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by Clarice Clique

  He pulled on my hair yanking my head to the side. ‘Tu es ma putain.’ He bit down on my throat.

  Tu es ma putain. I didn’t know what it meant, but it sounded raw and real and beautiful.

  I wiggled my knickers down my legs and twisted my thighs around his legs. He was inside me. I’d captured him. He was mine. My hands ripped at his shirt, scratched his chest, pinched his nipples.

  ‘Come, bitch. Come.’ His mouth was by my ear, but it didn’t feel like he’d spoken; it was as if his voice was inside my head and emanated from within my own soul.

  My orgasms were a tumbling waterfall. A stormy sea. A hurricane. Of the earth that made me and would one day reclaim me.

  His come was hot, bursting through me. Part of me. He was part of me. Our orgasms merged and were one.

  We slid to the floor, our bodies remaining connected until we were flat on the floor and he rolled away from me. I lay still and looked over at him. We were both covered in sweat. There were scratches on his skin. I knew without a mirror my skin was bruised.

  He met my gaze. ‘Put your stockings and shoes on.’

  His voice was calm and steady, but I moved slowly. My body was weak, my muscles were shaking, the tips of my fingers and my face tingled. He observed me as I removed my clothes, using them to wipe the stickiness off my skin. His spunk trickled out of me. Gravity felt wrong; my body shouldn’t let go of any part of him, it should absorb him into the essence of my cells. I caught his come on my fingers and licked them clean, sucking each last drop off. I’d done this before, but the way he was looking at me, it felt new, as if I had never tasted him before.

  I lingered, letting the moment last until he repeated his order in the same calm voice and I obediently reached for my stockings.

  I was careful with them, pulling them up my legs inch by inch, trying to keep the red seam at the back straight. I spoke as I dressed. ‘I had a slave. You know that, I met him for the first time the last time that we met. And if you read anything I sent you, or looked at the photos I sent you, you know that I’ve been playing with him. But I want to tell you anyway.’ My voice was as slow as my movements; I sounded slightly drunk. ‘I had a slave. He was cute. I liked him more than I thought I would. I understand now the responsibility you have. I see the constant pressure of having to be inventive, and creative, and in charge, and always thinking of what your sub wants and can take, while making it look like you’re not thinking about them at all. You and me, we’re not like me and Slave. We belong. But still I wanted you to know that I see how it can be now on the other side.’

  ‘Shoes,’ he said.

  ‘Shoes.’ I slipped my feet into the heels and then lay back down, staring into his eyes.

  He reached his hand out and stroked my cheek, then slapped me. It was gentle rather than angry, but still it sent tremors of fresh desire through my whole body. But he moved away from me and pulled up and fastened his trousers. He picked up his picture and hung it back on the wall. I looked up at it as if it was important. The glass of the frame hadn’t cracked. I was disappointed; I wanted the whole world to break when we fucked.

  My lover shook his head at me as if he knew my thoughts. An image of Joe entered my mind: Joe’s little gesture of shaking his head and smiling at me in happy disbelief. It gave me a sense of nostalgia, as if we’d been childhood sweethearts. Then everything else disappeared as my master’s hand clamped over my breast. He yanked me to my feet and led me upstairs in this way. And into his bedroom.

  His bedroom . It was the same as it was the last time I was here. It was the same as it had appeared in all my fantasies of the past months. Yet it was different. Somehow it was lighter; less shadows and more sunlight. He released me and stepped over to draw the curtains.

  I smiled. That was more familiar. For the first time I noticed there were two sets of handcuffs on the bedposts. ‘Are those for me, or are they for someone else?’

  He looked at the bed with an expression I couldn’t interpret.

  I persisted. ‘Have you been seeing other women? Another woman? A man? Someone younger than me? More intelligent? One of your students?’

  He laughed. ‘Do you think that I want to marry you so I can have the thrill of being unfaithful to my wife? Do you want pain so much that you are creating the jealousy of my prick getting hard for a student?’

  ‘Yes.’ I bit down on my lip. ‘Not a student, lots of them. One special clever, witty one, and lots of others in constant orgies. All of them obeying you and being better sluts than me. Occasionally I’ve thought about you getting back with your wife, your real wife, not me. And you tie her up and punish her harder than you’ve ever punished me because she hurt you so much. Because you loved her so much more than you’ve ever loved me.’

  He came over to me and held my face between his hands, tilting it so I gazed up at him. ‘It’s all creating narratives and not real, but if my ex-wife hadn’t fucked off and I’d still been married, even then, I don’t think I would have been strong enough to resist you. I would have tried, but you have a power over me that doesn’t compare with anyone else I’ve ever known. You, my twisted-up little fuck, are the love of my life.’ He kissed me tenderly at first, but then my lips were between his teeth, my hand was down his trousers squeezing his balls and his fingers were probing between my buttocks.

  He threw me face down onto the bed, pinning me down with his weight, forcing the oxygen out of my lungs. ‘These handcuffs are yours. They’ve been ready for your return. I am never going to let you go again. I gave you your chance, now you’re going to be chained to my bed until the end.’

  He clicked the handcuffs around my wrists.

  I gabbled out words, panting for air. ‘Yes. Yes. I do. Until death. Until death do us part. Death won’t part us. I’ll follow you into the dark. I’ll never let you go. If I die first. I’ll haunt you. You’ll taste me in your tears. You’ll fuck other girls and hear me in their screams.’

  ‘I am only interested in hearing your screams.’

  I lay and listened to him moving around the room. He was removing his clothes, putting them away, throwing something in the bin, searching for something. He was beside the bed. A swishing sound cut the air apart. My body tensed, my cunt was wet; Pavlovian responses. The cat o’ nine tails slashed across my buttocks.

  ‘Darling. Darling. I’ve missed you so much.’ I cried.

  The cat tore into the skin of my back.

  My body shook with sobs. ‘Never leave me again. Promise you’ll never leave me again.’

  He stroked my hair away from my ears and leant over, close to my face. ‘It was you who left me.’

  ‘I didn’t. I couldn’t.’

  A quick movement and the cat’s claws were on my thighs. I yelled out, the room filled with my pain and ecstasy. There was no space for anything else. My head throbbed. My body seemed to shrink and enlarge at the same time, became everything, became nothing.

  My master left the room.

  I listened for his presence around the house and heard nothing. He was silence, a wisp, a shadow. A dream. Love.

  No, love wasn’t silence. It was the sound of men at war, the clattering of swords and shields, battle cries and screams of death. It was the taste of poison on your lips, the bite of an asp, a dagger through the heart.

  My flesh became cold despite the heat outside. I was in a different world to the people enclosed in their cars safely driving past this house, their minds intent on shopping lists, family visits, the football results. None of them knowing, or caring, about a young woman (was I still young?) naked apart from stockings and heels, handcuffed to her lover’s bed and waiting almost patiently to be filled with his come again.

  Or maybe they were all like me, hiding behind the mundanity of work and duty their true selves. Maybe they hid so well that no one, including themselves, could ever find them again.

  I was struck by a deep thirst and hunger. I’d had an espresso when I woke up and that was all. My body was fuelled only by
caffeine and yearning. I pulled on my handcuffs, knowing they wouldn’t come loose. The metal cut into my skin. I did not move to make myself more comfortable, the same way I didn’t call out, asking my lover if he could bring me a drink of water.

  I took deep, slow breaths from my stomach and concentrated on the steady beat of my heart.

  When my lover returned it was sudden. The door was opened, he was on me, his naked skin pressed against mine, biting my shoulders. He parted my thighs with his knees; his cock slid into my moist cunt as if it was returning home. I raised my hips.

  ‘You want to be fucked like a bitch?’ He put his hands either side of my head and I arched my back against his chest.

  He was warmth. He was life.

  ‘Fuck my arse,’ I said.

  He was moving inside me gently, ignoring my efforts to grind against him.

  He grabbed my hair and yanked my head back. ‘Ask nicely, slut. You’re forgetting your good manners.’

  ‘Excuse me, sir, would you please be so kind as to bugger me senseless. I would very much appreciate it.’

  He climbed off me.

  ‘Please, sir, a proper gentleman shouldn’t ignore a damsel in distress.’

  ‘You are nowhere near being in distress yet, my dear.’ He was getting something from a drawer, hopefully lube.

  ‘Perhaps you could do something about that too.’ I twisted my head to try and see him.

  ‘Eyes front, soldier.’ He spanked my arse in the same place he’d hit me with the cat earlier.

  I yelped.

  He laughed.

  He was on the bed behind me. I spread my legs wide for him. Cold lube was rubbed between my buttocks.

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  But it wasn’t his hot cock that forced into my tight hole. The thing being pressed inside me was a string of love beads, cool and hard and unrelenting. He did not give my body a chance to adjust; he pushed them in as fast as they’d go.

  ‘Your cunt is mine.’ He thrust between the lips of my sex. ‘Whoever else has had you, your cunt is mine.’

  ‘Everything I am, everything I’m ever going to be, is yours.’ I pressed back into him.

  He remained statue still as I fucked him. I thrust back and forth, pulling on my handcuffs until my wrists were sore.

  I looked over my shoulder at him, and he smiled indulgently. Being able to look at him, to know him again with all my senses, not to have to rely on my misty memory, that broke the orgasm in me as much as the pleasure of my cunt squeezed around his cock.

  He tugged the love beads out at the peak of my orgasm. And before I had a chance to settle my breath, his hands were on my buttocks, spreading them, and his prick was forcing its way inside me.

  I made an attempt to reposition myself, but he pushed my hips down into the sheets. His cock was slow in spreading me, so I could feel and concentrate on every millimetre of him pressing into my body.

  He lay down on top of me, all of his weight squashing me. I gasped. He stretched his arms over mine. We were one being. He didn’t move inside me. We were still.

  ‘I love you.’ We spoke at the same time, one soft whisper teasing the air.

  Those too oft spoken words, three little syllables to try and balance out and justify all the hurt and wrongness.

  We claimed them in that moment to try and express that which was impossible to express.

  The choice of a life apart was no option. It was barrenness, the constant ache of loneliness; it was our minds as arid deserts, our bodies as broken machines.

  Whatever constituted our souls was so entwined that we dared to believe in forever despite all evidence to the contrary.

  All the billions of adults covering this world, and every time we would choose to fuck each other.

  The image of each other twisted around our hearts.

  That was our love.

  Epilogue – Happily Ever

  We got married in a cave in Australia.

  I found it on the internet and somehow it seemed appropriate.

  We had a long honeymoon. My husband took a sabbatical; I was unemployed. When my office became a victim of the recession I volunteered in the first round of redundancies. Marcus had an awkward (on his part) conversation with me. I winked and told him I’d nearly forgotten about the sexual harassment and it had nothing to do with me wanting to leave. ‘You shouldn’t joke about those sorts of things,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ I said in all seriousness. ‘I shouldn’t.’ I think despite, or because of, his one-time attraction to me, Marcus was glad to see me leave.

  Joe and I had a joint leaving do. Joe said it was the push he needed to take the ultimate deep sea plunge. A miracle had happened and he’d met a woman who was as “special” as me. She was filthy rich and had made an offer for him to be ostensibly employed as her chauffeur, but in reality he would be her 24/7 personal slave, her true companion. Did I feel a twinge of regret for a possibility disappearing? Yes. But it was only a twinge, a simple kneejerk reaction. Joe possessed an unbelievable body, was funny and warm and open-minded with sex, but he wasn’t my lover.

  The day before my lover became my husband we fucked each other sore. We had none of our usual toys with us, so we improvised.

  We stripped the hotel bed bare and he bound and gagged me with sheets and pillow cases.

  I rubbed my cunt against a chair leg.

  He teased my clit with the corner of the room service menu.

  The hotel body lotion became lube.

  The handles of teaspoons and toothbrushes pried open my arse.

  He spanked me with his bare hand.

  I pretended to be the maid.

  He dragged me fully clothed into the shower. That was my favourite thing, or the thing I remember most; holding each other as the hottest water possible fell onto us and the room disappeared into steam.

  We were both tired for our wedding. He wore the suit he wore for formal occasions at work. I had a red dress with a sweetheart neckline. We asked for the word “obey” to be kept in the marriage vows. We paid a fellow guest at the hotel, a random woman who claimed to be having an adult gap year, to take the wedding photos on her camera phone. She emailed us 20 photos which all looked like us, not glamorised or romanticised, just us. My husband printed one out in miniature to put in his wallet.

  For our honeymoon we had no sex. We did things we thought married couples might do; visited famous landmarks, went to restaurants recommended on travel websites, bickered over directions. I wrote a postcard to my mother telling her I’d got married, but in the end I dropped it in the bin and sent my brother an email with the news, leaving it to the gods whether it was important enough for him to take time out of his studying and share with the rest of the family.

  I bought Bill Bryson’s book about Australia and read the funniest anecdotes and the things I thought might be of interest about how many casinos there are in Australia, how many poisonous animals, how vast it is as a country etc., out loud to my husband. He bought Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda and read the whole heart-breaking, hope-destroying story of obsessive love to me.

  ‘I make you laugh, you make me cry,’ I said to him. ‘Is this going to be a microcosm of our married life?’

  ‘This is a microcosm of our whole relationship, my dear,’ he replied.

  At night and in the mornings we lay naked on top of the bed covers, gazing at each other but never touching. We’d silently agreed that we were doing our honeymoon in reverse, without the sex; instead we were being a couple, asking each other boring questions and sharing the details of our life as if we were endlessly thrilled by ourselves.

  When we were on the plane home I put my jacket over our legs and we wanked each other off. We were discreet, but I suspect everyone around us knew what we were doing.

  Back at his house, which was now my house, we resumed our normal fucking. Sometimes we ventured out of the four walls of our bedroom. We went to couples’ Tantra weekends, a place where the women are treated like po
nies, a few dogging sites, one swingers’ party where we didn’t swing, a pub which was hired every month for people who liked throwing custard and cream and jelly at each other (especially at the more curvaceous of women), and we went to fetish nights at clubs and private BDSM parties.

  Whether we were watching or involved, these were voyeuristic nights out. It reminded me of when I was a teenager going out clubbing with my friends because with a lot of make-up and a pair of heels I could pass for 18. I did it because I could and because it was a laugh, but the true me, the happier me, preferred being alone in my bedroom with my headphones on, dancing around in the dark to the same tune repeated again and again.

  What my husband and I had, what we did, wasn’t something that could be acted out in public. But still, watching doms sitting on their subs’ faces was a more interesting hobby for us to do together than the book club or rambling association, which were the suggestions my husband always came up with whenever we had an empty evening together.

  It was on one of these nights out that I saw Slave for the last time.

  My husband decided fairly late in the evening that he wanted to watch other people fucking. It was past 11 when we got dressed and went to a party. It was in a warehouse. So many of these things seemed to be in old warehouses; buildings that were constructed for industry now utilised for the kinkiest of orgies.

  We walked into the midst of the leather-clad people. My husband wore his smart casual clothes, I wore a light summer dress which was too thin for the night air, wedge-heeled sandals and my hair pulled back in a loose pony tail. At these events I always drew more stares for the everyday normality of my attire than the sluts clad in net body stockings and the mistresses in their outfits which revealed stunning bodies.

  The host of the event was a professional dominatrix who also organised frequent parties for friends. She called herself Adora and was an imposing figure of over six foot in her thigh-length boots. I had never seen her without her well-heeled boots on so, like many things regarding her, I could only guess at her real height.