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Still the Master, then. It was a demand more than a request.
Fuck.
I take a deep breath, trying to say the words without feeling them.
“She was…an addict. A heroin addict. She was using as far back as I can remember. But a friend of hers who I once called Aunt told me she didn’t start until after I was born. She overdosed maybe once a year, and…”
I have to stop. The damn tears are starting again, but I don’t appreciate these at all. They aren’t in response to my adoration, my need to please, my self-doubt about the quality of my slavehood. They aren’t about the yearning I am always filled with that overwhelms me sometimes. No. These tears are unwanted, and a small part of me is furious about it. I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand, soaking the sleeve of my Master’s white shirt, the one he put on me.
He pulls my hand away and I wait to be punished. But instead he wipes my face with a handkerchief, and I am as shocked by the old-fashioned square of cloth in his hand as much as I am by the kind gesture.
“So she died of an overdose?” he asks.
“Yes, Master,” I say, still half-choking on the words.
“I’m sorry, Mina. And what of your father?”
“Oh, I only met him once.”
“Tell me about that experience,” he demands, even though his voice is as soft as I’ve ever heard it.
I want to question if I really must do this. But of course I must. This is the life I’ve chosen, after all.
“He came to our apartment when I was seven, maybe eight. He had the same dark hair and gray eyes I do. I recognized who he was immediately.”
I can see in my mind’s eye the dingy apartment with the refrigerator that whirred and whistled. The yellow Formica table in the kitchen. The sagging green couch. I don’t want to see it, but I am in the memory now, and I find I can’t stop talking. I have to tell him all of it.
“When he came to the door my mother sent me to my room, but I knew something was…different. I peeked around the corner of the hallway so I could see who it was. She was angry when he didn’t ask about me, and they argued for what seemed a long time. But she took him to bed with her, anyway. They got high together, and it was quiet for a while, and I went back to bed and slept. But I woke to them arguing again early in the morning, and she kicked him out. After that the house was full of smoke all day, and that night a neighbor took her to the hospital, and I was alone until the next day. We never spoke of it. I knew she wouldn’t tell me anything. And that was…it.”
I feel the need to shrug. To shrug off the feelings. To shrug off the acrid scent of burning black tar heroin that hovered always in the back of my mind. To shrug off the parents who were more interested in getting high than in me.
“My father was an alcoholic,” Master Erek says, “so I have at least a glimpse of what addiction can look like.”
I look up into his face then, and his blue eyes are brilliant, intense as he looks back at me.
“You’re so, so pretty when you’re sad,” he murmurs, wiping my cheeks again. “I don’t know why I’m like this,” he says with a small laugh.
It’s perhaps the first sign of vulnerability I’ve seen from him, this bit of amused self-deprecation. I don’t know what to think of it. But it does make him more human, and I have no idea if this is a good thing or a bad thing.
“So,” he continues. “Tell me what your life was like after she died.”
“Oh, I…well I…I wasn’t able to stay in that apartment. It reeked of death and the sadness and drugs that killed her. I was on the streets for a few weeks before I got a fake ID and got a job go-go dancing at a little club on Sunset. Then eventually I got a better job stripping, and got an apartment in Hollywood…”
“But? It sounds as if there’s a ‘but’ there.”
I nod, memories flashing through my brain so fast I can barely hang onto any one of them.
“Not a ‘but’. An ‘and’, perhaps?” I stop and shake my head, needing to clear it. “A girl I worked with took me to a kink club. And for the very first time, I felt…at home. No one there cared where I came from. I had my first flogging there. I went back every chance I had, and fell in love with all of my Tops.”
“Of course you did,” he says, nodding. “And then?”
“I… This isn’t boring for you, Master?”
He leans a bit closer. “Quite the opposite. I’m fascinated. Tell me your story in kink. How did you become a slave?”
“I was at the club for maybe three months, doing pick-up play, mostly, when I met Patrick. He became my first Dominant. Not my Master—neither of us knew enough to go there. I only ever called him ‘Sir’. But it was never enough for me. I knew it very early on; that I always craved…more. He sensed it, and he tried. He did a lot of reading, went to classes at another club in the Valley. But even when he asked me to call him ‘Master’, he asked. And I just… He didn’t feel like a Master. So…I’d met a woman at the club, and she told me about another club in Phoenix, where she’d met a man who was a slave trainer there, Jay Dixie.”
“Jay Dixie? Yes, I’ve heard of him. He’s small-time compared to the International slave markets, but he’s got a very, very good reputation. But go on.”
