walks of life, the 'singles' that live in every big city, the young women who sportfuck and the young men just out of the closet.' 'Yes,' Martin said. 'The good-looking kids who would have been the starlets, the high-class hookers, the dancers in a Las Vegas or Broadway show. Offer them room and board in paradise, and a hefty salary to live out their wildest fantasies, and believe me they will be beating down the door.' 'I think we have to start small to do it right,' I said.
'It has to be carefully structured, really clean. Nothing shabby. This sort of sex has its rituals, its limits, and its rules.' 'Of course, that's why we sent for you,' Mr. Cross answered. 'Let's think about a little beachfront club ...' And five years later look what you have around you. Three thousand guests on the island this very night.
And the imitators, the 'resort' in Mexico and the one in Italy, and the posh big city clubs in Amsterdam and Copenhagen, the one in Berlin where all the members were slaves and the staff were the masters, and the vast spa in southern California giving us the most competition. The inevitable auction houses, and the private trainers. And that mysterious legion that had always existed, the private owners. Was it inevitable? Was it the right moment? Would someone else have organized it, discreetly advertised it, made it big business? If we hadn't been the first?
Who cares? Were codpieces inevitable in their time, or castrati singers, or the sky-high white wigs of the Ancien Regime, the bound feet of Imperial China, or the witch trials, the Crusades, the Inquisition? You set something into motion. It gains momentum. It is. Momentum. For me, year after year, it was mania. Meetings and draftings and drawings and discussion, inspecting the buildings, picking out fabrics, paint colours, shapes for the swimming pools. Hiring the physicians, the nurses, training the best slaves to be dominant, to 'handle' the masochistic members who didn't even know their own desires. Executing, correcting, expanding. First two buildings, then three, then the compound. Motifs, ideas, fees, contracts, agreements. And the same old heady gratification of seeing one's fantasies, one's secret dreams, made into a dizzying reality. Only it was now on an almost incalculable scale.
I could always think of better things than what my masters did to me. More elaborate things. The source is virtually endless. All life is variation upon certain themes. Now I saw others swept up in it, dazzled, amazed, adding to it, varying it. The flame burns ever brighter and brighter. But passion for me? Passion? What does that mean? Certainly there were never again masters. Sometime or other that kind of intimacy had been utterly forfeited and there are times when I do not know why. Was it because I really liked it better when I was the mistress, because it was not merely the old excitement, it was that divine sense of knowing what my slaves, my lovers, really felt? I mean I really had them. My knowledge and my understanding penetrated them. They belonged to me inside and out. As for love, well, now, that had never happened, had it? Not in the conventional way. But what is love, if it's not the love I feel for every one of them in those moments? And in the shadowy alcove of my veiled bed, I had had the best of the male slaves, bodies you wouldn't believe. There are exactly thirty seconds between wanting and having at The Club. Lashing them into submission, ordering them to fuck, astonished at their heat, their power, that strength under my command, that extraordinary masculine body belonging to me. Noting their responses later in the computer files. Learning how better each time to manipulate them. And then the women slaves with their silken fingertips and lapping tongues. Leslie, Cocoa, the lovely and presently neglected Diana, my darling, who nestles with me in the dark, which is possibly the same dark from one end of the world to the other, soft on soft.
Midnight in Eden. But is it Eden? Somewhere an old-fashioned clock chimes.
Twelve hours until Elliott Slater. And what is so special about that blond-haired, blue-eyed man? Won't he be like all the rest?
Chapter Twelve
12 -- Elliott
White Cotton
The corridors were a labyrinth. Bits and pieces of The Club passed me without making any real impression. I knew only that she was at the end of the string that was pulling me