The Collectors (9 page)

“And how good I look tied up.” I was trying for a light tone.

“And you do look gorgeous. But in terms of what it means to me, what it means to you, anything about how we are all in relation to one another? Not only am I terrible at talking about those things, but I also have a stubborn belief the women I have sex with should work out their conflicts among themselves. So far that seems to have worked. Adele has just informed me it’s not working for her.”

I looked at her like she was a foreign species. Or a man. “Are you kidding me? I have to side with Adele on this one. I mean, maybe if you were a sultan, or the Queen of Sheba, you might expect your, uh, harem to fall into line according to your whims. But this is the twenty-first century here.”

Jeanne pulled over and turned off the car. “Adele has refused to fall in line about anything, and that’s the last I’ll say about her. You have not been instructed yet, so I can’t expect you to know what to do and what not to do. That’s fine, because we’re getting to know each other. And you don’t need to know anything else at this point. But you should know at least this. If we are to have something ongoing, something you’d call a ‘relationship,’ it will not be anything like a relationship such as you’ve always defined it. You will operate in my world, and in my world I am like a sultan or the Queen of Sheba. You can reject the idea right now and I’ll take you home. No hard feelings. Or you can come home with me. I would like to be with you tonight.”

I didn’t say a thing. I didn’t use the time to consider options, for I didn’t think there were any if I wanted to be with Jeanne, as I desperately did. I was silent simply to take in all the new information. She’d never revealed so much before.

“I’d be sad if you left, Laura. You do mean a lot to me.”

“I’m not going anywhere, except to your house,” I said.

Half an hour later we were in the study, on the sofa, me naked and laying over her lap, my butt in the air. This seemed to be a favorite position of hers. After spanking me for an eternity and a half, Jeanne parted the lips of my pussy and the cheeks of my ass and she put fingers and her thumb in both holes and fucked me for another forever. I could feel her focus on me, her patience. I came again and again. Then she had me lay full out on the sofa and she rubbed herself against my thigh, holding herself up by her arms and staring down at me, commanding me to stare back at her. If this wasn’t the beginning of a relationship as I’d always understood relationships, it was already a lot more intense than any “real relationship” I’d ever had. I was willing to see what her version looked like.

Jeanne had me sleep over, in her bed, a first which furthered my confusion. We looked at an art book together and drank chamomile tea. When I woke in the morning she was kissing my breasts, fingering me, making me come before I’d opened both eyes. Then she hovered over my face, bracing herself on the headboard, and rode herself on my tongue to the loudest orgasm I’d heard from her. She actually shouted.

I got back to my apartment before noon on Saturday. When I unlocked the door to the building’s foyer I saw an envelope had been left for me on the table, probably placed there by another tenant who found it shoved under the door. I could see it was from Adele and I knew without a doubt I wouldn’t be able to do whatever the letter asked me to do. I couldn’t leave Jeanne. I was falling in love with her. Or whatever the equivalent of being in love was in Jeanne’s world. I opened the envelope and saw a drawing. One thing I can say about Adele is she’s an excellent draftsman. There were two figures, one was a very good likeness of me, another of Adele, and we were both naked. The life drawing studio time had clearly paid off for her. I don’t know if Adele was uncertain about her skills or what, but each of us was wearing a collar. One said “Adele” and the other said “Laura,” as if one wouldn’t know who was who simply by looking. But in addition to identifying us, the collars also showed we were submissives, and in that way identical. And I couldn’t deny that was true. The drawing showed me stabbing Adele in the back with a monstrously large kitchen knife, which was a little over the top. I’m not a back stabber. I’m just a woman who knows what she wants.

*

I devoted the rest of the afternoon to work. I unplugged my Internet router and hid the SIM card from my phone. I couldn’t trust myself to not check my messages every two minutes to see if Jeanne was trying to contact me. It was getting ridiculous how much time I was spending on sex—thinking about it, having it, planning for it, recovering from it. I barely had time to eat, let alone write a book-length monograph on an inscrutable artist.

I slogged through a few hours of writing before going out for coffee and a bite to eat. I gave way to my thoughts of Jeanne as I walked. I missed her. I wanted her every minute I thought of her. And I thought of her every minute. When I sat at the table in my favorite diner, I pulled Adele’s drawing out of my bag, trying to figure out the proper response to it, knowing the idea of leaving Jeanne was out of the question. I didn’t feel threatened by the drawing. After all, it showed me stabbing Adele, not the other way around. But clearly she was saying she hated me for betraying her, and this is where I thought she was being dramatic. Didn’t you have to have some kind of relationship with a person before you could betray her? Strangers did not have the kind of trust with each other that is broken by betrayal. I’d had coffee with Adele four or five times. Whatever she felt I’d done to her, it didn’t rise to the level of betrayal, of stabbing someone in the back. It didn’t seem Adele had a very strong hold on Jeanne, who was her patron, after all. A patron with benefits, it’s true, but not her partner, her lover, her significant other. Not as I understood those terms.

A shadow fell over the drawing and I looked up to see Pat standing by my table. Her friendly expression darkened when she saw the drawing. We looked at each other.

“Were you stopping by to say hello?” I asked.

“Yes.” She looked at the other chair and started to pull it out. “May I?”

I got a good look at her as she sat down, something I didn’t do the night she had demonstration sex with Adele. I’d been in such a daze then I could hardly focus when she walked me to the door.  I saw a woman who looked even younger than the handsome butch fucking the daylights out of Adele.

“What the hell is that?” she said, pointing at the drawing.

I pushed it over to her. “I wasn’t going to show this to anyone, but since you asked…”

Pat studied it for a minute. “It’s you and Adele.”

“Yep. Adele drew it. She’s quite good, isn’t she? She left it for me at my home, shoved under the door in an envelope.”

A server came by and Pat ordered coffee. She took the drawing, folded it, and put it in her pocket.

“What are you doing?”

“This needs to be seen by people a few pay grades above us.”

“It does?” I was confused, which was beginning to feel like a normal state of mind. “Are you giving it to the police? I don’t intend to stab Adele in the back. You do know that, don’t you?”

Pat smiled. “I know. But Adele clearly feels she’s been wronged and she’s pretty upset about it. I just want to make sure you’re safe.”

I stared at Pat for a moment. “I’m getting a little sick of not understanding anything. I understand what Jeanne and I do together; I understand the scene you and Adele performed. You know what I don’t understand? The Byzantine rules you all seem to have. Submissives aren’t supposed to talk to dominants about their issues. Dominants may have Primaries. There are ‘Pay Grades’ above mine —“

“Not pay grades,” Pat interrupted. “I just meant letting the women who keep an eye on these things know about Adele’s state of mind.”

I shook my head in bewilderment. “This is what I mean. It’s one mystery after another. What women? What do they keep any eye on?”

“Well, it’s hard to explain…”

“Don’t even try.” I gathered my things to go.

“Wait.” She reached over and grabbed my forearm. There was a little weight to her grip. She wasn’t asking me to stay; she was telling me to.

“I’m not at liberty to explain things to you. That will come with time and at Jeanne’s direction. Adele should not have told you anything about primaries, or anything else.”

“You seem like a nice person, Pat. And Jeanne? I’m already a little in love with her. But I’m feeling unnerved by all this. I don’t think I’m interested in learning about it.”

Pat kept her hand on my arm and pulled her phone out of the back pocket of her jeans. She hit a speed dial number.

“Jeanne, it’s Pat. I’m at a restaurant with Laura—ran into her here. You don’t mind if I go home with her, do you?”

I was slammed with several strong and competing feelings on hearing this. First was the shock of hearing myself spoken of as if I were property to be passed among friends. Pat could have been asking to borrow Jeanne’s bicycle, from the sound of it. Then I was hurt because Jeanne didn’t care whether Pat had sex with me. But the feeling that rolled over the other two like a fireball was lust. I became almost instantly turned on by the idea of the boyish Pat taking me to my house and having her way with me. Perhaps rules wouldn’t be a bad thing for me, for I seemed to be completely out of control.

Pat handed the phone to me. Jeanne’s voice sounded velvety. “Do you want to please me?”

“Always.”

“Then go do what Pat wants you to do. It will make me happy over the next hour to know you are with her. To imagine what she’s doing to you.”

“All right. But when will I see you again?”

There was a pause. “You’ll hear from me,” she said and hung up.

Pat paid my check and we took the short walk back to my place. She didn’t chat and I didn’t try to engage her. It seemed we had a job to do and we just needed to get to it. In my apartment she had me stand in the middle of the bedroom while she took off all my clothes. She walked around me and took a long look, stopping only to put my hands together behind my back and move my legs a little further apart than they were. She finally stopped in front of me.

“Where do you keep your stockings?”

“Stockings?”

“Pantyhose, that sort of thing.”

“I don’t wear pantyhose,” I said.

Pat frowned.

“But I have tights! Will they work?”

“Where are they?”

I started to move toward my dresser, but Pat stopped me with a hand to my chest.

“Did I say you could move?”

I hesitated. She grabbed a nipple and twisted. I was so surprised, I shrieked.

“I asked you a question.” Pat was looking a little fierce and I felt alarmed. But once again, with the fear came the excitement. She still had hold of my nipple and the feeling shot down between my legs.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I cast my eyes downward, thinking that was the right thing to do.

“Look at me,” Pat said, taking me by the chin. “You don’t move unless I tell you to. You don’t speak unless I tell you to. But if I tell you to do either, you’d better be quick. Do you understand?”

I nodded and looked at her.

“Asking you a question is telling you to speak. What is so hard about that?”

Now she had my other nipple. She twisted it like she was opening a safe.

“I understand.”

“Good. Now, where are your tights?”

“Top left drawer of the dresser.”

She rummaged around for a bit before returning with several pairs of tights, mostly black, but there were also the funky white ones with black skulls like polka dots all over them. Pat took me by the elbow and brought me over to my bed. Within what seemed like seconds she had me tied to the four corners of the bed frame so I was facing down, on my knees, my ass pointing toward the ceiling. My poor ass. It was still marked from my last session with Jeanne.

I heard Pat remove her belt. It was the exact sound I’d heard in my first fantasy about Jeanne.

“I’m giving  you ten with my belt. I want you to call out each one.”

I counted to ten, thinking at first it was not the kind of counting my mother had coached me to do. I quickly realized that thoughts of my mother were the last thing I wanted in this situation. By the third strike I was focused completely on the simplest of elements—the sound of the belt hitting my ass, the shock of pain that followed, the effort to not scream but instead to bark out a number, the concentration it took to remember what number I was on. At one point I skipped a number, so Pat added it and two more to the total.

When it was over, I heard Pat unzip her pants. I was resting my forehead on the sheets, hoping whatever Pat had in mind somehow involved my pussy. It was desperate for attention. When she moved in front of me on the bed, I knew it only involved hers. So I put my lips to her, sank my tongue into her, did my best to make her noisy. She came within a few minutes and I could tell quite clearly how much she enjoyed it. I forgot about the overwhelming desire to have my clit touched. I wanted only to give her pleasure, a way of thinking so new to me, so unanticipated when I entered this life. The desire to please, to serve, was stronger than the desire to be pleased. I wanted both, but I hadn’t known beforehand I would find true pleasure in simply giving pleasure, particularly when it was ordered of me.

Pat untied me and lay beside me for a few minutes.