Tales of MU

In Which Mackenzie Breathes

If Ian liked me confident, a few more nights like that one would have him loving me… well, more than he did.

Out-and-out humiliation could get me hot and bothered given the right context, but it would also leave me just as bothered as I was hot. But what we did was not humiliating. Giving in to Ian, giving myself over to him, being put to his use like that… it was more a form of sublimation, no pun intended, and it left me feeling both very relaxed and very strong in myself. Amaranth’s gentle, loving, but firm spanking had had a similar effect, or else I probably would have been too frazzled about the casual nudity to pull it off.

We didn’t go to bed any time soon after I finished Ian off, but instead just went back to our homework. Only now I was sitting cross-legged on the floor near him, and he still had his dick out until the next time he needed to get up… but only in an incidental sort of way.

The whole thing left him with a kind of unassuming cockiness, pun somewhat intended, that just made me want to be used even more by him.

I’d spent enough time sitting on the floor at the feet of either Amaranth or Ian to be comfortable doing it, though doing homework was a new experience. I thought I would probably need to get some kind of writing surface if I were to do it more often. The interesting thing was that even without a desk to write on, the clarity and calm it left me with made a huge difference in my ability to write out a spell formula flawlessly.

If Ian really did want to assert more dominance in our relationship, I could definitely see the upsides from where I was sitting. It was something to talk about in the morning, I decided, once I’d re-emerged from my submersion. I didn’t feel like talking much at all as it was, and there didn’t seem to be any need to.

My dream that night began with me naked and on the floor, though sitting rather than kneeling or crawling. It had the horrible hyper-real clarity that told me it wasn’t just a dream.

The contours of the room had shifted a bit. In the waking world, the only way to fit a queen-sized bed into the undersized dorm room was to have it with one end stuck in the nook where the original bunk beds had been. In the dream, the whole room was bigger and the bed had its head towards the outer wall and its foot towards the door.

The man was sitting on the foot of the bed, his hat in his hand. I didn’t know how much control he had over the initial setting of the dream, but he certainly would have had a hard time figuring out a better way to make me feel looked down upon. The altered dimensions of the room even made me feel smaller, like I was a child instead of being a mostly-adult college student in what was technically her own room.

“So that’s how you spend your time,” he said, shaking his head .”On your knees, slobbering all over a piece of human meat… it’s like watching a vampire kiss a boo-boo to make it all better. Disturbing”

“Well, I’m sorry for having sex in a way that makes it creepy for you to spy on it,” I said.

I used the shot of indignation that went through me as I said it to asset myself a bit, and I found myself sitting on the desk chair. I’d go to the floor for any of my lovers because I chose to be beneath them, but I wouldn’t lower myself for him.

I kept myself naked, though. I was naked, in real life, and since I was alone in bed with my boyfriend I didn’t see a problem with that. If he was going to sit there in judgment of the way I lived my life, pretending I was living it a different way wasn’t exactly a strong opening move.

“Listen, child, your mind’s not a television box and it’s not a book,” he said. “I can’t change the channel and I can’t flip around in it. You got something fresh and firm in your head…excuse my choice of words… when you fall asleep, it’s going to be right there when I show up.”

Buoyed by the sense of clarity that still lingered from my earlier submission, I took the time to dissect what he was saying before responding. He was acting like he’d had the misfortune of stumbling into his knowledge of my bedroom hijinks… but even if that were true, he’d had no business in the place where he was stumbling.

“Think of it as a trap for the unwary burglar, then,” I said. “I’m sure you’d rather I’d been biting and tearing… but I’m just not made that way, and even if I was, he wouldn’t be very filling any more.”

“Hey, just because I’d like to see more respect for yourself doesn’t mean I’d want you to do anything that makes it more dangerous for you to live in this world,” he said. “You are far too precious to me. That’s one reason I took your pitchfork away until you’re a bit… wiser. It was apt to get you into far too much trouble.”

The mention of my pitchfork stirred something in me that almost distracted me from the ongoing judgment, but I decided to address that and ignore the dangled bait.

“I’m learning how to respect the person I am,” I said. “I have to know myself in order to respect myself, and I’m not going to accept the judgment of someone who doesn’t know the first thing about me when it comes to what is and isn’t respectful… and anyway, you could have told me what the pitchfork could do to me and how to handle it safely!”

Okay, so ignoring the dangling bait hadn’t completely worked out. But I hadn’t let his judgment pass unchallenged, and I’d kept mostly calm.

“Still could,” he said. “Will, one day… when I can trust that you’ll listen to me and won’t just go doing the opposite of what I say out of sheer damned spite. The point isn’t that you should be out there killing humans or that you shouldn’t be enjoying yourself, it’s about how you do it.”

I didn’t want his approval, but I didn’t deserve his disapproval.

More than that, he didn’t deserve to approve or disapprove of me.

“Yeah?” I said. “If you think you could do a better job, I’ll dream a dick and you can show me.”

“So that’s how you talk to your daddy?”

“I wouldn’t know, I’ve never met him,” I said. “To tell you the truth, I don’t think he even exists. I also don’t think you really give half a disapproving cluck who I have sex with, or how I do it… it’s just a convenient lever, a way of making me feel inferior.”

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent,” he said.

“Right, which is why you need to go to that kind of effort to convince me to,” I said.

“Hey, listen,” he said. “We’re getting off to a bad start… again… but I’m not here to push my own agenda. I wouldn’t be bothering you at all, to tell you the truth, but there’s something going on you need to know about. Something new.”

“What?”

“Well, I don’t want to alarm you any, but you should know you’ve got something creeping around your backstair,” he said.

I bit back my first response and forced myself to breathe, in the process realizing that I hadn’t been. At all. One of the lesser pitfalls of a dream. Elves… full elves… could stop their breath in real life, though they lost some of what made them like mortals in the process.

What did I lose when I didn’t have a breath? Any sense of tempo, or temper, probably. Though I still felt more in control than usual, I’d been getting angrier and angrier.

Focus, I thought, and it sounded in my head like Dee’s voice during our meditation sessions. Breathe.

I made myself breathe and thought before I answered. The way he said it, it sounded like he didn’t know that I knew about the owl-turtle thing… that seemed impossible, but the owl-turtle thing itself was an anomaly to begin with, and Dee had said that it was able to hide its nature and true presence from even skilled telepaths. Whatever path he’d taken to my sleeping mind, I didn’t think the man measured up to the standards of Dee’s people in that department.

If he didn’t know, I decided, I wasn’t going to tell him.

“What, child?” he said. “What were you going to say?”

“Nothing… just another retort wasted on you,” I said, realizing that leaving it at “nothing” was telling him that it was something I didn’t want him to know. “But it seemed too obvious, and honestly, you’re not worth the effort.”

“I’m serious, though, and no, I’m not talking about me,” he said. “There has been something lurking around the edge of your mind the past couple of nights. Listen, I know you don’t think much of me but I’ve always been up front with you about my presence. I’ve got no reason to come by except to see you, so you’ll always know when I’m around.”

“As far as safe but meaningless claims go, ‘I’m never around when you can’t see me’ rates pretty high,” I said. “How exactly is it that you came to know what’s going on in my mind, if you weren’t around?”

“A father knows,” he said.

“So how did you?”

“Thought you weren’t wasting time with obvious retorts,” he said.

“It’s a work in progress,” I said. “If you haven’t been spying, how do you know what has or hasn’t been in my head?”

“When I go in and out, I leave protections over my path. Alarms, you might say,” he said. “It’s you I’m thinking of… I wouldn’t be so irresponsible as to leave a way into your mind that any Tom, Dybbuk, and Harry could crawl in through, you know. I hope you can at least appreciate that.”

“Thank you for taking the time to put a string with some tin cans on it across the hole you leave in my head,” I said.

“Yeah, well, something tripped over that ‘string’, only it was heading in the wrong direction… it wasn’t on the outside heading in, but the inside going out.”

“Oh,” I said. So, it seemed that the owl-turtle thing had at least made an initial foray in the direction of the man’s mind without my permission. It seemed obvious that the sense of lurking presence I’d felt the past couple of nights was either a result of it trying to skirt around the edges of my consciousness, or a side-effect of it trying to get past the man’s defenses. So it seemed that either it had decided there was something there worth pursuing with or without my cooperation, or it was trying to test the feasibility of its ideas in the hopes of better persuading me to go along with them.

The man’s eyes narrowed, just a bit. I realized my noncommittal response had rattled him somewhat. That was surprising, but it was nice to see.

I kept breathing. Slow, steady.

“What?” he asked. “What do you know?”

“Nothing,” I said, this time counting on the fact that it was the world’s most transparent denial. It was more or less the truth, but if I said it loud enough he’d never believe it. “I mean, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised you noticed.”

“What were you doing?” he asked.

“Nothing!” I said, even more forcefully. “I mean, you’d know if I did, right? You’re the expert here. I’m just sort of… feeling my way around.”

I didn’t have to force the smile that came onto my face as I said the last part. Feeling my way around. If he thought I was stumbling around in the direction of his headspace, that would probably reinforce it.

“Don’t play around,” he said. I wasn’t sure if he meant not to play around with him in the here and now, or not to play around at poking back at his mind, or if he was just covering all the bases in general. “Seriously, girl, you do not want to mess with me.”

“You’re right about that,” I said. I got up and stretched. Now that he was getting uncomfortable, I was feeling far less so. “I don’t want to have anything to do with you.”

“You’re not fooling anyone,” he said. “I know there’s something else that’s been bird-dogging me. Not you. More than you.”

The phrase “bird-dogging” made me smile because of its accidental almost-appropriateness. I didn’t hide my amusement from him… I’d let him wonder what was so funny.

“I thought I made it clear that who I let into my room and what I do with them is my business,” I said. I wished it were true, but I could say it with enough conviction anyway because given the choice I would take the owl-turtle thing in over him.

I had the increasingly surreal sense that to an outside observer… someone who had no clue what was going on in my head… I’d look a lot more clever than I actually was, like a character in a TV show or comic book who always keeps her cool and always has a plan.

I didn’t have a plan, exactly. I was just liked seeing him rattled.

Is this how he feels? I wonder. Not knowing half of what he wants me to think he knows, not telling me half of what he does know. I didn’t necessarily agree that turnabout was fair play, but playing fair had to be done on both sides.

“You’re messing with things you don’t understand,” he said.

“I’m messing with things you don’t understand… and that worries you,” I said. I added the last bit when I realized how I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I I had almost sounded. With the addition, it almost sounded insightful.

“I’m worried for you,” he said. “Can’t you understand that?”

“Yeah, well… if I didn’t have anyone climbing into my head in the first place, I wouldn’t have to turn to anyone else to help keep them out,” I said. “So if you don’t want me making any alliances with forces that are beyond your reckoning, stop giving me a reason to.”

I felt every inch the brat that Amaranth had said I wasn’t, and that thought gave me a weird thrill of impish glee. Asserting myself like this was doing nothing to knock me out of my comfortable headspace.

I still felt submissive, that just made it all the more significant that I wasn’t submitting to him.

“Girl, you have no idea what kind of forces I can reckon with after a thousand years of crawling about the skin of this world,” he said. I could see fire behind his eyes… I could practically see it burning beneath his skin. For the first time, the thin veneer was fading away.

“No, but I know at least one thing you can’t reckon with,” I teased.

“You’ve got too much of your mama in you,” he said.

“Nine years’ worth of her… not nearly enough,” I said. That was probably his fault, but I sat on the blast of anger that thought provoked. “Can I blame you for that? I think I will.”

The offhand way I said it to him was apparently the conversational equivalent of a head blow in Callahan’s class. He leaped to his feet like he’d just sat on something with teeth, a sneer on his face.

“Yeah, don’t you be so proud,” he said. “You know where you get that from, don’t you? You Blaise women are so prideful, so stubborn when you get pressed to the point. Your granny would light the whole world on fire if she thought that wickedness could be burned out of it.”

“I bet she’d do just about anything to stop you,” I said.

“Of course she would, even on principle alone,” he said. “Wouldn’t even have to be personal. That’s what I’m saying. No sense of proportion at all, just like your mother. Just like you.”

“Like you’ve never given her a reason to make it personal.”

“Not so far as she knows.”

“You mean she doesn’t know who you are?” I asked.

“As much as anyone does, I suspect she does,” he said. “We’ve had our go-rounds, but I think I learned more from them than she did. Mostly I learned she’s not worth trying to tackle directly.”

“No, not when you could take advantage of her daughter and rub her face in it,” I said.

“Oh, like I’d be so indiscreet,” he said. He sounded offended… not wounded in the way he did when he was pretending to flinch at my disdain, but actually insulted. “Being with your mother was a great big risk, and I’ll admit to some private pleasure, but what happened between your us wasn’t about petty revenge. I wouldn’t risk what we accomplished together just for the sake of spite… though the same can’t be said for your mama.”

I wanted to tell him to shut up… but more than that, I wanted him to keep talking. I’d never made him mad like this before, and his chrome-plated tongue seemed a lot looser when he got wound up.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Do you want to know the real reason why she’s gone?”

“If you’re going to say it’s because of me, you can save your breath,” I said. “I know it wasn’t my fault.”

“It wasn’t,” he said. “And if you’re going to guess it’s because of me… well, that’s what she’d say, too, if she could tell you. But the truth is, I didn’t lay a finger on her. She did it all herself, and she did it out of spite… to spite me. She was so dead-set on shutting me out, she was willing to take herself out of the picture to make it happen.”

“Even if that is true, I don’t think you’re proving what you think you’re proving.”

“She left you alone, Mackenzie,” he said. “She left you alone with that woman. Think on that a spell, why don’t you. However much I irk you for whatever reason, try to imagine having a daughter you love, and taking your dislike of me out on her the way she took it out on you. Could you do it?”

“No,” I admitted. “I really don’t think I could.”

“Didn’t think so,” he said.

“That’s why I don’t think she did,” I said.

“I’m telling you, I didn’t kill her,” he said.

“I can believe that much,” I said. “I’m not saying I do. But if I go with the idea that you’re slanting things rather than lying outright, then maybe she did give her life to spite your plans… and I’d have to be pretty stupid to not think your plans don’t revolve around me.”

“Then you’re as arrogant as your grandma.”

“Fine,” I said. “They revolve around you using me. From this point on I’m working on the assumption that she gave her life to put me outside your grasp, and I’m going to do whatever it takes to honor that.”

“Girl, you’re making a mistake you don’t want to make,” he said. “You’re doing the exact same thing she did.”

“And wouldn’t she be proud to know it?” I said. I walked over to the door and opened it. “I think you know what this is and how to use it. I’m going to give you exactly one chance to walk out of here under your own power, and then I’m going to wake up. I’d rather not do that because I have class tomorrow, but missing a little sleep is the least of what I’m prepared to do to keep you out.”

“Girl, every time I see you, you say you’re going to…”

“Goodnight,” I said, and I pried my eyes open.

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Characters: Ian, Mackenzie, The Man
Setting: Mackenzie's head, the suite
Topics In This Story: dream, submission