Breaking Abigail (3 page)

Part of Abigail wanted to say, “That has a name?” and fall at Mr. LeMarchand’s feet in gratitude. But in response to that part, and to its almost making her admit that she wanted him to spank her—to dominate her—she found that another part had begun to rise up in opposition, saying “You must not. This is wrong, and he is wrong, and you are not that… thing he said. You are not submissive.”

“No,” she said. “No, that’s wrong.”

Mr. LeMarchand laughed, put his right hand inside the waistband of her panties, and pulled them down to her knees.

“I can see how wet you are, little sub,” he said softly.

“I’m not!”

Then he spanked her, hard, with his open hand. Abigail yelped loud at the agony of having the bruises from the belt reawakened.

“Don’t talk back to me, young lady,” he said. “And don’t lie. You are a little sub whose cunt gets wet when your master tells her how to please him. If you don’t learn to follow my rules, you are going to have to endure a great deal more punishment.”

Abigail moaned at that; she simply couldn’t help it.

“See?” Mr. LeMarchand said. “Don’t try to deny it, Abigail. You are a sub, and it’s time for your master to give your sweet little cunt its very first fucking.”

He wouldn’t, would he? And if he tried, what should she do? Abigail couldn’t even figure out if what Mr. LeMarchand had begun here with her was sex. The scene differed radically from what her friends talked about, as she pretended not to hear, and above all from what they had told her in 5th grade and then again in 9th grade, in health class. In bed at night, Abigail thought about men spanking her, yes. Above all, she thought about this man spanking her. Sometimes she felt she had begun to go insane, so hard did she find it to stop thinking about men spanking her, beating her, and stripping her naked.

But that wasn’t sex, was it? It was just a kind of coincidence that she used the same part to make herself feel good when she thought about Mark LeMarchand spanking her as Jon Southey had wanted to touch and, presumably, to penetrate. Abigail watched between her spread thighs, unable to progress her thoughts further, as her childhood friend’s father unbuckled his belt, unfastened his jeans, and lowered them and his underwear to the floor. She looked at a real, live man’s thing for the very first time.

The sight of it, bobbing there, advancing toward her, made her gasp, and suddenly she realized it was about sex, but it was about a very different kind of sex, or a very different way of looking at sex. When Mr. LeMarchand put his manhood there, and deflowered Abigail, and… fucked Abigail, he would be beating her, too. He had already stripped her. He had already rubbed the places where she had been whipped.

To have him there in her private part, her shameful part that could make her ‘easy’ and immodest and wicked—oh, God, she wanted it so much, but at the same time she didn’t want it—she
couldn’t
want it.

Mr. LeMarchand saw Abigail peering between her legs. “This is my cock, young lady,” he said, holding it in his right hand. “It’s time you knew what a man’s cock feels like.”

He took the final step, and Abigail felt the cock up against her pussy. “Don’t worry,” he murmured. “I’m fixed. I can’t get you pregnant.”

“Oh,” was all Abigail could say.

Mr. LeMarchand rubbed the tip of his cock up and down her pussy, saying, “Shh… such a nice pussy… such a nice little cunt.” He kept it in one place, and then pushed it in further until it came up against a place where it suddenly hurt. Her hymen. Her maidenhead.

Then something went wrong inside Abigail’s mind. She wanted this, but she couldn’t want it. It was wrong, and dirty. Abigail wasn’t dirty, she wasn’t shameless, and she didn’t get fucked by older men in the summerhouse.

“Oh, God…” she said. “Mr. LeMarchand…”

“Sir,” he said sternly, but he stopped pushing his cock against her maidenhead, perhaps hearing the new, different note in her voice, of real refusal and not pretend “Please fuck me even though I say no” refusal.

“Sir,” she sobbed, starting to cry in the enormous distress that had engulfed her. “I can’t… it’s wrong… I… I don’t… I don’t want it.” It wasn’t true, and it was true, at the same moment.

“Abigail,” Mr. LeMarchand said gently. “I think you do want it. But if you tell me to stop, I’ll stop.”

She whimpered in the grip of her distressed confusion. “I… I don’t! I don’t!”

He stepped back, and she whirled around and looked at him, feeling that her expression had utterly changed, and seeing in his own eyes distress and confusion. She put everything she had into her performance as she said angrily, “Get out! Get out of my summerhouse!”

“Abigail… I…”

“Get out!”

He closed his eyes for a moment and bowed his head, as if gathering his thoughts. Then he opened them and said. “I’m sorry, Abigail. I’m not sure I understand, but I think maybe I do. I’ll go. May I put on my pants?”

“Yes,” Abigail said, still pretending fury.

Mr. LeMarchand pulled his jeans on and buckled his belt.

“Abigail, I’m going to go now,” he said, now with a sad look on his face. “I think you may have second, and third, and fourth thoughts about this moment. I’m there for you. I know what you need much better than you do, it appears.”

Then he walked out. When he was gone, Abigail collapsed on the couch in tears. How could she have done it? she asked herself, but from moment to moment ‘it’ seemed to change meaning. One moment it meant, how could she have almost let her childhood friend’s father deflower her in the summerhouse? The next it meant, how could she have stopped him and sent him away, the man she had fantasized about at least since her eighteenth birthday?

Then she asked herself, and couldn’t stop asking,
why didn’t he make me?
If he had just taken what he wanted and pushed in, everything would have been alright. More than alright: wonderful. She would belong to him now, and he could have her whenever he wanted to spank and fuck and make her do terrible things to please him. Why didn’t he just take her hips firmly and start fucking her?

God, he couldn’t have done that, could he? It would have been… horrible. And yet it would have been perfect. She sobbed as she realized just how messed up she was. If the only way she could have that feeling, the incredible feeling she’d had while Mr. LeMarchand had commanded her to do those things—to strip and assume that position bending over the couch—and when he had been touching her… If the only way she could have that feeling was for a man to take her against her will, and no man she could ever love would take her against her will, truly, how could she ever find happiness?

Chapter Four

The next time Mark saw Abigail was at Christmas. That night in the Podrets’ summerhouse—the feeling of lust so great he thought it would rip him apart and then the titanic struggle to stop himself from taking the lovely girl against her will—had haunted him. In the intervening months, he had talked, in hypothetical terms, to as many experienced people in the BDSM scene as he could (such as it was in Westchester County, though of course he spent a good deal of time in the city, where there was much more advice to be found). Mark had laid out to everyone who might have advice what had happened, and the response had been exactly the same from nearly everyone he told: “Poor girl.”

Only one person, a switchy, aristocratic Frenchwoman named Anne-Marie Ney, whose trim bottom he had been delighted to spank for an hour in her beautiful Park Avenue apartment after meeting her at a very exclusive club in Williamsburg, had anything to offer beyond “Poor girl.”

“It may be,” Anne-Marie said, “that a gifted psychologist could create the conditions under which your little girl could consent, and then have the memory of that consent taken away, until she had experienced enough that she could truly enjoy playing consensually.”

“How?” Mark had asked, though the idea sounded preposterous. He wanted to help Abigail—frankly, he wanted Abigail—so badly that he would entertain any notion, though.

“I don’t know,” Anne-Marie said simply. “But I do know a psychologist who uses hypnotism in therapy, and sometimes talks about the way our memories can be manipulated. I will try to remember to ask him.”

Janet had begged him to throw a Christmas party, because she hadn’t seen her friends in months, and he had finally relented. They had a massive tree in the foyer, and the ground outside was white. The eggnog was flowing, but Mark was drinking champagne. The eighteen-year-olds’ keys had all been collected, and they were enjoying themselves but not yet to the point of excess at which Mark had promised Janet he would shut things down. The younger folks were in the basement media room where they were easier to corral, and Mark was socializing with his neighbors, trying as hard as he could to remain out of any conversation that included Prudence and Dan Podret.

Out of the corner of his eye, Mark saw Abigail come up the stairs from the basement, looking lost, which made no sense given that she had come here to play and hang out with Janet since she was a baby. He saw her see him, and watched a look of distress cross her face. At first Mark thought Abigail just felt emotional pain at the sight of him, but if that was the reason she bit her upper lip, she would have looked away, wouldn’t she? And surely there wouldn’t be tears coming into her eyes?

Abigail finally turned and wandered off into the old family room, where Janet and her friends used to hang out before the sumptuous room in the basement had been finished. Mark excused himself from a conversation with a law-firm colleague and followed her, not sure it was the right thing to do, but unable to do anything else in the grip of the heartache that had seized him seeing brilliant, beautiful Abigail look so sad and vulnerable.

“Abigail,” he said softly, forcing himself to take a stand three feet away, so as not to put them in danger of physical contact.

“Oh, sir,” she said, turning to him. “Sir… I…” The look of need, but also of terrible confusion, in her eyes threatened to make Mark cry himself, in response to her own tears.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Please tell me, sweetheart.” He had always called her sweetheart, just as he had called Janet that, when they were young.

“Oh, God… don’t call me that, please. Please. Mark… Sir… I-I fucked up my first semester. Royally, completely, so much that I may get sent home to think about it for the spring.”

“How can that be?” Mark asked. “That’s… it sounds impossible, frankly, Abigail. You’ve always been the best student anyone around here knows, and that’s saying a lot.”

“All it takes is thinking about
you,
all the time, sir, actually.”

“Oh, no,” Mark said. “I refuse to believe that, Abigail.”

“Alright,” she said, a note of bitterness entering her voice. “I got drunk a lot so that I wouldn’t think about you. Is that better?”

“No,” Mark said, “not really. But as an explanation it
works
a lot better, at least.”

“Mr. LeMarchand,” Abigail said, “it’s about you. I want you to know that. But it’s also only about you as a kind of representative of how fucked up I am. I don’t think there’s any way for me to be happy, ever. Maybe I’ll be able to pull the college thing back together, but what kind of life can it lead to?”

“What do you mean?” Mark asked, thinking that he understood some of what she meant, but by no means all of it.

She seemed to change the topic completely, though. “What I keep thinking is… what if there were some world where you could make me… just… make me… have me… take me? And I wouldn’t have to say it was okay… you would just… do it. And I could be yours, in that world, like… like a girl a soldier got when his army sacked a town, or a bride in the Middle Ages?”

She stood there in the dark room, lit so much like the summerhouse had been, by light shining in from elsewhere, looking into Mark’s eyes. The expression that sat in her eyes told of sorrow that could never find joy.

“See?” she said. “I’m crazy.”

Mark thought of Anne-Marie, of her psychologist. “I’m not sure you are,” he said, “though I think you’re definitely making yourself feel that way.”

“How can that not be crazy? That I want you to… to do that?”

“Abigail,” Mark said, “I can’t offer much hope, but I have to confess I’ve been thinking about this a lot since… that night.”

“You have?” she asked. The ghost of a smile played on her lips.

“Oh, yes,” Mark replied. “I met someone who might have a way to make it work kind of the way you just described.”

Abigail’s brow furrowed in puzzlement and she tilted her head to the side, as if she were trying to decide if Mark was serious.

“No promises, but what you just said made me think she might have been on the right track.”

Just then Dan Podret came into the room. “Abigail?” he said. “Why aren’t you down with your friends?”

Abigail plastered a smile on her face. “Oh, I was just reminiscing with Mr. LeMarchand about when Janet and I were little girls. I’ll go down again now.”

She walked off toward the basement door. Dan said, “I wish I knew what happened to her first semester. I think she’ll be able to stay in school, if I lean on the dean, but just barely.”

“Sometimes kids just don’t know how to cope with the freedom,” Mark said. “It happens a lot, I think.”

“Probably that’s it,” Dan replied.

Mark thought,
especially the repressed ones
.

* * *

“I realize it’s a long shot,” he said to Anne-Marie on the phone, “but is there any chance you remembered our conversation about the girl who couldn’t play, even though she needed it so much?”

“Yes!” Anne-Marie said, sounding a little hurt that Mark would think she had forgotten. “And I did ask my friend Jean, and he said that the problem is fascinating. And then I had an idea I want to discuss with the two of you.”

* * *

They met at Anne-Marie’s apartment, in that wonderful New York twilight that only heat haze and the crisscrossing canyons of rectilinear streets and avenues built up fantastically high can produce. Without explaining why, Anne-Marie opened a bottle of Dom Perignon and poured three flutes. Jean and Mark, introduced to one another only five minutes before, looked at their silent hostess, and then at each other, as they took the flutes.