Carrie's Story Read online

  “Yes, I did,” I said, “but I’m surprised, now that I think about it. I mean, shouldn’t you be doing stuff like VR? Or uh, you know, what do they call it, teledildonics?”

  “Oh, please,” she said, “helmets and suits with wires in the crotch? Why, is that what turns you on? Of course it isn’t. What gets to me—and you—is power, coercive power. Force, directed. I make you do something, go somewhere, be as I wish. You, your flesh, your prana. And what I especially like, what has always fascinated me, is making you work at it. I love the fact that you get around here on your own, that you deliver yourself to me, that it is always a stretch, an effort of will and intelligence, to become an object.

  “And it’s not just one on one, you and me. It’s you and all those other slaves, and it’s staff and buyers. It’s a world, it moves. Power is exercised, but power relations are enacted. I model the form, you reproduce it, in your actions and in your desires. I mean, that’s why computers are sexy, isn’t it, because they’re such sophisticated modeling tools—they inscribe the invisible, inexorable paths of power and energy flow just as surely as Paul’s beating marked your lovely ass.”

  “I understand,” I said. “I think I probably even agree with you. But maybe it’s a little more one on one around here than you think. Because I immediately recognized you, your hands and your intellect, as the creator of this system. When that ape Karl was screwing me up the ass, what made it bearable was my thinking, my repeating to myself, ‘It’s Margot, Margot, who’s created this pain and humiliation for me.’”

  She was silent for a moment. “Oh dear, that’s not what I had intended. At least, I don’t think so. And it’s certainly not what they’re paying me for. But I did enjoy hearing you say it. You felt him up your ass and you thought about me?”

  I nodded and then stared off into space. We were both gripping our ends of the table, as though it were some kind of Ouija board that would tell us an answer we needed to know. She regained her cool first.

  “Well, this job is good, anyhow, and sexually it works out about as well as anything would, given that I often work twenty-hour days. Still…” she looked at me for a long moment. “I do have fantasies.”

  “For example,” I said.

  “Oh, well, for example, if I had an extra hundred thou or so, maybe I’d buy you tomorrow,” she began.

  I started to breath more shallowly.

  “I’d take you home,” she said, “and I’d beat you every day for weeks, a little more every day. I’d beat you and then I’d fuck you and then you’d make me come with your mouth. And you’d wait for it. You’d be all alone on your knees, chained to the bedpost, waiting for the sound of my footsteps.

  “I’d use a long, braided whip, and I’d hang it on the bedroom wall. Sometimes you’d just stare at it for an hour or so, trembling. And sometimes you’d lose yourself and your sense of time and place in reveries about me.

  “You know how busy my schedule is, how I work around the clock, I nap on that couch when I absolutely have to. So I could arrive at any time. Sometimes you prick up your ears, get all wet and excited thinking you hear my footsteps, and it’s only a servant with your food.

  “Or sometimes I am simply too busy to come that day and must send a servant to beat you instead. You have learned to contain your disappointment, and you know that you must obey the servant in every way.

  “When I do come, I make you beg for everything, even the beating. You need to be eloquent, to persuade me why I should tax myself, why you need it, how much good it will do you.

  “You are very articulate, perhaps too much so. I’d make you put all that verbal inventiveness to good use.”

  I gripped the edges of my chair. I hadn’t had caffeine or alcohol in days, and I hardly ever smoked. So all the potent legal drugs I’d just ingested were combining to make my head swim, and my cunt was wet and burning. She stood up, wheeled the table away, and looked down at me.

  “Take your clothes off, Carrie,” she said.

  “I thought,” I stammered, even as I started to unbutton the dress, “that you had this, uh, ritual here …”

  “Shut up,” she snapped, “unless you want another spanking.”

  I stood up and took off all the clothes, slowing down a little as I took off the underwear. She’d gotten it for me, I thought, so maybe she’d want to see it a little. And she did smile a bit at that point. But then I hurried along. No point pushing my luck.

  “Kneel in front of the couch,” she continued, when I was naked. “Back to the couch, facing me. And you can look at me.”

  “Yes, Mistress,” I said, without even thinking too much about it. “Thank you, Mistress.”

  “Good girl,” she said, and took off her silk shirt. Her breasts were small and round, with very dark nipples. They were beautiful under her wide shoulders. She walked over to her desk and picked up a manila envelope.

  “I want you to see how your photographs turned out,” she said, and handed me two prints. Then she sat behind me on the couch, her legs straddling me, her hands on my breasts, her breasts touching my shoulders. “Do you like them?” she asked close to my ear. “Tell the truth, slave.”

  I figured I’d better. “No, Mistress,” I said.

  She squeezed my breasts painfully, “And why not?”

  The pictures were very careful, very documentary jobs. She had been right the other day; Paul did good work. The light was harsh; the general effect was of truth-telling. Something about the marks on my ass, the shadows under my eyes, the pallor of my skin. Nobody was being flattered, the pictures said, but this was itself a form of flattery. And if the viewers were not being flattered, they were certainly being asked to participate, if only imaginatively.

  “Here,” the pictures seemed to say, “this is for you, if you want it. She will receive whatever you care to give: caresses, thrusts of your hand or cock, blows. It’s up to you. Interested?”

  I was scared to see how I had posed for the pictures. In the front view, I thrust my pelvis out a little, as though I were offering guests something to eat. I looked shocked and a little outraged, but I held the pose anyway. Even in the back view, smarting and still sobbing from a beating, I held myself up. I was surprised at how firmly my feet were planted on the floor. I had remembered dangling from my suspended wrists, but in fact the pose was much more provocative. I couldn’t deny it; without even realizing it, I had complied with Paul and Margot. I was showing off the bruises. I was displaying myself for buyers. I looked proud to be able to receive pain. I was showing myself to whomever and whatever, to strangers, who could do anything they wanted to me; I was offering myself to the highest bidder.

  “Why not, slave?” she asked again, this time twisting my nipples and making me gasp.

  “They frighten me, Mistress,” I temporized. I knew she’d insist on hearing me more. “I…I look willing to be hurt,” I mumbled.

  “And?” she insisted.

  “I look available to everybody,” I said sadly. “And proud of it.”

  “These are wonderful pictures,” she said, moving one of her hands in slow circles down to my belly. “Right now, in various expensive hotels and pieds-à-terre in this city, there are dozens of people looking at these pictures. They are considering whether they would like to fuck you, whether they would like to hurt you, whether you could be led and trained and forced to become what they want. You look like…new red wine. Beaujolais Nouveau. The depth is still developing, but the sweetness caresses the tongue and touches the heart. Not everyone wants it, but it is a unique pleasure.”

  Her hand had reached the opening of my vagina. Her fingers were slowly searching their way around. I wanted to drop the pictures, but I was afraid to. I just kept staring at myself and feeling her. She’d reached my clitoris. She was in no hurry. I heard myself moaning. I dropped the pictures and leaned into her leather-clad thighs, her bare breasts, her hair, her mouth on my neck. And then she stopped.

  Lithely, she swung a leg over me and stoo
d up. She turned to face me.

  “I would whip you right now if I could,” she said. “I’d love to see you trembling and weeping under me. But I can’t. We’ll manage, though.”

  She went to a drawer and pulled out some black leather, and something else. A harness for me? No, a harness for her, I realized hazily, as I watched her fit the big dildo into place. It was a heavy clear plastic—virtual phallus, I couldn’t help thinking. She pulled some zippers on her leather pants, and they fell away from her lean belly, though they stayed around her legs like a second skin. And then she quickly strapped on the harness while I looked at her in awe. Bright skin against black leather, shiny transparent up-curving member, insolent smile, clouded, intense eyes.

  I was still kneeling in front of the couch. She nudged the dildo into my mouth, deep, deep, deep, and then she pulled out and pulled me to my feet. She lay down on the couch and pulled me into a straddle on top of her, the dildo deep in my cunt, making me groan as I raised and lowered myself on her. Her fingernails played with my nipples. She moved her hips subtly, suavely. Her hands were on my ass now, squeezing my flesh and moving me with her. And I followed her blindly, seeing her face through a haze of pleasure, the hard dildo probing deep inside me, my groans louder and louder, cresting to a howling orgasm.

  She didn’t let me recover very long. Quickly, she pushed me off her and forced me down to my hands and knees. She took off the harness and pulled my mouth down on her. I licked, I sucked, I nibbled. I wanted to do everything she might possibly want. I wanted to hear her cry out. I succeeded. She took her hands off my head and stroked my back, my ass. I lay with my head in her lap.

  I heard a low laugh. She raised my head and kissed me a long time on the lips. I held her tightly.

  “Do you think,” I murmured, “that I’ll ever see you again, after tomorrow?”

  She nibbled at my neck a little more before she answered.

  “Well,” she said, “I do have some influence. I don’t use it much, but I suppose that makes it more valuable. So if what I think is going to happen happens…well, yes, maybe you will see me again. But only after you’ve been worked so rigorously that you will have almost forgotten me.”

  I looked at her imploringly.

  “No,” she said, “I’m not telling you a word more.”

  I sighed, though of course I wasn’t surprised.

  “But I won’t forget you,” I said, kissing her hand.

  “You won’t forget me, what?” she asked sternly.

  “I won’t forget you, Mistress,” I said meekly, dropping my eyes. End of idyll.

  I didn’t want to move, but she got up and started searching around for her shirt. When she’d gotten it sloppily buttoned up, she walked to her desk and found my bracelet. I was still on my knees in front of the couch, my head resting on my arms, but I turned and straightened into a position of attention, raising my arm passively to let her buckle on the bracelet.

  “Get up,” she said, and when I did she led me to the door.

  “If you’ve forgotten how to get back to your room,” she said, “the Argus will help you, of course.”

  Of course. And just then, as she opened the door, the bracelet prickled.

  “You’re going to be very tired tomorrow morning,” she said, pushing me gently into the hall. “All the other slaves have had their regular tofu dinners and special baths and massages. Except, of course, for that crazy boy with the ponytail, who’s probably still down in the kitchen, servicing every woman who works there.” She chuckled and kissed me on the forehead. I was too tired and satiated to be anything but amused as well.

  “Sleep well, Carrie,” she said, and closed her door. As I waved my bracelet over the Argus, trying my groggy, confused best to make sense of the diagram that appeared on the screen, I heard the keys at her keyboard clicking fiercely away.

  CHAPTER VII

  What Happens Next?

  I was considerably less amused the next morning, if it was morning at all when the maid woke me up. It was dark outside, and I was a mess. The maid gave me a nice bath and a brief massage, which helped somewhat. I guess she was catching me up with last night. I grimaced ruefully when I remembered how readily I’d bought Margot’s story. Last supper. Right. Everybody gets his or her favorite food. We’ve got salmon for Carrie, and then, let’s see… how about jelly beans for Tommy, colored eggs for Sister Sue? Still, it was a nice memory and what had I lost? Some sleep was really all. Better, I supposed, to be rushing through these preparations than have all the time in the world to be scared to death of what the day would hold.

  And of course, as soon as I thought about being scared to death, I realized that scared to death was exactly what I was. I mean, it had been one thing to have Jonathan—who, when you got right down to it, was a composite of crushes I’d had throughout my life—pick me up at a party. It would be quite another to surrender my body and will—for a year—to anybody, anybody at all who had the bucks. Could be somebody really gross. Could be somebody dumb. Could be somebody I didn’t—underneath it all—actually like. I was choosing to put myself in about the most choiceless situation I could imagine. What puzzled me, when I looked at it that way, was why I wasn’t more frightened still, why I was still willing to go through with it, why so many of my nerve endings were eager, awake, and alert.

  But they were. I lapped up the rice gruel eagerly, I relaxed into whatever the maid wanted to do with my body, cleaning me up, making up my face, attaching small placards with the number 14 to the rings, front and back, of my collar, locking a cold, narrow, iron cuff around my left ankle, and then leaving me alone in my room.

  The bracelet buzzed soon after, and I walked out into the corridor. And for the first time, I wasn’t just tracing my own solitary path through that place. Rather, there was a whole tide of us, naked, tits and cocks bouncing, numbers hanging from our collars, terrified yet resolute expressions on our faces, a parade of us walking the now-familiar route toward the Garden.

  When I got there, a security guard, dressed in a spiffy uniform and holding a walkie-talkie, took off the bracelet, checked my number, and moved me into the quickly forming line of slaves. It was all going along so quickly and fluidly that I didn’t really have time to think. As I approached the door, I could see into the Garden, which was full of beautifully dressed buyers and marvelously decorated with bright silk tents and banners, in the colors of a medieval book of hours. A stage had been erected in the center, and there were pedestals to the side of it, with some slaves already standing on them.

  The guard at the door whispered in the ear of the slave at the front of the line—all I could really see was fine straight ash blond hair down to her ass and long elegant legs. Then a trumpet sounded, and he smacked her hard on the ass. She ran out to the area in front of the stage, where another guard was standing, and turned, knelt, and kissed the ground in the direction of the crowd of buyers while an announcer up on a stage read off her number and the page of the catalog where you could read more about her. Then a guard took hold of her wrist and led her to a pedestal. And by that time, the next slave was being smacked and running… so gracefully, how would I ever… ? And then I was next.

  I hardly heard the instructions whispered in my ear, but it seemed like there were no surprises, nothing I hadn’t already learned by watching. It was just that I couldn’t, couldn’t possibly—there were too many people out there, it was all a terrible mistake, I’d just slink back to my room and work it all out later, and…I heard the sharp sound of the smack on my ass more than I felt it, and then I was running, feeling nothing but the smoothness of the cold tiles under my feet and about a thousand knowing sophisticated eyes on my body. There’s the guard. Stop. Turn. Kneel and kiss the ground. He knows where to take me, I just have to follow him, to that pedestal over there, past that group of people watching so intently. I saw Chloe, laughing up at Francis and André. Some nasty Eurotrash boys who’d come to my room one morning and made a little gauntlet of cocks for me
to suck and who seemed to be happily reminiscing about it now. I saw Margot, in the distance, her brow furrowed, keeping track of the proceedings like an orchestra conductor with the whole score of the symphony in his head. Jonathan, looking pale, as though he’d just finished a workaholic binge, watching me intensely and dragging deeply on a cigarette. And Kate Clarke, briskly taking Jonathan’s arm and threading their way back through the crowd.

  And then the guard was attaching a long chain attached to the pedestal to the iron cuff on my ankle. “Head up,” he muttered to me. “Eyes down. And breathe.”

  It was good advice, the breathing part, I realized, especially after all the slaves had run to their pedestals, and there was one last hour when the buyers could check us over. There were just so many eyes on me, and fingers, nudges, pokes, laughs, and comments. I preferred it when the comments were in languages I couldn’t understand. Arabic, I guessed. Japanese. I kept my eyes down. And breathed. And tried not to concentrate on anybody as an individual, but as an element in the swirling, hydra-headed, shiva-handed, multicolored, polyglot, gorgeously dressed crowd.

  So I was surprised when there was a momentary parting of the crowd around me. I looked up, just a little, enough to see a by-now-familiar flash of dark, gray-tinted glasses. And then quickly down, my stunned brain stupidly registering that no director of security anywhere could afford shoes as expensive as the ones I was looking down at. I felt cool, dry fingers parting my ass as if it were a tangerine.

  “Look, Stefan,” I heard, in precise, oddly unaccented but clearly foreign English. “It’s been the same all week, the expression on her face. She can’t help it, it breaks through all the mediocre training she’s had. That pure passion for obedience. What do you think?”