The Addicted Natural Ch. 06

The room was totally bare except for a metal folding chair and a very strange sort of table in the center of the floor. The walls sported no pictures. A small fireplace was set into one corner, but there was no firewood and no ashes in the grate. It hadn't been used for a very, very long time. The table appeared to be bolted to the floor on sturdy, oversized wooden legs that were both too far apart on one side and too close together on the other. It was very narrow in the center, and very wide at either end, and it faintly resembled a capital letter "X." The only light in the room was provided by a bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling. There was a hook on one wall, and from it, in a large coil, hung a very thick, very long, very mean-looking bullwhip.

So this was to be my punishment. How Machiavellian. How gothic. I was to be reduced to a character in a cheap novel. But he couldn't hurt me anymore. No suffering could surpass what I was feeling already.

He led me to the table and let go of my wrist to position it. The whole table twisted on some sort of hinge, and sure enough, when it was vertical, it looked exactly like a big "X." There were leather buckles at each corner, and I passively let him fasten first one wrist, then the other to the uppermost portion of it. My breasts, unrestrained beneath my light blouse, ballooned slightly as they pressed into the rough wood of the thing. There was a cross-brace at the level of my face, and I turned my head and rested my cheek against it, watching, waiting. He knelt to remove my sandals before fastening my ankles to the lower portion, spreading my legs so that my feet no longer touched the ground. I felt more of the cum dribble down the insides of my legs. He must have smelt me. He was very close down there, and I could smell the odor.

He twisted the table again, swinging it forward, so that I was neither horizontal nor vertical. Then, with a savage movement, he grabbed handfuls of the back of my blouse and ripped it almost completely off of me. Small tatters of the garment were dangling from each arm, and he quickly tore those off as well. With a vicious yank, he pulled my skirt's waistband so far asunder that it fell all the way to my widely spaced ankles. He left it there. The air was cool but dry in the basement, and with my whole backside exposed to the room, I shivered involuntarily.

Daddy walked to the wall and picked up the bullwhip almost reverently. I watched in fascination as he began doing something very strange. He started pick-pick-picking at something on the very end of the whip, and with all honesty, he reminded me of a monkey picking fleas. I simply couldn't fathom the meaning of the ritual. He didn't even glance at me for the longest time. I was completely naked, yet Daddy was much more interested in the whip than in the nude woman tied to the table in front of him. I had thought briefly that he might rape his only daughter, but he was much too focused on the task at hand to consider such a thing.

He walked behind me and I lost sight of him. I waited several long seconds before the first blow struck.

The fickle finger writ, Khalil Gibran once said, and having writ, moves on. History, once complete, cannot be undone. But, if I ever DID have the chance to relive that horrible event, I would have done it much, much differently. I would have screamed. I would have screamed loud and long and begged and cried and pleaded. But as it was, I did none of those things, except to continue to shed my silent "Daddy tears." I never uttered a peep of protest. That's why he didn't stop, of course. He wasn't going to stop until he had gotten some sort of response from me.

There is no sound on earth like that of a bullwhip striking flesh. Many have written about it, but they've obviously never seen it, and most certainly they've never experienced it. TV and movies don't even come close. Try to imagine hitting a piece of raw meat with a dull butter knife hard enough to cut. That's what the whip does. It strikes and grabs and digs in and rakes and tears and cuts, all in the span of a half-second. The first stroke hit with enough force to knock the air from my lungs. By the time the second struck, the pain from the first was just starting to build. And after the third, I quite frankly lost count. Silly for someone so proficient at math.

I've tried to count them once or twice. It just can't be done. I stand, naked, in the bathroom with my back to the big mirror and look in a hand mirror back over my shoulder and try to figure it out, but it's impossible. They get all jumbled. The scars, I mean. One ends where another begins. Were those two from the same blow? Surely not. They're at slightly different angles. And that one's too deep to be connected with that one. Unless two blows fell in exactly the same place. Thirty, at least. Fifty? Perhaps. Oh, God, the pain was terrible.

I suddenly couldn't breath, and sputtering, realized that Daddy had thrown a glass of water in my face. Had I passed out? Where had the water come from? I looked over my left arm to watch him. Why was everything pink? No, not pink, really. There were little, tiny dots of red on everything, everywhere. Blood. My blood. Daddy stood in front of me, breathing hard, picking at the end of the whip again. Picking. Cleaning the end of the whip. Picking what? Bits of flesh. My flesh. And suddenly my heart sank even more. Oh, the horror of it! Whose flesh had he been picking from the whip before he struck ME?!?! There could be only one answer to that question, though my mind screamed and railed against the thought. Mommy. Oh, Mommy!

And then he was gone again. Out of my view again. And another blow, and another.

I sputtered and coughed on the water once more. I felt different. Sort of "floaty," is how I'd describe it. The room was floating around me, or maybe I was floating around it. The pain was hot, but the room had suddenly turned very cold. Daddy had a funny expression on his face: sort of half triumph, half ... what? Fear? But that was impossible for me to know, and I almost laughed. I'd never seen Daddy frightened of anything.

Suddenly, he was gone. I thought maybe he was behind me again, ready to strike the next blow. But it never came. Where could he be? And what was that strange noise? At first, I thought it might be a loud clock ... tick, tick, tick. But I finally realized that that wasn't the sound at all. Drip, drip, drip. I forced my arm so that I could look beneath it at the floor. Where had all the blood come from? Surely not just me ... there was too much of it. No one could possibly lose that much blood and survive. It stood in a huge, spreading puddle, and it looked ... deep. Drip, drip, drip.

Scream. It exploded into the room and bounced around the walls, and suddenly Mommy was there, holding my head and looking at me in abject horror.

"Call an ambulance!" she screeched at my father, who was standing at the small doorway. He held an armload of bath towels.

"No," he said flatly.

Mommy spun to face him and talked frantically, waving her arm in my direction. "She has to get to a hospital, Robert! She desperately needs a doctor! You can see the bones laid bare in her back! Look at all the blood!"

"No ambulance," Daddy said calmly. "No hospital. No doctor."

To my astonishment, Mommy knelt in the spreading puddle of blood and looked up at him. "Please, Master," she implored. "Please! She's going to die!"

(Master?)

Daddy tossed the stack of towels onto my back as if I were the piece of furniture itself, then reached down, grasped Mommy by her shoulders and hoisted her to her feet. He looked her steadily in the eye.

"If she dies, you and I will bury her body in the woods and we'll tell everyone that she never came back. We'll tell them that we've disowned her and we don't care where she is. No one will ever know. If you can save her somehow, I'll put her back to work. Either – Or. I really don't care which."

And he turned on his heel and was gone.

Mommy spun around and looked at me, big silent tears flowing freely down both cheeks, and I thought "She cries like I do." And then a look of stoic determination I'd never witnessed set her features and she picked up the stack of towels, gasping at what she saw beneath, set them on the folding chair, took the top one and pressed it into my back hard. That should have really hurt, but I found the pain somehow oddly decreasing. I tried to say something, but my lips didn't seem to be responding to my brain. I jerked awake as she removed the towel and threw it onto the floor, where it quickly became sodden with blood; then she grabbed the next towel from the stack and pressed it in a slightly different place, pushing hard with both hands. This went on for some time.

My mind seemed to fade in and out more frequently, as she worked, pressing, changing positions, changing towels, pushing some more. Finally, I seemed to wake a little more than usual, and she smiled down at me. "I think it's stopping, Dee! You're going to be all right! You are! Let me do this just a little more, then I'll untie you. Okay?"

In a sudden burst of clarity, I found my voice. There was one thing I desperately wanted more than anything, but when I spoke, it was in a whisper so faint I had to repeat it for her. "Please ... please clean me. Please."

"What? Where?"

"Between my legs. Please."

She paused and I could see her look down, see the shock on her face. "Oh." I could only imagine what it must look like; Jay's cum mixing with all the blood. I could still feel it. I could still smell it. "Did your ... did your father do this to you?"

"No .... Jay."

"Jay? Was he the boy you ran away with?"

I couldn't find my voice again, but I think I managed a small nod.

She stopped pressing on the latest compress and reached for the next towel, moistening it in a small bucket of water I hadn't noticed before. I felt its coolness as she began cleaning the cum from my inner thighs, moving up toward my cunt. "I wish so much you hadn't come back," Mommy was saying, pushing the tip of the towel inside my gaping opening, cleansing me of Jay's slimy deposit. It felt good. Good to be clean. Then she inadvertently scraped the rough material across my clit.

I hadn't uttered a peep during the beating, but I did now. I screamed a weak "Ahhhhh!" as I came and came and came. My body jerked inconsequentially against my bonds and the orgasm just seemed to drain the last teeny bit of strength from my body. Mommy didn't seem to notice at all, just went back to the job of staunching the blood flow from my back as I lay quivering from the ecstasy that had washed through me.

"I'm sorry," I murmured meekly.

"Don't worry about it at all," Mommy said. "I think it's perfectly natural. The whip always leaves me that way, too."

"He whips you," I whispered, fresh tears on my cheeks. I was about to pass out. I don't know how I knew it, but somehow I did.

"No, not for a long time now," she said. "And never like this. Never, ever like this."

That comforted me, strangely. And yet my uppermost feeling was shame. My mother had made me cum. And it wasn't a little one, either. I was still tingling.

That was the last time. I haven't had an orgasm since. Not one in more than two years.

I woke to find myself in a very strange position. My bare breasts were pressed against the smooth fabric of the back of Mommy's dress. She had a firm grip on each of my wrists, and she was carrying me on her back, like a donkey with a heavy burden, slowly, one step at a time up the stairs. She'll never make it, I thought. She's smaller than I am and she has too far to go. But when I opened my eyes again, I was on my own bed, lying nude on my stomach, and she was rubbing something on my butt.

There was something I HAD to do before I lost consciousness again. "Please!" I croaked.

"What is it, dear," she said, coming close to my lips to hear my whispered plea.

"In the waiting room. Blue bag. Under the settee."

"You want it? I can have Martha get it for you."

"NO!" I murmured urgently. "No one must see. Please get it! Get rid of it!"

"Yes, dear. I promise," she said, and began swabbing my butt again. My mind drifted away.

I won't keep you in suspense any longer. I lived. My recovery and convalescence took almost two months, and in a way, they were the best of my entire life. I wasn't pregnant with Jay's child (or if I was, it wasn't for long). My period started almost two weeks early, possible from the loss of blood. I was extremely ill for awhile.

I got to know my mother, and oddly, she became a friend. At times, Daddy would come for her, demand her presence, and she would never hesitate to leave me and serve him. But he allowed her to return to me when he was finished with her, and for the entire period, Daddy never spoke a word to me; which, I thought, only added to pleasantness of those eight weeks. She read to me as I lay there, my wounds open to the air, slowly healing. Book after book, she read, and I loved it. Loved her, the way every daughter wants to love a mother. When I was strong enough to sit, I would read to her while she sewed patches for her quilts. It was a magic time.

But it ended. One day, Daddy came to me and ordered me downstairs to the main office. It took me almost a week to figure out what had happened with the mutual fund. Daddy had taken over its administration, and quite frankly, he had bungled it badly. My formula was in tatters. Once some erroneous variable has been added to a complex equation, the permutations compound at an incredible rate. It took me almost two more months to set it back on the track to profitability. I worked feverishly, sometimes fourteen hours a day, but the work was all I had. Mommy went back to her quilting room upstairs. Our dysfunctional world was back in order.

Five months ago, Daddy took Mommy with him to a speaking engagement in Manhattan. He evidently decided to walk to a little-known gourmet establishment in the Restaurant District off of 7th Avenue, somewhere in the 50's. After they caught the guy that did it, the police said that the mugger had demanded Mommy's diamond necklace, and she'd given it to him immediately; but Daddy had refused to give up his wallet. The guy shot them each in the head. It probably would have been the trial of the century, but I threatened the New York Prosecutor's office with revealing certain "possible contributing factors" if they didn't cut a deal with the guy. There was no trial, and now he's serving a life sentence on Riker's Island.

As soon as I heard the news, I made Ben get an axe and knock open the door of the little room in the basement. Then I made him leave me, and I used that axe to pound the "X" table into splinters, which I burned in the little fireplace. Leather is a funny material. It took that bullwhip almost two hours to burn entirely, but I sat watching and poking at it until it was finally only ashes. I will never again experience the companionship of a man because of that bullwhip. I am hideously disfigured! And in the end, I could only find the strength to take out my frustrations on the implement rather than the man who used it.

I had our family lawyer fly to New York and apply "pressure" to the coroner's office. While, by law, an autopsy was required in a homicide, Mommy's records were to remain sealed and the Chief Coroner was the only one to see her body. He seemed sympathetic, and no one ever knew about her scars.

No one has ever seen mine, either. No one until Brenda, that is. And of course, I have never breathed a word of this to any person on earth. Not until Brenda.

The story left me exhausted, teary-eyed, and strangely light-headed, but of course, the four glasses of Dom might have had something to do with that. Brenda had tears, too, and she had snuffled frequently into her napkin during the hour-long baring of my soul. I really DID feel better telling someone about it, but I still had serious doubts whether I'd done the right thing. We were both silent for a long time, and she seemed to want to say something, but was reluctant. I just waited. I'd done enough talking.

Finally, she looked at me and said "But that's not why, is it? It's sad, but it's not the real reason."

For a second my blood ran cold. I had a very funny feeling that there was considerably more to this young woman than meets the eye. I remembered how she'd looked at me in the shower. Could she really see inside me? "The reason for what?" I asked, holding my breath.

She was silent for a long second. "You're going to commit suicide, aren't you, Dee?"

I glared at her, unbelieving, and I opened my mouth to answer, shut it again, then reached for my glass and knocked it over. Across the room, a waiter saw me and came hurrying our way, but I waved him back, and he changed direction and rushed into the kitchen, instead. What could I say? Icouldlie. Icouldtell her to go to hell.

"How ...."

"You look like someone I used to know," Brenda said calmly. "My freshman year. She lived in my dorm, on the same floor. She was quiet, kind of a loner, but I think we were friends." Another tear slid down her cheek. "At least, I think we were. Second semester, she started getting a funny look in her eye. Something ... I don't know ... hard to describe. But then, after another week or so, she changed again; like she'd made up her mind. She seemed more at peace, I suppose, like she was glad the decision had been made. She looked like .... She looked ... like you do. The same sort of expression. A few days later, she threw herself off the roof. It was twenty floors ...."

"And now you wish you'd been able to talk her out of it," I said, my voice dead.

"No," Brenda replied quietly. "I don't think I'd have been able to do that." She paused again. "I just wish I'd been able to tell her good-bye."

I stared at her. I was afraid to say a word.

"Please, Dee," she said, staring pleadingly into my eyes. "Don't do it without telling me good-bye. Come to me and tell me before it happens."

I don't know why I said what I did next. I guess I did it out of some sort of survival instinct (which is especially funny for someone about to do what I'm going to). When trapped, animals lash out. Humans turn to mean-spirited words instead.

"Very nice," I hissed at her. "It would make a GREAT magazine article! 'How I Saved the Poor Little Rich Girl!'"

If I had struck her in the face, I couldn't have injured her more. Her eyes widened in utter shock, she opened her mouth to say something, shut it again, and her face dissolved in total despair and sadness. She raised a hand to her mouth and sobbed, stood rapidly, overturning her chair, and turned to flee.

I reached out with both hands and grabbed her right arm. "Brenda ... Brenda, I'm sorry. Please, sit down. I didn't mean that. Please!" At least three waiters, scurrying around the periphery of the room, setting tables for the evening service, had frozen in their tracks and were staring at us, wondering whether to help or keep away.

Brenda looked back at me, her hand still to her mouth, and she tried to talk through her sobs. "Did ... did you ... did you really think I ...."

"NO!" I implored. "Please forget I said that. I ... You ... you just really surprised me, that's all. I didn't know how to react. Please sit back down! I'm so sorry!"

Slowly, she sat, and I did, too. The waiters began scurrying again. I didn't know what to say, and it was evident she was afraid to say anything. She took a tissue from her purse and blew her nose, then sat silent, miserable.

"What do you want me to do?" I asked her quietly.

She looked up again, a glimmer of something ... hope? ... in her eyes. "Promise you'll tell me before it happens," she implored. "You have to tell me personally, to my face. I promise I won't try to talk you out of it, though I want to, of course. But it would be unbearable if you didn't tell me good-bye."