Pirates of the Caribbean — A Marketplace Tale, Part 4
Pirates of the Caribbean is fanfiction based on Laura Antoniou’s Marketplace series, a fictional world in which there is a large and secret market for consensual slaves who serve their owners under contract. Laura recently released “No Safewords,” a fan anthology of tales by different writers set in the Marketplace world.
This tale also takes a page from the real-world phenomenon of modern high seas piracy. Most people think that pirates are a thing of the past, but in fact, across the globe at least one boat a day is attacked by pirates looking to steal cargo, ransom the crew or owners, or steal the boat itself.
In Part 3, Bette arrives in Puerto Rico and meets Rita La Banquena, local power broker, and learns more about the pirates…and maybe about her own history.
I progress up the grand staircase, and from there to my suite on the third floor. As tired as I am, I can’t seem to wind down; the thrumming current of tension in my gut won’t let me rest. This happens a lot when I travel, particularly when I’m on the job. Even though I should rest, because once things get rolling I might not get the chance – it’s hard for me to do it.
I stand out on the balcony, rubbing my neck with the back of my hand, trying to imagine what’s in store with this job. My first slave, Diana, was with me for a decade and had gone out to dozens of jobs with me. She was like the corner crew to my prizefighter; getting me ready for the event, keeping me in it, even pulling me out a few times when necessary. I never took Diana further than the drop point – the location where I’d begin a job, but she’d be there, usually in a hotel, available to me by phone, ready to get me supplies, information, tickets home. She could pack in an eyeblink for the both of us and not forget a thing, something I sucked in nine keys at.
I don’t think this was ever an official, spoken-out-loud part of her job, but thinking about it now, one of her unspoken tasks was getting me to relax. I mean, that’s not something you can put on a checklist: “Relax me, dammit!” But the beautiful thing about Diana was how well she anticipated needs I didn’t know I had, or didn’t know how to satisfy. When I met Diana, if you had asked me to make a list of things I found relaxing, I’d just sit there staring at the blank page, thinking, “What the fuck does that even mean? If I’m relaxed I’m relaxed, if I’m not, then I’m not.” Until I met Diana, I thought of my moods and emotions like weather: they were there, but there wasn’t much I could do about them except wait them out, right?
Diana taught me that I could aspire to the kind of control over my inner world that I’d relentlessly sought over my outer world. No lie, I am a control freak. But my inner world was an uncontrolled Wagnerian opera half the time. I looked like I had my shit together when I met Diana, and through sheer force of will I acted like I had my shit together, but the truth was, I was a hot mess.
Diana was my slave, my lover, my servant-of-all-trades. But she also made me a better person. While it was happening I never saw it, but in retrospect, I realize that although I owned Diana, I was Diana’s project, her Great Work; she spent a decade shaping me, molding me, expanding my reach and my comfort zone, and seamlessly substituting her own efforts in places where she knew, unerringly, that no amount of practice was ever going to make me improve.
Like remembering where my keys were, or figuring out my damn calendar. Those she never tried to train me to do, I chuckled.
Yup, Diana surely trained me as much if not more than I trained her.
I looked out at the moon and thought, “All the dangerous shit we did, and she gets killed going to the grocery store.”
Diana died four years ago in a car accident. I spent a solid year fucking up like a pro: my rage and grief propelled me to self-destructive highs and lows. I thought I could make things better by buying a new slave to take Diana’s place; I called my friend Chris Parker and got an invite to an auction.
I didn’t buy anyone at the auction — apparently, I wasn’t quite done fucking up yet. Instead of making any bids, I got knee-walking drunk and ended up in a guest room in a house where Chris was working as a trainer. While my hangover was still in full effect, I bought a one-way ticket to Montreal, where I stayed for six months before Chris called me about a job in Costa Rica.
That’s how I’d met Kelly, my current slave. Unlike Diana, I didn’t bring Kelly on jobs: for the first year she was with me, I was her ‘foster owner,’ someone who volunteered to take in human property whose owner had died, gone to jail, or gone off the deep end. Foster owners must avoid placing their charges at risk; and even if that wasn’t the case, in the first year Kelly was far too fragile, physically and perhaps mentally, to do this kind of work.
Now that she was pregnant, of course, putting her at risk was totally out of the question. Impending parenthood was making me question a lot of things, as you might imagine, and I realized that Kelly might never serve me in the capacity that Diana once did: I’m not sure I’d ever get to the point where I felt comfortable putting the mother of my children at risk. My work was dangerous, and if something happened to me, I wanted them to have at least one parent around. As someone who went through a lot of my growing-up without responsible adults around, I didn’t want that for my own children.
Still, standing on the balcony looking at the moon over the bay, feeling the alert, ready-to-fight feeling thrumming in my gut made me wish I’d actually read one of those books about mindfulness meditation Diana was always strategically placing on my nightstand. Diana gave me a lot more control over my inner world than I’d ever had before, but the fact was I was always better at relaxing with her than I was without her.
I hear a soft knock on the door to my suite. I walk to the door in the thin, tropical-weight robe the hotel had supplied me. Upon opening it, I see the same trim young woman I’d seen earlier on the dock, but carrying a large, flat case that I recognize as a massage table.
“Come in,” I said, as I sigh inwardly. You know, at home, I’ve created a life where I’m not routinely confronted with what an oddball I am. I mean, statistically speaking, I’m unusual. There are way more straight people than there are dykes, for example. And I’m also one of the three people in the world who just don’t like getting a massage.
Diana used to laugh at me: impatient with meditation, unwilling to get a massage — I fought inner peace like it was cancer and parking tickets rolled into one. But I don’t like strangers touching me, and for me, activities that give me a lot of time to think just turn into a turbo-worry session. I’m more likely to find relaxation at the batting cages, where I can smack the fuck out of things and just stop thinking for awhile.
I watch the young woman set up the table, and I briefly consider just taking one for the team. The fact is, I really like Rita and I don’t want to rebuff her hospitality twice. The young woman bends over to retrieve some things out of a canvas bag she’d set on the floor, and I immediately think, “Shit. Nice ass.” The truth is, I’m kind of a pig; I just get away with it more because I’m a woman. Most women won’t notice another woman cruising them, and I can shamelessly ogle the passing parade of femininity without getting busted for it.
I clear my throat. “I’d like to suggest an alternative,” I say.
Lily Lloyd is the author of Discipline: Adding Rules and Discipline to Your Kinky Relationship, a book about making kinky relationships work.
