From the Top Shelf - 9 1/2

These are excerpts from two early chapters in 9 1/2 Weeks by Elizabeth McNeill. It's before they start the serious BDSM part of their relationship, but it's imminent.

We're doing errands: supermarket, liquor store, dry cleaner's, drugstore. It's a lovely Saturday...in early June. We spend a long time at the toothpaste counter: he is giving dramatic recitals of competing TV commercials...Twice I ask out loud, "How can I be so happy?" Each time he smiles at me, a delighted grin, and shifts both shopping bags onto one arm to hug my shoulders with the other.

We are both laden down with packages when he says, "I have to get one more thing." And hails a cab. We end up in Brooklyn, at a small, obscure hunting store. There are two clerks, one dignified and elderly, one in his teens, no other customers. He is pricing insulated vests, the kind to be worn under windbreakers.

I put my parcels on a chair, walk around, get bored, sit down on the edge of an old mahogany desk, pick up and leaf through a three-year-old New Yorker, which miraculously looks brand new.

"This one, I guess," he says. I look over at the counter, he is looking back at me. He is holding a riding crop.

"I'd like to try it out." There is a peculiar shift; from one second to the next I have become disoriented, I am on alien territory, in a foreign century. He walks a few steps to where I am half-sitting on the desk, one foot on the floor, the other dangling. He pulls my skirt up over my left leg, which is resting on the desk, steps back, and strikes me across the inner thigh. The searing pain is an inextricable part of a wave of excitement that robs me of breath and speech and the ability to move; every cell in my body is awash with lust.

It is silent in the small, dusty room. The clerks behind the counter have frozen. He slowly smooths down my skirt and turns to the older man, who is wearing a suit and still looks like an accountant, though a deep flush is spreading upward from his shirt collar.

"This one will do."
.
.
.

He fed me. He bought all food, cooked all meals, washed all dishes.

He dressed me...

He read to me endlessly...

Every three days he washed my hair. He dried it with my hand dryer and was clumsy at it only the first two times. One day he bought an outrageously expensive Kent of London hairbrush and beat me with it that evening. Its bruises persisted beyond all others. But every night he used to brush my hair. Neither before or since has my hair been brushed so thoroughly, for such long periods at a time, so lovingly. It shone.

He ran my bath every night, experimenting with different gels, crystals and oils, taking an adolescent girl's delight in buying great varieties of bath products for me... I never stopped to contemplate what his cleaning woman thought of the whip lying on the kitchen counter, of the handcuffs dangling from the dining room doorknob, of the snakes' heap of narrow, silvery chains coiled in the corner of the bedroom. I did idly wonder what she thought of this sudden proliferation of jars and bottles, nine barely-used shampoos crowding the medicine chest, eleven different bath salts lined up on the edge of the tub.