The Tutor

"I can't," I choked.

"I didn't ask if you could, I asked if you would. Do you want to be my slave?"

I shook my head. That was too much. It was too inappropriate, too horrible, too painful. I wanted to be free, to return to normal.

"Do you want to want to be my slave?"

I hesitated, tangled in the syntax for a moment before I realized that yes, soaking as I was in the perfume of her ejaculate, having witnessed her in the depths of intimacy, and with the strange gratitude towards her sympathy still swirling around in my head, I did want to want her. I had not exactly enjoyed the past half-hour, or however long it had been since she threw me to the ground and tied me up, but she was beautiful, and she thought I was beautiful, and she was only doing it for my own good....

"I asked you a question, Lexxxi." Her voice was not impatient, but it insisted.

"Maybe," I said to the floor.

"That's a start." She crouched down into a squat in front of me and pulled my chin up with a finger to look her in the eyes.

"I know it's hard," she said seriously. "You've been hurt, and you haven't healed. I am not promising to heal you. But I won't hurt you----" she smiled suddenly, and my heart caught at the sight---- "at least, not in that way. You know you will receive spankings if you disobey me, but you can handle a little pain of the flesh, can't you, Lexxxi?"

I nodded before I knew I was doing it. My bottom no longer burned; so much had happened since then that I had almost entirely forgotten it.

"Good girl," she said, and caressed my face with one hand, wiping a bit of her own secretion from my cheek with her thumb, and popped it into her mouth.

"Did you taste me?" she asked. "When I came all over you?"

I shook my head, and felt vaguely disappointed with my answer. A good slave would have---- but, I had to remind myself, I was not her slave.

"It's all right," she said. "You'll have lots of other chances." She stood up, and stretched.

"Time for your reward, Lexxxi," she said. "Get up and follow me."

My knees were burning, and screamed in pain as I wobbled to my feet unsteadily, my hands tied behind my back, and balanced precariously on the high heels I was still wearing from the office. A lifetime ago, it felt like. Kanae was already disappearing into the back hall. I hobbled after her, telling myself that I had to make sure that she wasn't going to go through my or Fiona's private effects, but when she glanced back and smiled, I blushed to realize how eagerly I had obeyed her.

She led me into my own bedroom, and through it into my bathroom. She opened the shower and started the water running.

"Your mistress was very inconsiderate," she said. "She came all over you without asking if you wanted her cum. Did you want my cum, Lexxxi?"

After a moment, I shook my head. She tilted her head and regarded me thoughtfully, her eyes gleaming behind her glasses.

"Tell me the truth," she said.

"I didn't want it," I found myself muttering, looking down, "but----" I looked up at her shyly. "I didn't mind getting it."

Her face melted into a smile.

"That's a good girl," she said softly. "As a reward for your honesty, I'm going to untie your hands."

Almost automatically I began looking around the bathroom for anything I could use to defend myself with once my hands were free; but of course there was nothing that could be used as a weapon except an old curling iron which hadn't been plugged in for years. And even the thought of trying to strike Kanae with it horrified and disgusted me. I was not a scrapper even at the best of times, and I was already half in love with her.

She came up behind me and loosed a single line that, it seemed to me magically, caused both entire loops around my wrists to come loose. I felt my arms fall free and sighed in relief; I rubbed my aching wrists.

"And now," she said, gesturing to the now-steaming shower, "your reward for kneeling and watching me cum. You are going to get clean. Take off all of your clothes."

I hesitated, and looked at her.

"Are you going to watch me?" I asked in a small voice.

"I have to supervise my slave," she said, raising her eyebrows slightly, "until I can be sure that she will follow my orders without thinking."

My cheeks burned. The implicit assumption that I was already her slave, even though she laid so much stress on the fact that I had yet to agree to be her slave, was hard to follow, and I was tired in both body and mind. The shower looked so good.

"I haven't been naked in front of anyone for so long," I found myself saying, in explanation for why my fingers were fumbling so much with the buttons of my blouse.

"It's all right," she said. "Take your time, Lexxxi. Do you want my help?"

I shook my head shortly. It had been bad enough when she removed my skirt. Finally I worked all the buttons out of their holes and shrugged off my blouse. Then, blushing fiercely, I unclasped my bra (my arms complained as I reached them behind my back once more) and removed it as well, trying to hide the swell of my breasts and their ragingly swollen nipples behind my arm.

"Panties too," she said softly. "And shoes."

I grimaced at her, and began to push down the waistband of my panties, then looked at her with a mixture of fear and triumph. I couldn't remove my panties entirely, since my ankles were tied together. She nodded, and knelt in front of me.

"Lexxxi," she said seriously, looking up at me, "I am going to ask your permission before I do this. Do I have it?"

The breath caught in my throat. She was so close to my privates, with only a thin layer of fabric hiding me from her. It didn't matter what had happened; every instinct in my body was telling me that I had to fight to protect the sanctity of my privates from ever being disturbed again.

"What are you going to do?" I asked in a shriller voice than I wanted to.

"I am going to remove your panties. Do I have your consent?"

A long silence drew out in the bathroom as her eyes stared up at mine between my swelling breasts. Her face was inflexible, unreadable; I knew my lips were trembling and indecisive. Finally I nodded yes.

"Please don't touch me there," I whispered.

She looked down without responding, and took the fabric in both hands, and pulled them apart. To my astonishment, the panties ripped open in a single tear, from the waistband to the left leg seam. She tore open the right leg seam, and then whipped the fabric off of me, leaving me exposed.

She stayed kneeling in front of me and looked directly at my hairy bush. She breathed deeply through her nose, and closed her eyes. I held my breath, waiting in terror. And then she sat back on her haunches and stood back up.

"Your pussy is as pretty as the rest of you," she said. "I'm so glad you're going to give it to me."

I was choking with emotion as I bent down to unstrap my heels. Part of it was the swimming, untroubled delight I felt, in spite of my own wishes, every time she paid me a compliment; but most of it was nauseating fear and loathing and terror that she was still going to do and be everything Jason had done and been. There was something else, though, too, an emotional undercurrent which I could not identify and which frightened me all the more for its mysteriousness. I felt painfully hot all over, and like my extremities were being either burned with coals or pressed against freezing metal.

At last I stepped into the shower, leaving the door open at her request, and submitted to the soothing pacification of warm, steady water. While she watched, I shampooed her out of my hair, scoured her off my face, soaped her off my shoulders, breasts, torso and legs. It had been a long day even before the horror, violence, and ejaculate of the past few hours; the long shower was necessary. But feeling restored, I reached out for the tap to turn it off.

"Not yet," said Kanae's voice through the steam. "You haven't washed your pussy or your asscrack."

I hesitated. "They're not dirty" would be a childish way to respond, not to mention a foolish lie. "I can't," would be closer to the truth, but it might invite scrutiny, or worse yet, another offer of help. Ignoring her and ending my shower anyway would be even worse; there was no telling what she might do to punish my recalcitrance. The only option I had left was what I did: soaping up another washcloth and carefully, clinically washing my undercarriage without ever glancing in her direction from shame and resentment.

When at last she declared I was clean, I was allowed to step out of the shower, and she toweled off my shoulders and torso, but left the rest to me while she sat on the closed toilet lid and watched. I wanted to snap something cutting at her, but all that came to mind was to ask sarcastically if she was enjoying the view, and that her response would be sincerely in the affirmative was too obvious to make the question worth the trouble.

"Was the shower a good reward, Lexxxi?" she asked, as she led me, naked except for the cords around my ankles, back into my bedroom.

"Yes," I said shortly. It had been lovely, at least until she had made me touch myself.

"I'm glad," she said. "Now lie down on the bed."

I looked at her for a long moment. It seemed certain that something sexual was going to happen now, that her promise that I would not be raped would prove to be a lie. I had a wild thought of trying to make a break for it, running out into the living room, grabbing the phone, calling the police -- I still had a landline, my old-fashioned employers insisted on it -- but even as I thought about it she moved between me and the door, not threateningly, with only the mild patience in her eyes that had been there ever since her orgasm.

"It's okay, Lexxxi," she said. "You aren't going to do anything you don't want to do. But you are going to have an orgasm before you leave this room."

I had taken one step toward the bed before I turned. "That's an oxymoron," I said automatically.

She raised her eyebrows.

"I don't want to have an orgasm. I will never want to have an -- orgasm." My voice shook on the word. It reminded me too much of the bad times.

"With all due respect, counselor," she said in a faintly mocking tone, "you can't know everything you will ever want. That's a petitio principii. We are here to discover your desires, not to assume them from the start."

I breathed heavily. How did this community college student know the jargon of legal argument? Her eyes laughed at me behind their lenses.

"Lie down," she said, and turned off the overhead light.

The curtains were heavy and drawn; and it was late enough in the year that it was getting dark already outside. I scrambled onto the bed with a sudden childish fear of being grabbed at by unknown things in the dark, and flung myself onto my back, my legs squeezed shut, my hands in fists at my side.

A match hissed, and her face lit up in its flicker as she lit the candles on my bedside table. They were not candles I had ever bought or placed there. How long had she been planning this?

In the yellowy, flickering candlelight I saw her move to take a seat at the end of the bed. She could reach out and touch my feet, but that was all, unless she moved.

"Let me tell you a story," she said calmly.

"Is it as horrible and disgusting as everything else tonight?" I asked, wanting to be spiteful, the fear still churning away in my stomach, ready to erupt at any moment as nausea.

"I think it's beautiful," she said calmly. "But you are free to have your own response. Listen and find out.

"Once upon a time, there was a girl who had always excelled at everything she ever did. She was the perfect daughter, the model student, the best girlfriend, the ideal employee. Everyone, all her life, told her she was perfect. What they didn't say, but what she understood them to mean, was that if she was ever imperfect, in even the slightest, tiniest way, it would mean the ruin of everything she had ever been, and she would no longer be worthy of love or acceptance or admiration or anything good. So as she got older and life grew more and more complex, she had to work harder and harder to maintain the perfection that she demanded of herself, and that she assumed the world demanded from her as well.

"And then one day she did something wrong."

I held my breath. This, surely, was where the sexual theme would come in. My entire body tensed in anticipation.

"She found out, entirely by accident, that a friend's boyfriend was cheating on her friend, and she didn't tell her friend."

She fell silent, and seemed to expect me to say something.

"Why not?" I asked at last. Kanae bowed her head.

"She was afraid to get involved. She had known the boyfriend first, and wasn't sure where her loyalties ought to lie. In any case, the friend found out, both about the cheating and her secret knowledge, and told the girl who tried to be perfect never to speak to her again."

She seemed lost in thought, and I waited for her to continue.

"The girl was crushed by this failure. She stopped trying in class, and yelled at her parents to leave her alone, and gave her boyfriend his class ring back, and quit her job. She spiraled into a deep depression for years, and failed too many classes, and could not get into the college of her choice, and had to take the GED and attend community college."

She was silent again. I felt that I had to say something. Awkwardly, because I felt I should still be resentful of her, but I was still rather touched by the story, I said,

"I'm sorry that happened to you."

She smiled, the candlelight glinting opaquely on her glasses.

"You have not earned hearing my own story," she said. "The girl in the story is one of my slaves now. You might meet her one day, if you are good. She is much happier now leaving all of the decision-making to me, since relying on her own judgment had hurt her so badly. She is excelling again, and will be transferring to a four-year college soon, with enough credits to graduate early and several potential good jobs lined up when she does. I take care of my slaves."

My tongue felt thick against the roof of my mouth as something like terror had flooded my system.

"Why did you tell me this?" I said in a voice that was more croak than whisper.

"Because I thought you needed to hear it." She looked at me carefully in the candlelight, and her face lost the faint smile it had worn throughout her recitation of the story. "Her story is not so different from yours, even though your mistake has been making you miserable for much longer."

My entire body quivered with emotion. Outrage, first of all, that this girl would dare to allude even indirectly to what Jason had done to me (let alone that she had the gall to know anything about it in the first place), and then, in an enormous wave that overwhelmed all thought of outrage, self-pity, as the truth of her words cut deeply into me.

I was miserable. I had not admitted it to myself, because it had been my default state for so many years -- since long before I'd ever even considered leaving Jason -- and I had to project a comfortable, reassuring image for Fiona's sake, for the sake of my career, for the sake of friends like Tori who had their own problems to worry about. But I was desperately, crushingly, unhappy.

Why else had I cut myself off from my own body, insisted that I was broken and therefore unworthy of (and more importantly, unavailable for) love? It was a coping mechanism, sure, but it had narrowed my life to a tiny sliver of experience, living for Fiona, for my job, for others and never, for even a moment, for myself.

Real sobs now shook my body, not the tearless sobs of the shock response I had experienced on the couch, but wet, choking, snotty sobs that felt more cathartic than any cry I could remember having since I was a child.

"That's right," Kanae's calm, even voice came to me distantly through my own heaving wails. "Let yourself grieve. It's only right. You've missed so much. But if you say you'll be mine, I will give you more joy and happiness than you can even imagine."

"Wh-why---- are you d-doing---- this?" I choked out between sobs. I had a vague sense that I had asked this before, but her answer had been vague and unsatisfactory. I was pleading now; I had to know what about me had been so clearly vulnerable to her. What it was about me that meant that her campaign of stress, intimidation, cosseting, and overwhelming sexuality was coming dangerously close to working.

"When you were a little girl, do you remember picking flowers?" she said.

"Y-yes," I sniffled, entirely baffled by this apparently irrelevant line of thought.

"Why did you pick them? Was it because the flowers needed you to provide something they couldn't provide for themselves? Or because they were beautiful in their own right?"

"Because they were beautiful," I said through heavy breaths, finally coming down from the worst of the weeping fit. "But I was killing them, even if I didn't mean to."

"That's right," said Kanae. "I saw something beautiful and wanted to have it. It's that simple. But I always put my flowers in water, so they keep their bloom. And you'll be surprised how long you can survive on what I feed you."

"But it will kill me eventually," I said, blinking at her. I was surprised to realize that I felt nothing in particular about this analogy. If any more evidence was needed that I had been living in a dangerously depressed state for years, I had it now.

"It will kill the person you currently consider you, yes," said Kanae. "The person that will continue to exist afterward will be someone else, and I promise you will like being that person much better."

I lay staring at the ceiling for a long time, watching the flickering candlelight play ghostly patterns on it. Kanae sat at the foot of the bed and waited.

"How do you know?" I said at last.

"All of my slaves are happier as my slaves than they were before," she said. "But it's not just happiness. They're more themselves in every way than they were before, more alive. They feel sharper pain, they feel deeper sorrow, they feel bigger joy, they feel wilder ecstasy. They truly live every moment of life, instead of just sleepwalking through it. All they had to do was give up the one thing that was making them miserable -- the illusion of control."

It was sounding too good to be true, dangerously so. I had a sudden sensation of teetering on the very edge of a steep precipice, and that the slightest wrong move would send me hurtling down to a doom I had no way to avoid.

"Let me think about it," I said. "I'll sleep on it, and tell you my decision in the morning. I'm too worn out to think straight."

For the first time since I had known her, Kanae laughed: a curiously musical sound, low in her throat and as just as calm as her usual habit of speaking.

"No, Lexxxi," she said. "That was an adorable attempt, but you cannot put me off any longer. Will you be my slave?"

My heart pounded wildly in my chest. My tongue seemed thick and hard to move in my mouth. Something huge and physical was moving in my abdomen: the nausea, I was afraid, having successfully kept it at bay for so long now; but something else, something even more horrifying and urgent, something that I knew instinctively, even without knowing what it was, would smash me to pieces if I gave it its head.

"What would I have to do if I said yes?" I was playing for time desperately now. I could taste salt in the back of my throat, a sign of dehydration, or adrenal fatigue, I couldn't remember which.

"Whatever I tell you to do."

"It's too dangerous," I whined. "You could ruin my life."

"Yes," she agreed.

"Everything I've worked to achieve, all the security I have. I can't throw that away. I'm a grown woman, a mother."