Obediance

VII

       Click.  Again I heard a key in the lock and squinted against the afternoon sun in the window to see a female figure in the doorway.  It was the art director from my photo shoot.  “Hello,” she said cheerfully, “all rested up and ready to go?”  Then she got a good look at me.  I was a sight: breasts and torso encrusted with an unknown man’s semen residue, feminine juices leaking out of my still-aroused sex, hair wildly askew, lipstick smeared from my wild adventure in oral sex.  “Oh my God.”  She smiled fake-coyly, putting her hands to her lips in faux surprise.  “I guess you’ll need a shower.  Can’t take you home like this.”  My instinctive modesty and embarrassment was offset, just a little, by the mention of home. 

       “Can I really go home?” I asked meekly.  I smelled like sperm and looked like the Whore of Babylon, but still my first thought was for my husband.  (He may require me to call him Master, but to me, at least at that time, he was still my husband.)

       “Come on,” she replied, offering me her hand.  She unlocked my left handcuff, helped me off the bed, and walked me down the hall, naked, toward the bathroom.  I stepped inside of what looked to all appearances like a spa at a high-end resort – not exactly the kind of place whores and sex slaves would frequent.  The limestone floor, marble countertops, and silk bathrobes looked more like I had come to Elizabeth Arden than to the offices of a porn magazine.  The only giveaway was the collection of frame art posters on the walls – posters of old magazine covers.  As far as I could tell, Obediance was some kind of kinky men’s magazine, although the subtitle “Members Only” had me puzzled.  The posters seemed to go back a couple of decades, based on the hair styles (both on the models’ heads and on their nether regions – I assumed that the fuller bushes dated to the 1970s and 1980s, while the more groomed pubic areas were more recent).  Like the poster I had seen in the photography studio, these posters all featured nude submissive women in various poses – some engaged in sex acts with one or more men, some in bondage restraints, some in other positions.

       I stepped into the shower eager to cleanse my body and, frankly, my mind.  I drifted into an early-evening reverie as I lathered my naked body with body wash.  My mind skipped from memory to memory, thinking about my first girlish sexual experiments with my high school boyfriend, to my sorority days in college (funny to think how wild I thought I was then, before I learned what wild really meant), to my wedding day.  My wedding day – I looked down to my left hand to admire my engagement ring, my most physical connection to my Master/husband.  It was gone.  I gasped and turned off the water, stepping out of the shower naked and dripping.  It was then I noticed the small emerald ring on the second toe of my right foot.  My grandmother had always told me that toe rings and other body jewelry were signs of bad character, something that sluts wore but not good girls.  Wedding rings were what good girls wore, she instructed me when I was young.  Yet now I had the toe ring and had apparently lost the engagement and wedding rings.

       Without bothering to dry myself, I ran dripping into the hall.  “I lost my engagement ring,” I cried to the art director.  (To this day, I don’t know her name.)

       “No, you didn’t lose it,” she said calmly.  “Whores are not married, so last night while you were sleeping your rings were removed and replaced with that toe ring.  Isn’t it beautiful?”

       “But my husband will be angry when he sees me without my engagement ring!”  I said breathlessly.

       “If you’re referring to your master, I very much doubt he will be angry.  Quite the contrary.  No man would want a common slut like you to be wearing his engagement ring.  Just look at you: you’re standing in a hallway naked, your pussy exposed, water dripping from your breasts.  You had to shower just to get a strange man’s sperm off of your body.  Believe me, an engagement ring would be highly inappropriate for someone like you.”

       Someone like you.  The phrase utterly defeated me.  I looked at my companion meekly, seeking help and guidance without saying the words.

       “Listen,” she said.  “Let’s get you dried off and headed home.  I know this is a lot to process.  The best advice I have is to obey.  Just obey.”  I looked at her searchingly – these were the very same words my neighbor Dan had spoken to me.  But this was a woman, and she looked at me without unkindness.  I nodded my head slowly, and she led me back into the spa-like bathroom where she dried me off, selected a short silk robe and a pair of sandals for me, and led me down the hallway to the elevator. 

       I was driven home in a black sedan that apparently belonged to the magazine.  I sat in the backseat clad in nothing but the silk robe and sandals.  The robe was enough to cover my private parts, but only just; my breasts strained the material in front so that my nipples were visible to anyone who cared to look closely, and the robe itself was just long enough to cover my rear, but not an inch more.  The seats of the sedan had pockets in them that normally would have contained copies of the New York Times or Fortune, but here unsurprisingly the pockets had recent copies of Obediance.  I pulled out the most recent issue.  On the cover was a woman with luxurious chestnut hair.  She was standing with her legs spread; behind her, a man’s hands were gripping her hips while his extraordinarily long sex penetrated her rear passage.  (Although I don’t like the word, I looked at that picture and thought, “That’s what the word ‘cock’ is for.”)  Her eyes were closed, she had a faint smile on her lips, and her hands gripped her breasts in apparent pleasure.

       I opened the magazine.  It seemed the entire issue was devoted to the woman on the cover.  Perhaps 20 pages of photos detailed her in every sex act imaginable – performing oral sex on another woman, fellating a line of a dozen men, and receiving anal sex while in bondage, among others.  These photos were fairly shocking to a modest person like me, but then I got to the “article” that followed the photos.  Written in the most graphic possible language, the article described how the woman – Cassandra – had been a businesswoman at a firm in town I had heard of.  How she had been identified by the editors as a prospect for the magazine and had, through a series of small steps, become the wanton whore now pictured in this issue.  Sounds familiar, I thought to myself.  Then I got to the truly shocking part.  No point paraphrasing; here’s what it said: “Cassandra lives at 1732 East Elm Street.  Her former husband is out of the country through the end of this year.  Her body is available to Obediance members Monday through Saturday from 7 am until midnight.  Your Obediance card will unlock Cassandra’s door.  All of her parts are available for use; her specialty is anal penetration, but she will enthusiastically comply with any demand.  Out of respect for other members, please clean her off after using her body.”

       And then, at the end, this: “Next month’s feature: Elizabeth, a common street whore with a heart of gold.  And a body with no limits.”

       Just as I read those words, the car came to a stop.  I recognized my neighborhood, but we had pulled up around the corner from my house.  I looked out the window and saw that we had pulled into the driveway of Dan and Lisa’s house.  “This isn’t my house,” I said to the driver, to whom I had previously not so much as said hello to.

       “Yes, it is,” he replied, as he stepped out of the car to open my door.

       “No, it’s not,” I insisted.  “My house is around the corner.”

       “I know the house you mean,” the driver said.  “Come with me, and I think you’ll see that it’s not your house.”  Wearing nothing but my silk robe and sandals, I followed the driver as we walked the block and a half to the house where I lived with my husband.  There was the house.  There was my Master/husband’s car in the driveway.  And there, clearly visible through the living room window, was my friend Lisa.  Totally nude, breasts exposed for all to see, ball gag in her mouth, looking straight at me.  Wearing the earrings I had seen on the Obediance cover back at the magazine’s studio.  Her facial expression didn’t change when she saw me.  Just then I saw a hand reach around from behind her back to caress her right breast, and that’s when I realized that my Master had his sex inside Lisa.  He was fucking her – no other word for it – in plain view, for all the neighborhood to see.  I watched for just a moment, feeling the jealousy well up inside me at the sight of my so-called “friend” fucking my husband practically in public.  Lisa closed her eyes in obvious ecstasy at what my husband was doing to her with his hands and sex.  That’s when I realized that this really wasn’t my house anymore.  I turned obediently to the driver, who led me back down the street to Dan’s house, my new house, where I would start my new life.  Whatever that meant.