Harvest of Sighs

Chapter 12-1

Chapter Twelve

DelphineThe club is called Justine’s, and it’s a meander of richly furnished rooms set into the heart of St. James—leather and wood and books, fireplaces, and small nooks for statues, and rugs so plush my feet sink into them as I stand. The light comes from the fires and sconces and the occasional chandelier; there always seem to be piano notes drifting from some distant room, punctuated with equally musical moans and cries.

Paintings hang from picture rails mounted on jewel-toned walls. Large oil works, small watercolors, portraits and landscapes and slyly erotic scenes, rendered so subtly that one hardly notices the c***s and cunts until one is staring directly at them. In the lobby, a gilt-framed painting stretches nearly from the floor to the ceiling: Cupid wrapped in silk ties and sulking while someone reaches to untie him.

Hope Comforting Love in Bondage, it’s called.

When I walk into the lobby today, I’m greeted by a young man in an impeccably tailored three-piece suit, the leather waistcoat underneath his jacket the only nod to the club’s true nature. He’s fat, with a full face and full body, and even though I wasn’t feeling self-conscious or nervous, I feel something inside my chest ease a little.

It eases even more as I see a woman my size walk through the far doorway and into a hallway. A naked man crawls behind her on hands and knees, his head down and his erect c**k bobbing as he goes.

“Mistress Rebecca sends her apologies that she isn’t able to meet you here herself,” the concierge says. He has a puckish face, with an upturned nose and sparkling blue eyes, and a spray of freckles across his cheeks. But despite the Peter Pan look, his bearing is nothing but stillness and grace. “She asked me to show you to your room.”

“Yes, of course,” I say with a beam and follow him as he leads me into a hallway. He pulls back the cage on an old-fashioned lift, and then together we go up to the second floor, where I’m led to a room furnished like a study—bookshelves, a desk, a small fireplace with a statue of Pan f*****g a goat on the top. The walls are painted in a dark garnet, and there’s a big window teasing a view of St. James’ Park—a glimpse of bright, new green in a world of gray.

But it’s not a study, not truly. A study wouldn’t have racks of paddles and crops set between the bookshelves, a study wouldn’t have a sensible wood floor for easy cleaning. A study wouldn’t have a bed set into the far corner with cuffs already dangling from the bedposts.

A study wouldn’t have leather lingerie waiting for me on the primly made bed.

“She expects you to dress and wait next to the desk. Kneeling, of course. Do you need help dressing?”

I go to the bed and study the lingerie. When I was a teenager, I used to hate the sight of my clothes laid flat because they always looked so much bigger than I thought they would be. I don’t feel that way nearly as often now, but there is a brief moment—an instant, nothing more—when I think: no.

When I think: anything but this.

Because this isn’t truly lingerie, not really. I’ve modeled for plus-size lingerie brands before; I’ve worn my own lingerie to take cute, flirty Insta pictures in. Lace, mesh, silk, cotton so fine one can peek n*****s and navels through it—all of that is workable. All of that I can do, and I have done, and I know how to angle my body and twist myself just right for the desired effects.

But the outfit Rebecca’s chosen—it’s nothing but straps. Leather straps, which means there’s no give, no stretch, no forgiveness. It will press into my flesh. It will show all the places where I’m soft. There will be no twisting, no angles, no way to hide that my body is a fat body, and I don’t want to hide that my body is a fat body, because it is and I’m proud of it, but—

But—

I don’t know. I don’t like how this is making me feel. This is worse than being naked somehow, this is having a lover say, here, dress up in this slutty thing I found, and having to show one’s lover that one can’t, that one only looks good in slutty clothes with planning and good angles and maybe a couple passes through Adobe Lightroom.

This is having to explain to a lover that one’s body won’t look as good as the lover imagines it will, and that feels an awful lot like saying, my body doesn’t look good at all. I know that’s not true—at least I think? I think I know that? But it feels true.

It feels brutally and humiliatingly true.

When I look up at the concierge, he says—in an offhanded sort of way, like of course it’s not meant to soothe me, it’s just an observation—“A mistress would be very pleased to see her pet wearing the things she chooses.”

I swallow, looking back at it. It’s like a snake on the bed. I’d been smiling earlier, and now I can’t remember what a smile feels like on my lips. “I don’t know if it will fit.”

“Why don’t we see?”

“I—” The idea of trying it on and then knowing for sure that it’s as bad as I’m imagining . . . it’s unbearable.

But before I can say no, before I can run back down the hall and take the lift to freedom, the concierge comes up to me and gently unhooks my bag from my shoulder.

“I’ll assist,” he says, and then he’s helping me out of my jacket with quiet grace.

“I don’t know . . .”

My bag and jacket are stowed in a discreet cupboard among the bookshelves, and then he’s kneeling at my feet, unbuckling my heels with a surprising deftness. Or maybe not so surprising, given that it’s a kink club. Rebecca told me last time that the employees here sometimes work as submissives or Doms, depending on the demand. Perhaps he’s been trained to do this very thing. Perhaps he would do it for fun even if he wasn’t paid.

My shoes deposited in the same cupboard, he then moves to help me with my clothes. “This outfit came from a very well-known atelier,” he informs me, again in that casual kind of voice, “and the atelier only takes custom orders. This means your mistress ordered this specifically for you. She would have given the atelier your measurements in order to do so.”

I chew on my lip as he unzips my dress. “You think so?”

The dress is tugged off, and then he steps back so I can remove my own knickers and bra. I’m not shy—photoshoots cure one of that quite quickly—but I still hesitate.

“I hate this,” I say. “I hate this right now.”

“My Dom sometimes makes me wear a corset,” the concierge says with a rueful smile. “I hated it at first—my belly hangs below the bottom and my back spills over the top, and I just kept thinking, ‘Does he want me to be thinner? Is that what this is? Or does he just want me to be embarrassed and miserable?’”

I run a fingertip along the leather. It’s supple, almost like satin to the touch. “And? Did you tell him you couldn’t wear it anymore?”

The concierge picks up the top part of the lingerie. “No. But I asked him what he wanted with me in a corset, and do you know what he said?”

I shake my head.

“He said he wanted to f**k me in it,” the concierge says with a laugh. “It was hot to him. I was hot to him. That simple.”

That simple.

I close my eyes. I should be over this. Why am I not over this?

“Let’s just try it on,” he says calmly. “If it doesn’t fit, then we will explain everything to your mistress.”

“What if it fits, but I still don’t like it?” I whisper.

He gives me a sympathetic look. “If you were going to push yourself to become braver—if you were going to perform exposure therapy on yourself so that you could wear whatever the hell you wanted—why wouldn’t you do it with someone who’ll reward you with orgasms?”

“I do like orgasms.”

“Of course you do,” he says. “Now lift your arms. There you go. Oh, your hair too, I don’t want it to get caught.”

Together he and I get the top on. The straps crisscross up to my t**s, making leather cups that can be unlaced down the middle to expose my n*****s, and the straps stretch up from those cups to create a halter, which effectively collars my neck.

The concierge cinches me up from the back, and then we turn to look at the mirror. I catch my breath.

Shockingly…it fits. And it fits well. I don’t know when Rebecca managed to find my measurements, or how, but somehow all the straps and laces work together to cup my t**s enticingly, and with plenty of support.

“Now the bottoms,” the concierge says, and these I need less help with, but he still laces up one side while I lace up the other. When the concierge buckles them to the top, I can feel where they crisscross my bottom and bite into my flesh. Not much—it’s too well fitted for that—but some, because it’s inevitable. “Look,” he says, turning me to the mirror. “Look at yourself.”

I look again, and blush. The bottoms are made to expose my s*x, and so framed by all the precisely cut leather is a delta of gold curls, silky and trimmed enough to show the pink seam where I split open. My hair is an equally golden waterfall of sleek waves, sliding against itself as I move this way and that.

“You look like a Disney princess who was cursed into slutitude,” the concierge says fondly. “Your mistress will be very pleased.”

Will she? I turned in the mirror some more, wondering. There’s no hiding the convexities of me like this—but there’s also no hiding that I’ve listened to her, that I’ve done as she asks. Her will binds my body along with the leather; in fact, the leather is her will, the leather is Rebecca’s command, her hunger, her possession of me.

How can I hate it then?

I still feel uncertain as the concierge tidies up the bed and then leaves. I kneel by the desk, ducking my head so that I’m surrounded by a curtain of blond hair.

I stare down at my thighs, which are pale and dimpled and flecked with a handful of stray freckles, and I wait.

I don’t have to wait long.

After only a few minutes on the floor, the door opens and I hear Rebecca enter. Even if I wasn’t expecting her, I’d still know those footsteps. Deliberate, precise, and yet fluid for all that. Almost dancer-like, although Rebecca would never do anything so frivolous as dance. The only time I’d seen her do it was in the thorn chapel, her feet bare and her eyes sparkling with firelight and champagne.

Rebecca strides toward me, and I try to imagine what will happen next. She’ll say she’s pleased maybe, and I’ll get to feel that sweet warmth in my chest at making her happy. Or maybe she won’t say anything at all, but have me present my body for inspection, and I’ll know I’ve pleased her by the curl of her mouth or by the satisfied flick of her eyes.

I’m not ready for what actually happens.

Rebecca makes a punched, gasping noise like she’s about to fall from some great height, a noise that’s as needy as it is stunned, and I’m surprised into looking up at her.

We meet eyes across the room, and for a moment, we’re both still, her lips parted and her eyes glittering, and before I even know what’s happening, before I can prepare to be bossed around, made to crawl, paddled on the backside, whatever, she’s on me. She’s in front of me and she’s yanking me up by the leather straps of my bodice and then she’s devouring my mouth like a woman starved. She’s molding her lips to mine as her hands find my hair, my waist, my arse, and she’s seizing me to her like she’ll rip this city apart if she can’t use me right now. Like she’ll set the world on fire if I’m not hers.

The kiss is like no other kiss we’ve shared. There’s a feral life to it, a desolation, and when I open my lips to say something—I don’t even know what—she steals inside my mouth with her tongue, and all my words leave me anyway. She’s too hot, too soft and slick, and each stroke of her tongue against mine sends thrills chasing through me, skating down my spine to the soles of my feet and skipping to the tips of my fingers. Breathing is an impossible thing, it’s all stolen wet gasps and shuddering exhales, and I’m dizzy, I’m so dizzy with it, but in the best possible way, like being on a sailboat that’s turning too fast, like dancing at a club so hard I can’t breathe, like watching thorns bite into my hand as they make me bleed.