“I’m married,” Delila said. “I don’t know how I can take pleasure when I have a husband that I love who is already suffering for my crimes.”
“Married, still?” Lexia said. “After your crimes, he still wants you?” Hardly believable.
“I’m to have conjugal visits,” Delila added, as she hoped for some sympathy.
“My, how interesting?” was Lexia’s comment.
“How shall I ever face my husband, bad enough to face him for my adultery, but after I’m used … ?”
Lexia thought a moment about the young woman’s plight. It had been a long time since anyone in Outer Island was married. No one subscribed to New Victoria’s rigid mandates, and to have a married woman in their midst made them all violators of a most extreme sort. The idea intrigued the impertinent Madam, even as it was fraught with personal remembrance.
“I’m afraid I don’t have an answer for you, Delila,” she finally replied with a good dash of kindness in her voice. “This makes Degas duplicity particularly inspired, even though it makes the moral dilemma more extraordinary for you. But perhaps my original advice is the best. Accept your fate, don’t try to wrestle with it. When you face your husband, face him as a willing submissive to the disciplines proscribed by law. You know you can tell him nothing of this anyway. I’m sure Degas procured your silence. Your two lives will simply have to remain separate.” The woman considered it an odd and somewhat amusing dilemma, though she was reasonably serious in her remarks for Delila’s sake. “One thing’s for certain though: you have no choice but to obey Degas. You can be sure that once you’re in Outer Island, there’s no returning to the other world before your stint in over. If it’s ever over. You can’t even think of it.”
Lexia returned to her task, swabbing Delila’s fresh wounds with disinfectant. Delila continued the little shrieks when the pain of it hit.
“If it’s over?” she repeated back in a whisper.
“Don’t worry over it, darling. Two years is a long time. Even in this suspended arena away from the maddening life, things happen.”
Chapter Thirteen
Delila returned to the cages that night to display all her marks as she danced for Degas’s guests behind the gilded bars. Returned to the cages that night and every night thereafter for a month, she endured the stares of men and women whose gaze was purely lecherous, and whose words were meant to provoke her more. Yet, by that second night, after her second caning, she had a new scheme, playing games with her admirers, coyly teasing them with her thrusting loins, while her mind did wicked things to them that averted her overt and ever present anger. It was an accommodation that would work as long as she remained just another bird dancing in her gilded cage.
Degas watched her from the doorways of the vast chamber of sensuality, his eyes often darting her way to sense what emotions Delila Armand was communicating that night. She may be trying to walk some fine moral line, she may be trying to define herself a martyr perhaps; but he knew her lusts better than she did, and he would prove it to her. How fortunate that the double dealing, hypocritical State gave him so much time to prove the very existence of things that they tried so purposefully to deny. His only regret was that he couldn’t rip away the rooftop from Outer Island, and show the world what took place in the cavernous depths of the human soul.
On a night six weeks after her arrival in Outer Island, Fier led Delila from her room to the chamber floor and drew down her gilded cage as he’d done day after day after day. Opening the door, she turned to go inside where her night’s work would begin, when the valet stopped her.
“Stay here,” he said.
Instead of completing the familiar ritual, Fier drew a set of manacles from the ceiling, and attached them to Delila’s cuffed wrists.
“What are you doing?” she whispered, even as a crowd was gathering around them to watch.
Fier smiled. “It’ll be a surprise,” he said. Something foul in his voice and attitude alarmed her; her mind freely moving to memories of her nights in the cage, when from out of nowhere, lights flashed and the sounds of drums and clanging instruments were heard, and in some corner of the chamber, Degas and his fleet of lordly servants appeared to wreak despicable things on surrendering bodies. Men and women, Degas’s whores were singled out for punishment, for shameless scenarios and taunting humiliation—not in the leather rooms where such acts took place each night, but right there in the main chamber were everyone could see. She’d seen naked men tied, bound to naked men and left hanging for hours, women with legs and arms stretched wide apart and whipped both front and back, and both sexes tied to a bed that could be moved about the floor, where their bodies became the centerpiece of raucous vulgarities—free-for-alls at the hands of any guest who wanted to use them.
In the still, unthinking moments after Fier left her tied in front of her opened cage, Delila wondered what trial she’d endure to make her one with her accomplices in crime.
***
There were no drums, no crowd uproar, no scurrying mice-like activity to preface Delila’s initiation. There was an invisible circle around her in the middle of the chamber of light and sound. No one crossed the line, not a stray hand, not a single body brushing by to jog her naked thigh or exposed breast. Her outstretched arms ached after five minutes of suspension, making Delila believe she couldn’t hold on a minute more. If only she could close her eyes, close out the world around her and float away in her mind; yet the immutable command, not to avert her gaze from those that would gaze on her, kept her mind focused outward, not on the inward path where her thoughts would journey.
“Ah, has my little bird flown her cage?”
She heard Degas’s voice behind her speaking softly to her alone, as his body pressed itself against her back. The feel of his leather pants against her bottom revealed the way his presence suddenly ripped a lightening path through body and limbs.
He reached around and jerked on her ring.
“Ahh!” she gasped sharply.
“You learn slower than you should for a slut as far gone as you,” he murmured, as he moved around her body, and greeted her face to face. “Your anger keeps you from understanding the beauty here.”
The crowd around them grew larger. People behind the first rows on tiptoe craning necks to see the couple: the towering dark man in leather, and the diminutive spark of clamoring female darkness that dangled before him, lurching against her bonds as the two stared eyes locked as if embracing.
“There are slow ways to learn your craft and faster ones,” Degas whispered. She looked up as he peered down, their lips so close it would be painful not to kiss. “It’s time your body was breached, destroying the idea that you’re some kind of holy saint.”
“A saint?” she whispered back.
“A martyr,” he replied. “I hate martyrs.”
Delila smelled Fier behind her, picking up his earthy fragrance from the myriad of body smells around her. He pressed himself against her back as Degas had done, one thigh lifting her groin to Degas groin, the dark man’s prick pulled from his leather, the thick long handle of authority pressing at her center.
Degas lifted her higher still, parting her thighs wide, and then pushed himself inside her cunt, while Fier behind her pushed in the opposing direction to make the breach firm and sure. Degas pummeled her erratically, with no even stroke, no thought of generating a steady rhythm. He thrust with zeal, with a scowl on his face she could not avoid, with his eyes fixed on her in a menacing stare of happiness. Each thrust provoked pain, each brief rocking motion of three bodies fucking in unison made Delila’s body ecstatic. When the rocking ceased, she were more swift thrusts of Degas’s enormous prick, violating places in her channel that had never been probed.
At the last, he was fearlessly beating his hips against her, as Fier still held her steady from behind. One after another, the unremitting thrusts brought Degas to a triumphant finish, while Delila was only beginning to achieve some climax of her own.
&nbs
p; With an expression of victorious celebration, Degas backed away, not bothering to sheath his slowly receding prick.
“Take her to a cubicle,” he ordered the valet. “It’s time she paid me back for the pleasure.”
Delila’s eyes followed the master out of the door, while dozens of hungry souls were making their way to the paymaster to buy time with the newly initiated whore.
***
Delila: I came to some peace in my cubicle home. My anger began to diminish. For six weeks in the cage, and the weeks before that, I’d been without pleasure, my cunt feeling like a hollow place that was shriveling up like an old woman’s breasts. Except for my moments with Lexia and Mira when they casually breached my opening door in a fit of passionate revelry—long about the wee hours of the night when the carnival had died down and I was led from my cage to my bed—I had no satisfaction in my cavernous center.
Night after night, one after another, the men came into the tiny, glass-walled enclosure; it was heaven. Lying back against the cushioned pallet where I worked, taking my customers to six minutes of bliss, was paradise for me, and a way to heal my mind, which had been so wounded by the grotesque mutation of morality that Outer Island brought me to.
To start, I never heard their words. I refused to listen to their comments, their lewd remarks, their bitter refrains, their guilt, their personal woes, and even the gentle choruses that occasionally tried to comfort me. I nodded at them happily, as a good whore would, and invited them to pleasure in my marked cunt. They left seeing the smile of satisfaction on my face, and were satisfied themselves.
Nightly I orgasmed five or six times, sometimes letting several men take me, allowing the amplitude to build before I’d let the switches out and the electric charges fill my overcharged body. I could be listless and passive, or like a hungry animal devouring the bodies that labored over mine. I was a whore of many moods, my captive servants of pleasure never knowing what they’d find when they took their keys and unlocked the glass door to my Spartan boudoir. It was a small kingdom to rule, but I did rule as the queen of men’s pleasures and their most sinister and perverted fantasy.
In time, I began to hear their voices speaking, and I listened to their words. The odd things they’d say as if fucking me they were flaunting the Law in the faces of those demons who’d written it. Such wicked looks, such ghastly, bestial expressions of outrageous glee, when they’d look at my loins before they even began, and caressed my ring adorned labia with their mouths as if they were feasting on the essence of life itself.
What great wonders and fine gratification they received from tenderly caressing the centerpiece of my great shame, I do not know. I wouldn’t wrestle with it. Just as Lexia counseled me, I wouldn’t wrestle over anything, but the pleasure my own body would know.
Perhaps Degas was wise to have me twelve hours a day fornicating in my glass cubicle. Perhaps he knew that I’d find the only peace I’d known in months from the repeated physical copulation. Perhaps he knew that only by plunging into the abyss of my body would I reconcile a mind that had been battered by constant storms.
Yet, regardless of whether Degas understood what I had to gain by giving up all virtue, I did understand. There was no greater contentment, no finer serenity to be found than what I discovered in that place. For reasons beyond my comprehension, my anger ceased to consume me, and I would be forever grateful to him for the gift.
At last, I understood what I witnessed as I danced inside my gilded cage, when the drums would beat and the sounds around me would go awry, and I’d see despicable things acted out on the stages before me. I realized, seeing into the eyes of those I thought were victims to the incredible lusts, they were not victims at all, but the kings and sovereigns and sorceresses of carnal pleasure. Experiencing my own serenity, I understood the expressions of tranquility on their faces.
Chapter Fourteen
After twelve hours, Fier, attending to her as he’d done for weeks, led Delila away from her cubicle. Unlike all the other days however, this time he didn’t take her back to her room and the empty rest her bed would give, but took her instead to Degas who was sitting back in his old chair with his feet up on the desk so that Delila could see the mud caked about his boots.
He sat up and looked at her officially, when he saw her enter, and Fier leave her. She couldn’t remember how many days it had been she’d laid eyes on his face. They had been moving in different circles even as Degas was taking care of his kingdom.
“You’re looking well,” Degas said.
“I am,” she replied.
He smiled, though the nature of his smile was undisclosed; it was a gentle smirk, as if he had some small knowledge that she didn’t have.
“You’re being collared and chained for transport south.”
“What?” Delila queried back to him, all peace and smiles flown away in an instant before the man went on to explain.
“Your first conjugal visit with Armand will last three days,” Degas went on. “There will be a day of travel at either end, so you’ll be gone five days from my Island. I trust you remember the rules, Delila Armand. I’m not certain you’d survive a breach of silence.”
“Is that a threat of death?” Delila inquired.
“That’s whatever you take it to mean,” Degas replied. “Just don’t be getting any ideas that your time here is nearly over.”
“I wouldn’t want it to be,” Delila said. The idea of there being any place but this place, anywhere in the world but this world, astounded her, as if she was blind and deaf, and all of a sudden awakened to the knowledge of something beyond these walls for the first time.
A small, but jubilant smile appeared on Degas’s face, hearing her message.
“Then go now,” he said. “Fier will prepare you.”
Chapter Fifteen
Delila: The lace scarf on my dresser is so white. I found it almost blinding after all the colors of my world had been muted to hues devised in the depths of the earth, the carnal shades of moss and mauve, the yellow golden glows of summer’s end, and the burnt tones of September.
White, like the satin of my wedding dress. White, like purity of the soul, and vows of fidelity and trust. I touched the fabric in awe of it, afraid that it would turn to the colors of my passions if I were to hold it. I was afraid that my touch would soil the white, as surely as my life had been soiled.
“I tried not to change anything, Delila,” Armand told her, seeing her look about their bedroom. Her eyes were in a state of shock from the moment he picked her up from the train station and brought her home.
It had been difficult for him, with the collar so prominent around her graceful neck. So many eyes stared at them, shunning them. Many looked and then looked away, then looked back when they wouldn’t be noticed staring at a woman’s defilement there for all to see. Delila was a marked woman. Armand a marked man.
They felt safer in their apartment.
“Is there anything I can get you?” he asked his silent wife.
She jerked around and looked at him.
“No, no,” she answered. You have to understand, this is nothing like the factory. It’s so clean.”
He nodded. “I’ll fix some lunch, unless of course you’d like to?”
She smiled. “I’m not even sure I remember how,” she replied.
“Then I will,” he said, and walked away.
Delila: He looked like a vacant man to me, his eyes more hollow than my own. Indeed, I don’t think mine looked hollow at all. I wondered what he was thinking. I wondered if we would get beyond the impasse that left us silent the entire journey home, and seemed to be continuing as we tried to etch out a relationship from the terrifying mess of our lives.
Armand fixed fish and bread. He’d bought tomatoes and greens that he rarely had money to purchase, but he wanted to give her sustenance he thought she wouldn’t have at her assignment.
“You look much better than I expected,” he said, after they’d each taken a bite of t
heir meal. They sat at opposite ends of the rectangular kitchen table. There was a bright January sun streaming in through the window warming them both, even with the chilly glances.
“This meal must be costing you a fortune,” Delila remarked. She could smell the fragrance of the orange slices that lay so prettily on her plate, next to the greens.
“But perhaps you get food like this?” he inquired, still in awe of his wife’s rosy complexion, when he expected her to be drawn and weary.
“Oh, never,” Delila answered. There had never been oranges to eat, however she hadn’t been denied adequate food in Outer Island. “Though the food is not as bad as you might imagine, they need to keep us healthy for work.”
“I didn’t know that,” Armand said.
“They must not have told you much.”
“Nothing,” he replied. Armand returned to his meal and said no more. When he was finished, he rose from his chair. “I have to go to work.”
“Now? But?”
“You can’t leave the apartment. They put a lock on the door to keep you in.”
“But, I thought you’d stay.”
Armand fidgeted for a moment, nervously fingering the napkin still lying on his plate. “It didn’t work out that way, Delila,” he answered tersely.
She rose to follow her husband to the door. “Armand, you’re angry, please talk to me before you leave.” He said nothing as he put on his heavy parka. “Please, talk to me. I can’t stand this silence after so much time away.”
“We both fared well enough it seems, I can’t see how another few hours of separation will make much difference.”
“Please.” She grabbed his arm to pull him back with her.
He shook her off. “Let go, wife.”
“How can you be so cold?”
He’d turned away, but hearing her plea, turned back, with eyes darting at her in instantaneous rage.
“You ask me why I’m cold. You dare to ask me why I can’t respond to you when you’ve taken our lives away from us. As innocent as you may have thought your conduct was, you reviled us before the entire world; in front our friends, in front of my business associates, in front of our families. I can’t talk to your parents and I certainly can’t look mine in the eye.”
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