Safe Word: An Erotic S/M Novel (14 page)

He nodded to me to climb up on the table. "That's it,
head down, ass up, spread those knees. And you'd better use
your hands to protect your balls, hadn't you, boy?"

And-sciatica or not-he did make me scream. Cry, too,
which was much more distressing.

He gave me a few minutes to recover, kneeling by the
side of the table, my pants still down around my ankles.

"And now that we've finished with the injury part," he
said, "let's move on to the insults, what do you say?"

It was an insulting, degrading letter of apology, detailing
the ways I really didn't deserve my membership in the association, and my gratitude that the association, in its mysterious
wisdom, was allowing me to stay. I agreed to everything.
I signed it, still on my knees.

"You're a nice fellow," he said then. "I've always thought
so. I've always liked your uncle too. Well, these things happen
sometimes. It'll be all right. But we can't have you acting disrespectfully toward the association anymore, can we?"

"No, sir," I said. "Thank you, sir," I said. "I'll never do it
again, sir," I said. "Sorry about your sciatica, sir," I said.

"Oh, you'll be much, much sorrier," he said, "when you
get the bill in the mail."

He got to his feet slowly, using both hands to lift himself from his chair. "Pull up your trousers," he said. "And be
charming to Marilyn on your way out, won't you? I've got a
difficult day ahead of me."

He looked at me curiously and a little nervously, wondering
how I'd absorb the images of him being caned, humiliated.
Interesting, I thought. And not really so surprising as all that.
Because when you think about it, pornography is as often told
from the point of view of the victims as history is told from
the point of view of the victors. So it made sense to me that
the story would have occurred to him. And anyway, it told me
something important about his world, his universe.

Well, it reminded me of another story. A whole other
kind of story-about a woman who had insisted to a physicist that the earth rested on the back of a giant turtle. And the
turtle, the physicist asked, where did the turtle stand? Well,
that was easy. On the back of another turtle, of course. And
so on and so forth, the woman concluded-turtles, all the
way down. Well, Jonathan's cosmos wasn't so different. You'd
just have to look in the right direction, which was upward,
toward authority. Power and discipline, all the way up.

I shuddered a little and put my arms around him. He
kissed my forehead. "Now go to sleep," he said, reaching to
turn off the light.

kay, I thought, opening my eyes to cloudy morning sunshine. Okay, I'm ready. I reached over to Jonathan's side of
the bed. I wanted to touch him a little before the day really began.
But he wasn't there; he was already up and out of bed, wearing a
light blue cotton bathrobe and sitting at the table in the corner
with a cigarette and a cup of coffee and a basket of croissants.

"It's getting late," he said.

"Well, I still need breakfast," I said, pulling myself out
of bed. And good morning to you too, Jonathan, I thought,
while I quickly washed and peed.

I walked behind his chair, leaning over him, my hands
creeping into the front of his bathrobe, down over his chest,
the muscles in his belly. I kissed his neck, his ears, the top of
his head. He smelled nice-soap and coffee, toothpaste and
butter and strong French cigarettes. I wanted to fool around a little. But he pulled my hands out, kissed the palms, and put
them down by my sides. "Have some coffee," he said.

I shrugged, and put on the T-shirt I'd dropped on
the floor the night before. I sat down at the table, munching a croissant, trying to gauge his mood. He looked eager,
abstracted, out of patience.

"It looks like it might be a nice day outside," I offered.
He mumbled noncommittally, waiting for me to finish the
croissant. I fiddled with it, making a million crumbs, scattering them everywhere and then gracelessly picking them up
and licking them off my fingers, until I got sick of this nervous,
messy routine, guaranteed to make him cringe. I finished my
second cup of coffee and wiped my hands.

"Okay," I said, looking at him evenly.

His eyes were opaque, inward-looking, and his voice was
soft. "Tell me about becoming a racing pony"

More stories? Not exactly what I'd expected. But okay, I
thought, whatever. He nodded toward the bed. I walked over
and sat down, drawing my knees up in front of me, propping
myself against the pillows.

"Well," I began, "Annie had kept tabs on my progress
in the stables and garage and all those other places, and had
been reasonably satisfied. So, at the end of the week, they
moved me into this white, cave-like room that was carved
into the cliff. And a routine gradually unfolded...."

And I told him about mornings in the ring with Annie. I'd
stand there in the corral, entirely naked, even barefoot. And
she'd touch me here and there. Lightly, just enough to make
me want more. I'd follow her fingers, I'd arch and bow my
body, thinking of nothing except the signals she was send ing me through the nerves in my skin. I'd pose, I'd leap, I'd
whirl and caper for her, trying to communicate how much
I wanted her to touch me again-oh, Madam, please, just a
little more-miming my desire with every bend and opening of my body And she might touch me a little more, if she
felt like it. But it was just as likely that she'd apply the riding
crop. It was a silent business-the idea was to teach my body
a sequence of sensations and responses-I felt as though she
were tracing a pattern on my senses.

It was only later, when I performed at dressage competitions, that I learned that there were names to the figures
I'd learned. I'd repeat them softly to myself: the pirouette, a
turn on the haunches in four or five strides at a collected
canter; the piaffe, a trot in place; the passage, a very collected,
cadenced, high-stepping trot; the levade, the courvet, and
the astonishingly difficult capriole, in which the pony jumps
straight upward, with its forelegs drawn in, kicking back with
its hind legs horizontal, and lands again in the same spot
from which it took off.

And there were the simpler presentations, the ones I'd
done so poorly on my first day. "Ass!" Annie might cry out,
or "Cunt!"-and here again my body would remember all
the ways she'd touched me and all the swipes of the riding
crop. I'd feel all wet and hot and flushed, but I'd present
my ass, calmly, humbly, elegantly, as though that were
my mission in life. I'd present my ass, or my cunt, or my
mouth. Or I'd kneel up with my back arched, holding my
breasts lightly in my hands, at a precise angle, so that she
could put stripes across them with a small whip she used
only for that purpose. I'd present to Annie, and to Mr.
Constant, those mornings he'd come down to watch. And I used what I'd learned that week that I'd been passed around
among his employees, too. Because now I knew how it felt
to be available to everybody and I knew that was what these
postures were really about.

You took me to see presentation competitions, Jonathan,
the year I spent with you. I remember how you loved watching them, preferring them to equestrian events, and insisting
that I watch carefully It felt odd, though, the first time I won
a ribbon to bring home to Mr. Constant's trophy room, to
realize that I was way better than those girls I'd seen performing back in California. It didn't seem right, somehow, but 1
knew it was true: I was good at this.

Annie would put me and Tony through our paces every morning and early afternoon. And when she'd finished with us, I
was happy to eat the tasteless, healthy food in the trough we
knelt at, and to collapse for a nap on the straw. We'd clean
the stables then, or the outhouse next door, or the brass fittings on the pony cart-we'd have to use our tongues to
clean out the little spaces between the spokes of the wheels.
And then we'd get an hour or two of free time, on one of the
house's terraced patios. The chains leading from our collars
wouldn't allow us to touch each other, but we could speak
softly from time to time. Tony was a dancer and did graceful and difficult stretching and contracting exercises. I was
amazed that he'd want to move at all after the morning's
exertions, but he said he needed these exercises for himself,
as much as I seemed to need those endless stacks of papers
I was always bringing out to the patio.

These were the downloaded books from Project
Gutenberg and other e-text sites-reams of paper, printed out on one of Mr. Constant's printers, at my demand, and to
Stefan's unfailing annoyance. He'd get even more annoyed
because sometimes when I would look up from the textto watch Tony, or just to think, or to dream-a stray breeze
would scatter blizzards of paper out over the sea, and I'd
have to ask him to download chapters 2 and 3 of Pudd'nhead
Wilson again, please, or Act IV of The Tempest. I hated reading
unbound, downloaded pages, so I ransacked Mr. Constant's
library-pulling out a few readable books from among the
Grisham and Clancy, the math and economics books, and
the books with words like Excellence and Virtual and Third
Wave in their titles just so that I could read something with
a cover and a spine.

They were nice, our rest periods, though they'd be cut
short those days when the market was extra-volatile. Annie
would get a call from Mr. Constant to bring us to the workroom, which was a haze of sweat and adrenaline. And Mr.
Constant would take one of us, usually Tony, and hand the
other one over to his assistants. And I'd follow the tugs at
my collar, crawling under desks and opening my mouth for
the eager cocks shoved down it, the quick gushes of cum
accompanied by shouts of "Buy," "Sell!" "Did you get it?" and
"Aw-right! Gimme five!"

Stefan would usually disdain to touch me those days,
which was all right with me. But the girl working there, too,
the slender, dark, doe-eyed one whom I'd seen the first day,
never grabbed my leash either. Or Tony's, for that matter.

At dusk, Annie would take us to prepare for our evenings in Mr. Constant's rooms. We'd be given early dinners
in the kitchen, with shallow bowls of resiny wine to lap. And
then Annie would bring us to a tiled, steamy little Turkish bath kind of place, where we'd bathe each other, give each
other massages. We'd knead each other's muscles until they
were warm, pliant, relaxed, our skins burnished with the
light, fragrant oil we'd rubbed each other with. I don't know
what the smell was, but it reminded me of mown grass. Tony
would sit cross-legged, and I'd kneel behind him and brush
his hair, stroke it back away from his cheeks, his forehead.
Sometimes I'd catch it in a heavy gold clip at the back of his
head. And then we'd change places and he'd trim my hair
with tiny sharp scissors, and sometimes, if Annie loosened
the buckles on my collar, he'd do the back of my neck, with
clippers. Those clippers made me shiver-the first time he'd
used them, I started to moan and tremble, to come, actually.
And Annie beat me for that. Well, actually, she beat us both,
silently and ferociously, with the little rubber truncheon
that she'd carry during these sessions, because it didn't leave
marks.

We outlined each other's eyes with kohl, and darkened
each other's lips and nipples, dipping our fingertips into pots
of ocher brown rouge. We hung heavy gold rings from each
other's ears, put bangles around our ankles. We shared our
smells and textures-even, it seemed, our slowed pulse rates
and measured breathing. The only other sound was the plashing of a little fountain in the center of the room, which was
there, I supposed, to cool the air-keep it from suffocating
us. There were no mirrors. If I wanted to see my face while
Tony painted it, I had to peer into his eyes-the green eyes of
a sleepwalker or an opium junkie, the pupils huge and black,
distended in the dim light.

And we'd know that we were finished, that we were
ready for Mr. Constant, when we heard the soft, dull sound of the truncheon in Annie's hand-she'd slap her
palm with it, twice, a small, tense, watchful figure in black:
lonely, sublimated, subaltern authority. Sometimes I'd fantasize rebellion: Tony and I joining forces to strip her, bathe
her, rub her with oil, and then take greedy turns eating at her
cunt with our darkly painted mouths-an orgy of primitive,
sibling communism. I pitied her, those evenings, that she
couldn't have us that way. Or any way. She was jumpy, impatient to get it over with, to snap slender red leather leashes
to the rings in our collars, and jerk us along behind her, on
our hands and knees, down the corridors to Mr. Constant's
sparsely furnished and brilliantly carpeted rooms. (And she'd
take it out on us the next day, of course, in the corral, in the
open air and blazing sunlight, where she was free to do anything she wanted with us.)