Summer School Pt. 06

Watching Tanya, in her rollers and her smock, helping in the salon was, Lara said, a revelation.

"It's so not like her, Pixie!"

I could see that Chloe was skilfully walking a fine line with her. The threat that her hair would look like a mass of poodle curls if Tanya did not do as she was told, was effective without being cruel. It gave her a choice - just not one she felt able to take. As Chloe said to me as I brought her some lunch:

"It's more choice than she gives others."

As it was a strategy I had suggested, I was rather pleased.

Inevitably, Tanya sometimes forgot that she was naked under a smock which just about covered her arse cheeks, which meant that every now and then someone got an eyeful. From the look on her face, Tanya was not altogether averse to the admiration - after she got over the fact that it was someone else displaying her charms.

Lara was solicitous, helping Tanya whenever she could. Chloe, who was as soft-hearted as I was, let her.

Submerging myself in the atmosphere and the routines, I spent a happy Saturday, and it was only as clients thinned out that Chloe turned to Tanya and told her to sit down. Automatically she headed toward the back room.

"No, dear, with so few here, we can do it here - if that's okay with you Edwina."

"As I've been ogling her arse all day, it's fine with me - as long as she opens her legs, and we can all see in the mirror!"

Tanya agreed.

As we all focussed on that wet, swollen pussy, Chloe got to work on the hair. Handing Lara the rollers as she unpinned the hair, she used her brushes with the skill that made her such a virtuoso - and after twenty minutes of primping and priming, the result was spectacular.

"Wow!"

"You look like one of those movie stars, darling," the loyal Lara said.

We could all only agree. The body was there, but the waves and the styling, well she looked a million dollars, as they say. I smiled at Chloe, who nodded.

"Lara, will you put the blinds down and lock the door?"

"Yes, Miss Chloe."

While she did that, I went into the back room to get the dress we had bought for Tanya - along with her discarded, and now clean, underwear.

"Take the smock off Tanya!"

It was a sign of the mastery Chloe had established that Tanya did so - standing, naked in the salon, four of us admiring her figure. She smiled.

"You like?"

"Gimme!" Edwina said, not altogether joking.

Chloe looked at Tanya as though to ask whether she wanted her; Tanya smiled, but shook her head.

"Lara, help Miss Tanya into her clothes."

"Yes, Miss Chloe." Lara grinned.

First Lara pulled the sensuous silk French knickers up, and then fitted the matching bra. Tanya looked good, and looking in the mirror, you could she knew it. She fitted the suspender belt and stockings, taking care to thread the suspenders under the knickers. Then she helped her into a navy blue and white vintage 1950s polka dot Swing dress.

"There!" Chloe declared, "the very image of the fifties movie star - and ideal for the fifties night at the Club!"

Tanya positively shimmered - as well as shimmying.

"Right ladies, there are dresses for the rest of us, so let's get ready to rock and roll!"

Tanya and Chloe both looked absolutely fabulous in their outfits, as did Lara. As ever, I looked like someone's younger sister brought along for the experience, but the night was a good one, with Edwina's Lindy hops stealing the show. Chloe's girlfriend, a gorgeous blonde, met us there, and the whole evening was a blast - with everyone enjoying themselves.

As Chloe and her girlfriend, Miri, were going back to her place, and Lara and Tanya back to theirs, I felt a little like the shy one at some orgy, and contented myself with the spare bedroom at Tanya's which was a noisy place that night.

The following morning Lara filled me in with the detail.

"It was marvellous, Pixie, really!"

Instead of just commanding Lara to do what she wanted, Tanya appeared to have learned something from her own experience as a submissive. She had usually used Lara's love of being told what to do to ensure that she ate her Mistress out, but this time it had been different.

When they got back to the bedroom, she had ordered Lara to bend at the waist and then lifted her dress. She had then proceeded to tease her for the next twenty of so minutes, pulling her panties down, fingering her asshole and pussy, before spanking her to the verge of orgasm.

"Oh Pix, it was so good. I had been hinting at her for ages that I'd love to be spanked, but she's ignored me. Last night she got it."

At first, she had spanked her as she bent over, but then she had put her across her knee, pulled Lara's soaked panties to her knees, and spanked her with a hairbrush, allowing her to rub her pussy until she came hard.

Lara had been so pleased that, unbidden, she had, in her own words, been a "dirty bitch."

"Tanya had been hinting for ages that she's like me to tongue her ass, but was clearly worried that if she made me, I'd gross out, but after I came, I wanted to pleased her so much that I sank to my knees, pulled her knickers off, put her legs over my shoulders and licked the whole was from her clit to her asshole, and as she got more and more worked up, I got her onto all fours and tongue-fucked her ass until she came hard on my fingers."

I smiled.

"And then," she giggled, I let her piss on me, which was so hot Pixie."

It was at the point that a bleary-eyed Tanya emerged from the shower, wrapped in a towel. She looked a happy bunny.

"Been telling Pix what a good girl you were, Lara?"

"Yes, darling, I have!"

"Well, Pix, and here's something else worth knowing - Lara," she said, looking at her with real affection. "Will you live me with here - as a couple?"

Lara squealed. I don't know I had ever heard anyone emit such a sound, but from Lara it was one of sheer joy.

"Yes, darling!"

And as they kissed, I knew my work was done.

We met up with Chloe and Kat for Sunday lunch, and told them the news. Chloe grinned.

"Well," I said, "I think our new couple can count you as their matchmaker, Chloe!"

"Yes," Tanya said, "yes. I owe you one Chloe. And as part of the down payment, I have told Eddie to tell Mistress Mia that in future, we'll vet the girls for the parties with more care - that should please you Pix."

"Thank Tanya," I smiled. "Just make sure that there is no underage stuff."

"I will, Pixie, and thanks, without your willingness to come here none of this could have happened."

That made me feel good.

Chloe suggested that she might talk with Kat about whether she would be comfortable with the occasional "fuck," with perhaps the three of us. Somewhat to my own surprise, I said no.

On my way back to Oxford, I pondered why.

It was not through want of desire. Chole aroused my lust, but then so had Tanya, and yet I had held back there. It was as though desire for its own sake was not enough. There needed to be something more.

The same thoughts came to me later when I went online to play with "Mistress Kate." Even as I obeyed her online orders to remove my knickers and play with myself without cumming, something had shifted. She confirmed that she would meet me, in person, when I went up to the annual meeting of the Graduate Literature Society meeting in Durham where I was due to give a paper, something which occupied me for much of the week.

The isolation, after the official, and unofficial summer schools, was rather like being plunged from a hot house into a fridge.

The nightly "sessions" with "Mistress Kate" continued. I was ordered to "edge" and told in no uncertain terms what I would have to do to please her. She emailed me with instructions.

"You will be my slut for the weekend, Pixie. You will wait in your room on the Friday night, you will be nude, you will wear your collar, and you will kneel by the door and wait for me. You will have to hand a vibrator, a butt plug and a leash, as well as a hairbrush with which your arse will be paddled until it is red. `You may edge yourself, but you are not allowed to cum. Tonight's play will be the last time you will touch yourself until you are naked in your room."

I replied that I understood.

The question I always asked my students was one I posed now to myself. What had I learned from what had happened?

Was it wrong for Linda to want underage girls just because there was an "imbalance of power?" What if the underage girls wanted it? They were too young. Who said? The Law said. But the Law had once said that homosexual men acting on what they wanted should go to jail; it still said that an adult male wanting someone under the age of consent should go to jail. So was it something called "The Law" which regulated our desires? If so, it was failing. It had with Gay men; there were those who said that it would have to change to take account of changing sexual mores with younger people. What magic happened at sixteen?

That all seemed to me hopelessly sterile.

At the same time, Society seemed hostile to most forms of celibacy, but in favour of regulating it in certain areas. There was no moral case being made; it was all about "The Law." There was no need for me, as a gay woman, to be celibate, unless that was, I wanted someone under the age of sixteen. As someone who had been mistaken for being under that age, I knew how ineffective that rule was. Linda would not have been celibate with me even if she had not seen my ID.

And yet?

And yet there was the rub. It seemed cold. It seemed about commodification. It ignored something that seemed to matter by the simple act of leaving it out. What about love?

What was driving me to "Mistress Kate?" What drove her to me? Desire. Yet was this not exactly what Shakespeare had talked about in Sonnet 129? "Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame / Is lust in action." It surely was:

"Mad in pursuit and in possession so,

Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;

A bliss in proof and proved, a very woe;

Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream."

But what sort of dream? A nightmare? As the Bard put it:

"All this the world well knows; yet none knows well

To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell."

The moment desire was thus consummated, it became an object of shame, disgust in myself soon followed the acting out. It was why every time I read St Paul's Epistle to the Romans, I shuddered when I came to verse 19: "For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do." I knew what "The Law" said, and yet desire consumed me. St Paul was right when he wrote: "I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not."

And yet, and yet, was it not staring me in the face?

What was it Freud had written:

"Sexuality has advantages, but, in return for an unusually high degree of pleasure, brings dangers which threaten the individual's life, and often destroy it."

Was not that exactly the point? Desire, sexual activity, however much we might try to conceive of them as an end in themselves were not that. They were means to many ends, which was where "love" came in. As St Paul told the Corinthians:

"Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonour others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres."

It was only absent love that lust became a "waste of shame."

But I was "absent love."

I could see, in my sister Ella and her relationship with her husband Rich, what it might look like. It made her less selfish. Not selfless, that she would never be. But she did not always put herself first. And in that, she had discovered a sexual satisfaction she had not experienced before, and might never had without it. I had no idea whether Tanya loved Lara, but in sublimating her own desires, she had found a new satisfaction which was not centred on her. I could follow my ego and desire - but the fruits were those of the Dead Sea - barren.

Even as I prepared to meet Mistress Kate, my thoughts were haunted by Sonnet 129 and Romans 7.

Tanya had tempted me to follow the path I had not taken those years before with Tay. I could hardly deny the erotic thrill I had from dressing down and being in a position of inferiority to her, and yet it had not gone where I had imagined. Concern for Lara, and then for underage girls, had channelled that erotic urge into something greater - was that a form of love? It had felt better than the orgasms I had thought I wanted. It had been the same with Chloe.

Even as I was tormenting myself before the week away at the conference and with "Mistress Kate," I got a text from Tanya.

"Lara and I are coming up to Oxford on Wednesday, can we see you? Tanya xxx"

"Sure, there's room if you want to stay overnight. P xx"

"Take u up on that. T xx"

I waited for the London train at Oxford station.

I wanted to know what was going on, but I also welcomed the diversion. "Mistress Kate" had gone silent on me. It was not the first time. She liked to play games. Despite my hesitations and doubts, I was ready for the Friday night after the end of the conference. I would be there, submitting to her in person.

As Tanya and Lara emerged, I could see that they were "a couple." They had that indefinable but unmistakeable air of being one.

They both hugged me.

I'd booked us lunch at the Randolph.

"So," I said, "what's this in honour of?"

"You," Tanya said. "I wanted to thank you, as did Lara. You tell her darling."

Lara grinned broadly.

"Well, Tanya will be applying to uni in London for next academic year, and whether she gets in or not, we are moving in together. I have a small place in Acton, and can manage my grad work from there."

I was delighted and ordered some champagne to celebrate.

"Sudden?" I said, smiling.

"You know, Pix, I'd never felt the way I felt doing what I did for Lara."

"What made you do it?" I asked. "It wasn't really Chloe's threat, was it?"

"No," she said, "I realised something you might think is soppy."

"What?"

"Well Lara did what she did for one reason, she loves me."

The look she shot Lara filled my heart with joy.

"And in doing what I did, I realised that I was doing it because I love her. That adds to the joy!"

Lara beamed - and we toasted their love and the pleasure they had found.

Though it had been but days since I had last seen them, it was clear something profound had shifted. Not in Lara. Lara, it was clear, had loved Tanya from the start. It was, I realised, why she had been so upset at the way she had been treated on the night I had met her. As she told me later, it would not have mattered what anyone had said to her, she could not have been cruel to Tanya, and she had been deeply hurt, emotionally, by the thought that the woman she loved could treat her with such brutality.

"That," she said, "is why I wanted to come to thank you. I am not sure that Tanya would ever have realised what she'd done, without you and Chloe."

I held her hand.

"Love would have found a way. I am just honoured to have been part of it."

It was with pleasure I handed my bedroom over to them. I slept that night better than I had for an age.

We had breakfast out. They could both see I was exercised by something.

"What is it?"

I told them about "Mistress Kate." Even in the telling I felt that "waste of shame."

But there was, to my surprise, no condemnation.

"Just take care Pix," Tanya said, "this Kate sounds like me before love got at me!"

There, again, was the rub.

I saw them off at the station and returned home, stripped the bed, did the laundry, revised my paper, and prepared to leave.

As I could afford it, I stayed at the Carlton rather than slum it in the university accommodation. That isolated me from my peers, but truth to tell I was in such a state, that suited me well enough.

Kate had ordered me to get a "tramp stamp" to go with my "slutty panties." It was not without difficulty that I managed to affix a transfer to the base of my spine. It was just an arrow, pointing down, but along with the black thong, it made me feel a slut.

The paper seemed to go well, which in normal circumstances would have been a success. But my mind was fixed elsewhere.

I got back to the hotel.

I stripped. I waited.

And I waited.

An hour came. An hour went.

From feeling numb with lust, I felt another sort of numbness.

"Mistress Kate" was not coming. I was not going to break her rule and text her. I looked at my laptop: nothing.

Damn it!

I was not even going to get the satisfaction which preceded the "waste of shame." Why did this keep happening?

I dressed carefully. I thought that my Stella McCartney outfit and Louboutins went incongruously with the thong, but it was not as though anyone was going to see it, or the tramp stamp. I grabbed my Gucci clutch bag.

I checked with Reception whether there was an upmarket restaurant nearby. There was.

I set off for it down the dark streets. My mood was at one with them.

After the anticipation, there was nothing.

I went into the restaurant. There was an air of business. Was I perhaps too late?

A rather pretty woman, about a foot taller than me came up to me.

"Would you, by chance, have a table for one?" I asked her.

"Welcome, let me take a look at our bookings, but if you are looking for a table now, I am sure we can accommodate you," she said, in a local accent, showing me to a table by the window so I could look out.

"I can get you something while you look at the menu, and there are some specials on the board."

"If I could have a small glass of the house Chablis, please, and when you come back, perhaps I could ask your advice on what is good?"

"Of course," she said, going off to get the wine and some water for the table.

She read off the specials, and I asked for her advice.

She was good at her job. Self-contained and yet friendly. I accepted her advice about the food and was glad I had.

She drew me out of myself; she had that gift.

I ordered a coffee, which attracted the comment from her that I was brave, as it would affect my sleep. I told her I would not be sleeping much.

"Oh," she said, looking at me with compassion. "Has someone let you down?"

"I was supposed to be meeting someone at the Carlton, but they did not show. I thought I'd come here and drown my sorrows. I was rather hoping they might text."

"Men!" June said, her voice full of scorn, "can't trust them."

"Oh no," I said, "not a man, a woman."

"Oh!" she said, her interest piqued. "I am sorry to hear that."

"It's okay, it happens, just a bit too often for my comfort. I am gay you see."

She grinned.

"I kind of guessed that. I am too."

"Oh! hence your remark about chaps?"

"Yes," she replied, had one once, never again. Look, if you are not hurrying off, why not stay for an after-dinner drink, that might help you sleep. I'm June, by the way."

"Oh thank you, June. I am usually called Pixie. If it would be no trouble, I'd like that. I have a room at the Carlton, but can't say I am in a hurry to get back to it."

And that was how I met June - just June. But that, dear reader, is another story.