Girl Trade - full length erotic adventure novel (Xcite Erotic Romance Novels) (9 page)

He had not realised that dawn was breaking and Scheherazade promised that she would tell him another, much better story, before they slept that night. One thousand and one nights passed. Scheherazade gave birth to three sons and every night she wove a new parable of morality and kindness. The Sultan never cut off her head and became a wise and respected ruler.

I had always loved that story. I loved to think of myself as Scheherazade, but as I stood in that cabin among those silk and satin cushions I had no tales to tell and no language in which I could have told them.

My throat had turned dry. The sheikh, as if he could read my mind, filled a cup and I drank with such thirst the water trickled from my lips and over my chin. I wiped it away and smiled. I felt silly. A doe-eyed girl. The sheikh placed the cup back on the table. He unhooked the fold in the sarong and flung the material across the cabin. He then took my arm and guided me through the quivering pennants of chiffon to one of the open portholes where he set my fingers over the curved rim. The night air cooled my bare skin. I was bent over with my bottom displayed like a model in an advertising shot from the 1940s, and wondered what is it with men and bottoms. My bottom. The beachcomber had spanked me, his companion had caned me, and I was now prepared for another thrashing.

I wriggled and made myself comfortable. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed the sheikh remove something from the chest of drawers and my flesh erupted in sweat when I realised what it was. He was holding a whip with a short handle, the long coil unwinding as he crossed the cabin towards me. Our eyes met once more and I looked away, down over my breasts at the blue arabesques on the carpet below my feet.

The sea slapped against the sides of the boat. The engines thumped like a distant drum. I closed my eyes and clung tightly to the ledge of the porthole. I had fought the man in the black turban, but I didn’t fight the sheikh. I knew there was no point. I was trapped, the butterfly back in the cocoon. Like the Sultan in the story from
One Thousand and One Nights,
the sheikh had to take revenge – on the man in black, on my bottom that he had cruelly caned.

I took deep breaths. The sheikh was going to whip me. I knew that. But I knew, too, that he was doing so without anger or malice. He was defining our roles. With that whip licking my backside he was going to demonstrate that there was no use to which I could not be put, no humiliation that I could not be made to endure. He was the master and, as his concubine, any pleasure I experienced would come from the pleasure I gave and from the obedience I showed. It was a new world, a different way of looking at things, but it made sense standing there naked on that hot night with my pussy moist between my thighs and my breasts swaying like udders below me. I had always been looking for a role and my being bent over in this way in the costume of nudity felt oddly natural, that without papers and possessions and choices and haste I was free to be me.

The whip cracked, splitting the air. Then the whip cracked as the lash wrapped itself like the arms of a lover across the rounded hills of my rump. The pain was immediate, all-embracing, overwhelming. Unlike the man in black when he took that beating on the beach, I didn’t hold back, I screamed, my voice piercing the porthole and frightening the night. When you understand why you are being disciplined it is easier to accept, but that doesn’t mean it hurts any less.

It hurts. It really hurts, the long snake hissing as it uncoiled for a second taste of my damp flesh, carving a groove into the soft skin. I screamed again. My body was shaking, but I spread my legs and didn’t move. When you know your place in the drama, when your bottom is the star, you steady yourself, you hold your legs firm and you count the lashes so you don’t forget how many you’ve been given.

Down it came again. Number three. A snatch of lighting burning my poor little bum and sending messages of pain up my back and down my thighs. He must have changed his position and, when the leather crackled and uncoiled, the next stroke snapped below the crease of my bottom and sent a finger of fire burning up the canal of my vagina, boiling the liquids of my womb. Tears coursed down my cheeks, snot fell from my nose, discharge coated the lips of my pussy.

How many was that?

Four. Yes, four.

Then five, that ribbon of plaited leather finding a fresh course across my bottom to sow and reap an excruciating harvest of agony. I screamed and in the moment of screaming the pain didn’t seem quite so bad. I squirmed and trembled. I writhed and wriggled. I was a fish. Liquids poured from my naked body. My nipples sparked and fizzed like they were charged with an electric current. I could smell the sugar almond sweat of my underarms, the smell of the night air, the smell of sex, pungent, ripe, earthy, an aroma that is feminine and carnal, the perfume of desire. I bit my lips. I almost went down on my knees, but pushed back with my arms, holding myself steady. I gasped and I groaned and I thrust my blazing bum out for the next one.

The whip struck like a snake’s tongue and the leather fangs took another bite. I didn’t shake. I didn’t tremble. I panted for air. I sniffled and sobbed. This was my first proper beating. I was a virgin. I was Scheherazade and my story was about a girl who ran away without any clothes and discovered the unassuming garments of submission.

I wanted the sheikh to be proud of me. I deserved this. I had cried out fuck me, fuck me, fuck me when the man in the black turban rode my wet pussy to a stirring climax. He beat me and then he fucked me. Fucked me until I screamed for more. Fucked me until I screamed in bliss. Fucked me to a sniffling state of hysteria and shame. I was a bad girl. A slut. A slag. A harlot. The sheikh was angry. He had every right to be angry. Like the first wife of the Sultan of Persia in the story of
One Thousand and One Nights,
I had betrayed him. I had betrayed the future.

I had taken six lashes from the whip. The sheikh paused. I thought it was over. I went to push myself up, but he tapped my bottom with the flat of his hand and said something, and what he said must have been stay there, stay exactly where you are. You stand up when I’m good and ready. I sucked air through my teeth. My hair hung in a soggy curtain over my face. My breasts were trembling below me. I clutched the porthole so hard my fingers hurt and the pain was a little outpost of the pain that ran from the nub of my neck to the balls of my feet.

The sheikh tested the whip once more, flicking the coiled length of hide out across the room like a lion tamer in the circus, snap, snap, snap it went. I heard him draw breath as he took a step back. I pressed the lids tight over my eyes, and the leather tail hissed with the sound of a sword being taken from a furnace and plunged into water, the line of agony cutting a diagonal stripe across the smouldering cheeks of my bottom, the knotted tip slipping over my hip to nip at my pubic bone.

The scream in my throat died. There was no air in my body. I was like a house on fire at that point where the fire cannot be put out. The house was crumbling to ash as my strength left me and I collapsed in a heap on the swirling arabesques of the carpet, weeping, the agony threaded through with an indescribable sense of delirium. I could smell seared flesh and erotic discharge as warm juices drooled from my vagina, coated my thighs and I gasped in obscene pleasure.

Seven.

I hoped it was a lucky number, that I was a lucky girl, and I felt like the luckiest girl in the world as the sheikh lifted me from the floor, one arm supporting my shoulders, the other under the crook of my knees, and carried me along the cabin to a feather mattress where he put me down as tenderly as a mother lays her newborn baby in a crib.

He rolled me on to my tummy. I lay there throbbing, panting, glowing. I heard him shout. I heard the door open and close again. Cool air whispered through the portholes. I was vaguely aware of the sound of his chewing. I heard him spit and I felt the fire go out of the burning welts as he rubbed a paste delicately on to my bottom. He had beaten me and now he was caring for me. I felt safe, protected, at peace.

He chewed and spat, he chewed and spat, coating the welts in a creamy substance that took away the sting and made my bottom feel cosy and warm. I felt like a princess. Like Scheherazade. I had survived. My head was still on my shoulders. Tomorrow was another story.

I must have fallen asleep and I dreamed that I was in my bed at home in Fulham; content after getting myself off with the dildo Bobby had bought in Old Compton Street for a joke, and he never knew on those nights when I stayed home to wash my hair that the joke was on him. Bobby was the same age as the sheikh, but Bobby was an apprentice in the art of sensual pleasure. The sheikh was a master.

The moment I opened my eyes, I was fully awake, relaxed. I rolled over and gazed at the chiffon hangings moving faintly in the misty light. The sting in my backside had gone, completely vanished, and on the table at my side were the skins from about a dozen Canary Island bananas. I remembered the sheikh making the poultice that had hardened across the cheeks of my bottom and had new respect for that clever yellow fruit with the pinprick freckles and a neat zip down the side for easy opening. I pulled three bananas from the stalk and ate them one after the other, gobbling them down, and I couldn’t recall ever having eaten anything so sweet and delicious.

I pushed myself up, swept through the drapery and stood staring out of the porthole massaging my sticky bottom. The fear of a thrashing is really much worse than the thrashing itself, and I would spend many days trying to understand how having your bottom disciplined can stir your body liquids into a molten magma that erupts over the engorged lips of your pussy and leaves you breathless, panting, in a state of euphoria.

Mmm
. Lovely. I wriggled.

Just thinking about it made me feel moist and I took a big gulp of sea air to calm myself. As I peered out at the churning ribbon of foam whipped up along the side of the boat I thought how marvellously logical it was that I should be carried away on the tide. My sheikh was Neptune, God of the Sea, his trident that whip coiled in the drawer. He was a torrent of quicksilver emotions, hidden depths, sudden storms, subtly shifting currents. My mind was filled with the poetry of watery images that made me wonder if he, too, was a Pisces, that we were two fish joined in the ebb and flow of the same ocean.

The air was clean, clear, and soporific. I felt as if I belonged in a way that I had never felt clipping along the Fulham Road. There had always been something bogus in the way that I hitched up my skirt and puffed up my boobs to glide over dance floors, along office corridors, to step on the tube and climb the stairs on the bus. I craved attention. I’d suck air through my teeth and turn in mock anger every time a stranger touched me on the tube. My body was a celebrity craving to be recognised. It had always irritated me when Mummy called me a poseur, and I giggled as I thought: what if she could see me now?

I was wearing nothing but my suntan with a sticky dressing on my bottom as the boat slid quietly over the dark blue sea – the same colour as the planet Neptune, as far as I could recall. I didn’t feel phoney. I felt like me, natural, real, living in the present. If the sheikh wanted me naked I wanted to be naked. If he wanted to dress me, I wanted to wear whatever he dressed me in. All through my life I had worried about what I looked like and what I wanted, what passing caprice was going to please me. It was liberating to be standing there knowing that from that day on my only role was to please him.

The last shadows of night had lifted and I became aware of the outlines of an earth-coloured city emerging out of the dawn light. I could see castle battlements and the domes and minarets on the mosques rising against the red-streaked sky. Clouds glowing with pink underbellies hung over the mud-walled buildings, but the clouds seemed to evaporate under my gaze and my view was drawn beyond the city across the endless waves of the desert.

A horn sounded, ending the silence. I thought at first it came from the city, but it was closer, the second blast bursting into the cabin, breaking the harmony. I heard feet slapping over the decks and the sheikh appeared, speaking fast as if I might have learned his language in the night. He pulled a woven quilt from the bed where I had slept and wrapped it around me. He carried me back to the divan. He held me still and stared into my eyes as he pulled a chiffon scarf from the hangings above and pushed it into my mouth, cramming it in until I was all but choking. He draped another piece of cloth around my head, covering my face, and I was barely able to breathe. He rolled me in another length of material and I felt the bundle tightening as he wrapped rope around me and tied firm knots.

‘Shush, shush, shush,’ he said.

The material over my face was sheer and I could still see the light, but then he added a piece of brocade and I was cast into darkness. I lay there listening to the subdued activity above decks. I heard a loudspeaker and I was sure I heard words of French, but it was too distant and muffled for me to understand anything that was being said.

I heard boots crossing the deck above me. There was a quiet moment, then the boots drew closer. The cabin door opened. I heard French being spoken in a gruff way, then the door closed again. I realised I had been holding my breath and breathed sharply through my nose.

The boots clattered about outside, then the stillness returned, and I lay there trying to work out what all this had meant.

Were they pirates seeking plunder? The Coast Guard searching for illegal immigrants? Or me?

Several more minutes passed and the sheikh returned. He unwound the cloth from my head and pulled the gag from my mouth. He smoothed back my hair and as he looked into my eyes it was as if he were gazing into the depths of the ocean. Then he smiled, and I realised I had never seen him smile before.

W
HERE DO DAYS GO
? They arrive with pink dawns and pass with red sunsets. The hours were long, the air clean and hot. The sky was the shade of blue taken from a picture book, the sky at night low and close, shot through with a billion stars. I ate figs, bananas, dates, and learned not to drop food down me as I shaped balls from the rice and vegetables cooked in the galley by Mo.

I had grown to know the sailors names: Mo was Mohammed, a wiry, older man with a single gold tooth, a hooked nose like a bird’s beak and the face of a thief from a story in
One Thousand and One Nights
. On those long hot days he wore nothing but a loin cloth and cooled himself dropping a bucket on a cord over the side of the boat and showering in seawater. Five times a day he unrolled a mat and bent to the east to say his prayers, a ritual the other men seemed to admire but felt no need to observe. They were Moslems in the way I would call myself a Christian, as the sheikh had black hair and mine is blonde, these accidents of birth and background assuming no importance; the men on board were not weighed down with opinions or guilt and seemed at ease with themselves and each other.

Azar was the engineer. He had coffee-coloured skin streaked in stripes of oil and fingernails that would never be clean. The boat carried a solitary mast with a lateen sail that barely billowed in the soft winds, and I had the feeling that it was the genius of Azar that kept the craft going. When he came up from below decks, sweating, drying his face on an oily cloth, he would light a cigarette and stand at the prow gazing at the sky and listening to the beat of the engines just as a mother at night listens for her babies.

Umah was a teenager, seventeen, maybe eighteen; slight as a girl with a high voice and delicate hands that he moved like a dancer. He wore a string of beads around his neck and you could hear the silver bracelets jangling on his wrists as he moved about the boat like a bird moving through the branches of a tree. His darting eyes followed me, not with lust or desire, but in the continuous state of surprise a child has watching a monkey at the zoo. When our eyes met he nervously smiled and looked away. Umah stitched the rents in the sail and took turns with Mohammed in the wheelhouse, the silver bracelets growing still as he navigated our course across the unvarying vista of empty sea.

Samir was my lover, my protector, my reason for being. He was a god we obeyed and worshipped. He wasn’t a tyrant; a bully, a slave driver. It is the wise master who leaves the whip coiled in the drawer. The sheikh simply saw the world and everyone in it in clear uncomplicated terms. Like pieces on a chess board we had our positions and the man in the black turban and the crew on the boat understood and accepted that. Once you know who you are you can let go of the things you crave and just be yourself.

Of course it was much easier to be myself on board the boat. There were no magazines telling me what to wear and what to think, no advice on how to win your man, please your man, keep your man. I had found my man and he seemed content with me just the way I was. Time, that inflexible substance always racing and running out, had ceased to have meaning. The days that passed were seamless, the sun cut by the cooling breeze that appeared in the afternoon, the stars at night shining like jewels, guiding the way as the star from the east directed the Magi to Bethlehem with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh, a balm with all the fine qualities of bananas ground with spittle and applied to flaming bottoms.

I saw villages along the coast, the mud- and dung-walled huts huddled around a white mosque, the desert beyond stretching out like a silent sea. Our journey appeared to have no purpose. There was no hurry. We stopped for whole days, anchoring to sand banks, resting the engines. We swam, the sheikh and I, two creatures at the dawn of creation. The men lit cigarettes and cast lines strung with corks and feathers that lay on the surface and pulled from the sea wriggling fish of countless colours. They wrapped the catch in wetted cotton and we gorged ourselves on grilled tuna, lobster and crab. On days when there was no fish, we ate rice, some dates or figs, feast followed by famine with equanimity.

Slipping in and out of the sea and in and out of the cabin with my lover, I ceased to recollect whether or not I was naked and when the taboo is broken it is easier to break the next one, to move further from who you thought you were and closer to who you might become. In me there were many women, infinite nuances and possibilities. Sometimes a mist fell, consuming the boat and as we moved through the void I watched Samir’s long fingers turning the brass bolts that locked the portholes. He would place a taper to the lamps, his movements performed with the minimum of effort, his shadow multiplied against the chiffon flags. The moment our flesh touched, I was seized by an intense passion that made the breath catch in my throat and his strong hands would stroke my arms, my cheeks, my breasts, calming the violent forces that gripped me. We lived in a fantasy on board the boast and when night fell I was afraid that tomorrow the fantasy would come to an end.

In the morning, the sky clear once more, I would watch Samir shave over a bowl of water content that the sun was rising and the crewmen were going about their ablutions, Azar smoking his first cigarette, Mo unrolling his prayer mat. Mo’s beard was pointed, neatly trimmed. Azar’s hair sprouted in a carpet from just below his eyes, covered his broad chest and was kept in a long coil below his grubby red turban. Like the sheikh, the boy was clean-shaven, bare of body hair; all were lithe, muscular and keen-eyed, a primal archetype to which I was slowly conforming. My mind was clear, serene, my memory in focus. Colours grew brighter, the edges of things more distinct. Fish tasted as the first fish must have tasted; as the fish on the Mount of Olives must have tasted. I knew by the smell of the air if on that day there would be a breeze or whether it was going to be sultry and still. I could distinguish the different cries of the birds that joined us like spies on soundless wings, following our course before returning back to the coast fed on the fish heads and scraps Mo threw overboard, maintaining the cycle, wasting nothing.

Just as I had shed my papers and clothes, my preconceptions and past, the superfluous bulk I had brought with me from London vanished from my tummy, my thighs, my cheeks. I became sharper, sleeker, my hip bones and cheek bones more defined, my bottom a dome divided in perfect halves. The cherry stripes and blue bruising left by the cane and whip faded and I turned golden, flawless, a goddess built it seemed for one thing, and it wasn’t writing cover notes for new books. I was born to open my legs and open my mouth and bathe in the sheikh’s syrupy semen, to swim like a fish in the sea by day and swim over and under the smooth satin skin of my lover in the glow of the oil lamp at night.

Like a parched nomad arriving at a desert spring, Samir would throw off his white turban to kneel as if in prayer below the arch of my legs, his palms cupping my bottom, his tongue supping from my open cleft. No matter how many orgasms oozed from me there was always more sap pressuring to escape. We are ninety-nine percent water and by some miracle I turned the water into wine, the vintage of the gods.

We mated on every cushion and mat, in every corner, against every wall. I sucked him dry and I sucked him until he was hard and hot and ready for me again. Like hunger and thirst, our sexual nature is coded into the lingering compulsions of our primeval genes. My deepest instincts had been buried in a quagmire of social conditioning and the sheikh, during those intoxicating days on the boat, brought them bubbling to the surface. I wept in pleasure when his cock nudged my clitoris, my song piercing the portholes, floating over the sea and drifting into shells that washed to shore where beachcombers would hear my voice as they raised the shell to their ear.

On those days beneath the blistering sun I was wild, insatiable, feverish. I had everything I desired but still there was something missing, some stone left unturned, some bridge uncrossed, some knot left untied. I recalled as a little girl the ache at Christmas when I saw the parcels below the tree with my name in Mummy’s big looping letters on the labels. I studied the parcels with their ribbons and bows trying to imagine what was inside, and on languorous afternoons in the cabin I found myself cast back into the past doing the same, my eyes drawn to the chest of drawers, even though I knew perfectly well what it was that lay curled and sleeping inside. I kept thinking about the whip, the way that fiery tongue licked across my backside, driving me like the stem of a lily through murky waters until on the surface of the pond my pink petals opened and bloomed.

Was it really like that? Orgasms I’d read in my old life release endorphins that give you a high and take away pain. I had climaxed under the whip. It was hard to believe and, stirred by impulses conjured less from memory than imagination, I dropped to my knees, slipped my fingers under the brass plates of the facia and opened the bottom drawer in the walnut chest. I raised the coils of the whip to my face and the lingering smell of my own discharge was like a drug, a ripe perfume that filled my nose and brought tears to my eyes.

My fingers closed around the handle and the whip uncurled as I waved my way through the forest of chiffon back to the mattress. We lay together entwined like serpents, the brown leather turned in spirals around my golden flesh, the short handle between my legs, the tail slipping between the cheeks of my bottom, crossing my stomach and circling my back to emerge under my breasts where the knotted tip lay in my cleavage like a talisman. The rough touch of the plaited leather made my nipples sprout from my heaving breasts. I squeezed the pink buds until they stung and panted with a sigh of relief.

It was sweltering hot, the air clammy, the slap of the sea against the hull a gently striking cymbal to the heartbeat of the boat’s big engines, the light diffused through the open portholes. I lay perspiring, dreamy, lazily turning my distended nipples and fighting the temptation to put the handle of the whip to some practical purpose.

When the door opened, the chiffon drapery shivered and Samir appeared with a look of ambiguity and surprise, the tic on his neck that I watched when he shaved vibrating as if a small insect was burrowing beneath the surface of the skin.

He unwound his turban and folded the material, his eyes never leaving me. He then took the whip handle as King Arthur took Excalibur from the clutches of the rock and paused as if history were being made. I wriggled as he pulled at the handle and the whip slid beneath me, the leather slicked and shiny as it slithered through the lips of my sex.

There was no need to speak. There was nothing to be said. I wanted him so much. I wanted him this way, a faithful slave with an indulgent master. I went up on my knees to display my perfect bottom, my sex wet as a dew-kissed flower. I was sopping, my labia running with the juices of anticipation, the puffy lips in a nest of golden fleece peeled open and pushing through my thighs, pink and inviting, fruit from an enchanted tree. My mind had turned off. I was all instinct, all animal, and hungered for the searing swathes of the strap across my hide.

The sheikh cleared the flags from above, giving the whip space to draw breath. I clenched my stomach muscles and the first crack was like a shot from a starting pistol, its retort detonating a crimson flare across the small of my back. I cried in agony and ecstasy and appreciated for the first time why those words are placed together. I kept my eyes pressed tight and felt the glow from that first stroke warm every part of my body.

Samir tested the whip, splitting the air, and brought it down again, the second lash falling just below the first, the two lines like tracks vanishing into nowhere, my limbs bucking, sweating, the fire on my naked flesh awakening all my primitive longings. I dreaded the pain as the whip crossed the mounds of my posterior, but it is at that moment when you feel the height of your sensitivity and awareness, unconditionally alive. It is a level of being beyond the commonplace, the accepted, the understood, where mind, body and soul dissolve into the unknown. With that quill of perfumed leather the sheikh was writing his name on the parchment of my bare skin. I had wrapped myself in the whip because without words it was the only way for me to show that his will was my will, that with the whip he would mark me as his.

As the pain subsides, a luxurious warmth winds through your guts and heats the oils of your womb. I could think of nothing more feminine than being on my hands and knees being disciplined in this way by my lover. My days had been lost in eating and swimming, to hedonistic pleasures. I needed the taste of the whip to remind me that I was alive to the point where even death had ceased to be frightening. I could feel contractions. The lighthouse of my clitoris was awash in pleasure and desire. If I died now, at this second, in the
petite mort
of orgasm, my life would have been worthwhile. I would have lived the way I was born to have lived. I would have transcended the mundane and touched the sublime. This, I thought, is true happiness.

A momentary pause. A moment to draw breath. Then one more, a little lower, placed expertly, the whip’s flashing tentacle scorching his name into the unsullied flesh. The liquids gathered about my vaginal lips let go with a scented spray fine as mist that filled the cabin with the aroma of ardour and want. I had taken three lashes and was still sturdily on my hands and knees, stomach stretched tight as a drum, my body wet, my mind wandering.

I remembered when the beachcomber bent me over and beat my bottom with his hand. Even then, that first time, a turmoil of warped feelings began to emerge in me. When I opened my mouth for his cock, it was such a relief from being spanked I found perverse pleasure being abused in this way. He released his come over my face and then pissed on me, over my cheeks and into my eyes, my mouth with the sour taste of his sperm, my breasts, his hot pee trickling down between my legs where I knelt before him wrists bound like a slave girl.