“That’s the lot, dear. What do you say?”
“Thank you, Mother.”
“She means it, y’know.” Diana said equably. “She knows it’s good for her. You do, don’t you, pet?”
“Oh, yes, Mother.”
“She means it, Dru’. The kid isn’t dissembling. Tell Mrs. Hammill what comes now, dear.”
“I’m left to stand like this and think about what’s happened ,” Ginny proclaimed brightly. “Mummy calls it ‘letting it sink in.’ I expect it does me ever so much good.”
“Aren’t you quite sure, dear?”
“Well, I do get awfully tired.” For a moment Ginny drooped, but instantly brightened. “But of course I’m supposed to. I’m being punished.”
“That’s my girl!”
“Thank you, Mumsie. You’re sweet to me.”
Back at the pool. Drusilla gratefully downed a martini.
“I don’t believe any of this,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t believe this damned corset that’s locked round my tummy, and I don’t believe you’ve just whipped your naked daughter.”
“You will, darling. Give it time.”
“But—but—” Drusilla waved a baffled hand. “How many people—?” She looked at her smiling companion in wide-eyed appeal. “Have I been living with my head in the sand?”
“Not really. But there’s more than you suppose. They’re the lucky ones.”
“Lucky!”
“Of course. You know the Albertsons. She’s a perfect submissive. He whips her for every fault. When they’re alone together he keeps her chained.”
“Why doesn’t she leave him?”
“She loves it, stupid.”
“What you’re trying to say is that I ought to love it with Bryce?”
“You already are. You just haven’t found out.”
There was between the two women an empathy born of old acquaintance. Drusilla, in a sudden need of sharing, looked Diana squarely in the eye and admitted:
“So, all right, some of it makes me horny. But where does it lead?”
“Couldn’t that be the excitement, darling, the finding out?”
“Suppose it doesn’t lead anywhere, except a lot of discomfort for me?”
“What would you have lost?”
“Where do you fit in, Diana?”
Diana grinned. “I’m not sure,” she admitted. “But I envy you, so I must want what Bryce offers you. I think I’d find the extra fillip—about the threat of divorce, I mean, tremendously exciting. One hell of a turn-on.”
“You mean that old thing about his secretly wanting compulsion?”
“I suppose... ” Diana made a wry face. “But I’ve been carrying around a sort of fantasy. Remember Elaine Neilsen?”
“Of course. She worked with us once.”
“Remember how she had a thing about Europe. Saved her money and took the trip and had a wonderful time?”
“Didn’t something go wrong?”
“Badly! The day before she was due to come home some chap gave her a thousand bucks to deliver a package back here. She took it for a giggle. The F.B.I. picked her up at customs. She’s still doing time.”
“She was an idiot.”
“A nice idiot. Harmless as they come. Happy, lovable. Civilized. Surely you remember the papers? They made a big tarada over the case because Elaine was a pretty girl.”
“But what’s she got to do with... ?”
Diana gestured in frustration. “You may well ask. But the press and T.V. featured so many pictures of the poor girl being led here and there in handcuffs—and sometimes with a chain around her middle so she couldn’t raise her joined hands! It got to me.”
“Sympathy?”
“No, dammit! Pure lust.”
Drusilla remembered the naked girl strapped to the bar back in the house... waiting! Something glimmered.
“Bryce gets a charge out of seeing me like that. I know he does.” She looked at the earnest woman across the table. Understanding came easily. “You mean you’d get a sexual bang out of seeing me handcuffed?”
“I think I’d melt in joy.”
“And that’s the reason you do that to Ginny?”
“Am I a bitch?” Diana looked contrite. “Actually, it’s working out real well. Can’t you tell?”
One more anomaly! But there was no denying Ginny was fine. A girl to be proud of. Drusilla grinned. She began to feel on top of things again. “Bryce bought some handcuffs,” she admitted demurely. “I’ll model them for you if you like.”
“Would you! Oh, darling... !” Diana was suddenly an eager child.
“Of course I will, Di’. But this Elaine thing? Is that all?”
“No, that wasn’t all,” Diana said slowly. “The fact was I couldn’t get her out of my mind—I mean, the visions of her as a chained captive. After knowing her around the office. So normal. So well-adjusted and with so much to look forward to. Young, lovely. Now, here she was, locked in a cell, hauled around in handcuffs wearing a prim little prison dress that was actually damned sexy.”
“But she must have got a fair trial?”
“Oh, sure. But it didn’t do her any good. She was still sentenced. And that’s where the compulsion thing hit me. It still wets my puss when I think of her behind bars. She’s basically innocent. She made one silly goof. Now she’s shut away from life, and love, and... and everything. I wish it were just sympathy I feel. But it isn’t. It’s envy! Can you understand that? Good old green-eyed envy.”
“For a girl in prison!”
“Nuts, eh?”
“A month ago I’d have said yeah, it was nuts. But now... !” Drusilla shook her head angrily. “What the devil are we females made of anyway!”
“Longings. ”
“You want to be put in a cell? And handcuffed?” Diana nodded whimsically.
“Yes. Don’t you?”
“I don’t know. But it looks as though I’m going to find out. How about Elaine? Was that the end?”
“I couldn’t let it be.” Diana chuckled. “I got permission to visit her. I laid it on the line. Told her the visit was to help me, not her. Told her the way I’d been affected... Guess what.”
“I bet she got mad.”
“Hell no! She burst out laughing. It had worked the same way with her.”
“You can’t mean... ?”
“Sure, I do! She said, without a blush, that all through her arrest and trial her panties were sopping, and that they weren’t much drier now she was in the house of correction. She told me that to have to walk through a door and have it locked behind her still took her half way to a come. She said she and several others had been moved not long past. In a transit they were handcuffed together. She had two orgasms. She didn’t pretend to understand it, but she was grateful it was there.”
“Crazy!”
“And wonderful.”
They looked at each other in discovery. It was Diana who broke the silence.
“I’d like to whip you; Dru’?”
Drusilla got decisively to her feet and offered her hand.
In a silence neither of them needed to break, they retraced their steps.
A helpless Ginny viewed their return with eyes that were big question marks. But she, too, was chary of words. When the bar was lowered and her wrists unstrapped her youthful resilience reasserted itself. “Am I forgiven?” she asked hopefully.
“You’re forgiven, poppet, but only because we need the bar.”
“Coooo... Oh, wowie!” The child’s orbs sparkled. “One of you’s going to be whipped?”
“Watch that tongue, girl,” Diana admonished. “Be grateful and run along while you’re home free.”
Thankfully rubbing chafed wrists, the teenager looked from one to the other of the two women. “Can’t I watch?”
“No, you can’t! Vamoose.”
Drusilla blushed under the youthful, speculative gaze. “I bet it’s Mrs. Hammill who’s going to get it,” Ginny said with the wisdom of intuition. “It’s not fair I can’t watch. You watched me get it, Mrs. Hammill.”