playfully at the hem of my dress, then slip inside next to my bare skin. Slowly he trails upward and behind, so that the hem of my dress rises in back, out of view of the audience. His fingertips dance lightly on the backs of my thighs, and I bite my lip, hard, to keep from moaning. I want to cry out for Cedric, I want him to come take me, wherever he wants, right here if necessary, just to give me some release.

Instead I have Simon’s slow, slight torture.

He traces delicate lines up to the curve of my ass, and then gently cups it, his fingers roaming close, dangerously close. For a brief, wild moment I think he will try to put a finger inside me, but he edges away, moving his hands up and curling his fingers over the waist of my panties. He pauses there for a moment, and then strips them down to my ankles in one fell swoop.

I step out of them, obligingly, the only acknowledgement I’ve made of what is happening. Simon must hold them aloft, like his predecessor, because he gets the same crowd reaction.

I can’t pay attention to any of that. I’m too focused on what comes next.

“May I have your attention please,” Gerald intones. “Our final lot. . . .”

And for the first time Gerald pauses with a hint of uncertainty. I know,
know
, somehow I know, that he is looking at Cedric. That he is wondering if he is to proceed, or if Cedric will stop him. And for that moment I swear my heart levitates between beats.

“. . .Our final lot, the most precious item of all. . . .” Gerald lets his voice ring out loud and true, and then he waits. I wait. It feels like the whole universe waits.

“Claire Donner herself. No further explanation necessary.”

A murmuring current spreads through the crowd below me. My heart doesn’t quite break, but it rattles a bit. There are many possible explanations. And this is my piece;
this
is the heart of my piece. I have to see it through.

And have faith that the rest will work itself out.

“I’m going to open the bidding at three hundred. Do I hear three hundred?”

Silence.

Aching, lonely, tormented silence.

“Is this for real?” someone asks.

The wind whips the edges of my dress, and I realize there is a very good chance it might expose my nakedness. I wonder if I’ll be arrested. I wonder if Cedric will intervene then. I wonder if he knows how much I crave him at this moment, how all I can think about is his dick inside me. How his control over me, even now, when I’ve put myself up for public auction, is completely fucking intoxicating.

“Do I hear three hundred?” Gerald says again, louder this time.

Oh, God, Cedric. My clit pulses for him, no matter where he is, no matter what he’s doing.