The Pleasure Quartet Read online

  The lighting was soft and low, and the space perfumed with a very mild spicy fragrance, akin to toasted chocolate and cardamom. Pots of lilies in water were situated in safe corners, away from the sharp end of a whiplash that might break the glass. Along the walls, low cushioned seats and beds were stationed, where onlookers could relax and watch the proceedings, or subs could curl up after a scene and be nurtured by their dominant.

  The dungeon was my pièce de résistance.

  Perhaps because it had been so long since I had been truly dominated, in any formal or deliberate way. Dominik, the man I still thought of as ‘my dom’, the man who had widened my eyes and my imagination to the wonders of sex and proven the love of my life, had been dead now for over three years. Long enough for me to grieve, and to move on, although he would always take up a space in my heart. Since then, I had no shortage of lovers. Most of them mere fucks, and some of them I no doubt would have been better off without, and had taken them or let them take me only as an attempt to blot Dominik out of my mind, to dull my pain. Others had been simple physical connections, men and sometimes women that I had met when I was horny and fallen into bed with, the same way that a hungry person might stop by the nearest fast-food joint. Convenience and filling a need, nothing more. Then there had been Antony, the playwright and theatre director whom I had fallen in with, my first proper relationship since Dominik’s death. He now worked with the Ball also, although he was working on the next Ball’s incarnation, scheduled to take place in Iceland in the future, so I had seen little of him recently despite our shared employer.

  But Antony was not a dominant by nature. We had fooled around with rope, silk scarves and the like, as lovers do, but he had never taken me to that brutal and blissful edge that I still longed for in my dreams. He was good in bed – great, even – but he did not want to hurt me, or to control me. And I had wanted him to want to hurt me. I had wanted to surrender to him, to feel the overwhelming sense of letting go and freedom that I found with Dominik, when I allowed him to do whatever he would with my mind and my body and I knew that he would keep me safe, despite the sometimes dangerous activities that we engaged in, because he knew me so well. Every iota of my thoughts, every inch of my body had been mapped against his heart. Since his death, no one had come close to freeing that part of me, that kernel of doubt and fear and lust and shame that I kept curled up tight in the deepest reaches of my soul, like a dark stone in a river bed, buried deep.

  That was what I wanted to give the Ball’s guests. A place to let their demons come out to play.

  Our vessel pulled into port with Aurelia at the helm. She was dressed all in white, a long flowing sheer dress that flew back in the wind, revealing every straight line and curve of her body. She was barefoot, and when she shifted her stance, squaring her shoulders with her arms outstretched, and held firmly onto the rail ahead of her, a gust blew the fabric of her dress firmly between her legs, highlighting the long length of her thighs and calves and the valley of her cunt. She spotted me watching her as the port auxiliaries grabbed hold of the prow and threw up ropes to the sailing hands on board to secure the ship to the mooring point. With her arm raised in a wave, palm outstretched, she looked like arriving royalty.

  The crowd turned into an orderly queue, and filed on board, almost in silence. Occasional whispers in languages that I guessed at but could not identify with any certainty reached my ears, but few people spoke in tones louder than a hush. We were like a congregation filing into a church hall. Reverent, awed by our surroundings and what we knew would come.

  I bathed slowly, deep in thought. As one of the organisers, I was assigned to the main dressing room and bathing area set aside for the higher echelons of the Ball’s crew, and the performers. The painted walls and plush carpets were a rich purple. Chandeliers hung from the ceiling. Long mirrors were set up at various intervals along the walls and sweeping wardrobes were packed with costumes and accessories. I was soaking in one of the many Jacuzzis, filled with warm, mineral-salted water. With me in the pool were half a dozen others, none of whom I recognised. Selecting and training the dancers, aerialists, gymnasts and those whose expertise lay in the sexual arts was not part of my remit.

  The six who shared the pool with me were near mirror images of each other. All medium in height, with bright red hair, an even truer shade of ginger than mine. Their skin was deathly pale and every inch of it covered in freckles, so they looked as though they had been dusted with specks of cinnamon. They had entered the pool after me, so I had been able to witness them saunter across the black slate tiles towards me and lower themselves into the steaming water. Their nude bodies were worthy of art. Slender and lithe, none of them older than twenty-five, unless they partook of Botox or drank the blood of virgins or had some other trick to keep them so firm and supple. Their legs were endless in relation to their torsos, and so slim and toned that they might have belonged to racehorses. Their stomachs were flat, abdominal muscles just visible in the right light. None of them were shaved. They each sported a thatch of ginger pubic hair that covered their slits fully. As far as I could tell without running my fingers through the curls, their bushes were soft and fine, not thick and coarse like dark hair often was. I was disappointed, I realised, that their hair prevented me from getting a proper look at their pussies, and my disappointment surprised me. I considered myself straight, although I had occasionally toyed with women. It was rare that the female form aroused me as much as these six did, with their lanky limbs and locks of fire. They did not appear to be wearing any make-up, but their lips were full and pouting. Their breasts were larger than mine. Each of them possessed a more than generous handful, and their nipples were small, pert and hard, pink nubs balanced upon the dark pink circles of their areola. They were pierced. A thick gold hoop was affixed to each of their nipples, and another to their clits. Each of the hoops was joined to a thin gold chain that ran from their cunts to the centre of their breastbone and then to each breast.

  They were not alone.

  A man had led them into the room. A thick gold ring circled his wrist, and from it a length of gold branched off into six, each length attached at the navel to the chains that bound the women. They were rigged together in the manner that a dog-walker might join a bunch of canines, for ease of handling, and managed to avoid getting tangled up together or having their parts pulled too hard by walking in perfect formation, the rhythm and length of their steps perfectly synchronised.

  He reached the steps that led up to the platform of Jacuzzi pools, paused, and stared at me openly. I recognised his gaze. It was arrogant, the look of a man who is accustomed to ownership. There was a question in his eyes, too. One that he thought he knew the answer to, but couldn’t be certain of, although he might pretend to. Would I submit to him, become one of his chained women?

  I leaned back, squaring my shoulders, and raising my elbows out of the water to rest on the Jacuzzi’s lip, boosting my body up and displaying my bare breasts to him. I met his look with a hard stare of my own. Neither yes, nor no. I would not run to a man like that the moment he snapped his fingers; not anymore. But I was glad to be sitting down, because the rush of desire that raced through my veins and tugged at my heart as well as my clit was so strong that it left me feeling faint. I was too proud to remove myself from the hot water and seek some relief in the comparatively cool air outside of the bath.

  ‘Here,’ he instructed the redheads, inclining his head towards the pool that I was in, rather than one of the other five. They remained still, frozen in place, and he released them one by one, pressing his mouth to the lips of each as he did so. Once freed, they entered the pool. Watching their bodies slide into the water’s embrace, I felt my temperature rise even further.

  There was a dull thud near me, the sound of glass on slate, as he placed a tall tumbler of liquid down within my reach.

  ‘Drink this,’ he said. ‘It will make you feel better.’

  I reached for the drink. It was ice-cold and
tasted of lime and sugar, like a caipirinha without any alcohol. I gulped it down and my faintness passed. Clarity returned to my thoughts.

  ‘I’m Vincent,’ he said. ‘Pleased to meet you here.’

  ‘Summer,’ I replied. ‘And nice to meet you too.’

  ‘Your expression suggests you’re attending the Ball for the first time. But I am guessing that isn’t the case, or you wouldn’t be in this dressing room.’

  ‘It’s my first time as an organiser. I helped with the logistics. Not my first time as a guest, or a performer.’

  ‘Really? You performed? I would like to have seen that.’

  ‘Perhaps you did,’ I told him. ‘I played violin, at the last Ball, in Nevada. The desert.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I remember now. You were quite wonderful. I looked for you afterwards, you know, but you were nowhere to be found. I was told that you were otherwise engaged, with one of the lighting crew.’

  ‘Antony directed some of the major performances.’

  ‘Director, then. I apologise.’

  ‘But we’re no longer an item.’

  ‘Sorry to hear it.’

  His tone indicated that he was nothing of the sort.

  ‘Mind if I join you?’

  Before I could respond, he undid the tie on his silk robe and dropped it to the floor, then began to ease himself into the water. His movements were almost comically slow, as though he knew that I was watching him, and he was giving me every opportunity to admire his body. His calves and thighs were thick with muscle, and his chest broad and meaty. He had straight blond hair that fell to his shoulders, like a Viking warrior. A small silver piercing decorated his left nostril. He was younger than me, perhaps about twenty-five. His cock and balls hung low in the warm room. I resisted the urge to reach up and grab his package as he lowered himself into the pool.

  We bathed together in relative silence, and then retreated to opposite ends of the dressing room to ready ourselves for the night ahead. My eyes stayed fixed on his reflection in the mirror in front of me as he covered the bodies of his six acolytes in oil until their skin shone. His hands worked slowly, massaging their body parts with reverence. When he was finished polishing their limbs, he fixed their hair, brushing it out over their shoulders and smoothing their frizz with hair balm. They stood frozen, accepting his ministrations like mannequins in a shop window. He bent down onto his haunches and slipped their feet into high-heeled, peep-toe shoes with a buckle at the ankle. Then stood back and admired his handiwork. Satisfied, he clipped each of the women back onto his leash, and turned to depart.

  ‘See you later,’ he said to me as they trooped out of the door. His tone suggested that he would make sure that he did.

  It was my first Ball as one of the staff, and I did not allow myself to relax until it was almost over. I stayed upstairs to watch the ceremony, and then, relieved that all of my plans had passed without a hitch I headed downstairs to the dungeon.

  Aurelia was there with her partner, Andrei. She had changed into a canary-yellow lace slip, low-cut at the front and back, just barely reaching down to the tops of her thighs. With her hair flowing loose and her energy palpable after the earlier ritual, she looked like a sunbeam that had been trapped from the sky and brought to earth. Her quilt of tattoos quivered and shimmered over her body, a plethora of fauna and flora that mysteriously came to life in circumstances like this. I saw the peacock etched on the back of her calf fan open its tail feathers and strut.

  Andrei took hold of her each time that she turned. Touching his palm to her waist, grasping her hand, or curling a lock of her hair in between his fingers. He could not bear to be apart from her even for a moment. They had an apparently open relationship, since it was part of Aurelia’s traditional duty as the Mistress of the Ball to take the starring role in a sexual ceremony that occurred each year and required her to fuck the men chosen by the Ball for the purpose, inevitably young, fit bucks – sometimes up to a dozen of them at a time. She certainly didn’t seem to mind. In fact, during and after these occasions she lit up like a firework, as though the sex brought her truly into herself. But I never saw Andrei with anyone else. He stuck faithfully to her side, always. They made a striking couple, his tall, lean body, the broad shoulders and ginger hair a good match for her cooler tones and long, lithe form.

  ‘Summer,’ she called out, when she spotted me lingering at the door. She lifted her arm into the air along with the scanty fabric that covered her arse, coming narrowly close to flashing me the smooth valley of her genitals. A pair of plain gold bracelets decorated her wrists.

  I walked over to them, threading my way carefully through couples who were using the various pieces of BDSM equipment, each of them occupying their own private universe, seeking that elusive high I knew of so well.

  She drew me into her arms as I approached and kissed me on each cheek, and then on my lips. Andrei kept his hand on the small of her back as she did so.

  ‘It was magnificent,’ she said. ‘You did a wonderful job. Truly wonderful. Not a jot out of place.’

  If I hadn’t known that she avoided all alcohol and drugs at these events, I would have assumed that she was drunk or high. Her pupils were dilated and her eyes appeared enormous, like great wells of blue that didn’t seem able to focus on anything.

  ‘Thank you,’ I replied.

  ‘Not at all . . . I wanted to speak with you. There’s someone who wants to meet you.’

  She raised her arm again and gesticulated towards the corner of the room. When her skirt lifted as she raised her hand in the air, her thigh brushed against mine. Her skin was soft and cool. I felt my muscles tense in response, and instinctively looked away, catching Andrei’s eye as I did so. There was both sadness and pride in his expression, as though he was aware of the effect that Aurelia had on others. I knew well enough that the ability to provoke desire in others could be a double-edged sword.

  Vincent was threading his way towards us in response to Aurelia’s signal, a large grin spread across his face.

  He nodded a greeting to Andrei, kissed Aurelia on the cheek and then turned to me.

  ‘Hope you don’t mind my tracking you down, water nymph. I didn’t want to leave it to chance this time,’ he said.

  ‘Oh,’ Aurelia interjected, ‘you two have met already?’

  ‘We bumped into each other earlier,’ I told her, ‘in the dressing rooms.’

  ‘Good,’ she replied. ‘I was hoping that you would meet.’

  She paused, and I waited for her to elucidate.

  ‘Vincent has certain skills that I think you might enjoy,’ she explained.

  ‘Darling . . .’ Andrei intervened. ‘Maybe we shouldn’t spring it on her. Might be best to talk it through first, in a different environment.’ He stared pointedly at the scene continuing alongside us, a domme dressed in a shining khaki and black governess’s get-up and caning a man who was bent over in front of her, weeping.

  It was Andrei’s tentative attempts at protecting me that encouraged me to throw caution to the wind.

  ‘I’m game,’ I announced, although I wasn’t at all sure what I might be agreeing to. Vincent’s eyes gleamed, and he pushed up the sleeves of his black silk robe, exposing his thick forearms. He looked like a magician of the dark arts, which I supposed, in a way he was. A tattoo was carved in white ink on the inside of each of his wrists. I squinted to make them out – infinity symbols, like figures of eight lying sideways.

  ‘I was hoping that you would say that,’ Vincent replied. His head was cocked to one side and he was staring at me, smiling, with a satisfied look in his expression that suggested I had confirmed whatever guesses he had previously made about my character and desires.

  Aurelia picked up a flogger from the nearest rack of accoutrements; walnut handled with long, soft hide falls. She turned it over in her hand and swept the leather over the inside of her wrist, learning the whip’s particular feel and peculiarities as a musician might come to grips with a new instr
ument.

  Vincent undressed me, without paying the slightest heed to the ritual of baring my flesh. He simply unzipped the black lace playsuit that I was wearing so that it dropped down to my ankles and then he hunched down, helped me step out of it, and tossed the garment to one side. He unbuckled the towering heels that I had been bravely teetering on all night, and set them aside, gripping my ankles firmly as he did so to assist my balance. When he began to push himself up again, his mouth was only inches from my crotch. How pleasant it would be, I thought, to feel his tongue inside me. Instinctively I threaded my hands through his hair. He took hold of my wrists and pulled himself to his feet.

  ‘Another time,’ he whispered into my ear. His lips brushed against my ear lobe. My nerve endings began to tingle with excitement. Vincent had a way about him that all of the dominant men I had encountered possessed. An aura of confidence that transcended any wealth, education or other positive qualities he might possess, including his good looks. I had found even short, dumpy dominants that were absolute bastards attractive in the past. There was no rhyme or reason to it. The sense of power that ebbed out of him affected me in a deep, visceral sense. If I allowed myself to be swept away by it then he would have me wrapped around his little finger like another member of his chained harem.

  It began and ended with rope.

  I noticed, vaguely, that a space had appeared around us. The steady flow of noise in the room emanating from couples and groups engaged in BDSM play had muted to a low rumour of whispers as we became the central focus in the dungeon. Even Andrei had stepped back into the crowd. Aurelia seemed to have grown an extra foot tall. She was terrible in a regal sort of a sense, her limbs taut and her legs spread apart with her weight on her heels, a coil of energy inside her like a red-hot snake ready to strike.