Lecture Notes (17 page)

Standing before him, hugging my chest, I feel actually more embarrassed and humiliated than I did in t
hat ridiculous school uniform. Now he is genuinely pushing me out of the comfort zone of my self-perception. While schoolgirl roleplay might be a ‘Beth’ thing to do, huffing and puffing on a running machine definitely isn’t. I am now not-Beth. I am just some deindividual.

“It fits you all right?” he asks with brisk faux-concern.

“Fine,” I snark.

“
Good, let’s warm you up then.” Oooh. That phrase reminds me of him spanking me over his office desk before the caning. Let’s do that instead! No such luck. He orders me to do all kinds of unnatural acts like star jumps, running on the spot, punching the air and stuff. This is like a masterclass in mortification. I hate getting sweaty (outside the bedroom), and within five minutes I am purple-faced and wheezy.

“Time to ditch
the cigarettes,” he observes. “They may have built the university but they’re destroying your body.” I double over floppily, my arms hanging. “Can you touch your toes?” he asks mercilessly. I stretch that little bit further, answering his question. The swine lopes up behind me and smacks my backside so hard I nearly fall forward on my knees. “That’s a position we’ll be seeing more of,” he says mockingly. Then he pulls me upright again, holding me straight by my hips. “With me so far?” he croons into my ear.

“You’re cruel,” I accuse.

“Hm, sadistic, some might say,” he replies nonchalantly. “Come and try the rowing machine.” Ah, the rack thing. I sit in it and spend an unenthusiastic ten minutes pulling back and forth. God, this is boring. How can people do this for hours at a time? I wonder if Sinclair will consider putting a TV in here. Next he makes me do about three thousand stomach crunches, using the bendy bar thing, and finally I set my tentative foot on the running machine. He sets the digital counter so that I am having to run at quite a fast pace. I really don’t think I can keep this up for long. “Too…fast…” I pant out after the first minute, alarmed that he intends me to maintain this pace for quarter of an hour.

“At your age, this should be comfortable for you,” he tuts.

“I can’t DO it!” I insist shrilly, gripping the sides of the machine and trying to lift my feet from the relentless conveyor belt.

“Keep going,” he says unbendingly
, then he leaves the room. Does he seriously think I’m going to carry on when he isn’t watching me? I lean over and press the stop button, collapsing on to the bars while my hammering heart slows to an acceptable manic thumping. I don’t look up when he comes back into the room, but just allow my legs to buckle and kneel lifelessly on the motionless rubber. “I see,” he says unpleasantly from somewhere slightly above me. “Direct disobedience.” I can’t think of a reply, and I’m not sure I’m capable of speech yet, so I continue clinging for grim death to the bar. Until a firecracking slash across my knuckles makes me yelp and fall backwards on to my arse. I look up and see that a stony-faced Sinclair is brandishing a riding crop.

“It appears a motivational tool i
s required,” he says severely. “Get up and put the machine back on, Beth.”

“But…”

“No! Get up and put the machine back on.” The threat in his eyes is more than that of the machine and the crop combined. I pick myself up, mouth drooping, and lean over to the button. The conveyor belt roars back into life, straight back to the unforgiving pace I found so difficult to keep up. I want to cry as I lift my weary feet to pound the rubber spool over and over again.

“I’m too tired!” I shriek after a minute, and rather than reassurance, I get a resounding swoosh-crack across my stretch-lycra bum that makes me squeal and lift my feet higher.

“That’s it. Keep running,” says Sinclair laconically at my side. For a split second I get a mad urge to snatch his crop from him and whack him across the head with it. I put the energy distilled from my rage and loathing into my running, feeling newly adrenalised and able to jump over mountains.

“Good!” encourages my tormentor, though obviously he isn’t so impressed that he can forego five more swats of the crop before the dread quarter hour is
up. Every time my feet start to drag, or I clutch more heavily at the bars for support, my backside is treated to a slice of fire, cutting across the still-present cane welts and waking them up to throb afresh. When Sinclair begins to turn the dial down, slowing the pace little by little until I stagger to a halt, I am more exhausted than I thought it was possible to be, with a sore bottom to boot. I’m sure this isn’t a training method sanctioned by the governing bodies of athletics.

Sinclair takes my arm
and helps me from the machine, which is just as well, because I am wobbling like a weeble and unable to put a foot in front of the other.

“Good girl, well done,” he murmurs coaxingly into my ear, bringing me down to sit
on the floor between his legs. “Come on, I’ll help you stretch.”

I lean back into him and he slowly, sensuously pulls one arm up into the air, massaging it from elbow to shoulder, repeating the process with
the other one. Then I lie down and he scoots in between my thighs, lifting one leg up and rubbing its burnt muscles back to life, then the other leg, then he lets me lie like a knackered starfish, immobile on the floor for a beautiful, peaceful age. I have floated off beyond the Beth. I am just an elastic band that has been pulled tighter and tighter and tighter until all resistance has gone slack and limp. I am just a body in stasis.

Until Sinclair
nudges me with the toe of his boot and says, “Come back now. Go and shower and I’ll be waiting for you in the bedroom.”

*

My shower has the magical property of washing away all the sweat and negativity and leaving only a beautiful buzzy endorphin-high. I smile widely at my glowing reflection and wrap a towel around my invigorated, but rather overstretched, body. Sinclair is waiting for me in the bedroom. Finally, my reward.

He is lying on the bed in his satin robe, reading
L’Heptamèron
, one hand behind his head, protecting it from the wrought-iron bedframe. It really is the perfect bed for tying things (i.e. people) to. I wonder if that was his sole purchasing criterion when he bought it. Bet it was.

“Eww, medieval Fren
ch,” I say, wrinkling my nose. “Isn’t that hard to read?”

“Scarcely any different than the
modern version,” he tells me. “Come and see.”

I sit down next to him and have a quick look
. He’s right. It’s almost the same. “Not like Shakespearian English, full of words that have fallen out of the language,” I note.

“Quite.” He puts down the book. “Take off the towel.”
I shrug it off and sit docilely while he runs a hand slowly over my refreshed upper body, creating exquisite whorls of sensation with his fingertips. “You have a beautiful body, Beth,” he tells me, frowning in concentration as he plucks a nipple between thumb and forefinger. “You need to maintain it. Do it for me.”

Ah
, he has me there. I will do anything for him. I want to be the best I can for him. I resign myself to dull hours of treadmill-pacing hereafter, since it is his will.

“Lie down on your back,” he intones,
his voice now low and hypnotic. I look up at his face, which is transfigured by desire, his sensual lips slightly parted and his eyes ferocious. He continues to move his long, pale hands over my sensitive skin in sweeping motions, circling my belly, cupping and tweaking my breasts, moving down to my pubic area, which I remembered to depilate after my shower, thank goodness. “Mmm, good,” he murmurs, resting a thumb on my mons while his hand slides sideways between the crevasse of my thighs so that his fingers can access my innermost parts. He flexes them lazily – “You’re wet,” he tells me unnecessarily – and gives the area a thorough digital inspection, moving his other hand up to my face and stroking the thumb insistently across my lower lip until he pops it into my mouth to suck on. “I had no idea when I decided to take you on,” he says, still in that trance-inducingly deep tone, “that you would be so very responsive to me. You’re like a little circuit board….all I have to do is put the wires together and your light beams out and your bell rings…until I take the wires away…and then I put them back together again…All I have to do is touch you, Beth, and you’re wet. Why is that?”

“Because I want you,” I gasp, pressing my clit down against his probing fingers, the words thick and sticky around his thumb in my mouth.

“Yes, you do. You want what I give you, don’t you? You want me to take your will and surrender it to mine.” He pushes his fingers, oh, just there, oh, just right and I begin to jiggle and whimper, feeling the pre-tremors of the quake building. “I want to see your face,” he hisses intensely. “I want to see your face when you come; you do it so sincerely, you give yourself up so completely. I want to see it. Come for me.” My heels drum into the duvet, I chew down on his thumb, singing out and undulating my hips like a bellydancer while the fire flows out of me, my gift to Sinclair.

“Not bad for starters,” he whispers to me, dropping a kiss to my famished lips
. “Let’s see how far I can take you.” He takes advantage of my depleted condition to fasten my wrists to the headboard again, then he reaches into his bedside drawer and produces something…something that buzzes when he flicks a switch. Oh, what the hell? It’s a silicone vibrator, thick and flesh-coloured, and with attachment at the base. I feel instantly swamped with coyness. Sex toys just make me want to giggle schoolgirlishly. Can’t take them seriously. If my hands weren’t tied, I’d cover my face with them. I content myself with biting down on my lip to keep the giddiness from spilling out, looking away from the peculiar thing.

“Something amuses you, Beth?”
He returns to his twixt-thigh billet and begins to circle my entrance with the rubbery tip of the vibrator. 

“No, s
ir, just…”

“Just?”

“Those kinds of things always make me think of…I dunno…bad seventies comedies, I suppose.”

He smirks a little, looking up int
o my eyes with vivid interest. “Curious girl,” he says. “Let me assure you that within, oh, a few minutes, bad seventies comedies will be the last thing on your mind.” He edges the vibrator into me, little by little, jiggling it as he does so, judging the level of stretch needed to accommodate it. It feels nice, but I wish it was him. I’d always rather have him. Once it is ensheathed within me, the small rubber tongue at the base rests snugly against my clitoris, just pressing down enough to induce urge to rub myself a little harder on it. The strange flesh-but-not-flesh feel of it is intriguing. Sinclair fiddles about with it until it is in exactly the right position, rammed up hard enough that I can’t expel it, nor shift aside from the clitoral stimulator, then he flicks a switch and watches my reaction, sitting back on his heels. A low buzzing emanates from my private parts and – oh my! – waves of delicate, trembly pleasure begin to radiate outwards from the double-core of me. I think the shaft bit is rotating; I can feel all kinds of wrigglishness in my channel, not quite like penetrative sex, but enough like it to…ah…powers of description starting to tail off….off the cliff…over the edge…cruel vibrations against my already-swollen clit….ah….wow…

Then Sinclair says, “You may not
come until I give permission.” And I snap out of my woozy spell and lift my head as far as I can in my state of bondage.

“But…you can’t
stop me…I can’t stop myself…” It is difficult to find words when you can feel yourself slipping away…past the point…way past it…

Sinclair picks up the riding crop which has been resting on the nig
htstand after our gym session. “You can stop yourself,” he says firmly, running the flat tip up and down my writhing thighs and flicking it slightly at the sensitive inner flesh. Ouch! That does…help. Puts it off. Can I put it off? Oh, I don’t think…it’s as if my orgasm is that fellow in The Shining, hacking his way through with an axe, and it’s inevitable that he will find his way to me in the end, however hard I push my shoulder up against the door, but I try, I push my shoulder so damn hard, and Sinclair is tapping the crop against my thigh again, which just turns me on
even more
, and I say, “I can’t…I can’t…”

And he says, “Not without my permission, Beth.”

And I say, “Pleeease….”

And he says, “Not yet.”

And….heeeeeeere’s Johnny! 

Bliss, torment, failure, humiliation, gushing torrents of bliss again, my hands working desperately but uselessly at slipping the
ir bonds, my eyes screwed shut. I very much don’t want to look at Sinclair at this moment. The vibrations continue and it feels tortuous. I want to remove the damned thing but I just can’t. 

“Oh dear.”
Sinclair’s voice is unctuous with false disappointment. “We need to work on this, Beth, don’t we? Open your eyes. Look at me.”

He has to tap my flank quite stingingly with the crop before I obey.

“Self-discipline, Beth. Control. A swift deterrent and then we’ll try again.”  No, please, not again. But he has both my ankles gripped in one hand and is lifting my legs into the air, so high that my bottom is raised off the counterpane. He takes advantage of my defenceless position to add six more strokes of the crop to those he has already placed; six burning red welts for my collection. I moan and hiss at the pain while the vibrator continues to roil away inside me and whirr against my clit. The river of juices on my thighs is starting to feel cold and clammy and my clit feels as if it might explode, but he lowers my legs again and spreads them.