Mirabeille, in progress

            Elena followed Ivan and Kelly down the hall, past the guest bathroom to a closed and locked door at the far end. During the course of the evening she had noticed them slip away periodically from the party into this room, darting quickly inside without opening the door all the way and then reappearing later, always together and hand in hand. She had assumed without really giving it much thought they were seeking refuge from the noisy gathering for a quiet moment together and at one point she indulged herself briefly with the imagine of a quick fuck or blow-job with several dozen unknowing friends and neighbors just a few feet away. A host’s prerogative, she thought after the third or fourth such visit and suppressed a secret grin.

            And now Ivan was motioning her inside.

            Surely they don’t mean to invite me to join them? she thought wildly as they ushered her into the room.

            That fleeting thought echoed instantaneously between her legs.

            She found herself in what was clearly a guest bedroom furnished plainly with a heavy bed, a garishly Art Deco nightstand with a metal-based lamp, a cracked antique-looking bureau against one wall and rich area rug but little else. A set of huge windows with the blinds drawn dominated the wall opposite the bed. She blinked in the pale light and her first impression was that the room was unoccupied but as the door clicked shut behind them she sensed, rather than saw, a flash of furtive and restrained movement from the bed.

            A pair of shocked, dark eyes peered out from beneath a tangle of raven hair and Elena’s breath caught in her throat.

            “You remember Mirabeille, don’t you?
            Elena stared at the girl stretched out on the bed. At first all she could see was the bare mound of her pubis, so swollen that it looked like a medical student’s perfectly exaggerated rendering. But as she dragged her gazed reluctantly across the plane of her stomach and the flat hard little breasts to the girl’s face, contorted by the effort of twisting herself as much off the bed as she could to stare at them and the anguish of whatever they had been doing to her, whatever she had lain there anticipating and the shock of Elena’s sudden appearance, a more composed version of her resolved in Elena’s memory. Small, spare, always with hair tied back tightly into a neat ponytail in Ivan’s regular evening classes, expression serene and practice perfectly composed. One of Ivan’s regulars who had followed him to the new studio, spoke an elegantly-accented English and paid with a platinum American Express card with the name M.-something-or-other.

            Mirabeille, stretched wide.

            Ivan and Kelly waited expectantly and the noise from the party outside sounded unnaturally loud.

            Say something.

            “She’s a student of yours.”

            Ivan actually clapped his hands together delightedly. “Just so!”

            Kelly finally left her position at his side and moved towards the bed.

            “Belle has been a student for some time now.” He watched as his wife slid onto the bed and propped herself on one elbow overlooking her. “A quite devoted student, I should say.”

            Kelly was smiling down and Belle looked up at her, something in her eyes that Elena was at a loss to place. Not fear but not relief, either. Something else.

            “Quite devoted,” Kelly said. She made no move to touch her, just looked down at her.  

            Elena had never seen someone look so naked. She had certainly seen her share of both men and women without clothes but stretched wide like that Belle looked naked and exposed in a way that slashed instantaneously at Elena’s senses and wobbled her knees. Reflexively she glanced at the girl’s pussy again, staring intently at the dark compressed slit gleaming moisture and wondered what they had been doing to her during their periodic visits to the bedroom. Whatever they wanted to.  Kelly was so vivid and bright with her sun-kissed skin and tennis-player’s legs next to Belle’s bare coolness. Like sun and moon.

            For an interminable interlude the three of them simply watched her. Belle stared up at Kelly as if to find a center of gravity in her green eyes, refusing to even glance at Ivan or Elena, although she doubtless felt their gaze. Her lips parted and she asked Kelly a silent question to which Kelly offered no reply. Then Ivan startled Elena out of her reverie with a hand on her arm, and steered her to a low, plain bench padded in cloth at the foot of the bed. She let herself be led to it and sat.

            From here she could have reached out and touched a tiny, callused foot.

            Belle clung desperately to Kelly’s gaze.

            “We’re showing you something quite special, Elena,” Ivan said, “and I hope you’re ready to appreciate the value of this gift. Belle is quite special to us and we’ve worked very carefully with her and over quite a long time to bring her to where she is. A long-term project, so to speak.” Elena could hear the smile in his voice. “We take great pride in her. Pride in what she has offered to us and what we’ve taught her to be. It’s very important that we all value her gift and respect it.”

            He paused and chuckled darkly. “Not her, so much, but her gift.”

            Kelly stretched out against the girl and threw one long leg across Belle’s and snuggled up against her. The two women stared at each other and Belle moved towards her, minutely and without effect, as if to absorb the other’s warmth. Kelly bent forward and lowered her face into the hollow at the base of Belle’s throat and kissed her there softly.

            The room was utterly silent. Kelly kissed the side of her neck, the sharp clean line at the base of her jaw and then languidly put her own mouth on Belle’s upturned lips that parted immediately to receive her in a hungry, open kiss that Kelly held for only a moment before drawing back again as Belle tried hopelessly to follow her.

            Belle’s scent, thick and salty, swam heavily in the room.

            “Our lovely Belle is very special,” Ivan said.

            “Very special, indeed.” Kelly said.

            “She had some significant barriers to break through, did our sweet girl, problems that had bedevilled her for her entire life. But she was eager to learn and to become whole  and that is what we have given her.  And now she has something she’s never had before, doesn’t she?”

            “Stability,” Kelly said to Belle. “Belonging. And ---- ” she suddenly brushed a hand across the flat, outstretched stomach, “--- release.”

            Belle convulsed and cried out, the first sound she’d uttered since they’d entered the room. She heaved up and into the fleeting caress.

            In the studio dressed her in compression pants and tank top Belle had always struck Elena as implacable and strong, unbreakable as corded wire. A fragment of vague conversation from the grand opening reception swam up from her memory: Spanish, a former ballet dancer, a job in some kind of financial analysis. Elena had made a point to talk to all of Ivan’s students, her “steals” as she thought of them, and Belle was always there when Ivan was teaching. She moved with such fluid strength and Elena remembered how neat and precise everything was, even the way she opened her wallet and withdrew a credit card. But here there was something so fragile and helpless about her that Elena was embarrassed and wanted to look away, to spare Belle the humiliation of whatever was clearly about to happen.

            Don’t watch. Go back to the party.

            She didn’t move.

            Kelly reached out one strong arm and began languidly running her fingers up and down the girl’s helpless flanks. Belle’s head fell back, eyes fluttering closed.

            “Discipline,” Ivan said. “Her entire life has been marked by self-control. She is extraordinary in that way, what she has made of herself. If you knew where she has come from and how far her journey has taken her . . . ”

            Belle cried out again as those dancing fingers suggested and then skittered away.

            “Elena, you’ve seen her practice. I’ve never had a student who had so much power without seeming to exert it. We all talk about ‘flow’ but Belle actually does. Flow. Each breath in full measure and in its own space. I saw it the first time she took my class. Every day, the same energy and focus. And not just in her practice but in her profession, too, and in the business of getting through each and every day. She is truly remarkable, you know. She exerted herself through sheer will. And we didn’t realize, not at first, how much it cost her to be such a tough girl. And how much she needed . . . not to be.”           

           “Go to her, Elena. Get to know our Belle.”

            Elena hopped rather than moved to the side of the bed, opposite Kelly so that Belle was flanked. She reached out, tentatively, to one narrow hip.  Belle’s skin was hot and dry to the touch but soft, like some kind of exotic animal, and Elena traced the elongated contours with her palms while Kelly continued with her own explorations.  Lean, hard arms, the pits lightly stubbled. Upturned ribs covered by a tissue-thin layer of skin. Belle turned and pulled, trying to follow the course of every caress, pushing up into their dancing hands, no trace now of the spare, economical movements Elena had seen in the studio. This girl was pure sensation and impulse, reduced to a collection of buzzing nerve endings. Elena marked the course of the shallow bowl between Belle’s hips and tickled the naked swell of her mons and Belle surged reflexively, crying out yet again and Kelly smothered her cry with a greedy kiss.

            “She needs the counterpoise,” he said. “For her to be so strong the rest of the time she needs a place to go, a place to be, where she isn’t strong. Where she is the opposite of that. And that’s what we give her.”

            Elena lingered over the dark pebbles of her nipples, circling each with her fingertips. Farther down, Kelly traced abstract circles between knees and cunt.

            “Does that feel good?”

            “Oh God,” the girl whispered, barely audible. “You don’t know . . . ” and then breathed something in Spanish that only Elena understood.

            Ivan watched thoughtfully.

            “But this isn’t her real secret, Elena. Walk into any bookstore and you’ll see evidence of the secret longing of women to be dominated, to submit to a fantasy lover. Men dream about Angelina Jolie and women dream about Christian Gray. Bondage isn’t even particularly titillating anymore, is it? It’s as commonplace nowadays as strippers.” He smiled thinly.  “That Belle likes to be tied up isn’t that special. What makes our sweet girl so special is that she needs this.  It affords her something she cannot achieve otherwise.”

            He watched as the two women caressed and teased her and she jumped like a wire between them.

            “Do you know what I am talking about?”

            Elena shook her head without taking her eyes off Belle.

            “Tell Elena sweet Belle’s secret.”

            “She’s such a poor baby,” Kelly murmured. “A poor poor baby. Isn’t that right?  Yes, she certainly is. We’re going to tell your secret.” Belle jerked helplessly and raised her head, imploring and about to speak but Kelly fluttered her fingers over that poor cunt and what came out instead was a strangled cry and she heaved up again and Elena momentarily lost contact. Kelly smiled. “Elena’s going to know. Yes she is.”

            “Tell her,” Ivan snapped.

            Kelly looked at Elena over the taut body. “Poor baby Belle can’t cum without this,” she said.

            Elena stared.

            “Not on her own. Not by herself. Not getting fucked vanilla.”

            The girl had fallen back on the bed, surrendered again to the women’s touch.

            “This is the only way she can get off. The only way.”

            “That’s her secret,” Ivan said. “Only like this. And only with permission.”

            Elena looked down at the girl again and saw someone different now. Belle seemed carved from a single piece of granite, a series of frosted flat planes connected by sharp angles and broken only by the inflamed pouch of her cunt and swollen tips of her nipples. Elena was dizzy. She wanted to sink her teeth into that skin. Blemish it. She began to trace a curve around the outer folds of Belle’s swollen pussy and the girl strained to follow the maddening caress, arcing up in a perversion of a bridge pose, failing desperately, dropping back against the bed. Elena wanted this to go on and on, to keep her like this.

            Belle turned pleading eyes to Kelly and Kelly kissed her, just a taste.

            “We own her. Because she’s trusted us with her secret.”

            Long tendrils of dark hair had been whipped across Belle’s face and Kelly smoothed them back across her damp forehead to see her eyes. She kissed her again and Belle kissed her back with her entire body, twisting against her cuffs as if testing to make sure was fully captured.

            Kelly touched her face and Belle pressed her cheek into her palm.

            “It is her need that is so beautiful. There is a purity and simplicity there that you don’t find anywhere else. Such a strong independent woman and this most basic and primal of human needs is beyond her. It doesn’t belong to her. That fundamental part of her, what makes Belle Belle in so many ways . . . ” He had not moved from where he stood over them. “ . . . she has given to me.

            “Because her need compels her to. She needs me,” he mused, almost tenderly. “In every true way that there is.”

            Kelly’s hand began inching its way down Belle’s body, fingertips lingering on her nipples before continuing over the ridge of her sternum and into the soft valley below. Down down, strong fingers reaching further . . .

            “Imagine the power, Elena. This exquisite woman at your mercy.”

            Kelly’s hand closed over the girl’s cunt and Belle gave a long dawn out Ohhhhhh.

            Her index and ring fingers flanked her swollen lips while her long middle finger slipped into the inner folds in a fluid, practiced motion. Elena could see it begin to move, slipping up and back until Belle’s hips lifted up as Kelly found her core.

            “She feels things because we say she can.”

            Belle’s hips began to rock in perfect counterpoise to Kelly’s stroking.

            “It’s not cruel. It’s a mercy. Without us, she can’t feel them at all.”

            Belle stared up at Kelly. Her tormentor, her savior. All under Ivan’s watchful gaze and for Elena’s benefit. Elena was no longer embarrassed, her breathing sharp and shallow and her own pussy throbbing. She wondered what it would feel like to be stretched out like that, displayed, toyed with . . . to be utterly captured the way Belle was.

            “And for us, a joy to take this for her and a responsibility to guide her.”

            Kelly found the hard little clit and Belle cried out, a nose of such longing that Elena jumped.

            “Its another form of teaching. And Elena is a dedicated student.”

            Kelly watched Belle’s rapt face, eyes glittering. As the girl’s hips pushed and pushed Kelly pressed the ball of her had into Belle’s mons to anchor her grip, keeping the sensation constant. Caught in the low lamplight Belle’s skin glowed damply. Belle stared up into that hard gaze, face a mask of concentration.

            The tempo of her hips increased, frenzied and the muscles in her thighs trembled.

            Ivan put his hand on the back of Elena’s neck, his hand in her hair.

            “Now it’s up to you, Elena. It’s your decision.”

            For the first time since Elena had entered the room Belle looked at her directly, with an expression of such pure desperate supplication that Elena felt flash-frozen in place. Kelly had changed neither the tempo of her manipulation nor her bemused expression even as the pace of the bound girl’s bouncing hips mounted frantically. Ivan’s eyes were on Elena while Belle’s were locked onto the new holder of . . . her.

            Elena decided.

            She took Belle’s nipples between thumbs and forefingers and pinched, twisting hard.

            “Cum.”

            At the sound of the word Belle’s face froze for a heartbeat, eyes wide and mouth open as if in eternal surprise, then crumbled. Her head jerked backwards in an exploding cascade of dark hair and her body surged off the bed in a clenched, bowed expression of release. Kelly had to lean forward to maintain her manipulation but she did it, wrapping her other arm around one corded thigh, her rhythm steady.

            Belle came.

             The girl hung in the air, body not moving as she received what they were giving her.

            What Elena had given her.

            Her mouth was frozen open in a soundless cry and she stared sightlessly at the headboard behind her. Elena imagined she could feel the surging of pulse through her nipples beating back against Elena’s cruel fingers. I’m holding her up. There was no other indication of what was going on inside the girl. She made no sound or other movement. Poised, disciplined, as if now that she was granted release her discipline had returned. When she was denied and wanting she had let go of self-control; it was only in that place that she could be outside herself and without responsibility. But now she was Belle again, no more vulnerability, as she pushed into her orgasms against Kelly’s hand.

            Her breasts were slick and ridged belly shone with sweat, an angry red flush spreading up from her chest to her neck. The room silent but for the wet sound of Kelly’s fingers in Belle’s cunt and seemed much smaller now, heavy with the scent of her sweat and her release.

            She fell back heavily onto the bed as if a cord had been cut, chest heaving. Kelly wiped her fingers on Belle’s stomach. They watched her catch her breath, eyes closed now, mouth working to moisten her mouth. The orgasmic roseate faded and her skin returned to its alabaster perfection. Finally she opened her eyes.

            “What do you say to Elena?”

            It was not a question.

            Mirabeille looked up at Elena, her eyes wide and searching.

            “Thank you,” she said.

            Long tendrils of black hair covered her face. Elena brushed them away from her face and thought she had never seen anyone look more beautiful.

            She bent down and kissed her.