Erotica: Master of O, Chapter Five

The strobe power packs beeped and popped when O test-fired the big Leica. For an instant, a brilliant flare from the lights on the umbrella stands illuminated the center of the darkened studio. O, dressed in a plain, black bra top, black tights and red, knee-high Doc Martens, stood next to the small, torso-shaped iron cage dangling from the ceiling on a long chain and studied the light meter in her hand. She frowned, hung the meter from a cross bar on the cage by its lanyard and went back to the wheeled cart where her cameras, memory cards, batteries and filters were all laid out on an immaculate blue furniture blanket.
“Still a little hot,” she pronounced. “Try raising them about six inches.”
Roger, O’s assistant, leaned over from the stepladder next to one of the stands and slid the shaft up, lifting the shiny aluminum umbrella. A wiry, balding gaffer who had once lit glamour shots on giant sound stages, Roger took it slow, tightening the stand and dismounting the ladder, wheeling it over to pop up the second umbrella. O watched carefully, judging how much spill she’d get from each.
She sighted through the viewfinder, lining up the empty cage dead center, and pushed the shutter button, triggering another brief explosion of brilliance. Putting the camera down, she want back to the meter, which was set to read when the packs fired. O pondered, head cocked to one side.
“I want some hair light from the back. Let’s pump up that slave pack a little.”
“On it,” Roger said, trudging toward the back of the set in his black jeans and T-shirt to tweak the power unit on the small strobe mounted to a rail below the ceiling. It was always tricky, shooting in a black space so the foreground details were clear without losing the feeling of cavernous gloom. It didn’t help that the studio Ray had rented for O was so enormous.
The ceiling, vaulted and braced with huge struts like a barn, was at least thirty feet high and the distressed flats, dulled to look like old concrete, were twenty feet back, arranged to intersect like the corner of a room. The vast floor layered over with black painted slats textured and riveted to look like steel plate contributed to the impression of a bleak and empty chamber. The atmosphere was as sinister as O could have wanted, but the place soaked up light like a black hole.
O strolled over to the makeup chair to see how Jacqui’s face was coming along. Jacqui lounged naked with a robe over her lap so any elastic marks would fade. She had earbuds stuck in her head and a copy of Wired spread across the robe. Her thick, naturally auburn hair was tied in a big knot on top of her head. Renata, the compact, butch-cropped makeup artist fluttered around Jacqui in her sleeveless shirt and cut-offs, dusting blush on the model’s cheeks.
“Light on that, please,” O instructed.
“You sure you don’t want any foundation?” Renata asked.
“Like she needs it with that complexion. And she was probably out partying all night.”
O reached up and plucked one earbud out of Jacqui’s skull. Carbon Based Life Forms leaked from the tiny speaker.
“Weren’t you?”
Jacqui, who had the high, trilling voice of a teenager, didn’t even look up.
“Only until two-thirty. Well, maybe three…”
Jacqui pretended to look guilty. O laughed.
“In about ten years you’re going to have to start working at looking like that.”
“In ten years I’m going to be living on a ranch in Wyoming not giving a fuck,” Jacqui replied, leaning forward to kiss O on the forehead.
“It’s so cool that you’re shooting me. That was one of the things I wanted to have happen this year and we’re already doing it. Your work rocks hard, man.”
“I’m glad you appreciate it. Models aren’t easy to impress.”
“A lot of the people doing this material aren’t that impressive. You bring some serious mojo to it.”
The next question was sure to be personal. It was time to change the subject.
“Like the cozy set we built for you?” O asked.
Jacqui looked around with an exaggerated shudder.
“Nice and creepy. Bad things could happen to a poor girl in a place like this.”
“Natalie Wood drowned off a yacht,” O said. “Bad things can happen to a girl anywhere.”
Jacqui rubbed her long hands together gleefully.
“So what’s happening to me today?”
“Just the usual. Rigid shackles, torture, fucking. Like I told you on the phone, you can pass on anything you don’t want to do. It’s not an endurance contest.”
“Maybe not for you, but I like to push myself. Terror is one of my better emotions.”
She gave O a huge, frightened face that made them both laugh out loud.
“My pitiful isn’t too shabby either.”
Jacqui stuck out a fat, trembling lower lip and widened her eyes to saucer-size.
“Remember that one,” O said. “I’m going to want it.” This bright, fearless, slightly geeky beauty had a lot of good images in her. O’s annoyance at Ray for slating a shoot without consulting her faded at the prospects. When it came to work, O and Ray had a separation of powers agreement. The office was his. The studio was hers. O hated having models pushed on her. There was usually some agenda that involved getting some guy laid and the model usually took advantage. At least Ray wasn’t a modelizer. This was strictly about good pictures and good pictures made up for everything.
“Now, about the fucking part …” Jacqui began.
“God,” O thought, “here comes the bad news.” She’d already inspected Jacqui’s lab report so she knew what the bad news wouldn’t be.
“Could you please ask him not to whisper dumb jokes in my ear when I’m trying to fake an orgasm? I don’t want him in my butt all night.”
“I’ll see what I can do, but you’ve worked with him before. He’s an obnoxious, little prick who …”
Both turned at the sound of a cheerful male voice.
“…shows up on time.”
Calvin, an unremarkably handsome, dark-haired, dark-eyed man just shy of thirty, strolled across the studio in his distressed motorcycle jacket and ripped jeans. He was very much Master Right, or at least Master Right Now, among the small group of players who specialized in on-camera domming, though neither he nor O knew just why.
He came over and kissed O on the cheek, blowing Jacqui an air kiss so as not to mess up Renata’s work.
“Hey, you,” he said to Jacqui, “how come you didn’t call me when you were up north?”
“They’d already booked me with someone else.”
“You could have requested me, you little shit.”
“I don’t want people thinking we’re married.”
Calvin made a gagging noise. Jacqui tossed the magazine aside and stood up, looming over him a good three inches.
“You better be good and mean to me today or I’ll kick your ass.”
“Not before I ream yours.”
O looked back and forth between them.
“Excellent. A grudge fuck. I can work with that energy.”
She turned to Renata.
“I want a lot of eyes, and some lips. A little redder than they should be. Don’t make her too innocent. “
“Right. Just a hint of her inner slut,” Renata said.
“Exactly. How long?”
Renata waggled her head from side to side, looking at Jacqui.
“Half an hour, maybe.”
“Make it twenty.”
O needed to confer with Fiona, her rigger, who was at the equipment table, zapping herself on the bare forearm with a violet wand. The gas-filled tube at the end of the generator lit up a nice, hot red-orange, but the spark seemed a little weak.
“The strobes will wash that out,” O said.
“Thought they might.”
Fiona used few words, uttered in a tight monotone though she had been known to burst out laughing at odd things. Small-breasted with killer legs and butt, it was Fiona’s face that both men and women found hypnotic. She had the high cheekbones from her exotic Eastern European blood, but her eyes were light grey flecked with yellow. Her hair was a deep and lustrous black. She was impressive in black jeans and a cropped T-shirt that showed off her muscles. Focused and disciplined, Fiona had been hurt enough during her performing days to respect the close tolerances at which a bondage rigger worked. That, and her creative mean streak, made her the best. O wouldn’t shoot without her.
Fiona cranked up the knob at the butt-end of the violet wand, stepped on the foot switch and gave herself another jolt. This time there was a loud crackle and pronounced whiff of ozone in the air, but Fiona didn’t flinch.
“That should read,” O said.
“Think it’s too much for internal?”
O stuck out her own arm so Fiona could shoot a loud spark at it. O didn’t flinch either.
“We’ll get a few good jolts on the tits and then crank it down a little for the hardcore. Jacqui likes to be pushed.”
A slight smile distorted the purposeful straightness of Fiona’s lips.
“This should be a fun day,” she said, putting down the wand and moving on to shake out the rest of her gear.
“We’ll be setting up for covers first. I’ll need her in the cage.”
“Let me know when.”
“Now would be good.”
As the cage descended, O did another lighting check, catching Fiona in the shot. Doing a digital instant replay on the Leica’s wide finder screen, she studied the results intently.
Fiona had the front panels of the cage, now suspended waist high, hinged open as Renata shuffled Jacqui, dressed only in green flip-flops to keep her feet clean, under the modeling lamp. O grabbed the Leica.
“Okay gorgeous, stand right there,” O said.
Shaking out her cascading auburn waves, Jacqui stood still in the halo from above while O took her first test-shot. The packs popped and beeped again. O looked at the preview panel.
“I already don’t like that. Roger, hook me up with a ring-flash, please.”
It was amazing how quickly Roger could move when the photographer had camera in hand. These were dangerous moments, employment-wise. He took the heavy unit from O, quickly wiring it with a circular reflector mounted at the end of the lens hood. He did a couple of trial pops himself before giving it back. For one long moment, O looked at Jacqui just standing there. One inch taller and this girl could have been on the catwalk. O wondered if Jacqui knew how lucky she was. She could even have a tiny, sexy belly under her navel without some agency ordering her to get lipo or seek new representation. O had come up through the rag trade and despised it as only an intimate could.
“Okay Fiona, let’s get her in there.”
Fiona eased Jacqui toward the cage by her biceps.
“You just sort of sit back into it,” Fiona explained.
Jacqui slipped into the narrow nest of bars effortlessly. She’d been bound so many different ways by so many different riggers she could have made a living as an escape artist. The contact of iron on skin raised a body-length shiver and a tsunami of goose bumps.
“Holy shit!” Jacqui cried out. “This thing is fucking furreezzing!”
“You’ll heat it up,” O reassured her while Fiona locked the bars into place around her body. She helped Jacqui thread her long legs through the openings at the bottom so they dangled vulnerably in mid-air. Jacqui kicked her flip flops neatly off the set.
“It’s tight too,” she said, shifting around as much as she could to see what movement she really had. The cage was designed to fit bodies even smaller than hers as closely as a suit of armor. The leg segments opened her wide, and there was a strategic gap in the ironwork running from the top of her pelvic arch under and around to the base of her tailbone. She looked down at it with raised eyebrows.
“And really, really nasty. Can I borrow it on Saturday?”
“Not unless you take Fiona along,” O cautioned. Fiona said she’d be happy to help out but she had another booking.
When the stage was clear, O told Fiona to crank up the cage. Jacqui made a noise like a kid on a swing as it rose. O stopped the hoisting with a palms-down grip gesture.
“Yeah, that’s very nice,” she said, eye welded to the viewfinder. This moment of promise approached the feeling she’d had when Steven circled her while she stood naked at attention in his living room.
“I’m going to take a couple of bracketing shots. Give me some deer-in-the-headlights.”
Jacqui’s face was suddenly transformed into a masque of frozen dread.
“Too much,” O said, shaking her head. “Dial it down about twenty percent.”
Jacqui grinned. It was so much easier working for someone she knew had been in the same position more than once.
“Perfect!” O exclaimed at the slightly less dramatic version. “Stay just like that, but lean forward as much as you can and squash your tits against the bars. Need the nips blocked for the cover.”
“Well, they’re certainly nice and hard,” Jacqui said calmly, pressing her flesh into the cold metal. She really did look fairly pathetic.
It was as important to her as to O that the results came out right, or she was suffering through this for no good reason other than a highly combustible paycheck. O fired away, squatting low, standing on a stepladder and lying on the floor. She had Fiona rotate the cage thirty degrees for some side shots.
“I wonder if I could spin around in this thing,” Jacqui mused.
“Why not? Just try not to giggle.”
O nodded at Fiona, who gave grabbed the cage and twirled it like a piñata. O wasn’t happy.
“Doesn’t work with the ring light,” she pronounced, ordering Fiona to steady things up.
Once the cage was still, O moved in closer, centering Jacqui from the waist up in the finder. This was it.
“Okay,” O said in a near whisper, “you’ve been hanging here for hours. You’re in some Eastern European hellhole and you’ve pissed off some cops who thought you were hot and you know they’re going to have their fun with you for a few days before they let you go. You want to play along, but you’re scared shitless you’ll fuck up and they’ll really hurt you. Now, give me that.”
Jacqui’s pathetic face would have made angels weep. O gritted her teeth, held her breath and fired off a dozen shots, perfectly cropped to fill a cover with Jacqui’s delicious anguish of anticipation.
O flipped back through the digital frames, amazed as always when something came out just like she’d imagined it. O held the camera up so Jacqui could look at herself on the screen. Jacqui’s face lit up.
“Bitchin’!”
“That’s our cover. Now for the easy part.”
It was true. The rest of the shoot lay ahead; it would be strenuous for all, but to O, that cover shot was the reason for all of it.
Fiona rolled in a long, steel table full of sinister implements and Calvin clunked over behind her in heavy boots and a rubber apron, completely exposed from the rear.
“Come on, O,” he whined, “do I really have to wear this thing? I mean, it’s so gay.”
“They didn’t tell you about the part where she gets out and pegs you with a strap-on?” O asked with a smirk. She promised she wouldn’t shoot him from the rear.
“It’s not like anyone wants to see your naked, hairy man-ass,” she reminded him.
“I’ll have you know I shave my ass twice a week. What do you want me to do with her, boss?”
O told him to start with some fingers. Calvin crossed to the cage, looked up at Jacqui and carefully started playing with her.
“Could we get a little lube, please?” O asked of no one in particular. Fiona ran in with a black bottle, poured some viscous liquid on Calvin’s fingers, and gently applied a generous dose to Jacqui through the opening in the bottom of the cage. Jacqui smiled down at her.
“I’ll make you stop doing that in about a week,” she warned.
“Nice wax job,” Fiona said.
“Hurt worse than anything that happens here.”
Fiona cleared the set and Calvin moved back to First Position, his fingers once more in play. O caught Jacqui in an authentic moan. Calvin really did know his way around a woman’s body – one reason he was on every girl’s “yes” list. Satisfied that she was ready, he slipped a couple of fingers inside.
“That’s great. Stay just like that. Jacqui, look down at him like you’d do anything to please him. More fucking equals less torture.”
Jacqui could easily do seductive and desperate at the same time. O captured that from a half dozen angles, having Jacqui move around as much as the steel embrace would allow so she could show off everything they’d had to conceal for the cover shot.
“Calvin, no more Mr. Nice guy. Get the long cattle prod from the table.”
Calvin picked up the yard-long rod with a big battery box at one end and double electrodes at the other. He looked it over and whistled.
“Now that is a wicked unit. I assume there are no batteries in this thing.”
“Sorry to disappoint you, but no, there aren’t,” O assured him.
“Damn. I’ve always wondered what one of those felt like,” Jacqui said.
O rolled her eyes and looked at Fiona.
“It sucks,” Fiona said succinctly.
“I do better faces when I don’t have to fake it. Let’s give it a try and if I can’t deal I’ll crash out on it.”
O shrugged.
“Okay Fiona, go ahead and sting it.”
Fiona shook her head but loaded up the battery box and handed the hot prod to Calvin. It had already been rewired to reduce the voltage by half but Fiona saw no reason to report that.
“Now what’s my motivation again?”
O reminded him that he was a sadistic little fuck who liked torturing helpless girls.
“I can do that.”
O instructed him to start with Jacqui’s right foot. He pulled her leg out straight, applied the contact points to her arch, and pushed the button just for a second. Jacqui yelped and rattled her cage.
“Ow! Fuck!” Jacqui yelled.
“I think we can take the batteries out now,” O said calmly. Fiona started over but Jacqui stopped her.
“Let’s just do it and get it over with,” she insisted.
“Fine, but no screaming,” O cautioned. “It gives me a headache.”
For the next half hour, Calvin worked Jacqui through the bars of the cage, carefully placing the prod with the contacts on either side of each nipple, then to her labia and finally across her anus, which O shot lying on her back from underneath, zoomed out wide for maximum depth of field to capture Jacqui’s suffering.
They broke for lunch, the models sitting around in hotel bathrobes swapping gossip while gobbling down sandwiches from the upscale deli nearby. O never ceased to be amazed at how performers could pack it away, but then most of them didn’t need to do a four-inch reduction with a corset unassisted.
They set up for the hardcore as Roger cleared away all the bags and napkins. Jacqui was stretched on a Y-frame, wrists overhead in steel manacles, ankles far apart, body-straps liberally applied in between.
O asked if she could move at all. Jacqui tried a few muscle groups to no avail.
“Not going anywhere.”
“Let’s get some singles on this,” O said. “Roger, I think we’ll need the kinos down toward the bottom of the frame to get a good arc.”
Roger unfolded a pair of long fluorescent tubes in corrugated cardboard housings and laid them out to cast their light upwards. They gave off a nice, soft glow.
Satisfied with the placement, O shoved the wheeled ladder toward Jacqui’s face, sending Roger up with the camera. Roger popped the packs and O, squatting next to Jacqui with the meter, took a reading. Looking at the image on the camera display, she smiled, turned it over and held it above Jacqui’s face so she could look.
“I think that works,” O said. “See? We’ve got the strobe on your face and upper body and we let your legs fall away from the light a little so when he zaps you we’ll catch the lightning in the bottle.”
“Nice,” Jacqui said. “Could I get a couple for my blog? I want to write about this.”
“No problem. I’ll res them down when I get home and email you a few.”
“Thanks. You’re nice to work with.”
“Only because you are.”
Free at last of the hated apron, Calvin stood by, stroking himself and looking Jacqui over. Whatever he was thinking made him visibly happy. O called for the wand.
“Flying in,” Fiona said, dragging the cord behind her. It was a harmless gizmo by comparison to the prod, making lots of sparks but causing only a mild static tingling where it touched flesh. Calvin had used it many times and didn’t need to be told to start at the breasts, working down. Jacqui made screaming faces but heeded O’s warning about doing it for real. Besides, this was cake, although when he actually put the glass tube at the end of the wand inside her and tapped the button, it felt like a swarm of small, angry wasps. It had to stay on a bit for O to get the sparks at just the right aperture.
The final set-up was simplicity itself: a waist high bondage pallet with rings around the edges. Jacqui and Calvin sat on a couch making out while the rest of the crew humped gear and lights. She was already on her knees sucking him when Renata came to patch her makeup.
“You can join her if you like,” Calvin said to Renata.
“Only if you want me taking a side of knackwurst with my lunch,” she replied. She didn’t have much patience for boys, especially this one; she’d had to put up with him on every set she’d worked one whole week this month already. Fortunately, no male performer stayed at the top for long.
O had Fiona position Jacqui ass-up on the pallet, wrists clamped between her ankles with a straight steel bar. Calvin gave into the impulse to tickle Jacqui’s left foot with the tip of a cane from the equipment table.
“Do that again, genius boy, and they’ll be two for knackwurst,” Jacqui warned.
“I just need a few strokes on each foot,” O said, already thinking toward the coming wrap and her drive home. She was sweating, and the heavy camera had begun to make her arms ache. Though the ring flash was long gone, the thing itself weighed a ton. Pro Leicas were still made with steel bodies, and there was no substitute for Zeiss glass.
Jacqui took half a dozen sound strokes on each foot, now deliberately taunting Calvin.
“Lovely, Sir. May I have another?” she said after each.
O made him count to three before every stroke so she could catch the cane in the air and then the impacts on Jacqui’s ass and feet. Once she’d gotten five frames on all targets, she couldn’t help asking, as she unsnarled her sync cord if Jacqui preferred sting to thud.
“I’ll take sting any day,” she said. “Floggers remind me of a car wash. It’s too bad he can’t mark me because I’ve got a vanilla girl-girl tomorrow.”
“Another time. Let’s get some sexy here. Calvin, find an angle where you can put it in her mouth. I want to see some good cheek stuffing.”
“Copy that.”
He leaned down, somewhat awkwardly to pack Jacqui’s mouth. How the boys stayed hard during all this remained an enduring mystery to O. Even a chemical boost wouldn’t give most men whatever it took to shake their spears at a room full of people without losing some concentration. But however uncomfortable the position, Calvin kept his edge, finding Jacqui’s mouth and putting it to work. As O had hoped, the pose made for some messy work. Spit was always a good prelude to other bodily fluids.
Climbing up behind Jacqui at O’s instruction, Calvin eased into her pussy first, doing long, slow strokes for the camera.
“This is such a tease,” Jacqui griped through gritted teeth.
“We’ll loan you a vibrator afterward.”
“It’s cool. I’ll get off during the anal if you let him go for a few minutes.”
“First I need an initial penetration shot. Then you two can have at it.”
O took the careful entry of Jacqui’s narrower channel low and slow, making the obvious even more obvious. For an instant, she was distracted by the thought of Steven. Why hadn’t he done this to her when he had the chance? When would he? All that was his decision. Her decisions counted in only one place anymore, and this was it.
Given the go-head, Jacqui and Calvin worked through the agenda, somehow able to stay in character, Jacqui looked back at him with utter hate. Calvin grinned sardonically, waiting for Jacqui to arch up in a wave of real spasms. Just for a moment, her face scrunched down in a way that wasn’t consciously appealing. Thankfully, O caught it in time. She loved documenting women’s orgasms, which she saw far too rarely shooting stills. Nothing ever went on long enough for most girls to come from it. Jacqui was not most girls, in a variety of ways. O realized they had things in common.
“I can go any time you want,” Calvin offered helpfully. It was a two-minute warning no experienced porn photographer would ignore.
“Okay, Jacqui,” O asked. “Where do you want it?”
“Gotta be a facial, don’t you think?”
With a face like hers? O didn’t usually like what she considered a tired convention of vanilla porn, but given Jacqui’s situation and how good she still looked in it, O decided not to duck the cliché. She had plenty of other unpredictable stuff already. While Calvin sprinted off to the bathroom for a quick rinse, O sat down next to Jacqui, still in her rigid bondage, and showed her some RAWs on the camera back. Renata shared the viewing experience while blotting Jacqui’s upper lip with a makeup sponge.
“You’re really good at this,” Jacqui said with genuine awe.
“You make my job easy,” O replied.
“Maybe. I can build a website from scratch in a day, but if I had to take my own pictures for it, I’d never get it online.”
“I knew you were a closet geek. You should get together with Fiona– she’s the queen of Photoshop, not that you need it.”
Jacqui gave O a very frank look.
“I wouldn’t mind getting together with you some time.”
Mercifully, Calvin strolled back from the bathroom, whistling.
“Good to go,” he announced.
O spotted him next to Jacqui’s face and moved in, sitting on the floor to see how much air she could get on the pop. She asked Calvin to please try and miss her.
Jacqui opened her mouth wide while he masturbated over her for a remarkably short time. One bad feature of stills was all the starting and stopping that made the final flat-out dash to the finish an ordeal for some of the guys. Not for this boy. However annoying, he was certainly reliable. Jacqui caught almost all of it on her tongue, rolling her head just enough to let it stream out the corners of her mouth and all over everything. Everyone in the room applauded, even Fiona who rushed in to take Jacqui out of the hard restraint.
“I’d call this a good day,” O said. “Thank you both. I’d like to shoot you again.”
It was only half a lie. She’d be delighted to shoot Jacqui any time. Calvin she’d rather shoot with an elephant gun, but she’d probably end up using him regardless. Male performers who could do their bit with bound female performers were a pretty small club.
Free at last, Jacqui stood up and gave a mighty stretch.
“That’s what I love about good bondage,” she said, giving Fiona a hug after Renata had cleaned up her wrecked face with a baby wipe. “It feels so fine going on and even better coming off. Somebody toss me my flip flops, please.”
O found them and handed them directly to Jacqui, who was covered in sweat and smelled strongly of sex. O could feel Jacqui’s body heat and it stirred her own uncomfortably, especially when Jacqui spontaneously used O’s shoulder for balance while standing up. She asked O if she could look at a few more pictures from the shoot. O obliged, flipping through them on the laptop onto which Roger had already started downloading them. They flew by in a fantastic blur of erotic violence.
“I’d love to have some of these shots for my site,” she said wistfully, knowing how hard it was to get use rights on work for hire.
“I think I can talk the boss into that if you give the magazine a credit.”
“No big.”
“And tweet about it. And write it up for your blog.”
“Done deal.”
They shook hands on it and Jacqui went off to a second bathroom to shower separately from Calvin. Somewhat to her own surprise, O found herself following along.
In the white, clinical bathroom, Jacqui sang to herself, off-key, while O watched her through the translucent curtain.
“Want me to wash your back?”
Jacqui pushed the curtain aside and turned around. O found a big sponge and some liquid soap. She worked away at some of the grime left over from the steel cage.
“You have no idea how good that feels,” Jacqui sighed.
“You’d be surprised.”
“I can tell you’re one of us. You know too much to be just another human tripod.”
“Well, your hints aren’t exactly subtle.”
Jacqui turned her wet face to O and kissed her on the lips.
It went on a few seconds longer than expected, threatening to turn into something else. Jacqui finally broke it off.
“Your hints aren’t all that subtle either, Madame Photographer.”
“I like flirting with girls if they’re wired like I am,” O said with a casual shrug. “They’re better at it than boys.”
Jacqui reached out and took O’s hand, looking at the big shackle ring.
“Whoever he is, he’s a lucky guy.”
“He’s the owner of the magazine, but he’s not all that lucky. He gets in his own way.”
“I can’t imagine much gets in your way,” Jacqui said over the noise of the streaming water.
“I take a detour here and there, but I stay on course when it comes to work.”
“Riiight. That’s why you’re in here with me.”
“I’d like to continue this conversation. I’m doing some stills for a latex catalog next week. All singles. Doesn’t pay a ton, but you can keep the outfits.”
“Fuck, yeah! What day?”
“Tuesday.”
I’ll put it on my phone calendar when I get out.”
Mission accomplished, O excused herself. She rarely did this kind of thing anymore, though she’d once been the terror of her boarding school locker room. She’d gone after girls relentlessly because that’s all there were. After meeting dick, however, O had pretty much given up her Sapphic enthusiasms. There were rare exceptions. Jacqui might be one of them.
O handed Jacqui a towel as she stepped, dripping, out of the shower.
“I’ll get back with you right away about Tuesday,” O promised.
Jacqui gave her a quick hug, all hot and pink and damp from the spray.
“I’d like that,” she said on her way out of the bathroom.
O wondered what was happening inside herself, a place where she didn’t spend much time as a rule. Tired and achy as she was after a typically strenuous studio day, she couldn’t deny her impatience for the coming Friday.

About the Author:
Ernest Greene has been the Executive Editor of Hustler’s flagship BDSM magazine Taboo since 1999 and of Taboo Illustrated since . He has performed in, written, produced, or directed over 500 adult titles, including the Nina Hartley’s Guide series, starring his wife and producing partner, noted porn star and sex educator Nina Hartley. Master of O may be purchased here.

About the Illustrator:
Fernando is a self-taught illustrator inspired by American comic books and European fetish art. One of the preeminent creators of graphic novels in the explicit BDSM genre, his work includes the Cheerleaders series, Confiscated Twins, Dark Vengeance, and many more.