The Mask of Submission Ch. 01

Warning. This first chapter contains little in the way of sex. Trying to keep the story to a manageable length and make it easier to read, I've decided to release the first chapter as is without including the more sexually explicit developments which make up the second. Hopefully it's worth the wait. I would appreciate any feedback anyone has, and as ever, feel free to rate this story.

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How did this begin?

I am sitting tonight on the wide veranda of a tidewater mansion. The Collins plantation as it is still called, even now, a century or more since the last of the Collins family passed on. I am looking east into the gathering dark, out across the empty fields where no more cotton grows. My ancestors worked in these fields in days gone by. Some are buried still in the black and fertile earth, no stones to mark their presence, their names have faded into dust. Now the fields, like this house, like all the memories, belong to me. To us, really.

I am waiting for my mother.

Who is driving down from Baltimore so that we can have a fight. So that she can scold me for the choices I have made. The one's she knows of, the ones that she does not.

It makes me feel like a little girl again, instead of what I am. At forty three, a woman grown and long married, three children of my own. A successful career in estate law, the youngest partner in my firm's history. It has been more than twenty years since my mother felt any need to correct my behavior.

But tonight I feel so small, and my heart beats faster and faster as I watch the long and empty road that winds between the eastern fields, the private lane which will bring her here. Knowing that any moment now I will see her headlights flashing through the dusk. Mamma coming to tell me off, to put me in line.

Mamma coming to punish me for all I've done. The things she knows, the things she doesn't.

I am not alone here of course.

In the house behind me I can hear the movement of my daughter Corrie's feet as she pads across the polished hardwood floors. I can hear the tune that she whistles as she goes about her evening chores. She sounds so close, if I could turn I might even catch a glimpse of her through the wide French windows of the parlor, a flash of a ghost in the blue dress that I picked out for her.

But of course, I cannot turn.

I cannot hear Simon, but I know my husband waits within even so. In some room upstairs where he has gone to be alone, to wait in silence for the arrival of my mother, just as I now wait. I imagine that he too has found a view of this twilight scene and even now his eyes gaze out to the east, I imagine that he listens intently to the sounds of traffic on the distant highway, trying to pick out the noise of a single engine bearing down towards this place where we are waiting.

Does his heart beat as swiftly as mine? Does he feel the anticipation and the nervous dread burning through his every vein? Do his hands shake where he rests them? Does he run his tongue across his own dry lips as even now I do the same?

I am waiting for my mother.

What will she see when at last the lights of her car fall upon me?

She will see what she is meant to see, what she has been brought to see.

She will see me, her daughter Gwen, but she will not see all of me. Not at first. Maybe she will not even recognize me in that first strange instant, I will just be a figure seated in an old rocker on an empty porch. She will not know me, how could she? There are no lights on in the house behind me, I will be a shadow in the fading light.

But she will come closer, and when she does she will take me in.

The yellow house dress I have poured my body into, the necklace of pearls and opals around my neck. She will see the coif I have placed my hair into, the heavy diamond earrings that dangle from my lobes. She will perhaps see the thick gold bracelets that adorn my slender wrists. She will see that I hold myself incredibly still, but mostly she will see that I am wearing a painted mask, the mask of a woman far younger and far whiter than myself.

She will not see that the tight necklace is joined at the nape of my neck to a thick iron rod that runs the length of my spine, screwed at the base into the wood of the rocker. She will not see how the thick bracelets link together and keep my wrists from moving independently. She will not see the butterfly vibrator that buzzes against my tender clit, or the tension in my shoulders as I fight to remain still against the intensity of the sensation. She will not see the large rubber plug that fills my ass and seems to slide deeper into me with each small movement of my struggling body.

She will see the mask, and that is the point.

The mask is what she has been brought to see.

How did this begin?

As I wait for my mother's arrival, as I shiver against the sensations that course through my restricted body, I know that this is all my fault, and beneath the mask I wear my true lips are curled into a smile at the thought.

It began with a memory that I did not know that I had, and it began with an accident at a breakfast table.

It was four months ago, and my whole family had gathered for Brunch at a restaurant in Richmond, to celebrate the graduation of my oldest daughter Corrie from Mary Washington University. It was a good excuse to get together, it had been months since Simon and I had had a chance to see all three of our children together, they had reached that point of young adulthood when their own lives were fully blossoming and it was harder and harder to meet as a family.

Corrie was graduating with honors and already in the hunt for a job, while Joanne and Tim were both in the midst of the college experience, and for the first time the twins had chosen not to come home for summer break, preferring instead to travel with friends. It was not something Simon and I minded of course, we had our own lives. I was as usual busy with my career, more than enough to occupy my time, and Simon was busily laying the groundwork for his campaign for congress after having served in the Virginia state legislature for so many years. All in all it was a bust time, so it was incredibly nice to have some excuse to get together and to sit down for brunch as a family.

It would have been a happy occasion, it was a happy occasion, but one which left no real impression upon me had my daughter Joanne not bumped the waitresses arm while the young lady poured some cream into my husband's coffee. Such a little thing, the very smallest of incidents, and yet so much has come to hinge upon it. So much rippling out from such a tiny accident.

As best I can recall we were all sitting around our table, and we were talking about nothing and everything, the way that families will. My husband had asked the young woman who was serving us for a little more cream in his coffee, and while that woman was leaning over to pour it, Joanne must have turned rather abruptly, not noticed her proximity to the woman at her shoulder. She must have bumped the waitress rather heavily, for all at once the cream was spilled, and I watched in amusement as it spread across the table before me, took in the waitresses startled apologies mixing with those of Joanne.

It was not any kind of crisis and it was not a big deal. At any other time I would have forgotten the matter completely within the course of the day. But of course, that was not the case.

How shall I describe it?

How can I make what happened clear, in the vain hope that it can provide an explanation of all the rest?

As we all tried our best to wipe up the cream with our napkins, as the waitress rushed off for a rag, I saw Corrie rise a little from her seat and reach out across the table to help.

Of my three children Corrie is the only one to truly take after me. Her skin is perhaps just a shade lighter than mine, her hair just a touch straighter but she was the only one of my kids who people were surprised to discover came from a white father. Joanne and Tim always had light mocha skin and the slightest curl to their hair, easily able pass as black or white in a way that had never been possible for Corrie. While I would never have said this aloud to any her or to any of my children, Corrie had always been the one that I was most proud of. The one that truly understood the struggles and challenges that a woman of color still faces within this country.

But that moment at the restaurant, when I saw Corrie lean across the table to try and help clean the mess, I was not thinking of pride or of the tone of her skin.

What I saw was the flash of her heavy brown breasts beneath her white cotton blouse, the way that they brushed across the top of the table. And how when she reached the limit of her arms reach, how those same breasts pressed upon the surface of the table. I saw the movement of her back and her large rear as she tried to help dab the cream that spread before her.

In and of itself it would have been nothing at all, it was nothing at all.

Yet all the same I felt something stirring in my head, and in a split second it was not spilled cream on a table of a Richmond Restaurant that I saw, and it was not my daughter Corrie.

What I saw was something that I had forgotten, something from long ago. And that morning at the restaurant it struck me like something from out of my earliest dreams, when I was still a little girl and did not know truly the difference between the waking and the fantasies of nights.

I saw my mother suddenly, as she must have looked when she was young. I saw her leaning across the kitchen table of the small red kitchen of the house in Memphis where I had grown up. But she was not leaning...the image changed all at once and I knew that she was sprawled across it.

In my memory my mother was nude, and she had knocked the remains of breakfast from the table. I saw the glass that had held the orange juice rolling across the kitchen floor, the juice in a puddle all around. Islands of pancakes breaking up upon the yellow tiles that my mother scrubbed religiously, each and every Sunday afternoon. I saw her heavy brown breasts sliding across the butter dish, made slick with the yellow spread as they slapped upon the table top, making a few utensils remaining jump, and clatter to the floor all along with the others.

My mother's eyes were wide as saucers, and they seemed to stare at me through all the years, to burst forth from out of the dream that must have been. She gazed straight into me, yet she spoke not a word, could not offer a single explanation. A dishrag had been shoved between my mother's lips and she was biting down hard upon it, the only sound she seemed capable of making was the low moan that seemed to tear through the rag and fill the whole of the room, an endless moan that was not explanation at all.

And it would have been awful, should by all rights have been a scene of horror. But as wide as my mother's eyes were they were not filled with fear. The low sound which escaped the rag that muffled her speech was not one of terror or pain, but spoke of something else and something far beyond.

And then I heard the laugh...

I pulled my eyes away from those of my mother, raised them up to see the figure that I knew stood behind her, the one from whom the laugh had issued.

Yet I saw nothing, just a formless shape with laughter ringing from it. All at once the memory dissolved, and I was looking into my Daughter's curious stare, hearing her asking me why I was looking at her like that.

I am sure I made some excuses. I have always been able to collect myself quickly. The waitress returned with a towel and wiped up the spill, I heard my husband laughing and assuring the young woman that it was no problem at all. The kids all returned to their seats and in a moment they were chatting and laughing once more, as though nothing had happened. Of course for them, for my husband and my children, nothing had happened. It was only me that was shaken, that was rattled. And no matter how much I tried to put that strange memory, if it even was a memory from my mind, I struggled with it all through brunch.

Even later that afternoon, as I watched my eldest daughter walk across a stage to collect her diploma, even as I stood and cheered with tears of pride forming in the corners of my eyes, I still could not wholly escape from the confusion which the memory left within me.

There was a large part of me that wished to believe it was nothing, that it had really been something from a very old dream. I had never seen anything like that, had never watched my mother writhe nude upon the kitchen table. I had never heard the sound of her moaning through the rag that filled her mouth, had never heard the laughter cut above it. It had never happened at all.

However, as much as I wanted to, I could not convince myself that it was nothing. I could not even wholly convince myself that it had never happened. It was not the image that had popped into my head. No, it was the sounds, it was the low and guttural moan and it was the laugh that had rung out. The laugh most of all. If I had never seen that image, then I was sure that I had heard the laugh.

Across the course of that long day I tried and tried again to recall just where I had heard it, who it was the laugh had once belonged to. No matter how I smiled, no matter how I laughed, no matter the many distractions which that happy day conspired to provide for me, beneath it all my mind was locked into the riddle of the memory and the laugh which echoed from it.

No matter how I wracked my mind, the placement of that laughter remained elusive. It hung there, right beyond the tip of my tongue, something familiar and yet somehow unreachable. A name that would not come. There were times when I felt myself drawing close, when I felt the name forming in the back corners of my mind and struggling to lumber forward and at last reveal itself. Each time however the feeling was lost somewhere in transition and all that reached the center of my consciousness was the same feeling that I knew the answer without knowing. That I had already solved this mystery once and simply could not recall having done so.

I was still struggling that evening, as I sat in the passenger seat while my husband drove us home to our place outside the city. He was chatting amiably about the day, about our children having grown up, and about nothing at all. His hopes for the coming election, the gossip from the campaign trail. I was happy enough to let him talk, I kept the same smile plastered on my face that I had left there all day, but inside my thoughts were reeling and I made no effort to join with Simon in the conversation.

We were nearly home, that last stretch of the highway where the lights of the city had finally faded and the countryside spread darkly all around us, the city traffic all falling away. Simon was speaking of a deal he was in the process of finalizing with some Richmond business board, and the car hit a small bump in the road which barely jarred our bodies and did not interrupt the story Simon was relating. Somehow though, that smallest of bumps jarred something in my mind. When the revelation came it was not a name, nor was it a face. Instead it was another memory, a memory of whispered words in a silent and sunlight room.

A memory of my mother's voice, a pleading edge within it I could not recall ever having noted within it. But words from long ago and maybe from a dream.

"Dominate me, baby..."

Words so strange that my mother could never in a million years have spoken them, not in the most private of hours.

But all the same it was her voice, as familiar to me as my own and no mistaking it. My mother's voice in the soft and pleading whimper that spoke of some great and yawning need.

"Dominate me, baby.."

Sitting here tonight on this veranda, it all seems so strange and long ago. So much has passed since this journey began for me, for us.

I've learned so much, seen so much, have found myself reborn in a mold I had never once considered but cannot say at all that I regret.

Sitting here tonight I am watching the fields to the east, where once my ancestors worked, I am waiting for my mother to arrive.

What will she say when she sees me now?

What will her reaction be when I tell her this story that is as much hers as it is mine?

I can feel the warmth spreading upwards from my sex, the vibe that does not cease my to provoke and from which here is no escape. I can feel myself ready to cum, I do not know how much longer I can resist the pleasure between my thighs and all the delights that I have come to know. Still I know that I must resist, that the time has not yet come.

I am waiting for headlights along a long and empty driveway.

I am waiting for my mother and all that will unfold when at last she finds me here, in this place where I have come to wait.

To be continued...