by Alex Algren
Your face is turned away from him, sunken into the softness of the pillow, freshly washed hair now tousled and messy. The tip of the belt rests against your newly shaved lips as you hear the words, “Spread your legs.” You do, because you always do, because this is what your relationship is about: he orders, you obey, and you both like it like that. Your hands instinctively curl around the pillow, long nails digging into the cotton and feathers as you wait. The belt strikes the air and you shiver, feeling a breeze that may be a phantom one or may be very, very real. The next sound you hear coincides with a strike of the belt on your cheeks, both of them, a slice that takes a moment to process before you say the words almost automatically: “Thank you.”
There’s never a “You’re welcome,” or rather, not a verbal one. It’s implied by the next stinging strike, by the fact that you’re deemed worthy at all. He doesn’t talk then, is almost solemn as you wait for it to be over with equal parts dread and glee.
But those kinds of smacks aren’t what make you come. No, that’s saved for when he makes you cry. You turn over and open your eyes for a moment to look at him, hovering over you. You marvel that you can feel so close when he’s not touching you with his body at all. The belt is capable of magic. You start to shiver once you realize what’s going to happen, that the belt is not just teasing your lips with a kiss, though you pucker up when it approaches.
Then the belt moves on to its real work, kissing your other set of lips harder, the equivalent of a shove-you-against-the-wall, bruising kiss. This kiss is merely an introduction, a warm-up. You know what’s coming and even though you want it, you press your legs together involuntarily until he barks at you to put them back. You shut your eyes because you know you can’t watch this. Your hands are twisted above your head, clinging to each other for some kinky version of safety. You focus on keeping your legs open, all of you exposed. When the belt strikes there, right there, you don’t quite scream; it’s more of a strangled, garbled cry. Your hand automatically goes to cover the sting, to cradle yourself. You finally get a “Good girl.”
You try to turn over, to curl into a ball, but you’re not allowed, or rather, your desire to prove yourself wins out over your desire to stop what’s coming. You didn’t travel for hours just to shy away from the pain. But you almost forget that when the next blow strikes. You wonder how the tender skin between your legs can stand that force, and then you stop wondering when the belt moves upward, to your breasts, your pebbled nipples no match for the blows. You arch your back and thrust upward, even though inside, you want to cower. You reluctantly remember telling him you wanted bruises there, marks you could proudly reveal with a hint of cleavage, a well-timed reveal as you lean over on the train. You still want the marks but breathe deep through your nose, twist your fingers more tightly around each other, to get through them. You bite your lip as the sweet pain of the belt heats your chest and wanders downward. You almost get used to the rhythm, your nipples stubbornly rising after each blow.
Then it’s back down, back to the place that no longer feels like your cunt, not the way it’s being set afire again and again. These lashes aren’t as swift as the ones against your breasts, but they are sure, steady. He’s not twice your size for no reason, and each slap strikes precisely where he wants it to. The tears finally appear in the form of sobs, traveling fast through your body, a current of energy you use to sustain yourself through the last few lashes. You’d think the pain would be a little more subdued, the pussy’s diminishing law of returns, but no. You feel every ounce of force he uses for each stroke, every bite of the leather into your inner thighs, against your wetness. You have a vision of the belt wrapped around your throat, the buckle cold against your skin as you stare deep into his eyes, but that was another time, another place. The next blow has you thrashing so much he has to hold you down.
Is it the belt that makes you come? The leather, the thrash, the pain, the jolt? Is it the force behind it? Is it the noises he makes as he does it, the hitches of breath that are nothing like your shuddering sobs but are music to your ears nonetheless—is that what makes you finally go over the edge? Is it him holding you down, him promising you pain that may or may not come?
Maybe it’s all of it, all the forces combining to make the orgasm nothing like what you were expecting, the kind where your body bonds with the belt, giving back some of its life force, only to have it beaten back into you. Though you know that logically, rationally, it’s impossible, you hope the belt has absorbed some of your tears, has taken them and held on to them for next time, has put the pain that you mostly wanted, but kind of didn’t, somewhere for safekeeping, somewhere he can hold next to his skin any time he desires.
Oh, it’s not like you really have time to think all that or think anything, not then. The belt is reminding you, lash by lash, that you must stay open, stay ready, stay through the moments when you don’t know how you will get through it, stay through the times you don’t have a chance to take a bracing breath or perform any other magic tricks to turn the pain into something else. By now even the light touches, the strokes of the belt’s rough edge against your fleshy inner thigh, the dance of the musky leather against your cheek, are enough to make you shudder, like when he raises his hand to smack you but stops right before his fingers reach the finish line. The effect is the same.
You breathe through your nose, a more refined type of breath, one granted you by the momentary lapse before the belt is between your legs again, crashing hard, calling forth wetness you didn’t know you still had. Pain, pleasure, obedience, pride, love, hate, fear ride each other along the waves of your body until you hardly know who you are anymore. You’ve moved beyond some simple goal of taking it into somewhere else, somewhere you’re afraid to look at too closely lest it prove to be just a mirage.
And then, almost too fast, it’s over. The belt lies limp on the bed and you’re allowed to press your legs together again, to admire the bruises on your chest that you will wind up keeping close like a secret. You wipe the tears from your cheeks, embarrassed but secretly pleased. What happens after that hardly even matters, because that is what will remain, not the belt or the pain or the marks, but the beauty of being transformed by each of them into someone new, blossoming like the bruises on and under your skin; traveling with him somewhere far away, somewhere magical no one else will ever visit, where each strike of the belt serves to bind you together in this sensual cocoon, sealing you in with its heat long after the physical marks drift away.
You hope it’ll be something like that, but with him, you never know what you’re going to get, and you wouldn’t have it any other way.
SUNDAY IN THE STUDY
Justine Elyot
I never know how long he will make me wait.
Never less than five minutes, usually between ten and twenty, and on one unfondly recalled occasion, I was standing hands-on-head listening to the steady tick of the grandfather clock behind me for over an hour.
This, he says, is Reflection Time. I am to spend it thinking through any of the week’s tribulations or missed opportunities, and considering how I will account for them. That is the theory, although in practice these tense minutes lend themselves to speculation. How many? How long? What will he use? Will I be able to sit at the family dinner afterward?
Later I will find myself in reflective mode once more, but this time I will be facing a corner, holding my hands clasped in the small of my back, above my bare and throbbing bottom. This is Recovery Time and usually lasts half an hour, long enough for tears to dry and sins to be absolved before we move into the final stage of the process: Forgiveness and Reconnection.
You will gather from all of this that Sinclair and I are lovers of ritual. What holds us together is something more than our mutual kink, our undeniable attraction and all the usual romantic folderol. It is our need for this Sunday to be like every other Sunday, in essence, even if certain elements are allowed to vary. It is my need for correction and his for control. When we
were younger, my Sundays were spent in church, while he captained the school cricket team. As adults, we have exchanged these rituals for their deviant counterpart. He dominates, as he did his ten bowlers and batsmen; I submit, as I did to the God I worshipped. But this time there is nothing unpredictable, nothing unknowable, nothing to fear. It is all so much more satisfying.
Tick…Perhaps the strap…tock…I hope not the cane…tick…But then again…tock…I like the cane… tick …I must be insane…tock.
The door opens.
I know the drill. I remove my hands from my head and lower my eyes, letting my vision drift over the familiar pattern of the Persian runner, through the doorway and across the highly polished oak floorboards. My feet follow their gaze until they are stopped by the obstacle of his desk.
I love his desk. It is so antique it even has an inkwell. When I am bending over it, I can see my face in the mirror shine, though I tend to screw my eyes shut rather than watch my contorted expressions. Rarely, he requires me to keep them open—for instance, on the day that he invited his Dominatrix friend to watch and take notes. I had to look her in the eye through twenty-four strokes of the tawse, an almost impossible task, though I am proud to say I managed it to their satisfaction.
He walks, always in a slow, stately fashion, from the door to the desk. He stands on the other side of it, looking down at me with his more-in-sorrow-than-anger face for a moment.
“Well, Beth, here we are again,” he says. “I wonder if the day will come when I do not have to waste my Sunday morning taking you to task over imperfections of behavior.” We both know it will not. “No answer to that, hmm? Well, it does seem a very distant prospect to me, as well. Now then.”
He seats himself and pulls over a large book, a leather-bound ledger. Large as it is, after two years it is already half filled with page after page of copperplate script, remembrances of crimes past and their associated sentences. He opens it, flipping the leaves to where the ribbon bookmark lies across a blank expanse.
Not blank for long though, for soon a fountain pen is slanted between his elegant fingers, dipped in the inkwell and put to the page. As he writes, he talks, his murmur following the looping progress of the pen.
“Sunday, June eighteenth,” he says, then he holds the pen in suspended animation and looks at me. “What should I write, do you think? Any ideas?”
I never reply to this at first. Although the rules of our contract are perfectly clear, and he is unfailingly consistent in his enforcement of them, my mind blanks as soon as I enter the study and does not refill again until much later. Somewhere behind my shivering anticipation and survival techniques, I am aware that I smoked a cigarette, or left the television on standby, but it is all too distant for immediate retrieval.
“I…can’t think, Sir,” I admit.
“Come on, Beth—you were the one that used to confess to priests. Did your memory fail you then, too?”
“No. But five Hail Marys…” I trail off, reddening.
“Quite a different proposition to six strokes of the cane. Yes, I do see that.”
Oh, god, not the cane. But I like the cane. But it hurts!
He sees the flicker in my eyes and chuckles slightly, his sadistic reflex flexing.
“Very well. I shall tally the scores.” His pen begins to document the evidence of my transgressions, committing my guilt to permanent record. “On Monday, you left the house without charging your mobile phone, so you were unobtainable for the space of three hours. On Wednesday, you ate only three of your five daily portions of fruit and vegetables. Yesterday, you did not go swimming…”
He looks sharply up at me. I had no idea he knew this, and I have made an incoherent exclamation. “I…” I cannot lie though. “Oh,” I say anticlimactically. “I just went to the shops instead. I didn’t think…you would mind.”
“I don’t,” he says. “I don’t mind if you go shopping. I do mind if a friend of yours calls me from the pool to ask me why you haven’t met her there as arranged and I can’t account for it, though. You know our rules. One of them relates to honesty. And if you genuinely thought I wouldn’t mind, why, then, did you not tell me at the time?”
Tough question. Because I wanted to be found out, flits through my head, but the rules of the game will not allow this kind of honesty. We do it because it’s hot, is not the dynamic that arouses us at all. We do it because it’s hot but we pretend that we don’t, is much closer, though still only partly articulating the subtlety and complexity of our compact.
“I didn’t think to,” is what I actually say.
“I didn’t think to, Sir,” he corrects me. My legs weaken and moisture seeps between them. I repeat the phrase. “I think we can categorize thoughtlessness under the heading of disrespect, Beth.”
I bite my lip. Disrespect always means the cane.
He writes out my sentence, then signs it with his usual flourish and pushes the ledger across the desk for my perusal.
“Read it,” he instructs.
“Ten strokes of the number-two strap for general disobedience, followed by six strokes of the cane.” This is never easy to say; my voice seems to blush as it reads. Sometimes he makes me repeat the words, but today he does not, which is one scrap of relief to hold close. I sign my name under his, my scrawl messy and disorganized beneath his perfectly reined-in script. He even has Dom handwriting.
“Good,” he says briskly, glancing at the book before opening the Drawer of Pain. “We shall proceed. Over the desk, please, Beth.”
I arrange myself carefully, hinged at the waist, my hands reaching to grasp the far rim of the desk, while he reaches into the drawer and withdraws just one of a vast range of nasty leather and wooden implements. This one is maroon leather, not the thickest nor the stiffest, but still capable of delivering a memorable sting. Ten strokes with it will warm and redden my bottom just sufficiently to prepare it for the cane.
Sinclair places the strap on the desk, rises and moves around behind me. I am wearing the light skirt and sheer white knickers he specified. He runs his hands over my jutting backside, rubbing at the whisper-thin cotton, pulling it taut and then letting it go slack before dealing two ringing smacks to each cheek.
“When will you learn, Beth,” he asks, lifting the hem to my waist so that only my tight mesh knickers offer any posterior protection, “that I take disciplinary matters very seriously indeed? Hmm?”
My only response is a yelp as a volley of faster smacks hails onto the barely there fabric.
“After two years of Sundays spent over this desk, one would expect something to have sunk in,” he says, peeling the knickers off my pinkening rump and letting them rest at midthigh. “And yet, here I am again, faced with the unenviable duty of visiting punishment on your recidivist bottom.” He sighs, a little over-theatrically, and I stifle a giggle. He does lay it on a mite too thick sometimes.
Amusement is soon replaced by clenching of muscles when he applies his hard, smooth hand to my bare bum, over and over and over until I can barely maintain my ignoble position. My breathy grunts cloud the perfect polish of the desk so that my nose tip is dampened, skidding around in time with the smacks. My fingers cling to the edge, but at the same time I must take care not to let my nails mark the surface. From this position it is difficult to focus on anything but the direction, speed and solidity of the next stroke, but somehow I have learned to keep a part of my mind concentrated on what Sinclair calls appropriate behavior.
No swearing. No badmouthing him. No kicking up with my feet or reaching behind to shield my bottom. I can plead all I like, but only the invocation of my safeword will make the slightest shred of difference.
None of this is unmanageable at first, but once the strap is flexed and flipped and brought to bear on my bottom, the alert level changes. I start to think about my breathing, I start to think about how many, mentally placing myself at the end of the ordeal before it begins. Always, about two or three strokes in, the question, Why do I do this,
why do I like this, blares across my brain in panicking neon, but I know the answer well enough to take another bracing breath and push my stoic behind back out.
The strap falls with its primitively satisfying crack, over and over. It is stiff enough to penetrate to my muscle, flexible enough to sting a red stripe across my skin. I know why this is so—I oil them myself once a week. On a Saturday morning, I take a spray bottle containing one part white vinegar to three parts linseed oil and use it to keep Sinclair’s straps and tawses and leather-covered paddles in the optimum condition for striping my backside. I spray on the mixture and rub it in with a soft microfiber cloth, then I soak the canes in a bucket of water to keep them pliable and whippy enough for Sir’s purposes.
I certainly seem to have performed my task with admirable efficacy this week—the strap slaps down, painting its localized sunburn in a pattern of regular rectangles across the fleshiest section of my rump. I make it to ten, then relax, twitching across the desktop like a fish on dry land, moaning my relief.
His fingertips brush the heated flesh, assessing its temperature.
“Nicely warmed up,” is the verdict. One finger ventures lower, into the depths, finding the lips swollen and sticky. “Hmm,” he says, as he always does. “Lesson not learned yet, Beth?”
“Oh, yes, Sir, it is,” I tell him, trying to split my sex on this one lean visitor, to enfold it and vacuum it up.
“Then, why…so…wet? Oh, no, I don’t think we are finished here.”
Ah, how cruelly he withdraws his foraging digit, moving around to the front of the desk and making me lick it clean.
“Stand up, Beth, and fetch me a cane. A nice thin one, I think.”
Fetching the cane: a simple enough act, and yet one that can never be unthinkingly performed, for it requires such a fine pitch of submission. I am absolutely conscious of what I am doing when I stand and make my way neatly to the umbrella stand where the canes hang. I select one, nice and thin as requested, and picture the imprint it will make on my body. Even knowing what is in store for me, I make a steady journey back to Sinclair and hold my offering out to him in upturned palms.