Every Which Way

by Sasha White

  Because I was quickly growing enamored, and she was a crazy, delicious fuck.

  Bettina

  Mark left me bound to his bed for almost half an hour afterward. He stroked me and played with my breasts, and called me his lovely, sexy slave. It felt wonderful, even if he terrified me.

  Sex really did feel amazing without a condom. Different, closer, warmer and more intimate. When he came inside me, I figured I’d just run into the bathroom and wash out his jizz. I hoped if I did it quickly enough, everything might be okay. But no, he wasn’t letting me run anywhere. I should have Harry Potter’d out of the unprotected sex thing. Sure, Mark was handsome and exciting, and he treated me like an actual person when he wasn’t tying me up and hurting me. I still didn’t want to have his baby.

  A slave should want to have her Master’s baby if he wanted it, but he wasn’t my Master and I wasn’t really a slave, just a grad student with my whole life ahead of me. I was only supposed to be Mark’s for a couple of hours, for a scene in one of the back rooms. Now I was in New York, cuffed to his bed, with his sperm swimming up my vagina.

  He finally let me go and I thought, now, I’ll run into the bathroom and wash out whatever I can. But he took me right from the bed over to the cage, a large rectangle about waist high, made of polished dark wood with cock-width spaces between the bars. I could tell it was custom made for stowing slaves. I started crying as he guided me into it.

  “Just a little cage time,” he said in a soothing lilt. “There’s a pillow. See? I’m not totally mean.”

  He closed the door and locked it, and went to take a shower. He left the bathroom door open, so I heard faint splashes as he moved in the water. I thought about the rivulets running over his muscles, and about the tilt of his head when he said, “I’m not totally mean.” I thought about the way he controlled me when he fucked me, not just with bondage, but with his hands and his touches, and his intent gazes.

  Oh, God, what am I doing here? I live in Chicago. I don’t know this man. He’s trying to knock me up. I’m locked in his cage.

  I tried to find the locking mechanism but I couldn’t see it from inside, and I couldn’t reach it with my fingers. For real, I was trapped here. I lay back on the pillow and slid my hand between my legs and touched myself. My Master didn’t have a custom cage like this, only a metal cage, mass-manufactured and intended for dogs. Mark’s solid, polished-wood cage made me feel horny. I started masturbating because I felt like his captive, his pretty toy in his classy cage. I finished quickly and guiltily, before his shower was done. Some of the wetness between my legs wasn’t from me...it was from him, his semen. What if he really got me pregnant? I started bawling again.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked when he came out of the bathroom. “Why are you crying?”

  He toweled off, a naked, beautiful man with natural muscles. Not gym-ripped, just real. His red-blond hair looked scruffier and darker when it was wet.

  “I’m sorry, Master,” I said. “I’m freaking out.”

  He sat beside the cage and looked in at me. “I don’t want you to freak out.” He ran a hand over the bars. “I put you in this cage so you’ll feel safe.”

  “It’s not the cage that’s bothering me. I need to come out. I need to go to the bathroom and wash. I’m afraid...”

  “Are you afraid because I came in you?”

  I nodded and cried some more. “It’s just...not something you can undo.”

  “If you didn’t want me to do it, why didn’t you use your safe word?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Were you trying to be a good slave? Letting Master do whatever he wanted, no matter how dangerous? No matter the repercussions for you?” This was a lecture, not approbation. “Do you feel proud of yourself now? Like the best slave in all of Slave World? Let me give you some advice. Slavery isn’t a contest. BDSM isn’t a contest. There’s no point in trying to win.”

  I buried my face in the pillow.

  “Bettina...”

  I heard the cage lock click, heard the door swing open. He crawled in beside me and pried my face out of the pillow, and made me turn to him.

  “You’re not going to get pregnant,” he said. “I had a vasectomy years ago.”

  I wiped away my tears. I had taken so many risks in my life. This hadn’t been a risk at all. “Oh,” I said stupidly. “Okay.”

  “I just wanted to fuck with your head. I guess I also wanted to see how far you’d let me go.” His frown deepened. “You let me go too far.”

  I knew that. I felt foolish. “I got caught up,” I said. “I feel so stupid now.”

  “Don’t feel stupid. Just stop letting people who call themselves ‘Masters’ do dangerous things to you. It’s not worth it.”

  I studied his face. I was still memorizing his features, the curve of his lower lip, the aquiline symmetry of his nose. He was familiar, yes, but not at all known. Even if he wasn’t capable of knocking me up, he’d still exposed me to danger. “What if you gave me an STD?” I asked.

  He shifted and propped his head on his hand. “That doesn’t seem like something a worthless slave needs to worry about. If you’re worthless, why would I care?” His thumb slid across my cheek, across tear trails. “Why would anyone give a shit, Bettina?”

  He said it in the softest, kindest voice anyone had ever used with me.

  He was fucking with me again.

  Mark

  I wouldn’t have gone to a public STD clinic for anything or anyone a week ago. But somehow, some way, I was here.

  “Happy now?” I said, handing over the report.

  She glanced over my very, very clean bill of health. “Thank you,” she said quietly.

  “But..?”

  She looked up at me. “But what?”

  “I don’t know. There was a but in your Thank you.”

  “I just wonder...” She folded the paper’s edge between her fingers. “I wonder why you didn’t make me get tested too. You trust me that much? That I told you the truth?”

  “At some point, someone has to trust someone.” I took the paper from her and crumpled it in a ball. “I told you I had a vasectomy. That may or may not be true.”

  Her flustered glare killed me, in a wonderful way.

  “I’m joking,” I said. “I don’t want kids. I definitely got a vasectomy. I’m not going to make you pregnant, and I believe that you’ve always used condoms.”

  “But why? Why do you believe me?”

  “The answer to that is simple.” I sighed and looked at her, and thought, this is your worst weakness. Your fatal shortcoming. “I believe you, because I don’t think anyone has ever taught you how to lie.”

  Bettina

  After that, Mark made me lie to him on purpose. In the middle of a scene, he’d stop and shout at me: “Tell me a lie!”

  It was hard, especially when I was tied up, being whipped or fucked or made to choke repeatedly on his cock. I love to eat broccoli. Dallas is in Massachusetts. Birdwatching is a dangerous hobby.

  He put up with my silly lies, and sometimes I even made him laugh, like when I said, Art is for fakes and posers. He talked a lot about art, about what made it good and what made it bad, and why some art appealed to people while other art disappeared, forgotten. He said that art was often tangled up in lies. He said a lot of things that addled my analytical, engineering brain.

  In between fucking me and forcing me to tell lies, he took me to his office, where I worked for an entire week as his assistant. He made me go for coffee, and place phone calls when his real assistant was busy. He bought me a sleek little pinstriped suit to wear on the job, and threw away my favorite sweater because it was acrylic. He bought me cashmere sweaters to replace it, one pale gray, one pink, light and soft as clouds. I loved those sweaters. I loved when he took me places and bought me things. I was kind of starting to love him.

  But I wasn’t his slave. I was Bryan’s slave, Bryan who was back in Chicago, who never bought me anything, who never ca
lled or texted to see if I was okay. After all, I was just a worthless slave.

  Eventually, I stopped thinking about Bryan so much, because my new Master kept me pretty busy between work and blowjobs and BDSM scenes and abandoned, horny sex. True to his word, he never touched me unless I was bound. This prevented me from touching him, which I didn’t like, but it made me feel very controlled, which I liked a lot. I learned to submit on an entirely new level.

  He did things to me that made me wish I wasn’t bound. He spanked me and slapped me, and attached clips to me in hurty, sensitive places, and fucked my ass almost daily. He had a whip he used on my back and legs that made me want to die.

  He messed with me too. Once he figured out my furtive cage-time masturbation habits, he made a new rule. No masturbation unless I was wearing nipple clamps and a butt plug. This led to conversations like this: Are you feeling horny, little slave girl? Okay, come here. I’d drag over to him, and offer my breasts so clamps might be applied to my nipples, and then bend over so an unforgivably large butt plug could be lubed and seated in my ass. Then I’d be forced to masturbate four or five times in a row while he watched, stroking himself. If I couldn’t make myself come, he’d bring out the vibrator and force painful, repeated climaxes on me until I wailed to be released.

  Then the clamps would come off and the rope would go on, or the cuffs. I’d be forced to my knees to suck his cock with my wrists bound behind my back as he played with my tender, post-clamped nipples. He’d come on my breasts or in the back of my throat, and I’d collapse on the floor, wrung out with exhaustion. He’d go get the whip, put a few marks on me, and then put me back in the cage, still wearing the butt plug. Later, when he came to get me, he’d trace those marks with his tongue until I shivered.

  I’d never felt so happy, so alive.

  I was definitely falling in love.

  No, it couldn’t be love, not so soon. I was only infatuated. I remembered that from my pre-slave days, when I’d made so many mistakes trying to convince vanilla boys to love me. What I felt for this Master was infatuation, and I constantly reminded myself of that. His delight in torturing me made things easier. It made me determined not to love him for hours at a time.

  He flew me to Toronto the second week, on his shiny private jet. He told his clients there that I was his intern, and they believed him because I stood beside him in my pinstriped suit with a leather planner clasped to my chest, and he called me Miss Silver in a cool, manicured voice.

  “I want you to watch them as we talk,” he said to me before each meeting. He had several meetings lined up on this trip, people who wanted to buy art, or sell it. Some were private clients, and some were curators of world-famous museums looking for new acquisitions. They called him Mr. Caulfield and smiled all the time when he was with them. He told me to watch and see if I could tell when they were lying. I was supposed to write the lies down, pretending to take notes in my notebook. This was all because he thought I wasn’t a good enough liar to get along in the world. And that was the truth, I was terrible at lying. I always had been.

  When we returned to the hotel room, after these meetings or dinners, he’d tell me to take off my clothes and then I had to tell him all the lies I thought I had heard. For a bad liar, I was right ninety-five percent of the time.

  “Are you ready to go back to Chicago?” he’d ask me sometimes.

  And I would say, “If it pleases you, Master.”

  One time when I said that, his lips went really tight, and he stalked over to the window. “He’s not calling the cops, your fucking ‘Master.’ There have been no Amber Alerts on my phone.”

  “I think Amber Alerts are only for children.”

  He spun back to me. “Do you think you aren’t a child?”

  I lowered my gaze. It was kind of a lie, the way he judged me for being so helpless and slavey, while taking advantage of it at the same time. I knew he was conflicted about keeping me, and using me for sex. I should never have told him about the engineering degree. I think he felt he should prefer that intelligent, well-adjusted woman, but he didn’t. He preferred to use me like a slave, and I preferred to be used like a slave.

  That night, he tied me to the hotel curtain rod and took out the small, vicious whip that made me cry just from looking at it.

  “Do you want this?” he asked.

  “No, Master,” I answered. Not a lie.

  He laid it across the backs of my thighs, a hot, wicked flash of pain. I made a ragged sound that was almost a scream.

  “Be quiet,” he warned. “We’re in a hotel.”

  “Let me bite on something, then. Please.”

  “No. Lie to me, Bettina.”

  An inaudible parting of air, the whispered non-sound that signaled another strike. I swallowed my agony because he’d told me to. Two strikes, two lines like brands of white-hot fire.

  I told him lies. I tried. It wasn’t easy when I was working so hard to be quiet, working so hard to keep my feet planted beside the hotel window. “I hate rainbows,” I said. “I love pistachio ice cream.” I squeezed my eyes shut. He was striking me every few seconds, whether I spit out a lie or not. Whether he believed me or not. It really felt like fire, that whip. It was like being struck with fire again and again.

  Then it got harder, because he didn’t just say, “Tell me a lie.” He said, “Convince me, damn you.”

  I yanked at the curtain rod, thinking I would die if he didn’t release me. “Contra-rotating turbines aren’t sensitive to pressure or mass,” I said, my voice trembling.

  “Bullshit. I don’t believe you.”

  “I don’t want this. I want to go back to Chicago.”

  “Convince me.”

  I started to cry. It was a lie, absolutely. I never wanted to go back. “I want to go back,” I screamed, loud enough for the people downstairs in the lobby to hear.

  He dropped the whip and clamped a hand over my mouth. “No. You don’t convince people by screaming. Screaming just makes it sound more like a lie.”

  I shook my head and pulled at the ropes until the rod creaked in the wall. He let me go. “I don’t want to go back,” I said. “I’m falling in love with you.”

  Neither of those things were lies. My ass throbbed like a drum beat from the whipping he’d given me. He went for lubricant and slathered it over his cock, and pressed himself between my sore cheeks.

  “I want to go back to Chicago,” I whispered. It seemed like a good time to lie again.

  “Shut up.” He clapped his hand over my mouth and gripped it hard. I sobbed as he pushed the head inside. It hurt because he was thick and hard and took no care except to lube his cock really well. His hand was thick and hard too. When he moved his fingers, he could block my nostrils so I couldn’t breathe.

  I cried and cried. I cried because I’d admitted I was falling for him, and I cried because his cock was killing my ass. I cried because he made me stop breathing sometimes, and let me start again only when I struggled and jerked my head back and forth.

  By the end I wrenched the curtain rod off the wall. It clanged down, still tethered to me like an anchor. He deflected it so it didn’t hit my head, and still he fucked my ass and held his hand over my mouth. I came hard, with his cock buried deep inside and my clit bumping against the windowsill. I gazed out at the Toronto landscape, but I didn’t see a thing.

  When we checked out of the hotel the next day, he left the curtain rod lying by the window. The whip was packed in his suitcase.

  “Tell me a lie, Miss Silver,” he said as I squirmed in his jet’s leather seat.

  I lifted my chin. “I want to go back to Chicago.”

  He gave me such a look then. Pleasure and spite, and haughty amusement. His blue eyes danced, and his lips turned down at the corners with good-natured disdain.

  “You’re getting better at lying,” he said. “But I don’t believe you yet.”

  Mark

  Her short skirts drove me wild. She wasn’t really my slave—I didn
’t want to own a slave. But oh, I appreciated those legs. I bought her shoes with midsize heels. I like them, don’t judge me.

  Tights. She liked to wear tights. I started obsessing over tights.

  I didn’t tell her any of this, obviously.

  No, I just bought her a bunch of tights. Cotton, not acrylic or some cheap polyester blend. I bought her luxury cotton tights from Scandinavia, with knit lines running down her legs to keep her warm in frigid art galleries. Nothing but the best for my loaner girl.

  Her asshole Master in Chicago never contacted her. It had been three weeks now. I asked if he called or texted her and she said no, and she never lied. She still couldn’t lie, after all my efforts to make her into a liar.

  Why was I doing that, trying to make her a more dishonest person? Maybe because her purity confounded me. It made her vulnerable in a way I couldn’t bear, because eventually I was going to have to send her back to Chicago where everyone was fucking crazy, and to her Master, who was fucking crazy.

  All this shit kept me up at night.

  For now, she walked beside me through the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Modern and Contemporary wing. This was my favorite place in the world, the magical world that had beckoned me toward art from my youngest years. There were thirty or more galleries, thousands of paintings, some of which I’d acquired for the museum. She looked at each work with a defensive sort of equanimity. I’d been trying to teach her about art, about good art and bad art, about qualities and mediums, and messages the untrained eye didn’t see.

  “What do you see?” I asked, stopping at a Morris Louis work.

  She studied it a moment. “Lines. A lot of blank space in the middle.”

  “There is blank space, by design. What’s your favorite thing about the painting?”