Eighty Days White (31 page)

I knew what I didn’t want.

But did I know what I wanted?

The woman wore only black boots that reached above her knees and a thin gold chain around her waist. She was not in the prime of youth any longer, probably in her forties, but with gym assistance and a suspicious all-over tan, she could easily have been mistaken for someone ten years younger. Only the lines in her neck betrayed her.

Both men were bald or, at any rate, shaven-headed and similarly tanned, as if they’d just stepped off the plane from a nude beach in the Caribbean. They were stocky and, from a distance, could even have been taken for twins. The woman had been laid out on a thick grey rubber mat and lay slightly on her side so that one man thrust into her from the rear while she raised her head an inch or two to accommodate the other hairless man’s cock in her mouth, sucking it greedily, her moans orchestrated by the bobbing movement of her head as he held her hair and pulled her towards his hard shaft with machine-like regularity. The men were relentless, pounding her metronomically, like synchronised athletes in training, never missing a beat or a thrust inside her.

I stood there with my mouth gaping.

It was animalistic, but it was also beautiful, a ballet of flesh in motion, a hedonistic dance of the senses.

I’d arrived at the club around mid-evening hoping to find She and to convince her to let me have my original coat-checking and general dogsbody job back. My anger at the way the photo shoot had panned out had long since faded and I wanted to extend the olive branch. I hadn’t recognised the bouncer at the door, but he was relaxed about letting me in after I’d advised him that I used to work there.

In my absence, the main room had been totally reconfigured and the atmosphere had radically changed. The stone-clad walls that used to house all the paraphernalia of BDSM – rows of instruments and toys, hooks, chains and pulleys and a dazzling assortment of hardware whose use had not always been clear or demonstrated to me – were now concealed by heavy velvet curtains, which made me think of a suburban Indian restaurant. The lighting, once muted and elegant, creating areas of light and darkness in clever harmony allowing for both discretion and exhibitionism depending on the evening’s mood, was now harsh and unforgiving, isolating the protagonists in an explosion of white light, while the rest of the room was not just in dark shadow but murky and uninviting, a haven for voyeurs and hangers-on. The club had lost all its joy.

But, nonetheless, the spectacle of the copulating trio was gripping, if only because of the expression on the woman’s face as she was being fucked. It was beatific, not far off the look I had often witnessed on subs’ features when they reached that special space. This was the happiest woman in the whole wide world and she was totally oblivious of anything happening around her, the spectators, the other couples sitting in alcoves in varied states of undress, a few lone women on the dance floor staggering on awkward heels
to the beat of some terrible electro-rock, drunk like refugees from the storm.

The club had changed beyond recognition and had now become a sex joint. I tore my eyes away from the rutting trio as the sounds from the woman’s throat took on a despairing note as she rode the waves of her orgasm and the untiring duo carried on her orchestrated destruction.

There were a dozen or so people in the room, and I noted their attire was different, vulgar, shoddy, devoid of all the ritualistic gleam of BDSM nights, like bikers crashing a wedding, loud and cheap.

I looked towards the bar and again didn’t recognise any of the staff.

My attention was drawn to the stairs that led down to the dungeon. A curtain was spread across the vaulted entrance, and access to the club’s lower levels was blocked.

I stepped back into the hallway just as the two men swapped places inside the woman and, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the one who had been face-fucking her slipping on a condom. The new bouncer was standing there.

‘The club’s different,’ I queried. ‘New people, new … activities.’

He gave me an odd look. Then smiled. He was almost two heads taller than me, built like a distaff wrestler, his biceps straining the material of his black T-shirt.

‘Oh yes, love, there are new owners. It’s now a swingers’ joint, no more of that leather and kink stuff any more … You didn’t know? They begin work in a couple of weeks downstairs to change the space into a sauna, so we’ll be properly up and running.’

Noting my disappointment as I stepped out past him
onto the street, he called out to me, laughing, ‘Sorry to disappoint you, girlie, but come back any time and I’ll let you have a good spanking in private. Won’t even charge.’

I gave him the V-sign.

What had happened to all the regulars? To She and Richard? Had they found a new place, or were they now orphans in the storm, cut off from their pleasure fix?

I assumed She was still with Grayson and I could find either of them in Shadwell. Or should I take this as an omen, a sign that part of my old life had now come to an end? I knew one thing, though: with or without Neil, I was not about to begin attending swinger parties.

As I made my way back to Neil’s place to consider my options, I couldn’t help recalling that transcendent look on the woman’s face as the two men fucked her, as if she was visiting a place I’d never managed to approach. Even with Leonard, when the lovemaking had been alternately tender and rough and my insides melted alongside the rational part of my brain, I knew I could never quite let go in such a manner. Likewise when I was domming men. It was a different kind of pleasure altogether.

I wryly recalled Leonard once saying one evening in Barcelona, ‘The problem with folk like us, Lily, is that we think too much. Sometimes we can’t avoid holding back. Simpler people are so much less complicated when it comes to their pleasure. They assume it unconditionally.’

My sweet and sad philosopher and soft-hearted philanderer.

Where was he now? Out of my life was my only certainty.

The club I had known and where, in a way, I had perfected the latter part of my sexual education was gone. Replaced by a cheap, vulgar joint where people unemotionally swapped partners or just prostituted themselves on the altar of nostrings sex. It made me feel unclean, but also conflicted. Who was I to judge the people who now went there and seemed satisfied with their lot? Surely, had they known, they would see me as the freak, the girl with the teardrop tattoo who got off on dominating men, cruelly playing with them, all in the service of my anger and frustration and an illusory sense of superiority over the common masses. They couldn’t understand me, or the ecstatic deliverance I offered the subs who kneeled down to me, figuratively speaking. We were on opposite sides of the mirror and it dawned on me that no one knew what the right side of the mirror happened to be. We were all right and we were all wrong. And I was caught in the middle, Lily in wonderland, Snow White wielding a whip.

Neil arrived back from his office around seven. He’d left a message earlier asking me not to cook as he wanted to go out and eat Chinese tonight.

‘The fetish club has been turned into a sex joint,’ I mentioned to Neil. ‘It looked so … sordid. Did you know about it?’

‘It happened just a few weeks after you left for Australia,’ he replied.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I thought you would have known.’

‘I didn’t. How did you find out?’ Apart from his visits there with me, I didn’t think that Neil had visited the place on his own.

‘From She,’ he said.

‘You’re still in touch with her?’

Neil looked up at me, blushed.

‘What is it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes what?’

‘I did see her again a few times. Following your departure.’

His tone was hesitant.

‘Tell me about it.’

‘The property company they had been leasing the premises from wanted to redevelop the block, so notice was served. At one stage She was hoping to convince Grayson to pitch in and make an offer for the club instead, but something went wrong, and after planning permission was declined by the council, it passed into the hands of some sauna and swing club group. I haven’t been since.’ He averted his eyes.

‘But you went on your own before it closed down?’

Again there was something shifty about his attitude.

‘Er … Yes.’

‘Just you?’ I was curious. It just didn’t sound like the Neil I knew.

‘I went with She, Ms Haggard.’

‘Oh?’

‘She contacted me, wanted to find out where you’d disappeared to. At the time I didn’t have a clue where you’d gone as you hadn’t yet been in touch. I just informed her. She didn’t appear particularly concerned. Became all friendly. Well, you know her. She was fishing, of course, but I had nothing to hide. Then the subject moved on to the things you got up to with me. I was aware she’d been
your mentor, had trained you. She dropped heavy hints she could provide me with … more. Show me—’

‘Neil!’

‘You weren’t here, Lily. And you’d given me a taste for it. I was craving those feelings, those emotions, the play had awakened in me.’

‘You went with She?’ I’d seen her at work on unsuspecting if consensual victims. I was a child in comparison, still a junior domme in training. She was cruel and rough, unbending.

For a brief moment, I felt a terrible arrow of jealousy run through me like a flash of lightning across a night sky at the idea that She, of all people, had ‘owned’ Neil. Surely, she knew he was mine.

My eyes betrayed me. I felt an irrational tear break the dam of my indifference. Neil looked at me, pleading silently for my forgiveness. But was he the one who needed to be forgiven? Or was it me?

I had to know.

‘Tell me,’ I asked.

‘Do you really want to know?’

I braced myself.

‘I do.’

He sighed deeply.

‘I went to the club a number of times. And also to her home. It wasn’t like what we have … but I won’t lie to you, being with her was electric. Like walking on the tightrope of a nightmare and all the time I felt simultaneously held and as though I would surely fall. It was like dangling in mid-air hundreds of metres from the ground and not being able to see or feel the rope.’

I nodded encouragement for him to continue. He reminded me of Liana. That same desire to go right to the edge. But the philosophy of it I already knew and understood. I wanted to know what she had actually done to him. Already I could feel the hair on the back of my neck standing up like an animal ready to defend its young.

‘She flogged me so hard that I couldn’t sit down for a fortnight. And used misery sticks … on my cock.’

I winced. Misery sticks looked tiny and harmless compared with a riding crop or whip but, depending on how they were wielded, the pain could be immense and, unlike other types of impact that eased very quickly after the initial strike, the throb from the misery stick endured. I couldn’t imagine the pain that might be caused from wielding it on a sub’s penis. And I had seen She use them on her slaves before. She wasn’t gentle.

‘And more. Humiliation. I cleaned her boots with my tongue. Was only ever allowed to approach her on my knees. I wore sissy outfits. A frilly pink and white skirt and high heels. And a pink studded collar and leash.’

‘How did it make you feel?’ I asked, more curious now than anything.

‘The outfits weren’t really my thing. I’ve never had any desire to wear women’s clothing. But I suppose that’s what made it humiliating. It would have just been a bit of fun otherwise. All the other things … they made me feel whole. As if I was finally admitting that I wasn’t worth anything more than a piece of shit on the bottom of her shoe. And coming to terms with it made me complete. Peaceful.’

I began to protest.

‘No, don’t. It’s hard enough to talk about as it is. Please just let me continue.’

The words stuck in my throat like a craw.

‘And I let her fuck me. With a strap-on. I imagined she was you. You use your finger, but I’ve always yearned for more.’

I nodded, mutely.

As Neil related his story, the expressions on his face travelled through a whole landscape of emotions. From apologetic to lustful, from craving to shame, and back again through a tortuous, complicated road littered by his senses in disarray.

When he reached the end, and described how She had impaled him and ridden him with a cohort of her other playthings dutifully in attendance, watching with intent, either yearning for similar treatment or fearful their most private openings would soon be breached in turn by the hard instrument of her wrath, his face displayed a feverish blend of pain and ecstasy.

‘Did it hurt?’ I asked. I had used many things on him but never had penetrated him in this way, just the random finger to stimulate his prostate in an attempt to edge him, that would have felt like a blessing or a caress in comparison with She’s ferocious ivory length. I had witnessed grown men crying as she had savagely penetrated them with it.

My stomach churned. I knew from my own experience that when my partner took the right care, anal sex was wonderful, but before that, when I had lacked any knowledge about the process and had been with someone as inexperienced as I was, then there had been an agonising initial burst of pain along with the rise of pleasure as they
had entered me from the rear, but I knew that none of their cocks had been the size or the rigid hardness of She’s Japanese ceremonial strap-on. And I doubted that She would have been careful.

‘Yes,’ Neil said. ‘A lot.’

I blinked in sympathy.

‘The thing is, she pushed me hard, but none of it was anything I didn’t want. Parts of it were a release and nothing more. A way to accept myself. But other things she did turned me on so much. The pain. The misery stick on my cock makes me come, Lily. Just from that.’

‘Why did you stop?’

His eyes shied away from mine and he whispered, ‘I wanted it to be you, Lily. I submitted to her because I wanted to be punished for sending you away, it was my stupid way to seek forgiveness, but in the end I had to admit that all I wanted was you. So I followed you to Australia …’