The Compound (20 page)

When Clarence finally lowered his arm, Rachelle remained still, her head heavy against her chest, her eyes closed. Clarence laid down the whip and moved behind her. He wrapped his dark arms around her, gently pulling her back against him. He nodded toward her fiancé, who stood and moved toward the stage. As if they’d arranged it beforehand, the two men lifted the naked, slender girl between them and carried her to an empty loveseat in the corner of the room.

Michael sat down first, and together he and Clarence maneuvered the girl so she was curled on his lap. Rachelle opened her eyes and smiled at her fiancé, who grinned back. “
Hoo wee dog!” he cried. “You were something else up there, baby.”

The room broke into spontaneous applause and warm laughter. Paul turned to see his trainee’s and
Alexis’s reactions. Trisha was smiling and clapping along with everyone else.

Alexis was nowhere to be seen.

Paul scanned the room. Maybe she was with John. But no, John was on a chair nearby, Wendy curled contentedly at his feet, her head resting on his leg. Paul leaned toward them, catching John’s eye. “Where’s Alexis?”

John looked toward the row of trainees. “She’s over there,” he began, but stopped himself with a surprised grunt when he saw she was no longer in the line. “That’s strange. She was there a moment ago. Maybe she had to use the bathroom and didn’t want to disturb the scene, so she just slipped out.”

Paul was relieved John didn’t ask him why it was his business. It really wasn’t, but her absence had taken him by surprise. John was probably right. She would return momentarily.

But she didn’t.

Miriam got up and spoke a few congratulatory words to Rachelle and Michael, and thanked Clarence for his usual stellar performance, and still Alexis didn’t return.

“Maybe she went back to the quarters,” Wendy suggested. “It might have been hard on her, watching that performance.”

Hard on her? Paul considered this. He thought about their shared session, and how hard she’d tried to fly, and how close she’d been before the panic had set in. Maybe Wendy was right. Maybe it had been hard to watch someone else slip almost effortlessly into that place, while she herself continued to struggle.

The words from her essay popped into his mind:
I need help to chip away at the mortar and knock down the bricks that are hiding the true submissive within.

He
should have been the one to help her. He should have been her trainer. But he wasn’t. He turned to John. “You need to find her—to make sure she’s okay.”

John looked hard at him for a long moment and Paul suddenly realized his friend understood more than he had let on. As if to confirm this feeling, John smiled as he placed his hand on Paul’s arm, squeezing gently. “You go, Paul. Go find her.”

Alexis stumbled as she ran, her bare feet splashing in puddles of muddy water, the rain blinding her and drenching her skin. She was crying as she ran, clutching her arms around herself as if that would provide any protection from the storm.

Watching Rachelle had been a heart-wrenching experience—so beautiful it hurt, especially because Alexis knew she would never achieve that level of grace and release. It just wasn’t in her. She didn’t know how to do it. For the first time in her life, Alexis had to admit she was a failure. The thought wrenched another sob from her lips.

She had been heading for the slave quarters, not caring that she would be punished for leaving the room without Master John’s permission. If she had stayed in that room for one more second she would have burst out crying in front of everyone, and that would have been her complete undoing, she knew.

But when the slave quarters loomed, she couldn’t face pushing through the doors. She couldn’t bear the idea of anyone seeing her in her misery and her shame, and so she kept running under the cover of darkness, her movements spurred by the flashes of lightning and the cracks of thunder. The rain poured down, the sky crying along with her as she ran.

Alexis found herself heading toward the back of the property, toward the creek where she’d shared so many happy hours with the other trainees and staff slaves. She stopped beside the old barn, breathing hard, a painful stitch in her side. She moved toward the old double doors and pulled at them. They creaked noisily open on rusted hinges. She stepped inside the dark room, relieved to be out of the torrential rain.

She stood still just inside the barn for a while, listening for the scurry of mice or the whirring of bat wings, her heart pounding, but there was only the sound of the rain clattering against the tin roof. She stood for a long
while, feeling hollowed out, as if someone had reached in and scooped out her insides, leaving only misery behind.

Her eyes adjusted slowly to the room, and she saw the dim white outline of the cot Sam had mentioned. She made her way toward it and wrapped herself in the blanket that lay atop it. She had stopped sobbing, but hot tears continued to course down her cheeks, and she shivered beneath the thin coverlet. She knew she was just feeling sorry for herself.

She thought of Marta and knew she shouldn’t quit before the miracle, but what if, for her, the miracle never came?

After a while the tears stopped. Her eyes burned and her heart felt like a lump of lead inside her chest. She curled tight against herself, wondering if anyone else had ever quit the program before their training term had ended. She could spend the last week just resting in her apartment, watching old movies and catching up on her email. Or she
could rent a cottage by the shore and swim in the ocean. She would put all this behind her. She would forget The Compound and Master John and Paul…

Paul.

That’s what had sent her running from the room. When Rachelle had begun to fly, Alexis had turned her eyes from the scene and toward Paul. He was watching the girl with such a rapt look, leaning forward, his eyes shining as if he were watching the most spectacular sunrise, or seeing the face of his lover…

She felt as if someone had reached inside her and squeezed her heart so hard it had stopped beating. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think. She just knew she had to get out of there. She had to get away from the sight of the man she loved staring entranced at the scene of a woman who had slipped with such apparent ease and grace into an altered state about which Alexis could only dream.

The man she loved.

Did love at first sight really exist? Was it possible to love someone you barely knew? Until she had seen Paul that very first day swimming in the pool, she would have dismissed such an idea out of hand.

But what did she know? She had never been in love before, in her nearly thirty years of life on the planet, she had never been in love, not like this. She had been attracted to guys, sure. She’d thought she was in love, or at least edging toward it, but it had always, in the end, seemed like too much work. And if you had to work at it, was it really love?

But with Paul it was easy. All she had to do was think about him, and she felt her body soften and open inside, like a flower turning its petals toward a warm, welcoming sun. She could sense when he was near, even before she saw him. It was like a tingle in her spine, as if they were connected somehow by some invisible electric current that moved between them. His eyes were always warm when he smiled at her, and then the current would zing like a violet wand moving over her skin and it would slip inside, lighting and warming her from within.

When she’d seen Paul with his new trainee, just a day after her bungled session, she’d wanted to scream at the injustice of it. After that he’d never had time to work with Master John again. She would never be given the chance to show him she could do better.

She’d continued to do her best with Master John, but if she was honest, her heart wasn’t entirely in her training anymore. She was distracted by Paul, and by the lack of him. It hurt so much to be unable to speak to him, to go to him, to let him know how she felt. Yet she hadn’t dared to do any of those things. She was Master John’s trainee. The rules were clear. She wasn’t to fraternize with the other trainers. This wasn’t, as she had to remind herself over and over, a dating service. It was a training facility and she was here to learn, and nothing more.

Yet it had become too hard. It hurt too much to continue. She knew that with certainty now. She could no longer act as if everything was fine
and hope it would somehow become reality.

Alexis had always been a woman of action. She didn’t believe in putting off what needed to be done. It would be best for her to have an honest discussion with Master John, or better yet, with Mistress Miriam. Surely she wasn’t the first trainee to fail. It was best to know when to cut your losses and move on.

If you go, you won’t see him again.

This thought made her begin to cry again, her tears wetting the thin pillow she clutched against her cheek.
A peal of thunder made her jump and give a startled cry. She heard the sound of the doors creaking open and she turned on the cot. She would have to get up and close the doors so the rain wouldn’t come blowing in. Yet as she peered in the darkness, she saw the shape of a man standing in the doorway. Had Master John come in search of her? Would he punish her on the spot for running away?

Another flash of lightning lit the room and she saw it was Paul.

“Paul?” she said in a tremulous voice, forgetting to precede his name with
Master
, for a second wondering if she’d conjured his image in her longing for him.

“Alexis! There you are. Thank god I found you.” Paul came striding into the room on those long, sexy legs of his. His long hair was wet and dripping, his shirt soaked against his skin. “You must be freezing,” he said, moving closer. “There are some candles somewhere, I’m pretty sure. Let me get some light in here.”

Alexis sat up, clutching the thin blanket around her as she watched in stunned silence. Paul moved toward an old chest of drawers she hadn’t noticed before and pulled open the drawers, rummaging in them.

“Here we go,” he said finally, striking a match with a hiss against a matchbook. He held the small flame to a candle until the wick lit. He produced three more candles, each set in a brass candle stick, and lit those as well. The space glowed with a soft, wavering light that lent a dreamlike quality to the already surreal circumstance.

He pulled something from his pocket and Alexis realized it was his cell phone. He pressed the screen rapidly with his thumbs and then slid the phone back into his pocket. Then he turned toward her, clutching an armful of blankets.

She let him take the thin, damp coverlet from her. He sat beside her on the small cot and wrapped one of the soft, thick blankets around her still shivering body. Then, to her stunned surprise, he pulled off his boots and stripped out of his wet clothing, dropping them to the ground before slipping beneath the blanket beside her.

He wrapped his arms around her, whispering against her hair, “Alexis. Alexis,” making her name sound like a caress, like the softest, sweetest kiss. She could feel the length of his hard, lean body against hers, and the unmistakable rise of his cock against her thigh. He smelled so good and felt so good with his body wrapped around hers.

Tentatively she dared to put her arms around him in return, as she nestled her head between his neck and shoulder. Was this really happening? Or was this one of those
lucid dreams she’d read about. If it was a dream, it was a good dream. A very good dream.

His lips found hers and they kissed, tongues exploring each other’s mouths.
Alexis’s heart was pounding against his strong, smooth chest as he kissed her mouth. “I’ve wanted you from the moment I saw you,” he breathed into her ear between kisses. “I have to have you. Tell me it’s okay. Tell me you want me too.”

“Oh, Paul.
Yes. Yes. Please.” She knew now it was no dream, but a reality she had longed for a hundred times over the week since he’d taken her face in his hands and peered into her eyes with such loving concern.

The rain pelted on the tin roof overhead and the candles illuminated the room in a soft, flickering light. Paul rolled Alexis to her back and lifted himself over her beneath the blanket. She felt the nudge of his hard cock between her legs and she
arched up, wanting him like she’d never wanted anyone before.

He held himself like that for several long beats, until Alexis thought she would die with longing. Before she realized she was speaking, the words burst from her lips. “Paul, oh god, I want you. Please, please, I want you so bad,” she begged.

When he entered her, she exploded in a sudden, fierce climax, shuddering against him, stunned at the violence of her body’s reaction. He pulled her close, holding her as her body spasmed in his arms, and then he began to move, his hard, perfect cock easing deep inside her wetness and then pulling back, the pleasure almost unbearable.

“Yes, yes, yes, yes,” she heard herself chant in a gasping voice. He took her harder, thrusting deep inside her. The movement was perfect, his pubic bone rubbing her throbbing clit as he moved, and she began to shudder again, her cunt contracting in another series of intense climaxes. He came at the same time, his body going rigid for a moment and then jerking as he thrust inside her in hot, perfect spurts.

He collapsed against her and she could feel his heart hammering against hers. His cock still buried inside her, Paul lay still for so long she thought maybe he’d fallen asleep. She didn’t mind. She loved the heavy masculine weight of him on top of her and she closed her eyes, drifting in a cloud of quiet, easy joy.