"It's not like I am being paid to fuck"

Lisa's Uber arrived for her before I had chance to respond.

It's exactly like being paid to fuck, I had wanted to scream, What else do you call it?

It was the same old argument. We had shared our two bed Mountain View rental for three years during which Lisa's career had taken off while I was barely managing to keep my head above water. Lisa spent her vacations in Barbados and Hawaii. I spent mine moonlighting as a network admin to make my college loan payments on time.

We both knew the reason Lisa had been so much more successful and it certainly wasn't her technical abilities or her people skills: Lisa went to those parties and I did not.

I'm not a prude by any means. Any Friday or Saturday that was neither a party night nor one of my increasingly brief periods of monogamy would find us in a singles bar. The morning after the parties (or more likely afternoon) I would trade a cooked breakfast with a pot of really strong black coffee for details of Lisa's night out. It was a ritual so firmly established that Lisa continued to insist on her sausage, bacon and fried egg sunny side up even after becoming an otherwise strict vegan.

There are silicon valley parties and there are silicon valley founders parties. The parties are like the minor leagues in baseball, a feeder circuit for the main event. There are many rich people in the valley, but only a few are really rich, Engineers drive Jags and Beemers, Founders drive Ferraris and Aston Martins.

Founders are the people who get into the startups first and get out with the biggest rewards. Joining a hot startup and making a million bucks in the IPO is the dream of every engineer in the valley. Congratulations, do it twice and you buy a house. Founders are the people who get in at the ground floor and get the lion's share. Engineers sign the kids up for a sleepover with friends and invite a couple of dozen people to a two beds-and-a-couch gangbang. Founders host parties.

Lisa was 27, bisexual and uninhibited. Her accounts of her adventures were comprehensive and delivered without the slightest hint of shame. A CEO whose name you must know had fucked her in the rear while she licked his wife's pussy. She had laid head to toe next to an engineer from a rival company and competed to take the most cocks inside her. She had been tied to benches, to ceilings, to whipping posts and to other women.

It was during a pause one of these accounts that Lisa had taken away my lesbivirginity. We were sitting together on the sofa in our sleep shirts, mugs of coffee in hand. I asked what it had felt like to be kissed by a woman and Lisa replied by way of demonstration. After our first kiss, we put our mugs on the table and kissed again without either of us saying a word.

Lisa had offered to pop my woman cherry for me soon after I moved in, an offer I had decided to treat as a joke. My stomach churned as the angels of my better and worse conscience carried out a furious argument in my head as our lips and tongues pressed close together.

Act like a man! Drill her!

Never fuck your roomie!

She, wants it, you want it, do it!

What would Hector think if he saw you?

The last argument was so stupid, I almost laughed. I had known Hector all of two weeks for a start, and what man doesn't fantasize about a threesome with his GF's roomie?

Be like Hector! I thought, and decisively placed my hand on Lisa's thigh. Meeting no resistance, my hand slid her sleep shirt back to explore Lisa's slippery cunt.

A few minutes later, we were a pair of scissors, grinding our pussies against each other. After we both came, Lisa gave me a comprehensive training in the pleasures of my newly discovered vice.

What man doesn't fantasize about a threesome? Hector. "There is never a quid without an eventual pro quo", he said as he dumped me.

Lisa had to make her own breakfast the next morning: I was spending my Saturday morning at work, packing my stuff into the car before the liquidators came to lock the building.

It wasn't the lost money that depressed me, it was the lost time. All I had to show for my six months of work was a huge dent in my bank balance and the Herman Miller Aeron chair I nicked from the CFO's office.

It wasn't just my bank balance that was being depleted, it was my energy. I had worked 350 hours in the last four weeks trying to get a product ready for launch that nobody would ever use. In valley lingo, such projects are known as a death march.

Lisa understood the reason for her missed breakfast and my foul mood the minute I wheeled the chair into the apartment. Lisa realized what had happened immediately. She had looted one herself in the exact same circumstance. I am pretty sure nobody in the valley ever pays for one, they just pick them off the corpses of failed dotcoms.

We always wore the same sleepshirts for our after-party parties and only ever washed them when the stench of sex became too overpowering. Lisa tried to cheer me up with a snapchat from the previous evening's debauchery of her hogtied naked to the spoiler of a bright yellow Lamborghini Countach.

Three men had taken her in that position. A power-fuck for the ages: Taking a beautiful woman in the rear as she was spreadeagled on the rear of the original supercar the original icon they had lusted after since before they discovered women. No man would forget a fuck like that. It would be the fuck they remembered when they fucked their wives, the fuck they remembered with their dying breath.

On any other day, we would have spent the rest of the day at each others naked crotch. But my energy was spent. I slouched off to my room to crawl under the duvet and cry where no-one would see.

****

After three days updating my LinkedIn profile, posting my resume to a half dozen jobs boards and playing way too much Gears of War in the apartment, Lisa summoned me to a lunch at The Good Earthin Palo Alto, 'to meet a friend who might be useful'.

I was tired, depressed and disappointed. There were plenty of jobs on offer but most would be a step back and none seemed likely to be a clear step forward. It didn't seem likely Lisa's head hunter would be able to find me anything different but I was obliged by the fact she had made an effort on my behalf.

Much to my surprise, Dave's portfolio was a clear cut above the rest. There is never a shortage of companies looking for code monkeys able to churn out Java, Python or C# and there are always jobs for systems and network managers. I wanted a job where I could own a little piece of the product we were building, a job that would allow me to move up the ladder, not sideways.

Lisa finished her lentil casserole and left me discussing three positions he thought might be a match. These were all positions that hadn't been posted yet. I wanted to know why they weren't posted, because companies don't ask for what they think they can get.

Despite living in the States for twenty years, Dave had not lost his native English accent. He spoke clearly and with precision as if narrating a documentary for the BBC. As we spent the next hour discussing possibilities and opportunities, I kept reminding myself of the need to focus on my future and not daydream the possibilities of a married man nearly twice my age.

It was only when it was time to leave that I discovered the cause of my unexpected good fortune. After paying the bill, Dave turned to me and asked if I could do him a favor, he had parked head on, could I be his eyes and guide him out of his parking space?

Dave started to explain that the mirrors in his car are practically useless for parking but I already knew that because there is only one car it could be. A car notorious for its comically defective rear vision and grossly incompetent spoiler that actually slowed the car down rather than speeding it up. A car that I had spent many hours thinking about even after Lisa's snapchat had expired: A bright yellow Lamborghini Countach.

A gaggle of admirers had formed around the car and it felt rather good to be the person charged with directing him out. Not that it was a challenge on this occasion, the cars stopped on both sides of University Avenue to give him space. The driver of one of them, a Porsche Boxster gave a smile and a friendly salute as he passed. If only they knew the use that spoiler had been put, I thought.

I was on cloud nine till Dave's farewell brought me down to earth, "Thank you! See you at Victor's on Friday then".

Six words brought my hopes for a new life crashing down again, See you at Victor's on Friday.

Where did I stand? What had Lisa told him? Had I just walked (or been led) into a quid pro quo?

I felt trapped. I could go to Victor's party and trade my self respect for a career or I get another job as a code monkey in a doomed startup on a death march and lose my sanity and my health along with my self-respect.

Lisa had meant well, I am sure of that. Girl goes to party, girl gets favor: Why should the girl who goes to the party be the girl that gets the favor. Why shouldn't the girl who goes to the party gift the favor to a friend in need of it?

That's just not the deal, I said to myself.

Dave was only the middle man. The founders wanted their parties to be filled with attractive, intelligent and available women. Dave's job was to find them.

For me, letting Lisa party for me was the worst deal of all. I might learn to live with myself for whoring my own body out to get ahead but I would never learn to live with whoring out Lisa. And the fact that Lisa was willing to be whored only made things worse. If I couldn't thank her for it, I would have to resent her for it.

Seeing no end to my foul mood, I decided I might as well be completely miserable and headed back up El Camino Real to have the lower half of my body tortured with hot wax. Next day, I went to Baker Beach to practice having people look at me. If I was going to be a whore, I could at least do it well.

Bitch,

Nothing says you're somebody's bitch as surely as being collared and led naked on a leash. It was Lisa's idea and actually rather practical. Touching a collared sub without permission of their master is one of the worst breaches of decorum possible.

Victor's party was just as splendid as you would expect of that Victor, the one you know because he's been a household name for a dozen years and you use his company every day. No expense was spared from the moment of our arrival when we were greeted by liveried staff who took our coats and handed Dom Perignon in crystal glasses from a silver tray. At the end, there were chauffeured limousines to take guests who might have had too much to drink home.

Our arrival marked my transition from the outside world to the party world, from regular me to obedient sub, a transition Lisa had made me practice several times. As the maid removed my coat, I was to tilt my head down towards the floor and put the end of my leash in Lisa's right hand. These apparently simple instructions were actually quite hard to make appear smooth and effortless. Or perhaps that was just some story I was telling myself for distraction.

At this point in the evening, the party might have passed for any other cocktail party in the atrium of an upscale boutique hotel. Guests wore Tuxedos and brightly coloured dresses. A string quartet (well known) played in a musician's gallery and the wait staff moved in and out of the crowd with trays of canapes. It might have passed for any other evening of drinking and small talk if not for the living statues wearing only brightly coloured body paint and a mahogany flogging horse in the shape of a pentagram at the very center of the atrium..

Lisa had told me Victor is in to serious kink and had tried to persuade me that I should start with a 'vanilla' party. After I insisted, she made me read the four page consent form before she let me sign it. I very nearly didn't.

Being collared and naked gave me a feeling of, well liberation. I didn't need to take any responsibility for my decisions because Lisa was making them. I didn't need to talk to anyone, I didn't need to look at them unless Lisa told me to. Several times, I caught myself thinking about myself in the third person, as if I had become a bystander, an observer in my own humiliation.

As we mingled, it became ever apparent that this was unlike any other party I had been to and not just because I was wearing nothing more than high heels and nail varnish. Dresses were not merely revealing, they revealed. The sexual tension that is subtext in any social gathering was made headline.

At a singles bar, I usually knew (or at least had decided) that I wouldn't be going home with a man before they had strung a dozen sentences together, and that was if I bothered to speak to them at all. But at the party, anyone present might fuck me before the night was through. I knew that most of the men had already fucked me in their head before saying a word to Lisa and that they were fucking me again with every pause in the conversation.

"You are the perfect prick tease," Lisa whispered in my ear as we circulated, "naked but unavailable."

Deathmarch.com, as I had taken to calling my former employer came up frequently in conversations that weren't about sex. I was surprised to discover how well known the company had been. Some of the guests had been investors. Some had lost serious money in the collapse. As I listened to them, I began to realize that the business we were building bore little resemblance to the one they thought they were funding. Small wonder they had pulled the plug. That knowledge alone would have been worth the price of admission, had I been willing to pay it.

According to Lisa's way of thinking, the room was filled with some of the most intelligent and successful people in the world. A real first class brains trust. At least half the gathering had degrees from the likes of Stanford, MIT, Caltech. They were rich, yes, and many of them had had more than a little luck. But they had all got where they were through hard work and being among the very best at what they do.

According to my way of thinking, the room was filled with opportunity. If I could dig myself out of my current situation, if I got back on my feet and climbing up the ladder and not slipping back down, there might come a time when I could go to a party like this for pure enjoyment. But not yet.

At ten o'clock, the conversation was silenced by the chimes of an elaborate mechanical clock. Mechanical figurines sprung into actions that initially appeared unremarkable but were then revealed to be obscene. A man who appeared to be chopping wood was actually paddling a naked woman who was sucking his cock. A nun who appeared to be spinning wool was in fact sodomizing herself with a dildo attached via a gear.

As the last chime faded, the lights dimmed and Victor appeared in a spotlight on the second floor balcony to give a short and quite amusing speech. He began by thanking us for coming, to which his audience replied with one voice, "we haven't got to that part yet". Evidently, a joke he always made. He then launched into an explanation of the flagging code for the evening which had been developed with the aid of what he called 9 3/4 sigma. Wearing different colored ribbons indicated interest in giving or receiving different acts. Black for S&M, dark blue for anal, grey for bondage and so on.

Victor missed my ribbon in his speech: green.

At the end, Victor demonstrated a magic trick in which a guest volunteer lay on a platform supported by two chairs which were removed leaving the volunteer floating in mid air. Then her clothes disappeared in a puff of smoke.

This was the signal that the pool and the playroom were open for business.

I was put into service immediately.

Just before Victor's speech, we had been talking to a tall blonde gentleman in his mid thirties who spoke with a Nordic accent and his wife, an elegant woman wearing a black silk kimono complimenting her Japanese features.

With Lisa's permission, the couple began touching me, pawing at my breasts, my buttocks, my limbs. I made no complaint, it was what I was there for, to be used for the pleasure of others. My only reward would come the next day when I would undress Lisa and grind my sex against hers until we reached shuddering climax after shuddering climax.

They stood either side of me, each exploring their side of my body as if planning to split me in two. Their fingers were cruel, pinching my nipples and labia, invading the open parts of my body. And through all of this, Lisa stood motionless, almost expressionless in front of me. The warmth in her eyes was the only approval I needed.

I am no pain slut but I wanted to hurt. The feeling of physical pain absolving me of the sin of transactional sex.

Just as I had become used to this abuse, Lisa placed a hand on each of my shoulders and guided me to my knees. The Nordic man grabbed a handful of my hair, winding it round his wrist. Instinctively, I leaned forward to fall on all fours and allow him to enter me from behind but was quickly corrected by a savage tug on my hair.

The wife unfastened her kimono and my face was pressed into her unkempt mass of pubic hair. The female stench was overpowering. I obliged her with my tongue as her husband skewered my pussy with his cock, whooping "Yeeha! Yeeha!" with each savage thrust.

Too hard, too hard! My mind screamed then all of a sudden the man and his wife were gone.

"Didn't he like me?" I asked, somewhat confused.

"Seed miser", Lisa explained, "What a prick."

Viagra can make a soft dick limp but it can't refill a pair of balls that have shot their load. Was the man was saving himself for later in the evening or did the couple had some weird rule that fucking wasn't cheating if he didn't come.

After this disappointment, we toured the playroom. A shibari artist was tying up the yellow living statue. He had already tied a karada, a body harness around her chest and breasts and was binding her arms behind her back. The red and orange statues were already bound and suspended from a chrome spaceframe. At the other end of the room, a man strapped to a bench was being whipped by a latex clad dominatrix and two men were spitroasting a woman between their cocks.

The spitroast turned into a double penetration, something I had only seen in porn films. She was tall but very slender her hair jet black against pale white skin and this was evidently her first time as well as the two men kept pausing to explain the next stage in the procedure. I imagined them pulling out their smartphones to write a Microsoft Project plan, step one lubricate, step two, loosen, steep three, "ahhhhhheeeough".

The woman's guttural cry as the first prick entered her anus snapped me back into the moment. This was real, this was live. The full attention of everyone in the circle of spectators was fixed on the exact same thing as her: the male member she was ever so slowly impaling herself on.

Once he was fully inside her, a third man, evidently her husband or boyfriend helped her lean back to take the second man in her pussy. They held each other's gaze until the moment the second man entered her and her eyes opened wide and almost rolled back into their sockets.

The man whose cock was buried in her ass let out a low moan. I am told a double penetration is the closest thing a man can feel to being fucked himself. Whether true or not, the experience was clearly at least as intense for him as for her.

After the trio was finished, we returned to find that the shibari artist had completed his piece. The green and blue living statues had been bound together in a 69 and suspended from the space frame.

At the end of the presentation, the rigger took a bow and asked for volunteers from the audience. Lisa was the first to step forward. Before I quite realized what was happening, Lisa had passed the end of my leash to the man standing next to me and was in the center of the circle, stripping naked.

"What should we do now dear", the man asked.

"The general idea would seem to be whatever you like," I began, "hopefully within reason."

"In that case, I choose to show off my hot tub", he replied.

It was at this point that I looked up and suddenly realized who Lisa had handed me to: Victor.

I was sure that after the atrium and the playroom, a mere hot tub would be rather a let down and I would have to fake my astonishment. I was wrong. Victor's hot tub had been constructed within a Rolls Royce RB211 jet engine nacelle and was mounted on a hydraulic jack so that it could be raised and lowered.

We lay back and watched as the orgy unfolded beneath us. Some people came in and immediately headed for the pool to swim a few naked laps, others made straight for the pool side to stand around in groups and talk or hit the sun loungers for some action.

It occurred to me that the average net worth of the occupants in the hot tub was currently well in excess of a billion dollars but unevenly distributed. An object lesson in the difference between the mode, the median and the mean. The thought amused me and I started to laugh and then I thought about a computer game I had played in which a group of rabbits try to build a tower of junk reaching the moon and at one point are riding on a jet engine.

Victor had not only heard of the game, he was an investor in the company that had written the game. It was the game that had given him the idea for the hot tub. And there we were, sitting naked in a hot tub talking about computer games in the middle of a gangbang. Victor was an enthusiast. He had played all the classics and more.

"This is all just another game to you," I suggested, "who can get the most people to do the most at their party."

"Guilty as charged." Victor conceded.

I decided to push my luck, "And what would you do to me?"

Victor leaned closer as if he was about to kiss and then stopped. "I have a rule," he began, "I never play at my own parties. A host has responsibilities even when they are not minding another person's sub."

I was disappointed. He was the first person I had met that night that I had actually wanted to fuck. Then Victor flipped a hidden switch and the hot tub jets went into overdrive.

Taking this as my cue, I positioned myself on the seat opposite Victor. He smiled back, this was evidently the feature of the hot tub that he had brought me there to demonstrate. The jets were carefully balanced to be forceful but not too foreceful, caressing my legs, my arms, my breasts and of course, my slit.

It did not take long for Victor's device to bring me to a screaming orgasm.

Afterward, he held me in his arms and asked me the words I most wanted to hear, "It's Mike's party next week, be my date?"