After three weeks, Tom had still not fucked Vanessa (or Isabella, as he knew her outside the house, or Professor O’Dair, which is how he addressed her in her English seminar). But he had brought her to the house, and it was tacitly understood, that he was her Master, and that his choices where Vanessa was concerned were his own business.

In the meantime, Vanessa was turned over to the loose community of regular patrons and guests. Tom often entered the room while she served a man with her mouth or ass or hands or cunt. Vanessa had joined the house at Tom’s invitation, and she had come to expect, even rely upon, his presence, though he only would sit silently, studying her face, the contortion of her mouth as she cried out, or the ripple of flesh in her hips and breasts as she was fucked, the arch of her foot as she curled herself around yet another lover.

Vanessa always knew when Tom was there. Sometimes she caught a piece of his reflection in a mirror as he stood against a mantel. She might see only his hand, or a length of his leg. Sometimes she never saw him at all but heard his voice as he exchanged words with the man who had just taken her. Away from the house, back in her own home, having become Isabella again, curled on a couch and drinking tea and smoking a cigarette, she wrote in her journal that she didn’t understand why he never fucked her, put his cock in her mouth, used her the way the other men--and a few women--did. He rarely even spoke to her, except in the most blandly courteous way: “Hello, Vanessa.” But since it was he who had given Isabella her slave name, his words held an extra weight. So there were two presences in the room, those of the men who used her, who held her down with their hands on her wrists and their weight between her legs, and Tom’s, who had looked at her in the classroom and figured out what she was and what she had wanted to become, and who made it happen. Under his gaze everything was heightened, her need and shame and pride, and her climaxes were fiercer.

Vanessa stayed at the house most weekends. In her short time there she had become in demand because of her responsiveness to almost anything she was put to. So it happened that Tom found her in a little-used library late on a Sunday afternoon while Geordi fucked her in the ass with slow, deep strokes. Vanessa was laid forward across a desk, propped on her elbows, her fingers extended and digging into the surface. Tom slipped quietly into the room and came to the side of the desk. The only sounds in the room were the lovers’ breathing, thick and punctuated with groans and guttural noises from their throats, and the wet friction of their flesh as Geordi rhythmically thrust into Vanessa’s asshole. Barely audible were other sounds, the chink of metal on wood and the muted sound of small bells attached to the clamps that Vanessa had worn on her nipples since before dawn. With each thrust Geordi lifted Vanessa’s feet from the floor, his fingers around her hips, pulling her back onto his thick cock, Vanessa’s voice low and trance-like: “…Ahh…ahh…”

Her face was turned to the side. Her lips were parted, colored with the smeared remains of the lipstick she put on last night. Vanessa’s eyes were heavy-lidded, and there