Tabula Rasa(45)

“Ow!”

“Just wait until they come off,” he said, chuckling.

He walked away for a moment, rummaging in the box, then returned. He pressed what felt like a rubber ball, about the size of his fist, between my legs. Then he secured it to me with straps which he wrapped around my body and buckled in place.

A humming vibration began.

Before I had time to enjoy that, he dragged something that felt like several long leather cords gently across my back.

“Twenty-eight dents in my floor,” he said. Then I heard and felt him climb up on the table with me.

I jerked in my bonds when his warm tongue stroked from the base of my spine all the way up between my shoulder blades. A moment later, the flogger came down hard across my back.

“One,” he said with the kind of satisfaction I was sure only killing normally gave him.

It was clear he intended to lash me twenty-eight times for the damage he’d insisted I cause to his floor. I gasped after each stinging blow, but I didn’t beg him to stop. I knew it wouldn’t do any good, and a f*cked-up side of me that I was sure had done this before didn’t want him to.

After the tenth lash he said, “Where are those tears, Elodie? Don’t disappoint me now.”

I could only imagine what disappointing him could mean, so I stopped trying to be brave and strong and tough and I let each strip of leather cord coax the tears and pain out of me until I was crying so hard I wasn’t sure if I would be able to stop.

“Good girl,” he said.

When he was finished, and I had a stripe across my back for each little mark I’d put on his floor, he put the flogger down and started to caress me. First he ran his fingertips over my back where I could feel the tender flesh welting up. Then he moved a hand between my legs and pressed it over the vibrating ball I’d almost forgotten about. He pushed it against me, then released the pressure and rolled it around on my rapidly moistening skin. He used the vibrating ball to massage me until I came in a cry more forceful than anything that had come before.

After the pleasure had run its course, he turned the ball off and unbuckled the straps and took it off me, then I felt him enter me from behind. He was rigidly hard, my tears having the same effect on him and his anatomy that they’d had the night before. He drove into me in a kind of frenzy for several minutes while the music in the room blanketed us in drumbeats and some exotic wind instrument.

When he came, his weight fell heavy against me for a moment. Then he rolled off me. The blindfold came off then, and I could see he lay next to me, his eyes locked with mine, staring intently. I would have looked away except that I couldn’t turn my head easily the way I was bound. He brushed my hair out of my eyes.

A few moments passed like this, and then his hands moved to my breasts again, and he removed the clamps. The pain was as exquisite as promised.

“Fuck, Shannon!” I shouted.

He struck my ass with his palm. “Sir,” he corrected.

But I couldn’t imagine screaming “Fuck, Sir!” at him would have been much better.

He moved behind me again and massaged a soothing gel into my back, then he refastened my corset and pulled my skirt down. He uncuffed me and then he carried me upstairs to my bedroom and put me to bed.





***





That night, I had another nightmare. Only this time it was different. It wasn’t the park. It was a memory from before the park. I was studying for my Master’s degree in Botany at the University of Washington. I was in the biology lab, my professor standing behind me. He was far too close for my comfort, as if he didn’t believe in the concept of personal bubbles.

His hands slid under my shirt, and then underneath my bra to stroke my nipples. He wasn’t even subtle. He had no shame about the brazen act at all. He acted as if he were entitled to this, but he wasn’t. This wasn’t a repeat occurrence. It was something new. And the boldness of the act shocked me.

I pulled away, trying to shift out of his grasp, trying to pretend what was happening wasn’t happening. I wasn’t into Professor Stevens. Not that way. I respected his mind. I’d been thrilled to get to study with him, but this had not been a part of the course work I’d signed on for.

He smelled of scotch and cheap cigar smoke as he leaned in close to my ear. “Elodie, come on now, we all know what kind of girl you are.”

From the moment he’d walked in on a private sex party a few of the students had thrown together at one of the frat houses—one I’d been at—I’d been his number one target. Because certainly if I liked to be tied up and whipped and f*cked by half a dozen frat boys, I must have no morals at all. I must have no limits. There must exist no man that I could legitimately say no to. How could I even have that right anymore when I’d said yes so many times?

If I said no, then I was just being selfish and terrible because, of course, I was that kind of girl. In my grandmother’s generation that kind of girl had been as tame as a woman who would blow her own husband. In my mother’s it had been the girl who’d slept with a couple of different men before marriage. In my generation it was the freaky ones. That bold, open freakiness made unsavory men believe that it was all up for grabs and that the word no, simply wasn’t allowed if you were that kind of girl.

“Stop it!” I said more firmly, pushing his hands away. This man had the power to halt my degree in its tracks. He could fail me, and then the only way I’d have a hope of salvaging my future was if I reported him. But wouldn’t that be convenient? It would be my word against his, and with the stakes involved, he could just say I was trying to get a grade I hadn’t earned by threatening his career.