The Gift of Shame

by Sophie Hope-Walker

  When he finally emerged, smiling, naked and even half erect, she wanted to hide. Certain of his scorn, she was even more shamed when he took a firm hold on the pillow with which she had covered her face and, looking down into her wide, defensive eyes, had gently kissed her full on the lips.

  ‘That was marvellous.’

  She braced against his contempt, lay still and frozen. She had heard only the words she had expected and not those he had spoken.

  Looking down at her widened eyes, and still lips, he was puzzled. ‘Something wrong?’ he asked.

  ‘Please go.’

  His brow furrowed even deeper. ‘Go? I thought we’d agreed I’d drive you to Bournemouth?’

  ‘Eastbourne,’ she corrected him.

  ‘Wherever. Didn’t we?’

  ‘It’s not a good idea.’

  ‘I think it’s an excellent idea,’ he said, and his hand sought out her traitorous loins that both burned and flinched at his touch. ‘I have lots of excellent ideas.’

  Summoning the will to move she thrust aside his hand, swung her feet to the floor and raced to the bathroom. She would have closed and barred it to him but he was already there gently preventing its closure.

  ‘You don’t regret what just happened, do you?’

  ‘No. But please leave the door …’

  He pushed against it even more firmly. ‘No. I want to watch you shower. I haven’t seen you properly naked yet, you know.’

  Now close to tears she turned to begging him to leave her alone, and he, looking wounded and puzzled, finally relented and let her close the door on him.

  Feeling safe for the moment she turned to confront herself in the full-length mirror which Kenneth had installed so he could watch her face while he took her, fresh from the bath, from behind. Now she could only beg its forgiveness.

  Standing in the shower she felt her legs weaken and had to hold onto the pipes to allow the water to do its best to wash away the dirt and the guilt. Guilt that rose not so much from what she had done but from recognising just how thoroughly it had excited her.

  She was still there when she became aware of the hammering on the door. Turning off the water, she called out angrily.

  ‘It’s the telephone,’ he called through the door. ‘It just keeps on ringing and I thought I’d better not answer it.’

  Illogically angry at him, Helen wrapped herself in a towel and opened the door to hear the phone still ringing. He stood back to make a respectful space as she crossed the room to answer it.

  ‘Darling!’ cried Millie. ‘I was sure you’d gone off without thinking to call me back!’

  ‘Not now, Millie. I’m all in a rush. I’ll call you from my mother’s.’

  She hung up, careless that Millie would be offended. The call had brought her out of hiding and now she was face to face with him, with nowhere to hide.

  ‘What are you so guilty about?’ he asked.

  ‘It shouldn’t have happened. I shouldn’t have let it happen.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Had he said any more she might have been able to summon up anger, but he hadn’t. She cursed silently as she felt herself weakening towards tears. Without warning they engulfed her and she found herself wrapped tight against him, begging for comfort.

  She cried herself out for some minutes, pleased to be within his warm embrace but hating herself for seeking this unsafe and dangerous sanctuary.

  ‘Do you want me to punish you?’ he asked in a soft, gentle tone that belied the enormity of his words.

  Thrusting herself away from his body, made suddenly chill, she stared at him.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I asked if you wanted me to punish you,’ he said again in patient, even tones.

  The words were plain but their meaning, to her at that moment, obscure.

  ‘What for?’ she finally asked.

  ‘Whatever is haunting you.’

  ‘Are you mad?’ she asked, throwing out one last desperate lifeline towards sanity.

  ‘Not at all. You seem upset about something. Guilty, even. Guilt left unpunished can fester.’

  She stared at him, not wanting to believe what she had heard. There was only one possibility – of the many which raced through her mind – he was insane.

  ‘I think you’d better go now,’ she said as evenly as she could manage.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m driving you to Eastbourne.’

  Aware that the towel was the only thing between them she felt suddenly vulnerable and went to walk round him to the relative safety of the bathroom. She didn’t make it. He caught her arm, reached for the towel, stripped it from her and threw it aside. In an attempt to minimise the feeling of vulnerability that now consumed her, she sat down on the bed, staring up at him through tear-stained eyes.

  He reached for her, turned her naked body onto its stomach and, holding her down firmly, slapped her repeatedly on the soft flesh of her buttocks.

  Wriggling for freedom from his firm grasp, yelling to be let up, she felt the heat from the blows suffusing her entire body.

  Still angry, she was flipped onto her back as easily as if she were a pancake on a hotplate, and looked up at him in fear as he loosed the belt from the loops of his trousers.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘Something you need badly,’ he told her.

  She watched mesmerised as the belt was flipped up into the air and then brought down across the bed within millimetres of her tender flesh. Yelping with sudden fear she dived from the bed and made for the bathroom. He caught her wrist and lashed at her calves and buttocks – anything that was presented to him.

  Now she was yelling, sobbing and protesting all at the same time. Next she felt her burning, outraged body thrown to the bed, where she could do nothing to prevent further invasion of her spreadeagled self.

  The fire that had played about her buttocks and loins was now being pressed deep inside her. He felt huge against her inner flesh, as, desperately hating herself, she found her nails digging into his back which he answered with sharp digs into her buttocks. Effortlessly he held her hips high as he drove even deeper into her again and again.

  She felt flames licking her every nerve as she abandoned herself to the inevitable orgasmic climax.

  He knew. Oh, how humiliatingly well, he knew how abandoned and lost she was. How easily her wanton body dismissed her protesting reason, how readily her thighs rose to answer his every sortie with greedy, clenching attack. She had surrendered everything of herself and now only regretted she could find nothing more to give.

  They lay exhausted on the bed for a long moment before she could bring herself to articulate the one word that had resounded in her head since her climax.

  ‘Bastard!’ she breathed with an intensity born of real hatred.

  He had smiled, she had lain her head down on his belly and, with the heat of the beating still burning on her flesh, felt the need to assert herself.

  * * *

  ‘Now I’m going to screw you,’ Helen had said and then, as she sat astride this man, almost still a stranger, she knew she was venting months of guilt and frustration on his body but, also, that it was directed mainly into her own soul.

  Assertive and positive he might have been, but now he was passively submitting to the slow tortuous pleasure she wrought out of him. He had even, at her urging, placed his hands behind his head while she used him.

  Then something snapped inside and she realised she was losing control. Her body was taking over, insisting she increase the pace and its pleasure. Violently now, she started to move on him, beating her pelvis into him with punishing force, finding she could no longer protest when his hands reached for her, dragged her down and forced her to receive his gushing tribute, spread helplessly on her back. ‘Yes!’ they screamed in unison and knew that this was right.

  There was an appalled silence during which it seemed even the walls of her bedroom held their breath, until, raising himself on on
e elbow to look deeply into her vulnerable eyes, he spoke. ‘I have no intention of letting you go,’ he said. ‘You’re mine. I’ve claimed you.’

  ‘I have to go to my mother’s,’ she said, hating the intrusion of a little girl’s tone into her voice.

  He nodded. ‘But afterwards …’ he said.

  ‘Afterwards,’ she agreed, and felt inside her the first real happiness she had known since that soporific afternoon in the Caribbean.

  They were half way to Eastbourne before she noticed the car following them.

  ‘Isn’t that your car?’ she asked.

  He nodded.

  ‘Luckily I managed to get Turner at home and he agreed to follow us so that I’ll have my car for the return journey.’

  ‘Who’s Turner?’

  ‘My chauffeur.’

  ‘You have a chauffeur? I’m impressed.’

  ‘Strictly speaking he’s employed by my company. He usually drives the company car but he’s been dying to have a go in the Maserati. It was that that lured him out tonight.’

  It was another reminder of how little she knew of the man who had so comprehensively invaded her life and her body.

  ‘What do you do?’

  ‘I’ve got some property.’

  She lapsed into silence. Kenneth had hated people who created paper profits and produced nothing. ‘Economic leeches,’ he had called them. She had, with Kenneth, developed some radical attitudes of her own. Now she was consorting with one of ‘them’. Yet another betrayal – the third or fourth – she was rapidly losing track.

  Helen spoke defensively as if he had been listening in on her silent thoughts. ‘You must have a very low opinion of me.’

  ‘What brought that on? Have I offended you in some way?’

  ‘Not you. Me.’ She looked across at him behind the wheel and saw him smiling. ‘I’m not usually like “that”,’ she added quietly.

  ‘Of course not. I think you’re a very special lady and I intend to cherish you.’

  ‘Is that why you thrashed me?’

  ‘I thought that was what you needed.’

  ‘It won’t happen again.’

  ‘Didn’t it excite you? At one point you asked me to hurt you some more.’

  ‘It’s very bad taste to repeat things said in the throes of orgasm.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Orgasm.’

  ‘You know I did.’

  ‘I’m one of those men that is never sure. I’m glad.’

  She fought down an impulse to say ‘So am I’ and reached out a hand to lay on his forearm.

  He acknowledged it by looking down and smiling. Feeling that his smile meant he was patronising her, she withdrew her arm. Arrogant bastard, she thought, he thinks he’s got me precisely where he wants me.

  ‘I have an unfulfilled fantasy,’ he said so suddenly that, at first, she wildly thought he must be speaking to someone else.

  ‘Haven’t we all?’ she asked.

  ‘You have unfulfilled fantasies?’ he asked, sounding genuinely interested. ‘I’d love to help you fulfil them.’

  She laughed. ‘You’d need a limitless resource.’

  ‘I have a limitless resource,’ he said, very soberly.

  Looking across she could see no trace of a self-deprecating smile or laugh. ‘So what is this unfulfilled fantasy?’ she asked.

  ‘I want a girl to go down on me while I’m driving. It’s never happened to me.’

  ‘I’ve news for you,’ she said. ‘Nothing’s changed.’

  ‘You won’t do it?’

  She looked directly at him but his eyes never left the road. ‘Do you seriously think I would? We’ve known each other for barely twenty-four hours.’

  ‘You did it in the bedroom. What’s the difference?’

  She stared out the side window. Resentment, she neither wanted nor could cope with, was rising rapidly in her.

  This man was supposing too much, too readily assuming that she was his creature, willing to devote herself to his pleasure.

  There rose a need to assert herself. To establish that she was an independent being, not some appendage he’d taken from a dusty shelf. She might have done so then and there but for her crippling guilt.

  Her mistake, she thought, had been to allow him to drive her down to the coast. She wanted him to stop the car and let her out, before reminding herself that this was her car and that his was following behind.

  So there was the solution! He could simply step into his own car, turn round and return to London. She need never see him again.

  He broke in on her thoughts. ‘Do it for me and I promise I’ll fulfil any fantasy of yours. Absolute promise.’

  ‘Now you’re treating me like a casual pick-up.’

  ‘I love whorish women,’ he murmured, almost to himself.

  ‘Then I’ve an idea,’ she told him. ‘Why don’t you stop the car, get into your own and drive back to London? You might even be in time to catch some tired prostitute on her way home. I’m sure, given the right incentive, she would happily oblige.’

  He laughed out loud for nearly a minute. ‘Not the same thing,’ he said when he finally finished. ‘I want a whorish woman – not a whore. There is a very big difference. Of course it would be perfect with someone who loves me.’

  Helen reached deep down inside for all the scorn she could muster. ‘You don’t imagine I’m in love with you, do you?’

  ‘I’m determined that you will be.’

  Now it was her turn to laugh.

  ‘Too late now,’ he was saying. ‘We’re nearly there.’

  In the context she thought, at first, the remark had been directed at their relationship but, looking up, she was surprised to see the first of the town’s signs. The time had flown, the mileage dissolved. It was the most painless drive from London to Eastbourne she could ever remember

  She directed him to her parents’ home, conscious that it was much later than they would have been expecting her. A further problem was that she could see no way of avoiding inviting him in to meet them.

  Perhaps his generosity would ease the inevitable tension this would cause. As they were driving through the London suburbs she had remembered her promise to provide the cursed liqueurs, without which her Mother didn’t consider it to be Christmas. She had asked him to stop at a store and, when he understood why, he had insisted on buying a bottle of every kind they had.

  Now, in the trunk of the car were bottles of liqueurs she had never even heard of, supplemented by a huge mixed box of every conceivable kind of liqueur chocolate ever created. Her mother was going to love this man!

  In the event, her optimism proved false. Her mother’s smile of greeting froze the moment she saw Jeffrey following Helen into the house burdened by the bottles of liqueurs.

  The display of abundance did nothing to diminish the chilly reception. She could see her mother’s intuition had sight read the situation. Her only consolation was that her mother couldn’t possibly guess at the depth of her daughter’s debauch.

  Jeffrey stayed just long enough to drink a cup of begrudgingly offered coffee before departing.

  The only positive response to his visit came from her father, who was impressed by the expensive sports car parked outside the house. Her mother had dismissed it as a ridiculous extravagance.

  That night Helen thought about the past twenty-four hours. She remembered the guilt, but also the thrill in her total surrender of self and inhibition. Before sleeping she had recalled his every word and conjured up his every gesture; probing them, turning them this way and that, in a search for hidden meanings.

  She decided that there were none, or room for very few. He had a directness about him which was disconcerting but, in its honesty, attractive.

  Most particularly, she recalled his fantasy in the car and knew for certain that, one day, she was going to do that – and much else – for this uniquely demanding man.

  Christmas Day was, as always, dis
appointing. Some distant relatives turned up. Her mother fussed over the strewn wrapping papers, lunch was late and the turkey overdone. Her parents got irritable with each other and, when all the ‘outsiders’ had departed, rounded off the festive day with a row.

  In need of some time alone she walked through the early night streets and found herself thinking about Jeffrey, tempered only by the memory of the previous Christmas when she and Kenneth had been here together.

  She remembered Kenneth’s tentative experiments with her body. Last Christmas, slightly drunk, he had wanted to sodomise her. She had refused when his clumsiness had caused her too much pain.

  She wasn’t sure about Jeffrey. Somehow she suspected she would feel no pain.

  It wasn’t until she was almost on the point of leaving that her mother mentioned Jeffrey.

  ‘Who is he?’ she had asked suspiciously. ‘I don’t like him. Not one little bit.’

  ‘He’s someone I hardly know. He offered to drive me down, that’s all. You know how I hate to drive after dark.’

  ‘Long way for someone to come who hardly knows you.’

  ‘I think he was going to his own parents’ house. They live along the coast somewhere.’

  The lie hadn’t convinced her mother. Mothers know their daughters too well, she concluded, because they were once daughters themselves.

  2

  THE RETURN TO London was an unexpected anticlimax. What she had expected, she couldn’t imagine. Jeffrey on the doorstep, perhaps? How could he be when he could have no idea when she was coming back?

  Wandering around the empty apartment she felt unutterably lonely. With the holiday season still in full swing to call Millie or anyone would seem to be begging for an invitation. Instead, she consoled herself with a bottle of whisky and the endless stream of movies pouring out on every TV channel.

  At some point she must have dozed off and was quite shocked on waking to find her first memories were of Jeffrey. She had, in those first unwary wakening moments, for the first time, found it difficult to summon up Kenneth’s smiling face.

  She dragged herself to bed – to sleep and hope for better things from the following day.