“At the end of the block. Most people park around the corner on Folsom.”
The “club” was the City’s reigning BDSM establishment, the Cathedral. The Mercedes’ diminutive driver was Caryl Leverett, sixty-something venture capitalist and one of California’s most relentless Republican fundraisers (I’m a penniless liberal; at my lover’s request, I’d left my Dean button in the dresser drawer). The flickering streetlight transformed Caryl’s snowy hair into an improbably cherubic halo.
My lover sat quietly in the backseat, not speaking unless spoken to. I ached to touch her, to reassure or to be reassured.
Caryl cleared his throat. “Deirdre,” he said. I heard the rustle as she came to attention.
“You may have forgotten about opening our doors,” Caryl said. His voice held a carefully modulated mix of annoyance and indulgence.
Deirdre got out of the car, her overcoat wrapped around her just a little too tightly. She opened Caryl’s door first, of course, and stepped back respectfully as he emerged; then she came and held my door. I tried to use my best puppy eyes to send a little love, but she kept her gaze obediently on the pavement. Maybe it was
me
who needed the reassurance.
Caryl handed her the keys. She opened the trunk and extracted a heavy leather duffel bag, looped its strap over her shoulder, and brought the keys back.
He smiled at me, an expansive smile for such a spit of a man—he barely cleared five-four—and lifted a black-gloved hand in the direction of the club. “Shall we go?”
As we started out, Deirdre, lugging the forty-pound bag of toys that Caryl would use on her tonight, walked a respectful half-dozen paces behind us. Had anyone been on the street to see us, we would have made a curious chiaroscuro: Caryl with his flaring eyebrows and mobile, alert face; me, a thirty-three-year-old wannabe and showing it, shivering in my just-bought black shirt and dangling triskelion from eBay; and Deirdre, elegant and silent in her ankle-length black overcoat. Her shining hair, pale in the glare of the single sodium streetlight, swept almost to her waist.
I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but it wasn’t a rusting, corrugated iron wall three stories high, interrupted only by an ancient door that screeched in protest as Deirdre opened it for us. And it wasn’t the paunchy, broad-shouldered man in leathers who checked Caryl against the guest list and eyed my ID. And it certainly wasn’t the cocktail-party decorum in the vast, complicated dungeon inside.
At the cloakroom, Deirdre shrugged quickly out of her overcoat, turning heads as she did so. Caryl’s elegant
leather collar emphasized the slenderness of her neck. My lithe lover—Caryl’s chattel for the evening, I reminded myself—wore a black halter with bright, dangling chains that teased her nipples to perpetual arousal. Black net stockings began at mid-thigh and terminated within spike heels. The heels gleamed the color of old blood. Tension constricted my throat, but a steady clutch of arousal churned in my groin.
Caryl took me on a tour as Deirdre went, eyes down, to fetch us drinks. It was still on the early side for a San Francisco party, so only a single scene was in progress: a tall black woman systematically flogged a sinewy man who was bound over something that looked like a vaulting horse. Clusters of people chatted among the machinery, the cages, and the Saint Andrew’s crosses, some in fetish gear, some in casual dress. Some of the machinery was ominously intimidating, and some of the people might have been flown in from the set of
Rocky Horror
, but what struck me most was the essential ordinariness of the low chatter.
Caryl ensconced us in high-backed chairs that faced two massive wooden crosses. When Deirdre returned, drinks in hand, he instructed her to lay out the toys. When she was through, he turned to me. “Are you still comfortable with being an observer?”
I nodded, trying a little too hard, I think, to communicate suave confidence. Maybe this evening had been a really bad idea; maybe I
didn’t
want to see what my lover did on her nights out.
The ruby studs on Caryl’s black shirtfront glittered. “Don’t get close unless I tell you to—I don’t want to worry about striking you accidentally—and as the evening gets busier, be careful not to impinge on the scenes around us. And if our play distresses you and you need to leave, no one will be offended.”
He stood and led Deirdre to the right-hand cross. He
stripped her naked wordlessly; with a tightening in my stomach, I watched the first signs of heavy-lidded arousal invade her face, watched my lover give herself up utterly to this wealthy, politically alien man I’d only met once before. With an easy expertise diminished only by his straining on tiptoes to reach the high rings, he buckled her face-in, arms angled above her head, legs spread and chained at the ankles.
He flogged her. Flogged her with a skilled, relentless rhythm. Flogged her until her ass and back glowed cherry red.
The flogging was almost more than I could bear. My cock was ready to burst—and I wanted to run, to call a cab and flee for home. I was wracked with guilt for being so turned on.
He turned her face-out. I could see she was deep in what she had told me was her “sub-space,” lost in the torrent of sensation and turn-on. Watching her slack face, her vulnerable breasts, her delicate genital hair—arousal and dread soared together in me.
He began flogging her again in this new position. What I had been witnessing was just the beginning. He progressed to cruel-looking, vibrating nipple clamps that pulled from her the first cries of pain and then a writhing, red-faced orgasm. A black box among the array of toys was an “electrostimulation device,” something brand-new in my experience. Deirdre loosed startled howls as he probed her nipples and her now-glistening labia.
The intensity grew and grew. And my tension grew right along with it. Deirdre got together with Caryl only a few times a year, and always for power play. I knew about their relationship from the first, of course: we have no secrets from each other. I’d asked nearly a year before if I could accompany them to a scene. Power play was part of an erotic world I knew next to nothing about, but on the nights my lover disappeared into Caryl’s world, I ached to know what was
happening. Caryl’s invitation to me had been tendered a few weeks before.
The evening had begun with dinner at a busy, fashionable restaurant. Caryl and Deirdre hadn’t “played” as we ate; it was simply a social occasion. Except that Deirdre never took off the long black coat…and I never lost my awareness of what she wore—or didn’t wear—beneath it, or what was happening to her nipples as she spooned her vichyssoise.
The
snap
of Caryl pulling on a latex glove brought me back into the room. Nose to nose with her, three fingers thrusting into her, he brought my lover to a pleading, head-tossing orgasm that left her hanging slack in her chains, spent. He kissed her in the aftermath, formally but quite tenderly. It wasn’t a bad performance for a Republican, and it was an opportunity for me to struggle with the uncomfortable truth that their kiss churned up more jealousy than her orgasm.
He turned to me with impeccable timing: “Would you like to have a little time to connect with her?”
I mumbled something that was intended as a yes and stood. Caryl lifted Deirdre’s silken hair from her face and caressed her cheek with a finger. He spoke to her gently: “Is it all right if I’m away for a few minutes?” He gestured: “He’ll be here for you.”
She kissed his hand in assent.
As Caryl walked away Deirdre struggled to raise her head. She brought her eyes to focus with a loving look. “Are you all right?” she murmured.
“Am
I
alright? I’m not being beaten and electrocuted!”
I stepped toward her where she hung and gave her an open-mouthed kiss. “It’s hard watching. Harder than I thought.”
She nudged my cock with her knee and grinned an exhausted, walleyed grin. “Good,” she said, “as long as it’s not
too
hard.”
I brushed my lips down her neck, struggling to suppress the
fine shaking that had seized me since the flogging began. “Are
you
all right?” I asked. “And how is it having me here?”
“It’s what I wanted.”
Her whisper was barely audible over the tumult of the couple next to us. There, a bristly-bearded young man was flogging a porcelain-featured Chinese woman: a relentless, two-handed rain of blows, the
whack
of leather and the woman’s cries almost continuous. Sweat streamed from both their bodies. Astonishingly, the woman was unrestrained: she held her body to the cross through sheer will.
Caryl returned. He gave Deirdre a drink of water and without a word, turned her so that her backside was again exposed. As he clipped in the last chains, he invited me to stand in the narrow space behind the cross. Stomach leaden with dread, I took my place.
He began again, this time wielding a flogger with a thick, braided handle and terrifyingly thin, cruel falls. My face was a foot from Deirdre’s. She held my eyes with her own, wide, undefended, and blue. I shook. She was calm, transparent to the sensations that assaulted her.
This flogging made what had gone before seem like a trivial preliminary. Caryl had unbuttoned his shirt and rolled up his sleeves. His hair whipped his face as he whipped my lover. My nostrils filled with the stench of leather and pain. As the session intensified, my ears filled with my lover’s cries, wrenched from her, impact after impact.
But from so intimate a distance, I saw something I hadn’t seen before: this fed her. I was watching a religious ritual. My lover reached through the pain to something beyond her, something lovemaking alone couldn’t take her to. My arousal remained, painful and unresolved, but my anguish receded. My shaking nearly ceased.
Caryl’s blows doubled in intensity. His pace quickened. I grasped the wooden beams of the cross and let the concussions
flow into my own body.
I understood. I finally understood!
How long they went on, I couldn’t say. A long time. Deirdre’s cries grew louder and wilder, her voice breaking, her breath coming in desperate gulps. But she never pled for mercy, never asked Caryl to back off. She took as much as he could give.
Finally he was done. Or she was. I couldn’t name the thing that had been communicated between them as she stood, spread-eagled in chains, eyes fixed on mine.
He took her down with delicate gentleness, and I discovered that I had reentered my body enough to make a joke, even if I did it silently.
I’ve finally figured out what the fuck a compassionate conservative is!
Deirdre folded herself into his arms—collapsed, really—and he held her. He turned her face to his and kissed her, a profound, long-continued kiss. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen someone kiss so tenderly.
I brought them a large cup of water and he gave her sip after sip, his face close, breathing with her. And then he laid her gently on the floor. He spread her long black coat over her and knelt with his hands resting on her body for several long minutes.
“Come and sit here,” he said, offering me his place. He withdrew to the chairs.
I sat, holding her, listening to the thud of my heart.
Finally she stirred, ready to rouse. He motioned me aside.
She looked up as he stooped and snapped a leash onto her collar. This was another transition, I saw. The purely physical domination was over; I knew from our talk in the car that he was about to parade her naked and in near-trance through the club. She was now his slave, to be displayed for something much more public than the flogging. In his narrow gray eyes, I saw the first uncurtained emotion he had betrayed all evening: lust. His lust to own this beautiful, naked, defense-less woman
He gave a sharp tug on the leash…and she stuck her tongue out at him, her pink, impudent tongue.
Not just a little way out. Not my lover. No, this was a full-blown, in your face, definitely Democratic
fuck you if you think I’m that easy!
It surprised him
.
I saw his split second of indecision.
And then I saw the Bush Pioneer swing into action, the million-dollar fundraiser, the white-maned, five-foot-four eminence of kinky Silicon Valley megabucks. That tiny white-haired man grabbed my five-foot-six, hundred-and-thirty-pound naked lover—and upended her. Jesse Ventura couldn’t have done it better.
She shrieked.
She was over his knee. She flailed, but he had her, helpless.
His hand went up.
It landed with a
smack!
that turned every eye in the club. Over the background noise of whipping and flogging, over the groans of the inflicted and the grunts of the inflictors, the intent of that sound was unmistakable.
“Caryl!” she screamed.
Smack!
“Whatthefuckdoyou…”
Smack!
Smack!
Smack!
“Nooooooooooo!” I’d never heard Deirdre wail.
Smack! Smack! Smack!
The pace never varied. He never lost his grip through all her frenzied thrashings, never lost his look of privileged determination.
Her butt was already red from flogging; now it flamed. I could see every handprint, one layered atop another.
Smack! Smack! Smack! Smack! Smack!
She went slack in surrender, then roused again. “You sonofabitch!” She bellowed this at the top of her lungs. If anybody had been lurking in the shadows on Folsom Street at that hour, he would have heard her.
Smack! Smack! Smack!
With every smack my cock cranked another notch toward vertical. With every smack, I didn’t think it was possible to get any harder—but I did. The glands in my jaw cramped. I ground my teeth.
She was clawing his shirt, trying to rip his six-hundred-dollar pants to shreds. If his balls had been in reach, she would have torn them off. No luck.
Smack! Smack! Smack!
He wasn’t going to stop. Not while an atom of resistance remained in her.