Surrender to Mr. X by Rosa Mundi

could hear the taxi outside. I shrugged; I took the money. My jacket had, as I feared, a nasty mark in it where it had been ruthlessly jammed over the designer peg: the beads and sequins made it quite heavy. Before I came back here I’d better sew on a ribbon tag so that at least it could get hung up properly, if I could find a needle and thread.
    â€œLam,” I said as I went, “if there’s to be any repeat of what happened this evening I want good quality gear in properly lined metal, preferably padded with real sheepskin or calf leather, Japanese silk bonds and definitely no plastic. Mr. Alden deserves better.”
    He just looked at me blankly. I don’t think he knew what I was talking about. Perhaps Alden was just phenomenally mean; or perhaps Lam was deaf. Maybe I still wasn’t speaking clearly because of being previously gagged.
    It was the same cab, with a discreet, custom-made wheelchair hoist and no public hire license number on the back. The driver was the same sleek, beautiful young African who had delivered me. I asked him what his name was, and he said Loki. My voice really was a little blurry: my lips were swelling. Normally I would have asked how a taxi driver from Somalia happened to have the name of the Norse trickster god, but I was not sure he would make sense of what I was saying, and I didn’t have the energy to enter into any protracted conversation with anyone at the moment.
    Loki opened the door for me when we got to my house in Warwick Road, where the water of the canal reflected the moon and stars, and helped me out: looking at my sleepy eyes, my swollen lips, my mussed hair and torn dress, the thongs of my Jimmy Choos wrongly laced, he must have seen I was scarcely fit to be out.
    He behaved as impeccably, courteously as if I were a lady of the land, which indeed I just about am, though not by bloodline: my mother’s sister’s husband’s eldest brother is a baronet, and of course there is a connection with the dreadful Lord Wallace F.

Getting to Know You
    I WOKE THE NEXT MORNING refreshed and none the worse for my experience. A good bath, some essential oils in it—camomile and a touch of angelica root—for aromatherapy; after a sound night’s sleep whatever it was that had made me feel poorly was already cleansing out of my metabolism. Also, of course, sex always has a tonic after-effect.
    The fact that I had £5,000 in cash and instructions to spend it on clothes made my step all the lighter. I called through to Max and said I had a migraine. I knew he would square it with the management: he owed me for the tennis champion, an incident that now seemed to me half a lifetime ago. His wife would be checking in this morning after an early arrival at Heathrow around nine and I wished them every happiness. Because of my ministrations he would be feeling less tense and have got a better night’s sleep than otherwise: it is best to be in mental, physical and emotional nick for any kind of power games. Clinton may have been right whenhe maintained that blow jobs didn’t count, in spite of the uproar from the feminists. It is a here-and-now kind of thing, and affection does not necessarily flow between sucker and sucked: nor should it, because it won’t necessarily give rise to any sense of emotional obligation. “But you and I made love last night, don’t you love me?” is at least a reasonable kind of question, as requiring the Latin prefix “nonne”: the “yes” of the yes? neither-or-both? no? trio: nonne? ne? num? “I gave you a blow job last night—don’t you love me?” if asked, must surely require the prefix “num” if it’s to be a sensible question at all.
    Mouths and asses are not the most numinous receptacles of love in the longer term, though connecting at the time to the pleasure centers. Vaginas are obviously the more profoundly connected to the mixing and loving of male