She and Saida communicated more by expressions and gestures than words. Saida seemed to have an even harder time of, or a greater reluctance to talking than Claire did. In fact, Saida resisted speaking at all in Arabic, and only spoke to Claire in English. Claire had asked her why, since she’d wanted to practice her Arabic with Saida. Saida had just shrugged and said she feared being overheard by the Arabic-speaking eunuchs and guards. The poor woman, who’d been altered more than Claire so the two would match, either was or had become a more fearful person than Claire. That was how Saida had accommodated the changes to her own life resulting from now being an odalisque. Claire realized they both had changed to deal with their circumstances, and had recognized that Saida’s particular way of handling her situation was just as valid as any other way.

  Now entrenched in their new lives, the weeks passed uneventfully. Every day for the two newest houris followed a predictable routine, as it did for all the other concubines. Each day consisted of morning ablutions and preparation, as though the Emir might arrive at any moment though he hadn’t yet, exercises and dance, twin training for Claire and Saida, sex practice and techniques, and varying amounts of innocent play with the other harem slaves. These activities were interspersed with eating. Claire did notice that the food given to her and Saida had moderated, and they were no longer allowed to snack indiscriminately. As a result, their weight had stabilized. Aziz went to great trouble to keep them matched exactly, and weighed them each day. They stayed at 180 pounds, never varying by more than half a pound from that new, set-point weight.

  The routine had become so consistent that both Claire and Saida were shocked when, early one morning, all the concubines were roused by their eunuch overseers. The Emir had arrived at the Palace. They were to prepare themselves immediately, in the event His Highness would want to visit his harem.

  With a mind still foggy from sleep, Claire was, at first, excited that the day might bring some deviation from the routine, and that she might finally meet the ruler and the man for whom all her training and preparations had been intended. The same man who, essentially, owned her. She also knew, somewhere in the back of her mind, that the Emir’s return might portend something else … but what was it?

  “W…what else does t…t…this mean?” She asked Saida. Her companion merely shrugged as they rolled up their mat.

  Then it came to her. “Is the u…uprising over?” She asked Aziz.

  “You need have no concern for what happens outside the seraglio,” he responded gruffly. Then, seeing the beginnings of fear in C’amila’s eyes, he softened his tone. No need to upset the sensitive little mouse. “As a matter of fact, C’amila, there is a cease-fire that His Highness, with his great skills in diplomacy, has successfully negotiated.”

  Claire didn’t understand the Arabic word for ‘diplomacy,’ but she got the message. She understood that might mean an opportunity for Elliot and Ali to get to them.

  She realized that she hadn’t thought of Elliot in weeks. He seemed so much a part of some long-lost life. Those memories were like a wonderful, inscrutable dream - but distant and not relevant to her life now. Perhaps Elliot would come to rescue her. No, not perhaps. As soon as Elliot could extricate her from the seraglio, he most certainly would. She’d be taken away to be with him. The idea of another dramatic change to her situation frightened her. What if she were required to make a decision whether to stay or go? She couldn’t do that. The idea of deciding scared her to death. It frightened her to her very soul, and she didn’t really comprehend why.

  It was an hour later and all the concubines had completed their preparations and were lounging about the pool, eating sweet rolls and sipping coffee or tea. Suddenly, they all heard the huge, bronze doors to the seraglio burst open, and heavy footsteps moved rapidly along the corridor toward the garden courtyard. In a moment, the Grand Eunuch appeared. He pointed to Claire and Saida.

  “Come with me at once!” He turned and left the way he’d come with the two women hastily following him, trepidation in their hearts and written on their faces.

  They rushed into an antechamber. The first person they saw was the Emir himself, dressed in a gold-trimmed, off-white desert robe and looking exactly like the picture they’d seen in Ali’s oasis home more than four months ago. The two concubines immediately knelt in tulip, their pantaloons, open in the front, clearly revealing their sex to their master, while their hands folded behind their necks caused their large breasts to be thrust out in front of their open boleros. Their eyes were downcast.

  For a brief moment, the Emir’s eyebrows lifted in apparent interest. Then he commanded, “No, no. Stop that, look up, over there,” as he pointed to his left.

  Elliot was there, standing next to Ali, barely resisting the urge to rush to Claire and pull her up into his arms. He was so glad, so relieved to see her, that he only distantly registered the fact that there was about forty percent more of her than before. Then he really saw her for the first time and gasped with surprise at her altered appearance. With an overwhelming need to hold her, he rushed to Claire, as Ali ran to Saida.

  Claire was uncertain what to do. There was the Emir, the man who’d been the focus of her existence for the last four months. Surely, she wasn’t allowed to do anything until he granted permission, was she?

  “Oh go on you two, get up and greet your men,” he ordered them, sensing the reason for their reluctance. After all, he’d created the standards for behavior in the harem that the eunuchs implemented. He knew how a trained houri was supposed to behave in his presence.

  They each stood, hesitatingly, as their anguished lovers took them into their arms.

  “Oh Darling,” Elliot said, “are you alright?! I’ve missed you so! I’ve been worried sick about you! I’m so sorry it’s taken this long to rescue you from here!”

  Claire was at a loss for words. “I…I…I’m f…fat, Master,” was all she could manage.

  He was so glad to see her that everything different about her escaped notice until much later. Then he saw the nose ring and the tattoos marking her as a concubine in the Emir’s harem. He could tell she’d gone through some traumatic experiences that had deeply affected her. She could barely talk, stuttered a lot, and seemed terribly anxious whenever he asked her if she needed anything.

  She was plump and, he thought, cute. Her hair had remained black and her skin was still a rich, healthy olive tone. Her gestures and expressions were subtly different and occasionally reminded him of Saida. Her bearing was such that she appeared to consider herself his property, not his equal.

  It was only much later that Elliot discovered what they’d done to her sex.

  It shocked him at first, then he put it aside for later consideration. Claire needed him like never before. He realized that her recovery from the harem experiences would take some time. He’d do whatever was necessary to make her his Claire again, getting her back to her old self, as much as that was possible.

  The agony of their long separation had taught him a deeply profound truth: he needed Claire in order to exist, in order for his life to have meaning. His happiness was totally dependent on hers. He loved her with all his heart, and wanted her to be with him always.

  They would find that new life and that happiness, but not without struggle. It would be hard for him and harder for Claire. As is true with many experiences, they leave us changed. Those who truly love us adapt to those changes and love us still. Those who don’t drift away.

  Elliot wasn’t going to drift anywhere, not unless Claire was with him.

  He was determined that they’d live together ever after – happily if he could make it so, if only the fates allowed.

  Epilog: Tell Me What We’re Gonna Do Now

  Elliot and Claire, Ali and Saida had been on the small island in the South Pacific for about eight weeks. Ali had found a psychiatrist couple, Roger and Betty Schiefatelli, who were willing to come to the island and treat the women in exchange for life in a vacation paradise and an obscene amount of money. One or the other of them had spent hours every day of those weeks with each woman in a therapeutic attempt to make them functional and adjusted to life outside the seraglio again.

  There had been ups and downs. Now, a couple of months after arrival, both women were noticeably improved, although neither was able to make more than the most trivial decisions or behave in any way other than submissive to virtually everyone around them, including to Elliot and Ali and the shrinks. Claire could speak, but only with evident difficulty. She stuttered uncontrollably as her therapy-aided desire to talk pressured her to respond to conversation, though her mind made her too diffident to want to express an opinion. Saida was unable to utter more than the simplest of phrases, and then only in English. She seemed incapable of understanding or speaking her native Arabic at all. Even in English, though she could understand what was being said, she was still deathly afraid of saying something in response that might get her punished. The logical part of her mind realized what was happening, but couldn’t easily overcome the conditioned fear of punishment. Every utterance represented a small victory of that logic in its mental war with her fear.

  They both were in a friendly environment; they recognized that intellectually, yet they were unable to internalize the fact that now they were safe and free to do as they pleased. What pleased them without exception was a night or morning or afternoon of uninterrupted sex with each other. Even then, one of the men had to be sure to proactively grant them permission to climax. When they’d once forgotten, the two women had spent an anxious and frustrating afternoon that’d taken them days to get over.

  Other than in their need to sometimes be alone together, doing what they pleased was no longer a concept they understood. They both preferred to spend quiet time sitting naked in the harem repose position, staring out to sea. The openness of the vista seemed therapeutic after the enclosed seraglio. But when someone else entered the room, heard but unseen, they immediately would put their hands behind their necks in the submissive tulip position.

  They both preferred the pantaloons and boleros they’d worn when they’d escaped the seraglio, or nothing at all, to any other clothes. They were irrationally afraid of covering their nipples or their intimacies. After Elliot and Ali discussed the situation, Ali decided to have a number of harem costumes made to accommodate them. The psychiatrists were still working their way up to getting the women to wear normal clothing, so they could get out and move about the island. So far, Saida had managed a dress, without panties, for thirty minutes, before she broke down and shook so violently that Ali had to bring her back to their bungalow. Claire had managed to wear a skirt and top for only half that amount of time, and couldn’t leave the resort grounds.

  Given their mental state, it was astonishing to Elliot and Ali that their ladies were so needy when it came to sex – Claire with Elliot and Saida with Ali, or Claire and Saida with one another. Both men admitted that, in spite of the fact that sex with Claire or Saida before had been great, it was now off-the-charts fantastic. The girls were talented, trained, eager, and absolutely determined to please them. It was evident that the women needed frequent sex, and would quickly spiral into depression if they didn’t get it.

  They were deathly afraid to masturbate or touch themselves in their genital area without specific permission, which had to be granted at least every session. It had required several days of therapy, before they could do that without permission each time they touched themselves.

  Two days earlier, Elliot had brought Claire back to their bungalow, following an hour with Roger. He’d barely closed the door when Claire, stripping out of her bolero and pantaloons, rushed up to him, a hungry smile on her lips and pleaded, “F…F…F…Fuck me now! P…Please, M…M…Master!”

  He’d carried her to the bedroom and dumped her, good-naturedly, onto the bed. “A questioning look crossed her face and she stammered, “M…M…May I …?”

  “Of course, Claire. You may touch yourself whenever you want.”

  She spread her chubby legs, used one hand to part her beauty lips, and immediately began to finger her clit and the ring piercing it, easily visible and highly accessible in the vacant area between her inner-lipless, outer labia. She quickly became wet and ready for him.

  When Elliot stripped and joined her naked on the bed, she stopped pleasuring herself, rolled on top of him, and immediately slid down to take his member in her mouth and used her tongue with a fervor and a skill he’d never experienced before from any woman. The tip of her tongue found exactly the right soft, sensitive spot to arouse him profoundly, and her sucking motion was exactly the right negative pressure and timed perfectly to correspond with the frequency of oscillation of his arousal. If giving head were an Olympic sport, she would have set the world record and taken the gold with no close competitors.

  But with infinite skill, as she sensed him getting close, she backed off, fondling his balls with her small hands and probing his taint and asshole to spread his arousal from front to back.

  Hands still at work, she slid up him to nip at his nipples and then kiss his lips with such emotion and astounding technique that he was ignited from his groin to his head. Then she rose up to tulip position, hands behind her neck, nipple-ringed breasts thrust forward. She lifted a little onto her knees, then easily, adroitly, settled back onto him, his member thrusting into, and captured by, her vagina. When she was completely back in tulip, he was as deeply in her as it was possible to be. Her well-exercised muscles gripped him with a finely-honed, heavily-practiced technique.

  Her full, rounded hips rocked and oscillated in perfect time with his burning, overwhelming sensations of pleasure. Surely the woman was telepathic, a witch, a succubus, supernatural. No mere mortal could know so well how to please him. She had become, she was at her core, a master, a supreme practitioner of the erotic arts.

  For only a moment, Elliot became lucid enough to watch her face. She was like a dolphin first released to its undersea environment, a cheetah hurling across the savannah in its initial dash, an eagle riding the updraft. Claire was a creature of sex. Maybe it was always there, maybe the seraglio had infused it into her, but it was what she was now. And oh God, she was so good at it!

  The build-up, postponement, then further build-up continued until Elliot thought he’d surely perish from anticipation. Finally, at his absolute peak, she brought him to orgasm with a power and ability beyond comprehension.

  When he did cum, the spasms of his arousal were powerful, sharp, forcing his essence deep into her. Over and over he pulsed, filling her. He watched the ecstasy on her face as she was flooded with his cum. It was as though she lived to absorb his essence.

  Then she shocked him again as she meekly asked, while still straddling his member, “P…Please, M…M…Master, may I c…c…cum?”

  “Of course you can cum, Claire. I’m your lover, your fiancé. With me, you may cum whenever you want to cum. You don’t need to ask permission, ever again.”

  She looked quizzical for the briefest of moments, then began to fondle her nipple rings and continue to precess on his still-hard, but beginning-to-relax, cock. The talented grip of her warm sheath held him erect, then reinitiated his climb to the top. She screamed as the orgasm overcame her. Elliot came again moments later. She shook violently and collapsed onto his chest, his penis still comfortably, firmly gripped by her Kegel muscles.

  She’d milked every last drop of pleasure and cum from him. This Claire could devour him in an instant. But she wouldn’t. She was no longer sufficiently self-confident or dominant enough to do that. She wanted to submit to him. If he weren’t there, she wanted to submit to anyone with authority over her. She had no will or will power of her own. Maybe, eventually, she would. Maybe not. So he would have to guide and protect her. That was more than fine. After all, she was a tremendous lover. She was his heart’s desire. He only wished she were the more assertive, western woman she had been. Perhaps the appreciation for her as she was and the desire for her as she’d been were incongruous. She wasn’t the same Claire anymore. She was still Claire, most of her actions and mannerisms were similar, her heart and soul were still there, even the preponderance of her personality was there, but they’d changed her drastically. I guess you can’t have everything, he thought. But I have her. And I will make sure she’s happy.

  When they finally laid back, his arm cradling her head, he asked her, “Why do you insist on calling me ‘Master?’”

  “You ah…ah…are my true M…Master. Withou…out you, a…a…all m…men are m…m…m…my master. B…B…But if y…y…you ah…are my Master, th…th…then n…n…n…no one else ca…ca…ca…can be. Th…Th…Then I am s…s…s…safe with you.”

  So now he understood. If she called him Master, if he were genuinely her Master, or her Master of Masters, then she would be safe from all those others whom she feared. She knew he would keep her save. After all, she belonged to him. In return, he would care for her.

  It broke his heart. “Claire, I’ll always be there for you – as your Master if you insist, and as your husband for sure. That is, if you’ll marry me.”

  “Wa…What ev…ver y…y…y…you d…desire, Master.”

  * * * * *

  He sat alone with Dr. Betty Schiefatelli. She began to talk immediately.

  “Claire is an inherently submissive individual, who was taught by the Western society in which she was raised to be strong, independent and assertive wherever she could be. One of the reasons your relationship with her prospered so quickly, is because you are off-the-charts dominant, so she naturally fell into a submissive relationship with you, which was to your mutual benefit, and her deep-seated liking.