Belongs to the Room

Marcus opened the door and stood looking at her for a long moment without saying anything.

He was in a black shirt, open at the neck, and black pants, and he looked bigger than usual, and very calm. She knew that calm. It was the calm he wore into negotiations worth nine figures. She’d never seen it pointed at her before.

“Ready?” he said.

She opened her mouth to say something clever, and he put one finger against her lips.

“You don’t need to say anything,” he said. “Not tonight. Just nod.”

She nodded.

He didn’t take her hand. He hooked one finger through the small gold ring at the front of her collar, and led her down the hall by it.

She had walked down that hall a thousand times. She knew every painting on its walls, because she’d chosen them. But tonight the lights were off, all of them, and the only light came from the living room at the far end, a single bright pool of it, and she walked toward it in her stockinged feet on the cool oak floor with the silk whispering against her skin and Marcus’s finger crooked through the ring at her throat, and she thought, this is what it’s like for the work. This is what it’s like to be carried into the gallery and hung on the wall.

Then they came around the corner, and she stopped.

Marcus had turned the living room into a gallery. He’d pushed every piece of furniture back against the walls. He’d taken down the big Rothko print over the fireplace and left the wall white and bare. In the center of the floor, on the pale oak, stood a plinth: a real one, low and white and broad as a double bed, no higher than her shin, the top padded and covered in white linen. She recognized it with a shock. It was from her own storeroom at the gallery. She’d last used it for a reclining bronze by a Chilean sculptor, a life-size figure of a sleeping woman.

Above it, on the ceiling, a single spotlight had been angled to fall straight down onto the plinth. And beside the spotlight, she saw now, newly screwed into the ceiling, a small brass hook, from which hung a long cord of soft white silk.

The drill. That had been the drill.

Around the edge of the room, just outside the pool of light, the four of them were sitting in a loose half-circle, on the dining chairs, with glasses of wine. Kate in a simple black dress, her hands clasped tightly in her lap. Ben beside her, in a white shirt, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. Elena, cross-legged, in narrow black pants and a silk shirt the color of blood, very still. And Tom, at the end, in gray, his face in shadow, his long hands folded.

Nobody said anything. They just looked at her.

Sasha had walked into a thousand rooms in her life and felt them turn toward her. She knew exactly what to do when that happened. She lifted her chin. She let her hip drift out. She smiled the smile, the one that had sold paintings and seduced polo players and silenced the board of LACMA. She felt herself turning into Sasha Reid, the performance, as easily as breathing.

“Stop,” said Marcus quietly.

She looked at him.

“You’re doing it,” he said. “The thing. Stop.”

She felt her face go hot. She let the smile drop. She didn’t know what to do with her hip. She didn’t know what to do with her hands. She stood there feeling suddenly clumsy and naked, though she was still fully dressed, and she heard someone, Kate she thought, let out a soft breath.

Marcus led her to the plinth and helped her step up onto it, into the light.

The spotlight was warm on her face and her bare shoulders. It was so bright that the room beyond it went dim and blurred, so that she could only half see them: four shapes, four pale faces, four pairs of eyes. She could feel the heat of the light through the black silk on her breasts and her belly and her thighs. She stood there in the most beautiful dress she had ever worn, with her name at her throat, and felt more undressed than she had ever felt naked.

Marcus stepped back, out of the light, and took a card out of his pocket, and read aloud in his boardroom voice.

“The Reid Collection presents Sasha,” he said. “Rule one. From the moment she put on the collar, she belongs to the room. Rule two. She may not touch anyone unless she is told to. Rule three. She will thank everyone who uses her. Rule four. She may say Pass, or Checkmate, at any time. Rule five.” He paused. “Everything else is up to us.”

He put the card away.

“The viewing is now open,” he said. “Looking is permitted. Touching is not. Yet.”

And then, for what felt like a very long time, nobody did anything at all except look.

She stood on the plinth with her hands at her sides, because Marcus had placed them there, and her eyes lowered, because Marcus had tilted her chin down with one finger, and she let them look. It was the hardest thing she had ever done. Every instinct in her body was screaming at her to do something: to shift her weight, to toss her hair, to make a joke, to perform. She could feel the urge in every muscle. She held still. She breathed. And slowly, as the seconds stretched out, the urge began to burn away, and what was left underneath it was something raw and quivering and terrifyingly exposed.

They got up. She heard the chairs scrape. They walked around her the way people walked around sculptures at her openings, and she heard them murmuring to each other, low, in the voices people used at openings.

“Interesting use of light,” said Ben, behind her.

“The silk’s doing a lot of work,” said Elena, consideringly. “Look at the drape over the hip. And the collar. The collar makes the piece.”

“I find the piece very emotionally direct,” said Kate, in a slightly unsteady voice, and somebody laughed, and Sasha felt the laugh go through her like a hand.

Tom said nothing. But when he passed in front of her, she raised her eyes for a fraction of a second and found him looking, not at the dress, but at her face, steadily, and she dropped her eyes again at once, her cheeks burning.

They stood back. They waited.

Marcus came into the light. He stood behind her and looked at her for a long moment. Then she felt his fingers at the back of her neck, at the clasp of the halter, and felt it give.

The gown slid. The black silk poured off her shoulders and down her body like water, and slithered over her hips, and pooled at her feet on the white linen, and she stood in the full glare of the spotlight in nothing but lace and silk and leather.

Sasha heard the room inhale.

They looked at her for a long time like that. The sheer black bra lifting her breasts, her nipples dark and tight beneath the lace, barely covered and not covered at all. The garters cutting faint lines down her soft belly and thighs. The seamed stockings. The tiny panties with their silk bows. And the collar. Always the collar, the small gold ring catching the light at her throat. She knew exactly what she looked like. She’d seen it in the mirror on Wednesday. She’d thought then that it looked like a gift, wrapped. Now, standing in the light with four people looking at her, she understood that it was exactly that.

Marcus unhooked the bra. He did it slowly, from behind, his knuckles grazing her spine, and drew the straps down her arms one at a time, and let it fall, and her breasts came free into the light, full and heavy, the wide dark nipples drawn tight and aching.

Then his hands slid down her sides to her hips. She felt his fingertips find one of the little silk bows at her hip, and toy with it. Draw one end of the ribbon out, slowly, a quarter of an inch. Then another. She held her breath. The whole room held its breath. She felt the knot loosen, felt the lace begin to slip.

And then he stopped, and smoothed the ribbon flat again with one finger, and stepped back out of the light.

“Not yet,” he said.

Sasha let out a sound that was very nearly a sob.

She stood there in the spotlight in her stockings and garters and the tiny scrap of black lace, and her collar, and nothing else. She had been naked in front of people before, on beaches in Ibiza and in hot tubs in Aspen and in the Mercers’ living room. She had never felt as naked as this, with that one last thing left on her. It was so small. It hid so little. And she was suddenly, mortifyingly aware that it was damp, that the lace between her thighs had gone dark and clinging, and that under the white glare of the light every one of them could probably see it.

“Oh,” said Kate, very softly. “Oh, Sasha.”

“Hands behind your head,” said Marcus.

She lifted her arms and laced her fingers behind her head, and the movement lifted her breasts and stretched her body long, and left her even more open than before. She felt the heat of the light on the undersides of her arms. She felt the heat of their eyes everywhere else.

“Turn,” said Marcus. “Slowly.”

She turned. All the way around, one small step at a time, on the white linen, while they watched. She felt their eyes travel down her back and over the curve of her bottom and down the backs of her thighs. When she came back around to face them, Ben’s lips were parted, and Elena had uncrossed her legs, and Kate’s hand had gone to her own throat.

“Touching,” said Marcus, “is now permitted. One minute each.”

Ben came first.

He stepped up close, right to the edge of the plinth, so that with the extra foot of height she stood a little above him, and he had to tip his face up to hers. He looked at her for a long moment. Then he put one hand very gently on the side of her face, and leaned in, and kissed her.

It was a slow kiss. Not hungry, not yet. Careful and searching and almost reverent, the way Ben did everything. She felt the warmth of his mouth and the scratch of his stubble and the slight tremor in his hand against her cheek, and she remembered Marcus saying he’s been wanting to kiss you for six years, and something inside her chest turned over. She kissed him back. She couldn’t help it. She didn’t touch him, because she wasn’t allowed to, and somehow that made it worse: her hands locked behind her head, her body straining toward him, and only their mouths touching.

When he drew back, she was breathing hard.

“Thank you, Ben,” she whispered. It was the first thing she’d said all night, and her voice came out small and cracked.

Ben made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh, and stepped away.

Tom came next. He didn’t kiss her. He stood in front of the plinth and studied her, the way she’d seen him study an X-ray once at a party, holding it up to the window. Then he reached out and laid his palm flat on her sternum, between her breasts, and left it there, and she realized he was feeling her heartbeat. It was racing. He smiled very slightly. Then his hand moved, slowly, down. Over her ribs. Over her belly. Down, without any hurry at all, until his long fingers came to rest between her thighs, over the thin lace, and pressed, very lightly, and she gasped out loud.

He didn’t do anything. He just held them there, against her, for a long silent moment. Then he took his hand away and held it up into the light, and looked at his fingertips, damp from the lace, and then at Marcus.

“She’s soaked through,” he said, in the tone of voice he might have used to report a blood pressure.

Sasha made a small, strangled sound. Her whole body went scarlet.

“Thank you, Tom,” she managed.

Kate was next, and Kate was nervous. Sasha could see it in the way she came into the light, half a step at a time, her hands clasped in front of her as if she didn’t trust them. She stood in front of the plinth and looked up at Sasha, and her clever gray eyes were huge, and she said, very quietly, “Is this okay?” and Marcus said, “She doesn’t get to answer that, Kate. I do. It’s okay.”

Kate swallowed. Then she reached up and cupped Sasha’s breasts in both hands.

Her hands were cool and soft and trembling slightly. She held Sasha’s breasts as if they were something precious and breakable, feeling the weight of them, and then she brushed her thumbs over the nipples, and Sasha moaned out loud, and Kate’s eyes flew up to her face, startled, and then went dark.

“Oh,” Kate breathed. She did it again. Sasha moaned again. Kate bit her lip, and stepped up onto the edge of the plinth so that they were eye to eye, and kissed her, softly, her hands still on Sasha’s breasts, and Sasha felt Kate’s tongue brush her lower lip and almost came apart right there.

“Time,” said Marcus, gently.

Kate stepped down, flushed to the hairline.

“Thank you, Kate,” said Sasha, and her voice shook.

Elena was last.

Elena didn’t hurry. She walked into the light and stood in front of the plinth with her arms folded and looked Sasha up and down, from her face to her feet and back, with an expression of cool, critical appraisal, as if she were pricing her.

“Legs apart,” she said.

Sasha moved her feet apart on the white linen. The damp lace pulled tight between her thighs.

“Wider.”

She moved them wider. She felt the air on her inner thighs. She felt herself open.

Elena reached up and took one of Sasha’s nipples between her finger and thumb, and pinched. Not hard. Just hard enough. Sasha cried out and her hands nearly came loose from behind her head.

“Keep your hands where they are,” said Elena, and pinched the other one, and Sasha held on, shaking. Elena watched her face the whole time. Then she stepped up onto the edge of the plinth beside her, until her mouth was at Sasha’s ear, and said, very low, so that only Sasha could hear: “You’ve been pretending for years, haven’t you, darling? Tonight you don’t get to.”

The word Pass came up Sasha’s throat so fast she had it on her tongue. It wasn’t the pinching. It was that Elena was right, and had said it like a verdict, with that small, amused darling, as if it were something she’d known about Sasha for years and been too polite to mention. Sasha held the word in her mouth for one long second. Then she swallowed it, and kept her hands behind her head, and let Elena watch her face.

Then Elena’s hand dropped to Sasha’s hip, and found the silk bow there, the one Marcus had loosened and smoothed flat again.

She didn’t hurry either. She drew the ribbon out slowly, the way Marcus had, all the way this time, until the knot gave and the lace slipped loose on one side and hung there, clinging, still just barely covering her. Elena looked at it. Then she looked up into Sasha’s face, and held her eyes, and reached for the other bow.

“Please,” Sasha whispered, and didn’t know what she was asking for.

Elena pulled. The last of the lace fell away between Sasha’s thighs and dropped onto the white linen at her feet, and Sasha stood in the light in her stockings and garters and collar and nothing else at all, bare and smooth and exposed in a way she had never been in front of anyone, the skin still faintly tender from Irina’s wax, and slick, and shining, and everyone could see.

Kate made a small sound. Ben swore under his breath. Elena simply looked, for a long, cool, appraising moment, and then raised one eyebrow.

She stepped back.

“Thank you, Elena,” Sasha whispered. Her eyes were stinging.

---

The games came after that. Marcus had planned them, she found out later, over three long evenings in The Viewing, with contributions from all four of the others; but at the time it felt as if they came out of nowhere, each one sliding into the next until she lost track of time completely.

First, the questions. Marcus sat in the chair nearest the plinth with a pack of Trivial Pursuit cards, the very same battered box from the Mercers’ house, and read questions to the others. Sasha didn’t have to answer anything. She only had to wait. Every time one of them got a question right, they won the right to choose a pose for her, and she had to hold it, in the light, until the next right answer.

They had never played Trivial Pursuit so hard in their lives. Ben, who usually let other people answer first, got the capital of Australia before Marcus had finished the question, and said, “Kneeling. Knees apart. Hands on your thighs.” Kate, who had read every Brontë twice before she was sixteen, snatched Jane Eyre out from under Elena’s nose and asked for Sasha on all fours facing away from them. Elena, who never lost at anything, rattled off three answers in a row, a chemical symbol and a river and a Renaissance painter, and with each one made the pose a little worse, until she had Sasha lying on her back on the plinth with her knees drawn up and spread wide and her arms above her head. Then, by some silent agreement, nobody answered the next three questions at all, not even Tom, who certainly knew them, so that Sasha was left there, utterly open under the glare, while everyone looked.

Sasha had never felt anything like it. Every pose was a little death. Every pose took something else away from her, another thing she would usually have hidden or arranged, and left her more exposed than before. She could hear herself breathing. She could feel herself getting wetter and wetter. She could feel them seeing it.

Then the blindfold.

Marcus tied it himself, a strip of the same white silk, and laid her on her back in the middle of the plinth, her arms stretched above her head and her knees apart, and said, “Somebody’s going to touch you. You tell me who. Every time you’re wrong, there’s a forfeit.”

“What’s the forfeit?” she whispered.

“Kate’s job,” said Marcus, and she heard Kate let out a nervous little laugh somewhere in the dark.

The first touch was a palm on her waist, sliding up her ribs to the underside of her breast. She thought: Ben. Warm. Careful. “Ben,” she said.

“Wrong,” said Marcus.

And then she heard it, a low electric hum, and felt something press against her between her legs, smooth and round and buzzing, and her hips jerked up off the linen.

She had used toys before. She had a drawer full of them. But she had never had one held against her by somebody else, blindfolded, spread out on her back, in a room full of watching people, and the shock of it made her cry out. Kate’s voice, very close and slightly breathless, was counting under her breath. Eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty. And then the buzzing went away, just as Sasha’s hips had begun to rock against it, and she was left gasping and trembling and empty.

“That was Tom,” said Marcus.

The next touch was a hand in her hair, tilting her head back, and a thumb dragged slowly across her lower lip. Sasha thought, Elena, and then thought, no, too big, and then thought, I don’t know, I don’t know. “Marcus,” she guessed.

“Wrong.”

The hum. The pressure. Kate’s soft count. Sasha bit her lip so hard it hurt. At fifteen she started to shake. At twenty, Kate took it away again, and Sasha heard herself make a sound she had never made before, a raw, high, pleading whine.

“Please,” she said. “Please. Kate, please—”

“Not yet,” said Marcus. “You haven’t been told you can.”

She got the next one wrong too. And the one after. She wasn’t trying to. She genuinely couldn’t tell anymore; every touch felt the same, electric and unbearable, and her mind had gone blank and white and wild. By the fifth forfeit she was crying under the blindfold and begging out loud, please, please, let me, please, with no shame at all, none, the performance burned away so completely that she couldn’t remember what it had felt like. And every time, at twenty, Kate took it away.

The sixth touch was a pair of lips on hers, soft, tasting faintly of red wine and nervousness.

“Kate,” she sobbed.

“Right,” said Marcus, and then, after a pause, very gently: “Good girl. Kate, finish it.”

The buzzing came back. It didn’t go away at twenty. It didn’t go away at all. Sasha came flat on her back, blindfolded, in the spotlight, with Kate kneeling over her and Kate’s mouth against her neck, and it went through her so hard that she screamed, and her back arched clean off the plinth, and Kate and someone else, Ben she thought, held her down while she shook and shook.

When it was over, somebody lifted the blindfold.

She blinked into the light. Kate was holding her, flushed and wide-eyed, a slim purple wand still humming faintly in her hand. Ben had his arms around both of them. And beyond the light, Elena and Tom and Marcus were watching her, and none of them was smiling, and none of them was laughing at her. They were looking at her as though she were the most extraordinary thing they had ever seen.

“Thank you,” Sasha whispered, to all of them. “Thank you.”

---

Marcus brought out the camera after that. Not his phone. A proper camera, a heavy Leica she’d bought him for his thirtieth birthday and he’d hardly ever used.

“Your list said maybe,” he said, standing in front of her, the camera in his hands. “Faces.”

She looked at the camera. She thought of the girl in the guest-room mirror, collar at her throat, already wet. She thought of a lifetime of photographs: the gallery openings, the red carpets, the Instagram, every single one of them a performance.

She wanted to see what she looked like when she wasn’t.

“Yes,” she said.

He photographed her on the plinth, naked and flushed, her hair wild and her eyes swollen from crying, her thighs still slick. He moved around her slowly, the shutter clicking, and told her nothing, and asked her for nothing, and when she instinctively started to pose for the lens he lowered the camera and looked at her until she stopped.

Then he turned and held the camera out to Kate.

Kate stared at it. Then she took it, very carefully, as if it might break, and lifted it to her eye.

And that was the thing that undid Sasha completely. Not the spotlight, or the blindfold, or the wand. Kate’s gray eyes behind the lens. Kate, who was so clever and so careful and so controlled, looking at her through a camera with an expression of such naked, helpless tenderness that Sasha couldn’t breathe.

“Lie back,” said Kate softly. “Like before. Arms up.”

Sasha lay back on the white linen with her arms over her head and her knees apart, and looked up into the light, and into Kate’s lens, and didn’t pose. Didn’t smile. Didn’t arch, or angle, or arrange herself. She just lay there and let Kate see her.

The shutter clicked. And clicked. And clicked.

“You’re so beautiful,” Kate whispered, behind the camera. “Sasha. You have no idea.”

Sasha started to cry again, and Kate kept taking pictures.

---

After the camera, it stopped being a game.

She didn’t know who decided that. Marcus, probably. She heard him say something quietly, and then the music changed, something slow and heavy and dark, and somebody turned the spotlight down so that it was softer, more golden, and then they were all around her.

“On your knees,” said Marcus. “Thank the men properly.”

She knelt on the edge of the plinth, and the white linen was soft under her knees, and Ben stood in front of her first, and she looked up at him, and he was so nervous that his hands were shaking on his belt. She wasn’t allowed to help. She waited, with her hands behind her back, her lips parted, until he’d undone it himself. Then she leaned forward and took him into her mouth.

She’d done this a thousand times. She was good at it. She’d always been good at it, and proud of it, in the way she was proud of most things: as a performance, a skill, a show. But Elena was behind her now, kneeling on the plinth, her hand in Sasha’s hair, and every time Sasha started to do anything clever, Elena’s fingers tightened and held her still.

“Slower,” said Elena in her ear. “You’re not showing off. You’re thanking him. Do it properly.”

So she did it slowly. She did it properly. She did it the way she’d never done it before, simply and completely and without any thought for how she looked, with Elena’s hand in her hair setting the pace and Kate kneeling beside her, stroking her back. She heard Ben’s breath go ragged above her. She heard him groan her name.

Then Tom. Then Marcus. Each in turn, with Elena’s hand guiding her and Kate’s voice murmuring to her, and each time, when they pulled back, she looked up into their faces and said thank you, and meant it.

She didn’t know how long it lasted. She lost track of everything except the taste of them, the heat, the hands in her hair, the voices.

Then the hands lifted her and laid her down on her back on the plinth, and she looked up and saw Kate and Elena kneeling on either side of her, and Marcus standing at the end with his arms folded, and she understood what was going to happen before it happened.

“You’ve earned these,” said Marcus. “Count them out loud.”

Kate’s mouth was on her first, nervous and tender and wondering, and then Elena’s, sure and slow and devastating, and then both of them together, taking turns, one kissing her mouth while the other went down on her, the two women’s hands linked across her belly. Sasha arched up off the plinth. She grabbed at the white linen. She came almost at once, crying out, and gasped, “One,” and they didn’t stop. They didn’t stop at two, or three. At four she was sobbing. At five she couldn’t speak at all, only shake, and Marcus counted for her, his voice low and steady and full of something that sounded like awe.

“That’s enough,” he said finally. “Let her breathe.”

They let her breathe. Kate lay down beside her on the plinth and held her. Elena smoothed the hair back from her wet face. And Sasha lay there in the soft golden light, wrung out and utterly, impossibly empty of everything she’d ever been afraid of, and laughed, weakly, at nothing at all.

But it wasn’t over. She knew it wasn’t over. She could see Tom and Marcus watching her from the edge of the light, and she knew what was on her list, the line she’d written in a rush with her face burning. Being fucked by two at once.

Marcus came and crouched beside the plinth, and hooked one finger through the ring of her collar, and turned her face toward him.

“I know what’s on your list,” he said quietly. “Two at once.” He shook his head slowly. “Not tonight.”

She made a sound of protest. She couldn’t help it.

“You’ll have to earn that,” said Marcus, and smiled the slow dark smile. “Tonight you get them one at a time. And you’ll wait for each of them.” He let go of the collar. “On your hands and knees.”

She went up on her hands and knees on the plinth, under the light, and she was so unsteady that Kate had to help steady her. Tom knelt on the plinth behind her. Marcus stayed where he was, in front of her, crouched at eye level, close enough to touch and not touching.

“Checkmate’s still there,” Marcus said. “If you want it.”

“I don’t want it,” said Sasha. “I want— please—”

Tom pushed into her from behind, slowly, and she moaned, and Marcus caught her face in both hands and held it, and watched her. That was all he did. He knelt in front of her and held her face and watched every flicker of it while another man fucked her, and murmured to her the whole time, low and steady, good girl, look at me, oh God, Sash, look at you. She couldn’t look away from him. She rocked forward with every stroke of Tom’s hips and her husband held her face and drank her in, and behind him she heard the camera clicking, and twisted her eyes sideways and saw Ben, crouched at the edge of the light, the Leica to his eye, his face behind it flushed and intent.

And beyond Ben, on the floor at the very edge of the light, Elena. Not watching Sasha. Watching Tom. Her arms were wrapped around her knees, and her face, for once, had nothing arranged on it at all, and Sasha, rocking forward under her husband’s hands, had time to think oh before she couldn’t think anything.

She came with her husband’s eyes on hers and Tom’s hands tight on her hips, and Marcus kissed her through it, swallowing every sound.

Then Tom withdrew, gently, and Marcus stood, and lifted her, and laid her on her back on the plinth, and came into her himself, face to face, her stockinged legs wrapped around him and his finger hooked through the ring of her collar. He didn’t speak. Neither did she. Around them the others had gone quiet: Kate and Elena on the floor beside the plinth with their hands joined, Tom sitting back on his heels, Ben lowering the camera at last.

She didn’t think about how she looked. For the first time in her life, she genuinely didn’t think about it at all.

She came one last time, so hard her vision went white, and somewhere in the middle of it she heard herself saying thank you, thank you, thank you, over and over, to Marcus, to all of them, to no one, to the light.