Carrie's Story: An Erotic S/M Novel (6 page)

I looked down at him. I felt weak, and my pelvis felt
bruised and wobbly. I was cold, too, my thighs shivery and
slick with sweat and come. I found words, although I was
blushing and trembling, and could only speak very slowly.
"It makes me feel like a very bad girl, Jonathan," I said hesitantly and very softly.

He spoke very softly too. "But you've been a very good
girl tonight, you know. Isn't it odd? Well, don't wear yourself out trying to figure it out." Then he stood up, found his
pants on the chair where I'd put them, and pulled off the belt.
"Kneel on the armchair and I'll beat you," he said gently, "and
then you can turn around and I'll beat you a little on the tits,
just until they get pink. Then I'll unplug you and you can
sleep here tonight. There's a little bedroom for you upstairs,
down the hall from mine. It's too dangerous for you to drive
back across the bridge in this storm."

But of course wear myself out trying to figure it out was
exactly what I did. Later, my friend Stuart and I would talk
endlessly about that night. Stuart and I had been friends since
freshman year, but we had become roommates in June, as
soon as we graduated. He had continued on as a graduate student in literature, getting the fellowship they probably would
have given to me if I'd applied for it. When I limped in, nights
I didn't stay over at Jonathan's, he'd rub my shoulders and
read to me from Francois Villon or the Brontes. We shared
a big flat in the Mission District with a UPS driver and a
magician (well, Jo does office temps for a living and magic
at kids' birthday parties, but I think she's good, anyhow).
Your typical twenty-something no-future roommate gang,
right? -delivery person, office worker/magician, grad student,
bike messenger/sex slave -your low-wage, nonproductive,
postindustrial workforce in miniature.

Only Stuart knew about my life with Jonathan, though
Jo and Henry were sweet and wouldn't have cared. Still,
I didn't want anybody but Stuart to know-it was too difficult to explain, too difficult even for me to understand.

Stuart was, as he put it, more or less bi, but mostly shy.
So, though I did certainly listen to his stories about his love
life, and pet and comfort him when he needed it, the unfair
truth was that he really couldn't compete with this amazing
continuing story I had going and my endless need for comfort. Add to that this other thing we had become addicted to
at school, theory. Lying across Stuart's big bed and talking
ourselves silly trying to understand the Jonathan story was
how we lived. Was there any other way?

"So maybe it's all just, like, object relations?" I'd muse.
"Civi/izatuozz aac) Ai Dliieozzteati? Fuckin' boring early socialization? Or how about we make it more politically correct object
relations-Jonathan was never nurtured by his rich father."

Stuart considered. "Well, I think we want an object
relations theory that's at least got a little more philosophical
oomph to it. I'd add in all that Hegelian master/slave stuff.
Self knowing itself by dominating the other, but not devouring the other completely because that blows the game. Some
of that seems true enough, anyhow, though you look in no
danger of being devoured completely, at least when you wear
your messenger clothes.

"All that basic social science stuff we had to sit through
seems true enough, if you want to explain what's going on as
a pathology. Which I don't. Not when it gives you such great
sex and me such great voyeuristic entertainment. You're my
heroine." And he stopped being helpful and supportive and
just looked expectant.

"Okay, yes, okay," I sighed, as I often did. "Yes, you can
see the new welts. You can touch them very lightly. First bring
me a cup of cocoa with rum in it and two marshmallows. And
turn the TV to Cheer ;. "

didn't exactly believe any of the theories, but it did look
-like Jonathan and I had found, as it were, a groove. When,
soon afterward, he started fucking me up the ass regularly,
I found myself thanking him, which wasn't according to the
rules he'd laid down, but became an extension of them, my
own little improvisation, I guess. As a graduation present, he
replaced the hated puppy collar and boots with sleek black
leather. That isn't to say that there weren't still whacks, beatings, and humiliations. That was, after all, the game we were
playing. But one thing I did know, perhaps the one generality all the theory was good for, was that the game was played
at some precarious balance point, teetering on the edge of
shame and the shadow boundary of civilization. That we
played this game mostly in that hypercivilized study, among
all the art, books, and old furniture, was, I was sure, an ironic
signifier he meant us to share. I appreciated that, whenever I
was in any condition to appreciate things like that.

As the winter wore on, he brought more toys - angry
little clips for the nipples and other soft parts, sometimes with
little bells attached. He told Mrs. Branden to give me a cup
of coffee when I came in and not to let me pee; this would
increase the chances that I'd have to squat over the chamber
pot he kept for me in the corner. And if I dribbled onto the
floor, I'd have to lick up the drops.

He tried different whips on me-whips and broad
leather paddles. Once "just for the hell of it," he said, he
tried a stiff hairbrush, which really hurt. Another time, an
old-fashioned shaving strop-he'd ordered it from a catalog,
Peterman or something, just to use it on me; I don't think he
ever used it to shave with. There was a period-Christmas
and through January-when he seemed to have presents for
me all the time. Things that hurt and humiliated, which sometimes I'd find beautifully wrapped under a little holiday tree
in his study and have to unwrap-of course without tearing
the paper-and thank him for. Sometimes I would never have
seen them before-strange Victorian posture-training devices,
for example-and he'd make me guess what I thought they
were for before he showed me.

And then, after the needles of the little Christmas tree dried
up and it got tossed into the alley, there were costumes. Not
every time -lots of times he still wanted me naked except for
the collar and cuffs -but sometimes, not when I could predict,
when I came to the kitchen door there'd be costumes for me to
wear. Tight, tight little corsets around my waist with elaborate
garter arrangements hanging off them. Black, mostly, but sometimes antique white muslin or canvas, for all I knew with real
whalebone. The corsets' laces and hooks drove composed Mrs.
Branden to distraction. She'd actually have to prop her knee
against my ass, like in an eighteenth-century engraving, to be
able to pull hard enough on the laces. She'd sweat and curse,
too, and once she slapped me afterward in frustration.

If the corsets were period pieces, though, the shoes provided an eclectic counterpoint, as well as an endless outlet
for what, evidently, was Jonathan's trashy side-just in case,
like me, you hadn't thought he had one. Well, it was shoes - glitzy, extreme torments for the ankle and instep. Where did
he get them, I'd wonder, the six- inch spikes in silver lame, or
purple glitter, or backless with a million little straps? Where
drag queens got theirs, I supposed, or Tina Turner. To wear
with them, there were seamed black stockings, which he liked
to see in shreds by the end of an evening.

I'd sometimes think, as Mrs. Branden was tricking me
out in this stuff, about what he'd said that first afternoon,
about my being willing to put up with the trite details. It was
true. I was, and so was he. Well, actually, he was a whole lot
more than willing to put up with it -he was utterly, sincerely
delighted with Barbie Doll stuff that you'd think he'd be too
sophisticated for. The first time, for example, that I wore the
white, antique, maybe-whalebone corset, he walked slowly
around me. "Oh, yes," he said dreamily.

I hadn't realized originally, even with all my reading and
fantasizing, exactly how these fetishistic props worked. It was
only after a couple of times wearing them that I'd really gotten
it-the way the different elements, these technologies of the
profane, worked in ensemble. I began to see and feel now how
the corset, when worn with the ridiculously high heels, would
thrust my ass out. How my breasts would be pushed forward,
while the high collar forced me to keep my back straight and
my head up. Sometimes I felt as though my body wasn't mine
at all, but his, forced into a configuration to make it maximally
accessible to him, giving me no place to hide. And sometimes I'd
be embarrassed to realize that I wanted to hold my body that
way in front of him-that I was grateful for the paraphernalia
that gave me no choice but to display myself so outrageously.
And mostly, I guess, it was a battle inside me between both of those attitudes, neither of which I could entirely control, both
of which kept me off balance.

That afternoon, anyhow, his "oh yes" made me almost
dizzy with a kind of power. I loved the feeling of getting him
that hot. He pressed against my front, put his hands on my
ass, and kissed my shoulders. "Do you think," he murmured,
"that Emily Dickinson wore one of these corsets? Under
those white dresses, you know."

A question I hadn't expected. Well, he had promised
he'd stay ahead of me, hadn't he? I tried to keep a straight,
respectful face. "I don't know, Jonathan. I don't really think
so, but I don't know."

"It would have been the right historical period, wouldn't
it?" he said, rubbing and pinching the bottom of my ass. "And
if Emily didn't, what about that sister-in-law? The one who
fucked on the pool table."

Southern belles wore them, I thought. And he was right,
they were Emily's contemporaries. But I knew he wouldn't
be interested in plantation ladies in big hoop skirts saying,
"Fiddle-de-dee, Rhett." His thing would be to wonder about
a spooky woman who could write a line like "I like a look of
agony/because I know it's true." Still, were the corsets also
worn up north in abolitionist Amherst, Mass.? I had to insist
on my ignorance, about both Emily and Susan, the randy
sister-in-law, while Jonathan maneuvered us toward the
couch. "And I thought you were so well educated," he said.
"Good thing I'm educating you now."

He sat down on the couch, forcing me to my knees in
front of him, and kissed me, holding my breasts in his hands.
He often did this, playing with my nipples, making them as
hard as cherry stones. It was usually a prelude to his putting clips on them, but even though I knew this, my nipples would
always stiffen obediently, humiliatingly to his touch. I might
have my streaks of waywardness; they never seemed to. This
time, though, he didn't stop. He kept kissing me, probing my
mouth with his tongue while he rolled my nipples between his
fingers. I gave up trying to figure out what he wanted; as far
as I could see, he wanted to be doing this. I should have been
alarmed-what was I missing? what was he going to punish
me for? -but I felt too wonderful, too warm and loose, and a
beating seemed like a small price to pay.

He loosened my collar. It was still plenty tight, but his
moving the buckles one hole over (or so it felt), allowed me
just a little more movement, a little more ability to throw my
head back, to gasp, shudder, and moan.

He moved his mouth to one of my breasts, and one of
his hands to my cunt. His tongue and fingers were insistent,
probing, and patient. He had great hands. Once in a while
he'd make one of those impossibly delicate model buildings
that architects, amazingly, still make in this electronically
mediated day and age. I mean, I never saw him at work, but
it would be there in the study, glue and X-acto knife on the
shelf, growing in size and complexity for a week or so, and
I'd go weak with lust, imagining his long fingers cutting and
pasting the tiny strips of balsa wood and foam core.

Right now one - no, two - of those fingers were slowly
moving up my asshole, while one from the other hand continued to make tiny circles on my clit. It felt like he'd go on
forever, or as long as it would take me to feel as absolutely
spectacular as I could possibly feel. I felt like a puppet, as
though there were strings attached to my breast and cunt,
and they were being tugged, ever so lightly, insistently, making me swoop and dance. I gave in, finally, howling
and even laughing a little, hoarsely, deep in my throat, and
collapsed against him, trying to catch my breath but dimly
aware of the volcanic sensations that were still there inside
me.

"Lie down on the floor," he whispered into my neck,
and began to push me down by the shoulders. I followed
the pressure of his hands and found myself on my back.
He knelt beside me, pushed my knees up, so that my legs
were bent, parted them, and started nibbling slowly at the
insides of my thighs, right above the black stockings. I
could feel him licking, chewing a little, kissing-lips, teeth,
and tongue all somehow getting into the act as though my
flesh were some kind of complex salad that he was savoring
thoughtfully.