In Which Waffles Are Served A La Mode
After showering and putting on clean clothes, I knocked on Two’s door, thinking that if she had nothing else to do she might like to walk over to the registrar’s office with me. There was no answer, though, either from her or from Delia Daella, so I went by myself.
Asking members of officialdom for something… even when I was just asking them to do their jobs… always made me feel like I was coming around with my hat in my hand to ask for a favor. There was nothing rational about it. They had forms scribed up for adding and dropping classes, and set rules which I was well within the bounds of. I found myself thinking that Two would have had absolutely no nervousness, had she been in my situation… I had a clear order and a procedure to follow. What more did I need?
I bumbled and mumbled my way through it and found myself out of “bladies for ladies” and in mixed melee with Steff. It worked out pretty well, actually… my Tuesdays and Thursday were going to be pretty packed, but I’d have a nice long break in the middle of the day the rest of the week. I had to smile a bit; if Sooni really had missed me on Sunday, what would she think if she never saw me in basic knife class again?
I’d still see her and Maliko in intro to logic, of course, but that was integral to my major. I couldn’t drop it just to get away from her.
Though Two hadn’t turned up, Amaranth and Steff were already at breakfast when I finished. They both applauded when I told them I had switched WP classes. Amaranth kissed me on the cheek, and then Steff kissed me on the other side. I blushed, and told them that I’d started on the lists as well.
“Don’t be shy,” Steff said. “Show us what you’ve got.”
“I… don’t really have much to show,” I said, which was true. I’d gone through a lot of drafts, though.
It was hard to say which was more difficult and embarrassing… putting into words the things I couldn’t stand to do or have done to me, or putting into words the things I liked… even loved… and craved to have done to me. The white list kind of broke down after the first item on it, “Spanking.” At one point, I’d tried to build from that by listing all the related actions that might be done to a person in the same general region… and then had tried to simplify things by just writing “Anything done to the external surface of my”, and then written and erased just about every synonym for “ass” that I knew.
I think part of me felt deep down inside that there was some special way to word it, and if I could just figure it out, the list would just be an innocuous piece of paper and not an embarrassingly in-depth examination of my kinks and perversions.
I’d had some interesting ideas… images, really… pass through my head as I’d stared at a succession of nearly-blank pieces of paper. Amaranth and Steff, both biting my ass at the same time… Steff biting me pretty much all over, that one was kind of a surprise to me… my mouth on Amaranth’s body, not biting…
Could I really put all of that into words? Was I supposed to? Or could I stick to generalities? “My mouth anywhere but…” But what? But where? Was I being descriptive enough? Too descriptive?
I decided it might be easier to leave the white list short and focus on the black list. Amaranth could find out for herself what I liked and what I was willing to do, if she had the black list to set the boundaries. I’d managed to make what I thought was both a fairly concise and comprehensive list. It specified no contact between my mouth and anybody else’s orifices, no contact between anybody’s mouth and my orifices, no penetration of any of my orifices, no contact with the outside of my orifices by anybody but Amaranth, and no penetration by me of anybody except for Amaranth.
By “orifices”, of course, I meant “pussy and asshole”, but putting those words down on paper in this context would have been impossible, so I added a line at the bottom specifying that “orifice” did not include mouth. After more consideration, I added “no blessed or magic weapons”, “no public nudity”, “no public performances”, and “no permanent marks.”
“Well, we’ll take it as a work in progress,” Amaranth said. “Do you have it with you?”
I nodded, blushing. It would utterly defeat the purpose of the lists if Amaranth and Steff never got to see them, but I would have loved to delay that moment, possibly indefinitely.
I pulled the notebook with the black list in it out of my bag and handed it to Amaranth. Steff came around the table to look at it with her.
“This is your no-no list?” Steff said. I nodded. “Is this pretty much it?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“So, if I wanted to call you a filthy fucking slut, I could,” Steff said, adding those extra layers to her voice which turned my skeleton to jelly.
I nodded again, biting my lip to hold in the noise that wanted to come out.
“Well… it’s a good start,” Steff said, as if she hadn’t noticed the effect she’d deliberately had on me. “But let’s be precise about these things. I mean, what’s ‘public’? We spanked you good in front of the leather shop guy, and you loved that, you silly little whore, so… that wasn’t public, was it?”
I shook my head.
“So public means some place where everybody can see, not necessarily where somebody can,” Steff said. “And when you talk about the surface of ‘orifices’… cute, by the way… you’re talking about your whole general pussular region, I take it, but not the entirety of your ass?”
I nodded.
“So only Amy gets to pet the kitty, but I can touch anywhere on your cute boy butt as long as I don’t go knockin’ on the door,” Steff said, using a maddeningly just-the-facts tone. “And you don’t mention anywhere what I can or cannot touch with, so if I am to read this document in the strict construction, as it were, then that means I could go so far as to press my…”
“Oh, let’s not overwhelm the poor, dear girl with a bunch of specifics,” Amaranth said, putting her arms around me. “She’s showing a lot of progress in even making the list. We can hammer out the particulars as we go, I think.”
“I just want to be sure we’re all on the same page,” Steff said. “I mean, when she leaves something open, I don’t know if it’s because she’s implying that she wants it, or if it’s just because she hasn’t thought it through.” To me, she said, “For instance, you’re pretty clear that you don’t want your mouth in contact with any ‘orifices’, and you don’t want any of your own ‘orifices’ penetrated, but if your mouth doesn’t count as an orifice, does that mean you’d be willing to let me f…”
“Seriously, Steff!” Amaranth said, with a firmness in her voice I’d never heard her use when talking to the half-elf. There was an odd sort of smile on her face, though. “Don’t push her.”
“Thank you,” I mumbled, grateful for the rescue. My head was swimming from the attention, and from being made to consider things I usually did my best not to think about.
“Alright,” Steff said. “But, that reminds me… so far I’ve only sort of spanked Mack in emergencies, but if we’re going to be playing together, I need to know you guys’ safe word.”
Amaranth and I looked at each other. She looked embarrassed, or possibly guilty. I wasn’t sure how I looked.
“Okay, well, if it’s something personal between you two, we’ll come up with a separate one,” Steff said. “But, I mean… and maybe I’m getting ahead of myself, but… well… the way things have been going, it doesn’t seem so unlikely that I might be playing with Mack when you’re not around, Amy… and… well…”
It was Steff’s turn to look embarrassed… to look, as Two often did, like she knew she was about to be yelled at for having overstepped her bounds.
I felt a sudden flush of fierce affection for Steff and a need to reassure her that what she was feeling, what she was thinking was not just her imagination or her fantasy, it was real… it was mutual. In the past week I’d named Two as my sister and Amaranth as my owner, and I’d even picked up a sort-of-boyfriend. I had no word for Steff yet, so I couldn’t tell her what she was to me, but I tried to say it with my face.
I don’t know if I succeeded, but the pale rosy blush in her cheeks deepened and she smiled, turning her face ever-so-slightly-downwards while keeping her eyes fixed towards me.
Amaranth cleared her throat, and then coughed, and then cleared it again.
“Well,” she said, “the thing is, we…”
“Basement,” I blurted out. I don’t know why. I didn’t want to ruin the moment. I didn’t want to look bad, or to have Amaranth look bad, in front of Steff. It was the first word that popped into my head. “Our safeword is ‘basement’.”
It wasn’t technically a lie, because, from the moment I said that it was onward, it was.
“Oh, okay,” Steff said. “Thanks.”
“And you can play with me whenever you like,” I said. An outside observer might have concluded I was addressing a tiny civilization that lived in my belly button, in a language understood only by me and them, but I think Steff got the idea. I hoped she had, anyway. Odds were that was the closest I’d be able to come to expressing it.
“Oh, here comes Twoey after all!” Amaranth said brightly. “And she brought a friend!”
That brought my head up out of my navel in a hurry. Two was coming towards our corner table, looking as relaxed and contented as I’d ever seen her. Her roommate had come with her.
“I asked Dee if she would like to have breakfast with us,” Two explained. Her smile faltered only a little bit… it was like she was still cringing in anticipation of a rebuke, but it had started to sink in that this wasn’t likely to actually happen.
“That was a very nice thing to do,” Amaranth told her, and Two glowed at the praise. She sat down, and I saw that she had selected waffles topped with ice cream, along with sausages and a small bowl of fruit.
“Out of deference to your condition, I will ask my gods for forgiveness after the meal rather than requesting a blessing before it,” Delia Daella told me as she took the chair beside her. She seemed to move with an odd kind of jerkiness… she had the same ethereal grace as any light-skinned elf, but with a sort of stiffness in the poses between movements. Having never met another dark elf up close, I didn’t know if that was a trait common to her race, or just something about her.
“Uh, thanks,” I said.
“Oh, go ahead and say your little prayers,” Steff said, waving her hand dismissively. “I’m sure it only bothers Mack when people pray to real gods, anyway.”
Delia Daella stood up in that same otherworldly way, her eyes flashing with righteous anger beneath the cool black ice mask of her face.
“Upon further consideration, I believe I shall show my devotion with a fast instead,” she said. She nodded curtly to Two. “Thank you for inviting me.”
She left so quickly it was almost like she’d disappeared. Two looked stricken. Amaranth and I both turned incredulous looks on Steff, who seemed to be acting as though nothing had happened.
“Listen to you,” Amaranth said. “You’re the last person I’d expect to be disparaging towards another person’s beliefs.”
“Well, I’m sorry,” Steff said. “Rather, I’m sorry that I’m not sorry. My dad’s a cleric, you know? I’ve spent half my life up to my armpits in the elven religion, and it’s all a bunch of shit. I mean, do you realize that nobody’s even seen any of the gods of the elves in like a million years?”
“I think Delia Daella thinks you’re prejudiced against dark elves in particular,” I said. I couldn’t restrain myself from adding, “And the world isn’t anywhere near a million years old, anyway.”
“It’s a figure of speech,” Steff said. “And what do I care if she’s a dark elf? It’s all the same pantheon.”
“Dee does not actually like that term,” Two said. “Dark elf. She’s an elf who has dark skin and there is nothing odd about that. She told me.”
“Well, good for her!” Steff said. She sounded defensive for the first time since I’d met her. “I don’t personally like being called a half-elf. Half-elf, half-human… those are just different ways of saying all nothing.” She gave a short, bitter laugh. “That’s me… all nothing, all the time. Draw a line in the sand and watch me straddle it! Is it any wonder I’m so fucked up?”
“I don’t think you’re fucked up,” I said, and I meant it. Steff had her head screwed on the straightest of anybody I knew. Yeah, she was into a lot of “weird” things… both in her personal life and with her scientific leanings… but she wasn’t all conflicted and turned around about them, like I was.
She turned her angry eyes on me, and I winced… but then they softened.
“Thank you,” she said, and it came out as a whisper… an ordinary whisper, not one which magically caressed my ear.
“None of us think you’re fucked up,” Amaranth said. “We all love you just the way you are.”
“You know, I think I’m going to try that whole ‘fasting’ thing,” Steff said, getting to her feet. “I could use some air.”
“I’ll come with you,” I said, but she shook her head.
“I’ll see you in history,” she said.
“Or before that, at lunch,” I said.
She shook her head again.
“I don’t think I’m going to be around for lunch,” she said. “I’ve got some stuff to do… reflections to make, you know?”
“Steff…” Amaranth said, tenderly. “Whatever you’re…”
“I’m okay,” Steff said. “Really. I’m okay.” She repeated this a couple more times as she backed away from the table, before she turned and headed swiftly out of the room.
I started to get up to follow, but Amaranth gently restrained me.
“Let her be, sweetie,” she said. “I don’t think you can help her with this.”
“I think Steff is mistaken,” Two said. “I don’t think she’s okay at all.”
TWO
is shrewd
who knew?
That’s an “I’m okay” that even *I* would realise wasn’t true, and I’m mildly autistic 😛 I don’t think it really requires shrewd, just paying any kind of attention, and Two has long since shown she can do *that*.
Of course, Two *has* shown herself to be shrewd on occasion… I just don’t think this time really qualifies.
Just another mildly autistic person, agreeing with everything said.
“Alright,” Steff said. “But, that reminds me… so far I’ve only sort of spanked Mack in emergencies, but if we’re going to be playing together, I need to know you guys’ safe word.”
Typo alert! You guys’ safe word
should read
“Your guys’ safe word”
unless she’s from New York; then it would be, “Yous Guys'”. Or if she’s from Texas it would be, “Y’all’s”. 🙂
Huh, just figured this one out. This must be the first time she called her “Dee” – thus expressing her friendship.
Or pehaps not, she did so before it would seem. It’s just the invotation she is nervous about.