By the time Sue reached the door, she was already soaked to the skin. The rain fell in sheets turning the unpaved parts of the driveway into a river.
A huddled figure sat in a domed porter's chair by the door. Only his battered frock coat and crumpled hat were visible in the gloom, both were as decrepit as the chair itself. "Your first visit," he said as she entered the lobby.
"Yes," Sue replied.
"It was not a question," the doorman snapped, "Room 13." A withered hand emerged from the sleeve of the coat to point the way.
Sue began to ask if there was somewhere she could freshen up first but the doorman cut her off, "Welcome to the Combat Zone." His tone was anything but welcoming.
The room was empty of furniture, the only lighting coming from an emergency strip light hanging off the wall at a precarious angle. It had been a grand room once but all was crumbling and decayed. The remnants of a chain that had once held a chandelier hung from a hook in the center of the ornately plastered ceiling. Sheets of rusted corrugated iron had been nailed across what had once been a window.
Just as Sue was getting used to the gloom, a device Sue had taken to be the remains of a floor lamp unfolded and wheeled itself across the floor. Like everything else in the combat zone, the droid was battered and old but it was functional.
"Consent to continue," the machine barked in electronic tones. A display showing a consent form unfolded from the top of its stalk.
The form was detailed, clinical and explicit. Some categories, mostly those involving criminal activities and bodily fluids, were pre-marked PROHIBITED in red. Tapping an unlocked category once caused it to show REFUSE in red. Tapping it again caused CAUTION to appear in yellow. Tapping it a third time and GOOD appeared in green. A fourth tap cleared the entry.
Marking categories yellow caused the indicator on an analog temperature dial underneath the display to move right. The left hand side of the dial was marked green, just past the center was a patch of orange, beyond that red. Different activities caused different amounts of movement but marking a yellow category green didn't move the gauge at all. To the right of the dial, a light inside button pulsed slowly green.
Sue began by marking her green categories and was disappointed to see the dial barely passing the halfway point. Marking restraints and public display yellow nudged the dial further towards the orange zone. After two more CAUTION choices, the indicator was almost there.
Sue was wet and cold. Pressing the button to accept her choices had no effect. The message was clear enough: move the dial further or leave.
Fortunately, one more selection was sufficient. The button changed color from green to orange and the machine sputtered back to life. An eye stalk contraption extended itself from the Lampbot. "Read consent for the record" the mechanism crackled.
The wording of the summary was as clinical and explicit as the form but no distinction was made between degrees of consent. As she read the words aloud, Sue felt her stomach muscles tighten.
"Public Display will not be possible."
Sue turned to see Max dressed in black tie, carrying a battered black Gladstone bag in his left hand. Max's dinner jacket was the only thing she had seen which was not broken, tattered or rusted since she had arrived, including her own clothes, the ones Max had told her to buy. Cheaply made but not cheap, they had not fit well to start with and the rain had only made them worse.
His choice of dress had surprised her. The first time they met at the book launch, Max had been one of the few men present not wearing a Tux, wearing an immaculate white Jacquard cocktail jacket instead. What had he said then? An Englishman never wears black tie before six o'clock and never when a lady will be present.
Max ignored her, turning instead to dismiss the contraption. "That will be all Cora." The device folded itself back down and trundled out of the room.
Max locked the door behind him and pocketed the key.
"Hello, Max," Sue began then stopped as she felt the stinging blow to her cheek.
"Have to be given permission." Max said, "You were not asked a question, you were not given permission to speak."
Sue opened her mouth to apologize, then thought better of it and nodded.
"Public Display requires an audience." Max continued, enunciating the words crisply in the manner of an English schoolmaster. "These walls are thin but you can cry or shout as much as you like. We are very much alone."
Max grabbed Sue's lower jaw, forcing her head upwards, "don't worry about the porter interrupting us either, he doesn't have ears and he's bolted to the chair."
Max lifted the bag to Sue's face and opened his hand. The bag hit the floor with a thud, "open it."
Sue was directed to arrange the contents of the bag on the floor in neat rows. Items she was familiar with such as the paddle and cane went on the left, the ropes, cat of nine tails, shock collar and all the other items new to her on the right. When the bag was empty, Max picked up one of the ropes and used it to bind Sue's wrists together, passed the other end through the chandelier chain and gave it a sharp tug.
Getting into the right headspace for a scene had always taken effort. The transition from Sue the business executive to Sue the submissive usually required the assistance of Sue the brat. Max switched Sue into submissive mode as easily as turning on a light.
"We are going to push your boundaries," Max said, sweeping the familiar items aside with his foot and picking up another length of rope.
Sue flinched with the sudden realization that their scene would be all about the yellow choices. The coded message in the dinner jacket now as clear as day: Max would not be treating her like a lady.
Max worked slowly and methodically, winding ropes around each ankle and fastening them to eyebolts screwed into the floor. With all four limbs immobilized, her legs splayed, Sue expected the assault on her body to begin. Instead, Max wound more rope over her dress, pressing the cold, wet fabric into her skin.
The ropes began with a double loop cinched under her breasts, with one end passing over each shoulder, then crossing at the front to pass under her armpits, crossing again around the back of her neck and so on to make an inverted pentagram front and back.
The upper harness complete, Max rolled the hem of the dress up underneath it to reveal her panties, which were pushed down as far as the ankle restraints would allow. Sue let out a stifled yelp as the cloth bit into her flesh and whimpered slightly as she felt the tails of the flogger caressing her buttocks.
Sue yelped as a cold, hard object was suddenly pressed up against her spine. The shock caused her to momentarily lose her balance but Max threw his other arm around her waist to stop her dislocating a joint. Sue tried to crane her neck to identify the object, but she already knew what it must be: the object to push the last boundary she had selected.
Max held the butt plug up for Sue to examine. Sue's guess was correct. Anal play had always been a red line for her, a line she would need to cross tonight if she ever wanted to return. The business end of the device was tear-drop-shaped with a number of radial gouges cut into the widest part with a t-shaped handle connected by a curving stem. Sue could see her face and Max standing behind her in the polished steel.
Sue had seen similar plugs on the Web but the handle of this one was different. Instead of being a flattened oval with a hole through the flattened part. The stem of this handle ended in a short tube with three curving U shaped channels emerging from it in a Y pattern. Before Sue could worry about their purpose, the device was hooked into the center of the pentacle harness and the flogger began inflicting a fiery pain on her buttocks.
"There is nobody to hear you," Max said between strokes. Sue tried to resist giving him the satisfaction, but soon the silence had turned to yelps, the yelps had turned to protests and the protests to full throated, inarticulate screams.
"That is better," Max said, "now we can begin."
Max took off his jacket and snapped on a pair of purple nitrile gloves. Before continuing, he examined all of Sue's bindings and cut parts of the dress away with scissors. The panties simply fell apart with a tug. Sue had never felt so naked. Her vulva and her anus were open, vulnerable, her arms and legs bound.
Max smeared the business end of the plug with grease and teased it against her asshole. It felt ridiculously large. Max grabbed her crotch, pushing his thumb and forefinger into her cunt and ass, lifting her body off the floor. Max repeated the process several times, each time working the plug a little deeper inside.
The plug fully inserted, Max wove a second harness around Sue's lower body, the ropes passing through the channels in the plug behind and digging painfully into her slit in front. A second, harsher flogging followed, the new arrangement amplifying the effect of each blow, focusing the force at the center of her being as the plug and ropes kneaded her clit front and rear.
Whether the balance was pleasure or pain, Sue could not tell. But after a while, instead of twisting away in a vain attempt to avoid the blows, she found her body turning to accept their full force as if under control of another person. It was as if the body receiving the blows, the mind controlling it and the mind observing the process were three separate people. She could not say how long the torture continued, but it must have ended as Max was there, holding her, soothing her wrists and ankles where the ropes had bound her, rubbing her body dry with a towel. "Aftercare," Max said simply, placing his jacket over her shoulders to keep her warm.
When she woke the next morning, Sue was in Max's bed. Max sat next to her in a chair, still wearing the shirt and trousers from the night before but the tie was now unfastened, the ends hanging asymmetrically. The jacket was thrown over a chair, the maker's mark embroidered on the lining: Henry Poole & Co. Savile Row.
Max had also told her an Englishman would never call a dinner jacket a Tuxedo unless it was made by Henry Poole, the tailors who had made the very first dinner jacket for the Prince of Wales which quickly found admirers amongst the members of the Tuxedo Club in New York.
"What happened last night?" asked Sue, "it was different."
"You were in subspace," Max explained.
"I think I might have liked it," Sue replied, "can we do it again?"
"You are a good girl," Max replied, the only praise Sue wanted or needed.
*****
It was over a year before Max decided Sue was ready to return to the Combat Zone. A year of pushing boundaries, of learning the true limits of her mind and body, of checking off the remaining items on the consent form until only one remained.
Rather to Sue’s surprise, being shared came easier than sharing Max. Perhaps that was because Max clearly took pleasure from allowing other men to use her body for pleasure. Watching another submit to Max’s cock did not make Sue jealous: Orgasms are not a rival good. But she could never watch a woman receive lashes from Max’s flogger without thinking, that could be me.