Rannah stood meekly. She presumed nothing. She waited. “Strip naked!” So easy an order to give, so potent. Slowly and deliberately Rannah removed her clothes. “Go stand beneath the bar.”
The girl to be whipped inclined her head in subservience and obeyed the order. She moved with a touching grace.
When the moment came to strap Rannah’s wrists to the bar the atmosphere between the girls was so charged that Stacie felt sure sparks must surely arc between their fingers, it was an intensity of something shared beyond any previous experience. Rannah’s eyes were dark sardonic pools in which she feared to drown.
“Put your wrists against the straps.”
How beautiful the obedience! But it was precise, it assumed nothing, it demanded orders. The dark eyes bent submissively and watched while their owner’s wrists were circles by the wicked straps and buckled tight. Then came the moment when they were eye to eye and breast to breast. The scent of female musk was heavy from them both. They acknowledged it with small female smiles. Stacie longed to cast aside the straps and take her love to the consummation of the fire she knew was devouring them both. But she believed such feminine weakness might be unforgivable. She had no wish to spend time on the morrow in this place with Yousef. Breaking the compulsion of the eyes she turned to the wall and touched the switch. When her former mistress balanced only on her toes she turned it off. “You are the most beautiful thing in the world, Rannah,” she said with innocent simplicity.
It was a good feeling! Stacie felt it welling within her loins and in every crevice of her being: She owned a girl! The naked body of a lovely female being was hers! She could do what she liked with it. Under a sudden compelling impulse she found the ankle chains and locked them fast upon the helpless ankles of the girl who stood bound upon her toes.
Rannah frowned and kicked, then smiled delightedly at the clatter of the links and kicked again. “I have never been chained,” she admitted. “There is a strangeness . . . I shall learn much today.”
Stacie found the whip. They had already agreed that the one she had used on Suzie was best suited to their need. She seated herself before the tractioned girl and allowed the thong to play back and forth between her hands. She was thrilled to observe that Rannah found it hard to divert her eyes from the thing with which she would be scored.
“You should be made to wait for your whipping. It is de rigueur, is it not?”
Rannah sighed; her eyes sparkled. “That is according to your pleasure, Miss Blair,”
she said demurely.
Again the surge of lust! Stacie too was learning. Why should submission in a girl make you long to whip her! It should be the reverse, but it was not! To whip her or to feed upon her! The more douce she was the greater the hunger she aroused. The dark eyes watched her discovery. They had made it themselves long ago.
“I think I will make you ask for your whipping,” Stacie decided.
“Of course, Miss Blair. But you must tell me when.”
“Why not now? Don’t you want to get it over with?” How wonderful to play with this gorgeous girl!
“My whipping cannot be got over with, Miss Blair. It is to last all day.”
“Don’t call me ‘Miss Blair’. It sounds sarcastic. Call me Stacie. And you can ask for your whipping to begin whenever you like. If you leave it too long I’ll simply whip you harder and faster.”
“You’re doing this beautifully, Stacie. You’ve got me all hot and wet. I don’t know why you were nervous.”
“Well, I was. Terribly! If I’m doing everything right it’s because I love you. Isn’t it nuts!”
“No, it isn’t! It’s delightful. You’ve got me in the most awful female dither I’ve ever been in.”
“Ask me to start whipping you then. That will cure your dither.”
Rannah drew a deep breath. She was uncertain how long her lovely state of euphoria would survive the first blows of the whip. She was reluctant to relinquish her sensuous glow. But she was also femininely curious: about herself as much as about the girl who held the lash. “Please start whipping me, Stacie. I want you to,” she requested firmly.
The quivers were gone, they were replaced by a deep content. She owned the girl she loved, owned her utterly. How great and incredible this privilege! To whip the slender loveliness all day long in a nirvana of sensory delight scented by their own secretions and the sweat of agony.
It was past midday before the Arab girl screamed. Stacie did not mind. The sinuous writhings which the whipped girl substituted for the pealing of her voice were beautiful to watch. In them was all the pain of being a woman and all the sensuality of being loved. To see Rannah whipped was to be given a too intimate vision of all womankind from the beginning of the world.
It had begun with the compelling impulse of three swift and awful slashes as hard and as fast as Stacie could make them. She knew not why, but they happened. They had been waiting for their victim all her life, it fell to Stacie to make them real. While the successive blows fell the tied girl held statuesque in shocked immobility. She absorbed their impact as though breathlessly receiving a gift long promised and overdue. When they were done she trembled and gasped and shook one foot against its chain. The nerve tremors beneath her skin were far more eloquent than screams.
Of the two, it was Stacie who panted the hardest. In a strange need for reassurance she dropped the whip and went to where she could kiss the lips of the girl who could deny her nothing. With a great hunger she clasped the slim nakedness with all her strength and welded her moist lips to those dry from the gasps of agony her whip had evoked. Frenziedly, she cast away the small covering she wore and rubbed her own nudity against that of the girl who could herself make only the smallest motions of response. Sex to sex they moaned their own strange penance. Stacie had gone away and stayed away long enough to cool the hot blood racing through her veins. She was afraid to stay with this palpitating heated flesh for fear of freeing it from its bonds or whipping it in a frenzy of lust beyond control. She wanted neither of these, so she went away and left her love suspended by her wrists and seeking to bear her weight upon her toes. No word had been exchanged.
When she returned the glint was back in Rannah’s eyes; the toes were firm upon the floor. “I won’t do that again,” Stacie said, her words more a threat than an apology. She laughed at her captive. “You talk about me radiating sex, but what about you! I can feel your heat ten paces distant. The way I’m going we’ll never get through the day, I’ll let you free for sure.”
“And keep your appointment with Yousef tomorrow?”
“Would you give me to him . . . honest?”
“I would not want to, but I would do it. I will not spoil you with indulgences. Today is important to me, I’m not sure why, but it is. So keep our pact, slave girl.”
“I’m not your slave girl today,” Stacie reminded indignantly. She curled the whip around the chained legs twice. “Must I teach lessons too.”
When the gasping was done, Rannah managed a penitent:
“Forgive me. It is so easy to forget. Always punish me when I do . . .”
Stacie kissed her captive and promised. She whipped her intermittently through the morning. Rannah did not scream.
It was in the afternoon Stacie got the idea. She supposed it unsporting and unkind and a lot of other things. Grudgingly she was compelled to give credit to Yousef. She found a cord, circled her prisoner’s narrow waist, looped one slender foot below its shackle and tugged it back and up as far as it would go, then tied it there. She found a cane.