Intake

The microphone is the worst part. Nora decides this the moment she sees it.

It sits on a stand in the middle of the Hartwells’ sunken living room, a vintage chrome thing like something from a 1950s nightclub. It’s set at exactly the height of her mouth if she’s kneeling. Someone has measured. Someone always measures, at these parties.

There are around thirty people in the room, most of them in their twenties and early thirties, and every one of them is beautiful in the careless way of people who know it. Men in open-collared shirts with their sleeves pushed up. Women in slip dresses and heels, a few in nothing but lingerie and a smile. They’re draped over the low sofas, perched on the long leather bench under the windows, leaning on the bar with drinks in their hands. The lights are low except for one warm pool in the middle of the rug, and when Adrian leads her into it by the rope around her wrists, the conversation stops one cluster at a time, like lights going out down a corridor.

She knows what they’re seeing, because Adrian made her look in the mirror before they left. Twenty-six. Long dark hair falling loose to the middle of her back. Wide grey eyes, a full mouth he’d painted a deep wine red himself. A dancer’s body from twelve years of ballet: long legs, a small waist, high round breasts. And, tonight, almost nothing covering any of it. A sheer black slip so fine it might as well be smoke, ending at the very top of her thighs, her nipples dark and obvious through the fabric. No underwear; he’d watched her slide them off in the back of the car and tucked them into his jacket pocket. Her wrists are bound in front of her with soft red rope, a neat column tie, and he has wrapped the tail of it once around his hand like a leash.

Around her throat is a black leather collar. Hanging from its ring is a small white card, printed on both sides. Everyone who arrived tonight has already read a copy at the door, by the bowl of condoms on the hall table. Her limits, her word, the house rules. Done. Signed. The only thing left is the part she has to say out loud.

“Kneel,” says Adrian.

She kneels on the rug. The microphone is two inches from her lips.

“Everyone,” he says, in the pleasant, carrying voice he uses to chair board meetings, “this is Nora. Nora has offered herself for free use tonight, from the end of this conversation until midnight. You’ve all read her card. But I want you to hear the rest from her. In her own words.” He rests his hand on the top of her head. “She’s told me all of it before, in private. It’s important that you hear it. And it’s very important,” he adds, “that she has to say it.”

A ripple of soft laughter runs around the room. Nora’s face goes hot all the way down to her collarbones.

“Let’s start simply,” Adrian says. “Tell them what free use means to you.”

She swallows. Her voice comes out of the speakers in the corners of the room, enormous and breathless. “It means anyone here can use me. For whatever they want. Without asking first.”

“Without asking,” he repeats. “Not even a hello?”

“No, Sir.”

“And how does that make you feel?”

The honest answer sticks in her throat. He waits. The room waits.

“Wet,” she says.

Someone by the bar murmurs oh, delighted. Nora closes her eyes.

“Eyes open,” says Adrian. “They’re going to look at you all night. You can look back. How wet, Nora? Right now?”

“Very.”

“Show them.”

She knew he would ask. They’d talked about this part at the kitchen table on Tuesday. But saying yes over coffee and doing it under a spotlight in front of thirty strangers are not remotely the same thing. She shuffles her knees apart on the rug, slowly, and the slip rides up, and with her bound hands she draws the hem higher until the warm light falls between her thighs and everyone can see how swollen and slick she already is.

“Hold it there.” He turns to the room. “Jess. Would you check?”

A woman detaches herself from the bar. She’s late twenties, with a sleek black bob and a white silk dress that does nothing to hide the fact that she isn’t wearing anything under it. She crosses the rug, crouches beside Nora, and without a word slides two fingers through her, front to back, slow and thorough. Nora’s hips jerk and a whimper escapes straight into the microphone and fills the room.

Jess holds up her glistening fingers in the light and turns them slightly, like someone showing off a ring.

“Soaked,” she reports. “And nobody’s even touched her yet.” She wipes her hand slowly down Nora’s cheek, leaving it damp, and smiles. “Well. Until now.”

Nora is trembling so hard the rope creaks.

“Your body,” says Adrian. “Tell them what’s on offer.”

“My mouth,” Nora says. Her voice shakes. “My breasts. My—” She stops.

“Use the word you use with me.”

“My pussy.” It booms out of the speakers. A man on the sofa laughs softly, not unkindly. He’s tall and dark, with a five o’clock shadow, his shirt open at the throat, and the sound runs through her like a hand. “And my ass,” she says, faster, getting it over with, “but only fingers and toys. Not tonight.”

“Not tonight,” Adrian says, amused. “You hear that? She’s leaving herself room.” He crouches beside her, close, and lowers his voice, but the microphone catches all of it. “What do you want in your mouth, Nora?”

“Cocks. Fingers. Anything anyone wants to put there.”

“Do you want to be asked to suck, or just used?”

Heat floods her. “Used.”

“Louder.”

“Used. I want someone to hold my head and use my mouth and not care if I’m ready.”

There’s a low sound from somewhere in the room, a man’s appreciative exhale. Her nipples ache against the sheer fabric. She can feel her own wetness cooling on her inner thighs, and Jess’s on her cheek.

“Can they come on you?”

“Yes.”

“Where would you like it best?”

The question is so specific, so unnecessary, so plainly asked only to make her say it, that for a second she can’t speak at all. Adrian waits with perfect patience.

“My breasts,” she whispers. “And my stomach. So I can feel it.”

“And then?”

“And then you won’t let me clean it off.” Her eyes are stinging now, from embarrassment, from how unbearably turned on she is. “You’ll make me wear it until midnight.”

“That’s right,” Adrian says gently. “I will.”

---

“Pain,” he says. “Tell them.”

“Spanking. Hands, paddles, belts. On my ass and thighs. Clamps on my nipples. Slaps on my pussy.” Her breath catches. “But light.”

“How light?”

“Light enough that I can still—” She bites it off.

“Still what?”

“Still come,” she says into the microphone, “if I’m allowed.”

“If you’re allowed. Tell them about that.”

This is the question she has been dreading most. Even on Tuesday, at the kitchen table, she’d gone scarlet saying it.

“I’m not allowed to come,” she says, “unless someone asks Sir first. Whoever’s using me has to come over to him and ask. Out loud. And if he says no, they have to stop right there, and I have to say thank you.”

“And if you come without permission?”

“Then I go on the bench by the bar for twenty minutes,” she says, “with my legs open and a sign around my neck that says greedy. And anyone who walks past can finger me, but they’re not allowed to let me finish.”

The room actually laughs this time, warmly, all together. The dark-haired man on the sofa says, “God, I hope she slips,” and Jess says, “Oh, she will,” and Nora wants the floor to open and swallow her whole. She is also so aroused that she could come from the humiliation alone, right there, on her knees, without anyone laying a finger on her.

Adrian strokes her hair. “How many times do you think you’ll be allowed tonight?”

“I don’t know, Sir.”

“Guess. For the room.”

“Once,” she says. “Maybe.”

“Maybe,” he agrees.

---

“One more question,” he says. “And then you’re theirs.”

He tips her chin up with one finger so she’s looking at him and not the crowd.

“Is there anything they can’t have?”

She knows what he wants her to say. It’s not on the card. It isn’t a limit, exactly. It’s something else.

“My mouth,” she says. “For kissing. Nobody kisses me.”

“Why not?”

She looks past him, out at all those beautiful, hungry faces, and then back up at him.

“Because that’s yours.”

For a moment the room is completely quiet.

Then Adrian leans down, in front of all of them, and kisses her. It’s slow and deep and possessive, his hand fisted in her hair, her bound wrists trapped between them. When he lets her go she’s gasping, lipstick smeared, and a soft collective sigh goes around the room, like an audience at the end of a love song.

“Thank you, Nora,” he says. He unwinds the rope from his hand and loops the tail over a brass hook set into the floor, so she’s tethered there, kneeling in the light. He takes the microphone away. He walks to the armchair at the edge of the rug that has been waiting for him all evening, sits, and crosses his legs.

“She’s open,” he says.

The tall dark-haired man is the first to stand. Nora hears his footsteps on the rug, unhurried, coming toward her. She lifts her eyes to meet his, as she was told she may, and opens her mouth.