Before Caroline could even get out of her chair, Dr. Orozco was hunkered down beside Rachel, checking her pulse as she tossed her keys to Sharon with orders to fetch her medical bag from her Expedition. Sharon hustled toward the doctor’s truck as the doctor asked Caroline the first obvious questions about Rachel, was she diabetic or on drugs? Caroline shook her head, visions of her career and this plum contract going up in smoke and ash. After all, Caroline had a very good guess as to why Rachel had just keeled over like this, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with drugs or diabetes or any other medical complication whatsoever.
Julieta returned her attention to Rachel, and was interrupted by Danielle, kneeling and whispering something in her ear. Julieta nodded, and asked Bill and George to help Rachel, who wasn’t quite unconscious, into the house, to the guest bedroom, where she could examine Rachel more privately. Danielle shepherded Caroline to the guest bedroom as well, and remained there as the men left. Sharon hurriedly came in with Julieta’s doctor bag, handed it off, and left. Danielle shut the door and smiled oddly at Caroline.
“Would you like to tell the good doctor what’s wrong with Rachel,” Danielle asked Caroline. “Or shall I?”
“Shit,” Caroline moaned, clenching her fists to drive her nails into her palms, wondering just how the jig was up. “She’s not on drugs, and she’s healthy as a horse. She and I … um … well, she’s in a bit of a euphoric condition, and I guess the bullwhip cracking was kind of another trigger.”
“Jesus H. Christ,” Julieta said, and chuckled with humor that somehow wasn’t to ridicule, Caroline sensed. “You mean she’s in subspace!”
“Well, yes,” Caroline said, blushing bright red, only very belatedly wondering how it was that Danielle and the doctor knew exactly what subspace was. “How did you … well …”
“How do we know what subspace is,” Danielle completed the question with an amused little smile. Caroline merely nodded, still blushing. “Rather than answering that question, why don’t I let you think about that, okay? I really hate overstating the obvious, Caroline, so I’ll just say I enjoy my own little visits to space when I get to go, and we’ll leave it there. I knew what was going on with her as soon as y’all got here, knew the look on her face. She confirmed it when she looked at you for permission to get a drink from me. My guts told me right then and there that she’s your submissive. You need not worry,” she continued in a softer tone, not one of amusement at all, seeing embarrassed horror on Caroline’s face. “You’re among friends and similar people, Caroline.”
“She’s right,” the doctor said, tenderly stroking Rachel’s hair while she drifted in that twilight between space and present. “You must’ve done one hell of a job on her if she could get sent back into space on the sound of a cracking whip. Is she injured at all, Caroline? Does she require treatment?”
“She’s just pink and welted, mostly,” Caroline said, deciding to face whatever music this was. “I only flogged her today.”
“I see,” the doctor said. “Let’s talk, Caroline. We need to decide what to do.”
“Okay,” Caroline said, uncertain, as she sat on a love seat along one wall of the spacious guest bedroom.
“Danielle, will you excuse us please,” Julieta said. “I think maybe it’s better if you retain some deniability. I’m unsure how happy Bill is going to be with your big mouth already, sweetheart.”
Danielle ground her teeth for a moment, her jaw bulging as her facial expression made it crystal clear that she in no way liked being talked to this way, but she nodded and left, quietly closing the door behind her. Caroline wondered what was going on, exactly, certain that nothing at all was quite what it seemed when she’d gotten here ninety minutes before, and looked at Julieta in quiet expectation.
“Do you know what ‘gaydar’ is, Caroline,” Julieta asked, after Danielle left them alone. Caroline mulled this over while she leaned forward and took Rachel’s hand in hers, and rewarded with Rachel’s sleepy smile.
“I don’t know the word, or I’ve never heard it before, but I can take a guess,” Caroline said. “Is it something like how gay people just know who’s gay and who’s not?”
“Exactly,” Julieta said, pleased. “Well, there are a number of local people involved pretty heavily in the BDSM lifestyle as well, Caroline, certainly to include myself. I guess Danielle kind of tipped her own hand too just now, and I have no idea what her master is going to do to her for that, but that’s his decision and not mine.”
“If she’s lucky, her master will do to her what Caroline did to me,” Rachel said dreamily. “Jesus, this is great!”
“Go back to space, Rachel,” Caroline said, laughing despite the embarrassment.
“Anyway,” Julieta said. “I’m involved heavily in the local scene, like I said, so I see all sorts of things that I don’t talk about to others. I don’t know if you ever watch Karen Everson’s show on the local news magazine program, but she’s done a couple very good stories about the local S&M scene.”
“I don’t watch much television, I’m afraid,” Caroline said.
“It raised a lot of eyebrows and she only scratched the surface with it all,” Julieta said. “There’s a really huge club here in the Five Counties, in fact.”
“Really,” Caroline said, astounded and unsure what else to say by way of reply. “You tend to only think of there being a ‘scene’ in big cities like New York or LA. I’d have never guessed there’s one here as well.”
“Where do we sign up,” Rachel asked, still with her eyes closed and smiling dreamily. “I want in!”
“Well, if you’d like, I can have someone from the membership committee contact you in the next few days and you can all do a little touchy and feel together and see what you think,” Julieta said, chuckling at Rachel.
“I’d like that,” Caroline said. “But our master would have to approve too.”
“Of course,” Julieta said, smoothly. “I’ll tell you what we’ll do. Give me your number, and I’ll have someone from the committee contact you, perhaps this evening. You can talk it out with your master and set up a time and place to meet and talk, and y’all can take it from there. Meanwhile, one thing more for you ladies and your master to consider here, if I may?”
“Please do,” Caroline said, hoping that Allen wasn’t about to skin her alive along with Rachel for the events of today. “Honestly, he’s probably going to kill us for this, and when our boss finds out that Rachel had a fainting spell here, we’re probably also about as fired as we can get and still live.”
“I don’t see any reason that he’ll ever find out,” Julieta said. “I’ll see to it that this never happened, but please don’t ask any questions.” Caroline nodded, doubting that anything was going to save her from Allen’s wrath, and then Julieta continued. “Anyway, physicians are required, of course, to report suspected abuse, but we’re on our own judgement as to what, exactly, constitutes abuse and what was just consensual play that might require medical attention to follow. Because of my own understanding and proclivities, I’m entirely willing to see you, either of you, for treatment of things you’d as soon your regular doctor didn’t put on your records.”
“Thank you,” Caroline said, meaning it very much. “Do you have a card I can use to get in touch with you, Doctor?”
“Sure,” Julieta said, and handed Caroline two business cards from her doctor bag. “Do you have a card in return that I can pass on to the membership people?”
“Yes,” Caroline said, reaching into her pocket for a small business-card wallet that Joel had advised her to get and always carry with her. She produced two cards of her own, and fetched a pen and wrote her home number on the back of one of them, explaining to Julieta that it was probably easiest to call on her cell phone most of the time. Julieta nodded and slipped the cards into her breast pocket as a gentle knocking came from the door.
“Come in,” Julieta announced, and Bill entered.
“I hope it wasn’t my poisoned barbecue,” he joked, winking at Julieta.
“If you talked to Danielle, you know it wasn’t,” Julieta shot back, smiling after a moment. “Bill, she’s a good girl, and mostly I like her, but I really wish you’d put her automatic mouth under control sometimes.”
“She’s had that addressed, and we’ll be discussing it a bit more … intensively … this evening,” Bill answered, then turned his attentions to Caroline. “Having said that, you obviously can figure out that I’m a bit more than merely Danielle’s husband, Caroline, yes?”
“Yes, I think I can do the math, Sir,” Caroline said, wincing as she remembered he’d already told her to not say sir to him.
“I spoke with the rest of the … guests ... and they’ve all agreed that I can tell you that they’ve all seen spacey girls before, and that as far as they’re concerned, this never happened,” Bill continued. “Your boss will never hear a word of this from anyone who was here. Guaranteed.”
“You mean everyone else here is … is …” Caroline stammered, shocked. She saw Bill and Julieta wink and grin at one another, and then nod at her with broad smiles.
“And you and your friend Rachel came as a very delightful surprise to us,” Bill remarked. “I’m guessing that she was feeling suggestive enough still after whatever you did to her earlier that the cracking whip just sent her deep again.”
“Did you know we were into this,” Caroline sputtered, still trying to assemble a line of thought here.
“No,” Bill said. “Everyone here today just happens to be in the local scene in one way or another, and has some business or other in my coming mall. That said, them knowing that you two are in the lifestyle makes them trust you just a bit more, and that nice little added bonus is likely to be handy for us all. After all, nobody would rather to business with an enemy than a friend who has common interests outside the business dealings, I think. There’s a certain implicit trust we have among one another when we’ve seen into one another’s deepest secrets. Everyone out there is very close to me, not because of business, but because of commonalities outside of business.”
“That makes sense,” Caroline said, amused with a sideward thought. There was certainly going to be some sort of trust among people who could be naked together and completely casual about it, now wasn’t there? Caroline had only been to one S&M event with her ex-master back when, and one thing she remembered most was people being stark naked and as casual as people hanging around the office water cooler in a JC Penney catalog. Not everyone, to be sure, but plenty enough people nonetheless, including one man, bald and in his sixties, walking around naked but for a new pair of white sneakers. And nowhere near all those naked people were perfect physical specimens. Indeed, Caroline had learned something interesting there that evening at the big play party, something that her master had pointed out to her privately. They’d watched two scenes, one involving a submissive woman perhaps fifty or so years old, far past her prime, overweight, and altogether not what one would expect to see in the centerfold of a girly magazine. Another scene perhaps twenty feet away involved a younger dom with a very beautiful submissive, a tall girl who looked to be Arab, with flawless olive skin, and a face and figure that would have looked marvelous in a centerfold. Both women were being flogged. The older woman was flying, making deep sounds of gratified pleasure as her dominant spurred her onward with the flogger, and before too very long, she had flipped into space, moaning and purring the whole while, utterly absorbed by her dom’s attentions. The other one, the beautiful one, was making sounds like she’d learned how to do S&M from a low-budget porn movie. She wasn’t into it for the scene, but only because she wanted to flaunt her beauty. The dom or top or boyfriend or whatever he was didn’t play her hard, had indeed barely flogged her hard enough to turn her even slightly pink. It was a total bore to Caroline to see it, and indeed, there really wasn’t much of a crowd surrounding this scene, not like one might expect.
Later, Caroline’s master had told her that the older woman’s scene, the one flying on her scene, completely absorbed in it and lost in a world that only included her and her master, was far and away the sexier of the two events. He’d agreed with Caroline that the other scene, while the submissive girl was indeed eye-candy, was an utter bore. For Caroline, it had been a good and enlightening moment in her life. She herself had far from a perfect face or figure, she’d always felt, although she knew she wasn’t entirely without appeal either. But his remarks that day made her feel far better about herself, because she’d seen with her own eyes that many others likewise agreed with him that it took more than a submissive’s looks to really work into a dom’s heart. Indeed, Caroline had long since learned that looks were secondary at best. That event had been a huge growth experience for her. She shook her head to clear her thoughts and return to the present.
“I told her I’d pass her information to the membership people,” Julieta said, smiling. “She says their master would need to approve, of course.”
“Yes, of course,” Bill said. “But we can at least get that ball to rolling, I suppose.”
“That was my thinking,” Julieta confirmed. “If nothing else, the ladies have something a bit more informative to bring to their master than that there’s just a BDSM club in the area and would he like them all to join up.” She winked at Caroline and then Rachel started to sit up, looking around with hollow eyes that finally were starting to get some snap back to them.
“Caroline, I think Master’s going to be okay with this,” Rachel said. “Fuck, you have his number. Call him, why don’t you? And why don’t you just admit that he’s Allen?”
“That’s enough, Rachel,” Caroline said mildly. “How about if you just shut up for a while before you dig this hole any deeper, okay?”
“That happens sometimes,” Julieta said. “I don’t think she’s being so much a loose cannon as that the endorphin rush for her is like a big rush of sodium pentothal. She’s too blasted right now to know what’s appropriate or inappropriate to say, and I’m certain Bill will keep this all between us. Besides, I’d pretty well done the math and figured out that your boss was the most logical choice for your master, anyway. If Rachel is his PA, it means she probably works a ninety-hour work week or so, and if you’re high enough up in his company that you’re managing an account this large, it means that you probably scarcely work less than Rachel, and so QED, it’s more likely that Allen Martin is your master than anyone else, since you work so closely with him all the time anyway.”
“Jesus H. Christ, he’s going to skin us alive when he gets a hold of us,” Caroline moaned. “Just like a couple of catfish.”
“Would it help if I talked to him about this before you did,” Bill asked. “To see if I could calm him down, dom to dom, so to speak?”
“I don’t know,” Caroline said, fretting and worrying. “He’s likely to be furious that I sent her to space and then blithely brought her along to a business function. I mean, we got lucky by the skin of our teeth here, Bill, that apparently we happened to be meeting with people in and around the BSDM scene, but let’s face facts, what I did was pretty Goddamned stupid.”
“How about we just call it ill-advised,” Bill said, smiling. “Here’s what I’m going to do, if you two please. I’ll call Allen and tell him you two impressed me very much – which is true, by the way – and ask him to come out here tomorrow evening with both of you, and we’ll tell him about the local scene and see where it goes from there.”
“But I still have to tell him what I did to Rachel,” Caroline said.
“Perhaps so,” Bill remarked. “But I’ll make it plain to him that it turned out to be perhaps an even better thing for all concerned.”
“I’d appreciate that,” Caroline said. “Maybe he’ll only peel off half my hide this way.” Her mind’s eye was filled with that whipping post in old Mexico, and Allen with his strap and his whip. That she’d be tied to that post sometime soon and pretty awfully punished for this stunt was not in question, but only deep dread and resignation.
“Well, maybe I can prevail upon him to leave your hide pretty much where it is now,” Bill smiled. “You wear it well and it would probably look disconcerting to see you just in your innards.”
“But if he does peel you,” Julieta said. “I only charge a dollar a staple to put your skin back on you, okay?” She laughed and Caroline returned an uneasy smile, and an even less sincere chuckle of her own.
“Rachel’s going to be okay though,” Bill asked Julieta, who merely nodded. “Good! I’m going to go call Allen right now and tell him I need him to come out here tomorrow night with you two, and I’ll have a couple other guests here, and we’ll talk to him about the BDSM stuff. For your part, let him know that tomorrow isn’t about the mall, but about personal stuff. That way he’s not caught utterly flat-footed. Okay?”
“Yes, thank you,” Caroline said, meaning it. Bill ducked out of the room and Caroline stroked Rachel’s hair for a moment.
“This was your first time to put her into space,” Julieta asked softly.
“Until Friday, I’d never laid a lash on another human being in my life,” Caroline confessed, deciding that if she was in for this penny, she was in for the entire pound. “Doctor, I’m a submissive, maybe even a full-out slave. But I got left in charge of Rachel while our master is out of town, and I’ve come to find that I enjoy that side of the fence too. I know how it is to submit, but I guess I’m a ways yet from learning the physical skills a dom or top needs, and maybe a ways from learning Rachel as fully as I should know her. But I doubt our master is likely to hand me this kind of trust again to see what new and amazing ways I can find next time to fuck up.”
“Don’t be too sure,” Julieta said idly. “Life’s about learning and changing, and sometimes shit happens, right?”
The door opened and Bill reappeared. “You’ll be here tomorrow evening at eight,” he announced. “Allen sounded happy for the invitation, which really means he’d rather have a gasoline enema and fart on a campfire, but that’s okay.”
“He’s been out of town and buried in busy,” Caroline said. “I’m guessing he wanted to just put his feet up after hours tomorrow, and debrief us about this weekend. It’s been something of an experiment, you see.” Caroline went on to explain, briefly, what she’d said to Julieta.
“That’s interesting,” Bill said. “Julieta, do you think you could tend to Rachel while I take Caroline with me for a few minutes? There’s something I think she should see.” Julieta eyed him for a moment, looking nearly angry, and then softened her expression and nodded.
Curious, Caroline followed Bill from the room, deeply surprised to find the whole house empty, and then she followed him on out to the barn out back, which he opened to reveal all the visitors standing around a support post, to which a fully naked Danielle was tied securely. Her long black hair, gleaming like volcanic glass, was bound up high, baring her back for whatever awaited her.. As Bill walked in, Fiona handed him a bundle of very thin switches, wet and dripping, and Caroline wondered what was going on here.
“Danielle, is there anything you’d like to say to Caroline about your conduct today,” Bill asked in a terrifyingly cold and calm voice.
“If I may, Master,” Danielle said, sounding not frightened or even dreading the events apparently soon to come, but instead merely sad and disappointed with herself.
“You may,” Bill said.
“Ms. Loring, while I was right about my guesswork, I was wrong to be so indiscreet, and I really am very sorry that I added to your embarrassment,” Danielle said. “It’s a lesson I should long since have learned as Bill’s slave, and one I have to learn also in the job I do for George and Fiona at the electronics plant. I hope this is the last time I need to learn this lesson, and I hope you forgive me. Thanks for letting me speak, Master. I’m ready now.”
“Bill, can I just forgive her and call it even,” Caroline asked, a bit annoyed with Danielle’s big mouth, but not so much that she wanted to see what gave the appearance of a pretty savage beating. She couldn’t imagine Danielle’s humiliation right now, and was glad she wasn’t in the younger woman’s place. “I don’t think she meant any harm, and I’d rather she didn’t remember the first time meeting me as a day when she was beaten in front of this many friends.”
“If I may, Master,” Danielle spoke.
“You may,” Bill said after a moment to consider her request.
“Ms. Loring, what I did to you and Rachel was wrong, but this isn’t about you getting justice, necessarily. It’s about me learning to rein in my mouth, which seems to get me into too much trouble sometimes. Master’s spoken to me about this a few other times, but I didn’t take a painless lesson to heart. In short, this is about me, about correcting me so I don’t do this and alienate more people than I seem to already do. Dr. Orozco can barely tolerate me half the time, and I can’t blame her. I can’t hate you or feel angry at you when I’m the one in the wrong.”
“Okay,” Caroline said, dubious.
“Caroline, Danielle has been running around with her mouth on automatic for a bit too long here lately, and today was just one more illustration of the problem, and perhaps of my failings as her owner,” Bill interjected. “This isn’t your doing. I think everyone here would agree that if it hadn’t been with y’all today, it would’ve been tomorrow or the day after about something else.”
“He’s right,” Fiona interjected, scowling at Danielle. “And one hell of a lot more than her submission is at stake if she doesn’t learn to control her mouth. She works for our company, and is a damned good engineer, but she’s never going to get my approval for a security clearance there if she doesn’t learn to curb her mouth until I’m comfortable that she won’t be released from Bill’s custody and into Leavenworth’s.”
“I see,” Caroline lied, wondering why Leavenworth would give a hooter’s damn about Danielle’s mouth, and then it dawned on her that Danielle was probably on some secret government project or another, or needed to be, but couldn’t be trusted to keep her mouth shut about the goings-on in her work. Obviously, if Danielle ran her mouth about something secret or top secret, it would indeed find her for an extended stay in the crossbar hotel at Club Fed. “Then I gather Danielle needs to learn this lesson soonest,” Caroline remarked after her ponderings. “I hope you do, Danielle.”
“Thank you,” Danielle whispered. Sharon approached Danielle with a bandanna in her hand, and slid it into Danielle’s mouth, and Bill took his position while Caroline found a place as out of the way as she could manage. He lightly touched her pale shoulders with the bundle of switches, and Caroline heard Danielle whimper a sound that communicated clearly her dread of what was soon to follow.
“Two dozen,” Bill announced in a calm voice. Danielle’s instant whimper and shivering didn’t seem at all calm, but she was hardly in a position to affect the outcome now, Caroline well knew by her own time on a whipping post. He drew back with the switches, and Caroline saw water dripping from them, curious as to why they’d be wetted. He laid the first stroke to her, and Caroline winced in empathy as she saw a broad cluster of welts rising diagonally across her shoulders, and trickles of the water running down her skin to her buttocks. Danielle whimpered and jerked some, but was bound too fast to the post to move even so much as an inch, Caroline saw. Bill lashed Danielle at a slow and measured pace, taking his sweet time to impart a hard lesson to his slave-bride. Before long, Danielle was screaming to the skies in agony.
“The switches are brine-soaked,” Caroline heard George whisper behind her. “They’re heavier and have more impact, and burn like hell if the skin opens. Danielle is accustomed to hard discipline from her owner when she rides off the range like she did today.”
“Jesus, no wonder she’s hurting,” Caroline breathed to George, barely audibly, as another lash fell and Danielle screeched, whipping her body back and forth as much as her tight bonds would allow. This lash broke the skin, Caroline saw, and she couldn’t imagine the exquisite agony Danielle must be undergoing. She remembered getting lemon juice in a small cut on her finger before, and had nearly fainted with the burning. Caroline knew Allen was a hard-ass in his own right, but was glad that Bill wasn’t her own master. Indeed, she was suddenly worried about what evil Allen might learn and emulate from an association with Bill, but it was far too late now, wasn’t it?
“Ms. Loring, every one of us in power chooses how we deal with our submissives and slaves,” George said, his voice so low that Caroline was convinced that only she could hear it. And as gently put as his tone was, she heard the reproof in it, and knew that he was disappointed that she was standing in negative judgement of Bill’s treatment of his slave-bride and her big mouth. He walked a few steps away while Caroline stood alone, feeling shamed. George was right, she knew, and she knew that if Danielle was on that post it was because she’d made a choice to serve Bill and suffer the consequences of her personal failings. She returned her attention to the whipping, seeing that it was nearly done, and glad for Danielle that such was the case, despite the presumption that Danielle deserved this entire beating. Finally, it was over, and Bill merely dropped the bundle of switches, which were looking frayed and worn by then.
He untied Danielle, from the bottom up, Caroline noted, and then he held her closely and gently as she cried her last onto his shirt. Nobody in the audience moved a muscle, and Caroline took her cue from her peers, if they could be termed so. Finally, Danielle was more or less back under control, and approached Caroline on unsteady legs, then fell to her knees in front of her, and took Caroline’s right hand in both of hers, looking up at her with a pleading expression.
“Am I forgiven, Ms. Loring,” Danielle asked, keeping her tone as neutral as the pain flaring from her harshly whipped back would allow.
“Well, yes,” Caroline said, taken aback. She honestly didn’t think Danielle had done that great a sin. Yes, she should have had a bit more discretion, but Caroline was honest enough with herself to know that Danielle had just been excited to meet more of her own kind so unexpectedly. And in truth, Caroline was also glad to meet more of her own kind out of the blue like this. “I don’t think there’s anything to forgive on my part, but if there is, it’s forgiven.”
“Thank you,” Danielle said, kissing Caroline’s hand and weeping. “I’m so sorry I embarrassed you, Ms. Loring.”
“If you don’t start calling me Caroline, I’m going to start thinking you don’t like me, and I’ll ask your master if he’ll redo this whipping because my feelings are hurt,” Caroline said, kneeling down to Danielle’s level and smiling kindly at her.
“Thank you, Caroline,” Danielle said, still sounding subdued.
“May I hug you, kiss you,” Caroline asked kindly, wanting to show Danielle that there were indeed no hard feelings on her part, and that if forgiveness was required of her, it was readily and fully given.
“It’s okay, Danielle,” Bill said softly, and Danielle nodded. Caroline knee-walked the last foot toward the whipped slave, and held her in her arms tenderly, hands low on Danielle’s back, kissing her cheek gently and then just holding her. Danielle started sobbing again, but the crying was of a different quality, not from pain but the catharsis of forgiving herself for so upsetting her master and letting herself down in the process.
Danielle cried long enough that Caroline was starting to regret her kindness as her knees ached on the floor of the barn, but there was no way she was going to let Danielle free until the tears were done. Caroline didn’t have that kind of selfishness in her. But the tears and shuddering finally ceased, and Danielle pulled away, this time able to look Caroline in the eye. “Thank you,” she said emotionally. “Thank you for your kindness.”
“No thanks required,” Caroline said, feeling a bit flustered that she was suddenly very aroused, having this naked and submissive woman in her arms. But she stifled the arousal, knowing that this wasn’t the time or the place. Sometimes it was better to have a desire than to push for a fruition that was unlikely to happen and far more likely to cause even more problems than she was facing. “Can I help you to your feet now?”
“Please,” Danielle said. Caroline stood and took Danielle’s hands in her own and helped her to her feet, and kissed her cheek again, then let her go to her master’s side, where she belonged.
“Every one of you was placed at risk by Danielle’s indiscretion,” Bill said to the assemblage. “Feel free, any of you, to speak your mind to her.”
“Danielle, I guess I’m the one here closest to your age,” Sharon said. “I know that we’re young and sometimes overly excitable, and that you honestly mean no harm. But BDSM is based on trust, and absolute discretion is a cornerstone of that trust. I hope this lesson doesn’t need to be taught to you again. You know I love you, but if I can’t trust you, I’m afraid all the love in the world won’t let me be close to you, and we both cherish that closeness, or I’d like to think that.”
“Well said, Sharon,” Fiona interjected. “I’ve already said my part, and that still stands, Danielle.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” Danielle said, sounding shamed and scared.
“Fiona spoke for me as well,” George said. “I hope you don’t forget this lesson, Danielle.”
“I was about your age when I got into this lifestyle,” Kate spoke up. “And I remember how thrilling it was to be a part of something so fulfilling, and wishing people weren’t so Goddamned narrow-minded that we have to keep our proclivities under wraps, but we’re in the buckle of the Bible-belt here, Danielle, and that means people think anything out of the ordinary is evil, and that those participating in it are to be shunned. The wrong word at the wrong time could have wrecked everyone’s lives here today, save maybe George’s and Fiona’s, since they have more money than God, but even so, it would’ve made their lives here very difficult, and probably seen them having to leave the area. I’m a small businesswoman, and Sharon is a part of that business. Chance here runs his own business, and Bill certainly does. A wrong word at the wrong time could derail many good lives here. Keep that thought in the front of your mind when your tongue wants to go on automatic, okay?”
“Yes, Ma’am,” Danielle said, eyeing the floor.
“For my part, I don’t think I’d be completely wrecked,” Chance interjected. “But I tend to be a very private person about my personal life, and I would’ve been very hurt by losing your trust, if for instance Caroline had left here to announce to God and the world that we’re all perverts. What if you’d been wrong? What if Rachel had just had heat-stroke or a diabetic episode or an overdose on something? Anyway, that’s my feelings.”
“Yes, Sir,” Danielle said.
“I guess that leaves me,” Christine said. “On my own, I’d be about as obscure in this area as the average prairie dog, but since I’m George and Fiona’s personal assistant, that makes me fairly visible in the area, and fairly well-known. Unfortunately, a part of my duties is that I coordinate a scholarship program for the local schools, and that means that you also risked one hell of a lot of deserving kids getting good college educations and a chance at a better future. I know that’s probably getting far-fetched, but there it is. Danielle, I’m close to your age too, and I remember like Kate does how exciting it is to first be among your own kind. Maybe someday, hopefully someday soon, we’ll find some acceptance in the mainstream. The gays did it, although it’s still a struggle for them, and perhaps our time is also at hand. But the time isn’t arrived yet, Danielle. You screwed up today. But you’re a bright girl, and as I understand it, Bill rarely has to give you the same punishment twice.”
“I’m sorry I let you all down today,” Danielle said in a subdued tone, still unable to look anyone in the eye. “I guess I should ask if you all feel I was punished enough or if it will take more for you to forgive me.”
“Well, I’d love to take you over my knee and spank the hell out of you,” Chance snarled, then grinned widely. “But more because you’re sexy as hell and it’d get my ancient rocks off!”
Despite her pain and shame, Danielle snorted and then laughed, and soon the rest of the group was chuckling too. It impressed something upon Caroline, and she wondered if this indeed wasn’t the objective of the round-robin ass-eating, that what was being said was perhaps as much or more for her benefit as Danielle’s. There were two issues that were plainly obvious to Caroline. First and foremost, her complete discretion would be required about the goings-on in this group. Secondly, but perhaps of equal importance was the plain fact that these people were intimately close, and shared a trust among one another that was absolute and unquestioning. What had happened here today wasn’t a kinky scene, but a slave being publicly beaten by her master, humiliated and abased before people she respected and held dear, to impart upon her a hard lesson in good behavior. Whatever this assemblage was, Caroline knew for sure that she wanted in, and hoped against hope that Allen and Rachel wanted the same. She felt something come alive deep in her soul with these thoughts, to live for a time among more like-minded people than just those in her own relationship sounded like a slice of heaven in many ways to her.
Christine announced then that the barn was too stiflingly hot and that she was going back to the house, and slowly but surely everyone filed out behind her, leaving Danielle the privacy and dignity now to dress herself before returning to their company, her place and esteem among them returned to her now that she’d paid her price. Already, Caroline knew the discussion with Rachel on the drive home would be intensive, and she would have given all she had in this world to see the future, the next few days, at least.
