“So good of you to come, Alan,” said Annabelle with a faint, half-mocking smile.
  
“I didn’t have a great deal of choice in the matter, Mistress,” I mumbled.

“But it was your choice to enter the circle,” she said seriously.  “I’m glad you were
willing to do so.  I like a man who has the courage to surrender himself to me.”

“I didn’t know what it would be like.  I didn’t believe in your control over me.”

“So you feel that I ensnared you?  Or perhaps I took advantage of your
naïveté?”  She tilted her head a little to one side and regarded me
appraisingly, like an empress weighing the petition of one of her subjects.  “I’ve never
believed in preying upon the innocent.  If you really want to leave, I’ll have Brian drive
you back to your hotel and I’ll find some other way of entertaining myself this evening.”

I gulped, taken aback.  “You’d let me go?  Just like that?”

“Yes, I would.  If you really wanted me to.”

“But what will happen to me if I choose to stay and be your, ah, entertainment?  I’m
frightened, Anna... I mean Mistress.”

“Of course you are frightened, but I think you know very well what will happen.  You will
do things, and you will have things done to you for my amusement and gratification.  Much
of what you experience may be rather unpleasant.  Some of it will be less so, but whether
you find it pleasant or unpleasant will be irrelevant.  It will be what I desire, and that
will be all that matters.”

And there it was.  I had the choice, and it was a choice that at this stage I had not
expected to be given the opportunity to make.  I could return to the homespun comfort of
John and Doreen’s hotel for the night, and quite probably there would be nothing to
prevent me leaving town the next day.  I could cross the border into Scotland, see some
castles and national parks, just as I had originally planned to do.  If I was lucky I
might meet a girl, an ordinary girl, who would come back to a hotel room somewhere and
make love with me in a perfectly ordinary way.  That was the kind of uncomplicated sex I
had enjoyed in the past, and the kind I had thought I would always want.  I had never
thought about giving my hard-earned cash to some leather-clad dominatrix, or asking a
girlfriend to tie me up and spank me, or anything like that.  I did not like helplessness,
and I had no desire to suffer pain, and yet...

What did I like?  What did I really like?   I liked being the object of passion, and I
liked it when the woman was the one who took the lead, kissed my lips, stripped my clothes
from me and eased my naked body back onto the bed.  It had only happened to me once or
twice in all my twenty-four years, but there was nothing more exciting than being taken in
hand and used to satisfy a woman’s overt lust. 

And now?  Now I had the chance to offer myself up to a woman who apparently lusted for
something stranger, more intense, and altogether more interesting than a sweaty grapple
between clean white sheets.  Everything that happened would be according to Annabelle’s
desire, and I was almost desperate to find out what her desires might consist of and how
it might feel to be subject to them.  I could leave if I chose, and it was reassuring that
Annabelle had given me the opportunity.  It helped to persuade me that she was not
deranged and that to her I was a man, a person, and not merely a piece of meat to be
wantonly devoured and enjoyed.  That was good, but I knew that if I asked her to have
Brian drive me back to the hotel I would spend the rest of my life wondering what she
would have done to me.  I would never know what pains and terrors and, most importantly,
what pleasures I might have experienced at her hands. 

There was really only one decision I could make.

“I want to stay,” I said quietly, my eyes lowered.