Girl by Eden Bradley Read Free Book Online

gratefully. And accept me making you come just as gratefully. But if I kissed you… What would you think of that?”
    I take a moment, confused.
    “You may speak,” he tells me.
    Still, it takes me several long seconds to find my voice. “I would accept it all with utter gratitude and desire, Master,” I whisper.
    “Because I am your Master,” he says, rather than asks.
    “No,” I tell him. Then more harshly, my heart oddly full, “ No , Master!”
    Straightening up, he runs a hand through his hair, then takes a step back and sits on the edge of the little sofa, watching me still. After a full minute goes by in which my heart is a small hammer trying to beat its way out of my chest, I hear footsteps behind me. “Robert, leash her and have her taken to the basement. Let my driver work her over after you’ve fed and rested her for a bit. He’s earned a little bonus.”
    “Yes, Sir.”
    “And have Cook send my dinner to my suite.”
    “Of course. Anything else, Sir?”
    “Leave her in her chains down there tonight.”
    “Very good, Sir.”
    He’s done with me? Tears burn behind my eyes. Robert pulls me to my feet, loops one of those choke-chain collars onto my neck, snaps a leash onto it, then he leads me back to my room. Unsnapping the carabiner which attaches my cuffs behind my back, he draws my arms to my sides, taking a few moments to massage my shoulders, to check my hands for circulation. Then the leash is removed but the choke-chain stays, like a metallic reminder of my utter submission around my neck, and it feels sacred, somehow.
    My mind is whirling, creating a tempest within the floating ether of subspace. He is so, so handsome, the Master, but it goes beyond that. His very darkness draws me, calls out to my own. And what was it he said to me? What could it possibly mean? And then to send me away like that… I have to force myself not to cry. I have never cried so much in my life, and I feel certain this is only the very beginning of a storm of tears the Training House will bring.
    Yes, please.
    “Stay here,” the valet tells me.
    And I do, standing in the middle of the room, trying to breathe through the confusion. After some indeterminable time Robert returns with a tray, which he sets on the floor beside my pallet.
    “You have one hour,” he tells me, then he leaves, locking the door behind him.
    There are so many thoughts and questions whirring through my brain I can barely stand having to eat—I’d rather lie down on my white pallet and think and dream. But I know better. If I am to withstand the beatings and God knows what else, then I have to eat and rest and stretch. And I do stretch for maybe five minutes before I eat my meal: a small portion of roasted chicken and vegetables, all of it beautifully prepared. There is tea on the tray, and I pour some, longing for milk and sugar, but there is none. I know this about the Training House—about all such formal places—that we are afforded few luxuries, and I had mine with my first meal. No, here the luxuries are in being beautifully bound, harshly punished, having no sense of self or time or meaning beyond what the Masters want us to be. Slave. Girl. Without identity. With no need for it. Yes, to sink into that. To drown in it.
    Bring it on.
    I lie down on my hard white pallet and close my eyes, although I don’t sleep. My mind is churning with images and memories I don’t want to see, but which I am helpless against, as I am at times.
    My mother’s face, so, so pretty, with the red lipstick she always wore, and the scarf around her slender neck. She whispers to me in French. “Je t’aime, ma petite.” This is almost the only thing I can remember about her, I was so young when she died. This and the lilac perfume she wore. I was so little, and yet I had the presence of mind to drag a chair into her closet, to pull one of her sweaters down and keep it in my room, where I slept with it until the scent disappeared.
    The day of her