Chapter 2 #4
I notice she didn’t tell me how she’d feel about being exhibited. Either she’s trying to keep me guessing, or she isn’t sure how it will work with me. I like that she’s keeping her options open. Clever girl.
“Tell me about your favorite scene.”
“Ever?”
At my nod, she rubs her forehead with long fingers. Short, bare nails. A sneaky tattoo on the side of her index finger in a scrolling script says, “Crescendo.” I like it.
“That’s hard,” she says. “I mean, my favorite, you couldn’t do on your own.”
“This isn’t about replicating your favorite scene. It’s about understanding what turns you on.”
“Oh.” She smiles and her hand drops back to the table. “Okay.”
While I feed her the rest of the lamb, she tells me about her favorite scene, which is the club’s bi-annual slave auction. Unfortunately, I’ve just missed the last one and the next isn’t for several months. Disappointing. It sounds like a damn lot of fun.
“What do you like best about the auction?” I ask, to pick apart what flips her switches.
“Everything,” she says dreamily. “The build-up is amazing. It’s like this crazy fluttering in my chest. I’m on edge for days.
Being displayed all day before the auction turns my head inside out.
Anyone can do anything they want while we’re being displayed so long as we’re not moved off the pedestal and it doesn’t breach our hard limits.
I’ve been whipped, fingered, fucked, had ice cubes pushed up my ass.
Anything goes. I never know what’s going to happen next.
I’m in subspace the whole time.” Her cheeks pinken with the memories.
“The auction itself is terrifying. We’re blindfolded so we can’t see who’s bidding.
Sometimes they bid out-loud and I strain to place the voice, but a lot of the bidding is silent, so all I can hear is the number going up and up.
At the end of the bidding, the winner comes up and leads me off the stage.
I can smell them and hear them if they talk to me, but sometimes I don’t know until the very end of the auction who has bought me.
Karl, he’s one of the club’s crazier Doms, he bought me one year and never let me take the blindfold off.
Not for the entire day he ‘owned’ me. It drove me completely insane. ”
I tick off boxes on my mental checklist. Anticipation. Exhibitionism. Public use. Uncertainty. Sensory deprivation.
“Sounds exciting. What about being owned after the auction?”
Her flush deepens. “Sometimes it’s good. Sometimes it’s kind of a let-down. But the auction itself is so good it doesn’t really matter.”
“Okay. Not to bring the mood down but tell me about the worst scene you’ve done.”
While she considers the question, I cut up the peppermint crisp tart that the restaurant recommended for dessert and take a bite.
Fuck, that’s good. Chocolatey and minty and crunchy with a very slight alcoholic edge.
I tease Brenna by pulling the take-out container in front of me and cupping my hands around it.
When that cute lower lip peeks out again, I relent and offer her a spoonful, which she eats greedily, licking her lips.
I like seeing her play my game, and I like even more seeing her enjoy dessert.
Amy wouldn’t eat anything sweet, and she shamed Naomi into not eating dessert even when she was a kid, which always made me sad.
“Worst scene really wasn’t all that bad,” Brenna says after a sip of water. “It was just disappointing.”
“What was disappointing about it?”
She lifts a shoulder. My mouth waters to lick the soft skin she exposes, trace the edges of the floral tattoo peeking out of the wide collar of her sweater with my tongue. I swallow the urge in my own sip of water.
“It was my second scene. The first one was so good. I started coming half-way through the flogging and never stopped.” She laughs, low and throaty, at the memory.
“The second one was a sensation scene. He used fur and feathers. It was just . . . dull. I know that’s terrible to say, but the first scene was so intense and then the second scene didn’t do anything for me at all.
He finished off with all these different flower petals.
There were really strongly scented lilies in what he used, and they made me queasy.
I offered him a blow job just to get the scene over with. ”
I tap her lower lip with the spoon. “That’s topping from below.”
“I know.” She sighs. “I’m guessing that won’t earn me sex privileges.”
“Definitely not. Why didn’t you just safe word?”
She grimaces. “It was only my second scene. I thought, maybe, I was the problem. I mean, he was trying. It just didn’t do anything for me.”
“So we’re clear, bold girl, if the scene I’ve planned isn’t doing anything for you, you’d better tell me. Trying to manipulate me into ending the scene will not go well for you.”
She widens her eyes at me. Minx. I tap her lip with the spoon again.
She laughs. I love the sweet, alto notes of her laugh. They make my chest light, and my balls tight.
“Will you punish me?”
“For topping from below? Yes, I will. That’s challenging my dominance.
Same as breaking a rule. You don’t want to go there, bold girl.
You’ll find I’m just like Logan in that way.
” I tap the spoon gently against her teeth just to see her shiver.
“Funishments? You’ll love those, and I’ll be happy to give ‘em to you all day long. Punishments, you will not like. No matter what a little masochist you are.”
She lifts one of those long-fingered hands that I have a strange hankering to see coated in latex and lifts her thumb. “Topping from below gets me a punishment. What else?”
“Breaking rules.”
“You haven’t given me any rules yet,” she points out.
“Don’t worry, I will.”
“Anything else?”
“Lying to me. Otherwise, I’m pretty straight-forward, as Doms go.”
She grins. “As Doms go.”
Over the last few bites of tart and then through coffee, black for her, milk and sugar for me, we talk through her hard and soft limits.
She doesn’t have many and the few she has aren’t any kind of problem.
We wouldn’t brush up against them during initial scenes, anyway.
Her experience is a little daunting: she’s been serving at Blunts for over five years, since she turned twenty-one.
Before that, she used fake ID to play in the underground clubs.
Bold girl that she is, she freely admits her lawbreaking, which earns her another rap on the teeth with the spoon.
I finish up by asking about her medical issues.
I know she’s had surgery on her hip, and she tells me she has a plate and pins in her leg as well, so I’ll have to watch her flexibility and be careful with electrical play.
She has nerve damage in her arms and back that she says can be aggravated by prolonged bondage.
I make a mental note to look for scars when I’ve got her naked, and to find out what gave her nerve damage, but that’s definitely not a subject for our first scene.
“What do you know about me, bold girl?” I ask, to segue into where I want to end our lunch.
“Only what Em spilled. You’re Logan’s oldest friend. He worked for you in the Navy—”
I chuckle. “He served in my unit.”
Her cheeks tint. “That’s what I meant. You’ve been married, but were separated for, like, a decade and made the divorce official recently because your ex wanted to remarry.
You have a daughter who is only six years younger than me and you’re worried that I might think that’s weird.
Which I don’t. I mean, it is a little weird that you’re old enough to be my dad, but it doesn’t really matter for a scene, does it? ”
I don’t like that. Not at all. I’m not thinking of this as a single scene, and I don’t like that she is.
“Does it?” I ask.
She folds her lips in and pinches them between her teeth, then blows out a breath before she says. “I said too much, didn’t I?”
“Did you?”
“Yeah, I did. You’re doing that Dom thing where you repeat questions back to me until I realize how stupid I’ve been and roll over and show my belly.”
The warm chuckle in my chest blooms into a laugh. This girl. I love that she’s so experienced she knows all the standard Dom tricks. It’ll keep me on my toes. And just because she knows the tricks, doesn’t mean they won’t still work on her.
“Is that what I’m doing?”
“I’m sorry for the verbal vomit.” She wipes her hands down her leather skirt before she circles them around her coffee cup again. “I guess I’m a little nervous.”
“Why are you nervous?”
“I’m sure Emily and Logan told you.” She gesticulates vaguely with her hands. “Submission. It’s not working for me anymore. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but my headspace is really off. It has been for a while. I, um, I guess I’m just afraid that I can’t do it anymore.”
“You can’t submit? Okay, let’s put that to bed right now. Stand up and lift your skirt to your waist.”
She gapes at me for a moment before she flushes as bright as a stop light.
Trembling, she stands and pulls her skirt up over her smooth thighs, revealing that beautiful hip piece she showed me before, another tattoo around her left thigh that’s a double band of barbed wire, and a gloriously bare pussy flushed a shade lighter than her cheeks.
No underwear, just as instructed. Perfect.
“Run your fingertips through your pussy and show them to me.”
She bites her lip before she does as she’s told. Her eyes are glistening as much as her fingers when she holds them out to me.
“Well done, bold girl,” I say softly. “Lick your fingers clean, lower your skirt, and sit down. We’re almost done here, but I think it’s safe to say that you can still submit.”
She licks her fingers before she puts them over her face. “That’s the first time in months I’ve actually wanted to.”
“Good. Take your hands away and look at me, sweetheart.”
She does, her chocolate eyes glossy and vulnerable.