Free Girl by Eden Bradley Page A

school. Maybe I don’t want to know.
    “Have you ever been worked by Gilby?” I ask instead, wondering if she will answer.
    “Of course. He was the one who brought us here.”
    “What?” I don’t know why I feel shocked by this—maybe it’s simply my fragile state after the working I’ve had—but I do.
    “He was my lover. My Dom. But he likes to share his submissives. When he found out I had a kinky sister, well, we were his fondest wet dream.” Her brows draw together for a moment as she takes a blueberry from the fruit bowl on my tray. She pops it into her mouth. “He was hard on me. He was the one who made me see I need it. He’s very good. But he’s not the Master.”
    She looks up at me, and her gray eyes are gleaming with what I recognize as that hint of subspace we all carry when we are well-played. It’s then I notice the bruises on her thighs. Am I so in my own head, my own experience, that I failed to see her beautiful marks?
    She catches me looking and smiles a small, Mona Lisa smile as she runs her hands over her bruises and welts, but she doesn’t mention them. There’s no need to. We both understand. It’s happiness for people like us. And I smile back, my own mysterious smile, because we are both freaks, and we know it. We glory in it. We are all of us freaks here. A lovely shiver of belonging runs through me, like a song in my veins.
    Yes.
    “This is ultimately a very small world we exist in,” she continues. “I’ve been given to Masters and Mistresses from all over the world, they’ve taken me places, to other houses in Europe, one in Bali, one just outside of Tokyo. It makes me know my small place in it all.”
    “I think I know what you mean.”
    She shakes her head. “This is your first time in this sort of environment. You don’t even know the half of it.”
    Some small part of my ego wants to argue the point, but I don’t do it. How would I know? Nothing can truly prepare you for this kind of formal place. For being a slave in the deepest sense. I understand I am at the very beginning of this journey. And isn’t a big part of it about learning to let ego go and simply be ? Isn’t that what I’m looking for? To be forced out of my busy, busy brain, to be made to be present?
    I nod. “I think I’ve only touched the tiniest tip of experience. I know that as much as I can .”
    Her smile lights up her face. She is so lovely, and my body aches for her touch again. “You’re a philosopher, like me. It gets us in trouble, you know. But we like that.” Pausing, she bites her lip for a moment before releasing the plush, pink flesh. “It won’t serve you well in the schoolroom.”
    I nod. “Will the Master be there?” And suddenly my heart is hammering with hope, my sex pounding with need for him.
    She picks up the tray and stands, leaving me disappointed, anxious. “Brush your teeth and empty your bladder again. Someone will be back for you.”
    I watch her long, brown hair swaying around the curve of her hips as she leaves the room, holding my breath until I hear the lock turn, allowing me to exhale.
    The schoolroom.
    Gorgeously threatening words, simply because the idea has been presented to me that way all morning. If only I knew he would be there. I need to feel his demanding hands on my flesh, to hear his voice. To breathe him in. But that will happen only when he decides, and right now I hate that aspect of my powerlessness.
    I take a breath of acceptance and do as I’m told—of course I do. But the whole time I am wondering what this school will be like, what might happen to me there. I flash back to the last days of summer before starting kindergarten. I felt so entirely alone, a sad thing for a five-year-old. But my beautiful French mother had died the year before, and my father, an American, had moved me from my early childhood home in Paris to his grand home in New York. There was no one but the new nanny to take me to my first day at school. It felt a bit