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)
She pulled the strip away.
I cried out, and the cry bounced off the volcanic stone and came back to me. Somewhere underneath the sharp bloom of pain I felt the unmistakable, mortifying throb of arousal that I had no more capacity to deny than I had capacity to free my wrists from their rings.
“Hold still,” she said, the sharpness returning to her tone.
I held still. I breathed. The pain faded as it had before, into a heat that spread inward and downward. I lay there with my face in the old tears of the women who had come before me and I thought, they felt this too. All of them. They lay here and they were afraid and ashamed.
Their bodies must have betrayed them exactly as mine was betraying me, and eventually their masters came for them and civilized them in the way Giovanna is describing. They became whatever a columba becomes, and I am going to become it too, and there is nothing in me that can stop that from happening now.
I wasn’t sure when I had known that. Perhaps since the café. Perhaps since the cavern.
Perhaps since the bride saddle, when the voice had said be still, and I had felt my body trying to obey it.
Giovanna worked, taking the hair from the most private part of my body. She was thorough. I wept quietly and held still and let her bare me in that final, most intimate place. When she was finished, she smoothed something cool over the skin there, as she had over my pussy, and I shivered at the contrast of temperature.
Then I heard her set down the spatula and pick something else up.
The oil with which my mistress proceeded to anoint me had a scent I couldn’t fully identify at first: olive oil at the base, of course, but infused with something warm and resinous and a floral undertone that the air of the chamber complicated into something even richer. She spread it across my shoulders first, working down my spine with long strokes that had the quality of a ritual preparation rather than a massage, though the distinction blurred quickly as the warmth of the oil and of her hands moved through my muscles and found the tension that had been living in me since the café and began, methodically, to address it.
I made a sound that had nothing in it of distress. I clenched my jaw to keep it in but it escaped anyway, low and involuntary, absorbed by the leather cushion in the stone alcove.
She oiled my sides, my waist, the curve of my hips, as if she were caring for a recently domesticated animal. She worked down the backs of my thighs. Over the welts there her hands were careful and deliberate, the oil cooling the lingering sting in a way that made the sting feel, paradoxically, more present rather than less. I became much too aware of every place the horrid mastix had found me.
Then her hands moved inward and upward. She touched the newly bare cleft of my pussy. My cunt.
“Oh,” I said, into the leather. Involuntary. Useless.
Giovanna anointed me as thoroughly between my thighs as she had everywhere else. The oil and her fingers worked together with the knowledge she had so clearly demonstrated. The terrible sensitivity of my freshly bared skin seemed to magnify every pass of her palm, as if the waxing had removed not only hair but also whatever insulation had existed between my nerve endings and the world. I was very close to a climax, immediately and entirely, and I knew she knew it though I tried to hide it in the desperate, idiotic hope I might be able to come without her sensing it.
She didn’t stop, but she didn’t give me what I needed, either. She maintained the same precise, patient pressure that brought me to the edge and kept me there, hovering over the precipice with my fingers gripping the stone of the alcove and my breath coming in ragged pulls through my nose.
Then her oiled fingers moved to the place she had just bared for me, the place she had told me my master would claim in the act of civilization. Her touch there felt so new, so specific, and so utterly without precedent in my body’s experience that I let out a sob.
“This is where he will have you,” Giovanna said, her voice very quiet now. Her finger moved in a slow, exploratory circle that my body received with a clenching shudder. “Where he will take you… and own you. When the time has come for you to belong to him there.”
She paused in her speech, but her touch continued. My hips tried to move, of their own accord, and the restraints held me. I knew, my cheeks burning at the realization, that I wanted them to hold me. Part of me it seemed had stopped pretending, somewhere between the mastix and the oil, that I wanted anything different.