The Gift of Girls (24 page)

This was not the same as being spanked by Simon Roche, being smacked by the stray hand at Rebels Casino, even enduring the bitter taste of the cane in the Sister’s office. The whip uncoiled once more, the crack split the air, and the finely woven thread of plaited leather found an unsullied target just below the curve of my bottom, the heat touching my pussy like the devil’s kiss. I screamed again as the second strike of the whip turned into a streak of sheer agony that encouraged the first to glow more brightly.

I panted for breath. I could hear Ben Olson panting behind me. I heard that terrible sonic boom a third time and the leather tongue took another taste of flesh from my bottom, turning it into a raised welt like a migraine pain engulfing body and mind, a pain that if it had had a colour would have been the deepest black. Tears ran in
streams
down my cheeks. Snot fell from my nose and landed on the floor below me. Sweat dripped from my armpits.

New sensations were racing through my body as my voice, in a scream that could have come from a wounded animal, filled the room and rattled the wooden beams supporting the roof. With my limited experience, I had come to think of spanking as an enigmatic pleasure, a naughty, well-kept secret. The pleasure in corporal punishment was all one-sided for the man who decided the world’s oil prices and, even in the midst of the beating, I couldn’t help wondering if a bad performance by the girl being flogged would cost the motorist at the pump the following day.

Did I deserve a thrashing? Did I push out my bottom arrogantly, as Simon had said? Was I in love with the mirror, as the Sister once told me? Was I going to be a better person after the beating? I bit my lip and snivelled. I took a firm grip on that wooden rail and tensed my burning flesh as I heard that fearful crack break the air above my head once again.

Ben Olson was clearly an expert, a connoisseur, a master. He knew how long to wait between each stroke and where exactly to lay the line of leather, picking out the space just below the third stroke, closer to my poor little pussy cowering between my legs satiated with pleasure and terrified by the mere thought of pain. That fourth whiplash sent a ricocheting series of vibrations through the pleats and coils of my vagina and back passage, resonated through my womb and stomach and came up through my throat in a wail to waken the dead.

The feel of that fourth stroke was painful, of course. It was agony. But I sensed a certain numbness. I screamed, and kept screaming, but this was part of the procedure, it was expected. But I knew, too, for the first time, that I could take the flogging, that, in the sadomasochistic interplay between Mr Big Oil and little Magdalena with
her
wrists bound and bottom so hopelessly bared, I was an equal partner.

I waited for the fifth stroke of the lash and, when it came, my body jerked forward and vapour rose in a mist from my skin. I screamed, but it was more for effect, theatrical. The worst thing about a beating is the fear, the fear of pain, the fear of the unknown. Once you get over the fear, the pain becomes a companion, understood, something you can absorb and make a part of you. It still hurts, it hurts like the flames of hell, but you know you can take it and you know that it will soon come to an end.

The sting from the fifth stroke roared like fire and, like the first four, faded to an ember. I could feel those five scorched welts running in lines from a fraction above the lips of my pudenda to the top of the crease in my bottom. Was there room for another? Where would he place it? Was six going to be it, as I had thought? Or was it going to be more? I didn’t know why beatings and canings were measured by the duodecimal system, in sixes and twelves, but the English had long favoured it for their currency and wasn’t spanking known as the English Disease?

Please make it six
.

The pause stretched. I was countering the pain by running through the different counting systems I could recall. The fact that we have ten fingers made 10 the basis of most systems, but there were some odd variations, the Babylonians using 60, the Arabs 80, and the binary system of computers was founded on the base of 2 rather than 10, requiring just the numbers 1 and 0 for their immeasurable calculations, those numbers beyond numbers like the reflections in the mirror.

Big Oil was flexing his shoulder muscles, building up his strength. I was trembling. My breasts swayed below me, that shiver of my own tanned flesh oddly soothing. My distended nipples, immune from pain, were actually
enjoying
themselves, and I could smell the faint musky aroma of my shameful arousal. My pubes were drenched and my tummy was sucked up in a hollow below my ribcage, the bones defined in a sheen of sweat. I could not imagine any position more exposed and, in a way, more erotic than this, legs stretched, arms stretched, toes pushing down into the floor, my damp hair in a veil across my face, my tanned bottom pushed out as arrogant as ever. What man could resist such a provocative display?

I had tensed the cheeks of my bottom before each lash. Now, I tried to relax. I counted in sixes, 6, 12, 18 … I got as far as 19×6 when the sonic boom exploding above my head broke my concentration. The wet tongue of the whip flashed across the small of my back just above the crease of my bottom and the scream that left my lungs was not in any way theatrical. The sum total of those first five lashes was equal to the pain inflicted by the sixth. That last lash made me feel as if I had been cut in two but, as in the trick of putting a lady in a box and sawing her in half, I was still in one piece, still standing, the embers from the first five strokes blazing again so that it felt like a forest fire running from the top of my skull down to the tips of my toes.

I wailed and screamed. Tears rained from my eyes. I was only vaguely aware of Ben Olson unhooking my bracelets from the bar and, when I stood straight, my bottom closed like a concertina and the pain was all the greater.

‘Come here, girlie,’ he said.

He crossed the room to the three-way mirror. I joined him, each step a separate torment, the lines on my bottom jiggling up and down. I stood before the mirror in such a way that I could see the six crimson welts. They were perfectly spaced, like steps, like a grid.

‘The Olson Ranch Brand,’ said Ben Olson smugly. ‘Now you belong to me.’

I wasn’t sure what he meant and remembered how Sergio Buenavista had said he wanted to ‘buy me’. Had the Texan pre-empted the sale? Was I in the world market a piece of merchandise? Were we all? Did it matter? I had taken six strokes from the bull-whip he was now hooking lovingly back on the display. I knew I had done well and knew by the set of Ben Olson’s craggy features that he thought so, too.

He found a jar on the shelf and came back to join me, unscrewing the lid. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from those six gorgeous red lines. I would wear the Olson brand invisibly for the rest of my life. The welts would go down and heal, the fine scars would fade, but on nights when I was naked in the moon’s waxen glow those lines would come to life and shine in the dark. I was and would always be a creature of the night, a slave to my senses, and it would all have begun that night in Black Spires.

Ben took a large dollop of cream from the jar and gently smoothed it across the welts. It was arnica, the same as Lee-Sun had used after Simon’s smacking, and it was surprising how quickly the fire died down to a gentle and pleasant glow.

‘What do you have to say for yourself now, girlie?’ he asked.

I swallowed. I didn’t know what he expected me to say.

‘Well, nothing, really,’ I replied.

‘It’s always best to say nothing when you’ve got nothing to say. Is that the first time you’ve been thrashed?’

‘Well, like that, yes.’

‘It won’t be the last, but girls always remember the first time,’ he said.

I do declare, there was a faint stirring in the tall Texan’s blue-veined and flaccid length of wrinkly cock. The moment he finished spreading the arnica on my bottom, I went down on my haunches and fed it like a lollypop into my mouth, sucking hard, moving slowly
back
and forth, pausing to stipple the big smooth helmet before swallowing it down once again.

He stood with his feet spread, his hands locked against the sides of my head, and I kept going for a long time, sucking and licking, using one hand to jerk off the creature, pausing to give my jaws a rest and using two hands, one above, one below, as if climbing a rope. It was getting harder, easier to manage. I plunged it back down my throat again, gagging momentarily, taking it all, the entire length pushing beyond my clanging tonsils, and back out again, up and down, up and down.

I could take six lashes from a bull-whip. I could do this too: I could make Ben Olson’s cock respond for the first time in a decade.

His grip grew tighter. I thought he was going to come prematurely and expected ten years of accumulated semen to pour down my throat. But he stopped suddenly, grabbed the back of my hair and pulled me to my feet. He kept hold of me this way, like a caveman grasping me by the hair. We crossed the room to the big bed where he tossed me across the sheets of white linen.

‘You’ve got a mouth that could suck oil out of the Texas desert,’ he said, and I felt inordinately pleased with myself as he lay back, his enormous cock like a lighthouse rising above his nest of pubic hair.

He spread his legs and, on my knees like a believer at prayer, I continued sucking him off, sliding my hands under his buttocks and pumping them up and down. His body was tense, but he stayed hard and I worked on that giant phallus, sucking, swallowing, stippling, licking its entire length, chewing on the bulbous head. I was like a dog with a bone, or a thirsty creature lapping away at a salt-lick, my dribble keeping the monster well oiled, my throat expanding and contracting as I swallowed it down once again.

As I came up for air, he again dragged me by the hair and, crablike, I swivelled round, took his cock back down
my
throat and wriggled with satisfaction as his tongue parted the cowling about my clitoris and pressed down on the magic button. It was weird but, after the beating, the little bulb was hot, electric, desperate for some action, and that big wet tongue was just what she needed. Now that I was getting some attention, and from this angle above the Texan, I was able to take the entire length of that astonishing cock down into the darkest depths of my throat and down, it seemed, to the place where my heart was beating faster and faster.

A spasm gripped me and, as if this was a sign, he pushed me sideways, rolled me over and plunged into my wet pussy like a battering ram breaking down the doors to the castle keep. I arched my back, pushed down with my heels and gasped as his long cock plunged up into those places never reached before, the membranes vibrating with unfamiliar sensations, my gymnast muscles firming and softening like a sea anemone swallowing a fish.

He had been silent all the time I was sucking him off, but now he started to pant like a runner at the end of a race, his breath coming faster and faster. I could feel the tension across his shoulders, in his loins. I could feel myself coming and wanted to hold back for him but couldn’t. Those places that had never been reached before were just too energised, too stimulated. The feeling started in my chest, ran down through my tummy into my womb and I roared as I’d roared being flogged, as a climax like a tidal wave gushed through my body.

The spasm overcame Ben Olson. He tensed and withdrew the monster as he was about to climax so that he could pour the creamy stuff like milk from an urn over my belly, my breasts, my face, a great stream of sperm ten years in the making, sticky as glue, hot and tasting of bitter chocolate. He held on to his cock as if it was the short handle on the bull-whip, pumping out every last
drop
of semen, and almost immediately he was flaccid again.

I was on my back. He dropped to one side, snuggled under my arm and lay there panting, fondling my breasts.

‘You see, Magdalena, you never know what you can do when you try,’ he said.

I wasn’t sure if he was referring to himself or me but didn’t think it wise to ask. He seemed content running his hand over my breasts, turning my nipples in his fingers, rubbing them with the flat of his palm. We were quiet for a long time, dozing, lost in our own thoughts.

‘You know something, I never felt any love from my mother and I never felt any love for her,’ he then said, his voice soft as if he was speaking in a confessional. ‘The only tits I knew as a baby belonged to Mammy. Then, they sent her away. I never knew why, but it was a good lesson. I learned I could never trust nobody, that the things you love will always be taken away from you.’

He was quiet again. The sperm across my body and over my face had hardened and gone cold. I shivered.

‘You cold, girlie?’

‘I am a bit.’

‘Then why don’t you turn out the lights and pull the covers over us. You’ve got a big day ahead of you tomorrow.’

We lay close like spoons and in seconds he was sleeping. Sleep for me came slowly, my nerve endings were tingling so, and I lay there as a storm moved across the channel and rain lashed the leaded windows.

13

The Hunt

IN MY DREAM
I was a mermaid with a shiny green tail swimming in a warm sea. There were other girls like me with long hair gliding behind them as they moved towards me and around me, their breasts bobbing above the surface of the water.

‘Shush, shush. Time to wake up.’

As my eyes fluttered open, I wasn’t sure if I were a girl who had dreamed she was a mermaid or a mermaid now dreaming she was a girl. I’d read that somewhere, or something like it, and smiled trying to recall where.

‘Come. Come.’ Lee-Sun was standing beside the bed, a finger to his lips.

‘No rest for the wicked,’ I said.

‘Shush. Is time,’ he whispered, and I uncoiled myself from Ben Olson’s circling arms. The Texan was sleeping like a baby.

The sun through the leaded windows lit the display of canes and whips, the glass and rubber phalluses, the metal clips and clamps. My gaze was drawn to the bull-whip, the fine leather glossy with memories in the refracted light. My smarting bottom reminded me that I wore the Olson brand. I had been whipped and serviced in ways girls can only imagine. I had been at the heart of an orgy, my first, and while I felt as if I should be vaguely ashamed, on the contrary, I was inordinately pleased with myself.