Marketplace (20 page)

Claudia bit her lip,
fighting back an instinctive protest. Chris released her right arm,
but maintained a strong hold on her left, and kept his knee firmly
between her thighs. Claudia let her hand hang loosely for a moment
and looked flustered, but then started to bring it up to her mouth.
She stopped herself before it got there and looked up at Alexandra,
her eyes wide.

Alex nodded. “Get them good
and wet,” she said softly. “Do whatever you have to do to get
yourself off for me. Make it good. Get me interested. Show me how
much you need this.”

Claudia gulped and placed
her own fingers in her mouth to moisten them. Then, she let her
hand seek that place she knew so well, and her eyes closed as she
began the familiar series of touches that until now had been her
private pleasures.

Alex gave a moment’s
thought to telling the girl to open her eyes, but decided that this
time, she would let Claudia have the comfort of that much privacy.
Next time would be different.

Held tightly against
Chris’s compact body, Claudia began to shift against him,
responding to the steady pulsing that was building between her
legs. She couldn’t squeeze her legs together the way she would have
if she were alone, but a week of frustration and confusing
desperation had done some remarkable work on her psyche. She needed
this so bad! Her fingers began to fly as she dipped into herself
for more of her sweet wetness, bringing it up to that little center
of heat. She began to gasp, and then pant.

“That’s it,” Alex coaxed.
“That’s a good girl. Let’s hear you come now. Let’s see how good
you can be. Let it out for me. Let it all out.”

“Ahh!” Claudia moaned,
twisting and squirming back onto Chris’s leg. “Ah,
yess!”

Alexandra smiled and moved
in closer. “Do it now! Come!”

Claudia gave a long, uneven
moan of pleasure and stiffened in Chris’s embrace. Her hips jerked
upward, as though she was rising to meet the thrusts of a dynamic
lover. Gritting her teeth, she collapsed back into Chris’s arms,
shuddering and crooning, and gulping air in between a series of
erotic shivers.

When she opened her eyes,
she knew that her entire face was flushed with the humiliation of
displaying such passion before a mistress, but Alexandra seemed
very pleased.

“You may release her,”
Alexandra said with a nod. “And go call Madeleine. Tell her we may
have something to work with.”

* * * *

Grendel met Chris in the
hallway in the late afternoon, just before dinner. The sounds of
table setting and the clattering of the kitchen were faint in the
background, and no one was near them. Chris had nodded, and was
about to pass Grendel by, but the master of the house put out one
hand to stay the majordomo.

“I hear you’re interested
in Claudia,” Grendel said.

Chris’s eyes matched
Grendel’s for a long moment, and then he dropped them. A tiny smile
touched his lips. “I’m eager to aid their training,
Sir.”

“Oh, I see.” Grendel moved
in closer and carefully took a firm grip on Chris’s shirt front,
grasping it and the tie in one fist. Chris let loose an involuntary
gasp and looked up, keeping his eyes open and locked as Grendel
pulled him closer, and then higher, until the heels of the man’s
boots lifted off the floor.

“Wise-ass,” Grendel said
fondly. He didn’t relax his grip. “That’s the epicure in you, you
always go for the ones with the best pedigree. Has Alex said you
can have the girl?“

“No, Sir.” Chris’s breath
came in short, paced inhalations. When Grendel lowered his fist and
began propelling Chris backwards, until his back touched the wall,
Chris took two long, ragged breaths, and shifted his eyes to the
right.

“They’ll either come and
see you like this or they won’t,” Grendel said. “Keep your eyes on
me, boy.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“That would be something,
wouldn’t it? To let them know right now that we can make you shake
and tremble the way they do? That one touch can make you lose your
cool? That might do something to the effectiveness of your
discipline, don’t you think?” Grendel continued to speak softly,
his voice just above a whisper, slow and almost hypnotic. Chris
pushed his head against the wall to better be able to look up into
Grendel’s eyes.

“They’ll obey you, Sir,” he
said. There was now a raspy quality to his voice, and he gave a
little cough to try and clear it. “I’m just a tool.”

Grendel shook his clenched
fist, digging his fingers into the hollow under Chris’s throat.
“Don’t pull that false modesty on me too often,” he warned. “I
don’t like being buried in your bullshit, boy. The fact is that you
still wish you were in their place. Every morning, you wake up and
you go to them and you hate their guts because they’ve got what you
never had. And they’ll get more this year than you’ll ever dream of
getting. That’s why you want them, the best of them.”

Chris swallowed hard and
replied, “As you say, Sir.”

Grendel smiled, but kept
his grip. “When was the last time you were fucked, boy?”

“Two months ago, Sir. And a
few days.”

“Ha! Good, you’re
pretending that you don’t know the exact number of days, that’s
good. You might sound desperate and petulant if you did that. Well,
let me tell you this,” Grendel enforced his words with a rocking
motion of his hand. “You’ll get yours when they start to break, and
not one minute before. And we’ll see which of them you’ll get to
handle when they start to show the signs of your teaching. There’s
one thing for sure, boy.” He released his hold and smoothed down
the crumpled shirt-front, and carefully straightened Chris’s tie.
“You won’t get Claudia.” Chris nodded and closed his eyes, and
Grendel gave him a gentle pat on the head. “You’d better go,”
Grendel said, looking over his shoulder. “Dinner’s almost
ready.”

* * * *

That night, the four slaves
sheepishly eyed each others’ marks and badges. Claudia looked
terrified, but strangely determined. Sharon was a mass of red
marks, faint bruises, scratches and smudges. And Brian couldn’t
even hold his head up. His body was still decorated with various
ribbons and bows, and marked in several places with reddened areas
that looked almost angry in their intensity. Only Robert seemed to
have survived the day without something traumatic happening to
him—at least as far as anyone could tell.

Back in their room, they
retreated to their beds in silence. Once again, none of them were
chosen to accompany either the master or the mistress of the house
for the evening, and Chris told them to just go and sit on their
beds until lights out and think about what they could do to remedy
that situation. Before dismissing them, he took Brian’s decorations
off and took them away without saying a word about them.

They sat in silence for
about one minute.

“How... how did everyone do
today?” Robert asked. Groans from three directions was his
response. The four looked up at each other, and a ripple of
hesitant snickers and giggles swept through the room.

“That bad, huh?” Robert
said, leaning back. “Well, at least you all are getting some
attention. I think Mistress Alexandra is so disgusted with me that
she just wishes I’d go away.” He said it lightly, but the look on
his face was very serious.

“Aww, you don’t know that,”
Brian said, waving a hand at the big man. “It could be just another
psych-out game they’re playing with you.” They nodded in agreement
and then fell back into silence.

“It’s not just games,”
Claudia announced suddenly. “If...if Mistress Alexandra didn’t tell
me something today, I might have...I might have made the biggest
mistake of my entire life!”

“Oh yeah? What did she
say?” Brian asked.

Claudia gently bit her lip,
considering. “I think I’d rather not say, Brian,” she said finally.
“But I did learn something frightening! Chris... wants
me.”

“Really?” Brian and Robert
echoed each other.

“Yes! While Mistress
Alexandra was... um... training me... he held me. And I felt him,
behind my back. His... you know.” She blushed slightly.

Robert looked down in
embarrassment. Brian stroked the place where his mustache had been
and wondered if he should share his little piece of important
information. He coughed and said, “Actually, Claudia, there’s
something you should know about that little bastard. The first day
I was here—”

“Could all of you just shut
up?” Sharon interrupted with a snarl. “We’re supposed to be
quiet!”

The three reacted to her
outburst with raised eyebrows plus one snicker from Brian. “Oh
dear, look who’s turned out to be the new Miss Goody-Two-Shoes.
Reading that manual and reciting it every night has brainwashed
you, hasn’t it, sweetie? Or was it your refreshing experiences in
the outdoors today?”

Sharon looked like she was
going to retort, but turned away from all of them with a jerky
twist of her body. Without another word, she wrapped the thin
covers over her body and put her head to the pillow. Brian
shrugged, and then turned back to Claudia.

“You might as well spill
it, Claudia. It looks like we’ll be in this for a while. Why don’t
we get back to telling our life stories again? Wanna start the next
chapter?”

“Oh no, I don’t think I
can,” Claudia said soberly. “Not tonight, anyway. Why don’t you go,
Robert?”

Robert shifted on the
mattress and thought it over for a minute. “All right,” he finally
said. “But it’s not very interesting, I’m afraid.”

“Trust us, we’re a captive
audience,” Brian sighed.

And with the rapt attention
of at least two of his comrades, Robert began his tale.

Chapter Ten: Robert's
Tale

I guess I had everything a
man could want these days. I had a good job, a wife, two kids, a
house in the suburbs, the works. We even had a dog, this mutt we
picked out from the shelter. The kids went to camp in the summer,
we even took them to Disney World one year. We had it real good,
and we knew it.

Angie, my wife, was...
is... the best. She was a Rhodes Scholar. She wrote this series of
papers on the effects of violence on kids, and they were published
all over the world. She was invited to speak in Northern Ireland,
and we all went. I was so proud of her.

And in the meantime, I went
to the city every day in my suit and tie, and I... well, I
basically sold toys to over-age kids. You know, you’ve probably
seen catalogs from my company. Gyroscopes made from space-age
metals. Computerized bar guides. Neon artwork. Hand-carved desk
accessories from some country where workers only get paid
thirty-five cents an hour. We targeted those catalogs to households
in the richest neighborhoods, and we sponsored expensive research
into gentrification so we could find all the yuppies in any given
town within five days of their signing a mortgage. As senior vice
president in charge of marketing, I had my finger on the pulse of
every American man who was earning three times as much as the
government thought a family of four should live comfortably
on.

At home, I tried to be
active in my family’s life. I went to school plays and softball
games. I even went to PTA meetings for a while. I... we... always
tried to do things with the kids on the weekends, and I always
remembered birthdays and special days. And I had my own stuff, my
hobbies. I played a little football in school, so I coached this
local teenage team. I went to the gym.

And I was the unhappiest
man in the world. Because I had the biggest, dirtiest secret. I had
a mistress.

And it wasn’t like all the
other guys, either. I mean, they had lovers on the side. Women who
worked with them, or women they met at bars after work, or even
their own babysitters! But I had a mistress. A
Mistress.
And... and I paid her. To
see me. Once a week, every week for over two years.

Don’t get me wrong. I...
loved her. But she was just too important to be able to see
everyone who wanted to see her. I mean, she was famous. Really, if
I told you her name, you would recognize it immediately. She’s even
been on TV. And she really didn’t have a job, so she would charge
men for what they needed. I never thought of it as a fee, really.
It was more like tribute. To my empress, my goddess. The money
didn’t mean a thing. But what she did to me was worth all the money
in the world.

I guess I’m starting in the
middle, aren’t I? Well, my life wasn’t very interesting until then,
I guess. Except for this huge secret I had, that was always there.
I can remember being thirteen years old, and smuggling this dirty
magazine into my room and jerking off to a picture of this woman in
thigh-high leather boots. But I never talked to anyone about it.
Never! Until I met my first Mistress.

What had happened was I
went to this chic party in one of those trendy clubs, some
remodeled church or something. I can’t even remember what it was
for, but my company had these tickets because we sponsored the
appearance of one of our boy-genius inventors or designers or
something. My wife had actually gone to a few of these things with
me, but she opted out of this one because she said it sounded loud
and obnoxious. I guess it was one of the few mistakes she made in
her entire life.