It was at the same time the sweetest and the most terrifying thing in her life.
And both sensations increased with each go round.
It was like this (it was impossible - even she found it hard to accept as true - but it was so).
It was like this: Her father-in-law had seduced her one day, a year or so after she had been married. She had been a little drunk, yes, a little over-awed, yes (he was a powerful and awe-inspiring man, a great writer, a towering intellectual, super-rich), but still, he hadn’t forced her, had offered her several chances to back out. She had allowed him. Arguably, she had even encouraged him. She’d certainly stripped for him to some lovely soul music, provocative, batting her eyelashes, biting her lip.
And he’d fucked her so well, so soft, so hard, so gently, so violently, so casually, so intensely - that she had not been able to get him out of her mind, despite the guilt, the shame, the terror she felt about it ever coming to light. Because she loved her husband - the titan’s step-son. Didn’t she?
For if she loved him, how could she be here, again? Like this - begging - offering herself. Knowing that yet more will be asked of her than ever before - that it will not really be asked, so much as demanded - expected - enforced if necessary.
That once she comes here - to this small but swanky apartment - once she strips, throws all her clothes in the garbage chute, once she kneels - she has offered herself to .. to what, she doesn’t ever really know.
To his will, to his fancy, to his caprice. To his friends.
To his cruelty, to his ruthlessness, to his casual sadism, to his psychological games - games that are so lastingly destructive to her self-image, that leave her each time more enthralled, less free, more needy - so that each time, the period of her resistance lessens.
It is only weeks, this time, since she was here last, kneeling; naked like this.
Oh, the first time, she had been all smiles - nervous smiles, but sweet, giggly nervous, fun nervous - she had shrieked prettily when the door had, at last, opened, had felt her heart leap in expectation, had hugged and kissed him, gasped at the way his hand went directly, invasively, to her sex, but opened herself for him without reserve, feeling slutty, loving having the chance to be slutty.
Now though, she has been changed - physically changed, to be sure: different hair (style and colour), trimmed pubes, augmented breasts, toned and trained as he wants her through private sessions with a series of dance and yoga teachers he has provided - but also, and most deeply, mentally changed.
She will manage a small smile, perhaps, one - as he arrives (if it is him - last time it was three strangers; she hadn’t seen him until the fourth day, and even then he had only watched as she was harshly made to jerk and moan, and finally to scream and beg. He had stroked her cheek with a lazy finger, and told her he liked her new tits, put his cock in her throat and choked her with it while they continued to thrash her buttocks, her thighs, between her legs. She had received his come with pathetic gratitude, even as it spurted, painfully, from her nostrils).
But she won’t speak. Not this time. No more speaking. They taught her that last time, with the aid of the electric prods. She won’t expect pleasure either - although it was pleasure that brought her back at first, he has taken her somewhere else - to a need for something she can’t find a better word for than ‘intensity’ - although she is beginning to think that something more akin to ‘self-destruction’ may be more appropriate.
For that is what happens to her, each time, a little more. She offers herself up to have her humanity, her individuality, her self-respect, her self-image - destroyed a little more. Not that there isn’t sexual pleasure, on occasion. But even this is delivered in such ways as to reinforce her total subjugation and degradation.
It is so hard - and at the same time awe-inspiring - to live with this self-knowledge, this simplicity - that she is complicit with all that has been done to her, that she has, each time, offered herself, consented, obeyed and accepted, submitted, smiled. Been sweet to those who entertain themselves by degrading her, knowing that for them she is no more than an occasional entertainment. Thanked them for treating her so - and come back for more.
Knowing that, each time, it will be her, unbidden, without coercion of any kind - that it will be her who engineers the increasingly unbelievable excuse for her absence (”a few days, maybe a week - I can’t be sure”), who takes herself to the prescribed beauticians, who submits to whatever they have been asked to do to prepare her (this time repeated coffee enemas, some painful laser depilation, and the installation of something small and hard they called an ‘arfid’ beneath the skin of her neck ‘It’s like a microchip you’d put in a pet’ they had said), her who strips, who kneels to offer herself, who waits, who accepts, who hopes, fearfully and eagerly, for that moment, the moment when she feels that she has been forced over yet another threshold, pushed deeper into the simplicity that is total submission to his cruel and erratic will.
Perhaps this time?
More fear, more hope. For she knows, with increasing desperation, that this cannot go on without some step-change occurring. Either her long-suffering husband will divorce her, throw her out, expose her shame to the world, or something else will break - probably herself - and that then she will simply disappear into his power. Never surface. Cease to be an independent being - become his possession, his creature, his thing. She knows she will lack the strength to do anything else.
Such hope, such fear! Such a privilege to be allowed this experience. So gloriously, terribly cruel to have done it to her.
The door! The door! Forward, face down, ass up, thighs spread. Concentrate - “Concentrate on your helpless need to be sexually used at all times”. That is what they had taught her last time.
Sweet Thing, they call her - everyone who sees her here. He had named her that during her first visit, and none of them know her real name. She was a thing - a sex thing, and she was sweet - so stupidly, pathetically, helplessly, deliriously sweet - even she was in love with her sweetness, with her ability to stay sweet no matter what cruelty, what humiliation, what excesses are inflicted upon her, demanded of her.
When she is here, she is a Sweet Thing; and nothing else. Everything else - all the difficulties, fears, decisions, responsibilities, choices, all gone. Just be sweet, just offer herself, just accept; the only reward their satisfied grins, occasional losses of control at the height of their pleasure, degrading compliments - all of these are like gold to her when she is in sweet thing mode.
It makes no sense; but then, what else in her life does?
And at least this is reliable. Simple rules, guaranteed intensity, guaranteed debasement, guaranteed period of numbness afterward, when everything seems unimportant except tending to her hurts - mental mostly, but also physical, folding those hurts back into herself, incorporating them, adding them to her library of searing memories, of moments when it could be no-one else but her at the centre of it all. What matter if they are moments when she is screaming, begging, crying, immersed in blackest shame - even, sometimes, throbbing with sexual pleasure? What matter what they are - these are the moments when she was someone. Even if that someone was Sweet Thing. What matter?
Little flashes of her hopes for a successful law career, family, respect from her peers, the opposite of all this, flash through her mind, swept away by the urgent need to ensure her nipples are swinging so that they just graze the rug, by the knowledge - they had told her - that this time she will be whipped harshly between the legs twice daily while giving head, that nothing less than perfection will be accepted, that her mouth will be used as an ashtray, cigarettes extinguished in her mouth and in her sex.
There are tears in her eyes, her belly flutters, but the important part of her is calm at last, as it has not been for weeks.
It’s up to him now; she can stop worrying.
