Fifty Shades of Submission

by Loris James

  “Your stepmother and aunt?”

  I nod.

  “That’s the saddest thing you have ever said to me.”

  We look at each other for a long time, then she says softly, “What beautiful eyes you have. Your eyes have the vulnerable look of a trapped, wounded animal in extreme pain. Are you in pain, Julian? Are you so very unhappy?”

  I bowed my head, and kept silent.

  “Do you still love me?” she says suddenly, almost plaintively. “Can you still find it in your heart to love me after everything that has happened?”

  She suddenly throws her arms around me and draws me up close to her with such vehemence that the coffee tray upsets and falls to the floor, coffee spilling all over the carpet.

  I cling to her, holding her hard and fervently against me. I begin to cover her face, and bare shoulders and naked breasts with passionate kisses.

  “Abuse me as you want, but don’t ever leave me!”

  “Hush,” Saskia says gently, rocking my head against her breasts. “I haven’t betrayed you. I have not allowed any man to touch me intimately since you and I have been together.”

  “And Osiris?”

  “She’s a lesbian. I was humoring her. She has a crush on me. She’ll get over it. Be that as it may, I have come to a decision that will effect both of us.”

  At the tone of her voice I felt a sickening feeling at the pit of my stomach.

  She takes my face in both her hands and looks at me closely. “I have decided to take a lover. A male lover. I have been giving it some serious thought for days now.”

  “Why?” I manage to blurt, my gut wrenching with agony.

  She smiled serenely. “Why? Because I need a forceful man in my life – not just a submissive slave. I told you, I like being dominated. I enjoy being treated harshly. And besides, if I did not take a man into my bed you might feel that I am not treating you cruelly enough!” She laughs. “Don’t look so sad, my darling. Just for today you shall be Julian again, the handsome young man whom I love and adore with all my heart. I will remove your slave collar and chastity belt and you will dress yourself as you used to when our love was wonderfully sexual and intimate. We will spend the day together and enjoy ourselves and forget all the horrible things that have happened between us. You will forget it easily in my arms, I promise - I shall kiss away all your sorrows.”

  She removes the dog’s collar and unlocks the chastity belt with the key on the gold chain around her neck. She kisses me tenderly and smiles. “Go now and shower and get dressed – you’ll find your clothes on your bed. In the meantime I’ll also get dressed. We shall spend a wonderful day together!”

  When I return, freshly showered and dressed in jeans and T-shit, she is wearing the long white satin dress, her red hair framing her perfectly sculpted face. I marvel again for the umpteenth time at her perfect beauty. Is that at the core of my attraction for her, I wonder – the perfection of her beauty?

  She draws me down on the chaise longue beside her and puts her arms around me, holding me tenderly against her breast. She is no longer the stern heartless mistress, she has slipped back into the role of tender and adoring lover.

  I kiss her lips, captivated.

  She puts her pale, slender hand gently in mine. Her expression is soft, her eyes filled with tenderness. “Are you happier now, Julian?”

  “Not yet.”

  She smiles and leans back against the chaise and pulls her dress down over her shoulder exposing her naked breasts.

  I stared at them, mesmerized. “Saskia, you’re driving me mad,” I stammer longingly.

  “Kiss me then,” she murmurs, pulling my face down to her pale flesh, guiding my mouth to her hard nipples. “They’re yours. My breasts belong to you and only you.

  “Are you happy now?” she whispers against my ear.

  “Infinitely!” I murmur.

  She laughs suddenly. It is an evil, shrill laugh that sends cold shivers down my spine. I stop kissing her and freeze.

  She pushes me away violently. “You dreamed of being a slave,” she says maliciously. “You longed to be my plaything, and now you want to be a free again, my lover - you fool! A sign from me, and you are my slave again. Down on your knees! At once!” Her voice was shrill and venomous.

  I sink down to the floor and kneel in front of her.

  She yanks her dress up over her shoulders, covering her breasts. “Oh how easy you are to toy with! One look at my naked breasts and you lose your mind. Look at you! You have the erection the size of a bull!”

  I stare back at her, speechless.

  “What’s the matter?” she cries malevolently. “Can’t you believe that I have been merely toying with you since last night? The moment I mention the word love you turn instantly to jelly – it’s pitiful! Laughable! I was bored and wanted to play with you to relieve the tedium. Don’t look at me like that—” She kicked me in the chest viciously with her foot.

  “You are no more than a thing to me! The moment you signed that contract you became an object for me to abuse at will! May I remind you that I can even kill you if I want to! And as each day goes by I want to more and more!”

  She reaches up and yanks the bell-rope suspended next to the chaise. The two black priestesses entered the room within minutes.

  “Tie his hands behind his back!”

  I remain kneeling and do not resist. They ripped the T-shirt off my torse and removed my jeans. Then they replaced the slave collar and the steel chastity belt. My heart sinks. For a brief moment she had set me free and showed me paradise – only to be hurled back into the darkness of despair once again.

  “Take him out into the field and show him that he is no more than an animal to his mistress!” Saskia commanded. She laughed shrilly.

  The two women clipped a leash onto my slave collar and led me out into the garden, past the vineyard to a fallow corn field beyond. The corn had long since been harvested and here and there a few dead stalks remained. A rusted, old-fashion plough lay abandoned in the long grass next to the field. It has been fitted with chains and a leather yoke.

  The two women put the yoke around my neck and harnessed me to the plough with chains. Then they pointed me into the field. Amun steered the plough while Osiris whipped my naked back to urge me to go faster.

  It is getting dark and I am herded back to the house. My neck and shoulders are so stiff and sore from pulling the plough that I can hardly walk.

  My mistress is waiting for me. The look on her face frightens me. I have never seen her like this before - her face is deathly pale and her whole body is shaking with rage. Her green eyes are ablaze with hate. She snatches the whip from Osiris and strikes me in the face with the handle, opening a deep gash on my cheek that begins to bleed profusely.

  “Take him down to the cellar!” she spits venomously.

  It is the first I have heard of a cellar.

  They drag me to a heavy wooden door off the kitchen that had been locked since our arrival and which I presumed to be a pantry. But it is the door to a cellar and the women manhandle me through it. I am too exhausted to resist. They push me down a flight of stone steps into a dark, dank, windowless prison-cell.

  I hear bolts being drawn on the outside and a key turns in the lock.

  I am a prisoner, buried beneath the house. If I die here no one will even come looking for me. I realize suddenly that I am the perfect victim for a crime. I have no family and a great deal of money. With me out of the way Saskia could think of ways to access my fortune. She was wealthy in her own right but I had inherited the kind of fortune that is capable of corrupting the souls of most men.

  I lie on the cold stone floor, hands bound like an animal ready for the slaughter. There is no light, no food, no water. There is a bucket for basic bodily functions, and a pile of straw to sleep on.

  What is Saskia’s plan? Does she mean to let me starve to death down here?

  I am shaking uncontrollably with cold. Or is it fever?

 
The woman I love hates me. I am certain of that now.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  I am not exactly sure how much time has passed since they put me in the field to plough like an animal at the yoke, but I’m certain it’s been several days – the hours spent in pain and delirium. The raw chafing sores on my shoulder from the plough yoke is festering. I can smell myself. I stink. I am filled with self-loathing.

  It is impossible to feel any lower than this. The only other time I had felt as trapped and filled with despair as this was when my stepmother used to lock me in my father’s closet for days when he was away.

  Finally after days of torment, a white streak of light suddenly floods across the floor as the heavy cellar door is thrust open. Saskia appears at the top of the short flight of stone steps. She is holding a torch and shining it down on me. She shines the light directly in my eyes and I blink like a rabbit caught in the headlights of a car.

  “Are you still alive?” she says.

  “Have you come to kill me?” I reply with a low, hoarse voice.

  She comes down the steps and kneels beside me in the straw. “Are you ill? Your eyes are glowing.”

  Her small dagger glints in her hand and I recoil. I am certain that she is about to stab me with it. What will she do – plunge it straight into my heart as Osiris had wanted to? Or stab me multiple times to prolong my suffering?

  I am too tired and broken to care.

  “Go ahead, kill me,” I moan. “Put me out of my misery. You will be doing me a favor.”

  She laughs. “Of course I’m not going to kill you! I have come to save you.” She cuts the ropes that have been binding my wrists. It is a relief to have my hands free at last but my wrists and hands are painfully swollen from being deprived of blood circulation for so long. My fingers feel numb and unresponsive.

  For a brief moment I contemplate putting my hands around Saskia’s throat and squeezing the life out of her. But I am too weak to be a physical threat to anyone.

  “Come on, get up,” she says. “You’re free to go. I think you’ve had enough punishment for the moment, slave.”

  She turns and leaves and to my relief she doesn’t close the cellar door behind her.

  Chapter Forty

  Amun fetches me and helps me up the stairs and leads me into the kitchen where I sit weakly at the table and eat ravenously and drink a whole jug of water. My mistress has instructed Amun to remove the slave collar but not the chastity belt. Osiris cleans and disinfects the wounds on my shoulder and puts a bandage on it. She is surprisingly gentle. She treats the deep cut on my cheek where my mistress had struck me with the handle of her whip.

  “That’s gonna leave a permanent scar,” she says. “You should have had stitches for that.”

  I shrug. What is one more scar on my body? It’s just another tangible token of receiving undeserved punishment from a wrathful and dangerous woman.

  My mistress has instructed the women to buy me new clothes and several pairs of jeans and identical plain white T-shirts have been left on my bed, together with a pair of Italian leather sandals. I am instructed to wash and get dressed.

  I feel strangely lightheaded and disorientated - like a prisoner who has been freed from solitary confinement after many weeks.

  Chapter Forty-One

  For the last number of evenings after dinner my mistress has called me to her little sitting room upstairs. She asks me to sit next to her and read to her. She seems entirely transformed and treats me kindly. It is almost as if she is ashamed of the savagery which has occurred before.

  She displays a touching tenderness towards me, her eyes filled with compassion. Gradually I begin to forget the horrors of the previous week and find myself slowly beginning to trust her again, little by little - although I am always on my guard, alert to signs of her changing mood.

  Now she takes the book from my hand, gently closes it and puts it on the table.

  “Don’t you want me to go on reading, mistress?”

  “Not today, Julian. Let’s just sit for a while, together – let’s try to forget all our troubles.”

  “If you command it, mistress.”

  “I do not command it, I am asking it of you,” she says gently. She rises, puts her hands on my shoulders, and looks down at me.

  “You have no idea how much it hurts me to see you like this! Do you believe that?”

  I look at her dully. “I don’t know what to believe anymore, mistress.”

  She smiles gently. “You will learn to trust me again, I promise.”

  PART THREE – THE PAINTER

  Chapter Forty-Two

  We have a new addition to our household.

  My mistress has commissioned an artist to paint her portrait. Without my knowledge, she has met with him a couple of times in town to discuss the project. And today he appeared at the house with his brushes and easel under his arm.

  He is to stay with us for the duration of the project.

  The painter is unusually tall and gaunt, a man in his mid-thirties with dishevelled clothes, dirty tousled blond hair and a thick stubble. He has paint stains on his fingers and his pale grey eyes dart about nervously when he speaks. Words tumble out of the corner of his mouth in rapid nervous bursts. He has a generally wild and unkempt look about him.

  I open the front door and he stands there, shy and silent, clutching his paints and easel and a small battered suitcase that had seen better days. “Would you please tell the lady of the house that the painter is here,” he says, not meeting my eyes. “She’s expecting me.”

  I show the painter the stairs. “She’s up there. She’s waiting for you.”

  “Thank you. Thank you very much.” He darts up the steps like a frightened rabbit and I stand at the foot of the stairs and stare after him.

  I suddenly have a premonition that my mistress will catch this timid man’s soul in her snare and ruin him with her wickedness. He will paint her, and she will seduce him with her beauty and her charm, and then she will probably drive him mad.

  My mistress has given the painter my room and told me to move into the cellar for the time being.

  I accept my new accommodations without argument. I have learnt that my mistress will get her way, no matter what. It is easier to accede to her wishes than to protest and be beaten for my trouble.

  At least now that the painter is here I will be allowed to be decently dressed every day, although I am still forced to wear the damnable chastity belt.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  It is a sunny winter’s day and the three of us are enjoying the warmth of the courtyard outside – the painter, my mistress and I. it is a beautiful spot. There are shrubs in mossy clay pots, and lush green ivy grows against the stone walls. An evil-looking gargoyle fountain against the far wall trickles a steady stream of water, making a lulling, comforting sound.

  The stone courtyard is my favorite place. I often come here to sit alone on the stone bench and reflect or read a book when my mistress is in one of her ‘moods’ or goes to great lengths to ignore me and banish me from her company. Sometimes I don’t see her for days on end. She has come to realize that excluding me from her company is another productive way of torturing me.

  At the moment she’s in good spirits and reading a book. She’s wearing a light summer dress and a straw sun hat that shades her delicate skin. The painter is sitting opposite her, drawing furiously in his sketch book. For the past number of days he has been looking at her with veiled adoration. It is clear that he has already fallen hopelessly under her spell. I almost pity him.

  I like the painter. He has a curious intensity about him. He seems to live for his work and I like the fact that he is a man of few words.

  Now and then my mistress looks up from her book and smiles at him. She does not look at me at all. She treats me as if I am not there. Since the painter’s arrival she has hardly spoken to me or acknowledged my presence.

  “That’s enough for today, Eric,” she tells him. “You ca
n go now.”

  Dismissed, the painter packs up his sketch book and leaves reluctantly to go to his room.

  “Do you love the painter, mistress?” I say, after taking some minutes to pluck up the courage to speak to her.

  The painter has been spending every evening upstairs with her, while she makes me wait outside her door.

  She looks at me quizzically, then shakes her head, and smiles.

  “I feel a kind of pity for him,” she replies at last, “but no, I do not love him.”

  “Have you told him about us?” I have noticed that the painter has been giving me curious glances from time to time when he thinks I’m not looking.

  My mistress nods. “I told him that you and I have an unusual and special bond. That you have devoted your life to serving me. Like a eunuch.” She smiles. “I have in effect castrated you, haven’t I, slave – by making you wear the chastity belt?”

  “Yes, mistress, you have.”

  “The idea of a eunuch as my slave appeals to me immensely. One of these days I may just decide to turn you into a proper and permanent eunuch.”

  “Eunuchs are usually castrated before they reach puberty, mistress,” I point out.

  “Are they indeed? You’re so fond of reading about the blood and gore and sufferings of mankind - tell me, how is it done exactly? Do I need to cut off your balls or your cock - or both?” She laughed.

  “The process of turning a young man into a eunuch varies, mistress. It is always done against his will and usually only the testicles are removed, but sometimes only the penis is removed, and sometimes both. By removing the testicles of a young man before he reaches puberty, it inhibits the production of testosterone and so the eunuch’s voice is usually high and he is unable to produce muscle mass and takes on the appearance of a she-male, with boyish body and soft feminine features.”

  “You seem to know a great deal on the subject, slave.”