Authors: Anneke Jacob
Anders tightened the chain and left her for a while with her face in the sticky tray, the porridge drying on her chin and nose, flaking from her eyebrows. She could see nothing of what he was arranging, but the sounds would reach her.
At last he released her nose ring, cleaned her up and hauled her back to the middle of the room, leaving her on her side on the floor, wrists and ankles still linked. She stared upward at the bars and pulleys above her. The harness, he decided, would get in his way; he took that off. Thick, cushioned suspension cuffs emerged from the back of the drawer with the smell of new leather. "These should keep your wrists and ankles safe. You'll tell me if there's a problem," he said coldly. One by one he unlocked her cuffs, brought her limbs forward, strapped them into the padded cuffs and linked them to the spreader bars. Then slowly he raised her off the floor, one careful eye on her face. Maia looked dazed and frightened, but there was no sign of pain. "Well?"
Slowly she spoke. "I'm all right, master."
He pinched her ass very hard and she writhed and cried out. "How about when you wriggle around?"
She breathed hard. "It's – okay, master." She was light, and flexible, and strong for her size. She should be all right. He raised her to about chest height. "How do you feel now, bad girl?"
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She twisted in the ropes. "Completely – totally – helpless, master," she panted. "More than I've ever – Terrified." She dipped her head back, and then gathering her limbs, managed to raised herself a little. The cuffs didn't give her anything to grasp. She swayed and dropped again. Anders thought he'd rarely seen anything as beautiful as that smooth, slender form hanging and struggling like a captured animal. Deprived even of the security of contact with the ground.
He took up his rawhide flogger. The narrow lashes stung and only the mildest application was any pleasure to her. He started well beyond mild, and she screamed.
"Are you relaxed now, my little space cadet?" The next blow and scream pre-empted any reply. Red lines were tracing the taut shape of her flesh. Her whole body flexed and tensed and writhed, its struggles attenuated, held back by gravity and her own weight. He started on her thighs, then stopped and unlocked her shield. "No reason you should be protected here, slave, is there?"
"No…master…" she whimpered. He couldn't tell if she was agreeing or protesting. It made no difference. Anders set the metal piece aside and aimed higher, across tense suspended thighs, and the exposed cunt came in for a stinging lash or two. She screamed again. "I thought," he went on, giving her another, "that you'd learned to pay attention. Horny or not. Evidently I was mistaken." Another blow. "Maybe you thought you didn't have to bother."
Another. He paused long enough between blows and sobs for her to hear each cutting word. "You seem to think you can do what you like when I'm not there to see. Maybe this," – he hit her very hard – "will make an impression on that self-absorbed little hide."
It took a while to get her where he wanted her. By that time her buttocks and the backs of her thighs were laced with narrow, swelling welts. He took her by the hair and stared into the wet and crumpled face, until she was looking at him and the washed-out eyes regained their focus. "Listen, slave.
Listen hard. You listening?" He gave the head a small shake and felt her urgent nod. "You are not a thing that has options. What you are is property.
Equipment belonging to me." He gave her head another little shake. "My property does not go wandering. My property had better take very good care and pay attention so that it does not go wandering. Do you think you've got that now?"
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Yes, yes, she got that, and sobbed out promises to pay much better attention in future. But he wasn't finished.
"You seem to have forgotten what you're here for. You're not here to wallow in erotic trances. You're not here to float around indulging yourself in subspace. Your purpose is to serve me. Is that clear? You are a thing for my use. That's your function: doing as I tell you. That's your first and only priority. Body and brain, sexuality, all of it, all the time, for me. Got that?”
“Yes, master, yes, I'm sorry!"
"All right," he said, letting go of her head. "That takes care of your punishment for being out of bounds. Now I'm going to punish you for forgetting to call." She gasped and pulled in her legs with frantic strength until she was almost upside down, and her head and mop of hair shook back and forth. Anders took her face gently in his hands, and looked at it, inverted this time. How strange and sweet the big, wet eyes below, above it the distorted, trembling mouth. "Yes, bad girl. You know you deserve it. Don't you." She sagged from the ropes and nodded.
***
"Well?" My master's voice, cool and questioning. I looked at him through clouded eyes. His hand shot out and slapped my breast. "Pay attention! Jesus Christ, girl! How much of this do you need before I get through to you?"
"I'm sorry, master," I got out in a fast whisper. "I'm – okay." Oh, god!
Would I never learn?
"All right. Let me know otherwise." And he took up a flogger with slightly wider lashes and went to work on the rest of me: breasts, belly, back and the fronts of my thighs. I don't think he'd ever hit me so hard. While he did this he made me count, ask for the next blow, and beg for more punishment for my specific faults.
I had never been in bondage so dehumanizing, subjected to so much 213
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torment, while having at the same time to maintain human intelligence and some kind of language capacity. It took everything I had to focus on my master's words, process them, and force my tongue to respond coherently, and not dissolve into a howling, mass of suffering and disgrace. No escape into subspace. No retreat from the realities of my own misbehaviour and his devastating anger and contempt. No relief from the overwhelming pain and humiliation he was meting out so lavishly in return.
At last he knelt over me as I lay exhausted on the floor, arms still locked behind me. The touch of the rug on my skin made me weep some more.
"Now," he said softly. "Tell me, bad girl, how we should take care of this." He indicated his huge erection.
He was still calling me 'bad girl,' which meant – oh god! – that he hadn't forgiven me yet. That face, those eyes were bleak; I almost broke down. But what remained of my brain managed to work this out. He wanted the punishment to continue, and he wanted me to ask for it. I begged in a hoarse whisper to be fucked up the ass.
"Why?" he asked.
"Because – master, it will hurt me a lot and – and I deserve to be hurt."
Apparently that was the right answer. "Right. Up the stairs. On your knees."
Groaning, I managed to get my knees under me, and made my way toward the stairs. Naturally there was punishment along the way; climbing stairs on one's knees with no hands is a slow business, even when you haven't just had the most thorough whipping of your life. You basically have to swarm up on your face and sore breasts. I almost fell back once, but he caught me, pushed me forward and gave me a terrible smack. By the time I made it upstairs I was crying so hard I could barely see to steer myself to the bedroom.
Over the footboard, stretched and tied by ankles and collar. My master lubricated my asshole, but apart from that he gave me absolutely no mercy.
My welted ass was grabbed, stretched and impaled. He got in as close as possible and tormented my raw flesh with every thrust, and with every thrust I screamed. Welted breasts were twisted and pinched and rubbed. I sobbed out how sorry I was, and please to forgive me, and I tried through all of this to stay open for him.
That night for the first time I wasn't allowed to sleep in his bed; he left 214
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me on the floor at the foot, chained by wrists and ankles. Everything hurt, but the loneliness was worse. But the next morning, when he unchained me, he held me in his arms and his eyes were warm. The punishment, that punishment at least, was over.
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They'd been heading north for over an hour before the traffic finally, abruptly fell away. The contrast was such that Anders felt like he had the road to himself. He took a deep breath and burst into a sea shanty in a big Stan Rogers voice.
Maia offered a round of applause over the final note. "Sea shanties would roll out nicely over these pretty Muskoka lakes," she said. "Make all those weekend sailors feel tough and tarry."
"Uh-huh. A shanty is a great experience in machismo; take it from me."
"Are there Danish sea shanties?" she asked.
"Oddly, only translations of English ones. Danish sailors who worked on English ships brought them back and translated them."
"Strange. What did Danish sailors sing when they hauled up?"
"No idea. I'll have to ask Svend some time."
"I can still see you at the helm. With an evil look in your eye."
"Watch your words, wench, or I'll put you in the hold on the return journey.”
“Yes, master. Did you live near the water in Copenhagen?"
"Not far from one of the canals. We used to go to Nyhavn sometimes to look at the old sailing boats. There are wonderful houses there. Hundreds of years old. Svend would be trying to sneak onto the boats and I'd be staring at the houses." He swung into the left lane to pass a big tractor-trailer. "I lost track of him that way once; oh, man did I get in trouble." He grinned. "But of course we knew our own neighbourhood best. We used to tear around all the time, the whole gang of us, through our friends' buildings, out the back through the basements and courtyards. All these secret routes.”
“Who were you hiding from?"
"Adults, I guess. Each other – spy games and so on. A whole detailed geography that I knew like the back of my hand. I think I even mapped it at one point."
"That sounds like fun."
"It was. Great fun."
"We always lived in boring subdivisions," she said. "I can't remember 216
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anything that exciting. Everything was so new and obvious. A few trap doors and creaky attics would have improved the ambience no end." She mused, stared into the distance. "I used to make secret worlds for myself with chairs and blankets and an old card table, down in the basement. And there was a crate, too. A friend and I used to hide in that. We turned it over on its side, and set it all up with little dishes and a toy stove and treats.”
“You envisioned yourself as a cook in those days?"
She laughed. "Apparently. I cooked a mean Oreo. I also made a little bookcase out of cardboard, and some tiny books to go on it. The blanket and card table construction was the rest of the neighbourhood, whenever my mother let us use the blankets. Little stores and so on." She was silent for a minute, thinking back. "God knows how much time I spent in there. My friend lost interest after a while, but I didn't. Then my sister and her friends trashed it and I wanted to kill them.”
“What happened?"
"I whined and complained until my mom said I should be outside, anyway, not lurking downstairs in the dark. I snuck back down and set it up again. Decidedly darker in theme, that time. I recall something about a chain off an old broken lamp, wrapped around my ankle." He laughed. Her leg was tucked up under her, and one ankle was within reach. He squeezed it.
The weekend was looking promising. A lot of potential in the folk festival lineup. Nothing worse than a few clouds in the forecast, and the temperature was hovering around 25 degrees Celsius. Perfect. High time they got away from Toronto and its hot summer smog. And sweet to go travelling with his little baggage.
He'd packed her up well before they'd left, in a tight new harness with many more but narrower straps. Just a few marks left from that major beating two weeks before; very pretty. Plus the usual ongoing ones. She sat there trading stories with him because he let her, looking lovely but otherwise unexceptional in her slender cotton dress and sandals. But beneath the dress was a little geography of bondage. One that he would have no trouble mapping from memory. In fact he had mapped it, in the process of designing and constructing it. "Did I tell you Val might come tomorrow for a little while?”
“Your friend Val from work?"
"Yeah. There's a blues singer she's got a thing for. We'll see if she 217
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shows up." Anders thought it likely. Val's apparently casual questions about Maia didn't fool him; she had been wanting to check the girl out for some time.
"Why did we start so early if the festival doesn't start till six?"
"The traffic was bad enough this morning; can you imagine what it'll be like later, on a Friday afternoon in summer? And I'll bet by then there'll be a huge lineup at the campsite. Anyway, I have one or two things to do." Her enquiring look got no response.
The camper trailer they were towing was on loan from a friend for the weekend. A functional little space. Anders had explored the tiny kitchen and bathroom, the storage in odd places and the double bed up a couple of steep steps over the hitch. It was fun seeing how it all fit together. An intriguing design problem; he wouldn't mind designing one himself some time. By the time they arrived and got the trailer into the site it was after one. At once they took the sandwiches he'd packed and went for a walk toward the water, and then dawdled along the beach. The lake puffed its freshwater scents to them, or the exhaust and asphalt stink came from behind them, depending on which way the wind was blowing. But the water sparkled, the sun shone, and they ate their sandwiches and were happy. After a while there was a tranquil kiss that turned into an exploratory kiss that turned into something that was going to shock the children, so they disengaged and headed back.