He reached down and pulled me up so I was sitting; then he sat, too, forcing my face on his, my eyes on his eyes. I tried to look away, only to have him pull me back.
Rather than give way to more hysteria, a strange calm came over me, at least enough so I could speak rationally, if not in a pleading tone. “How can you want a woman who detests you so?”
He smiled and removed his hand from my face. “Detest? Are you so sure?”
“Of course, I’m sure.”
“But how you rail against me, only to offer up your finest treasure, this tarty little sex of yours, and perform exactly as you always have. What am I to think?”
“You’re to believe what I tell you.”
He shrugged. “I believe what I feel from you, whore.”
Once again, haughty scorn took over his persona. Oh, and how familiar was that humiliating talk! I wore my shame on my burning cheeks so he could see it clearly. But to misjudge my loathing of him, whether my body responded to him or not, was immaterial – to misjudge my true feelings, I couldn’t let that go unanswered.
“I’m like Pavlov’s dog: you present me with the stimulus, I react. But to use that against me, as if it’s a sign that there are still some feelings, even horny ones, still present in my psyche is just plain foolish, Jon Ryder.”
His dark stare refused to waver; if anything, it became more severe.
“You know why you have to suffer, Kris.”
“Don’t you have better things to do,” I argued.
“Wouldn’t you like to think that? In fact, I’ll bet you’d like to redeem me, show me the error of my ways, so that I’ll ultimately see what I’m missing in my life and leave you alone. Is that it? Is that your hope?”
“I’m not sure it would be beneficial for me to hope for anything.”
He nodded. “You’re right there. No amount of persuasion will deter me from my plans. You fit as neatly into my life as all my other vices – the booze, the sexy females, the wild partying, my daily exercise. When I need a fix from the dark angel that holds up in me, I have you. To find that my former fiancée actually responds to rough physical abuse – to find a real masochist in her soul – well, that couldn’t have made me happier. Saves me from going to those seedy dungeons to find a female to whip. I can have you in private and no one will ever know but you and me.
“You count on that, don’t you?”
“Other than telling your tall tales to your detective friend, you haven’t told a soul and you won’t. You know what I have hanging over you. You know the family money would bury you in a mountain of shame, and you couldn’t stand that. You’d be ruined. You’d be lucky to spend the rest of your life as a fry cook at the local diner.”
I seethed at the reference, then said, evenly: “Maybe you shouldn’t count on me being quiet forever, Jon.”
“Oh, I think I will. And my advice is to lose the boyfriend, your rich rancher. If he gets wind of what his pretty redheaded lover really is, you’ll be drummed out of town.”
“He already knows about my kinky sex life, Jon. That would not be a surprise.”
“But does he know about the lies you’ve told? The savvy law student from New England with the sordid past with men, not the college dropout from Florida? And will he know about this weekend? How you gave him a story about visiting an old girlfriend, when in fact you fled Rio Marinas so you could meet with one lover while the other stays home alone? How would your infidelity fly with that no-nonsense cowboy? He’s a defender of old-fashioned values from what my sources tell me, which makes me wonder how he’d feel about a two-timing girlfriend. Think about it, Kris. You don’t have to decide right away. But I’m sure that by the time our little love fest is over for the weekend you’ll know what you have to do.”
I showed him little emotion, while in my gut I could feel the malicious intent of his words do exactly as he intended. To admit that he’d beaten me once again – I refused to do that. At the same time, I was already making decisions about my future with Lawton Brady, knowing that the halcyon days of our love affair had come to exactly the kind of end I feared when it began. Had I been a fool to get swept up in another impossible relationship? I don’t know. What I did know now was that there would be no escape. Even as I stared into Ryder’s haughty eyes, I could already feel my heart grieving for Lawton Brady as the truth came crashing down around me.
Maybe it was my good fortune that Ryder chose that moment to switch gears and get started with the next phase of his revenge. This would be a lot easier to handle than my bitter thoughts.
He moved to his feet, then lifted me up and popped a ballgag in my mouth before stringing me up to the ceiling with my arms spread wide. He loosely tethered my feet at a similar distance apart. You wouldn’t have figured there’d be room enough in a small motel room for the kind of sex play Ryder had in mind, but as it turned out, he had all the maneuvering room he needed to accomplish his torturous schemes.
After appraising my vulnerable body, he drew out a knife and slowly began to cut away my jeans and t-shirt. The thought of them cut to shreds and left in a useless heap only expanded on my feeling of worthlessness.
When he was finished, the clamps went on, a dozen heavy pinchers weighting down my tits, my nipples, my labia and clit. After stuffing a vibrating dildo in my ass, he turned the thing on high so that my entire backside was vibrating. Then he pulled out a small but vicious-looking whip and held it right before my eyes.
“Ah, Kristin, the look on your face tells me all. You can’t hide what’s real, my love. Everything about you speaks to me of your raunchy lust. What a slut you are and will always be.”
I gulped back tears and willed away any erotic reply my body might be suggesting, but I’m not sure that I was completely successful.
As soon as the whip began to work its way around my flesh, the desire hiding in me magnified. The brutal leather stung each time it grabbed my skin. My breasts and thighs suffered through a dozen strikes before he moved to my backside and started in on the expanse of my exposed flesh. He targeted every place that was sure to feel the gripping anger behind his blows: shoulders, ass, and the tender skin below. I could handle most of what he dished out, and much became the fuel that emboldened my natural inclinations. I couldn’t stop that. But I refused to react with any kind of blatant show; and I refused to lose control. To ratchet down my instinctive responses was the only control I had left, the only way to maintain some self-respect – as little as that was.
But there was more to fend off than just my masochistic lust. Ryder himself became a force I could barely rebuff. He’d grasped the truth at last: that I was a pain-slut as much as I was a slut for sex. His previous assaults had taken stabs in that direction, all punishment more than foreplay. But then he’d stumbled on my wet hot responses to pain, and something clicked in his twisted psyche. A new means of torture, another way to take control. I was often surprised that as long as we’d been together, he’d not discovered my dirty secret.
But now that the cat was out of the bag, Ryder’s fiery passion billowed all around me. The pain-slut in me was the perfect accompaniment to the sadistic man he had become. When he tossed the whip away, he moved in front of me again, fishing between my clamped labia and the clit pincher, jamming his fingers into the wet love-hole while staring into my shocked eyes.
Instantly, I started to come and found myself unable to stop. I adamantly tried to deny the waves of riotous pleasure that moved through me, but my body continued to spasm on. If I’d had my voice, I would have been crying, “No, no no no no no…” while shaking my head back and forth. But the noise rising up from behind the gag amounted to a delirious groaning sound that communicated arousal, not a denial of the rampaging desire.
I wanted him to stop. I even stamped my feet, as much as the bondage allowed, but by then it was useless to protest what was so obvious to us both.
When he picked up the whip again he flailed my breasts, seeing a response so obvious and so out of co
ntrol that I could never deny the facts. My hips bucked back and forth despite the way the clamps pulled down hard each time I did. I fucked on a phantom cock growing more agitated and delirious from the skyrocketing sensations as time went on. With all inhibitions finally having fallen away I was stripped to the core of my natural being, the raw, unbridled me shining on.
Side by side with my loathing for the man was a strange kind of love. The very idea of love seemed ridiculous, but there had always been a certain charismatic madness in him that attracted me; a wicked magic in his clever schemes that I failed to resist. Was it love? Not in any real sense. But his unfailing ability to make me submit suggested that I’d still not distanced myself from him enough to resist his power.
Seeing this clearly, all that was left for me to do was pick up the pieces of my failed life one more time and move on, knowing that if Ryder intended to have me whenever it suited his fancy, he would have me. I was a fool to fight this painful truth. I may have hated his control over me, but I could not fight what he alone was able to do to my needy mind and body.
By the time Ryder removed the vibrating dildo from my ass and stuffed his erection into that dark channel, I was spasming in an endless stream of orgasms and unable to stop. A cock in my ass? My body met it with another crushing climax. I wanted to scream, to vent my lust, my rage, to pound my fists against the air, and pummel the man until there was not a speck of him left. When he came with the guttural sound of his voice crowing his triumph over me, I came again too, bearing down violently on his cock and milking the spasming member until it was completely drained.
I became exactly what he’d made of me and the evidence against me was far too condemning to refute.
I spent long hours alone and tied to the bed in the motel room while Ryder spent his time elsewhere. When he returned twice a day, he brought me a few scrapes of food to ease my hunger. I emphasize, these were mere table scrapes left over from his last meal, wrapper and all thrown to the floor where he expected me to hunt for them like a dog while he watched in scornful silence. If I’d not been starving I would have refused the paltry handout, and in fact, twice I snubbed the food and stayed glued to the bed. I held out that he would release me after a day or two, and certainly I could suffer a little hunger until he did. But Ryder had no intention of making this the quick ‘fuck and run’ that our other confrontations had been.
On the third day, when he returned with a half-eaten sausage biscuit, I was so starved that I scrambled to the floor and devoured the tiny meal as quickly as I could. When I raised my head, there he was beaming at me, my conqueror.
After his attempts to feed me, I fed him – offering my body as the only sustenance he demanded. There were more whippings: two times I was tied over a chair and soundly spanked with a wooden slat. Then one morning, he used a rattan cane to cover my ass with welts. Sex followed once he saw me reduced to tears. Sometimes sex was as brutal as the punishment, but more often as the hours in captivity whittled away, he wanted me in bed, much as we used to be. With my heart so badly bruised, playing the ‘cold fish’ wasn’t difficult, at least to start. But then the constant dissertations about my submissive character began to wear me down. Resignation. Acquiescence. Even I could feel myself give way.
On the last night of the ordeal, a blanket of darkness covered the room, the light having given way to a moonless sky. Ryder’s physical presence loomed over me while I lay half awake on the bed, my stomach grinding with hunger and my lips parched with thirst. The shackles he used to chain me to the bed moved ungraciously with me as he sought to turn me toward him. Could he see my face? I wondered as I stared up to the inky blackness? I could not see his.
Hunger seemed to have consumed my every waking moment. Thirst? I could have satisfied that with the bottle of water he’d left on the bedside table, although during much of his time away, I was too tired to do that. Occasionally, I wondered if I’d been drugged to make me so listless. But I was quite certain that I was not under the influence of any strange substances when I felt Ryder’s hand reach out and take mine. His palm was warm and moist, and I could almost hear him breathe through the blood pulsing in his veins.
My naked pussy squirmed, thighs rubbing against thighs, the beat of my clitoris suddenly sounding off throughout my entire body like an enormous drumbeat.
He pulled his hand away and for a time I felt lost again, abandoned to the darkness. But then I realized that he was removing his clothes. Whatever dim star giving light to the murky room glanced off his torso. For a moment his muscles were rippling before my eyes. Then with unexpected suddenness, his body came down heavily on mine, his thrusting groin prying my legs apart and my hands against the mattress where he forcefully held them down.
My crotch moved against his rising organ, feeling its hardness cause my loins to quake and my clit to throb. My wanting body rose up naturally to meet him and a second later his organ split my insides in two.
I groaned savagely as my pussy closed in around the hard cock and drew it in. His response at first was just the gentle rocking motion of his hips, something guarded and obscure. Kisses covered my mouth, my lips, my throat – but a dozen times over he returned to my lips, seeking something unknown there.
I kissed back, a natural act, as though we had floated back in time to years before when we had the luxury to enjoy moments like this one. Enjoy now? After all his violent acts? Was I a fool to have fallen for him again… or had I fallen at all?
I remembered a time when, with the same grace, the same ferocity, the same gentleness of spirit he made love to me. I felt an inner cry rise up in him – or at least this was what I wanted to believe. For a few moments, I was sure my intuition had not failed me, that this was Ryder seeking more than just my humiliation and abject submission. But then the spell broke. Ryder started to move in earnest, and the gentle rocking motion of our fused bodies fast gave way to the ruthless pounding I expected from him. He came, grunting hard, long before my own erotic fervor engaged. I heard from him a cry unlike anything I’d heard before. I wondered where it came from. But then he pulled off my surrendered body, gasped for breath several times, and rose up off the bed, discarding me.
I assumed that he would be as swiftly out the door as he’d been on previous nights, when remaining with me seemed as distasteful as the lousy food he gave me to eat. But this time was different. He stood over me, naked as he’d been before, the feral qualities of his body still as palpable to me as they had been before we started fucking. I wondered what he wanted.
Silence, demanding and embittered, reigned over us both.
“I’m sorry it can never be like that again, Kris.” His words were wistful and real. “I’m sorry you ran out on me. You didn’t even try to change things before you decided that I was wrong for you. You might have healed what was disturbed in me, you might have then. But the time for that is long gone. I am what I have chosen and it pleases me, as much as my vengeance pleases me. That will be something that you’ll have to live with.”
He waited for some moments, still as the dark night, physically distant, but as emotionally powerful as I’d always known him to be.
Did he want me to say I was sorry too? That I wanted to back up, pretend that his past crimes against me had never happened? Surely he didn’t expect that much of me.
There were no words to address this stalemate – he remained my ex, the man I loathed. Given that he planned to tail me forever and ruin my life, there was no room in me to tend to his fractured heart. And I wasn’t shrewd enough to talk him off the dangerous cliff on which he seemed to teeter.
Finally, he began to move again, to dress in the dark and then move hastily to the door. Having gone that far he then turned back.
“Accept that it’s going to happen, Kristen. I’ll have you till the day I die.”
The morning brought sunshine, an empty room and a curious feeling of loss when my eyes gazed about. His retreat was so swift as to leave me almost gasping for air, at least until
I came to, sat up and fully awakened.
He must have returned during the night and unlocked the shackles, although they still jiggled noisily on the bed as I rose up. The scene retained the finer points of that morning in the woods. There were no woods, no cabin swept of dust, no cobwebs in the corner. But a fresh set of clothes had been neatly laid out, my purse beside them, and except for the chains, there was no sign of Ryder anywhere. Another image greeted me, this one tacked to the mirror in the bathroom – a picture of just Ryder and me, his naked body behind my naked one, his hands cupping my tits, a devious smile on his surly lips. And me? I was laughing happily.
All the noxious feelings from my past returned, as if they’d never gone away at all. I left the picture in a thousand pieces scattered on the motel room floor, and fled the scene, driving north as fast as I dared go.
***
“Where the hell have you been?” I heard Lawton’s voice on the other end of the phone, distant and disconnected from me. I wasn’t sure what to say.
“Busy, Lawton, I’ve been busy.”
“So busy you don’t answer your calls?”
“Is something wrong?”
“No, nothing is wrong, except that you’re a million miles away. I’ve spent three days talking to lawyers. I’m glad you’re not here, but I’ll be glad when you get back.”
“That will be soon,” I said. “Just a couple days.”
I imagine he expected that I’d recite the itinerary of my trip with lots of fancy details, but so far I’d done little but get laid and laid again, and painfully abused in a seedy motel room. I had very little that I could report. Another string of lies just didn’t suit me.
I dropped in on Brit for an afternoon, not an entire week. As it turned out, she was so busy with her research projects that we would have had little time to spend together. I would have spent most of my time wandering San Francisco by myself, or stuck in her apartment. At least for those few hours, she gave me back a little normalcy, something I needed after Ryder’s demented version of reality. Once the afternoon with Brit was over, I drove further north to a beach town that almost seemed to be a carbon copy of Rio Marinas. For two days I envisioned relocating there – not to get away from Ryder, I’d given that up, but to get away from Lawton Brady, Miss Bessie, the boarding house and all of my adopted life.
Nightmare of Vengeance Page 13