Red Hot Obsessions (169 page)

She sagged back against him as the blood rushed back into her arms and her legs trembled. His strong arms kept her from crumpling.

“My God,” she said.

His chest rose and fell against her back because his breathing rasped, too. His head fell forward on her shoulder, and he absently kissed her shoulder. “
Oui,
” he said. “
Mon Dieu.
”

“I don’t think I can move.”

“You don’t have to.” He reached between them with one hand and pulled his hips back, sliding his dick out of her. She moaned because, even though she was sore and exhausted, his cock in her felt good. He still held her up with one arm because her legs wobbled.

After a minute, he turned back and picked her up in his arms.

“Oh my God,” she said as her feet left the ground. “No one can pick me up.” Rae had grown almost a foot in high school, and since her junior year, no one had even tried to hoist her into the air.

Wulf curled her naked body against his white shirt and carried her over to a chair.

He settled her on his lap and held her while she shook with exhaustion and the aftermath. Her naked ass sat on his pants. She said, “That was amazing.”

His modest shrug rose around her. “An introduction.”

“No, I’m serious. That was amazing. I’ve never done
that
before.”

He chuckled. “Yes, your application was a little thin.”

She laid her hand and head on his chest. His heart beat slowly under the thick slabs of muscle. She could check three more boxes on that application form now. “What was that thing you whipped me with? It didn’t hurt, really.”

“It was a cat o’nine tails, but the tails were made of suede. Such a soft whip is for the effect rather than to produce pain. The term for whipping with a cat o’nine tails is actually ‘flogging,’ not whipping.”

“Wow.”

“I’m afraid your Domme training turned into play time.” He stroked her naked back. She was surprised that her flesh didn’t sting when his hand ran over her. “We’ll have to do better tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” Today was Sunday, and she had to study for an exam on Monday morning. The test didn’t matter if she had to leave school, but if she didn’t have to quit college and go back to Pirtleville, the test did matter. She had to pass her other classes if she wanted to graduate on time.

“Yes,” he said. His firm voice sounded like he had made a decision. “You’ll have Domme training for an hour or so.”

“Domme training with you?” She was mortified that her voice sounded stupidly hopeful.

“Yes, at first.” His offhand remark sounded like he was thinking about something else. “Sometimes I’ll put you with other Doms, too. However,” he looked back at her, and his blue eyes crinkled with amusement. “No more play time. We have to train you, not screw you, even as absolutely delightful as that was.”

Rae snuggled in against him, wondering what training was like, since this wasn’t training. She wasn’t as scared as she had been just a few hours ago.

Wulf rubbed her arm and kissed her forehead. “Rae, we should discuss something else.”

“Yeah?” She was a little sleepy.

“You should talk to the other girls about me.”

Rae wasn’t sleepy any more. Lizzy and Georgie had already told Rae all that they knew, which wasn’t much. “Why?”

“You should know how I am. You shouldn’t get attached to me.”

“Lizzy and Georgie said you ‘love women,
crave
women, and like to be with women, in the plural.’”

Wulf laughed this time, and his chest rumbled beside Rae’s head. “They’re spot on.”

Georgie had also said that The Dom got inside your head and knew what you wanted, even if you didn’t know it or didn’t want to say it.

Uneasiness rose in Rae as she realized that Wulf had done just that to her.

Rae felt helpless in a different way, now. Being tied to the wooden frame and fucked from behind paled beside this vulnerability, that he had sized her up and known exactly what to do to her.

He adjusted his arms around her. “You can relax. It’s just a natural reaction to having a naked woman on my lap. It will go away presently.”

Confused, Rae glanced around, and then realized that his cock was nudging her ass through his pants again.

She took a deep breath, unsure she should do this, and asked, “What else do they say about you?”

Wulf glanced away and seemed to consider for a moment. He stoked her arm, slowly, three times. “That I’m an empty shell. Sometimes they say an empty suit.”

Last night in the limo, Georgie had said that The Dom was as smooth and polished as mirror. Whatever you were or wanted reflected off of his perfectly shiny shell. “Are you?”

Beside her cheek, Wulf sat up straighter and looked toward the door. “I apologize, Reagan, but I have some things to attend to.” His arms strengthened around her,
hugging her,
and then he stood and set her on her unsteady feet.

Rae tugged her skirt down over her hips, covering her pussy, as he walked away from her. The rest of her clothes was scattered all over the playroom. Her nakedness and abandonment combined to make a whole new kind of helplessness.

Dang, she felt
awful
.

Beside the door, Wulf paused. “Outside the waiting room, turn left, and there is a ladies’ spa room with showers, if you like.”

Rae doubted there were any
ladies
in The Devilhouse. She crossed her arms over her bare breasts to hide them and looked away.

“Reagan?” he asked.

She couldn’t look at him. Shame and embarrassment blew up inside her, and her face flushed hot. She felt stupid for all that, and she wanted to yell at him.

“Rae,” he walked back over to her and held her bare shoulders. She tightened her arms over her breasts. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” she said. “I’m okay.” Danged if she was going to let him see her cry now.

“Rae.” He took her chin and raised her face up to meet his eyes. Tears stung her eyes. “Here is some Domme training: a new sub shouldn’t be crying at the end of a session. Some experienced subs, yes, you can break them down and leave them, but not new ones. What is wrong? It seemed you liked it.”

She didn’t want to admit that, when he just walked out the door to go back to his office, it upset her. “It’s just so different.”

His arms went around her, even though her arms covered her chest. “Yes, this place is different from the vanilla world out there, and I think the experience of being a sub, the submissive one, was new to you, yes?”

She felt like he had thrown her away when he just walked out. “Do people
like
this feeling?”

Wulf lifted her chin again to look in her eyes, which still felt odd to Rae because she was used to being the same height or taller than most men.

“You are a natural-born Dominatrix, aren’t you?” His thrilled grin embarrassed her again. “You feel
used
, yes?”

“Yes!” She did, and she didn’t like it, even though just the thought of being tied up and fucked by him again, right now, sent shivers through her legs and belly.

“Then express your Domme identity.” Wulf sat down on a studded leather bench and reclined, curling down in a muscular reverse of a sit-up. He looked up at her with those startling blue eyes and surprised her with a wink. “Here is something you should never do with your subs.”

He laid back and draped his arm over his eyes. “I am spent.” His voice had risen in pitch, and his accent had changed from standard British with light Germanic inflections to pitch-perfect High British, like a bad Shakespearean actor with a little Cockney thrown in. “You ‘ave used me up.” He peeked out from under his arm and whispered in his normal voice, “So you go.”

Rae hurried with pulling on her clothes—her bra was hanging over an iron cage—straightened her shoulders, and strode out of the playroom. Just before she closed the door, she said, “Be on time tomorrow.”

She heard him chuckle through the closing door.

She stood a little straighter on the other side of the closed door in the empty antechamber, another red and black waiting room, and smiled at her little act. Maybe Wulf was right about her being a “natural-born Dominatrix.”

Rae realized that, again, just as Georgie had warned her, Wulf had gotten inside her head and seen that she needed a bit of self-esteem and perceived control so she would come back to him.

Plus, he hadn’t told her anything more about himself, not even whether or not he was indeed an empty, mirrored shell like Georgie had said he was.

Rae had diagnosed him a psychopath from Georgie’s description of him when they were riding to the party in the limo last night. Most psychopaths can charm the pants right off you or, when necessary, tie you up and yank off your panties.

The memory of his hands inside her panties ran through her, and her clit throbbed again.

But Wulf had told Rae his name, his whole name, even if she couldn’t remember more than a few pieces of it, and he had never told Lizzy or Georgie even his first name.

And today, Wulf had told her that he was from Switzerland.

She clung to those two tidbits, but she wondered if they were true and, if they were true, she wondered if he had told her those trivial, objective things because he was indeed a shiny, mirrored shell and was reflecting her need to know something about him.

The only thing that she knew about Wulf, really, was that he liked sex.

She remembered his hands running over her skin and, when she thought she would burst, sliding into her pussy and fucking her hard from behind. She wanted him to have sex with him again, right then, on the floor of the waiting room.

This time, the aftershock orgasm shivered from her clit and over her skin.

Just like Lizzy’s reaction in the limo last night.

Rae needed to figure this out. She wasn’t sure that she should come back to The Devilhouse tomorrow, or ever.

~~~~~~~

Episode 3: Secrets on his Skin

The Costume Closet

Against her better judgment, Rae carpooled with Lizzy and Georgie to The Devilhouse Sunday afternoon.

Up front, the two girls squinted though the windshield at the blazing desert sun and giggled and gossiped about their clients while Rae fretted in the plush leather back seat, watching the strip malls and cacti whip by. The gravel islands down the center of the street blurred into an unrelenting beige stripe. The girls’ perfumes steamed in the heat radiating from the windows, and Rae’s nose tickled with the smells of wilting roses and baking vanilla. She rubbed her nose, trying to itch the tickle.

Rae fussed about her bad judgment when she failed to drop her danged statistics class right off and then her failure to somehow survive a class where the professor passed less than a quarter of the students who started it, and even acing the final exam would not raise her grade above an F anyway so sitting in class was futile so she had stopped going, which felt like accepting defeat.

Rae stewed about how the psychology department was going to yank her scholarship when that jerk stats professor posted her failing grade, and so Rae was faced with the choice of dropping out of college and going back to Pirtleville or finding a whole heck of a lot of money, fast.

Rae was vexed that, if she went back to Pirtleville, her know-it-all Aunt TracyJo would remind her daily that Rae was no better than the rest of them for having only half a college degree, even though Rae didn’t think she was “better than the rest of them,” but Aunt TracyJo thought that Rae thought that she was, so Aunt TracyJo would harp on it, daily.

The only job that would pay Rae enough money to afford tuition, books, dorm fees, and ramen noodles was at The Devilhouse, and The Devilhouse and its Master troubled Rae.

She had another jewelry box in her purse to hand back to him this morning. This one was teal and tied with a thick white ribbon, and she didn’t believe for one moment that the words
Tiffany & Co.
on the box meant that it was real. If that bracelet were real, with its triple-row of colorless stones set in silvery metal, it would be worth a fortune. Such gaudy imitations seemed in poor taste to Rae, like she was trying to ape her betters, which was insulting on several levels.

Outside the car window, Rae watched the tourist stores in the strip malls flit by, selling knickknacks and tchotchkes just like The Devilhouse sold women.

No, Rae was being unfair. The Devilhouse did not sell women. The women and the few men reported their income on their taxes as independent contractors.

The Devilhouse sold sex.

Even that was unfair. The Devilhouse sold space for freely consenting adults to bind and whip and flog and fuck each other, and money changed hands for some of those services.

Lizzy and Georgie consulted for The Devilhouse’s freely consenting clients, and thus they were not whores, even though they were giggling in the front seat about the client with a thumb-dick.

Prostituting oneself raised so many questions. Rae wished that she could just turn off her brain.

Aunt TracyJo would shriek with glee if she knew that Rae was working, or might be soon working, as a dominatrix, and TracyJo would crow it to every member of Rae’s family that she could find as definitive proof that too much education had exposed a mortal flaw in Rae’s character and led to her damnation.

Then no one in her family, even her parents, would ever speak to her again.

Rae had to be careful to hide her possible-maybe new job from everyone, especially Hester.

Hester, Rae’s dorm roommate and cousin, would narc to Rae’s parents and her own mother, Aunt TracyJo, if she saw any sign of moral failure on Rae’s part, and The Devilhouse surely fell on the far end of depravity. Rae’s parents had insisted that she room with her cousin, lest Rae be assigned a roommate of low moral character or—sweet Jesus!—a Catholic.

Rae sighed. A girl could fight her way free of a fundamentalist upbringing, but crazy cult brainwashing never freed the girl.

Rae had been doing so well, she had thought, in fighting all that craziness. She had gone to college and majored in theater and psychology, which her childhood church would have judged as Godless methods to justify sin, and she had slowly, carefully, transitioned into leading a free life without all that fear and guilt and shame.

Or so she had thought.

Wulf—for that was The Devilhouse’s Master’s name—had pushed Rae’s boundaries so far in only two days that her carefully constructed stacks of psychological baggage had crashed down all around her.

He had screwed her yesterday from behind while she had been tied standing, spread-eagle, and she had screwed him with his back against a wall at a party the day before that. He had wrecked her organized towers of mental steamer trunks and emotional wheelie suitcases and reusable shopping totes of trauma, but
dang,
just thinking about those two encounters with him made her skin tingle.

Lizzy wrenched herself around in the front passenger seat to look at Rae. “So what exactly did The Dom say to you yesterday?”

“What?” Rae wasn’t startled out of any reverie. She was straight stalling, and as a psychology major, she knew that transparent and pathetic attempt wouldn’t fool anyone for more than a second.

Georgie had warned Rae about The Dom, as they called him, describing The Dom in terms that Rae would use to characterize a psychopath. Georgie had called Wulf an empty mirror that reflected what you wanted to see. She didn’t seem to hate him at all. In fact, she sounded fond of The Dom, though wary.

Lizzy had had a “date” with Wulf a week and half ago, a date where the sex had lasted three hours and that she wouldn’t talk about but had shivered with aftershock orgasms for an entire week. Georgie had been worried that Lizzy was falling in love with The Dom and had insisted that she forget him and screw someone else to make sure she forgot him.

That night, the day before yesterday, Rae had screwed Wulf before she had known that he was The Dom whom Lizzy was unwisely falling for and Georgie had warned her about, and now, Lizzy was asking Rae what she and Wulf had talked about.

Rae said, “He was nice.”

Both girls in the front seat laughed.

“Oh, yeah.” Georgie glanced at her through the rear-view mirror. “He’s
very
nice.”

Again, uneasiness constricted Rae’s chest.

Lizzy asked, “He must have liked you if you had an interview yesterday and are going back today. Are you working today? Are you official?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Have you filled out the tax forms and stuff?”

“No.”

Lizzy turned back around to look out the front window again. “Must be a second interview, then. I had three interviews before he hired me.”

“What’s a second interview like?” Rae asked. If Wulf was going to screw her again, she should know that in advance, and her pussy warmed at the thought of Wulf’s fingers massaging her clit.

“Oh, you know,” Lizzy said. “He asked a lot of questions about my sexual history and relationships. Afterward, I felt like I had no secrets from him at all, like he knew more about me than my mom and my first lover and God, all put together.”

“Yeah.” Georgie nodded and drove. “I think he makes sure you’re psychologically healthy enough to work there. A sex addict or substance abuser would be a disaster in that place.”

“Oh, yeah,” Lizzy said. “A few Daddy issues help, though.”

Rae blurted, “Did you have sex with him during your interview?”

Lizzy turned slowly and Georgie stared at Rae through the rear view mirror. Surprise lit up both their faces.

Lizzy said, “No. Did you?”

Rae didn’t want to lie to them because they were her friends, but embarrassment rose in her. “No.”

“Ah,” Georgie said. “But you want to.”

“No!” Rae protested, lying some more.

Lizzy laughed at that.

“Don’t worry,” Georgie said. “He never has sex with the girls unless they’ve opted in to having him as a client. Did The Dom explain that whole opt-in thing to you?”

Lizzy said, “Makes it sound like we’re an email list.”

“Yeah, he explained it,” Rae said. “Did you guys opt in?”

“Yeah,” they both said. Lizzy added, “He’s a boss with benefits.”

“Really?” Rae was shocked that they would fuck the boss, especially Georgie, who seemed so leery of him.

Georgie answered, “Hell, yes. Besides the fact that he’s an extra client and you make your usual rate off him, he’s fun, and it’s just a blow job.”

“Lizzy said they had sex for three hours.” Any guy who could bone for three hours without stopping frightened her. Rae’s pussy would be torn to shreds.

“Oh, no!” Lizzy said. “That was a
date
, not a consulting appointment in the office, and he didn’t go for three hours straight. We went back to The Devilhouse after dinner and the concert and did all kinds of stuff for three hours.” Lizzy licked her lips, and her knowing, gleeful grin reached her green eyes as a sparkle. “All
kinds
of stuff.”

Lizzy said that like Rae had no idea what she might be talking about. After Rae’s “training session” yesterday, Rae suspected that she had a very good idea what Lizzy meant, and yet she suspected that Wulf knew so much more than what he had shown her yesterday.

Georgie added, “But it isn’t always just a blow job.”

“Yeah,” Lizzy said. “But you discuss it first, and if it isn’t just a BJ, you leave with a smile, too.”

“Yep,” Georgie conceded. “Giving head all day can get you hot and bothered. Sometimes, I just want to beg one of the clients to break the Terms of Service.”

“So true,” said Lizzy.

Georgie turned the car into The Devilhouse driveway and drove up the long road, past the barred, fenced gardens. Yesterday, Rae had driven herself over, so she had watched the road rather than try to spy past the greenery. The dry hedges just inside the imposing wrought-iron fences blocked her view. “What’s in there?”

The girls laughed again, and Rae was starting to feel like a country bumpkin around them. “We call it The Garden of Good and Evil.”

“You must be joking,” Rae said.

“Some people like to fuck outside,” Lizzy said. “With the desert sun, I’d worry about sunburning my fair ass.”

“Now that’s a kink I haven’t heard of before,” Georgie said. “Stake someone out on the ground until they’re sunburned all over. In the summer, that would take an hour, tops.”

“Lasting damage,” Lizzy said. ‘That’s a no-no.”

“Right, the melanoma thing.”

“Plus sunburn doesn’t show up right away, so the damage might be a lot worse than you think. Those Dominants have to be so careful. Just sucking guys off and pounding out hand jobs is easy.”

Nerves flared in Rae’s chest again.

Georgie parked in a small lot off the north side. “Employees’ lot,” she explained.

Rae stepped out of the car among neat rows of over-priced BMWs and sports cars parked alongside Georgie’s Lexus. Parking her beat-up Ford Taurus in the regular lot yesterday had saved her some embarrassment, but Rae picked up her chin. Her car did not define her or her self-worth. Even if she were to make a lot of money from this venture, she would not buy a ridiculous car and become enslaved to payments that a child therapist couldn’t make.

Besides, people would ask prying questions about how she had afforded such a car. Her parents would ask worried questions. Aunt TracyJo and Hester would ask snide questions.

Georgie swiped a card through a keycard reader, and she and Lizzy led Rae through a non-descript black door into The Devilhouse.

Rae blinked at the darkness inside the short corridor, trying to accustom her eyes to normal indoor lighting after the desert glare. She removed her sunglasses and trotted to catch up with Lizzy and Georgie, who were already swiping their cards in yet another card reader. This place had more layers of security than a heroin smuggler’s warehouse. The door buzzed.

“This swipe is just so they know who’s in the house,” Lizzy explained to Rae as she leaned back and pulled the heavy door open.

“Should I go around to the front?” Rae asked.

“No, you’re fine. Once you’re ready to see clients, then you swipe a card reader in the spa room, and that actually starts your hours on the clock. Did The Dom show you around? Did you see the locker room?”

“No. We just talked.” Rae had lied to her friends more in the last couple days than she had in the nearly three years since they had met, and the wrongness of those lies weighed on her.

“This is the girls’ locker room,” Georgie said. “The boys have a smaller one on the other side, because there are fewer of them.”

“This is
not
a locker room,” Rae said. Locker rooms smelled like feet and sweat, and metal lockers clanged all day long.

Wooden cabinetry lined the walls of this room, and curved benches wound between the doors. Spa music chimed. Herb and flower scents criss-crossed the air. Rae picked out the aromas of rosemary and jasmine. Locker rooms did not have delicate silver and glass sconces that caught the light and glistened.

“Wow,” Rae said.

“Yeah, it gets you in the mood. The showers are back there,” Georgie pointed to a doorway, “and the costume closet is back there.”

“Costumes?” Rae asked and then realized that she sounded like a dolt. Of course the sex workers must dress up in costumes.

Lizzy and Georgie glanced at each other, smiling mischievously. “Yeah. Costumes. Want to see?”

If Rae had not been about to embark on a career as a sex worker, she would have refused, and yet it was stupid to refuse. Costumes were fine. Nothing was wrong with costumes.

Dang it, she had to stop being so weird about everything.

And she had to stop saying
Dang it,
even in her own head. The phrase was
Damn it.

The costume closet was a warehouse-style room full of racks of formal dresses and the occasional period or exotic piece. The ambiance of outlet shopping permeated the place, even to the overhead fluorescent tube lights and cement floor. The chemical-dye smell of new clothes was tinged with dust and leather cleaner.