I wasn’t sure how getting closer to him right then was supposed to make me less nervous, but I nodded automatically and knelt down to untie my right shoe, anyway. Abruptly I let go of my shoelace and stood back up to face him.
“I’m sorry, but I’m supposed to pay the rent for the room before I start the session. Is that okay?”
It had just occurred to me that being in someone else’s place was the perfect excuse for asking about the money. My clients wouldn’t be talking to Catherine directly, and wouldn’t know that she hadn’t set down such a policy about the rent; I could take care of business while still appearing totally submissive.
“That’s fine. Why don’t you take this,” Marcus reached into the front pocket of his shirt and pulled out a wad of money, “and leave your shoes and socks outside the door when you come back.”
“Yes, sir,” I took the money and went out into the hall.
I had put a large paper bag inside the room before Marcus got there, and had set my purse outside near the bathroom at the other end of the hallway. I went to it and stowed the money in one of the inside pockets, then waited a few moments to make it seem like I was spending time doing what I’d said I was going to do — pay Catherine. I knew I’d see her afterward and didn’t want to interrupt now in case she was getting a pedicure or something from her slave.
The paper bag had a towel and a large glass bowl inside, the two items Marcus had instructed me to bring. I wasn’t sure which of the implements hanging on the walls might come into play as well, but was less worried about them. The bowl was for me to squat over and pee in toward the end of the session. I assumed the towel was for me to kneel on or something. Or maybe he was going to jerk off and wanted something softer than a scratchy paper towel to finish in? I returned to the room, my feet bare as instructed, and looked at Marcus for a sign of what I was supposed to do next.
“Come stand here.” Marcus pointed to a spot in front of him.
Planting myself there, I could feel his eyes on me again, but I kept my own gaze fixed on the floor between us. I was wound so tightly by that point, I couldn’t really take any more of the staring contest.
“Take off your clothes, Marnie.”
Reaching down, I unbuttoned my jeans and pulled them past my naked hips. I’d figured it would be more time-efficient to skip underwear.
“Turn around and bend over,” he said, before I could pull off my T-shirt and bra.
Taking more deep breaths, I turned around and dropped my torso toward the floor, keeping my bare legs straight. I heard the sigh of the leather mattress as Marcus stood up, and seconds later felt his still-cool fingers brush my lower back.
“Grab your cheeks and hold yourself open for me.”
I knew on some level that this type of pose was meant to embarrass me, to make me feel exposed in a way that would leave me more susceptible to whatever kinds of control he wanted to exert over me. But as his index finger stroked the delicate skin where my hands pulled me apart, I felt not humiliated but relieved. When he pushed on my opening like it was a button, I gasped and stood up halfway but kept my hands in place. I had wanted to be touched all over for so long, it seemed like. I would have kissed Marcus’s feet then if he’d asked me to.
“Stand up, Marnie, and take off the rest of your clothes.”
I turned around and did as he said, and when my shoulders were bare he rested his hands on them.
“You’re doing very well. How are you feeling right now?”
“Thank you, sir. And I think I’m more relaxed,” I said, as he massaged the leftover tension out of my back and upper arms.
“Good. I’d like you to stay that way. Come over here with me.”
Marcus turned me around and took my hand, leading me over to the wooden stocks. Instead of opening them and having me put my head and wrists through the holes, he placed my hands on top of the closed apparatus and pulled my hips back so that my ass jutted out behind me.
I heard him walking to the other side of the room and wondered which of the implements he would be using on me. The room was silent for a moment, and then Marcus was coming back toward me. It sounded like he was tapping a pencil against his palm.
Is he going to write something before the flogging?
“Have you ever been caned, Marnie?”
I turned my head to see him standing near my left side, holding a long, thin rattan cane in one hand.
“No, sir, I haven’t,” I said.
I had heard while working at the Dominion that the cane was a scary and dangerous tool for corporal punishment — scary because even a light caning could hurt like hell, and dangerous because bad aim on the part of the caner could result in things like nerve damage for the caned. I considered whether to tell Marcus that I wasn’t up for it, but changed my mind when he started tapping it lightly up and down my cheeks. The rhythmic touch soothed away the anxiety that had cropped up moments before. I pushed my hips toward the cane and let my hands on the stocks hold the weight of my upper body as Marcus continued his soft drumming on my skin. When he stopped abruptly a few minutes later, I thought he was going to take me back to where I’d put the glass bowl and ask me to fill it. I was relieved that I really had to pee by that point.
“Now that I’ve warmed you up a bit, we’re going to start. I want you to pick a number between one and ten.”
I knew that whatever number I picked was going to be the number of cane strokes he gave me, but I didn’t know how he expected me to make that choice without having any idea of what I was signing on for. Were they going to be just slightly harder than what he’d been doing so far, and hence something I could take at least ten of? Or was it going to be a full-fledged whacking, in which case I would want to opt for as few strokes as possible? I still hesitated to come across as a lightweight, and reminded myself that probably nothing Marcus did with the cane could hurt more than many of the things T had done without it.
“Seven?” I finally answered.
“Good.”
Marcus ran the tip of the cane up and down the middle of my back. I dropped my head down between my shoulders and closed my eyes, shivering from a slight draft I began to feel now that we were closer to the windows. Marcus put a hand on the lower part of my back while his other hand made swishing noises with the cane behind me.
He can’t possibly intend to hit me hard enough to generate that same noise for seven strokes, can he?
“Is it okay if we have a safe word, sir?”
I hadn’t thought before now to talk to him about how to bring things to a halt if I suddenly felt like I couldn’t take what was going on. If someone didn’t ask me about heavier play beforehand, it rarely occurred to me that a safe word might be necessary.
“Are you afraid you might need it?” His tone was neutral as he asked the question.
I didn’t want him to think that I was planning to pull the plug at the slightest discomfort, but I didn’t want to lie to him, either. “Yes. I am.”
He took his hand off my back and must have put the cane on the soft bondage table, as I didn’t hear him drop it. But suddenly both his hands were free, his ten fingers trailing up and down my bare back as he stood behind me.
“You’re afraid it’s going to hurt?” he leaned in and whispered in my ear.
He smells like a… sexy… clean… forest.
I guessed there was no such thing as “Sexy Forest” cologne for men, but if Marcus ever bottled how he smelled that night, I would have bought it for every other man I got close enough to smell from then on.
“I think… I’m just scared because I don’t know
what
it’ll feel like,” I finally answered.
“Would you like me to tell you?” One of his index fingers traced a large M between my shoulders.
“Yes, please.”
“It’s going to hurt in some way,” he said dryly.
I laughed out loud then, knowing he was teasing me. I figured anyone with a sense of humor probably wasn’t going to try to wipe the smile off my face with a brutal beating.
“Are you ready now, Marnie?”
“I think so.”
“Ask me for it,” Marcus’s voice was soft, and the command sent a pleasurable chill up my spine.
“Would you… please… cane me now, sir?”
The first stroke slashed across the middle of both of my cheeks and left a thin line of fire that soaked through to the layers of flesh just under the surface and then disappeared altogether. I barely had time to gasp before the sensation was gone, and it was as if I’d never been struck in the first place.
“Wow, what was that?” I asked, genuinely startled.
“That was a fairly light stroke of the cane,” Marcus answered. “Ask me for the next one.”
I did as he said and felt the same thing, a centimeter lower. In addition to “scary” and “dangerous,” someone should have also told me that caning was simply amazing. The sting of it was so intense when the cane landed, even for these supposedly light strokes, but it left not even a ghost of an impression mere seconds later.
“I want you to relax your shoulders,” he said several minutes later. “Relax your whole body, as much as possible now. I’m going to cane you harder, and the less tense you are when this next stroke lands, the better it will feel. Ask me for it when you’re ready.”
His announcement excited and alarmed me. How do you relax when you hear something like that? And how could I not, now that he’d ordered me to? I took in deep breaths and forced my shoulders to drop back down, let my jaw release, and finally spoke in a steady voice.
“Would you please cane me again, sir?”
“It would be my pleasure,” he said, and this time there was a faint whistle in the air before the implement landed on my skin.
I had just enough time to think
this is the feeling people are scared of
and to notice that I wasn’t feeling scared of the pain yet myself when the second hard stroke cut across my ass just slightly above the previous one. I cried out and gripped the stocks, pressing my forehead into the slightly cool stretch of wood between my hands.
“That was excellent, Marnie.”
Marcus let the cane fall to the floor and came up quickly behind me, pushing one of his legs between mine and rubbing my still-burning skin with his hands. I pushed back and dropped down a little so that his thigh could press more firmly into me. I could feel myself swelling down there and was surprised when it was accompanied by a real craving for more strokes of the cane. It had stung so much, but now that the pain had mostly vanished again, my skin ached for more of it.
I had never really believed T when he’d said that I was a serious masochist, that I liked intense pain. If anything, I thought he just said it to try and convince me it was true, like the power of suggestion and repetition in advertising. Even when I’d played heavily with Phil, the combination of his touch and my excitement had rendered the floggings virtually painless. I could not remember ever having felt something that hurt enough to make me yell and then having a desire to feel more of it as soon as possible. I felt a sort of narcissistic awe, in that instant, at the idea that I might be turning into something different from what I had been up to that point. Could experience and the right person make you feel pain as pain and like it anyway? What kind of voodoo was
that?
“Stand up.”
Marcus put a hand around my waist and pulled me into an upright position. Keeping his leg between mine, he rubbed my shoulders yet again and pressed soothing fingers into the back of my neck. I thought I could doze off right there on my feet.
“I’d like to finish up tonight by having you at least
hover
over the bowl, even if that’s as far as it gets.”
Marcus moved his leg and I turned around to face him. The clock on the far wall said that our time was almost up. I could hardly believe it. I started to feel nervous again, uptight even, and finally realized that I hadn’t really given much thought to this peeing scene up to now. It had sounded so harmless at first mention that I’d mostly put it out of my mind. Now I wondered — was it supposed to truly embarrass me? And if that was the point, why was I going along with it? I didn’t do humiliation scenes, and as much as I liked Marcus, I didn’t want to make an exception for him. I knew I had to say something.
“Sir, can I ask you why you want me to do this?”
I watched while Marcus brought a straight-backed chair from the side of the room into the middle and placed the large glass bowl a couple of feet in front of it.
“Why?”
Marcus repeated my question, and looked at me with sincere surprise.
“Yeah, I mean… are you going to make fun of me, or…”
“Make
fun
of you? Certainly not. No. That’s not what I had in mind at all,” he said, confused.
“Okay,” I sighed with relief. “I got afraid for a minute that this was some type of humiliation scene. It sort of seems like it, and I haven’t done anything like this before.”
“Well, of course, in a sense it is, but there are many kinds of humiliation scenes, Marnie.”
Marcus sat in the chair and motioned me over. I stood in front of him, straddling the empty bowl, and he took my hands.
“Some things that fall under the humiliation category are more about vulnerability than degradation — stripping you bare, so to speak, and forcing you to be fully exposed in front of me. Can you think of a more helpless situation than being made to look in my eyes while I watch you now?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Do you not want to expose yourself to me completely?”
It sounded like a real question, not a scripted prompt for the “right” answer, and I thought about it. At the mere sound of his voice, my body wanted to open itself entirely to whatever he wanted to do with me. But this peeing-in-a-bowl thing was so obviously not about just my body.