(http://elliquiy.com/elluiki/images/7/75/Matigroves125square.jpg)<br/><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: trebuchet ms;"><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 18pt;">Mati Groves</span></span><br/><strong>Location</strong>: The Fairmont, Mati's room<br/><strong>With</strong>: Paulette Lisette Saint-Simon<br/><br/><br/>How do I love thee?  Let me count the ways...<br/><br/>Agh, how could he count anything with the slave ministering to his prick?<br/><br/>He sank to his knees, forcing her to bow to him.  There was some sort of perfection in the bend of her back, the flow of her ribcage beneath her pink skin, as she drank him, sucking her own life from him as from a deep dark well.<br/><br/><div align="center">+</div><br/>'You must rest,' he said.  'rest your body and your voice.  Eat fruit.'  There was a bowl of fruit he'd hardly touched at breakfast.  He placed it on the bedside table.  He'd placed the slave carefully on the bed, but somehow she'd rearranged herself in a more elegant position.  Such grace she bore about her, even when humbled.<br/><br/>Oh, he mustn't fall in love with her just because she was beautiful, and sang well, and -<br/><br/>He telephoned room service.  'I need a dark blue marker pen, and a honey-flavoured gargle, and a long length of gold chain with a padlock, and a portable, I don't know what you call it, a frame to suspend a slave from, with cuffs and so forth.'<br/><br/>They were most obliging and said they'd only be a few minutes.  He padded around the suite naked, hunting through her trolley, examining the supplies of drugs that had been sent with her, finding the remote control that fixed her collar.  There was a knock at the door and she began to uncoil, as if to go and answer, but as he pulled on his dressing gown to greet the bellhop he raised his hand, as if she were a welcome guest he didn't want to trouble, not a -<br/><br/>There.  He tipped the bellhop after a brief foray to his wallet by the bed then manoeuvred the suspension set to the french windows on to the balcony so that, as he envisaged, when he hung her – would it be by her wrists or ankles first?  - she would be able to gaze out into the world, to the glittering blue sky and sea.  Now, there was something he'd been going to do...<br/><br/>He sat by her, naked again, his brain a-whirr, stroking her flanks.  'You've lovely skin.  Gargle with this.  Here, it's time for me to practise and improvise, but I want to feel attached to you.'  He fixed the chain to her collar, and used the remote to change her setting to '1' – available only to him.  He explained to her, stroking her face.  'Available only to me.  For the present, at least.  Masturbate for me, would you?  Just languidly, snooze if you like, while I play.'<br/><br/>The chain jangled slightly, attached to the piano-stool, as he played.  Sequences of chords.  A couple of his old songs for warm-up.  They would be an act, a new act, he felt new songs rising in him.  Improvising riffs, he tried out lyrics...one began to settle into<br/><br/>Grace<br/>Some see it in the beauty of her face<br/>Some in the way she moves from place to place<br/>as if some animal once taught her<br/>how to wear chains with pride and hauteur<br/>that's why I call her<br/>Grace...<br/><br/>And that was as far as it seemed to go for now and then amid some familiar chords he heard from before her voice singing Ma-ti; it stirred his loins.  He found a melody, like hers but in a minor key, more longing.  And then he realised it should be the possessive...<br/><br/>...de Ma-ti<br/>Je m'appelle Paulette<br/>de Ma-ti...<br/><br/>...and he made up rhyming verses, none of which quite made sense except as jokes (cat me, flatly, that we)...but he jotted down the ideas on sheet music, then smiled to himself, oh, his lust fuelled again by the sight of her on the bed, humming to his tunes...<br/><br/>He had to go to her, the chain jingling and jangling as he picked it up and wound one end round his wrist, knotting it.  He took the marker pen from the bedside table.  'You will have to endure pain,' he said, beginning to write on her belly.  'Pain gives me such intense pleasure.  But you're like a new toy, there are so many things I want to do with you.  I can't decide whether to hang you by your ankles and torture you, or take you out and buy you things to wear, or buy you a fine meal and have you tell me the story of your life.  Here, look at what I've written and tell me what you'd like to do.  Don't give me one of those namby-pamby whatever-master-wishes answers.  Tell me what you'd like to do for the afternoon.  But first, tell me what you think...'<br/><br/>He'd led her, right hand in left, to the full-length mirror on the wardrobe.  Across her belly he'd scrawled a stave, and three notes: a quaver on E, then a bar line, then a minim for A and a minim for E.  Below the music, against the three notes, were the three syllables, de Ma – ti.<br/><br/>'Perhaps I shall have you your musical name tattooed on you,' he said, smiling, so happy, so boyishly happy to have a new, and such a beautiful and musical, slave.  'Now, you were saying...?'