A moment with Miss Dolphinia
Feb. 22nd, 2015 09:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lit_gal
A rough tidbit Fettered fans might enjoy.I give you ...
Miss Dolphinia
Miss Dolphinia scanned the email. Reading official documents on changes in liquor license enforcement was hardly entertaining, but she had responsibilities. Boring ones. And being a good business owner meant that she tended to them in a timely manner.
She tapped her red fingernail against her lips and grimaced. Good Lord, when had she turned into her father? She tisked at herself and vowed to find some pretty little sub to play with for the night. Maybe she should go to Philadelphia where she could really let her freak flag fly. The New York scene was smaller than it appeared, and someone as loud and proud as her stood out. She didn’t want some clingy little thing following her back to the club. That was the sort of complication that led to police involvement.
Someone knocked on the door, but Miss Dolphinia ignored it. They weren’t open. Less than a minute later, her phone rang. When she glanced over, she could see Jason’s number flash on the screen. She wasn’t sure if she was aggravated at the interruption or grateful for an excuse to put off some of her work. Either way, she got up to open the club’s door.
Without heels, Jason’s height would have been a good match for hers, but she did not put on a dress without at least a four inch heel. Ladies did not slop around in flats. And she was a lady—a glorious lady.
“Miss Dolphinia,” Jason greeted her politely. He wore street clothes instead of his leathers, so he could have passed for a healthy and active grandfather with his gray hair and button down shirt.
“Jason.” She stood to the side so he could come in. Over the years Jason had grown into his strength as a submissive. He’d shown up the first year she’d opened the Stonewall with Rice, and back then he’d gravitated to Rice. Then again, a lot of the young and timid ones had. She understood that her personality was far too much for most of the newbies. Except Dylan. That boy might be as submissive as they came, but he had a core of steel that had never bent, even when she’d turned her dominance up to high.
“You’re here early.”
“I just got out of a support meeting, so I thought I’d check to see if you needed any help around the place.”
“A support meeting? Please tell me you were out confessing your alcoholism.”
Jason laughed. “No, I was at the group for young gay men interested in the lifestyle.”
Miss Dolphinia rolled her eyes and headed back to her table. “I really don’t see why you go to those meetings.” Arranging her skirts, she settled down. Like the proper submissive he was, Jason waited until she was seated and then gestured toward one of the empty chairs. She waved a hand to give permission for him to sit.
“Because the younger guys sometimes need someone with a little experience to guide them,” Jason said.
“Guide,” she said in her most derisive voice. “Yes, I believe that’s called controlling. We used to be better about making our own path, and now every Tom, Dick, and Steve wants to fit into society.” Some days Miss Dolphinia considered closing the Stonewall and retiring to some very gay enclave in Florida.
“That’s not fair.”
“Isn’t it?” She closed her laptop. “They have meetings to talk about what it means to be gay and kinky.” Miss Dolphinia had figured out how to find her inner queen when living in fucking New Jersey with a father that scratched his belly while watching football. It wasn’t terribly difficult. Be yourself and keep a baseball bat handy when someone decided to make it a mission to remove you from the world. Those were the only two rules that mattered.
Jason gave her a sad look. “And you’d prefer the old ways where we all had to flail around and figure it out on our own?”
“Yes.” She laid her hand on the table between them and spread her fingers so all her perfectly manicured red nails stood out against the scarred wood. “We figured out new ways to do things, better ways to do things, without getting sucked into the boring reality of society and its rules.”
“And how many people did we lose?”
She sucked in a breath, feeling in that moment like he’d punched her. Emotionally he had. “Oh no. We lost most of our friends to AIDS, not to a lack of mentorship programs and support meetings.”
“No, but I remember plenty of guys who got raped, who got abused. And we were all too scared to go to the cops.”
Where the hell did that come from? “I know that. That’s why Rice and I started this place.”
“And that’s why the support groups are a good thing,” Jason said, his voice suddenly soft. Miss Dolphinia realized that she was allowing her own emotions to show too much, so she schooled her features. Jason gave her an amused look. She gazed back.
Eventually Jason shook his head. “These young ones need to talk about SSC and RACK and PRICK.”
Miss Dolphinia held up a hand to stop him from going any further. “Prick? Oh, I am afraid to even ask what that might mean. If people don’t stop making up stupid names for everything, I really am going to put my heel up someone’s ass.”
Jason gave her a conspiratorial grin that made him look boyish, despite his graying hair and deep smile lines at his eyes. “Oh, you’ll like this.”
“I doubt it.”
“Personal-Responsibility Informed Consensual Kink. PRICK.”
Miss Dolphinia sometimes despaired at the stupidity that led people to try and put a label on every part of sexuality and their community. Sometimes she suspected they were afraid and like all little minds, tried to define what they couldn’t feel in their gut. “What moron comes up with these names?” she asked.
Jason shrugged. “I have no idea. But this one is all about taking responsibility to make sure you know the rules of the game and consenting to them up front. Some of the guys in the group are thinking they might want to have a flag party, and I said you would probably be open to the idea.”
“A flag party?”
“Men come with their color showing, and if two colors match up, they just have at it.”
Well that sounded familiar. “So, if a dom flagging black sees a sub flagging black, they just grab each other and find a back room?” Miss Dolphinia checked.
“Something like that.”
She threw up both her hands. “Hallelujah. After forty years, the idiots are finally back to the place where we all started.”
Jason studied her, a frown marring his beautiful features. She slowly lowered her hands and then planted them on her hips. She didn’t like having someone make her feel uncomfortable for having an opinion, and she surely was not going to accept silent condemnation from a submissive who was sitting in her club.
“I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think this is where we were forty years ago, or even twenty.”
Miss Dolphinia would have dismissed that as one more piece of foolishness from the youth that filled her club on most nights, but Jason was about her age, and he’d been in the scene back in the seventies when it’d been illegal even stepping foot in a gay club, much less a gay kinky club. He knew how the community had diluted itself down to be more acceptable to vanilla society, so instead of calling him a fool, she raised her eyebrow.
“Think about.” Jason leaned forward on the table. “We felt rebellious for even standing up and saying the word ‘gay.’ I felt like a fucking gladiator going to battle every time I told someone I liked to get tied up.”
“And it was glorious,” Miss Dolphinia agreed. She remembered sliding women’s underwear on under her men’s clothing and feeling like she was flipping off the whole world. They would not define her. She would never allow it.
“But we didn’t know what we were doing,” Jason said. “Christ, how many times did guys get their signals crossed? And these young kids… they think the hanky code was some sort of universal Morse code that we all understood. But do you remember the first time you saw a hanky?”
“I saw a lot of them before it dawned on me that they had any meaning. But the point is that we figured it out.”
“Not fast enough,” Jason said. His gaze skittered away. “I lost the line, you know. Somewhere in the seventies or eighties, I lost the line between what it meant to submit and what it meant to get abused by an asshole. And that’s because we didn’t know what we were doing or what to look out for.” He looked at her. “I don’t want that to happen to these kids. Jesus, you should see them. They’re babies.”
“Babies learn about the world by exploring it.”
“And too many get hurt when they find a hot stove or a poorly balanced television set,” Jason said. “I know you get that because you are the grand queen of manipulation. You’ll stick your fingers into anyone’s pot and then take over the cooking if you think they have the spices wrong.”
“I most certainly do not,” Miss Dolphinia said. She just as quickly reconsidered that answer. “I don’t do it with everyone. Certain men simply need a little more ass kicking than others. Vin, for example.”
Jason laughed. “Yeah, he had his head pretty far up his ass.”
“And I never gave him arbitrary rules or bizarre acronyms. Safe, sane and consensual.” She snorted. Have a safe, sane 4th of July, the television had warned them for years. Then someone came along and tried to apply some government catchphrase to her sex life. Have fun, but try to avoid blowing off your partner’s dick with poorly handled fireworks. It was utterly ridiculous. The two situations were not even similar. “I taught Vin to follow his heart. Rice taught him the same.”
Jason leaned back. “Okay, let’s pretend that instead of hanging out at Dylan’s father’s shop on the weekends that Vin forbid Dylan to see his family. Pretend that Vin got him a new cell phone and didn’t give that sharp tongued sister the number. Pretend that Dylan was stuck in that house doing paperwork for Vin’s business all day every day instead of taking classes at the local college.”
“Vin wouldn’t do that,” Miss Dolphinia interrupted him. The very thought disturbed her to her core.
“But lots of guys would, and when we don’t talk to these young kids about the danger, then you get subs that fall for the bullshit, or we get Doms that are so afraid of taking risks that they don’t know how to listen to what their subs really need.”
“They’ll work it out,” Miss Dolphinia said, but she was suddenly uncomfortable.
“They won’t. We didn’t—not until it was too late for a lot of us, and those of us who are left have already lost a lot of years to mistakes we made.”
Miss Dolphinia was ready for this conversation to end. She was intensely uncomfortable, but she didn’t allow emotions to control her. So she looked Jason right in the eye and asked, “What is the purpose of this conversation?”
“I want you to help them.”
She raised an eyebrow and stared at Jason incredulously. “What? You want me to dominate all the little puppies in your support group? Well, that would be a new experience for me. Usually subs dream of being gang banged by many Doms, not having to wait in a line for their turn with one.”
Jason narrowed his eyes, and the aggravation was a palpable force in the room. “I want you to have the group here. One day a week, let them come in. Talk to them, do demonstrations. Let me do demonstrations, talk to them about abuse. Hell, let Guard come in and talk about legal issues… he’d be in heaven. Have Dylan talk to them. He’s their age, and he’s bagged himself a hard-core Dom—they’d listen to him.”
“You want me to rearrange my schedule to babysit?” she asked. She really had no words. It was a shocking suggestion.
“Do you remember when I first started coming here?”
Miss Dolphinia knew Jason well enough to know that he had some purpose in this change in topic. “I remember well,” she said.
“I was drawn to Rice.”
Miss Dolphinia felt that same slash of grief across her heart that she endured every time someone brought up his name. She had always thought herself a sadist, but in this, she indulged in her masochism. The pain was so bright and so delicious that she could live in it for the briefest second. And in that second, she could live in the memory of Rice. Had the other driver not died before Rice, Miss Dolphinia would have killed him. She knew that without a hint of doubt.
She slowly brought herself back to the conversation with Jason. “Many of you were. He was beautiful when he dominated men.”
“He was caring,” Jason said. “He was a papa bear.”
“Yes, he was.” Miss Dolphinia cleared her throat and looked up at the ceiling for a moment. She couldn’t afford to spoil her makeup.
“I’d been raped,” Jason said.
Miss Dolphinia’s gaze snapped back down to him. “By whom?” she demanded, fury already gathering in his chest.
“Someone who’s been out of my life for twenty years now,” Jason said, “but Rice showed me that it can be better. He always told me that he got his best moves from you because you were a momma bear.”
Miss Dolphinia pulled out a handkerchief and touched it to the corner of her eyes to catch the gathering moisture before it could ruin her mascara.
“I’m asking you to be a momma bear and teach them something important. I saw you with Dylan. I saw how you helped him with the sort of edgeplay he craved, and I saw how you cut the legs out from under some of the assholes who would have put him at risk.”
“I never—”
“Halverson,” Jason said, cutting her off.
Miss Dolphinia pressed her lips together. Perhaps she had warned him off, but he wasn’t right for Dylan. He was far too aggressive, and he didn’t pay attention to the needs of a sub. He was better with the older subs who could articulate exactly what they did and didn’t want. She sagged as she realized what Jason was saying. The young ones needed to know how to deal with the Halversons and the Vins and the Guards on their own. None of the men were wrong, but certainly not all subs could mesh well with all Doms.
“I don’t know that I’m the best person to get involved with this,” she warned softly. Teaching the young ones had been more Rice’s passion.
“I know you’re the perfect person. So, what day do you have available that the group could have a 10am meeting?”
Miss Dolphinia sighed. 10am. That meant that she would have to get up at eight if she wanted her coffee, her breakfast, and her perfectly done makeup.
“You will owe me for this,” she warned Jason.
He smiled. “Any time you want to put me over a spanking bench and take it out on my ass, you definitely have my permission.”
Miss Dolphinia poked a finger in his direction. “Oh no. You do not get to play Briar Rabbit and tell me what price you’re going to pay.”
“That’s not exactly how the story goes,” Jason said.
Miss Dolphinia stood up. “I will decide how you’ll pay for this, not you.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And you are going to pay,” she warned over her shoulder as she headed for the back room.
“Looking forward to it, ma’am.”
“Sweep the damn floor if you have nothing better to do than loiter about the place.” She didn’t hear any answer he might have given because the door fell closed.
As I asked once before, please don't put this on Goodreads and then rate it down because it's short and you found grammar errors. Please let a fun little something be a fun little something without getting rated and judged to death.
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Date: 2015-02-23 05:35 am (UTC)Learn more about LiveJournal Ratings in FAQ (https://www.dreamwidth.org/support/faqbrowse?faqid=303).
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Date: 2015-02-23 06:42 am (UTC)Gabrielle
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Date: 2015-02-25 04:05 am (UTC)More, please, when she deigns to bend your ear again.
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Date: 2015-02-25 04:35 pm (UTC)EDIT: the answer was in the title... errr... sorry...
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Date: 2015-06-08 11:40 pm (UTC)Thank you
Date: 2015-06-09 06:00 pm (UTC)Re: Thank you
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