"And you're positive the crew at this party will be, you know, cool?" Jane twists the cord of her dormitory desk phone around her fingers.
"Super cool," Tom reassures her. "The organizers are like Daria—multiple redundant safety checks for each mode of interaction."
"And it's up in, where, Lynn, city of sin?"
"Swampscott. Big old house, 1880s fixer-upper, kind of an Addams Family vibe. Vegetable garden out back in summers. Nice place."
"It's just that, you know, it'll be a kind of big step for her."
"And for me," Tom reminds her. "But nothing ventured, and all that."
"I'll raise the idea," Jane promises.
* * *
Daria learned to walk on boots with absurd platform heels far more quickly than either she or Jane had anticipated. It has taken them years to assemble an outfit that works for Goth Night clubbing, and tonight is the first test drive outside of their rooms of the extra bits they'd bought in Los Angeles. For the trip out, Daria is wearing a borrowed BFAC jacket over the outfit proper.
The car pulls up to the curb. Both the passenger and driver wave.
"Hey-hey, Seth-os my man!" Jane greets the driver as she pops open the back passenger door. They meet with a fist bump in the interstitial space between the front seats.
"Yours is ready?" Seth asks. "Mine is psyched."
"Kelly green," says Daria, climbing through the door that Jane is holding open.
"Evening," Tom says.
Jane pops around to the other side and clambers into the backseat behind Seth.
There is a soft clinking of metal as Daria's hands stretch something out flat in her lap. "I can't believe you talked me into this," she says to Jane.
"What, the party? The clothes?"
"No, just the collar." Daria shucks off her jacket. She likes to be covered, and the solid black dress with the frills in the skirt does that down to her knees, where it almost meets the platform-heel boots. It bares parts of skin on her back, where Jane has cut the fabric in horizontal vents, on the William Ware Theiss principle that the dress will look best if it looks like one wrong movement will make it come right apart. It's sturdier than it looks, though. (Jane: "Yes, both Trent and I can sew. Had to learn to keep at least some of our clothes together.") And, while Daria is covered from the front, she's decidedly feeling herself accentuated with the new feature, a harness of leather straps joined by steel rings.
The collar bears three round metal rings of its own, dangling on little steel connectors. It is a sparkly rainbow punctuated with pink-lined holes for the buckle prong. Daria wraps it around her neck. "Everything else, I'd expect from you. I'm not surprised you could eventually appeal to my better judgment. Or my worse, according to the probabilities."
Seth glides the car into traffic. "Neither of us could land a normal one, could we?"
"Hey," Tom says, "handcuff twinsies!" He shows off his own, padded leather construction encircling his wrists, with steel loops for attachment points. They clink as he toasts his left-hand cuff against Daria's.
Daria flattens the folds of her skirt to make legible the Property of JL calligraphed on it in silver pen. "Is yours into this?" she asks Tom.
"Not yet," Tom replies.
Jane remarks, "It's a good thing I came along, because you two would have had no idea what to do with each other." Both Tom and Daria smile. It's a joke they could not have appreciated in an earlier stage of their friendship; it's a truth they could not have known before they had made certain discoveries about themselves.
"OK, bracelet check," Seth announces. "You all set with social signal number one, Daria?"
"All set." Above her right handcuff she wears a yellow elastic band printed with LOOK BUT DON'T TOUCH, an orange one with NO PICTURES and a gray one with NO ALCOHOL. Tom is wearing the first two of those three.
"Not drinking tonight?" Seth asks.
"In those heels?" Tom quips. It's among the easier explanations, and what Daria herself might have said under different circumstances.
"With these genetics?" Daria counter-quips. It's a more personal admission, for people she trusts to hear it.
Jane smiles at this, not so much because Daria is admitting a truth to her—they've shared harsher truths for longer—but because Daria is willing to share this much with the others in the car.
Jane takes a long leather cord out of her bag. "Seth and I were talking earlier," she says, "and we're comfortable with you two holding each other's leashes, if you are."
"Twinsies again," says Daria. "Copacetic."
"I'm game," Tom affirms. "Hey," he adds, "you realize that to get where we're going, we'll be crossing the Mystic River?"
"I think that was Massachusett for big estuary," Seth says.
"In Pennsylvania," Daria observes, "we could be going up the Murderkill." She pauses and then adds, "But yes, it does seem appropriate for a night when we indulge in fantasy." She runs her fingertips around the rainbow collar. "OK, next question: Do we have to say Fidelio to get in the door?"
* * *
Daria wears the jacket again for the half-block walk from the parked car to the house. Jane peels it off her once they're inside, and then she sets about removing her own outer layer. Black and red PVC suit her well, and there's little enough of both that Theiss logic is well in effect. With Tom bared to the waist, Daria can intellectually grasp why Jane had been willing to get into his alleged car all those years ago, but Jane—
"Incomparable," Daria manages to say.
Jane pauses before attaching the leash to Daria's center ring. "Still green?"
"Like emeralds," Daria says, breathing fast, "and saffron with woad, and envy, and leaves in spring."
"Always a writer," Jane says. Then, close in Daria's ear, "Always mine."
"Always," Daria agrees.
Seth gestures with the mocktail in a Nick-and-Nora glass from which he has been sipping. "What do you think of serving juice from a tray gag like that?"
"Honestly," says Daria, "I'd be too terrified of spilling."
Jane twists Daria's leash about her fingers. "Well," sipping her own beverage, "we can't have you getting more nervous rather than less, can we?" Daria's wrists are linked, and Jane can see that she's pulling intermittently against the connection, with the diminishing intensity and frequency that means she'll drop soon.
"Yes," Tom chimes in, "but it's a gadget that you have to special-order. Tell me there's no appeal in that."
* * *
Daria and Tom are both ordered to the floor cushions eventually. Daria is a bit too fuzzed to walk, anyway, so being on her knees while Jane further stills her with a hand in her hair is probably preventing a pratfall. Tom, Daria realizes through her fog of idleness, is more into being given little orders, you cannot eat anything except what is fed to you and the like, while she herself prefers being taken down to a level of immobility and objecthood that such orders would be meaningless. This might say something about the social strictures with which Tom had to grow up—nothing a better relief than forsaking authority and receiving a message unambiguously—versus Daria's struggles with sensory overload and her discomfort with physicality—nothing a better escape than trusting another person entirely with the question of what it means to be attractive. Or maybe they're just submissive oddballs in slightly different ways.
Daria doesn't bother to try following anyone's arrivals and departures. Some vanish off to private rooms. Others wander in and mingle. For a while, Tom and Daria are both clear-headed enough to talk, and so, holding each other's leashes like they'd been allowed, they do.
"You don't think Kubrick was the right director for Lolita?" Daria inquires.
"I don't think it can be adapted in a straightforward way, not just because of the subject matter, but because its structure is so intensely verbal."
"Hmm. I'd say that Kubrick was the wrong fit because so much of his best sense-of-place work is with the cold and urban and artificial, whereas so much of Lolita depends on the earthy specificity of Americana. You don't get Ken Adam or Douglas Trumbull for a road trip movie."
"There's a coldness in Nabokov, too, though, don't you think? He builds labyrinths, and if they have a center, it's pain and loss more often than joy."
"And I think he bleeds into his characters in ways that don't always make sense. Like, it doesn't make sense for John Shade to dislike all jazz. He's supposed to enjoy all streams of culture on their own merits. That's Nabokov preaching."
"You think he preaches less than Borges?" asks Tom.
"I think Borges is more harmonious. And there's a fear of instability at the center of his labyrinths that Nabokov just doesn't quite do the same. It's more humble. 'Course, with Borges, you have to remember that the two stories read by the physics majors are not his whole deal. You'd never recognize the author of 'Emma Zunz' from the description they give."
"You see the Death and the Compass movie?"
"Mm. Too stylized for its own good, I'd say."
"Like the director set out to make a Borges movie, when the way to make a functional translation to the new medium would be to follow the visual tropes of a police procedural, only in a city that's sureally rearranged, like Boston with Parisian placenames."
"Mm. But, on the other hand, Christopher Eccleston."
"True."
"Hey," Daria offers, "what about this for adapting Lolita. Take the character of John Ray, the one who is supposedly editing the manuscript. Have him travel around the country trying to discover what really happened. He gets different stories in different places. The flashbacks are all animation. You never get one consistent look for Dolores, or for Humbert."
"And you can preserve more of the novel's text without having to cast anyone except for voices."
"Maybe the animation style could change with the narrator..."
Seth whispers to Jane, "You realize there are people, like, fucking upstairs."
Jane whispers back, "You realize we've been watching these two the whole time?"
"Yeah. You gonna stop?"
"Not yet."
"Me, either."
* * *
Seth and Tom do eventually vanish off to a private room. Jane transfers Daria's wrists to behind her back and slips a gag into Daria's mouth—obnoxiously pink, to match the collar—and once Daria's jaw relaxes, she fuzzes out hard. Trusting Jane to put her on display like this pushes her into a level of objectification where she can't hold a thought in her head for five seconds at a stretch. They had practiced a boot-tap signal to use if she's overwhelmed in a bad way when she can't speak, but she's far in the opposite direction from needing it. She's happier than she had ever imagined during the planning phase for all this.
"Isn't she adorable?" Jane asks the woman with Domme-y looks who sits on the loveseat beside her.
"It all becomes her," the woman replies. "She like pain as well as restraint?"
"We're still figuring that out," Jane says. "Some, yeah. Trouble is, right now she'd probably agree to anything."
"I could retrieve mine for a demo. He's been shamefully under-used tonight."
"We do both appreciate learning experiences. Oh, Jane, by the way."
"Irène. Does this little one need a name tonight?"
"You know," Jane ponders, "maybe not." And the next wave of objectification hits Jane's enraptured little toy so hard her eyes roll back.
It's a good night.
Jane's transfixed toy watches from her place on the floor. Sights and sounds and movements don't bother to cohere into her awareness, beyond the fact that she is leaning into Jane's leg, and Jane is keeping her leash short. Conversation? Discussion? Too hard to follow....
And then Jane unbuckles her gag for her and is crouching down beside her giving little caresses to her shoulder. "Hey, Sunflower," she whispers, just loudly enough for her and her alone to hear. "Still green?"
Sunflower blinks. "Still green."
"Irène says we can claim the whipping room right now."
"There's a..."
"Yes, a dedicated whipping room. She wants to demonstrate a few things for us. It's up one flight of stairs."
"Might not be able to walk. I think. Up stairs."
"You could crawl."
In front of everyone, everyone at the party seeing her as nothing more than a toy, and suddenly she wants all of them to be right.
"Gag back in," she requests. "It'll help."
Strangely, it becomes easier to follow the talk around her as she makes her way up, one hardwood step at a time, the leash never too tight or too slack. Having to make her limbs work is bringing her functionality up. She regrets the loss of the fog, then feels a pang of oddity that she is crawling leashed and gagged in front of strangers and wishing she were feeling more deep in submission rather than less, and then the sensation of the oddity is itself clarifying her. The point of the night had not been to be Daria Morgendorffer, incisive observer of social dynamics....
The dedicated whipping room has an open expanse of hardwood floor, a wall of floor-to-ceiling mirrors, and a few items of furniture that Daria doesn't have time to identify before Jane says, "Hold on a minute. Mine's being too alert."
Kissing her brow. And now her leash is attached to something low and solid, and her hands are cuffed behind her again, and Jane is doing her ankles. "Give me one tap to make sure you still can signal if you need," Jane instructs. One clonk of boot-heel against wood. "Wonderful. Now, how does this feel? Nod if you agree." She brushes her fingers up Daria's leg, sliding from boot-leather to skin, and then slides her skirt above her knee, exposing a stretch of thigh. "Agree?"
She nods.
"Going fuzzy for me again, aren't you?"
She nods again.
Jane, incomparably beautiful and desirable, brims with delight.
It's hard to tell what exactly Irène is doing to her submissive. There are masculine grunts, and momentary glimpses of sweat and leather, and a riding crop and a beaded flogger are involved somehow, and Irène's voice is altering in tone between firm and commanding when instructing the submissive and instructional with a wry hint of allure when explaining why it all works the way it does....
She tries to follow—the writer observes—but it's easier to catch Jane's movements as she passes in front, Jane's reflection when she is looking away to watch the lesson... The writer knows her subject matter.
The submissive is put through multiple poses. Jane's toy closes her eyes and only cares to listen to Jane's questions.
And then Irène's submissive is down here beside her, exhausted and blissed. She feels sudden commonality with a man she's never met and whose name she's never heard, because it's so blatantly obvious what both of them need.
Jane distracts her from what Irène is doing on her other side by unbuckling her gag again. "Still green?"
"Envy," she says. Her voice is rough. Jane is offering an electrolyte drink with a straw. It's worked well for her when they've been alone. "Want to prove... you're just as good."
After an evening of Jane pushing her buttons, she's now pushed Jane's own, hard enough to make Jane actually blush, here, in the middle of all this.
She lets her head loll back as Jane has a sotto voce consultation with Irène.
"I'll be right back," Jane says.
She feels anxiety over separation, washed over by curiosity about what a trip away entails, what might have to be acquired elsewhere.
Jane and Irène have one more brief exchange that she can't make out, and then Jane has popped out the door.
Irène orders her submissive to clean something.
She focuses on finishing the last of the electrolyte drink, sipping through the straw while kneeling on the hardwood floor, her hands still immobilized behind her back.
"Look what I checked out of the library," Jane announces, sing-song.
The first thing she recognizes is another riding crop. Of the other two, after a few blinks, she parses one as a gag where the internal bit is a purple dildo. The other is also a gag, but inflatable, controlled by a bulb that dangles at the end of a rubber tube. "What's your pleasure?" Jane asks.
Her eyes go to the inflatable.
"Not much straightness left in you, is there," Jane comments. "Maybe I've finally fucked it out. Now," curling into a kneel before her, soothening her voice, "this will go in further than what you were wearing before. First we'll check that you can handle that. Then, the plan is to silence you, restrain you while standing, and hurt you."
The unvarnished words make her mind explode with possibility, and without a word, she contorts herself to take the rubberized mouthpiece of the inflatable gag onto her tongue.
"Wow," Irène says, "someone is eager."
Jane guides the gag straps past the toy's hair, buckles them down snugly. It covers more of her face than the other, masking everything between nose and chin and most of her cheeks with its leather panel.
Jane puts a hand on the toy's knee and, with the other, pumps the bulb, one, two, three times. She flickers her glance momentarily up to Irène. "Enough?"
"That's up to her."
She extends her index finger.
"One more?" asks Jane.
She nods.
"Thaat looks about right," Jane says, evaluating the reaction. "Now, I'm going to loosen your arms and legs so you can crawl forward again. Ready?"
It takes her fuzzed-out brain a while to realize that she's crawled to the center of the room. "Perfect," Jane tells her. "Now, up we go on three. One, two, three." Jane brings her to her feet and, briefly, squeezes both her hands. "Here's where we get dramatic. Lift your arms. Up and out." There's a soft clinking of metal, and then a louder clattering. "That sound," Jane says, "was you being chained to a ceiling beam. Now, take a deep breath for me, OK? And another. Perfect. Tug on the chains to see how they feel. Can you give me just one tap to make sure you can still signal?" One solitary clunk.
Jane steps aside and lets the toy see herself in the mirror. And in that reflection, there is a reflection of another mirror, showing the deliberate rents in the fabric across her back.
"Five strokes," Jane says. It's the first time her own voice has roughened with tension, been anything other than steady. She flexes the riding crop between her hands, takes a step further around, and—
The first hit makes Jane's toy gasp around the bulb and her eyes water. She blinks that away and sees in the mirror that while her mouth is concealed, her eyes are smiling.
The second hit lands cleanly on her exposed skin without touching fabric. Jane has stopped being nervous. The residue of the pain wraps around her spine and holds her in place as strongly as the metal chains.
The third hit echoes the angle at which Jane loves to stroke her when they are in bed together. The riding crop is now an extension of Jane's being.
She has just a moment to wonder if she's ever dropped this hard and fast before when the fourth hit lands and memory becomes impossible and there is only Jane's will, Jane turning her into something beautiful, a beauty of sweat and allure and welts multiplied between mirrors.
Jane stands beside her, brings that will in close, touches the full length of her. She feels fabric move on her leg, and in the mirror she sees Jane gathering the fabric of her ruffled skirts, baring her thigh.
"Always mine," Jane purrs in her ear.
She trembles in the chains.
"Just as I am always yours." The fifth hit lands on her thigh, and ecstasy explodes up her nerves, and she thrashes into Jane and her arms spasm within their chains and her scream is wordless and the room lights flare bright and pure joy seizes all her senses—
* * *
"Heyyy, Sunflower," Jane is saying.
"I came," Daria announces. Jane is cradling her in a world of cushions.
"Yep," Jane confirms.
"I came from being chained and beaten," Daria elaborates.
"Yep-p-p-p."
"Chain, beaten, gagged, with strangers watching."
"Mm-hmm." Jane is nuzzling into her now, there's no doubt about it.
"And you are being incredibly self-satisfied."
"You thirsty? Hungry?"
"Both, I think."
A bowl of grapes materializes from somewhere outside of Daria's awareness. She begins popping them into her mouth. "Thanks," she says, after finishing a fistful.
"We can find something more substantial if your stomach's up for it," says Jane.
"In a minute. Or five. Or..." Strength leaves Daria again, and she becomes friendly with the cushions.
"You were beautiful," Jane declares without introduction or modification.
"Oh?"
"You're beautiful every day I see you," Jane goes on, "but tonight, you transformed. Something arose from within you that I don't think you knew you had the capability for. You accessed a style and form of beauty you haven't given yourself the credit for."
Daria is silent.
"Was it too much?" asks Jane.
"No."
"Too fast?"
"No, nothing like that. It was... suddenly revealed as irreplaceable. Yesterday, I could have imagined that I would grow comfortable enough with your touch that we'd forsake the calming rope ties, that I'd grow content enough with my looks to be your ordinary girlfriend who wears ordinary nice clothes on ordinary date nights. It didn't seem like I was only doing it all to work through my damage, but that didn't seem impossible either. Tonight..." She fixes Jane with a dead-on stare. "You leashed me and made me crawl and gagged me and chained me and lashed me to an actual white-out orgasm. This is part of who I am. It's part of who we are."
"Knew you'd catch up eventually."
Daria tosses a pillow at her. She deflects it with her elbow and then snuggles it against her side. "Is that any way to treat your owner and mistress?" Jane inquires, sweet as sugar syrup.
"Is that..."
"What I'm after? Outside of bed? Or, well, beds and playrooms with mirrored walls and..."
Daria waits with a raised eyebrow.
"No, Sunflower," Jane says. "Some people at this shindig are into organizing their whole schedules around it, I think, but I don't have an appetite for that. And I can tell that you don't, either, so I wouldn't ask for it if I did."
"All right. We add some pain tools to the Nightstand of Sin. We expand our options for plugging my mouth. We shop around for other kinds of restraints. We consider doing more scenes where other people can watch."
Jane comments, "I think it took the whole night for both of us to get worked up to the point of enjoying that."
"I don't want anyone else topping me," Daria states. "And I'm not comfortable with the thought of you topping anyone but me."
"You're saying I was so good you want to keep me all to yourself?"
"Jane, come on, I'm serious... but yes, also that."
"Agreed, my love, agreed. And," Jane grows more solemn, "I don't think I could do that to anyone else. I passed on Irène's offer to use the riding crop on her boytoy because, well, that's just not what I want."
"Hell-oo-oo?" Tom's voice has entered their world of cushions. "Jane? Daria?"
"Somewhere in here," Daria replies.
"All's well with you two?"
"All's well," Jane confirms.
"Apart from working up a pizza-murdering appetite," Daria amends. "Got any suggestions in that direction? Bearing in mind that I'm still too loopy to know if my arms and legs all work."
The weekend after the party, Jane is slammed with coursework and with setting up an installation. It's not until the Friday after that when they finally have enough time to get a carry-out pizza and devour it sitting under the loft bed in Daria's room.
"So, I've been thinking," Daria says.
"I expected no less."
"You were honest when you said you didn't want to control me in between sessions, right?"
"Uh, yeah. You're not worried I wasn't, are you?"
"I know it's not a thing you'd hide the truth from me about, but I... needed to hear it again. I'm sorry. Bit of a mess."
"Sunflower, did we go too far for you at the party?"
"No. I told you then, and I haven't changed my mind. It's just that... I don't know where to begin here, but—does that include caring about whether I, you know, get off when we're apart?"
"Honestly, I haven't much thought about it. It's a thing people do. Sometimes we're apart for too long. It'll happen. I guess it bothers me to be apart for too long, but, like, how either of us takes the edge off that? Whatever, right?" Jane watches Daria pick a mushroom off her pizza and slowly nibble on it. "Sunflower, you're being maybe a bit weird about something that's pretty normal."
"I started writing a story. One of those that I couldn't not start. Worked some every day, worked a lot over the weekend when I couldn't see you. The skeleton is in place with about fifteen thousand words now. It might grow to twenty if I revise. In the process, I kind of..."
"Excited yourself?"
"That doesn't happen," Daria insists. "Remember Melody Powers and Antonio? That was a joke, just pushing clichés around on the page. You think writing that did anything for me? I've been more serious later, written lines that I thought were too much for their surroundings, struck them out during editing... But this, all of this was necessary. There was no place to fade to black without breaking it all to pieces. And the experience this time..." She stands, retrieves her laptop, works the keys briefly and turns the screen around to face Jane. "Please," she says.
So Jane reads it.
It's spare, careful in its disclosure of details. The world feels fantastical, or at least uncanny, while the main character is drawn with the strict rules of science fiction, a system that is established and then followed. It takes place in a city that is Boston but also not. Jane thinks of the Death and the Compass story that Daria and Tom had discussed while leashed at the party. The place names are deliberately off, and the neighborhoods are not juxtaposed following the geography she knows, but the atmosphere in each location feels correct. It's an exploration by variation, a calling of attention to details that she would have overlooked otherwise.
The main character is Daria, but also not. Tiny, yes, and an intellectual, and with mannerisms that Jane recognizes, but with different interests and hailing from a different part of the world and growing up without a Jane in her life.
Because it is science fiction, or a fantasy, the main character is a telepath, born by accident in a world where, as far as she knows, there are no others like her. She senses feelings, sometimes hears thoughts... and sometimes cannot help but feel herself what others do.
She grows terrified of sex, because she cannot resist feeling the enjoyment of whoever is touching her. Her thoughts break apart into fragments of verse that, somehow, echo the surrealistic rearrangement of the city. As if its escalating wrongness is hers, as if everywhere she turns is a new facet of the perfect jewel in which she gradually learns she is imprisoned.
The story ends with her trembling on the edge of deciding to give herself over to someone who will own and rule her, the edge of making the last choice she will ever make, because she knows her freedom will die with a touch, and the alternative to that is solitude.
"It's fucked," Jane says at the end. "And fucking hot."
Daria's hands bunch up and fold over each other. "I can't write like that without you. I wouldn't have the experience to tell a coherent story about going further and darker. I couldn't make the temptation happen. And... writing it did so much to me..."
"It felt like I was Domme-ing you at the time?"
Daria squeezes her eyes shut. Her hand goes into her jacket pocket and finds the NO PICTURES wristband. Without looking, she slips it on and snaps it against her skin. "Yeah," she says. "It felt like I would need your permission to share it. Maybe even to finish it. Like I was waiting for your orders, my love." She snaps the wristband again.
Jane brushes her fingertips around Daria's ear, over her piercings, and brings her hand to rest atop her head. "Are you in a place where you need orders now?"
"Yes, Belladonna."
"Are you comfortable in that place? Do you want to stay?"
"Yes."
There are wellsprings of darkness inside Daria, thinks Jane. That prudent avoidance of alcohol manages a real fear. Perhaps she is even afraid that the fantasy is so good, one could tempt her into giving up her safewords and signals, just once, just for the thrill.
"Give me a color, my love."
"Green, Belladonna."
"All right." This is yet another time when Jane feels grateful that Daria followed Marina's example and moved to an off-campus living group. Her room is tiny, but it's hers. "I'm going to lock the door. And then you're going to put on everything you wore at the party. Everything."
Jane guides Daria through the process of undressing and redressing with her eyes closed. Platform heels, then harness, then cuffs, and—"Do you know what I've put in your hands?"
"My collar, Belladonna."
"Go ahead, Sunflower." She brushes back Daria's hair to keep it from getting tangled in the restraint.
"Do you feel beautiful now, my love?"
"... Yes."
Jane thinks that Daria would worry about falling if she tried to climb into her bed like this, so she says, "We're going to lay you out on the floor. Ready? Down we go." With Daria resting on the floor, Jane takes a deep breath and continues, "I brought a couple surprise new additions for the Nightstand of Sin today." She goes to her bag and retrieves her latest contributions to their collection. "When I said everything, I meant it. Open wide, my love."
Jane takes the inflatable gag up to four pumps, as before. She ties Daria's ankles, as before.
"Now, open your eyes, Sunflower."
Daria discovers that she is facing her laptop.
"Can you tell where this is going, Sunflower? I want you to write. Your computer stays on as long as everything remains on your body. You release your gag, and I close your file, no changes saved. For every page you finish," Jane leans in close and caresses Daria's shoulder, "you get a stroke. Perhaps here." Her fingernail traces along a rent in the dress and grazes Daria's back. "Or perhaps here." Now her hand brushes Daria's thigh. "Or perhaps... Can you use your imagination, Sunflower?"
Daria is feeling the fog coming on harder now, even with her hands free, because they aren't really free, not if she wants to finish her story.
"Give me a color, Sunflower."
Daria types GREEN.
Jane is keeping so much of herself in contact with Daria, feeling Daria breathe. "Begin," Jane instructs her.
The first few paragraphs are easy. She had wanted dialogue to fit in with the scenery description, and dialogue came more quickly to her, so she had challenged herself to do the rest first. Now she just has to fill in those gaps she had left herself—
She feels the riding crop strike her leg, just above her knee. Fuck, the page count had gone up. Staccato dialogue meant short paragraphs and frequent line breaks.
The next lash hits a hand's breadth higher. The deep fog is inviting her down, now. What can she even write in that state? The thought-verses, yes, the fragmentary ones—
Which also make for easy line breaks.
This time, Daria lasts for seven strokes before her moans become a muffled scream and the letters blur and Jane takes her consciousness away at last.
* * *
"Maybe next time," Daria says much later, as they are falling asleep in her bed, "we should do that by word count instead."
Jane is in the back corner of an art-supply store—she's trying out a different one closer fo Daria's home—when she hears that boot-tread she knows and loves. Daria appears by her side and gives her a quick hand-squeeze.
"OK for smooch?" Jane asks. They're alone in the Bristol board section, after all. Daria nods and offers herself up for a peck.
"Your story didn't end how I was expecting. I thought what you added had some good stuff."
"Jane, everything I wrote while you were that needed editing to fit right. Even a fantasy doesn't work like a fantasy. And even a character who I pour a lot of me into doesn't have all of me."
The near-hallucinatory passages that Daria had added that night brought back an incidental character from early in the story. Now Daria has made her protagonist cross paths a third time, and the character she meets in the surreal city is an asexual woman. By the telepathy rules that Daria had established, lack of desire also flows. The protagonist discovers that her own original sex drive is quieted. Now the story ends with her on the brink of romance with a woman who lets her escape wanting, finally able, perhaps, to make another happy by giving what she values best in herself.
"And if they have your problems, they might solve them in upside-down ways," Jane says. "Like finding freedom from having to choose how to be beautiful."
They're walking now, past sketchbooks and towards drawing tools.
"Like that."
"Or the fear that someone will tempt you to give up—" Jane quirks her head briefly to indicate the racks of watercolor pencils in all their varieties.
Daria's attention goes very obviously to the yellows and reds. "Yeah, like that."
Jane decides to buy a bottle of gesso and a new scalpel-like precision knife. "I shudder to think," Daria says.
"I just need the handle, not the blade. It's for holding a wire. You cover a page with this—" She holds up the bottle of thick primer. "And you draw on it with tiny streaks from a metal wire. Copper, silver, even gold."
"Sounds methodical. Maddeningly so."
"Which is why I haven't tried getting into it before now. That and trying to score jewelry wire."
On their way out of the store, Daria says, "B-movie night at Tom's? He called and said they're trying to decide between Critters and the Hercules with Lou Ferrigno."
"Tough call. And the plan is still to order a giant pile of General Gau's and whatnot?"
"That's the idea."
"Count me in."
They're walking away from the hustle and bustle of Mass Ave, heading towards Daria's place, without saying anything to decide upon this. "I wouldn't mind drawing you in gold one day," Jane says.
"And to think, there was a time you were so angry at me that you would have painted me in pig's blood."
"Sunflower, I was able to imagine you making out with someone—a lot more easily than you could imagine that, apparently—but I could never see you going to prom."
"What's the point of dressing up if you're not going to be tied down?"