TRIGGER WARNING
This section contains descriptions of intense needle, scalpel, and knife play. It is not safe to insert piercings of any kind without being properly trained on technique. If you have not learned from a professional, do NOT attempt to do any of the things "Magister" does to "ancilla" with needles.
For that matter, if you have never studied shiatsu, don't play with meridians and pressure points, whether you use sharps or just your hands.
I would also like to iterate that bloodsports are controversial in the BDSM community. Aside from the risk of disease transmission, there's the simple risk that someone on the receiving end of a blade might be a heavy bleeder.
As with the activities depicted in the "Netzach" chapter, I ask, as an author to reader, and as an experienced dominant to anybody with any degree of interest or experience in BDSM, to exercise discretion. Just because some things are interesting plot elements in a work of fiction does not make them safe. There is nothing sexy about a trip to the emergency room or a call to 911.
We sit side by side on the couch, near the tiny tree he has set up on top of one of his shorter bookcases. The little white fairy lights shine through prisms we've hung from the artificial boughs, making rainbows scatter along the walls of the living room.
"You first," I say. I hope I'm cute when I wheedle. "Go on. Please?"
He smiles, kisses me lightly, and reaches for the larger of his two presents. I wrapped them in notebook paper because I couldn't afford wrapping paper after I bought his presents, but I decorated the paper with drawings of trees, to make it at least a little more festive.
"Baudelaire! In the original French, too, no less! Thank you. That was perfect. I'll have to read some of them aloud to you tonight. Have you ever read Les Fleurs du Mal?"
"Some of it. In translation. It's been a long time. I didn't quite get his poetry when I was a teenager. No doubt I was missing something. I did think it was beautiful, though, even though it mostly went over my head."
His "Litanies to Satan" gave me the creeps when I was sixteen, because I was still Christian at the time, but the stanzas were so gorgeous that they swept me away anyway. I'm sure there's more to Baudelaire than Satanism, though. He has a reputation. Which is why I grabbed the paperback copy of Les Fleurs du Mal to get Magister as a present when I saw it on display.
"Very beautiful. Also very strange, rather like us." He opens his other present. "A replacement silk! My tarot deck will thank you for it." He kisses me again, this time running the silk lightly across my cheek. "Although I might put it to other uses first. Your turn, eromene."
There are three packages, one large and long, one medium-sized, and one quite small, all of them wrapped in brocaded midnight blue and silver cloth, tied with braided silver fabric trimming. The fabric and trimming alone could be gifts; I could sew them into a pouch or a pillow, or maybe an altar cloth. Where on earth did he find them? The local fabric store wouldn't have something this precious, surely. Then again, if it carried silk gauze for my ritual robe, it probably has a wide selection of luxury fabrics. Sewing has never really been my thing, so I didn't really explore the store too thoroughly when I visited it.
I decide to go for the package that looks and feels like books.
They're books.
"The collected letters and writings of Abelard and Heloise?"
YOU ARE READING
Ancilla
RomanceA shy public reference librarian, and a college dropout who was disowned when she refused to submit to conversion therapy, encounter each other in a bookstore. He's been waiting his whole life for her. Meanwhile, she's starting her whole life over...
