He was certain that if he did not help her abuse herself, then she would press on without his help and would eventually kill herself by miscalculation or misadventure. He had begun helping her when he stumbled across one of her self-arranged bondage sessions that had gone wrong and had rescued her from death. Since then, his justification had been that she was going to punish herself whether he watched over her or not, so his only choice was to try to make her self-abuse safer by taking an active role. But he was always nagged by the worry that he should be getting her professional help instead of complying with her instructions to tie her up and beat her.
His doubts about himself were exacerbated by the knowledge that he enjoyed doing painful and humiliating things to her. He had to admit to himself that he got a thrill out of opening each envelope and seeing how he was to abuse her next. He was intellectually stimulated by the breadth of her imagination. He reveled in knowing that he had been given opportunities to do things to a woman that most other men would never get, from laying a switch into a woman’s ass with gusto to piercing her nipples, as slowly and painfully as possible.
And he had to admit that he enjoyed a kind of perverted illicit sexual relationship with her. They had never made love, never would. He would never have an orgasm in her presence. But she was a fine looking woman; she had a pretty face and a terrific body. He enjoyed seeing her naked, was thrilled by the casual touch when he bound her, loved to see her twitch and wriggle in response to the things that he did to her. No strip tease, no sex show, no pornographic movie could hold a candle to his experiences with Leslie.
Though Kingsolver was a terrific writer, the novel in his hand was dull compared to the reality of Leslie suffering yet another self-imposed punishment a few feet away. As he tried to concentrate on the next few pages, these written in the voice of Kingsolver’s character who littered her thoughts with palindromes, a pithy critique of the novel sprang fully formed into his mind: Egad! No bondage! He would find The Poisonwood Bible so much more engaging if the characters were bound physically instead of merely psychologically. Yet, ultimately, Leslie’s bondage was only psychological as well. She knew with absolute certainty that she had to say but a single word to him or to the other man, Alex, and she would be freed immediately. It was only her will that put her in this position and only her will that she continued to suffer to the limit of her endurance.
And maybe she would change her desires with a bit of therapy. He could force it. He could strike a bargain with her that he would only help her punish herself if she agreed to enter into therapy. He could even make it acceptable to her by phrasing it as an extension of her punishment: that she would have to subject herself to the additional semi-public humiliation of telling a therapist exactly what she did to herself in every detail.
Because he never proposed such a bargain, he had to ask himself if he was avoiding forcing her to get professional help because he wanted to let her keep punishing herself. He wanted the thrill of seeing how she would suffer the next time. How much was his judgment colored by this conflict of interest?
Facing this dilemma, his copout was to do nothing but what she asked him to do. That was the easiest path for him. But it still left him stewing in self-doubt.
And it did not help that he was enjoying nothing about today’s show. Leslie had been suffering for a long time. This was the longest period that she had endured punishment by far. The type of punishment was not as extreme as on previous days – this time it was limited to simple bondage, some small risk of public exposure, a few episodes of unwelcome sex last night – but her suffering was constant and the duration extreme. It was clearly wearing her to exhaustion.
She whimpered almost constantly throughout the day. With the earplugs fitted to her, she probably did not realize that her whimpers were audible. And, with the hood blindfolding her, she had no idea that he was present in her home listening to her.
Craig found it difficult to stay in the same room with her. She was suffering and he found no redemption in it, either for her or for him. The hours ground on and on as he read page after page of his novel, trying to flee from the real suffering in this room and seek solace in the fictional suffering of the family in the Congo, described so vividly by Kingsolver’s wonderful prose. Surely he would find redemption there.
He needed to find it somewhere.
He opened the nine o’clock envelope early, at about seven, and was relieved to read, “Free me, please.” He had been afraid that she might have programmed some final, over-the-top torture for herself.
As the sun slowly set, he was tempted to free Leslie early. What would two hours matter? He could claim that he had some other affair to attend to this evening and had no choice.
He resisted the temptation. He knew how her thought processes worked. She had programmed herself for a specific time and would feel cheated if she were not forced to endure her full allotment of agony. Ever after, she would be obsessed by the fact that she had suffered only forty-six hours of punishment when she had committed herself to forty-eight. After all that she had endured, she deserved the satisfaction of serving the full measure that she had requested.
So Craig was forced to endure listening to her twitch and whimper for the last two hours, waiting until the clock in the kitchen reached the exact minute that had been proscribed.
He spent the time planning every detail of the process of freeing her. The first step was latex gloves. He would have been happy to do it without the gloves, but he knew her. She would be embarrassed by the piss that covered her head and back, by the body odor that was inevitable after two days of physical effort without a shower, and even by her bad breath because she had no access to a toothbrush. She would be mortified by the thought that her friend was getting her filth on his hands. Knowing that he was properly gloved would give her comfort.
At ten minutes before nine, he began his preparations. He took the key from the wall and the wrench from the table and put them in his pockets. Then he extinguished the lamps that had kept the room as bright as day for the past forty-eight hours. The dining room chandelier would cast enough light for his work. He picked up the cardboard screens from the floor and covered the windows. The public was no long invited to discover her predicament. As he placed the last screen, he breathed a sigh of relief. Public discovery of her had been his greatest fear, in no small part because there was a risk that his role in this affair could have been revealed as a consequence.
Leslie never thought much about the risk that she was imposing on her friend.
Craig did, but it was a risk that he was willing to accept.
As soon as the kitchen clock reached exactly nine, he walked over to her. The soles of his shoes squelched through the puddles of sticky drying urine around her.
When he touched the buckles on her chin, she started and said, fearfully, “Craig?” She did not know if her time was up and she was being freed or if she had been discovered and the police had arrived to question her about what had happened or if a sociopathic rapist had noticed her and broken into her home.
“It’s me,” he said, knowing that his words were wasted because her ears were still plugged underneath the hood.
As soon as the buckles were released, he pulled the hood from her head. She squinted against the light. Her eyes had habituated to darkness for so long that even this dim light was painful but she was desperate to see who had released her.
As Craig reached around to pull the plugs from her ears, she said, “Thank you.”
He did not know if she was thanking him for freeing her now or for having left her to suffer for so long. It did not matter. “You’re welcome,” he replied as soon as he had permitted her to hear again.
She peered at his hands. “You’re wearing gloves. Good. I hoped that you’d think of that.”
“I try to think of everything.”
She looked around at the windows. Assured that they had privacy again, she twisted to try to sit up. “I’m an awful mess.”
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“That’s all right. You can get cleaned up as soon as I get you unbolted.” He pulled her to a sitting position and then walked around to unwind the cap nuts from the bolts. One by one, the U-bolts fell away, first from her wrists, then from her forearms, then elbows.
The bands of bruising at her shoulders and arms were severe. She would be wearing long sleeves for some time. Mercifully, summer was long gone.
As soon as her elbows were free, she bent her arms slowly forward. “Ouch,” she said, “I’m really stiff.”
“I bet you are. You wore that crossbeam for thirty-six hours without relief.” He continued working. He left the bolts nearest the shoulders until last so that the plank would be supported until he could finally free it completely. It was the reverse of the sequence that he had used when he put it on her in the first place.
As he released the final nuts, he said, “You have a raw line across your upper back where the corner of the plank was rubbing.”
“I’m not surprised. It stings a lot.”
When he finally lowered the plank to the floor, she groaned and slowly crossed her arms across her chest to massage her shoulders. “God, you can’t believe how much my shoulders are aching. I never thought that it would be so painful to have my arms held straight out for a day and a half. How do people who are in body casts survive?”
Craig answered as he unlocked the stirrups from her feet, “They are put in a more comfortable position. They don’t have their arms and legs stretched wide apart like yours.” Finally, he unlocked the chain from her ankle. “Now, you go have a nice long hot shower and I’ll whip up some eggs and toast for you.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“You run along and don’t tell me what I don’t have to do.”
She smiled weakly. “Of all the food I fantasized about over the past two days, eggs was not one of them.”
“Would you like something else instead?”
“No. Now that you’ve mentioned them, eggs sound like the most delicious food on earth. I can hardly wait.” She limped upstairs.
Craig took the opportunity to watch her ass wriggle as she walked. She was stiff but he was sure that she’d be okay. Her ass looked fine.
He didn’t start the eggs right away because he wasn’t sure how long it would take her to shower. Instead, he rinsed the urine from the plank and chains in the set tub in her laundry room, as well as cleaning the plastic bucket, and then carried everything down to her basement. He poked around until he found a bucket and a mop in a closet and set to work mopping up her living room floor. That was beyond the call of duty, but he figured that she was in no condition to do it herself she must be absolutely exhausted and he could not let her spend the night here when the whole place stank like a latrine.
He finished cleaning about the time that he heard the shower turn off upstairs. He had just begun frying up three eggs and two slices of toast before she appeared in the kitchen doorway wearing her fluffy white robe and slippers.
She said little while he cooked. They both felt comfortable with a few minutes of silence, each thinking their own thoughts. When he set the meal in front of her, she said, “You’re terrific,” then fell on the food like a ravenous beast, which was pretty much how she felt by this time.
“You want milk or tea to drink?”
“Milk would taste wonderful,” she replied between bites.
The meal was gone in a few gulps. “Do you want more?”
“I think I better let this settle first,” she said. “I don’t want to hurt myself.” She looked at him and laughed at her incongruous comment. Then she said, “You can leave whenever you like. I’m going to be fine now. As soon as I clean up the dishes and the living room, I’m going to go to bed and sleep like a log.”
“You should go to bed right now,” he said. “I’ll throw these dishes in the dishwasher and that’ll be it.”
“I’m going to clean up the living room a bit, then.” She blushed at the thought of having her urine all over her hardwood floor.
“No need. It’s all done. I put your stuff in the basement and mopped up the mess.”
“What?”
“I cleaned the living room while you were in the shower.”
“You mopped my floor?”
“Yeah. There was some Mr. Clean in the closet where you keep the mop. It only took a few minutes and you’re too tired to worry about it.”
For the first time this weekend, she began to cry. Really cry, not just the few tears that had escaped after her orgasm with Alex. Now she sobbed deeply and great tears rolled down her cheeks.
He held her hand for a minute until her sobs began to subside, and then said, “Let’s go upstairs. I’m going to put some Polysporin on that raw strip on your back and then tuck you into bed before I leave.”
And that’s exactly what he did.
* * *
As they dined on rabbit cassoulet, Alex entertained Leslie with stories about his work and commentaries on movies that he had seen recently. He did not mention the previous Saturday night until the waitress had brought the desert. Apples sautéed in Calvados was the specialty at La Grotte Méditerranée. When they were alone again, he said, “I hope that I gave you what you wanted on Saturday.”
“You gave me what I needed at that time.”
“Well, if you ever need something like that again, you’ll have to give me more instructions. I don’t mind helping you but it’s not the kind of thing that comes naturally to me.”
“I appreciate that.”
No more was said about it.
That night, he made love to her in his usual tender style. She melted into his body with joy.
Three months later, he proposed marriage to her and she was thrilled to accept.
During their nine-month engagement, she felt no desire to play any more backgammon for penalties.
Alex did not mind that she maintained her friendship with Craig and went out to lunch with him every two or three weeks. Craig was more relieved than disappointed that she had no more need for his help to torture herself.
Leslie counted herself uncommonly fortunate to be able to keep two such understanding men in her life. They were two better men than most women found in their lifetimes.
The Whore-for-a-Day Game
“Let me be blunt,” Alex said. “We’ve been married for more than a year and a half and it’s not as good as it should be. I’m willing to do whatever it takes to have a better marriage. I just don’t know what I should do.”
“I think everything’s fine,” Leslie said, but there was no conviction in her voice.
Alex waited for a long time, hoping that she would elaborate, but she remained mute. Eventually he asked, “Are you happy?”
“Yes. Are you?”
“Not especially. Not as happy as I thought that I’d be when we first got married.”
“Well, I guess life isn’t a bowl of cherries after all, is it?”
“I’m not sure that it should be this sour.”
She looked at him with shock. “You think that our marriage is sour?”
“It’s not sweet. You can be pretty sarcastic sometimes, you know.”
“Is that it? You want me to act sweeter. You don’t want me to be so sarcastic? I can try to change that if you want.”
It was his turn to look at her for a while, trying to figure her out. “I don’t think that’s it,” he said, finally. “I don’t mind your being sarcastic. I just think that we’re stuck in a rut. We don’t have as much fun as we should.”
“You think we should have more fun? Like what? I’ll do whatever you want to do for fun. Go dancing? Go to more movies? Whatever.”
“It’s not that simple. It’s… I don’t know. It’s something more important than that.”
She looked at him through narrowed lids. “Okay. Let’s do it this way. I think that our marriage is fine. You don’t. You said that you wanted to be blunt, so do it. Be blunt. Tell me exactly what you want that you�
�re not getting.”
He blushed, and then said, “Okay. Let’s start with sex. I think that we should have more sex.”
“You think that we should have more sex or you want more sex for yourself. This is important, so let’s be absolutely clear about this.”
“I want more sex. I love making love to you. There’s nothing in the world that I’d rather be doing than making love to you. Nothing.”
“And doing it whenever we feel like it isn’t enough?”
“Three times last month? That’s not much sex, you know.”
It was her turn to blush. “You’re keeping count?”
“It’s not like it’s hard for me to count to such a big number.”
“And you call me sarcastic. So what do you think would be a good number? Twice a week? Three times?”
“That would certainly be a better number.”
“Even if I don’t feel in the mood? Even if I can’t enjoy it?”
“No. I want you to enjoy it as much as I do. I don’t want to make love to you if you’re not having any fun.”
“So that puts us right back where we started. I’m happy; you’re not. And if I’m not happy, then you’re still not. I’d say that it sounds like you have the problem, not me.”
He sighed. “I don’t think that you’re being honest with me. I don’t think that you’re really as happy with the status quo as you claim.”
“What makes you say that?”
“The way you act with me. You don’t act happy.”
“Maybe I don’t want to be happy. Maybe I’m happy not being happy. Did you ever think about that?”
“Now you’re being sarcastic with me again.”
She paused. Then she said something strange. “No. I’m not being sarcastic. I’m being literal. You’re going to think that I’m all screwed up in the head, but sometimes I need to be unhappy. Sometimes a little dose of misery is exactly what I need.” She paused and he saw that her hands were trembling. “I… God, this isn’t easy for me. I…” She stopped and looked at him. There was a glint of desperation in her eyes.
A Lady Pays Her Penalties Page 18