Carrie's Story Page 2

  Anyhow, her announcement had gone something like, “Today, we have six lovely participants in our first event. They are Elizabeth, owned by Mr. Elias Johnstone; Janet, owned by Mr. Frank Murphy; Tina, certifiably owned by Mr. John Rudner…” and so on. Six naked, very beautiful young women walked twice around the ring, then each in turn kneeled before the lady and kissed her foot. Each of them had her name, the name of her master, and some other code numbers that I didn’t understand elegantly stenciled in grease pencil at the small of her back. The garden-party lady smiled at all of them and then introduced the judge, who, it seemed from the audience reaction, was very well known, for whatever it was he usually did. Maybe it was this. I overheard some whispering about his working wonders as a trainer, whatever that was, with somebody’s slaves. Anyway, he had a great body and a not so great haircut. He was wearing a sort of Jack LaLanne getup. And he got a lot of applause.

  The performance itself was very simple and very difficult. There were formal positions, called presentations, that the slaves had to strike in turn. These were sexual positions, of complete compliance and availability. There were, as you might imagine, a mouth position, a cunt position, an ass position, and variations on all these. The idea was to strike a posture in which you would be most easily and appealingly fuckable. It had a lot to do with muscle control. Even if you weren’t the judge, who would put the slaves through their paces and try them out, you could see that there were right and wrong ways to do it.

  I particularly remembered the slave named Elizabeth, who I thought was really good. She was wearing a very high collar, which seemed to be made of silver, but which was probably stainless-steel mesh, like a good, flexible watchband. She had dark hair, tied in a small knot on top of her head like a ballerina, and big, guileless, pale blue eyes, outlined in black. Her only adornments were a pair of bright nipple clamps, probably also of stainless steel, and a white orchid attached to the side of her head. Her breasts were large and firm, and her waist and ribcage were very small and delicate.

  The trainer held a small whip, which he mostly used for pointing and gesturing. He pointed to her and said, shortly but calmly, “Elizabeth. Mouth.” Slowly, and with wonderful grace, she kneeled in front of him, holding her body so her mouth was perfectly in line to receive his cock. Since his pants were on, I don’t know how she judged the probable angle of his erection, but she put her open mouth six inches from his crotch, arching in a perfect curve from the small of her back to her neck, so that when he unzipped his fly, there she was, to the naked eye immobile as she received his cock down her throat and began to suck. You could tell, too, that her throat was wide open and relaxed and that she was breathing gently through her nose. Her eyes were wide open and serene. There was scattered applause.

  The trainer didn’t keep his cock there for long, of course. He pulled it out, very large and very erect, and said, “Elizabeth. Cunt.” This looked especially difficult to me, as there was nothing but the soft grass for Elizabeth to lie on, but she didn’t lie down—rather, she stood on her toes and levered herself slowly onto his cock, until he was all the way in, and then she wrapped one arm around his shoulders, a little like a trapeze artist sliding down the rope. “Elizabeth. Ass,” he continued, and she levered herself off and got down on her hands and knees. You could see, somehow, that her ass was beautifully open, though still hot, tight, and young. Her face was meek, beautiful, impassive, but somehow lustful. There was more applause as he quickly got in deep, then pulled out and stroked her head. She turned around, kissed his foot, and then kissed the ground in front of the audience.

  There was quite a bit of applause, and then Elizabeth got to her feet and returned to the circle. I was very taken and tried to file away my impressions for later use.

  In fact, though, Elizabeth didn’t win first prize. She came in second. Tina, certifiably owned by John Rudner, came in first. I wasn’t sure why, but I figured that I still had a lot to learn. Still, Jonathan was impressed with Elizabeth, too, and went over to talk to her master during the champagne break. I saw Elizabeth shyly kissing his foot, and then he shook her master’s hand and stroked her breast. The red second-place ribbon was pinned to her collar. I, of course, was still kneeling with all the other tethered slaves. Next to me was an absolutely gorgeous boy, all shoulders, suntan, cheekbones, and flowing hair. He whispered to me, “Your master is fabulous-looking. Are you certifiably owned?” I had no idea what to say, but didn’t have the chance anyway, as one of the servants who was setting out little troughs of water for us to lap from came over and slapped the boy for talking out of turn. Then another one came by with a bucket of SPF30 sunscreen and started slathering me with it, rubbing it in hard, and finding ways to get in some invisible but painful prods and pinches.

  In any case, as Jonathan was explaining to me now, what “certifiably owned”—which Tina had been and Elizabeth hadn’t—meant was that Tina had been bought by her master, probably at an auction. This didn’t clarify things a whole lot for me, but it was a start.

  “Well, in that case, Jonathan, am I just plain ‘owned’ by you?” I asked.

  “No,” he answered, “not even that. This is just an informal arrangement. I want to formalize it, though, so that I can sell you.”

  “Will you make a lot of money if you sell me?” I asked. The words felt so strange in my mouth that I forgot to call him “Jonathan.”

  “You’ll get ten strokes when we get home,” he replied, and then calmly continued, “No, that’s not how it works, not in this century. If you formally give ownership of yourself to me, then we’ll draw up papers and I’ll own you and I can sell you. But I get a pretty nominal fee. You actually get the money—it’s held for you in trust and earns interest until your term of service ends. Terms of service are usually a year or two.”

  I was silent, partly because I was thinking of the ten strokes. But this was also a lot to digest.

  “How much money, Jonathan?” I asked.

  “Tina,” he said, “cost her master $250,000 for two years. Let’s go home.”

  When we got back to the house, I helped him off with his leather jacket and hung it up. Jonathan sat down in his armchair, and I came and stood before him, trembling. I hoped he’d forget about the ten strokes. I knew he wouldn’t. “You know what you have to do,” he said quietly. “Don’t dawdle.”

  “Yes, Jonathan,” I said. I dropped to my knees, pulled off my sweater, boots, and jeans, and folded them as quickly as I could. I crawled quickly to the closet, put them away, and then crawled to a cabinet, where I got his rattan cane. The cane made me tremble more as I crawled back to him. He took the cane from me and removed the leash, unhooking it from my collar and deftly unknotting it from around my waist.

  “Over the table,” he said. There was a small table near his chair. I stood and bent over it, folding my hands at the small of my back. He stood up, grabbed both my wrists with his left hand—hard—and pulled them up in the air behind me. Good, I wouldn’t have to worry about keeping them out of the way of the cane. And his holding my wrists like that would help me keep my balance, too. All I had to do was bear the pain and count the blows. And then it was really happening. God, it hurt. I kept it together, more or less, just sort of whimpering until the fourth stroke, when I gave in to the pain, sobbing and crying even as I called out each stroke by number. Before the tenth stroke, he shoved his foot between my legs, kicking them open a little, so the last stroke hit right where my pubic lips began in the back. I think I screamed before I remembered to say “ten.”

  He let go of my wrists and I slid to my knees again. He shoved the cane in my mouth and I crawled to put it away. Then I crawled back and knelt in front of him, thanking him and promising to try to keep the rules better in the future, and he held my head in his hands and kissed me lingeringly on the lips and on my cheeks, which were cold and wet with tears. He bent his head down and kissed my breasts, too, while I let out the last little volley of sobs. “Crawl out to the kitchen,” he wh
ispered. “I’ll see you later.”

  In the kitchen, Mrs. Branden gave me my dinner in a pan on the floor. And after I’d finished eating, she led me upstairs to Jonathan’s bedroom, where I waited on the bed on my hands and knees, my collar chained to the headboard. I figured that Jonathan had probably gone out to grab some dinner, maybe a beer, with friends. I knew I’d have to wait at least an hour, but, well, waiting’s part of what I do. Amazingly to me, I usually stay in position, even when nobody’s watching. When he came in, he snapped his fingers. I lowered my face to the pillow and folded my hands at the back of my neck. My back arched, and I became open, relaxed, ready.

  He stroked the back of my head, reached under my shoulders, and caressed a breast. “Good, Carrie,” he said. I murmured my thanks. I was really happy, in fact, no longer to be in disgrace. My ass hurt a lot—it felt huge and swollen—but in a funny way this didn’t feel entirely bad. I felt, well, there, open and available. No question about there being a there there. I knew exactly where there was.

  Jonathan fingered my ass thoughtfully, making me whimper, then stroked his tongue along one or two of the longer welts. I began to moan. He got up. I could hear him in the bathroom, peeing, washing, and brushing his teeth. Then he came back into the bedroom and got undressed, slowly and carefully putting his clothes away and whistling a theme from the “Trout Quintet.” He liked anticipating pleasure; I’m an antsy, impatient kind of person, but I’d learned to see what he got out of the stately way he paced these things. Trembling on the bed, with my face in the pillow, working to contain my sighs and moans, I couldn’t see him, but I could hear little things—the closet door turning on its hinge, a zipper sliding open, clothing rustling, the tiny sighing sound that was the squeeze of the Charlie’s Sunshine bottle—all behind the sad, sweet melody he was cheerfully whistling.

  Finally, naked, smelling of toothpaste and oatmeal soap, he climbed behind me. He whistled a rousing final bit of Schubert—he’d been doing both the strings and the piano—and then he entered me quickly. Did I say I was ready? I was almost ready, I guess. But for me there’s still always that shock, that invasion, that readjustment, it felt, of everything, including—especially—my will. And then that moment of reacquaintance with the smaller sensations, the pure little pleasures, the feel of the sweetness of his belly, the fine black hair on it, the muscles stretched across his pelvis, perfectly curved around my painful butt. He took his time, fucking me slowly, luxuriously, up the ass. Floating, buffeted by waves of sensation, I tried to anchor myself to something besides the pleasure and agony by kissing and nibbling at his hand, planted on the bed next to my face.

  Afterward he sleepily unhooked my collar and cuffs, while I bowed my head and thanked him. He sent me to my little bedroom at the end of the hall. I fell asleep confusedly trying to sort out all this owning, buying, and selling business and the flood of feelings it had loosened in me.

  I woke up early the next morning and tried to hurry out to work. I supposed that Jonathan was still asleep—he’s an architect and owns his own company, and some mornings he doesn’t go in until 9:30 or so. It’s better that way the mornings I’m there—I mean neither of us really wants to run into the other one when we’re trying to pull ourselves together for a day at work. We’re pretty cool about it, but it’s hard to know how to act when we pass each other in the hall. So I’m glad he can leave late some mornings, because I work as a bike messenger downtown and I sure can’t.

  Like most mornings, I pulled on black tights, torn, baggy khaki pants cut off below the knee, neon orange Converse high-tops, and a ratty brown leather bomber jacket, with a T-shirt underneath that said DEAD ELVIS. I was achy and groggy, which was slowing me down and threatening to make me late, but I was also starving. Jonathan’s refrigerator usually had good food in it—sometimes I wondered whether somebody was thinking about what I needed to eat for breakfast, doing physical work as I do, or whether Jonathan just normally liked to eat well. I sometimes made myself huge cheese omelettes before taking off in the morning, but today there was no time for that. So I hoped I’d find some cold pizza or something. I opened the refrigerator and—paydirt!—there was half a carton of Mu Shu pork. No pancakes, but you couldn’t have everything. I wolfed it down out of the carton and was out the door.

  Mostly, I like my job. I like being loud, fast, tough, and rude, and buzzing traffic and peds on my bicycle. Today, however, it wasn’t so great, what with my sore ass. And I was still distracted by vague thoughts of auctions, ownership, and money, losing my edge and damn near getting killed by one of those bozos who open their car doors while you’re zooming up beside them.

  I hadn’t really planned on being a bike messenger, though. I’d sort of assumed I’d be going to graduate school in literature when I met Jonathan during my senior year at Cal, at a party in a fancy house in Pacific Heights.

  The party wasn’t my kind of scene at all. It was given by a rich lawyer who seemed to know film people. I was there because my roommate Jan wanted to be a filmmaker and was sniffing at the outside of that scene. We’d gone to a movie in the city and run into some people she barely knew, and they brought us along to the party. It was the kind of party you feel self-conscious at if you’re dressed as I was—black jeans and a Mime Troupe tank top. It was a rare warm San Francisco night in October. Women were wearing fantastic silky floaty-looking things, and men were looking very pulled-together, very GQ in Armani jackets. Jan seemed to be having a good time with the film people. I got a beer and drifted around, feeling shy.

  They were showing videos in one of the rooms, on a huge high-resolution screen, so I wandered in and sat on the floor, figuring that this would keep me from feeling too lonely and at loose ends. I caught the last fifteen or twenty minutes of Tribulation 99, which was wonderfully funny and made me glad, for the first time, that I had come to this party. Then somebody put on an S/M film. It was awful, clearly playing for camp value. I gathered from the hoots and conversation attending it that somebody at the party had—when in desperate financial straits years ago—shot it or directed it or acted in it or something. It was about this dominatrix and her consort—the dominatrix is big, bleached, and blowsy, and has huge breasts with hefty rings piercing the nipples. And the guy—what do you call him, the dominator?—wears leather pants and no shirt and his skin is pitted from acne. Anyway, this cute lesbian couple comes to live with them because they aren’t getting it on very well and need to be whipped into shape, which they are, and it does wonders for their sex life. It’s all very trashy and inept, and the lesbian couple dissolves into giggles periodically. But I got into it.

  Actually, it was very embarrassing that I got that deeply into it. I felt my cheeks get hot and I found myself staring and sweating a little and going slack jawed. Quickly I shook myself out of it, hoping nobody had noticed. The lights came on and I started out of the room, when Jonathan sort of materialized and fell into step beside me.

  “They really are in that business, you know,” he smiled charmingly. “I’ve met them.”

  “You mean Sir Jack and Mistress Anastasia?” I was proud that I could answer so calmly. “Are they good at what they do?”

  “Actually, yes,” he said. “They’re not very glamorous, but, yes, they are good at what they do.”

  I had no idea what to say next, it suddenly occurring to me that I was talking about S/M with the most gorgeously Armani-ed man at the party. Thin, tan, intelligent-looking. Little black pearl stud in his ear. He wore the loose, elegant suit as though it were no big deal, and those wonderful, animal brown eyes were sexy, friendly, and cool enough to pretend he wasn’t having to put me at ease.

  Oh, my goodness, I thought. Wow. Middle, maybe late, thirties. Rich. Straight, or mostly so, anyway. And beautiful. I’d never said it before about a man, even to myself, but there it was, there he was. I felt gawky and somewhat sweaty. And tongue-tied. But I didn’t take my eyes off him.

  Which he had the good manners to accept as a compliment. And
continued chatting, pleasantly and intelligently, not following up on Sir Jack and Mistress Anastasia. We went out to the balcony and sat on a stone balustrade overlooking the bay. And pretty soon I was telling him about school and literature and what I was actually interested in. Which was troubadour poetry, which got us talking about the south of France. He was smart and well read and he seemed to know everything about medieval architecture. Not that I really care a whole lot about medieval architecture, but I’m sure he’d picked up on how I’m an incredible sucker for expertise—of any kind, really, short of maybe earned run averages and runs batted in. I thought he was terrific—I mean, I was charmed and flattered and, face it, he was certainly the oldest and classiest person who had ever shown any romantic interest in me. I felt that maybe I actually liked him, too, but truthfully, I was so infatuated—and turned on, first by the porn movie and then by him—that I couldn’t really tell and didn’t entirely care. I wanted him to take me home with him, though. I knew that I cared a lot about that.

  Until finally he put his hand on my arm and took a deep breath. Oh my god, he has AIDS or something, I thought wildly. But…

  “Look,” he said, “you’re pretty and very bright and I like you, but that’s not why I’ve been talking to you for the last hour. The thing is, I’m got something much more serious in mind. I want you to be my slave.”

  Oh. My. God. If I’d said it out loud I would have sounded like a refugee from “Beverly Hills 90210.” Oh my god and ee-yew, gross. Talk about your conversation stoppers, I thought—this certainly gives a whole new meaning to what they call “meeting cute.” I just stared for a minute while I carefully considered whether there was any chance I hadn’t heard him correctly. But Jonathan has wonderful diction and it was quiet out there on the balcony and my hearing is just fine, so there was really no mistaking what he’d said. I slid off the balustrade and turned to go. “Uh, well, it’s been nice talking to you,” I stammered. Damn, he had seemed so fantastic, and it turns out he’s just majorly sick. But it would make a great story. I could already imagine telling it.