If Rebecca flaunts me in front of everyone, then I’ll know I’m not just a novelty, not just the fat girl on her boffing bucket list. I’ll know she’s proud to have me as her own.
“I know,” Rebecca says. “But there will be more nights like it soon, I’m sure.”
I can see it now—I can see how she’ll dodge the next night, and the next, and the next after it, until we never do it at all. Until she’s hidden me forever, because I’m embarrassing and ugly and afraid of cherries—
Stop.
Stop it.
I’m feeling hurt right now, that’s all—and sometimes when I’m hurting, it’s like I want to injure myself more, like I want to rip my own existence up and grind the pieces of it into the ground, because it’s easier to press on my own bruises and peel off my own skin than it is to turn my wounds into words.
But I try now. It’s what my therapist would say to do. It’s what Rebecca herself would say to do.
“I really want to go,” I say, feeling stupid and awkward and needy. “It’s important to me.”
Rebecca stares down at me, her dark eyes studying my face. She so rarely misses anything, but I hope she does now, because I don’t want her to see what a beastly, clingy mess I am inside. I hope all she sees is a pretty submissive eager to have lots of kinky fun.
And maybe she does, because her face softens. “Of course, pet. I do need to work later than usual, but I can meet you there to save time, yeah?”
My shoulders drop in relief. “Yeah.”
“Come here,” she says.
I move toward her on my knees, and in a graceful move, she bends to take my hand and pull me to my feet.
“Bex, no, you’re going to get wet—”
I’m in her arms anyway, and she’s nipping at my jaw, which from her is a caress of purest affection. She keeps me pressed against her, soaking through her jumpsuit, as she says, “If it’s important to you, it’s important to me. I’ll do my best to make it.”
I drop my head onto her shoulder, wishing I were stronger and better. Wishing I didn’t need her approval and her public validation so much. “Okay.”
She starts to pull away but then goes rigid. “What,” she asks, in a tight and furious tone, “is this?”
Confused, I straighten up to see her glaring at me, and before I can ask what she means, she turns me around so I’m facing the back of the shower.
A finger traces a line of inflamed skin and I wince a little. “They have to use gaffer tape sometimes instead of a bra depending on what I’m wearing,” I explain. “It irritates my skin a little.”
“And this?” Her finger stops at a spot above my hip, tapping a cluster of aching pinpricks.
“They had to pin a dress to make it fit.” I flush a little, remembering it. The dress had been a flouncy retro number with a crinoline under the skirt, and it had taken me actually yelping aloud for the stylist to realize she wasn’t stabbing the pins into a thick hunk of dress and crinoline, but into my flesh.
“And this here? It looks like someone clamped your back.”
“A dress clip.”
“And your feet?”
I look down, to where bruises have started to come up around my toes and where raw red skin has started to bleed on the backs of my heels.
“The heels weren’t my size.”
They were too small, so they’d slathered Vaseline on my feet and shoved them on, pair after pair.
Rebecca turns me around. Her hands are kind, but there’s nothing gentle in her face when I see it. “I can’t believe Kendra would let this happen to you,” she says with fury in her voice. “I can’t believe any of them would just let this happen.”
“It’s normal,” I try to reassure her. “It’s so normal. And I don’t mind the pain, I never have.”
“Maybe not,” she says with a scowl. “But that doesn’t make this okay, even for a masochist.”
I lap up her concern, her protectiveness, even as defensiveness hums through me. “It’s part of the job. If I don’t put up with it, then there’re a hundred other girls who will, just waiting to take my place.”
“But none of those other girls are mine. You are.”
I practically melt at hearing her say I’m hers. “I know.”
“Do you know?” she asks, one brow raising into a perfectly curved arch. “Because if you do, then you should also know that I’m the only one who gets to put marks on your body. I’m the only one who gets to hurt you, is that clear?”
I’m still melting. I’m still defensive. I’m a mess, all clamoring, querulous contradictions. “You know I love being yours, Bex. Mistress.” I add the last part after I see the dangerous glint in her eyes. “But I also love my job. I can’t jeopardize it by being fussy or difficult.”
“There has to be a way that you can still do shoots and not look like you’ve been in a bad dungeon after,” she says. “You are mine alone to hurt. Mine to pleasure, and mine to keep safe. No one touches you unless I allow it.”
I open my mouth to argue some more—the sentiment itself is very sexy, but my job doesn’t work like that, it just doesn’t—when she presses her lips to mine in farewell.
“I have to go, pet. Be good.”
“Tomorrow night?” I plead into her kiss. “Please?”
“Tomorrow night,” she promises. “I know you want it. And I think—” she slides a hand between my legs, her fingers grazing against my clit and making me shiver “—you need it too.”
I do, I do. I do need it, I need all of it, I think—to come, yes, but also to have that shivery kind of hurt which turns all other hurts into soft, manageable things. Just like kneeling, the hurt gives me back my choices and my strength. It reminds me that someone sees me and cares about me enough to help me digest my pain.
I nod, closing my eyes to savor her touch. “Tomorrow night.” I’m already clinging to the idea of it like I clung to the idea of getting in the shower earlier.
A small squeeze on my most intimate skin, and then my mistress is gone, leaving me alone with a wet flannel and a still running shower.
And the knowledge that more than twenty-four hours separate me from shuddering, blissful relief.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Delphine
After my shower, I want to drink a bottle of champagne and sleep for sixteen hours, but I can’t. I have a podcast interview later this afternoon, and a conference call with a publicist from a charity I rep, and then I have my biweekly phone call with Mummy and Daddy. They’re on some pseudo-business, pseudo-holiday trip to Cyprus, and are already sunburnt and blotto by the time I ring. But they’re still as sweet as ever, and when I change into pajamas and curl up in Rebecca’s big bed alone, I find myself truly and achingly homesick.
Not for home necessarily, but for Mummy and Daddy and Gimlet and Rumswizzle, our springer spaniels. For laying on the sofa with my head in my mother’s lap, for listening to Daddy read something aloud to us while Gimlet snores next to him.
I hug a pillow and fall asleep before Rebecca gets home.
When I wake up the next morning, she’s already woken up, dressed, and gone.
My head hurts from too much sleep, but I burrow back under the blankets anyway. I feel empty and gummy inside, like mascara left uncapped on a sink. Like a jam jar with only a thin layer left at the bottom.
Just make it until tonight.
I close my eyes and imagine, in great detail, being tied up, cropped, paddled, flogged, anything, anything with my Mistress. I imagine what it will feel like on the stage with her, all eyes on us, knowing once and for all that even if she doesn’t love me, at least she’s not ashamed of me. I imagine how good it will feel to turn all this chaotic emptiness into something explicit and distinct—turn something intangible into welted stripes no wider than my thumb, into pink handprints, into rope marks, into ruined knickers. Something I can point to and say, see this? I chose this. I felt this. And someone I love helped me feel it.
I stay in bed long i
nto the afternoon, wrapped in fantasies of tonight.
Emily Genovese: I see you.
I look up from my phone to see Emily striding across the lobby of Justine’s, and I greet her with my customary kiss to the cheek, which seems to take her by surprise. But she’s smiling when I pull back.
“Thank you for inviting me tonight,” she says. “This is much better than dinner alone at my airport hotel.”
“It’s my turn to be hospitable,” I say, struggling to sound cheerful. “How was your film festival?”
“Equal parts dull and brilliant.” Emily searches my face, her smile fading. “Is everything okay? You seem upset.”
It’s rude, it’s shockingly rude. And yet something in me blooms under the scrutiny of her stare and the directness of her question. “The last two days have been . . . disagreeable,” I admit.
She tilts her head to study me even more, and I flush. Not entirely with displeasure.
“Where is your Mistress?” she asks finally. “Or do you often come here without her?”
“Oh, never,” I say quickly, not wanting her to get the wrong impression. “We always come together, and she’s coming tonight too. She had to stay at work late, so I’m just waiting for her to arrive so we can go in together.”
“Ah, of course,” Emily says. Her voice is smooth and easy, a Hollywood voice, and it’s hard not to watch her mouth as she speaks. She’s painted her lips in a deep matte black, and it highlights how soft and full they are. How flawless her skin is.
She’s dressed for the occasion too, wearing her usual black boots and fishnets, but with a red vinyl miniskirt and matching halter top. It hides nothing of the convexities and soft places of her body; there’re swells of skin between her skirt and her top and where the top cuts into her back and near her armpits—and yet she’s not shy or self-conscious in the least. She knows she’s totally lush, she knows everyone around her thinks so, and she receives it as her due.
“I’ll wait with you,” Emily continues. “No sense in walking away from the prettiest girl in the club.”
I shouldn’t flush again at that. She’s being flirty and I have a Mistress slash girlfriend slash . . . something.
But I do. I do flush. It’s strange to feel, because my face is still tight and swollen from so much crying yesterday, and I spent today feeling numb and odd and like maybe I wasn’t even real. But Emily is the first person since yesterday to make me feel human and not all empty and gummy. And if not full again, like I could be full again. Someday.
“Will you and your Mistress take part in the exhibition tonight?” Emily asks.
It’s small talk, I know it is, and Emily has no way of knowing that her casual question has an anything but casual answer. I try to respond in a steady voice, a voice of someone who didn’t spend the day listening to her eyelashes scrape across a pillow. “Yes, I am very much hoping so. But we haven’t—we haven’t scened publicly here before.”
Emily’s dark eyes dip over my flouncy white skirt and sheer white top, which reveals the black lacy bra underneath. “A shame,” she murmurs. “The people here have been missing something truly special.”
If only Rebecca felt the same way, a disloyal voice whispers, but I quash it as fast as I can. “We simply haven’t had the time,” I explain. It sounds weak, even to my own ears, and Emily’s eyebrow rises the smallest bit.
“But you’ve had time to scene privately?” she asks. Then she holds up a hand. “I’m being nosy, I’m sorry. Not everyone likes to play in public.”
But I think I do, I want to say.
I think I’d like it more than anything.
“At any rate, you look like it would do you some good,” she says bluntly, and again, I should bristle at that, but I don’t, because she’s right.
“It would do me some good,” I reply. “It would be marvelous.”
The lobby is starting to empty of people now—most of the guests are heading toward the theater below—and I glance at my phone again. It’s almost time for the exhibition to begin and Rebecca isn’t here. Nor has she answered my phone calls or texts.
I’m starting to feel strange again, and I know, I just know, that if I could kneel in front of Rebecca, I’d feel better. If she were here, if she could bite my jaw or swat my bottom or tug my hair—if I could see her glimmering eyes and barely there smile—I’d feel okay again, capable, clear.
But she’s not here. And as Emily and I stand in the now-deserted lobby and the minutes pass, I realize that for the first time since I’ve known her—the first time in at least twelve years—the ever-punctual Rebecca Quartey is going to be late.
Applause and music drift up the stairs from the theater, and I glance at my phone again.
“Maybe there’s traffic?” Emily suggests kindly.
“Probably the traffic,” I agree. Rebecca would never be late unless something was totally out of her control. “She’ll be here any minute.”
“Of course she will,” Emily says. “But there’s no sense in you being late to something you want to attend. Why don’t you text her that she can meet you inside? I’m sure she’ll understand.”
“I don’t know,” I say, wavering. “She really will be here any minute . . . ”
“You’ve been looking forward to this?” Emily asks.
“Very much.” Very much doesn’t even begin to cover it.
Emily nods. Her black hair is hanging over her shoulders in full, shiny waves, and when she nods, it slides over itself like a fairy-tale princess’s. “Then she wouldn’t want you to miss any of it on her account.”
I could easily see Rebecca walking in, already tutting when she sees me standing here like a twit. She’d tell me I should have gone in without her, and she’d be right, because it is rather silly to miss something I want to do merely because she was late.
“You’re right,” I declare, and Emily’s black lips curve up in a smile.
“I’m always right,” she says.
I lead her to the desk in the lobby—which looks like the front desk at a smart hotel—and arrange for her guest membership. While she gets that sorted, I text Rebecca.
Going in since it’s started, but I’ll make sure to take a seat by the door so you can find me! xx
There’s no response. I chew on my lip a moment, and then remember my lipstick and stop. I have the sudden worry that she’s not okay, that she’s been hurt or fallen ill, that she’s been in an accident . . .
I’m worried, Bex. Let me know if you’re okay. xx
The text comes half a second later.
I’m fine.
My heart flips over as I read it. And then immediately sinks back down to my feet. I decide to try calling one last time—and then I’m sent to voicemail after only a ring.
I look down at the phone like there’s been some sort of misunderstanding, but no. That’s Rebecca’s voicemail message I’m hearing, and after only four seconds on the line. Which means she sent me there. Which means she’s not injured, which means she’s not away from her phone.
She just doesn’t want to talk to me.
I . . . have no idea what to make of this.
A sad, lonely kind of panic starts buzzing around the edges of my mind.
“Which way?” Emily asks. I look up to see her finished and standing next to me, the thin white wristband on her wrist indicating her guest status at the club. She’ll be able to play publicly and in the private rooms, but only with members of the club.
I force myself to lower the phone. To smile as brightly as I can.
“This way.”
The theater underneath Justine’s is all prewar glamor and Jazz Age luxury. Circular booths upholstered in buttery leather surround red-clothed tables, which are lit by small fringed lamps. Globed pendant lights hang from the ceiling, burning a faint gold, and the whole room is adorned in a custom silk wallpaper depicting various sex acts from mythology and history: Catherine the Great having her feet tickled; Enki ejaculating the Tigris and Euphrates r
ivers; Edward VII fornicating by aid of his special sex chair; Pasiphaë and the bull.
At the front of the room is a low stage framed by velvet curtains in a deep-hued garnet, and the usual kinky furniture staples are front and center—racks of toys, padded benches, crosses. A slender woman with light brown skin and straight black hair purrs the night’s agenda into a microphone as Emily and I slide into the last unoccupied booth toward the back.
I check my phone again. Nothing more from Rebecca.
The panic at the edges of my mind buzzes louder now.
The exhibition works on a volunteer basis, our host is explaining, and anybody can come up and display whatever they like—a particularly tidy little sub, a talent for Florentine flogging, even the more outre kinks like autofellatio or fire play—all that’s needed is clear, sober consent from the participants and an adherence to the club’s rules, which ban scat, watersports, some types of breath play, and most types of blood play. She cedes the stage to polite applause.
A server wearing nothing but a cock ring brings us shallow coupes of fizzing champagne while the first volunteers mount the stage—an older woman and a young man with a leather collar around his neck. She cuffs the man to the spanking bench and starts perusing the selection of paddles hanging from one of the racks.
Emily clinks her coupe glass lightly against mine. “Here’s to a night of fun,” she whispers, her dark-lipped smile evil and beautiful in the dark. I try to smile back, but my eyes slide to the empty doorway instead, as if I expect Rebecca to be standing there, tall and stern and perfect.
She’s not.
The sub gets paddled, his cock reddened and ready between his legs as his Domme beats him, and then she uncuffs him and allows him to ejaculate onto her boots. The equipment—and the Domme’s boots—are cleaned and the next volunteers come up.
Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel Book 3) Page 33
