Safe Word: An Erotic S/M Novel (13 page)

I was embarrassed, a little, after that. "But where...?" I
whispered, after kissing him breathlessly for a while, "how...?"

He pretended to be casual about it. "Oh, that," he began.
"Oh. Yeah. Well, sometimes I like to go down to Valencia
Street and browse the lesbian sex zines. And, well, uh, when
you were telling me about your adventures in the kitchen,
I remembered something I'd read. See, there's a zine that has
kind of a `Hints from Heloise' column and I always check
it out. Well, I figure they'd know, right?" He shrugged, all
boyish, charming, phony modesty. I kissed him again.

And when I went to take a bath a little while later, I found
that I was singing, softly at first, but happily and ridiculously,
a song from deep within my memory. I know lots of old rock
songs, you see. They were imprinted on me, when I was very
little, by my boomer parents who played their favorite records over and over, constantly. So, as I was running the hot water
and dumping in the bath salts I started singing. I got louder,
too, warbling unselfconsciously along with the sound of the
water and the pipes-with the harmonies of my overworked
senses and overwhelmed emotions. And as I lowered myself
into the steaming tub I was singing full force.

"In the jingle jangle morning," I sang, "I'll come followin'
you." And I wondered if I really would, too.

Of course, you always pay for it, don't you? You get out of the
bathtub or shower, you see the other person's amused face,
and you realize just how loudly you were belting out your
song in there.

"Nice selection," he grinned. "A lesser sensibility might
have given me `You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman."'

"Come back to bed," he added. "I lied before. I want
your mouth too."

I'd forgotten how devastating I found that little phrase.
I want. Well, it was more than a phrase, after all-it was, as I
could have told you at nine years old, a complete sentence, the
verb sweetly agreeing with the subject in number. Number?
One. Just him, his declarative, subjective singularity-taut,
swollen, urgent. I want. Tense: the present. Oh, yes, very tense,
and very present. A simple sentence, wanting to grow, to complexify, its predicate demanding its object give it its object.
Your mouth. And I opened my mouth, and he pulled my head
down on him, hard. Oh, and I want you. I want you. To want
it. To want me. It. Dissolve. Drown in the ambiguity.

But you don't really drown. After a while you surface.
He pulled me up, helping me to swim, like Alice through her tears. And words, phrases-exclamatory, hortatory-odd, illassorted forms from languages living and dead, bubbled up
in me, as I demanded more, more from him, his hands, his
mouth. Onward, I insisted. Onward and upward and downward too, I directed him. And so on. And so forth. Q.E.D.
and P.D.Q. I remembered another barely understood favorite song from early childhood. She comes in colors-only I
don't, I come in words. Et cetera and even and so weiter. Aha
and eureka and excelsior, too. Semperfidelis and don't forget
sic semper tyrannis. I led and he followed, but matching me,
teasing me, laughing at my insatiability and goading me on,
chasing me through moods and modes, hollow lands and
hilly lands, as the twilight deepened and we exhausted ourselves-our abilities, ingenuities, vocabularies. We slept for
a while, and it was very dark when we woke up. Ten o'clock,
too late to get dinner in a restaurant. "But I'm starving," I
wailed, and we went out to find a cafe that would give us
salad, or cassoulet, or anything.

Over coffee, our elbows on the crowded little cafe table,
our hands linked, I wondered how I could make this moment
last, just a little longer. Because out of the happy haze that had
surrounded us that long, drizzly afternoon, certain details were
beginning to emerge, islands in the sea of memory, the tides of
events swirling around them. Things were going to change, I
knew. Soon. They were changing now, and I couldn't stop
the haze from dissolving, from revealing the new landscape.
I looked at him, silently imploring him to help me hold on to
the moment, but he shook his head. Damn, I thought, he wants
things to move along. He's ready and I'm not. He kissed my fingers, my knuckles that were beginning to clench; he brushed
them lightly with his lips. His eyes, peering over the top of my hand, were sympathetic, ironic. He'll be patient, I thought, for
a little while longer. Maybe, if I'm lucky, until tomorrow

Where had it come from, this change in mood, in tempo?
Perhaps it had been those slaps. Not that they'd hurt, but
they'd lingered, resonating in memory. I was suddenly overwhelmed by memories, images-his hand on his rattan cane,
while I sobbed and writhed beneath him. The modeling of
the bones in his wrist, the tension of the muscles in his forearm, the heat in his eyes. Was I feeling terror, I wondered, or
impatient desire? Was time moving too fast or too slowly?

Back up, I thought. Slow down. This isn't about pain yet.
It will be, oh, don't doubt that. But there are other things,
important things, protocols and decorum to be put in place
first. Those slaps-they're not punishment, after all. They're
communication: simple syntax in the pidgin of dominance
and submission. Like that snap of his fingers. It's a wakeup
call, a warning signal that we're no longer moving through
the courtly figures of seduction, flirtation, negotiation.

But it was dangerous to think like that. If you could call
it thinking at all. I mean, it was the kind of thinking where
thinking makes it so-I was already mainlining his signals,
his commands to my wet, open, tremulous, primitive body,
feeling the sound of the snap of his fingers.

He shook his head, across the table from me. "You're
really something," he said, smiling. And then, looking around
him, "I think they'd like to close the cafe." He gestured for
the check, and I tried to compose myself-to get back into
real time, to watch the cafe owner's wife yawning, her reddened hands polishing the espresso machine.

Hurry up please it's time. Time to wrap up the old stories
and to make up some frightening, difficult, new ones. Hurry
up. Because he won't say "please" tomorrow.

We walked quietly back to the hotel through dark,
wet streets. You could see a few stars, but it was still mostly
cloudy.

"It's late," he said, opening the door to our room, taking
off his jacket and hanging it in the armoire.

I nodded. I pulled off my clothes and tossed them onto
the floor.

We got into bed and he snapped off the light.

I snapped it back on. "Not yet," I said. "One more story
today."

He raised an eyebrow, and I drew myself into sitting
position.

"Okay, Jonathan," I said. I found that I could still conjure
up a confident, demanding tone. "A story from you now" But
with a subtle weakening at the end, like a boy whose voice is
changing. "And one that's not about Kate."

That letter I wrote to you-I'd given it to Stefan to give to
you-got me into trouble. It was definitely an unacceptable
thing to do, you see, in the parallel legal universe of the auction association. Stefan should really have refused to let you
see it. His story was that he thought I had a right to send it to
you, because they hadn't signed the papers yet and you were
still my property. But I think he'd passed it on, to you and
Constant, just to make trouble for you. And for me.

Because it had definitely been a no-no, and the auction
people, the powers that be, felt they had to censure me for it.
I'd gotten a phone call from my lawyer, Brewer. Not from his
secretary, which is what I would have expected. No, Brewer
called me himself, to set up a lunch appointment, to talk
about it some more. "What the hell did you think you were
doing?" he asked. And when I stammered my apologiesI'd been carried away emotionally, whatever-he sounded
serious.

"That letter could get you barred from the association,
Jon," he said. "How long have you been a member?"

"Fifteen years," I said. "More, I guess."

"Well, you should know better," he growled. "I'll send
you copies of the relevant clauses in the bylaws, so you can
see just how entirely out of line you were."

Who reads these things? I never had. Well, but I'd never
needed to. I'd always been such a good, well-behaved citizen of
the association before. I mean, it was all common sense, basic
manners and sensibility, boundaries one wouldn't dream of
overstepping. Who would have imagined doing any of what I'd so thoughtlessly done? The bylaws couldn't have been clearer.
The prohibitions against declaring love or proposing friendship
to a slave, revealing one's own emotions, or phrasing anything
as a request rather than a command. Worse, I thought, probably, was the way I'd asked you to meet me in a year. I couldn't
specify the exact clause I'd violated, but I knew that Constant
had been right to take issue with what I'd done. Because, yeah,
I'd definitely wanted you to think about me, on his time,
across the boundaries of the year he'd paid for.

Constant, Brewer told me over lunch, had really been
very decent. He'd known how badly trained you were when
he'd bought you-that was why he'd gotten you for less than
a hundred K, and he didn't mind that. He liked a bargain
and he was depending on his trainer to get you into shape
anyhow. So in a sense my sappy letter was just confirmation
of what he'd already surmised. "But," his letter to Brewer had
concluded, "while I don't mind playing outside the rules once
in a while, most of your members would probably not be so
forgiving. So I advise you to censure Mr. Keller, and-for the
future health of the association-to make every effort to keep
your procedures clean and rigorous from now on."

"We'd simply boot you out," Brewer said at lunch, "if
you weren't a member of such long standing. And then there's
your friendship with Ms. Clarke."

Kate. Oh, shit, Jon, I thought.

"Does she know?" I asked.

He scowled, not dignifying that with an answer. He
hadn't spoken to her about it, the scowl implied. He'd find
that entirely indecent, embarrassing. But of course she knew.
Whom was I kidding?

"You'll come to the office, tomorrow at ten," he said. "I'll draw up some papers and you'll sign them. You'll pay a fine,
too. And you'll be disciplined."

I raised my eyebrows. I wasn't used to being bossed
around by a man who was, after all, a functionary I paid
to keep my affairs in order. And he couldn't mean what it
sounded like he meant, could he?

He nodded, his leathery face set in grim lines. "Be there,
boy," he said. "And," he looked disapprovingly at the collarless dress shirt I was wearing, under my jacket, "wear a tie."

"Yes, sir," I said.

Well, I hoped it was a conservative enough tie for him-blue
and olive diagonal stripes. Navy blue blazer, gray slacks. I
couldn't believe I was dressing this carefully-and shaving
this closely. I felt raw.

I got to his office about two minutes late. I'd intended to
be early but I'd been held up for twenty minutes while they'd
rerouted downtown traffic around a PCB spill. Brewer wasn't
very impressed with the excuse, either, when the receptionist
led me into his office. "My sciatica's bothering me," he said.
"I would have stayed home today, but we've got to get you
squared away, you know.

"Thanks, Marilyn," he said now, to the receptionist.
"Look, Mr. Keller and I will be busy in conference room H
for an hour. You can leave messages on that phone, but don't
disturb us otherwise."

She nodded, throwing me a last, wounded look-I
hadn't had the energy to flirt with her that morning. I guessed
that I usually did-she's always been really nice and helpful
to me-but I'd never really thought about it before. And then
Brewer led me down the hall.

I'd never been in that conference room before. Odd. It
didn't have any of the bland, corporate art they had all over
the rest of the place. Nothing on the walls at all. And just a
small window facing a blank wall. It was small, for a conference room. And there was only one chair at the oval table,
though there was a leather couch against a wall.

I'd thought we'd both sit on the couch, and I headed
toward it.

"Hey," he said then, "where do you think you're going,
boy?"

I swallowed, turned slowly to face him. He was sitting in
the chair at the oval conference table, a manila folder of papers
in front of him. He opened a drawer under the table then, and
took out a rattan cane, which he put on top of the folder.

"You do want to keep your membership in the association?" he asked.

"Yes, sir," I said.

"Drop your trousers," he said. "Shorts, too. Thats right, just
let them bunch up around your ankles. And walk over here."

God, I hate that. Hobbling across the room with my pants
around my ankles, and then standing there in my gold-buttoned blazer and striped tie, my erection beginning to poke
its way through the opening in my shirt. Even as I stared fearfully at the cane. Well, especially as I stared at it.

"Nice tie," he said, and I thanked him. "You can take off
the jacket, if you like," he added.

"Okay," he said then, "Twenty strokes, and you'll count
them for me, won't you, boy?"

"Yes, sir," I said.

"You can scream all you want. The room is soundproofed," he added. "We don't want to frighten the secretaries. Or upset Marilyn. You seem to have upset her enough this
morning already."

I apologized, and he nodded. He winced, his posture
stiffening-and I realized that his lower back really was pretty
painful. And I felt a sudden rush of guilt. Jeez, he was old, he
was in pain, and he was taking the trouble to punish me, all
to keep me in the fold. This was going to be different from
other beatings I'd had from time to time, usually from Kate,
or somebody equally delicious. Those had been sport. This
was going to be, uh, difficult....-