The Collectors

by Gowan, Lesley

  “Where is everyone?” I asked.

  “It’s just the two of you here with me,” Veronica said. “The other women will get ready in their rooms. Tonight’s all about the women being initiated. The doms won’t be touching anyone else until after the ceremony.”

  Nan and I exchanged looks. I could tell she was tired from last night too. I suppose that’s why it was called an initiation. It was some kind of test of endurance.

  There was nothing different about our preparations from the night before, and soon we were made up, robed, clean as a whistle and sitting around waiting for our escorts. The doms that sponsor us were to pick us up at six and escort us in for the cocktail hour. Jeanne was prompt and I took her arm as we walked the long hallway from the west wing.

  “Did you have a busy day?” I asked.

  “I would call it productive. But we have other things to talk about right now. Tonight, you will be given an oath to swear to, and I want to explain it to you so you have time to think about it.”

  “But not too much time.”

  Jeanne looked at me.

  “I mean, I’m going to be taking an oath in an hour or so and you’re telling me what I’ll be swearing to now. That’s not much time.”

  “Do you have some doubts on the matter?”

  “No. I’m just observing. Never mind.” This wasn’t how I meant to start out our evening. I got into trouble every time I was on my way into a group setting with Jeanne.

  “The oath states you will honor the confidentiality of the Society’s membership, you will never speak of its procedures and practices to anyone not a member of the Society, you will treat all members with respect and courtesy, and in the case of your interaction with dominants, you will obey them when you are asked to do something. By swearing the oath, you are granting your consent and placing your trust in the dominants of this Society. To your sponsoring dominant you will swear absolute loyalty and obedience. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is any of that problematic?”

  “No, not at all.”

  We were at the door to the main gathering room and it looked like most everyone had arrived. Heads turned our way, and the feeling wasn’t completely one of welcome. Denise and Pat and many others I’d started to feel a friendship with acted genuinely glad to see me arrive with Jeanne. But there were others, Kevin and Heather first among them, who seemed to release a toxin in the air when we walked in the room. It wasn’t the best atmosphere for a newcomer on her initiation night, but I didn’t dare bring up my caution with Jeanne. Before we started to mingle with others, Jeanne leaned in and spoke softly in my ear.

  “I’ll be watching after you tonight. Don’t worry about anything. But try to endure what you can. The initiation is meant to be intense. You might mistake it with something else, some ill intent from a member. It won’t be. Initiation can feel like punishment. But then, you have an extraordinary liking for punishment. It probably won’t make you think twice.”

  If this was meant to be comforting, Jeanne had fallen short. But I had to trust her. I’d trusted her so far.

  As we waded into the room I saw the other submissives were wearing dresses and heels, and that Nan and I were the only ones in robes. And it wasn’t just the doms who were reaching in our robes to take a breast or butt cheek in hand. The submissives seemed to get a real kick out of it, and it had the disarming effect of making me feel more like an object than when the doms helped themselves. I was hoping to make the emotional slip into my sub space, the state of mind where feeling humble would be a step up. Where the ego is completely dissolved and the only feeling left is sensation. Where I found the deepest relaxation possible, the deepest peace. But that journey seemed to be longer than usual.

  At the dinner table there was a lot of talk about the delicious meal, but for Nan and me it was an hour of crawling around at the end of a short leash held by a submissive. Occasionally, a dom would ask us to stop and then I would be fed a tidbit from a plate, sometimes having to take the food off the plate with my mouth. I didn’t take much notice of how it tasted. Other times, I would be stopped and a dom would check out the state of my pussy, which was wet despite my nervousness. I think even the other submissives were impressed.

  As dinner came to a close, I found myself kneeling next to Jeanne’s chair at the head of the table. She rose to speak.

  “If everyone’s ready, we will excuse the submissives and begin our vote on the membership for Laura and Nan. You’ve all gotten a chance to get to know them over the weekend, so you know how privileged we are they’ve agreed to apply for membership. They will be, in my opinion, wonderful additions to our organization. Ladies, if you’ll take yourselves back to the west wing, we’ll send someone in to get you when the voting is completed.”

  The submissives moved as one out of the dining room and back to our headquarters in the west wing. As we sat in the living room waiting, the women teased Nan and I about what we had in store for us that night.

  “Don’t plan on walking much tomorrow,” one said.

  “No, walking and sitting are going to be a little difficult,” said another.

  “If I’m not walking and I’m not sitting, what am I supposed to be doing with myself?” Nan asked.

  “Kneeling?” Denise said, and everyone roared. It was kind of funny, but not that funny. Still, I appreciated it was good-natured. I could feel Heather’s stare on me, and I started to wonder what her problem was. Was she so devoted to Adele as a friend she was willing to focus her venom on me this whole weekend? There had to be more to it than that. I walked across the room and sat next to her. She looked surprised.

  “What can I do to make things a little easier between us?” I said. I took a conflict resolution class as an undergraduate, but this opening line was about all I remembered from it.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. She was staring at her hands.

  “Really? Ever since you first saw me you’ve been shooting daggers at me. I guess because you’re friends with Adele and she’s been asked to leave the Society by Jeanne, who is the one bringing me in. I get that.”

  “You don’t get shit.” She was looking right at me.

  “Am I wrong? Is there some other reason you’ve been so nasty?”

  “Nasty is as nasty does. Bitch.”

  I felt for a second as if I’d been transported to the Jerry Springer Show and was about to be thrown down by my baby daddy’s girlfriend. I didn’t understand Heather, and I was starting to get pissed off.

  “Okay. I’m going to walk away before we start rolling around on the floor scratching each other’s eyes out. I sure don’t get what I’ve done to you, but you’re going to have to get over it. I’m going to be around.”

  As I turned to leave I heard her say, “No you’re not.”

  “What?”

  Heather had a smug smile on her face as she sat in her chair and picked up a glass of wine. I was about to question her when Veronica came into the room.

  “Listen up,” she said, as everyone turned their attention to her. “The voting is complete and they are waiting for us downstairs. Nan, will you come forward?”

  Nan looked a little confused, but went to stand in front of Veronica while the rest of the women started to line up behind her.

  “Wait a minute,” I said, walking up to stand next to Nan. “Don’t forget me.”

  Veronica looked stricken. “I’m not forgetting you, Laura. But you have to stay here. You’ve been blackballed.”

  The others gasped. My jaw dropped open, but nothing came out of my mouth. All I could think about was Jeanne and what this meant to her. I bolted toward the door.

  “Wait!” Veronica cried. “You can’t go out there.”

  I was already out the door, running down the long hallway toward the main house to find Jeanne. I saw Pat enter the hallway. She grabbed me as I tried to race by her. My robe was open in front, the tie having come loose during my sprint. Pat
took me by the elbow and into a nearby room. I could hear the submissives starting to move down the hallway on their way to the basement dungeon.

  “What the hell is going on?” I asked. I was gripping Pat’s arm.

  “Jesus, I don’t know. Revolution, I guess. The vote came in unanimously for Nan, and blackballed for you. Jeanne asked for an open vote and it turned out there were five voting against you. It wasn’t just Kevin.”

  “Oh, god. That’s really not a vote against me, is it?”

  “No. Definitely not. They were voting against Jeanne and she knew it.”

  “Where is she? I have to go to her.”

  Pat tied my robe and adjusted it at my shoulders. “I don’t know. She ran out of the room after the vote. I was just going out to look for her.”

  “I’m going too. Let’s split up. I’ll go to the boat house; you go toward the barn.”

  Pat handed me a flashlight and we went out a side door, away from where the others could see us. I didn’t know if all the other doms were downstairs, or whether some of them were out there looking for Jeanne also. I wished I had something more than slippers, a robe, and a flashlight. Maybe a pitchfork. Isn’t that what they carry during revolutions?

  My search didn’t take long. As soon as I entered the boat house, even before I turned the flashlight on her, I could feel Jeanne’s presence. She was sitting behind the steering wheel, her hand resting on top of it as if she were lazily guiding the boat through open water.

  “That didn’t take long,” she said.

  “You don’t sound surprised to see me.”

  “I’m not. Mrs. Kirchberger is on the roof and she texted me you were approaching.” She pointed at her phone sitting on her lap.

  “Mrs. Kirchberger is on the roof?”

  “I can’t ever seem to shake her. I’ve just grown to live with it.”

  I stared at her. Jeanne’s life was bizarre. It was fully dawning on me how different everything was in her world. It was also dawning on me how lonely she was.

  “She has your back, that’s for certain,” I said. I climbed into the boat and sat next to her. “What will she do if someone unfriendly approaches?”

  “Depends. If they look threatening, I imagine she’ll pick them off with her rifle.”

  “Now you’re pulling my leg.”

  “Am I? We’ll see.”

  We sat quietly for a bit.

  “Are you mad about me not making it into the membership?”

  Jeanne looked at me in dismay. “I’m not mad at you, for heaven’s sake. No one would ever imagine you would be blackballed. This doesn’t have anything to do with you.” She took her jacket off and gave it to me. I was freezing in my silk robe.

  “It’s hard not to take it personally. I understand it was more than one vote against me.”

  “That’s why I know it’s not just someone’s jealousy or quirk. There’s no reason multiple people would be against your membership. This has to do with me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s what I spent the day trying to find out, with only a bit of success. It looks like there’s a group who think the Society should be run along democratic principles, its rules should be formulated by committee, and on and on like that.”

  I was quiet again. It was hard to argue with what the dissenters were asking. Most organizations in this country would follow that model.

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  Jeanne had the good sense to smile. “It never even entered my mind. To tell you the truth, I started this group and just made things up along the way. It all seemed to work fine—until it didn’t. Maybe I’m not a democratic sort.”

  “Still, they could have talked to you about it before blackballing me. What are we going to do now?”

  Jeanne pulled me on to her lap. “I think you and I will just sneak up to our rooms and have our own fun. I’ll figure out what to say to everyone during the meeting tomorrow.”

  She nuzzled me for a bit before we climbed out of the boat. As we walked up to the house I looked back and saw a figure in black climbing down the ladder from the boat house roof. It looked like Mrs. K. actually did have a rifle in her hands. I bet she could field-strip a six-point buck and have the steaks on the grill that night. And it struck me like a bolt that the other thing Mrs. K. couldn’t do without a tongue was taste food, a horror I hadn’t even considered before. She was largely incomprehensible to me.

  I also couldn’t help but marvel at how well Jeanne seemed to be taking this rebuff by her fellow doms. I knew she was used to having her own way.

  “Are you upset?” I asked.

  Jeanne took my hand when we reached the top of the stairs and walked across the lawn toward the brightly lit house. “Strangely, I’m not. I don’t get it, really. I’ve given this organization everything—my time, my money, my best thinking, my property. And when the vote was returned it felt like I’d been kicked in the teeth. But then I thought about how a lot of things have happened lately that seemed to be telling me I might not be as in charge of things as I thought.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like this little coup d’état. Like losing a couple of bids on paintings I’ve planned a long time to buy and was sure I would get for exactly what I wanted to pay for them.”

  She stopped walking and turned toward me.

  “But the thing that has rattled my cage more than anything else is you.”

  I bit my tongue. There were so many ways I could fuck things up. I kept quiet.

  “You’re the first true submissive I’ve ever fallen in love with.”

  I gasped a little, but still didn’t speak.

  “And the more I fall in love, the more I find your submission the most thrilling I’ve experienced in my life, and your participation in my life the most fulfilling. I call all the shots, but somehow I am aware it’s because you allow me to, and the shots I call seem to all have your wishes taken into consideration. It’s all very different.”

  “And that’s unsettling to you?” I asked.

  “Deeply.”

  “We can be discombobulated together. I’m discovering a new me since I started spending time with you and it’s exhausting. I know I’m in love with you, a whole new and different sort of love.”

  She got a scared look in her eye again, so foreign in Jeanne. She started walking again.

  “Are you going to freak out every time I tell you how I feel about you?” I asked. “You can tell me not to do it.”

  “No. That’s not it. Just don’t expect me to get all lovey-dovey.”

  “I won’t.”

  She stopped again. “Let’s go home. Tonight. Mrs. K. can stay and see the rest of the group doesn’t trash the house or anything. Pat will be here. I think I just want to be with you. For right now, anyway.”

  We walked into the house and slipped up the stairs. We couldn’t hear what was going on downstairs in the dungeon, but my mind’s eye had a good look. I hoped it wouldn’t be too long before Jeanne mended fences with the Society and we were welcomed back in. Somehow, I knew it wouldn’t be. But for right now, just the two of us together was more than enough.

  About the Author

  Lesley Gowan has published several novels and many stories under a different name and in a different genre. This is her first book length work of erotica. She can be contacted at lesleygowan@gmail.com.

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