Total pages in book: 106
Estimated words: 96271 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 96271 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
“And in the chambers?” Giovanna’s voice was very quiet now. The quiet of someone who already knows the answer and is simply waiting for the courtesy of confirmation.
“I rode it.” A sob broke through the words. “I rode the… the saddle. The bride saddle. I found it and I… I took my clothes off and I mounted it and I—”
“Did you experience orgasm?”
The clinical phrasing made me want to disappear through the table. “Yes,” I whispered. “Yes, I… please. Please, Mistress, please let me—”
The vibrator pressed harder against the shameful, shockingly sensitive place it had found, and the climax rose and rose and crested at a height that felt like the upper branches of the tree itself. Giovanna held it there, held me there, on the exact precipice of the thing I needed most, and I heard myself making sounds I had no words for.
“Please,” I sobbed. “Please, I’ll tell you anything, I’ll… please, I need to come, please—”
Then, from somewhere in the building, a chime sounded. Clear and single and businesslike: the sound of a phone, a door, or some internal signal I had no context for.
Giovanna’s hand stilled.
I made a sound of pure, wretched despair.
She withdrew the vibrator entirely. I heard her stand, heard the small sounds of her straightening her jacket, and then she appeared at the edge of my vision, composed and unhurried, and held the vibrator out toward the nymphobus.
“Hold her here,” she said to him. “I won’t be long.”
She left. The door clicked shut.
Nymphobus Oceanus stood somewhere at the periphery of my vision, a large, quiet presence. The hum of the vibrator had ceased. The room was very still. I lay on the table with my legs spread and my whole body one long, unresolved ache. I stared at the ceiling trying to remember who I was.
“Please,” I said. I hadn’t intended to speak, but the word came out anyway, stripped of any academic dignity I might once have possessed. “Please, can you… the straps? You could just undo the straps? Or—” I stopped. Gathered myself. Tried once more. “Please. I need… I can’t stay like this. Please just—”
“No.” His voice sounded low and unhurried. Not unkind, but with the quality of a door that is simply closed; not locked against me personally, just closed.
“She’s been gone a minute,” I said. My voice had taken on a quality I recognized with shame as pleading. “She won’t know. You could just—”
“She would know.” A pause. “She always knows. Much more important, if you think you’re entitled to an orgasm, you have a great deal to learn, columba.”
I pressed my eyes shut. The warmth between my legs was maddening. The welts on my bottom throbbed with my pulse. “Please,” I said, hating myself, “please just… it would only take a second for the vibrator. You could just let me… I just need…”
He moved. I heard him come around the table toward my head, and I turned to look at him with what I suspected was a terribly transparent expression of hope, which quickened when I saw that he held the artificial phallus.
Instead of bringing it over my body and lowering it between my thighs as I expected, though, the huge man crouched beside the table and brought the matte black tip of the thing to my lips.
“Open,” he said.
I stared at him. “That’s not—”
“Open your mouth, columba.” Still the same unhurried quality. “You’ll need to learn to do this properly, and soon. You may as well begin now. Taste yourself, and start to learn how to please your master.”
The blunt tip pressed against my lower lip, and I understood that this was what I had instead of what I wanted. The choice between compliance and refusal was not really a choice at all, not with my wrists clipped to my belt and my ankles spread by the table’s straps. I opened my mouth.
The silicone was smooth, faintly cool, and tasted of my helpless, mortifying need: the flavor of the naughty scent I had added to the air of the Viking bridal chamber. My cheeks burned as the huge man guided the plastic phallus past my lips slowly until I had it atop my tongue, pressing down.
“Wider,” he said. “Relax your jaw. You’ll need to learn to accommodate more than this.”
I made a sound against the thing in my mouth that expressed, I hoped, something of my opinion of this instruction. He seemed not to notice.
“A man’s cock will be more demanding,” he said, in the same tone with which one might say a man’s handshake will be firmer or a man’s stride will be longer. “Considerably more demanding, depending on the master who chooses you. You will be expected to receive him without difficulty.” A brief pause. “You should begin practicing your breathing now.”
I breathed through my nose with my jaw stretched around the vibrator’s girth and thought about the carvings in the cavern, the women on their knees with their heads guided forward by patient Viking hands, and the specific expression on their carved faces that I had spent an hour refusing to name, and I understood with a lurch of my stomach that I was now on that side of the image. I was the woman on her knees. I was the woman with her head guided, her mouth occupied, and her expression doing the thing I had refused to name.