Carleton hung up before hearing any answer, knowing it would be in the affirmative. He turned his attention to the expert ministrations of Richard on his cock. The slave was really a good cock sucker. He’d had to train him though. When he’d acquired Richard, the boy was simply a deep throater; he didn’t understand the ritual of worshipping a master’s cock. It wasn’t just about being able to take it down the throat without gagging, it was about adulation: lightly grasping the shaft, stroking the inner thigh, mouthing the rim of the cockhead, nuzzling it against your cheek and nose, letting your saliva drip down onto it, making it wet and sloppy so that when you started to jerk it off into your mouth, it would be slippery and moist. A slave had to turn his mouth and hand into a cunt. And Richard was one good cunt.
But Carleton didn’t feel like rewarding Richard with his come, so he pushed him off as the limo pulled up to the apartment building. Richard hadn’t been expecting the ultimate reward of his master’s come, but he’d tried to bring him off anyway, hoping to steal at least more than the sweet pre-come from his master’s slit, but that was all he got. His own cock was so hard and sticky that it rubbed raw against the fly of his pants.
The first thing Carleton did when he entered the Penthouse was to walk over to the kitchen, and eat one of the crackers. He chewed thoughtfully as he went through the mail beside the plate. Richard walked through to the main bedroom and removed his clothes, put on his collar and leash and then attached it to a nearby hook in the wall.
All was ready.
Carleton finished eating his snack. It was silly perhaps, a dominant’s affectation, but he enjoyed the idea that Michael’s hands had made this snack. It was a child’s snack really. Something his mother had prepared for him to make him feel special when the other kids were eating chocolate or potato chips. She said Philly on Ritz was classy. It still made him feel that way, kind of sophisticated, superior. Did a man like Carleton need to feel superior? Wasn’t he already superior? Not really. He knew he was just a simple, unassuming man with a need to release his slaves, with a need to control something in a life where he had no control otherwise.
He spent his days as a clerk in a bank. His supervisor had referred to him as mouse-like, timid. In this apartment, not one person would consider him to be timid. They didn’t know about his job. All they ever knew was that this man had the power to make them travel, and they wanted that, needed that.
He walked to the bathroom, put his clothes on top of the hamper and showered with the soap and shampoo he specifically required, then dried off with the towel that was the exact colour and style he enjoyed most. Breathing a sigh of satisfaction, he donned his leather vest and slacks, the black boots and the mask that covered his eyes. He looked in the mirror. To his eyes, he looked taller than his 5ft 8in stature. He was a dominant and the master of three slaves. His plane trip had only taken an hour, but in that time he travelled from oblivion to adulation. He was a traveller too.
He entered the room and transported his slaves to ecstasy. Not bad for a mediocre man.
Appetites
Sage Vivant
In between her first and second Overeaters Anonymous meetings, Julia had an epiphany. She realized that the slim, pretty woman everybody flocked around during the break at her first meeting was the woman whose husband she had fucked for nearly a decade.
How could Julia be faulted for failing to recognize Paulette? For the many years that Matthew had been her lover, Julia had faced the rosy, round cheeks and strangely tired smile of his wife every time she visited his cubicle. Although it was often obscured by piles of error reports, the photo of Paulette always served as a prickly reminder of who had staked claim to Matthew first and who shared his bed each night. Julia’s only comfort came from noting Paulette’s obvious girth. Whenever she thought of Paulette in the days of the affair, she envisioned the lumbering, overweight matron who couldn’t hope to compete with Julia’s younger, svelter charms. Paulette’s size was her principal flaw, the ingredient in the cocktail for lust that soured the matrimonial drink.
Something had happened to Paulette since those days, though. The same bizarre twist of fate that had removed Paulette’s excess weight had reapportioned it to Julia. Although it had been years since Julia had even spoken to Matthew, seeing Paulette in her new sexy, confident persona upset the sexual status quo that Julia had previously accepted as incontrovertible.
So she skipped the next weekly OA meeting, which would have been her second, in order to think about what Paulette’s transformation meant to her.
“She’s a good person,” Matthew would say to Julia when the subject of leaving Paulette came up, as it inevitably did each time they were together. “And I have Sarah to think about.”
“Sarah is in high school now,” Julia would remind him. “How old does she need to be to understand that her parents are miserable and need to split up?”
And then he would look at her with brown eyes full of pain and desire and conflict, and nothing mattered except the smooth heat of his neck against her lips.
She recalled a certain regrettable phone call she’d once made.
“May I speak to Matthew, please?”
“He’s out right now. May I ask who’s calling?” came the unbearably courteous inquiry.
“This is Christine in I.T.,” Julia lied. “He’s not answering his pager and there’s an emergency here at work he needs to deal with. Can you have him call this number as soon as he gets in?”
“Oh, of course. What is it?”
Julia gave the unsuspecting, trusting wife her home phone number, which Matthew promptly called when he returned from his bike ride some thirty minutes later.
“I’ve got some drives that are really overheating,” Julia purred into the telephone. “How soon can you get here?”
She heard his silent confusion, imagined him turning away from a questioning Paulette. She ignored the sickness in her gut.
“I’ll be right there,” he said after a long pause.
The urgency of her request precluded the shower he might have otherwise taken after such an extended bicycle excursion, and that was fine by Julia – she adored the scent of his sweat. The only time he showered whenever they were together was after sex. It was a precaution he felt was necessary to keep at least the olfactory evidence of the affair hidden from Paulette.
Julia recalled that particular visit well. Her hunger for him, always at barely manageable levels, had been so intense that day that she’d broken their rule about no calls to his home. When he arrived, his face a paradox of reprimand and excitement, they fell to the stairs leading to her flat the moment she closed the door to let him in. Their bodies tumbled in a blur of kisses, gropes, and erratic breaths. With his rigid cock in her hand and her swollen nipples at his tongue, they somehow inched their way upstairs to her freshly made bed (white linen, to mirror the one he shared with Paulette).
The strange thing about depravity and deception is how beautifully it feeds an already corrupt and selfish obsession. Never before had he thrust into her with such ferocious need. Never before had she wanted to feel him so deep inside her, pushing and pounding against her, filling her so full that grateful tears stung her eyes. But the door to one moral misstep always miraculously leads to another, and with Julia’s disregard of one rule came the reckless and heady freedom to violate new ones. They soiled more than the pristine white linen that afternoon but the all-consuming joy they felt in one another’s presence helped them justify the rightness of it all.
Julia had always been one of those students who read ahead to future lessons. So naturally she acquainted herself with not just the first step in OA but with the entire dozen.
Step Four: Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
The reading materials explained that this step required an honest examination of one’s past. Because wrongs weren’t faced honestly, it said, feeling shame was common.
Okay. Her affair with Matthew was wrong. She knew th
at. She could even face it, but could she face it with Paulette in the same room? Was an outright confession absolutely necessary?
Step Five: Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
Shit. Letting Paulette in on the results of her searching and fearless moral inventory might actually be what was supposed to happen.
Underneath all the grousing she’d done about Paulette during the affair, she’d always wanted to apologize. No, that wasn’t entirely true. She wanted absolution, then and now. That need had never abated – Julia carried it around like a marble stuck in her spine. She was accustomed to the discomfort but always aware that it needed attention. Steps Four and Five might very well be the opportunity she’d been craving all these years. But was she ready for this opportunity?
Maybe the OA people would allow her weeks or months to get to Step Five. Or even Step Four, for that matter. Maybe she should have signed up for WeightWatchers, instead.
There was no question that Paulette had probably lost more than a hundred pounds. This fact continued to bewilder Julia, who had most assuredly gained that amount since her break-up with Matthew.
Paulette moved about the church basement in a friendly, almost motherly way, looking positively waifish in her soft, black, jersey pencil skirt, flat sandals, and simple, knit top. She had nice but modest breasts, Julia realized, surprised that she had never thought of Paulette with breasts of any kind. Along with her excess weight, Paulette had also ridden herself of her signature, loosely tied bun that controlled her graying but long hair. Now she sported a sassy layered cut with ends that skimmed her jawline – and the gray had been replaced with a subtle blonde color. As she spoke to the people milling about before the meeting, her smile was warm and wide, not at all like the pained pretense of happiness in the photo that once graced Matthew’s desk.
The women had met before. Julia had once come to Matthew’s home under the pretext of researching some bicycle options for her, but Paulette obviously had no recollection of the meeting. She had been so kind to Julia, even offering her lunch, which Julia politely declined because the thought of sharing a meal with this woman disturbed her more than sharing her husband did. Julia couldn’t remember now whether Matthew or she herself had thought the meeting was a good idea, but she would never forget the urgent desire to run screaming from that house into the street.
As she watched Paulette now, the woman felt her gaze and turned to her, still smiling. “Hello. Nice to see you again.”
Julia’s heart felt like it was creeping past her oesophagus. She searched Paulette’s face for signs of what might be coming next. Did she finally recognize her? Would she now launch into some wildly shrewish tirade about the place in hell reserved for women who break up marriages? Would she really do that in public?
“You remember me?” Julia stammered, trying to return the smile and irritated to find that her mouth was twitching.
“Of course! I remember everybody who attends our meetings,” she said, placing a delicate hand on Julia’s arm. “It’s how friendships begin.”
To Julia’s relief, the meeting was then called to order. Despite Paulette’s genuine greeting, there was some kind of vapid quality in her eyes, something that reminded Julia of a Stepford wife.
As they sat in a circle and listened to someone read about one of the program’s twelve traditions, Julia’s attention was continually diverted to Paulette, sitting there in an aura of such disconcerting serenity. She was sorry for her; sorry that she didn’t know her husband had been screwing around on her, sorry that she didn’t recognize the woman seated directly across from her who’d been the catalyst in their ultimate divorce. It must be heavenly to be that delusional, Julia thought.
One night, Matthew had eyed the collection of scarves that hung inside her closet door and decided to tie up her tits while he fucked her from behind. He and Julia watched themselves in her bedroom dresser’s mirror, mesmerized by the image of his pulling on the scarves like reins as her tits reared upward in response. One orgasm wasn’t enough to satiate them and, because her lips were still slick with need, she mounted him, still wearing the scarves. Her breasts bounced and jiggled with her enthusiasm and he came again, this time before she did. She continued to grind her cunt into him, spreading her juice over his balls and thighs until he sought out her clit and played until she shouted her climax.
How she loved it when his balls contained an endless supply of what she needed, when she needed to work him to exhaustion to stem his series of comes. The payoff was only partially the sex. When he’d given her everything he had and laid there quietly snoring, she could pretend that he was spending the night, sleeping in her bed. She could pretend that he was her husband and that the bed was conjugal. She could pretend that Paulette did not exist.
Newcomers were not expected to speak at their first or even their second meetings – unless they had a burning desire to do so. Julia waited until her third meeting to tell her story.
“Hi, my name is Julia.”
“Hi, Julia.”
“I really want to thank all of you for making me feel comfortable enough to speak about what led me here.” She smiled at the kind, nodding faces, the kindest of which was Paulette’s.
Julia took a deep breath and began the speech she’d rehearsed in the shower, in the car, in the elevator, and lying in bed at night for the past week.
“So where does she think you are tonight?” Julia had asked him one Friday evening as she rode his lap. In her mind, Friday nights were reserved for them, despite his tendency to fill his time after work with drinks with the guys before finally heading over to her place.
“Why do you ask?” His expression always darkened whenever she brought up Paulette. He was still hard but a definite pall had fallen over the proceedings.
“I’m just curious. Does she think you’re out with the boys every Friday night?” Julia raised and lowered her hips in slow, dramatic movements, enjoying the sound of her wetness as it consumed Matthew’s cock and released it again.
“Well, she’s not stupid. I’m sure she wonders why I stay out so late or why I come home so much cleaner than I should after a day of work and a night of drinking.”
But Julia disagreed. She thought Paulette must be supremely dense not to realize that her husband was in love with somebody else. If Matthew were her husband, she’d know within hours of any dalliance. She’d just know. It was just a further testament to their malfunctioning marriage that Paulette had no idea that Matthew spent so much time with another woman. Julia said nothing, though. She had learned that Matthew would come to Paulette’s defense whenever Julia criticized her.
She had tried to imagine what life was like for the rotund Paulette, filling her mouth and her life with food, and driving her husband away in the process. Julia gradually decided that Paulette’s determination to stay overweight was her way of keeping Matthew at a safe distance. Julia had heard about wives like Paulette, wives who craved the security of marriage but didn’t want to feel the intimacy of it. The fear of losing oneself, of becoming a boring hausfrau, or simply being too bored to care any longer were all possibilities, although Julia never really knew which situation best described Paulette’s. All she knew was that a woman who wanted to keep her husband was unwise to puff herself up with candy and cookies.
And if Paulette chose not to see that Matthew was having an affair, she either had to be oblivious or, in some twisted way, complicit to the grand act of deception in which they all played a role.
She lingered at the literature table, staring at the pamphlets and booklets she’d already read many times at home. She didn’t want to watch Paulette make her way through the small group, smiling encouragement and touching support to all she encountered. If Julia proceeded with her plan, would she be destroying this woman’s happiness for a second time? No, she decided. She would be completing Step Five.
When the meeting officially began, Julia did not wait for some o
ther needy soul to share what was on his or her mind. She launched into her own without delay.
“Hi, my name is Julia.”
“Hi, Julia.”
“I’ve been coming for a few weeks now and have been so touched by the love that’s here. I feel honored to be able to work my program with people who really seem to care about my welfare.” Her words caught in her throat – she hadn’t realized how true the words were until she said them. But she had a mission and tears would not help her accomplish it.
“I’m working Step Five now.” Knowing nods dotted the circle of concerned faces. “I know why I became powerless over food and I’m not going to keep it bottled up inside me any longer because I’m tired of the shame.” Her throat tightened. She took a deep breath and continued. “I’m powerless over food because I am powerless over sex.”
The silence in the room suddenly felt oppressive. Everybody stared at her with that insipid loving kindness when she would have preferred a snide remark or shocked expression. Anything to distract her from her confession. But none came and as she played with the hem of her plus-size jeans, she knew that the only real elephant in the room was her disclosure, sitting big and heavy and smelly until somebody could figure out how to remove it.
“I fell wildly in love about twelve years ago,” she began. “The man was married and so I fought the desire to sleep with him for as long as I could, which ended up being a lousy two months. He quickly became the reason I got up each morning. I dressed for him, listened to music that he liked, shifted my political beliefs closer to his.
“I still don’t know whether our sexual connection made me that compliant or whether I was compliant because of the sexual connection. Whatever it was, I craved him constantly and took every foolish risk I could have taken. I gave him blow jobs in the office, made love to him in the back seat of my car, and told friends and family that my travels to meet him in faraway places were business trips.
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