“Shouldn’t I be tired after a night like the last?” she asked.
“Then I’ll come for you again,” he said smiling.
“Please don’t. I’d rather have a thousand lovers like the men that rape me nightly, than have you again,” she said. “You have no decency in your soul.”
He looked perplexed, his face turning ashen.
“Don’t bother,” she said, when she saw him tempted to speak.
Delila: He was beaten, and I didn’t care. I had no regard for him and his tawdry soul. I knew he had a woe as deeply felt as mine. Who wouldn’t, the courtesan of the grand Diva? Certainly he had his own suffering, but anymore, I simply didn’t care.
The Baron never came to me again.
I was never so grateful to see anyone, as I was to see Degas when he appeared one day in Diva’s private salon. After the houseguests at the Baron’s estate had left, I knew there would be another change in my life. I was glad I’d be returning to New Victoria, to what I considered my real world.
I had much time to think on the long journey home. Typically, Degas said little, and I sat back in the motor cars and train and pondered the nature of my existence, since there was little else to do.
They said the Baron’s house was outside the perimeter of New Victoria, but I disagreed. It was to me all that New Victoria was—exaggerated.
In the Baron’s house, I lived the duality night and day—not month to month. All that was confining and harrowing to my spirit in the daily living of New Victoria, and all that was dark and frightening in the recesses of the underworld of Outer Island were there in the Baron’s house, to slap me in the face and jerk me awake. How I could ever live in both worlds? How could I live in just one? I didn’t know.
For as much as I sought the real world for its abundance and light and what I perceived as love I might know from my husband there, it seemed an impossible society to enjoy for there was no way I could stretch the wide arms of my imagination or the bounds of my desire.
Still, for all the physical pleasures and wanton expression of sexual gratification, Outer Island could be as bleak to an aching heart, as an unfulfilling marriage bed without intimacy of the soul.
I sought more.
Although how silly to even think of the great dichotomy under which I existed! With no control over my fate, how could I contemplate such vast and complex thoughts?
The fact remained that Degas, the dark arm of the State, still reigned over my fortune even as he slept peacefully beside me in the gently rocking train.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Degas allowed her several days rest before he ordered her to the floor again. By that time, she was anxious to return to her duties whatever it was he wanted her to do.
“I’ll let you choose, my well-seasoned lamb,” he said, the day he entered her room, drew away the curtain that surrounded her bed and looked down at her awakening body.
She stared up at him, knowing what he meant, though thinking how much she wanted him to say it himself. She liked to hear him talk, to listen to the mellifluous sounds of his baritone as it caressed her back into her body. A hand finding her crotch, finding the hard bud between her labia, she rubbed it. Waking from slumber had made her especially horny. Her act drew Degas’s interest. “Then I come and go as I please?” she said, thinking she could toy with him.
They were on a different level now, having traveled such a distance beyond Outer Island. With her experience with the Baron, she knew Degas better now than anyone knew him, except Lexia perhaps. Lexia knew things no one had a right to know of anyone. Delila swore that woman was a witch the way she divined truth so cleverly. She was the only person in Outer Island that seemed to be able to get under Degas’s skin. Delila wondered if that was because she was in love with him, or maybe him with her.
“You do your job, bitch. You make my customers happy, very happy. I would think it would be all the easier for you now.”
“Do you know what happened to me at the Baron’s?” she asked.
“Something special I should know about?” he asked.
“I got wise,” she said. Her head was cocked; the look on her lips was classically cute—rare for Delila.
“That’s good, it’s time you got wise,” he said. “Now hustle your ass. Some of your favorite clients are waiting for you. I’ve never had a whore so missed as you.”
“Then maybe I should hold out for more pay?” she joked, as she rose from the warmth of the sheets.
“More cruelty on your ass, perhaps,” he shot back. He tugged her to her feet and inspected her rear. “Little marred I’d say.”
“But feeling fine,” she smirked, as she shook him off and walked to the closet, pulling out the rose-colored dress.
“Forget the dress, Delila,” he interrupted her. “You’re wanted in the leather gallery.”
“So soon?” She sounded weary, trying to put enough of a whine in her voice to guarantee his sympathy.
“You’d miss it if you didn’t have it, my love.”
“You’re right, and I admit it. I would miss it.”
“Then there’s no point in staying away from what you want. I’m glad they took you to the utter depravity of life, you needed to know that before you started committing yourself to romantic things.”
“Romantic things?” she wondered aloud.
“Husbands and marriage.” He started to turn away.
“So when is my next conjugal visit?” she asked.
He spun around, and for perhaps the first time ever looked at her with as mystified an expression as she often had with him.
“You’re expecting a visit?”
“Of course,” she said.
“And still clawing for your husband?”
“I need him.” Delila replied. No emotion, straight-as-an-arrow straight, the message delivered without theatrics, so Degas actually took notice.
“Need him?” Degas repeated. He chuckled, a hearty noxious kind of laugh.
“You think I’m not serious?” she asked.
“You said you got wise. The Baron’s regimen made you see things clearly?”
“That’s right,” she replied.
“I wonder. What do you suppose would happen, if your cherished Armand knew about your passions?”
“He’s never to know. You’ve already told me that. On pain of death, I’ll never tell him.”
“But how honest can you be with him? How well can you harbor your lies? How, in the middle of the night, will you be able to cover your appetites the way they ooze from your very pores? You eat, you drink, you breath your lusts. How is he not to know? And not curse you?”
“He’ll not curse me!” she snapped at him indignantly.
“And why would he not?” Degas mocked her. “Is he not a member of the State of New Victoria, schooled as you were in the regulations that define a good life?” Such sarcasm! “Isn’t that how they say it in school? How can you ever be honest in a world like that?”
“I’ll be as honest as I can with him, Degas, and he won’t forsake me! He loves me and would never curse me.” She vowed that with every fiber in her, though she had no idea if her vow was true at all.
Degas noted that none of the erotic quality of Delila’s morning had vanished—even with her raised emotions. She was as mellow, succulent and warm as a full-blown flower still clinging to its stem.
“I must give you credit for your illusions. They’re quite strong. But your problem, Delila, you love it here, just as Lexia and Mira do. There’s no way you can live out there and be yourself, whether your lover/husband finds it in his heart to approve of you or not. It’s a tangled web, don’t you think? For your own sanity,” he shook his head sadly, “don’t go chasing your illusions much longer, it would be as pathetic as trying to hold your cloudy breath upon your palm on a snowy day.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Delila: His breath on me was like a sunrise I’d seen once, when there were no clouds in the sky, when there was cle
ar air after a violent storm that took the horrors of the atmosphere off to some out-of-bounds hell.
We’d fallen into bed the instant we arrived home. It was exactly as I’d dreamed it. Only it was our first visit I’d been dreaming this, not the fourth, and after so many months.
I could tell that Armand had missed me, that these extra, unexplained months weighed on him. I was afraid that they’d told him the worst. That Degas had concocted some awful tale—as awful as Armand’s own disappearance—thinking that some time down the road he’d be told that I’d not be coming back to him at all. I was probably lucky to be seeing him, and perhaps had Lexia to thank. One word to her, and this conjugal visit suddenly materialized. Degas didn’t even speak of it to me. I was on the train toward the Southern climate of New Victoria after only a few weeks back in Outer Island’s comfort. I know there were tears in Armand’s eyes when he saw me at the station, and for the first time, we were so engrossed in each other, we didn’t see the people around us who stared at me in the collar that marked me the worst of criminal offenders. I didn’t even think of those vultures once, until we returned to our apartment and realized that the anger we’d shared at these awkward moments in the past, just didn’t exist.
I don’t know what happened to Armand to make him so unambiguous in his thirst for me; but I do know what made me that way. Armand gave me love. As clouded and confused as it had often been, he’d not given up on us, and he’d not stopped loving me. Embraced by him on our marriage bed, as he swept me into his encompassing affections, I felt as cared for and accepted as I ever had, knowing that at last he’d forgiven me my crimes, and was putting all that aside.
I should have relished the moment, savored it for our three short days and said nothing. That would have been easier, then we would have had nothing but these pure memories to fix on later. However, as certain as I was of Armand’s love for me, as certain as I was of my love for him, I feared that these days, enjoying the vast realms of our love would be our last. The closer I got to the end of our visit, the more I feared that I was really saying good-bye. I believed that there was no other choice.
***
“You don’t have to cane me this time?” Delila asked Armand on the morning of their third day together.
“No. This visit came as a surprise actually. I think even the State was surprised by it, if that’s possible. I think they viewed our missing the last visit as an oversight that we’re correcting now.”
“How strange.”
“So, you miss the caning?” He was joking perhaps.
Delila was aroused, she was going to miss him flailing on her and she knew why, he should by now too.
“You have to do it,” she implored him. “And anything else you want to do to me. I want to be yours that way.”
“Anything? That’s a broad spectrum, Delila my love,” he said smiling.
“Anything,” she confirmed. She was feeling agitated when she didn’t want to. Something boiling up from the underground. She’d vowed it wouldn’t happen, but it was nonetheless.
“You’ve been thinking about this a lot?” he asked.
She’d turned her back to him, so he wouldn’t see the expression on her face. He was nuzzling next to her, his naked body pressing against hers. He reached around and pinched her nipples, and she groaned happily.
“Some,” she replied to his question. “I want you to be rough with me, real rough.”
Armand pinched her nipples harder still, then ran one hand to her cunt and cupped it in his palm so he could squeeze tight. She groaned, and he knew she wanted more. Still holding her, a hand retreated to her backside, where with more harsh squeezes and sharp smacks and deep probing, he had his wife’s body wild and submissively relenting to everything.
“You want it here too?” he asked, as his fingers dropped deep into her anal cleft where his hands found the puckering hole that had known so many invading hands and cocks.
“Yes, Armand, yes.” Her head fell back against him.
“You want me to sodomize you?” he whispered, as if the walls had ears and he wanted no one to hear the blasphemous suggestion.
“Oh, gawd!” she answered without saying another yes, so ready to climb on the bed before him and wiggle her ass like the slut she was in her heart.
Armand pushed her there himself so she was on hands and knees, and began probing her with an invasion that pushed her along orgasmic trails. Deep, deep in her soul, she was aroused, finding her mind going farther than she’d ever gone into some place out of control, out of mind … she thought she was careening through clouds, and the depths of oceans, swimming in the air and through the dry ground. Climactic masterpieces were written in her body about these wild places.
When Armand violated her ass with his prick, he did so with a crude and barbarous plunge. He lunged inside her, practically pushing her from her hands-and-knees ass-waving pose, though Delila was holding on tight to the desperate need she had to have him ravish her. She screamed frantically for him to continue.
Even as he held her ass cheeks with a stunningly fierce grip, and pummeled her as nastily as Degas had, she held firm in her place. Forgetting the pain, it was only arousal taking her to another level of relief. When he exploded in her, suddenly pulling her up against him so they were back to chest, he grabbed her cunt with a fist again, and let her ride his hand all the way to her final oblivion.
***
“Does it make you feel better that you’ve made me break the law?” Armand asked her.
“No,” she replied. “It makes me feel better that I’m honest with you about my lust.”
“Why such lust now?” he asked, truly wondering. “When you work in a dire factory with no more stimulation than grinding machines and sewing needles and endless bolts of denim?”
“I told you, there are times …”
“When you’re taken advantage of.”
“But I can’t talk about it.”
“But you have this lust, these whorish needs.”
She wondered why he chose the word “whorish.”
“I have too much time to fantasize, to think about impure things and let my mind wander to the devil’s work and all those reprehensible acts that the State believes it’s drummed out of my head.”
“So tell me what you think about?” he asked.
“Why? What good would it serve? You’ll think I’m a sinful tramp.”
“Would I, Delila?”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“Didn’t I just take your ass, and didn’t we both want that?.”
“But oh! That’s such a small part. You have no idea.”
“But they’re just fantasies, aren’t they?”
“I wish they were just fantasies,” she said sadly. “Maybe if you looked at them, you’d feel differently.”
“Tell me,” he said.
“No,” she answered.
“Tell me, or I’ll make your ass burn until you do. That is still my prerogative.”
“Tell you things that will condemn me more! You’re kidding.”
“Absolutely not!”
“Then paddle my ass as you like, you’ll get nothing from me,” she said, wishing she’d said nothing of this. It was a much too dangerous road to walk.
Armand pulled up on the bed and knelt on one knee. Reaching for her, he drew Delila over his bent knee, his hand coming down on her behind with a rash of smacks. More and more, with a furious pace, no clear design. He struck like lightning strikes, with razor sharp intensity and erratic form. She refused to cry, some kind of anguish resting in her that she wouldn’t release. With one smack after another, he pelted her meanly until he pushed her away when he was exhausted.
“Tell me, Delila,” he ordered her, an old persona coming out to confront her: the government operative, the agent of the State that had once been on the upward path of officialdom, before he was captured by enemies and his wife became a State criminal. He’d never wanted to let her see how cold he could be; but h
e wanted answers now.
She looked at him too afraid not to answer the savageness of his cold eyes. He was like Degas at that moment and more, much more. What was churning in him was unknown to her.
“I lust for unspeakable things,” she began speaking quietly. “For the warmth of a woman’s fragrant sexual home, for arms of many lovers, for anal things, and pain when I’m in the midst of sex. I pray to be defiled by many and lifted as well by the physical rapture my sexual being was born enjoy. Certainly, it was born for this! Not a thing to keep caged as I have been to in this place. I lust for freedom from this weary home, freedom from these restrictions.” She looked at him with as deadly a look as was on his own face. “Armand, I’ll die if I have to return to New Victoria, to have watch-dogs peering into our bedroom, to have to hold my tongue, and fear that around every corner there’s a spy waiting to catch me in the act of depravity that my own heart demands I embrace. I think like a whore now. Don’t ask me how that’s happened, but it has.”
He listened to her from the same cold place that initiated this tirade, hearing more than just her words. The power of her emotion submerged him for a moment in the world of her convoluted mind.
“Are you a whore now?” he asked, calmly.
She looked at him bewildered, and shook her head. “How could I possibly be a whore, when I sew my heart out at a slave table seven days a week?” She showed him her hands—hands she’d soaked in brine for a day to make rough, hands that she poked with pins and punctured with glass so they’d resemble the hands of a garment sewer just to make him believe her stories. How could he believe anything else?
“You’re exhausted, Delila,” he said, taking her torn hands in his. “Your spirit is overworked and weary. But your time is nearly done. This is almost over. You’ll be home for good. You can repair better when you don’t have to split your thoughts between whatever evils flood your mind and what you know with me.”
She shook her head again. “That’s the point. I don’t think anything evil anymore.”
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