Macho Sluts, page 22
“Walk after me.” The clothespin at the top of Roxanne’s left ear was removed. “The flesh itself cannot hold you. It is like a book, while you readin’ it you think it be the whole wide world, but when you close it and turn aroun’ that world disappear and another one open up all about you.
“Walk after me.” Joy continued to chant, but Roxanne lost the thread of what she was saying. She could see her mouth move and feel the sense of her speech, but it was as if her hearing had been turned off. As each pin was removed, she became lighter, giddy. She felt as if Joy’s hand could pass straight through her. Then her hearing came on again, blaring, as Joy said, “I have placed you at the gate of truth, with pain and bondage. Now I say, shed the flesh and see yourself.”
She was looking over Joy’s shoulder. Joy was holding her fingertips half an inch from the temples of a girl who seemed to be asleep. A girl who was herself. Then the girl’s eyes opened, and she spun around three times, like a leaf caught in the wind, and looked back into Joy’s laughing mouth. It was a soundless laugh, a secret between the two of them. “Nex’ time You an’ I gonna walk a little further, Roxie,” Joy nodded. “Now you begin to see what can be done.” Her hands made the remaining clips on Roxanne’s breasts ripple.
“Do you want these off, I hear?’
Roxanne nodded, still in a daze. She had to shut her eyes.
“Chrissie, my love,” Joy called without turning around, “she’s all yours. She is ready t’be charmed by your pythons and cobras.”
When Roxanne lifted her head and opened her eyes, Chris was standing below her in a pool of colored light, waiting to be recognized. Her throwing stars and knives gleamed, and a dull sheen lay upon her leathers as well. She was utterly still, except for one hand, which trailed the whip. It coiled and uncoiled at her feet like the evil tail of a restless jungle cat.
“The light from the stained-glass window is falling on your body,” Chris told her. “It falls in patterns of pure color. You are elevated there for our adoration. The scapegoat, the scared victim. In you we find forgiveness, resurrection.”
Once again, Roxanne felt the pack draw together and summon its energy, its presence both protecting and imprisoning her. Chris stood before her as their emissary, the lens through which they would observe and ignite her. She began to pray that she would not fail them. Let it not be too much, let her endure … and above all, let it begin quickly! For under her thin shell of resolve was a raging flood of panic that threatened to crack her self-control and leave her sniveling and disowning them all so that Alex would set her free.
Chris took a step back, scuffed the floor with her toe, squinted at her victim, and centered on herself—her balance, her judgment, her skill. The whip sailed toward Roxanne. The tip of it coiled around a clothespin, plucked it off, and deposited it at Chris’s feet. Roxanne was too astonished by her skill to complain about the pain it gave her.
Chris blew the air out of her lungs, shook tension out of her shoulders, and started to swing the bullwhip in a steady rhythm. Roxanne found her voice again, and began to grunt and shriek as the clips came off in rapid succession. The floor at Chris’s feet was littered with pins, many of them broken. The room was completely silent except for the crack of the whip and the cries of the victim suspended on the cross. Roxanne felt the pack absorb her cries and her aborted attempts to struggle. The assembled dominatrices fed on her pain, her violent disordered breathing, the patches of red that were springing out on her skin, the sweat that dampened her scalp until her hair clung in wet strands to her skull. They were nourished and awed by the sight of her. Her helplessness was so voluptuous that it infuriated them. She trembled for herself, victim-without-end.
Roxanne abruptly became aware that Chris had stopped. There was no reason to scream. Shamefaced, she fell silent. Were they all gone? Was it over?
“Easy,” Chris said to her. “Ssh. Relax. Easy, now.”
Roxanne felt her muscles flow into relaxation. She had not realized how tense she was.
The whip was too quick to see. Another series of stabbing pains invaded her flesh.
There was another pause. She glared suspiciously at Chris, determined to anticipate the resumption of the game. Chris mimicked her pout. “You trying to scare me?” she demanded. “Maybe make me feel sorry for you? Boo-hoo, you poor little thing you. That was nothing. Clothespins come off in a second. But those alligator clips on your nipples … those are tricky. Sometimes takes me two or three tries.”
Roxanne choked on her own tongue. “You can’t—” she managed.
Chris began to swing the whip.
Roxanne had never screamed so hard in her whole life. It rang and echoed in her ears, like the roar that follows an explosion of a battery of cannon.
“No?” Chris said, pretending mild surprise. The whip was back on her belt. “No? Then make me an offer I can’t refuse.”
Roxanne began to shake her head so hard that saliva flew from her lips and hit the arms of the cross. She was incapable of speech or thought.
“Pull it together, babe,” Chris threatened her. Roxanne heard the muted laughter of the pack. Her silence, her inability to piece one word to another, shamed her and drove her further into panic. She finally fell back on the ineffectual offer of a desperate bottom.
“Anything but that,” she whispered. “Do anything to me but that.” Then she hung her head, insofar as her rigid bonds permitted even that gesture, and absorbed the silence that greeted her as just punishment for her lack of originality, her lack of fire, her admission of failure and fear. She despised herself utterly—first of all because her offer was a bluff. She had not meant it. It was completely insincere. Chris could (she was sure) come up with a dozen other things she would hate and fear just as much.
There was also the inescapable fact that she was in a bondage too complete, too carefully constructed, to allow escape. Therefore, the pack—or Chris, as their delegate—could literally do anything they wished to her. Any mercy they showed her was a gift. She had no position to bargain from. Chris knew this, and had decoyed her into a game that only Chris could win. Either the sentence would be carried out anyway—thus demonstrating Roxanne’s lack of power and complete helplessness—or another, more terrible one would be enforced in its place.
Finally, Roxanne knew that the ropes and clips were there only to save her face, to give her an illusion of dignity that would make her more pliant beneath the pack’s will. Should any of them choose to do so, she could be loosed from all physical restraints, and still she would not be able to move from the spot without permission.
But Chris appeared to have taken her seriously. Chris seemed to think that she did, indeed, have something left of sufficient value to buy herself a little time. Joyous Day walked over to Chris and offered her “a funny cigarette, mon.” They contemplated their victim together, turning over her offer, finding something in it that terrified Roxanne.
“Since you don’t want me to whip you on top of the clips, I’ll whip you without them,” Chris said. “Joy, take them off.”
Joy did not hurt her. It was the return of her own blood to the nipples that caused the pain. A white-hot needle seemed to pierce the tip of each breast. Her cunt had not troubled her for some time, but it began to ache now, demanding some attention, some reassurance that it still existed. Joy stroked her as if she were a pet that needed soothing. Roxanne moaned in gratitude, and made useless attempts to rotate her pelvis against the knowing hand.
Her thighs were wet, and Joy ran her fingers over the slick surface. Most dominants are fond of confronting their victims with their response to punishment and insult. There is no defense and no denial possible when one tastes the liquid evidence of lust that is flowing unhampered between one’s legs. Roxanne told herself she did not care, it did not matter, and she tried to lure Joy’s hand back up onto that sensitive point. But the more needy she became, the lighter the touch became, and the further it wandered from the place that cried out to be caressed. Finally, Joy withdrew her hand and withdrew herself and left Roxanne alone with Chris and her signal whip.
This one was a third of the length of the bullwhip. Roxanne admired the sleight of hand that had distracted her from this important alteration in the pieces of the game. She would have covered her face, would have turned away, tried to shield herself—but her arms and legs were immobile, pinned, of no use. So she adopted the best defense available—she began to erase herself. She began to give up the idea that she had anything to hide or any right to demand pleasure instead of pain. She began to crumble herself at the edges, fade into the air, render herself will-less and invisible.
But Chris required an exchange of words between them before the whipping could begin. Roxanne made the necessary responses— she acknowledged that it was she who had offered Chris anything, acknowledged that she had no right to appeal the matter to any other court, acknowledged that it would indeed be very hard to endure and that she had no choice but to endure it. And she asked for and was not granted permission to scream. Both of them knew she would scream anyway. This excuse to prolong the punishment was a formality, a ritual that was of value primarily to Chris, for it allowed her to gather her energy, feed her rage, and finally granted provocation to unleash that rage.
I am not here, Roxanne told herself. This will happen, but it will not happen to me. I am not here for anything to happen to.
Liar, screamed the first lash of the whip, and she was suddenly unable to be anywhere else but here, bound to this wooden cross, a woman being beaten. The bondage that had seemed excessively confining was now insufficient. She wished there were many more ropes. They would be shelter, protection. It does not matter, she told herself. I am of no consequence, my pain is of no consequence, if I resist it will be the end of me.
The second lash brought a cry of pain from her throat, and the muscles there bore down around the next scream like a woman giving birth and forced the sound into a word. The word was “Yes.” It was the only word that would not stop her heart.
“Jesus,” someone in the pack murmured, “she’s really marking her up.”
Roxanne had never been so heavily abused on the insides of her thighs. Her ass and shoulders were much less sensitive, and could consequently take a greater amount of punishment. Chris was deliberately aiming for the softest, most vulnerable part of her body, raising welts and bruises with each stroke of the whip. “Yes!” she screamed again. I consent to this beating, I give in to this beating, please please how long will it go on?
But Chris was already ahead of her.
“I know you’ve taken more than this, but not a hell of a lot more, was it?” Chris asked. Roxanne groaned assent. “I wish you could see all of this. You’re so soft and ripe that all I’ve got to do is flick you and you turn black and blue. I want to be able to hit you until my arm is tired, until I can’t lift it to hit you any more. Can you do that for me? Can you stay here with me? You’ve gotten me this far. Don’t give up on me now. The rest won’t be easy, but I’m so close, so close, so fucking close.”
She continued to administer the snapping strokes, but now they had been redefined as something Chris needed that Roxanne could provide. She did not want to deny Chris her climax, and went looking for a second wind. A drowning woman must, she thought, when she knows she is dying, attempt to dive yet deeper into the water, to hide herself, to take in more and more of the alien water that surrounds her. Perhaps she hopes to be able to draw oxygen from the water, if only she takes in enough of it, or become a fish and swim without harm in it. The force that surrounds me is pain, and it is alien to me, and yet I begin to crave more and more of it. I will take more and more of it in until it is part of me and loses its power over me and I cease to exist. But God, it is hard hard so very very hard.
Joy was behind the cross, her hands hooked over its arms, her feet braced on the shelf. “Roxie, you are wastin’ time, trying to make it fly away. But you only got this one good life, and it’d be much better if you slowed yourself down. I’m gonna help you now, if you let me, you gonna be able to see that whip come at you like it takes ten minutes to land. And the tip of it is gonna hook you, take you outta your self again, draw you out on the shining path. God walkin’ out of your body, Roxie, I mind the silver cord for you. I know who you need right now. That Alex, she is watchin’ you with narrow eyes, you circle ’round behind her, girl, and kiss her neck.” Joy saw Alex jump and look over her shoulder. With a puzzled look on her face, she rubbed the nape of her neck.
Normally, a crowd would make this dangerous. But the pack was fascinated by the flogging. No one was going to cross the silver cord that would lead Roxanne back to her body. Joy called softly to the girl’s spirit, and it retraced its footsteps, re-entering just as Chris let her arm fall to her side. Sweat had soaked through her leather until it was visibly damp—darker, no longer shiny. Her chest heaved. Anne-Marie looked worried, and went to the bar for some water.
Roxanne took gallons of air in with each sob, air that replenished her flagging energy and cleansed her aching flesh. The pain had not stopped with the fall of the whip. Her flesh had been so marked that it still throbbed, the heartbeat that pushed blood through the tissues causing enough pain to make her gasp and wince. “Please don’t go away,” she pleaded with Chris. “Don’t leave me here alone. Oh, please, don’t abandon me.”
Chris was suddenly standing so close to her that they almost touched. A goddess, nude to the waist, threw a poisoned star at a demon who charged her with a bloody sword. Roxanne reeled from the image until she realized it was only a tattoo on Chris’s shoulder. Her very breath fell on Roxanne’s cheek; the hand that had wielded the terrible whip was inches from her tender and mottled thigh. “Oh,” Roxanne exhaled wearily, exhausted by the weight of her love, “I wish I could drop down to your feet and rest my head on your boots. You hurt me so much. I love you.”
The handle of the whip came up and caressed her cheek. She accepted the touch without flinching away. All her fear of being whipped had been burned away by what she had endured, and there was no ambivalence left in her, only longing. Chris saw the change, let approval show in her eyes, and drew the touch out into a line that ran down between Roxanne’s breasts and found her navel. The handle of the whip continued to descend, seeking something even softer, something that would yield, a cavity, an oasis. Chris held the thick roll of braided leather in the palm of her hand and inserted it gently between Roxanne’s thighs, held it against the spread wings of her vulva, held it there, and moved it slightly. Roxanne wanted to cry, she was in such need. Chris fed the whip butt-first into her, and then Roxanne witnessed something incredible and almost blasphemous. Chris went down on her knees. Hot breath moved like a vagina around Roxanne’s engorged clitoris. It can’t be, she thought, and moved to prevent it, but could not, and then Chris took her with her mouth.
She was held within that darkness and liquid and heat by a slight suction. Chris held her in place with the suction, and moved her lips in a semicircle. The whip also rotated within her. Roxanne realized she was being possessed by an expert. But this was a maîtresse, on her knees, and it was not right! It should not be this way! The service offered her was too much for her to accept, a gift too gracious, abundance she was afraid to receive. She tried to persuade Chris to release her and allow her, Roxanne, to suckle on Chris’s cunt.
“No,” Chris said firmly in the cold tone that the mistress uses when she will brook no more nonsense and tolerate no more dissent. “I want this, bitch, so hand if over and disappear. Just get lost, give it up. I don’t want anything to do with you, just this, your pussy. Don’t interfere. Don’t tell me I can’t have anything I want right now. You’ve had it. You’ve lost and you’re nothing. Disappear.”
The touch was so taboo it was irresistible. To allow a dominant to kneel and use her mouth upon her—to grin into her mouth and demand further attention, repetition of the most exacting and gratifying and difficult caresses. It was so sweet, so sweet, thrilling and devastating and impossible to halt.
She was only a heartbeat going miles a minute and a cunt being eaten out, whip-fucked, teased, titillated, praised, drawn out and out and out and out … The orgasm collected at the very tip of her clitoris and gushed from her into Chris’s mouth. She could have sworn she ejaculated, spurted cum; could not believe that the pleasure surging from her body did not leave physical evidence behind. Chris wiped her face on Roxanne’s well-marked thighs and came slowly back up to her feet. Her face was red, her cheeks glistened. “Still here?” she asked Roxanne. “Did you think we were done?”
“It won’t ever be done,” Roxanne sighed. “It won’t ever be done. You go away, you forget me, you get bored with me, I lose you, but you find me again and punish me and hurt me and make me scream. I fall in love and it starts all over again. I could not live without you. I am lost without you. Use me in whatever way you please, do whatever you like with me. I am nothing, I am your toy, a thing, a slave.”
“I love you,” Chris said. “Joy, let’s take her down.”
The black woman shook her head. “You an’ I better do this than you. Why not sit down before you fall down, and drink some of that seltzer Anne-Marie’s about to pour over your head?”
Suddenly that was a very good idea. Chris sat heavily on one end of the shelf at the foot of the cross while Joy began the laborious task of undoing her human macramé project. After checking Chris’s pulse and patting her on the head, Anne-Marie gave Joy a hand. “This is so much more entertaining than staying home and knitting sweaters,” she said cozily.
Chris had drunk a pint of seltzer and given Roxanne the rest of the bottle before she could be taken down from the cross. Joy and Chris linked arms behind her shoulders and under her knees, and carried her away. The three of them wound up on the same mat that Kay had taken her to. Roxanne sat in Chris’s lap, her legs thrown across Joy’s thighs. Chris cradled her, hid her face from the light and the future. Some of her welts were bleeding slowly, but her breathing was peaceful and untroubled. “It’s a miracle,” Joy said, rubbing her feet. “Look. No holes.”
