Eighty Days Blue

by Vina Jackson

  This time, Dominik was determined to get it right. If Summer genuinely craved to submit to him, that is what he would give her.

  He would learn the art of loving domination, take her on a journey from which both of them would emerge as new people. Hardened but tender, walking the tightrope, wondrously alive.

  He thought back to those years between Kathryn and Summer, the times of indulgence and cruelty. The knot in his stomach tightened as he evoked the memories of the madness.

  Exploring the dark, murky streets of the Internet, he had cruised chatrooms and forums and met scores of women whose desires matched his. He’d learned a whole new vocabulary and repertoire of clandestine encounters, a curious etiquette of alternative sexuality. Some encounters had proven liberating, others awkward and less successful, some even comic for Dominik with his developed sense of irony.

  As a voracious reader, he was already aware of some of BDSM’s practices and avenues, but was surprised by how prevalent it was, behind the everyday masks of respectability. The whole world seemed involved in it, a complete parallel world of which he had hitherto been so innocently unaware. Fiction was one thing, but real life was another altogether, and it had proven full of untold surprises.

  His wilderness years. Dominik closed his eyes.

  The man he had met at the Groucho Club was a friend of a friend of a friend. Dominik had been vouched for, somehow.

  ‘You’ll still have to be vetted by a couple of the others,’ the other man said.

  ‘I quite understand,’ Dominik had answered.

  The stranger had made a phone call, and an hour later they were joined by two others. Well-dressed businessmen, suited and tied. A few drinks later, he was formally approved.

  ‘How do you find them?’ Dominik asked.

  ‘Chatrooms, ads, by personal recommendation . . .’

  ‘Recommendation?’

  ‘You’d be surprised.’

  ‘Jesus . . .’

  ‘All quite normal women. No money changes hands, ever.’

  The spokesman for the group was in his early fifties. Earlier in the conversation, he’d mentioned he’d returned just a few weeks back from his holidays, sailing his boat along the coast of Turkey. Another was a surgeon, an imposing black man originally from Ghana, and the third had some unspecified high-powered job in the City.

  It was agreed Dominik would be invited to join their next session.

  They met in the cellar bar of a large, impersonal hotel right by Victoria Station. Two of the other men in the group were already there, nursing beers, when Dominik arrived. No introductions were made.

  The young woman walked into the bar ten minutes later, accompanied by the group’s leader. She seemed barely out of her teens, although when you looked at her closer in the calculated semi-darkness of the bar, there were dark circles under her pale grey eyes and thin lines across her neck. She appeared at first hesitant, even shy, but after a few drinks, she relaxed and loosened up. She was a student nurse, she revealed. On subsequent occasions there was a much older assistant bank manager who’d travelled up from the south coast, and on another occasion a single mother who wanted to be a writer and who, having uncovered some of his non-academic publications, later mailed him a few stories she was working on; they were actually surprisingly good. Sometimes the group booked the hotel in Victoria, but on other occasions they would use a hotel near Old Street or, one time, the basement of an empty shop on Old Compton Street, which one of the guys had access to through his job. The hotels were principally chosen for their busy nature and the fact that five or six men entering the lift to the upper floors together with a single woman would not attract undue attention.

  ‘Your first time?’ he asked the student nurse, that first night. This was still at the bar. Two of the other men had walked over to the counter to pick up another round of drinks.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Me too.’ He attempted a smile.

  ‘That’s nice,’ she replied.

  ‘Why are you doing it?’ It wasn’t quite what Dominik wanted to ask, but somehow the right words couldn’t form on the edge of his lips. She looked so young, if worn out.

  ‘You know, a fantasy. I think all women have them. Just want to know what it would feel like. Silly, no?’

  ‘No, not at all.’ The others returned and their one-to-one conversation came to an abrupt end.

  Once they were all in the hotel room, the young nurse was summarily stripped. She had lovely, round breasts. High and firm. She had been ordered to shave herself below and had followed her instructions to the letter. She wore no knickers, just hold-up black stockings.

  The leader of the group unzipped his trousers and presented his cock to her, forcing her down to her knees. She took him into her mouth. This was a signal for the other men to undress. Dominik looked around at the ocean of male flesh now crowding him. They came in all shapes and sizes, and he was glad to see his was not the smallest, or the fattest. Some feelings never changed in the company of others, despite his usual self-assurance and ease with his own body.

  While she hungrily sucked on her first cock of the evening, others began to touch her, greedily exploring her, forcing her, feeling her up like a prime cut of meat. Cocks hardened, jutted. His eyes took in the room, the scene of the crime. The window looked out on a dull panorama of city roofs. On the bedside table was a small pile of condoms and various tubes of cream and lube. On a desk near the fridge, someone had placed a couple of bottles of wine, both red, plus three glasses and a mug. A few sex toys were scattered around, including a monstrous two-headed dildo that surely wouldn’t fit into any woman’s apertures without tearing her apart, he thought.

  It turned out it did fit. An hour or so later, after she had been used by every man in the room in succession and on some occasions together, two men busied themselves stuffing the dual-purpose black dildo deep into her vagina while the other extremity was, inch by inch, forcibly buried into her anus. The young nurse breathed heavily as the operation took place, on all fours on the bed, her mouth impaled onto the thick cock of a heavy-set red-haired man.

  ‘Good girl,’ someone said.

  By then, Dominik was already spent. He had fucked her in every way he could wish to, had once even felt her gag on his hard cock when it hit the back of her throat as the black medic thrust into her from behind and the motion threw her involuntarily forward more than she had expected.

  The others kept busy. Between fucks, they would hand her a glass of wine, later water, which she requested, and some would gently mop her brow when the sweat began to drip from her fevered forehead. She never complained or asked for a break. He looked at the scene, trying to place himself in the skin of a dispassionate observer. One of her hold-up stockings was badly torn, and the one on her other leg was bunched up round her ankle. She was ravaged, but still rather beautiful as the men in the group circled the bed, moving along to play with her in turn.

  He gazed at the men surrounding their conquest. He wondered what it must feel like to have a penis in one’s mouth, what it would taste like, how it would fill his insides. What it would feel like to be a woman. His mind was entranced by the sheer beauty of submission and the undercurrents of beauty and self-determination it brought to the surface of a woman’s skin and soul.

  Right there and then, at the heart of his first gang bang, Dominik momentarily understood what it would be like to be submissive and knew that if he were a woman, he would also be a woman who would gift herself to men, to strangers.

  He was awed by the fact that a submissive woman could, through the power of her sexuality, almost control such a mad situation.

  The young nurse shrieked. Someone had pushed too far. ‘Enough,’ she protested.

  Nevertheless, her blushing face was radiant, ecstatic even.

  The men respectfully moved away from her. She slipped off the bed and away from the tangle of bodies.

  Spent condoms littered the hotel-room carpet.

 
‘I think I need a shower,’ she said. She looked around at the circle of bodies surrounding the bed. ‘Wow! That sure was some party,’ she laughed, and headed towards the bathroom.

  They all dressed and one by one left the hotel room, leaving her behind with just the group’s leader, who had initiated the original contact with her and escorted her here.

  Dominik attended a further five gang bangs organised by the motley group. None of the men involved knew each other’s names, and he soon came to understand the other unwritten rules of the game. Because it was a game, consensual, lustful, sexual. The group provided a need, and surprisingly, some of the women even returned on a few occasions.

  Every time, he told himself he wouldn’t attend the next event, feeling shameful, guilty, angered by his own compulsion. But every man is led by his dick, and even if he left it to the last minute before confirming his attendance, he would be present at the pub or the bar where yet another new girl would be introduced.

  At the final gang bang he attended, back at the hotel near Victoria Station, following forays at the Old Street hotel and the basement in Old Compton Street, Dominik surprised himself by allowing his dark side to take over.

  The woman was a librarian from High Wycombe and they were still liberally taking their pleasure with her when a member of the group went to the hotel bar downstairs to fetch some extra drinks and returned with another woman. He had somehow seduced her in record time, or at any rate convinced her to join them all in the room. The newcomer was not taken aback by the spectacle of six naked men writhing lewdly around the pale body of a younger woman, cocks at attention, hair in disarray. She announced she would rather not participate and just wanted to observe.

  Right then, the woman who was the evening’s main attraction was positioned on her knees on the edge of the bed, feeding on Dominik’s cock, who sat with thighs wide apart. He was tiring, losing his hardness. The woman from the bar watched them both, nursing a glass of gin, her eyes eager, her lips moist as she followed their movements. He avoided her gaze, pulled the librarian’s face away from his crotch by her hair and raised himself slightly.

  ‘Lick me,’ Dominik ordered the young woman in a voice that surprised him. He took hold of a belt that just lay there on the bed, abandoned earlier as part of another sexual variation, and placed it round her neck like a collar.

  She obeyed, and for just a moment, he left his body and became an observer of the scene, watching it all from afar, detached.

  This was sex at its most basic.

  No need for latex or toys, no need for words, to be called ‘master’ or whatever.

  The rush had been blinding.

  A woman between his legs. Another watching.

  Ten minutes later, he was dressed, racing through the hotel lobby and signalling for a cab.

  ‘Take me to Hampstead,’ he had told the driver.

  ‘Where in Hampstead?’ the cabbie had asked. ‘It’s a big place, Hampstead is.’

  ‘I’ll decide when we get there.’

  The night traffic was sparse and they soon crossed the Marylebone Road, cruised through Regent’s Park and reached Camden Town and then Belsize Park.

  ‘Take a right past the Royal Free,’ Dominik said.

  ‘You’re the boss, mate.’

  He had ordered the taxi to stop when they reached the pond by Jack Straw’s Castle.

  His mind was bubbling with confusion.

  On one hand, he felt downright shocked by his own actions: the senseless sex, the indifference, the emptiness. Images of the women, the men, the cocks, the animalistic sounds of unfeeling lovemaking. On the other, he felt the electricity of dominance rush through him like a drug running wild through an addict’s veins.

  For a moment, he was tempted to enter the woods by Jack Straw’s Castle’s car park, an area notorious as a gay cruising ground. He had an irrational desire to explore what it meant to be penetrated, used, as if it would help him better understand the women he fucked. Crazy! He stepped one way, then another, hesitated and finally walked slowly towards home.

  Dominik didn’t reach the stone steps leading to his door until well past midnight. He could have hailed another taxi, but the walk had calmed his nerves.

  A week later, he hooked up with one of his former students, Claudia, and broke all contact with the group. Or maybe it was the other way round and they no longer invited him to attend their somewhat particular events.

  The sex with Claudia was good, uncomplicated, healthy in a vigorous way. She accepted his needs, the control he sought, welcoming the variations, the kinks, somehow never questioned them, and for some time he thought he had conquered his dark side, put a brake on his deeper, irrational cravings. Dominik knew, though, there was something missing . . . until he had come across Summer playing her battered violin in the Tube station and the fire inside him had been set ablaze again.

  ‘So how well do you know Summer? And Victor?’ asked Dominik, as Lauralynn sat down on the blanket she had brought along and spread out on the grass in Regent’s Park.

  She’d suggested a picnic and the weather, according to the forecasters, was going to be warm this weekend, a final hiccup of clement sun before the threat of autumn. How quickly the seasons turned, he reflected, making him think of the Vivaldi piece. Almost a year since that fateful afternoon when he’d ventured into Tottenham Court Road Tube and heard the intoxicating music of a violin coming from along the corridor and had within seconds come under the dazzling spell of Summer and her violin-playing and the way she looked when she played.

  ‘Victor has been an acquaintance, a sort of partner in crime, for some years. We met at a party and he offered to help me set up some scenes. He recognised that streak of aggression in me, I guess. He’s a dangerous man, you know. He uses people. There’s a powerful core of vindictiveness in him . . . But he is well connected. And experienced.’

  ‘And Summer?’

  ‘Only the once after the special concert in the crypt when you had her play naked. I found her – how can I put it? – interesting.’

  ‘You and her?’ Dominik enquired. ‘Anything happen?’

  ‘Sadly, no,’ Lauralynn confessed. ‘I don’t think she’s that way inclined. Maybe some no-strings play, but nothing serious. I know her type, though. Like a moth attracted by the flame. Also dangerous. She thinks she’s in control, but is sometimes quite mistaken. She can’t see the forest for the trees and doesn’t realise what is motivating her. Hasn’t quite yet reconciled herself with her cravings. She thinks she is modern and assertive, but it’s so easy to lie to oneself. Isn’t it, Dominik?’

  Once again the malice in her eyes was both overt and complicit.

  She took two plastic cups and carefully poured out coffee from the thermos flask she had carried along with her to the park in a wicker basket. Dominik had brought the sandwiches. A stone’s throw away from where they were sitting, along the road that bisected the park, files of noisy kids were being led towards the nearby zoo.

  ‘What happened? When she met up with you?’

  ‘We played. I summoned one of my playthings, a sub, a guy. I think she enjoyed it, opened her eyes to some new variations.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘But as I said, I know her sort. I’ve come across others like her before. They are their own worst enemy. Left to their own devices, they have a talent for getting drawn in by all sorts of temptations. Their pride leads them by the nose.’

  ‘Really?’ Dominik remarked, partly annoyed at the way Lauralynn was articulating feelings about Summer’s psychological make-up he was still confusingly attempting to get to grips with himself.

  She took a bite from an egg mayonnaise and cress sandwich.

  ‘If you’re so attached to her,’ Lauralynn pointed out, ‘I wouldn’t leave her at a loose end in New York, or for that matter anywhere. You’ll lose her.’

  ‘Victor?’

  ‘Possibly. But he’s not the only wolf in the pack. She is just the sort of sub some of our
kind would take a shine to, would want to break.’

  ‘Break?’

  ‘Her spirit. She’s strong, I grant you that, but no one is immune to certain pressures. I get the feeling Summer is pretty relaxed about the way she uses or allows her body to be used, so the alphas will go straight for her mind. That’s where they will try and bend her to their will. And once broken, you can never put the pieces together again. She doesn’t realise, I don’t think, that beyond a certain point, there is no return.’

  ‘Very melodramatic, Lauralynn.’

  ‘Maybe . . . But domination comes in many colours, Dominik. For some, it’s the exercise of power. For others, it’s merely a game—’

  He interrupted her, wishing to make his case. ‘I’m not concerned by power, and I reckon with Summer it’s more than just a game. I want her to be strong. I have no wish to break her, as you put it. I want to see her grow, assume her nature. That’s what gives me pleasure, not the control. The acceptance of her feelings . . .’

  ‘Dangerous ground, Dominik. Some would use a pesky four-letter-word for all that.’

  ‘And you?’ he asked. ‘With those you play with, control, whatever, what is it you seek?’

  ‘It’s a game of wills. Sometimes a cruel game, but a game all the same. See, I thought we were in the same camp, but there is a softness in you, Dominik. I see that now. Most admirable. It’s not just your cock leading you.’

  ‘I’d very much hope not. Although neither would I want it to be overly neglected.’ He smiled.

  ‘Whatever happens, Dominik, I’d like us to be friends, you know.’

  ‘That would be nice.’

  ‘With Victor, it was always about the next target; he was relentless. At first, I’d find it amusing, but he has an evil streak, a deep-seated desire to bend his subs, his slaves to his will. Beware.’