Beg Me (18 page)

And my fingers strayed to my clit, desperate to come as if he were inside me. Isaac. I masturbated in front of them all, and one of the princes who helped me sit up reached around to fondle my right breast. But I was thinking of Isaac. Danielle came with a wail, my own following not far behind. With an effort of will, Isaac pulled out of her, his cock still hard and red, and then he moved over to me like a panther. He hadn’t come yet. I can make him come, I thought. Put yourself inside me.

I was barely aware of where I was anymore. Still leaning against strong hands, exhausted, drained, but touching myself, opening my legs. For him.

I stared into his face. His expression was so compassionate. Yes, it was compassion—for all that I had been put through, knowing it was necessary.

“You have passed your trial,” he said. “Will you submit to any prince now by your own free will?”

“Yes…”

“Including me?”

“Yes. Oh, yes, please!”

My eyes locked with his. I didn’t notice someone pass him something—one of the princes? I felt penetration, but it wasn’t his flesh. His cock was still a rude pole, erect in front of me. No, he was shoving a dark red dildo inside my vagina. It was powerfully intimate in front of the others, yet there was a regal aloofness to employing this tool.

I stammered like a child: “Please, I want…I want…!”

“No,” he said firmly. “This. Take this gift from me now. Take every gift.”

“Yes.”

My finger played frantically with my clit, as his hand plunged the dildo in and out of my vagina. I wanted to see him let go. I would have begged him if we were alone, but not surrounded by the others. I’ll make you come, I thought. I’ll make you come with the sight of me in ecstasy. But he stayed hard, he didn’t lose control, his cock an impressive dark totem such short sweet inches away. It was me who lost it. He pulled the phallus out of me at one point, sensing me near my peak, and as I screamed, I experienced my second-ever ejaculation, my fluids gushing and cascading out with an orgasm that felt ripped from my soul.

I had to lie down on my back for a while. Jimmy returned to wash me. For a moment I thought I’d pass out again, but I didn’t. Hands helped me rise up from the floor.

“You are ready,” said Isaac, standing in front of me. “Do you accept the freedom to give us your strength of will? To allow us to care for you, feed you, clothe you, shelter you?”

“Yes.”

“You will be sister to every woman here, brother to every man, wife to none but consort to all. You belong to no one outside, but you are ours.”

Two of the girls produced a robe for me to wear. And then, out of the blue, Isaac stepped forward and tore the delicate cotton off my body, rendering me nude again.

“The robe is an illusion,” he laughed. “You must be prepared to be taken by any prince, to submit on command. Can you do this?”

“I—I can.” I felt disembodied, someone else saying it.

“Our sister!” said Isaac proudly. “Our new princess!”

And they lined up to kiss me one by one, each one congratulating me.

I tasted my own tears. I was so happy.

8

O
kay, I’m writing this, so you must know I didn’t completely lose my marbles for good.

The euphoric conversion? It didn’t take. It couldn’t. No point in keeping the jury out.

A proper meal at their family feast and a good night’s sleep, and I came crashing back to earth. I even felt embarrassed at my reactions during my isolation. But I shrugged that off too, chalking it up to a good thing that I had “stayed in character.” Just as well. I’m no psychologist, but I think I figured it out.

You starve, isolate, and maybe sleep-deprive anybody, you can get short-term results. But for one night they had converted Teresa Willoughby—and I wasn’t who I said I was. I wasn’t my cover story. I was Teresa Knight, came from good parents, got to travel a lot, and was reasonably satisfied with my life, despite my occasional cash-flow problems. I don’t know whether that makes me deep or shallow, but maybe it makes me slightly less susceptible to long-term influence.

And as much I look for the ultimate lay, I wasn’t going to base my life around it. I didn’t have any mental problems (Helena might say,
Prove it!
), and I didn’t think I was “missing” a key part of myself. I’m no searcher.

You don’t rope in converts with one light show.

Reinforcement, that’s what it would take. And there was a danger in that one eroding my resolve. Because I did like many of the devotees. I liked the big group dinners, and I liked the camaraderie and sense of family. I wasn’t crazy about the way Danielle watched me like a hawk, but as mother hen—our one and only duchess and Isaac’s second-in-command—it stood to reason she’d be cordial but restrained toward any newcomers.

“We’ll put you in with Violet,” she told me.

Oh, great. A roommate. Hadn’t had one of those in a few years. Wasn’t looking forward to it now.

I was led to a dorm room, where a beautiful girl who looked about nineteen was polishing the few spare pieces of wooden furniture. She offered me this huge smile of greeting as if I were a long-lost friend, and, damn, I couldn’t hold my resentment. Large brown eyes with lush eyelashes, a slightly long face, café au lait skin, hair in elaborate corn rows. Skinny but with a generous behind, legs toned like she’d done a lot of track and field at school.

“I’m Violet,” she said needlessly, and then gushed, “My God, you’re gorgeous.”

“Uh, thanks?” I laughed. “Teresa.”

“We’re gonna get along great, I just know it,” she said. “I love it here, and you will too.”

And with that, Danielle stepped backward to the doorway, saying, “I’ll let you two get acquainted. Violet can answer any questions you have about our routine.”

“Thank you, Duchess,” I said.

“Don’t be silly,” laughed Danielle. “The princes call me that as a sign of respect for Isaac, but I’m your
sister.
You call me Danielle.”

“Okay…Thanks, Danielle.”

And I thought: If you ever forget she
is
the duchess, you’re a complete fool. Trick to a pecking order is to always remember the top bird.

She was gone, and now Violet took both my hands in hers and sat me down on one of the double beds. “This’ll be great! Listen, I think I’m pretty easygoing, you know what I’m saying? But if you want to put up some pictures or something, you go ahead. I don’t mean to monopolize the walls.”

I looked. It was something else. Not your usual prints of Klimt’s
The Kiss
or Doisneau photographs or the cheesier African-American mass-produced art I had grown to loathe and wanted to banish to some velvet-painting hell along with poker-playing dogs. This was unusual.

Violet had put up framed satellite shots of stars and constellations. Huh. An astronomy buff. No pictures of relatives, but then my guess was that Isaac and Danielle discouraged this. The temple was the family.

There was, however, one significant framed color photo of Violet, age about thirteen maybe, in what must be a school. She was handing some award or something to a smiling black woman with a short hairstyle who looked to be in her very youthful forties.

It took me a second. Wow.

“She’s always been one of my heroes,” confessed Violet.

The woman in the photo accepting the scroll was Mae C. Jemison, the first African-American woman to go into space. The
Endeavour
shuttle back in 1992.

“I got so nervous, I couldn’t even ask a question,” said Violet. “She came to speak at my school. She’s had such a life.”

I glanced at a map of constellations. Just as in London, you don’t see the stars very well in the heart of Manhattan.

I was never very clever at science. But I respect people who have good math and science skills.

“Is that what you want to do?” I asked, starting to like her. “Be an astronaut?”

“Oh, no!” laughed Violet. “I don’t think I could handle being sick with the g-forces and weightlessness! I’m Theoretical Girl.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yeah!”

I zoomed in on the modest but impressive stack of books on a shelf next to her night table. Both Hawking books, neither of which I could understand, but then a lot of people buy those and never crack the spines. Violet had thick tomes on astrophysics by people I’d never heard of, three Anne McCaffrey novels, and a dog-eared paperback copy of Toni Morrison’s
Beloved.

“I’d think you’d be on a campus somewhere,” I observed. Tried not to make it sound like a reproach.

“I’m only taking a year off,” replied Violet. “Isaac says he’ll help me with tuition when I decide where I want to go.”

“Wouldn’t your parents help you with that?”

She had to think about it, giving me a sad little smile. “No.”

I didn’t press.

Then she started asking me about my accent and what I was doing in New York, and I had to launch into my cover story. I’m a good liar, but I feel less commitment when I have to spread it thick with someone I like, and I already liked this girl. She was sweet and intelligent, and whatever she felt she got out of all this, she had so much potential to surpass it.

But I wasn’t here to save any souls—I was supposed to be finding bad guys.

It was odd reconciling Violet’s character with the temple and the sexual exhibitionism demanded in this place. She was obviously a person who spent a lot of time in her own head. Hell, maybe she needed the paddling, the bondage, and the domination to balance her intellectual drives. But that’s just it, isn’t it? People expect submissives to lack self-esteem, and most don’t.

She said she was happy here.

“We live for death!”
boomed Isaac, making a speech to us all. You could say he got my attention.

A fire was roaring in the main lounge area just off the library, and all of us were seated or kneeling in front of him. With the lights down and the backlit glow as he roared and thundered, I wondered if we were about to grab a few torches and storm up to Baron von Frankenstein’s castle.

“We live in a pathetic string of moments!” he railed. “Each one a drop of anesthetic because we can’t stand to be in our own shells, in our skins. We look for quick enjoyment—sex, drink, highs, thrills. We know it’s bullshit, and we don’t care ’cause we’re not going to be here tomorrow, right? Fuck the other guy! Fuck that bitch or that dude ‘cause they ain’t family! Look at our culture. Everything disposable. You buy that shit—do you want to listen to it tomorrow?
No.
How many times you gonna watch that DVD you bought that’s five years old? Does it have anything to say to you today? Our whole culture’s built on what is good for this moment. You know what we’re doing? Really? We live for today, but unconsciously we are putting ourselves to
sleep.
We are waiting for the surgery to fix us up, make us better. And I’m tellin’ you it ain’t coming!”

He stroked his goatee beard as he paced back and forth, sizing each one of us up every now and then, our military commander. He didn’t sound as much like a Baptist preacher as you might think—there were no stereotypical “Mmhmms” or “Tell ’ems” from the faithful here. Everyone sat there politely but urgently attentive. It was…Well, it was weird.

None of this sounded rehearsed or carefully constructed. It was more the venting you get when a friend rushes in to tell you someone smashed into her car, bloody stupid fool, look what the guy did. His thoughts had a theme but they were jumbled, not sorted in place.

“Those who brought us here were damn clever, we know that,” he continued. “They mixed us up so we couldn’t speak to each other in the same language. They kept us down. All of this we know, and we’re still recovering, but that can’t be an excuse! White man’s day is almost done. Watch the news—it’s all there. But we ain’t ready. We think our ‘heroes’ are these dumb-ass athletes and airheaded singers. And then we walk through our neighborhoods and wonder why we’re still down! Is there anything pouring back into our communities? No! Until we run our own business empires, until we can trade among ourselves, we are still in the shit.”

Nods from the faithful.

“You want to know who’s gonna run the world tomorrow? All those millions in East and Southeast Asia. Chinese! Japanese! Thais! Koreans! All of them dudes, that’s who. The Asians. Not the white man, not the dude from India or South America or some other backwater. The Asian, man. The Asian doesn’t fuck around and smile at us and say, ‘It’s better now.’
He hates our guts.
He runs his little corner shops, and he won’t hire us. He doesn’t like you guys going out with his daughter, and guess what? That daughter ain’t gonna marry
you.
You are
practice.
Before she finds a skinny yellow guy with a tiny dick who gives her the big house! The Asian man got shit on by the white man, but he fooled him! He kept his language. He kept his strong business and customers who were his
own kind.
He kept the respect of his women.”

I did my best to check unobtrusively on how this part went down with the others. A couple fidgeted a little as they sat cross-legged on the hardwood floor and mats—but they were all with him. Uh-oh.

“There’s billions of ’em out there, and they don’t mind sacrificing thousands of themselves in war, like fucking ants!” sneered Isaac. “They want to win. You know what we got that they fear?
Genuine virility.
They fear black cock. They don’t want our women because they can’t handle our women! And I say fine. I say great! I fucking hate their men—I’ll say it plain. I hate Asian guys. Look, they hate us. I’m tellin’ you, they do. So we understand each other. But I’ll take their girls who grow up here, who know there’s nothing wrong with us, who want to share our beds and our homes. I’ll take white women who know the strong hand comes from the black man who has self-respect. The white women and the Chinese women? They bully their own men because they
know
something’s wrong. They know they’re not true partners in both the home and their husbands’ business empires. They want to
submit.
They look for strength and the firm hand. And the strength is in the proud black man!”

Around me, a few of the girls nestled closer to the guys, held hands, silent gestures of solidarity. Isaac’s finger pointed at this person and that person, old rhetorical trick.

“You and you and you,” he said. “All of you! You think we found one another by accident?
No.
Strength of character. The fool is the one who sleeps with the guy or girl nearest, who just takes who’s available. I understand needs! I got needs! Which is why we have loyalty to the
unit
—to the temple. Because we have to be as children again and learn our way, find out what true fidelity, true monogamy means. This is the ancient way it was, and so we’re going back to that. That’s why our women feel so miserable out there! They’re carrying the burden of being strong without having a strong man in charge. That’s why our men feel emasculated! Because our values have been perverted, and our women have been told this is a
good thing
that they have to do everything for us, raise the kids with absent fathers, absent husbands! They’re saints. And why should they have to? Society’s upside down and tells ’em, have a career but give up being a woman, being a mother. And so it’s slow genocide. As you grow in affluence, you stop having kids, and the race fades. You have the kids, you live in poverty, and the race fades. Because we have lost our true values, our
temple
values!”

And on he went like this. Insights warped and shoehorned into this perverse philosophy that seemed to work backward to justify the practices. Business is good—I got that. All of us here were somehow the chosen ones because we signed up—got that too. Promiscuity was fine as long as it went on inside the temple.

The synthesis, as far as I could tell, was to adopt the Asian “strategy” (and what he had against Asians, who knows?) in developing an insular business and cultural enclave.

“So many times they predict a race war,” he concluded ominously. “I tell you it’s already here! But you know what? Nature has blessed us in what they mock. They mock us because they can’t stand it. We
are
sexual. We
are
virile. That’s what nature meant—for us to thrive. And when we acknowledge that and come back to our values, then we can be confident that we will endure.
They’re
the mistake. It’s no accident that the white women, the Asian women, the Indian women all seek out a proud black man for his potency, because he was always the first, the one chosen to be supreme. And it’s not hate to hate the ones who hate us. It’s not hate to destroy the ones who want to destroy us! Because in the days ahead we will not just be husbands and lovers—we will be warriors. Show your true selves!”