Part I is here

I followed Gwen through the foyer and started behind her up the grand staircase. I slid my hand over the slick banister as we ascended- not a speck of dust or dirt between the wood and my fingers. I watched her closely, her skirt hem lifted artfully to allow her high-heeled mary jane’s more room to take the steps. Her movements were graceful, measured, and I wondered again if she too was a dancer. Both of my new attendants were so… poised. Above her slow steps, weighted by her heavy shoes, lay a delicate gold anklet that glimmered from the last vestiges of light from the dome.

I always noticed little details like this. It was occasionally a blessing, but historically a curse. 

“Distressingly perceptive,” a doctor once told my beleaguered mother when I was child. “She sees and understands too much for her own good. She’ll be a nightmare to reign in when she comes into her womanhood.” 

I remember desperately wondering what “coming into my womanhood” meant at the time. It’s a phrase I’ll never forget.

“They used to do barbaric things to girls like her,” he’d continued. “Cut out pieces of their brains, can you believe it? Now we have much more humane ways of treating her issues. Now we can achieve similar results with just some small electric shocks to the temples.”

I can still feel the tight grip of my mother’s hand from when we left the doctor’s office that day. Once we were in the safety of our tiny back-to-back, she’d kneeled to my eye level and held my shoulders tight while she pleaded for me to be a good girl from now on. I’d promised her, genuinely, that I would be good- partly because it was hard to see her so upset and partly because I really wanted to be good. Truly good. 

But one important thing I’d failed to understand was the fear behind her request. She’d never let the doctors touch me, and when I inevitably did become a hellion of a teenager, the urges and cravings of pubescence mixed with the heady torture of sheer boredom started warping my sense of good and bad. The truth was that nothing else in my small world ever made me feel more alive than my own pleasure. And wasn’t that a good thing? I still didn’t know the answer.

Which is why I didn’t think to stop myself from following the line of Gwen’s ankle, up the back of her leg, to the soft swish of her ass moving under her thin satin skirt. Her body was incredible, like a greek statue come to life. Everything in me wanted to reach out and grip the plump flesh under the slick fabric. She would feel amazing. It would feel so good. Just so achingly good. 

Gwen reached the top of the stairs and turned to catch me staring. I was startled and quickly ashamed; my cheeks flushed hot knowing I’d let my filthy desires take hold again. And with the Rectrix of all people. I hadn’t even been here an hour. 

I opened my eyes wide, looking up at her with a little fear, and started to apologize. But she put a finger up to my lips to stop me.

“Morgan, it’s important for you to know that here at Janus, you don’t have to apologize for being the way that you are.” 

I was taken aback by this statement. It went against everything I’d ever been told at the other homes, by the doctors, even my mother. Gwen quickly read the confusion on my face. 

“Janus understands that there’s nothing to be done to stop your mind from wanting what it wants. For girls like you, it’s just your nature. Telling you to not have those urges is like telling you to not have brown eyes. It’s a useless request, and we don’t ask you to apologize for having brown eyes around here.” 

I looked at her from behind her finger, which was now resting on my lips. I couldn’t decipher her like I could so easily with the priest, but I recognized the same urge for wanting to please bubbling within me. I stayed locked in our shared gaze while I let her words sink in. 

Did that mean my urges were good then? Or are they bad, and that means I’m bad by nature? My head started to swirl with conflicting thoughts. 

Like clockwork, I could feel the breath in my chest deepen as the noise in my head grew. As was my nature, my lips slowly parted and my tongue instinctively reached for her skin. I pushed my tastebuds against her and watched her watch me, her eyes now following the slow lick edging up to her fingertip. I felt my eyelids get heavy as the salt from her flesh finally quieted my thoughts. I was just about to take a deeper taste when she chuckled haughtily and pulled her finger away.

“And you are such a hungry one, aren’t you,” she said with a sly smile. “You live up to all expectations, I’ll give you that. You could be just the Novitiate he’s been on the hunt for. So much potential in you, Morgan.” 

I didn’t know at all what was meant by this, but my chest was still heaving slightly and now I couldn’t stop myself from imagining what the rest of her tasted like. 

“Come,” she said tersely while snapping her fingers. I immediately came to heel. 

She began taking me into the depths of the house, at first through one door but then out another into an adjacent parlor. But this just led to another small staircase that was connected to a different transitionary room that then somehow opened up into a multi-storied library with no windows. With the lingering distraction of her skin still in my mouth, I quickly lost my sense of where she was taking me. And these interiors didn’t square at all with my understanding of the scale of the house when I first arrived. We left the grand library to then travel down a narrow hallway toward another door that led to a game room, all while she filled the now seemingly frenetic time and space between us with a litany of house rules and facts that I’d forget as soon as we turned yet another corner. 

Gwen led me this way without pause until we reached a small, unadorned door where she finally stopped and turned toward me. I was out of breath from struggling to keep up.

“You’ll find the stairs to your room through here. It used to be the old servants quarters. Your things will already be put away for you and you’ll meet some of the other girls up there. My advice to you is to follow their lead as you get acclimated.” She gave me one more sly smile and squeezed my shoulder. 

“You’ll see that we don’t just go around sucking one another off here at Janus.” 

And with that she was off and around another corner, her steps fading down a flight of stairs I don’t believe we even got to see.  

I shook my head and took the distinctly new silence as a chance to right myself. I was thrown by this whole introduction. What had I gotten myself into? Where the hell was I? What is this place? I wondered if Roz would be up those stairs to answer questions that were now beginning to surface in my chance to think. 

Hesitantly, I turned to the nondescript door, my hand now gripping the brass doorknob. Not too many moments before, I’d been imagining my hand around thick, soft muscle. The stark contrast jolted me back into some small sense of place. I paused to take one more unsteady look behind me at the hallway we’d just traversed. I had no concept of where that hallway even led to anymore and it occurred to me that I wouldn’t be able to find my way back even if I wanted to. No, it was clear - the only choice before me was to go through the door.