We passed a stall where I could see Mr. Finch’s shoulders and the back of his gray-blond head and hear his moans. I could also see a chain attached to the stall’s back wall, trailing down the wall and onto the ground. The chain was moving rhythmically, and I knew, even though I couldn’t see her, that attached to its other end, in the straw on the floor of the stall, was Stephanie on her knees with Mr. Finch in her mouth. And I realized that part of me was glad she was having to blow this unpleasant guy—gorgeous snooty perfect little bitch. Dumb, Carrie, I thought. Before you’re out of here, you’ll probably have to do a lot worse. But I couldn’t help what I felt.
Frank let me into a stall and quickly took off my tail and bridle, as well as my collar and cuffs, which I’d been wearing all morning and which came from Jonathan’s house. He hung the tail, with its straps and dildo, on a hook on the wall and then took all the other hardware somewhere else. I wondered why he’d taken the bridle. Then he came back, took off my boots, slapped my ass again, and nodded to the door of the stable. I followed him out and he led me a little further down the path to an outhouse, a regular one, only rather large, with room for maybe a dozen people and no seats, just holes in the floor to squat over. It was quite clean for an outhouse, which is to say, just a few flies.
When I’d finished there, he led me back into my stall and put a loose chain collar around my neck, hooking it to a long chain attached to the wall at the back of the stall, like the one I’d seen in Stephanie’s. Whistling as he did all these chores, he went out again and returned with a pan of food and a little trough of water, both of which he attached to the top of the door of the stall, so I could eat and drink standing up (and of course not using my hands), facing the stable’s center aisle. The food was a grain and vegetable mixture, tasting vaguely of oats, but formed into little pellets like breakfast cereal. Science Diet, I thought, specially balanced for girl ponies. The only pieces of the food that I actually recognized were the cubes of raw carrot and celery mixed in with the kibbles and bits. I hadn’t realized how dehumanizing it would be to eat food that had been prepared entirely for its nutritional value. I didn’t want to do it, but I was hungry and figured that I’d better. And when Frank came back holding a large, perfect green apple, it looked so appealing to me that I ate it out of his hand and, after he’d tossed the core, licked his sticky fingers clean. He stroked my head, to dry his hand, and then my face, and it frightened me that I was beginning to feel a kind of affection for him.
Then he came into the stall, stroked my ass, crooned to me that I was a good girl and needed some rest, and pointed to the pile of straw with some blankets on it. I crawled between the blankets and fell asleep.
When I woke up, it was a lot busier in there. There were lots of girls in the stalls. I guessed they’d given me an early lunch, because I was new, and I’d been asleep when the rest of them had come back. And now they—we—were all getting out again. The stable guys were busy bridling and harnessing.
Pretty soon one of them, one I hadn’t seen before, came in to get me ready.
“Back to work with you,” he sang out, “up, up, thatta girl,” as I stumbled to my feet and rubbed my eyes. He reattached my tail, first regreasing the dildo. Then he put a different bridle on me. It looked the same as the first, but the bit was cold metal. I guess the first one had just been for practice. He took off the chain collar and put a harness arrangement around my torso. It buckled over my shoulders and ended in a new, stiff, collar. There were also matching cuffs, which he hooked together behind my back, up a little above my waist, so they wouldn’t be in the way of the tail. Then he put on my boots again, attached some reins to the bridle, and led me out of the stall.
As the business of the afternoon unfolded, I figured out that there were four guys working fourteen girls in the stables. There were Frank and Aerosmith, whose name was really Mike, and two others, Don and Phil. The four worked well together, yelling questions and answers to each other, sharing tasks. And they were fast. I mean, putting all the hardware on us was no loving B&D ritual; it was a job they were paid to do, like sweeping out the stable and greasing the wheels of the carts. It probably took Phil about as long to do up all the straps and buckles and laces on me as it has for me to describe him doing it. And this included a once-over, after he finished, a general straightening and tightening of everything, until I felt almost corsetted. Leading me out of the stall, he went along the center aisle, stall by stall, and gathered up a bunch of other girls’ reins in his hand. So there were four of us that he was briskly leading down the path back to the ring, the midafternoon sun making everything look lovely, golden, and pastoral.
Walking fast to keep up and trying to find a comfortable way to rest my tongue against the bit took a lot of my attention. So it took me a minute to notice that one of the other girls Phil was leading was gorgeous Stephanie, just floating along, her tail bobbing. I tried to make eye contact with her, and when she clearly, if subtly, refused, I felt myself involuntarily rolling my eyes and sighing behind my bit. I doubt that I was audible, but my body language must have been expressive enough, because the girl on my other side bumped her hip against me, and when I looked at her, she nodded toward Stephanie and did a perfect matching eye-roll.
I would have smiled at her, if the bit had let me, and I guess she could tell that. As we hurried along, I got a chance to look at her. She had short, curly blond hair, a pointed chin and high cheekbones under the straps of her bridle, very firm conical breasts that her harness caused to jut way out, and great, lithe muscles under lovely suntanned skin. Cathy, I guessed. And she looked familiar. Now where had I…well, the body remembers, even if the mind is overwhelmed by new rules and concepts. Involuntarily, I found my eyes moving to her thighs, searching for the marks. And yes, there they were, very light, almost, but not quite, healed and still unmistakable, those evenly spaced marks. I remembered her mistress from the dressage show and Cathy’s worshipful look. I was glad, though, that worshipful as she’d been there, she clearly had a sense of humor. Even if all we could do was roll our eyes at each other, I was glad she was here.
By this time we, and the groups of ponies led by the other guys, had all reached the ring. Sir Harold was there, supervising busily, and the guys were really hopping. Some of the ponies were being harnessed to carts—I noticed there was a two-seater, to be pulled by two ponies harnessed together, and even an elaborate little open coach, to be pulled by two pairs, one in front of the other. I would have been fascinated to watch the intricacies of the harnessing arrangements, as the nicely dressed folks waiting to drive were doing, but Frank led Cathy and me into the ring, with a sharp tug on our reins.
He led us to a corner where there was a sort of maypole arrangement with chains maybe ten feet long dangling from the top. A circular path had been paced into the ground around it. Looping our reins behind our backs, he attached a chain to each of our collars. Then he positioned us carefully at points in the circle around the pole, Cathy at twelve noon, me at three o’clock, both of our chains standing tautly out from the pole. Loudly but curtly, he barked out, “Walk!”
And we did. I tried to copy Cathy exactly, her speed, her posture, and I was careful to keep the distance between us constant and the chain taut. You would think it would be a piece of cake, and I actually thought I was doing very well, but damned if Frank’s riding crop didn’t keep falling on my calves, or my ass or shoulders, almost every time I passed him. “Head up!” he’d shout. “Tits out! Knees higher!” and damned if he wasn’t always right, too. Cathy’s head would be held higher, I’d realize after the fact, her body more complexly and elegantly displayed than mine. Drooling behind my bit, I put everything into trying to get this together.
I must have improved somewhat, because we advanced to trotting and cantering (I guessed goose-stepping was part of the advanced course). And I felt like I was really improving when, as the afternoon wore on, the times I didn’t get hit started to outnumber the times I did, even though Frank
was barking out his commands with great frequency, making us change gaits almost in midstep. I could relax a little, I realized, just enough to realize how painful and difficult this really was. The muscles in my legs ached, and my back and my belly too, from holding myself up so perfectly straight as I circled around and around. And the accumulated bruises and welts from the riding crop began to hurt more and more. Dusty, salty sweat was dripping into my eyes, I was panting, and a little drool was running out of the corners of my mouth.
Finally we stopped, and Frank wiped the sweat off us while we cooled down. It had been hours, I realized, hours of painful, monotonous walk-trot-canter. The weather was still warm, but the sun was a lot lower in the sky than it had been when we’d started.
Sir Harold and our guy from this morning came over to where we were standing. The guy unhooked Cathy from the maypole and led her away, and Sir Harold said to Frank, “Let’s see what you could do with her.” Frank commanded me to trot, and I was off.
It was harder to do without Cathy in front of me, but my muscles seemed basically to remember the rhythm. Frank kept quiet and let Sir Harold bark out corrections and lay his riding crop on me. He hit harder than Frank, of course, but even he didn’t hit every time I went around, so I figured I was ahead of the game. And when I stopped, and he curtly told Frank to clean me up, adding, “You can have her if you want,” I knew I hadn’t disgraced Frank or myself (or Jonathan, I surprised myself by thinking).
Frank quietly led me back down to the stable. I saw that most of the other ponies had already been taken back and been cleaned up. The only ones left in the yard were some girl who was still being dried off and Stephanie, whose hair Aerosmith was lovingly brushing. That hair, I thought, God, it must take hours of their time to wash out the dust and brush out the tangles. Still, Aerosmith looked like he was in heaven (it didn’t look to me like this was just a job for him, and I wondered how he could stand it), and Stephanie, once again, looked like she wasn’t here at all.
Frank took off all my hardware, putting it in a neat pile on the ground. Then he turned a spigot and aimed a hose of cold water at me. I gasped. I hadn’t expected that. The water pressure was hard against my bruises, though nice against my sore muscles, as he thoroughly soaped me down head to toe with a soft brush and then rinsed and dried me.
“Okay, okay,” he sang softly to me, picking up all my straps and other assorted hardware, “back in your stall, just a little more work this afternoon and then you get a nice dinner.” He slapped my ass and I hurried in, wanting to get both the work and the yucky dinner over with and just collapse in the straw.
He came into the stall with me, hung all the hardware neatly on its hooks, attached the chain collar, and then surprised me by kissing me on the mouth, a long, deep, tonguey kiss, that made me moan and kiss him back. “Pretty mouth,” he murmured, “so pretty without its bridle, oh yes…”
And then he surprised me some more by whispering in my ear, “And forget about this stupid horse thing. For the next little while you’re a girl, not a damn pony.”
Then he went over to the straw and lay back, leaning on his elbows, sticking a piece of hay between his teeth and jerking my chain to pull me along. He pushed my shoulders down to the floor so that I was on my knees, and lifted one of his feet. “Now, darlin’,” he drawled, “you can use that pretty mouth to clean my boots.”
Oh yuck. His old cowboy boots, leather and snakeskin, were covered with dust and dirt and pieces of grass and hay. I thought of licking Jonathan’s meticulous shoes, of that first silly little humiliation when he made me lick the lipstick off. Welcome, I thought, to the great outdoors, city girl.
It took awhile—quite awhile—to clean off those boots and my mouth really tasted awful, when I’d finished. Frank gave me some water to drink, and then he undid his buckle and pulled off his belt.
“Now suck me good,” he said softly. “You treat me as good as those boots, Carrie, or I will whale hell out of that little ass, and not with a riding crop, but with my belt, maybe with the buckle end.”
If I was a girl, I figured, I could use my fingers to unzip his jeans and take out his cock, and I thought I’d test these new, local rules a little. So I whispered softly, “May I use my hands to take out your cock, Frank? May I touch it with my hands?”
He grinned and cuffed me lightly, “Polite, aren’t you? Well yes you may, darlin’, if you hurry the hell up.”
So I did. I unzipped him, fished around just a little until it practically jumped out of his pants, and sucked and sucked, while he grinned and moaned, his big hard hand on my neck.
After he came, rested for a while, and put his belt back on, he jerked the chain attached to my collar and whispered, “Pony time.” And then we were back to the pony game, me standing quietly at the stall door and him whistling, patting me, and crooning animal inanities as he got me some more healthy Science Diet for dinner. And as I crawled between the blankets on the straw, hoping my sore muscles would get rested enough overnight for whatever was in store tomorrow, I wondered just how many levels of mindfuck I’d have to deal with in this place.
And then, just as I was about to drift off to sleep, I noticed a really odd thing. A little piece of rubber hose, maybe two inches of it, was snaking its way through a knothole in the wall of my stall, the wall, I realized, that I shared with Cathy. And softly but unmistakably coming out of the hose was a whispering sound, “psssst,” to get my attention.
I put my mouth to the hose and whispered, “Cathy?” and then put my ear to it.
“Yeah,” she whispered back. “So, what do you think? What was Frank like?”
“A pervert,” I answered. “He likes to talk to the ponies as if they were girls.”
She stifled a giggle. “I caught some of that. Sir Harold sure wouldn’t like it if he knew.”
“How’d you get the hose?” I asked.
“Yesterday, or day before,” she answered, “they had me crawling around the yard with a little saddle on, and I found it on the ground and palmed it, just in case I got a neighbor I wanted to talk to.”
I felt like a new kid in summer camp who had just made a best friend. Life was looking up.
Cathy had been here for four days and would be here another three before Madame, as she called her, picked her up to take her home.
“She’s thinking of showing me at those dressage shows,” she said, “so she sent me here to get some basic training. She may put in a ring, all that stuff, at her house. Hire a trainer, even.”
“How do you feel about it?” I asked.
She surprised me, then, by a total transformation of her whispered voice. The bratty, giggly tone disappeared completely, and she answered simply, “I’m honored, of course. I just hope she’ll be pleased when she sees what I’ve learned.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so she continued, “And your master—he’s the beautiful man with the gray hair, right?—why did he send you here?”
I explained, as best I could, about my training for the auction being interrupted by Jonathan’s trip to Chicago. She knew about the auctions, but not much more than I did.
“But to have to leave your master. I’d die if it were me,” she said. “How did you displease him, Carrie? Isn’t your heart breaking?”
I was pondering how to answer all this when we heard footsteps. One of the guys was coming through, doing a bed check, I guess. I snuggled into my blanket and pretended to be asleep. And the next thing I remember is waking up the next morning in a pool of bright sunlight.
Feed, groom, harness. The routine really wasn’t going to vary, I realized. My leg muscles were stiff, but not horribly so, and when the guy—it was Aerosmith this time—came to put on my bridle, boots, and all the rest of it, he skillfully rubbed my calves with some stuff out of a brown bottle, which seemed to help.
When they’d gotten us down to the ring, they harnessed me to a cart. This one, however, looked a whole lot more like a wheelbarrow. I mean, it was clearly a pract
ice cart and might as well have had a sign on it that said STUDENT DRIVER. Still, I stood very straight as Don pulled the straps tight and attached the rings in my cuffs to the cart handles. Then he came up to me and silently showed me the whip he’d be using. It was long, braided, scary-looking dark brown leather, and he looped it in his hand, stroking my breasts, my pubis, my face through the bridle.
Finally, he climbed into the cart, pulled the reins, and yelled, “Walk!” I started up and soon came to a fork in the road. It was easy to tell, though, that he wanted me to turn right by the sharp tug on the right rein, so I did, and we were off, soon trotting along what looked like a pretty hiking trail, up and down hills, through copses and over ridges. When he wanted me to change gaits, he’d yell that, but he’d also accompany it by a coded set of tugs and pulls on the reins. And after about half an hour, he stopped yelling anything, just testing me on my understanding of the tugs and pulls, and flicking the whip over me whenever I was slow to get a signal. It was difficult. I was scared I’d lose my footing, step into a hole, or turn my ankle on stones in the path, particularly as I ran down the steep downhill slopes.
And when I began to feel a little more confident about where to place my feet on the path and how to understand the signals, he started laying the whip even harder. Because it wasn’t enough to follow instructions, keep up a steady clip, and keep my balance. I had to look good, keep my head up, tits out, knees up, ass bobbing. Well, what did you think, I chided myself, that the folks who’ll be driving you will be paying Sir Harold for a look at the pretty countryside? And I found myself flashing on mental images of racehorses, their snorts and the angles of their heads, and the fastidious ways they placed their hooves. I tried my damnedest to look good, and I began to feel a perverse pride in it all.
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