The Slave (40 page)

There, when someone made a move on her, she
had to check with Eric or Raul, and let them make a quick decision.
Occasionally, to add spice to the event or just to make a friend
happy, she was told to allow herself to be seduced, and to take the
guest to some out of the way place for a quick screw. When a
television actor whose clean-cut good looks made him the cover boy
of countless teen magazines slipped into the office he had no idea
was really hers and fucked her on the desk, she almost broke into
laughter. But he was better than she could have guessed, and
despite the tackiness of the situation, she found that looking up
into his oh-so-famous soft brown eyes was very pleasant.
Afterwards, he gave her his card, and actually told her to contact
him if she was ever in Hollywood. Before he left, he had his driver
run back up to the house and give her an autographed picture.

Jimmy insisted on framing it and hanging it
in her office where she could see it every day. It never failed to
make her laugh.

And then there were the more intimate
events. Occasionally, either master would bring home a special
guest or guests who would be granted the use of one or several of
the slaves. Sometimes this was a reward for past services, and
sometimes it was a gesture of friendship. Sometimes, especially
with Jimmy, it was part of a bribe. These people were never aware
of the Marketplace, only of their extraordinary luck in having such
an interesting pair of friends.

The slaves were united in hating those
events. Raul turned up one lip in distaste whenever one was
mentioned (providing there wasn’t a master around to see him).
“This is surely a case of pearls before swine,” he opined with his
own brand of self-pity. “Let’s not kid ourselves. Humiliation and
degradation goes with the job. But even a slave has limits.”

When Robin cracked up, he only shook his
head. “You’ll see, girl. Wait until you actually end up doing the
funky chicken with a feed store magnate from Idaho. They may be
millionaires, but they still have all the charm and sexual
expertise they had as a seventeen-year-old prom date in a rented
blue velvet tux, driving their polished pick-up truck into town to
pick up Mary Sue-Ellen.”

“
Not to mention the same BO,” Carl had
added.

“
Come on, guys, it can’t be that bad,”
Robin had laughed. “You’re scaring me!”

It was that bad.

Robin’s first experience taking care of one
of Jimmy’s customers started as elegantly as any evening of lust;
after serving brandy out by the deck, she had gone up to change
into the lacy outfit Raul had tossed to her that morning, telling
her that she was up at bat for the visiting pitcher later that
night. It was a classic ensemble, Merry Widow in black lace with
stiff ribs caressing her body, G-string, garters and lace
stockings, a velvet choker, lacy gloves, and even a matching
hairbow. She looked in the mirror and sighed.

Frederick’s of Hollywood. Except that she
wasn’t tall enough. She pulled her breasts up a little more, hoping
to make more cleavage. It didn’t work. Oh well. At least she looked
good otherwise.

She checked the guest bedroom to make sure
that the usual supply of sex toys was present, and nodded at the
fresh flowers and the chilled bottles of mineral water and
champagne that Raul had no doubt placed there. And she waited
there, nervously, for the guest to come up. Carl had coached her,
“You won’t have to say anything. Jimmy will let them know what’s
going on. All you have to do is look cute and be ready for
anything. Don’t tell them nothing about real life, but lie your ass
off about what they wanna hear. Then fuck ’em, and leave ’em, and
forget ’em. But whatever you do, make the fuckers happy. That’s
what you’re there for.”

So Robin prepared herself for an evening of
making a stranger sexually happy.

What actually happened was that he staggered
into the room dead drunk, made astonished and pleased noises at
her, opened the champagne and drank some out of the bottle, and
told her to dance. After some inspired shaking and wiggling, she
watched helplessly while he lurched into the bathroom and threw up,
noisily.

He slept for three hours, and she was still
too nervous to leave.

When he woke up, he looked around the room,
saw her sitting on the floor by the bed, and started tugging at his
clothing. She helped him get undressed, and without either of them
saying one word, they had a strange, fumbling kind of sex.

Neither one of them came, although Robin put
on one of her best orgasm performances. He fell back to sleep, and
she finally left, feeling that her job was done.

He had ripped the stockings and dislodged
two garter straps. But in the morning, he was fresh and chipper and
Robin stayed discreetly out of sight while he loudly proclaimed his
visit to be “the best ever!” and shook Jimmy’s hand and lumbered
back to Chicago.

Robin ended up being punished for not
staying with him and doing things that any drunk’s caregiver would
know, like feeding him water and aspirin and cleaning him up and
tucking him in. Also, Raul told her, she should have hung his
jacket up and snuck his shirt out to be cleaned. But after Eric
finished paddling her for all of these offenses, and she had spent
a few hours in bound isolation to think about it, she returned to
Raul and whispered to him, “You were right.”

“
I am always right,” he replied. “That
is why I am the manager.”

As if that weren’t enough, the young men
also entertained for their friends and contacts who were in the
Marketplace. At those affairs, the slaves got to be themselves.
They even got to meet and sometimes “play with” other slaves from
time to time. It was a great way to catch up on gossip and send
messages to other slaves that they knew.

Carl knew a lot of the slaves who visited
and had been used by most of the masters and mistresses. He was a
treasure trove of information about who did what to whom and how
often. Robin loved it when he would come up behind her while she
watched some erotic goings-on through the slats in the upstairs
banister. “He likes to have his butt-hole licked for hours,” he
would say, pointing. “And she likes to cane blondes―swears that
they make nicer marks. And see her? She says she’s straight, but
give her a girl to play with and she’s all over her, all night. Bet
you get her tonight.”

And Robin did. And found that Carl was
right. The sweet, soft-spoken woman who had an ex-husband in
Phoenix and three children in school practically leapt on her as
soon as the door was closed. Robin felt the all-over passion that
she reserved only for women rise and engulf her, and threw herself
into being the most pleasing and exuberant partner in the
world.

It was different, being so powerfully
ravished and positively devoured by a woman who seemed old enough
to be her mother, but it was also comforting. When she led, it was
only natural for Robin to follow. When she asked Robin to pose for
her, Robin colored, but loved every second of bending, turning, and
striking one move after another. She shivered and giggled as the
older woman trailed her entire body with feather-like touches. And
when the guest tied her to the bed and made love to her, Robin had
to scream when she came. It was all too wonderful! She had almost
forgotten how different a woman felt and smelled. Surrounded by
mostly young men who were obsessed with keeping their bodies hard
and athletic, she felt herself drowning in the softness of another
woman’s flesh.

Later, with her hands tied behind her back,
she pleasured the woman with her mouth, licking and kissing her way
all around her body, over the pale expanse of her breasts and down
across her soft belly. She was allowed to suck and lick her
temporary mistress until the woman came and came, trembling and
crying out with delight. And as if to thank Robin for such a treat,
the woman pulled her up onto the bed and spanked her, hard, with
her bare hand. Robin ended up coming that way, bent over the
woman’s lap, with a hard hand against her ass and another one
tucked up between her legs.

And there was also the time that Eric and
Jimmy hosted a slave owner from the northern reaches of the state,
whose property housed a veritable community of male slaves. Raul
had trained there, and he was always anxious to find out how things
were doing back at the “old school.”

“
You never forget your training,” he
had said to her in one of his contemplative moods. “It would be
like forgetting your parents.”

And while Robin had assured him that she
would hold onto her memories of those tightly packed two weeks for
the rest of her life, she was nonetheless surprised to find a new
reminder of them had arrived with the new guest.

The guest was a vintner who had made a name
for himself by writing several books about Californian history.
Very few people knew that within the fenced-in acres of his estates
and farms lived over a dozen men who served him as his slaves. Raul
told Robin tales of the tremendously demanding and almost inhuman
life lived by those who served under this man’s contracts. They
were worked hard at basic manual labor, from dawn to nightfall
every day, and had to do strenuous workouts designed to build
muscles and perfect their physiques. Raul himself had barely made
it through his two months there, mostly because his body just
wasn’t built to bulk up that fast. “I’m no body builder,” he added.
“I’m built for speed, not muscles.”

To supervise the slaves, the man employed
three brutal overseers who could use any slave at will in any
manner they chose, or order them to use or abuse each other.

“
It was a wet dream come true,” Raul
sighed. “Except that in real life, we had sun stroke and burns,
sore muscles every day of the week, and sore everything else as
well. And you’d think that being called up to serve big master
would be a respite? Why no, not at all. Then, you’d find yourself
in all sorts of trouble, tied up, clipped all over, big old plugs
up your rear, gags so big they made you want to just die... It
reads like paradise, girl, but lives like hell. No privacy, no time
off, no freedom at all.“

“
Gee, too bad it’s not open to girls,”
Robin had remarked in a mock tone of sorrow.

“
Girl, you’re lucky it
isn’t. But don’t hold your breath. Some big old lesbian is going to
open one of those for you one of these days. And you watch
out
―we’ll be seeing your sculpted bod on
Glamorous Ladies of
Wrestling
,
making the big money for your mistress.”

The guest himself was
entertained by the masters, while his two private slaves were sent
off to carry his things and wait for him in the largest
g
uest room.
Robin had seen Jeff carrying out the soft pallets that were
commonly used by visiting slaves who slept next to their owners’
beds on the floor. Again, Raul filled her in on the reason. “When
you work that house, you don’t get no soft mattress to sleep on.
Blanket on the floor, and one of those nasty army surplus things,
too. If you’re bad, they take away the blanket. When master
travels, you sing, because there might be carpeting where you’re
going.”

It was Carl who whispered the news to her as
she returned to her own work that afternoon. “One of the boys here
trained with your trainer,” he said softly, leaning slightly into
her office. “The one with the nipple rings. He’s going to be on
kitchen duty tonight, while the masters play in the back with the
other one.”

Robin couldn’t wait to meet him.

The masters took Carl and Jeff out to use
them in the various amusements they had planned, leaving Raul to
supervise the general clean-up and prepare the late night snacks
and drinks they’d be wanting after the merriment. But Raul, who
heard everything, left Robin to supervise the visiting slave while
he busied himself with chores that were usually beneath him. Robin
made a mental note to be extra enthusiastic the next time Raul came
over to her bunk late at night.

The slave was already rinsing things and
stacking the dishwasher. Robin slid up to his side and took a dish
out of his hands. “I hear you knew Parker,” she said softly. There
was no one near but Raul, but it always paid to be circumspect.

The man looked at her in astonishment.

He was about average in height, maybe a
little tall, and the short fuzz that covered his scalp said that he
was naturally black haired. There wasn’t an additional strand of
hair below his neck. There was nothing about him that was
particularly striking, except for the fact that he was very well
built; something that was no mystery when Robin applied her
knowledge of the activities that he probably spent his time in. He
was still pale by Californian standards, and his dark eyes moved
too quickly; Robin was getting good at spotting fellow Easterners.
There were faint lines across his back, and sharper ones on his
thighs. In addition to the rings in his nipples, he had a Prince
Albert piercing, and one just behind his balls that looked like
putting it in might have been traumatic.

“
Yes, he was my training supervisor,”
he said back. He hesitated, as though surprised that so many words
came out at once. Robin remembered what it was like to be
restricted to answering questions in the briefest form possible,
and smiled encouragingly.

“
He trained me, too,” she said,
starting to put things away. “I’m Robin.”

“
Brian.” The man looked out the window
over the sink, but it would probably be two or three hours before
the masters trooped back to the house. “When did you see him
last?”