Geoffrey's Rules (16 page)

I thought about it and tightened the muscles in my backside, winced a little, and nodded.

He kissed me. “I’m sorry. I know it was a little… rough for your first time, but… I couldn’t help myself.”

“It’s okay,” I whispered with a blush. “I loved it. And… I’m supposed to be sore, right?”

“Yes,” he replied, nodding as a joyful smile overspread his face. “Did you really like it?”

“Mm-hmm.” I tried rolling over onto my side, facing away from him, and barely managed. I twisted my face back to him, with a look of entreaty. He took the cue and gathered me into his warm body, and I took his big right hand in both of mine and kissed it on the back, then on the thumb. “Thank you, sir,” I said. And then I did manage to go to sleep, just like that, with my master’s arm around me.

The next four months went by in a blur. Finishing the semester up with a couple of seminar papers, one of them about the thematic importance of anal sex in
Ulysses,
was not a tall order, especially now that I was interested in grad school again.

Chaser’s video was finished, and it appeared that he and Lia were closer than ever, though every time I looked at Chaser and then at Geoffrey, I pitied Lia. I had the real article, and she had a… rookie, to put it charitably. Geoffrey could make me wet with a single look, while Chaser tended to resort to crudity, with winks at Geoffrey to make sure Geoffrey saw Chaser dominating Lia. Still, it seemed to work for Lia, who would hang on Chaser’s every word.

Yes, I definitely had the real article, and all through that spring and summer, the real article took me in hand and had his way with me, to my utter delight. There were flowers and even a few pieces of jewelry, and then there was the spanking: lots and lots of spanking. It turned out that the rules existed first and foremost as an excuse for Geoffrey to spank Chloe’s bottom. The atavistic need on his part to spank a feminine bottom and on my part to have my bottom spanked by a masculine hand, I soon realized, required justification. It didn’t require justification for any ethical reason; the rules existed as a way to make spankings hot.

To put it another way, the process of taking me in hand was not a matter of controlling me. Rather, it was an ongoing way of letting a powerful part of our imaginations come out to play.

It felt wonderful, but it had an intellectual cost that late spring and summer. I kept putting off the internal debate I knew I would one day have to have about whether what I was doing was wrong. I was, after all, ceding certain rights to a man on a basis that we were clearly both contemplating being permanent. The internal feminist inside me, installed by academia in general and in particular by Professor Whitlock, said that was wrong, pure and simple—that even considering having an ongoing master/owned relationship (as unusual as ours was) in which I was liable to discipline was a violation of egalitarian principles to which I was supposed to submit (ironically enough) absolutely and without complexities, like loving the way Geoffrey guided me in my studies and in my work for him.

He had said, before our dinner with Chaser and Lia, that I would get to lead him. That was not untrue, but it was by no means the way to stop the imagined voice of Professor Whitlock from berating me. Leading Geoffrey meant that after a meeting, I got to explain to him how I felt about what had happened in the meeting. I was indeed allowed to interrupt him on those occasions, but I didn’t do so except a few times, experimentally, just in the beginning.

Geoffrey was very attentive and once or twice actually had me incorporate suggestions I made into the final proposals I was now drafting for him. (One of the reasons he had hired me was that although he’s a pretty good writer, I’m a much better one; he’d actually read an article of mine in the grad student journal before he decided to bring me on board.)

But the problem could be encapsulated in the way that every typo in those proposals was compensated with a stroke of Geoffrey’s cane. And above all the problem was in the way that I loved it, craved it, and wanted it all the time.

The war between my newly complicated understanding of egalitarianism, with its mighty ally my libido, and the internalized voices of my professors, with the brilliant tactician Christine Whitlock directing their movements, had been called off until the fall. I was Chloe Revkin, besotted sex-slave and special personal assistant of Geoffrey King, and I had told the professors to take a hike.

It just felt too wonderful to be told, nearly every afternoon, to lie over the arm of the couch in his office for a spanking. It felt too right to be called “good girl” when for the first time I managed to take him to the back of my throat without gagging, or when I learned, under Geoffrey’s painstaking tutelage, to give him a rim-job that made him shout his pleasure and spurt his seed lewdly onto his own office furniture.

In fact, the way my vulva flowed with wanton moisture whenever, while working at the standing-desk he favored, he turned his face over his shoulder to me, where I was sitting at my own desk, and said, “I think I’d like your tongue in my anus now, Chloe,” and abruptly dropped his pants, could serve as an illustration. The first time he did it, of course, I blushed very deeply. In keeping with his theory about shame, though, I never stopped blushing when I was told to do one of these humiliating things.

He would bend over a bit, supporting himself on one of the lower shelves of the desk, and he would lift his shirt-tails so that I could see where I was putting my face. He spread his feet to give me access to the cleft between his muscled, pleasantly hirsute buttocks. He said, “Get your face in there, girl,” with the tone I now knew so well, the one that meant that not getting his way this instant would mean a spanking.

Panting with desire, I licked the crack of his ass from bottom to top, drawing a groan from my master. I did it again, and he growled, “My asshole, Chloe. Right now.”

His anus tasted cleanly of him. Maybe that was what saved our relationship, in the end; Geoffrey would never have commanded me to put my tongue in his ass if he hadn’t washed it thoroughly beforehand.

And he groaned, and he pounded his desk with his fist because he loved having my face in the naughtiest possible position, and he jerked off while I did it, because he knew it would have taken away from my own capacity to please him the way I wanted if he had made me try to jerk him off at the same time. My own eyes were full only of his backside, but I felt the vibrations he made with his hand as he pumped his beautiful cock to realize fully the pleasure I was providing.

That was when he said (grunted, really), “Good girl, oh, such a good girl, Chloe, such a good girl,” and came. Then he turned around, his flaccid cock dribbling the evidence of my developing skills, and growled, “Get in the chair, and get that skirt up.” The chair was a wonderful, big armchair that had become the place where I received cunnilingus.

“Hold yourself open,” he commanded as he knelt on the rug, and submissively, I took my knees in my hands and spread my vulva in front of him. I was not allowed to wear panties at all, generally, except the ones he specifically provided for me on special nights. What did it mean that it made me wet (wetter, really) that Geoffrey loved to torment the pussy that he had commanded be shaved for him—that he loved to make me submit to his fingers, his tongue, his vast collection of dildos and vibrators? That he loved to spank my pussy and hear me scream as he did it?

I didn’t want him to rouse me lovingly or inquire if it felt good; I wanted him to make me come—
make
me come and not let me do anything but come. I wanted to be given absolutely no choice in any matter that had anything to do with sex, and I wanted to feel that I never, ever would be given such a choice.

That was what it came down to. Was I a girl who obeyed a man—intelligent, handsome, and generally well-mannered though Geoffrey might be—who seemed unlikely ever to stop telling me to put my tongue in his anus in the full expectation that I would do so without hesitation? This would be my life, and I loved it, but was that right, cosmically? Metaphysically? Ideologically?

* * *

In August we visited his parents on Nantucket. With the exception of not wearing panties, it was completely vanilla. Geoffrey did make love to me in the bed he had slept in every summer of his childhood, but, although after a few minutes in missionary position he turned me over and rode me doggie-style (“I just can’t resist,” he said, “I imagined doing this to a girl in this bed so many times”), no BDSM was in evidence, even when we were in private.

We weren’t in private very often, either, because Geoffrey wanted me to get to know his parents, and his parents wanted to get to know me. They were wonderful, down to earth people, and Geoffrey hadn’t brought a girlfriend to Nantucket since college, and so they were wonderfully welcoming. We swam and sailed and biked, the four of us, for four exhausting but fabulous days. Geoffrey’s father Wesley had conserved the old family wealth he had inherited by a great deal of wise investment, but those investments were all in things that seemed wonderful to me, like publishing and even a few movies.

Through the whole trip, Geoffrey treated me with such gentlemanly, vanilla courtesy that the apparent normality of our relationship gave rise to a humorous, but also precious, moment just before we left. The night before we were taking the ferry back to Boston, Geoffrey’s mother, Rose, and I sat up late by ourselves in the kitchen, drinking wine, while Geoffrey and his father talked business in his father’s study.

“You make him very happy, I think,” Rose said. She was slightly rounded of face and of body. Geoffrey’s curly brown hair came from her, though hers was nearly white now. She wore it in a lovely chignon at the nape of her neck, fastened with a big brass barrette. She was so elegant that it almost made my heart ache to be like her.

“He makes me very happy,” I replied, blushing.

“I’m not going to ask you anything about the future,” she confided. “I’m a Yankee, after all.”

I laughed.

“But…” Her brow furrowed a little, as if she weren’t sure she could say what she had it in mind to say. “I guess I want to make sure you understand something about Geoffrey.”

I lifted my eyebrows, wondering if I was going to hear something wonderful or something awful.

Rose’s voice fell to a whisper. “He likes spanking,” she said. “It was a problem with his college girlfriend.” I tried desperately to maintain my composure, though I knew I was growing redder by the second. “He told her, and she told lots of people, and it was a horrible experience for him. Obviously,” Rose continued, “it’s a very private thing, but you see…” She took a sip of wine for courage, and then finished in a rush. “Wesley and I like spanking, too, and it’s been so important to us that I want to make sure Geoffrey’s not keeping it from you. I probably shouldn’t have said anything, but I’m a little tipsy and maybe it’s for the best.”

I reached out across the kitchen table and took her hand. “He’s not keeping it from me, Rose,” I said.

A beatific smile passed across her face. “Oh, that’s good. I’m so happy.”

For one moment, I debated telling her that he had found me masturbating in a café bathroom and spanked me for it, but I decided that revelation could wait for the future.

* * *

The crisis came in early September, right after I had started my fourth year of graduate school. Everything seemed to be going wonderfully for the first two weeks. I had moved back into my apartment; I wasn’t seeing Geoffrey quite as much, as we had agreed that I would cut back my hours with him. We had our usual Friday through Sunday date, with plenty of BDSM, and I met on Monday with Professor Whitlock, who seemed relatively impressed with the reading list I’d put together for the independent study she had agreed to do with me.

One of my agreements with Geoffrey about term-time was that I would go to certain important client meetings so that I could edit his proposals. So when the following Friday I arrived at a lunch meeting at Mistral with Chaser and his PR guy, it was according to plan.

It went off the rails very quickly, though. Chaser, who seemed to me to be intoxicated with his new-found life as a dominant, wanted his next video to feature a punishment spanking.

“You know…” he said, winking at me and then turning back to Geoffrey, “like the ones you give your girl.”

The song was called “Baby Needs to Know”. Geoffrey and I listened to it on ear buds at the table, looking at each other and at Chaser in unfeigned approval. Chaser nodded at us arrogantly, and at his PR guy, with an expression on his face that said he knew the song was pure genius.

The song was, I had to admit, incredibly hooky, and I thought instantly that it could prove to be Chaser’s first mainstream hit. The basic theme was that baby needed to know that she was being held accountable by the speaker (who was kidding anyone? Lia needed to know that she was being held accountable by Chaser) for assorted violations of basic boyfriend/girlfriend things, like texting when you were going to be late.

“So when she comes home,” Chaser said by way of unnecessary explanation, “she knows she’s late, and part of her really wants a spanking, but she doesn’t want to show that she wants it.”

As a BDSM concept, I had absolutely no problem with the content of the song, despite Chaser’s annoying attempts to portray himself as an alpha-male when he didn’t even have the personality for it (since in my opinion, he mistook narcissism for confidence). Baby did need to know, provided baby had entered of her own free will into a disciplinary relationship with the speaker of the song. Indeed,
I
needed to know that Geoffrey would spank me if I was late to meet him. It made me feel safe, and it made me feel I existed inside a relationship that would fulfill the parts of me that felt more real even than my intellectual pursuits.

“And,” Chaser continued, “this is, like, the fifth time, so he really needs to make sure she understands, yeah? And then they get turned on, yeah?”