Nothing Less Read online

  How’s that for poetry?

  I lost count of the number of times. Again, I’m not bragging, but there were at least four orgasms on my part and twice that number on hers. Something had been going on, evidently, all along back at Vendras’s villa between us. We’d been ready.

  I had no rope to tie her so I used my voice. Once put in a position, it was as though she were bound in steel. Like animals we went at it, her on all fours, on my lap, on her back, standing, bent over a low-hanging branch.

  “Dios mio,” she cried at one point. “I want to feel your whip on me.”

  There was no whip, but I found a stiff palm frond that was particularly suited for heating a pretty young ass like hers. The moon and stars rose and we gave no never mind. All night long it went on. By dawn there was no question in my mind, no more fear. It was like we’d been married in some invisible, pagan ritual. By the call of jungle birds, by the distant growling of panthers.

  We had a fresh lizard for breakfast. Then I washed my new love slave in the stream. Making her wade to the middle up to her belly, I had her put her hands on her head holding up her hair. She looked so incredible, so wildly at home, with her hips thrust out just so, her head lowered a tiny bit, her eyes closed. For the longest time, I watched. Then I washed her with my hands, cleaning every part of her.

  You cannot truly appreciate a woman’s beauty unless you own it. I see that now. A husband or lover looks for what he can use on a girl’s body; he wants to get through it to something else. But a slave, a slave is something you treasure with infinite pride. I was the luckiest bastard on earth. And Vendras could go to hell.

  I took her in my arms, the innocent washing having turned sexual, the way it inevitably would with us. Doe’s eyes on mine, hot and submissive, she begged and received silent permission to lower her arms, to touch me. My cock surged under her fingers. It was like her hand was born there. Greedily, I pushed against her belly.

  “Lift yourself,” I commanded. “Wrap your legs round my waist.”

  She obeyed, joining us. One with each other, one with the river. I began to laugh and she began to laugh. We were one in the water, droplets of sun, droplets of river surrounding us. This was beauty, I realized. Perfection. The one thing I’d sought all my life in all the wrong places. You’ll never find anything, my grandmother used to say, until you stop looking for it.

  And once you’ve found it…ah, what does the rest matter?

  Nora saw them first. She froze in my arms, giving a little gasp. I had my back to them, but the terror on her face said it all. He’d found us. Against all odds, despite my best precautions, we hadn’t gotten far enough. Maybe if we hadn’t stopped so long to make love we’d still be alive. But you can’t second-guess like that. Hell is full of should have, could have, would have.

  I hear Hector first. “Put your hands up you filthy pigs!”

  Neither of us obeys. There is no point, nor do we have the strength. What we have left is enough for one kiss, no more, no less.

  “Get them!” Hector is screaming, no doubt to whatever lackeys are with them.

  “Fuck that!” This comes from Raoul himself. “Shoot them, right there. I’m tired of this shit!”

  “But the diamonds,” Hector whines.

  “Didn’t you hear me, hermano? Shoot!” The last word comes out in a long ghostly wail. They say it’s all slow motion at the end, and it did seem that way. The weapons are automatics. With more than enough range to reach us.

  Bullets slice the water, slice us.

  “Together,” I breathe. “Forever.”

  “Master,” she says.

  “Slave,” I reply.

  We are both smiling. Truly, I think we have won and Raoul, for all his bullets, has lost.

  ‘Tis better to have loved and been shot to hell than…well, you can figure the rest out yourself.

  Like I said, I’m not a poet.

  Chapter Three

  Becca’s Dream

  Becca is trying to lie back on the analyst’s old-fashioned couch. She feels funny coming here, and she wishes she’d never let her girl friends talk her into it.

  “Tell me about the dreams,” the doctor says.

  “Oh, I just don’t know how to begin,” she protests, but in a moment, she is spilling her guts anyway. “They’re pretty much all variations of the same thing, doctor. I’ll be lying in bed with a new man. We’ve just made love two or three times by then, and I’m feeling really good. You know the feeling, right? Sleepy, sexy and sated all rolled into one? The only thing is, I have to pee. I tell him this so he’ll let me up.

  “‘No,’ he mumbles into the pillow, his muscular arm draped across my stomach. ‘Not until you ask me nice.’ At first, it seems like maybe just some little game, so I say ‘please, Roger, or Harry, or whatever his name is in the dream, ‘pretty please can I go to the potty?’

  “But he says ‘no’ again more forcefully, and the next thing I knew I am on my back underneath him.

  “‘I’m serious,’ I say now, not liking the forced intimacy, with me all bloated and covered in sweat, my pussy oozing with the man’s cum. ‘Get the fuck off me.’

  “Then my wrists get pinned over my head, and my thighs get jackknifed. I didn’t like the odds anymore, but I hold my ground. ‘Stop smirking and let me up—if you ever want sex again!’

  “‘What makes you think you can control when and how I use you, Rebecca?’ he tells me, and now there’s these men behind him in top hats and long coats. They’re nodding in agreement.

  “At this point in the dreams I try fighting, sometimes by scratching, and occasionally by kneeing him in the groin. Roger or Harry—or whoever—is always ready, though, because each and every time I end up on my stomach, one arm jammed painfully behind the small of my back.

  “‘You’re hurting me,’ I protest, trying not to sound too much like a girl.

  “Roger ignores me and puts his hand on my arse like he owns it. When I try to fend it off with my free hand, he forces my arm higher, till I relax.

  “‘Do you feel that, Rebecca?’ he asks, caressing my cheek lightly but possessively with his free hand. ‘That is a feeling you will grow to fear, as it will be associated in your mind with punishment. On the other hand, it can also be a harbinger of pleasure.’

  “I shriek as he strikes me, delivering a brisk, totally unexpected swat to my exposed hindquarters.

  “Three more times, in rapid succession I am spanked. I can hear the men in the room clapping and commenting on the technique.

  “‘You will learn this as a means of communication between us, Rebecca,’ he explains, his hand once more making a swirling, feathery pattern over my twitching flesh. ‘Before long you will find yourself responding to and even anticipating your discipline. The time will come when a word from me or even a glance will be enough to move you into bare-arsed submission. Don’t worry if things seem confusing now. My bonds will teach you much, as well as my whip.’

  “I tell him if he doesn’t let me up, I will go to the police.

  “He tells me if he does let me up, I will have to crawl there on my hands and knees because now I am his slave and I have to obey.

  “‘You’re a sick bastard,’ I say, but he just laughs and tells me what he really is my master.”

  The doctor pushes his wire-rimmed glasses up on his nose and rubs his hand over his beard. For all the world, she can’t help thinking how he looks just like the pictures she’d seen of Sigmund Freud.

  “The details of your dream are extraordinary, Miss O’Neill,” he observes. “I have never encountered such a level of recall before. Dirty slut.”

  “I beg your pardon?” she sits bolt upright, which is difficult because she has on this belly shirt that keeps riding too high. I really need to lose five pounds, she tells herself, to pull this off.

  “What we may be dealing with here is a reaction formation,” the doctor continues, scribbling something on his pad. “Fucking whore.”

  “There,”
she exclaims. “You just did it again—put something on the end of your sentence . . something filthy.”

  The doctor purses his lips. “Projection. How fascinating. This may take months of analysis. Rip your clothes off and whip your ass until you scream.”

  She runs her hands through her hair, trying to clear her head. She doesn’t have on the belly shirt anymore, but a white blouse, the kind she wore in Catholic school with the pleats and the bobby socks. She brushes her hands nervously over milk-white thighs. When she looks up, she sees a priest behind a desk. She’s in a wooden chair in the principal’s office of her old school.

  It’s pretty clear now, she decides; I’m still dreaming.

  “Say ten Hail Mary’s,” the priest is saying, “and stick your finger inside your dirty hole while I beat you with a ruler.”

  Girls are in the room laughing. The priest has her father’s face.

  Gasping for air, she screams.

  Roger grabs hold of her. “Baby, you were having another nightmare.”

  She buries her head against his strong shoulder, finding that little hollow place above the collarbone she loves so well. “Oh, God, honey. It was awful. Jeezus, do I ever have to pee, though.”

  There was a clinking sound as she tried to swing her leg over the edge of the bed. Pulling the cover aside she sees there is a shackle on her ankle and a chain attaching her to the leg of the bed. “What the…?”

  Roger has turned away from her and is rummaging through the drawer of his nightstand. “I made a few changes while you were sleeping. From now on, you’ll get up only with my permission.”

  She can see he’s putting something over his face. She asks him what he’s doing, but when he turns around, there’s this rubber mask, a Freud mask, like the doctor she was talking to. His eyes look wild behind it, as he forces her down onto the mattress, entering her without any kind of foreplay. Her breasts swell against him. Traitors! Her cunt melts. Bitch cunt traitor!

  “Chained and naked slut,” he keeps repeating. “Getting what you deserve.”

  She hates that she’s turned on, but it’s like this dark cloud has been pulled off of her sex life, and suddenly she can feel. “I’ve never had an orgasm,” she tells him, as if he didn’t know.

  “Shut up,” he warns. “Cunt.”

  “And I don’t like that word.”

  More laughing. The men are back, with the top hats and the long, pointed beards. Very elegant men, from Victorian days.

  “That’s enough for today,” someone calls. “Turn it off.”

  The pictures in Becca’s head immediately click off like they were a movie. She opens her eyes and everything is white. She can’t sit up because she’s strapped to a table, metal and cold. It’s something clinical, she thinks, and then she remembers the Lab.

  The place where Roger has sent her, as a gift to science.

  “It is our belief that the true submissive nature of womanhood can be tapped into in any female,” had said Doctor Richtenwald at her admission. “The implications, were the process ever to be fully understood, would be staggering.”

  Roger, who was sitting next to her, his black wavy hair perfectly styled as always, nodded. “Think of it sweetheart. A society in which women are chattel, bought and sold, their bodies put to proper use for breeding, sex and manual labor.”

  Her cunt had thrummed in response beneath the tight skirt and thin panties.

  “Is she obedient?” the doctor had asked Roger as though she weren’t there.

  He smiled thinly, shrugging his jacketed, turtle-necked shoulders. “I rarely have to punish her, if that’s what you mean. A few lashes with a buggy whip from time to time are all she ever needs. Generally, she’s well disciplined and satisfactory as a sexual vessel.”

  She squirmed in her severe blue suit, her hair in a swirl on top of her head.

  “Hmm.” The doctor templed his fingers. “Will she drink sperm, though?”

  Roger had turned to her lovingly at this point. “Like a champ,” he smiled, putting his hand over mine.

  She opened her mouth to reply, and the screaming starts in. She’s fighting my way out—still trying to wake up.

  None of this is real.

  “I need to pee,” she calls out to the unseen watchers on the other side of the glass. Though she can’t see them, she knows they are there. They always are.

  “You need to ask permission,” replies a mechanical voice.

  She squeezes the muscles of her vagina. She is naked on the table and spread-eagled. They are doing experiments. Mental ones. “Please sirs, may I urinate?”

  A jolt of electricity passes through the wires suctioned to her nipples. “There is no ‘I’. Say, ‘Slave Number 561-A wishes to urinate.”

  She repeats the formula, still wincing from the charge.

  “Request refused,” the mechanical voice drones. “Why don’t you piss on yourself you filthy, little slut? The Lord knows you won’t amount to anything, anyway.”

  The laughing again. The words are her father’s. Christ, she realizes, it’s just another dream!

  “It must be awful.” There’s a hand on her shoulder.

  She looks up. She is in her doctor’s office. Her real one. She is sitting on the examining table in her burgundy blouse and gray skirt and he’s beside her, comforting her. Yes, she thinks, that’s it. I scheduled this appointment this morning because of the dreams I keep having, the ones I can’t seem to get out of. My name is Rebecca O’Neill, she thinks, I’m an assistant publicist for a downtown agency and I live alone with my Siberian Blue cat, Alexander. I’m five-foot-five, and minus fifteen pounds, I’d be perfect. I used to date a man named Roger, but he tried to control me and I dumped him. Now I’m single and feeling okay just being me.

  “It is awful doctor,” she smiled gratefully, wondering if he had a girl friend. “I hate to be such a bother, but isn’t there anything at all you can prescribe?”

  “Absolutely, Miss O’Neill. Not a problem at all,” he beamed, pulling the prescription pad from the pocket of his white lab coat. A moment later, after jotting something down in bold letters, he tore off the top paper, folded it and handed it to her.

  “I really appreciate it.” She batted her eyelashes. “Really.”

  This was the turning point, she thought. From here on in, it would get better. No more slipping in and out of worlds. No more waking in cold sweats only to find herself in yet another nightmare.

  She was halfway to the pharmacy when she realized she hadn’t even looked at the prescription. How silly! She’s usually so careful, making sure she’s ordered generic and all that. She’s stopped at a red light as she fishes the thing from her purse.

  “Here’s hoping I can read his writing,” she says out loud, in unusually good humor.

  As she opens the paper, she sees a single word, unmistakable. She swallows hard, not wanting to believe her eyes.

  The prescription he’s given her is for slavery.

  A black van pulls in behind her at the light. The windows are tinted but she knows the men are inside. The ones that are coming after her. She’s seen them before. She knows what will happen to her if they catch her.

  There isn’t time to wait. She accelerates through the red light, the van hot on her tail. They want her bad, want to tie her down on the metal floor and cut away her clothes with scalpels. Then they’ll take her and take her again.

  “Learned your lesson yet, bitch?” they’ll sneer as they pull through the gate of the Institute. “Still want to escape?”

  There’s a tractor-trailer ahead of her, but she can’t slow down. She can’t be caught. Not now.

  The crash is in slow motion, not nearly as terrible as you might think. Everything goes blank, and then, sometime later, you wake up. In her case, she’s handcuffed to the head of her cot.

  “Hello, Rebecca.”

  “Hello, Roger.”

  “I prefer you call me doctor, Rebecca,” he says gently as he parts her legs.

 
“Of course,” she smiles. “Doctor.”

  It’s a great convenience, of course, having nothing on her body. With the cuffs and waist chain holding her down, she can be used for hours on the padded mattress. Any fluid leakage is easily cleaned, and none of the doctors need exert themselves fending off attacks from her flailing hands. Becca appreciates their wisdom; she is their property. Her cunt and arse and mouth ought to be properly exploited. She comes again and again for them, on the sticky, padded material. When allowed to speak, if not stuck full of cock, she begs for more.

  “That’s hardly original, is it?” asks Roger as he thrusts himself in and out of his new slave’s cunt. “The idea of women being kept in an institute as sex slaves, I mean?”

  “You’re right,” Becca nods. Bound on her back in her own bed, she’s been fantasizing during the fuck to keep herself properly juiced. There are many places she goes in her mental universe, the institute being her favorite. The fact that he’s reading her mind doesn’t strike her as being at all odd. “I read it once in a book.”

  “Very clever,” he concedes. “Now there’s no way to ever be sure, is there?”

  “About what’s real or not, you mean? No, I suppose not.”

  “For that matter,” he grunts as he ejaculates, “I could be you and you could be me. Like that ancient Chinese philosopher’s dream.”

  “I dreamt I was a butterfly,” she paraphrased. “And afterwards I woke. The question is, am I am a man who dreamt of being a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming of being a man?”

  “Both,” came the reply. “And neither.”

  They came together then, Every Man and Every Woman, her in her chains, he over her, nude together, in each other, with each other forever and ever.

  Chapter Four

  K’s Story

  K concentrated on her breathing. Phillip had taught her to do this and he was right beside her in the car, so she should have been fine about it.

  She wasn’t. In fact, it had backfired terribly, and now it all felt sexual. Kicking off her flats, she dug her stockinged toes into the plush carpet of the XKS. She wished her feet were bare, wished all of her were bare; wished above all they were going somewhere for him and not for her. And especially not this.