Chapter 15

"He's going to sell me," I said.

"Mayhaps he will, mayhaps he won't." Mercy shrugged. "Eat your breakfast now."

"What are they doing in there anyway?" I frowned, looking at the door. Beyond it, around the corner, Mr. Reiser sat in his study with his new slaves, Tom Henry and Lilah.

"Suh's introducing hisself, I spose, like a genuine person oughtta," Mercy clucked her tongue and I nibbled some toast.

Mercy was getting on me of course, first for the way I'd treated Tom Henry upon meeting him, and secondly for this morning when I'd just ignored the girl completely. A van had brought Lilah by just past seven and she had one little bag and that was all. Now they were talking with their new Master, Delilah and Tom Henry, and I wondered what Mr. Reiser was saying to them.

"I want to know what he's saying," I said, maybe expecting Mercy to agree with me, but I should have known better than that.

"You want, that's all you's evah done is want. Girl, you doan know the first thing bout bein' a slave, does ya?" Mercy laughed at me and I burned at the truth of her words.

"What's the first thing?" I wondered sarcastically.

"The first thing is, you doan get to want nothin'. You get what you get and when it's gone you doan be complainin' bout it."

"Huh." I rolled my eyes.

"You been gettin' for a long time now, but you's gone get over that." The old woman loved to lecture me about how bad a slave I was. "The world's turnin' ever minute and you's turnin' right along with it."

"I never know what you're talking about, Mercy." I laughed at her. "The world's turning, what's that mean?"

She didn't get a chance to explain as our Master entered the kitchen with his two slaves following close behind.

"Got you some coffee and one o' them bagels you like, right here, suh," Mercy said, pouring a cup for Mr. Reiser. I just looked up at him from my seat at the table.

"In a little bit. I'm going take a walk around the house with Tom, show him some work I want done," he said, but Mercy wasn't going to take that.

"No, suh. You eat somethin' now. This house ain't goin' nowheres." She pointed at a chair and Mr. Reiser sighed and then smiled.

"You're setting a bad example, Mercy," our Master said.

"Not if I's feedin' you proper, I ain't." She put a small plate with a warm bagel on it down in front of him, and then his coffee before turning to the other slaves. "Doan you two be standin' there. Get that suitcase, Tom Henry, we gone show the girl where she's sleepin' tonight."

There were slave quarters over the large garage, which had been a carriage house a hundred years before. Now it housed Mr. Reiser's two cars and the Mercedes he'd given me with room left over for storage and a workshop. Upstairs there were a half-dozen small bedrooms, a common sitting room for slaves to use, and a modest bathroom with a shower and sink. Tom Henry had a room there and now Lilah would have one as well.

I wondered if I'd be moving out there soon, perhaps even Mercy too, although I doubted that. Even a wife couldn't come between Mr. Reiser and Mercy. He'd keep her close and comfortable, although keeping a slave in the house proper was definitely outside normal social custom for an owner with a family. Being single and private as he was, Mr. Reiser enjoyed a lot of freedom from convention and I wondered if he was really willing to give that up. Not for a woman, I was sure, but for a child? Probably, I thought, and that was saddening.

They left us alone in the kitchen, my Master and me, and I ate my toast slowly while Mr. Reiser chewed his bagel and sipped his coffee. Weekends were very relaxed around the house, but supper would be formal as always. We'd shared mornings like this many times before, but today I was sullen and unhappy and my Master was aware of it.

"I'm going to put the boy to work this morning," he finally said. "I want you to take the girl upstairs, show her how to clean herself up. I want to see her dressed and pretty before lunch, understand me?"

"Yes sir," I said, unwilling to argue.

"I don't want you to beat her up either," Mr. Reiser said, looking at me hard. "She doesn't belong to you, she belongs to me. Both of you do, Dani, and you're going to have to start acting like it."

"What? But I always..." I started protesting, and then dropped my eyes. "Yes sir."

"The girl didn't ask to be sold or bought, neither did the boy for that matter. No more than you did," he reminded me. "I want you to remember that. If you have to be angry, be angry with me."

"I am angry with you," I pouted, just begging for the strap, but I didn't care.

"I know you are." Mr. Reiser chuckled. "I let you get away with it too, don't I?"

"Master ... Please, I just..." I looked at him, pleading with my eyes for something, but even I wasn't sure what exactly.

"What?" he asked, and I shook my head.

"I just want to know you still love me." I looked down again, knowing it was more than just that.

"I do love you," Mr. Reiser said softly. "More than I should. More than I can, Dani ... I want the same things you do."

"Yes sir," I sighed softly.

"Next weekend we'll go someplace, alright? Orleans, how about that?" He reached for my hand. "Just the two of us. We'll drive down Friday afternoon and come back Monday morning."

"Just us?" I squeezed his fingers and looked at him, into his blue eyes. "You promise?"

"Just us, all weekend long," he assured me. "We'll have fun, okay?"

"Okay." I nodded and returned his smile, wanting to be cheered up.

"In the meantime, I want you to behave yourself. I told the others that you're my mistress. Tom and Lilah, they know you're the lady of the house."

"Did you tell that to Mercy?" I wondered, and my Master laughed.

"No," he said gently. "I don't have to, she knows."

"She doesn't like me," I sighed.

"Heh." Mr. Reiser shook his head. "You have a lot to learn, Dani."

"Lilah, right?" I looked at her as she stood in the kitchen and we were alone.

Mr. Reiser had gone outside to walk Tom Henry around, show him what the boy needed to work on. It would just be small jobs, cleaning the pool, sweeping the gutters, maybe some painting and hedge trimming, stuff like that. Outside was going to be Tom Henry's job, the girl ... I wasn't sure exactly. I figured the kitchen and keeping house, but maybe something else besides.

Lilah stood tall and thin for just being fourteen, but very pretty nonetheless, especially with her blue eyes and light brown skin. She was fair, like hot cocoa with a lot of cream in it. Long kinky black hair though, coarse and thick, a broad forehead and flat little nose. Smallish lips around a smallish mouth, giving her a natural pout above a tiny cleft in her pointed chin. Lilah was a pretty one alright, with an interesting face, that's what you would say about her. She was fun to look at and very animated. That girl couldn't hide her feelings to save her life.

"Or am I gonna call you Miss Delilah?" I prompted, because she didn't answer me right away.

"Just Lilah, Mistress," she said softly, and that negra wouldn't look in my eyes for all the beans in 'Bama.

"Mistress?" I laughed at her. "You just call me Dani. Mercy hears you calling me that and I'll get a whippin' for sure."

"I'm sorry." She nodded quickly.

"Kay, come on. We're going to go upstairs and have some fun," I said, making it sound like I was already bored out of my skull with her.

"F-Fun?" she asked, following me as I walked towards the door and the stairs beyond it.

"Didn't Mr. Reiser tell you what we were gonna do?"

"No, Miss ... uh..." Lilah shook her head.

"We're going to clean you up, take a bath, and find you some nice clothes," I said, waving my arms around. "Gonna make you look six kinds of beautiful, understand?"

"Ummm ... We are?" Lilah frowned and I glanced at her, wondering what was wrong with the girl. Maybe she was retarded or something, I thought.

"Why are you so scared?" I asked her, deciding to just ask and avoid any misunderstanding. Besides, I didn't especially care if I hurt her feelings or not.

"W-What?" she asked as we went up the stairs, and I just sighed.

"Is this the first time you were ever sold?"

"No," she replied. "Um, I've been sold a lot."

"Really? How many times is a lot?"

"Three times, ma'am," Lilah said. I didn't bother getting her worked up about that; the girl was determined to call me by something other than my name.

"That's not so many." I shrugged.

"H-How many times have you been sold?" Lilah asked hesitantly, and I wondered if she was teasing me, but one look at her face told me she wouldn't dare.

"I was freeborn," I said. "Just the one time. In here..."

We were using the hallway bathroom, the one Mercy used, because I didn't want that negra using my bathroom, or even setting foot in my bedroom if I could help it. I mean, our Master's bedroom of course, but I'd taken to thinking of it as ours, his and mine. I sat on the closed toilet and hadn't bothered closing the bathroom door. A slave like her didn't need any privacy anyway.

"Take your clothes off. Let me see what you look like."

"Yes ma'am," the girl agreed. She wore only a simple dress anyway, like a yellow sundress. It looked cheap and threadbare around the seams, at the hem and buttonholes.

"Is that the best dress you have?" I wondered, and she nodded, confirming my suspicions. "We're gonna have to go do some shopping then. I've got some clothes, but I don't know how they're gonna fit you."

"Oh." She widened her eyes at that and almost looked me in the face, but not quite.

"And they're my clothes anyway." I laughed. "You need your own, right?"

"Yes ma'am," she said, pushing her dress off her thin shoulders. Lilah brought her arms free and let it slip down her body.

"Take off those panties too." I pointed at her ugly white underwear and it looked too big for her anyway. "Where'd you get those?"

"My panty?" She looked down at herself. "I borrowed it from one of the other negras before I left Texas."

"That's where you're from?" I asked, and she nodded. "You look like a boy."

"Oh." She swallowed so loudly, I could hear it.

I looked her up and down while she held her folded up her dress and now her underwear. Lilah was skinny, not like malnourished or anything, just naturally thin the way some girls are at her age. I imagined she'd fill out in a year or too, probably grow taller as well. As pretty as she was, the girl might even grow up to be beautiful, but that wasn't a thought meant to comfort my ego.

"Set your clothes over there. You don't gotta be told everything, just do it," I said. "And you can look at me too."

"I just ... I don't want to make you mad." She cleared her throat and I blinked at her. "That nigger Tom Henry, he said you got real mad at him for no reason. He figured you were gonna whip him."

"He thought I was going to whip him?" I stared at her. "He said that?"

"Yes ma'am." Lilah nodded seriously.

"Fuck!" I giggled.

"And the Master, he, uh, he said you're the lady of the house, so ... I don't want to be no bother, ma'am." Lilah was talking a little faster and I just nodded at her.

"Yeah, whatever," I said. "I'm not gonna whip anybody, okay? Only one that does the whippin' around here is Mercy, so you watch out for her. She uses a razor strop, you know what that is?"

"No ma'am." The girl shook her head.

"It's like a belt, sorta, and it hurts!" I grinned and nodded. "Believe me, she whipped me plenty of times with it."

"She whips you?" Lilah blinked at me.

"Yeah, she does." I shrugged. "Turn around some for me."

The girl turned, letting me see all of her and she was a little shy maybe, but mostly nervous. Lilah had nice skin too, without any scars or anything that I could see right off. She was smooth and the same light brown all over. She didn't have any tits, not even puffy nipples really, just small dark ones. Her waist and hips were thin and about the same width, so she didn't have a whole lot of shape to her, except her butt which was nice and round, lifted high too. A pert little butt, I guess, and her pussy had a few wisps of brown hair on it, dark brown, but definitely not black.

"You haven't had any menstruation yet, huh?" I asked. "How come? You got lice? Get over here and sit on the floor. I wanna look at your head."

"No ma'am, I ain't got any lice," Lilah said. "My blood..."

"What about your blood?" I prompted, leaning over as she sat down on the bathroom floor, letting me look through her hair and check her scalp.

"I got sexed the first time and I was too little for it."

"What's that mean?"

"I mean, I was small and the man, he was big and I had a lot of blood down there. The doctor told me later I might never get any seasoning at all."

"You had sex and you don't have any periods cause of that?" I sat back and looked at her.

"Yes ma'am," Lilah nodded.

"Well..." I narrowed my eyes at her. "How small were you?"

"I was round seven or eight years maybe." She shrugged. "I don't recollect exactly."

"You were eight years old and a man had sex with you?"

"Yes ma'am."

"What? Some nigger did that?" I felt sick at the idea and looking at the girl sitting right in front of me made it worse.

"Oh no, ma'am." Lilah shook her head. "He was a white man. He was my owner then."

"Your Master did that? He raped you?"

I had a hard time believing any white man would ever rape a child, and a master doing it? That sounded crazy to me, like some of those lies you hear sometimes, the ones the abolitionist people spread in their little pamphlets and such. I didn't ever believe that stuff. Some crazy nigger, sure. Everybody knows some of those boys can't control themselves. Mercy said they had a devil inside, the runaways and such, and I figured she would know.

"Rape?" Lilah shrugged. "He was my Master. He'd do whatever he wanted to. My momma told me go with him, so I did."

"So he didn't rape you." I nodded and I was glad that much made sense anyway.

"No. He just wanted to sex me up some, but I was too little," Lilah agreed. "After that though, after I got all healed up inside, we did it a lot. I was his bedroom negra for awhile, til I got too old for it."

"Did he treat you nice?" I asked her, pushing her back and satisfied that she didn't have lice or anything.

"Oh, yes ma'am!" Lilah said. "He was always nice anyway and he'd give me candy sometimes, those chocolate kisses. I like those."

"Well..." I said, going to the tub and running the water so I could give the girl a bath. "Mr. Reiser is real nice, so you got lucky he bought you."

"You think he's gonna sex me up some?" The girl asked, and she didn't mean anything by it, except genuine curiousity.

"I seriously doubt it." I giggled looking at her little sex nestled between her thin thighs.