As She's Told (28 page)

Politely I pretended that such a thing had never occurred to me. "Sorry?

What do you mean?"

"Leda said I was being too pushy. Instead of being supportive. Which you need more than lectures."

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"Well…" I smiled, and handed over one of the menus. What form was this support going to take? "Thanks. I know it all seems pretty weird."

"I've been asking around, and looking it up. And all right, TPE does exist; people actually do it."

I'd never liked the term 'Total Power Exchange.' The first two words were fine; it was the "exchange' part that never felt right. As if it was a seesaw that tipped both ways. But I wasn't going to quibble. "They do," I agreed.

"Though the only websites I saw were people who'd been married for years, and they wrote as much about their kids and their jobs as their kink.

And they went to play parties, lots of them." She eyed me meaningfully. I had heard multiple times that she didn't like my isolation.

"Mm. Keep in mind that the ones on the net are the exhibitionist types.

Kind of by definition."

"And you're not?"

"No."

"And Anders isn't either?"

"Not so far."

He'd been moody that morning. One of his street acquaintances had been assaulted and was in hospital. A debate on public housing in the legislature had gone nowhere as usual. And as a minor but irritating bonus, the mantelpiece he'd tracked down had turned out to be the wrong one. I had listened from the floor and shared his frustration, and wished I could do something, anything to help. My harness got yanked extra tight, so perhaps I provided some distraction, if nothing else. Not much room for lunch today as a result. I looked at the menu, which was basically burgers and beer –

Nikki's choice, not mine. There had to be a salad somewhere. I was actually going to eat at a table for the first time in weeks. I hoped I remembered how to use cutlery.

"But you could show up. I mean, you wouldn't have to scene if you didn't want to."

She was still on about the play parties. "I know." It's not up to me, Nikki, I wanted to tell her, but why start a fight?

She sighed. "I told Leda you were clamming up on me. She said it was because I was judging you, of course you'd stop talking."

I shrugged apologetically. "You were just worried about me. It's okay.” 174

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“Oh, stop it! Stop being so nice and just spit it out!"

I winced. "Sorry. Ms. Nice Guy strikes again." I stared at my plate for a minute, trying to marshal my assertive forces, such as they were. "Okay, when we've been talking, I have been feeling – kind of bossed, a bit. And judged."

"Finally. Well, kinda. In the politest possible way. Girl, you are absolutely turning me into a switch. I never knew I had a dom side until I met you. Do you have this effect on everybody?”

“Hey, maybe." I opened my eyes wide. "That would explain a few things." She laughed, and I laughed, and the atmosphere lightened up. When the food arrived, I picked up my knife and fork and began on my Caesar like a lady, making frequent use of my napkin. Bottled dressing; Anders did it much better.

"Okay," said Nikki, spearing a fry, "I'm accepting that you're safe and happy, like you keep telling me. And I'll stop bugging you about the play parties. I guess you don't get to decide anyway."

Hah! I thought.

"Though you could always ask … sorry." She waved the impaled fry at the end of her fork. "Forget I said that. But what's he doing to you?"

She wanted details. I knew what Nikki wanted to hear, and I owed it to her, after her most kind surrender. So I told her about the Island picnic, not the conversation but the teasing on the way home. She loved it. I told her about the piercing scene, leaving out the long-term use he'd threatened for the rings. She gasped and exclaimed and empathized in a most satisfactory way, and had heard of Zoë and approved of her, which was reassuring. I agreed that this had, in fact, been a scene of sorts, and tolerated the smug look on her face. She asked why I wasn't wearing a collar, and I explained that I only wore one at home. I didn't get around to mentioning the rest of my accoutrements, including the tight web of harness hidden beneath my dress. In short, I gave her a quarter-inch-deep version of the truth that wouldn't upset her. We whispered and giggled, and she reciprocated with descriptions of her most recent play party. It was fun. But Nikki may have intuited a little deeper past the surface than she let on. Pulling back from our goodbye hug she gave me a careful look, and reminded me that if I was ever in trouble I only needed to call. Though I appreciated the girl talk more, it was nice of her to make the offer.

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The routine varied here and there in other ways. Anders sometimes took me out, for long walks or to listen to folk music or jazz; sometimes blues.

There was always a great deal of bondage beneath my clothes, to remind me that I wasn't as other people were. He played at the folk club again, this time in the company of others playing guitar, drum and flute, and I sat below, my heart pounding, as music flew from his fiddle. It seemed like magic, the skill of his fingers that could produce sounds like that. I felt the familiar stirrings of fearful semi-worship, like early man watching electricity crackle through the sky. Why I made so much of this I don't know. Anders had picked up the fiddle when he was a kid, and practiced like anyone else; there had been a neighbour who'd taught him in Copenhagen, and various mentors in Toronto. He wasn't born out of his father's head, radiating complex harmonics and laser light shows from his outstretched hands. But sometimes I caught myself thinking of him that way.

One thing that got introduced as part of the routine was exercise: D/s as part of a healthy lifestyle, as Anders reminded me with that characteristic glint. I had never been especially athletic, but I'd done quite a lot of yoga, and some aerobics off and on, usually when I'd been studying non-stop and felt restless. Anders decided that I'd do these on alternate days, evidently for the dual purpose of my fitness and his own carnal entertainment. The yoga took place after the harness came off and before the corset went on, with minimal bondage. I was only linked to the living room floor by a collar chain, like the day I'd moved in. Very simple, as befit the culture from which the discipline emerged. I learned to work around it. Anders sat back and watched me stretch and bend and twist. He particularly liked anything that resembled a bondage position – lying on my back with my legs over my head, for instance, or the half moon, in which I stood and bent my back in an arch. The bow was a voluntary hogtie position, and the camel not only had me on my knees but displayed my tits nicely.

I was reasonably good at these positions, and doing them naked for my master was hot as hell. At first he didn't know enough about yoga to criticize, but he brought the large mirror down from upstairs and had me do a running commentary in which I critiqued my own performance. After a while he was familiar enough with my self-expectations that he could take over, and suggest a better alignment, a straighter leg, a more extended stretch. And before long these suggestions became demands, and I was no 176

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longer allowed to be sloppy or lazy. Aerobics days were different; they started out tough and only got tougher. Although it was fun that Anders used fiddle music CDs for the background instead of ghastly pop, he pushed me much harder than I'd ever pushed myself, and he used a whip. I found out how much more a whip can sting when used on sweating flesh. The last few minutes were always frenzied, frantic; he invariably drove me a little further than I thought I could possibly go. Trapped between exhaustion and that insistent, stinging lash, I sometimes envisioned a dramatic collapse as the only way out. I never had quite nerve enough to try it, though.

The fiddle music got to both of us, and a lot of the time I ended up just dancing, hard. At first I improvised steps as best I could, since I didn't know, for instance, how to jig. Anders did, and he taught me. He was really good at it, actually, which was intimidating. The more I tried to learn, the more I realized how good he was, though he was completely offhand about this unexpected talent. It was an incredible turn-on, just watching that long body move: loose-limbed and casual, and yet with that centred coherence that was his trademark. Sometimes I got swatted for admiring him, because I was forgetting to dance myself.

One does not normally jig naked, for reasons which should be obvious.

Breasts tend to bounce in an odd rhythm that doesn't quite match the rest of the body. Anders definitely enjoyed it. We also had some funny moments dancing together, him clothed, me naked in collar and cuffs, him stamping loudly with his big shod feet and me echoing with my small bare ones. He'd grab me sometimes and dance me round the room. Every once in a while when the music was right, he'd leap into a hornpipe, waving the whip for emphasis, with an expression of such roguish self-mockery that I'd double up laughing. But a lot of days he said he got quite enough exercise at work, thank you, and made me do all the work. And made me, and made me. I got noticeably stronger, more limber, and more aware of my body. This provided some interesting contrast, given that I was kept literally powerless for hours at a time. But then, the stronger I was, the more restraint I could handle. I could sit still for much longer periods on my chain, and after a while even hogties no longer left me with stiff muscles. In fact, I felt healthier than I'd ever been in my life. Those regular, balanced meals in my bowl probably also had something to do with it. It was a bit like being a valuable racehorse, systematically fed and conditioned.

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I was well broken to harness now, too – his humiliating phrase. The harness felt twinned with me, really; my naked body plus its confining leather web was the thing I was, most of the time; the thing he sent out the door each day beneath conventional camouflage. I moved within those arousal-inflicting confines as if they were – if not normal, at least deserved.

My naked vagina went untouched as promised, for two solid weeks after the piercings, except for shaving, which procedure a s a result became excruciatingly erotic. Anders didn't even use my ass; he said the risk of bacteria travelling wasn't worth it. Without direct teasing I wasn't, thankfully, hovering helplessly on the edge of a crescendo. But I was always well into the adagio. It became an ache, like a background of insistent drums in the distance, sometimes ignorable, but always present.

On laundry days I'd haul baskets of dirty clothes down the stairs, breathing in the atmosphere of Anders' sweat and sawdust and trying not to groan with desire. The machines thrumming behind me, I'd find myself drawn to the incomplete art deco fireplace, with its formal, sensuous grooves just made for stroking fingers.

By the second week I was so desperate to be touched, I would have been happy to be teased and left hanging. But he withheld his torments, at least to that particular region, and teased me by not teasing me.

In fact it turned out to be good training. I was forced to focus on serving his pleasure, since my own was in abeyance. He hadn't made that particular bit of learning easy for me, with his preference for keeping me so constantly aroused. There had been so much focus on my body, on its display, management and discipline, that I'd sometimes forgotten that the whole exercise was for his benefit, not mine. This had of course been made clear to me in words many times, starting with that night in Philosopher's Walk. But he'd also put me through more stimulation and sensation in the short time I'd known him than in the whole course of my previous life. As a result I was getting obsessed with myself. I was being shamefully egocentric, and it was time for that to stop.

One hot day just after the two weeks were over, Anders came home and released me from my waiting spot (the floor at the foot of the bed), and when he pulled me to my feet I could see he was wiped.

"Long day, master?" I ventured.

He groaned, and stretched his back until it cracked. "Hauling bricks up a 178

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ladder all day. Mike is sick, and Eric didn't show."

"Jesus. Are you okay?"

"Just tired."

"I thought Eric was doing better." Eric was a young guy, a former street kid who worked for Anders in between bouts of rehab.

"He was. He's back at it. Stupid bugger. I went over there, but there's no way to get him into detox till the drugs run out. A day or two."

"Um… didn't you just pay him? It could be longer."

"Yeah. I'll have to talk to him about that. Maybe I'll have to go back to paying him in groceries and doling out pocket money. Shit." Anders rotated his head around and pressed fingers into the back of his neck. "At least his rent is paid." By agreement, that part of Eric's wages went straight to his landlord.

"Master, let me get that?" He sat down and I did my best to massage his neck and shoulders. Small fingers have limited effectiveness on that much muscle mass; I used the heels of my hands, and pressed with a balled-up fist on the tight spots. And I mused on the Eric saga, that had been going on since long before my time, starting when Anders found the kid shivering in a doorway and got him to a shelter before he froze. Gradually there'd been progress: stable housing, welfare, addiction counselling, job skills. But the drug problem kept coming back. And who took the brunt? It bugged me to see Anders' support repaid in this way. I redoubled my efforts on the tired shoulders. "Is Eric – I mean, you're so good to him, but there's a limit to –

isn't he kind of – self-destructive?"

The muscles bunched up under my hands. "There are limits to what I can do for him. I know that. I don't try to do it on my own. That's – "

He went utterly still. For some reason I held my breath, my hands still on his shoulders, and my chest tightened in sympathy. What…? Gently, after a minute, I kissed the tight cords at the back of his neck. Anders sighed, rolled his head again, and I went back to massaging. Then he spoke, his voice once again confident and calm, and I felt my own breath returning.