Girl Trade - full length erotic adventure novel (Xcite Erotic Romance Novels) (3 page)

Keep them, probably, I thought. That’s the way people are. That’s the way we have become. I had left my backpack still stuffed with clothes on the floor in my room in the pension where no one spoke English, where no one had bothered to register my name. They would think I had travelled on and would return later for my things. They wouldn’t want to go to the police, make a fuss, waste time. Girls are always wandering off these days. That’s what they’ll say to themselves. She was a foreigner. You know what they’re like. She’ll turn up. And if she doesn’t, it’s nothing to do with us. They will put my backpack in the storeroom and forget that I had ever existed.

The man lit a cigarette, the harsh-smelling smoke an intrusion on the clean sweet air. We had left the sand and were walking on coarse grass thick as reeds. I could see the tower more clearly, but no other people, no buildings, no sign of life. The sun was stoking up the fires of early afternoon, but at least there was a cool breeze rising off the sea.

We entered a twisted maze of low, windswept pines sharing the hillside with giant cactuses and bushes with brilliant yellow flowers. It was all perfect, pure, untouched, and I couldn’t understand why one of the hotel chains had not come along and ruined it all with a resort complex, a yachting marina, a spa.

My situation with each step I took became more surreal, more difficult to get my head around, those steps as I climbed the hill taking me further from the certainty of who I was, who I had once been. It was beyond absurd. I was naked, sweaty, my face coated in dried sperm, my bottom glowing after the man had bent me over and thrashed me, something I could not have imagined ever happening to me, to anyone, and something that had certainly never happened before. I mean, a girl, me, in modern times being beaten in this way, not so much to inflict pain, I realised, but to show exactly what our roles were, to show who was the master and who was the slave.

Slave.

The very word made a lump form in my throat. I had been spanked to instil in me a sense of discipline. I had rashly, stupidly, set out swimming naked to the island and destiny had punished me for it.

Did I deserve to be spanked?

Certainly not. But having survived the ordeal, it wasn’t as terrible as the upsurge of fear when that hand came down across my bottom the first time. As the pain passed, transmuted as if my some piece of alchemical wizardry, there was a brief mad moment when I experienced a grotesque satisfaction in being bent over in this way without rights or choices, past or future. In pain you are living in the present and as the pain passes there is pleasure from having endured the pain.

What was even more astonishing, and something else I couldn’t fully grasp, was that the beating had contained a distinctly sensual element. I had known even as that hand came down again and again on my bottom, I had felt intuitively, instinctively, subconsciously, I’m not sure how, but I had known the man was beating me in this way to prepare me for all that was to follow. He wasn’t trying to hurt me. He was breaking my will.

When I went down on my knees to let his cock slip into my open throat, it was such a relief from being spanked, not only did it provide pleasure for the man, there was in me a contradictory gratification made preposterous as his semen burst from his cock and exploded over my face. Bobby had never done anything like that and perhaps if he had we would still have been together.

I felt ashamed to have these thoughts and wondered where they could have come from. Being naked strips away more than your clothes, it reveals unknown facets of your true nature. I had thought of myself as a career girl, independent, a climber on the slippery pole of achievement and success. But really, I was just as happy to let others make the decisions, to follow where the road of life led rather than trying to hack out my own individual path. Had the stranger seen something in me I had not known existed? Did he look at me and see a girl who wanted to be pissed on?

The suggestion was mortifying. I pushed such thoughts from my mind and concentrated as we climbed to the top of the hill. I glanced back again. The mist was thicker. La Gomera had gone, vanished from the landscape. It struck me that no one in the world had any idea where I was. I had heard of girls disappearing and now I knew how it happened. They did something stupid. One wrong turn leads as if by the law of cause and effect to the next. And once you stray from the path, it is all but impossible to ever find your way back.

The man changed the bag from one shoulder to the other and turned occasionally to nod. I found myself nodding and smiling back at him. It is inexcusable, I know. I had been used in the most outrageous way. I was totally vulnerable, humiliated, in grave danger and grateful like a beaten dog for this jot of human connection.

W
HEN WE REACHED THE
tower the man stopped, put his bag down and the way he shaded his eyes and looked out over the sea could have been a caricature of me on La Gomera peering out towards the island, an imitation of everyone who stares at the horizon and wishes they were some place else.

He kept looking, but there was nothing to see but the unending waves of the ocean, the great vastness of it all making the island appear transient and exposed, one giant swelling tide and it would be gone, wiped from the map, perhaps the tower remaining to remind seafarers of the impermanence of all things, even those we hold as true and dear.

I looked back the way we had come as if at the past and knew that, even when I returned, I would not be the same, that my life had already changed, each step that I took invisibly unpicking and remaking the fabric of my being. When I set out for the island with nothing, not even my clothes, it was as if I had thrown myself on fate. It was fate that would now deliver me into the reality of who I was, not who I pretended to be, that multiple persona who changed for Bobby, my parents, for old friends, my colleagues at work, for celebrities I met through my job.

We are all chameleons acting out different roles, trying to find the role that suits us best. As I stood at the top of the hill in that unknown place, it felt as if the atoms and cells of my body were at that very moment dividing and reforming, that another version of myself was rising to the surface and, like a negative in a tray of chemicals, a more authentic picture of that girl who had set out in search of adventure was about to appear. I was terrified of the man, of the power he had over me, but my fear was contained in a heightened sense of self. Within my fear, I experienced a sense of being at centre stage, no longer an observer watching life, but the star of my own implausible production.

The air blustering about the tower was briny and pure and tasted as if it had been charged with an extra shot of oxygen. Just as we had stopped at the tower, the sun seemed to have stopped in its progress across the sky, the slow steady heat baking my skin and putting a vibrant tint on the colours of everything around me: the sea and sky, the black rock, the green cactus plants, the intense red and yellow blooms of wild flowers. It was as if the veil had been lifted from my eyes and I was seeing everything more clearly. Far out to sea the faint mist was turning to cloud and I thought there would be a storm when night fell.

The tower was a little taller than me and was probably the remains of an ancient lighthouse. It was circular and made of blocks of stone cut from the rock. The island, too, was perfectly circular, the tower like a pert nipple on the low hill.

The sensuality of the landscape, the fact of being naked in the sun, was inhibiting my judgment, lessening my fears. I dug my nails once more into my palms to wake myself up, to remind myself what had happened to me. This wasn’t a holiday romance, a diversion. I was a prisoner, beaten and abused. It was hard to keep that fact lodged in the front of my mind, even with my bottom tingling still, even with the taste of the man’s sperm in my mouth.

It was so weird having been bent over by a stranger and spanked, so bizarre having his urine drying on my skin, my conscious mind seemed to be rejecting that fact and dwelling on the beauty of nature, the warmth of the day, the wild flowers, the scent of the sea air. I had to keep my wits about me. I didn’t want to antagonise my captor. The worst that he could do to me he had surely already done. I had to go along with him without complaint, lull him into a sense of security until I found a way to escape.

I took a deep breath and calmed myself. If there was a bright side, and usually there is, I hadn’t been harmed, not really, and if nothing else I was getting the overall tan I’d always wanted. The thought went through me and I shuddered with the shame of my own stupidity. Escape. That was the only answer.

The man still scanned the horizon, for what I wondered, a boat, the past, a message?

From the tower, I could see at the bottom of the hill the roofs of some buildings and, as we set off down the rugged path towards them, I wasn’t sure if I should feel more afraid or faintly relieved. Surely, there would be someone there who could help me? Someone who spoke English. Girls can’t just be tethered, led around without any clothes on, used as a urinal. I had decided to behave myself for now, but when I was free to report the man, bring him to justice, get my revenge.

My resolve made putting one unshod foot before the other easier as the path curved down to the sea. We walked along the dunes above the beach. The buildings turned out to be two sheds that could have been built from driftwood and thrown up by the wind. They were roofed in corrugated plastic sheets of different colours and I imagined those, too, had been carried to shore on the tide. Beyond the sheds in a grove of bent pines I could now see several huts built from black stone with thatched roofs. They seemed to be abandoned and mostly in ruins. If there had ever been a community on the island it had long since gone.

Beyond the first shed, there was a bay hidden from view below a wall of rock. The inlet was ringed with volcanic outcroppings coated in cockle shells, which made a natural harbour and protected the black sand beach where the remains of three old fishing boats lay like dead animals on their sides. There were two rubber Zodiacs, heavily patched, looking anything but seaworthy, one half in and half out of the water, the other pulled up on the sand.

As we drew closer to the bay, I began to think we were completely alone, just the two of us, and was processing the implications of this when another man popped up from behind the beached Zodiac. He had been working on the outboard motor and shook his head in an irritated gesture that revealed that whatever he had been trying to do, he had not been able to do it. He approached, wiping oil from his hands with a greasy rag. He said something to my man, and they didn’t exactly shake hands, but touched their fingers lightly together.

The newcomer was dressed in a similar fashion as the beachcomber in a black tunic and matching black turban. He was younger with a precise pointed beard and clear lively eyes that studied me with the concentrated gaze of a scientist looking at a rare specimen through a microscope. He said something and the other man laughed. The younger man pinched my narrow waist as if to show there wasn’t much meat on me and then took a grip on my breasts, turning to the other man as if to say they at least were satisfactory.

They carried on talking and I wasn’t sure what to do, what to say. Their language was completely unknown to me; with French, Spanish, Italian, even German I could have understood something, but their guttural sounds held no clue to their meaning and I was trying to follow the conversation by studying their impenetrable features. They moved down the beach to look more closely at the open outboard and I followed automatically, as if my will had gone. When they finished discussing the problems with the motor, I plucked up the courage and took a step closer to the man in the black tunic.

‘Can you help me, please,’ I said. ‘Do you speak English?
Habla usted español? Parlez vous francais
?’

He stood back as if in shock and shouted at me, waving his fist as if I had done some terrible thing. He then spoke to the beachcomber and they both laughed.

‘I haven’t done anything,’ I said.

The man in black stared at me, sealed my lips with a stiff greasy finger and said a single word I did understand. ‘Shush,’ he hissed.

He then waved his finger at me as you may wave a finger at a naughty puppy. That’s what I was in their eyes. I was secured by a leather thong, a dog being trained to behave itself. I stared at the man and he stared back until I lowered my eyes.

My captor removed the conch shell from his bag and the man in black turned it through his hands like a connoisseur with a rare gemstone. He examined the pink glaze on the inner lip of the shell, running the tips of his fingers over the smooth surface. He looked up and, as our eyes met, I knew instinctively what was going through his mind. He gave the conch back to the other man and then did something revolting and inexcusable. He ran the side of his hand like a saw between my legs, opening the pink lips of my vagina. I tried to back away, but his hand slid around my waist and he held me still as he wormed his fingers up inside me. He removed his hand and showed me his palm slicked and shiny with discharge. I couldn’t believe he had done this and I couldn’t understand why I was wet.

The man rubbed his fingers together, held them to his nose and stared at me at the same time. I would have slapped him across the face, but couldn’t with my hands tied behind my back. I understood how controlling this is, that with your hands bound in this way you can really do nothing but accept what happens to you just as the wind-bent pines bend to the prevailing wind. I was gritting my teeth. My knees felt weak. My heart was pounding in my chest. I had thought as I stood at the foot of the tower that being in the hands of fate was liberating, but it was confining, too. I was imprisoned by the whims and lusts of others.

The two men now started arguing, shrugging, raising their voices, turning away and turning back again. This went on for several minutes. The man in black was punching the palm of his hand. The beachcomber was shaking his head and making a clucking sound with his tongue.

‘Agh. Agh. Agh,’ he kept saying.

The man in black finally took out some money, three or four folded notes, and slapped them down on the side of the Zodiac. My man looked at the money, shook his head and the other man angrily grabbed the money, stuck it back in his tunic and went back to work on the outboard motor.

We turned away and were making our way towards the sheds when the man in black shouted what sounded like a terrible insult. My man stopped, threw up his palms as if in defeat and we returned once again. The man repairing the motor wiped his hands on the same filthy cloth, drew out his money and counted out five 10 euro notes that the beachcomber squirreled away in his blue tunic.

It was only at that moment that I realised that the two men had not been shouting at each other in anger. They were bartering over the price for that bonded piece of bric-a-brac. I was valued at 50 euros, the price of a meal in a good Barcelona restaurant.

Had I been sold, I wondered? Or was this a rental? Was I now a hooker and the man in blue my pimp? Was this how he made his living, searching for conch shells with pink lips and stray girls washed up on the beach? Was that what I had become, an object to be sold or hired or exchanged?

Yes, that’s exactly what I was. I had stopped being the girl who catches the bus along the Fulham Road with its cinemas and antique shops and bars and restaurants. I was no longer the girl who, with the toss of her long blonde hair and her pouty lips, had entrée to every club in the West End. I was no longer one half of a
happening
item. I was merchandise in the market. I was a slave like the people once stolen from Africa.

The younger man studied his prize. He felt my breasts, did that revolting thing of running his hand between my legs and, as if I were a horse, he even looked at my teeth; the only thing that appeared to impress him, good private dentistry and not one single filling.

‘Please, please don’t …’

‘Shush,’ he said.

He took out a worn knife with an ivory handle and a curved blade that gleamed in the sun. He turned me around and slashed through the leather thong binding my wrist. He then pushed me down over the rounded hull of the Zodiac. He said something which I assumed was ‘don’t move,’ and I lay there with my bottom in the air and my waist resting over the thick rubber sides of the inflatable boat.

The beachcomber, my
owner
, had moved around the bay and sat in the shade of one of the beached fishing boats with a clear view of the action. He crossed his legs and lit another cigarette.

The younger man used his foot to spread my legs wider and I had never felt more exposed, more ashamed, with my bottom in the air, still smarting from being spanked, and my wet pussy pushing through my thighs. The man started massaging and smacking my bottom; not hard, but what on another occasion I may have described as
playfully
. I heard him spit. As his moistened finger pressed at the delicate ring of my anus, a surge of fierce, uncontrollable anger rose up through me. I pushed myself up from the Zodiac, turned and slapped him across the face.

The sound rang out like a gunshot. I heard a bird lift on flapping wings from the undergrowth and fly like a stray thought across the empty sky.

The man didn’t look angry. He was amused. He lifted his hand to slap me back and, as I raised my hands to protect my face, he slapped my breasts, first one breast, then the other. I am not sure why this was so shocking, but it was. I hit him again, and he hit me again, two swift blows as if my breasts were punching bags. Tears streamed from my eyes and a scream rose into my throat.

‘You bastard,’ I cried.

I rushed at him. I got my hands around his throat and tried to throttle him. But men are always stronger. He took a firm grip on my wrists, pulled my hands down, turned me around and shoved me back against the black rubber Zodiac.

The beachcomber was grinning, his brown teeth on show, the cigarette in the crook of his fingers.

I caught a glimpse of the man in black as he stepped away from the Zodiac and grabbed a curving strip of bamboo from what looked like the remains of a beached lobster trap. He snapped the bamboo in half and I heard the two-tongued cane come down through the air with a screeching sound that made me shudder. He did it again once more and, the third time, the cane bit like the teeth of a serpent into the soft flesh of my bottom.

I wailed in agony. I wasn’t going to take this. I pushed myself up again, my fists clenched, but before I could hit him, the man caught me by the shoulders, held me still and stared into my eyes. He spoke slowly, his voice low and threatening. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t understand a word. He turned me round and pushed me back against the side of the Zodiac, the weight of my body springing me back up and, as it did so, that terrible cane came down once more, the two sinewy fingers biting into my flesh, the pain like no pain I could ever have imagined or will ever be able to fully describe: a pure, unmodified pain, the pain of loss, perhaps, a pain beyond the physical, a pain that touches your soul and reshapes the strands of your DNA.