Rendezvous With a Stranger (13 page)

      
His apartment’s dark when I enter.
 
Just the streetlight beaming in through one cracked blind allows me to steer my way and look for something to illuminate this scene for me.
 
I find a floor lamp with a bowl in the shape of a budding tulip offering its petals to the sky. I turn it on, and the light glows softly against the dark walls of the stranger’s apartment.
 

      
There’s a comfortable familiarity about his home, as if I’ve been here before, though I know I’ve never set foot in this place. The incense of aging and well-polished wood drifts to my nostrils. I touch the doorpost; it’s like satin to my tentative fingers as I run them along its smoothness. His rooms have the look of Frank Lloyd Wright in lines and the use of glass and light.
 
Shadows seem to move with me so I think he’s somewhere inside these walls with me, watching every move I make.
 

      
When I make abrupt turns as I stroll my way through his living room, I jump, startled by eerie masks hanging on the wall.
 
There are the ghosts of people behind them.
 
My bones feel as if they’re rattling inside my skin. As in Nicholas Riley’s office, there’s a simple order in the middle of this psychic chaos.
 
The simplicity is pristine even though his ornaments scare me into wondering what rituals he performs when he’s here.
 

      
I discover his kitchen at one end of the living room, with wood and polished stainless steel and the smell of garlic and basil lingering in the air—and maybe a hint of rosemary.
 
There are greens enough in his refrigerator for a Caesar salad with cold salmon and nuts, and a pot of soup already made.
 
Making a feast of this will be easy.

      
Turning my back to the masks on his walls, and the thousand clues about my man of mystery that dance inside the room’s great shadows, I busy myself thinking of dinner.
 
He says he’ll be back by ten.
 
I’m getting this ready for 9:30, should he arrive early.
 
I hadn’t realized how intimate it feels having this liberty inside the place he lives. Everywhere I turn, I think of how he moves about this apartment.
 
I imagine his long hair loose around his shoulders after he’s showered and he’s naked except for his faded blue jeans.
 
I’m amazed to think of him drinking coffee while he reads the morning paper, of his significant hands doing such mundane things as making eggs and bacon and toast on a cold morning, of his cleaning the grate in the fireplace, or throwing out the trash.
 
There’s a stack of wood on the hearth and I’m tempted to start a fire to remove the chill in the air, but I don’t have permission for anything but fixing his dinner.

      
In the midst of my thoughts, I suddenly realize that he’s arrived.
 
I don’t move, but continue chopping sweet peppers for the salad and imagine him stalking close by.
 
He’s behind me long before I think he should be, and when I feel his breath on my neck, I close my eyes to feel him with my whole body. He smells of the brisk out-of-doors, and though his hand at my neck is warm, his clothes feel cool.
 

      
“Dinner can wait,” he says, as he reaches around me with a towel and wipes my wet fingers until they’re dry.
 
I feel the handcuffs secure my hands in front of me, their tightening grasp of my flesh secure enough to keep them fixed.
 
I can hardly move them inside the confines of the steel. Remembering what I wore today, he reaches around and unzips the zipper of my sweater.
 
I feel a waft of air against my skin and my nipples harden poking though the lace of my bra.
 
He pushes me silently into the living room where he extinguishes the light.
 

      
Bathed in the ghostly glow of the streetlamp, with the masks looking as though they’ll fly off the walls into my face, with my heart beating so fast I think it’s racing on beyond me, I find him raising my hands above me.
 
A hook from the ceiling comes down to hold my cuffed hands.
 
Immobile and stretched, I wonder how he’ll use me, but that becomes an even greater mystery when a blindfold slips over my eyes.

      
While my sweater hangs open, he cuts away my bra leaving my bared breasts to feel the tease of the air.
 
Undoing my pants, he strips everything away below my waist.
 
When he walks away, I am more alone than ever, afraid that his next move will come to me out of the darkness and bring me pain.
 
I’d welcome pain now, but it’s the impending first strike that frightens me most.
 

      
Out of the silence, I begin to hear the noise of him at the fireplace, fixing the fire I was too afraid to light myself.
 
Hearing the wood crackle as it’s lit, the warmth soon follows, but it doesn’t take away my fear.
 
I only imagine how my skin gleams by the light of the fire’s leaping flames.
 
I move unconsciously to the beat of some rhythm, like this is someone’s bonfire I’m bound before, not the genteel fire at some gentleman’s hearth.
 
I suppose I think of the stranger more as a savage than a gentleman, even though he seems to thrive in a gentleman’s surroundings.

      
The first touch to my skin is that of something as savage as my imagination conjures.
 
At first, its thin form makes me believe he holds a cane to my skin, prodding it along my sex-flushed pores, teasing me with the threat of that first explosive slash to a thigh or breast.
 
I wait impatiently, my blinded eyes peering upward toward the heavens as if penitent.
 
I wonder why he punishes me.
 
Is this just for sport, or is there some psychic reason for my present captivity?
 
I shudder with each sensation he draws from my expectant skin.
 
My eager loins betray me, gyrating as though they beg for a harsher touch.
 

      
The more he runs his implement over my swaying body, the more I become aware that this is not something as refined as a polished cane, or even a smooth bamboo rod.
  
The end of it tickles my nose and I smell the raw freshness of trees.
  
The aroma of it takes me from a city living room into a woods with verdant greens and the smell of darkness—into a forest where a hundred more saplings like this tender birch wait for a man to snatch them.
 

      
“Will you beat me?” I gasp thoughtlessly.

      
“You should worry that I will,” he says, “not beg for it.”

      
But I do beg for it.
 
I hate this waiting game.

      
The froth between my thighs grows thick and it’s there he focuses this cutting shoot, pressing it into my labia, running it along the pathway between them where he draws it meanly against my throbbing clitoris.
 
I ask for more with each movement of my hips, each appeal I make with my ready ass and cunt.
 
When at last he begins, he doesn’t shock me with a painful bite, but taps my pubis, first lightly, and then harder.
 
At first my voice sounds that peculiar sexual melody, whimpers and sighs meeting the air almost silently.
 
Then as he begins to flail the thing against that rocking, bucking mound, I gasp harder, my whimpers turning into cries.
 
Words of fear fall from my lips,
“ah noooo, pleeease, I caaaaaaan’t ….”
and
caress the air with such woe.

      
The stranger makes no sound as he moves around my body to my backside.
 
There is just the sound of the sapling cutting the air and my cries that rise from the steady shock of pain.
 
When he reaches my behind, he picks up speed and intensity.
 
I could scream, but I fear he’ll gag me too—even though he hasn’t made that threat.
 
More lashes land and I’m beside myself, writhing.
 
I believe he’ll never stop and my resolve for self-control is at its end.

      
He stops when I least expect it and I sense him steal away from me to another room, vanishing with his heavy aura.
 
I wonder if he’s displeased. I sense his return simply feeling the atoms in the air part for him as he passes.
 
On me, his hand clutches my neck, another presses that dreaded sphere into my mouth.

      
“You didn’t want this, did you?” he purrs.
 
There’s no way for me to answer him.
 
But he knows.
 
“You tried to be silent.
 
You tried to please me.
 
And you tried to remain haughty, beyond the power of my birch to effect you.”
 
I shake my head,
no
.
 
I could never imagine myself haughty, beyond the power of any of his implements to affect me.
 
He can’t hear my rebuttal with his ears, but surely he can with his heart.

      
He drops back and I begin to feel the birch again at my ass.
 
Its repeated strikes burn like the fire in the grate that causes me to sweat.
 
I feel that sweat trickle down my leg, though I wonder if perhaps it mingles with blood he’s drawn from my tender bottom.
 
More, and I struggle for a while … more yet and I find the birch landing on my sides where the sting of it makes my blind eyes cry into the mask that covers my face.
 
When he suddenly stops again, I pray he’s finished with me, but instead, he addresses my front side again. I know he’s standing close; his breath moves my hair, his hand takes my chin and fondles it gently. When he strikes with the birch, it’s to my breasts and the ripe pain makes me lurch and cry more. Backing away, he alternates from my breasts to my thighs, delivering blows that I don’t believe will stop.

      
And then, I sense he’s finished.
 
The fire is snapping in the background; the heat makes my skin piping hot like smoldering embers. He walks twice around my hanging body as though he’s inspecting me. The tip of the birch pokes at a fresh burn and occasionally delivers a sharp nip to my sides or agonized breast.
 
I cry with any measure of abuse he wreaks now.
 
I hate this bondage that keeps my hands from his body, that prevents me from kissing his lips with mine, that denies me any kind of reply but this whimpering servile one.

      
When he finally removes the blindfold, his message is simple, “Keep your eyes closed, Ellen Laurey. Open them only when I tell you.”

      
This is as much a burden as any he’s had me bear, but I survive this one too.
 
When I finally hear his command, and lift my lids, I gaze at him.
 
He’s sitting in a chair before me, a look of satisfaction on his face.

      
“You make a good slave,” he says.
 
“Seems that you enjoy being beaten as much as I enjoy delivering the blows.
 
You know my cock’s hard?”

      
I can imagine so.
 
I stare at his denim-covered crotch and think I see his penis surging with arousal.
 
My lips, still occupied with the ball-gag, beg to know his taste again.
 
I long for the perfume of his balls, the feel of the masculine thatch of hair, the brawny thighs, the firm, sculptured ass in my hands.
 
I would devour him.
 

      
He mocks me sitting aloof in his chair.
 

      
Oh, how I’d trace the line of his mouth with my finger, or if not my finger, then my tongue.
 
I writhe before him pleading for his mercy.
 
My eyes caress him, tears beginning to well there.
 
Such desperation grips me.

      
“All I can think of, Ellen Laurey, is how much I desire to control you.
 
I cannot imagine loving you any other way than this.”

      
If he’d only let loose the gag, I’d tell him the same thing.

      
“You want to orgasm, don’t you?” he says.

      
Until that moment, orgasm has seemed so far away, locked inside the never-ending cycle of pain.
 
But now, at its mention, my hips buck with the answer.
 
He moves forward in his chair, and I can feel his body drawing nearer.
 

      
“The hair between your thighs tickles you now.
 
You can almost feel it move with my breath as I speak … ah, but it’s only the air gliding around you that has you aroused.”
 
There’s a smile now on his lips, though the look of steel remains in his cobalt eyes.
 
“You’d beg me to place a gentle finger on your clit and rub it, or perhaps press my mouth against the wetness there, or if I was especially inspired, come at you from behind, burying my face into the fragrance of your crack, where my mouth could find all your holes and explore them.”