Submissionette 02: Lady Indigo

The man reached out a hand and touched the side of her body.

Her natural reaction was to recoil, but she kept that reaction in check. "Like with licking pussies and squeezing breasts?" he asked, stuttering.

She angled the mug sideways and let some of the ale flow into his crotch.

The hunchback whistled.

Even his whistle was a painful screech.

The man with the wet pants fumbled out several more coins and dropped them all into the mug, which Lady Indigo again held in front of his face.

"Yes, with licking wet, willing pussies, and squeezing breasts until they're pink and tender, and sometimes..."

Another coin dropped through the ale.

"...pinching..."

She grabbed his nose and twisted it, causing just the right amount of hurt.

He groaned and his tongue fell out from between his lips.

"...each other's nipples."

A hand slapped her butt. She wiggled it to entice more slapping, but even as other men's hands handled her body, she kept some of her attention on Oxhide Drang, for whom she was really performing and whose acceptance she was really craving, and when Oxhide Drang smiled, she wiggled even more lasciviously than before.

"Hip hip," the hunchback sang, keeping time with each thrust of her hips, "Whore-ah!"

She answered question after question drifting from table to table to dripping tongue, slicing through arousal and desperation so dense that she could have climbed it:

"How many times ya done it since ya got here?"

"Ever taken two men at once?"

"You been so wet before that it squirts out of yeh and drips down yeh legs?"

Coin after coin after coin dropped through the ale, until there there were more coins than liquid, and each subsequent coin clicked rather than dropped, and the mug was so heavy that Lady Indigo could barely hold it up.

Oxhide Drang watched from the edge of the room, but after half an hour or so, his attention waned and his thoughts, as best as Lady Indigo could guess them from between the more raunchy acts of her performance, veered away from her and sex and settled on something she knew she shouldn't even try to fathom. She'd known men's eyes to fill with lust and violence, sadness or laughter, but the contents of these eyes remained a mystery to her. Every other man in the room was open, tabled and readable, even the hunchback. Oxhide Drang was unknowable. The closest image her mind recollected was one of childhood, when she'd be unable to sleep and would creep, undetected, to her father's workshops, where always one light would be on and one man would be working. Warwick, his name was. He wasn't the chief engineer or the brightest, but he was a tireless and eager tinkerer. Whenever he'd see her, he'd raise his head—yes, his were similar eyes. "It's late princess," he would say, "shouldn't you be sleeping?" Made brash by the deference shown to her by all of her father's workers, young or old, brilliant ot dumb, "And shouldn't you?" she would ask back. He would chuckle and the light from the lamplight would deepen with shadows the creases on his forehead. "The mechanical man never rests. He is always working."

"Won't he ever stop?"

"He will, princess. But only once he creates a machine that makes obsolete even him."

"Have you had enough? You must be tired," Oxhide Drang said.

Lady Indigo was flowing and weaving next to him, though she didn't quite remember how she'd gotten there. The questions still came at her, but not as eagerly ("I knew a woman once put a fruit up herself in the feminine place, you ever done that, Lady Indigo?") Storytelling, like every other art, must never overstay its welcome. She remembered more than once being forced to sit through some bard's torturous ode to an ancestor or urn. Boredom, she learned early, is equal parts danger and contagion.

As to her answer to Oxhide Drang's question, she was tired but, "No," she said, but, "yes," she thought. She wanted to stop and be with him again, to be alone with him in that room by the descending stairway down which she was forbidden to go, but she also wanted to make him proud of her. She wanted him to know that he'd done good in saving her today, in whatever way made sense to him. If what made sense was a mug full of coins, she saw no problem with that.

* * * * *

When her performance was over, and the Surreptitious Mongoose's clientele had either gone wandering home through the night or was snoring on tabletops, she could hardly stand. Her legs didn't feel sore. They felt weak. She leaned her body against Oxhide's, her head resting on his arm, and let him walk them both to the Mongoose's private quarters.

Through drooping eyelids, she expected him to go straight to the door to which he went last time, the door leading to their room.

He didn't.

He stopped at the adjacent door, through which Lady Indigo heard silence where before she had heard sex, and knocked. A minute later the door opened—albeit a crack—revealing a quarter of a woman's powdered cheek, one pursed corner of a pair of red lips, and an eye made impressively more eye-like by the expert application of a heavy line of black paint.

"Lady Teodora," Oxhide Drang said, "meet Lady Indigo."

The door opened wider.

"So where'd ya fail yers, honey?" Lady Teodora asked. She poked Lady Indigo in the chest. "Well, speak up and say yer answer when another asks for it. Me, I couldn't listen to me Matron no more and I cracked her fierce in the face, and that was the end of it for me, totally, I thought, till this here Ox pulled me from a pile of horny bodies trying to have their ways with me."

"I failed the march of shame."

Because she'd grown up without knowing a single failure, that she'd broken where twenty others had persevered filled her with embarrassment.

"Still managed far into it, though. Me, I didn't last more than a week, then, crack, and me Matron was down, yelling, 'Ya won't get away with this, ya won't, ya furry little bitch, mark me words, ya's done!' while I stood watching her and laughing like I do at times Ox here calls inopportune."

Furry. Lady Indigo looked down to where Lady Teodora's belly and shirt ended and her crotch began. Her pussy was covered by a thick bush.

"That's how we wear 'em where I hail from. Yers is kempt, but at least it ain't bald like some of the ones here wear it. Come winter, I understand those of 'em even less."

"Lady Indigo will be living in the room next to yers," Oxhide Drang said. "She will be in my employment, too."

Lady Teodora raised her eyebrows and bit her bottom lip. "Ooh, maybe we'll do it combined on a day or two. Can't say women is my favourite, but I don't like the coffee brew neither, yet I still drink it on those mornings where my head feels like the sun don't be shining through the clouds bright enough."

"Yes, I look forward to it."

"Is that all ya wanted?" Lady Teodora asked.

"That's all," Oxhide Drang said. "It's been a night of introductions. Keep an eye on Lady Indigo. If she has trouble, help her. If one of the patrons is too forward without paying, ye let me know."

"Yes, Ox."

She stood on her tiptoes and gave Oxhide's chest a kiss. She couldn't reach any higher and Oxhide didn't bend very far. Jealousy did course through everyone's veins, Lady Indigo admitted, as her cheeks burned beneath their flushing exteriors.

Lady Teodora bid them goodnight and closed her door.

Oxhide Drang opened their door, and Lady Indigo slipped past him, inside. She jogged toward the bed, almost falling on account of her unsteady knees, before throwing herself onto the bed like a girl, and hugged the sheets. Normally, she would be disgusted by another person's linens. She was apparently no longer normal.

Oxhide Drang sat on the bed beside her. "Ye have done well, Lady Indigo."

"Are you... proud of me?"

"Ye will make much money for me."

"I want to make you happy," she said, "because you saved my life."

The sentiment appeared to cause him pain. He tightened his jaws. Lady Indigo sat up and petted his robed back and his beard, and played with his braids.

"You are my protector."

She slid off the bed. Standing, she was only a head shorter than him. She put her body between his legs and her hands on his shoulders. He didn't do anything except blink. "I am not a good man," he said. "One day, you will hate me..."

"Lady Teodora doesn't hate you."

She moved her face close to his and kissed the space between his lips and chin, enjoying in detail how his individual hairs scratched and tickled her skin.

"Lady Teodora is afraid of me."

"Fear can be good." She kissed him again, this time daring to loop her arms around his neck and press her knee into his crotch. "We fear the unknown, and the unknown is not always bad. And we fear the gods."

"I do not believe in gods."

The bluntness of his blasphemy shocked her and she stopped kissing, retreating with her head but keeping her arms and knee in place. Under the knee, she could feel his rising erection. "Do you believe in the unknown?"

"For now."

"Fuck me," she said, "so that I may no longer be unknown to you."

He moved himself against her knee.

She bit his earlobe and whispered into his ear: "Be my one and only god."

"There are no gods."

The blasphemy turned her on. She hadn't been spanked or otherwise punished often growing up. She could mistreat the servants, and nothing would happen. She could curse at a guest, and she may end up on the receiving end of a scolding. But the gods—they were always and completely off limits. They were sacred. Offend them; nay, don't pay them the requisite respect, and suffer a guaranteed hiding. "But you are, because I see you and I taste you and I feel you."

She took off his glasses and laid them carefully on the bed table.

"And I want you."

She substituted her hand for her knee, grabbing his cock through his robe rather than just pressing against it.

His legs closed against her body.

It thrilled her to feel so caught, like in a vice.

She lowered herself to her knees and moved her hand from above Oxhide Drang's robe to beneath it, making sure to touch each inch of each muscle of his leg as she traveled to her throbbing destination.

His cock was warm and too thick for her fingers to close all the way around it.

He leaned forward and kissed her mouth.

She squeezed him.

The kiss transformed into a moan, which she caught inside herself.

She swept the robe out of the way until she exposed her hand palming his cock, whose girth looked even more magnificent than it had felt. Her sight must be hungrier than her touch, she reasoned, but her taste was hungrier still, and she extended, teasing with, her tongue even before she had moved it close enough to his cock to lick...

Oxhide Drang put his hands on either side of her head.

She licked from his testicles all the way up the shaft of his cock to its head, on which she closed her lips and sucked—tenderly, greedily...

She forgot about touch. She forgot about taste. It was her desire that was hungriest of all: her desire to give him pleasure, to cause him the opposite of pain, to make him come to know his own goodness.

His war hammer still stood in the same corner where he'd put it.

How they had feared when he wielded it! It was fear and respect, and it was due to his own presence, his aura, not the result of being born out of the right womb or having inherited from the right accounts...

He increased the pressure of his hands on her head and increased the pressure with which she was sucking him.

She let more of his cock into her mouth.

She was his Lady Indigo and she spread her legs and touched herself between them, even as she sucked, rubbing her wetness into her softness or her softness into her wetness, embracing his hardness with the same mouth that had—

There was a smack on the door, followed by an, "Oh gods," followed by a rattish scurrying.

Oxhide Drang moved Lady Indigo's head aside and sprang to his feet. His robe fell into its natural position, covering his erect cock, but not concealing it. He grabbed his hammer from the corner and in the same motion swung open the door. To Lady Indigo, there was no place safer in the world than being in a room with one entrance and Oxhide Drang's body protecting it.

He looked left, looked right, and Lady Indigo remembered his eyeglasses and wondered how poorly he saw without them.

"Bawlegg."

He breathed the name more than said it.

Then he closed the door, returned the hammer to its corner and picked up his eyeglasses from the bed table. "It is the hunchback," he said while putting them on. "He is a peeper and a listener, and he has left his seed on the floor."

Lady Indigo remembered him from her performance earlier this evening. He was an ugly creature, possessing a voice that made one's insides want to blister.

"Is he in the employment, too?"

"Bawlegg is handy."

As Lady Indigo realised that her chance with Oxhide Drang had passed—his robe fell loosely across his crotch, no longer emphasising his cock—she admitted to herself that she hated the hunchback. He would be her enemy. Just as Oxhide Drang was her saviour and protector, this Bawlegg, the very sound of whose name made her want to wretch, would be her foil. She would find a way to vanquish him.

In the meantime, she reached out to touch the one body she wanted...

"No, it was a mistake," Oxhide Drang said.

"I want it."

"Ye are confused."

He fiddled a little more with his eyeglasses before adding, "Ye are in my employ. Ye are my profit, nothing more. A banker does not sleep with his promissory notes."

Lady Indigo had known some who did. She also knew that there was more between Oxhide Drang and herself than pure business. She was not just profit. Between them, there was also fate, and sexuality, and, though she was afraid to betray how giddy and light headed the possibility made her feel, maybe love, as well. And she had known these things from the very first time she had opened her eyes in his presence and saw that he had cracked another man's ribs to keep her safe.

She whispered the declaration in her mind: "I love you."

"Tonight is done. Sleep as long as ye please, Lady Indigo. This room is yers." Ours, she fantasised she corrected him. "Tomorrow, when ye wake, I shall show ye more, and learn ye to the more mundane tasks that will be yer responsibility."

"And an auction?"

"They will be. The merchant ship from Temorline docks in nine days. Ye will likely be auctioned then."

For a split second, Lady Indigo panicked. For the first time, the notion that an auction could result in her permanent sale flashed through her mind. "Have you ever sold an... employee... for good, forever?"

"I have."

She wanted so badly for him to notice her fear, her need to stay with him. She didn't know if that happened, but he said, "But ye perform well for coins, and I would not sell a performer for merchantman prices. Ye will stay put for the foreseeable future."

She would have sworn their minds met then, and he didn't want to think about selling her as much as she didn't want to think about being sold by him, but it was a meeting of the bodies that she craved first. That meeting had been stolen by the hunchback. She wanted to strangle him and she wanted to have Oxhide Drang's cock in her mouth, but did she want to strangle him while having...

"Excuse me," Oxhide Drang said, "but I have matters to attend to, and the hour is late."

* * * * *

Because he was big, the room felt immensely empty when Oxhide Drang left. Lady Indigo remained in bed, but she no longer hugged the sheets or felt as safe as she had felt before. Once in awhile, the air smelled foreign to her.

Although she was tired in every way possible, she couldn't fall asleep. Her mind kept turning and rotating. To try to slow it down, or at least take advantage of its hyperactivity, she began touching herself. She imagined Oxhide Drang beating away mobs of evil people from her path, she imagined him taking her in public, she imagined his physicality overpowering hers, followed immediately by her imagining his tenderness, so incongruent when measured against his body, but lovely because of it. He was her personal monster, her gentle giant, her freak, who'd growl at everyone but her and whose love for her was so strong that he would be completely devoted, as she would be to him, and nobody would understand their love but they.

This was enough to bring her to cusp of orgasm.

But, while she was on that cusp, Bawlegg would force his way into her fantasies and ruin everything. She fought against the image of his hideous face emerging from between her legs, covered in her arousal. She made herself forget her imagining of his awful orgasm, whose screeching would no doubt shatter windows and cause alleycats to arch their backs. And worst of all was when she imagined him just behind the door, now, standing or sitting, with his ear pressed against the wood, feasting on each of her sounds and subjecting her to perversions in his mind. How she despised him!

* * * * *

After hours of failed sleep, she got out of bed and opened the door. Her first inclination was to knock on Lady Teodora's door. Maybe Lady Teodora couldn't sleep, either. However, as she raised her fist to knock, she knew there was no reason for Lady Teodora not to be asleep. The last thing she wanted to do was make a potential friend into a potential foe. She left her hand drop to her side.

Her next plan was to explore the Surreptitious Mongoose, top to bottom in the privacy of nighttime, but she remembered the snoring patrons, and she wanted nothing to do with them. She'd had enough of their wagging tongues and pawing hands. It was only in the presence of Oxhide Drang that she would allow strangers to treat her that way. It was only for him that she would do many things.

The third plan she put into action before truly thinking it through. Because she'd never lived in a house with forbidden rooms, she took several steps down the descending stairway before realising that perhaps she shouldn't take any more. When she did realise it, she stopped, but noted the faint outline of light escaping from between the door and frame. The padlock she'd seen earlier was no longer there, and the chains that had been barring the door lay in a tangle on the floor.

She descended lower.

She liked sneaking.

When she was halfway down, she pretended that the world had flipped on its head and told herself that conquering the remaining half was actually the only sensible way of retracing her steps. It was silly. She didn't believe it, but the light kept pulling her...

The floor at the bottom of the steps was cold.

The door was cold, too. It was made of metal, just as she had suspected. As she pushed it, she expected it not to budge, but the hinges must have been properly greased, because it swung open far enough for her to see:

A million mechanical parts, tinkerer's parts and engineer's parts, and books, and the beautiful left side of Oxhide Drang's seated body, in front of which stood a table of some sort, and on the table lay a man; or, she looked more closely, lay what was the shape of a man but that was covered by a shiny, metallic skin, and where he should have had ears, the metal man had bolts, and where eyes, gears, and—

She spun to look at the top of the stairs. A silhouette, a streak of motion, had caught her attention. Though brief, the silhouette was unmistakable with its short stature and curved back. Had he seen her, too?

She closed the metal door more carefully than she had opened it. Because the door was locked by padlock, there was no click to betray her transgression.

She went lightly up the stairs and into her room.

As she fell asleep, it was Bawlegg's silhouette that occupied her mind, but something altogether different that held her subconscious: the tinkerer, Warwick—though not so much even the man, as his words: "He will, princess. But only once he creates a machine that makes obsolete even him."