Page 52 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
“I don’t know . . .”
My bag and jacket are stowed in a discreet cupboard among the bookshelves, and then he’s kneeling at my feet, unbuckling my heels with a surprising deftness. Or maybe not so surprising, given that it’s a kink club. Rebecca told me last time that the employees here sometimes work as submissives or Doms, depending on the demand. Perhaps he’s been trained to do this very thing. Perhaps he would do it for fun even if he wasn’t paid.
My shoes deposited in the same cupboard, he then moves to help me with my clothes. “This outfit came from a very well-known atelier,” he informs me, again in that casual kind of voice, “and the atelier only takes custom orders. This means your mistress ordered this specifically for you. She would have given the atelier your measurements in order to do so.”
I chew on my lip as he unzips my dress. “You think so?”
The dress is tugged off, and then he steps back so I can remove my own knickers and bra. I’m not shy—photoshoots cure one of that quite quickly—but I still hesitate.
“I hate this,” I say. “I hate this right now.”
“My Dom sometimes makes me wear a corset,” the concierge says with a rueful smile. “I hated it at first—my belly hangs below the bottom and my back spills over the top, and I just kept thinking, ‘Does he want me to be thinner? Is that what this is? Or does he just want me to be embarrassed and miserable?’”
I run a fingertip along the leather. It’s supple, almost like satin to the touch. “And? Did you tell him you couldn’t wear it anymore?”
The concierge picks up the top part of the lingerie. “No. But I asked him what he wanted with me in a corset, and do you know what he said?”
I shake my head.
“He said he wanted to fuck me in it,” the concierge says with a laugh. “It was hot to him. I was hot to him. That simple.”
That simple.
I close my eyes. I should be over this. Why am I not over this?
“Let’s just try it on,” he says calmly. “If it doesn’t fit, then we will explain everything to your mistress.”
“What if it fits, but I still don’t like it?” I whisper.
He gives me a sympathetic look. “If you were going to push yourself to become braver—if you were going to perform exposure therapy on yourself so that you could wear whatever the hell you wanted—why wouldn’t you do it with someone who’ll reward you with orgasms?”
“I do like orgasms.”
“Of course you do,” he says. “Now lift your arms. There you go. Oh, your hair too, I don’t want it to get caught.”
Together he and I get the top on. The straps crisscross up to my tits, making leather cups that can be unlaced down the middle to expose my nipples, and the straps stretch up from those cups to create a halter, which effectively collars my neck.
The concierge cinches me up from the back, and then we turn to look at the mirror. I catch my breath.
Shockingly…it fits. And it fits well. I don’t know when Rebecca managed to find my measurements, or how, but somehow all the straps and laces work together to cup my tits enticingly, and with plenty of support.
“Now the bottoms,” the concierge says, and these I need less help with, but he still laces up one side while I lace up the other. When the concierge buckles them to the top, I can feel where they crisscross my bottom and bite into my flesh. Not much—it’s too well fitted for that—but some, because it’s inevitable. “Look,” he says, turning me to the mirror. “Look at yourself.”
I look again, and blush. The bottoms are made to expose my sex, and so framed by all the precisely cut leather is a delta of gold curls, silky and trimmed enough to show the pink seam where I split open. My hair is an equally golden waterfall of sleek waves, sliding against itself as I move this way and that.
“You look like a Disney princess who was cursed into slutitude,” the concierge says fondly. “Your mistress will be very pleased.”
Will she? I turned in the mirror some more, wondering. There’s no hiding the convexities of me like this—but there’s also no hiding that I’ve listened to her, that I’ve done as she asks. Her will binds my body along with the leather; in fact, the leather is her will, the leather is Rebecca’s command, her hunger, her possession of me.
How can I hate it then?
I still feel uncertain as the concierge tidies up the bed and then leaves. I kneel by the desk, ducking my head so that I’m surrounded by a curtain of blond hair.
I stare down at my thighs, which are pale and dimpled and flecked with a handful of stray freckles, and I wait.
I don’t have to wait long.
After only a few minutes on the floor, the door opens and I hear Rebecca enter. Even if I wasn’t expecting her, I’d still know those footsteps. Deliberate, precise, and yet fluid for all that. Almost dancer-like, although Rebecca would never do anything so frivolous as dance. The only time I’d seen her do it was in the thorn chapel, her feet bare and her eyes sparkling with firelight and champagne.
