by Vina Jackson
Beads of sweat began to appear on my brow and on his sides. When I struck hard and then cupped his cheek to ease the sting, he relaxed against me and I was overcome by tenderness and wanted to take him into my arms and stroke him like a child.
Time stood still and I was aware of nothing but the rasp of Neil’s breath and the sound of the flogger beating against his skin.
Until the moment Grayson took a deep breath, paused, handing his cameras to his ever-silent and expressionless assistant and declared he was done.
Both Neil and I had become Grayson’s puppets, positioned left and right, straight and crooked, chastely and indecently, just another set of props like the instruments we had been using.
‘You can get dressed again, guys.’ In his eyes I could see he was still faraway, lost in the visions he had conjured. Until the next model, the next musician, came along and the dance would begin all over again.
Ignoring us altogether, Grayson retreated to one of the side rooms and the strong spotlights were switched off.
We were dismissed.
7
Snow White at the Ball
The grey shades of the city unfurled as the car sped north, soon making way for the orderly parades of semi-detached houses standing to attention behind well-tended front gardens that littered our steady path through London’s suburbs.
We’d begun the journey from Grayson’s studio when it was still light, but by the time we reached the open road, darkness had already fallen. Grayson was driving and She sat next to him in the front and dozed throughout the journey, creating an uncomfortable silence I was reluctant to break. The car radio was set low to a classical music station and the gentle, cushioned hum of wordless melodies lullabied us along.
I had met up with Grayson again in Shadwell a few days ago, where he’d invited me to see the finished pictures from the shoot with Neil. The photographs were rather beautiful. Our bodies fit together almost as if we were one person and the way the light reflected from our skin was haunting in its simplicity. A few shots showed just my hand, which seemed so small and fragile in stature but so powerful gripping the flogger, with the curve of Neil’s buttock rising to meet the lengths of suede, like a promise of things to come.
I still felt a little uneasy about the level of intimacy that I had unintentionally displayed for the camera, but considering the quality of the finished product it seemed churlish to complain. We were just bodies. Skin. Flesh. The emotion that Grayson had captured in the photographs seemed so clear to me, but it was intangible. A figment of my imagination. I didn’t have any ownership over the way that the viewer chose to interpret the way that our bodies melded together, the precise turn of my wrist, the bump in Neil’s spine.
Neil had shrugged off the event when I tried to speak to him about it afterwards to check if he was OK. As if being flogged nude by a friend in front of a celebrity photographer was an everyday occurrence. Instinctively I felt that he was holding something back, but I wasn’t sure what. Perhaps he was just embarrassed about how far things had gone. I was ashamed of my own behaviour. I’d been responsible for him and his first scene, but I’d fallen so far into my own head space I hadn’t stopped to give Neil a safe word or to even check that he really knew what he was doing. The presence of Grayson, his assistant, the lights and the camera made it seem at the time as if it were just a set-up, a game we were acting out, but I knew that for me it had gone beyond that once I had begun to wield the whip. Despite the public show, it had felt natural. More natural than almost every other interaction I’d had with Neil. If Neil felt the same way, he didn’t share the fact with me. It was easier not to talk about it.
After we’d been through the images and Grayson had given me a disc with my favourite shots, he took me on a tour around their apartment. For the first time I had been allowed into the house beyond the confines of the photographic studio and been surprised at how conventional the furnishings and the overall style of their living space actually was. It was as if they kept a strict demarcation line between their kink life and their existence as a couple. It made me realise how little I knew about them.
The size of She’s walk-in wardrobe was the only unsurprising thing. When she pulled the sliding doors open, it was a veritable treasure trove of outfits, shoes and accessories, a deep cavern of delight, of assorted materials, textures, brash colours as well as racks of fearsome implements most of which I hadn’t seen before and would surely not even know how to use properly.
Grayson had then invited me to the ball, and we had agreed She would dress me for the occasion.
‘The ball takes place only once a year. It’s very special,’ She had told me, a broad, sensual smile spreading across the scarlet hue of her full lips.
‘Has it got a name?’
‘No, we just know it as the ball. It’s a celebration of everything we enjoy and believe in. And the tickets are very exclusive. Most people don’t even know it exists. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it, Lily.’
‘I hope so.’
‘I think you’re ready for it,’ she said. ‘Our little kink debutante. Your coming out.’
It made it all sound very formal, albeit alluring, but I knew it was best not to ask too many questions. This world I was gradually becoming part of was a domain of half-whispered secrets, of darkness hiding between the folds of the light. It wasn’t just the physical pleasure that beckoned me in its direction, but also the sense of ritual, the conspiratorial togetherness that bound all its participants from the instant they changed into their other selves and stepped beyond that invisible curtain that separated the everyday life from the kingdom of the senses.
I returned on Saturday afternoon, several hours before we were due to hit the road, as instructed, so that She could make me over. The extra time proved unnecessary as my costume was extremely simple: a floor-length grey silk sheath dress that clung to my body like water with a short beaded train in the shape of a tear that ran behind as I walked.
‘A teardrop, for our teardrop girl,’ She said as she pulled up the discreet side zip.
‘You had this made for me?’ I asked.
‘Well, of course.’
The dress might almost have passed muster for an ordinary night out if it hadn’t been so low at the front and the back. The neck line cut savagely between my breasts all the way to my belly button and the back was cut even lower, displaying the curve of my rump. I was close to naked from the waist up.
To my amazement, She had arranged flat shoes for me to wear with the dress rather than the towering heels that I knew she preferred and that most of the other dommes wore to events. She presented me with a pair of grey silk beaded slippers, lined with soft leather. They were so comfortable, I may as well have been walking barefoot.
‘You’ll be up all night,’ She said, ‘and I know you can’t stand in heels for that long.’ She sniffed, as if this were a great personality flaw. ‘Besides,’ She added, ‘you don’t need the false height. You’re rare, Lily. A natural. You have more power when you’re just being yourself.’
I wore my hair loose and, once She had finished glossing it and ironing out the frizz and any stray waves, it hung dead straight and heavy around my shoulders, like Cleopatra’s bob. In my ears I wore a pair of long beaded pearl earrings, which swayed and flickered in the light as I walked.
She and Grayson wore matching red and gold military outfits sculpted to fit their bodies to the millimeter, as if they’d been fitted and measured that morning. Whatever their relationship was at home, Grayson wasn’t accompanying her as one of her subs to the ball. The show that they put on for the rest of the world was one of equality. They were partners in kink.
With London now firmly in our rear-view mirror, Grayson’s dark-green Saab was racing down straight country roads with alacrity. I saw a sign for the M25, which gave me a sense of how far we were, but we soon left it trailing in our wake as we reached a vast expanse of open fields. With just the glow of the headlights cutting through the night, we w
ere like a ghost train chasing a will-o’-the-wisp through a swamp of darkness.
The low, cloudy horizon quickly raced to meet us and we took a turn onto a narrower road that led into woods. Five minutes later, we reached a high metal gate, where two burly attendants ticked our names off a set of checklists held against clipboards and waved us in. Grayson drove the car a hundred yards down the path beyond the property’s entrance until the wall of trees finally parted and we emerged onto a vast clearing beyond which a towering mansion stood, its floodlit outline razor-sharp against the night sky.
The guests’ cars were parked in a tidy half-circle in front of the large country house, with a handful of traditionally uniformed hired help on call to pick up the car keys and slot the incoming vehicles into the carefully organised pattern like pieces in a jigsaw.
She had woken up as we reached the front of the house, alerted by Grayson switching the radio off.
‘Lovely. Truly lovely,’ she remarked, looking up at the vast house that towered above them.
It could have been a scene out of Brideshead Revisited or any English upper-class property porn. There was no hint at the excesses and follies concealed within.
Grayson opened his door and I followed his example. He’d kept the engine running as the valet busied himself around the car and Grayson emerged from the Saab in full regalia and handed him the set of keys in exchange for a playing card. An ace of hearts, I noticed.
Only then did She make her exit from the car. Lazy, regal, like the queen of kink she was.
I could feel the gaze of other guests, arriving and disembarking from their own cars, linger on her as our trio moved together towards the house’s front steps. Did I appear incongruous, a grey shadow, sandwiched as I was between those two aristocrats? I wondered.
The doors were wide open, and the sharp beat of techno music reverberated through the rooms all the way towards us like a gushing stream of sound.
We walked into a blinding pool of light as we finally passed the threshold and entered the house.
A large hallway opened up with a bevy of topless women in white Roman togas and silver belts all standing with trays of drinks at the bottom of a grandiose staircase, each with their hair held tight above their head in a severe chignon. I could not help noticing how opulent some were, while others were modest in size and so much less well-endowed. I noted, with a tightening of my throat, that they all displayed the same colour nipples, painted silver, matching the shade of their belts. For a brief instant, my mind in a whirl, I imagined how I might look with painted nipples.
As we passed the partly undressed young woman nearest to us, Grayson and She each picked up a glass of white wine, or maybe it was champagne, and I took hold of what appeared to be water unless they served vodka or gin in tall glasses here. My eyes were already darting around in all directions as we walked along, taking in the sights, the house, the guests, and nothing would have surprised me at this stage.
‘Let’s get the lay of the land,’ Grayson suggested, taking both me and She by the hand. ‘A bit of exploration before the fun begins.’
‘The ball isn’t always here?’ I queried.
‘No, it moves around. Seldom takes place at the same location twice,’ She replied.
We moved on to a circular salon where guests jostled and congregated in small groups. A babble of indistinct conversation ebbed and flowed amongst the clink of the glasses and the swish and swirl of couture dresses, leather and latex under the glow of old-fashioned chandeliers.
So far it felt suitably lavish and classy, and anyone’s idea of a bourgeois gathering of same-minded souls in a country mansion, or so I reckoned, had it not been for the half-naked waitresses stationed by the stairs and the elaborate assortment of clothing on parade, which added a curious sense of provocation to the proceedings. But the other guests appeared straightforward and, dare I say, normal, although I had long realised the corridors of BDSM were like a hall of mirrors and seductive depravity was always an inch away, skin deep behind the reassuring façade of everyday life.
A large French window at the back of the salon looked onto an endless garden, illuminated by a row of strong klieg lights, just like a son et lumiére spectacle, with a variety of different-sized marquees which had been erected at regular intervals throughout the grounds. Beyond them lay a small wood, while the gardens to the left of the house were protected by a tall brick wall, with rows of barb wire across its top.
‘Ah,’ She exclaimed, pointing at the marquees. ‘Our theatres for tonight.’
Grayson calmly nodded, downing his white wine with a greedy look of anticipation colouring his face.
We were still loitering without true purpose by the French windows when I felt the murmurs of the room shrink to a muted hush behind us. We all looked around.
A tall man in his late fifties, with a shock of abundant white hair and a pair of red-framed glasses, wearing an exquisitely tailored tuxedo whose shiny lapels caught a sharp reflection of the room’s central chandelier, came surging head high through the crowd that parted at his approach. Two steps behind him came a young woman. She was connected to him by a leash, which was itself attached to a dark collar circling her neck. In his other hand he held a minutely carved wooden walking stick with a metal pommel in the shape of a skull.
The woman was totally nude.
Apart from a pair of impossibly high-heeled and precarious leopard-skin-print shoes. And the collar around her neck, from which a small golden padlock hung.
I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever encountered. And thing was the right word. Her beauty had something of the unreal, the uncanny, about it, as if she had been manufactured to a most demanding specification and been brought to life just for this public display, so that we common mortals could wallow in our own imperfections.
Her face was like a mask of perfect beauty, serene, eyes green and distant, cheekbones gently rouged to emphasise their hand-carved precision, hair like pouring jade reaching down to her shoulder blades almost in a parody of a shampoo commercial, flowing, free, alive. Luscious red cupid lips in harmony with the rest of her make-up, strong, but elegant and discreet at the same time. Her breasts were high and firm and bouncing gently with every step she took behind her master, her long legs steady despite the awkward equilibrium imprinted by the tallness of her shoes, the back of her thighs tense and strong like whiplash string, her ankles delicate and poised, pillars for her movements.
Everyone gazed at her as the couple passed, ignoring our gazes.
She brushed against me as they headed towards the garden.
Her mons had been shaven to utter smoothness. But what caught my fevered imagination was the fact that she was also tattooed.
Just half a finger above her immaculately bare pussy, precisely centred, was the tattoo of a bar code, and next to it a number ‘1’.
Was it a real tattoo, or something temporary, the way I sometimes used to wear a detachable nose ring when I had felt particularly rebellious?
Gut feeling told me it was real. She was permanently marked. But already the couple was melting into the darkness of the garden, heading for one of the marquees, and all I could see was the white imprint of her naked arse as it swayed away, inviting questions and lust.
I caught my breath.
‘Wow,’ I said. ‘She is beautiful.’
I was going to add something irrelevant, ask either She or Grayson questions about the striking couple, but She interrupted me.
‘Ah, that Thomas. Why is he always so theatrical?’
A bell chimed.
The sound was light and playful and unlike any tolling church bell that I had ever heard.
‘The shows are beginning,’ Grayson said to me. ‘You’re going to love this.’
She had already begun to move towards the French windows, which had theatrically swung open at the sound of the bell, seemingly of their own accord.
Grayson took my hand and I followed him o
ut into the garden.
The air was soft and warm and filled with the heady scent of tropical flowers, although the garden itself contained only a large field of grass on which the marquees sat, ringed by ordinary London plane trees.
‘Where is that smell coming from?’ I asked, inhaling deep gulps of air.
‘The heaters, I think,’ Grayson replied, ‘although I’m not entirely sure. There’s always been something a little magical about these parties.’
Tall glass cylinders, each containing a glowing flame, were dotted around the patio and the lawn and I noticed when I stood near one that every minute or so they hissed, exhaling a little scented vapour into the air.
‘Your first night here too?’ said a cool voice behind us as I was trying to decide whether the flames suspended in the heaters were real. From a distance, the glass cylinders were invisible so it looked as though a dozen tiny fires were suspended in the air across the lawn, as if the party had been gatecrashed by a dragon, or a group of marauding Vikings.
The voice belonged to a tall, blonde woman who was dressed in a bright red, blue and gold Wonder Woman outfit. When I looked closer, I realised that she was in fact completely naked and her costume was merely body paint. In one hand she held a lasso, and in the other, a long, dark wig.
‘It was too scratchy to wear for long,’ she confessed when she saw me staring at the length of hair in her hand. ‘I’ve been looking for a pot plant to hide it in.’
I began to giggle, until Grayson shushed both of us.
‘I’m Lauralynn,’ she whispered into my ear as we slipped through the entrance of the first marquee and she slung the wig around a tent pole.
