Total pages in book: 109
Estimated words: 104165 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 521(@200wpm)___ 417(@250wpm)___ 347(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 104165 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 521(@200wpm)___ 417(@250wpm)___ 347(@300wpm)
I’m perfectly healthy apart from the blow to my temporal lobe that caused significant trauma to my hippocampus. That little detail from the doctor’s report, I can pull up with perfect recall.
But anything before blinking groggily awake in the hospital in downtown Dallas?
Nothing. Zilch. Blank canvas.
But that’s not really true. I was somebody. And she’s still a ghost inside me. I wake up shaking from nightmares I can’t remember, feeling cold down to the bone. Her nightmares. I have to turn on all the lights afterwards each time. Whoever I was—whoever I am—is scared of the dark.
“Moira,” chides Quinn from the corner of the elegant changing room. “Don’t make it sound like she wasn’t beautiful before they put all that shit on her face.” Quinn stands with her arms crossed, intimidating in sleek black head to toe latex.
“Of course she is!” Moira says to Quinn, then makes eye contact with me in the mirror again. “Of course you are. You’re just more beautiful this way.”
She says it so without guile, I laugh again and turn to hug her. “I love you to bits, M.” Really, she’s made it all feel as smooth a ride as something like this could be.
Right now, we’re in a back room of the club, Carnal, with tons of bidders from what Moira casually described as “Billionaire’s Row” out front.
She seems so unaffected by wealth, but then again, she’s around it all the time with her rich brother, I guess. I still haven’t met him; everything’s been so busy. They weren’t always rich, I know from some of the conversations we’ve had. Moira grew up in poverty back in Ireland, but she still seems at home wherever she finds herself, in some of the fancy places she’s taken me this week or back at the women’s shelter. She got to the states when she was young, so she doesn’t have an accent anymore.
I’m generally so overwhelmed by the details of every room I enter that I’m just wide-eyed wherever I go. I couldn’t stop staring at everything at the salon earlier when Moira and Quinn took me to get my long hair trimmed a couple inches.
“You can still back out,” Quinn says.
“I’m fine.” I suck in a deep breath. “I’m doing this.”
“Or at any time,” Quinn keeps at it. “You say no, and we call it all off. This isn’t like some medieval shit. We’re all about consensual play.”
I look the stranger in the mirror in the eye and declare, “I want to play.”
Yes, auctioning off my virginity is insane. Especially when I don’t even know if I am a virgin. But as Moira pointed out when she presented the ludicrous possibility to me last week, “Your doctor’s report says your hymen’s not broken. Not that an unbroken hymen always means anything. But with the amnesia, it’s not like you remember your first time, anyway. So, for all intents and purposes,” she just kept chattering on, “you’re a virgin. It’ll be the first time for you, and that’s the whole point.”
“The whole point of what?” I’d stuttered back at her.
“Oh! Didn’t I say? My head really has run away from me today. The virgin auction.”
She knew I wanted to make big money fast; just like I knew how to cuss and that I’m scared of the dark, I know I need money and that working minimum wage jobs aren’t for me. We’d previously been discussing Moira hooking me up with her friend Quinn so I could shadow her and learn how to be a professional domme. But then Moira got excited about this new opportunity that had come along.
The club, Carnal, was putting on a virgin auction, and it had a big payday.
I’m not an idiot. Or at least I like to think I’m not. I was skeptical.
But then Moira took me by the club one night last week so I could meet everyone else ahead of tonight. It didn’t look anything like it does now. I’m not sure she’d exactly thought through what all the leather and floggers would look like to an outsider, but Quinn saw us walking in and immediately came over. You’d think she’d be intimidating in her shiny black latex—wait, no, it’s not latex, what’d she call it? Oh right, PVC. Her black PVC.
But Quinn’s so down to earth, she had me laughing in seconds, and when she introduced me to the bouncer and the club owner who’ll be the emcee tonight, I felt a lot more at ease.
And then I just thought… Why the hell not? Yes, it’ll mean having sex with a stranger. But why not do this now, while I don’t know who the hell I am? Sure, some part of me wonders—what if there’s someone I’m intimate with in the life I lost that I’d be betraying?
But that thought is immediately followed with fury. Because if that was true, then where the hell are they? Why didn’t they come looking for me when I disappeared? They obviously didn’t look very hard. Even the news picked up the story and broadcast it everywhere.