of Vaseline and lightly greased the thick four-inch leather dildo in the center of the belt. Opened her up and greased her too. She tried to squirm away from his fingers inside h but there wasn’t far she could go on the X-frame.
Another breach of conduct duly noted.
He held her open and inserted the dildo and even with the Vaseline she was dry and tight but by moving it back and forth, in and out he got it into her up to the hilt and then ran the strap up through the cheeks of her ass and through the second buckle and tightened it firmly and buckled it off.
He could hear her faintly squealing inside the box.
He stood back and watched the roll of her hips, she was trying to scrape the thing off against the X-frame but both belts were buckled up tight, they were there for the duration, the belts were going nowhere.
For as long as he wanted.
To remind her exactly who was who in this relationship of theirs.
He walked over to his worktable and opened a drawer and took out the Polaroid camera.
All she could think of from then on was this thing inside her.
This lifeless thing fucking her. This constant violation.
She couldn’t begin to guess how many minutes, how may hours it stayed there.
NINE
6:10 p.m.
The two of them stood behind her as he lifted off the headbox and tied the black scarf over her eyes. Kath could see the raw spots where the box had rested on her collarbones. She wondered how the harness and dildo felt. It was new. He’d never made her wear one. She felt a twinge of something that was almost like jealousy but of course it wasn’t that because jealousy in this case would be ridiculous. They were probably damned uncomfortable. She watched him gag her.
They moved around in front of her, Kath following behind, giving him space. Knowing he’d need it.
“Here’s the story,” Stephen said. “The rules are that I do anything I want with you and you don’t flinch, you don’t pull away. You don’t resist in any way whatsoever. You understand me? Even when I put my fingers inside you like I did before. All I was doing was opening you up, lubricating you so it wouldn’t hurt so much. And you try to pull away. A that’s stupid and B it breaks the rules. So I guess you can figure what comes next. Sorry.”
The whip had eight long leather tongues, each tongue ending in a twisted ball.
She had felt it on her own body. An evil old acquaintance. The tongues stung you, raised instant welts if he whipped you hard enough. The balls bruised you, punched at you like tiny fists. Which was worse she couldn’t say.
She watched him drag the whip up sidearm from the concrete floor and slap her heavily across the breasts, first one breast and then the other, over and over, slap, slap, his arm like a metronome. Regular and more brutal she knew precisely because of the regularity, red streaks appearing instantly on Sara’s pale flesh, she wasn’t a topless sunbather like Kath was, she was probably too modest, blotching as he crisscrossed them with new strokes a she knew that the woman would welt up soon and that if he continued long enough the welts would bleed. She heard the woman screaming inside the gag, saw the muscles of her face pinch tight with pain, the body writhing and shocked by each successive blow and trying with no hope whatsoever to avoid them, every blow aimed at her breasts, each and every one with no relief except that he was moving from from one breast to the other, not much there, breasts being a kind of thing of his, a kind of fixation with him like having babies was a fixation with him and maybe they were connected, they probably were. He liked to suck her own breasts and bite them especially the nipples, he was like a baby himself sometimes always wanting mama’s titty and she knew how this felt, she knew exactly how Sara felt under the whip. She’d been there. She could feel it in her own breasts, tingling.
She figured it must be sympathy.
TEN
9:55 p.m.
They’d let her use the bedpan but now she was back on the rack again. Mercifully, her hands were only tied behind her to the center of the X-frame instead of overhead. At least her fingers weren’t going numb. When her legs got to trembling too much she could kneel for a moment on the concrete floor but in that position her forearms slipped down and spread apart painfully over the lower V-shape of the frame and it was too much to take for very long. Still it provided some relief.
Whatever he’d used on her breasts had taken out most of the sting. She felt a kind of throbbing heat there and a raw spot in the center of her right nipple. The one which for some reason had taken the most abuse.
She was blindfolded, not inside the headbox.
Another small mercy.
There was a rubber ball inside her mouth. It was affixed to a leather gag strapped across her face.
They had traded the harness and vagina plug for another one in which small dildos penetrated both her vagina and her anus. She imagined she could almost feel them touching inside her.
She was cold. Her throat was terribly dry. A taste in her mouth like fallen leaves.
Humiliation. Discomfort. Deprivation. Pain.
The Four Horsemen of her own personal Apocalypse.
Her only comfort was the cat, who had taken to her for some reason or perhaps was only curious. She would feel it now and then rubbing up against her ankles, its cool wet nose and soft haunches, and once, its calloused warm front paw-pads and the tiny sharp retracted claws on her thigh just above the knee. She imagined the cat standing on its hind legs looking up at her, though as yet she had no idea even of its color or size or the color of its eyes staring up at this strange naked human tied to a tree.
She imagined a tabby. A female. She imagined her eyes were green.
Alone in the early days following Daniel’s death and her divorce she had taken a six-week-old kitten, a tabby, out of the Humane Society shelter and sardonically named her Neely after the doomed Patty Duke character in VALLEY OF THE DOLLS. The cat lived with her until her death, of cancer, only last year. The name she had given to her, that of a fictional junkie, became ironic and practically prescient and not really very funny at all because in the almost three years prior to her death the cat had come down with diabetes and Sara had needed to give her insulin shots twice a day, into the heavy fold of skin at the back of her neck, at feeding time.
It was inconvenient as hell building her entire schedule around the shots and running every morning to the litter box to check the blood-sugar levels in her urine but she did it gladly because nobody could comfort her the way Neely did. It was almost always at night that the sadness and loss and loneliness descended upon her and when they did the cat was magically always there, seemed to sense the yawning gulf of emptiness opening up inside her even as it grew, seemed ever alert and responsive to this alien human need. The cat was right there. Curled warm and soft in her lap or lying on her chest purring until these awful moments passed and long after if she wished, asking only a stroke or a scratch behind the ear or even just the heat of her body if Sara’s soul could offer up neither of these just then. As though she knew that this was exactly her role in life, exactly what she was born for, this gentle service.
Sara found her lying in the darkness of her closet one day and the cat could barely raise her head. In the vet’s office she held and stroked her and looked into the green-golden eyes as he administered the shots. One which would rocket her deep into anaesthetic sleep and the next which would kill her. She saw the head droop and fall and felt her heart break yet again.
She had not got another cat despite her family and friends’ advice. There was too much loss for her in the world. And then she met Greg. For a long time he’d made her — if not forget — at least put aside the losses and focus on what they had together, on the present.
She couldn’t imagine what he was going through.
Or her parents. Or her sister.
