Page 124 of Dirty Discipline, Vol. 1

David watched Maud's red Bug pull up at the grand entrance to the enormous chateau from the second story window of the bedroom where Will had told him to wait until they — whoever they were — came to get him. David still didn't understand why Will would go to the trouble of creating a fake conference to lure him down to Connecticut, but Will had always been the kind of guy who pulled mysterious shit like that, and David had always loved never really knowing what his friend had up his sleeve.

Ever since Will had taken the younger man under his wing when he was a college senior and David was a freshman, there had been surprises like snap trips to Vegas and Paris, blind dates with hot girls, and bottles of Dom Perignon "just because." This, though. This didn't just take the cake: it hit the cake with a nuclear missile.

Or so it seemed, though David had no way to tell for sure because he still had no idea what this was. Twenty hours before, he had found, in the hotel lobby, instead of a reception for software developers, Will Garland in his usual natty suit, hands spread in a sue me gesture. Since then David had enjoyed the hospitality of this mansion on the Connecticut shore instead of enduring hours of mind-numbing boredom.

"Trust me," Will had said, when leaving David at the door of this bedroom done in a French Second Empire style that matched the architecture. "In the morning you'll start to understand."

The man at the gatehouse had greeted Will as "Mr. Garland," as had someone who could only be a butler, but they had seen no one else. Who lived here? How did Will know them? Why the Hell was David going along with this?

Well, the last question was easy to answer: Will had never steered him wrong. The older man's tastes might run to slightly racier extremes than David's own, but on several memorable occasions Will had introduced David to certain pleasures he probably wouldn't have had the audacity to try on his own.

That was why, David had reflected as he fell asleep Thursday night, the advice to be patient with Maud had seemed so strange. Indeed, that piece of advice was running the risk of being the first bum steer Will had ever given him. After the strange call with the interference and then the second call saying Maud wasn't coming over after all and she would see him Saturday, he had resolved that he would take her out for a nice dinner on Saturday as he had planned, but he wouldn't bring up her submitting to him the way he had thought he might, and then he would stop by her apartment on Sunday and put a regretful end to the thing.

He had given it more than a month since he had confessed to Will that he thought he and Maud weren't going to make it, despite how over-the-moon David had been in November.

"You don't blame me, though, right?" Will had asked over their weekly lunch, the Friday after New Year's.

"Why would I blame you?" David asked, taking a sip of water.

"You know, because I got you into D/s."

"Dude," David replied, laughing, "you didn't get me into D/s."

"Come on," Will said, in a tone of mock-offense. "Don't tell me you would ever have spanked a girl if I hadn't made you spank Monica."

"You didn't make me." David said, feeling a bit of anger rise at the thought. "You suggested it, and I decided to try it, and it worked."

"Okay, okay," Will said, raising his hands above his sandwich in a conciliatory gesture. "But am I right in thinking that you're going to break up with Maud because she's not into it? That you told her she needed a spanking, and some good, hard, come-for-me-you-little-bitch fucking, and she wasn't having any?"

David kept his silence, but he knew his eyes betrayed the accuracy of the guess.

"Don't," Will said simply. "Give it a month. Give it until Valentine's Day at least. I have a feeling Maud will come around. I think you two are good together."

Now here Maud came in her VW. David began to get the feeling that the whole thing was one amazing set up. For what, though? Twenty hours in this bedroom, luxurious as it was and as extensive as was the selection on the bookshelf — featuring some rather spectacular erotica — and on the TV — every imaginable channel including some adult ones David had never heard of — had strained his tolerance of Will's mysteriousness. That strain vanished the instant he caught sight of Maud's car driving up the long tree-lined avenue towards the house. In place of skepticism, though, his curiosity became almost maddening.

Suddenly, without warning, the TV turned itself on. David looked back from the window to see that the screen showed a view at ground level of Maud's car, as someone who seemed to be a parking attendant walked out to meet it, while the butler stood ready a few yards away. Maud got out with a puzzled — or frightened? — look on her face. The attendant got in and drove the VW away.

The butler must have been wearing a mic, because the sound came very clearly. "Welcome, Miss Fredericks," he said.

Maud turned from watching her car driven around the back of the house to look at the butler. "Is this…"

"The Society of Saint Valentine, yes," the butler said. The what? David thought. What the Hell is going on? "Follow me, please."

The view on the screen changed as Maud passed in through the big door. Wordlessly, the butler led her through the foyer to a door that lay beyond the grand staircase he and Will had come up. The butler opened the door, and suddenly the view changed again, to a camera inside the room that lay on the other side, showing the look on Maud's face as she saw what awaited her. She took a step back, but now the butler had taken up a station behind her, and he propelled Maud firmly into the room. He stepped back and closed the door. The click of a lock sounded.

Maud said, "Oh, no." Her eyes had gone wide, and she had begun to breathe very quickly.

Then the camera panned, and David saw what had alarmed the girl he loved.

The room was a sumptuous bathroom, tiled in marble. Another girl, a beautiful, busty brunette, sat reclining naked in what looked like a cross between a dentist's chair and a gynecologist's exam table. Her legs were spread wide in the knee stirrups, and a third girl, a redhead, dressed only in a pair of pink panties, sat on a stool between the brunette's legs, waxing her pussy.

It took David a moment to realize that the girl in the chair had been strapped to it, and that she also had a sort of gag in her mouth, which appeared on closer inspection to be a pair of lacy panties. Her eyes went wide, apparently at the sight of Maud.

The girl doing the waxing said, without turning around, "Hello, Maud. I'll just finish up Mandy's pussy and then it will be your turn. Go ahead and get undressed for me like a good girl, please."

David Ross took an analytic approach to life. His mind, ever since he could remember, had had the power to observe its own working, and this observer-function, as David thought of it, clicked along whether he willed it or not like an old-fashioned movie-camera, always ready to offer its notes and comments so that much of life felt to him like he was in a movie that, at the same time, he was watching.

Now, the feeling of watching himself watching Maud grew vertiginous for a moment as David's mental observer rendered one urgent judgment: not surprise — a fact that, paradoxically, surprised him — but affirmation. Yes. That's what my girl needs — what I couldn't give her.

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