Breaking Abigail (4 page)

Anne-Marie said, in a musical French accent that made Mark think of the string pieces of Couperin, “Indulge me, gentlemen, for a moment, and drink with me
à l’Institut
.”

To the Institute?
Mark could not but be charmed, given that Anne-Marie was beautiful, wealthy, and, he had learned almost by chance the day before, extremely powerful. The daughter of a banking family, she had left France at age twenty to pursue projects that a friend had said—when Mark had mentioned that he would be having drinks with her—had something to do with the international trading of rare earth metals.

“
À l’Institut,
” said Mark and Jean together, and drank. Mark failed to keep the wonder off his face as he tasted the best champagne that had ever passed his lips.

Jean smiled. “Anne-Marie knows to choose,” he said, his accent thicker than Anne-Marie’s but no less musical.

“
Alors,
” Anne-Marie said, after she’d had a sip. “Come with me.” She led them to a corner of the vast living room. Across the canyon of Park Avenue, Mark could see a slice of the sun setting down the street opposite. They sat on immaculate white couches. Anne-Marie began to unfold the mystery of the Institute.

“For several years, I have been making a list of investors for a project I have always thought of simply as
l’Institut
. I suppose that to be completely honest, the Institute has always been my way to imagine Roissy, in the real world—or even Sade’s creations.”

Roissy.
Story of O
. Mark nodded.

“Always, though, the problem of consent has stood in my way: the problem of the terrible craving both certain men and certain women feel to experience the opposite of consent—that is, to enact and have enacted upon them the sort of naked erotic force that leaves a submissive like me shaking and wet, and gives men like you a reason to live.
N’est-ce pas
?”

“Yes…
oui,
” Mark said, and Jean nodded.

“Mark, I believe that your poor little sub—what was her name?”

“Abigail,” Mark said.

“Abigail,” Anne-Marie responded. “Yes, I believe that poor little Abigail has given us the spark that will light the fire to make the great engine I imagine go. And when Jean told me he thought what I had envisioned for Abigail was possible, I knew that I must try to bring that engine to life.”

Now Mark looked at Jean, and saw that he was in on whatever it was that Anne-Marie was talking about.

Anne-Marie said, “What if we could obtain Abigail’s consent to train her as a concubine for a wealthy man, Mark? What if we could promise her that her memory of consent would be taken away for the first year of her service to him, and that she would depart—if she chose—so wealthy that she need never worry about money again? What if there were many such girls, and many such wealthy men? How many people in Abigail’s predicament could we help?”

The vision rose up in Mark’s mind’s eye, but he shook his head. “But consent is still the problem. How would Abigail consent to be trained that way, even if she were assured she wouldn’t realize she had consented? How does that change the difficulty?”

“That will be Jean’s other task,” Abigail said enigmatically, looking at Jean.

“In addition to the hypnotism,” Jean said, nodding. He turned to Mark. “It will seem strange, but I believe it to be quite true that a girl will consent to non-consent, as long as she is assured she will not realize that she has consented.”

Mark closed his eyes and shook his head rapidly at the strange idea. “If I may be so bold,” Jean continued, “the difficulty you faced with your Abigail was that you had your cock in her little
con
before you realized the problem existed.”

Mark looked at Anne-Marie. She shrugged, “Forgive me, Mark, but in order to be sure Jean could understand, I had to tell him the story.”

Mark nodded, and turned back to Jean. Jean said, “I do not know if you could have exerted the necessary persuasion
before
that happened, but I am nearly certain Abigail will agree to enroll in such a program now, after her experience with you. In my experience—which is very great, in this area—repressed submissives, once they have been awakened to the erotic nature of that side of their souls, yearn for precisely this sort of opportunity.”

Mark nodded slowly, thinking of Abigail’s face at the Christmas party.

“Their intellects grasp that they wish to live their fantasies—that to play out those fantasies will free them to live a life without the fear of their families and of society that has pushed their desires down from their very earliest days. But their bodies, and their libidos, simply cannot attain that desire consistently. To be happy, they know instinctively that someone must force them to live their fantasies, without their requesting it, or that dominant seeking their consent.”

It made sense. It made perfect sense, Mark realized. Abigail’s repression lay so deep inside her that only truly breaking her could help.

A sudden doubt arose in his mind, though. “Could therapy do the same thing?” he asked Jean. “I mean, I guess this would be therapy of a sort…”

Anne-Marie nodded. “Exactly. The Institute will provide therapeutic interventions for these girls in a way that will let them live full lives—and will enrich them, and us.”

“But,” Mark continued, “what about conventional therapy—talking? I guess it just seems a little risky to me, and even potentially unethical, and maybe even illegal.”

Jean lifted his aristocratic chin as he considered. “Perhaps a very gifted therapist could help. But I assure you that said therapist would certainly tell your Abigail that she needed to submit to a man in a BDSM relationship—that only that way could she feel herself to be whole. And, perhaps more important, the chances of Abigail finding that sort of therapist, and not one who would make the problem much, much worse by attempting to cure her of her fantasies, is very small.”

Anne-Marie said, “And of course the special kind of therapy offered at the Institute will be supervised by Jean and the colleagues he chooses.”

“Okay,” Mark said, “so why me? Why am I here? You’re very nice to include me since apparently I was the impetus for you putting this together, Anne-Marie, but although I’m prosperous, I’m not wealthy enough, I imagine, to be one of your investors, or to… um… purchase Abigail should she join the program.”

Anne-Marie smiled. “That’s very astute of you, Mark. First of all, we know you’re a gifted contracts lawyer, and that will suit our needs immediately. Second, you’re a moderately gifted dominant, from all I could find out, which makes you perfect to guide Abigail through the first steps of the process—for we have decided that because of your and Abigail’s previous relationship, she is to be the first ‘pick-up’ as we plan to call them—that is, the first girl to have her memory of consenting taken away, and then to be picked up. Finally, we think there is a vital role to be played by a friend of the girl who is to be trained—a person outside the Institute itself, who monitors what happens to the girl, and intervenes if necessary. We would like you to be that ‘safer’ as we’re calling it, for Abigail. And if and when she finishes the program successfully, and has her memories restored at the end of her first year with her owner, we would like to invite you to join the Institute staff, with a signing bonus of a full share of the corporation we have formed.”

“Of course,” said Jean, “it would mean giving her up to the man who purchased her—at least until she had served him for a year. It would mean suppressing the memory of what happened in the summerhouse, so that she believes no man has ever dominated her, or really touched her sexually.”

Mark thought. He remembered the moment when he had stopped himself from taking Abigail’s virginity in the Podrets’ summerhouse. Why had he really stopped? Not because she had told him to. No. He had known beyond any possibility of uncertainty that she needed fucking.

No, he had stopped himself and stepped back, because he wanted what was best for her. If that meant ending up with him, then all the better. But she would never end up with him if he didn’t try to help her—and she would never have ended up with him if he had deflowered her there, because she would have run away, and probably resented him forever even if the act finally proved beneficial to her in the end.

To go along with Anne-Marie’s plan presented the glimmer of hope that he and Abigail could have a happily ever after. It would end happily, in that case, no matter how unorthodox, or how seemingly wrong, it might be to offer her virginity up—the maidenhead he had managed to stop himself from claiming—to a wealthy man. He had no doubt at all that Abigail was a submissive, and if his instincts were wrong about that, the extensive profiling the Institute would do would find it out, and the whole process would stop before it started.

But Abigail
was
a submissive. Mark knew it. That meant that the conventional romance script simply didn’t make sense for them, even if according to some version of that script the eighteen-year-old daughter of your next-door neighbor whom you fuck in the summerhouse could end up with you—a highly doubtful proposition in and of itself. It was time to write a new script for her, and for him.

Mark took a deep breath. “Alright,” he said. “How do we start?”

Chapter Five

Abigail walked across the quad in the twilight one day in early March. Her nineteenth birthday had been the day before, and it had provided moderately fun times. The dull ache of knowing she could never be happy had buried itself under the more mundane annoyance that nothing her instructors taught her represented knowledge she couldn’t have acquired much more easily on her own. Along with that annoyance came the insistent drumbeat of the question her brain seemed to pose every five minutes or so, “Why not just drop out?”

She was in the process of telling the voice to come back over the summer, please, and let her pull her academic record out of the gutter this semester at least when she saw that sir—Mr. LeMarchand—Mark, Janet’s dad (Abigail couldn’t even really process who he was because his presence startled her so thoroughly) was sitting on the steps of her dorm.

He had a small briefcase with him. He said, “Come with me, Abigail,” and Abigail followed him without him telling her where they were going, or why. He took her to a café, saying hardly anything. He asked what she would like, and he ordered it for her: a cappuccino. He had a double espresso; Abigail couldn’t figure out why a double espresso suddenly seemed so dominant.

“Abigail,” he said, “do you remember when I said at the party that I thought I might be able to help with making you play out your fantasies?”

She felt her face turn bright red. She couldn’t even say yes; she could only nod, very slightly. At the same time, she felt herself growing terribly warm and moist, between her thighs. What was coming next? Was he going to take her to a hotel room and… enjoy her there? At the thought, at the image of herself tied to a bed, with sir enjoying her as she cried out into the gag he had placed in her mouth, a yearning stronger than anything she had yet felt took hold of her. Abigail felt her private part seem to clench in time with the fantasy.

But it could never be. Because Abigail couldn’t allow it to be. Because she would never even let him get her onto the elevator to the hotel room, and if he tried to persuade her she would scream bloody murder and run away.

“There may be a place where that could happen.”

“What?”

Mr. LeMarchand reached down to get something from the briefcase. It was a sheaf of paper, which he laid on the table. “This contract,” he said, “could be the answer you’re looking for.”

He pushed the document across the table. “The first page has a summary. If you sign, you will undergo hypnosis, and your memory of having signed will be temporarily erased. It will be restored no later than the end of your first year of service.”

“Service?” The very word made Abigail want to touch herself.

“If you sign, you will be purchased…”

Abigail’s mouth dropped open. “Purchased?” she whispered. “Oh, my God. I…”

It was the answer. She knew it immediately, even before she heard the rest. By the time her cappuccino was gone, having heard the entire setup of the Institute, she had signed. Dropping out to do nothing in particular was one thing. Dropping out to become fabulously wealthy living out your impossible fantasy of non-consent and in the process leaving your repressive family behind was another. They would wait until the summer to take her, Mr. LeMarchand said, and she would have to spend a week in New York undergoing the psychological profiling necessary to make sure she really could benefit from the strange therapy as much as it seemed, and then she would undergo the memory suppression. She could come to New York over spring break, in two weeks, and then she would finish out the semester while the Institute made the arrangements, including a cover story for her parents and friends. Before being hypnotized, Abigail would book a trip to California that would serve as the beginning of that cover story. Abigail would not see Mr. LeMarchand again until the time came to restore her memory, but he would be watching and keeping her safe the entire time.

“And… my owner… he’ll make me?” Abigail asked again. She watched a look of pain flit across Mr. LeMarchand’s eyes.

“Yes,” he said. “And you’ll serve him for a year—more if you choose to.”

The way Mr. LeMarchand said “if you choose to” clued Abigail in on why there had been pain in his eyes. On an impulse she could not control, she reached across the little table in the café and took his hand in hers.

“It’s still about you, sir,” she said. “But… my fantasies…”

Sir’s eyes widened, as if what Abigail said somehow corresponded exactly to what he had thought she might say. “I want you, sir, but I know now that I need… the terrible things… too.” She closed her eyes and tried to figure out how to describe the burden that lay upon her heart. “I need…” The next word was barely a whisper. “…training.” Even without voicing it, the word seemed to shoot an electric tingling through her body, and she felt her private part spasm and release its wetness in what felt like a gush.