Puppet On A String

by Lizbeth Dusseau

  Shelby had been huddled in the corner of the couch, hugging her knees, as she often did while spinning her story for Sylvia Ramsey. But by the end of the hour on this particular day, she’d pulled out of that hunched knot and was sitting straight up. Unlike her previous session, there was a lightness about her, a burden lifted as she finished the day’s tale.

  After she left the session, Shelby bought a new dress at Macy’s after trying on a couple dozen. She had no idea what the occasion was, but she wanted something that made her feel sensational, as if she might find a new self inside the pretty fabric and stylish design. One last look in the mirror and she was happy with her purchase, though when she got home she wasn’t so sure if she wouldn’t have been happier in the green smock dress, rather than the blue print.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Session Three…

  At her next appointment, a question from Dr. Ramsey about her physical experience of torture caused Shelby to dive right into a monologue about the effects of the bondage. By then, Shelby had begun to realize the purpose in coming to the psychologist: in reliving the experiences she could make sense of them…and perhaps make peace with herself. Perhaps.

  The doctor’s latest question was not difficult to answer. “I don’t think of the bondage as torture,” she stated. “It was difficult some times. But strange things happened to me after the bondage was over. The ropes were so tight that when I was finally released, there was this terrific euphoria. I usually hurt, aching muscles, tight skin, that sort of thing. There were often painful welts, too, from where Greystoke’s whips filleted my skin. But none of those things mattered to me. The elation after my release made the experience worth the agony. I found it a little bizarre, but there were even more odd experiences.

  “The first times he bound me, I would struggle out of the ropes after he loosened a few knots. He was terse about it; he wanted me gone as quickly as possible. I sometimes thought he was worried that his wife might walk in. But I guess not. After my initial visits, however, things began to change. He began something new that felt gentle almost loving. Instead of having me quickly extricate myself from the ropes when the session was over, he loosened them himself. Refusing my help, he slowly drew the scratchy hemp along my flesh. Didn’t matter whether it was against my pussy lips, or my asshole, my breasts, my thighs, the same slow and methodical pulling on the ropes continued – almost like a meditation.

  “Sometimes I’d be standing or sitting, more often though, I was lying down. If I really let myself go, I could orgasm when the vibrations of the sliding rope filled my body with a weird sort of tingling sensation. Greystoke liked watching how my face would change, or the way I’d groan, as if he were taking pleasure from my arousal. In fact, I think it made him horny. A couple times he actually stuffed his erection in my mouth when he finally had me untied and on the floor at his knees. This shocked me. It was another first… the first time sex between us was anything other than anal. He’d been so consistent about not using my mouth or vagina, that I’d begun to wonder if Mr. Darcy had some hard limit the man had to observe. I think he probably had a preference for the tighter orifice. Who knows?

  “One of those times he used my mouth – this was during the final months – I was kneeling before him, naked, Greystoke’s hand was in my hair, clutching it so tightly that it could hardly be called affectionate. He had his cock, which was fairly large when erect, stuffed in my mouth. He was banging away, not caring how much I was gagging as it slid deep down my throat. I couldn’t balk. But because he’d come in my ass not more than an hour before, it took him quite a while to get off. The first time it happened, I thought it might signal a significant change in his feelings for me. I was wrong there. The oral sex was just another means of playing out his fantasies for control. Except that this particular time there was something else new about the incident. I didn’t know about it until he was finished. When he finally pulled out, while I was staring up at him adoringly with his cum covering my mouth, he suddenly looked toward the door to his private playroom.

  “I turned too, on instinct, I suppose. There was a woman there. Mrs. Greystoke, he told me. I’d never seen her before. The sight of her practically bowled me over. She was beautiful, and everything I was not: self-confident, a little brassy, but perfectly put together, her clothes the designer variety. She was wearing a pale green suit. I remember the skirt hugging her hips like skin and the coat cut deep into her cleavage. Light from a skylight above her streamed down on her breasts. It was almost blinding. And her makeup and hair looked as if she’d just come from a ritzy salon. Her nails were long and painted the prettiest shade of pink. She might have been a little brassy, but only because she reeked with confidence. I don’t think I’d ever seen a more beautiful woman.

  “Jealousy ripped me apart. I suppose until then, the woman was just a figment. I knew there was a Mrs. Greystoke, but she wasn’t real to me. Suddenly everything with Greystoke shifted again, like it had when he introduced his friends into our session. I felt like I’d been caught red-handed with the man. I’d been through months of long sessions with him, doing all the reprehensible things he demanded of me in the name of pleasure, and I didn’t feel an ounce of shame. Suddenly I felt like an unrepentant slut. There… naked…on my knees… giving head to her husband like a street whore.

  “My face was on fire with embarrassment. But she was so calm about it. I guess that what her husband did in his spare time to let off steam was no surprise to her. She stood there, leaning sexily against the door post, a wry smile on her blush pink lips. It was hardly even the smirk you would have expected…

  “’So this is the latest, Grey?’ she said, staring at me looking almost amused. ‘She’s actually pretty.’

  “She moved into the room, those hot hips of her swaying, and stood right above where I was kneeling. Greystoke was done with me, his cock stuffed back inside his pants, and it was suddenly her hands in my hair, clutching it a little too vigorously to be incidental contact.”

  “‘Maybe you’d like to see me use her, Jen?’ Greystoke said.

  “‘Yes, I might actually like that,” she answered back. ‘And if you gave her to me, I might like that too.’

  “‘You needn’t worry, she will be back soon,’ he said.

  “The two were eyeing each other strangely. I couldn’t quite figure out what to make of them. Affection or something a little sinister between them…” I’d never felt so diminished, so degraded.” Shelby left off looking at Dr. Ramsey wonderingly.

  “And how did you leave that session, Shelby?” Dr. Ramsey asked.

  “I-I was so shaken that I practically ran to my car. I drove right to Mr. Darcy’s office and shook my clothes off in seconds. Mr. Darcy could see how upset I was. Suddenly, he was using me, no inspection, or questions. None of that. When he was finished, I told him that I’d met Mrs. Greystoke for the first time…

  “‘Ah, Jenna,’ he said – like he was really fond of her. Nothing about this went down easy. I felt like a fool, that my entire world was playing games with me and I was just their pawn. There I was, clueless about what was going down and far too unsophisticated to ever understand.”

  ***

  Shelby left the session and walked the streets again, working off her nervous energy while trying to understand how she felt about what was going on in her sessions with Dr. Ramsey. With no answers immediately on the horizon, she finally took a bus to the coffeehouse – her car had broken down. She donned her apron and began waiting on customers. But when she hardly cracked a smile after twenty minutes, the vigilant Maureen pulled her aside.

  “I don’t know what’s going on for you, but you need to go home until you snap out of it.”

  She didn’t argue with the woman.

  Back home, she turned on the TV and found a series of Bette Davis movies featured on TNT. For the next six hours she submerged herself in the engaging dramas on the screen. These were far easier to deal with than her own drama, past or present.


  Chapter Fourteen

  Session Four…

  “I forgot where I left off,” Shelby announced when she returned for her next weekly session. She’d gone directly to her perch on the cream-colored couch, just as usual, though she seemed a little discontented on this particular afternoon.

  “I believe you left off where you first met Mrs. Greystoke.”

  “Right, yes, I remember.” She clammed back up, and remained silent until the doctor spoke again.

  “Would you prefer to talk about something other than Greystoke and his wife? This is your time, you can use it however you like.”

  “I know that. It’s just felt good to tell it like a story in the order it happened. It makes it clear in my head.”

  “Well then, lets start with a few details I’m missing. How long did you go to Mr. Greystoke for these bondage sessions?”

  “About two years.”

  “And how often were the sessions?”

  “A week, sometimes two or three weeks apart. Greystoke always arranged the meetings through Mr. Darcy. He had no way of contacting me otherwise. I suppose if it had been a real affair, I might have given him my phone number or told him where I lived, but Clive gave me so many warnings about how dangerous the man was that I was too scared to give him any personal information. He never asked for it, so I suppose it was a moot point.”

  “How would you describe your feelings about the sessions? Satisfied? Happy? Content? Needy?”

  “Never happy, not ever happy,” she shook her head adamantly. “But at first, after the strangeness wore off…I suppose that took about a month or two…I was satisfied, even content. The routine was easy. Here was Mr. Darcy arranging my sex life again, giving me what I obviously needed in a way I could handle it. Of course, he didn’t think about my heart, about love and honest affection. He couldn’t be bothered about that for himself, so why would it be important to me?”

  “But it was important. You did need love. You even sought it from a man who was colder and harder than the one you were trying to leave behind. You made it up in your imagination based on the tiniest traces of affection. Affection you knew was not real.”

  “But I didn’t know anything else.”

  “But I think you do now, don’t you?”

  Shelby’s face shot up, taken momentarily off guard. She could feel herself shiver inside. “Please say that again?”

  “I’m suggesting that you know something about love now.”

  “You can tell that?”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes my clients tell me things without using words. How about we skip to where you are today? We can pick up the past anytime. What’s going on for Shelby now? For a moment you looked like a deer in the headlights when I mentioned love. Is there someone now? Someone you love?”

  Huddled again in the corner of the couch, there was nothing in her mind but Padraig, as if he were clinging to her like smoke.

  “Yes. There’s Padraig Finnian, the man I loved. But he’s past tense now.”

  “Gone recently?”

  “Two weeks ago. Maybe three now.”

  “It was three weeks ago when you called me. You were desperate. Something terrible had happened, but you haven’t told me yet what that was. Maybe we should start today with what brought you back to me in the first place? What made you so scared?”

  Shelby didn’t say a word. She didn’t even look up.

  “Why don’t you tell me about Padraig?” the doctor tried again.

  The conversation stopped at this point and for maybe ten minutes the room was silent. Silence was not uncommon in Dr. Ramsey’s sessions with her clients, so it wasn’t uncomfortable to her, though it felt dangerous to Shelby. After a long and circuitous meandering through her thoughts, through the events of the last three years, and especially the most recent two months, it was still the present that upset her most.

  Finally, she looked straight into the doctor’s eyes, and said plainly, “I’d rather talk about Mrs. Greystoke if you don’t mind.”

  “No, I don’t mind at all. You’re the one paying me,” Dr. Ramsey replied.

  For now, this was a relief. To get to the real reason she sought out Dr. Ramsey, she needed more time.

  “Mrs. Greystoke was at my next session with her husband. And now everything changed. I couldn’t feel a thing from the man, nothing. He went through the motions, putting on a demonstration, tying me up as if I were a human Barbie doll. She made him do the breast bondage twice, insisting that it wasn’t tight enough the first time. I don’t know why she thought that, but she made him start over and wrap my tits until the ropes were so tight that I could barely breathe and my breasts were absurdly shaped and turning purple. After he hoisted me into the air, there was a little reprieve. My body settled inside the bondage so that there wasn’t so much pressure on my diaphragm.

  She was the one who decided he should use the cane. She wanted welts that were deep and distinct across my terribly strained breasts…and, of course, my thighs, my ass, my cunt – whatever flesh was available and whatever would hurt enough for me to scream. Greystoke offered her the cane so she could do it herself, but she shook her head. I saw it clearly. My eyes were wide open and staring at her – as long as she wasn’t looking at me. I wouldn’t have wanted her to see me staring. I could see her mind working, planning, scheming. I was pretty sure this wouldn’t be the last I’d see of her.

  “I screamed long and hard. The beating was far worse than any Greystoke had made me suffer. Or maybe it wasn’t any different, it was just her. Mrs. Greystoke and her gold grey eyes cutting into my flesh as sharply as her husband’s cane.

  “She stayed until the end…she even watched as he fucked my ass. She stood right at his side so that she could look at how he entered me. I have no idea if this actually happened, but I think she may have had her hand on his ass. He seemed to have an extra spark in him, whether it was from her touch or just her presence in the room, I couldn’t tell.”

  Shelby took a deep breath, then she began again…

  “A week later, I was there again. Normally the sessions were not that often, but I learned when I arrived that Mrs. Greystoke had requested me, not him. In fact, he was away on business. At least that is what I was told. I suspected he was gone – I always thought that I could have smelled him if he were in the house; his scent, the cologne and the aftershave were strong, distinct scents I’ll always associate with the man. In fact, my body would start tripping as soon as I arrived, as soon as I had the first whiff of him.

  “But there was no trace of him when I arrived for that session; and I wasn’t sure I liked being there without him. I felt as though I were on a fresh, green field filled with scents I couldn’t recognize, nothing earthy, no manly musk.

  “Suddenly, Mrs. Greystoke stepped into the foyer, dressed in much the same way she was when we first met. Cold. Beautiful. Haughty. Her perfume was something cruel and damaging…like her long painted nails; they were blood red that day. This time, she was completely in control, not subject to her husband’s interference.

  “‘You look different in your clothes,’ she told me. I was wearing a jean skirt and a t-shirt – made sense, since it was summer. There was nothing sleazy about my clothes, but you would have thought I was a low life by the way she looked at me. ‘Strip’, she said. I was used to stripping in that house so it was not that difficult, but it was different right out in the open foyer – doors leading everywhere; servants could have at any time crashed the party. But none did. I suppose they’d been forewarned. I’m not sure she liked me any better naked, but this was one way to dehumanize me. ‘Crawl,’ she said. I wanted to challenge the woman; but I was also scared to death. I dropped to my knees and crawled across the back and white checked marble, shivering the whole time. The floor was cold and so was the air; the air-conditioning had been turned on high – probably on purpose.

  “She led me right to Greystoke’s playroom, although she’d opened the dark curtains so that the landscape o
f the property was right there in front of my eyes. I could see across the lawn, and the trees, the rosebushes, all of it. It just wasn’t the same room, none of the dark depths that would call up my desires when Greystoke was there. But apparently this was the mood she wanted – my bound and brutalized body in broad daylight. There were two women joining us. I think one might have been a maid, because I’d seen her before and she wasn’t dressed up. The other woman must have been Mrs. Greystoke’s friend; she was dressed in the same kind of expensive clothes, although she wasn’t nearly as pretty as Mrs. Greystoke.

  The two women watched as Mrs. Greystoke worked the Shibari ropes around my body. Her finesse with them was surprising. I expected she would have some hesitation since I assumed this was new to her. If that was true, she was a quick learner. She went through the complicated bindings, having my torso dressed and hands tied behind me within a few minutes. When she was done, she hooked me to the suspension apparatus and with the help of the maid had me hoisted high in the air, with my head and torso facing the carpet. My legs were just hanging down at that point. But she bound them too, so that when she finished, my back was arched, my legs bent at the knees and my feet tied off to my thighs. Ropes dangling from the ceiling were attached to the ones that bound my knees. Then my knees were pulled apart so she could abuse most any part of my body.

  “She used a lot of clamps. Nipples. Labia. She hoisted me even higher so that she could easily reach her targets.

  “‘How does that feel?’ she kept asking me questions.

  “‘It hurts, ma’am,’ I kept telling her. Then she’d move on to something else, leaving my body strained and screaming. The beating followed – her technique with the whip was as ruthless as her husband’s. I’d hardly healed from the last session with Greystoke and she just revived all that pain, and refreshed the fading bruises. She moved around me with her weapon for maybe twenty minutes, letting off steam with her arm reared back and coming down with the full force of her leather tawse striking me at will. She ended with a steady beating of maybe twenty or more strikes to my ass. I was sobbing, the pain so brutal that I could hardly stand another blow – although I didn’t really have any choice. There was no symbiotic coupling with this woman. All that harsh daylight – there was no imagination, no mystery, no hope of tender affection. With the clamps still on nearly all my body parts, she stuffed a vibrator in my ass, another in my pussy, and turned them both on high. Then she stepped back and swatted my breasts until I came.”