Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [234]
Sex is in charge here, and Sex has no difficulty in detecting that she has him on a leash. He waves her politely ahead of him, and they go up the stairs. She walks up slowly, letting him have a good view of her tight-laced back. His murmured conversation with Ax carries oddly in the stairwell.
They ascend into a circular room built around the stairwell. Its ceiling is a glass dome above the two-metre-high walls. Dee sees the sun, and the darting manta-shapes of passing aircraft. Nothing else overlooks the room, which seems to combine the functions of a studio, a gallery and a bedroom. There’s a drawing-console and a camera-array. Around the walls are chairs, low tables, and long couches which might be used as beds, though the artfully casual deployment of covers and cushions makes their function ambiguous. The walls are hung with ornate weapons – swords of beaten steel, lasers of brass and ruby – and with pictures, of children who look vulnerable and women who look invulnerable.
‘Would you like a drink, lady?’
‘I would,’ she says distantly. ‘Dark Star.’
Parris’s quick, almost obsequious smile can’t quite conceal his momentary grimace at her taste in liquor, but he goes over to a drinks cabinet and a fridge and prepares the mixture. He brings it over, ice clinking, and touches her glass with his own of chilled wine.
Parris smiles as she drains her glass. He discards his kimono. Under it he’s wearing deeply unoriginal bondage gear, a costume of belts and clips. His cock is straining against what looks like a painfully tight jockstrap, ‘strap’ being the operative word.
Ax, to her surprise, drops on all fours and scampers across the room to a big wardrobe. He nudges the bottom of the door with his head, and the door swings open to reveal an apparatus of chains and straps. Dee slams her (fortunately solid) glass down on the most expensive and delicate table-surface within reach, and turns on her heel and looks at Parris.
‘I understand,’ she says coldly, ‘that you have been a very wicked man.’
Parris nods. His eyes are shining, in a face that’s become a flushed mask of humility.
Dee lets the Sex program play out the scene. She slaps his face, a little harder than he perhaps expects.
‘I have come to judge you,’ she says. She pretends to think, scrutinising him. She looks around the room, until her glance lights on the open cupboard. Ax is squatting beside it, his tongue hanging out. Dee’s eyes widen in mock surprise. She points to the cupboard.
‘Over there,’ she orders. Parris walks towards it. He flashes her a servile, collusive smile.
‘Eyes down!’ Dee yells.
Parris obediently bows his head and walks to the door.
Dee has the whole protocol mapped out in her head, but she’s not really into this sort of thing (being, if truth be told, more sub than dom) and she gives the finicky business of shackling and binding him perhaps less attention than it deserves. It ends with her squeezing his cheeks until he opens his mouth. She pops a rubber ball into his mouth, closes his jaws with a finger on his nose and a thumb on the point of his chin, and slaps a piece of insulating-tape (of a suitably shiny black) across his mouth.
She drops out of character for a moment.
‘OK?’
Parris nods. Dee checks the restraints. They’re secure.
Ax, who all the while has been working his way slowly up from the man’s toes to his knees with playful nips of his teeth, suddenly stands up and steps back. Dee steps back too, and together they look at the man hanging in the cupboard.
Ax smiles into Parris’s suddenly troubled, puzzled stare. He reaches behind his neck, and the long knife is in his hand. He tosses it sideways into the other hand, and then back. He