Training Allie

Training Allie part 1, revised and extended {Les Evans} [1/2]

  “Training Allie” was originally posted as “Allie.”

  Consider “The Story of O” and “9-1/2 Weeks.” This story is an exploration of the question: why would any woman consent to persist in a relationship that, by any standard, would be considered abusive? There are many possible answers, each of which could be the basis for other stories. I hope that “Allie” presents one answer.

  Introduction to Chapters 1-11:

  This fantasy has been living in my head for a year, and it was time to let it out so maybe it would stop bothering me. It concerns the lengthy seduction of a stepdaughter by her stepfather.

The phenomenon of ‘false memory’ is real, and there is a real article in “Scientific American” on the subject (Scientific American September, 1997, volume 277, number 3, pages 70-75). A Google search for “scientific american false memory” should pick it up. In any case, I commend it to the attention of other authors, particularly in the MC genre, because I haven’t exploited it to the full.

  If you’re looking for a stroke story, this probably isn’t it. All places, events, and persons (including the author) are fictitious.

  Acknowledgements: The single best example of intentionally bad writing I know of, from Penelope Ashe. The idea of the notebooks comes directly from “Second Best,” by Thinking Horndog. A line from “Guns of Navarone,” by Alistair MacLean. The yoga lesson, from a yoga book by Jean Couch. Long after I wrote this, I realized that much of the “training” theme was inspired by “Owning Mother and Daughter” by Pedro Vila.

  Other influences will be obvious to those who spend too much time reading this sort of thing. Thanks to all.

  Chapter 1: The Perils of Prevarication

  Jane Adams was my first wife, and I was her second husband. She had been widowed several years earlier by a drunk driver, leaving her with an 8-year old daughter to raise on her own. She stood up to the challenge, and did her best after her own lights, which is as much as anyone can ask of a parent. We met in the line of work, found that we hit it off, and in due course we decided to marry. After the wedding ceremony, which was not memorable to any one not directly involved, I moved in with them. Work it out: she had a house that had already accommodated a married couple with child, and, while I was very well off from my work in technical training, I had up to then chosen to stick with a bachelor pad. The three of us worked into a comfortable household. Jane had traditional views, and changed her last name, and her daughter’s, to mine (Kennedy, if it matters).

Of my relationship with Jane and her daughter at the time, the only element that is germane to this story is that Jane had firm and non-negotiable ideas about how her daughter should be raised: Catholic/parochial girls’ schools, and no dating until college. That wasn’t right to my way of thinking, but Allison wasn’t my daughter, and I didn’t get to vote on it. I’ll spare you any stories about sexual activities between her daughter Allison (/never/ “Allie”) and myself as Allison grew up, simply because they didn’t happen. I did what I could to help with Allison’s school courses, tried to provide when asked whatever passes for wise advice to an adolescent of any gender, be a provider, and be a model of the male role. In Jane’s mind, the male role included the exercise of discipline, on the extremely rare occasions that Allison’s usually-exemplary behavior warranted it. In time, Allison accepted me as Father, Version 2.0, and called me “daddy,” and no, it didn’t give me any special charge. When it became clear that the now-teenage Allison was beginning to chafe under the “no dating” rule, it was made clear that that was Jane’s rule, and that was that.

Not that my prick didn’t scent Allison from time to time. Allison had bloomed into a beautiful specimen of the feminine gender. But Jane was a good wife—she’d had years of practice in a previous successful relationship, after all. Some say that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, or his balls. Jane kept both of those avenues well serviced. Some say that the way to keep a man faithful is to keep him happy, and tired. She ensured that I was both.

Then, near the end of Allison’s junior year at Saint Virginia High School, the universe of drunk drivers visited again, and took Jane from us. In a paradoxical way, Allison took it better than I did, perhaps because it had happened to her before, and she had learned how to cope, a little. We were both damaged—there’s no other word for it. No, it didn’t “drive us together,” and I didn’t see her step in to be “the woman of the house.”  After a month or so we began to return to something like normalcy in our reduced household, and we redistributed the chores between the two of us.

  When the mourning period had passed, I became aware that Allison was restless. I had been around her for more than several years now, after all, and I’d have to be denser than a brick not to pick up on her moods, at least a little bit. And I could guess the cause: she was approaching the end of her junior year of high school, and she wanted to date. Her hormones were undeniably active, witness her enchanting growth, and I suspected that she felt that after her senior year, she’d be an “old maid.” I also suspected that she felt that she had a window of opportunity to appeal the “no dating” rule that her mother had enforced. In any case, I knew enough about parenting not to offer advice until it was demanded.

Consequently, it was no great surprise when, one Friday evening, in fact, the day she finished her junior year, Allison came up to the doorway of the study/office of the master bedroom suite and made it clear that she wanted an audience. She was still in her school uniform from the day. I was sitting at my desk, and she stood across from me.

  “Um, daddy, I’d like to talk to you about switching schools next year.”

  “Oh? Where to, and why?”

  She had clearly rehearsed this speech in her mind. “I’d like to switch to Central High.” (the local public high school) “I think I’d get a better science education there, in prep for going to college. The Sisters at SV” (local speak for “Saint Virginia”) “don’t have the science labs to give what it takes to prepare us for the best schools.” She stopped. End of prepared speech. In her mind, the next thing that happens is that daddy agrees.

  I regarded her. The silence dragged on, her gaze wavered, and she began to shift from one foot to the other. I began to show anger.

  “Young lady, the last time I visited them, the science labs at Saint Virginia appeared entirely up to snuff, and I know something about the subject. I don’t know why you want to switch schools, but it has nothing to do with science labs. You’re lying to me, Allison, and I don’t take kindly to being lied to.” She went pale.

I made a show of restraining my mounting anger. “I’ll offer you a choice. I can punish you for your lying, after which we can start this discussion over again, without prejudice, but with no promises on my decision one way or the other. Or, you can avoid the punishment, but go to Saint Virginia again next year, no appeals. What is your decision?”

This was clearly not the way she expected or wanted the discussion to go. “W-what punishment do—“

  I practically frothed, spittle flying. “Stop! This is not a negotiation! Which is it—punishment, without knowing what it will be, but with a chance to present your case again, or Saint Virginia next year?”

  Four or five deep breaths on her part, with delightful effects upon the front of her white oxford-cloth Catholic school blouse. A final shuddering inhalation: “Punish…punishment.”

  I made it look as though I was trying to get a grip on myself. “Very well. You will receive a bare-bottom spanking, as is just for such an infantile stunt.”

“But, I’m too old to—“

  I slammed the flat of my hand down on the desktop. “Silence!” She flinched. “Once again, which is it?”

  Another delightful deep breath. “I’m sorry. P-punish me for lying to you, daddy. I want to try again to talk about the schools.”

  I let time pass while I watched her discomfort. I found the situation too delicious to rush it. I had spanked Allison in the past, but it had been years. Back then, she’d been a preteen with the genderless bottom of that age. Now, she was a blossoming woman. Oh, goody! Oh, woody!

“Very well, young lady. Over my lap.” I’m left-handed, so I had her approach around the desk from my left. As I wear my wrist watch on my left wrist, I took it off; I remembered the bruises it could cause—to me, not to her. She knelt down and draped herself over my lap, left to right. The sensation of her young breasts on the outside of my right thigh was electric. I told her to give me her left wrist, which I twisted up between her shoulder blades with my right hand to control her struggles, and used my left to sweep her plaid school skirt up, tuck it into her waistband, and sweep her panties down. She was already whimpering.

No time like the present, so I laid into her with all I had. When I spank, it hurts everyone involved. Somewhere in the back of my mind I was reminded of the old line “This hurts me more than it does you.” While my hand began to smart and swell from the blows I was inflicting, I doubt that the old line held in this case: she was rapidly reduced to blubbering mush. I don’t know how many times I struck, but her rump glowed by the time I was unable to continue. Frankly, I stopped because the squirming she was doing over my lap would have made me come in my pants with one more strike, which would not have helped the image I was working on. I heard wailing coming from the vicinity of my right ankle. My hand would be swollen for several hours. Her ass would be red/purple for several days. I thought that was fair.

  “All right, young lady. Up.” I released her wrist, and she sobbed to her feet, panties still around her knees, skirt still tucked up. “Leave your clothing as it is. Go put your nose right in that corner,” I pointed, “and stay there until I call you.” Her face was flushed red, from her head having been lower than her body when she was bent over my lap, but also from her crying, and from the humiliation of the situation. With the tears still streaming, she wiped her nose on her wrist, looked at me for a moment through swimming eyes, then shuffled as best she could to the indicated corner of the room and pressed her nose firmly into the plaster. I swear that I could have turned off the lights and read a newspaper by the light given off by that glowing ass.

  I left the room, and spent half an hour in the kitchen with my left hand in ice, drinking a Scotch-rocks with my right, and thinking about how I wanted the conversation to go, before I refreshed my drink and returned to the study off the master suite. I switched the icy Scotch tumbler to my left hand to continue my treatment. She was exactly where I had left her, and her sobbing had subsided to the occasional sniffle. I went back to my desk. It was a power dynamic, right? The person sitting at a desk has rank on the person standing in front of it—think about the last time you were in your boss’s office. She heard me come in, but didn’t move. I sat, and waited, watching her bottom.

  “Very well, Allison, turn around and put your clothes back together.” She turned around, unaware that she was giving me a breathtaking show, and made a delightful shimmy to get the panties back in place. It wouldn’t have surprised me that she’d rather have avoided the contact of even the wispy nylon with her burning rump. She pulled the hem of her skirt out of the waistband. “Blow your nose.” She did, and wound up standing in front of my desk again. “You have taken your punishment, and I’ll say no more about it. You wanted to make a case for switching to Central High. We both know that the issue at hand has nothing to do with science labs. What does Central have that Saint Virginia doesn’t?”

  She gave me another look, then it all rushed out. “Boys! I want to date! Please, daddy…?” and she ran out of steam. Well, duh.

  I decided that it was time to alter the dynamic of the situation. The master suite had a small wet bar. “Allison, pour yourself a glass of sherry and join me on the couch.” Jane and I had let Allison drink a glass of wine with us at dinner from time to time. I watched as she poured herself a rather full glass, probably thinking sherry was like wine, right? I didn’t say anything. She came over to the couch, put her glass down on the end table, and sat down, v.e.r.y carefully. I sipped my Scotch and waited until she nibbled her sherry.

  “You want to date.” It wasn’t a question, but she nodded, staring at the surface of her sherry as though it held answers. Perhaps it did. “So if I had agreed to let you go to Central next year, and later you’d asked to date and I said ‘no,’ you’d have accomplished nothing.” Another nod, and a shuddering sigh.

  “Let me draw you a picture, figuratively speaking. If you went to Central, you would walk into a social situation as a senior where the other boys and girls would have been dating for two or three years, and some of them fucking for one or two years.” Her head whipped around as though I’d slapped her. Profanity wasn’t often heard under this roof. “Look, that’s what they’ll be talking about at Central, and what they’ll be calling it. Get over it. The girls will have been honing their skills in the dating game for several years, and the boys will have expectations about what a girl will do on the first date, and the second, and so on.” She took a bite of her sherry. The level in her glass was dropping nicely. I was in full-lecture mode.

  “How would you survive, let alone compete? For example, to have that hunky guy in your senior physics class ask you out, he has to notice you, and think maybe you’ll be worth his time, more than the girls he’s been dating for several years. What have the good Sisters taught you about attracting male attention?” That got a little rueful smile from her. “Then suppose you somehow got a first date. Maybe you sink to asking him out. High school boys want one thing—sex. It may be your prerogative to meter out the rate and kind that you give, but that’s what they’re after. Maybe a kiss at the end of the first date, a grope on the second, and so on. If they don’t think they’re going to get what they’re looking for, you’ll wind up sitting at home on Friday nights, and again, you’d have accomplished nothing by switching schools. Suppose it’s the end of the first date, and he tries to French kiss you—if you flinch and giggle, the word will be all over school in 30 seconds: ‘Allison Kennedy is a baby, don’t waste your time.’” Her glass was nearly empty.

  “At the other end of the problem, let’s assume that you develop the skills need to get a boy interested in you, and yes, I mean sexually interested. He’s going to be doing things that will get you ‘interested’ too. What practice do you have in controlling yourself when your hormones get flowing? Because without those skills, without that practice, your body will take over on autopilot, and you could wind up fucking in the back seat of some guy’s car, just because he kissed your earlobe or something.” Unconsciously, her hand stole up to her ear. Her glass was empty. Time for the close.

  “I’ll summarize. First, you don’t know how to get noticed.” I ticked the points off on my fingers.

“Second, you don’t have the skills to keep a guy aroused and interested and wanting more. Why do you care? Because in order for him to get ‘more,’ he’s got to ask you out again, and that’s what /you’re/ after, right? Not just a first date, but something ongoing, a relationship? For which, you’ve got to be better at those skills than the next girl.” 

Her body language said that she felt like she was being pounded into the ground like a tent peg, each of my points like the blow of a mallet on the top of her head. Exactly the reaction I wanted.

  “Third, you don’t know what that ‘more’ would be, how to offer and control the progression of increasingly arousing activities, activities that the girls at Central have been practicing for several years now.”

  Pound.

  “Fourth, once you’ve got him aroused, you don’t have the skills to satisfy him or yourself without intercourse, because you don’t know what the alternatives are to fucking. And without those alternatives, you either fuck, or you wind up frustrated, both him and yourself, which is not the path to happiness.”

Pound.

  “And finally, you don’t have the skills or training to keep control of yourself when he arouses you. All of this thanks to the good Sisters at Saint Virginia.”

  Pound.

  “Have I missed anything?”

  Another long silence. She had not raised her eyes from her empty glass. A single tear ran down the side of her nose. “No, daddy, that’s about it. I’ll forget about Central.” She made as though to get up.

  “Allison,” I said kindly, “just a moment. Let’s ignore Central for a second. What happens the year after, when you go to The College Of Your Choice? Do you think the situation will be any better? On the contrary, everyone else will have had yet another year of practice. Sending you off to college in your current state brings to mind the phrase ‘a lamb to the slaughter.’” Her eyes were open but vacant, seeing I suppose some vision of Hell.

  “Look, you’re going at this all wrong. This is about skills and training and practice, and I know a thing or two about training. You finished your junior year today, and have a summer ahead of you with no major demands on your time, right? I’ll give you a chance, if you’re willing to work for it.” She looked up, for the first time in several minutes. “I’ll work with you to teach the skills you’ll need. It will take a lot of time, a lot of energy, and a lot of focus on your part and mine, and it will involve a fair amount of discomfort from time to time, both physical discomfort and embarrassment, because you’ll be learning to do new things you’ve never done before, and before you can make progress you’ll need to get over some of the nonsense that the good Sisters have been pouring into your head.” She bristled at this. As much as she wanted out of Saint Virginia, they and their kind had built her entire belief system for her whole life. Well, we had a summer to work on that. A man such as myself could accomplish much in three months. “But if, by the end of the summer, you demonstrate to me that you’ve learned all the essential skills, I’ll switch your registration to Central High and you’ll have permission to date, if you still want to. Otherwise, Saint Virginia next year. It’s up to you.”

  She mulled it over for a long time, maybe three seconds. It meant giving up her free time for the summer. And there was this worrisome note about “discomfort.” But it was the only path to what she’d asked for. “OK, daddy. I appreciate it. And I’ll work hard, honest. Sign me up.”

  “Very well, Allison. I’ll spend some time putting together a lesson plan. Come up to the study here after lunch tomorrow and we’ll get started.” She carefully got up and walked unsteadily toward the door, having to correct her course in mid-flight, as it were. The sherry had hit her pretty hard.

  Chapter 2: Cats and Dogs

  The next day was Saturday. We each had our own errands to run in the morning, and finally crossed paths when we wound up in the kitchen, each of us foraging for sandwich makings. We sat at the kitchen table, munching. She, of course, sat carefully. We adjourned to the study.

  “OK, daddy, where do we start?”

  I looked down at the lesson plan I’d put together. “Well, I’ve blocked out the skills you’ll need to demonstrate this summer, and the order in which they need to be learned, which is more or less the order that you’d need to use them in a sequence of dates over a period of months. After you’ve had some time to learn and practice a skill, I’ll test you on it. The most appropriate method of testing a skill mimics the conditions under which you’d use the skill.” She looked blank. “You need these skills for dating, right? We’ll go out on a ‘date,’ you and I, every week or so. I’ll take the part of your ‘boyfriend,’ and you’ll need to show that you can use the skills appropriate to that stage of a relationship under simulated ‘live fire.’ Who knows, you might even enjoy the date.  They’d probably be rather more classy affairs than the pizza and a movie you’d likely get from a high school boy on an allowance, but that’s not all bad.”  I laid just a little disparaging emphasis on “boy.” It seemed to me that it wasn’t too early to start setting her expectations. I had my own agenda here. All work and no play, after all.

  “So, what’s first?”

  “Unfortunately, several things. There are three skills that need to be second nature, things that you do without thinking. I want to get you started on all three today, because it will take time for them to become natural, and you’ll work on them all summer.

“The first skill is managing your posture. You want to date, which means that you need to have a first date, which means that you need to get noticed. How are you going to get a high school boy to notice you from across the room? By giving a particularly intelligent answer in calculus class?” I snorted, and she giggled, then looked down at her chest, and back at me with a question in her eyes. “Right, if he notices you, it will be because he notices your body. So how do you stand out in a field of other senior girls? By using what you’ve got to best advantage, and not hiding it in a teenage slouch.”

She squared her shoulders a bit. “That’s the general idea, and you can do much better with training. There are four exercises in this group. And remember, this has to be something you do without thinking, a part of how you carry yourself, without even realizing it, whether you think someone is looking at you or not. We’ll begin with a little yoga, for which you are not appropriately dressed. I’d suggest that you go change into your swimsuit, and I’ll make a space here on the carpet.”

  She returned in a few moments, wearing a modest one-piece. The bottom almost completely covered the bruises I had placed there the day before. I moved easily into my Trainer persona. I mean, it’s what I do for a living, after all.  “OK, the basis of posture is the pelvis. We’ll begin with the ‘dog tilt’ and ‘cat tilt’ positions. The purpose of these exercises is to make you aware of the bone and muscle structure around the pelvis, to do some gentle stretching of the lower back, and to strengthen the muscles of the abdomen.

  “Get down on your hands and knees and make yourself into a table, one hand directly below each shoulder, one knee directly below each hip. When I say ‘cat tilt’, you need to do several things at the same time: exhale, arch your back like an angry cat, let your head drop so that you’re looking down through the space between your legs, and curl the bottom vertebrae of your spine as though you were trying to touch your pelvis to your nose. Cat tilt.” She did nicely. I prompted, “Don’t clench your buttocks, hold the position with your tummy muscles only. Squeeze every particle of air out of your lungs. Curl the spine more. Hold it.” I put my hands on her belly and at the base of her spine and helped her refine the position. I wanted to get her used to my touch.

“Now relax” and she dropped back into the neutral position, inhaling. “Good. The ‘dog tilt’ is exactly the opposite: when I say ‘dog tilt’, inhale, raise your head to look forward, open your chest, let your upper spine hang from your shoulders, and swing the base of your spine back and up. Dog tilt. Good, rump up, inhale more, pull all of the air in the room into your lungs until they can stretch no more.” I positioned one hand on each of her hips and made some adjustments. “Good. Good. Hold it. Now…‘cat tilt.’”

We spend 20 minutes on those poses until I was sure she had learned them. She’d worked up a light sweat. “You’ll do those poses every morning and afternoon for five minutes. I’ve put it on your copy of the homework list.

  “With that as a basis, the next exercises will be a little easier. Stand up in front of the full-length mirror here. We’re concerned with both sitting and standing posture, and we’ll start with standing. Slouch for me. What’s that position?”

  She looked up, puzzled, then her expression cleared. “Oh, ‘cat tilt!’, sort of.”

  “Right. And what’s it look like?”

  She smiled. “Not much.”

  “Right. Now, ‘dog tilt.’” She did, and her breasts came out from wherever the had gone and rose proudly on her chest. “Nice, huh?”

  She admired herself, then frowned. “But it makes my bottom stick out and my tummy bulge!”

  “Excellent! No dummy, you! Think of your pelvis as a bowl of spaghetti: if you tip it, all the contents run to the front and try to flow over the edge. So here’s the final pose: from the middle of the spine up, ‘dog tilt,’ and for the pelvis, ‘cat tilt.’ Remember, curl the base of your spine. Pull your pubis up into your navel. That’s called the ‘mountain pose,’ if it matters.” It took her a moment to make the neural connections, but she got it right.

“Oh, wow. That flattens my tummy, and raises my, uh, bosom.”

  “Allison, if you use that vocabulary at Central, you’ll be laughed all the way back to grade school. The boys will call them tits, or jugs, or hooters, or boobs, or bazooms, or lungs, or knockers, your rack, or two dozen other terms you’ll pick up in time. But dear, ‘bosom’ went out with Queen Victoria.”

  She blushed, a charming sight. “OK, it raises my…tits.”

  “Very good. We’ll work on your anatomical vocabulary as we go. Now for sitting posture. It’s almost the same, except that the ‘cat tilt’ is hard to maintain while sitting. So sit on the couch and do a full ‘dog tilt.’” She sat, and flinched. “Delightful. Sit on the front half of the seat—your back should never touch the back of a chair. Yes, I know your bottom is still sore. Your back should be very straight. Think of a hook descending from the ceiling and pulling your head and spine into a column. ‘Sit tall.’ Perfect. You’ll consciously work on sitting and standing posture for ten minutes every morning and afternoon. The muscle-awareness of what good posture feels like should trigger the sensation that ‘something’s wrong’ if you let it slip. That completes the first two exercises, on pelvic and spinal control, sitting and standing. Any questions?”

  “No, dad. But you sound an awful lot like you’re delivering a class in database design, or something.”

We shared a laugh. “Sorry, baby. Old habits die hard. Now, the third exercise on posture. Here, have a look at this.” I showed her a Victoria’s Secret catalog. “Now that you’ve started to think about posture, look at the models. What do you notice about their elbows?”

  That one really threw her. Here she was, confronted with dozens of images of flesh and nylon, and impossibly perfect, well, bosoms, and I wanted her to look at /elbows/?

  “Uh, oh I see, they’re all holding their elbows back.”

  “Right, so we have the third exercise, to strengthen the muscles of your upper back, and to reinforce the ‘dog tilt’ posture of the upper spine.” I took out a length of broomstick I had cut and steered her over to a spot about three feet from the wall. “Now, this is sort of a Zen thing. I’m going to give you an instruction that is manifestly impossible to do. Don’t let that worry you. But I do expect you to sweat bullets trying to do it anyhow. Understood?”

  “I…guess so.”

  “That’s my trooper. OK, here’s how this one goes. Stand here, proper standing posture, ‘dog tilt’ above and ‘cat tilt’ below, about three feet from the wall. I want you to pull your elbows back, as though you were trying to make them touch behind your back. Now, I’ll slide this broomstick horizontally behind your back—hold it there with the crook of your elbows. Got it? Good. Now for the exercise. Keep your heels flat on the floor, and look up to the place where the wall in front of you meets the ceiling. Here we go. Look at that seam between wall and ceiling. I want you to touch that seam with your nipples.”

  She turned and goggled at me. “Remember what I said? I don’t expect you to succeed, but I do expect you to try very, very hard.”

  “Oh. Uh, ok.”

  It was magical to watch. Her tits rose another impossible inch, and her whole posture fell into line. “Right, keep that ‘cat tilt’ going. I’ll be back in a few minutes.” And I left her to it.

  Ten minutes later, I returned. She was again sweating lightly from the exertion, even though she was motionless. Kind of an isometric exercise. “Don’t change your position, and tell me about your sensations. What’s your body saying to you?”

  “I’m getting sore between my shoulder blades. My rib cage feels like it’s expanded. I can feel the muscles in my tummy pulling up on my pelvis.”

  “Terrific! Damn, you’re good! Now, relax.” She positively wilted with relief. I took the broomstick from her. “Those are the sensations that tell you that your posture is perfect. If ever you /don’t/ feel like that, something’s wrong. You’ll do that exercise for five minutes every morning and every afternoon, just to remind your muscles of what they should feel like. It’s on your copy of the homework list. Here’s some water. Only one more exercise in this set, baby, and we’ll take a break, OK?”

  “Sure. I’m getting tired.”

  “I don’t wonder. Fortunately, the last exercise is more mental than physical. I need you to do some mental imaging. Close your eyes. Remember when you worked at the library last year? I saw you pushing around some heavy carts of books. Whenever you went through a doorway, the cart went first, and you followed it into the room. Got that image? Make a mental movie of it. Feel it in your muscles. Now, in the movie, it’s not a cart of books, but your tits that you’re pushing. Heavy, and way out in front of you. They enter the room first, the rest of you follows along. Play that movie.”

  Eyes closed, she got an embarrassed little smile. “I see it.”

  “Here’s another image. Two famous and powerful people are walking briskly down a corridor, side by side, trailed by short female assistant behind and between them. She almost has to jog to keep up. At the end of the corridor, they sweep into a room. Everyone pays attention to the famous people, who are imposing and handsome, while mousy little secretary behind and between them is ignored and almost invisible. Got it?”

  Another smile. “I think I know where this one is going.”

  “Of course. Nobody said you were slow. Ok, now alter the image. The famous people are your jugs. Their faces are your nipples. The little office girl is the rest of Allison. In your mind, play a movie of the three of you entering that room.”

  “Not good for the self-esteem.”

  “Aw, don’t start. If it bugs you, remember that the three of you have to work together. Or come up with your own movie, the exact image doesn’t matter. Now, enough for one session. You’re off for the rest of the afternoon. Take it easy and relax. Be conscious of your posture, and every time you go through a doorway, lead with your chest. I’ll see you at dinner.”

  “Thanks, dad. Whew, what a workout.” She followed her nipples out of the room.

  I smiled. Things were starting well.

  Chapter 3: Arousal and Relief

  It was my night to make dinner, and I did some simple fish thing. Allison had changed from her swimsuit into a spring dress. I gave her one, ONE, glass of wine with dinner, not enough to get her tipsy. After we cleaned up the kitchen, we adjourned to the living room. It was still pretty early.

  “All right, Allison, this afternoon you learned some skills that should help you get noticed, help you get first dates with guys in your classes. What happens at the end of the first date?”

  “He brings me home?”

  “Well, we can hope so. And you’re standing on your doorstep. What does he expect?”

  “Oh. The goodnight kiss.”

  “Right. Without which, will there be a second date?”

  “Probably not.”

  “So here we have another essential skill, and we’re going to spend the next hour on it.”

  I turned down the lights, and we did, delightfully. We had to get beyond the peck on the cheek, and the tongue thing, but after twenty minutes or so she really started to get into it. I won’t claim to be an Olympic Medallist in kissing, but she didn’t have much to compare me with. The smell of feminine musk became noticeable, and she wasn’t paying a lot of attention to where I was putting my hands. At the end of the hour, I broke the clinch, and waited for our breathing to return to normal.

  “Oh, daddy, I never knew…”

  “Allison, you’re a gifted student and a delightful lab partner.” She blushed. “We’ll do a lot of that this summer. But you remember what I said about needing to deal with your own arousal, so you wouldn’t lose track of what was going on and do something you’d regret? Look down at your dress.”

  “Aack! Daddy, you.…” And she hurriedly buttoned up, and pulled down the hem of her dress. Her blush, impossibly, had become deeper.

  “Right. Have I made my case?”

  “Yes, but geez, daddy, you shouldn’t be touching my…” she paused, searching for another word “…knockers. You’re my stepfather!”

  “We’ll talk a lot about relationships and their limits this summer, Allison. But I had to shock you, because if you didn’t believe in the power of your hormones, you wouldn’t do what had to be done to deal with them.”

  “OK, OK, I’m shocked. I believe. But geez. So what is this magic antidote? Cold showers?”

  I smiled. “Nope, just the opposite. Cold showers sounds like ‘mortification of the flesh,’ good Catholic doctrine, but not very good for relationship management or mental health, And not effective in the long run. No, the strategy here is to permit yourself to be aroused, knowing that you can release the frustration at a time and place of your own choosing.”

  “That sounds suspiciously like, well, masturbation.” She made it four distinct syllables, and it was clear that each of the four distinct syllables of the word tasted bad on her tongue.

  “Yes, Allison, that’s…”

  “But the Sisters say that’s a sin! Touching yourself ‘down there’ is self-abuse, it makes you want to have sex, it…!”

  “Allison, down!” She stopped, and deflated. “Let me show you why the good Sisters have it all backwards. The object of the exercise here is to /avoid/ intercourse, not to pave the way to it.” Well, that was half the truth. And maybe not all of a lie. “If you find yourself on a date feeling like you did a moment ago, thinking that if you don’t do something you’ll explode, with no relief in sight, isn’t the natural impulse to “go all the way?” But if you know that you can provide yourself with relief in just a few minutes, isn’t it more likely that you can use that to hold on to your principles just a little longer?”

  “Well, if you put it that way.”

  “I do put it that way. And there’s more.” OK, the other half of the truth. “The time will come as a relationship develops that you will want your boyfriend, or lover, or husband to bring you to orgasm. The female body is a wonderful thing, because the more often a girl comes, the easier it is for her to come. Your lover will feel pleased and proud of himself if he can bring you off quickly. And you can make that easier for both of you by practicing your orgasm, frequently.”

  A tiny nod. She was mortified to be discussing this. Too bad. I told her she’d have that feeling when she signed up for this.

  “Finally, ‘playing with yourself’ provides a good tool for evaluating possible relationships.” I’d lost her again. “Look, you have fantasies, daydreams about guys, right?” More blushing, just visible in the dim light. “I’ll take that as a ‘yes.’ You imagine different situations, sometimes he’s a strong adventurer, sometimes a nurturing homebody, sometimes he sweeps you off your feet, sometimes he pursues you on bended knee….” An anatomical mixed metaphor there, I realized. Oh well. “You have the opportunity to find out whether a kind of relationship really lights your fire. If you find yourself masturbating with one particular image more often than others, that may be a sign that that’s the kind of relationship you seek at that point in your life. You can ‘try on’ a lot of different relationships, keep the ones that work, discard the ones that don’t, and no one needs to know. It’s a lot cheaper than divorce.”

  “But…”

  “Allison, masturbation is one of the essential skills you need to demonstrate to get to Central High. What’s it to be?”

  A long pause, stretching into minutes. She studied her lap. Then, very quietly, “OK, what do I do?”

  I silently let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. That had been the Rubicon. After this, it would all be easier.

  “Tonight, we’ll go back to kissing. It should be obvious, but the rules of posture don’t apply. Take off your panties—look, dammit, it’s not as though I didn’t get well acquainted with that end of you yesterday!” She remembered the spanking with chagrin, and swallowed her objection. “When you begin to feel aroused, go ahead and touch yourself in any way that feels good. And I’ll offer direction as best I can. I’m just a guy, but I have some experience with female anatomy.”

  “OK, but don’t look.”

  “Oh, come on. How can I tell you how to get better if I can’t see what you’re doing?”

  “Humph.”

  And then we were back at the kissing game, in each other’s arms. Actually, she was in my arms. After a little while, hers were otherwise occupied.

“Allison.” Her head came up and she tried to focus. “Eyes open. You’ll want to watch your lover, and he will want to watch you. Don’t close your eyes.” After that I didn’t really need to do much to help things along, the occasional caress, a word of direction now and then, a kiss on an earlobe, and in a while she was bucking and shuddering against me. And she dissolved into tears. Good, I thought, almost certainly her first orgasm, looking into my face, and with my arms around her, with my hands on her skin. If there’s anything to “imprinting,” we should be well on our way.

  “Shh, baby, wasn’t that good?”

  Her reply was inaudible. Slowly she returned to reality, and pulled down her dress. “I…need to pee.”

“Of course, baby. But come back.”

  She reappeared in a few minutes. It looked as though she’d splashed some water on her face. “Allison, look at me.” She dragged her eyes up off the carpet, and I took her hands in mine and looked into her eyes. “You can’t know how honored I am to have been here for that.” A little half-smile from her. “You’ll do that at least twice a day, once each day in front of me.” Her eyes got wide, but I bulldozed ahead. “As I said, part of the value of masturbation is that it let’s you ‘try out’ relationships. Here’s a stack of stories, each of which is an example of some relationship.” Wonderful thing, ASSTR.ORG. “Read one each time you play with yourself, and sort them into folders I’ll give you—one each for ‘Ugh!’, or ‘Nice’, or ‘Oh, wow!’” Over time, you may begin to see a pattern in the ones that light your fire. Review the folders now and then. Again, Allison, thank you. It’s been a wonderful evening.” And I meant it.

  And so to bed. I had a date with my hand.

  Chapter 4: Mutual of Omagawd

  The next morning, Sunday, got going slowly. I was down in the kitchen working my way through a cup of coffee when Allison made her appearance, following her nipples into the room. Her posture was perfect. I wasn’t sure, but I thought she looked a little flushed. In any case, she avoided my eyes.

  “Allison.” Finally she looked up. “Good morning, beautiful.” I kissed her, at considerable length. If she wasn’t flushed before, she was now.

  “Good morning, dad.” A shy smile.

  I took her hands and brought them to my nose for a sniff. “Good girl.” I’m sure she wanted the floor to open up and swallow her. “Now, none of that. You’ve done a beautiful thing. You had a lot to absorb yesterday, so nothing new today. Just keep up with the exercises in your homework list. We’ll do a refresher this evening after dinner. Otherwise, go enjoy the day.”

That evening, after dinner was cleared, we went up to the study. I had her bring her sheaf of stories, and make herself comfortable on the couch, with a good reading light. I said, “OK, peel off a story and go ahead and ‘enjoy yourself.’ I may coach from time to time, but otherwise I’m not here.” This was a new situation for her. This morning, she had done the deed in the privacy of her room, and yesterday, it had been in the heat of the clinch. Now, she had to bring herself off, from a standing start, and with a watcher. I gave her a glass of sherry and went to my desk, pretending to work. The configuration of the room for this exercise was no accident: she was more-or-less facing me. I wanted her looking at me as she came. After a moment of hesitation her eyes dropped to the page and she submerged herself in the story, this one with a strong theme of dominance and submission. I had taken care to ensure that her pile of stories had that theme well represented. A few pages into the story, she dipped her hand into her shorts and began stroking, and a bit later she laid down the story, closed her eyes, and began to work herself in earnest.

  “Allison. Eyes open. Try pinching your nipples.” She was far enough gone that she didn’t try to respond verbally. The fantasy and her own manipulations took over again, and though her eyes were glazed, seeing God knows what, they were open and pointed in my general direction. Good enough. A few minutes later she came, with something between a groan and a whimper. I let her recover, then said, “That was beautiful. Thank you.” I gave her a thorough goodnight kiss, and sent her to her room with a “See you in the morning. Remember your exercises. And you have a date on Saturday. Some guy is going to take you to dinner and the Opera.”

  The next morning brought a new work week, and I did have to make a buck. I spent most of the day trying to nail down some training contracts with three potential clients. The bad news was that two of them took lower-priced bids from competitors, but hey, if you’re never underbid, you’re not charging enough. The good news was that the third one signed, and would give my small organization all the work it could handle for a month, at a premium rate. So I was feeling pretty good about the day as evening approached. It was then that I realized I hadn’t seen Allison all day. As I was pouring myself a Scotch, and laying out things for dinner, she made her appearance in the kitchen, in a little wrap dress thing I hadn’t seen before.

I’m slow, but two and two eventually got together. “Shopping day?”

  She smiled, almost coquettishly, the first full, unembarrassed smile I’d seen from her for several days. She did a spin in the dress, which resulted in showing an improbable amount of thigh. “Yes. If I’m going to have a date at the Opera this weekend, I need to have the weapons and the warpaint.” Good, she was getting into this.

  I smiled back. “That wasn’t the only purchase, then? Do I hear my credit cards whimpering? I think a sauvignon blanc with this fettuccini—would you drag one out of the cooler?” And we were off into the evening.

Later, we convened in the living room. I put on some quiet jazz, and turned down the lights.

“Let’s review.”

She rolled her eyes. “Yes, teacher.” But she smiled when she said it.

  “You’ve got the skills, and the body, to get a first date. You are starting to get some experience dealing with what it feels like when your hormones start pumping. And you’re starting to get some practice with what to do to relieve yourself when aroused. But what about your date?”

  “My date?”

  “Come now, dear. Guys have needs, too. If you aren’t thinking about where his hormones are taking him, if you aren’t one step ahead, then you’re hopelessly behind.”

  “Oh. Well, can’t he go home and ‘play with himself?’ This cuts both ways, doesn’t it?”

  “Sure he can. And will, at first. But string that along too far, and he’ll go elsewhere, or deliver an ultimatum along the lines of ‘Put out or I’m gone.’ You don’t want that, because at this phase of things, you want to avoid intercourse, but you want to keep the relationship going. You don’t want to have to choose between. So you want to take things gradually, as you sense the kind of relationship it’s going to be, and whether you want that relationship, and with this guy. But the time will come when you need to do more than arouse and frustrate him, if you want to keep him. Think about the feelings you’ve been able to give yourself over the last few days. Imagine what a gift you’d give your lover to make him feel like that, and to have him give you those feelings in return. Whether you call it ‘heavy petting’ or ‘mutual masturbation’, it’s a wonderful experience. And it’s tonight’s lesson.”

  She swallowed, hard, at that one. “Here we go again,” she said.

  I made a show of exasperation. “Dammit, I didn’t come to you and say ‘Please let me teach you about sex.’”

Actually, I’d said something more like, I’ll teach you about sex or else.

I continued, “Look, if this isn’t what you want, I’ve got other things to do.” And, I didn’t have to add, you will go to Saint Virginia in the fall.

“No, no, I’m sorry. You’re right. How do we start?”

  “I don’t want to spoil that nice cocktail dress. Change into your robe and meet me here in fifteen minutes.” I used the time to change into my own robe, pour us a couple of glasses of wine, and spread out some cushions on the living room floor.

  “So, we meet again, my pretty,” I said, twirling an imaginary moustache. She snickered. “OK, I get no respect. Join me here and let’s neck.” And we did. When things had warmed up sufficiently, I said, with as steady a voice as I was able, “The way this will work is, I will do for you what you’ve been doing for yourself the last several nights, and you will do for me what I’ve been doing for myself the last several nights.”

  Her fogged vision cleared for a moment, and she said, “Oh. Oh my” as the realization of what I’d said, and what it implied, hit home.

  I continued, “Feel free to coach me, as I will coach you.” And I reached for her. She flinched at my touch. I took it very slow, because after all this was to be a learning experience for her, so it wouldn’t do to have her too worked up to think. I dialed my fingers to “simmer” and waited. She hesitantly opened my robe, and came face-to-face, or face-to-cock, with her first penis. I’m only average, but again, she didn’t have anything for comparison, and I was gratified by her response.

  “Go ahead and explore. If you’re gentle you can’t hurt me.” She looked as though she’d rather touch a corpse, but my caresses had her going, and she reached out with her fingertips and made contact. Of course, I already was fully erect. I’d have had to be a corpse to be otherwise. “A little bit about the male anatomy that the good Sisters didn’t tell you. That’s the head, or crown, and the rim you see there is very sensitive. Run the tips of your fingers around it. Ahhhh….good. Wrap your fingers around the base, a little more firmly, and stroke upwards. Uhh. You’re doing fine. Now relax your fingers until you’re barely making contact, and stroke downwards. Ahh…nd repeat. Loose on the down stroke, firm on the upstroke. Yes.”

  I shut up at that point, because she was doing fine, and because I was finding it very hard to speak. And this was not the time to teach her the subtleties of the hand-job. So I concentrated on keeping her just below a boil, with pleasant results. Maybe she’d learn a thing or two about how to do herself. The hard part here was trying to achieve near-simultaneous orgasm. You know the old one: “To go together is blessed, to come together is divine.” Not that it was indispensable, but at this stage of her training, the associations would help matters along.

  “Baby, slow down for a minute, let me talk.” I was on the edge, and while she was still hearing me, I sensed she was, too. “When girls come, it’s usually rather tidy. The good Sisters have told you about semen. When men come, it makes a bit of a mess. I’m going to come about when you do, and it may get a trifle sloppy. Don’t let it put you off. OK, here we go.” I put my mouth back over hers and, as I felt that familiar almost-painful sensation begin to build in my crotch, I diddled her clit for all I was worth. She lost control of her body, yelling into my mouth as she came, and damned if she didn’t try to rip my dick out of my groin in her convulsions. But that sent me over the edge, too. And she kept the soft-down, hard-up rhythm the whole time.

  It took several minutes before either of us was aware of the outside world. I kissed the side of her neck and said, “Thank you.”

  She looked down at her hand, now aware of my goo on her fingers, which were still wrapped around my shrinking cock. “Did I do that?” she said with wonder in her tone.

  “Yes, baby, and very well you did it, too.”

  She giggled. “Like you said, a bit of a mess. What do I do about it?”

“Very good” I said. “If not quite one step ahead, at least catching up fast. The answer is, whatever you want. Most men find it intensely sexy if you lick it up. You could clean it up with a washrag. Or leave it to be my problem. It’s your call.”

  Though she didn’t move a millimeter, physically, I could sense that she recoiled from the image, but she kept her hand around me. After a minute or so, she shivered a bit, looked back into my eyes, then bent around to clean up her hand, my dick, and my belly with her tongue. It was heavenly.

  When she was done, she came back up and nestled in the crook of my arm. The expression on her face and the tension in her body told me that she was, as they say, ‘deeply conflicted.’ “Allison,” I said. She looked up. “Thank you.” And I kissed her deeply. I tasted myself on her tongue, not my favorite sensation, but this was all for the greater cause. The kiss went on. And on. After a while I felt her relax in my arms, as if she had come to terms with what she’d done with her hand and her mouth. Yet later she broke the kiss.

  “Jack,” she said. I looked at her. That was the first time she’d used my given name. “Thank you.” And she put her head back on my chest. A long while later, I sent her to her room, and tidied up the living room.

  Chapter 5: Celeste Aida

  The rest of the week, I left her pretty much to her own devices. I didn’t touch her, once.

We had the usual cursory chat at breakfast/coffee before I dove into work each day. Somebody had to pay those credit card bills. We had a pleasant dinner together, one or the other of us doing the cooking. Every evening, she would read a dirty story to herself and masturbate on the couch in the study in opposite me, her eyes on me. I would remind her to do her “exercises.” And that would be that. Except that I would find her watching me from time to time. When I made eye contact, she would blush and vanish into her room. And we were back to “dad,” not “Jack.”

  And we both knew we had a ‘date’ coming up on Saturday. I told her, “Look, forget if you can that this is some sort of ‘test.’ I’m going to treat you the way you should expect and demand to be treated on a date. Here’s the scenario. Be dressed and ready at 5PM. I will drive up to the front curb. I will come to the front door, not honk the horn. I will come in to the house to greet you, not expect you to come out to the car. If I were going to do this really right, I’d have a discussion with your father about my ‘honorable intentions,’ but I don’t feel right talking to myself.” She laughed into her hand. “We’ll do whatever the date is, in this case, dinner and the Opera. Relax and enjoy yourself—if you can’t, one of us is doing something very wrong. If you don’t feel like a princess at least at some time during the evening, ask yourself whether you want another date with this clown. But will you be ‘one step ahead’ of me? In this case, assume that we’ve been dating for a couple of months, progressed to necking and touchy-feely, but you’ve refused more. I’ve made it clear that I’m ready for more than a smooch and a grope, and I’m about out of patience. Otherwise, tonight is a ‘last hurrah.’ You’ve decided that the relationship has matured enough for the next step. Sometime during the evening you’ll have an opportunity to show off the skills you’ve been learning. Let the situation develop. Play the role. Take the initiative if feels right. You’re a high school girl being taken on a date by an ‘older man’ named ‘Jack.’ As an instructor, I’ll be watching for your technical execution of the skills, but more importantly for your judgment on what’s called for given the development of the relationship. As your date, I’ll bring you home and walk you to the front doorstep. If the evening has gone well, I’ll kiss you goodnight. Again, in the real world I’d turn you back over to your father, but too bad. I’ll drive away. A few minutes later I’ll park the car in the garage, and we can ‘drop role’ and do a post mortem of the evening over coffee or drinks. OK?”

  And so it happened that in the fullness of time Saturday rolled around. I put on the suit that I kept in the closet for meetings with other ‘suits’, dragged the Lexus out of the garage, drove around the block, and pulled up to my own front door. Funny, I had to corral the butterflies in my gut as though I were a teenager again. Deep breath, Jack, and center. I walked up to the house and pushed the button. After making me wait just the right amount of time, the door opened, and there was my Allison. No, not my Allison. She stood, well, regally. A teenage incarnation of sex, in another dress I’d never seen, a maroon item that was classy, but too tight in too many places, too short in too many others. If I were acting as her father, I’d forbid her….

  “Jack!” she squealed, and was in my arms. Instant erection. No wonder I was dizzy: all the blood in my brain had rushed to my dick. She twisted around in my arms to face the open front door. “Daddee!,” she tossed over her shoulder into the hallway behind her, “byee!” Never mind that the house she was shouting into was empty, it was clear that she was into the role. She freed one arm from my embrace to close the door behind her and offered me that arm. “Shall we?”

  I won’t bore you with the most of the proceedings.

Dinner was at a small, quiet restaurant on the fringe of downtown. We were early enough that the dining room was mostly vacant. Service was instant without hovering, the scallops were perfectly done, and we begged off of dessert lest we fall asleep during the Opera. Allison glowed. Her spine never touched the back of the seat.

  And then the Opera. Ah, yes. Verdi’s “Aida,” and not by accident. The next week would have been “Othello,” which wouldn’t have done at all. But here we have the queen enslaved, falling in love with her owner, who has fallen in love with her. Perfect. As we waited at the curb for the car afterward, Allison gushed about the lead soprano. I turned to her, wrapped my hand under her chin, kissed her, and said, “But who had the power in that relationship?” I might as well have spoken Swahili. But the question sank in, and I could almost hear the gears turning in her head on the silent drive home.

“OK,” she finally said. “I think I get it. It’s a kind of vicious circle, isn’t it?” I glanced over her as I drove, her face illuminated by the instrument lights on the dashboard, and kept my mouth shut. “I mean, they owned her, she was property, like…I don’t know…a pet rock, or a goldfish, or something.” She shivered. “Aida was a slave, for chrissake! So he had the power. But he loved her. So she had the power. She betrayed him, and when he was punished for what he’d done for her, she found that she loved him, and he had the power. And then around it went until it blew up. And everybody died, of course, like all operas.”

  I said I thought that would do as a plot synopsis. As I got back to our suburb and pulled off at the usual exit, Allison turned to me and said, “Could we stop by Cornell Park, ‘Jack,’ just for a couple of minutes? I don’t have to be home just yet.” I said sure. Cornell Park was a small park in a nice neighborhood cut off by the way the freeways had cut through the town, and there wasn’t a lot of traffic through that area. I pulled into a dark spot and cut the engine. The almost imperceptible grumble of the engine died away, and she was in my arms, her lips to mine, pressed to me as best she could over and around the center console of the Lexus. Damn, I hate making out in a car. I thought I got over that when I got my own place. One of us was going to need a chiropractor. I pushed her back. “Allison,” I said, staying in role, “we need to talk about whether this relationship can continue like this. I really don’t think I want to hurt you by….”

  “Please?” she interrupted me. I played dumb. “Please,” she said again, “touch me, there?”  She had twisted around so that she was lying across the two seats, facing rearward, and therefore facing me, and her hand fell to open my fly and begin her own kneadings. Her position made it easier for me to put my right hand where it needed to go, to do what it needed to do. The whole thing was not quite anatomically impossible.

  Never one to refuse a desperate woman, I ran my fingertips beneath the hem of her dress and up her thigh. “Imagine my surprise,” as the saying goes, when I found, not pantyhose, not panties, but thigh-high stockings and moist flesh. “Well, what do we have here?” I said as I commenced exploratory manipulation. “Sluts dress like this. Are you a slut, or do you just dress like one?”

  She began to squirm under my efforts. “Ah, ‘Jack,’ you know I want keep seeing you, but I’ve been raised to be a ‘good girl.’ I’ve held you off, I know you’re fed up, but can you accept that I want to take it slow? Can I make it up to you a little, like…this?” A squeeze. “I’ve never…touched any man…like…this before.” Academy Award stuff, this. And loose on the down stroke, firm on the upstroke. Where did she learn that little twist of the wrist? OJT? “Tonight felt special. I knew I was ready to give you more, at least a little more. At the intermission I knew I didn’t want anything to get in the way, so visited the little girl’s room to…clear the way. For you. I’m not a slut, ah, yes, there, but I’m beginning to think I might want to be /your/ slut, if you’ll…teach me? Am I, am I doing it right, for you?” Real desperation in her voice, or at least, really good acting of real desperation. I found that I didn’t care which.

  My efforts were being rewarded, as were hers. Both of us were standing on the cliff. I drew a ragged breath. “Baby, I’m going to make a mess on my suit if you do that any longer.” Her eyes focused on my face as best she could, and she made a little smile without slacking the motions of her hand. Then the next thing I knew, her mouth was around the head of my cock and I was erupting into that hot cavern, and her thighs clenched around my hand as I pushed her off of her own cliff.

  The short drive home was, you’ll forgive the expression, anticlimactic.

  I did the walk, did the kiss at the front door, did the “I’ll call you this week, maybe” and she let herself in and, with a lingering glance, closed the door. Through the closed door I heard “Dadeee, I’m hoome.” I shook my head, took a deep breath, and went back to drive the car into the garage.

  By the time I got into the house, she was in her robe, and had a sherry for herself and a Scotch for me already made. I excused myself to change, hung up my suit, and was back in the living room in a few minutes. We sat in our robes and nibbled our drinks, and I said, “OK, post mortem time. Talk to me.”

  She looked up at me through her eyelashes (where do they learn that?). “What do you want me to say? What an evening! You told me I should feel like a princess. I did. I had a relationship with ‘Jack’ that I wanted to keep going, but ‘he’ was tired of waiting for me to decide to keep ‘him’ happy, happier than I’d been willing to do in the past. I wanted the relationship to continue. I made some decisions, dressed for the occasion, took some risks, and used what I’ve been taught.” She paused, with a small smile. “Tell me, ‘Jack’, how did I do?”

  It was odd, being referred to by my own name as though it were a pseudonym. I tried to put on my face of an instructor doing an evaluation. It didn’t work. “Ahhh. Where do I start? You did fine. More than fine. Obviously, you ….” Damn. OK, Jack, another deep breath. “Two things. I was astonished when you took me in your mouth. Very good. Oh, very good. On the other hand, you might have been a little more ‘hard to get.’”

She placed the brilliantly red nail of her forefinger to her brilliantly red lips and put on a wide-eyed, puzzled expression. It was a caricature, a ‘50s pinup. “Hard to get!? But Jackee, baby, whatever would I have done with my hands?” We both collapsed in roars of laughter. I sent her to her room, and went upstairs.

  Chapter 6: Relational Data

  So we started July with a certain amount of momentum, and I made some changes in our routine. She still did her posture exercises, and twice a day read her smut while masturbating. Maybe more that twice a day, for all I know. Her three folders of stories were filling up.

No, the changes were more subtle. The training always remained separate from our day-to-day relationship, but a little less so. I stopped referring to the weekly testing events as ‘dates.’ They were always for testing purposes, but they became dates, without the quotation marks, and then became just enjoyable special things we did together, that provided an environment for the testing. I stopped being ‘Jack,’ some fictitious guy she had a ‘date’ with, and was myself, a stepfather trying to teach his stepdaughter what she needed to know to get along, and show her a good time in the process. And after our weekly dates, we brought things to a climax, so to speak, in my bed. No more wrestling in cars, thank you. The post mortems continued, as we cuddled and talked about our sensations. But when we were done, I always sent her back to sleep in her own bed. This process was still ‘training,’ and not an almost-incestuous affair. We had started the process with a goal, and it was continuing toward that goal, even though we didn’t speak of it any more.

  And after the first ‘date,’ I didn’t bring up Central High, or high school boys.

  All the same, if I wanted to have a harvest at the end of the summer, I needed to plant some seeds now. They would take time to sprout.

  “Allison, tell me what you know about relationships.” I loved dropping these things on her out of the blue. But I’d done it often enough now that she had learned to keep her mouth shut until she’d begun to organize an answer.

  “You mean, like husband-wife?”

  “Be more general. People relationships.”

  “Hm. From what I can see, one way to organize them is by how much they have legal recognition. You’ve got employer-employee, which often has a written contract, husband-wife which may, boyfriend-girlfriend which won’t, and like that.”

  “Fine. Take that set, though obviously there are others, of varying durations: shop clerk-customer, parent-child, ex-husband-ex-wife. Pimp-whore.” She gave me a shocked look. Still some prudishness left from Saint Virginia. “Each one is a type of relationship. Generalize across all of them. What’s a relationship?”

  “They all have a set of assumptions and permissions, I guess. Each participant assumes certain things about the behavior of the other, and gives permission for behaviors to the other.”

  “A little pop-psych, but that’s a start. And are the assumptions and permissions permanently defined?”

  “Sometimes, in part.” The girl would make a good consultant someday. “I mean, take husband-wife. There are legal restrictions, like about economic support, and assumptions, about sex and such. Some behaviors society or laws don’t permit in a relationship if anyone complains, like abuse in a marriage, or intercourse between a parent and child. Beyond that, I guess the couple gets to choose, like who takes out the garbage.”

  I summarized, “So all relationships of any type are not the same, and any given type of relationship may change, within limits, over time. No surprise: look at us, stepfather-stepdaughter. We changed our relationship in some ways when Jane died, and again when we began this training. And usually, two people can change the /type/ of relationship they’re in, if they choose. Of course, some types of relationship are forever and can’t be left behind, like biological parent and child. But generally, you see changes of type all the time: clerk-customer become boyfriend-girlfriend, become husband-wife, become father-mother, become ex-husband-ex-wife. Relationships often fall apart if the permissions and assumptions of one party don’t match the other’s. Sometimes two people can’t find a ‘pre-defined’ relationship that works for them, and have to make up a new type of their own. And each change of type has a ceremony or event that marks the transition, maybe as simple as the first kiss, maybe signing a contract, maybe as elaborate as a church service.”

  “Sure, what’s the point?”

  “Exactly, what’s the point of all this training you asked for?” Well, she didn’t exactly ask for it, but I took every opportunity to confuse her recollections on that point. “Why do you want to date? Is this just in support of, I don’t know, ‘random social activity?’ Does it stop at that, or are you looking beyond that to a goal, something more permanent, and if so, have you thought about what you want? You want to land a guy? If so, how do you choose which one to go after? What’s the relationship you want? How do you want to be treated? What lights your fire? As you said, what’s the point? I don’t want an answer. I don’t expect you to have an answer, and if you did, I expect it would change as you grow. But to misquote the Cheshire Cat, if you don’t have an idea of the relationship you want to wind up in, any guy is as good as any other. Think about it as you go through the summer.” I went off to make lunch. All this hoeing and seeding was hard work. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her pick up her three folders of stories and start leafing through them. Good.

  Chapter 7: Endless Summer

  Things progressed quickly. I’m sure she felt that she was constantly being bombarded with new things that stretched her in ways, and places, that she never expected. But I had to hurry her a bit. I had a plan with a deadline, and the most delicate part of it required a stretch of downtime on her part, and I couldn’t rush that or control how long it might be.

  She was an apt student, I’ll give her that. We went from handjobs after the Opera, to fellatio after a jazz festival, to 69 after a day at the beach. Each new technique was still being justified under the heading of  “avoiding intercourse.” Each date involved a complete review of all the previously-learned skills, with refinements, coaching, and extensions. So it came about that, on a weekend as July turned into August, after “As You Like It,” we were in my bed, spooned, me buried to the hilt in her rectum. And yes, anal was pushing the “avoiding intercourse” justification as far as it could be pushed.

She had waddled around all week with a butt plug in one end, and a pained expression on the other. The build-up had begun in the middle of July, when I started playing with her asshole, running a finger around the rim, then into it, then two fingers. When she got beyond the revulsion, the squeamishness, when she admitted that she liked it, a little, then a lot, I took her along slowly, to wind up where we were now. The butt plug lay glistening on the side table next to the bed. I was pleased with her: she had come without any clitoral stimulation after the foreplay. She had fully learned “relaxed going in, grip coming out.” I waited for the sweat to dry.

  “Allison, baby.”

  “Mmmm, so full.”

  “Allison, honey, it’s time.”

  “Nnnnn, a little longer?”

  “No honey, off you go to bed,” and I pulled out, gently, got a hot washcloth, and cleaned us both up.

  She rolled over in my arms for a last kiss. “Jack, I keep saying this, but I never knew, so much pleasure…. I can’t wait to see the lesson for next week!” And she gathered up her robe and made her way with careful steps to the door. She’d be a little sore for a few days, in spite of the preparation.

  And she’d be surprised at next week’s lesson.

  Monday came and went with making a living. I shut down at five and found her on the back porch, wearing a little halter number, and handed her her drink. She had developed a taste for Scotch-and-soda.

  She sat in my lap, a big smile on her face, careless of the amount of thigh she showed. Her kiss tasted of Scotch-and-soda. She put her arms around my neck and asked, “What’s the new ‘skill’ for this week, teach?”

  “Nothing.” She sat up, her face blank. “You’re done. You passed. You’ve mastered the ‘essential skills.’ You can go to Central High in the fall if you want, and date, if you want. There’s one more thing you could learn, but I can’t teach it to you.”

  A little chuckle from her. “I’d sort of forgotten about Central. And high school boys. Why would I want to date one of those?” Another kiss. She used the same disparaging tone I had used on the words “boys” and “those.” The kiss lingered.

  After a long while she came up for air and looked up. “What about the ‘one more thing,’ and why can’t you teach it to me?”

  Here we go, I thought. Show time. Everything on one throw of the dice.

  “You remember when we talked about relationships? Permissions and assumptions? Changing relationships? Flexibility in defining what’s permitted?” A nod. “The stepfather-stepdaughter relationship isn’t really well defined, but whatever it is, you and I have been pushing the envelope of what society permits, really hard. The ‘one more thing’ would be the skills of actual intercourse, and that, baby, is /not/ permitted to us in this relationship.”

  I shut up. Now I’d learn whether the seed I’d planted a month earlier would sprout.

Her hand crept under her skirt. Having spent two months playing with herself in front of me, she no longer had any shame on that score. That was unfortunate, but it was the price that had to be paid. Perhaps I could fix that over time. “And actual screwing, it’s even better yet?” I nodded. “I can’t imagine anyone I want to give my virginity to more…. But we can’t?” I shook my head, not saying anything. “If it’s better than what we’ve done, God, just the idea. I mean, I’ve been reading all those naughty stories all summer, but it’s just words. But if I can’t do it with you, Jack….”

  The silence stretched on. Had I been too subtle? I had to keep my peace though, because she had to think that this was her idea.

  “Waaait.” She drew out the word. “You said ‘in this relationship.’ Do /we/ get to change the type of relationship we’re in?”

  I barely resisted the impulse to pump my fist in the air in victory. “Well, doll, I haven’t really thought about it.” Like hell, I hadn’t. “I mean, parent-child is forever, but like I said, the stepparent role sort of loosely defined, and it’s by ceremony, not by blood. Are you thinking….”

  “Well, if we can’t ‘do it’ as stepfather-stepdaughter, and God, do I want to ‘do it’ with you, then maybe we should choose another relationship.”

  My little seed had become a beautiful little sprout.

  “Honey, my legs are going to sleep with you sitting on me like that.” She dismounted, still deep in thought. Now for the next step. “It’s an interesting idea.” I made a show of giving it some consideration. “Look, if you’re thinking about changing the type of relationship we have, we need to go at this carefully. I think both of us want something more permanent than ‘boyfriend-girlfriend,’ and I don’t want to marry again: Jane was my first and last wife.” I stopped, and let the silence stretch out. “You remember the ‘What’s the point?’ discussion?” A nod. “Any thoughts on what kind of relationship you want? Do your folders of stories tell you anything?”

  “Yes, daddy.” She blushed, “I…”

  “Wait.” I stopped her. “Here’s what I want you to do. Think it through. You’re going to be making a decision that will affect your happiness for a long time to come. When you’re ready, when you’re sure, write me a love letter. In the letter, seduce me into the relationship you’ve chosen. Sell it to me. Make me want it, too. Anticipate my doubts and objections, and overcome them. Draw me a picture of how we’d live. Writing the letter should make you want to play with yourself. When I read it, I should have the same reaction. Understand?”

  “Hmm, interesting. Yes. When do you want to see the letter?”

  “When you’re really ready, and really sure.” And that closed the discussion. We finished our drinks and went in to start dinner.

Two weeks passed. I didn’t touch her, not once. I told her she no longer needed to play with herself, certainly not in front of me. After all, all those things had been “training,” and the course was over. I was her stepfather. I was not her lover, never had been. Yeah, right. Nothing was said about the letter. But I could see that she was spending a lot of time in her room, on her computer at all hours, and no, she wasn’t on the Internet. The way her wastebasket was filling up, she was going through a lot of drafts of something.

No, I didn’t dig through her trash. I didn’t think I needed to, because I knew what stories wound up in her “Oh, wow!” folder.

  Chapter 8: Billet Doux

  Dearest Jack, my only love,

  You have given me so much pleasure this summer, without demanding anything in return. I’m sure it’s getting old to hear it, but I never knew my body could give me such pleasure. The ‘good Sisters’ can go to Hell. I hope my body has given you a little pleasure, too? All this time you thought you were going to turn me over to a bunch of pimply high school boys to play with.

You didn’t touch me these last two weeks. I’ve been climbing the curtains with need, but it proved to me that you really thought of all that stuff we did as ‘training,’ not a chance to grope your stepdaughter. Thank you, and I’m ashamed that I ever doubted.

  You asked me, what relationship would I pick? I’ve watched you work, and you taught me to think about ‘requirements.’ What a dusty-sounding word for something so juicy. Requirements: I want to please you, give you pleasure the way you have given me pleasure. All day, every day, any way, without limits. I want you to take without waiting for me to give. But what relationships are without limits? Even a mistress can say ‘no,’ and how can ‘no’ give pleasure? And what relationship would accommodate my desperate desire to please?

  You told me to go through my folder of stories. I didn’t really need to, because weeks ago I knew what fired my rocket. It was the stories of submission, of dominance, of helpless slave girls weeping and coming as they served the lusts of cruel and demanding masters in some jungle or on some faraway planet. The words I’ve written look so corny on the page. Dammit, they are corny. But I look at the words and say, that’s what I want. Because those girls give pleasure, no, it is demanded of them, torn from them, without limit, and ‘no’ is gone from their vocabulary.

  You will say that slavery is dead in modern America. But we’re defining our own relationship, and we can use slavery as a metaphor, a starting place, can’t we? There’s no property ownership of people, any more, but in terms of permissions and assumptions, it’s a relationship where everything is permitted to you, and I may assume nothing, call the relationship what you will. To borrow the phrase you used at the beginning of the summer, all my time, energy, and focus will go to serve your pleasure, and my discomfort means nothing. Any lapse from perfection would merit punishment, because any lapse from perfection would mean that I had failed to give you all the pleasure I could and should and must.

  You ask, how can such a relationship last? What’s in it for little Allison? I’ll tell you a story. Suppose that early in their relationship, sometime before the Chateau, O did something for Renee. The task itself held no pleasure for O. It was the fact that Renee got pleasure from her efforts that gave O the pleasure she needed to make the doing worthwhile. Pleasure by reflection. Take it another turn. Renee knew that O didn’t enjoy doing the task. Knowing that O imposed upon herself, or accepted being imposed upon, increased Renee’s pleasure, even if he took no direct pleasure in the gift itself. That’s what we mean when we say “It’s the thought that counts.” But either way, O got her pleasure from Renee’s pleasure. The more O suffered for him, the more Renee was pleased, and /therefore/ the more pleasure O got from pleasing him. And /therefore/ the more pleasure O got from suffering. That’s what’s in it for me: I will get pleasure from your pleasure, the way the moon gets its light from the sun. And when I must, I will feel pleasure from your punishments, because I will know that they are correcting me, preparing me to please you better.

  You want to know how we would live. And I say, any way that gives you pleasure. Chain me in a dungeon or let me run. Keep me naked or clothe me in silks. Beat me or stroke me with scented oils. Force me come for hours or deprive me for weeks. My last choice will be to do what you choose to do with me.

  You have but to claim me. Have I seduced you, have I sold it to you?

Yours without hope, the free woman now known as

Allison Kennedy.

      Chapter 9: September Song

  No, I didn’t “claim” Allison on the spot, much as my dick argued for it. You can imagine that the letter made for interesting dinner conversation, which I will spare you, except the following:

  “Allison, you’re proposing a significant change in our relationship.” A nod, and a shrug from her, as if to say, ‘well, duh’? “Back to what you know about relationships. Generally, when there’s a significant change in a significant relationship, there’s a more-or-less public ceremony to mark the fact. Whether you’re talking about signing a contract, or formalizing a marriage, there’s a ceremony. That means that there are witnesses who can vouch for the fact of the relationship. It makes it harder for either party to back out of the new relationship, or claim that it’s something that it isn’t. And it makes a kind of punctuation mark in time, making it clear that ‘before now’ was the old relationship, and ‘after now’ is something new, with no going back.”

  “Well,” she said with light sarcasm, “I’ll pop over to the archdiocese and get a copy of their enslavement ceremony.”

  “Look, you write well. Write your own ceremony. I don’t doubt that the Internet would yield endless examples with a search for ‘enslavement ceremony,’ but you can get your inspiration where you like. Couples write their own wedding ceremonies, why not write your own ceremony of claiming?”

  “I guess I don’t have any pressing engagements just now. If I’m going to be a slave girl, I don’t need to worry about summer reading lists for either Central High OR Saint Virginia.”  She didn’t need to know that I had plans afoot on the subject of schooling.

  “Good. A little advice: keep it short. You can take a lot of the text from your love letter. Make it clear what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, what you expect of the new relationship. You can use a bit of theater: you don’t have to tell your audience something if you can make it clear by showing them.”

She disappeared into her room, and again the wastebasket began to overflow. Yet in a few days, she was satisfied. I was delighted with the result. Invitations went out to a select few of our more open-minded friends, and the remaining preparations were indistinguishable from any small garden wedding.

  I didn’t touch her, not even once. But I did send her to her OB/GYN to get on The Pill.

  The great day came, and the well-stocked caterer’s tent went up in the garden, near what they assumed to be some sort of arbor or trellis. Chairs were set out. The caterer’s people were dismissed.

  I found Allison in her bedroom, looking over the garden, dreamy-eyed.

  “Are you sure about this, baby?”

  She came into my arms, urgent, squirming. “God yes. I’m scared as hell. I’ve got butterflies the size of bombers in my stomach, And I’m running like a faucet ‘down there.’ I’m glad you made me keep the ceremony short.”

  I laughed, and kissed the top of her forehead. “Enjoy your last hour as a free woman. The guests are starting to arrive.”

  I did the meet-and-greet thing, and Allison came out to circulate with the guests. I was in my suit, and she was wearing a white, lacy, calf-length, loose summer dress that she had had made for the ceremony. Finally we had a quorum, the guests sat on the chairs gathered at one corner of the garden, and Allison and I took our places in front of the small group. She stood at my side, we faced the group, I put my arm around her shoulder, and she put her arms around my waist and snuggled in.

  Allison had taken my advice, and copied liberally from her love letter, so much of what follows will be familiar language to the reader. I started in, from the script that she had written.

  “Welcome, friends, to our home and to this ceremony. What you’re about to be witnesses to will mark a change in the relationship between Allison and myself. I’m confident in saying that you are unlikely ever to see another ceremony like it. There will be elements of the ceremony that are likely to profoundly disturb some people. Each of you has been invited because of your long friendship with Allison or myself, and because we believe you to be sufficiently open-minded to accept what you’re about to see. If you even suspect that we might have been wrong, we suggest that you excuse yourself at this time.” I paused. Nobody moved, beyond the odd raised eyebrow.

  Allison took over. “I wrote this ceremony. Myself. Every word of it. With two exceptions, which Jack will explain when we come to them, I completely scripted each event in the ceremony. Not to put too fine a point on it: if the question occurs to you, I want this to happen the way it is going to happen.” Several guests traded glances.

I went on. “I’m glad that’s out of the way. Let’s begin.”

I disengaged from Allison, and we turned to face each other. The audience was to one side of us, and could see both of our faces in profile. We began the ceremony, looking into each other’s eyes.

  “What is your name?”

  “Allison Kennedy.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “To give myself to you, voluntarily, freely, completely, and irrevocably.”

  Not too bad so far, rather vanilla stuff.

  “What relationship do you seek?”

  “A relationship where everything is permitted to you. I forbid nothing, I may forbid nothing. I demand nothing, expect nothing. I accept everything in advance, without knowing what you will demand. I want you to take without waiting for me to give.”

I stole a glance at the audience. The eyebrows were starting to go up again. Back to Allison.

  “What do you call this relationship?”

  “Call the relationship what you will: if slavery is dead today, let me use it as a metaphor. All my time, energy, and focus will go to serve your pleasure, my discomfort means nothing. I want to please you, give you pleasure the way you have given me pleasure, give without taking. All day, every day, any way, without limits.”

  “What if you fail to please to your utmost?”

  “I would beg you to punish me for failing to fulfill my promise to you, and correct me so that I did not fail again.”

  “Why do you want this relationship?”

  “I will get pleasure from pleasing you, the way the moon gets its light from the sun.”

  “What do you offer?”

“Absolute and instant obedience. I won’t negotiate, won’t consider, won’t accept, won’t even wait to understand. Just do, instantly, like a reflex.”

  “How will you be called?”

  “I will have no name, unless you wish to give me one.”

  “How will you be clothed?”

  “My clothing has been for concealment. How can concealment give you pleasure? I will be clothed as you wish, even if not at all.”

  “How will you be fed?”

  “By your hand, and by your wishes, even if not at all.”

  “What are your rights? What limits do you place upon the relationship?”

  “I want no rights, because they imply choice, the option to refuse. I place no limits. How can refusal or limits increase your pleasure?”

  “Very well.” I put my hands on her shoulders. “I accept you.” I pushed down gently, and she went to her knees. I thought absently that there would be grass stains on her dress. I twisted her hair into a rope, gripped it in my fist, and faced the audience. I raised my voice, a little, because this was the punctuation mark. “I claim this woman as my property, to do with as I see fit.”

A murmur through the audience. Rub their faces in it. I turned back to her and looked down. Time to show the “after.”

Still with my hand gripping her hair: “What are you?”

  “If it pleases you, sir, let me be your slave.”

  “Why do you exist?”

  “To give you pleasure.”

  “And if you cease to give pleasure?”

  “If it pleases you, sir, I would cease to exist.”

  “Do you have the right to say ‘no’?”

  “I’m sorry sir, I don’t know that word.”

  “What is your name?”

  “You have not chosen to give me a name.”

  I turned again to the audience, and dropped my hand from her hair. “This is the first of two moments in the ceremony that Allison did not script. She does not know the name I will choose for her to wear in her new life.” I walked around her, pretending to consider.

I had a wicked thought. “You certainly are long and slender. Perhaps I will call you ‘Sprout.’  She looked up at me with the look that said, “That has gone far enough.”

  “Yes, I will call you ‘Sprout.’” She looked at me with horror. I could tell that she wanted to shake her head, but caught herself in time. Good girl.

  “What is your name?”

  A tear began to run down the side of her nose. “’Sprout,’ sir, if it pleases you.”

  “It pleases me. Stand up, Sprout.”

  She stood, still facing me. Her eyes were wide, her head making the tiniest of ‘no’ motions, not of negation, but of disbelief that I would do this to her. I looked at her. “On the other hand, you’re smarter than the average vegetable, a little. Maybe even as smart as the average alley cat.” I snapped my fingers. “That’s it! I will call you ‘Allie.’”

  She had hated that nickname, never permitted it, corrected everyone who used it. But it was a promotion from ‘Sprout.’

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “What is your name?”

  “’Allie,’ sir, if it pleases you.”

  “It pleases me.”

  A pause. I nodded to her. She wiped the tear from her cheek, and turned to the audience for a moment, and said “We are beginning the last part of the ceremony. I beg you again to remember that the free woman I used to be wrote this as you will see it, and that she wanted this to happen.” She turned back to me, and nodded. She knew what was coming. After all, she’d written the script.

  I said, “Are you a free woman?”

  “I am a slave.”

  She might have said “no,” but her new identity did not permit it.

  “Is a slave allowed to dress as a free woman?”

  “Only with her owner’s permission.”

  “Do you have that permission?”

  “My owner has not given me that permission.”

  “What is the punishment for a slave who dresses as a free woman without permission?”

  “Whatever her owner chooses.”

  “Very well. Remove the offending garment.” Murmurs from the audience. I thought they were taking this all rather well.

  She reached to the nape of her neck where there was a single drawstring, tied in a simple bow knot. She tugged on the knot, and a second later she was gloriously, proudly, royally, totally naked. A white Aida. The dress made a white puddle about her feet.

  “You will be caned for forgetting your place, for attempting to disguise yourself as a free woman, and for concealing the body whose appearance gives me pleasure.” I led her to the trellis/arbor construction a couple of steps away. It was built far more solidly than would be needed to hold up a rose bush. Soon her hands were cuffed, separated, and raised above her head. She was facing away from the audience.

  I faced the guests again. “This element of the ceremony is to accomplish three things. First, to prove to Allie beyond doubt that I will punish her when I wish, with or without justification. Second, for her to prove to me that she will accept such treatment if I choose to deliver it, with or without justification. Third, to prove to you that she voluntarily accepts this behavior as part of our new relationship. Allison scripted this scene, excepting only the number of stripes Allie is to receive. To tell you the truth, I don’t know how many it will be, myself.”

  I put in Allie’s mouth a folded washcloth, not as a gag, but to protect her teeth and tongue when she bit down from the pain. I picked up a cane that had been hanging on the trellis. Her eyes were closed. I pulled back the cane and struck at her ass, very hard.

  She stiffened, rose on her toes, and moaned into the washcloth.

  At the next strike, on the back of her thighs, she raised one leg, as though she were trying to mount a bicycle.

I was looking for something, and found it on the fifth strike. The last three had been across her back. She had finally started crying, and her head hung down between her stretched arms. The sound coming through the washcloth was a continuous keening, like very distant singing. I was surprised to find that I was crying, too. I dropped the cane.

  I whispered in her ear, “That’s all, Allie. It’s over. You did fine. Rest for a minute and I’ll be back.” 

I left her hanging there and went back to the guests, wiping my eyes. “That concludes the ceremony of the claiming of Allie, the woman you knew as Allison Kennedy. I would like to emphasize a few points. First, when Allison became Allie, you heard her give up the right to say ‘no’, which includes the right to refuse access to her body. However, that right was transferred to her new owner. I will not be pleased if anyone attempts to use my property without my permission. I trust that I make myself clear?” I made eye contact with each guest. There weren’t all that many of them. “Second, some day you may meet Allie on the street. It is likely that she will be disguised as a free woman. I would appreciate it if you were discreet. I don’t expect Allie’s new life to remain fully secret for long, but I expect that you will use judgment in whom you tell, and how, and how you speak to her when you meet.

  “Finally, you have seen about all of Allie there is to see. But I would be a poor host if I continued to dangle such a morsel naked in front of you, so she will be clothed, after a fashion, during the reception. Refreshments will be available in the tent in twenty minutes or so. Please enjoy the gardens for a few moments and then join us.”

I bent down to pick up a small piece of white cloth that had been lying on the ground nearby. It was a little stained from lying there, not entirely clean any more. I went back to Allie. I took the washrag from her mouth, gave her a drink of water, kissed away her tears, disconnected her cuffs from the arbor, and we put our arms around each other. “You OK?” I felt her nod her head beneath my chin. “Did it come out the way you wanted?”

  “Yes. Yes. But oh, GOD, that thing hurts. Please make sure I never deserve the cane?” She shuddered in my arms.

  It was time for one last bit of establishing the new relationship, at least for the moment. Without speaking, I gave her the cloth I was holding. She swabbed her face and blew her nose on it. She looked around quickly, and wiped the soaked insides of her thighs, too. When she was done, she handed it to me. I shook it out into a little tunic-like dress, handed it back, and told her to put it on and go serve my guests their refreshments. All she could say, with wide eyes and a certain air of wonder, was “Oh, you meanie.”

After the last guest had gone, I took the cuffs off of Allie’s wrists and sent her in to bathe, then called the waiting caterer in through the gate to come get their equipment. When they’d finally gone, I went up to the master bedroom and found Allie kneeling at the side of the bed. The welts were beginning to turn purple. I didn’t know how long she’d been waiting. It occurred to me that she had probably spent hours practicing that position, alone in her room.

I ignored her while I changed out of my suit into a robe, and splashed my face. Then I came over and sat on the edge of the bed, took her face between my hands, and kissed her. “OK, slave, what’s going on in your head? Just let it flow.”

  “I’ve been kneeling like this forever. My back and ass sting like fury. When you came into the room now I wanted to stand up, throw you on your back on the bed, and rape you. But somewhere deep down where I hadn’t realized it before, I knew that ‘I want,’ is gone, gone, gone. They told me you were crying when you caned me. I’m making a wet spot on your carpet.”

  I smiled into her eyes. “Come to bed, Allie. It’s time.”  I guided her up onto her feet, re-cuffed her hands behind her back, and purely for theatrics, chained her ankle to the bedpost. It’s not as though she was wanting to escape. But if she wanted the “slave girl” shtick, who was I to spoil it for her by denying her the trimmings that came with it? I ran her quickly through her repertoire, as best she could with her hands cuffed, skipping the anal. Then I got on my back and had her straddle and mount me. She took two or three shallow strokes up against her maidenhead, set her face, and plunged downward. “Eeeeeeuuugh” was all she could manage through gritted teeth, and she froze in position for a minute or two. I rested my thumb on her clit, and after a while she began a small, experimental movement of her hips. In a moment a tiny smile came to her face, and she began to “grip on the upstroke, loose on the downstroke.” It was delightful, and neither one of us could hold out for long. When she came, she convulsed once, twice, and pitched forward in a dead faint. I narrowly avoided getting my nose broken by her descending forehead. Served me right.

  I disconnected her cuffs, leaving the chain on her ankle. I spread her out on a little mat at the foot of the bed, covered her with a thin blanket, cleaned myself of the fluids of her inaugural fuck, and went to bed.

  Chapter 10: The First Day of the Rest of Your Life

  The next morning, a Sunday, I awoke before the alarm, and got to my feet. Allie was still zonked. Her thighs were encrusted and bloody. She was beautiful. I prodded her belly with my toe, not gently, and was rewarded with an “Oof.”

“Up, lazy wench. This is the first day of the rest of your life.”

  She groaned, and then, with surprising grace, flowed into a kneeling position. I say surprising, given how stiff and sore she must have been. “How may I serve you, master?”

  I reached around and took the chain off of her ankle, and the cuffs from her wrists. “Go make my coffee, shower, put on your robe, and get back here. You have twenty-five minutes.” I went to take my own shower.

  She made it in time, just, put the coffee on my desk, and knelt at my feet. It was clear that she wasn’t eager to sit, just yet.

  “OK, it’s time to establish the expectations under which you’ll live in your new role. Here are two notebooks, and a pen. On the cover of the first, write ‘Policies and Assignments.’ I’m about to give you a list of policies, which are long-term rules you must obey any time a given policy applies. Assignments are one-time things I want you to do, like pick up a quart of milk on the way home, or whatever. Policies go in the front of that notebook, assignments in the back.”

  “On cover of the second, write ‘Discipline.’ I expect you to put an entry in that notebook any time you feel that you have done less than demanded, less than your best, less than perfection. Call my attention to it. I will put in the correction I consider appropriate, and will check it off when it has been executed, which may be some time later. At the top of the first page of each notebook, write, in large letters, ‘ABSOLUTE OBEDIENCE.’ You will keep a copy of your love letter attached to the inside front cover of the ‘policies’ notebook. You are to keep both of these notebooks available to me. As a practical matter, that means that when we’re in the house, just don’t lose track of where they are. When we leave the house, you must have them in your hand, or in your bag.”

  “Now, policies. When you are in the master bedroom suite, you will not speak without permission. Anywhere else, I love the sound of your voice, and I want to hear you. You are smart, and witty, and I want you to talk to me, whenever you wish. But in this suite, no. How do you get permission? If I ask you a question that you can’t answer by pointing, or nodding, or raising so-many fingers, you automatically have permission to speak. Otherwise, take a position where I can see you, and raise your hand, just like in grade school. If I give you permission, you may speak. Write that down. Not verbatim, but make notes of the important points.” She wrote.

  “I do not want to be called ‘master,’ or ‘sir,’ or any other honorific. Let your actions show your respect. If you find it necessary to use a noun of direct address, you may call me ‘Mr. Kennedy.’” She wrote.

  “Some owners want a slave that does exactly what she’s told, when she’s told, never anticipates an order, and no more. I own you in part because of your mind. Be inventive. Anticipate my desires. Look for ways to please me that I don’t expect. Surprise and delight me. Astonish me! Of course, if you get it wrong, it will go badly for you.”

  “You will not normally be naked during the day. I want you to put together a wardrobe of clothing that you will wear around the house. I’m thinking in terms of the degree of coverage of a tennis dress, or a swimsuit coverup, or an ice skater’s costume, or the kind of thing a desperately horny girl would wear clubbing. Use your imagination. It should be clothing you’d be mortified to be seen wearing in public. We may have guests here from time to time, some of whom will not know of our relationship, and I won’t give you the opportunity to dress any differently for them from the way you do for me. Maintaining anything like decency should be a constant struggle, and a losing battle. I want you clothed, but only just, not because I expect to become bored with your enchanting naked figure, but because I want to have the ability to deny you clothing as punishment, or for my amusement. I don’t want you to get used to being naked. There is nothing less interesting than a slut. This is implies an assignment.” She flipped to the back of the notebook and looked up. “Go shopping for day clothes.”

  “Further on clothing.” She flipped to the front of the notebook. “You will wear nothing that blocks my access to your cunt or ass at any time, in public or in private. No panties, no pants, no pantyhose. There is a standing exemption for athletic activities. Now that I’ve broken you in, use a tampon during your period.”

  “Policy: you will be totally hairless below the neck. Assignment: shave, then acquire and use a home electrical depilatory kit.”

  “Your lips will be slack and your mouth open at all times.”

  “You will keep your asshole greased for my use at all times.”

  I waited while she caught up.

  “I will demand that you take care of yourself, both physically and mentally. Assignment: enroll in a health club and sign up for any exercise regimen that keeps you limber and fit. I don’t care if it’s yoga or kickboxing or anything else. Work up a sweat five days a week.”

  “In terms of keeping yourself fit mentally, I’ve had some discussions with Chancellor Reed of the State University here in town. He’s reviewed your record from Saint Virginia along with your SATs, and sees no reason why you shouldn’t be able to enter State as a freshman immediately. You’ll…”

  “Jack! State! Omigawd, State!”

“Allie. What have you just done? Look at the policies.”

Her mouth snapped shut, and she scanned down the policies. She had spoken out of turn, and addressed me incorrectly. Another scan through the policies. I had asked her a question she couldn’t answer by pointing, so she automatically had permission to speak. “I spoke without permission in the master suite. I didn’t call you ‘Mr. Kennedy.’ I’m sorry, Mr. Kennedy.”

  “You will be. Put it in your Discipline Book. I’m not going to beat you for this—too many beatings shows a lack of inventiveness on the part of the owner. Besides, it was your mouth that sinned, not your back or your ass. For ‘punishment,’ put ‘four hours with gag.’” She looked up at me, and swallowed. She had never been gagged. “Write it. And there’s no time like the present.” I reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a penis gag, one recently made to my own specifications, in that the depth of oral penetration could be easily adjusted. She still had some trouble with her gag reflex, and this was an opportunity. I guessed at the right depth, and strapped it home. “Awrk! Hngrrh!! Hngrrh!!!” Hmm, back off a quarter of an inch? Ah, that will do. She was far from comfortable, gagging every few seconds, her chin pointed upward, swallowing constantly to fight the reflex, but that was the idea. “Note the start time in your Discipline Book.” She did, with difficulty. “And when you drool, clean it up. Come back to me when the time is up and I’ll remove the gag.”

  “As I was saying about State. You’ll need to take come catch-up courses to make up for the year you will miss at Saint Virginia, but the Advanced Placement courses you took will partially offset that. And put in an assignment: Complete application paperwork for State. That will be all for now. You’re dismissed.”

She stood up, wiped the drool that was already forming on her lower lip, and came around my desk and kissed me. That’s hard to do with your face is as full of machinery as hers was, but she managed somehow. Then she followed her nipples out of the room, trailing behind her the occasional sound of choking.

  Chapter 11: Thanks for the Memories

  It was six months later, that our little household changed again. Allie came into the study, and I saw that today was “latex maid day.” It wasn’t my fetish, but she always seemed extra juicy after a “latex day,” so I didn’t mind. The chain hobble between her ankles didn’t slow her down all that much, except on the stairs. And the impressively-sized ballgag hanging loosely around her neck was like a bright red pendant on a necklace. The woman dressed kinkier every day. Yesterday had been “Catholic schoolgirl day,” though I doubt the good Sisters would have approved Allie’s alterations to their uniform.

She raised her hand. A handcuff was closed around her wrist, the other cuff dangling and open, ready.

  “Yes?”

  “Mr. Kennedy, your birthday is coming up in a couple of months, and I was hoping to do something special to surprise you. But…it will take money.”

  “How much?”

  She named a figure, and I raised an eyebrow. “That’s some surprise.” I thought for a moment. Business had been good, recently, and I had a fair amount of money laid away. What the hell, it’s only money. “Very well, go ahead.”

“Thank you, Mr. Kennedy. You won’t be disappointed.” She knew what would happen if I were.

  I wrote out the check, blank as to payee (wouldn’t be much of a surprise otherwise, would it?) and forgot about it. In the spirit of the thing, I was careful not to look for the cancelled check after it cleared.

  A couple of months later, on the day before my birthday, and right at the end of Allie’s freshman year, I received a thin envelope in the mail, with a return address of the Psych department at the University she was attending. Allie was downstairs, somewhere. Upon opening it, I found the following letter, on University letterhead:

    * * *

  Dear Mr. Kennedy,

  Allow me to introduce myself. I am Dr. ____, Professor of Psychology, in the Department of Psychology and Psychiatry at State University. I am writing you at the request of Miss Allie Kennedy.

  My particular research interest is the human memory, and specifically how it is distorted. I have almost accidentally become an authority on the phenomenon of ‘false memory,’ by which people are induced to ‘remember,’ quite vividly, things that simply never happened. There have been multiple court cases recently in which this has been an important element. People have fully and honestly confessed to crimes they couldn’t possibly have committed, truly believing themselves guilty. Young women have, in the belief that they are telling the truth, accused their fathers of rape, of fathering children upon them, young women who passed lie detector tests to support the accusation—young women whom subsequent medical examination shows still to be virgins. There are other cases that I won’t bore you with.

Suffice it that the phenomenon of ‘false memory’ is now tolerably well understood, to the point of having made the pages of ‘Scientific American.’

Now to the present.

  Miss Kennedy has spoken to me at length about your relationship with her. It is not my place to judge either of you. I will only note that you have a remarkable woman here, and I hope you deserve her. She came to me a couple of months ago with an extraordinary request: she wanted me to create in her a false memory. After considerable soul-searching, and after cross-examining her at length to ensure that this is what she really wanted, I agreed to do so, and have done so.

  (I worked it out and thought, yeah, and the size of my check didn’t hurt, either.)

  I have videotapes of all sessions between us under lock and key, to protect all the parties involved.

  You will find in Attachment A a manuscript in Miss Kennedy’s hand giving you her rationale for this action.

Attachment B is a manuscript, also in Miss Kennedy’s hand, of the ‘memory’ she asked me to create, which I have done. You should be aware that one of the characteristics of ‘false memory’ is that, once the core images have been introduced, the subject often unconsciously elaborates them, fills them in, with details that will be every bit as vivid as the core images, and which they will believe to be true with absolute certainty.

  At her request, Miss Kennedy currently has no memory of having visited me, nor is she aware of the ‘memory’ which lies latent in her mind. Attachment C contains the trigger phrase that will bring the latent ‘memory’ forth. Attachment C also contains a trigger phrase that will enable her to remember that ‘memory’ is false, and how it came to be in her mind. The second trigger phrase exists in case you decide that, to speak bluntly, the whole thing was a mistake. Please understand that each trigger phrase can be used only once. This is because the transition will be almost violent, at the psychological level, and I felt I needed to prevent the psychological damage that multiple transitions could cause to her mind, rather as repeated concussions do to the brain.

  Finally, in the event of your death, she will recall visiting me, and will understand that the memory, if activated, is false. This is a precaution to avoid potential emotional, or even legal, problems that are unforeseeable at this time, but which would otherwise be very difficult to reverse if no one knew to notify me to intervene.

  I hope that you and Miss Kennedy find pleasure in what she has asked me to do. Remember that it can be undone.

Sincerely yours,

Dr. ______

    * * *

  I turned the page, and was confronted with a page of Allie’s handwriting on lined legal paper. At the top was overtyped “Attachment A. Page 1 of 1.” In the lower corner, I could make out what must be Dr. ____’s initials. Careful fellow.

    * * *

  Dear Mr. Kennedy, my lord and my love,

  These pages I write are the only physical existence of my gift to you. Please bear with me while I justify my actions.

  You have made for me a comfortable and protecting home, for which I love you. You are a demanding owner, for which I am grateful.

  You know I want only to please you. You know that I try to meet your demands before you know that you will make them.  I work on my skills to be good for you.

  I know of only one thing I have left to offer for your greater pleasure, but it’s something you’ve never wanted, and that is my pain. I could do more, give more, but the things I could do and give would not bring you pleasure today, because you’d have to hurt me to get them, and you have been too decent an owner to demand that, though I’d give my pain freely and gladly for your pleasure.

  Do you remember what I put in my love letter not so long ago? “The more that O suffered for him, the more Renee was pleased, and /therefore/ the more pleasure O got from pleasing him.”

  You could wring more pleasure from me, more pleasure for both of us, but only if hurting me would please you.

  My gift, if you will have it, is to make it possible for me to ‘remember’ that I have gotten pleasure from being hurt, not only indirectly by pleasing you, but also somehow directly, in the pain itself. I will be able to ‘remember’ that you have gotten pleasure from my pain, AND SO HAVE I. I want to give you greater pleasure by making it easier for you to hurt me, to demand my pain, because you will know that I now believe myself capable of finding, and will expect to find, pleasure in the pain.

  You hold the keys in your hands. Please understand that, at the time you read this letter, I will have no remembrance of having written it.

  All my obedience, devotion, and love,

  Allie

    * * *

  My first reaction was, “Oh, really!”, which is what I say when I’ve got nothing to say. The woman had, indeed, astonished me. I turned to the brief “Attachment B” and read carefully the things she’d asked to “remember,” things that never happened. She wanted to believe that, when I spanked her that first time, she’d become very aroused, and tried to hump the wall while I was out of the room. To “remember” that, during one of her private masturbation sessions, she’d experimented with clothespins on her nipples and it got her off (her note said that she had tried clothespins, but they just hurt). To think that, while I was caning her at the ceremony, she had orgasmed from the pain in front of everyone. There was more, but that was the tone of all of it. The girl wanted to please me, and if it took her pain, she was ready to deliver it.

  I sat at my desk for a long time after I finished reading. The sunlight outside began to fade into dusk.

It took a long time for me to put my finger on what was bothering me. There was an assumption here: Allie was assuming that if, under the influence of her false memory, she ‘remembered’ having gotten pleasure from pain, her belief that it had happened to her before would mean that she would in fact feel real masochistic pleasure when experiencing real pain, something that, as far as I knew, she never had done. She was betting that the expectation would cause the reality. That was an assumption, and a risk she was apparently willing to take.

  Did I want to take that risk with her? The problem was that, if I took her up on this offer, an offer that at this point she didn’t even know she’d made, and I began hurting her, and it didn’t work out, what then? Sure, I could back the worm out of her mind, it said here, but after doing so, she’d still remember that, at some time in the real world, I had actually been willing to hurt her for my pleasure, not for punishment. What would that do to our relationship? What would she think of me, then?

  I flipped back to her letter, and re-read “…though I’d give my pain freely and gladly for your pleasure.” 

While I was reading, Allie came silently into the room, carrying my evening drink. She was wearing only a Very Short red tunic. It was not sheer, but had the perfect quality of translucence such that, if you’d looked at it as you walked past her on the street, you’d be fifty feet beyond her before your brain said, “Did I see what I think I saw?”  She knelt gracefully in front of my desk, and reached up to put the drink on the desk’s surface in front of me, meeting my eyes. She pulled the hem of the tunic down to cover her slit, and blushed.

  Without further thought, I turned to Attachment C. A day early, perhaps, but it was time to unwrap my birthday present.

  *** END PART ONE, BEGIN PART TWO ***

  Training Allie part 2, revised and extended {Les Evans} [2/2]

  “Training Allie” was originally posted as “Allie.”

  Introduction to Chapters 12 and on:

  When I submitted the first 11 chapters of “Allie,” I really thought I was done with the story. But then a request poured in for “more Allie,” so here it is. The characters develop in a somewhat different direction from how I thought they might when I submitted the first version. Be warned, the tone of the new chapters is considerably darker than the first 11. If you’re rigidly pro-life, I suggest you not read on. Thanks to those who provided feedback; I hope you like what I have done with your suggestions. Chapters 1-11 have been lightly edited.

  Acknowledgements: Advice on happiness, from Marcus Aurelius. A chapter title, from an old Fellowes book. Several  images from “9-1/2 weeks.” A respectful and grateful nod to “The Story of O.” A line from an old Donald Hamilton novel.

  Chapter 12: How high? What color?

  Allie: As I knelt there, I couldn’t help reflecting on how disappointed I was in how this had all turned out. I mean, did I somehow fail to make it clear what I wanted? Jack was a nice guy, which maybe was the problem. He insisted on treating me, I don’t know, like some kind of /girlfriend/ or something! I kept hoping that he’d “grow into the job” of being a master, but it never happened. So the letter thing was kind of a “last hurrah.” If he didn’t get a clue, I didn’t know what I’d do. It was easy enough to steal a page of Psych Department letterhead, and the check went into a savings account. Tomorrow would be his birthday, and then we’d see. I planned to spend tonight working up my courage for how the relationship would, or at least might, change.

  Jack: I said, “Allie, I’m disappointed with you. You seem to think that I’m looking for some sort of /girlfriend/! Lots of fun sex, a little kinky dressup, and you think you can call yourself a slave? I’ve been hoping that you’d grow into your slavery, but it hasn’t happened. Didn’t I say, ‘Surprise me’? Look, did you promise to devote ALL your time, energy, and focus to MY pleasure?” She nodded. I said, “Let me give you an example: did you play with yourself today?” She nodded again, with a shrug that said something like, “Sure, since when is that a problem?” I said, “And whose pleasure were you seeking, mine or yours? ” The light slowly began to dawn in her eyes that she had blown it, big time. “That is part of what I mean by ‘acting like a girlfriend,’ not a slave. Let me remind you that the last time you forgot your station, I gave you six with the cane.” Real fear in her eyes now. She knew the cane. One of those six had been across her breasts.

  “Here’s what’s going to happen to you. We have the summer in front of us. By the end of the summer you will either have developed the obedience you need to be a true slave, or I will destroy you, which is to say, I will free you.”

  She wanted pain? Well, she’d get it. But not in the ways she was expecting.

  Then, in my best imitation of Lieutenant Columbo, I added, “Oh, there IS one more thing. As of now, you’re off The Pill.”

I watched her face for several minutes as a sequence of emotions rolled over her: realization that pregnancy would be inevitable, the fear of the whole medical process, the tentative glow at the thought of being a mother, the implications of not being able to finish her college degree, the fact that she would be an “unmarried mother.” All of these chased each other across her face, finally leaving her wide-eyed and open-mouthed. She raised her hand.

  I said “No, you may NOT speak. You just demonstrated that you lack the one skill you need to truly be a slave, not a kinky girlfriend. In the ceremony where I claimed you, did you not offer ‘Absolute and instant obedience’? You promised—your words—not to consider, accept, or wait to understand. Yet you just spent several minutes considering, trying to accept, trying to understand. This summer, you will learn to do, not accept, or I will break you in the process.

  “There’s an old saying from the Army: When I say ‘Jump,’ you jump, and you don’t ask ‘How high?’ until your feet have already left the ground. When I say ‘Shit,’ you shit, and the only question you ask is ‘What color?’ Implications and consequences are my problem, or my pleasure, not yours. Your problem is instant and perfect execution. It should be enough for you that I believe the action I demand will please me.

“Over the course of the summer, I will give you many commands. If you learn the skill of instant obedience, if you confine yourself to execution, you will find none of the commands difficult. How hard is it NOT to take a pill, for example? But if you have not learned the skill of instant obedience, if you concern yourself with consequences, of what other people think, dealing with execution of the commands will be its own punishment.

“And now we come to this…” I waved the letter, “…which is totally bogus.” Her face went white. “I can understand a slave who, as they say in the NFL, wants to take her ‘game to the next level.’ But I make no allowance for a slave who attempts to mislead and fraudulently manipulate her master in doing so. That was a stupid thing to do. You remember what happened the last time you lied to me?” Clearly, she did. It was, you’ll forgive the expression, the seminal event in our relationship. I wrapped my hands around her throat. “In the old days, slaves who lied…” I tightened my grip “…were killed.” She could barely breathe, sucking air noisily past the constriction of my thumbs. Her hands fluttered against her thighs, resisting the desperate desire to tear my hands away. I released my grip. “But I won’t do that to you, mostly because the paperwork would be such a bother. However, I will punish you. You have forgotten your spanking, so I am going to come up with a punishment that will be unforgettable. Not today, perhaps not soon, but some day this summer I will require you to submit to a punishment that you will remember every time you look in a mirror, for the rest of your life.

“And NOW you may speak.”

  Allie: My gut felt like it had a ball of lead in it. Here we go, I thought. I had it so good, and I had to go and pull that stupid stunt. Where did I get the idea that I could put one over on him? Saints preserve me.

Suddenly, I was afraid, very afraid, more afraid than I’ve ever been in my short life, and not from having been caught in a lie. My bowels turned to water. I know that my eyes were like saucers. Although I was nearly naked, I could feel the sweat and heat on my face and sides. The fear came from several directions at once, like multiple attackers in a dark alley.

I realized—OK, I’m a little slow—that I wanted him more than he wanted me. “Who has the power?” Hoo, boy….

  Worse than that, I knew that I would drive myself to the brink of what I could stand and beyond it to persuade him to keep me. The fear wasn’t of anything I was afraid he’d do to me, but rather a fear of myself—because just now I couldn’t think of anything I would refuse him. No, more than that: if he asked, I’d give him a long list of horrible things to do to me, offer to him, beg him to do for redemption, as proofs of my devotion. I wasn’t frightened of him…I was frightened of /me/.

And worst of all, the thought of life without him was, what? Like being dangled by the scruff of my neck over a black and bottomless pit.

  There was nothing to say but, “How may I please you?”

  Jack: Allie had made a small but important mistake. How many people do you know that sign their names in green ink? Not many, right? None? Well, Allie does, a harmless affectation she picked up in grade school. And guess what? “Dr. _____,” the Psych Department expert on false memory? The letter supposedly from “Dr. ______” was signed in green ink, ballpoint. As it happened, I knew “Dr. _____” from some work he had done for me on the psychology of learning, and I knew that he favored blue-black, fountain pen.

I had to be careful about how I did this. I realized that Allie was starting to bore me, because she loved everything I did to her. Different people “do sex” for different reasons: to make babies, to express affection, whatever. In my case, sex is an expression of power. You show power by making something happen that otherwise would not. In this case, it means making someone do something they don’t want to do. But in the realm of sex, a slut will do anything, she will like anything, and Allie was in danger of turning into a kind of monogamous slut. So I had to make her do things she didn’t want to do, hated to do, would do only because she needed to please me. I didn’t want to “break” her, to grind her down to where she lost any emotional reaction to things I demanded: I really wanted to see that grimace of pain or disgust as she leapt to obey. And now I had a documented volunteer.

  Ah, Hell. “Allie, get on your knees and elbows. Let’s set about getting you pregnant.”

  An interesting thing happened. When I came in her, she burst into tears. Perfect.

  Chapter 13: Alfresco

  Jack: We were invited to a garden party of some friends of mine, people who weren’t in on the relationship Allie and I had. It was one of those informal things where waiters circulate with drinks and canapés, and paper lanterns are strung through the trees.

Allie wore a full peasant skirt and blouse. And of course, no panties. Early on, I found a chair at one side of the garden, and had her sit on my lap, facing and straddling me. Her full skirt fell to the ground in back of her, and bunched my lap. I snagged a passing waiter and got a drink. “Allie,” I said, “open my fly and put my cock in you.” She looked wildly around, trying to reassure herself that we were in some dark corner, unobserved. We were neither of those. “Allie,” I said, “there will be punishment for that.”

  Allie: So I reached under the roll of my skirt that was in his/my lap, got him open, and wiggled a bit until it went in. Of course, I was soaking wet, but that meant nothing: I’m always soaking wet these days. Just as he popped into me a waiter came by to ask whether he could get me anything. I wanted to say, “Yes, please. Could you get me a pistol? I’d like to shoot myself.” But I said no. Then Jack had me start squeezing my cunt while we necked. All the while, people he knew were coming by to indulge him in civilized conversation. Since neither of us was moving, externally anyhow, it was a long time before I felt him shoot into me while he was talking to someone about crabgrass. I hadn’t come, not that that was his problem. Finally we were alone for a moment. He sat up straighter, which caused his deflating cock to pull out of me. He said, “Clean me off on the inside of your skirt, and close up my trousers.”

Jack: We left shortly thereafter. As we walked away, I noted a tablespoon-sized gob of come on the ground in front of the chair. The fact that she had looked around meant that she was still worried about what other people thought, rather than about executing my commands. Since her eyes were the part that sinned, I made her wear a blindfold for 24 hours. And I cuffed her hands behind her so she couldn’t play with herself.

  Allie: Jeeez. I mean, I used to be smart, y’know? Got into college a year early and everything. Hell, I know how to operate a zipper, right? I know how to “put it in” (yum). But can I do two simple things like that when my man sez “do?” Nooo! What do I think with? My ovaries? Whatever gave me the silly idea that I had a reputation to protect? Why did I start making things that are so damn easy, so damn hard? The thing that makes me weep is he’s right: work at the task in front of me, /without expectations/, and I can’t fail to be at peace. The last thing in the world I want is for him to free me.

  And I remember, every time he comes in me, it could be the time that knocks me up.

  Jack: I decided that her vaginal muscles could be toned up. After some thought, I went to my workshop and over a day or two put together an exercise machine that you’ll never see at Geld’s Gym. I called it the “Prayer Tower.”

  Think of an upright, a miniature tower about two feet high, with four legs extending horizontally from its base at floor level. One of the legs is thicker than the others, maybe 4” x 4”. On the top of the outer end of that leg you’d see a hemisphere about the size of half a grapefruit, flat side up, with a dildo attached firmly to the flat (upper) side of hemisphere. The dildo assembly is kept vertical by a cord that’s attached to the opposite (rounded, bottom) side of the hemisphere. The cord runs down, through the inside of the “table leg,” up the tower, and down to a weight, which serves two purposes. First, the constant tension of the weight on the dildo assembly keeps the dildo upright when not “otherwise engaged,” as it were. Second, the weight provides an adjustable tension which challenges the vaginal muscles to keep the dildo in place, which is the object of the exercise. Of course, the dildo is my size—why invite unfavorable comparison?

  In use, she straddled the dildo, genuflected, and impaled herself (no hands permitted). Grip and kneel up, thighs vertical, pulling the dildo up with her against the resistance of the weight. Hold as long as able. When the dildo fell out, the weight reeled it in and returned the dildo to the starting position. Genuflect and repeat.

Of course, as the duration and number of reps increases, the dildo gets wetter, which increases the challenge, just as she is also tiring. Just as at Geld’s, both weight and duration can be increased. When she got pretty good, I increased the weight.

  I even added a little surface to the top of the tower, like a music stand, so she could have a book to read while she was exercising. So considerate, I am.

  Chapter 14: Ringing the Belle

  Jack: A few days later, I sat her down in the study. “Allie, I’m going to try a little ‘art therapy.’ In the western world, we associate different emotions and rational capabilities with different parts of the body. The ancient Greeks thought that emotions originated in the belly. Our modern romantic view has them coming from the heart. Aristotle thought that the function of the brain was to cool the blood. We associate that organ with the rational facility, planning, weighing consequences, and such. Draw me a sketch of Allison, not a likeness of her outside, but a symbolic representation of what went on inside.”

Allison had always been clever at the arts, and after a couple of tries, Allie came up with a Picasso-esque left-to-right sweep in which disembodied eyes were linked by two broad ribbons to a brain, which was linked by a broader band to a heart, which was linked by two bands to a pair of hands.

  I picked up the riding crop and said, “Fine. Sort of ‘Guernica’ looking. Now, how would we represent Allie, the slave? You have a cunt—no, you ARE a cunt. And an ass, and a mouth. Those three warm, moist holes ARE Allie. Everything else is transportation,” (here I tapped her thigh with the crop), “advertising,” (a flick to one nipple), “or mission control,” (I grabbed her by the hair and shook her head), “for Allie, who is HERE,” (and I cupped her pussy). “As a slave, you have no need for planning, or weighing consequences, only doing, immediate compliance. Emotions are tied up in some mess of past and future and what-if and could and should and might. Draw me a picture of Allie, the slave.” And I left the room.

  Allie: I suppose it was denial on my part. I kept doing doodles of Arabian Nights girls in chains, with my face. It took me an hour before I got serious. I wound up with a thing: an open vagina filled the center of the page, a toothless mouth and tongue sat above it. A tiny rectum was an asterisk hanging from the bottom. Little feet were attached left and right to the bottom of the vagina as though it were a torso, little hands where the “shoulders” would be, little tits on the sides of the vagina. No brain. No heart. Just the essentials for Absolute Obedience. Just then he came into the room, and looked at the drawing. He asked, “What’s that?” and I answered, “That’s me, now.” He grunted, “Good. When that’s your self-image, you’ll be happier. Hang that drawing up where you’ll see it.”

  Then he had me dictate my “love letter” into my iPod, along with the tape we had made of the claiming ceremony. I was to listen to those segments all the way through once each day. I couldn’t decide whether they sounded sappy or exquisite.

  After lunch, he handed me a card. He said, “You have an appointment at this address at two o’clock. Ask for Ken. They have their instructions. If you leave now and take the bus, you can just make it. Get going.” So I grabbed my purse and got. I knew the general part of town, not one of the best, so it wasn’t hard to work the buses to get there. I found myself standing in the gritty street in front of a gritty tattoo/piercing parlor, trying to keep the gritty wind from blowing my short skirt up around my waist as I wrestled with my feelings, my eyes stinging from unshed tears. It didn’t matter whether he wanted a piercing or a tattoo: I’d be DAMNED if I was going to have some obese biker stick NEEDLES (I hate needles) into MY BODY. I’d be DAMNED if I was going to have MY BODY violated with some kind of pagan decoration. I’d be DAMNED if…if…I’d be DAMNED if I would forfeit this chance to please him. I don’t know how long I stood there.

  “Ken” turned out to be Kendra, a little half-oriental girl who ran the shop. She had her instructions from Jack, and the first thing she said to me was, “You’re late. You know I’ll tell Mr. Kennedy that?” Then she was in to getting the necessary bits uncovered, cleaned, and punched. I walked out of there an hour later with my nipples, clit, and septum starting to throb. My nose ring was in an envelope in my purse: he had specified a kind of grommet in my septum, into which a removable ring could be placed when he desired. I guess he wanted to spare me the embarrassment of going to class with a ring in my nose. What a guy.

  He gave me hell for being late for the appointment: Kendra had ratted me out. Actually, not for being late, but for standing on the curb and wrestled with “consequences,” trying to “accept.” After all, as he said, “You’ve known how to walk for a long time.” All I had to do was walk; is that so hard? Walk right on through the door of the tattoo parlor. One foot in front of the other. But oh, no, even knowing that my master wanted this, I had to /decide/ for myself whether it was a good thing. Dumb. Made me feel three inches tall.

At the beginning of the summer, he threatened to free me if I don’t start getting my act together. The threat of freedom fills me with dread, and I sure haven’t given him any sign that I’m learning obedience.

Since I /wouldn’t/ walk, my punishment was that I /couldn’t/ walk: my ankle cuffs were locked together for the next week. I had to go up and down the stairs on my bottom. I couldn’t spread my legs for him.

And every waking hour, the cloud of my pending punishment for lying hung over my head.

  My masturbation was now always in his presence, at his initiation, for his entertainment. Sometimes he’d have me do it standing up. Sometimes, use the “wrong” hand, or wear gloves. Sometimes, I’d have to hump myself on his thigh. In bed, he’d have me straddle him in the “cowgirl position” and bring him off with whichever hole he’d chosen, and myself off with my fingers. As he said, why should he have to do all the work around here?

And he had me “count myself down.” When I got close to orgasm, I had to count down from ten, nine, … and come before “zero.” If I was gagged, I had to signal him, and he’d count. At least he never said “blastoff” at the end.

  Chapter 15: Center of Gravity

  Jack: Her punishment for lying came sooner that I had hoped. No sooner had her piercings healed than the events I wanted were lined up. Without explanation, I had her pack an overnight bag, loaded her in the car, and took her to a building in a pleasantly landscaped industrial park a couple of miles from downtown.

  Still in the car, I turned to her. “This is your punishment for lying. This is a plastic surgery clinic. You have an appointment. I have made all the arrangements. You will go through the door, sign all the forms they give you, go where they tell you to go, do exactly what they tell you to do, ask no questions. You will keep a straight face. I will be there when you come out of the operation. Now go.”

  As I expected, she broke down in tears. Of course. Again. In other circumstances, I would have enjoyed the show. She still didn’t get the idea of “Don’t accept, do.” Of course. Finally, she recovered control enough to say, “Please…” and I stopped her right there. “Allie! One more time. You said that you signed up for this life to please ME. When you start a sentence with ‘please,’ almost always the person you’re trying to ‘please’ is YOU. You do have a choice here, but if you refuse me, I will destroy you, which is to say, I will free you. What’s it to be, woman?”

After a while, she quit with the waterworks. She cleaned up her face, blew her nose. Deep breath, a nod, and she picked up her overnight bag and walked into the clinic. I went back to the house. As a footnote, the exercise was funded, in part, by the “check to the professor” that I had recovered from her savings account.

  Allie: He was too nice to me, calling me “woman.” I’ve been such a twit. He should have said “girl.” I walked into the clinic in a daze, like a robot. I signed papers, heard little, felt nothing. There was the pre-op prep, and they put me under. Just after the needle went it, I realized that I had no idea what was going to happen to me.

  When I woke up in post-op, of course, I was disoriented. It took a while to realize that I was in a clinic, and why. Jack was there, holding my hand. Nothing hurt, yet. I still didn’t know what had been done. It took an hour or two before I was fully conscious and able to sit up, at which point part of the answer was instantly obvious. My chest was suddenly heavy. Oh, dear God, no!

  Jack: Allie had been a nice B cup. I don’t have a tit fetish, but I whoever said “More than a handful is a waste” was of limited imagination: more than a handful is a lot of fun to bat around. Perhaps as much as the function of her ovaries, a woman defines her body through the size and shape of her tits. Allie was now a solid D cup, not monstrous, but considerable. I figured that there was no better way to give her something to remind her of her transgression. As I said, every time she looked in a mirror, for the rest of her life. And for good measure, a bit of collagen in the lips.

Allie: The first time I stood up, I overbalanced and nearly fell over, my center of gravity had shifted so much. It took a long time before I could even walk with confidence. After recovery, he took me home. As we left the clinic, I started to run ahead of him as I always have to, to open the car door for him (after all, I’m a slave, why should he ever have to open a door?), but I had to slow down after a couple of steps—the damned things were bounding all over the place, and they hurt. On the way home, I wore a baggy sweatshirt over his new milk bags. On the way, we stopped at a mall and I bought a dozen industrial-strength bra’s, and some tops to display his investment.

I hated them immediately, my Silicone Sentence. I gave them names: the left one was “Liar” and the right one was “Stupid.”  Jack calls them my “funbags.”

Let me tell you, I had to learn to put a bra on. Little B’s are bumps. Little B’s just get wrapped up. D’s are Capital Equipment. D’s require technique: bend way over, let the udders hang, mold the cups around them, do up the snaps, do up the straps, then straighten up. Just when I thought there was nothing else that would surprise me, he had me modify the bra’s. Each cup received a buttonhole, vertically in the center of the cup. When I put the bra on, I had to rotate each nipple ring 90 degrees, thread it through the buttonhole, and rotate the ring back horizontally, with nipple and ring now trapped on the outside of the cup. Imagine what it looked like. Imagine what it felt like.

  For the rest of my life, I’ll carry those bowling balls slung around my neck. It was a good thing Jack had spent a year working on my posture and back muscles, or I’d never have made it.

  And of course, men immediately started talking to my chest. Which made a kind of gruesome sense—until I could start to get this obedience thing right, I was a pretty worthless slave girl. Clearly there was nothing between my ears worth talking to. Some days it seemed that my head was nearly as large as my tits, and nearly as smart.

  I never learned to love those mammaries. They were a punishment, after all, a life sentence: “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.” What was The Word? Jack had said, “You lied to me. That was a stupid thing to do.” And I could tell you, stupid girls do stupid things.

Here’s how life changes with juggs. Imagine that you have a heavy cardboard box, maybe 18” on a side, that you have to get across town on a crowded bus. It’s too big to tuck under your arm. Most people would carry it against their chests by cupping a hand under each outside corner. Think about getting on the bus with the box. You’d have to plot your course so the box didn’t bump into things or people, you’d have to lean way backwards to avoid intruding into other people’s space, apologize when you failed, couldn’t see where you were putting your feet. Other people bump into you, brush against you, in ways that wouldn’t happen if it was just you, not the box. The damned thing is always in the way, is always an inconvenience, always has to be accounted for, planned for.

  Now, add to that the fact that it wasn’t a box, but boobs. With sensitive, exposed, ringed nipples that are constantly erect. Where every brush sent a jolt of sensation to my pussy. And, of course, a lot of men on the bus worked hard to make sure that the brushing wasn’t accidental.

  They attracted unpleasant attention of another sort, in bed. Jack would cuff my hands behind me and have me ride him, and after I got really worked up he’d start to spank Them, like he was clapping his hands but with titmeat in the middle. A couple of minutes of that, I could take. Much more would have me howling into the gag, even as I struggled to thrust Them forward for the next slap. God forbid I should break rhythm or miss a “grip on the upstroke.” It seemed that he wasn’t laying into Them as hard as he’d like because of the implants, and in a strange way, I wanted to apologize to him. But the worst part? The worst part of it was that a long session of boobie bongos, followed by a sharp yank on the nipple rings, would pitch me right over the edge into mindblowing orgasm. I really am a painslut after all! And I always came on the countdown, and always before “zero.”

  Jack: Cuffing her hands behind her, of course, meant that she couldn’t inadvertently defend her breasts. She knew I enjoyed her reaction to the pain, and so great was her desire to please that she’d do everything she could to allow, even assist, her own torture. But /in extremis/, it would be unfair to expect that she could control herself.

Why bind a willing partner? When she was bound, in bed or out, she had to work harder, and hurt more, to please me. The pleasure comes from watching her struggle to please, and the harder she has to strain, even if only to achieve the same result as unbound, the better. And if sex is about power, as it is for me, the trick is to drive her right up to the point where the need to escape the pain, emotional or physical, almost overcomes her desire to stay.

Of course, a woman’s bound body can be a work of art. Her writhing to deal with the pain caused by enforced immobility can be a ballet.

  The hard part of this for me as a new master, technically, was ensuring that there was—as one Internet master put it—no unintentional pain. Ropes should not chafe. Straps should not pinch. There should be no cramp. The suffering must come from the position itself. Or—with great care—loss of circulation. Or the humiliation of her submission.

  Chapter 16: Table Manners

  Allie: About this time, he started to come up with new ways to use my mouth.

  After I made his dinner, he would have me back under the table in front of his chair, and he’d hook my nose ring by a short chain to the underside of the table rim. He’d begin to eat dinner, and I’d begin to eat him. I had to get him off quickly, or there would be no table scraps for Allie. All this was a greater challenge because the chain was too short to let me really use my throat, and boy, did that ring hurt when I forgot the chain was there.

  Then, there was the conference call routine, with the opposite objective. Some of those calls lasted an hour and a half, and it was my job to make sure he did, too. I had to crawl into the knee-space of his desk, where he’d hook my tit-rings to the front of his chair. He had a small chain to my nose ring, which he’d yank if he thought I was getting bored. Bored? Worshiping that magnificent rod? Though sometimes I’d get distracted, what with an aching jaw and sore throat. But nobody said I couldn’t diddle myself during the exercise. At least his new balloons gave me more maneuvering room than my former knobbies would have. And I learned to kneel on a towel so I didn’t mess up his carpet with drool from either end of me. I could always tell when he was closing a deal, because his hand would go to the back of my skull, and it would be a very long time indeed to the next breath. If his business gets any better, I’ll have to learn how to breathe through my skin, or through my ears, or adopt blue as my color.

  And the “endless loop.” He’d saw around for a while in one of my nether holes, and then I’d have to put stupid’s mouth to work for a while before he went to use the other one. I never learned to like doing it when the hole involved had been my ass, but you have to understand the tradeoff: in that case, if I keep get him going, then he’d be back in my cunt, which I admit I liked best. I guess I’m just an old-fashioned girl with traditional family values. It took me too long to learn that if Jack was feeling frisky, I should find a way to sneak off and give myself an enema: at least that way I got to choose the flavor. And never, NEVER forget to grease up.

  Of course, now that I had cleavage, I had to learn to tittie-fuck. That was kind of fun. But I would have nightmares about a giant serpent slithering out of a mountain cave to devour me.

  His favorite, I think, was “fetch.” He would double my arms up, strapping each forearm to its upper arm. He would strap each calf to its thigh. He’d attach small bells to each of my rings—nose, tits, and clit. Then, he’d get out the rawhide dogbone and fling it across the room. And Allie would have to go galloping and jingling and jiggling across the carpet, my nipples scraping along the carpet, pick up the dogbone in my mouth, bring it back, and “sit up and beg.” Repeat, endlessly. After the first iteration or two, the rawhide would be wet from saliva, and sticky. It would pick up any dust bunnies I’d missed in my cleaning. Yech! It was bad enough when it went under a chair, worm and squirm. But the worst was when he tossed the damned thing down the stairs. At least I didn’t have to pay health club fees for the exercise.

  Chapter 17: And Baby Makes Two

  Jack: As it turned out, it was only about a month after the initial confrontation that I woke up one morning to the sounds of retching coming from the bathroom. Morning sickness usually doesn’t start until about the fifth week, but my Allie was an overachiever, and she must have “caught” almost immediately after we started trying. Well, /I/ started trying. I reached for the phone: I had an appointment to set up. When she emerged from the bathroom, her face was the color of oatmeal. We exchanged a look, and I hugged her. No words were needed.

  Over the course of the next week, the changes that had been there, but too subtle for me to notice, became more obvious. Her nipples became more sensitive. She lubricated more easily. The morning sickness intensified. And the mood swings—oh, the mood swings! She collected several lines in her Discipline Book, and many hours of progressively more uncomfortable gags, for letting her hormones run her tongue. But those things aside, she seemed to be getting into the idea of being pregnant. She glowed. She started thinking about baby names.

  Then one morning the next week, I told her to get dressed, that we were going out on an errand. The tone I used admitted no discussion, and she did.

After a short drive to a nearby medical complex, I pulled into a parking place in front of a single-floor “professional building.” In front was a discreet sign that let one know that this was the Baker and Baker Family Planning Clinic. She looked at the sign, then back at me, then at the sign again. In some parts of the country, “family planning clinic” is a code phrase for “abortionist.” Ours was one of those parts of the country, and she knew it.

I turned to her and said, “You have an appointment in ten minutes. Go on in.” I said nothing more, and watched her. She was breathing more rapidly, tears rolling down her cheeks, almost hyperventilating. I thought she was rocking forward and back in her seat, but I realized that she was nodding with her whole body, her eyes closed, and saying “Do it, do it, do it,” under her breath. I hadn’t noticed it, because the movement had been so slow, but her right hand had begun to rise immediately after I stopped speaking. It rose, ever so slowly, to the door handle, and ever so slowly, she pulled the door open. Her chant had become almost a motive power, like the sound of a steam locomotive. Once she got her feet on the asphalt, the chant stopped. She took a shaky breath, wiped her cheeks, quietly closed the car door behind her, and unsteadily walked into the clinic. Is there anything more erotic than tearful obedience? She didn’t look back. I went to get a cuppa.

Some time later, the clinic called my cell phone, and I went to pick her up. She was sitting on the curb, looking oddly shrunken. She didn’t look me in the eye.

When we got home, I took her up to my bedroom, and had her strip, then told her to kneel in front of the couch. I said “OK, Allie, let it out.” And she did. She wept, she cried, she howled with fear and pain and loss: loss of her girlhood, loss of what would have been her child, loss of her innocence. She balled up her fists and pounded her thighs, tore at her hair.

Finally the storm blew over, and she subsided to normal sniffling and silent tears. I got her a handkerchief, and a stiff drink. She drained the drink, and I refilled it. No more need to worry about Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, after all. I began stroking her hair and her neck. After a few minutes, I said, “Allie, look at me.” She did. “What have you learned?”

  Allie: What have I learned? That I’d made a huge mistake? That I was shacked up with a monster who knocked me up purely so he could put me through maybe the most wrenching experience a girl can have, as some kind of goddamned TRAINING exercise!? All right, Allie, get hold of yourself. “I learned that my body and all of its organs are subject to your pleasure. I learned that I really /can/ give instant and total obedience. It really /is/ as simple as putting one foot in front of the other. I left a part of myself inside that clinic, but it was enough for me that you wanted it done.”

He didn’t say anything for the longest time, just ran his fingers through my hair, hypnotically, until I finally relaxed with a shuddering sigh. Then he held up something in front of me—my Discipline Book. The tears started to come again, and with them, anger. I thought, Jesus Christ, what have I done? Didn’t I do just what you wanted, didn’t I.… He opened the book to the current page, and through my tears I read: “Allie acted today with Absolute Obedience, and her master is pleased with her.” I wrapped my arms around his knees, rested my cheek on his lap, and bawled. All the while, he kept stroking my hair.

  Finally, I said, “Mr. Kennedy, will you do something important for me?” He nodded. “I’m not perfect at this business of ignoring consequences; that would take a saint. I’m going to carry the guilt of today with me forever, unless…unless you punish me. Please, beat the shit out of me?” Maybe it was a Catholic Guilt thing. And you know, he did, out in the garden, on the same trestle we used in the claiming ceremony. After the whipping, he left me hanging by my wrists until long after night fell. Then he carried me in—I couldn’t have walked, Hell, I couldn’t stand—cleaned my wounds, and loaded me up with ibuprofen. I was asleep long before he laid me on the mat.

The last thought I had before darkness came crashing down was that I had pleased him, that I finally had, this one time, obeyed. But once isn’t going to keep your job for you, Allie.

  The next time he fucked me was both painful and tender, sweet, almost wistful. He took me in the ass, to give my womb some more time to recover, he said, though the position was a bit hard on my freshly-torn back. But I came anyhow, as I always do. Unless he doesn’t want me to. And the next morning he had me start on The Pill again.

  Chapter 18: Hen Party

  Jack: I’m a lousy chess player, but I can plan one move ahead. Now that she was starting to “get it” with respect to obedience, I had another challenge for Allie, and it required some prerequisite experiences I couldn’t give her. I called up one of the women who had been at the claiming ceremony, whom I knew to be rather open-minded. To be frank, she was of the Sapphic persuasion, and an amateur domme. We agreed to terms: two friends, three hours, no permanent marks, no penetration with anything other than fingers, and strictly NO orgasms for Allie.

  One evening several days later, I took Allie downstairs, stripped her, and wrapped her in a cloak. I took out a leather half-hood that covered the eyes and ears, but left the nose, mouth, and chin free. Before I laced it up, I took her chin, looked into her eyes, and said, “Make me proud.” Then I hooded her. Unless you shouted, she couldn’t hear a thing. I took her by the elbow and led her, stumbling, out to the screened-in porch. I clipped her wrists together behind her back, then backed her up against a post, and attached her ankles to a spreader bar. Finally, I fastened her to the post with a leather strap across her throat. She was going nowhere. I left the porch, closing the house door behind me, and went up to my study. I left the door from the porch to the garden unlocked.

  Allie: So there I was, in my own private dark. One thing was for sure, I wouldn’t be able to be very disobedient while trussed up as I was. I had a choice of whether to be scared or bored. I still hadn’t made up my mind which, before I felt the cloak brushed aside, and a pair of very talented, soft lips, lips that tasted of lipstick, fastened upon mine. Here I didn’t even have a script, even a “Do this,” just “Make me proud.” My brain, what we laughingly refer to as my brain, had just worked out that I was involved in my first lesbian French kiss, when another pair of lips fastened on one nipple. Finally I got the sums right: Jack had rented me out as a party favor to a bunch of…. At that point, rational thought fled, because yet a third pair of lips found my clit. I threw myself into a lava pool of lust. There was no orgasm, just toiling up and down burning hills of arousal.

  After forever, or a little longer, the lips withdrew, leaving me leaning over the edge of the cliff, waiting to be pushed, unable to fall. My neck and ankles were unfastened, the cloak was removed, and I was led, staggering, several steps forward, and pushed to my knees. In an instant, my nose was buried in warm, wet flesh. I must have flinched backward, because suddenly a flash of fire exploded across my shoulders—the crop! The impact drove me forward again into the swamp.

I’ll never be a lesbian. Even the thought of the act nauseates me. But just now I wasn’t listening to my stomach—I was listening to the line of fire across my back, and to “Make me proud.” Instantly, I got it together: girl, don’t evaluate, do! This is OJT, work on it! So I burrowed in, with lots of energy if not lots of skill or enthusiasm. After the first few licks, I started to try new things. What would I like?—try it! Hands on either side of my head gave continuous feedback on my experiments. Once I got started, unseen fingers did exotic things with my clit and nips. I suppose it was a good thing that I’d done the conference calls with Jack, because three pussies later (I could tell by the taste), twice over, my jaw and tongue were running out of endurance.

Finally, they dragged me to my feet, wobbly, backed me up to the post, refastened my bonds, strapped my neck to the post. The lips attacked again, and once again took me to the edge of the cliff before leaving me, tears running out under the hood, frantically humping air. I was on fire! Maybe a couple of minutes passed, and suddenly a cock drove into my cunt—Jack!—driving the air from my lungs, and I exploded, on and on. My knees buckled, leaving me hanging, strangling. Maybe there’s something to be said for hypoxia. I went into some other dimension, and like my abstract drawing, I was nothing but glands and hormones when I lost consciousness.

  Jack: I had watched the whole hen-party on closed-circuit TV. What a girl! She had made me proud, indeed. I took her down, unbound her, rolled her in the cloak, and carried her to bed. I felt like giving her a treat (slaves don’t /earn/ anything but punishment), so I let her sleep in the bed next to me, ankle chained to the bedpost. She was going to have to wear a turtleneck for several days, though, which was too bad, because it was going to be hot.

  In the morning, she rolled over, and without opening her eyes, raised a finger. I said, “Yes, doll?” She asked, “Was I OK?” I said, “You were perfect. I’m so proud.”  She shivered and snuggled into my armpit, her arms around my waist.

  Allie: I had a little come from just his words. Good girls, girls that don’t try to be too smart, get lovely cummie-cum’s. Finally, I was pleasing him. There were a few tears, but they were tears of joy. “Don’t think, do,” is that so hard?

I mean, if I don’t start to get this right, he can sell me to a pimp in Chicago.

  You think if he did that, I should say “no,” run to the cops? Unh-uh. You still don’t get it, do you, Gentle Reader? The whole jolt in this high-wire act is that there’s no net to catch me. When I gave myself to him in the ceremony, there were no “except’s”, no “up to but not including’s,” no “within reason” clauses. If I want the thrill of submission, it must be absolute. The books have to balance, the pleasure with the risk. I need to know that his pleasure matters to me where it hurts. If he put me on a bus to Chicago, I’d go. No, you still don’t get it.

  If I busted my butt, maybe I could change his mind about throwing me away.

Chapter 19: Sunrise Services

  Allie: Several days passed, they way the do in his house. Then:

  You know how it feels to wake up from a deep sleep? In my case, it feels like being deep under water, rising on my own buoyancy, faster and faster, until I break the surface into consciousness. As I came partially awake, I was filled with dread, with a feeling that something was very wrong, and that it was my fault. Panic set in. Then I found the source, and calmed down, a little: it was just that it had been six hours since I had done anything to pleasure Him.

I knelt up from the mat. I looked first at Jack—still sleeping, thank God. Then at the time—5:45AM, right on time. I have a clock in my head, it seems. I neatly folded the mat and the thin blanket, and pushed them and the tiny pillow under the foot of his bed. As quietly as I could, I crawled to the low table next to the bed, trying to keep the clanking of the chain joining my ankle to the bed quiet. A few baby wipes removed the worst of the visible damage from the night before, and a few squirts of perfume covered the fact that I hadn’t had a shower yet. Breath mint. Freshened the Vaseline in my ass, just in case things went that way this morning. I brushed my hair, teasing it out wildly. I reapplied the lipstick: it is important to leave the carmine lipstick ring around the base of his shaft, a sign of my devotions.

The morning routine takes only a few minutes, but those minutes are filled with dread. If he wakes early, before I am in position, I will have failed the first task of the day. Jack says I go into “auto-punish mode.” He doesn’t consider it a point worthy of discipline, but I do; it’s enough that I know that I’ve missed an opportunity to please him, and I can’t bear it. Over the weeks I’ve come up with a punishment I use on myself, diabolical in its simplicity. I put one spring clothespin on one nipple, far enough on to grab the metal of the nipple-ring inside the teat. Fifteen minutes later, I yank it off, and switch to the other nip. The thing is, the pain flares in both teats, one being freshly crushed, and the other with the blood rushing in to the damaged tissues. But wait, there’s more! Fifteen minutes later, switch again. Now the first nip, already bruised, gets revisited. After an hour of this, fifteen minutes in alternation, I have to use both hands to force myself to put the clothespin on. After two hours, the pain makes my knees buckle. Once that happens, I give myself one more hour. The really hard part isn’t the pain. The really hard part is making sure I don’t falter yet again in pleasing him during the ordeal. Smile through the tears, dammit! So my hands tremble as I hurry through the tasks.

  But this time, I make it to the side of the bed before he stirs. My hand steals down between my thighs, and I begin the last of my preparations, taking myself from my usual “short fuse” condition to “hair trigger” status. He likes it when I have to struggle not to come the moment he enters me, to have to wait for his countdown. As I finish bringing myself to gasping readiness, the clock ticks over to 6:00. I work my enlarged torso under the side of the covers and, ever so lightly, my mouth and hands go to work. As I do, a great peace comes over me. I’ve been built for a purpose, and I’m doing what I was created to do, bring pleasure. But can I ever get good enough for him, even nearly adequate?

  The next week, Jack was gone on a business trip. I was left to mope about on my own. I felt like a puppet with the strings cut, the Battery Bunny with the battery pulled out. I kept up my exercises, and played with myself as directed, but it was putting on a play without the audience. You want to punish a slavegirl? Ignore her.

  Friday evening he was due back. He had an invitation to a party, would go directly to the party from the airport, and I was to join him at the party. I put on the essential little black full-skirted cocktail dress and heels. Period. My nipples made little tents in the silk, and the rings were visible if you looked closely. Given the juggs, every male would be looking closely. Given that it was one of my pre-augmentation dresses, I filled the bodice rather to overflowing. Per instructions, the makeup went on just a little thick.

  I arrived at the party by taxi. The party was thrown by a couple that were at my claiming, attended by several adult/mature couples, and a number of college kids, not from State.

Our host met me at the door. “Well hello, Allie. My, aren’t you a Big Girl now?” I could hear the capitalization in his voice.

  What was there to say? “Yes sir, I’m a Big Girl now.”

  He said, “How do you like your new wheels?”

  Wheels? That was a new one for my Plastic Punishments. I said, “Frankly, sir, I hate them.”

  He said, “Good, good! I’ll have to remember to ask Jack for a ride. Well, off you go, and enjoy the party.”

  I thought, great, now I’ve been promoted to ‘bicycle.’ I made sure Jack’s Gollywobblers were at full hoist, made sure my elbows were back, and followed my nipples—at a distance—into the room. “Two famous and powerful people.…” Jack wasn’t there. I didn’t know it at the time, but his flight had been delayed. God, I was horny. I could feel that the insides of my thighs were slick as I walked. I could smell myself.

I got a juice drink (I’m still technically underage for alcohol), and went to look at the gardens. In about 15 milliseconds, I had attracted a swarm of the college boys, and the serious hitting-on began. God knows what their dates thought. The boys knew that I was something different. Little did they know what explosive material they were playing with. The adults watched the mating ritual from a distance with amusement. The adults knew who and what I am.

  In a little while a dance quartet started up. Our hosts’ patio had been cleared as a kind of dance floor, and of course I was asked to dance. So I did. I mean, what female doesn’t want attention? And a slave girl? Being a slave girl is a performance art. Attention and approval are all we live for, the reason we exist. So I danced with each one of the boys. One dance each. Of course, there was a certain amount of caressing, or groping, if you prefer. I pretended that I didn’t realize what was going on until it became blatant, when I primly moved the offending hand to neutral territory. None of which helped me to cool off.

  Finally, I saw Jack out of the corner of my eye, lounging at the back of the crowd with an unreadable expression on his face. When the dance ended, he came over and asked for the next dance. The college boys smirked. I felt like saying, “Thanks for the evening so far, boys, but now I’m going to dance with a Man.” I swept myself into his arms.

I later found out that he had tipped the band to do two slow numbers in a row. In thirty seconds, I was awash with lust. One arm went around his neck, and I was dry humping—or to be more accurate, wet humping—his thigh. My other hand was stroking his cock through the fabric of his pants. A leechlike kiss. I discovered that it’s hard to dance when you’re standing on one foot, because my other knee was raised by his hip, the better to grind myself against him. That caused the dress to ride up and bare my thigh to the hip, but somehow I knew I was pleasing him, and I was beyond caring what anyone else thought.

  The first piece ended, and he pushed me back a foot. I tried to focus through the fog of arousal. The next piece started, and he said to me, “Allie…Ten.”

  Huh?

  “Nine.”

  I thought, you’re kidding, right?

  “Eight.”

  Without touching myself, without you…

  “Seven.”

  You beast…

  “Six.”

  Oh, Mr. Kennedy…

  “Five.”

  Oh, My Lord…

  And somewhere within me the dam burst. Jack never made it to “four.” I had just enough time to wrap my arms around his neck again. Suddenly, I was shaking like a leaf in the wind, like an epileptic patient in a seizure. Jack folded me in his arms to hold me up, and the world went away.

  Some women orgasm in colors. Mine are usually shades of pink. This one was blood-red, orange, crimson, Trinity-nuclear. Several centuries later, I realized that the music had stopped. I thought, “Jeez, I’ve just come on command!” Jack peeled me off of his chest, and led me on rubbery legs to the side of the dance floor. The college boys were slack-jawed. They knew they’d just seen something special, but they couldn’t figure out what. We left soon after.

  When we got home, I raped him. I showed him what happens when you leave a slavegirl alone. I punished him. I fucked him into a coma. The last thought I had as I crawled to the mat was, “That’ll show him.”

  The next thing I was aware of was that the sun was slanting through the windows, and Jack was downstairs somewhere, whistling. Probably making coffee. I groaned as I got up off the mat. He had unlocked the ankle cuff, so I took the hint and crawled off to shower. I hurt everywhere, including places I didn’t think that I had “places.” Ok, “That’ll show him.” Yeah, right.

What to wear? I settled on the cutout black leather bra and the matching leather chaps.

With a sigh, I picked up the clothespin. Allie Fails Again. It was going to be a long morning. And at this rate, there’s a Chicago street corner with my name on it.

  Chapter 20: /La Cazadora/ (The Huntress)

  Jack: Allie’s self-esteem had been taking it on the chin all through the summer, not without cause. Now that she had learned a little obedience, I wanted to build her up again. So we started dating, just like last summer. She had to get a new formal wardrobe to accommodate her new dimensions. She loved shopping, so that was no burden upon her, and I did verify that none of the pieces was too modest.

We would go to classy events: dinner, musicals, operas, museums. We got some odd looks whenever she raced ahead to hold a door open for me. The /Maitre d’/s were flustered when she pulled out my chair to seat me before she took her own chair in the restaurants. I made sure that I praised her looks, her intelligence, her eagerness to please, every time I screwed her in some stairwell or janitor’s closet or alley. And she never hesitated an instant when I motioned for her to lift her skirt or drop to her knees.

  Allie: I hated the alleys. It’s bad enough being top-heavy, bent over, holding the little purse with one hand, holding myself off the grimy wall with the other hand. It’s bad enough wearing those towering, tottering heels. But being taken from behind, in heels, while trying to keep my balance in the rubble of an alley, in the drizzle, was hard on a girl’s attitude. But I came, of course. Every damned time he took me that way.

The heels were a mini-project of their own. The heels were actually functional, not merely decorative and painful: their job was to achieve propinquity. Jack is tall, and I’m, well, not. I experimented with different heels until I got the altitude of my perineum when I was bent over exactly to match the altitude of his groin when standing erect. So to speak. They were, literally, “fuck me shoes.”

  Jack: She already had some new blouses, and I funded a renovation of her informal dresses, too. My favorite was built on the model of the peasant blouse. You know, the gauzy, billowy things with the elastic neckline, meant to be worn off-the-shoulder. She got one that came to mid-thigh, IF she pulled it down far enough that the bazooms threatened to spill out the top. But we’ve all seen that the elastic neckline of the peasant blouse tends to make it creep up around the wearer’s neck, as does any motion if the wearer raises her arm. I got endless hours of entertainment watching her try to maintain some semblance of modesty as we wandered, tug down, ride up, tug down, ride up. For variation I’d tie 3-4” of fishing line to the clit ring, with a tiny split-shot fishing weight at the end. The weight would bounce off her thighs as she walked. Drove her nuts. Gave her another reason to be conscious of her hemline.

Allie: Night after night, I lie on the mat at the foot of his bed, tears running down my face. If he doesn’t cuff my hands behind me, I silently pound the carpet with my little fists in self-loathing and frustration. I mean, here Fate deals me such a prince of a guy, and I keep disappointing him. Why did God saddle him with such a loser?! I’ve never wanted anything as much as I want to be with him, to be his little toy, to drain his balls, to see his face light up with pleasure when I finally get something right, but I feel this chance slipping through my fingers.

This is NOT HARD!

He doesn’t hurt me too bad. Not more than I can take. Really he doesn’t. Not too often, anyway.

I don’t have to be a gourmet cook. I don’t have to be Madame Curie. I don’t even have to be all that inventive in bed. All I really have to do is obey. One foot in front of the other. And I keep fucking it up. I really should go out and find him the girl he deserves.

  I’m so worthless. My gut turns into a ball of lead and I curl up around it. Some nights it’s a good thing I’m chained to the bed, otherwise I’d go and flush myself down the toilet. Dear God, if Jack freed me? I’d find a way to kill myself, I really would. So his pleasure is really a life-or-death thing for me.

Aw, Hell. Get a grip, Allie. You don’t help your case when you look like Death Warmed Over in the morning.

  Jack: As summer came to a close, I reminded her that her anniversary was coming up. The anniversary, of course, of her claiming. I asked her what she wanted for an anniversary present, thinking she might want some jewelry or such. She got all dreamy-eyed, and said, “If it please you, may I call you ’My Lord’?” After some consideration, I gave my permission.

  I couldn’t think of a better way to rebuild her self-esteem than by giving her something really hard to do, but something that she could succeed at if she really tried. And now that the summer was over, and she was ready to start her sophomore year at State, it was time to put the plan into action. I found her in her old room, where we had set up the Prayer Tower. As I stood in the doorway, she was in profile to me, unaware of my presence. She was in the ‘kneel up’ position, reading a paperback. When she turned a page, I got a glimpse of the cover: The Perfect Victim by Christine Mcguire and Carla Norton, still the best nonfiction pornography I’ve ever encountered, about the kidnapping and brainwashing of a college co-ed. Yes, I said NONfiction. I winced when I saw the amount of weight she had on the Tower: muscles that could hold that weight could be painful—for me.

Finally she noticed me, and the dildo dropped back onto the base with a thump, rocking, glistening. She pivoted gracefully and knelt before me. She began to shake slightly, not the trembling of fear, but that of an eager hunting dog, straining at the leash. She was waiting for, eager for, hungry for an order, any order. “Yes, My Lord?”

  I said, “Allie, I have a challenge for you. This is not intended to be a test, though I expect that you will learn a lot from the experience, and you may even find it a pleasure. I want to reassure that you have mastered the skill I put before you at the beginning of the summer, and that I have no current plan to dispose of you.”

  Allie: And then he said, “I want you to get yourself a sister. Go hunting at State, and bring me a girl that we can train together.” I had learned something this summer, because my mouth was saying “Yes, My Lord. How long do I have?” while my brain was saying “See, toldyaso, he’s looking for a replacement!” My ears were hearing “All year, if you need it,” while my brain was saying to me “Don’t cry, you twit, you’ll blow it all!” It was a struggle to listen to his suggestions and requirements, because I was telling myself, “Allie, this is YOUR ‘last hurrah;’ make him proud, or you go back to being just a stepdaughter, and dating college boys. Or peddling your ass in a Chicago snow storm.”

  I threw myself into making notes. Action is a wonderful anesthetic. “Just do” has the side effect of killing any ability to spend time uselessly worrying. His idea, and it was a good one, was that my grades last year would make it easy for me to get a volunteer job in the student counseling center, where marginal students go for tutoring, where disturbed students go to get their heads together. Happy hunting grounds. I made that my first stop.

  And the school year was starting for me, too. I had to sign up for classes, get books, meet professors. And think up an answer to the question from my friends from last year: “What did you DO to yourself?!”

The year started the way any academic year does. A tidal wave of work in the new subjects, that began to recede as new concepts began to make sense. What was new this year was the tidal wave of offers for dates, which began to recede only as the drooling boys eventually got the message that Allie’s new tits were somehow spoken for. About the time I got my head above water in my coursework, business started to pick up at the counseling center, as students who didn’t weather the storm started to realize that they needed help, or there wouldn’t be a “next year.” And then I began to hunt. I was looking for a frosh girl who was not necessarily beautiful, but salvageable; not stupid, but undisciplined; not disturbed, but with really low self-esteem. The others I referred to tutoring or clinics, as required.

  I found what I was looking for after six weeks. A Chicana from Los Angeles, away from home and daddy’s discipline for the first time, who spent too much time learning to get drunk, too many hours in residence-hall bull sessions, and not enough time just doing the work. She had long, greasy, stringy hair. She was already succumbing to the tendency of her maternal ancestors to put on fat. She dressed like a duffel bag. But those things could be cured, and under all of that, there was a woman with the blood of Aztec princesses in her, waiting to be brought to heel.

Then the hunt began. I tutored her. Sat down and commiserated with her. Learned that, if she flunked out, daddy wouldn’t want her back home: “He’ll tell me to go get a job as a /camarista/ (maid) just like /Mamá/ did,” she wept. Slapped her upside the head, once, when she wasn’t putting in the work. An allnighter cram-session at Jack’s house for one of her exams gave her the first glimpse of my relationship with Jack, and in the wee hours of studying, her first faint whiff of girl-girl contact.

Two nights after the exam, which was a disaster for her, she came over to cry on my shoulder, and I took her to bed in my old room. It was nice to sleep in a bed again, even if a twin bed was a bit crowded for two. I’ll still never be a lesbian, but this year has taught me time and again that when Jack calls, I can do things that nauseate me, and do them very, very well. In any case, she was in no condition to critique my acting. My brief indentured servitude as a party favor helped with the mechanics.

My Lord, I think we’ve got a live one.

 

In some sense, the seduction was the easy part. She was rapidly running into a blind alley, with no alternatives, no one else to turn to. She was doing a fine job of flunking out on her own, and I was rapidly becoming the center of her universe. Even though we were actually the same age, I became an authority figure. It would be a mistake to try and force her into Jack’s hands. I had to set things up so that she viewed that outcome as by far the most desirable from a field of miserable alternatives.

Softly, softly, catchee….!

  The day came when she arrived in my cube in the counseling center with her “grey slip” from State in hand: “Thanks, but you’re outta here.” Now it was time to make my move. She was looking at her assimilated life going down the toilets that she’d be cleaning as a maid from now on. I said, “Look, if you’re going to do that kind of work, why not do it for someone who cares about you? Jack’s been thinking about getting a maid for some time. I could work with you to try and get you back in to State next year (yeah, right!), get your head squared away, give you some life skills and self-discipline. You could take my old room—I rarely use it. Think about it, and let me know.” Such a juicy worm, wiggling there in the water. Tell them what they want to believe. Give the lady what she wants. A week later, she moved in.

So close, My Lord. Just a little patience.

  It was a lot of fun coming up with a hacienda take on the French Maid’s costume, embroidered “peasant blouse” and all. The wrap skirt was kind of an embroidered apron, modestly below the knee in front, ascending and wrapping around to cover the rear. But if she bent over or knelt, it unwrapped, like a tulip, exposing everything below the waist in back. And no panties, of course.

The important thing was that she was totally dependant upon me. I had pried her away from all of her support systems, her family, her friends. She had no plan other than Allie. If she failed to please me, I withheld my favors, and she was desperate, because the outside world was a cold, dark, and unwelcoming place.

She was a third-generation American, and her family in LA was rather well-to-do. Jack suggested, and I agreed, that she was to speak to us only in Spanish, which he and I understood tolerably well. We would speak to her only in English. The idea was to put her into the role of a /mojada/ (literally, “wet” back, an illegal immigrant). We decorated the “maid’s room” with pictures of hacienda life and religious icons. She was delighted when we got her an iPod. She was less delighted when she found that it was loaded full of mariachi and Mexican pop music. We got her a /metate/ (grinding stone) and taught her to make corn tortillas. I told her she stank of /manteca/ (lard), and made her wash, several times a day. The whole effort was a particularly unsubtle, cruel, and effective form of psychological warfare. And what was her alternative?

  She slimmed down. How could she not, on a diet of table scraps, and all that work? Jack had moved me up the food chain, for the moment anyhow.

  Often, she was in the room when Jack took me. While he was screwing me, he’d sometimes call her over to tighten a strap or rope on my body.

  The first big test was when I ordered her to go down on me while Jack was in the room. She failed me, of course, and I thrashed her, at length. And then we started over again, and eventually she got it right.

She had to learn that there was nothing I could demand of her that she couldn’t make worse by hesitating. She had to learn what took me too long to learn: that this wasn’t a tradeoff between obedience OR punishment, between compliance OR pain. Oh, noooo! She WILL obey. She WILL do the thing demanded. Her only choice is whether, and how much, she gets punished first. So it’s obedience, or it’s pain AND THEN obedience. Put it that way, it’s a no-brainer. But for silly holes like us, a no-brainer can be a major emotional challenge.

  Are you shocked, Gentle Reader, at “holes?” Don’t be. Finally I know that Jack was right. It’s what girls are. It’s what I am, just like my drawing. I live to give pleasure to him, so my holes are my primary assets. When you take away the other, unimportant stuff, “I” am a set of warm, moist holes. A capacity for giving pleasure. Everything else is overhead.

  We had “reaction drills.” I was training her to “Do, don’t think.” I flattered myself that I was working with less-cerebral raw materials than Jack had had, so I didn’t try to teach by syllogism. With a crop in my hand, I had her kneel in front of me. I would order her to do something repulsive, say, scrub out the toilets with her beautiful, waist-length, obsidian-colored hair. As soon as I finished and yelled “GO!,” I would backswing up and swipe straight down with the crop, an overhead swing, with all my woman’s strength. If she was already on her way, she might escape with a grazing blow. If she hesitated, she got a welt. As time went on, I hit air more often than flesh.

  When I was “managing” her, I wore a black suit I had worn to church in another life. Calf-length skirt, jacket. Very severe, very professional, except that, with the new whoppers, I spilled out of the jacket. I didn’t bother with a blouse under the jacket. I had to admit that the acreage between the lapels was impressive, as much as I wished that said acreage belonged to someone else.

I tried not to remember that I was training my replacement. But if it had to be, I was determined to leave behind the best-trained girl I could figure out how to give him.

  When she screwed up, I’d grab her by the ear and march her out to the post of famous memory in the patio. I’d fasten her cuffs behind the post, and spend half an hour with my nose inches from hers, bellowing at her like a drill sergeant. Of course that meant that The Chest that I carry around spent a lot of time rubbing against hers. The monologue was predictable: Jack is your savior, how could you be so ungrateful, he’s given you a roof over your head, he asks so little, what a wonderful man, etc. Unroll several yards of guilt-trip and trim it to fit.

  I learned just how hard I could slap her without visible bruising. In her case, because of her dark complexion, pretty damn hard. Harder on tit than cheek, of course. I mean, a haymaker across the face was spectacular, but let me tell you, a bit of titty tom-tom with her breasts (I can’t bring myself to think of them as ‘funbags’) really got her attention. Hers could take more than mine, of course, because she got hers from /Mamá/, and I got mine from Dow; in a strange way, her ability to absorb abuse made me envious. I could tell when I was getting to her when her whimpering became a thin, high-pitched whine, like a scream with the volume turned all the way down. After I got done yelling, and she was suitably contrite, I’d forgive her, and I’d do kiss-kiss and rub-rub until she was panting. At which time I’d free her hands, smack her on the ass, hard, and send her back to her chores.

  When she did well, though, when she sweat bullets to please me, I would pay her a night-time visit in the “maid’s room,” and let her take me to the places that only one girl can take another.

  Later, we had her part her hair in the center and braid it in long pigtails. They would come in handy, eventually, with stainless rings plaited into the hair, but for now, it was just part of the humiliation.

  It wasn’t long before I could sense the change in her. When I came into the room, everything but my face disappeared for her, as if she were looking through a cardboard tube. Was I pleased? Had she forgotten something? Her breathing became labored, as though someone were sitting on her chest. I knew those feelings—Jack has the same effect on me. You know how they say, “Never let them smell your fear”? I could smell her fear. But the relief, the love, the gratitude, the lust she felt when I gave her a compliment, a motherly pat on the bottom, a kiss with a bit of tongue, a fingernail drawn once, slowly through the slit, were like a solid presence in the room. “Putty” is the wrong word. She was /mantequilla/ (butter). She melted in my hands.

  So came the time for the handover, the transfer to Jack. This was the crisis, make or break. One evening, she served drinks to Jack and me, and knelt in front of me, her eyes a laser focus upon mine.

  As I looked down at her, my breath caught. I suddenly realized just how she and I were alike and different, and it chilled me to the core.

She needed to please me, not because I loved her—I had never said “I love you”—nor because she loved me—she didn’t, really—but because she couldn’t imagine any way to achieve any better outcome for herself. I needed to please Jack, not because he loved me—I couldn’t remember him ever saying “I love you”—but because I loved him, and I couldn’t imagine any way to achieve any better outcome for /him/.

But her desperation gave birth to a kind of love. My love gives birth to my desperation.

I please him because I love him. But more importantly, I love him because I please him. Sometimes I please him, anyhow.

  I shuddered. Focus, Allie. You have GOT to get this one right.

  “You know how important it is to me to please Mr. Kennedy.”

It wasn’t a question, but she nodded. She had seen enough of our relationship. Jack was wearing a robe, watching, stroking himself. He was hard. I wanted that, but it wasn’t mine, not tonight. And perhaps never again, ever. Her skirt, by design, had flowed open in back, giving him an unobstructed view of her unpantied bottom. She, of course, could spare no attention to that humiliation, because I was speaking to her.

  “My period has started,” I lied, “and I won’t be able to give My Lord all the choices he might demand tonight. It grieves me that I won’t be able to please him as much as I must.”

  I paused. Her eyes were on me the way a bird watches a snake. The rest of the universe had ceased to exist. I picked up the crop, and adjusted my grip on the handle with the same care that a top-flight golfer might use on an 18th tee for the title.

Her vision contracted further, to the tip of the crop. She hadn’t learned to watch the eyes of her assailant. She was wound tighter than a runner in the blocks. She knew she was going to have to jump—she just didn’t know which direction.

  “I want you to mount his cock. GO!” I took the backswing with the crop, over my shoulder, and I swiped down with all my might. The tip of the crop bounced off the carpet, raising dust. She was all the way across the room, her hand driving him into herself. She gave a little cry of despair as she tore away her own maidenhead. He looked over her shoulder, and smiled, and blew me a kiss.

The moon gets its light from the sun.

  When he was done, Jack, ever the gentleman, said, “/Gracias, señorita/” (thank you, miss). He said it in her ear, but he was saying it to me.

He pulled her off of him, and she took one step and collapsed on the carpet, in shock. Unbidden, I took off my suit-jacket and knelt between his legs. I gently laved his groin with my tongue, cleaning him of her blood and his fluids. Finally, I took his deflated cock in my mouth. This wasn’t a blowjob—he’d be supersensitive just now. I just held him in my mouth and gazed up at his face, tasting her. “Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me.” With my replacement now installed, I might not have many more chances to touch him. I felt a hand on my ankle, and, without looking, reached back and grasped her hand in mine. There were no tears. No jealousy. His precious cock lay soft on my tongue as I let my soul steep in regret and longing. Idly, I wondered whose slave I’d be next week. If it wasn’t Jack, it didn’t seem important who it was. The three of us held that tableau for maybe 15 minutes, and then he announced that it was bedtime and pulled out of my mouth.

  He cuffed her wrists behind her, chained her ankle to the bedpost, and spread her out on the mat. It was a position she had seen me in, many times. Nearly every night for more than a year, it had been me on that mat. Yup, Allie, out with the old, in with the new.

  I had succeeded with her. He had accepted my offering. But it was an acid victory: my achievement seemed also to be the final seal on the loss of the only thing I ever truly wanted. The weight of my failure to be good enough for Jack bore down upon my shoulders and threatened to crush me through the floor. My eyes burned, but I had no tears left to shed. Allie, I told myself, he gave you a fair shot, and this is how it comes out: you could dream, but you couldn’t do.

  Then I got the same treatment as she had, except that he motioned for me to come to his bed. I don’t know where I had expected to sleep that night—maybe out on the patio, or on a bus to Chicago.

  I nodded a question, and he shrugged back. I knelt down as best I could by the mat, and kissed away her tears. Her returning kiss was urgent, desperate. I whispered, “You did fine, /querida/” (darling). “I’m proud of you.” She gave me a tremulous, uncertain smile. “Now, sleep.”  This wasn’t her fault.

  It was hard to find a position, lying against him, with the chest-bags I wore, with my hands cuffed behind me, but I managed, perhaps for the last time. I never got to actually /sleep/ with him all that often.

Then he whispered to the top of my head, “You can begin the next phase of her training tomorrow,” and almost immediately he started to snore. And then it hit me, like a load of bricks: Mygodhesgonnakeepme! Hesgonnakeepme!! After all my stupids! HE’S GONNA KEEP MEEE!!!

  As quietly as I could, not to wake him, I sobbed tears of joy into his sweaty armpit, and slowly humped my clit ring, my drooling slit, on his thigh.

  I was a falconess. I had delivered prey to my master.

The next night, of course, I joined my new sister on the mat.

  END