Please, Sir

by Rachel Kramer Bussel

  “I think that the first time I beat you, I should use a riding crop. Each stroke will hurt more than the last. The pain of a crop is sharp, searing, biting deep. Eating into you, body and soul. I’ll beat you into a lather, my little pony. Your ass will look like it has been barbecued. You won’t be able to sit down for days.”

  I could see it all. I wanted it all, wanted it now. The delicate trace of his fingers on my flesh burned like the trails of fire he promised me. His silken voice made me weak with desire. My clit was a red-hot coal threatening to burst into flame.

  “Touch yourself, girl. Show me how much you want to be my slave.”

  I didn’t think twice. Before my new Master, I knew no shame. I brushed my palm over my sticky pubic curls, then slipped my middle finger into my soaking cleft and grazed my clit. Lightning shot through me. My body began to erupt. He rested his palm on the small of my back, short-circuiting the climax.

  “Cassie! Don’t come, slave. Not until I tell you that you may. Can you do that for me?” His voice was gruff with lust. Joy sang through me at the realization. He wasn’t doing this just for my benefit.

  “Yes, Sir.” I managed through gritted teeth. I pulled back, sliding my fingers along my slippery lower lips, avoiding the swollen nub begging for my attention. Sensations prickled and sparked between my thighs. I spread myself wide with one hand and stroked with the other. The Master’s magic fingers returned to my butt, kneading and caressing. I strained for control.

  “Before your first flogging, I’ll rope you up and suspend you from the ceiling. Wrists fastened together, arms pulled overhead. I’ll secure a spreader bar between your ankles, to keep your thighs apart and make sure you’re accessible. I’ve got a fine cat that I’ll use to whip your shoulders, your back, your butt—strokes fast and then slow, each one slicing across your lovely pale skin and leaving fiery trails. When you can’t take any more, I’ll just twirl you around and start on your breasts and your belly. Every so often I’ll stop to use one of your holes. Your mouth. Your dripping cunt. Your tight, tender ass. I’ll fill you with my come. Then I’ll go back to beating you.”

  My fingers squelched in my cunt. I thrust them deep, trying to get my whole hand inside. My clit throbbed and twitched. I felt the orgasm coiling deep in my pelvis, winding tighter and tighter as his words and his stroking hand drove me toward the edge.

  “The marks will show the world that you’re mine. I’ll take you out to my favorite club, lead you collared and naked through the crowds, so that everyone can admire the rosy tattoos of your devotion. Don’t stop frigging yourself, girl. Work those fingers. In and out and around. That’s right.”

  I hovered near the peak of pleasure, dizzy, pulsing, terrified that I would topple over the precipice and disappoint him. I focused on his hand, still dancing across my butt, and his deep, controlled, hypnotic voice, painting pictures that seemed more real by the minute.

  “Everyone will want a piece of you. I’ll drag you up onstage and bind you to the padded horse. Then, one by one, the mistresses and the masters will take you, however they choose. Paddling you, whipping you, clamping your clit, forcing their fists into your cunt. You’ll take them all, for me, and you’ll love it, won’t you, my slutty little girl. Won’t you?”

  His finger traced its way into the cleft between my buttcheeks.

  I held my breath, unable to move, unable to answer.

  “Finally, at the end of the night, when you’ve been beaten and fucked to exhaustion, I’ll stand behind you, grab your hips, and ram my cock into your ass. And then I’ll let you come. I’ll pump myself into your butt and we’ll come together, master and slave.

  “Come now, Cassie. Come now!”

  He pushed his slick finger deep into my rear hole. One finger only, I knew it was just one finger, but I felt the thickness of his cock, the pain of being stretched, the dirty joy of being filled, the spasms as he emptied his seed into my bowels. I was there with him, in that club he described so vividly, jerking and convulsing as I came, impaled on my Master’s cock.

  The tension snapped. Fierce gusts of pleasure battered my body. I sank to my knees, face against the padded seat of the chair. It went on and on, swells of sensation spiraling up from my sex, shaking me until I was limp and exhausted.

  The quiet finally roused me. I stood up, stiff and sticky, and turned to face Dr. Carver. He lay back against the piled pillows, his eyes shut, locks of silvery hair plastered to his forehead with sweat. He was completely still. The sheet barely moved with the rise and fall of his shallow breathing.

  Oh, my god! What had I done? What if he had suffered another stroke? I groped for his wrist. His pulse was slightly elevated. I cursed myself and my unnatural desires. I’d lose my license, certainly, but that wasn’t what mattered. My only concern was for my Master.

  “Master?” I whispered. I grabbed him by the shoulder. “Sir? Please, Sir, wake up. I’m so sorry, Sir…”

  His sapphire eyes flipped open. He favored me with a faint smile. “Don’t be sorry. I’m fine, Cassie.” He placed his hand on mine, stroking a fingertip along my wrist and sending shivers up my spine. “Better than I’ve been for months.” Warmth flooded through me as his voice gained strength. “Now, put your clothes back on. Then you can help clean me up.”

  He pointed to the growing damp area on the sheet. “For the moment, I’d like to keep our little arrangement confidential.”

  “Yes, Sir.” I wondered what the day shift would make of the smell of sex that hovered in the room. I donned my bra and reached around for my panties, which lay crumpled on top of the sheet. Dr. Carver grabbed them before I could.

  “I think I’ll keep these,” he said, stuffing them under his pillow.

  “Whatever you wish, Sir.”

  “And from now on, Cassie, I want you to come to work without any underwear. It will make everything more convenient. No brassiere, no panties. And wear a skirt, not those silly inaccessible trousers.”

  “But, Sir…”

  “Are you going to argue with me, slave?” His grin belied his cautionary tone.

  I felt the gathering wetness soaking the crotch of my trousers. “Of course not, Sir. But I don’t know if this kind of—activity—is good for a man in your condition.”

  “On the contrary. Anything that gives me the motivation to suffer through the endless hours of physical and occupational therapy that I’m facing is good, in my book.” His smile was an affectionate challenge. “I’m determined to reach the point where I can flog you the way you deserve. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  I hugged myself, amazed and delighted. “If it pleases you, Sir, then I’d like it very much.”

  SUNDAY IN THE STUDY

  Justine Elyot

  I never know how long he will make me wait.

  Never less than five minutes, usually between ten and twenty, and on one unfondly recalled occasion, I was standing hands-on-head listening to the steady tick of the grandfather clock behind me for over an hour.

  This, he says, is Reflection Time. I am to spend it thinking through any of the week’s tribulations or missed opportunities, and considering how I will account for them. That is the theory, although in practice these tense minutes lend themselves to speculation. How many? How long? What will he use? Will I be able to sit at the family dinner afterward?

  Later I will find myself in reflective mode once more, but this time I will be facing a corner, holding my hands clasped in the small of my back, above my bare and throbbing bottom. This is Recovery Time and usually lasts half an hour, long enough for tears to dry and sins to be absolved before we move into the final stage of the process: Forgiveness and Reconnection.

  You will gather from all of this that Sinclair and I are lovers of ritual. What holds us together is something more than our mutual kink, our undeniable attraction and all the usual romantic folderol. It is our need for this Sunday to be like every other Sunday, in essence, even if certain elements are allowed to vary. It is my need for
correction and his for control. When we were younger, my Sundays were spent in church, while he captained the school cricket team. As adults, we have exchanged these rituals for their deviant counterpart. He dominates, as he did his ten bowlers and batsmen; I submit, as I did to the God I worshipped. But this time there is nothing unpredictable, nothing unknowable, nothing to fear. It is all so much more satisfying.

  Tick…Perhaps the strap…tock…I hope not the cane…tick… But then again…tock…I like the cane…tick…I must be insane …tock.

  The door opens.

  I know the drill. I remove my hands from my head and lower my eyes, letting my vision drift over the familiar pattern of the Persian runner, through the doorway and across the highly polished oak floorboards. My feet follow their gaze until they are stopped by the obstacle of his desk.

  I love his desk. It is so antique it even has an inkwell. When I am bending over it, I can see my face in the mirror shine, though I tend to screw my eyes shut rather than watch my contorted expressions. Rarely, he requires me to keep them open—for instance, on the day that he invited his Dominatrix friend to watch and take notes. I had to look her in the eye through twenty-four strokes of the tawse, an almost impossible task, though I am proud to say I managed it to their satisfaction.

  He walks, always in a slow, stately fashion, from the door to the desk. He stands on the other side of it, looking down at me with his more-in-sorrow-than-anger face for a moment.

  “Well, Beth, here we are again,” he says. “I wonder if the day will come when I do not have to waste my Sunday morning taking you to task over imperfections of behavior.” We both know it will not. “No answer to that, hmm? Well, it does seem a very distant prospect to me, as well. Now then.”

  He seats himself and pulls over a large book, a leather-bound ledger. Large as it is, after two years it is already half filled with page after page of copperplate script, remembrances of crimes past and their associated sentences. He opens it, flipping the leaves to where the ribbon bookmark lies across a blank expanse.

  Not blank for long though, for soon a fountain pen is slanted between his elegant fingers, dipped in the inkwell and put to the page. As he writes, he talks, his murmur following the looping progress of the pen.

  “Sunday, June eighteenth,” he says, then he holds the pen in suspended animation and looks at me. “What should I write, do you think? Any ideas?”

  I never reply to this at first. Although the rules of our contract are perfectly clear, and he is unfailingly consistent in his enforcement of them, my mind blanks as soon as I enter the study and does not refill again until much later. Somewhere behind my shivering anticipation and survival techniques, I am aware that I smoked a cigarette, or left the television on standby, but it is all too distant for immediate retrieval.

  “I…can’t think, Sir,” I admit.

  “Come on, Beth—you were the one that used to confess to priests. Did your memory fail you then, too?”

  “No. But five Hail Marys…” I trail off, reddening.

  “Quite a different proposition to six strokes of the cane. Yes, I do see that.”

  Oh, god, not the cane. But I like the cane. But it hurts!

  He sees the flicker in my eyes and chuckles slightly, his sadistic reflex flexing.

  “Very well. I shall tally the scores.” His pen begins to document the evidence of my transgressions, committing my guilt to permanent record. “On Monday, you left the house without charging your mobile phone, so you were unobtainable for the space of three hours. On Wednesday, you ate only three of your five daily portions of fruit and vegetables. Yesterday, you did not go swimming…”

  He looks sharply up at me. I had no idea he knew this, and I have made an incoherent exclamation. “I…” I cannot lie though. “Oh,” I say anticlimactically. “I just went to the shops instead. I didn’t think…you would mind.”

  “I don’t,” he says. “I don’t mind if you go shopping. I do mind if a friend of yours calls me from the pool to ask me why you haven’t met her there as arranged and I can’t account for it, though. You know our rules. One of them relates to honesty. And if you genuinely thought I wouldn’t mind, why, then, did you not tell me at the time?”

  Tough question. Because I wanted to be found out, flits through my head, but the rules of the game will not allow this kind of honesty. We do it because it’s hot, is not the dynamic that arouses us at all. We do it because it’s hot but we pretend that we don’t, is much closer, though still only partly articulating the subtlety and complexity of our compact.

  “I didn’t think to,” is what I actually say.

  “I didn’t think to, Sir,” he corrects me. My legs weaken and moisture seeps between them. I repeat the phrase. “I think we can categorize thoughtlessness under the heading of disrespect, Beth.”

  I bite my lip. Disrespect always means the cane.

  He writes out my sentence, then signs it with his usual flourish and pushes the ledger across the desk for my perusal.

  “Read it,” he instructs.

  “Ten strokes of the number-two strap for general disobedience, followed by six strokes of the cane.” This is never easy to say; my voice seems to blush as it reads. Sometimes he makes me repeat the words, but today he does not, which is one scrap of relief to hold close. I sign my name under his, my scrawl messy and disorganized beneath his perfectly reined-in script. He even has Dom handwriting.

  “Good,” he says briskly, glancing at the book before opening the Drawer of Pain. “We shall proceed. Over the desk, please, Beth.”

  I arrange myself carefully, hinged at the waist, my hands reaching to grasp the far rim of the desk, while he reaches into the drawer and withdraws just one of a vast range of nasty leather and wooden implements. This one is maroon leather, not the thickest nor the stiffest, but still capable of delivering a memorable sting. Ten strokes with it will warm and redden my bottom just sufficiently to prepare it for the cane.

  Sinclair places the strap on the desk, rises and moves around behind me. I am wearing the light skirt and sheer white knickers he specified. He runs his hands over my jutting backside, rubbing at the whisper-thin cotton, pulling it taut and then letting it go slack before dealing two ringing smacks to each cheek.

  “When will you learn, Beth,” he asks, lifting the hem to my waist so that only my tight mesh knickers offer any posterior protection, “that I take disciplinary matters very seriously indeed? Hmm?”

  My only response is a yelp as a volley of faster smacks hails onto the barely there fabric.

  “After two years of Sundays spent over this desk, one would expect something to have sunk in,” he says, peeling the knickers off my pinkening rump and letting them rest at midthigh. “And yet, here I am again, faced with the unenviable duty of visiting punishment on your recidivist bottom.”‘ He sighs, a little overtheatrically, and I stifle a giggle. He does lay it on a mite too thick sometimes.

  Amusement is soon replaced by clenching of muscles when he applies his hard, smooth hand to my bare bum, over and over and over until I can barely maintain my ignoble position. My breathy grunts cloud the perfect polish of the desk so that my nose tip is dampened, skidding around in time with the smacks. My fingers cling to the edge, but at the same time I must take care not to let my nails mark the surface. From this position it is difficult to focus on anything but the direction, speed and solidity of the next stroke, but somehow I have learned to keep a part of my mind concentrated on what Sinclair calls appropriate behavior.

  No swearing. No badmouthing him. No kicking up with my feet or reaching behind to shield my bottom. I can plead all I like, but only the invocation of my safeword will make the slightest shred of difference.

  None of this is unmanageable at first, but once the strap is flexed and flipped and brought to bear on my bottom, the alert level changes. I start to think about my breathing, I start to think about how many, mentally placing myself at the end of the ordeal before it begins. Always, about two or three st
rokes in, the question, Why do I do this, why do I like this, blares across my brain in panicking neon, but I know the answer well enough to take another bracing breath and push my stoic behind back out.

  The strap falls with its primitively satisfying crack, over and over. It is stiff enough to penetrate to my muscle, flexible enough to sting a red stripe across my skin. I know why this is so—I oil them myself once a week. On a Saturday morning, I take a spray bottle containing one part white vinegar to three parts linseed oil and use it to keep Sinclair’s straps and tawses and leather-covered paddles in the optimum condition for striping my backside. I spray on the mixture and rub it in with a soft microfiber cloth, then I soak the canes in a bucket of water to keep them pliable and whippy enough for Sir’s purposes.

  I certainly seem to have performed my task with admirable efficacy this week—the strap slaps down, painting its localized sunburn in a pattern of regular rectangles across the fleshiest section of my rump. I make it to ten, then relax, twitching across the desktop like a fish on dry land, moaning my relief.

  His fingertips brush the heated flesh, assessing its temperature.

  “Nicely warmed up,” is the verdict. One finger ventures lower, into the depths, finding the lips swollen and sticky. “Hmm,” he says, as he always does. “Lesson not learned yet, Beth?”

  “Oh, yes, Sir, it is,” I tell him, trying to split my sex on this one lean visitor, to enfold it and vacuum it up.

  “Then, why…so…wet? Oh, no, I don’t think we are finished here.”

  Ah, how cruelly he withdraws his foraging digit, moving around to the front of the desk and making me lick it clean.

  “Stand up, Beth, and fetch me a cane. A nice thin one, I think.”

  Fetching the cane: a simple enough act, and yet one that can never be unthinkingly performed, for it requires such a fine pitch of submission. I am absolutely conscious of what I am doing when I stand and make my way neatly to the umbrella stand where the canes hang. I select one, nice and thin as requested, and picture the imprint it will make on my body. Even knowing what is in store for me, I make a steady journey back to Sinclair and hold my offering out to him in upturned palms.