Following events happened so fast she wasn’t certain of them. Her next awareness was of him standing above her, fully clothed once again. “Congratulations. You passed.” With silent grace he moved to his desk, sat and began going through papers, ignoring her.
The beating and rape had not only stunned but confused her. She had no idea what to do so simply relied on habit. It took her several minutes to sit up. She crawled half naked to the small dressing room and toilet and used the single flat bench to pull herself standing. The toilet. She stared befuddledly at the half open door for an indeterminate time period. Hadn’t she heard something about peeing after sex?
The toilet seat was cold but comforting, kind of like sitting on an icepack. Better, she could relax her sore muscles onto it. She was a little surprised when pee flowed effortlessly. That felt good too. She reached between her legs to wipe herself and discovered the stretch was much more difficult. She didn’t do a great job but didn’t care. Without thinking, she glanced at the toilet paper. Traces of red spotted it.
Her black jeans and sweater were on their customary wall hook. Gingerly she sat on the bench and pulled her pants on, blearily wondering about her underpants but again not really caring. Her sweater was harder. Certain arm positions seemed impossible. At last, she stretched the garment low enough to accommodate the entrance of lowered arms.
Cautiously she rose to her feet and tottered into and across the dojo. Sensei still sat occupied at his desk. Her coat had fallen behind the bench by the entrance. She winced when she bent to pick it up. Slowly and methodically she wrapped a long scarf around her neck and slid her aching arms into the coat sleeves, her feet into her short, soft boots. No socks. Too much trouble. Before she left, as was the custom, she bowed to the altar and to Sensei.
Mid-winter’s early dark, overcast and starless, made the city depressingly gloomy and cold. She shivered and pulled her coat closer. Out on the street, passers-by looked oddly at her – or seemed to. Maybe they thought she was drunk or drugged or even mentally ill as she stumbled under the highway and back onto campus.
She was so tired, that was paramount. She had to make it down to her dorm, Middlebrook Hall, at the south end of the West Bank – a dozen blocks. Not that far, really. Doable, probably. Right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot, were her only focuses.
Underneath each footfall questions … and guilt murmured insistently. She’d wanted him. Had she teased him? Why hadn’t she told him to stop? Was this her fault? And what was she going to do about it?
She’d only just crossed 2nd Street to the big parking ramp across from the Law School – barely started her long walk – when she had to sit, immediately. The door to a stairwell was to her left and she lurched toward it. She was bent almost double against the stair rail, trying to lower herself onto a stair, when the door opened and a girl with pale, shoulder length brown hair came into the stairwell. Delia stared, trying to make sense of the muddled vision. “Karen?” Hope and also love surged inside her. “Is it really you?”
She heard the girl’s urgency, “What’s wrong? Are you okay?” A slim arm circled her shoulder and everything went black.
Sensei was attacking, pushing her, jarring her aching body. Delia couldn’t stop him, couldn’t even cry, just had to take it. A sweet concerned voice penetrated her hopelessness. “You need to open your eyes.”
She realized she was being gently shaken. Her eyelids were leaden but she managed to lift them. Very close – so close – was the beautiful face that motivated every one of her activities – her life – Karen.
Her vision cleared and hope died. It wasn’t Karen. “You’re not Karen,” the syllables were awkward in her mouth. “Who are you?”
The girl was shorter and slimmer than Delia’s memory of her beloved friend. She leaned toward, almost over Delia, clearly worried. “My name is Anna. I think you fainted – well, almost, you kept drifting in and out. In the stairwell. I didn’t know where else to take you.” Delia slowly turned her pounding head to survey her surroundings. They were sitting in an unfamiliar car, the girl in the driver’s seat and Delia in the front passenger’s. “What happened to you?”
Delia thought about the question. How could she answer? Her silence was only from inner turmoil but Anna didn’t press. So Delia let the subject drift into her mind’s grey wasteland. “Where do you live?”
“In a dorm – Middlebrook Hall.”
Anna was thoughtful. “You can’t rest in a dorm. What if I take you to my house?” When Delia didn’t answer, Anna put the car in gear and drove out of the ramp. Delia laid her head back and drifted off.
Her eyes flew open at the touch on her arm. Then she remembered.
Anna helped her out of the car then up a few red brick stairs onto a porch and into a living room. Delia was not thinking or, for that matter, seeing too clearly so she didn’t really discern the house’s features – only had an idea it was warm and cosy. Anna held her up with one hand and pulled off her coat with the other.
To the left, in the wall’s midpoint, was the arched entrance to a hallway. Anna guided her through. The door to a bathroom, tiled in the small white and black hexagonal tile popular sixty years ago, stood ajar.
“Do you need to pee?”
Delia turned her attention to those damaged parts. Was that impulse there amid the other throbbing sensations? “Yes. I think so.”
Anna guided her into the small bath. “Can you stand?” When Delia nodded assent, Anna slowly released her to unzip and lower the jeans. Delia heard Anna’s rapid intake of breath and expected a comment. None came. Instead Anna helped Delia sit and then gently wiped her when she finished – a considerate gesture that Delia was too exhausted to reject. Delia was struck by the sweetness in Anna’s tone. “Since your jeans are down already I’ll take them off here.” So gently, her warm hands like caresses on Delia’s aching legs, Anna slipped off each boot and pulled the stiff fabric over one foot then the other.
In a small bedroom, Anna tried to help Delia out of her sweater. When Delia cried out and tears streaked her cheeks, Anna said, “Don’t worry. We’ll leave the sweater for now,” and eased her under a down comforter. She quickly stripped naked and slid in beside. Her warmth comforted Delia for her few remaining moments of consciousness.
Delia stared in desperation into those dark eyes. She was furious both at him and at her own helplessness. In blind rage she lashed out, not caring about the outcome … and the punch connected. She felt the give of soft flesh and heard his cry.
No. It wasn’t his cry. Suddenly she was awake. The girl – Karen? No, not Karen, she remembered – was clutching her abdomen, curled into a loose ball under the covers. Delia’s mind cleared for the first time in … how long? “I’m so sorry! Did I hurt you?”
What did she see in the girl’s, Anna’s, eyes? She endeavoured to define the strange emotions. A sort of yielding satisfaction or – Delia couldn’t make sense of it – pleasure?
The girl looked up at her out of wide, pale brown fawn’s eyes. “It’s all right.” Her rounded lips curved into a timid smile. “I like it.” She fell silent, her gaze searching Delia’s face. For approval? Or, Delia was dumbstruck, was she flirting?
Anna seemed to shift gears. “You were raped, weren’t you?” She reached out a soft hand and touched Delia’s pubic mound.
Delia restrained a flinch. This was all too strange and yet – her vagina tightened with simultaneous pain and pleasure – somehow compelling.
“Would it help if you raped me?”
The idea shocked and also bewildered Delia. “I can’t!” Lamely she added. “I’m a girl.”
The covers fell to Anna’s naked hips when she sat up, turned and pulled something black and strangely shaped from the bedside table drawer. Delia found herself unable to look away from the delicate curve of waist and breasts and the pale skin. Anna held the “thing” out.
Delia hesitantly reached for it, managing only to grasp the leather straps. Though she knew �
� guessed – what it was, she’d never seen anything like it. Two black rubber penises, one larger than the other, connected end to end against a leather triangle from which the straps hung.
Anna’s diffident voice penetrated her ferment. “Would you like me to help you put it on?”
For several minutes, Delia looked toward the object, seeing nothing. Ambivalence, anxious and exhilarating, swirled through her. She shouldn’t, she told herself. Something unacknowledged made the decision. She handed the thing to Anna.
“Can you get up? Knees will work.” Delia knelt on the bed facing Anna. “How are your arms? Can we take the sweater off?” Delia’s arms were not as sore as the night before. She hurt but the sweater came slowly off. Anna’s eyes widened. “Oh my God!” She touched Delia’s skin and again Delia felt excitement’s clutch. “You poor dear!”
Delia followed Anna’s gape to see purple bruises blotching her torso and limbs. Anna’s fingers moved again, this time onto the breasts’ swell. She bent her head and tenderly at first then sensually kissed the discolorations. Delia watched the bowed head and softly straying lips with astonished and quickly growing arousal. When Anna took an erect nipple between her lips, Delia lifted her up. “Put that thing on me.”
Anna smiled and offered Delia the smaller penis. “Put this inside you please.” When the rubber penis slipped easily into Delia’s astonishingly lubricated vagina, Anna’s eyebrow’s arched but she didn’t comment. She moved close, avoiding the protruding rubber, and buckled the straps around Delia’s hip. Delia felt the girl’s lovely breasts press against her pelvic bone.
The straps bit into her cleft and hips, pulling the rubber phallus firmly inside her. Again, Delia was aware of the pressing combination of pleasure and pain. She peered downward, amazed at having a weapon giant and even blacker than Sensei’s. Carefully she reached out her hand and touched then stroked it all along its great length. Her hand’s exterior motion caressed, teased her own vagina to its bruised depths. It felt good. And it made her feel – what? Strong? Dominant? Male? Yes, she thought, all of those. And also Right.
She raised her eyes to see Anna watching her. The expression was odd. Eager?
Even stranger, Delia was struck with the desire to fuck Anna from behind, to breed her like an animal. Delia grabbed Anna’s silken hair hard and tight, stretching it from the scalp and tilting her head far back. The lovely girl’s narrow back bowed. Her buoyant young breasts and lithe pelvis curved to touch Delia’s flank.
Anna made a noise, complaint but the no that really does mean yes. Delia kissed her roughly on the lips and forced her around.
Her hand went to the phallus like a man’s would, wrapping it to guide it into its target. Like a man she felt for Anna’s pussy, spread it and pushed several fingers inside. She pressed the rubber head inside the girl and with a hard thrust forced it deep using Anna’s pale rounded hips for leverage. Anna screamed and Delia felt the rubber’s resistance against the vaginal walls. “This,” she understood in a burst of anguish and power that meshed with her forced withdrawal and re-entry and with the sensations in her own vagina, “is what it feels like to rape.”
She beat the girl with her manhood as Sensei had beaten her, her hands gripping the girl’s willowy white waist as Sensei had gripped her own arms. The girl screamed and cried and then the resistance lessened and she moaned and writhed in pleasure as Delia fucked her, fucked herself. Through the penises she felt Anna’s – and her own – arousal increase until the two of them became elemental beings, moving in violent rhythms as old and intoxicating as time.
It was all tumult. Delia experienced the bed heave underneath them with their motion and noise. The door flew open and a stocky young woman in only a big T-shirt came through. Giant pendulous breasts with nipples as big as saucers pressing through the shirt’s thin fabric obtruded into Delia’s awareness. Delia heard her voice above Anna’s cries. “Very pretty. I’m next.”
Monday morning Delia arrived early, before the others. She went straight up close to him and looked up into his eyes. “You are the best and I want to train with you. But if you rape me again, I’m finished.”
She didn’t know what she expected. Yet she was not surprised by Sensei’s response. His even white teeth and the whites of his eyes gleamed in amused satisfaction through the half dark. His tone was neutral and at the same time completely comprehensible – both cool and warm. “Excellent.”
Chapter Twelve
“It’s time to get you up, dear.” The woman was lean and wiry with defined muscles bulging in thin arms. She lowered the protective bedrail with a loud click.
Karen’s eyelids trembled and slowly, tentatively opened. Her throat was dry and her voice tiny and plaintive in her own ears. “But my back,” she whimpered, “and my arms and legs hurt.”
The woman was sympathetic. “I know, dear. But we need to get you moving so you heal quickly.” She put her arm behind Karen’s shoulder and helped her sit up. When the sharp pain she’d experienced on earlier attempts didn’t materialize – only a deep, dull ache – Karen relaxed a little and tried to cooperate. “Now swing your legs over the edge.”
Her body seemed unbearably unstable and vulnerable. She expected intense stabbing pain to strike at anytime, but it didn’t. Only the throbbing malaise she’d experienced incessantly, waking and sleeping, in stillness or with every small motion, for more than a month. She looked hopefully at the physical therapist. Maybe it was time to move again. She sincerely wanted to.
The woman lifted her to her feet. Again Karen expected intolerable pain and again it was deep but bearable. She took a tentative step, leaning heavily against the therapist. “Very good!” The woman observed her with intense solicitousness and, Karen was certain she saw it, well-disguised pity … and disgust. “Today you only need to take a few steps – let’s see how many. Once you can walk down the hall we’ll start working on teaching your back to be flexible with one less vertebrae. Then, when the bones in your arms and legs have solidly re-knit we’ll do some strength training.”
She managed ten steps forward, turned, and was almost back to the bed when Michael entered the room. He strode quickly to her side and displaced the therapist, helping her to stand straight while his eyes travelled painstakingly up her body barely camouflaged by a thin long sleeved pink gown. He looked into her face with an expression of unparalleled love. “My darling, you are exquisite! Perfect!” He helped her gently back into bed.
Tenderly he adjusted the pillows at her back and pressed his full lips to her pale ones. She fought to restrain a wince at the pressure on her still-fragile spine. He was too enthusiastic to notice or didn’t see fit to. He took her chin between his fingers. “Aren’t you pleased with the surgery?” He held her chin too firmly for her to nod or speak but no response seemed required. “Not only are you the perfect height now but you lost the rest of the weight.” His smile stretched unnaturally wide before her and with a hidden shiver she remembered the beast.
“I brought you a present in honour of our success.” He pulled a square blood red box from his inner jacket pocket and set it on her lap. Gingerly she lifted it and tried to snap it open. Even that small exertion was too much, so he opened it for her. She gasped then gave a small cry at the many stabs of pain. On a black satin pillow lay a narrow white diamond necklace with a huge, pendant, emerald-cut pink diamond at its centre.
He lifted the necklace and laid it above the gown’s low neckline. He waved his fingers for the therapist to bring a mirror and held it in front of her. “For you. To wear when I take you dancing at the Rainbow Room.”
She stared at her thin pale face.
Ward watched Michael shepherd Karen between tables in the discreetly lit old restaurant, hard in the slight but remarkably formidable maitre d’s wake.
The restaurant had never aspired to any fad nor, in this age, to even the semblance of modernity. It none-the-less remained one of the finest and most expensive restaurants in Washington DC. Through its g
ilded old-fashioned interior every DC decision-maker passed at some time during the various cycles of the Federal Government and the organizations servicing it.
Monsieur Paul’s choice of a path through the dining room’s congested centre rather than its sparsely populated periphery piqued Ward’s interest. In the several minutes Le Grand Monsieur took to guide the couple across the human sea, Ward examined the ornate, dimly lit banquettes running along the walls. Many contained a sole occupant – each a man, each a pale, puffy antiquated candidate for gout (if gout still existed this close to the 21st century), each otherwise non-descript though clearly affluent, and each rigorously undisturbed.
His eye travelled to the more populous banquettes and stopped. Two men sat looking in his direction, heads inclined together. Ward recognized one, a long-faced man with glasses who he’d met briefly at the FBI. “One more of the city’s invisible personages,” he wryly ruminated. His brow lifted fractionally. “Not at all like his companion.”
The second man could have been a dark angel in a Renaissance, or perhaps even more appropriately Goya, painting. He was beautiful and sublime, almost inhumanly so, with great, rapturous black eyes and black curls slightly longer than the convention. He, and his companion also, caught Ward’s gaze and nodded congenially before again plunging into discussion. Ward nodded and turned his attention.
Michael looked exceptional, as always. He towered above the diners, his intense smoky eyes fixed solicitously on his wife from under an elegantly unruly mop of thick sandy hair as he guided her with a large, manicured hand placed gently on her fine neck’s nape. Though no doubt richer than most of the room, in this realm he was just one of the crowd and, thus, ignored.
With a flash of realization Ward recognized the restaurant’s unique standard of celebrity. Monsieur Paul applied an identical lofty standard to each diner. Again Ward glanced at the banquettes. Only Paul’s regulars – the only distinction he required – received higher attention.
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