Carrie's Story: An Erotic S/M Novel (7 page)

I felt my belly quivering under the tightly laced corset.
And yes, his mouth was moving upward, slowly, almost
absentmindedly, but definitely toward my cunt, parting it with
his tongue, while his hands on my hipbones held me still. I
wanted to move more, to buck. The quiver in my belly spread
and rippled, centrifugally. Part of me wanted to try to throw
him off-I was almost afraid of the sensations, the intensity
of not just his tongue, but his breath as well. It was his warm,
even breathing that I could feel up my cunt, that seemed so
invasive, in its tiny way, and that was making me moan -was
I moaning? I guessed so. But he wouldn't let me throw him
off, I knew, and realized that truly, I didn't want him ever
to stop. All I could do was rock my pelvis back and forth,
meeting his tongue, chasing it, and then retreating, pretending to hide from it, and finally just surrendering to it, moaning
and then yelling until everything exploded and first I was fall ing from a very great height and then I was a puddle on the
rug, the winter afternoon light slanting in on me through the
leaded windows.

He sat next to me for I don't know how long, tracing the
intricate stitchery of the corset with his finger. Then, finally,
he got back up on the couch and said, "Kneel up straight."
Now, I thought, wincing, I'll find out what I didn't do -what
it was he had really wanted. I looked up at him, lounging
with his arms spread against the top of the couch and his
legs crossed. And I wondered what I should be doing right
now. Should I be thanking him, worshiping him in some way
I should know but didn't? Should I be doing anything at all
except feeling splendidly drained and exhausted? He didn't
look angry or even stern, though he did look thoughtful.

"Well," he said, looking at me carefully.

I didn't know what to say, just stared at him through a
kind of haze, as he reached down and tightened the buckles
on my collar. "Well, okay," he said, smiling. "I like the way
you look right now. You look surprised and grateful, and
frightened and confused, too. Perfect.

"That," he continued, "was as nice as beating you or
coming in your ass. Different, of course, but lovely all the same.
I've wanted to do it for a while, you know, but it wouldn't have
worked out. But I can tell you that I haven't enjoyed holding
back on it all these months."

I had only a faint understanding of what he was getting
at. Actually, at that moment, it took just about everything
I had to keep myself upright and scraped off the floor. He
wasn't going to punish me, I was dimly realizing. That was
good, anyway. He was telling me something that he thought
was important, and I knew I had to listen, though all I wanted to do at that moment was live happily ever after in the way
my body was feeling. And to sleep, upstairs in his bed with
the window open and a breeze drifting in...

"Listen to me," he said, raising my chin and slapping my
cheek lightly.

"Yes, Jonathan," I murmured. "I'm sorry, Jonathan."

"That's better," he said. "God," he continued, "I love to
see you following the rules when you really don't want to.
Well, but that's why we have rules, isn't it?"

I murmured my assent, according to the rules. Right, the
goddamn rules, and I could feel the world he'd built around
us taking shape again, disrupting my idyll. This catechism
was going to take some time, I was beginning to realize, and
I was also beginning to realize that I wasn't going to enjoy it
very much.

"And you've learned a lot, haven't you?" He was deep
into pedantic mode now. "I mean, you're still far from perfect, but you'll continue to improve. You've learned to be
open and available and attentive to me. You've learned to
accept punishment from me. Well, punishment isn't so difficult, I guess, compared to gratuitous whimsical pain-pain
that I've created simply because I feel like it. If I want to see
marks on your thighs, I put them there, right? If I want to
see you in tears, I make that happen. And now you're learning that if I want to make you entirely delighted, I can do
that, too."

I had, believe it or not, forgotten that that's supposed to
be the point of a sexual relationship-usually, that is. Which
was more or less what he was saying, now. "The night you
met me, at that stupid party, you imagined my taking you
home and makingyou feel this way, didn'tyou?"

"Yes, Jonathan, I did," I admitted softly. This was about
as humiliating as anything I'd been through with him.

"Well, why shouldn't you have?" he said. "You deserve
it. Someday maybe you'll find somebody just as attractive
and deserving as you are and the two of you will burn up the
sheets every night, while you get your PhDs and write books
and have babies, all that good stuff.

"Only," he continued, "that's not what I want, and it
seems that it's not what you want either, at least for now. So
we're doing.. .well, you know what we're doing. I've held
back all these months on making love to you this way because
you would have misunderstood if I had done it any earlier.
And I'm still not sure you understand completely. I didn't
want you to expect to feel like this, or even to think of it as a
treat or a reward. Don't expect it. Don't anticipate it. I'll do
it when I feel like doing it, and you won't be able to predict
it. And don't try any tricks to make me feel like doing it. I'll
punish you very severely if I ever think that's what you're up
to. Got that?"

"Yes, Jonathan," I murmured, quite miserably.

"Yes, I think you do," he said, and then unceremoniously
unzipped his pants. "Well," he continued, "my turn now.
Open your mouth."

And afterward, he simply sent me home, telling me that
was enough for today. As I was getting dressed I remembered
an old musical, Caroiaiel, that they'd done at my high school.
Songs like "My Boy Bill" and "You'll Never Walk Alone." We
all sneered at its corniness, but secretly I'd loved it: I'd cry at
the thought of never, never knowing that someone loved me.
And I'd fall asleep trying to imagine a slap that felt like a kiss. I still couldn't quite imagine such a slap. But trust Jonathan
to teach me about kisses that felt like slaps.

And that was the end of my apprenticeship. That was, in a
sense, the golden lesson at the end of the rainbow. No matter
what happened between us it was all consequence and actualization of his utter monopoly of power. He'd proved it to
me that winter afternoon, like the bomb at Alamogordo had
proved Einstein's physics. Not that I would have denied it
before, but now I knew, consciously knew, that there was no
second-guessing him. It was a relief in some ways, a letting
go. I simply relaxed into it, as though I were beginning to dream
in a foreign language-a language of beatings and humiliations, of rare, extravagant pleasure, rituals, formalities. It was
a complicated and mysteriously involving language, for all
that it was based on only one deep syntactical structure, one
rule once again, the rule of his saying, "I want."

And-I'll confess it to you here-I loved to hear him
say, "I want." I'd meditate on it. I'd hear it like a mantra. I
got off on thinking how privileged he was. Once, during my
last weeks of school, I had to go to the women's room of the
library to jerk off, just from thinking about how exquisitely,
consistently unfair it all was. Well, I'd also been reading some
theory that seemed quite apposite to my situation. It seemed
as though everything we were assigned that semester was
about sex-every text in the canon was really an eroticized,
sadomasochistic version of some other text. Intellectually, I
didn't quite approve: there must be more to life than sex and
power, I'd think, even if there wasn't much more to my life at
that time. But given my inability to concentrate on anything else, I figured I'd lucked out. In a sense, you could say that it
was Jonathan who got me through my last semester.

On the surface, my life at school didn't change at all.
I wrote my papers, I hung out with friends, some of whom
knew I had some mysterious relationship with a guy in the
city and accepted the fact that I wasn't going to tell them any
more than that. About the only day-to-day thing about my life
that changed was that I ran instead of swimming for exercise
that spring-well, I couldn't change in the locker room anymore, could I?

In March, I got a thrilling letter saying that one of my
papers was going to be published in an obscure academic
journal-I'd submitted it the previous fall. The professor who'd persuaded me to submit it insisted on opening a
bottle of champagne that he kept in a little refrigerator in his
office-for first publications, he said. I just kept reading the
letter, over and over again, until I had it memorized.

That was the only time I ever got to Jonathan's late,
fifteen whole minutes. And buzzed on champagne, too -lucky
I didn't get killed driving over on the bridge. I remember
Jonathan's look of dark concern and restrained anger when
Mrs. Branden led me in, flushed and spacey. He asked me
why I was late, and I remember the transformation his expression took-God, he has awarm, lovely smile, I thought-when I
told him about the publication.

"That's terrific, really terrific, Carrie," he said, taking
the chain off my collar. "God, that's really great, I knew you
could do it. Now go get the cane so I can give you five for being
late."

So my life continued, weird and schizy, but with a kind
of logic. It was the future that I couldn't deal with. I mean I had no problem leading this double life while I was an undergraduate, but I couldn't make myself fill out graduate school
applications. Later for graduate school, I kept thinking. Later
for any future at all. I felt as though I was in the middle of
reading - of living - this epic story, and it was all I could do
to keep turning the pages fast enough. Everything else would
have to wait.

Application deadlines passed and I didn't care. I started
telling people that I was going to take a year off. I even had an
elaborate song and dance worked out about how you couldn't
really know postmodern America until you'd put in some time
as a slacker. I said this a lot, I think, until one day I goofed
and said "slave" instead of "slacker." People thought I meant
wage slave, so it was okay, but I never said it again.

I wondered, now and again, if I weren't becoming some
kind of crazed cultist, a Manson girl, a Moonie. Was I throwing my promising life away? But I didn't think so. I mean,
I would have done-come on, I M-everything Jonathan
told me to do, but it was a different kind of doing what I was
told than selling flowers in airports. And I didn't think it was
my whole life. It was just what was happening to me exactly
then, in the present tense. Anyhow, as soon as I graduated, I
got my bike messenger job. Jonathan had never asked me my
plans. I guess he'd been confident, in that smug way of his,
that I'd be around for a while. Definitely not flattering, but I
was beyond finding any of this flattering. I just wanted it to
continue, to develop, to take its mysterious course. I thought
of us like Krazy Kat and Ignatz, or Wile E. Coyote and the
Road Runner, an eternal couple, enacting the endless themes
and variations of power and desire, ingenuity and redundancy
and pain. Someday, I thought, I would look down and see that I was standing on thin air, and then I'd go plummeting to
earth. But that was someday, not now. I was glad that when
I announced that my schedule was changing, he added a few
more hours a week to our routine.

In July, a month or so after I'd graduated, Jonathan told
me that he had to go to Chicago for two weeks on a business
project.

"I want you to come with me," he said. "It would be bad
to break our momentum, and anyhow, I don't want to go that
long without doing this."

Obediently-I was on my knees in front of him, back
arched-I said I'd find out if I could take some time off work.
Actually, the idea sounded pretty awful to me. Chicago in
August. Probably he'd allow me to wander around the Art
Institute a couple of hours a day while he was working and
the maid cleaned the hotel room. Then I'd probably have to
wait on my knees for god knew how long until he got back
from work, all tense and stressed with yuppie workaholism,
tie loosened, oxford cloth shirt and suspenders all sweaty
from muggy Chicago. Perhaps, I thought, he'd hire somebody
to come in and chain me up an hour or so before he was going
to get back (though he'd always get back at least an hour later
than he'd planned).

Concretely, the idea sucked, I thought. Abstractly, though,
I discovered that I found it somewhat exciting. I was turned
on by the purely objective, instrumental quality of my situation. Why shouldn't he bring his slave along, I thought. Why
have a slave unless you could have her there to stick yourself
into when you were hot, stressed, and exhausted? I thought I could arrange the time off. That was one of the good parts of
being a bike messenger. I promised to try.

He stroked my breasts and shoulders and kissed my forehead softly. "Undress me," he whispered, and I started with
his shoes, as he'd taught me, unlacing them with my teeth. He
helped me, taking off his shirt, unzipping his pants. We were
both very turned on; I realized that we were both imagining
this trip, though I'll never know if our fantasy images matched
or not. Everything was going very slowly, as though we were
already moving sweatily through heavy, moist air (though in
fact it was fifty degrees outside-gray San Francisco summer
weather). I sucked him, rolling his balls around my mouth
while he stroked my face.

Then he pulled away from me and told me to choose a
whip from the cabinet where they were hanging on hooks. He
had several, of different styles. As though in a dream, I chose
the heavier of the two cat-o'-nine-tails. It had knotted ends.
Why did I pick the heavier one? Maybe I wanted to be hurt
more, or I knew he liked that one more, or (this is the way I
really remember it) I simply thought it was a prettier whip.
I handed it to him silently, and he flicked it lightly over my
breasts. "You don't have to count," he said. I nodded. I knew
he meant that he wouldn't need the sound of my voice to tell
him when I'd had as much as I could take. That he'd know.