Filling in gaps

Didn't really know what to write today, but I wanted to write something. So I looked through the blog and checked out what we need more of. And I think I came up with something that works.

Let me know what you think. I love to hear from you. Comments make Boot smile.

Steam, Slavery, and the soft Hum

            He clicks closed the cover and puts the watch into his vest pocket. He straightens the sleeves of his shirt and puts one gloved hand on his knee. The two bare fingers tap against the top edges of the brown leather boots.

           “You understand what we are going to do?” he asks.

           She smiles at him, somewhat sheepish, and wrings the lace kerchief clutched in her hands. “Yes,” she says. “I know.”

           “Look at me,” he says, his voice calm and friendly. Her eyes are like saucers, and she is almost shaking from the nerves. “I need to hear you say it.”

           She shakes her head. “I can’t.”

            “Yes you can. Say it, please.”

            “I’m going to be your slave for the week,” she says, barely a whisper. Her skin flushes scarlet.

            “And that means?”

            “It means you are going to train me all week long, then take me to the convention as your personal servant.” Her eyes, somehow, get wider. “You aren’t going to make me go naked, are you?”

            He smiles, considers remaining silent and letting her wonder. But she’s nervous enough already. “Of course not,” he says. “It’s a public con. Those who understand will know what you are doing. Everyone else will just think it an oddity that you’re wearing certain equipment. But I would not expose you to strangers. We talked about that.”

            She nods. “I know,” she says. “I just wanted to make sure.”

            “I’m not going to do anything that we haven’t talked about,” he says. “And you’re not going to do anything you haven’t agreed to. Every night, you’re going to call your friend to check in, right?”

            She nods again, relaxes a little bit. She raises one hand and brushes the hair out of her eyes.

            “And you have your safe word,” he reminds her. “And the word to make me slow down.” She nods again, vigorously.

            Then she pushes her hair behind her ear again and bites her lip. “Are you really going to, um,” she gestures towards her hair.

            He nods. “Unless you want to take that off the table, it’s the first thing I’m going to do.”

            She takes a deep breath. Definitely shaking now.

            “No, it’s okay,” she says. “I mean, it’ll grow back.”

            He nods.

            She takes a deep breath. “Okay,” she says. “So how do we start?”

            He gestures towards the table. There’s a soft leather collar on the table. One side is lined with lace. There’s a lock, one with gorgeous brass gears on it. Next to the collar are two matching wrist cuffs and two larger ankle cuffs. Each cuff has a lock with gears on it, along with a brass loop on the outside. Then there’s a pair of boots.

            Such stunning boots. Victorian brown leather, fastening up one side with loops and studs, not zippers. Buckles, not laces. Latches. Locks. The heel is a bit high, but not too high. They look like they’ll come up just about to her knees. There is what looks like a crank at the top of each boot.

            “You put on your uniform,” he says. “The collar goes on last.”

            She looks at the table again. She opens her mouth to ask where the rest of it is, but the glint in his eyes makes the answer very clear.

            He puts out a trash bin for her current clothing. Maybe he’ll throw them away. Maybe he won’t.

            She unfastens her waist cincher, unzips her boots, and puts them both in the bin. She rolls the stockings down her legs, pulls off her panties, and unfastens her blouse. One by one, she adds each item of her clothing to the bin. By the time she actually unfastens her skirts and puts them inside, the bin is overflowing.

            He watches her dispassionately, starting to look almost bored by the time she stands in front of him, completely naked. He gestures towards the table.

            She puts the boots on first, sliding the soft leather up over her skin, feeling the comfortable padding on the inside as it hugs her legs and her feet. As she buckles and latches her way up the outside of her legs, the boots start to conform to her skin, still loose and comfortable but definitely more shapely. She wonders how difficult it will be to walk with those heels.

            “Turn the crank,” he says as she finishes with the second boot. “Clockwise.”

            She takes the tiny crank in her hand and begins to rotate it. As soon as she starts, the whole boot begins to tighten around her, plastering itself to her skin until it feels like part of her. She turns the other crank to similar effect. He smiles and gestures for her to remove the cranks. The actual handles of the crank come out easily, leaving her locked in the boots as surely as if they’d been a part of her.

            She slips the cuffs over the ankles of the boots, finding that they fit right in with some of the latches. As she closes the clasp, she finds a lock with somewhere for the crank handles to fit. She turns it, watches the gears shift, and feels the shackle tighten as firmly as the rest of the boot.

            Her wrists tighten the same way, but the collar seems to have its own locking mechanism. Makes sense; if a shackle is too tight, it cuts off circulation and needs to be adjusted. If a collar is too tight, it chokes and could kill. The collar around her neck is tight enough for the leather to press against her skin, but not tight enough for the padding to even flatten. She could easily slide two fingers between the collar and her neck.

            He stands up, walks behind her, and lifts up her hair. With a quick turn, a ticking sound begins just behind her ears.

            “It’s a time lock,” he tells her. “Twenty four hours from now, it will open.”

            She swallows. “Is that the only way to open it?”

            “There are other ways, in case of emergency,” he tells her. “But as far as you are concerned, yes, the only way to open it is for the time to run out.”

            Then he hooks a small leather strap to the front of her collar. “Come along now,” he says.

            She is awkward at first on the heels, not so much walking as slowly falling forwards, but eventually, she gets the hang of it. She uses the hand rail to go down the stairs, but the leash never gets tight, and he never has to actually drag her along behind him.

            There’s a chair in the middle of the floor. It doesn’t look uncomfortable, but doesn’t look comfortable either. It’s a chair. It has a bar for her to rest her feet, it has arms, it has a back that looks like it will adjust backwards. But otherwise, it’s just a chair. Nothing special.

            He leads her over to it and has her sit down. It’s cold on her bare skin, and she gasps as she settles in, resting her feet on the bar, heels on one side of the bar and toes on the other.

            He clicks little bits from the chair to her wrists and ankles. Simple clips, not locked or anything. She could get them off herself if she wanted to. But she doesn’t want to. Not even when he pulls her long hair out from under her. Not when he starts to brush it gently. Not even when he leans forward, his hand gripping her hair firmly, and whispers “Say goodbye to it,” in her ear.

            She just bites her lip and says a silent farewell, telling herself it’ll be just like a normal haircut. When he starts with the scissors, that’s how it feels. Just a hair cut, with that slow clipping cut, the noise and feel that only hair being sliced off can make.

            He reaches around her and puts a clump of hair in her lap. It’s longer than any hair she’s ever cut off. He must have gotten nearly to the scalp! Another cut, and more hair ends up in her lap. Two more cuts and she can feel the cool air against her head. She looks down at the hair in her lap and a small whimper escapes her lips.

            “Oh, how rude of me,” he says. “I didn’t even consider that. My apologies.”

            And he steps away. She closes her eyes and fights back the tears that want to fall. When she opens them, she can see that two streaks have traced themselves down her face. She can see them. He put a mirror in front of her.

            “Go ahead,” he says. “Take a look.”

            She turns her head. The way he cut, there’s no way to save it. He didn’t just start on the sides or at the back. It looks like she’s lost huge patches of hair in the middle of her head. Nothing she could cover. Nothing she could undo. Too late now.

            He cuts again, and it starts to look like she’s had hair falling out because of radiation or something. She looks like a freak. More and more hair comes off, leaving behind jagged and angular tufts sticking off in every direction. It looks awful, and she sniffles as the tears slide down her face. She can’t raise her hands to wipe off her cheeks, or to stop her makeup from running, or really to do anything. She just has to watch, completely helpless, as he chops off her hair. The scissors aren’t even hair cutting scissors. They’re those ugly and bulky slabs of steel with the painted black handles. They’re meant for cutting up construction paper in art class, not the careful removal of hair.

            Soon she looks more like a shaggy dog than a girl, hair piled up in her lap, beautiful healthy hair that was once on her head, that once made her so pretty.

            He takes the hair from her lap, carefully putting it in a bag.

            “Now someone who deserves it can have a wig of human hair,” he says. He smiles at her, and she shivers at the implications he makes. Looking in the mirror, it’s hard to deny it, hard to claim that she deserves hair. Naked in a chair, mascara running down her face like some annoying emo girl or like some tired whore, shackled into place and wearing just a collar and some boots; why would she need hair in the first place?

            He smiles again and begins rubbing something on her head. Looking into the mirror, she sees the cream lathering up, covering the ugly mess that was on her scalp. It is warm, and it tingles, and she almost smiles at the feeling. But the face staring back at her, so utterly exposed, stops the smile.

            He lets her watch as he runs a straight razor up and down on a strap of leather. She listens to the noise, expecting it to grate on her nerves, expecting to be tense and on edge. But there’s something comforting about it. Something oddly relaxing.

            The shaving itself is slow going. He pulls the blade over her scalp, leaving a spot of bare and bald skin, then carefully rinses the blade in a bowl of warm water. He starts in the middle, right by the forehead. Again, no way to cover that up. No turning back.

            After the first pass, he puts warm towels on her head, and she is given a brief respite, a chance to imagine that the towels are just covering her hair, that she still has it to hide behind. Like she just got out of the shower and wrapped it up in a towel. But that doesn’t explain the dampness of the towel, or the streaks of makeup on her face.

            And it really doesn’t help when he begins shaving again, sliding the razor along her scalp until it’s the most bare skin on her entire body.

            He leaves her there for a little bit, staring at herself in the mirror. He rubs a bit of aftershave over her scalp, and the cold liquid tingles so much that even closing her eyes won’t let her ignore the truth. She’s bald. Completely and utterly bald.

            He comes back what seems like ages later, holding a small bag. He smiles at her, but the smile has no real warmth in it. Just cruelty, and the promise of things she is afraid to put words to.

            “Much better,” he says. “Now you look the part. All that’s left is the training.”

            He reaches behind her, and the back of the chair suddenly clicks and falls back, flattening almost completely horizontal, leaving her staring up at the ceiling and the flickering shadows cast by the gas light lamp in the corner.

            “Open your mouth,” he says. She obeys, and he puts a soft piece of rubber between her teeth. She tries to bite down and discovers the rubber is not as soft as it seems. Is it a ball? No, it’s too long for that. She runs her tongue around the curves and the bumps as he ties the strap behind her head, against her now bare scalp.

            He checks to make sure she can breathe okay, then reaches past her head and clips something to her collar. Then another thing from the other side. She tries to lift her head, but it won’t move.

            “Don’t want you thrashing about,” he says. He pushes her legs apart, then straps some kind of belt around each thigh to keep them spread like that. Another belt over her hips makes any movement a futile impossibility.

            “Tomorrow,” he says, “We’ll start your real training. In the meantime, I just need you to think about how important it is to be obedient.”

            Then a soft humming sound begins. Her eyes go wide. The soft rub of the vibrator presses just barely between her legs, and she hears the sound of tape ripping to fasten it into place. It’s not on very high, just a soft rumble, one that she knows will feel good, but never good enough.

            He comes back into her line of vision and smiles when she whimpers. “Take the night to think about being obedient,” he says. “About the connection between pleasure and pain. And about who gets to decide which one you feel.”

            Then he leans down and kisses her on the cool and bare top of her head. He runs a hand over the smooth skin, gives a little chuckle, and steps away.

            The lamp goes with him, leaving her in the dark.

            No hair, no distractions, no movement.

            Just her and the soft hum of the vibrator.