Free The Collectors by Lesley Gowan Page B

eternity and a half, Jeanne parted the lips of my pussy and the cheeks of my ass and she put fingers and her thumb in both holes and fucked me for another forever. I could feel her focus on me, her patience. I came again and again. Then she had me lay full out on the sofa and she rubbed herself against my thigh, holding herself up by her arms and staring down at me, commanding me to stare back at her. If this wasn’t the beginning of a relationship as I’d always understood relationships, it was already a lot more intense than any “real relationship” I’d ever had. I was willing to see what her version looked like.
    Jeanne had me sleep over, in her bed, a first which furthered my confusion. We looked at an art book together and drank chamomile tea. When I woke in the morning she was kissing my breasts, fingering me, making me come before I’d opened both eyes. Then she hovered over my face, bracing herself on the headboard, and rode herself on my tongue to the loudest orgasm I’d heard from her. She actually shouted.
    I got back to my apartment before noon on Saturday. When I unlocked the door to the building’s foyer I saw an envelope had been left for me on the table, probably placed there by another tenant who found it shoved under the door. I could see it was from Adele and I knew without a doubt I wouldn’t be able to do whatever the letter asked me to do. I couldn’t leave Jeanne. I was falling in love with her. Or whatever the equivalent of being in love was in Jeanne’s world. I opened the envelope and saw a drawing. One thing I can say about Adele is she’s an excellent draftsman. There were two figures, one was a very good likeness of me, another of Adele, and we were both naked. The life drawing studio time had clearly paid off for her. I don’t know if Adele was uncertain about her skills or what, but each of us was wearing a collar. One said “Adele” and the other said “Laura,” as if one wouldn’t know who was who simply by looking. But in addition to identifying us, the collars also showed we were submissives, and in that way identical. And I couldn’t deny that was true. The drawing showed me stabbing Adele in the back with a monstrously large kitchen knife, which was a little over the top. I’m not a back stabber. I’m just a woman who knows what she wants.
     
    *
     
    I devoted the rest of the afternoon to work. I unplugged my Internet router and hid the SIM card from my phone. I couldn’t trust myself to not check my messages every two minutes to see if Jeanne was trying to contact me. It was getting ridiculous how much time I was spending on sex—thinking about it, having it, planning for it, recovering from it. I barely had time to eat, let alone write a book-length monograph on an inscrutable artist.
    I slogged through a few hours of writing before going out for coffee and a bite to eat. I gave way to my thoughts of Jeanne as I walked. I missed her. I wanted her every minute I thought of her. And I thought of her every minute. When I sat at the table in my favorite diner, I pulled Adele’s drawing out of my bag, trying to figure out the proper response to it, knowing the idea of leaving Jeanne was out of the question. I didn’t feel threatened by the drawing. After all, it showed me stabbing Adele, not the other way around. But clearly she was saying she hated me for betraying her, and this is where I thought she was being dramatic. Didn’t you have to have some kind of relationship with a person before you could betray her? Strangers did not have the kind of trust with each other that is broken by betrayal. I’d had coffee with Adele four or five times. Whatever she felt I’d done to her, it didn’t rise to the level of betrayal, of stabbing someone in the back. It didn’t seem Adele had a very strong hold on Jeanne, who was her patron, after all. A patron with benefits, it’s true, but not her partner, her lover, her significant other. Not as I understood those