Dating guys her own age—Jenny was twenty-one—proved useless. They were inevitably either too timid or too selfish to take a look at her sexual needs. If she ever did get to talk a bit, they would end up being freaked out, calling her a “ho” or a “psycho bitch."
One boyfriend actually made the effort to handcuff Jenny and take her a little more roughly, but it wasn't worth the effort, having to tell him everything step by step. What fun was it, having to tell someone how to be a dominant? Either it was in a man's nature or it wasn't.
Every two seconds he was stopping her. “Baby, am I doing it right?” “Baby, is that too hard?” Fuck it! She'd rather masturbate and surf the web.
Of course there were plenty of older guys available on line, ones with all kinds of claims to being Masters. She even signed onto a couple of personals sites to maybe get hooked up.
Wow, was that a depressing experience. Most of them were a joke right off the bat. Total pigs who could barely keep a civil tongue in their head. Did they actually think a woman would swoon at the sight of an unsolicited swollen cock or agree to surrender their precious freedom to a total stranger just because he can type, “Kneel now you frigging cunt,” on his computer screen?
Far more interesting to talk to were the women. The ones who'd actually had some experience living out their fantasies. The news they shared wasn't exactly encouraging. Men weren't anymore trustworthy or ‘for real’ in the BDSM world than they were in the realm of vanilla relationships.
The one everyone stressed was being patient and careful. The right Master might be out there, but so were the predators and jerks and mama's boys and everything else under the sun. “The only thing worse than no master, is the wrong master.” That was the mantra every submissive woman should have in her heart.
Sound advice, but a little hard to take at twenty-one. It was so tempting to just agree to hook up with someone for the sake of a quick fix, or else to just give up altogether. Jenny had lots of tear-filled nights over this, and they were only partially eased by her newfound cyber sisterhood. She was grateful to have them, though. In the rest of her life, Jenny couldn't even begin to share her pains.
Her father could barely accept that his little girl was old enough to even want sex, let along kinky sex. Her mother might well have understood Jenny's needs, given some of her own bizarre, extra-marital proclivities, but the two of them were like oil and water. Jenny had a long list of unresolved issues, up to and including mom's treatment of dad and her role in Kyle's suicide last Spring.
Kyle was her brother. He ought to have been there for her, and she'd told him all about the things in her heart and head. He'd been so fucking awesome. Never judging, just letting it all be in that fantastic, out there head of his. Kyle was all about the being. Things just were. You didn't push them. She could still picture him, night after night, sitting there in his torn jeans, his wild, shaggy, sandy colored ‘fro, some black rock group t-shirt on, smoking a joint, picking on his guitar.
Never had to say a fucking word. Just the look in his eye, those nods every now and again, or a carefully placed “yea,” and Jenny knew she was being understood.
Nobody saw it coming, the thing with the pills. Mom had this whole bullshit story about an accidental overdose. Right. Like he had some fucking reason to have a bottle of morphine lying around his apartment.
Grow up, mom.
Had Jenny seen it coming? No. Not really. About a week before, he'd said “Life is tough, Jen.” The day of his suicide, he'd seemed the happiest he had in months, though. He was all psyched about this new band. They were going to go out on the road. Make it out west.
Marlene, her mother and Robert, her father, had wanted to pull the reigns in pretty tight on Jenny afterwards. Typical parent bullshit. Closing the barn door after the horses, trying to appease their own guilt.
Dad at least listened to reason. She'd always been able to talk to her father. “Tell mom, to leave me the F alone,” was her one request."
Being pretty estranged already, it wasn't a huge leap for Robert to take her side against the wife he barely saw. He'd already leveled with Jenny about his girlfriend, a former secretary at the law firm and about how the main reason he stayed married was because he knew Jenny's mother would crack up without him.
It was probably true, for all her big talk. And anyway, wasn't she fucking around on him just as much as he was on her?
"We'll keep this between us,” Robert wrote her out a nice big check to meet her rent for the rest of the year. “Just tell mom you got more scholarship money so you might as well stay here."
"Thanks, daddy.” She always did that, giving him a big hug at the end.
Some psychologists said that was the root of submissive girls’ desires—a deep seated need to please a remote, unreachable father figure. Jenny was smack dab in the middle of a sexuality class right now and was learning all sorts of interesting things. The way she saw it, it was kind of like explaining why people were gay or why they liked chocolate over strawberry. You could find “reasons” or just leave it alone. People have preferences, they are one way and not another.
What fucking difference did it make?
In here humble opinion, that statement ought to be a litmus test applied to every so-called moral judgment. Did it really make a difference to anyone's well being or to the stability of society if people ate strawberry ice cream of if two guys sucked each other off in their own house?
Now hurting kids, involving bystanders, that was wrong, but not the freely consenting stuff.
Jenny was very sensitive to issues of people's rights. That was something Kyle had believed in very strongly. One of the last jobs he held was as a caseworker at a homeless shelter. He told her stories about what people had to put up with—the way they were punished in this society just for being poor and weak. Not to mention all the ways they could be victimized.
She'd given serious thought to going into advocacy herself, but really she had to admit that was his thing, not hers. She couldn't live her life trying to be him or make up for the space he left. The psychologist had told her that. One of the few useful things she'd gotten out of the six months therapy had father and mother had insisted she get.
It was a decent trade off to buy mom's silence so she could stay on her own. They were terrified she'd just party and do drugs, spiral out of control. But she wasn't like her brother—and that was something they'd needed to figure out in counseling.
She was a hell of a lot more disciplined, if less creative and sensitive than her big brother. Jenny had school, a few sort-of close friends, her enjoyment of swimming and karate, and of course her dreams of sexual slavery.
And while they might serve as sources of torment to her, they never once caused her to doubt her will to live ... or to believe.
They say you have to give up on wanting something before it comes to you, and Jenny had certainly moved pretty far in that direction when she came across the e book.
A sad and stirring and wonderful tale of mastery and love and loss written by someone known simply as “Mister SM."
Three times she read it through in the course of twenty-four hours, masturbating countless times and missing a whole day's worth of classes. When she had exhausted herself, physically and emotionally, she jotted off an e-mail to the editor asking how she could get in touch with the author to express her gratitude.
Much to Jenny's surprise, the editor sent back the following. “We regret to inform you that the author in question is not open to any contact with readers."
A form letter if ever she'd heard one.
What kind of writer didn't talk to fans? Or at least enjoy a word of praise or two? Jenny looked at the story once again, with fresh eyes. It was the account of a man surrendering the slave he loves more than life in order for her to fulfill herself ... the irony of cultivating such a stunning creature only to have her need something more than chains could give ... it had to be an autobiography ... this Mister SM had to be the master
in the story. He personally had suffered this way, out of his own great love and now he was too heartsick to love another slave.
Jenny wept at the thought of it. She knew this man. She could feel his pain etched in her heart. Moreover, she knew that she was born to ease that pain, that her desire for submission was meant to reach the empty, wasted part of his soul.
There was no way to explain this, even to herself, but Jenny was convinced beyond the shadow of a doubt that this was the man who must own her, the one who enslave her completely and totally, at once reducing and lifting her, to become a creature outside herself ... a creature of utter and complete service, her every scrap of being to be used for another's purposes.
And unlike this other slave, Jenny would never leave him ... not unless he discarded her and even then she would come crawling back, on her belly, in glorious abasement.
For he was her fulfillment ... in him, her mind would blossom, she would become all the things she was capable of, he'd see that, and yet she would still be his, all the more so for her growth.
The only real question was how to break through that self-imposed wall of his and make first contact.
CHAPTER TWO
Simon Majors palmed the outside of the white ceramic mug, brooding. He was already regretting the meeting and it hadn't even taken place yet. Rules were there for a reason and exceptions were nothing more than momentary lapses of sanity as far as he was concerned.
"At least meet with this one,” his editor Teresa had implored. “You turn them all away—consider this your offertory for the year."
For the decade more like.
The really aggravating part was that Teresa would not forward him any of her e-mails. All she would say was that the woman was a submissive and that she had obviously been through a lot and needed some TLC.
"Why don't you meet with her if you connect with her so much?” He'd asked his prime literary supporter and (soon to be ex) best friend. “You're a woman ... you're submissive. Sometimes."
She'd laughed over that. Teresa and her husband Mike had a complicated relationship, one that called for a lot of love and patience on both sides and a good deal of switching roles in the bedroom. “One cup of coffee, Simon,” she pronounced, using her best editorial domme voice. “It won't kill you. Might do you some good in fact to get out of that morgue of a house of yours."
"People would kill for that morgue, as you put it,” he reminded her. “Along with the five acres of unsullied green hills and forests surrounding it."
"Fine, call it a cemetery instead,” she conceded. “Just do the coffee thing, Simon. Or I will never get you on Oprah as long as you live."
As if the publisher would ever allow him to go anywhere in public to reveal that the face of the best selling romance novelist Bethany Wyles was actually a forty two year old misanthrope whose only resemblance to a woman was in his deep blue eyes and long, prematurely graying, hair, which at the moment was gathered behind his neck and partially tamed by a rubber band.
Yes, life on his white elephant estate, inherited from a crotchety grandfather in the aspirin business suited him well. The writing money gave him just enough to keep up the expenses, pay the taxes and allow for an occasional re-constitutive sojourn to the mountains of Tibet.
Blast it, where was this woman? The manipulative creature—making Teresa take pity on her enough to interfere with his right to privacy. He wrote the books to be read. That was the extent of it. As far as he was concerned, authorship ought to be a matter of total indifference to a reader. Either you liked the book or you didn't. Did people want to meet the makers of their cars or sandwiches or bloody handkerchiefs? What was it about writers made them so special?
Why did people need to see their pictures, to know their own life stories, as if that would somehow make them closer to the story. As if you could escape into the world on the page ... as if there were some entry possible.
Mostly it boiled down to sex. Certain kinds of women were aroused by what he wrote. Frivolous women, desperate women...
Damn it, Simon was tired of all this. Not only shouldn't he have agreed to this meeting, he should never have let Teresa talk him into publishing Eternal Bond in the first place. The book was far too personal. His own anguish aired out like dirty laundry. So what if it might help others in a similar situation to the one he went through? What about his own feelings?
He checked his watch. She was five minutes late. He'd give her five more, and then he was out of here.
"More coffee?” Inquired the overly solicitous waitress.
He nodded absently. Supposedly he had this thing where women were concerned. A particular appeal. Not because he was the most handsome man in the world—his face was a little too long, his cheeks a little too sunken—but on account of his expressiveness. And his eyes.
Eyes never lied and his apparently were particularly telescopic.
"Females fall for men like you instantly,” Teresa explained. “It's the challenge of it, the passion you obviously keep under wraps. The set of your brow. It speaks of unseen oceans."
Those oceans were better left unseen—he was doing women a favor, and himself.
"Have you the correct time?” Simon asked her.
"Certainly, Sir. It's ten after three."
Ten after ... halleluiah, he was a free man. “On second thought, just get me the check, please."
"Excuse me, Sir? Are you Mister SM?"
Simon looked past the waitress to the young woman in the skirt and sweater, eager eyed, swinging chestnut hair framing a perfect oval face. Lips, demure and at the same time hungry. The jade eyes, innocent as a newborn, yet touched by something depthless—something even he could not readily perceive.
"Because if you are,” she smiled. “Then I'm Jenny. The Jenny you were supposed to meet?"
This was the writer of the heartfelt e-mails? The woman he simply had to meet? He was going to have Teresa's hide for this...
"Exactly how old are you?"
"I'm twenty one,” she met his glare with a sweet, determined smile. “But I'm mature for my age."
"Bonds mature at your age, not people.” He was already on his feet. “I'm sorry, you came here for nothing."
Jenny allowed him to brush past. The touch of her naked arm was warm, electric. “It wasn't nothing,” she absolved his rudeness. “Just getting to see you was enough."
Simon stung—he did not enjoy being made to look the lesser person. “Look, Miss—"
"I'm Jenny,” she reminded gently but firmly. “My name is Jenny."
"Look ... Jenny. I am sure you have the best of intentions, but you are simply to understand the foolishness of what you are doing. Trust me, I am saving you a good deal of grief."
"And how do you know what I'm doing, exactly,” she wondered. “If you haven't even asked?"
Simon scowled. The question was a reasonable one. For a second time, he'd been caught out. “I'll give you fifteen minutes,” he said. “After that we go our separate ways. No further contact. Agreed?"
She put out her hand beaming. “Deal."
Her fingers pulsed with life, the delicate grip like a signature, so familiar, unlocking memories. Of Christine.
He retracted his hand, as if struck by lightning. “The fifteen minutes has already started. I suggest we sit."
Jenny smoothed her skirt over her firm cheeks before sliding into the booth across from him. She had a body made for love ... made for punishment.
Teresa had called her a submissive, waiting to bloom. The worst kind of temptation to a man like him. “So tell me ... Jenny ... what is it you want so badly from me?"
She smiled, a sad and complicated little curl of her lips. Yes, he thought, she's survived something. Something that might kill a lesser person. “You probably expect me to say how your book changed my life, or how I feel like I already know you because of the characters you write."
Actually, that was exactly what he'd expected. “Don't tell me, you're here to let me know in
person you think my work is crap?"
Jenny laughed. He liked her laughing. It was something she probably didn't do near enough of. “Hardly. It's just I'm not some little groupie..."
Could have fooled me.
"Tick tock,” he admonished her for beating around the bush.
Jenny took a deep breath. He tried to keep his eyes off her rising and falling breasts. “It's like this. I know we're strangers, and there's no reason at all we should have, like, a relationship. Truthfully, I don't want one. I don't want you to know a thing more about my life."
"But..."
Her pretty face clouded. It had to be an awful big ‘but.’ “Well,” she looked down at her hands, interlacing her fingers in her first show of nervousness. “I think we need each other."
"Need? How?"
As if a girl half his age could tell him anything he needed...
"You need to own me,” she said. “And I need to be owned."
He waited for a punch line. Hearing none, he said. “You realize there's a little more to it than that?"
"I don't know how it works,” she admitted. “I just know I want your collar. I want to live for your pleasure ... I want to suffer your every abuse. I want to die to myself."
"Submission is not suicide,” he lectured. “Nor is it the romance found in the pretty books—even mine. If you want my advice, get some counseling and find a nice vanilla boy to live in the suburbs with."
"I don't want to kill myself,” she countered. “I want to die to myself. There's a difference."
"You talk back too much,” he shook his head. “That fact alone would make you a poor slave."
"For some maybe. But not for you."
"I thought you weren't going to pretend to know me,” he challenged.
"That's not knowing—it's hunching."
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