Fast And Loose

JUSTINE ELYOT

A division of HarperCollinsPublishers

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Mischief

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street,

London SE1 9GF

Copyright © Justine Elyot 2015

Justine Elyot asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Ebook Edition © 2015 ISBN: 9780008148782

Version: 2015-06-30

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

More from Mischief

About the Publisher

Chapter One

I could stare at the screen until the skies fell but the message wasn’t going to be any different. ‘This blog has been removed.’ No explanation, no apology, no clue as to why.

The blank blandness of the words made my skin prickle. There was something sinister about the whole thing. It reminded me of old drama programmes about apocalyptic events when the TV pictures frazzled into test cards. What could it mean?

What had happened to her?

Never had I been so grateful for my habit of saving favourite posts to my hard drive. I went straight to her last – and most exciting – update and read through it again.

Mia stands on the brink.

The next time you hear from her, she will have crossed a Rubicon from player to professional, from ingenue to sophisticate. Most importantly, she will be what J wants her to be: his perfect submissive.

She heard from The Academy today. She is to pack nothing but her toothbrush – everything else will be provided. On her arrival, she will be stripped, bathed and measured for her new costumes. For one week, she will wear nothing that restricts access to her, and she will be open and obedient to all.

Would you be unnerved, in her place?

Sweet little Mia has never given herself in submission to anyone but J before, and now she anticipates being used and whipped by anyone who wishes it. She wishes she could say the idea does not arouse her, but it does. It always has. And this is how she knows who and what she is. She wants to be owned, but she wants to be shared. She wants everything of her to be subject to the will of her master. And if her master wishes that she offer every one of her openings to faceless unknowns, then that is what she will do.

She will glory in it, and with every stroke of the whip, every thrust of an anonymous cock, she will have his name upon her tongue.

He will love her for it.

Your Mia is trembling in anticipation, my darlings, and she hopes that you are too. She will be back in one week, to give you every dirty last morsel of her experiences at The Academy. Nothing will be hidden, because she is permitted to hide nothing.

She kisses your boots.

XOXO Mia XOXO.

My greedy eyes lapped up her gorgeous illustrations – line drawings of her kneeling, naked and in profile, at a man’s feet, sucking on him. Only the man’s lower portion was visible, the picture ending at Mia’s bowed head. She had drawn the remains of faint whip-marks on the portion of her buttocks presented to the viewer. Her hands were bound behind her back.

There were other pictures, too. One of her standing, her back to the viewer, before a huge and ornate front door, holding a cute little handbag. One of her standing naked in front of two stern and unyielding-looking characters – a suited man with a riding crop, and a woman of a Mrs Danvers cast, in housekeeperly black.

God, I had been so looking forward to the next update. I had my vibrator ready and everything.

And now this.

I kicked at the desk leg and pushed my computer chair back on its castors, frustrated in the extreme. Now I was going to have to use my imagination.

I cocked an ear, listening to the silent flat.

Jess and Mehra were both out, one at lunch with parents, the other at IKEA with boyfriend. I should be safe for another hour at least.

I eased my pyjama shorts down to mid-thigh, the feel of the leather on my bottom taking me back to another of Mia’s posts. The one where she sat on a high stool in a crowded bar, waiting for her first meeting with J. He had ordered no underwear and a skirt loose enough to make this skin contact with the stool top possible. She had sat there, worrying about getting the leather wet. She had been so worried that she had taken a pack of wipes with her, meaning to run one over the round red seat once she was off it. But in the end J made her lick it up. Right there, in front of everyone. I cringed, just as I had when I first read it, but at the same time I reached for my vibrator.

Later that night, after dinner and champagne in a restaurant that sounded a lot like Wystan Place, he had taken her to a hotel room and made her bend over the bed.

I switched on my vibrator and applied its smooth round head to my parted under lips.

After making sure she was bent to his total satisfaction, he had lifted her skirt and smacked her bottom, six times, hard enough to leave handprints.

Then she had moaned and begged for more, but he had refused her. Instead, he made her stay like that, bent over with her thighs spread, while he made a slew of business calls. The last call was to a friend, and he had spoken to this friend of Mia and how she was positioned just then.

I tried, as I rubbed my vibrator up and down and around my clit, to remember his exact words.

‘I’ve got a little slut up here with me – you’d like her. We’ve hardly spoken to each other and already she’s bent over the bed with a red bum and the juiciest pussy you ever saw. I’m making her wait, though. Maybe I won’t even fuck her tonight. What do you think?’

I thought of what must have gone through Mia’s head; the jumble of humiliation and outrage and frustration and sheer horniness.

He had laughed before speaking again. ‘Yeah, I might do that. She needs a bit of training first, though. Do you want to see her?’

And he had photographed her upturned bum, with its scalded red spots and her open lips below, for his friend to look at and pass judgement upon.

I gasped, feeling my pussy clench uselessly on nothing while warm sensation pulsed around my clit.

‘Ohhhh,’ I moaned, thinking of J and his friend. But in my imagination his friend looked a lot like Tom Crowley, and that spoiled the moment for me.

‘For God’s sake,’ I muttered, standing to pull my shorts back up before heading to the bathroom to wash the vibrator. I put my tongue out at my tousle-headed reflection in the mirror, thinking it was no wonder Crowley had never called me for a second go if this was my morning look.

But then I told myself that no amount of last night’s mascara or this morning’s dull skin would have influenced Crowley’s decision. He was a one-night merchant. That was common knowledge.

I sang a few lines of Britney’s ‘Womanizer’ into my vibrator mic, scowling at myself. I needn’t have given in to him so quickly, though. If I’d held out, we could have had a month of lovely flirtation. A month would have been my limit before the knickers came off, I reckoned. He was a bastard with a terrible reputation, but he was also an astonishingly attractive bastard with a terrible reputation. A girl could treat herself to a one-off, couldn’t she?

I dried the vibrator and went back to my bedroom, where I pulled out my little bag of tricks from the bedside drawer to replace the vibrator with its fellows. The bag of tricks was full of stuff I’d never used and probably never would. A satin blindfold, a silky bondage rope, a little heart-shaped leather paddle. What I needed to distract me from Tom Crowley was somebody I could use these things with. But I’d never summoned the nerve to bring it up with any of my past boyfriends, and I doubted that was going to change. Once I knew a man, the desire to surprise him with the information that I was actually a person who enjoyed being tied up and spanked faded away. How could I throw that into the carefully constructed and cherished image of me he’d built up? It would ruin everything. Unless – and it was a massive unless – he turned out to be into it himself, the sex would become awkward and…ugh. No. It didn’t bear thinking about.

Of course, I could always try it the other way around. Look for somebody who had a declared interest in the subject. It was easy these days, with sites like Fetlife and so on. But I’d register and spend fifty hours trying to write a personal profile, then end up deregistering because I couldn’t stand the embarrassment any more. If only cringing turned me on, I’d have had it made.

So I was stuck with virtual kink. I trawled the net for sites that chimed with my tastes, and had to wade through a lot of unappealing material in my travels. The amount of surprised-looking blondes in red ball gags! Seemingly lots of people were all about that, but it wasn’t for me. I was looking for a particular aesthetic to go with my kink – no lurid intimate close-ups, no skulls and tattoos. I was looking for corsets, seamed stockings, ribbons and slender-handled riding crops.

Luckily, there was plenty of that, and nobody did it better than Mia Culpa.

I think what drew me in was that she started from the same point as me – curious inexperience. Her first posts were all about her fantasies, flashes of erotic fiction that chimed with my own yearnings. I would never know her, and I wasn’t one to comment on blog posts, but in a funny way I felt she was a kind of soulmate.

Her fantasies were wonderfully extravagant, often based on a pretty lingerie set or toy she’d seen in one of the luxe sex boutiques, and I began to look forward to my late-evening browse of her blog. She posted every day – sometimes with a story, sometimes with an opinion, sometimes with one of her drawings.

Then, one day, she posted an announcement. She had made the decision to seek that experience we both longed for. I didn’t know how to feel about this. On the one hand, I admired her courage, and I was desperate to read her accounts of this new stage in her life. On the other, I felt a little bit sad, almost betrayed, that she was moving on from my stationary position. I was the bridesmaid, watching the bride leave the reception, with only my bouquet to cling to.

I soon forgot my disappointment when she started posting the most riveting series of updates about her experiences in the D/s dating pool. They were funny, then despairing, then hopeful – then she met J.

That was when her blog switched from first to third person. The significance of it wasn’t lost on me. It meant it was serious. Sometimes I could imagine that J was writing it himself. It pulled me in deeper at the same time as it distanced me from her. Gone was the breathless intimacy of her virtual voice in my ear. Now I read about a fully-fledged submissive, giving all agency – even down to the pronoun she used – to her master.

I lived that deviant education by her side. I was there for her first spanking, the first time he tied her up, the first time she put on latex. All those firsts, and I had yet to break my duck.

And now, six months later, she was about to obey J’s command that she take her place at an exclusive ‘training school’ for submissives and the blog had disappeared!

I typed in the address again, hoping for a resurrection, but those foreboding words filled the screen once more.

I had to face it. Mia Culpa was no more.

Of course, I couldn’t just leave it like that.

Over the course of the next two hours, I clicked around between her online friends. A good many of them had posted updates about her sudden disappearance, but not one seemed to be in real-life contact with her. ‘Mia is M.I.A.’ was the upshot, with dozens of commenters lamenting her loss, but none having any news of her.

Many expressed fears for her safety. Did anyone know anything about this Academy? Where was it? Had anyone been there?

Everybody had drawn a blank.

I, at least, had a little bit of knowledge they didn’t, though, because it had become clear to me, over the course of time, that Mia lived in the same city as me – or at least somewhere near it.

I worked it out from little details about local bars and restaurants, or beauty spots, or shops, or even the weather. The bar where she met J – the one with the leather-topped stools – was Rum & Rose Petals. The restaurant where he made her touch herself under the table was Wystan Place. She’d had sex bent over the bonnet of his car at the viewing point on Golbury Hill.

Wherever Mia was, she was likely to be somewhere within a few miles of me.

The thought took me over to the window.

Was The Academy near here too? If she didn’t have to pack a passport, at least it had to be in this country. In fact, if I remembered correctly, J had mentioned that she’d be surprised how close to home it was.

My flat overlooked a church, and as I watched people mill about the porch, I wondered if any of them had been to The Academy. Or knew someone who had. Or had the kind of skills they taught.

Conjecture was useless.

I switched off the computer, got dressed and went to meet Tilda at the Arts Shed for our pre-arranged lunch and film date. Mia had decided, for her own reasons, to pull the plug on her blog. She was entitled to do so. And that was all there was to it.

Of course, my overdeveloped sense of intrigue was never going to let me leave it at that.

When I wasn’t working, or messing about with my fellow subeditors, or trying to avoid Tom Crowley, the disappearance of Mia Culpa impinged on my thoughts with relentless force. I looked at her blog site every evening, and every evening the message was the same. The conspiracy theories on her friends’ blogs blossomed and multiplied, with one poster even suggesting she might have been murdered.

It was possible. Anything was possible.

The prospect of never finding out was too maddening. I knew I had to step away, for the sake of my sanity, but how could I? Especially when I might be in a position – geographically speaking – to investigate.

On a Thursday night, four days after the disappearance, I went back over all her old blog posts, right from the beginning, raking through them for clues.

What a bittersweet blast of nostalgia it provided. Her first post, back in May, reminded me of those times. Up to my eyes in books, preparing for my university Finals. My desk had been littered with Pro-Plus and cue cards. I’d been browsing shops for a dress to wear to the June Ball, drawing a blank until I fetched up at an independent boutique that sold gothic and alternative gowns for special occasions. I gorged on the dark jewel-coloured silks and delicate laces, the corsets and ribbons and daring décolletages and giant black corsages. Then I noticed that they had an underwear section and I clicked straight away. I’d always been a sucker for posh knickers.

A feast of frills and tight lacing met my gaze. When I was earning, I’d come back and buy that bustier, and those cami-knickers, and that suspender belt. I already had fishnet stockings galore, but they were cheapies from the alternative market. I wanted some of these, finespun as cobwebs. They would feel like angels’ breath on my legs. And as for the matching knickers…

But for the time being I had no money and no time to get a job until after the exams. I would have to dream on. All the same, I was tempted to Google the underwear brand to see if anything came up on eBay. It didn’t, but something else did.

Hi, my name’s Mia and I want you all to know that I bought a pair of knickers to die for today.

I want you all to think of me, and picture me wearing them.

Before you can do that, I’ll introduce myself. I’m a twenty-one-year-old student, living in a medium-sized English city, doing all the ordinary student things like studying and going to bars and gigs and clubs with my friends. But there is something my friends don’t know about me. Nobody knows it, and you are going to be the first to hear it.

I’m kinky.

There. It’s out in the open now, although none of you knows me and it feels a little strange to have revealed this dark secret part of myself to anyone and everyone who might click this way.

Of course, with you being the first to know, you’ll guess straightaway that I’ve never explored this side of myself with anyone else. I’ve written stories, hidden deep in password-protected folders, and I’ve drawn pictures that I’ve ripped straight up and thrown in the bin. But I’ve never spoken of it, never bought anything relating to it and certainly never given my vanilla ex-boyfriend any kind of clue that I might want something different.

But you and I are going to find out what it’s all about. I can’t wait, can you?

But first – the knickers.

I finally decided, after weeks of shilly-shallying, to order something from a clothing website I’ve been obsessed with lately. They sell the most beautiful, most shocking, most scandalous underwear and I covet it all, but I’ve never dared buy any for myself.

Until last week, after finishing the bottle of wine that was left in the fridge from a house dinner party. The Dutch courage chose me a pair of the most exquisite little barely-there panties – a scrap of flimsy lace, held together with satin ribbon. They’re a little like boyshorts and a little like French knickers. When I put them on, they don’t quite cover my bum cheeks, and you can see everything through the filmy patterns of grey-black lace. You can see where I’ve shaved myself especially for you – something I’ve never done before, and the Ladyshave was shaking in my hand. Next time I’ll try wax. So I’m bare and smooth and my knickers feel so light I think they might dissolve at any second. But I can’t forget I’m wearing them, even if I put something on top of them. It’s like having nothing on, and yet it’s also like being marked in some way. The thought of the wind blowing up my skirt and them being seen on the street has made me so excited I can hardly keep still.

So I’m sitting here at my computer, wearing nothing else, and wanting to touch myself through the lacy nothingness. Can you see me? Can you see my nipples and my thighs and the satin ribbon running over my hips? Can you see how ready I am?

I’m so very ready.

Look at me.

Underneath were several line drawings of her, from neck to knees, in the knickers. One a front view, one from the back and one of her sitting spread-legged on a chair. They were erotic in a classy, alluring kind of way, and I couldn’t take my eyes off them.

That night I ordered the same pair of knickers and to hell with the expense. My ballgown came from eBay and had a cigarette burn in it the vendor hadn’t declared.

But it was worth it.

And so was Mia. I minimised the screen, my fingers trembling on the mouse. I loved the girl. She was me, but with the ability to write and draw. I couldn’t let her fade away, I just couldn’t.

Chapter Two

‘Ella, what the hell’s up with you today? If I’d wanted a zombie I’d have hired one.’

Dean, the chief sub, had reason to bark at me.

My copy was littered with typos and I’d put the wrong name in an article about a pensioner’s massive premium bonds win. The truth was, I hadn’t slept at all the night before, spending the darkest hours trawling Mia’s blog for clues about the identity of J and the whereabouts of The Academy or her flat. But I hadn’t turned up anything I didn’t already know. Her flat was in the city somewhere; The Academy was a short distance outside it; J was an older man in ‘a distinguished profession’ that remained nameless.

Contrite as I was to have made such an uncharacteristic slew of errors, I couldn’t help resenting Dean’s timing. His reprimand coincided with the departure of the journalists from an editorial meeting, and they filtered out into the open-plan office, looking curiously at us. The last to saunter into my line of sight was Tom Crowley. I ducked my head, but the damage was done. I’d seen his glorious gorgeousness in tight jeans and a biker jacket, and now I wasn’t going to be able to concentrate on anything else.

‘Sorry,’ I muttered to Dean. ‘Didn’t get much sleep last night.’

‘So it’s true.’

The voice was Crowley’s. The vibrations of my skin told me that he was standing very near, near enough to smell the leather, and the divine aftershave he wore. Fuck. My head was swimming.

Don’t look at him. Don’t answer him.

I knew I was blushing and I hated the heat that suffused my cheeks, my forehead, my neck, my bloody chest – where would it stop?

‘You are a vampire,’ he finished.

God, I hated him. But at least he’d said it only to me, lowering his voice so that nobody else would hear it. He could easily have played it for the cheap office laugh. So he was vile, but not super-vile.

‘That’s right,’ I said tightly, tapping at my keyboard and keeping my eyes glued to the screen. ‘I shrivel up at the sight of fake tan.’

He laughed, and I swallowed as his hand materialised on my desk. What lovely long fingers they were, splayed out elegantly next to my Slytherin mug. Where those fingers had been…

‘Well, that’s what I wanted to hear,’ he said, and I couldn’t stop myself from looking up at the hint of something promising in his tone.

Electric-blue eyes caught me in their beam. It was appropriate that they reminded me of one of those fluorescent fly-zappers in fast-food restaurants. I was the fly in this scenario.

‘Did you?’

He reached into his inside jacket pocket, drew out a folded piece of paper and handed it to me.

When I unfolded it, I found it was a flyer for the opening night of a new bar.