The Collaring of Chloe Ch. 36

He came over to her, pulling her into a hug, which she returned gratefully. It felt so good to have him arms around her, as though the arms of a father telling his little girl that everything would be okay. Daddy would make it all better. For a minute, simply for how safe it felt to do so, she cried. Not a heavy sob, but just a light shudder of emotional release, as though expelling a chest full of smoke that she'd been holding in for far too long.

Once she'd managed to recover herself, they retired to the den together, each with their tea now, and sat down to talk. Heron sat next to her on the sofa, turned towards her to listen attentively while she said her peace.

"I have a dilemma that I have to work out..." She stumbled a moment, trying to keep from calling him 'Master', but also just not able to bring herself to call him by his real name either. She finally compromised with 'Sir', which felt acceptable enough to her and seemed something that Master Heron didn't object to.

"There is another person, someone who also is interested having a slave-submissive, who is planning to give Master an offer to purchase me." She explained, figuring it best to give him some kind of exposition. "She is someone that I really enjoy my time with and is much more focused on the kind of intensity of this dynamic that I was looking for. Master is amazing, more so that I could have ever believed, but she truly makes me feel the way I am wanting to feel: owned and at someone's complete mercy. She is not cruel or unreasonable with it, but is definitely far more what I had envisioned when I first decided that this was what I wanted to be."

She paused a moment, meaning to take a sip of tea, but found herself needing to just plunge on. "She has confided her intent to me, but gave me permission to inform Master of it, if I felt I needed to, out of respect for both me and him. However, I haven't told him." She blushed at the way Heron's brow crinkled, likely more in confusion, but it felt more like disappointment.

"He is someone who would spend this time trying to talk through the decision with me, wanting me to do what I feel is best for my wants and needs." She gave a stressed little laugh. "Which, I know, sounds like a good thing. However, it goes back to the heart of why this Domme does appeal to me so much. As much as it is a good thing that he does care what I want, what I really want is to have no say. What I want is to be made to feel like a real slave."

Heron nodded, seeming to, at least, generally understand what she was trying to say, even if he might not fully understand the why. "You want him to make the decision without consulting you." He said, checking to make sure he was understanding correctly.

"Exactly, Sir." Chloe said with a soft nod. "I suppose it doesn't help that the very situation of being sold to someone, even if it turns out to be against my will, is at the heart of what I want my place to be. Him just selling me away, even if it were something I didn't actually want, is something that would make me feel truly like the slave I want to be."

Heron sighed. "It's obvious he cares too much about you to do something like that, though." He said, his expression seeming to say that she should see that as a good thing.

She nodded to him. "I know, Sir. And, I'm pretty sure he will ask me in that moment, because he cares so much. For now, though, I don't want these days with him and Mittens to be filled with us debating it from every angle." She paused, scrunching up her face. "Actually, no, that's just what I keep telling myself. The real reason is...is..."

"You don't know what your answer is." He completed for her, his tone suggesting confidence that he had surmised the real point.

Again, she gave him a weary nod. "Yes, Sir. I want to feel like a real slave, but I can't deny how close I've become to Master and Mittens. I feel close with this Domme too, but it's not the same. I'm torn between what is more important to me, being made more into the slave I want to be or compromising the intensity I want for the love I've found."

She let out a deep breath, her chest shuddering as she did, as though on the verge of crying again. "I know that it's more a matter of semantics, really. She has said that I would be allowed to regularly see Master and Mittens and I know that Master would allow me to spend time with her. I won't lose either one, not fully, at least."

"But in a way, you still will." Heron said, sympathetically. "Your life will revolve around your owner, whoever that is. Orbiting them and merely being visited by the other."

She looked at him gratefully, giving words to something that she'd been unable to for some time now. She realized just how right it was too. It wasn't just semantics, whoever became her owner would be who dominated her world. Whatever she shared with the other would never be the same as being theirs. All of a sudden, her conflict became that much larger in her heart.

"And so, I need to figure out what I will say when he looks to me and asks what I want." She said, staring into her tea just as Master had done earlier, as if she might see something there. "I need something that will help me understand just what is most important to me."

Heron looked down at his own tea a moment, considering it before taking a long drink of it. When he sat it back down, he took the tea-cup from Chloe's hands and put it on the table next to his. Taking her hands into his, he pulled her attention to him. "What makes you the happiest?" He asked her earnestly. "Feeling like you are truly a slave, with no will of your own, or being with people you are in love with?"

Chloe looked into his eyes for a long moment, questioning so many things in her mind. "I... I... I don't..." She struggled to find an answer, to separate things. She wanted both, to feel like a true slave and to feel such love. "I need to understand why being a slave is so important to me, I think." She said finally. "I need to remember what it was that made me want it so badly."

She squeezed his hands, inching a little closer. "Can you remember anything that I said when I first started talking about it? Anything about what made me become so focused on it?"

Heron paused, rummaging through his mind for anything of pertinence on the subject. After a few minutes of thinking, he gave a little nod. "I don't know exactly why or what, but I do remember when it became so important to you." He peered at her. "The first time I ever heard you talk about it was right after we attended that big anniversary party that the fetish club in Dunston, Thorn Marks, threw. You mentioned that one of the people you met there introduced you to the idea, had told you about their own slave and how much you really felt drawn to the concept."

Chloe thought back, trying to remember that party. Thorn Marks was a BDSM nightclub, really more of an enormous community dungeon than anything else, but it had been a popular place that people from surrounding lifestyle communities would flock to in droves. They'd been celebrating its tenth year anniversary with a large bash, featuring all manner of demos and shows. The three of them had rode all the way into Dunston with a handful of other friends from their community to attend.

She'd become introduced to all kinds of new things there, the whole party like a gallery of kink. She realized she did remember that it was where she'd first heard about the idea of lifestyle enslavement. Though she couldn't really remember the person who had told her about it, half of the people there had been wearing masks of different kinds, either to protect their vanilla lives or just for the fun of it, she did remember them making a pronounced impression on her.

She'd come away with stories of the slave they owned and how close that relationship had made them. She remembered how strangely beautiful and powerful it had seemed to her at the time, how much it had evoked this image in her own mind of being absolutely possessed, reduced to someone whose whole existence was to belong to another. Just recalling the memory now brought forth intense chills through her body and made her feel intensely aroused.

In her mind, she pictured it as something deeply anachronistic, mixed up shades of sultans with chained dancing girls, barbarian slavers roughly slacking their lusts with captured women, and beautiful Victorian images of delicate concubines owned by rich and powerful men and kept on fine leashes. It had woven into this powerful fantasy in her head, maturing over the following weeks into a certainty that it was what she wanted to become.

The purity of that seemed sacred to her, to be not just a slave in name, but in reality, with nothing else but the person who held her gilded chain. It had devoured her entire existence, consumed her very soul until all that was left was her need to make that fantasy into a reality in as pure a way as she could manage it. It had been what had prompted her to find a way to not just make herself into a slave, but to be made into a slave, sold completely outside her control.

It had taken all her passion to convince Heron of her intention and to get him to be who found the person she would be sold to, all without her having any foreknowledge or say in who they were. In the end, she was pretty sure the only reason he'd even agreed was because he'd become convinced she would only have someone else do it, someone who might not be as careful in who they selected for the honor.

"I had forgotten where that idea came from." She said absently, amazed that she could have lost sight of where it had begun so completely due to how obsessed with the idea she had become. Before this moment, it had felt as though it had been a desire she'd always had, but the truth was, her need for it had been born not fully a year ago.

The question was, what did that mean for her? On one hand, the revelation showed that this wasn't something she'd spent her whole life yearning for, but was something she'd only recently become set upon. However, the utter tenacity and iron-clad certainty with which she'd grappled onto it with suggested that it may well have been something that she'd simply just never had a name for. It seemed so elemental to who she was, despite how recently she'd first considered the idea.

While it seemed to have changed nothing in her struggle to figure out what was the most important to her or even why it was so important to her, she couldn't help but feel like this reminder, of where the idea had come from, was somehow deeply important to solving the riddle. If anything, it made her realize that from the moment she'd first heard about becoming someone's slave, it had become an all-consuming need. That had to mean something.

"Thank you, Sir." She said gently, looking at him gratefully. "I'm not sure how much it does, but I know that it does help to be reminded of that." She squeezed his hands. "I suppose it still seems silly to you though, possibly walking away from someone as incredible as Master. And Mittens too. I really do love them, so much."

"If everything in life was so simple, if love was so black and white, Chloe, there would be no such thing as the BDSM lifestyle or polyamory." Heron said with a smile. "Love is an amazing thing, but it isn't the only thing. Sometimes, we have wants and needs that someone, no matter how much we care for them, cannot give us the way we need. I don't think it is silly that you are conflicted, my dear."

He gave her a soft kiss on the temple. "However, I will admit, as a romantic, my hope is that love wins out."