Chapter 3

The Game was this: Kami would play the part of the precocious daughter and Mistress X would play the part of the doting, somewhat domineering mother. They moved from Strap to the neighboring town of Slunt as they’d planned. They rented this small white house in the middle of downtown Slunt in a neighborhood that looked straight out of a scene from The Stepford Wives—or Desperate Housewives—with its identical homes and their equally identical families. It was Suburbia Nightmare come to life disguised as Heaven on Earth. Every house had a perfectly manicured lawn, two cars in the garage and a white picket fence to keep out the undesirables (i.e. anyone who wasn’t lily-white and Christian). Kami and Mistress X thought it was a pathetic joke. To them, Slunt was, at its heart, no different than Strap or any other town they had been in, for that matter. Both Kami and Mistress X learned from experience that people who chose to live in these “perfect” towns more-often-than-not harbored dark secrets and even darker passions.

Mayberry…on acid.

This was precisely why Mistress X chose Slunt to train her newly-acquired protégée Kami. Shortly after moving to Slunt, Kami found Mistress X sitting outside on the back deck of their house late one afternoon looking as if she was lost in deep thought.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Kami said to her.

Suddenly Mistress X jerked her head around and seemed genuinely surprised to find Kami standing on the deck looking at her.

“Oh, Kami,” she stammered. “You startled me.”

She stepped up to her and stood beside the chair.

“What were you thinking about?”

“Oh, just,” the Domme paused, “things.”

Mistress X looked out over the backyard again. Kami wasn’t one to pry, but there was one question she just had to ask her.

“Why don’t you tell me a little bit about your past?”

Mistress X jerked her head around at her again. Kami could tell by the harsh look on her face that she had struck a nerve.

“Say what?”

“How about telling me about your past?” she restated.

Mistress X furrowed her brow at her. “Why do you ask?”

Kami shrugged. “Call it curiosity.” She grinned at her in a somewhat futile attempt to lighten the emotional load of the moment. “Besides, you haven’t told me anything about how you came to be the great Mistress X.”

The dominatrix paused before answering her like she wasn’t sure whether or not she wanted to tell Kami anything about her past even if she was her protégée.

“I haven’t told you anything about my past because, to me, a past is simply that, a past,” she answered her apprentice sharply.

“Oh, okay,” Kami replied quietly, crossing her arms in front of her next-to-nothing chest.

She wanted to pry some more into her past, but the harsh look on the Domme’s face told her that she should drop the subject altogether—that perhaps, as Mistress X herself had implied, some things were better left buried in the past.

“What about you?” Mistress X asked Kami, turning the tables on her. “What about your past? Did you have a good situation growing up?”

“Not really,” she said, shaking her head. She paused and then said, “To make a long story short, my parents were hardly ever around long enough to take care of me, so I was more or less raised by my grandmother Noreen.”

“Why weren’t your parents around?”

“Well,” she began, shrugging nonchalantly like it didn’t really bother her, “I found out years later when I learned how to have my way with men using my, uh, talent,” she pantomimed quotations with her fingers when she said the word talent, “that my parents were swingers who used to attend a lot of sex parties and orgies.”

Mistress X gave her a facetious grin. “So I guess the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree after all, does it?”

Kami appeared to be only slightly annoyed by Mistress X’s rather sarcastic comment.

“Guess not,” she said, shrugging nonchalantly again.

The two women were silent for a moment before Mistress X asked Kami, “Whatever happened to your grandmother Noreen? Do you still keep in touch with her?”

Kami paused again before she answered, “She died about five years ago.”

The Domme gave her an uncharacteristically sympathetic look.

“Oh, I’m sorry, Kami.”

“Oh, that’s okay.” She waved her away. “She was the only person who ever really gave a damn about me.”

Kami began to tear up. Not being one who’s good with displays of emotionalism, Mistress X said half-jokingly, “Well, don’t worry, ‘cause now you have me.”

Kami gave her mistress a funny look.

“Somehow I don’t find that a very comforting thought.”

The two women shared a much-needed laugh before going back inside the house.