by Anneke Jacob
***
I pushed my chain into a back-and-forth sway, and listened to it creak.
The taste of latex lingered, interfering with the usual smells of hay and old wood and my own flesh. Leather came through pretty clearly from all the harness on my body and on the wall, or was that the scent of the leather hood lingering on my face and in my hair?
My brain had managed to climb a notch or two up from animal mode.
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Shame made my toes curl, clenched my inner thighs right up to my carapaced cunt. I felt a surge around the huge plugs that my master had left me in that morning.
First there had been something nudging me awake – his foot. Then the tug at my neck, drawing me out of my basket by chain and collar, between his legs. My sleepy eyes had barely glimpsed the cool dawn light before they closed again. But painful experience had taught me to bring myself up to full awareness and not sleep on the job.
For a few minutes after he came I had dozed again, my head on his thigh. I woke to his hands stroking, murmurs in Danish that sounded like endearments. For all I knew he could have been calling me all the demeaning names in the Danish dictionary, but I responded to the tone like the animal I was, snuggled against him and was happy.
An early morning walk in the space between the two sheds. There'd been sounds of stirring above us when we returned, but no footsteps on the stairs. I'd braced on elbows and knees, moaning, just as I had done a hundred times, to have the belt removed and relocked with its planted plugs. Harness on and pulled tight, muzzle on. The smack toward the cage. And then I'd dwelt in my kennel, while long legs came and went, while hands tended to me or not. Seeing mostly chair legs, feet, the shadowy underside of the table.
Aware of those upper, inner planets circling warm around their conversation.
I was so far into outer darkness as to be barely discernable, the Pluto of this solar system, downgraded from planetary status. Pluto the pet dog, too; the one who walks on all fours and doesn't talk.
Straw now between my curling toes. Shame at what and who I was.
Shuddering, abominable, delicious shame.
Voices outside the stable. The sound of teasing, laughter. Karl and Ria.
Coming closer. Fear: a thumping presence between my ears. Voices quieting now; going away? My disappointed body strained toward the door.
Wanting even Ria? Thoughts doubled back on themselves. How odd. I seemed to be adapting to the women somehow. Their proximity and power over me had been deeply upsetting; now, not so much. I knew they had the right to me; that was the main thing. That sense of wrongness was abating.
And they weren't entirely unknown quantities any more. In any case, my body was so desperate to be handled that the gender of the handler had become secondary. Both genders were usually around; I could and did think 399
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of the female hands as extensions of the male ones.
Karl and Ria came in after all, and began the process of getting me sunblocked, into pony tack and between the shafts of the two-wheeled trap.
Ria made me bend, and pressed hard on the butt plug till I heard a snap; as I expected I felt the long tail brushing the backs of my calves. Karl clipped the lines from nipple rings to reins; that particular embellishment had become standard. There were the blinders and bells, even one on my nose ring, so that I jingled and chimed as I was led onto the road. And all this time, apart from some brief exchanges as they handed each other things or advised on the tightness of a girth, they were talking over my head, some conversation that had nothing to do with me.
Between the obscuring blinkers was a vertical slice of light, banded horizontally: the brown road at my feet, crossed by the green of distant trees, and topped by blue sky. The whip flicked me up to a trot and I jingled along between the shafts, shoulders doing their best with arms folded back. A lash of pain goaded me up to a run, but the pull of the bit quickly hauled me back. The pain was just gratuitous amusement, not a driving technique. I winced and danced a little as the blows fell, but trotted at the speed that the bit dictated. Reins and whip got passed back and forth a couple of times.
One driver preferred to lay lines across me, and the other was an expert at small, cruel flicks with just the tip; I couldn't tell which was which.
Every pull at the corners of my mouth drew on nipples as well. The pain was only mild; the additional arousal was something else. My noises became guttural, long before we reached the trees. The impaling objects between my legs moved with me. I could run in them for hours, be whipped round and round the circuit and never come; Anders had long since made sure of this. I was frantic to stand and squirm, no matter how foolish and futile the behaviour. At last we were between the trees, out of the sun. They drove me off the road onto sparse grass well marked by previous wheel marks; this was a favourite spot, with grass and access to the stream. Karl tightened the reins around a branch and gave me some water from the bottle, all the while holding Ria by the waist and biting at her neck. Her hands were in his pants.
He set the bottle down and grabbed her up, and I could hear them tussling and giggling behind me. Then I caught sight of Ria in the grassy clearing beyond the light screen of scrubby growth to my right, carrying a basket.
About twenty meters away from me she set it down, and rolled out a blanket.
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They were having a picnic.
A breeze filtered through the trees and cooled some of the sweat off me.
Standing and squirming against the plugs, I waited, and watched through the blinders as they lolled and ate. One step pulled my head back at an angle and drew on harnessed breasts.
A squirrel came within a couple of feet of my motionless body. I imagined little claws climbing me, and made an attempt to swish my tail, hoping to scare it. It scampered off. After a while Ria went off to the river to rinse some things, and Karl returned to get something from the trap. My feedbag. A chopped-up amalgam as usual, in a basin strapped to a tree trunk.
With my rein retied around the tree below the basin, the bit out of my mouth and the bell out of my nose, I dipped my head in. There was celery and apple and a few nuts in with the mix; not bad. A hand on my flank would have been a comfort, but Karl was gone.
When I straightened up again and no longer had the sound of my own crunching in my ears, I could hear splashes and their voices; they were out of sight down at the water. A few minutes later, Ria came through the clearing wrapped in a towel, and dumped some things into the basket. A call from Karl, an agreeing sound from her, and she came up from behind the trap, gave me a drink, shook out a little water to rinse my face, replaced the bit in my mouth and retied the reins to a branch above my head, all in about half a minute. She forgot the nose bell; no complaints from me. Then she was back in the clearing, leaving a scent behind: Jasmine, water, sunscreen, a hint of a sharp cheese, and a lot of arousal. Hers or mine?
She'd barely touched me. I arched, thrust breasts and buttocks into empty air, not even that stray breeze to caress them. Even that long, soft, slender hand with its lacquer and rings, even that mocking female glance would have been something. An acknowledgement of my presence. Even just an acknowledgement of an animal's consciousness and suffering. They were naked now. Karl's long back showed me its vertebrae and muscle, the hollows at the side of his buttocks. I caught sight of a white breast. Then the swell of Ria's hips, the grip of her thighs as they rolled, off the blanket and back again. He licked, and she arched like a cat; she straddled him and held her breasts out for him to pinch. I could hear the suction of their kisses, the grunting exclamations, the words that demanded and caressed.
I soaked all this in, enthralled, my breath matched to theirs. Now Karl 401
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had his hand deep inside her and his mouth on her cunt, and she was screaming. I writhed and shimmied and j
ingled, and felt the pull at mouth and nipples; I had tried to move more than a step from where I was tied. My tongue worked around the bit. My insides clamped down hard on their intrusions. Insects were discovering my unprotected flesh. The two on the blanket also; they lay back, slapped at each other, laughing. Then they were rolling over and over on the grass. I caught the shine of Ria's breast in a pocket of sunlight, Karl's browner shoulder. Ria began a low purr, which opened out into a long, rising howl ending in an ecstatic "Ah! Ah! Ah!" I shuddered; from the back of my throat, whimpering, came my own empty echo. Then she was on top of him, hands braced on his shoulders. Slowly he turned her around so that she faced his feet, and bit by bit they got to their knees, and then their feet, never losing that connection. His lean brown arm across her waist, he walked her toward the living screen dividing us, and then she had a hand around two saplings and he was holding her by the hips and fucking her from behind, their faces distorted, lost. I could smell them both now, that deep sexual bouquet. This time they both came, and then they sank to the grass below the bushes, and I couldn't lower my head enough to see them any longer.
A long pause, and then a small "eek!" and a slap. Ria rose in my field of vision, slapping away insects, scratching a mosquito bite on her butt. Karl followed her, scratching his belly and grinning.
They took the trip back rather slowly, and hardly whipped me at all. I could hear them murmuring to each other, closely entwined on the seat no doubt, in a sweet daze of fulfilment. I thought mode of transportation thoughts. Wordless, lonely, horny pony thoughts.
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Chapter Thirty-One
Game of all fours
That night Anders brought the cage in from the kitchen to serve as a table, and they all played Scrabble by the living room fire. Karl and Ria worked together, shamelessly combing the dictionary for usable words, claiming the handicap of English as a second language. The board itself was on a piece of plywood to prevent it from folding itself through into the space below. But the wooden racks were held in hands or balanced across a couple of bars. Occasionally a tile was dropped, and much groping and pinching was required to retrieve it. At one point Svend's entire rack of seven fell through, and the game was delayed for several minutes.
"Here we go. Vice. Double word score." Val announced, laying out her tiles. The laughing group laughed harder.
"I've never seen anything like this," said Anders when they had recovered. "Do you think there's some pattern?" Everyone cracked up again.
Ria, who had had an extra glass of wine, fell about, unable to get her breath.
Already the board contained 'top,' 'sling,' 'heel,' 'rear,' and on a triple word score (15 points), 'ow.'
Svend groaned. "I have nothing. Not even an ordinary word." He considered for a while. "Fuck it." He added an 's' to 'vice' and received general approval, picked up a new letter, fumbled it deftly, mimed dismay and sent his long arm into the cage to get it back. The creature within squeaked and scrambled up to hands and knees, squealed again as helping hands searched her folds for the tile.
"Ah ha!" Anders gloated. "Finally!" He made 'zoos' using the 's' that Svend had just laid down. "I've had that Z since the second turn. Kinky enough if you put your mind to it."
"We have our little zoo of one right here," Karl concurred. "Too bad you missed the double letter score."
"Who's winning?"
"I lost track. Weren't you keeping score?"
Before the letters were gone they'd managed to add 'rod' and 'lube' to the board (the last ruled allowable by popular consent), and then Val in a burst of triumph put 'latex' down onto a triple word score. No one had a clue what 403
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the score was, but all agreed she'd won.
***
Val and Anders spent a Sunday afternoon exploring the property's several sheds and outbuildings, which were full of tangled, dusty heaps of obsolete farm equipment, discarded furniture, lumber and other odds and ends. The owner had expressed no interest; in addition to the break on rent that Anders was getting for repairs, he was welcome to use or take whatever he wanted from the sheds; the more the better. So far they had unearthed a rusty pump, a grain mill, and an old, well-used butcher block that Anders figured he could find uses for. Val had decided that some heavy old adjustable wrenches were worth cleaning up, as they were better than the ones she had.
"Look at this." Anders wiped dust from the edge of a slab of wood, about two feet by five, a good two inches thick. "Maple. Good quality.
Unused, I think. Let's have a look at the grain." He hefted it up from behind the miscellaneous lumber, manoeuvred it out the door and leaned it up against the shed. "Yup, this'll do. I'll have to pick up some urethane.”
“Do for what?”
“Another piece of obscure fetish technology; what else?”
“Jesus, don't you have enough?"
"Nah," he said. "I'm in the full flower of kink creativity; why quit now?"
"As long as you can still find your little prize under all the junk."
"Oh, come on. You get off on it, too. You were into that Scrabble game as much as anybody."
"Yeah, and I won, too!"
He chuckled. "A killer instinct. Competitive to the last tile." He picked up the piece of maple and sang a verse from a bawdy old folksong as he headed for the workshop he'd set up.
I said, my dear lady, if you're fond of the gaming, There's one game I know I would like you to learn, The game it is called The Game Of All Fours…
"Don't you try your musical wiles on me," said Val. "I'm wise to you country boys." She trailed along, examining her wrenches.
"How do you know it's a boy singing?" he teased.
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"Oh, there were dyke deedle-eedle ploughboy songs? I don't think so."
Anders went into the hot workshop and found what he was after, then took it outside again where there was some breeze and the air was fresh. He set the wood over a couple of trestles across the bumpy roots of a huge oak.
Leaves were rustling overhead, and he could hear the fast claws of a couple of squirrels. He oiled a cloth and began rubbing the dust off his find.
"Speaking of things lesbian, how's Maia behaving with you?"
"Not bad. Her lip service is improving. Between me and Ria, she's catching up on some of that basic training that's been so shamefully neglected." Val fetched some WD-40 for the wrenches, set them on an old oil drum and began to loosen their arthritic joints. "Your straight-arrow baby's stopped freezing up on us.”
“You don't say." He had noted this for himself.
"She's not exactly eager for it. We're part of her dom scenery now. I'll have to ratchet things up a little or I'll get bored."
Anders looked up from his wiping, eyebrows raised. "I thought all this was way beyond your tastes already."
"Not my ideal direction," Val said. "But I do like taking a girl where she doesn't think she wants to go, and watching her find out how much she needs it.”
“Needs what? The act, or being taken?"
"The second is a lot more interesting. I've used up dozens of the first kind. No doubt they've gone on to lighten the lives of innumerable butch dykes."
"You're such a community benefactor. What have they given you, a dozen toasters by now?"
Val ignored this. Anders smiled to himself and wielded his rag slowly, watching the apricot-hued grain emerge. "I take it my girl is the second kind."
"Uh huh. It's all about the journey in her case." She looked over at the heavy plank. "So what have you got in mind there?"
"Well you know, it occurred to me during the Scrabble game. The cage was okay as far as it went. But it didn't require much of her except to curl up and be decorative. Except, of course, when Svend dropped letters in there."
"Not just Svend."
"Yeah, how hard did you pinch her, anyway? She's got black and b
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marks all over her.”
“Hard enough to get her to move her sweet little butt. Boo hoo."
Anders grinned. "Anyway, she'll need to work a little harder next time."
"Why not?" Val wiped her hands and came over to examine the board.
"Not bad. By the way, did you get hold of that Schaeffer guy?"
"I did."
"Any good?"
"Might be," he said. "We're talking. He's interested."
"Cool."
"Yeah, yeah. Might all come to nothing."
"Just look out that some kind of power and control out in the real world doesn't make you lose interest in your little ménage. Or menagerie, I should say."
Anders shook his head. "Won't happen. What, are you after a piece of her?"
Val grimaced. "Christ, no. Anything that dependent? Spare me. I'll help you out with her, you know, like a good buddy should, but I'd never want that kind of responsibility, even part-time."
"Good, because I'm not giving her away." He turned the board over and started on the other side. "So you still think I do all this out of frustration with my failures. Stoking up my inadequate ego and so on; is that it?"
She snorted. "Oh, relax. Who wouldn't use some kind of power at home to make up for all the shit out there."
"A lot of people." He examined a knot in the grain. "But the question is whether I do. Or whether they're two separate tracks I follow."
"You don't think you put more energy into this stuff when you're blocked somewhere else?"
"That, maybe." He put down his rag and stared at the thick, deeply-furrowed bark on the tree beside him. A tiny insect was making its way over one ridge and down into the next. "But this isn't some minor diversion, some little hobby that I can take or leave. Whatever happens out there."
"Yeah, no shit. You think too fucking much, Thygesen, you know that?
You're a head case, you're happy, leave it." Val sighted along the plank, and rubbed a thumb over the grain. "This is good and straight. Trim this end and it would make a nice coffee table.”