“Are you sure about that?” Craig would have preferred to be present all the time if she were doing something extreme.
“Oh, yes. I’m sure.”
“Okay, then. When should I come over?”
“If you could drop by on Friday evening? Say about nine o’clock? Would that be all right with you?”
“I’ll be at your place at nine on Friday.”
“I appreciate this.”
She sounded more dismayed than appreciative.
* * *
As requested, on Friday, Craig knocked on Leslie’s door sharply at nine. He was not surprised when she answered promptly; undoubtedly, she had been waiting anxiously for his arrival.
She was dressed only in a fluffy white bathrobe. Her feet were bare. He suspected that she was naked underneath.
It was no surprise when she handed him five sealed envelopes. Her preferred means of scheduling her punishment was to have him open envelopes, one at a time, and follow the instructions contained within. He leafed through them quickly. Times were written on the outside of each: 9 PM Friday Evening; 9 AM Saturday Morning; 5 PM Saturday Afternoon (or earlier); 9 AM Sunday Morning; and 9 PM Sunday Evening.
As he leafed through them, she commented, “The times are approximate. If you want to sleep in, you can come later in the mornings, ten or even eleven o’clock. The most important time is Saturday afternoon at five. If you can’t open it exactly at five, be sure to open it earlier. It’s important that that one not be opened later. Also, you’re welcome to come by at any other time, day or night, just to look in on me, but that’s not really required.”
He could tell by the tone in her voice that she making a reluctant concession; that she knew that she needed closer supervision than that. “I understand. I’ll be able to keep pretty close to your schedule.” He could see no reason to reassure her by telling her that he intended to watch her more closely than the minimum that she had specified.
“Thanks.” She smiled weakly. “I do appreciate your help.”
He did not reply.
“I better get started, then, so that you can get back home,” she said. “Come on into the living room and you can open the first envelope.”
He followed her into her living room. She led him past a pole lamp that was partially blocking the doorway. The shade had been removed and he had to squint against the glare of the strong bulb. The living room was brightly lit by that lamp and by another identical one in the archway to the dining room. To his surprise, he saw that the room had been emptied of all furniture and decoration, including the drapes and rugs, leaving nothing but bare walls and a hardwood floor. His eye was drawn to a white plastic bucket that had been placed in the middle of the room.
He tore open the envelope marked “9 PM Friday Evening” and read:
Confinement: The chain that I lock about my ankle will confine me to this room for the duration of my penalty. Potential public exposure will ensure my ongoing discomfort. Boredom is a significant part of the penalty. Please do not talk to me or entertain me in any way when you come to check on me. If you like, you need only glance through a window to ensure that I am still okay. When the time comes to release me, you will find the key for the padlock hanging on the far wall.
He heard a sharp click and, when he looked up, he saw that Leslie had padlocked a chrome-plated chain – the kind that would be used in a leash for a large dog – about her ankle. The chain had small links so the padlock had to be small. Even so, it looked strong enough to withstand any attempt to break it by hand. The loop around her ankle was not tight, but it would not slip over her foot. His eye followed the length of the chain across the floor to the corner of the outer walls. There, it disappeared through a small hole that had been neatly drilled into the hardwood floor. Undoubtedly the other end was securely fastened in the basement, far out of her reach. Prompted by the note, he looked around and saw that a small brass key was hanging from a hook in the opposite corner of the room.
He could not tell exactly how far the chain would extend but was certain that it would keep her from reaching either the key to unlock her chain or the two pole lamps to turn them off.
The only things that she could reach were the plastic bucket and a case of bottled water. The water had been placed in the corner near where the chain disappeared into the floor. The bucket, though, was sitting in the center of the floor. There was a chain threaded through the handle that led to an eyebolt that had been screwed into the wall furthest from the corner where Leslie was chained. The geometry was clear to Craig. The chain on her ankle extending in one direction and the chain on the bucket extending in the opposite direction meant that she would be able to reach the bucket but would not be able to move it any closer to her. If she were going to be confined to this room for two days, the purpose of the bucket was obvious; and she would have to use it in its present location in the middle of the room.
Leslie backed into the corner of the room where the chain disappeared through the floor and slipped the robe from her body, leaving herself naked. She held it out to him. “Please take this out of the room.”
The reason for her backing into the corner before disrobing was immediately clear to him. He house was situated on a corner lot. There were large picture windows on both outer walls that extended to within eighteen inches of the floor. The only place in the room that she would not be seen easily from the street through one window or the other was either backed into the corner of the room or lying flat on the floor near the windows. Even so, he suspected that if a person were to press his face to the window and peer in at an acute angle, he would be able to see her nude body no matter how she positioned herself. Worse, if the person went into her back yard and looked through the dining room window, they would be able to see clearly into the corner where she was hiding. There was no place in the room that she could hide without being visible through one window or another. And, being unable to extinguish the lamps that were shining brightly out of her reach, she would never benefit from the cover of darkness. If she stayed huddled in the corner, it was unlikely that anyone would either press their face to her living room windows or go into her back yard to peer through the dining room window. However, if she were careless and flashed herself so that a passerby noticed something untoward, he would likely decide to investigate further. If she were not constantly vigilant, her nudity would become a public spectacle.
After he took the robe from her outstretched hand, he stared openly at her naked body. She was good to look at, not too thin but nicely rounded everywhere. He had seen her naked close up when he had monitored her previous punishments, but he would never tire of the view. He knew that she did not like to be ogled by anyone, especially her platonic friend, but she accepted it as part of her penalty for losing backgammon games and needing his assistance in paying her penalties. Though he was happily married and had always resisted taking advantage of her when she was helpless, she knew that he enjoyed the temptation of her body even though he had to work hard to resist it.
He noted that safety pins still pierced both nipples; the catches still crimped shut so that they could not be removed without cutting them. A small, strong, steel chain connected them, its weight tugging her nipples slightly downward. Soon she would be replacing them with proper rings or bars. It was a pity. The crudeness of the safety pins had a brutal appearance that emphasized their purpose: to punish her. The well-crafted jewelry that would replace them would look gentle in comparison. Once again, he wondered if he had overstepped his bounds when he had asked her to make her piercings permanent.
“There’s a key in the envelope so that you can use to lock the front door. I don’t want any strangers coming in.” She smiled. Her punishment had barely begun; she could still smile. Knowing that she preferred to design punishments that grew more severe over time, he expected that this might well be her last smile until Sunday night.
But she had been clear in her instruction that that he was not to give her the comfort of
any conversation. He said nothing as he pocketed the key and left the room. On his way out, he dropped the robe in a heap in the middle of the foyer near the lamp. She could see it, but not reach it; that seemed to be the theme of this stage of her punishment – to have the means of alleviating her discomfort in view but unattainable. When he left the house, he locked the door behind him and then pushed on the knob to make sure that it was tightly latched.
As he drove away, he glanced at her living room window. Leslie’s head was visible in the corner, partly silhouetted by the lamp that shone brightly behind from the far side of the room. She was watching him leave; watching her last hope of comfort disappearing down the street.
He wouldn’t wait until morning to check on her. Before he went to bed, he would swing by again.
* * *
This was only the first hour of the first stage of her punishment, but Leslie already wanted the weekend to be over. She huddled in the corner of the room and crossed her arms over her naked breasts. It made no difference. If anyone saw her they would know that she was nude no matter what pose she struck.
Tucked into the only corner of the room permitted by the chain, she could not be seen from either of her living room windows unless someone pressed their face against it. The dining room window was another matter entirely. If someone stood in the middle of her back yard, they would be able to see her clearly and she would never know. It was late autumn; the sun had set long ago and her undraped windows were shining like beacons, beckoning to any voyeur who happened by. From the inside, the light turned all the windows into dark sheets of imperfect mirror. Leslie would be able to see a face that was close enough to be illuminated by her lamps, but could not distinguish anything in the dark beyond their range.
She could not resist watching the dining room window, constantly fearful that some perverted peeping tom would suddenly spring up and leer at her with hungry eyes.
Her only hope was that no one would dare walk across her front lawn and press their nose against her window for fear of being reported by a neighbor. Her back yard would be less problematic for a voyeur. It was unfenced so anyone could easily slip back there in the dark to see what he could see.
And if she were seen, what then? A voyeur could stand at her dining room window and stare for as long as he wished, especially in the middle of the night when the neighbors were in bed and their windows were dark.
The voyeur would see her naked, would see the chain about her ankle and would know that she was helpless. Would he take advantage of her predicament and escalate beyond simply peeping at her? Would he be incited to break through a basement window or force her back door, come into the living room and rape her? And then strangle her to ensure that she could not identify him to the police?
The scenario seemed unlikely. Most likely no one would bother even glancing through her window on a chilly November night. And if someone did glance through the front window, even a pervert, he would not peer into the corner; he would see the barren room, think the house empty, and continue on his way.
Another, more dangerous scenario was that teenagers or young men would see the empty house, think it unoccupied, and break in without seeing her, hoping to find something to steal. But in that scenario, all she had to do was scream as soon as she heard them enter and they would flee before they came into the living room and saw that she was helpless. Petty thieves would not want to break into an occupied house.
As one slow minute after another crawled by, she struggled to convince herself that she was relatively safe. She failed. No matter what scenario she spun in her mind, she was keenly aware that it was based on assumptions that could be false. Even if the odds were in her favor, the dice could always land snake eyes and that she could find herself in the hands of a murderer, helpless to defend herself.
That possibility, though small, was real. Constant fear was the punishment that she was forcing herself to suffer all night long.
As the night wore on, she grew colder. Just before nine, she had turned the thermostat down to sixty degrees. She judged that to be a temperature that would be adequate to keep her acutely uncomfortable but not low enough to put her in danger of hypothermia. Once the temperature dropped that low, it would stay there until she was released on Sunday and was permitted to reach the thermostat again.
Her arms pimpled with gooseflesh and she began to shiver slightly.
There were no clocks in view so she did not know if only an hour had passed or if she had already been confined for most of the night and the sun would be rising soon. She suspected that less time had passed than she hoped. The sun rose at about six in the morning now and she was certain that nowhere near nine hours had elapsed since she had locked the chain about her ankle.
She stretched full length on the floor, pressed to the wall underneath the window that faced the busier of the two streets, rested her head on her hands, and tried to sleep.
The flooring was called hardwood for good reason. There was no comfortable, or even tolerable, position that she could adopt when lying on the cold floor. When she lay on her side, the bones in her shoulders and hips felt like they were pushing through her skin. When she lay on her stomach with her head on her hands, her breasts were crushed flat and her knees and elbows began to ache from the pressure on them. And when she lay on her back, she felt entirely exposed while her buttocks began to ache from the pressure on them. She settled for a combination of turning from prone to supine at frequent intervals, punctuated by attempts to sleep in a sitting position wedged into the corner.
The night was a misery, but she knew that this was only the first stage; she would suffer much worse tomorrow. Both her vulnerability and her boredom would increase substantially when Craig arrived in the morning and opened the next envelope.
* * *
When Craig left Leslie’s house, he drove only around the block, and then returned to park down the street and watch her house for a while. He knew that he could not stay there all night, but he wanted to wait for at least an hour to make sure that nothing obvious was going to go wrong. He listened to the radio and blessed his wife for understanding his need to help his friend. He did not give her all the details of Leslie’s elaborate self-punishments; he told only her that she needed someone to watch over her to make sure that she was not hurt too badly. And he assured his wife that his interest in Leslie was strictly brotherly. That was not entirely true – he could lust after another woman as much as the next husband – but the essence that he would never cheat on his wife with Leslie was low. He knew that all three of them, his wife, Leslie, and he himself would be equally destroyed if his self-control failed.
It helped that he knew that he would never be able to keep his betrayal a secret from his wife. He was not strong or clever enough for that.
After an hour, he went home and put his wife to bed. When he made love to her, he could not help thinking about Leslie, not so far away, naked, vulnerable, alone. If his wife suspected what fuel was powering his passion in bed tonight, she gave no indication. But she might well have comforted herself with the thought that the intensity of his passion proved that he had not already spent himself in Leslie, and that he did not intend doing so later when he returned to her house.
His wife was fast asleep when, just before midnight, he left quietly.
He parked a block from Leslie’s house and walked the rest of the way. He could have driven right into her driveway, but it was clear that she wanted to feel abandoned and vulnerable and he reasoned that he would destroy that illusion if she knew that he was checking up on her.
He half expected that he would see her head still poking up in the corner of the window. If so, he was prepared to retreat back to his car and hope that he had not been spotted. There was no need for that, though; she was nowhere in view.
He stayed on the sidewalk as he walked past her front living room window and then around the corner past her side living room window. He could see nothing of her from either place. He expect
ed that she would still be crouched in the corner of the room, out of view of either of those windows.
After he passed her house, he left the sidewalk and went into her back yard, walking slowly between her wall and her neighbor’s fence. Her back yard was not fenced, but the neighbor’s was, so he doubted that the neighbor would see him and call the police.
From the distant side of Leslie’s back yard, he could see nothing through the dining room window. It was high enough that he had a view only of the top half of the front living room window. Carefully he crept forward, seeing a little more with each step. However, he could not see her until his eye was within two feet of the glass. At that point he could see almost down to the living room floor where she was laying stretched out full length on her back below the sill. He watched for a minute, ready to duck down if she turned her head in his direction, but she remained motionless. At this distance, he could barely see her chest rising and falling with every breath. Maybe she was already asleep, or maybe she was merely resting and waiting.
He could see the silver chain glinting on her right ankle, held by the little brass padlock.
She looked as lovely from this distance as she did from up close.
There was nothing further for him to do so he retreated back to the sidewalk.
Now that he knew where she was, he knew how to see her through the side living room window. He had only to advance halfway across the lawn to see the lower half of her naked body lying beneath the other window.
If anyone suspected that she was in the room, they would have to go to only a small effort to see as much of her as they wished. There was no place for her to hide from all windows.
A Lady Pays Her Penalties Page 12