Through the Looking Glass (Ch. 05)

Through the Looking Glass (Ch. 05)

soppingwetpanties

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, merchandise, companies, events and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. All characters in sexual situations are 18 years or older.

Chapter Five

David waited patiently... at least as patiently as he could when naked, in Suzanne Kennerley's home, with his cum smeared all over his lips. Suzanne had left the workout room doors open when she went upstairs after allowing him to lick that cum off her feet. Through the open doorway, sounds occasionally drifted down from the master bedroom, traveling along the second-floor corridor and down the stairwell. At first there was a muffled cry, too distant for him to distinguish anything beyond the unmistakable fact that it had come from a woman. Several minutes later came another, louder this time, followed by a succession of gasps and sighs that left little to the imagination.

David had no doubt that Suzanne and Joanna were making love. Nor did he doubt that Suzanne intended him to hear them. He had learned that very little Suzanne did was accidental. The open workout room doors, the bedroom door presumably left open as well, and the sounds reaching him from upstairs were all part of her design.

What he had yet to determine was precisely what Suzanne expected him to do about it.

He remained on the bench where Suzanne had left him and contemplated what was happening to him. For years he had written about submission with the unearned authority of a man whose experience existed largely in his imagination. Tonight Suzanne had turned imagination into reality, and the reality had proven to exceed anything he had conceived.

What surprised him most was Suzanne herself. She had begun tentatively, almost experimentally, as though trying on the role he had written for her in his work of fiction, Blonde Bitch Domme, to see whether it suited her. Somewhere along the way, the experiment had ceased being an experiment. Her confidence had grown with each passing hour, until she wielded her power with an authority that seemed increasingly natural to her. David wondered whether she had discovered something new about herself or merely uncovered something that had been there all along.

And there had been other, more revealing evidence.

He remembered the growing damp patch at the crotch of her yoga pants before she hurried from the room to find Joanna. He had spent enough time since then listening to the distant sounds from the upstairs bedroom to understand that whatever desire he had awakened in her was now being satiated by Joanna. He began to wonder if he was merely a plaything for her amusement, or if there was a more insidious agenda.

His moment of reflected was interrupted by another sharper cry of pleasure carrying down the hallway.

David shifted uncomfortably on the bench. After all, it was designed to assist with weightlifting, not as a seat for an extended period of time. Looking at the wall mounted clock it was an hour and twenty-two minutes he had been waiting, listening... and wondering.

Had Suzanne forgotten him? Or was leaving him there part of a game she was playing? Or did she expect him to understand that the evening was over and leave on his own accord? But she clearly hadn't dismissed him, and that seemed to matter if she was truly in control. But an hour--an hour and twenty-two minutes--seemed excessive.

His clothes remained on the floor where he had left them. David sighed, crossed the room, and retrieved his phone from the pocket of his black slacks, then returned to the bench without dressing.

No messages. No missed calls.

How long was a naked, submissive, middle aged man supposed to wait after being abandoned in a home gym while his Mistress went upstairs to have sex with another woman?

It wasn't a question addressed in any etiquette book David had encountered.

Another ten minutes passed.

Enough.

He stood. Whatever Suzanne intended, he wasn't going to spend the entire night sitting naked on a weight bench. He reached down for his underwear.

The opening guitar notes of Chris Isaak's "Wicked Game" suddenly erupted from his phone, shattering the silence. It was the ringtone he'd purchased to identify a call from Suzanne. Startled, the phone slipped from his hand and struck the rubber flooring, bouncing once and careening away from him.

"Oh, shit!" he called out to no one.

David scrambled off the bench to pick up the phone. By the time he held it he'd missed the second ring.

After the third ring, his thumb missed the screen because his hand was shaking as he tried to answer it.

He finally managed to answer just before the fourth ring would have sent the call to voicemail.

"Hello?"

The word came out more timidly than he intended.

Suzanne's voice was composed.

"What are you doing?"

David looked at his clothes scattered beside him.

"Waiting."

"For what?"

He hesitated. "For you... Mistress."

There was a brief silence.

"As you should have."

David sat back down on the bench.

"I wasn't sure whether you'd forgotten about me."

"I didn't forget you, David."

The sound of her voice sent another flutter through his stomach.

"I was just about to get dressed."

"I didn't tell you to get dressed."

"No."

"Then don't."

David released the underwear still clutched in his other hand. It fell onto the mat.

"Yes, Mistress."

Another pause.

"Come upstairs."

His pulse accelerated.

"To your bedroom?"

"You're a college professor. What do you think?"

"Idiot," David muttered to himself.

"Did you say something?"

"No," David answered. "I'll be there in a minute."

The call ended.

David stared at the phone.

Whatever had been happening upstairs for the past hour, apparently his invitation had finally arrived, and whatever Suzanne had planned would soon be revealed.

* * *

David left the workout room and stepped into the hallway. The house seemed different at night. Most of the downstairs lights had been extinguished, leaving the second floor illuminated by small wall sconces spaced along the corridor. He crossed the landing and climbed the short second flight toward the bedroom wing, conscious that with every step his arousal was rising, as was his cock. Walking with an erection in Suzanne's Kennerley's grand estate was not what he envisioned when his day started.

He paused at the top of the stairs. Three doors opened off the corridor. Two were closed. The third, at the far end, stood open, warm pale yellow light spilling out of the room. It was inviting... and unnerving... in equal measure.

David walked toward it like a moth to flame.

The master bedroom occupied the entire western corner of the house and was considerably larger than his own living room. A broad bank of windows overlooked the darkened grounds, their curtains left open to the night. Glowing embers burned in a fireplace with a carved limestone mantel facing a sitting area furnished with two upholstered chairs and a small sofa. An antique Persian carpet covered much of the polished oak floor. Beyond it stood an enormous four-poster bed of dark wood, its white linens in considerable disarray.

This was unmistakably Suzanne's room. Understated elegance, much like the way she dressed. Everything curated, everything in its assigned place, chosen with the eye of someone who knew exactly what she wanted and possessed the means to acquire it.

His attention settled on the bed and its two occupants.

Suzanne and Joanna were sitting propped up against oversized pillows, naked, covered only by a rumpled sheet that lay loosely across their legs. Whatever had occupied the previous hour had apparently concluded. Suzanne's blonde hair, normally immaculate, had escaped its ponytail and fallen untidily around her shoulders. The transformation startled him. The polished woman who presided over museum meetings and commanded conference rooms had disappeared. In her place was a woman wearing nothing but an expression of complete satisfaction.

Joanna looked equally content and considerably less concerned about concealing it. She reclined against the headboard beside Suzanne, her full, rounded breasts, considerably larger than Suzanne's, exposed above the sheet. One knee was raised beneath the covers, her cropped hair was tousled, and an arm rested possessively across Suzanne's waist. Two empty glasses and a half-empty bottle of Scotch stood on the bedside table.

David stopped just inside the doorway. The sight of them affected him more powerfully than he had expected. Suzanne and Joanna were together in Suzanne's bed, comfortable in their nakedness and in each other's company, while he stood several yards away with no idea what place, if any, had been reserved for him.

He felt embarrassment first. Naked, he was unable to hide the evidence of his arousal, though the women seemed uninterested in his erection. Their inattentiveness accentuated his sense of humiliation.

Then came jealousy.

He hated it immediately and was unable to suppress it. Joanna and Suzanne had spent the past hour making love while he sat downstairs imagining them. He'd been infatuated with Suzanne for years, and here she was, naked and in the arms of a woman, and not his.

Yet beneath the jealousy were more powerful emotions. The perverse pleasure of having been deliberately excluded from their bed. These feelings were new, but instead of diminishing him, he discovered an unexpected strength in surrendering to them. He had written and published countless words about submission, yet none had adequately captured the pleasure of surrendering control, and his ego, to two self-confident, extraordinarily desirable women.

"Close the door," Suzanne said.

He did.

David's heart was beating hard enough that he could feel it in his throat.

Suzanne pointed to the floor beside the bed.

"Kneel."

David crossed the room. Every step intensified the contradiction inside him. Some stubborn remnant of Professor David Elliott--the respected academic, museum board member, a man accustomed to being listened to--wanted to preserve a shred of dignity. The rest of him wanted nothing more than to obey her.

His baser instincts prevailed. He lowered himself beside the bed, humbled and naked.

"Here?"

"A little closer."

David shimmied forward until his knees were nearly against the bedframe.

Suzanne reached across and took Joanna's hand.

That small gesture of familiarity produced another stab of envy. Joanna possessed something he did not, history with Suzanne, trust, and a place in her bed. Whatever Suzanne was making of David, he remained the outsider.

Suzanne studied him as though she could see every one of those thoughts passing across his face.

"You spent more than an hour downstairs wondering what Joanna and I were doing."

"Yes."

"Imagining it?"

David swallowed.

"Yes."

Suzanne leaned back against the pillows, inviting Joanna to suckle on her breasts.

"Now you don't have to imagine, David."

She sighed as Joanna encircled an erect nipple with her mouth.

With eyes closed, she said, "Watch."

David understood the significance immediately. Suzanne wasn't inviting him into their intimacy. She was permitting him to witness it. And, to his considerable surprise, he wasn't offended by the distinction, he was honored... and highly aroused.

David settled back on his heels, a voyeur instead of a participant. Jealousy remained. So did humiliation. But underneath both was the deeper realization that frightened and exhilarated him. Suzanne understood his fantasy better than he had.

Suzanne turned to Joanna, and for the next several minutes David watched the two women lose themselves in each other. There was nothing tentative about their lovemaking, naked bodies writhing against each other in a familiar, and highly erotic dance. Whatever appetite remained after the hour they had already spent together seemed undiminished, and they pursued it with an intensity that left David alternately fascinated, envious and painfully conscious of his assigned place beside the bed.

He watched because Suzanne had told him to watch.

And because he wanted to.

Kneeling, David leaned forward for a better view of the two women, absorbed in an intimacy born of years together. Suzanne's head was thrown back, her eyes tightly shut, Joanna's attention focused entirely on his blonde wet dream.

It was the first time David had seen Suzanne without the armor of her public persona. The commanding woman he knew was still very much present, but with Joanna there was another dimension to her, an ease born of ten years together. Their intimacy was apparent in the smallest gestures, in the familiarity with which they touched and responded to one another. He was witnessing a side of Suzanne that few people had ever been permitted to see.

David's eyes greedily followed Joanna fingers, slender and long, tracing a line along the crease between Suzanne's thigh and neatly trimmed light haired pubic patch and then running them along the length of the labia to scoop up her honey.

His tongue passed over his lips without his realizing it. Joanna noticed.

"You want to taste her, don't you?"

She already knew the answer. The pleasure was in making him admit it, in seeing that glimmer of submission in his eyes when he did.

"Yes."

"Yes what?" Joanna asked, holding her glossy fingers inches from his face. He could smell Suzanne on them, and that alone was driving him crazy.

"Yes, please, Miss Joanna. I'd like to taste her."

"This may be as close as you get."

Joanna offered him her fingers.

David took them into his mouth, sucking and licking until Joanna withdrew them. Suzanne's sweet, earthy taste remained on his tongue. For the moment, he wanted nothing more. The taste of her, the sight of the two women together, and the knowledge that Joanna controlled even this small privilege had given him exactly what he craved.

"Thank you, Miss Joanna."

David desperately wanted to take Joanna's place. Yet the knowledge that he would not be permitted to do so only deepened his sense of submission. Desire and denial, emotions he had always imagined to be in opposition, had become strangely complementary. The more he wanted, the more acutely he felt the power of being refused. To his surprise, he discovered that the deprivation caused a darker and more irresistible sensation than desire.

More surprising was what he saw beneath Joanna's brashness. Tenderness. Affection. She touched Suzanne with an intimacy born not merely of desire but of long familiarity, and David understood that the love Joanna had professed for Suzanne wasn't an exaggeration or a convenient description of their unusual relationship. It was there before him.

Their affection shifted between laughter and urgency, tenderness and hunger. David watched the familiarity between them become something more intense, fueled by their desire for one another and, he increasingly suspected, by their awareness that he remained exactly where Suzanne had placed him.

And Joanna knew he was watching.

Suzanne knew it, too. The awareness of David's presence had introduced something neither woman had anticipated. After ten years together, Suzanne and Joanna knew each other's habits, preferences, and responses with an intimacy that left little room for surprise. Their affection had never diminished, nor had their attraction, but familiarity had inevitably replaced some of the uncertainty that accompanied their earliest encounters.

David had changed that. His fascination with Suzanne, his willingness to submit to her authority, and the extraordinary position he now occupied in their bedroom had given their relationship an unexpected new dimension. Suzanne found herself responding not merely to Joanna's affection but to the knowledge that David was witnessing a side of her that no one else had ever seen.

David wasn't surprised that Joanna assumed the dominant role. After everything he had learned about her, he would have expected nothing else. What astonished him was Suzanne.

This was the woman who controlled virtually every environment she entered. David had watched her preside over museum meetings, negotiate disagreements, redirect conversations and make decisions while everyone else adjusted themselves around her. Even earlier that evening, experimenting with David in the workout room, she had seemed to discover authority as naturally as if it had always belonged to her.

With Joanna, that Suzanne disappeared.

She surrendered herself completely. The immaculate composure gave way to abandon. Her blonde hair spread across the pillows, the sheets twisted beneath her, and the voice that could silence a conference room with a few carefully chosen words was reduced to gasps and broken pleas. She no longer seemed interested in controlling anything. She responded to Joanna without inhibition, allowing herself to be carried wherever Joanna chose to take her.

David found the transformation mesmerizing.

Perhaps that was possible only because Suzanne trusted Joanna so completely. Ten years together had created an intimacy David could observe but couldn't yet comprehend. Suzanne wasn't surrendering control because Joanna had taken it from her. She was giving it to her.

David had spent years fantasizing about submitting to Suzanne Kennerley. Now, kneeling beside her bed, he discovered that watching Suzanne willingly surrender to someone else was even more powerful.

Suzanne spread her legs wide open for him to witness her need, stoked by Joanna's domination of her and David's submission to her. Sex with Joanna was exciting, but inviting a man into their bedroom as a voyeur excited her in a way she didn't think possible. She had expected David's presence to amuse her. She hadn't expected it to make something so familiar feel as fresh as first time sex.

"Eat me, babe," she whispered to Joanna, though her eyes were fixed on David when she said it. Seeing the fire in his eyes made Joanna's wet tongue on her weeping sex generate an explosion of pleasure. Joanna could sense Suzanne's excitement as her lover's smooth thighs pressed against her cheeks as her tongue plunged deep within Suzanne's fleshy folds.

"Oh... Joanna... yes... make me cum... make me cum..."

Their lovemaking became furious, the women lost in each other, their movements increasingly urgent until Suzanne's hips began to tremble. Words tumbled from her mouth, fragments of thought that no longer formed coherent sentences.

"Oh... fuck... no... oh God..."

David heard the sounds of their intimacy and Suzanne's increasingly breathless cries, followed by a final shudder that seemed to leave her without strength. His raging erection was granted no relief, and yet there was even greater pleasure in the denial of his release.

Gradually, their urgency subsided. Suzanne lay motionless against the pillows, spent and breathing heavily, while Joanna settled beside her, her own breathing slowly returning to normal. For several moments neither woman spoke.

Then Suzanne reached for the sheet and drew it across them both.

David remained exactly where she had told him to remain.

On his knees. Thoroughly aroused, yet unsatisfied.

Neither woman seemed to have forgotten him, though neither paid him any attention. Strangely, David felt no urgency to leave or even to change position. He was content where he was, kneeling beside the bed, excluded from their intimacy yet permitted to remain in its aftermath.

The silence continued. Suzanne rested against Joanna, her breathing gradually returning to normal. Joanna stared toward the darkened windows, one arm still around her. David waited for one of them to acknowledge him.

Neither did.

Five minutes passed. Perhaps longer.

The position that had initially seemed so appropriate to his new circumstances gradually became less romantic. The hardwood beneath the carpet was unforgiving, and a dull ache developed in his knees. David shifted his weight slightly, hoping not to draw attention to himself.

Joanna noticed. Of course she did. Her eyes dropped briefly toward him, then returned to Suzanne.

David stayed where he was. His knees began to hurt in earnest. Apparently submission, like most things David had romanticized from a comfortable distance, was considerably easier in fiction.

Suzanne finally turned her head.

"Joanna and I have been talking about you."

David looked from her to Joanna.

"That sounds ominous."

"It isn't."

Joanna reached for the water glass on the bedside table.

Suzanne continued. "We've decided this arrangement isn't going to work."

David felt something drop inside him.

"What arrangement?"

"The two of us managing you."

He wasn't certain he liked the verb, but this seemed an unwise moment to object.

Suzanne sat higher against the pillows.

"Think about what has happened already. I send you to my office, Joanna intercepts you, and afterward you spend the rest of the meeting trying to determine whether I arranged it. Tonight I tell you one thing, Joanna might tell you another tomorrow. Sooner or later you'll be wondering whose instructions take precedence."

"We could establish rules."

"We could. Then we'd spend half our time discussing the rules." Suzanne shook her head. "I don't want to consult Joanna every time I decide what to do with you, and she doesn't want to consult me. Neither of us wants you running back and forth between us asking whether something has been authorized."

Joanna lowered her glass. "And I'm not interested in being Suzanne's assistant when it comes to you."

"You are my assistant."

"Not in bed."

Suzanne acknowledged the distinction with a small inclination of her head.

David looked between them. "So what happens?"

"You choose."

He thought he had misunderstood.

"I what?"

"You choose one of us."

The words seemed absurd in their simplicity.

"One?"

"One," Suzanne said.

David stared at her.

"And the other?"

"Steps aside."

He looked at Joanna. "You're all right with that?"

"Wouldn't have agreed to it otherwise."

"And if I choose Suzanne?"

"Then you choose Suzanne."

No irritation. No challenge. Joanna might have been discussing which road he intended to take home.

David turned back to Suzanne.

"And if I choose Joanna?"

"Then you choose Joanna."

There was something almost unnerving about the absence of competition between them.

"No resentment?"

"None."

"No judgment?"

"David, this isn't a test."

Given his recent experiences, he considered that worth confirming. "You're sure?"

Suzanne almost laughed.

"Yes."

David shifted on his knees.

"Can I think about it?"

"No."

The answer came immediately.

He stared at her. "No?"

"You've spent years thinking about what you want. You've spent the last several days experiencing some of it. I'm asking you what you want now."

"This is a fairly significant decision."

"Then make it carefully."

"How long do I have?"

Suzanne glanced at the clock on her bedside table.

"You have as long as it takes you to answer me tonight."

David looked down at his hands.

Suzanne Kennerley or Joanna Burke.

A week ago the question would have been ridiculous. There would have been no decision to make.

Suzanne.

Of course Suzanne.

She had occupied his imagination for years. She was beautiful in precisely the way he had always believed a woman should be beautiful: blonde, elegant, sophisticated, exquisitely dressed, socially formidable. She possessed wealth and position without being defined by either. She could command a museum board, a corporation or a roomful of wealthy donors without raising her voice. David had taken those qualities and built an entire erotic mythology around them.

He had written Blonde Bitch Domme because of her.

And tonight she had given substance to the fantasy.

He looked at Suzanne.

She was watching him without offering the slightest assistance.

Choosing her meant getting what he had wanted.

Didn't it?

Then why was this difficult?

His eyes moved to Joanna.

Joanna Burke would never have appeared in one of his fantasies before last week. That realization now seemed almost comical. She wasn't his type.

Except apparently she was.

He thought about the drive home after their first encounter. He had sat in his kitchen with a beer and tried to understand why a woman so different from Suzanne had affected him so profoundly. Joanna wasn't polished. She didn't possess Suzanne's classic beauty or cultivated elegance. There was nothing remote about her. She was physical, blunt, irreverent, sometimes profane. The Army had left something in her bearing that no expensive education or social position could manufacture.

And she made him laugh.

That mattered more than he had initially allowed.

The restroom joke downstairs harkening back to their tryst in the executive washroom in Kennerley Towers had been ridiculous, but for those few seconds they had simply been two people enjoying a private joke about something outrageous they had done together.

Together. For real.

David stopped there.

Perhaps that was the difference.

With Suzanne, he was living inside a fantasy he had constructed before Suzanne ever consented to participate in it. Even now he couldn't always tell where the real woman ended and the Suzanne of his imagination began.

There was no imaginary Joanna.

Everything he wanted from her had developed from actually being with her.

That realization changed the calculation.

Suzanne was the known, the embodiment of desires he had cultivated for years. Joanna was the unknown. And somehow the prospect of discovering her excited him in ways he had never anticipated.

David rubbed his palms against his thighs.

But choosing Joanna meant relinquishing Suzanne.

The thought produced an almost physical sense of loss. Years of wanting her, watching her across boardroom tables, inventing scenes around her, wondering what it would be like to surrender himself to precisely the woman now sitting a few feet away asking him to choose someone else.

Could he really walk away from that after finally having it within reach?

He looked at Suzanne again.

She gave him nothing.

That, too, was Suzanne.

Then he looked at Joanna.

He remembered her Army tattoo beneath the rolled sleeve of her shirt. Her dry humor. Her physical confidence. The complete absence of self-consciousness. He remembered his astonishment at discovering how powerfully he responded to a woman he would once have dismissed as outside the boundaries of his carefully constructed preferences.

Perhaps that was the answer.

Suzanne represented the desires of a fictional man.

Joanna represented something he had only just discovered about the man he actually was.

David drew a long breath.

"All right."

Neither woman spoke.

He looked first at Suzanne.

Then at Joanna.

"Joanna."

The room remained still.

David waited for the regret.

It didn't come.

Suzanne nodded once.

"Joanna it is."

That was all.

No disappointment. No wounded pride. No demand that he explain himself.

Joanna studied him from the other side of the bed.

"You sure, Professor?"

David considered the question one last time.

He looked at Suzanne Kennerley--the woman he had fantasized about for years and, until a few days ago, would have sworn represented everything he wanted.

Then he looked at Joanna Burke.

"Yes," he said.

This time there was no hesitation.

"Yes," David said. "I'm sure."

Suzanne regarded him for several seconds.

"I thought you'd choose Joanna."

David's eyebrows rose. "You did?"

"I did."

"Why?"

"Because I've been watching you."

"That doesn't answer the question."

"It answers more of it than you think." Suzanne drew the sheet across her lap. "You wanted me before any of this began. You invented a version of me and spent years entertaining yourself with her. Joanna was different. You had no expectations of her, which meant you had nothing to compare her against. Everything that happened between you was new."

David considered that. It was uncomfortably close to the conclusion he had reached himself.

"You knew before I did."

"I suspected before you did. There's a difference."

He looked at Joanna. "Did you?"

"Nope."

"You thought I'd choose Suzanne?"

"I'd have bet money on it."

"Why?"

Joanna gave him an incredulous look. "Have you seen her?"

Suzanne laughed.

"On that note," she said, throwing back the sheet, "I'm taking a shower. And the two of you are dismissed."

Suzanne climbed from the bed.

David watched her cross the room toward the master bath.

For perhaps three seconds he forgot every conclusion he had reached during the most consequential deliberation of his recent life. Suzanne was naked, completely unselfconscious, her tousled blonde hair falling across the shoulders of a perfect body as she walked toward the open bathroom door. He followed her with his eyes.

A minute ago he had possessed the possibility of her.

Now he didn't.

The distinction was suddenly excruciating.

Good God.

Had he just made a terrible mistake?

Suzanne reached the bathroom doorway and disappeared inside. A moment later David heard water running.

He continued staring at the empty doorway.

Joanna saw all of it.

Something tightened inside her.

She'd spent ten years beside Suzanne and had long ago made peace with the comparisons. Suzanne was the woman strangers noticed when she entered a restaurant. Men watched her cross hotel lobbies. Women noticed her clothes. Photographers knew instinctively where to put her in a group. Suzanne possessed the kind of beauty that made people straighten unconsciously when she approached.

Joanna had never been that woman and never would be.

She had never particularly wanted to be.

Until, for one unwelcome instant, she found herself wishing David hadn't looked quite so stricken when Suzanne walked across the bedroom and then disappeared.

Joanna got out of bed and retrieved Suzanne's dark blue silk robe draped over the back of a chair. She slipped her arms into the sleeves, pulled the robe around herself, and tied the sash.

"Come on."

David turned toward her on his aching knees.

"Where are we going?"

"To get your clothes. Unless you'd prefer to drive home like that."

She held out her hand.

"Let's go."

He took it.

Joanna pulled him to his feet and led him out of Suzanne's bedroom. She didn't release his hand until they were halfway down the corridor.

At the head of the stairs she stopped.

"All right. I want to know something."

David recognized the change in her voice.

"What?"

"Why me?"

He had known the question was coming. He still wasn't prepared for it.

"I told you. I'm attracted to you."

"That's not what I asked."

"No?"

"No. You're attracted to Suzanne. Blind people are attracted to Suzanne." Joanna folded her arms. "You spent years fantasizing about her. You wrote a goddamn story about her. Then she finally gives you exactly what you've been fantasizing about, puts the two of us in front of you, and tells you to choose."

She pointed toward the bedroom.

"And you chose me."

David said nothing.

"I want to know why."

He leaned against the banister.

"For years, I thought Suzanne was exactly what I wanted. Beautiful. Wealthy. Sophisticated. Powerful. Almost unattainable. She was practically the perfect expression of a woman I'd constructed in my imagination."

Joanna's expression hardened.

"You're doing a terrific job of explaining why you chose me."

"I'm getting there."

"You'd better."

"Then I met you."

"You'd met me before."

"I'd encountered you before. That's different."

Joanna waited.

"With Suzanne, reality finally caught up with something I'd imagined for years. With you, there wasn't anything to catch up with. I hadn't imagined you."

She tilted her head as she digested his answer.

"You weren't part of the fantasy. You weren't even my type. Then suddenly I couldn't stop thinking about you. You made me reconsider whether I'd ever understood what I wanted in the first place."

A smile curled up on Joanna's face, a self-satisfied smile.

"I chose Suzanne in my imagination hundreds of times. Tonight was the first time anyone actually made me choose between the woman I'd imagined and the woman I'd come to know. I realized that I'd dreamed about Suzanne, but I wanted you."

"And?"

"And I chose you."

Joanna chewed on the tip of her finger as if she was chewing on his answer.

"All right."

"That's it?"

"For now."

She started down the stairs, then stopped and turned back.

"One thing, Professor. Don't expect me to be Suzanne."

"I don't."

"I mean it. I'm not going to dress like her or talk like her. I'm not going to turn everything into some elegant little ceremony because that's what you wrote in one of your stories. I'm not interested in playing the woman you thought you wanted."

"What are you interested in?"

"Being me."

"That seems reasonable."

"It won't always seem reasonable."

There was enough warning in the statement to make him take it seriously.

"And there's something else," she continued. "You chose me. That means you don't get to spend the next month wondering whether you should've chosen Suzanne. I don't want to see it. I don't want to hear about it."

David thought of Suzanne upstairs.

His hesitation lasted perhaps half a second too long.

Joanna caught it.

"Oh, for Christ's sake."

David laughed despite himself.

"I'm working on it."

"You'd better work fast."

She took his hand again and led him down the stairs.

They passed through the downstairs corridor to the workout room. Joanna opened the door and switched on the lights. David's clothes were where he'd left them, scattered around the bench beside the exercise equipment.

He started toward them.

"Not yet, David."

He turned. Joanna had closed the door and was standing with her back against it.

"There's something we need to settle before you get dressed."

"What?"

"You made a choice upstairs. Now I want to know whether you understand what you chose."

"I understand."

"Do you?" She approached him. "Then tell me what you want from me."

David considered the question. He had spent so many years concealing his desires behind fiction that expressing them plainly required an effort.

"I want to serve you."

Joanna regarded him for a moment.

"Why?"

"Because I admire you. Because I trust you. Because I want to give you something that matters to me."

"And what's that?"

"My loyalty. My obedience, when I freely give it. My willingness to put your wishes ahead of my own."

Joanna nodded, but she wasn't finished.

"And what do you expect in return?"

David hadn't anticipated the question.

"Your acceptance, I suppose."

"Anything else?"

"Your respect."

"OK."

She stepped closer. "Because you're going to have that whether you're standing in front of me or kneeling at my feet. I don't want a man who mistakes humiliation for devotion, David. I want someone who understands the difference."

He nodded.

"Then I want you to make me a pledge. A pledge of fealty, if you like. Not to Suzanne's assistant or chauffeur. To Joanna Burke."

David felt his pulse quicken.

"Get on your knees."

He obeyed.

Joanna stood before him, her robe falling almost to her ankles, the sash tied loosely at her waist.

"Look at me."

He raised his head.

"Tell me."

"I pledge you my loyalty, Miss Joanna. I promise to serve you faithfully, to respect your wishes, and to be truthful with you. I give you my trust because I believe you've earned it, and I ask you to accept my service because it's what I want to give."

Joanna considered his words.

"And you'll tell me when something isn't right?"

"Yes, Miss Joanna."

"Even when you think I won't like hearing it?"

"Yes."

"Then I accept."

She reached into the pocket of her robe.

"Bow your head."

David lowered his chin. He heard the faint sound of metal followed by the soft movement of leather.

Joanna held a collar in her hands.

It was made of supple black leather, approximately an inch wide, with neatly beveled edges and a lining of smooth, dark burgundy suede. The stitching was exceptionally fine, the seam following the curve of the leather. A small stainless-steel buckle secured one end, while a polished steel ring was fixed at the front. There were no studs, decorative chains, or ostentatious ornaments. Its workmanship was elegant, its purpose unmistakable.

A shiver passed through him the moment he realized it was for. The collar wasn't merely another accessory in an evening of extraordinary experiences. The collar was apparently put into Suzanne's robe to be used by whomever he chose.

"Do you want this, David?" she asked.

He looked up at her.

"More than I can tell you."

"Then hold still."

She placed the collar around his neck, adjusted it carefully, and fastened the buckle. Her fingers moved beneath the leather to make certain it wasn't too tight. Satisfied, she stepped back to examine him.

David remained on his knees. The feel of the collar was an immediate and ongoing reminder of his pledge of obedience. It also confirmed he was owned, body and soul, by Joanna.

* * *

For much of his adult life, he'd imagined belonging to a woman. Sometimes the fantasy was elaborate, involving costumes, rituals, rules, and acts of obedience. At other times it had been nothing more than the desire to place himself willingly in a dominant woman's hands. He'd always assumed that sexual excitement lay at the center of those imaginings.

He was wrong.

Physical pleasure was still part of what he wanted, certainly, but it wasn't the destination. It was one expression of something considerably deeper: the satisfaction of serving a woman he admired, of earning her approval, of knowing that his devotion had been offered freely and accepted with equal seriousness. What he had sought for so many years wasn't merely gratification. It was purpose within a relationship built upon authority, trust, and affection.

For the first time in his life, he felt that the desire he had struggled to explain, even to himself, had found its proper place.

He belonged to Joanna Burke.

Not because she had conquered him or deprived him of his independence, but because he had chosen to give himself to her and she had accepted.

Joanna watched him experience those feeling by the expression on his face.

.

"You're sure of this, aren't you?"

"As sure as I can be about anything."

Then he watched with reverence as she untied her robe and let it fall open. Her body still glistened with beads of sweat and the product of her lovemaking with Suzanne, her heavy breasts drooping slightly, long brownish-pink nipples hard and a matted pubic patch between two muscular legs. She wanted him to look and he did.

"You're beautiful, Miss Joanna."

She slipped a finger underneath the front of his collar and gave it a gentle tug, drawing him closer to the source of her wet heat, allowing him to show his devotion to her. He reveled in his submission to her, mating his lips with her nether lips, and tasting her pungent honey, mixed with Suzanne's.

For several moments she held him there, her hands firmly grasping his shoulders, though he had no desire to be elsewhere. He lapped at her well of pleasure, feeling every contour of her sex with his tongue and lips. Joanna had many sexual experiences, but like David, her feelings of pleasure were heightened by her acceptance of his submission.

"Yes," she said, as her pleasure spiraled, savoring the worshiping of his tongue.

"Fuck yes."

Those words of encouragement further inflamed David's lust, a thin stream of precum flowing out of the tip of his penis. His finger crooked as he tickled her anus with a circular motion, coaxing the opening wider. The tip of his finger penetrated her, her tight ring of muscle flexing with each burst of pleasure.

"Thank you," David murmured. There was no greater joy than knowing he was pleasing her.

Her legs squeezed his head, temples pounding as he gasped for breath. Lightheaded, he tongued her pussy and finger fucked her ass, riding each wave with her, until she shuddered and pushed him away.

There was no sounds in the workout room but the quiet whoosh of air from the overhead vent and their breathing. He wanted to ask for his release, but then thought better of it. He realized it wasn't his place to make demands, only to serve. There was contentment with that realization.

He waited until Joanna spoke first.

"I wasn't expecting that."

David caught his breath.

"Thank you."

"You know Professor, I think you're on to something with this Blonde Bitch Domme story though I'm the furthest thing from a blonde."

Joanna could see the David's knees were likely aching. She helped him to his feet and looked him in the eyes as she asked her question.

"But do you think I'm a bitch?"

David hesitated.

"Did you want me to answer that question?"

She laughed.

"No. We'll leave that for another day. And speaking of another day, I want you packed and ready to go to the airport tomorrow morning at 0600."

Joanna picked up David's shirt and handed it to him.

"Where are we going?"

"Get dressed. You'll find out soon enough."

It was then that David realized that the state of not knowing gave him a peculiar sense of pleasure.

David reached for his trousers, then hesitated and touched the collar at his throat.

Joanna noticed.

"Something wrong?"

"No, Miss Joanna."

"Then what?"

He thought for a moment.

"You know, nothing's ever felt quite this right."

Joanna studied him for a moment, then reached out and straightened the collar.

"Well," she said, "this is a hell of a beginning."

* * *

Chapter Six will arrive soon.