Chapter 6

I was attending the university on a full-ride math scholarship, and on my own, I had chosen a computer science minor. That quickly turned into a double major, because I found it so fascinating. And, as I said, I spent a lot of time studying that first year.

My roommate was a senior, and she was busy doing all sorts of senior stuff, like getting ready to graduate and looking for jobs, so we mostly just said hello and goodbye to each other. She didn’t ask me what I was into, and I didn’t ask her. It wasn’t until my second year that things got interesting.

“You getting all of this, Karin?” Betty asked.

“Yes, Mistress.” Karin glanced at the counter on her phone’s display—plenty of memory left. “Take your time.”

“Good, good.” Betty paused to unlatch the barn door, and swung it slowly open on creaking hinges. “Let’s get out of the wind for a while.”

The two trailing women nodded, and followed Betty into the dimly-lit confines of the old barn. The smell was very earthy, even in the cold of the morning. A few columns of light filtered down from gaps in the boards high above. Besides a few old bales of straw, the barn was essentially bare.

Betty pulled three of the bales into a loosely-constructed circle, and gestured for Karin and Desi to sit. “This is what I had planned for mother’s horse,” Betty said. “As you can see, I didn’t get very far.”

Karin and Desi sat silently, their hands clasped loosely in their laps, waiting for Betty to continue.

The University housing form had a way for you to indicate a roommate preference, and they would try to match you up with a friend if things worked out. But as I mentioned, I still didn’t know a lot of people at that point, and for my sophomore year I picked a dorm that was close to campus as my first choice and left my roommate preference to chance.

I ended up paired with Becky the Biter, another girl who had also rolled the dice on roommate preference.

Rumor had it that Becky got her nickname from chomping down on some dude’s dick while she was giving him a blowjob. The word was that she was very sexually active. That pretty much grossed me out—not the sexually active part, ’cause I couldn’t care less what she did on her own time, but the heterosexual nature of it. We soon came to a sort of joking agreement that she wouldn’t try to convert me if I didn’t try to convert her.

Becky was fun. Becky was adventurous. Becky knew where all the great parties were. Becky and I hung out a lot.

“Come on, Betty,” she said. “It’s just a party. If you don’t like it, I promise we can leave. But, please don’t make me go by myself.”

Becky had these amazing big, brown, puppy dog eyes, the kind that could make you melt in a heartbeat. The problem was, she knew they worked on me, and she used them regularly.

I looked into those big brown eyes. “Fine,” I said, “But if it’s creepy or lame, I’m out of there.”

Becky smiled and tugged me by the hand until I stood up. Before we left the room, Becky had me standing in front of the mirror while she was busy outlining my eyes with black eye pencil, and then smearing it all around with a wadded up tissue. Then she stuck her hand in my hair and mussed it all up.

“There,” she said with a smile, “you look just like Siouxie Sioux.”

Becky looked at me with her head cocked to the side. “From Siouxie and the Banshees.” She paused, probably waiting for that glimmer of recognition. “God, I need to get you out more.”

When she was done questioning my musical and fashion taste, Becky reached into one of her drawers and pulled out what looked an awful lot like a black leather dog collar, with spikes and everything. She buckled it on and asked me how she looked.

“What kind of party is this?” I asked.

Becky and I started going to a lot of parties like that, ‘the fun kind’ as she called them. I still spent my weekdays studying my ass off, because I needed to keep my grades up so I wouldn’t lose my scholarship. I also spent a lot of time at the gym, working out, because it was good stress relief from all the studying. But the weekends… the weekends were for parties.

After a while, I learned how to do my own Siouxie Sioux eyeliner, and Becky and I were a regular feature on the off-campus party circuit. It was always a different house, but the crowd seemed to be mostly the same—students like us. It’s like they all had access to the same line Becky did, and knew just where to show up and when.

There was a certain similarity in the music too. Lots of the on-campus parties played music from bands that got their start in the seventies and were still churning out pop radio hits. But the parties we went to played a different kind of music—bands like Siouxie and the Banshees, the Cure, and Depeche Mode. I distinctly remember a lot of Depeche Mode.

At a certain time of night at these parties, the Depeche Mode song Master and Servant would be played—it didn’t matter the location, Master and Servant was always played. And then I got to noticing that whenever it was on, guys and girls would start pairing up and wandering off together. Several of them wore dog collars like Becky did, or studded wrist bands.

The music took a darker turn after that, too—heavier, more angsty—bands like Front Line Assembly, Ministry, Nine Inch Nails.

“Where are they going?” I asked Becky. “And why is it always after this same song. No matter where we are, it’s always Depeche Mode.”

Becky gave me that look again—not the puppy dog eyes she gave me when she wanted me to agree to something, but the look she gave me when she said I looked like Siouxie Sioux and I had no idea who she was talking about—the look that said, ‘come on, make the connection.’ Well, I missed it.

“It’s Master and Servant, Betty.” She kept staring at me. “Really? Master and Servant.”

“They’re going off for a little domination, a little tie me up tie me down, some naughty girl spankings… You know…”

“Betty, seriously. All I have to do is flirt with one of these guys and I’ll have him begging to spank me.”

“Yeah, seriously. And that’s all he’ll do, too. Because I have a safe word, and as soon as I say it, he’ll stop.” Becky stood up and gave her hair a flip. “Watch and learn.”

I watched as my roommate, the notorious Becky the Biter, sauntered over to some random guy, kicked up her heel and went to work on him with her best puppy dog eyes. Within a minute she was smiling over her shoulder at me while they wandered off together.

I sat alone for the next thirty or forty minutes, mulling this over and doing some serious people watching with the new nugget of information that Becky had chosen to bestow upon me. I watched couples wander off together, looking like they were about to do something forbidden. I also watched other couples returning, grinning and looking like they’d just gotten away with it.

Becky returned with a triumphant smile and gave the guy she was with a little finger wave before she sidled up next to me.

“Did you really—?” I asked.

“Come with me to the bathroom and I’ll show you the handprints while they’re fresh.”

“I’ll take your word for it.” I grinned, and looked out upon the party with the wonder of someone who had just opened her eyes after being asleep for her whole life. “He really just spanked you, and that was it?”

“Well,” Becky said, “I gave him a blowjob at the end, but yeah.”

“You can get these guys to do anything, Betty. They get all stupid as soon as they see your naked ass wiggling in front of them, and you peer over you shoulder and say, ‘Spank me, big boy, and I’ll make it worth your while.'” Becky turned her puppy dog eyes on me and sucked her finger as she said this.

“Forget it, Becky. I’m not putting some dude’s dick in my mouth.”

“Fine,” she said. “But it’s a small price to pay for a warm, tingly backside.”

“Eww,” I said. “And double eww.”

“Mistress, you didn’t—” Desi started.

“No.” Betty’s face scrunched up. “God, no. Becky did, but as I said before, her body, her rules. It didn’t matter to me what she did. But my eyes were open now, and I went to these parties with a renewed sense of wonder. I began to think what it would be like if one of these girls were to look over her shoulder at me—and give me those puppy dog eyes.”

“Did Becky ever—?”

“No. No, that would have been too weird. Plus, she liked boys.” Betty stood up and walked a circle around the three hay bales there in the center of the barn. “Are you girls ready to head back? It’s getting kind of drafty in here.”

The three women stepped out into the air together, and Betty latched the door and Karin watched as she tucked her crop under her arm again.

“But I haven’t told you the weirdest thing about those parties,” Betty said, as they walked. “I actually bumped into Tina Moreau at one of them.”

Karin felt a cold shiver wash over her at the mere mention of the name.

“Tina Moreau. Like from The Academy, Tina Moreau?” Desi said. “The evil doctor who almost enslaved Karin’s immortal soul.”

“Yeah,” said Betty, “that Tina Moreau. Of course, she wasn’t a PhD, yet, just a lowly undergrad like me. But she was still pretty intense.

“Becky was off getting spanked somewhere and Tina sat down to strike up a conversation.

“But that all happened much later on. I don’t want to deprive you of the story in between, because this is where it starts getting good. This is when I finally got some of those girls to start looking at me with puppy dog eyes. Unfortunately, it took Becky getting hurt before the puppy dog eyes started happening.”

“I am Thunderbird,” I muttered under my breath. “I am Thunderbird.”

Becky was behind me with tears in her eyes, telling me to leave it alone, that it was all just a misunderstanding. But I knew it wasn’t just a misunderstanding. Becky had used her safe word. The guy she was with chose to ignore it. In Thunderbird’s rule book, that made him Whale. And Whale was going to seriously regret messing with someone under Thunderbird’s watchful eye.

I walked straight up to the guy Becky had been with and grabbed him by the nuts. My approach was more subtle than it would have been in my youth, when I probably would have come out swinging. I also had the benefit of having taken a couple of the free Self-Defense for Women classes offered by the university. So I knew how to hurt a boy, and I knew how to do it in a way that would wound his pride and make it less likely that I’d be reported.

That night, Thunderbird was not the benevolent being of the stories told by Sally’s father. Thunderbird was out for vengeance. Thunderbird twisted, and squeezed. Thunderbird talked of the importance of not ignoring safe words, and the consequences if they were ever ignored again. Thunderbird’s talons dug deeply into the tender parts of Whale’s body.

“Do you understand!” I bellowed. “Do you understand!”

The guy kept nodding his head and saying ‘Yes. Yes, I understand.’ He ran off as soon as I released him.

We had attracted quite a crowd, that boy and me.

“Come on, Becky,” I said, putting my arm around her. “I’m taking you home.”

Now after that, I thought for sure that I’d be blacklisted and never allowed to darken the doorway of another of those off-campus parties. But my social life went on as it always had. Well, almost. There were a few added perks after that incident. First, the dude never showed up again. And second, I became a bit of a celebrity.

Eventually, Becky got the courage to go off and get her spanking from some new guy. As I mentioned, it was mostly the same group of students at these parties, so a lot of them had witnessed me accosting the dude a few weeks prior. I started noticing that the guys who approached Becky now were being very respectful in the way they did it. And while Becky was off wiggling her ass in the new, respectful guy’s face, my newfound celebrity gave me the opportunity to chat with some of the other single girls who were there.