Exit to Eden

by Anne Rice

  And that rational part of me, that part of me that was pure professional, kept trying to figure out what was really going on with the two of us, why I was out of hand.

  Okay. He’s a thousand times as handsome as the file pictures. Forget early calculations on that score. His hair is thicker, almost bushy, and that softens the shape of the head. And he does have a slightly cruel expression when he isn’t smiling, a toughness that he hasn’t invented, but on the contrary, tries to conceal. He doesn’t like his own toughness all that much. He takes it for granted. Okay. That’s nice.

  And blue eyes, yes, unbelievable, and infinitely beautiful by sunlight, torchlight, incandescent light, whether or not he is smiling, staring, merely thoughtful, grave. The body is the body for a man to have. Say no more.

  Now, add in the long fingers, the narrow hands, the manicured nails (almost unheard of among the slaves), the bearing, and the deep inflection of the voice and the way he does almost everything I tell him to do and you have Mr. Macho with inveterate elegance, the square-jawed guy by the fire in the ski lodge in the cigarette commercial, drawing on a Marlboro as if he’s lazily recharging his batteries with it, the guy you know will like Mozart as well as Billie Holiday, be a tolerable judge of French wines.

  All right, I have that part. And I admit I have never seen a slave quite like that before. That’s dream stuff, only I never dreamed it. Reads Russian novels word for word.

  But what about the rest of it, the look in his eye, the odd and intimate way in which he smiles, the way he told me he was scared of me, the damned smart cracks—nobody ever does that with me—and the particular energy that starts burning out the circuits when we touch?

  I never fell in love in high school, never believed all that stuff about guys “kissing” better than others. But damned if he doesn’t know how to kiss. He kisses the way I imagine men kiss each other, rough and really luscious, and affectionate in a way it can only be between equals, real equals, when there is equal potential for the acceleration and the fulfillment of desire. I could crawl into the back of a Chevrolet with him to kiss like that for an hour. Only guys don’t kiss each other in the backs of cars, do they?

  What in the hell is going on?

  We’d come to the triple whipping post. Okay. He was really uptight.

  Flood of white light on the three round cement stages, each slave tethered by the neck to the high post that came almost to the chin. And the line of shackled slaves waiting their turn, only two of them blindfolded, one gagged.

  The crowd was the usual nine o’clock five-or-six-drinks-and-nobody-has-to-drive-home-because-we-are-home crowd, the guests at the tables on the raised terraces the ones who make no bones about the fact that whipping, pure and simple, turns them on. They don’t need the games and the races. They think they’re silly. And never mind that the whipping is 50 percent show and noise.

  And the usual drifters, a good hundred or so milling in front of the stage with drinks in hand.

  The handler, a very abrupt and rough young man I didn’t know, led Elliott to the side, but Elliott was turning his head to look at the slaves who were “getting it,” and the handler gave him a corrective crack of the strap.

  I drew in a little closer. I half wanted to put the shackles on myself, but the handlers do it better, faster. They have more practice. I came up just close enough so that I didn’t interfere.

  Elliott looked at me for a second. There was a little muscle dancing in his cheek, and the dark red flush.

  The handler put the thick white leather strap around his chest and then laced his wrists to the strap in back. It was driving him crazy. He looked off at the crowd and I could see the glaze over his eyes.

  I kept reaching to touch him and tightening my fingers, moving so the gesture wasn’t noticed. But now I put my fingers in his hair. He looked at the whipping post steadily, not acknowledging me, and his mouth twisted a little, looked a little mean.

  When the handler put the white leather collar around his neck, I thought he was going to struggle. And he almost did.

  “Take it easy,” I said.

  It’s a lovely collar, lined in soft fur, and it pushes the chin up gracefully, but it makes you feel fifty times more helpless than you already are, and I could see he was clenching his teeth hard.

  “You’ve been through this before . . .” I said, stroking his back. I was really not liking this so much. And I could see it was killing him that he couldn’t lower his head to look at me, couldn’t even turn it anymore.

  “Blindfold him,” I said.

  Definitely not expecting it, silently terrified of it. And the handler pulled his head roughly as he slapped the blindfold around his eyes. He went rigid. I could see the thick pads under the white leather, thought how they felt when they were pressed to the eyelids. The handler buckled it tight. And as always happens, the lower part of his face looked irresistible, the lips working nervously, stretching, pressing together, going slack.

  He shuddered all over, swallowed, shifted his weight.

  I rose on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek. He moved aside. It was getting worse for him by the second. His body seemed to swell under the shackles, his wrists twisting in the lacings, his lips drawn back in what looked like a bitter smile. But it was really sending him. He was hard and there was no way to hide that, no matter how angrily he turned away from me.

  I kissed him again, and felt that shock. I went up on tiptoe and kissed his mouth. He started to pull back, all rage and frustration, but he didn’t, obviously couldn’t make up his mind to it fast enough, and it started again, that energy, that vibration with the pull of his open mouth.

  He stopped it and turned away again. But he was losing control completely. He shook his head as if the blindfold were driving him wild. It looked like a white bandage around his eyes, and with his blond hair over it, he looked boyish and vulnerable, like he’d been wounded and patched up.

  “Lisa!” he whispered, barely opening his lips. “Take off the blindfold. Take off the collar. The rest of it I can take.” He started struggling against the shackles, his face beet red. The handler gave him a mean tug, kicking his legs apart.

  “Shhhh.” I kissed him again, pressing against him. “You’ve had the blindfold on before. You can stand it.”

  “Not this time. Not here,” he said in the same whisper. “Lisa, remove it. It’s too much.”

  Then he went still like a person counting to ten to keep his temper, the sweat draining down the sides of his face.

  “I’m taking you up to the head of the line,” I said. “They’ll whip you next. It’s not going to be too much harder than what I gave you in the bedroom.”

  “Only there’s a little matter of two hundred people seeing it,” he whispered between his teeth, “and I can’t see them.”

  “I’ll gag you if you don’t shut up.”

  That was it for him. He wasn’t going to let that happen. Silently, he was really coming apart. When I put my arm around him, he didn’t pull away this time. He broke down. He turned towards me, and I rose on tiptoe again, and he kissed my hair.

  I felt such a wave of desire for him I could hardly stand it. I motioned for the handler to go up and arrange for the whipping, trying to hide my face from anyone who might look. I didn’t want to do all this, but it was what he came here for, goddamn it, what he really wanted, and I didn’t dare not give it to him. I didn’t know what the hell was really going on.

  I loathed all of it suddenly, the artifice of it, and yet the excitement, the sense of the forbidden, the sheer lust at having him helpless . . . well, that was still there. And he was feeling it; he wasn’t flagging for a second. But he was really out on the edge.

  All right, first-class Club experience, Elliott. This is what it’s about.

  “You want to please me,” I said, close to his ear. That’s what the mistress is supposed to say. Go for the Academy Award with it. “Tell me you do. I want to hear it.”

  But the handler had come
back for him, and it was time. Two other fresh slaves were being tethered to the posts. He was to be on the right.

  I gave him over to the handler and went up into the highest part of the bleachers to watch.

  From there I could see a lot of the arcade, the avenues, the fountains, the booths, and the crowds streaming through the walkways, and radiating out from the raised concrete stage on which the pillories stood.

  He was pulled forward by the metal ring on the front of the white collar. Then that was tethered tight to the high post. Quickly, they had the straps around his ankles. Now he couldn’t do anything but stand straight, arms tight to his back, and take the blows. He looked noble, actually. Like Errol Flynn in Captain Blood when the enemy got hold of him: straight Saturday matinee hero in chains. Grind of desire with a root like a time probe.

  Immediately the whipping masters started swinging the straps.

  The others took it predictably, with a nice dramatic flair, but he was tensing, shivering, working against it all the way.

  A dozen or so guests gravitated to him with an infallible eye for something special. They started taunting him. But I wondered how many of them realized he was really breaking down.

  The noise and the rhythm of the straps was hypnotizing. And the longer it went on, the worse it was for him. Obviously, no matter how it excited him, it was devastating him. He couldn’t give in.

  As soon as it was finished, I gestured for him to be brought to the foot of the bleachers with the shackles and blindfold still on.

  He was so hot he was like a man just out of a steambath, his hair soaking, his chest heaving, his breath coming in little pants. I turned him around and there wasn’t a particle of resistance in him as I looked at his skin.

  He looked just about as enticing as he’d ever looked, and he was silent, licking his lips, only his color and the dancing muscles in his face revealing how miserable he was.

  I propelled him carefully down the walkway through the crowd. He was obviously still frantic at not being able to see. He jumped when he was touched. But he wasn’t going to beg me again to take off the blindfold. He didn’t make a sound. I moved him steadily towards the front floors of the arcade and out into the garden and the quiet.

  LISA

  Chapter 16

  Locked Out

  He wasn’t any calmer when we reached my room, but he hadn’t said a word. The lowest lamps were lighted, the bed changed, the covers neatly turned down for the night.

  I led him to the center of the room, where I told him to stand still. I stood back looking at him, just quietly watching him. He was crying under the blindfold. And he tried to swallow it in that classic masculine fashion so that the little soft sounds he made actually gave an impression of strength. His cock was still beautifully hard.

  I moved through the double doors, wondering how keen his hearing was, and glancing back at his profile, at the really luxurious sight of him shackled that way against the civilized furniture of the room. The white blindfold made him look all the more ruddy, and his hair more full.

  I sat down silently at my desk. I had a pain in my head that wasn’t really a pain. It was a great, awful noise. My body was hurting for him, and yet I felt paralyzed, numbed. I reached over and picked up his file and I looked at the big glossy black-and-white photo of him in the turtleneck and the tinted aviator glasses, smiling at the camera. And I shut it and put it back.

  I rested my elbow on the end of the desk and pressed my teeth to my knuckles and actually cut them with my teeth before I realized what I was doing, and stopped. Then I stood up and stripped off my clothes, getting impatient with them and almost tearing them, and just letting them fall on the floor.

  Naked, I went back into the bedroom. I stood in front of him and looked at his face again, sliding my fingers around it and tilting it up from the rim of the white collar so that I could see it better in the light. I ran my thumbs over his lower lip, stroked his cheeks.

  He had silky skin, the kind of skin only men have, not soft like a woman’s skin, but silky. The heady sense that I possessed him, could do anything to him, was overpowering, yet the feeling was not what it should have been! It was not, was not . . . I felt locked out of him and he was not the one locking me out. All of this was locking me out! I could have whipped him more, made him crawl. He would have done it. And I would have been locked out!

  He was still agitated, almost frantic. And my touching him made it worse. I reached back and undid the strap that was holding his arms and his hands. And before he could work himself free of it, I unsnapped the collar and threw it aside.

  His body seemed to sigh all over as the straps fell to the floor, the tension knotting in his cock.

  Then his hands came to life. He went as if to rub his wrists, then he reached for the blindfold, his fingers dancing right in front of it without touching it, and then he reached out for me.

  I jumped. He caught me by the arms, wrapping his fingers all the way around them and bringing me forward. And then he realized I was naked, and he felt my sides and my breasts, giving a little startled noise. And before I could stop him, he had pulled me to him, forcing me against his chest. His cock was thumping against my sex, and he kissed me in that shocking way and I realized he had lifted me off my feet.

  I reached up and shoved the blindfold up and off his eyes and his eyes were like some sort of unearthly part of him, a spectacle of light and blue color unlike anything else on his body, these two living reflecting orbs. I am going crazy I thought. I am truly out of my head.

  But I couldn’t see anymore. He was kissing me again and we were going down on our knees, him pulling me, and it was so hot it was like losing consciousness, the lights going out around me, the walls dissolving. He stretched me out on the carpet and then he went in with a fast, thick scraping motion so that I couldn’t find myself in it, hold it back. It blazed at once.

  I moaned into his mouth, then my breath stopped. I was rigid, the pleasure erupting in waves, one after another, until I almost screamed, certain that it couldn’t go on or I really would die. He was driving against me, right against the core of me—I could see the shaft of his cock against the blackness in my head—and I felt that sudden little spurt of my fluids against him, that impossible opening up, the sensation positively raging, as he came, roaring right over it, stoking it and stoking it and driving it further, until I shattered, screaming No, No, No, and God and Shit and Damn and No, Stop and finally giving up, like something broken, smashed to pieces, unable to make a sound or move.

  After a long moment, I pushed at him a little, at his shoulder, his chest. I loved the crush of him against me, his head on my shoulder, the sun-cooked smell of his hair. I pushed him a little, loving the fact that I couldn’t possibly move him. And then I lay perfectly still.

  When I opened my eyes it was to see an almost formless shimmer of light. And gradually the bed, the lamps, my masks floating against the walls, the real faces of myself.

  And him sitting up, beside me, his bent knee against my thigh.

  He was just sitting there, his hair messed up, his face still moist and florid, and his mouth a little hard. His eyes were large and dreamy, full of whatever he saw. And he was looking at me. And it was like waking on the bank of a stream in a place where you think you are completely alone, and seeing this extraordinary male creature sitting right beside you, this beauty looking at you, like he never saw a female creature before in his life.

  He didn’t look crazy, or dangerous, or unmanageable. But he looked extremely unpredictable, as he had all along.

  I sat up, drawing back very slowly, then rose to my feet. He watched me, but he didn’t move.

  I went to the dresser and took my negligee off the chair. I put it on, thinking how odd it was, this envelope of cotton and lace, that it was supposed to protect me from him. I pressed the button for the handler, and his face changed.

  There was a raw glimmer of fear, and then a look of desperation. And his eyes watered slight
ly as we regarded each other. I felt this catch in my throat. Everything is coming to an end, I thought. But what did that mean? Why do I say things to myself when I don’t even know what they mean? He looked forward, to the left of me, as if considering something, unable to make up his mind.

  Daniel came in almost immediately; Daniel always takes care of my room.

  And I saw the immediate shock on his face to see a slave sitting there without any manacles, in that outrageously relaxed position, taking not the slightest notice of either of us.

  Elliott slowly climbed to his feet. He continued to stare, clearly thinking, still only vaguely respecting the fact that we were there.

  Daniel looked relieved, but still unsure.

  “Okay,” I said. “Take him in for the night. Bath, full massage, healing lamp.” I paused, rubbing the back of my head. Schedule for him. Routine. Got to get him away from me or go crazy. And got to give him what he’s signed in for. “All right. In the morning, classes with the other postulants. Dana for exercise at eight, food and drink serving with Emmett at nine. I’ll call Scott to see if he can take him for a demonstration in his class at ten.”

  No, no, not Scott. He’ll fall in love with Scott. But got to do something, got to . . . Okay. Stick with Scott. Let Scott use him in the class for a demonstration, double whammy, that’s something. Scott won’t let him down.

  “Rest in the afternoon, then he’s to serve at the tables or in the bar all afternoon. Everybody can look, but don’t touch.”

  What else? Can’t think. He’s going to fall in love with Scott.

  “Any misbehavior, whip the hell out of him. But no one, I mean no one, not even Scott is to really touch him, I mean . . .”

  I was drowning.

  “And I want him rested between four and six and then back here at six sharp.”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” Daniel said. Uneasy. Worried expression.