As She's Told

by Anneke Jacob

***

  I slipped into a phone booth, dialled.

  "Yes?"

  "It's me, sir," I murmured.

  "What's up?"

  "Please, could I skip my next class? Just this once? It's a guest speaker, I've heard the lecture before. I need the time to get hold of something on censorship ethics."

  Anders interrogated me on how I would use the time, and on the existence of past notes on the guest speaker's lecture, before he would give permission.

  I ran for the library. In the past I would have skipped the class and wasted the time, but now I knew I'd better have something major to show. I foraged for material with a sharpness born of necessity, cursing at the lineup for the photocopiers. Then I ran for home. I had to get the morning's notes typed up, organize the censorship information, fix those database errors….

  At six thirty I came around the corner with a basket full of clean laundry in my arms, saw the truck and froze. Froze solid, like a wicked troll caught in the sunlight. Anders was early. He got out of the truck and stood there looking at me. The sun was directly behind him; I couldn't see his expression, but I could imagine it. I could picture myself through his eyes, as if this were a movie and they'd switched to Camera B. Me, wearing jeans and an old sweatshirt. Guilt incarnate. A gust of wind blew last year's leaves along the ground toward me. I felt a momentary impulse to fling down the laundry and run like hell.

  He waited. My feet took me over to him without my active cooperation, step by slow, inexorable step. He relieved me of my basket and nodded toward the house. Numbly I climbed the stairs, opened the door, closed it behind him.

  "On your knees. Strip." His voice was deep, even, and dark as a dungeon. I bared my upper body first, but had some trouble getting the jeans 95

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  over my knees. The panties came off with them. He picked the jeans up by one belt loop and dangled them in front of me. "Well?" My throat like dry leaves. "I'm sorry sir. I had no more clean clothes, and…." I trailed off. We both knew I was supposed to have done my laundry on Sunday. It was now Tuesday. "I'm sorry," I whispered.

  "What were you thinking when you put these on?" There was the accent. Oh, god…. "I was in a hurry and – and I wasn't thinking at all, really."

  "Yes, you were. You were thinking that I wouldn't find out." I winced, and looked down at the floor. "Which you thought would make it all right.

  To do what I'd told you not to do. Isn't that right?"

  I started to shake my head, but stopped when I thought of being punished for lying, on top of my other sins. I nodded.

  "How many times have you done this?" The quiet voice was ominous.

  "I haven't before, I haven't, honestly, it was just because I had no clean dresses, I had to wash them, two are at the cleaners…." I was babbling now, and starting to cry.

  "That's enough," he said, sounding disgusted. "Crawl over there." I obeyed his gesture, crawling into the corner by the bathroom door, then knelt up when I was told and shuffled forward.

  "I want your knees, tits and face right up against the wall. Hands behind your back. Now think about what you've done." I pressed myself into the cold surfaces, shivering.

  He walked away, rummaged under the kitchen sink, went into my bedroom. I heard drawers opening and closing. The closet door slid on its track. Hangers clanged. In a few minutes he was back, carrying something in a garbage bag; I heard it drop next to the door. He went past me into the bathroom and there was the sound of cupboard doors. Then he was moving around the living room.

  I tried to think about what I had done, but his anger made me so wretched that my brain's rational operations were simply suspended. I knelt there for ages, head down, listening. When would he let me up? I could hear my laptop starting up, the mouse clicking.

  My bare ass was on display as he'd intended; flesh cringing. He was really going to hurt me this time. My only option now was obey, and try not to provoke more punishment than I already deserved. Shame and 96

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  apprehension were sawing around inside me, leaving glittering particles of lust in their wake, and a small, abrasive grain of defensive resentment.

  Humiliation…. My visual field was confined to a dim tunnel ending at my knees. I wanted to shift my weight, straighten my back. And it seemed to me suddenly that any normal person would straighten their back if they wanted to. Surely I could do a little thing like that? For that matter, I could get up, put my clothes on, wear what I liked. Do my chores when I felt like it. To do those things I would have to defy the man behind me. I would have to have the gall to look him in the eye, and tell him – tell him –

  Tell him what? That he was mistaken; I didn't belong to him after all? I wasn't supposed to lie to him. Tears welled. My eyelids moved to dislodge them. The rest of me stayed where it was put.

  What had I been thinking? It hadn't seemed like any great harm, a thoughtless bit of risk. An impulse. But to my shame I knew that at some level I had felt exactly as he had said, that I could get away with being naughty as long as he never found out. What kind of stupid game was I playing?

  His anger and disgust were churning around in my guts. I'd planned to lie to him, by omission at least. Something he'd told me never, ever to do.

  Worse than disobedience. What the hell was the matter with me? I'd opened up yet another careless pit of doom for myself. The silence began to upset me even more than the upcoming punishment. Why didn't he say anything?

  Scold me, berate me, anything? He hadn't laid a finger on me, handled me at all, smacked my ass as I deserved. I began to wish hard for pain, some step toward redemption. But contact of whatever kind would be a relief. Tears were slipping down my cheeks, into the tiny, cold, isolated world of my corner.

  I heard the laptop shut down, then footsteps. "All right, bad girl. Crawl over here." His voice was loud against the silence. I turned my wet face and blinked into the light, crawled after his feet, looked up when he stopped. He glanced at me, gave me a tissue and motioned for me to use it. Then he handed me a dress, a clean one that had been in my laundry basket; it was the soft one that didn't need ironing. I knelt up and put it on, all my antennae out and quivering for signs from him. His face was neutral, no clue there.

  My bedside clock said seven-thirty; I'd been in the corner for almost an hour.

  I got into stockings awkwardly, bringing one foot forward and then the 97

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  other, and then slipped into the shoes he brought me. Still no contact. "Let's go," he said, motioning me to get up. He turned out the lights, and picked up the bag by the door.

  I prayed that the Silvas would not be in the front hall, and tried to walk so as not to let my breasts bounce, uncomfortably aware that I was not having much luck. Then we were outside in the dusk. It was warm for the time of year; still, the cooling air caressed my naked thighs as we crossed the sidewalk. He opened the door of the truck for me, but let me get in without help. As he turned onto College he said, "You know what's in the bag, I take it.”

  “Yes, sir. All my jeans and pants?"

  "And your panties. I was going to let you wear them to school until you finished, but not after this." I felt a bitter blush mount up into my face. "I know where everything is now in your apartment. If you add anything or move anything I'll know. You're not to buy another article of clothing; if I think you need something I'll buy it."

  "Yes, sir."

  I preceded him into the grey brick house as into the Bastille.

  The place seemed even more deconstructed that it had been the time before. There was a wall half down. Bathroom fixtures leaned at odd angles, wrapped in cardboard and tape. Before I'd taken two steps in the door I had to strip again and wait for him. He took his time. Each second stretched my nerves another click of the rack.

  At last he took me to the back of the house and down some stairs to the basement, where the thick door of the front room closed
with a soft swish and a thud. Silence. Soundproof, I thought. Oh, god! A sharp, prickly smell of sawdust. The room was small, clean, and almost empty; just a kitchen chair and a heavy table by the far wall. Something across the table. He picked the something up, and sat down. I stared at the short whip in his hand, and the shaking that was in all my limbs moved to my belly. He pointed at the floor. "Hands and knees now. To me."

  I dropped to the wooden floor and crawled on shaky limbs. Cowered at his feet.

  "Sit up. Look at me." I looked up: a contracted brows, eyes like slate.

  He'd grown taller than ever, huge, towering. His voice was like the rumble of a train in the distance. "What else have you done that you haven't told 98

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  me?"

  Involuntarily my eyes dropped, but the whip was under my chin now. "I said look at me. What else?" The train getting closer.

  "I – I'm sorry, sir, I was supposed to study all of Sunday but – but I – I was on the net, just – just wasting time."

  "Yes, I could tell from your browser. Flipping through Amazon. No wonder you didn't get your laundry done." He leaned back. "And you didn't tell me." The train going through a tunnel, quieter but about to roar into the station any minute now.

  "No, sir." My voice sounded shrill.

  "Since I can't trust you to be honest, I've put a child minder on there. I'll be able to tell from now what sites you've been on and for how long. What else?"

  I set aside the humiliation of 'child minder' for the time being, and thought frantically about what else I might have done wrong. I had been feeling guilty about Sunday; it was almost a relief to tell him, but nothing else came to mind.

  "I – I can't think of anything else, sir."

  He looked at me a long moment. "All right. Turn around." I felt my hands pulled behind me and quickly tied with a strap of some sort. I started to breathe very hard – fear, arousal, who knows? Real bondage at last, and I was too scared to savour it. A moment later there was a leather collar around my throat. A click, and a leash was clipped to the ring in front. The sound of my breathing and my heart's pounding seemed to reverberate off the walls.

  A yank on the leash startled me; I got up as bidden. A second later the top half of me was face down over the table, the leash stretched under my face. I craned my neck and saw him crouched down, fastening the leash somewhere out of sight. I experimented with raising my head, and found I couldn't.

  Then he was behind me. My hands twisted helplessly, and I could hear a little whimper rising in my throat.

  "Frightened, bad girl?" came the low, accented voice from behind me.

  I nodded in an attenuated way and whispered, "Yes, sir."

  There was a pause that went on just long enough for my fear to edge into panic. Then the sound of something slicing through the air and a crack, and pain, pain, pain. A second, and then a third. I could feel my cries against the collar at my throat.

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  "Why are you being punished, girl?"

  That voice! The train roaring into the station at last. I tried to get my breath, and another blow forced a wail out of me. "Why?" he demanded harshly

  I managed a confused enumeration of my recent sins, wailing and then sobbing away about jeans, laundry, time wasted, while the blows fell and my body writhed helplessly. "What else?"

  He hit a spot for a second time and I screamed, and tears streamed from my eyes. I couldn't think at all. How could I answer him when all I could think of was the pain and the next blow coming?

  But the time in the corner came to my aid, all that time stewing in my pit of guilt and shame. "I didn't tell you…and I thought…if you didn't find out…" Another blow, another. They snatched away my breath, and the whip fell twice more before I could force out, "I thought it wouldn't matter! Aah!

  Please, sir, please, I'm sorry!"

  "You thought it wouldn't matter," he growled. A harder stripe.

  "Disobedience. Deceit, concealment. Games." The whip fell again, and I lost it; lost all connection to mind, past, future; there was just the eternal, dreadful now, my existence as a bad girl sealed in anguish. When at last he stopped he stroked the whip threateningly across my burning ass. "Well, girl?"

  Please, no more! No more! Out of my mouth spilled apologies, promises, stumbling pleas for mercy. But the voice and the whip weren't satisfied; still they threatened. What now? Be grateful, stupid girl! I choked out my thanks for the punishment. As I said the words I knew I actually meant them, and something about this made tears burst forth from me again.

  Then he was there in front of me, releasing the leash, using it to turn me off the table and onto my knees between his legs. I got no chance to see if he had forgiven me, or obey my impulse to throw myself at his feet. He held the leash very short with one hand, and thrust his cock into my mouth with the other. This time he showed no patience with my mistakes. My sore ass was smacked several times, till I was sucking and sobbing simultaneously.

  He led me upstairs to the kitchen after that without a word, except, "Into that corner, bad girl," and a gesture to the far wall behind the table. I limped stiffly over and paused a moment. Should I kneel? He hadn't told me to. I pressed myself into the corner, standing, feeling my flesh cringe in case 100

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  another blow was coming. Again my ass was on display, but now it throbbed and I could feel the air moving over each painful welt. I was back in the dimness, still miserably in disgrace.

  ***

  Anders stood and let his eyes absorb every bit of light the little figure reflected. How lovely, the round swell of red buttocks, the small hands above them crossed and bound, the head sinking under its weight of penitence. Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie. But Robbie Burns' mouse had had the freedom to run for it; not this one.

  Anders set about heating up some the leftover sopa de couves for dinner. Fortunately it was thick stuff, even better reheated; he was ravenous.

  Next time he'd make her wait for her punishment until he got some food into him. He set his bowl where he could watch his cowering woman and examine his handiwork. He could still feel the whip in his hand, hear her breathless pleading.

  Beneath the adrenalin running through him, the wonder, the almost constant arousal, there was something more. A sense of balance, an alignment of forces. Or perhaps something like an unexpected, perfect chord. It was a harmony that had to do with the sight of her in that corner.

  What was it?

  Something about domesticity. It came to him that he'd never felt so at home before, not in the apartment he'd shared with Janice, not in Copenhagen as a child, not anywhere. This half finished kitchen with sawdust on the floor felt like home at this moment, because the woman who shared it did so absolutely on his terms.

  Perhaps a man, too long a bachelor, just sitting down at his table after his honeymoon and gazing at his bride with delight, would feel as Anders felt at that moment. Life was the way it ought to be. This was how he was meant to live.

  Did he really come across as someone who thought he had all the tools for all the renos of the world? Surely he'd got past that. World dictator, benevolent or otherwise, was not on his ambition list, his siblings'

  impressions notwithstanding. What he had was a fetish for being an absolute ruler in his domestic life. All he needed to satisfy that was one woman to own, handle and control, completely and absolutely. And now it seemed he had her. His forebears with their dreary portents could march straight into 101

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  the North Sea and drown.

  Was he controlling his woman because he felt ineffectual elsewhere?

  Taking his frustration out on her hide, as Val had snidely suggested? One of those assholes? He considered this, tore some bread, stirred his soup meditatively.

  No. His need for this went too far back. Back to childhood, when the world had been a fin
e place, his for the taking. Maia might get it worse on a bad day, but that was just one of a slave's functions. As long as he was always in control of himself as well as her. Something that went without saying.

  Hunger satisfied, Anders took up the little Japanese maple sapling he had established in a bonsai pot, and began the gentle, painstaking process of wiring its limbs. From time to time he raised his eyes to follow the smooth curve of his woman's hips, the dark cleft between the red cheeks, the bowed shoulders. Wire slid slowly through his fingers; he wound it round slender branches, visualizing the shape they would take as he trained and restricted and pared them back, the eventual beauty of the little living artwork that it would be. He was peripherally aware of the slight jump of the woman's flesh at the sound of the wire cutters.

  At last, setting the pot and its paraphernalia aside, Anders got up and went to the corner, stroked Maia's back and took hold of the leash, still dangling between her breasts. She turned toward him, her eyes blinking in the light, traces of tears still on her cheeks. Her glance ran over the bonsai, returned to his face. Without speaking he led her over to his chair and had her kneel and be fed. She was still looking at him with a face full of shame and distress. "Punishment's over, sweetheart," he said, and she laid her head in his lap. He felt rather than heard a last little sob, lifted her chin and briskly spooned more food into her mouth.

  Then he released her and dressed her and drove her home through the dark streets. Contentment was meandering through him; a slow, sweet tune.

  In front of her house he turned to her, asked the usual questions. She shook her drooping head, and then put her face into her hands. For a moment, the notes inside Anders went awry. Perhaps this was it – it was more than she could take after all. Ancestral fatalism vindicated.

  But he didn't believe it. Logic insisted that it could be so, especially tonight. But his hands that had handled her, his gut knew otherwise.

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  "What is it, Maia?"

  She looked up, her face a little desperate in the shadowy light. "Those questions…," she said, "I know they're for my safety, but…."