The Foundation Ch 01 1

With her face buried in pussy, and kept there by a taut leash pulling at the collar around her neck, Caroline was not in a position to respond when she heard Arthur's quiet voice behind her:

"We were thinking of having a little celebration for our newest art acquisition next month."

She was kneeling on the carpeted floor in front of a sleek winged armchair where Margot's slender legs were spread. When she hesitated for a moment, wondering where this proposition was headed, Margot suddenly jerked at the leash. The angular woman pulled Caroline's face up just enough to give it a curt smack. "Who told you to stop?" Her voice was ragged with pleasure but still managed to sound appropriately cruel. Then she pushed Caroline's head back down into place, where the dark-haired girl moaned her apologies into flesh.

Much later, when the couple's seemingly inexhaustible appetites had been sated, Caroline's wrists were still cuffed to the headboard of the large bed when Arthur raised the subject again.

"How would you feel about meeting some of our friends?"

Caroline had almost fallen asleep, wedged between the couple's languid bodies in a post-sex heap. Arthur's fingers lightly traced the clean red lines that he'd placed on her ass with a cane earlier, and felt goosebumps raise on her skin.

"Well... what kind of friends are they?" she answered, blinking the fatigue from her eyes.

"The very best kind. Connoisseurs. People who appreciate beauty," he replied, his impish smile audible.

"As in people who love art?" She tried to sound nonchalant, but her traitorous body had begun to tremble.

"Sure, that too."

Margot rolled over, sighed, and began unfastening Caroline's cuffs, "As charming as this game of twenty questions is, we are due home in half an hour." Arthur wrinkled his nose and groaned theatrically, while Margot continued, "The premise for the party is that we'd like to show off the latest addition to our collection- your fabulous sculpture- to a few like-minded friends. There will be a dinner, with some play afterwards."

"That isn't also to say there won't be some play during dinner," he winked.

"Play.. as in..." she trailed off, afraid to finish the question. Her head was spinning.

Margot filled in the blank. "Play, as in all the fun games we play together." She studied Caroline's shocked expression with amusement, "There's no need to give us an answer right now. Take some time and think it over. In the meantime, you can show us what a grateful little slut you are and pack up all the toys we brought for you. We have a car coming in 10 minutes."

At that, Caroline nodded, blushing. She dashed out of the bed to gather the various implements scattered around the hotel room while the older couple dressed, grateful for this simple task to occupy herself while her mind raced.

Margot was pulling on her tawny leather boots when a thought occurred to her. "It's getting late and you're far from home, you should stay the night here."

After they left, Caroline rolled around in the king-sized bed and reached for the forgotten bottle of champagne they had opened when they arrived. She sauntered to the window and pulled open the blinds. Standing naked and drinking straight from the bottle, she looked out at an impressive vast view of lower Manhattan and the Hudson River. She inhaled deeply, her ribs opening like an accordion, and took in the heady bouquet of sex that lingered on her body. She wasn't ready to shower that away quite yet. She was wide awake now, turning a particular word over in her mind on an endless loop: "Connoisseurs."

---

Though he seemed to revel in keeping Caroline frustrated and off-balance, Arthur had always kept his promises to her in one way or another. He had given his assurance that he and Margot would commission a small sculpture from her; they ended up buying an existing piece that turned out to be significantly larger.

He had also returned for a second visit along with his wife, as promised, and the couple made use of some of Caroline's tools. She'd found herself naked and splayed open on her work table, which had been rolled to the center of the room on its casters, on her back with each of her limbs bound to the four corners by a daisy chain of zip-ties.

Despite her genteel appearance, it turned out that Margot was quite resourceful-- carefully trawling through Caroline's tools before she plucked out mini c-clamps and electrical tape to fashion homebrew nipple clamps-- and rather sadistic.

Caroline had never been particularly interested in pain. Like many people who work with their hands, she was prone to accidental injuries; cuts, burns, scrapes, and bruises were a constant annoyance. So she was surprised that she began to develop a taste for pain when it was administered by particular people, in certain ways, and in a specific context.

Arthur didn't seem very interested in testing the limits of her endurance, preferring to deal in pleasure and mind games, but it quickly turned into Margot's favorite experiment. Caroline became well-acquainted with Margot's tools of torture on date nights with the husband and wife duo. Then, she spent her solitary days ruminating on the strange contradictions in her cravings.

She didn't exactly *like* the way it felt to be hit repeatedly with a wooden hairbrush on her thighs or pinched with as many clothespins as Margot had the patience to apply-- it really fucking hurt, actually. But somehow suffering, when mixed with arousal and a touch of humiliation, could be alchemically transmuted into ecstasy.

It was an exciting and confusing time; she was making her biggest, most technically challenging, and most expensive sculpture to date. It was to be the first in a new series: Swooning Slab 1 ("Her depravity was so deep and so dissembled as to be almost intangible: where could she have learned it?")

There had been a flurry of new interest in her work after a small but respectable museum in New Hampshire had publicly announced the commission of this large marble sculpture. It seemed she was poised to enter the next stage in her career.

But when her studiomate unexpectedly announced that he was quitting art and moving back to Cleveland to flip houses for a living, her confidence faltered. Success had not yet translated into the kind of currency she could use to pay rent. In 6 months, without someone sharing the financial burden of her studio, she would be dead broke. Her dream of becoming a prominent artist was unfolding in real time and, rather than feeling accomplished, she was restless, preoccupied with anxiety, and perversely yearning to be hurt and degraded.

There were, it seemed, so many things to be confused about. For one, who was she to Margot and Arthur?

It had turned out that when she first met them at a Bushwick loft party, they had been more than a little coy with her about the extent of their investment in contemporary art.

The first time she was invited to their Manhattan home-- a four story townhouse on West 13th Street-- she was stunned to find that they had quite a serious art collection. A large photograph by Andreas Gursky in the entrance of the house stopped her in her tracks, and it only got worse as she was shown around the house.

They seemed to collect mostly photography from the '90s and '00s with an occasional abstract painting. In more public-facing rooms, the work tended to be more impressively large and innocuous in subject matter. Leading into their bedroom, however, the collection became more risque. She recognized a Leigh Ledare (a portrait of the artist's own mother in lingerie) and a Laurel Nakadate (a self-portrait in which she was crying in bed, lit only by the blue glow of a laptop screen).

"Your collection is... really wild," she managed to squeak out after she was shown a particularly sexy little Catherine Opie (a blurry, black and white photograph of a suggestively placed o-ring and chain.)

Margot demurred, "Oh, my best girlfriend from college is an art advisor and she basically picked out everything for us- we're complete philistines. You should meet her, by the way."

There were also some newer sculptural pieces in their bedroom on the fireplace mantle: a few small, colorful, gloopy ceramics, of the kind that had been all the rage in Lower East Side galleries a few years prior. Caroline vaguely recognized these and thought the artist might be a woman around her age named Esther. As she opened her mouth to inquire, Arthur motioned her over to a corner of the room that was home to an armchair, "This is where we were thinking of putting your sculpture."

That weekend, with their children visiting the grandparents, it seemed Margot and Arthur did not want to waste their precious childless time with talk. They instructed her to strip naked and bend over, with her legs spread and hands on the mantle. Caroline focused her eyes on the ceramic pieces in front of her when she felt a cold squirt of viscous liquid slide down into the cleft between her legs. Then Arthur used his fingers to properly lubricate her, and pressed something small, irregular, and rubbery into her asshole.

A gasp escaped her mouth as her mind began to try to solve the new riddle 'what is inside me?', but the shock of three sharp spanks brought her attention back to Arthur. Bracing herself for more impact, she was alarmed by an uncomfortable, rumbly feeling deep inside her, almost like stomach distress at first. It went from uncomfortable to uncomfortably pleasurable when she realized that the mysterious object was vibrating.

"How do you feel, Caroline?" Arthur stepped forward, leaning over her to look at her face, his brown eyes dancing with mischief.

"I feel... it feels strange, but good."

"And now?" He asked, stepping back as the vibrations intensified. She couldn't help wriggling and bucking her hips, as if she was trying to physically channel the vibrations from her backside to her front. It was so close, yet so far, from where she wanted it to be.

"Oh God," she whimpered.

" 'Thank you, sir' should suffice," Margot corrected from some distance away.

Caroline groaned, "Thank you, sir..."

Margot's voice drew closer. "That's better. Now be a good girl for me and stay still." Caroline felt something flat, cold, and unyielding sweep across the skin on her back.

Margot began to paddle her ass at a relentless pace as Arthur sat back on the bed, using the wireless remote to lower and raise the vibrations. It was not long before Caroline was in tears, dancing on her tip-toes, shaking, and begging them to touch her.

"No," they replied in accidental unison, and laughed at the coincidence. While they seemed to enjoy her increasingly desperate pleas, it wasn't until Caroline stopped resisting entirely-- as she cascaded into that strange dreamy state where everything harsh became soft-- that they brought her to the bed and laid her on her back.

With Margot's finger lightly circling her clit, Arthur's cock filling her cunt, and the vibrating plug still inside her, she came hard three times in quick succession, murmuring an incoherent string of pleases and thank yous while Arthur decorated her body with a few choice spatters of cum.

Cradled in the smoothest, cleanest bedding she'd ever touched, she remained in their bed, adrift in time. It was all so perfect that she couldn't even remember what lack or want felt like. At some point, Margot had tenderly removed the vibrator from her and wiped her skin clean with a warm washcloth, while Arthur laid next to her and fed her small, delicious sips of a glass of water. Like the superlative linens, the water was the best thing she'd ever tasted. Caroline considered that she might feel abashed, letting them clean up and take care of her like this. But that idea slipped away in her profound contentment, with as much purchase as a rain droplet on a moving windshield.

In the early hours of the morning, after she had been deposited in an Uber back to Brooklyn, Caroline couldn't stop thinking about the gloopy ceramics that had been her visual ballast during the worst of her beating. Recalling their strange forms, a disquieting movie started playing in her mind: Arthur and Margot were bringing Esther into their bedroom, showing her exactly where her art would be displayed, before they used her as the evening's entertainment.

It was summer, but she hugged her knees to her chest and shivered as if she'd been caught out in the cold for the rest of the car ride home.