Carrie's Story: An Erotic S/M Novel by Molly Weatherfield Page B

anything I'd been through with him.
    "Well, why shouldn't you have?" he said. "You deserve
it. Someday maybe you'll find somebody just as attractive
and deserving as you are and the two of you will burn up the
sheets every night, while you get your PhDs and write books
and have babies, all that good stuff.
    "Only," he continued, "that's not what I want, and it
seems that it's not what you want either, at least for now. So
we're doing.. .well, you know what we're doing. I've held
back all these months on making love to you this way because
you would have misunderstood if I had done it any earlier.
And I'm still not sure you understand completely. I didn't
want you to expect to feel like this, or even to think of it as a
treat or a reward. Don't expect it. Don't anticipate it. I'll do
it when I feel like doing it, and you won't be able to predict
it. And don't try any tricks to make me feel like doing it. I'll
punish you very severely if I ever think that's what you're up
to. Got that?"
    "Yes, Jonathan," I murmured, quite miserably.
    "Yes, I think you do," he said, and then unceremoniously
unzipped his pants. "Well," he continued, "my turn now.
Open your mouth."
    And afterward, he simply sent me home, telling me that
was enough for today. As I was getting dressed I remembered
an old musical, Caroiaiel, that they'd done at my high school.
Songs like "My Boy Bill" and "You'll Never Walk Alone." We
all sneered at its corniness, but secretly I'd loved it: I'd cry at
the thought of never, never knowing that someone loved me.
And I'd fall asleep trying to imagine a slap that felt like a kiss. I still couldn't quite imagine such a slap. But trust Jonathan
to teach me about kisses that felt like slaps.

    And that was the end of my apprenticeship. That was, in a
sense, the golden lesson at the end of the rainbow. No matter
what happened between us it was all consequence and actualization of his utter monopoly of power. He'd proved it to
me that winter afternoon, like the bomb at Alamogordo had
proved Einstein's physics. Not that I would have denied it
before, but now I knew, consciously knew, that there was no
second-guessing him. It was a relief in some ways, a letting
go. I simply relaxed into it, as though I were beginning to dream
in a foreign language-a language of beatings and humiliations, of rare, extravagant pleasure, rituals, formalities. It was
a complicated and mysteriously involving language, for all
that it was based on only one deep syntactical structure, one
rule once again, the rule of his saying, "I want."
    And-I'll confess it to you here-I loved to hear him
say, "I want." I'd meditate on it. I'd hear it like a mantra. I
got off on thinking how privileged he was. Once, during my
last weeks of school, I had to go to the women's room of the
library to jerk off, just from thinking about how exquisitely,
consistently unfair it all was. Well, I'd also been reading some
theory that seemed quite apposite to my situation. It seemed
as though everything we were assigned that semester was
about sex-every text in the canon was really an eroticized,
sadomasochistic version of some other text. Intellectually, I
didn't quite approve: there must be more to life than sex and
power, I'd think, even if there wasn't much more to my life at
that time. But given my inability to concentrate on anything else, I figured I'd lucked out. In a sense, you could say that it
was Jonathan who got me through my last semester.

    On the surface, my life at school didn't change at all.
I wrote my papers, I hung out with friends, some of whom
knew I had some mysterious relationship with a guy in the
city and accepted the fact that I wasn't going to tell them any
more than that. About the only day-to-day thing about my life
that changed was that I ran instead of swimming for exercise
that spring-well, I couldn't change in the locker room anymore, could I?
    In March, I got a thrilling letter saying that