Chapter Three
Just before midnight, a highly sought-after dominatrix stands outside of a client’s building on Mercer Street in SoHo.
She’s been running around the city for hours and did all the drinking and all the drugs and all the fucking to forget about the one place she can’t go tonight: the private birthday party at the Blue Angel.
She pulls the keys out of her trench coat pocket. Yes, she has keys to this client’s well-appointed loft. His particular, elaborate fantasy includes the feigned element of surprise.
She opens the heavy exterior door and takes a small elevator to the top floor.
It’s warm for mid-October, and she’s sweating in her thigh-high black patent boots and constrictive corset.
She sets her suitcase down and takes a moment to powder her pale complexion.
It’s crucial, as the saying goes, to never let the customers see her sweat.
She is superhuman. She is master of the universe.
She is Mistress Violet.
With a quick time check—eleven p.m. on the dot—she unlocks the door and steps inside. As always, the man sits in the middle of the room on an antique wooden chair, dressed in a vintage red ball gown pulled up to reveal his small cock, which he is methodically stroking.
Violet strides deeper into the room, her sharp-heeled boots making a menacing clatter against the marble floor.
“Billy! Are you doing that naughty, naughty thing again?” she says, her voice dripping with disgust.
“Yes, Mistress,” the man says sheepishly.
“This is very, very distressing to me, Billy,” she says, moving closer, shedding her trench coat to reveal her leather-and-satin-clad body. The client’s hand continues to work his cock while his eyes sweep her from head to toe.
Violet reaches forward and slaps him hard across the face.
“Did I give you permission to look at me?”
“No, Mistress. I’m sorry, Mistress,” he says, immediately averting his gaze.
“You are being a very bad girl,” she says. “I’m going to have to punish you, you realize that, don’t you?”
The man nods, cowering slightly. Violet pulls a whip out of her small suitcase.
Tonight she doesn’t have to feign her anger. How could she be excluded from Moxie’s birthday party? She’d fought her way into the club but is somehow still an outsider.
“Remove your dress,” she says. The man complies, unzipping the back seam with practiced hands and stepping out gingerly. He folds the dress and places it carefully on a chair. “Now turn around and show me your ass,” Violet commands.
He follows her orders and she waits a few beats, letting him savor the anticipation of the first tear into his flesh.
Then, raising her arm and with expert precision, she flogs him across his ass cheeks.
She sees the usual shudder run through him, and she never knows if it’s pleasure or pain.
Probably both. She lifts her arm once again.
After a few minutes, when red welts appear in a crisscross pattern on both sides of his buttocks, she drops the whip and sighs.
“That was for looking at me without permission,” she says, walking around him in a slow circle. “Now, we still have to deal with you playing with your dirty parts, don’t we?”
“Yes, Mistress,” he says.
“Bend over the chair, you little whore,” Violet commands. The man follows her direction, bracing his torso with his forearms on the chair, his legs nearly straight, his ass high in the air.
Violet struggles not to yawn. The tedium of following the same script week after week, coupled with frustration over the party, is making this session unusually difficult.
She used to love sessions like this—simple S&M, a little verbal abuse.
Classic and very satisfying. Midway through the session she’d get a high that would last for hours.
Now the only high she can get naturally comes from performing on the Blue Angel stage.
But that gig doesn’t pay shit. It’s a conundrum.
“I can’t believe you couldn’t get me into the Blue Angel party tonight,” she says. This time, her anger isn’t an act.
The first time she saw Moxie, aka Mallory Dale, was at an exclusive party for Gruff magazine’s “Hot” issue.
The only reason she got in the room was because the founder and editor-in-chief of the taste-making rag was none other than tonight’s client, Billy Barton.
She’d never forget looking across the room and seeing the striking woman, wondering who she was, and learning—to her delight—that Mallory was a newbie burlesquer like herself.
But Mallory “Moxie” Dale was in the inner circle, with her journalist boyfriend and her new gig at the Blue Angel.
Violet was still laboring in the shadows as a dominatrix, picking up burlesque gigs here or there at the Slipper Room or Public Assembly in Williamsburg.
So she networked that party and got the word out that she needed a more high-profile gig.
Agnes heard there was a hot new girl in town, and Violet got into the Blue Angel.
But tonight, her exclusion from the birthday party reminds her just how far down on the burlesque hierarchy she remains. And it’s humiliating. Unlike her clients, she does not appreciate humiliation.
“I’m going to have to teach you a lesson,” she says, kneeling down to choose from her supplies. She decides on a wide black dildo and squeezes a liberal amount of lube on it. “Teach you not to ever, ever let down your mistress again. Do you hear me?”
“Yes, Mistress.”
She advances toward him, then reaches out her foot and skims his waiting asshole with the heel of her boot.
“Do you think you are worthy of having my beautiful boot in your dirty, ugly pussy?” she says.
“No, Mistress.”
“No is right. I’m going to fuck you with my dirty cock—and you’re barely worthy of that.” She plunges the dildo deep into his anus. He likes a rough entry, and then for her to work it slowly in and out while he jerks off.
While she waits for him to come, she looks around the apartment, marveling at the art, the photographs on the walls, the brilliantly composed furniture and color scheme.
She wonders how many celebrities have partied in this very apartment, perhaps even sitting in the chair that their host is now leaning on while being fucked in the ass, drooling over a ball gown, his cock in his hand.
It’s hard to recall the time when this had been fun for her. She knew she had once enjoyed the work, but the memory is fading like a dream hours after waking. Now all she feels is resentment. It’s frustrating to always be the one giving satisfaction, never receiving it.
“Mommy!” her client calls out, as he always does upon climax.
Violet looks at her watch.
“Thank you,” he says, breathless.
“My pleasure, Mr. Barton,” she says.
Time to clean up.
She strides into to the bathroom, washes her hands, and repacks her bag.
By the time she returns to the living room, her client has transformed from a sniveling sex slave to media mogul.
The entire countenance of his face is different, and he’s changed into slacks, a jacket, and pinstriped Thomas Pink shirt.
He hands her an envelope that contains five hundred dollars in cash.
“See you next week,” he says. “Oh, and I’m sorry I couldn’t get you into the party at the Blue Angel tonight. But to make it up to you, inside the envelope you’ll find a few tickets to a private screening of the new Jarod Marks movie.”
Jarod Marks is a gorgeous young actor, the latest protégé of director Martin Scorsese. Billy knows everyone. And his connections should really be paying off more—for her.
“You know, you should own a club,” she says. “Ever think about it?”
“Not really. Few are truly profitable. I’ll stick to media domination.”
She can’t help but smirk at the word domination. For a magazine editor, he should have a better sense of irony.
She shows herself out.