Энн Райс - Beauty's Punishment

“Hope for what? To be punished all the more?”

“I don’t know.”

“You do know!”

“My only hope for a deep love, a loss of myself to someone, not merely a loss amid all that strives to break me down and remake me. But a loss to someone who is sublimely cruel, sublimely good at mastering. Someone who might somehow, in the blaze of my suffering, see the depth of submission and love me also.” It was too much of an admission. I stopped, crushed, certain I couldn’t continue.

But I did go on, slowly.

“I could have loved many Masters or Mistresses perhaps. But you have an eerie beauty that debilitates me and absorbs me. You illuminate the punishments. I don’t... I don’t understand it.”

“What did you feel when you realized you were in line for the Public Turntable,” he asked, “when you implored me with all those kisses to my boots and the crowd laughed at you?”

The words stung. Again, it was too real for memory. I swallowed hard.

“I felt panic. I cried, to be punished so soon like that, after trying so hard. Not as a spectacle, I thought, for a crowd of common people, and such a crowd, all there to preside over the chastisement. And when you reprimanded me for begging, I was . . . ashamed that I had ever thought I could escape it. I remembered that it wasn’t necessary for me to have earned the punishment. I deserved it by being here, and being what I was. I was filled with remorse that I had pleaded with you. I will never do it again, I swear it.”

“And then?” he asked. “When you were taken up and mounted without fetters? Did you learn from it?”

“Yes, enormously.” I gave another low, harsh laugh. Hardly more than a single syllable. “It was devastating! First there was that fear of losing control when you told the guard, ‘No fetters.’ ”

“But why? What would have happened if you had struggled?”

“I would have been bound down, I knew it. Tonight I saw a slave bound like that. Last night I simply assumed it would happen. I would have resisted with my whole body, bridling the way the Prince was tonight, bucking, the terror crashing against me and washing away from me.”

I stopped. Engulfing yes, it had become engulfing.

“But I held still,” I said, “and when I realized I wouldn’t slip or slide under the blows, all the tension was released. I knew this remarkable exhilaration. I was being offered up to the crowd and I submitted to it. I collected all the crowd’s frenzy to myself, and the crowd enlarged my punishment as they enjoyed it, and I belonged to the crowd, to hundreds and hundreds of Masters and Mistresses. I yielded to their lust. I held back nothing, resisted nothing.”

I stopped. He nodded slowly, but he didn’t speak. The heat pounded silently in my temples. I sipped the wine, thinking of my own words.

“It was the same in a smaller way,” I said, “when the Captain thrashed me. He was punishing me for having failed after his training. But he was also testing me to see if I was telling the truth about Stefan, if it was mastering I needed. He was calling my bluff, saying, in effect, ‘I’ll give it to you and we’ll see if yo can endure it.’ And I offered myself to his lash, or at least it seemed so. I never thought, not even in the camp when the soldiers punished me, or at the castle when the Lords and Ladies looked on, that I could, in a hot noonday village square, full of passersby, dance for a soldier’s thrash like that. The soldiers trained my cock. They trained me. But they never got that from me. And though I’m terrified of what lies ahead, terrified even of the pony harnesses, I feel myself opening to all punishments instead of triumphing over them with sublime form as I did at the castle. I am being turned inside out. I belong to the Captain, and to you, to all who look. I am becoming my punishments.”

Silently he moved towards me, taking the goblet and setting it aside and then taking me in his arms and kissing me.

My mouth opened wide, eagerly, and then he pulled me onto my knees and went down to put his mouth on my cock and fold his arms around my buttocks. Almost savagely he sucked at the full length of my organ, enveloping me in tight wet hotness as his fingers, spreading my buttocks, pried open my anus. And his head went back and forth, pulling on the full length of my cock, lips tightening and then releasing as his tongue circled the tip; then the rapid, almost mad sucking continued. His fingers stretched my anus wide. My mind went clean. I whispered, “I can’t hold back.” And when he sucked even harder, with rougher strokes, I steadied his head with both hands and jetted hard into him.

My cries came in short bursting rhythm with the suction that seemed to want to empty me. And when I could stand it no more, and tried gently to release his head, he rose up and pushed me down on the bed on my face, shoving my thighs up and wide and flattening my buttocks to the sheets with the heels of his palms before he lay down and forced his cock into me. I was spread like a frog under him. The muscles in my thighs positively sang with delicious pain. His weight pressed me down all the harder. His teeth opened lightly on the back of my neck. His hands hooked under my crooked knees and forced them up closer to the pillow. And my exhausted cock throbbed and doubled beneath me.

My buttocks bobbed. I groaned from the strain. And his cock, stabbing into my wide-spread buttocks, seemed some inhuman instrument reaming me, coring me, and emptying me.

In a wild series of spurts I came again, unable to remain flat, bucking under him, and he bore down all the more, grinding out his low moan of climax.

I lay panting, not daring to uncramp my bent and flattened legs. Then I felt him pushing my knees down. He was lying beside me. He turned me over to face him, and in that keen high-pitched moment of exhaustion, he started kissing me.

I tried to fight the languor of sleep, my cock begging me for a moment’s respite. But he had sent his hook down into my loins again. He was bringing me up, forcing me to my knees, directing my hands to a wooden handle over our heads in the paneled canopy of the bed, and whipping my cock with his hands as he sat with his legs crossed before me.

I watched it engorge with blood under the slaps, the pleasure slower, fuller, excruciating. I moaned aloud and twisted away almost before I could stop myself. But he tugged me forward, wrapping my balls up against my cock with his left hand, and he continued the merciless slapping with the other.

My body was on the rack. My mind was on the rack, and now I realized, as he pinched the tip of my cock, that he meant to tease it out of me. Pinching, stroking with his curled fingers, now licking with his tongue, he had me in a frenzy. He took the cream from the jar he had used last night and greased his right hand and pulled at my cock, squeezing it as if he would destroy it. I was grunting behind my clenched teeth, my hips rocking, and then it shot forth again, the hard spurting and spurting. And I hung from the wooden handle dazed and truly empty.

A light still burned.

I didn’t know how much time had passed as I opened my eyes. But it must have been early. Coaches still rolled on the road outside the window.

And I realized my Master was dressed and walking back and forth, his hands clasped behind his back, his hair tousled. He wore the blue velvet doublet unlaced, his linen shirt with its long balloon sleeves open down the front also. Now and then he would pivot sharply, stop, run his fingers through his hair, and then continue pacing.

When I rose on my elbow, afraid of being ordered out, he gestured to the wine goblet and said,

“Drink if you wish.”

I picked it up at once and sat back against the paneling, watching him.