Chapter 34
The restaurant was Saturday-night busy, crowded and buzzing by the time they got there.
Helena sat between Caitlin and Thiago, Juliana across the table opposite Thiago…
in Helena’s eyeline but not directly opposite, so that Helena had to turn slightly to see her.
Another little trick, but Helena recognised it for what it was and every time she did look over Juliana was there, watching her with a calm that Helena was growing to recognise not as playfulness but genuine authority.
The messages had been silent since lunchtime. No instructions, no demands. I taught her that too, Helena thought, that the absence of a command can be as powerful as its presence, that the dominant’s silence keeps the submissive alert, anticipating, wondering what’s coming next and when.
Helena was wired, unsurprisingly seeing as she’d been undergoing a torturously slow form of foreplay since dawn.
She ate her starter without really tasting it, laughed along with the table without really hearing it, and agreed to organise some aspect of Mariana’s upcoming birthday party without really comprehending what she’d agreed to.
She was performing normality while her body buzzed with anticipation, every nerve she had tuned to her dominant across the table who was eating grilled prawns and talking to Mariana about a film they’d seen as if the evening was entirely unremarkable.
Then, between the starter and the main course, Helena’s phone buzzed.
Go to the bathroom. Take off your lingerie. All of it. Bring it back and give it to Caitlin under the table. She’ll confirm for me.
Helena stared at the message. She read it twice, her heart hammering, then looked up at Juliana across the table. Juliana was talking to Camila, not looking at Helena, not acknowledging that she’d sent anything. Her composure was flawless.
Helena looked at Caitlin next to her. Caitlin’s phone was on the table and Helena saw that she had an unread message of her own. Caitlin glanced at it, read it, and turned to Helena with an expression of barely suppressed delight.
“You’d better go,” Caitlin leaned in and whispered. “I believe you’ve been given an instruction.”
Helena stood up. “Excuse me,” she said to the table. “Back in a moment.”
She forced herself to walk normally through the restaurant to the bathroom, locked herself in a stall, and stood there for ten seconds deep breathing.
The practicalities of following her instruction hit home…
lingerie as in bra and underwear. As in she’d have to take her dress off to remove her bra, either that or try on the spot to master the bra removal trick she’d never managed before.
Better get this over with, she thought. She unzipped her dress, lowered it down to her waist, and took off her bra.
She pulled the dress back up again, zipped it, then hooked her thumbs into the waistband of her underwear and pulled them down.
Once she stepped out of them she held her lingerie in her hand…
her nicest set, deep red, chosen specifically for Caitlin and Juliana, warm in her hand, physical evidence of her obedience and her surrender.
She walked back to the table and sat down. Her hand reached under the tablecloth and placed them in Caitlin’s waiting hand.
Caitlin’s fingers closed around them. Helena saw her glance down, confirming she’d done as ordered, then discreetly tuck them into her bag. A moment later Caitlin sent a message on her phone and turned to look at Helena with a small grin. “You ok?” she asked.
Helena nodded and smiled.
Across the table, Juliana picked up her phone, glanced at it, and looked at Helena. There was the faintest smile and a nod so small that nobody else at the table could have seen it.
Good girl, Leoa.
Those two words, good girl, sent a shiver of pleasure through Helena that was entirely disproportionate to two words on a screen.
She’d said them to submissives before, of course, and when she’d been submissive they’d been said to her.
But right then, in that context, knowing that Caitlin was at most a handful of hours away from seeing Helena do something intensely private with the woman who’d earned the right to say them… it was a different level.
The main course arrived and Helena toyed with her food, naked beneath her dress, the fabric shifting against her skin every time she moved, the awareness of her own exposure constant and maddening.
She could feel Caitlin next to her, radiating amusement and arousal in equal measure, and across the table Juliana ate her fish and talked about psychology research and gave absolutely no indication whatsoever that she’d just commanded a woman to remove her lingerie in a crowded restaurant.
“You’re quiet,” Mariana said to Helena from the end of the table.
“Just tired. It was a long day in the sun.”
“Drink more water. You look flushed.”
Helena drank more water and tried not to think about the fact that she was sitting at a table with her sister, her girlfriend, and the woman who currently owned her, wearing no underwear because the last of those three had told her not to.
After the main course, while dessert was being debated, Helena leaned close to Caitlin. “I’m sorry.”
Caitlin looked at her. “For what?”
“For… this. All of this. I know I’ve been distracted. I know my attention has been on Juliana all day. You came to Brazil to be with me and I’ve spent the last twelve hours focused on someone else.”
Caitlin’s expression went from surprise, to kind, to a grin that was so genuinely, thoroughly delighted that it transformed her entire face. She leaned in and placed a soft kiss on Helena’s lips.
“Helena. You absolute idiot.” She took Helena’s hand under the table.
“I love this. I love watching you like this. Flustered, distracted, trying to maintain your composure while a twenty-three-year-old runs you ragged with text messages. Do you have any idea how unusual it is to see you off-balance?”
“I’m glad my psychological torment is entertaining.”
“It’s not just entertaining. It’s magnificent.
” Caitlin squeezed her hand. “You spend your life in control, in one way or another. Of yourself, of situations, absolutely wonderfully of me. And today I’m watching that control get systematically dismantled by someone you trained to dismantle it, someone who knows everything about what control means to you, and it’s the most fascinating, arousing, wonderful thing I’ve ever witnessed.
Don’t apologise for it. I wouldn’t change a single second. ”
Helena looked at her, this force-of-nature who’d had the strength and bravery to kneel for her again and again and who was watching her dominant be dominated and finding it not threatening but thrilling, not diminishing but illuminating, and felt like her chest could burst.
“I don’t deserve you,” Helena said.
“You one hundred percent deserve me. You just don’t realise it yet.” Caitlin kissed her cheek. “Now order dessert. Because I promise you that with what Juliana has planned, you’re going to need the energy.”
***
After dinner they inevitably went on to a bar with music and dancing. They had some more drinks, they danced, they talked.
At one point, on the dance floor, Juliana passed close to Helena and her hand brushed Helena’s hip…
a touch that lasted less than a second, that nobody saw, that sent a jolt through Helena’s body.
Juliana didn’t break stride, she didn’t even acknowledge it, she just moved past and back to her conversation.
She’s a conductor, Helena thought, watching Juliana laugh at something across the bar. And I’m the orchestra. She’s been warming me up all day and tonight she’s going to play.
To Helena’s surprise and relief, she realised that that was precisely what she wanted…
genuine submission to someone special to her, witnessed by someone even more special.
Tonight was exactly what Juliana had called it on the beach at dawn: a parting gift, the last time between them in this stage of their life.
That made it more important, not less.
Around midnight Juliana caught Helena’s eye from where she was standing next to the bar and held up her phone. The message arrived:
Go home, both of you. I’ll be there in thirty minutes. And Leoa? You’ve been very good today. I’m going to reward you for that.
Helena showed the message to Caitlin. Caitlin read it and Helena watched the flush travel up her neck and reach her cheeks. When she looked back at Helena her excitement was palpable.
“Thirty minutes,” Caitlin said.
“Thirty minutes.”
They walked home along the beach in the dark, hand in hand, the moon on the water, neither of them speaking.
The anticipation had solidified into something almost unbearable with the exquisite awareness that in half an hour she would become the lioness who chose to kneel, and that Caitlin would watch her get taken apart in every way imaginable.
At the pool house they showered quickly, separately. Helena pulled her dress back on and, for want of anything else to do, paced slowly next to the kitchen, while Caitlin slipped on a t-shirt and sat in an armchair.
They looked at each other across the room.
“You’re shaking,” Caitlin said.
Helena looked at her hands. She was. Just a little, not much, but everything was coming to a head and she could feel it everywhere all at once.
“I’m scared,” Helena admitted. “Not of Juliana. Not of what she’ll do. I’m scared of you seeing me like this.”
“I know.” Caitlin’s voice was comforting. “You’re magnificent. Remember that. Nobody has the strength that you do.”
There was a knock at the pool house door.
Helena’s heart seemed to stop, then restarted.
Caitlin’s eyes went to the door, then back to Helena.
“Ready?” Caitlin asked.
Helena took a deep breath. “Ready.”
She walked to the door and opened it.
Juliana stood in the warm night, her curls loose, wearing her dress from earlier.
Her expression was composed, calm, the playfulness from the day gone entirely.
This was the other Juliana, the one that Helena had trained, the one who knew everything there was to know about Helena’s thoughts on dominance and submission and who had, through her own natural ability, taken it and made it something bigger.
“Good evening, Leoa,” Juliana said. “May I come in?”