Chapter 73: Chapter 73
The fire had burned down to a low orange glow, and the room smelled of sweat, spilled wine, and the faint chemical sharpness of the cleaning fluid Suzette had used on the floor. Clarissa sat sideways in a high-backed chair with one shoe off, rubbing her arch with her thumb. Nadia lay full length on the chaise with her glass balanced on her sternum. Suzette sat upright, spine straight, as though the party had only just begun.
Tim crossed the room with a canvas bag in each hand. Worm walked ahead of him with her head down and her hands behind her back, still naked, her skin goosefleshed in the draught from the hall. Puddles followed. She had a bath sheet wrapped around her shoulders and she kept her eyes on the carpet, the way she always did after a long night of being the joke.
"You'll want the salve on the welts before she sleeps," Clarissa said without looking up. "The ones on her back. Not the others."
"Yes, ma'am," Tim said.
The door clicked shut behind them. For a moment nobody spoke. The clock on the mantel ticked, and somewhere deep in the house a pipe knocked twice and went quiet.
Nadia rolled onto her side and propped her chin on her fist. "The funnel," she said. "With Puddles. I want to know how you thought of it."
Clarissa smiled at the ceiling. "She'd been whining about how much she hated the taste. So I gave her something to compare it to." She shifted her foot off her knee and set it down. "Four women's piss and a spoon of honey. She drank every drop and thanked me for it."
"She thanked you," Suzette said flatly.
"Twice."
Nadia laughed into her glass. "And Milly. God, Milly. I thought she was going to break when you had her on the trestle."
"She's tougher than she looks," Clarissa said. "She suffered on the trestle beautifully. It was the ginger that got her in the end." She reached for the bottle on the side table and topped up her own glass, then Nadia's, without asking. "Did you see her face when I told her she'd be going home on Sunday with the marks still on her? Her husband picks her up at the station."
Suzette made a small sound that might have been approval. "She didn't cry."
"She cried in the bathroom afterwards. Then she washed her face and came back in." Clarissa drank. "I don’t think she realised that we film in the slave toilets!" They laughed.
Paul stood where Suzette had left him, near the hearth, his arms folded tight across his chest inside the canvas jacket, straps under his armpits.
He had heard the name. Milly.
He tried to place it against the shapes from that first hour, when Puddles had walked him down the corridor and he'd caught sight of the room through the doorway with the dildo from Puddles’ cunt still in his mouth. She'd looked at him. He remembered her looking at him, and the way she seemed frightened and determined all at once.
Nadia got up off the chaise with a groan and padded to the long wooden chest under the window. She opened it and the smell came up off it, leather and linseed oil and something older underneath. Crops first. Two of them. Then a flogger. Then a short riding baton Nadia spun once between her fingers just to hear it hiss.
They arranged themselves without discussing it. That was the part Paul noticed, the way they didn't need to say anything, the same way three women might stand up to clear a table.
Clarissa took the riding baton. She tested it once against her own palm and nodded to herself. Nadia had a crop, Suzette the other. Suzette's arm went back first.
The first stroke caught him across the outside of the thigh. He breathed out hard through his nose. The second came from Nadia, low across the calf, and the third from Clarissa, lazily, almost affectionately, across the tops of his bare feet.
They fell into a rhythm, none of them hurrying. Clarissa would take a sip. Nadia would walk a slow half-circle and let the crop land wherever her arm happened to point. Suzette moved only as much as she had to, her strokes shorter and more precise, and she watched Paul's face each time rather than the spot she'd hit. He learned to read the three of them by the sound of the tails, and by how much wine was left.
He said nothing, because there was nothing to say that wouldn't cost him, and because the flogger had begun its slow work across his back, and the fire had burned down so far that the only light left in the room came from the embers and the lamp beside Clarissa's chair, and the whole house had gone quiet around them, room after room after room.
The flogger dropped away and the room went quiet except for Paul's breathing and the tick of the mantel clock. Clarissa set the baton down across the arms of her chair. She took a mouthful of wine, held it, swallowed.
"How many orgasms do you think you ate tonight?" she asked.
Paul's mouth was dry. He turned his face toward the sound of her voice, though he couldn't see her, only the grey-brown murk the lenses left him with.
"I don't know," he said. Then, because she hadn't told him he could stop: "Fifteen. Around fifteen."
Clarissa made no sound either way. That was worse than being told he was wrong.
"How many different women?" Nadia asked from the chaise.
He tried to count and found the hours came back to him as a single warm blur, mouths and thighs and hands in his hair, the little weight of women settling onto his face. "Nine," he said. "I think nine."
"Think harder," Nadia said.
"I ate Tim twice," he said to the direction of her voice. "I'm sure of that. And I think I ate Suzette twice as well."
Suzette's crop tapped once against her own boot, unhurried.
"And do you think you ate everyone in this room?" she asked.
Paul's knees ached. He considered lying and decided he had nothing left to protect. "Yes," he said. "I think I did."
"You didn't," Clarissa said.
He waited.
"You ate Suzette. Twice, as you say, though the second time she didn't come, she seldom does, she just wanted to feel you work for a while." She shifted in the chair. "You ate Nadia while she was plucking the hair out of your groin. You may remember the pliers more clearly than the orgasm. And you ate me, more than once, through the small hours. That was the long stretch you're thinking of. You were between my legs for the better part of an hour."
"And?" Nadia said.
Clarissa drank. "There's another female present."
The floorboards creaked. Someone moved close, close enough that Paul felt the warmth of a body and the faint orchard smell of sweat and skin. Whoever it was didn't speak. He heard a chair drag, then the soft weight of someone sitting down in front of him.
"Kneel," Suzette said.
Paul sank down onto the boards. His bound arms pulled tight across his chest and he had to lean forward to keep his balance. A hand took the back of his head, firm, and guided him down and forward until his mouth met hair, coarse curls, then the heat underneath.
Her thighs were heavy and soft, and they opened without being asked. She was buxom, full-breasted enough that the fronts of her thighs pressed against his ears on both sides, and she smelled of soap and of the party. His mouth found her vulva and the first thing he noticed was how slack it was. The outer lips came apart under his tongue like fruit left out in the sun, and the hole behind them was open, already open, not the tight seam he had to coax. She had been used tonight by more than him, and probably not long ago.
He swirled his tongue inside her and her whole cunt answered. Arousal came out of her in a steady seeping wash, enough that his tongue slid and lost purchase and he had to lap at it from the bottom up, gathering it, swallowing it. It tasted of the party too, tangy and salt and something metallic underneath, and he didn't care, he pushed his face further in and let her folds flatten against his nose and upper lip.
Somebody laughed above him. Clarissa, he thought, or Suzette, low and short.
"She's bleeding a bit," Nadia said. "You'll taste that."
He did taste it, a thin iron thread under the salt. His own cock was hardening against his belly inside the restraint jacket, uselessly, the canvas cutting into his folded arms every time he strained. He pushed that away and worked his tongue deeper, curling it, fucking her with it in slow strokes the way he'd learned the whole weekend was the only thing he was actually good for.
The woman above him rested one hand on the back of his head, not forcing, just resting there, and let out a long breath. Her cunt clenched on his tongue once and then relaxed. She let him go on.
Paul kept his rhythm. He found the sour little pool of her and drank it, then went wider, dragging his tongue along the inside of one lip and up around the soft nub of her clitoris, hooded and slick, which made her thigh jump against his ear. She didn't tell him to stop, so he stayed there, circling it, then dipped back down to the hole and drank what gathered there again. His jaw ached. His neck ached. Saliva ran down his chin and onto her, and she made a small rough noise at the back of her throat that told him she liked that.
"She's wetter than she was earlier," Nadia said.
"She's had a night off," Clarissa said. "That's what a night off does for a woman."
The hand on Paul's head pushed him down a fraction, and he took the hint and buried his face until his nose was pressed into her mound and his tongue was buried to the root. She began to roll her hips against him, slow, grinding, using his face the way a person uses a hot flannel, and the arousal came out of her in thick pulses he could feel against his lips.
Behind him the crops had gone quiet. Nobody was hitting him anymore. It was only the fire, and the clock, and the wet sound of his mouth, and the three women watching.
Clarissa finished her wine and set the glass down on the floor beside the chair. "Stay there until she's finished," she said. "Then we'll have a conversation about what tomorrow looks like."
He kept at her, and she took her time, the way the women in this house always did. There was no hurry in the hand on the back of his head. Twice she pushed him back down when he tried to surface for air, and twice he went willingly, mouth open, tongue flat, drinking whatever she gave him.
When she finally came she did it quietly, a slow clench and release that ran through her thighs and into his jaw. She tasted of copper at the end.
The hand left his head. Somebody dragged her chair back across the boards.
Clarissa stood up and Paul heard her shoes on the floor, one, then the other, unhurried. "Bed," she said to the room generally. "Nadia, you're in the blue room. Suzette, leave him warm, I want him usable at eight."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Doors locked. Tim has the keys, don't argue with him about it." She paused. "I'll say it once. Good work tonight, all of you."
The lamp went off. Their voices receded down the corridor, Clarissa's unhurried and Nadia's rising and falling about the trestle and the ginger, and then a door closed somewhere at the far end of the house, and the ticking of the mantel clock was the loudest thing in the room.
Suzette had not left. Paul could hear her settle deeper into the couch, the old springs complaining, and the small wet sound of her finishing the last of somebody's glass.
The fire cracked. Paul's knees were numb against the boards and his bound arms had gone from pain to something duller.
Hands, then, on either side of his face. Cool palms. They tilted him up and back, away from the wet wreck of the vulva he had been working on, and he made a small startled sound because he had not heard anyone come close. The hands cradled his head like a bowl and held it there, patient, waiting.
He waited too.
Then something soft brushed his mouth, and something softer behind it, and his face was pressed into the warm slope of a huge breast, so wide that it filled his whole front from chin to throat. The nipple found his lips on its own, thick and blunt, and he took it because there was nothing else to do and because the hands were not letting him go anywhere.
He sucked once, testing. Nothing. He sucked again, and then the milk came, warm and thin, and his whole body went rigid.
He stopped.
The taste came back over his tongue, faintly sweet, faintly hay, and utterly wrong in his mouth. A woman's milk. He tried to lift his head and the hands only tightened a fraction, and from the couch Suzette said one word without opening her eyes.
"Keep going."
Paul kept going.
He drew on her and the milk came steadily now, easy, enough that it pooled against his lip and ran down his chin when he swallowed wrong, and he had to work to keep up with it. The breast was enormous and warm and the skin of it smelled of soap and clean cotton, not of the party, as though she had been washed and brought here especially. His throat worked. His cock was hard and trapped and he barely noticed it.
"That's it," Suzette said, drifting. "She's had the pump off all evening. You're doing her a kindness."
He didn't understand what that meant. He kept drinking.
Somewhere behind the grey murk of the contact lenses he was aware of the woman's breathing, unhurried, above him. She hadn't spoken. She hadn't moved except to hold his face and let him feed, and the passivity of it, the way she handled him like a thing to be emptied, sat strangely against the size of those hands.
He drank until he had to breathe and then drank again. His jaw ached from the night and from the new work. Milk ran down his neck into the collar of the jacket and cooled there.
"Amber," Suzette said. "You can take his lenses out now. He's earned a look at his dinner."
The hands left his face. A thumb and forefinger found first his right eye, then his left, and worked the small curved discs out one at a time. The world came back in a rush of colour, orange from the embers and the lamp she must have switched on, and the blurred ceiling, and then her.
He was looking straight up at her.
Her hair was a deep auburn, crushed against the pillow behind her, and her face was the kind of face that sold magazines, freckles across the bridge of the nose and a mouth he could not make himself look at for long. And above him her breasts were simply enormous, each one the size of his head, heavy and pale with a shine of new milk on the areola. She had one hand under the near breast, lifting it for him. She looked down at him along the length of her own body.
She didn't smile. She didn't say anything. She just watched him with her lips slightly apart and let him see exactly who it was that had been feeding him.
Paul's mouth was still open. Milk sat on his tongue.
He should have looked away. Some last instinct told him so, and he tried it, turned his eyes down, and there she was anyway, her belly and the soft dark hair between her legs and the whole of her filling his view from the floor up. So he gave up and looked back at her face instead, and she was still watching, unhurried, and the milk was still coming, and he drank it.
Something in the back of his chest went quiet and did not come back.
He sucked the nipple deeper and swallowed and she breathed out slowly and drew him in a fraction closer with the arm she had behind his head, and he lay there on the boards of another woman's house with his arms folded and strapped across his chest, being fed like an infant by a stranger who had been brought in and bound in another room all evening for exactly this.
Suzette shifted on the couch and yawned without covering it.
Amber adjusted her grip on the back of his skull, unhurried, and Paul drank.
Suzette yawned again, longer this time, and the old couch creaked as she stretched out along it. Paul heard her boots drop to the floor one after the other. Then nothing but her breathing, slow and even, sliding down into sleep.
Amber's hand stayed on the back of his skull. She let him drink until Suzette's breathing had gone heavy, and then she eased him off the nipple with a small wet sound and held his head just clear of her so he could breathe.
Her voice came down to him almost at a whisper, pitched for the two of them.
"Tell me what they did to you."
Paul's tongue was thick. Milk sat in the back of his throat. The embers clicked in the grate.
"I ate them," he said. His voice came out low and cracked. "All night. Woman after woman. They just kept bringing them in."
"How many?"
"I lost count. Fifteen or twenty. Some of them twice."
Amber lifted the near breast again and guided his mouth back onto it. He took it without thinking. The milk came slower now, thinner.
"Keep talking," she said. "You can talk with your mouth full. Nobody's listening."
So he did. He told her about the frame, and the lenses that had taken his sight, and the foam in his ears that had taken everything else for a day and a half. He told her about the urine, which he found easier to say than the rest of it, the sheer volume of it, women lining up with a tube in his mouth while he gagged and swallowed. He told her about the spit, how they had covered his whole face in it until it ran up his nose and he had to wipe his eyes with his shoulder.
"Their cunts," he said around the nipple. "Their cunts were the easy part."
Amber made a small sound, not quite a laugh. "And your body?"
"They took the hair off me." He swallowed. "With pliers. Two or three of them holding me down, and one with the pliers. All of it. It took a long time."
"Where?"
"Everywhere. My groin, my balls, my arse. hair by hair"
Her thighs shifted under his chest. She drew him in a fraction tighter and rocked her hips once against nothing.
"And the end?" she said. "There's always an end."
Paul was quiet for a moment. Above him, out in the dark of the room, a coal fell apart in the grate and sent up a small flare of light across the ceiling.
"Worm," he said. "The thin one. They put her on my cock. In front of everyone, and she rode me till I came inside her." He heard himself say it flatly, the way you read something off a page. "Then she knelt over my face and let my own spunk run out of her arsehole into my mouth. I swallowed it."
Amber said nothing.
"And then they made me lick her out. Her arsehole. Clean. Till Nadia was satisfied."
The hand on the back of his head loosened a little. Amber let him breathe. Milk had dried tacky on his chin and down his neck and she wiped it with her thumb, almost gently, then put him back on the breast.
"They kept you blind for it," she said.
"Yes."
"Good. That's how it should be done."
She said it without heat, the way you'd approve of a well-made chair. Paul drank and said nothing.
"I'll tell you about my night now," Amber said. "Since you told me yours."
She shifted under him and got comfortable, one knee up, one leg long. Her voice stayed right at his ear.
"They had me in the room down the corridor from you all evening," she said. "Bound and gagged, like you saw. Not for the party. For the preparation. It takes hours, what they do to me."
Paul's mouth worked at her nipple. She let him.
"They stretched my vagina, reamed it," she said. "That's the polite word. Dildos, starting small, working up. By the end of the evening there was one in me that I couldn't get my fist around. They held it there with a strap while it did its work." Her breath moved in her chest. "Then the hooks. Soft ones, they're careful, they don't tear, but they go in and they pull you open at the front and the back and both sides at once, so you can feel the cold of the room right up inside you. Four women round the table and a lamp, all of them looking up inside me, parts of me I’ve never seen, as they liked to remind me."
"You were in the room with me," Paul said, into her skin.
"I was. You didn't see me past the frame. You were busy." She stroked the back of his neck with two fingers, slow. "And a fist. Easily, by the end. More than one of them."
He pulled his head back slightly and she let him, this time, so he could look at her. The freckles, the wet shine on her chest, the flush along her collar. She looked exactly the same as she had when the lenses came out. Eyes steady, unhurried, closed at the corners.
"My insides are still open," she said. "That's the part I want you to understand before you say yes to anything."
"Say yes to what?"
"There's a thing inside me." She took his wrist, still strapped in the jacket, and pressed the flat of his folded hand low against her belly, just above the hair. Paul felt nothing. "A ring. Silver, smooth, they put it in past where I can reach and opened it out. It sits right up at the top, holding the deepest part of me open and empty. Every so often, at random intervals it hums." She watched his face. "On its own, it vibrates. Just enough to keep me wet. Just enough that I never stop wanting something in me."
Paul looked at his own hand pressed to her belly and then at her face.
"That's what tonight was for," Amber said. "The pump too, the milk, it's all part of the same arrangement. They keep me like this since I was pregnant, they never want my vaginal canal to return to normal, nor my breasts, they’re holding me exactly as I was in the moments after childbirth, as a sexual novelty."
She let go of his wrist and it dropped back against the canvas.
"I want you to sleep between my legs.” she said. "Head down between my legs, your face right up against me, all night, till Tim comes for you at eight.”
"Okay," Paul said.
"Say it properly."
"I want that."
Amber moved then, unhurried, and slid herself up and back along the boards until her hips were level with his shoulders. She opened her thighs and drew him down between them by the back of the head, and Paul went, the way he went whenever a woman's hands told him where to be.
His mouth met her vulva and it was exactly as she'd described. The lips lay open like a split fruit, loose from the hours of work, and the hole behind them was an open door, no seam to find, no resistance, his tongue sliding in past the root with nothing at all to push against. Warm, wet, faintly metallic from the copper taste of the bleeding, and above his tongue the whole cavern of her ran up and back into nothing.
She settled her thighs on either side of his head, heavy and warm, and closed them a little. Just a little. Enough that the pressure held him where he was.
"You can sleep," she said above him. "You won't fall out of me."
Paul lay on the boards with his arms strapped across his chest and his nose pressed into her mound and his tongue resting inside her, and after a while he felt a slow deep flutter start up somewhere far above his tongue, way back where he couldn't reach it, a small mechanical hum inside her that went on and on and did not stop. Amber breathed out and let her hand rest on the top of his head, and neither of them said anything else.
He surfaced slowly, drawn up out of a black sleep by the hum. It was still there, deep inside her, that small uneven pulse that came and went like a moth against a lamp. His tongue was dry and stuck to the roof of his mouth, and his jaw felt unhinged. Sometime in the night he had slipped lower, until his cheek was flat against her inner thigh and his mouth was just resting open against her, not working, just there.
Grey light came in at the edge of the curtains. Ash and cold hearth. The clock said ten past seven.
Above him Amber breathed on, slow and even. One hand still lay on the back of his skull, heavier now, the fingers gone slack.
His neck had locked. When he tried to move it, the tendons complained all the way down into his shoulders, and the canvas jacket had stiffened against his folded arms until it felt like a shell. His knees were worse. He couldn't feel his feet at all.
Amber woke without any fuss. The hand lifted off his head, her thighs opened, and cool air came in where her heat had been. He rolled his face sideways and dragged a breath.
"Morning," she said. Her voice was gravel.
"Morning."
She sat up on the boards, unbothered by her own nakedness, and looked down at the state of him with an expression he could only call professional. Milk had dried down his neck and into his collar, gone yellowish in the creases. There was a crust of her on his chin. He did not want to know what his hair looked like.
Then came footsteps, and the door, and Tim.
He had a canvas bag in one hand and a plastic jug of water in the other. He looked Paul over and did not comment on any of it. "Right," he said. "Up."
Getting Paul up took a while. Tim took the buckles at his side one at a time, and the jacket came off him in slabs, and Paul's arms swung down and immediately failed him. He had to be handled onto all fours, then onto his feet with a hand under his elbow. His shoulders screamed. Both hands had gone the colour of a bruise.
Tim poured water over his face without warning, using the flat of his hand to work the dried milk off his throat. Then he threw a cloth at him.
"Smock," he said. "Both of you."
From the bag he pulled two garments, shapeless, grey, coarse as sacking. Paul got his over his head and it hung off him to mid-thigh like something issued in an institution. Amber pulled hers on without hurry and it made no difference to her at all. She looked the same in it. It covered her breasts, technically.
The house was already up. Somewhere below them a Hoover ran, stopped, ran again. Coffee smell came up through the floorboards, and with it the sound of a woman laughing in the kitchen, short and flat, not amused so much as finished.
Tim checked Paul's fingers one hand at a time, pressing the nail beds, then set a mug of tea on the floor beside him and left them to it. The door clicked. His boots receded down the corridor.
Paul drank the tea scalding. He had been thirsty for days, it felt like.
Amber sat on the edge of the low couch opposite, knees apart, mug held in both hands, and drank hers the same way. The Hoover started again below.
There was a thought he kept turning over, and it had been sitting in him since around the third or fourth woman last night, and he'd been too busy to look at it properly.
He set the mug down.
"Can I ask you something?"
"Of course, we’re sex toys, we have no secrets."
"You said it's what they keep you for. The milk. The rest of it. You said it like it was a job."
"It is a job." She took a mouthful of tea. "It's the job."
"But is it a job you've chosen?" He searched for the right way to put it and gave up on tact. "Odette didn't invent me. She didn't make me into anything I wasn't. She just put me somewhere I couldn't say no to, and the thing is, I don't think I would have said no anyway. All of it. The mouth stuff, the piss, the arseholes. It's what I wanted. I've wanted it for years and never once found a way to ask a woman for it."
Amber drank and watched him over the rim.
"So what's the question."
"Was it yours?" he said. "Before any of them ever touched you. This. Standing there and being milked, and kept open, and hooked out in front of a room of women. If you'd woke up one morning with nobody watching you and a free choice, is this the thing you'd have picked?"
Amber was quiet for long enough that the Hoover finished its run below and went silent, and the whole house came back in around them. She picked a fleck of milk off her wrist with her thumbnail.
"I used to stand in front of the bathroom mirror after a shower," she said. "After my first was born. Wet hair, towel round my waist, and my tits aching and dripping right down my front, because they do that, they leak whether you want them to or not. And I'd look at myself and think, don't let this stop. Don't let me go back to how I was. I didn't have a word for it. I didn't know there was a place for women like me to be this. I just knew I didn't want to stop being it."
Paul said nothing.
"So no, they didn't invent me either." She set the mug on the floor and looked at him properly for the first time. "They found me. Nadia found me, actually, at a thing in town. She saw me looking at one of the girls on the stage and she came over and asked me a very direct question."
The smile arrived slowly, and it was not a nice smile. It was the smile of somebody who has just been told she is allowed to want what she wants. She bit down on her lower lip, hard enough to whiten it, and held his eyes and nodded.
"Yes," she said. "Every part of it."
The ring inside her hummed on, faint and regular, and Paul heard it now the way you hear a clock in a quiet room and can't stop.
She leaned back and stretched, and the smock pulled tight across the big shelf of her chest, and she did not bother moving her knees together.