Eighty Days White (30 page)

Tearing my eyes away, and oblivious to Neil tugging my hand, I surveyed the rest of the room. An assortment of low-slung tables and, along the walls, a set of red alcoves, occupied by silent drinkers, most of whom were now examining us.

It was only then I realised they were all women.

A voice greeted us.

‘Welcome to the House of Bamboo Dolls.’ It was an older woman in her forties, I guessed. She was dressed in a tight-fitting kimono, black with thin filigreed streaks of gold, through a slit of which a dark-stockinged, taut and shapely leg emerged. She wore Christian Louboutin high heels. I’d know those red soles from anywhere, not that I could ever afford any. ‘Your first time, I gather?’

I nodded.

She gave Neil a dismissive glance.

‘The young man is yours?’ she asked me, indicating him, as he stood nervously, visibly feeling out of place.

I acquiesced, although I was curious as to why she had used the possessive as opposed to ascertaining that he was with me, which was obvious anyway.

‘It’s allowed,’ she said.

‘Allowed?’

‘There are rules,’ she added, a faint smile spreading fast across her lips. She looked Neil up and down as if he was cattle. He fidgeted uncomfortably in place.

I must have appeared quizzical, so she continued. ‘Is your sub for general or personal use?’

It then dawned on me that Lauralynn was playing a mischievous joke on me, having heard that I would be travelling with Neil. I had confided in her about the ambiguous situation the two of us were navigating. This was all a game for her.

Neil shot me a despairing look, as he also began to size up the situation. His eyes pleaded with me.

‘Personal,’ I quickly said. ‘Is that OK?’

If she was disappointed, the woman in the kimono didn’t show it. ‘Of course.’ She paused. ‘In that case, may I have your assurance the young man is properly marked?’

My eyes opened wide.

‘The Network insists that personal property should be marked,’ she reiterated.

‘Marked?’

‘I take it he isn’t, then?’

‘Hmm … no.’

‘Otherwise, he may be used freely for our entertainment and pleasure. Did Lauralynn not advise you?’

‘No, she didn’t.’

‘Very naughty of her, but then she was always was. It has always been an obligation for anyone who attends the House of Bamboo Dolls to bear a tattoo, as a sign of recognition.’

Neil and I looked around the room. Indeed, all the women here displayed one as our gaze travelled freely.
Facial ones, shoulders, arms, elbows, some fully visible, others just peering out from material and clothing.

Neil swallowed hard. Whispered in my ear that there was no way he could be tattooed across his face.

The woman overheard him.

‘A sub’s mark must be on the body, so only his or her owner is aware of his condition,’ she indicated.

Neil looked at me, and then back at her.

‘I’ll do it,’ he said firmly.

‘What?’ I replied. ‘No, we’ll leave. This isn’t the right way to get something so permanent.’

He glanced pointedly at my teardrop tattoo and raised his eyebrow. Neil was right. On this count, I could hardly protest or offer advice.

‘I’m yours, Lily. I want to always be yours. I want to be marked.’

‘We have an excellent inker on the premises,’ the woman said. ‘Follow me.’ She didn’t seem in the least surprised by Neil’s response.

We were led to a backroom.

‘This is Nibbles,’ the woman said, introducing us to a short, gamine, razor-cut-fringed young woman with a nose ring sitting there at the computer. She had pale-blue eyes and tattoos of flowers running all the way down the side of both her legs. She looked up at us, mildly curious.

‘The boy,’ the woman in the kimono declared.

Nibbles’ expression didn’t change, remote, businesslike. She rose from her chair and walked out of the room to fetch her equipment and was back within a minute, during which time neither of us had said an additional word.

‘How rude I’ve been,’ the older woman said to me,
breaking the ice. ‘I didn’t introduce myself. I’m Madame Violet.’ She didn’t even look at Neil, as if he was barely worth addressing.

‘I’m Lily.’ I didn’t introduce Neil, as I knew she did not expect me to. Some of the rules of the House of Bamboo Dolls were becoming clear to me.

Nibbles returned from the side room, carrying a medium-sized metal-framed flat Samsonite case. Her equipment.

She followed the direction of Madame Violet’s gaze and turned to Neil, sizing him up. There was a deep streak of cruelty shining through her translucent eyes.

‘So?’ she asked, speaking directly to me.

Madame Violet helped me out. ‘Where do you want him marked, and how?’ It was to be my decision.

I deliberated hard and fast, ignoring Neil’s panicked expression.

‘His butt,’ I said.

Madame Violet, Nibbles and Neil were all hanging on my next words.

‘My initial. L for Lily.’

I noted a faint tremor of disappointment running across Nibbles’ scarlet-drawn lips, as if she had been hoping for both something more profoundly humiliating and a more degrading location. But it passed quickly and she puffed her cheeks up and opened the large flat leather case and laid out her instruments on a low-slung table. Some I recognised; others appeared as if they had sprung from a medical horror movie or the brain of David Cronenberg. Neil swallowed hard and held his breath.

Madame Violet and Nibbles looked expectantly at Neil.
He was rooted to the spot, his face paler than I had ever seen it.

‘It won’t be bad,’ I said quietly to him. ‘And it won’t hurt that much. I’ve been through this too, you know, and on my face.’

‘Come on, boy,’ Nibbles said sharply.

Neil failed to understand.

‘Get your boy to undress, Lily.’

It dawned on Neil that the point of no return was irreversibly long gone. He slipped out of his beige tailored cotton jacket and draped it across the back of a chair. He was about to unbutton the front of his silk blue shirt when Madame Violet peremptorily shouted out, ‘No! Just your trousers. We have no wish to see your puny chest.’

I stifled a murmur of protest; Neil was no buffed bodybuilder, but neither was he an eight-stone weakling.

Now increasingly self-conscious under the voyeuristic gaze of three women, Neil’s hands tentatively moved down to his leather belt, which he unfastened. Then he pulled his zip down and stepped out of his trousers. Down to his jockey shorts, he had no hesitation – as if he had now grown resigned to his fate – and swiftly took them off.

Yet again I couldn’t help admiring the tense harmony of his butt cheeks as he was bending over. He straightened and his long, thin cock came into view. He was semi-hard, involuntarily aroused by the turn of events. But he still had his black socks and shoes on and I couldn’t bear to see him look ridiculous. ‘Take those shoes and socks off, Neil. They make you look like silly.’ This time it was me giving the orders. He meekly obeyed and ended up standing there bottomless in our presence and totally helpless.

Madame Violet circled him, and briefly took a hold of his dangling cock, as if weighing it before she let it drop.

‘His ass? You’re really certain, Lily? Last time we marked a sub, we were much more imaginative …’ Her grin was truly wicked and a parade of obscene visions flashed in front of my eyes. But I fought the impulse.

‘His arse. An L,’ I confirmed.

‘So be it,’ Madame Violet concluded. She gripped Neil by the hair and led him a few steps to a tall stool, and forced him to bend over it so that his butt was fully displayed, almost as if he was being disposed for a spanking or a flogging. Neil offered no resistance.

Instruments in hand, Nibbles approached and dabbed some disinfectant across his arse cheeks, lingering maliciously as she did so. She took a step back and kicked his legs further apart to compound the humiliation. Standing behind him, with an obscene view of Neil’s arsehole, I could only imagine the look of horror taking hold of his features.

‘I think Gothic lettering sounds right,’ Madame Violet proclaimed. Nibbles nodded her agreement and bent over Neil’s backside, her instrument purring monotonously and began tracing the letter across his skin. When I saw how large it was, I had an impulse to stop her, but I held back in silence, remembering the indelible impression the number 1, just a few inches from her smooth pubis, had made on me when I had seen Thomas leading his slave at the ball, and also recalled in a flood of warmth the way I had seen marks and words denoted in all their various forms on both men and women by way of collars, paddles with letters set into flesh that marked the word ‘Slut’ in fierce bruises, Liana’s genital piercings, even once a barcode.

Now, Neil would be forever associated with me, whether I liked it or not. I hadn’t planned it. But the thought excited me more than I would have imagined before our visit to the House of Bamboo Dolls.

‘You could have just said ‘no’ and I’d have willingly left the place,’ I said to Neil. ‘Not gone through with it.’

We were in London in his new flat near Maida Vale. From the bay window on a clear day we could see the low walls of Lord’s cricket ground and below a faint, distant strip of green from the pitch. We’d been back two days already and were still fighting jet lag. The initial ardour of our frenzied week in Darwin had cooled and a sense of unease had fallen over us both since our return to England and the events in San Francisco.

Neil was sitting on a kitchen stool and appeared uncomfortable as he shifted from side to side, seeking some form of balance.

‘Does it still hurt?’ I asked him.

‘Not really. But I feel like scratching it all the time and have to hold back.’

I hadn’t seen the mark on his arse cheek, my mark, since the House of the Bamboo Dolls after he’d quickly scrambled back into his pants and we had fled the establishment after a few coffees and some desultory form of conversation with Madame Violet and some of the other dommes present who were curious about our story and backgrounds. Freshly inked and dark black, it dominated the pale surface of his arse like a scarlet letter, a heavy gothic font. I wondered how often, when I was not present, Neil would take a peek at it in his bathroom mirror and what it
made him think of. And in what manner he now associated it with me.

‘We could have left the place, not gone through with it,’ I remarked again.

‘No, Lily, it was my choice,’ he declared. ‘My way of accepting the dynamic of our relationship.’

In the heat of the tropical sun on the other side of the world, his exuberance had seemed so natural and I had enjoyed being waited on hand and foot, worshipped. But my behaviour at the House of Dolls had shocked me, and now that we were back to normal day-to-day life, I feared what we might become.

I felt bad about it all. As if I had deliberately lead him on and not given him anything in return, treated him like a pet, played with him and taken his emotions for granted. Whatever I felt about it now, he would wear my mark forever.

Tomorrow his holiday break would be over and he had to return to work. Should I keep on crashing in his flat or should I somehow begin to look for somewhere of my own to live? And a job? I couldn’t sponge off him eternally, even if he got off on the way I treated him and never complained.

‘Why me, Neil?’ I asked him, just as we were about to slot a DVD into the player. We had spent ages arguing about the choice of movie to watch and reached a halfway compromise which neither of us was enthusiastic about. ‘With your job, your looks, you could have any girl, surely?’

I observed him choosing his words ever so carefully before gazing up at me, looking me straight in the eyes.

‘I’ve always wanted you, Lily. From the first day we met. It’s not a question of looks. Though, for the record, I’ve
always thought you beautiful. When you know, you just know. You attract me, you annoy me, you sometimes make me angry and at other times I feel like shouting at you, but it makes no difference. I’ve never felt this way about a woman before.

‘Initially, I wanted to be with you, to fuck you, sweet or rough, in all ways possible and obscene. I was even ashamed of all those terrible fantasies you evoked in me, the things I wanted to do with you, that sometimes made me feel ashamed of my own thoughts. Don’t laugh, but for months on end I would fantasise of dominating you, taming you, using you like a whore, exposing you in public with a rage I didn’t know I was even capable of, ordering you to do the most degrading, disgusting things, offering you to other men and watching. See how sick I was …’

I opened my mouth but he resolutely continued.

‘So imagine my surprise, my terror, when I found out that I was the submissive one when I was with you, that I had to silence all those thoughts and the only way to be with you was for me to be your pet. At first, I was taken aback by this streak you have inside you, but then I realised that pleasure works in such different ways, and reconciled myself to the fact that accepting your nature was the way to keep you, to be with you.

‘And now I find I am addicted. I need you. More than ever. And I’m scared that you don’t truly understand this and that, eventually, you will tire of me, drop me for another pet, abandon me, empty and unfulfilled. It’s not just the physicality of it, it’s the emotional involvement. When you use me, you take me to places I never knew existed, and I,
melodramatically, think I’d die if I were to be denied access to that space again.’

‘I think I understand, Neil, but I’m not the only domme around, you know. Others are so much more experienced, I’m still learning.’

‘I realise that, but I don’t have that personal connection with them that I have with you.’

‘I just don’t want you to depend on me, Neil,’ I protested. ‘I don’t know if I’m capable of being all the things that you want. That you need.’ His shoulders stooped as if I had delivered a mortal blow.

‘I agreed to be marked for you, Lily.’ He was pleading now, and all it did was stoke my anger. I hadn’t asked for this level of dependency. I didn’t want to own him. He was a friend. A close friend. A lover. I didn’t want him to be just a toy. It was a responsibility too far.