The Collaring of Chloe

Chapter 4: Learning Naked

Once Mittens excused herself, Chloe and Master settled in to talk and get to know a bit more about each other, seated together on the couch. Or, more accurately, for her to get to know him. He seemed to know just about everything about her already, which wasn't especially surprising, when she thought about it. Master Heron had obviously told him everything he knew about her, which was most everything there was to know. Chloe really had very few actual secrets, especially since entering into the BDSM lifestyle, which had allowed her to reveal the only real secrets she'd kept, namely that she wished to be part of it.

He already knew about her lack of actual family, her parents having died when she was a child, and Chloe coming to live with her only Aunt. Aunt Nina had been a lawyer, often not having a large amount of time to spend with the young niece she'd never expected or really wanted. Despite this, she did have more than enough money to send Chloe off to good schools and day-care facilities, where Chloe had spent her youth mostly blending in. She'd not been a bad person, just indifferent and distant, much more focused on her career than being a parent.

To be honest, there wasn't an awful lot more to her past to tell, though. She'd always been a submissive soul, though occasionally adventurous. Though pretty as an adolescent, she'd always been far too shy to really make many friends, much less ever have a significant boyfriend. She'd learned well in grade school, but had gone mostly unnoticed socially. Almost immediately after graduating high school she went straight to college, which had opened her up a little more socially, but she'd never had much luck with making truly close friends or ever meeting anyone that really made her feel a real connection.

Out of college, she'd gone to work as an underwriter for a national insurance company, crammed into a small cubicle away from everyone else. She'd made a couple of acquaintances among her co-workers, but few had really established themselves as anything like a real friend, at least until the night she'd confided in the one that brought her into the lifestyle. It had been there that she'd felt she'd finally begun to make real friends that she really connected with. That had been the only thing that had made her have pause in her decision to uproot herself and come to Master.

The people of her local BDSM community had been the first close friends she'd ever had and leaving them all behind had been more painful than she wanted to admit. However, she'd decided on the gamble in the greater hope of finally being able to feel like she really belonged to someone. She loved her new friends, but she longed for the collar of a slave, to belong to someone as a possession.

Of course, when she thought about it, Master was really taking almost as much of a gamble as she was. Sure, he had the 'power' in the relationship, but he was essentially inviting a stranger into his home to be a permanent fixture. For all he could be certain, she would prove to be more trouble than this would all be worth. One might say the dice she'd rolled held more at stake, but he was rolling dice himself and, really, their stakes were not much different.

So, he'd, of course, hedged his bets, much as she had, through Master Heron. He'd mined everything about her that he could to make sure that he was not bringing someone he'd regret into his house. It all hinged on trusting Heron to be forthright and a good judge of character. That was the same extension of trust she'd given the old man to pair her with a man who would not abuse her or their arranged relationship, but in Master's case, he couldn't be certain he could trust Master Heron either. Chloe had spent a year and half with the older man and his energetic submissive, but Master knew him only ephemerally.

Likely, Master had told as much of himself to Heron as he'd received about her, but since Chloe had actively requested to know nothing of him until she arrived, all that information had remained with Master Heron. She'd imagined a hundred times a multitude of different visions of who that Master might turn out to be, often heavily seasoning her imaginings with faults to prepare herself. She'd spent months preparing herself to obey any man who would take ownership of her, no matter who he turned out to be.