I’m naked except for the beads and blanket. The sarong is discarded somewhere, likely buried in the sand. I fish around for it, still harboring some responsibility for the stolen garment. Finding it, I pull the blanket tighter still around my shoulders, and make my way to the rickety staircase, where I climb to the top.
The house is quiet now.
I know Analise waits for me but I need some sleep. I drag my weary body to my room and collapse there, passed out until cawing sea gulls wake me.
Chapter Fifteen
I see the black haired woman at breakfast. A thrilling sun breaking through the window makes her hair glow lustrous. She smiles broadly at the women who eat muffins and fruit with her in an uncommon act of gentility. Is this what this is about? Is this the place where the dark and light meet, where dark takes center stage for a few decadent hours, only to be whisked away by the full sun?
The woman reaches out to me and pulls me to her side. “Rozelle,” she says introducing herself, “Sit down, Cassidy, join us for breakfast.” She strokes my thigh, her hand meandering down to the edge of my sundress, then runs her fingers up inside until she has the ring at my clit.
“You bear Anastasia’s mark well,” she says, referring to the rose petal ring she jerks mildly.
“It’s not Tasia’s,” I say offended.
“You think not?” she jibes.
The other women laugh.
“You’re her protégé, and a very good one,” another woman charges, lightheartedly.
I don’t like their easy mockery, the fact that they appear to know things I don’t know.
“Sit,” Rozelle repeats.
I obey her, though I distrust her.
“You have the madness down pat,” she tells me.
“What madness?” I ask. I’m bewildered, not just by these women, but by the whole curious aura of this morning. Everything is like a dream, or a nightmare. I’m not sure right now what’s real, what’s not. My head is pounding as if I’ve been drugged and am coming off of a bad trip. And yet, I remember last night with acute clarity—far more clarity than when it actually happened. I see the women, recognizing each one in this dining room as they’re pleasantly clanking forks and glassware. I could relive the vibrant orgasmic gyrations right atop these tables. The screams, the cries, the mellow and the harsh. Maybe Rozelle is right. Maybe I’m mad.
“I have to go,” I excuse myself. Rozelle still takes liberties with me, even as I’m retreating from her table. It makes no matter that she’s practically bared my ass for the dining room. I’m feeling like a harlot in a den of whores. My body belongs to them as if they own me, and I’m no longer in charge of me.
Still, I’m sure I’m forgotten as soon as I disappear beyond the doors.
Without thinking I’m moving toward the cellar. It surprises me that the door is standing open. I hear voices below, but they don’t dissuade me. I’m sure it’s Tasia. Even a confrontation with her doesn’t matter. I’ve already done the damage. It’s just time to clean up the mess. Whether she does it, or I do, it doesn’t matter.
I move cautiously to the bottom of the stairs, and stand to one side to see Tasia in the torch lit chapel hovering over the bound Analise.
“I’m surprised she didn’t beat you too,” Tasia tells the whimpering waif. I wonder why the girl cries. Tasia paces from one end of the stone table to the other, snapping her baton against the air. It lands nowhere.
“You wanted to play in my world, child. I told you it would be too much for you, especially when you set your sights on Miss Cassidy. I’m surprised she’s been so easy on you. You can take heart in that. Your innocence, or the appearance of it, obviously engendered her sympathy. Now she has you spent, what do you suppose she’ll do with you as hollow as you are?”
I listen, surprised to hear Tasia discuss Analise’s hollowness with such frank words. She seems almost as dismayed with her treacherous innocence as I am.
I hear the baton sizzle in the air and come landing down on the girl’s behind. There is a snap when it hits, and an instantaneous red mark, punctuated by a passionate howl. Anastasia hits her again and again. I see the whirring instrument make a half dozen initial cuts, and then another half dozen lines on that pure white skin, until it’s white no more.
Analise sobs. I try to feel some sympathy, but mine’s spent. I think what it might be like if I had been whipping her, but for reasons beyond my understanding it seems more appropriate that her other lover deliver the well-earned blows.
For the first time, there’s some real woe in the waif girl’s eyes. I can see that she’s spotted me hiding in the shadows. Perhaps she hoped I’d be here to see this scene, it would fit her sense of thrill. She gazes at me absently, not even pleading for my sympathy, as Tasia slows the rain of blows on her ass. When Tasia finishes, she massages the girl’s burning posterior with firm grasps to her well marked rear. The kneading hurts her too, but it appears to be part of the punishment, no different than the cane.
“She does what I cannot do for you, Ana,” the mistress says softly. Some bittersweet melancholy sweeps me away. There’s a tenderness between them, born of something I have no knowledge of, something that predates my appearance in their lives. “You’ll have to take care of yourself now, you’re on your own. You wanted out of my lair, so now you’ve done it. I might beat your ass again for disobedience, but there’s little more I can do for you. Protect you? Never. You defy everything I expected of you.”
“You’ll send me away,” she murmurs.
“No,” Tasia says emotionless. “I can’t do that, our relationship prohibits that. But let me warn you, your lover is going to come to you and tell you the same things I’m telling you. She will dispense with you coldly. Just remember, I warned you about her, even when you insisted. Try not to be hurt by this; remember, you asked for it.”
The girl lies silently, tightly tied, with a well whipped bottom. If I could find some kind of sympathy in me, I would. But even as I try to whip up some pity, I wonder that Tasia has spoken of me the way she has, and why? How would she know beforehand what I’d do when I didn’t know myself?
I step back into the shadows beyond the staircase as I realize that Tasia is leaving Analise for me. She’s not a brutal woman, at least the expression on her face is sadder more than it’s cruel right now. Perhaps she’s wreaked such cruelty that she’s finally spent, if that’s possible. For some very odd reason I feel sorry for Tasia. Whatever story is written between these two women has come to a sad end. I know I’ve been instrumental in the ending, but I’m not the cause. This was always Analise’s battle. She initiated it and I merely replied. Though I played her dominant well, I was as submissive to her as she became to me.
I wait until I hear the cellar door close. Moving out of hiding, I approach the gently sobbing girl.
“Tasia finished for me,” I tell her, rubbing her burning ass with my hand. “Shall I take you again?” I ask, as I push her to her knees, so her ass spreads widely for my probing hand.
“I’d submit to anything you give me,” she says.
I know she will, but I have no stomach or even inspiration for anything else with her. And strangely, I’m feeling exceedingly sympathetic to her, when I vowed I never would.
“Your ass is raw,” I comment, seeing beads of blood, similar to Peach’s. “Does it hurt?”
“Yes,” she replies. “But I like the hurt. When I hurt, I feel.”
“You want me to beat you more?” I ask.
“I want you to do whatever you want,” she says. There’s almost a hopeful tone in her voice. But it’s too late for anything more between us. She’ll have to go on without me. And I have no doubt she will, as soon as she recuperates from whatever grief she feels over leaving Tasia. She won’t grieve me, but she will the loss of that woman.
“Did you feel your spooks around you, Analise,” I ask her. I remember the way she talked of such a night in bondage as if it was to be some divine experience.
; “Not the way I imagined it,” she admits.
That makes this doubly sad, I think to myself. I doubt that the girl knows what she wants from this. “Let’s go down to the water,” I suggest.
I untie her wrists, and then her legs; and she sits up on her raw bottom, wincing as she does. There are still traces of blue green paint on her torso and thighs. She no longer looks so classically perfect, and I think that’s good. It will make her more approachable. But no matter how this woman matures, no matter what happens in her future, I know that there will always be an otherworldly quality to her being.
“Let’s go out the basement door,” she says. And she leads me down a passageway to a door that takes us to the cliffs below the gardens. I should parade her in front of everyone, and if I were a better dominant, I probably would. But this will have to suffice.
I see no one on the beach now. The sun, rising higher in the sky, makes me think it’s nearly noon. Analise gathers speed as we make our way down a cliff path I’ve not yet used. It looks as if she’s reclaimed the energy that was sapped from her over a long night of bondage, and beat from her by Tasia’s cane.
We splash into water that’s only now beginning to warm. There are currents of warm and cold that feel good to both of us. I know the salt water must sting her wounds, but I imagine that it’s a good sting. She smiles and giggles as I’ve often seen her do; but, if I’m not mistaken, there’s a depth to her that wasn’t there before. Perhaps, I just want to see it there; maybe, I’m making up my own version of the truth to make me feel better. But whatever, I know that this is the last time I’ll be with her. What’s left in me, what energy and sanity I hold on to now is saved for Peach and for me.
I let her play, while I play alongside, thinking how much I’d rather it be Peach. Then, I’d be fondling my lover, and truly invigorated by the dip in the ocean. Now, it’s just an ending, as melancholy as the dispirited one she just had with Tasia.
We hike up the beach when we’re done, and part at the top of the cliff. She enters the house at the cellar door. I take a momentary interest in her odd choice, then assuming it’s just another typical antic in Analise’s portfolio of oddities, I climb toward the garden. Thoughts of Analise disappear as soon as I spot Peach sitting next to the tall pink roses in one corner.
Chapter Sixteen
“Good morning, or is it afternoon yet?”
“I think it’s nearly eleven,” Peach replies so pleasantly that I sit down across from her in this little garden within a garden, surrounded by roses.
“You look very relaxed,” I comment. Peach, fresh as a daisy, leans back in a lounge chair with a book in her hand. I notice how lovely her breasts look peeking through a bright white tee-shirt. Her tan is even deeper than when we arrived here. I wonder for all her time with Tasia these weeks, that she’s had time to lay out in the sun.
“Thank you. If you don’t mind my saying so, you don’t look so well. Are you all right?” Her concern is genuine; there are no vague cagey eyes to make me wonder what’s behind her comment.
“This has been the oddest three weeks of my life,” I tell her. “I should resent you for this, but I can’t. Not yet anyway. Until I see how it ends, I suppose,” I say, joking with her as I’m still uncertain how she’ll respond to me.
She smiles kindly.
“Did you know what would happen bringing me here?” I ask.
“No,” she says plainly.
For the moment, I’ll suspend belief and take her at her word.
“What about the ring? You knew something then?”
“That roses are Tasia’s symbol? No.”
“How am I supposed to believe you after all this?”
“You’re supposed to believe in miracles, in divine coincidence. You used to spook me with those things. You don’t realize the number of times since I’ve been here that I’ve thought of you and your silly religious meanderings… all the spiritual mumbo jumbo.”
“Are you coming to our bed tonight?” I ask, skipping lightly over her use of my sacred thoughts to trap me. I’m fidgeting with the hem of my dress, nervous about her reply.
“Tonight’s the final night on the beach,” Peach says. “There will be hardly anyone in the house, including you and me. We both belong down there.” She points toward the water. “We don’t want to miss a thing.”
“I can’t imagine missing anything if I were with you,” I tell her.
“Ah, but you don’t know.” Her eyes sparkle as she says this. “I saw you last night… you were so elegantly taken away, I had to smile thinking how much you were enjoying your freedom. It’s what you’ve always wanted, isn’t it? Total sexual freedom?”
I recall the notion crossing my mind once or twice. “I was drunk,” I reply to her question.”
“On liquor?”
“No, I think somehow the girl cast a spell on me, or maybe it was Tasia.”
“Anastasia has no power to cast spells. She’s just an expert manipulator.”
“What’s the difference between manipulating my mind and casting a spell, if she makes me believe unreal things either way?”
“You can only play into her hands if you want to,” Peach reminds me.
“Why didn’t you tell me you knew her, when we got here? Why all this hating her as if she’s the devil?”
“I didn’t know her, not really. When I lived with Miriam, she talked about Anastasia. She appeared in her monologues frequently, and I was a little scared of the woman. Miriam kept talking about her coming for a visit, and then the day before she was suppose to arrive, I split. I always thought I could handle just about anything with Miriam, you know the way she is.”
I nodded.
“I’ve never had anyone take care of me the way she does, not even you. But all the talk about Anastasia was just too weird, and I decided it was time to cut myself away from Miriam and find something else. Then, when you and I arrived here, and I saw that Miriam wasn’t living here anymore, and Anastasia was—I guess I knew it was time to face her. There are other things, I’ll tell you about sometime.” She pauses, considering carefully what she’ll say next. “She’s Miriam’s sister, you know. Her darker half, I’d say.”
“Sister?” I repeat, though I’m not particularly surprised, certainly in a spiritual sense they’re twins. I’ve already concluded that. Why not be a physical match as well?
“You’re not shocked?” Peach says.
“Not really.”
Two women walk by us on their way back from the beach.
“You going down later?” they ask.
“How could we miss it?” Peach says sweetly. They hold hands. When they stop to kiss, I think of Peach and I when we first met. The gentleness between us was extraordinary. It’s hard to imagine with things so different now.
“Say, you need to get ready for tonight.” Peach tells me. “Let’s go upstairs and see what we can find.” She pops up from her chair and pulls me with her. I admit to being delighted by her attention, since it seems forever since she’s offered to care for me.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
“The attic,” she replies.
“I’ve already been there many times,” I inform her.
“Good.” She’s hardly dissuaded as she insists that I follow her beyond the third floor to the attic I’m so familiar with.
As we enter, I ignore that I’ve been here before, hardly taking notice of the mess that still exists. I doubt that Analise has returned since I took her away. Now I follow Peach to an antique wardrobe, a fine mahogany piece with double doors, beveled mirrors on the front and a latch that closes with a key: a key Peach conveniently pulls from the pocket of her shorts.
“You planned this?” I observe aloud.
“The thought crossed my mind, but I had to come up here anyway. Tasia needs one of her costumes for tonight.”
Peach opens the wardrobe so I can see dozens of clothes hanging inside. There are shoes, hats, dresses, beads, even a man’s tuxedo.
“Why all these?” I ask.
“That would take me too long to explain, and likely I couldn’t explain all this anyway. Remember I’ve only known the woman for a few weeks.”
“It seems like longer,” I comment.
She nods agreeing, then turns to rummage through the clothes as if she knows exactly what she’s after. She pulls out a shawl that seems inappropriate for the moment, and throws it over her arm. Reaching deeper inside the wardrobe, I hear the sound of jangling beads. I imagine a beaded skirt similar to the ones I saw in the trunk, but what appears in her hand is something unexpected. It looks like a dress the way it hangs on the hanger. The beads gleam; they’re not the rough wooden ones that I wore the night before. I can tell it’s heavy the way Peach holds it.
“This is magnificent,” I exclaim. “Tasia’s going to wear it tonight?”
“No.” Her eyes gleam, “You are.”
“Me? For heaven’s sakes why?”
“Don’t you like it?”
“I love it! But…”
“Don’t “but” me, Cassidy, you didn’t come prepared for tonight, you need something that’s appropriate, fitting for your position.”
“What position?”
“As my lover.” Her eyes light wistfully.
Now I don’t trust her. I can imagine a whole new scenario going on behind this one.
“You need something this wonderful, c’mon, wear it and enjoy it.”
I’m skeptical and hesitant, but so aroused I can’t believe it. She undresses me with careful hands and a watchful appreciative eye as she gazes at my body as though she’s unveiling it for the first time. There’s likely not a thing I wouldn’t do for her to have her back in my life, and she knows it.
“You’re taking advantage of me,” I tell her.
“I know, just trust me. Here, let’s put it on.”
The dress is actually several layers. There’s a small skirt of beaded thongs that goes around my hips. It rides low and sensuously so that the thongs caress me.
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