"You won't be able to lie on your back. You'll probably have a rather bad night-on your stomach. And you'll want to feel free to fidget."
He looked seriously at her and wondered whether things might go too far, after all. This preliminary excitement was very, very stimulating-but there seemed to be no doubt that she would do what she said she was going to do. Her delivery of six strokes downstairs, immediately after he had been drained of sex, proved it conclusively. He knew, however, that no power on earth could now stop him; no fear, however great, could prevent him from going forward. He would submit to whatever pain she had to give him-and the knowledge that, as a sadist, she had to give the pain increased his own present mental excitement. He would submit to it willingly, if not gladly, in order to relive it in his mind after it was over, to luxuriate in the pain of sitting down-and to dream of it happening again.
"You frighten me quite a lot," he said.
She nodded. "Yes, I know. And you are right to be frightened. I am a person to be frightened of-when I have a cane in my hand. Or a birch or a switch. I'm going to buy a switch tomorrow, as I said. I can't have that German girl giving me competition."
"She doesn't, you know," he said at once.
She moved closer to him and took his great penis in her hands. "She'd better not!" she murmured. "But seriously, I'd like to thrash you with a switch. A very swishy cutting one with whalebone inside it. It could be better even than Peter the Punisher. It would cut more."
He caught his breath. "I am afraid of you!"
"And I think," she went on slowly, "that I'll buy a whip too. What was it that you said downstairs? 'There's something clean and almost poetic about a whip.' Wasn't that it?"
"It was. But I wonder whether I meant it."
"I'll give you an opportunity of finding out. I'll make you dance around your study like a performing bear. And I'll make you do all sorts of humiliating things-and if you hesitate as much as a second I'll flog you till you're unconscious."
He drew her close to him. His heart was beating hard. "What sort of humiliating things?"
"I'll make you wear my underclothes. I'll make you put on my stockings and panties. And I'll make you put on a sanitary towel and pretend you're a woman with a period."
"Go on."
"And I'll put a padded brassiere on you-one of the things the Americans call falsies."
"What else?" He was straining against her, his whole being quivering with longing.
"I'll paint your lips and your eyes. And I'll rouge your cheeks. And-and I'll do all sorts of awful things to you. And when you're like that-in that humiliated condition, I mean- I'll thrash you till you can't stand, never mind sit. You'll wish you'd never met me."
"Oooh!" He drew a great breath and quivered again from head to foot.
She drew away from him. "It's time to give you another thrashing now. Lie down on the bed." She released his penis and gave him a small push.
He turned immediately and flopped down on his stomach on the rubber car-cover. It felt very cold against his skin.
"I'm not going to tie you down now," she said, reaching for her birch. "You know the conditions, don't you? You give me complete obedience, or I leave your employment immediately." She felt quite safe now in threatening this. He had not called her bluff downstairs. That meant that he would do anything at all that she ordered him to do-on the threat of her walking out of the house. She sensed that her being a sadist, and, what was more, a sadist under his roof, in his employment, was an excitingly important thing to him-so excitingly important that she had him from now on in her total power.
"Yes," he said, "I know the conditions very well.' "What are they now at this moment?"
"I suppose they are"-he twisted his head and grinned up at her ruefully-"that I must not get up and stop you thrashing me."
"Exactly. Otherwise-?"
"Otherwise you'll leave my employment." He frowned and said slowly: "I don't think you would, you know. You've found a masochist who is very convenient to you."
How right you are, she thought. But you mustn't be allowed to know it. She said: "You are very foolish. I can find a dozen masochists within an hour."
"Oh, can you?" he said lamely, and turned his head back into the pillows. "Anyway, I agree to your conditions, so there's no point in arguing about it."
"No," she said, and hit him hard across his shoulder-blades with the birch. "No, there's no point in arguing about it." She hit him again.
He gasped with the pain of her first lash, and cried out when the second cut into him.
The sound of his cry was sweet music to her ears. She hit again, very hard. "But that is not to say"-another lash-"that I shall never tie you down." Another vicious lash, this time across the small of his back.
The agony was such that he threw himself over on to his back, and held up his hands to her in supplication. "Please! Not so hard!"
"Oh, you are foolish!" she said silkily, and lashed him across his nipples. "If you prefer to be whipped across your chest it's all the same with me. Ah! I see you don't!"
He had thrown himself over on to his stomach again. "But please!" His voice was muffled by the folds of the car-cover. "Please… "
"Please nothing!" she answered, lashing him more quickly now. "You are going to be properly thrashed tonight, and every night, and perhaps every day too." She alternated her lashes between his shoulder-blades and the small of his back. "Your life is going to be one long thrashing from now on."
She paused, panting, to catch her breath. "I was saying that I may tie you down one day. And do you know how?" She put down the birch and took the cane in her hand. "One day when you do not have to go to your office-" she raised the cane and brought it down hard across the fleshy lower part of his buttocks, and felt a surge of sexual bliss as he cried out-"I shall tie you down to this bed in the early morning"-lash! lash! lash!-"and I shall give you a terrible whipping with the whip I'm going to buy"-lash! lash! lash! lash!-"the whip that is so clean and poetic as you said"- lash! lash! lash!-"and then I shall leave you for an hour or so tied down over the bed. Oh, God!" The thought of doing this to him sent the blood to her head.
She stopped speaking and put all her strength into her lashes. She delivered about twenty before she stopped, and sat down on the side of the bed, exhausted and panting hard. When she regained her breath she stood up and began to cane him again, hitting very hard with every third or fourth word she spoke. "And then, after an hour or so, I shall come back and give you another terrible thrashing. And then I shall leave you again for another hour or so. And then I shall come back once more with my whip. And I shall whip you and whip you and whip you and whip you!" She felt the blood rising again to her head, and again thrashed for several moments without speaking. Then she went on: "And you'll stay tied down all day long. You won't have anything to eat, you won't have anything to drink, you won't have anything to read or smoke or do-except watch the clock, which I'll leave beside you. and wait for the whipping which you'll receive every hour. And oh God! oh God! oh God! Ooooh!" She felt her senses swimming with the thought of doing all this to him, and she lashed like a girl possessed, drinking, sucking, enveloping the piteous cries which he was giving whenever he could find the breath for them.
He was in such total agony now that he could not have got up from the bed to stop her if he had wanted to. The truth was that no such thought was in his mind. He wanted to scream for her to stop, but he had no breath. The awful pain had paralysed, it seemed, even his power to speak. He could only whimper piteously. This was not the sort of pain that he enjoyed. There was nothing of sexual stimulation in these lashes. There was only breathtaking-literally breathtaking- agony. At the back of his mind he bitterly regretted having given her the newspaper story to read. That had begun it. He had given it deliberately, with the hope that it might begin something. He now saw that it had begun far too much. This would be the last time he would submit to her. Nobody, could stand sadism such as this-nobody, nobody, nobody… When, for God's own sweet sake, would she stop?