'If I can make a deal I'm going to buy you, Miss Carstairs,' said Mr. Royden, and struck me again on the same place. It was probably the most sincere tribute ever given to me. But I think I must have gone half mad with the pain. Two on my thighs, one on top of the other! For a moment they almost doused my fire. I bit my lip to keep from screaming, but my legs flailed like crazy and the rest of me writhed and twisted worse than a puppet on a string. I did not trouble to look, but I had a feeling he was standing back in awe. After a long while he made an important announcement.
'I think we can discard the cane now, Euphemia, and move on to the whip.' I controlled my vocals long enough to say: 'Thank you, Mr. Royden, that would be nice.' How absurd we were! How formal and correct! I sensed that, for both of us, it was keeping my torture on a plane above the commonplace or the disagreeable. We were being frightfully British. His use of my Christian name gave me an inordinate pleasure. I made my small moans and used my feet to kick away the pain they could not touch.
'Have you any preference in the matter of a whip, my dear?' Royden's voice had taken on a new warmth during the caning of my bottom.
'Please, could I have one without knots?'
'Of course. But there's quite a collection here.'
'Knots cut me, Mr. Royden, and I've found that multiple lashes tend to bunch and give me a miserable sort of blow that makes ugly marks and bruises. A single thong is the most aesthetic and they hurt terribly, You can choose the length according to how you want them to snap around me. The shorter ones are the most accurate if you want to mark me in certain places or ways.'
'Knowledgeable little girl, aren't you!'
'Yes, Master. Thank you. I've been whipped a lot.'
'And it still hurts?'
'Oh, Master, if you only knew!'
'What about your breasts, do they just take what comes?'
'I'd be grateful, Master if they were left safe. When the lash curls under my arm and goes on 'round, the tip snaps on them and cuts my skin. You could whip me more somewhere else.'
'Where somewhere else?'
'I'll open my legs wide if it would please you there?'
'On this little lady here?' His masculine hand enveloped my puss and squeezed. I gasped with pleasure. It was as though Yola stood beside me. I knew I should be angry, but my blush was my only protest.
'If whipping her would give you pleasure, I won't mind,' I told him prettily.
'You're right, you're not like other girls,' he declared emphatically. 'You're every man's dream… mine, at any rate. Did you know the lady was soaking wet?' He wiped his very wet hand on my thigh below the wounds.
'She's like that,' I admitted apologetically. 'She's always wet when I'm being punished, even when I scream.'
'Don't feel badly about her.' He chuckled. 'She's one in a million. I suppose she's also wet at the proper time?' How could I tell him it had been just me and Yola! I giggled. Giggles help a girl a lot. 'I'm afraid she is,' I said demurely. I don't suppose there was a whip in that room that would not hurt a girl unbearably. The one Mr. Royden selected was a half and halfer. It would not wound me and it would not curl all the way 'round my nudity. But apart from that it was a whip well designed to hurt a girl.
'Stand on this a minute, you can use a rest.' My toes were only six inches from the floor. The box he thrust beneath them was an unexpected boom. I stepped on it gratefully. Yolanda had suspended me all night once. I had been a very humble girl in the morning. Mr. Royden was an unknown quantity. Any respite was welcome. My flaming bottom was testimony to his enjoyment and skill in hurting girls. The whip was still to come. 'You're being terribly kind,' I said, and actually meant it.
'Want a drink'?' I almost wept when he handed me the glass. But I still could not lower my hands far enough, so he had to hold it to my lips. I don't drink, but I gulped this gratefully. It was shockingly strong. I hoped it might be at least faintly anesthetic.
'I'd sooner carry on with your bottom; but enough's enough. You did damn well. Is the whip going to be worse for you?'
'It's a different kind of pain. It's less sexy.'
'But still a little?'
'Oh, yes. Especially if you use it between my legs. You'll have to tell me if you want to do that.'
'Doesn't the suspension bother you?'
'In it's own way.' I giggled. 'But we've agreed I'm not like other girls. For an hour I love it. Then it gets increasingly awful.'
'If a chap had the time to just be cruel to you up to the limit of your tolerance for pain, you'd be an astounding experience for any man, Euphemia.' He gave me an incongruously comradely grin. 'If I manage to buy you I can limit my baser instincts to a good bash every Saturday. The prospect appeal at all?' I expect I'm a silly girl with a warped set of values, but I was impelled by a wave of longing. 'Please buy me, please, please,' I begged with complete sincerity. 'I'll make you very happy.' Oh sure, I had a pretty mental picture of him selling me back to Yolanda. I felt certain Gyorkos never would. He was pleased. He gave me the rest of my drink and patted my wealed bottom in a paternal sort of way. 'How many do you usually get with a whip like this, Euphemia?' He said it like asking how many sugars in my tea. I decided not to be too much of a cheat. 'Fifteen,' I said brightly.
'We'll make it twenty then,' Royden said genially. He took away the box. Hanging suspended by my wrists again made me want to cry. My punishment was going on and on. A girl gets tired and scared and hurt, and she keeps wondering why men get so much happiness from giving her pain. About that time in a punishment it all seems terribly hopeless. I was wondering if I dared ask for another drink when the lash sang its warning whine and cut into my back. I am trying to tell you a story about me and Yolanda. You will already have realized I am a girl who gets whipped a lot. If I try and take you along to share every harrowing lash and stroke that slices my flesh it's going to be a bore. A whipped girl is a whipped girl any way you describe it. The variations of temperament by which girls endure their whippings all bring her to the same end. She is well striped with scarlet weals and very thankful when it's all over. The most pertinent impression of a girl being whipped is not so much the whip as helplessness. Always you are tied or strapped or chained. You have to be. You are naked and vulnerable. This is the paramount sensation: you have to stand there! Or hang. Or bend over! You never get reconciled to the seeming anomaly of having your bare skin whipped while you do nothing about it. You can't do anything about it! It was that way now with Mr. Royden. I was beautifully suspended. My nakedness was stretched from my wrists. I was all there to whip. I could generate a lot of motion, I could scream. But I could not get away from the lash that striated my skin, nor from the man who wielded it. It is an extraordinary frustrating impotence that everyone should endure once just to know what it's like so they can realize how lucky you are the rest of the time.
'You mark exquisitely, Euphemia.'
'Thank you, Mr. Royden.' The formal game we played satisfied some strange sense of propriety for both of us. Absurd! you say. Well perhaps but I'd swear the whip hurt me less because a gentleman was using it.
'Do they whip down to your knees?'
'Not usually. It hurts a nasty sexless hurt and isn't a bit aesthetic.' He stopped whipping me. 'You and this Miss Harding of yours place a lot of stress on aestheticism?' I was gasping with pain, but he had put his finger on a favorite theme. 'Of course we do, Mr. Royden. To us the whole experience of two girls, one a slave to the other, is beautiful. Girls ought to be beautiful. Yolanda and I are. It sort of follows, then, we can't do anything ugly.'
'A bit over-simplistic?' He hit me low so the tip snapped into my hip. It was hard to cope with the agony and carry on the dissertation, but I managed.
'You're thinking of the conventional pictures of brutality, Mr. Royden, in which it's always a man who flogs a girl. Most people would see it as disagreeable and unworthy of analysis. But I bet you see what you're doing to me right now as beautiful, don't you'!'
'It's you, hanging there naked, that's beautiful.'
'But you're part of the scene. I wouldn't be hanging here decorated with lovely weals if it was not for you.' He slashed the thong across the top of my shoulders. While I worked at absorbing it, he continued his casual observation: 'Damn rummy, when you think of it. If I whip you for the pure cruelty of lust there is something transcendent and immaculate about the tableau the two of us create. But if I was whipping you as a real punishment for some delinquency the scene becomes sadistic. I'd probably feel sadistic in a way I don't now. The
