Slave Wife

by Frances Gaines Bennett

  Michael leaned tenderly over her. His authoritative voice swirled balefully in her brain. “It’s time to make you well.”

  She peered up at him, stupefied, and at the softly smiling man beyond. Michael straightened to his full forbidding height and turned slightly. “This is Mr. Smith. He is going to make it easier for you to fulfil your objectives.” Michael smiled and, as always, her emotions surged and she wanted to please him. Incomprehensibly, she heard his words, “I think you’ll like him.”

  But then, as was inevitable, his beautiful mouth turned downward. “You are to do exactly,” he repeated the word with autocratic emphasis, “exactly as he tells you.” Michael cordially shook the man’s hand, “I’ll leave you to it,” and strode toward the door. She heard the lock turn and turn again then the drop bolt’s metallic clank as Mr. Smith moved quietly toward her.

  Her impulse was to panic like a cornered animal. But as he closed the small distance she sensed her muscles and even her spirit relax. It was something about him. She seemed safer than any time since she’d left her parents’ house.

  He took her thin fingers in his large, strong hands and she felt their warmth move into her, penetrating even her bones. She looked up into the shimmering depths of his grey eyes and suddenly she realized how tired she was. All she wanted was to sit on his lap like a small child and go to sleep – forever.

  His calm voice was soporific but his words, when they finally adhered to her attention, shocked her to her core. “Have you thought about what you’ve done to bring yourself here? What is it you desire?” His eyes were firm but kind. “If you understand yourself it will be easier for you.”

  His words plunged her into paroxysms of self-doubt. She remembered the Christmas party. Had her desire for wealth and refinement, for Michael, been so overpowering she’d influenced her fate and his actions? Her husband, reluctantly she thought the word, was doing this all for her. He’d told her so many times. Could all this be her fault and … did she desire his torture?

  She was aware how meticulously Mr. Smith observed her. In a trance, she saw his lips begin to move again. “I know this has all been uncomfortable,” the words struck her like an ironic slap before they transformed in her mind, transformed to truth, “but you must understand – don’t you?” She nodded dumbly, anticipating his words, “that he is doing this all for you. He sees perfect beauty in you and is doing everything in his power to make it real.”

  He gently squeezed her hands. “You want it to become real, don’t you? You want to fulfil your wonderful potential?” His words carried a languorous, drug-like peace that continued from his warm hands through her limbs to her chest. She smiled timidly up at him. He gently released her fingers and straightened definitively, giving her right hand a paternal pat. “Good. We’re ready to begin. Please remove your clothes.”

  She stared horrified at him, snapped instantly back from the warmth to her perpetual chill of anxiety. He simply waited, dispassionately observing her until slowly, with quivering fingers, she moved to comply.

  His eyes never left her as she bent to remove her high heeled pumps, demurely lifted her skirt and unhooked her stockings front and back from the garters, then reached behind and struggled to lower the taut zipper. She looked at him plaintively, but when his gaze didn’t waiver she rose slowly to her feet, dropped the dress to the floor and stepped out, laying the dress carefully on the bed.

  What about the corset? Michael had mandated she remove it only to bathe. And each day Steve tugged it inexorably tighter. Her fingers strayed hesitantly to the difficult metal front hooks. Self-conscious confusion froze her in place with lowered eyes and blushing cheeks.

  “Remove the corset.” His cool voice acted on her like a cattle prod. With a clumsy jerk, she reached behind, fumbled with the doubled bow and loosened the laces. Inadvertently she sighed with relief as the hooks came apart in her fingers.

  Her cheeks flushed a lovely pink as she stood naked before him, eyes dropped shyly to the floor. He stepped forward and … she stifled her gasp as his fingers touched one of the deep corset marks at her waist. His lips twitched and she knew he saw and understood his profane effect. Her cheeks’ pink deepened to fuchsia – she felt the heat – and spread down her throat to her breasts’ tops.

  “I’m going to make some measurements,” he said. She realized he held a tape measure as he slipped it around her waist. He used the tape measure impartially as if she was inanimate, moving first upward around her ribcage.

  When his fingers brushed the underside of her breast she flinched, she couldn’t help herself. His smile was pleasant, even kindly. But he took a nipple between his thick fingers. This time she was prepared and didn’t stir, even fractionally, just stared across into his eyes – he was not much taller than she – half wondering, half beseeching. Until, with no apparent effort whatsoever, he brought his fingers together.

  Did she scream? She couldn’t remember. Her knees buckled beneath her yet she couldn’t fall, held upright only by unendurable pain. With that one nipple he jerked her upward until she balanced – almost – on her feet. One searing point was all there was.

  Through it his voice penetrated, unwaveringly warm and calm, “I will touch you wherever I desire and you will not move.” She didn’t believe his grip could tighten but pain building almost to numbness again consumed her. “Do you understand?” Mutely she nodded and the agony diminished. The pleasant smile never wavered.

  With dull compliance she stood still. The measurements began again, continuing upward to her throat and her head. At eye level, the tape wrapped her eyes, momentarily compressing her eyelids and blinding her with a fearful bolt of yellow lightening in the darkness. Next he moved downward to wrists, thighs, calves and ankles. Each measurement was noted in his PDA.

  With hope she knew to be faint, she watched him return the tape to his satchel. With the same motion he retrieved several shining steel objects. He turned her. “Please bend over. Spread your legs and place your hands on the bed.”

  She struggled, strained, to restrain her body’s shivering. What would he do to her? A silent tear dropped to the coverlet, making, she noticed incongruously, a small stain. The images passing through her mind were almost beyond her conception. Her husband refused to have sex with her, well, with her body. Would he ask someone else to do it for him? Would it be rape if her husband gave permission?

  She was terrified, weak with nausea, when she felt his fingers spread her bottom. Her fears were certainly going to be realized, she just knew it. Several more tears dropped to the coverlet. She was so rent with helplessness that her limbs felt dissociated. She tried to flex her fingers against the bed but they were numb and uncooperative.

  Her teardrops sounded like drumbeats in her ears. His fingers spread her vagina and she used every bit of her strength to quiet her body’s quivering. But she could not repress a small cry and lurch when something hard and cold went inside. He laid one hand flat on her spine above her lovely bottom’s abyss. His palm’s warmth seemed to counteract the coldness and even the device’s uncomfortable movement as he did something with his other hand. Then her tissues tried to rip apart.

  One shrill scream and she was silent. But her tears streamed onto the bedding. Michael never hurt her. Why did this man?

  And then, thank God!, the pain subsided. Her attention riveted down … there and she tried to understand. Nothing seemed to have changed. In fact, she felt air currents moving inside her opened vagina and also strange and, with chagrin she realized, pleasurable sensations.

  His soft shirt and, she felt herself redden, his body’s warmth rippled across her bare back as he leaned over her. His voice was quiet in her ear, “Don’t worry. Michael has instructed me not to stretch you.” In her mind, she saw his chilly smile. “He reserves that privilege for himself.”

  He lifted off her. Almost immediately she heard the click of metal on metal. Something poked her, this place and that, inside. Suddenly, without warning and with shockin
g intensity, something indescribable – like a giant tidal wave – happened inside her. Again she screamed. Now, though, the scream was rapturous. It felt so good! Her breaths burst out in huge gasps and her chest heaved for many almost unendurable minutes – or so it seemed to her. All her pent-up tension, every emotion she hadn’t dared recognize, exploded out of her in giant convulsions.

  Still, it was over far too soon. When her body calmed, she yearned to beg him, “Please Sir! Do it again!” but was too timid. But he did, without her pleas. And it happened again, shaking her uncontrollably almost to the shattering of both substance and consciousness.

  This time, as her body heaved with aftershocks that surged all the way to her throat, he said, “Good girl!” His tone was that of a trainer to his well-trained dog. Her body had relaxed, become wonderfully languid when he slipped the now-warmed metal out of her vagina – as always, pleasure short-lived.

  To her shame, his fingers were opening her rear and sliding cold metal into that hole. Worse, it ached and pinched. Once again her muscles constricted into anguished knots. “Never peace,” she silently lamented, labouring not to writhe away from the awful device. But the metal didn’t stop moving deeper. His hand tickled her bottom and there was stretching and pain, strange and also unbearable.

  Then her face flamed hot and red when he pushed something inside her, even deeper between the metal jaws. The thing, whatever it was, probed deeper and deeper into that dark, dirty hole and, replete with shame and fear that quite literally grabbed at her entrails sickening her, she tensed against it. Endlessly it penetrated her, delving and poking, until she couldn’t imagine it going further … but still it did.

  Without warning it stopped and withdrew. In scalding mortification, her imagination vividly painted the fouled instrument’s withdrawal and his requisite cleansing or disposal of it. She couldn’t bear him seeing or God forbid! touching her filth. Yet, her dismay mingled with something else, with a strange, forbidden pleasure as the retracting thing sucked at her tissues. The pleasure moved deep inside her and her humiliation increased a thousand-fold.

  “You may stand,” he said when she emptied of metal. Shyly she stood, still facing away from him.

  “Turn.” She recognized his economy of speech as customary. With lowered head, she obeyed. Her downcast eyes snuck to the formidable silver metal items on the small table, nervously trying to discern what violated her … and, she shivered with disgust, how dirty it was. But she couldn’t tell.

  He lifted something long and narrowly rectangular with a needle sharp end. It spread apart in his hands into two flat sides of a triangle. With head lowered she couldn’t avoid seeing the points move downward. She was tense as a board when one point pricked one side of her clitoris. Quickly, fearfully, he rotated the device from side to side, to top and bottom taking what she assumed – and then realized to be correct when he scribbled them onto a piece of paper with one hand while holding the device still with the other – to be innumerable measurements. The needle points hurt but her fear that they would pierce her was far worse. Methodically he began to measure – every minute part of her, moving meticulously around her genitalia then upward to her breasts.

  She watched, morbidly fascinated, as the point approached her right nipple’s very centre then, though she was somehow certain it was simply a gratuitous enjoyment for him and not truly part of the process, penetrated. True to her dire expectation, the pain was sharp and cutting. From a distance she watched and felt and so wanted to scream, but didn’t – at least didn’t think she did. He simply continued his intricate measurements, dispassionately rotating the implement around the terrible notch of pain. Then he moved to her throat, hampering her breathing with her fear, and finally, upward to her head.

  It was to her head he gave most attention, taking dozens of measurements from as many direction and angles. The instrument’s point poked her like a pincushion – her nostrils, her ear lobes, even her eye sockets, no spot was exempt. All the while she held herself still, ominously waiting for a mistake that maimed.

  At last he closed the device and set it with the others. In relief, she sucked in breath she’d been holding tensed as severely as her muscles then dragged it in again when he opened the big bag and reached in.

  When he turned, his smile was customarily bottomless. “It’s not complete,” his brow furrowed microscopically, “or perfect, but it’ll have to do for now.”

  She resisted staring at the object in his hand. It looked like something from an old Frankenstein movie – three fragmented bands of shining steel held together horizontally by hinges and locking rings and vertically by long screws and turnbuckles, the whole threaded with plastic ended wires.

  She stood meekly, eyes lowered, as he tugged it over her head. A band fit tight against her forehead. Another was far too thick, far too snug at her throat. The most puzzling was a band with a hinge and lock on either side of her mouth. He adjusted this screw and that.

  Not until she heard a lock snap did panic strike. It was irrational, she told herself. But she suddenly choked with overpowering claustrophobia, with terror her breathing would be stopped. She yearned to grab something, hold tight and scream and then to weep when she knew unequivocally she had nothing, neither physical nor indeed psychic, to hold onto. She did none of these, simply struggled to remain upright.

  Enshrouded in nauseating dread, she saw him reach deep into the big bag and lift out a bread loaf sized black box. Again the unfathomable smile as he hooked the headpiece wire’s plastic ends into their complement from the box. Her eyes were still lowered and her head and stomach still swirled but she could not help but notice the box’s dials and switches as his fingers went to them.

  “Sit,” he said and pressed her onto the bed with one hand. Again the cool smile, “so I don’t have to pick you up from the floor.”

  Her stomach heaved … and before she could vomit it became far worse. A strange burning jolt raced through her jaw and the experimentation began.

  Over the months, Delia visited Karen’s mother often. They both missed Karen terribly.

  Delia simply forged ahead, finishing her last year in high school and preparing for college at the University of Minnesota. Like many young rural Americans, she was intensely grateful to have state-subsidized access to a superb university.

  Karen’s mother, though, seemed seriously diminished by her daughter’s absence. Her once pretty face and body, already desiccated by years of farm life, now appeared stripped of life, shrunken and aged. A hundred new lines carved the peripheries of eyes and mouth. She moved as if under some unbearable strain, head always lowered and shoulders increasingly stooped.

  Through the late spring and greening summer Delia gently probed but received no answer. Always a few tears dropped from Mrs. Johansson’s eyes at the questions. Ultimately, though, she straightened her sagging shoulders, dried her eyes and said – reassuring herself, Delia invariably thought – “I’m sure it’s for the best. He’s such a good match.” Then she sipped her tea and shifted the subject to Delia.

  One perfect summer day, Delia’s battered baby blue Ford Escort slid to a stop in a swirl of gravel and dust next to the many bloomed flower bed flanking the porch stairs. Karen’s mother sat in the whitewashed porch swing, a creamy page in her thin fingers. Delia paused on the centre stair, admiring the teeming stalks of fragrant blooming lavender, pink Echinacea, yellow and white daisies alongside pastel roses and imperious yellow sunflowers, until she noticed Mrs. Johansson’s devastated expression.

  Her heart in her throat, she raced up the remaining stairs and crouched next to the swing, throwing her arm around the older woman’s shoulders. “What’s wrong?”

  “She says she can’t come to visit us until she finishes,” the voice dripped with anguished sarcasm, “her training.” It quavered with heavy, unshed tears. “She says maybe,” now her voice shot up several decibels, “if he says it’s all right, we can visit her at Christmas.”

  Mrs. Johans
son’s eyes raised to Delia’s then dropped in a flood of tears. The letter fluttered to the porch floor from her stiff fingers. “Look at her handwriting.” She choked on a slew of sobs as Delia retrieved the thick paper. “It looks like a spider wrote it! She …” more sobs rose toward hysteria. “He’s making her weak – sick!”

  Delia lowered herself to the seat and gave Mrs. Johansson’s hand a small, determined tug. The woman’s liquid gaze was pulled toward the girl’s. “Mrs. J,” Delia’s inflection was resolute, “it’s time for you to tell me what’s going on.”

  And Karen’s mother at last told her.

  When the woman finished, her face hidden in haggard hands, Delia sat silent, stupefied and helpless. After some indeterminate time, from somewhere deep within, her own thoughts at the awful wedding dinner replayed loudly in her mind. She’d sworn to herself she would help her friend – her back stiffened – and she would.

  When the metal garment was finished Mr. Smith ran a battery of tests to verify functionality parameters.

  Most physically uncomfortable and cumbersome, of course, was the headpiece. Light, yes, but still so, well, much more than embarrassing. Her husband trusted her so little he locked her head in obstructive metal – in a cage! It wasn’t heavy weight pulling down her head. She was profoundly ashamed.

  And then the waist cinch. It was beautiful, like exotic lingerie, but squeezed her brutally, reorganizing her insides she was sure, and forcing out her breath.

  The rest could, if allowed, be remarkably comfortable, even the flexible probes that penetrated places she couldn’t bear to consider. Mr. Smith tested those too. Her mind lingered on the memories. Those strange contractions inside her. She’d been terrified and humiliated at once at her loss of control. Yet even out of control he made her body thrill in ways she’d never experienced.

  Michael apparently had no use for that function. Though he repeatedly professed his desire, nay, need for her happiness, he’d given no indication of interest in her physical pleasure. But he did have use for the probes.