Quick Like a Flash

"Quick Like a Flash"

Looking at the tape, it was easy for Lora to see that she had been acting strangely that day. She didn't notice at the time; she remembered the day of the interview with a remarkable, crystal clarity that seemed far more vivid than her usual routine. Most of the time it was just 'fly out, get into costume, get into makeup, set up the camera, ask the questions, get the answers, dismiss the subject, record the interstitials railing about progressive morality and the death of America, close up shop and fly home', but this one... this one stood out in Lora's memory for some reason. And in her memory, everything she did seemed perfectly normal and natural to her.

But the tape showed... well, the tape didn't show anything to anyone but Lora. She'd already paid Gerald five hundred dollars to admit to a 'camera malfunction', and she'd already scheduled a replacement interview with 'Queen Maeve' for next week in-studio. Lora couldn't let the recording get out, not when it showed her behaving so... inexplicably. Even if Lora knew that her behavior was odd and out-of-character, even if she suspected that Maeve had done something to her to make her act that way, she could never let anyone else see it. It would be a career-ender for a conservative journalist to be seen...

Lora blushed. She rewound the tape to the beginning, and watched again, trying to determine what went wrong.

It all seemed to start perfectly fine. There was Lora, golden blonde hair perfectly coiffed in a style that said 'sexy but demure', just enough makeup over her warm ivory skin tones to highlight her features, wearing a blue dress that looked sober and professional without giving up any of her sex appeal. She looked every bit like the perfect wife and the ideal mother, just the kind of American whose virtues she lauded every week in prime time to an audience of red-blooded patriotic men. (None of whom, again, could ever be allowed to see this tape.)

And across from her sat... 'Queen' Maeve. Lora was a little disappointed they couldn't get her into anything low-cut and leather for the interview, but apart from that, Maeve looked exactly like the stereotype of a ball-busting dominatrix that Lora wanted to get on camera. Skin so pale it looked like white marble, long raven-black hair that went all the way down to her tailbone, piercing violet eyes... even in a dark red velvet dress that came to her ankles and a black velvet top that went out to her wrists, she looked like some sort of decadent succubus waiting to suck the resiliency out of decent men everywhere.

Or at least, that's how she would look by the time Lora was finished with her. This tape was just a, a minor setback. It just made Lora all the more determined to ruin Maeve's sick little career. Not that she wasn't planning to do that already, but what Maeve did made it personal. Lora always won when she could make it personal.

Lora pressed play, and the interview jerked into life. "And we have with us today 'Queen Maeve'," she heard herself saying, "a self-professed 'erotic temptress' and 'queen of sexual bliss' who is actually running for public office in California's 22nd Congressional District. I guess my first question, Maeve, is whether you've ever heard the expression 'stay in your lane'?"

It was a good start, very aggressive, using the rhetoric of the Left against it, but Maeve only smiled like she was listening to a toddler telling their first knock-knock joke. She leaned forward in her seat, her face momentarily at an odd angle to the camera as a result, and said, "Oh, I'm reasonably sure this is my lane, Lora. What happens in Washington affects the life of every person in America, every single day. That includes me... unless you're saying I'm not a person to you."

Lora paused the tape and replayed it in slow motion, watching the change in her own expression. She could remember the way she felt when she heard Maeve's words, the sudden conviction that this woman was smart and eloquent and that trying to simply treat her like a joke would be a huge mistake, but... it didn't really seem to match up to what was a fairly mild barb on video. Lora had interviewed plenty of liberal talking heads, and she was usually more than happy to let them get their jabs in until she found something she could edit down to a humiliating gaffe on their part, but for some reason she hadn't done that with Maeve.

Lora rewound and watched herself again, but even though she could see the surprise settling onto her face, she couldn't tell why it was there. She hit play, allowing the interview to progress.

"I'm sure you're as human as the next person," she heard herself saying. The voice on the tape sounded strangely chastised to Lora, not her usual acid tones at all. But it recovered as she went on to her next line of attack. "It's really more your qualifications that I'm questioning. Do you really think that a career of 'punishing naughty boys and girls' could possibly prepare you for public service?"

Lora didn't mind admitting that she had tried to work quotes from Maeve's website into her questions wherever she could. Not only was it a good way of reminding her audience how perverted the other woman was, but she figured it couldn't hurt her ratings if a few guys heard Lora talking about 'punishing naughty boys' every now and again.

But in retrospect, that may have been where the interview really started to go off the rails. On the tape, Maeve brushed back a lock of her glossy black hair and said, "Honestly, I think it may be the best preparation of all. If there's one thing that liberals and conservatives can agree on, it's that there are a lot of naughty boys and girls in Congress right now who could use a good spanking." Maeve smiled wickedly, a charismatic grin that Lora could remember astonishing her with its pure sensual heat. "Even if we don't always agree who needs to be bent over my knee."

Lora paused the tape again, rewound it, played it back frame by frame. She could actually see the arousal etching itself onto her face with every word Maeve spoke, her expression tightening in a desperate attempt to pretend that Maeve's smile wasn't like a current of pure electric desire going straight down to her clit. (God, Lora could remember that feeling so perfectly. She made love to her husband three times a week, right on schedule, but she couldn't remember anything he'd ever done to her body as well as she remembered the way Maeve smiled at her.)

But it didn't make sense. Lora didn't feel that way about women, especially not kinky perverted women like Maeve. Even now, with the memory of that sinful smile echoing in her mind, Lora could look at the dark-haired woman on the tape and see her as just another smug feminist bitch who needed to be taken down a peg or six. But at the time... she replayed the video again, looking at it as a series of still pictures. There was Lora looking cool and professional, like a journalistic assassin. There was Lora listening to her subject's words, looking for a sign of weakness. There was Lora looking...

Blank. Lora stared at the image, frowning in consternation as she clicked a few frames forward and a few frames back to observe the transition. For just an instant, a fraction of a second, Lora could see the expression of the woman on the tape slackening into a complete and total vacancy, an empty stare without any thought or emotion to it. At normal speed, it was barely even there, just a flicker in the shift from cutting coolness to squirming, helpless arousal. But Lora saw it.

She rewound back to the first time Maeve spoke. Now that she knew what she was looking for, it was easy to find--a single frame, just as Maeve was leaning forward in her seat, where Lora could see her jaw go slack and the light in her eyes sputter out into vacuity. It was there and then gone in a flash, but the camera caught it. For an instant, nobody was home in Lora's head. She didn't know what it meant yet, but she marked the time code. Just in case.

Then she went back to where the interview left off, Lora's slightly stammering response to Maeve's innuendo that she tried to pass off as indignation. "Madame! These are members of Congress we are talking about. I think that if you can't respect the, the office they hold, I don't see how you can possibly expect to... to do right by the American people in that position yourself. I think you should apologize at once!"

On any other day, Lora knew, that would have been the beginning of the end for her hapless opponent. Invoking patriotism like that was always the perfect attack--either they responded by apologizing, in which case Lora could hammer them again and again for being so wrong they even admitted it themselves, or they dismissed her complaints, in which case Lora had a ready-made clip of the Left hating America. It was the perfect double-bind.

But it wasn't working here. Even to herself, Lora sounded weak and ineffectual, her normal authoritative demeanor reduced to sputtering petulance in the face of Maeve's calm confidence. When Maeve rested her head on her hand and said, "It's 'Queen', not 'Madame'. And might I remind you that I have watched your show. You once said that Nancy Pelosi, quote, 'should be spanked like a toddler if she insists on acting like one', unquote, and told your audience that Elizabeth Warren 'is just lucky that the Republican men are too polite to give her the spanking she deserves.' Do you think that what you said on those occasions was disrespectful and inappropriate?"

With a clear head and the benefit of hindsight, Lora knew how to respond to that. She could hear the right words forming in her head, a scathing response about journalistic hyperbole versus the perverse rhetoric of a decadent whore who was degrading the office she was running for. But the Lora on the tape was too stunned to think about any of that. In the video, she saw herself look down with a contrite expression on her face and mumble, "N-no, ma... Mae... quee... um, no."

And there it was again. As Lora rewound, clicking forward one frame at a time through the collapse of her facade of righteous anger into sheepish, stammering embarrassment, she found it again. That single quick frame of blank, mindless vacancy. She took a screenshot of it, went back to the other incidents she'd noted. She compared them, a chill stealing over her as she realized that they were identical. Absolutely, perfectly identical. In those instants, something happened to simply hollow out Lora's mind, leaving her empty for Maeve to fill with her own twisted thoughts.

But what? Lora went back over the tapes in each instance, this time looking at Maeve's face, but there was nothing to see. Maeve always seemed to have her hand up or her head angled or her hair tousled at just the right moment to keep the camera from getting a good look at her in the moments when she did... whatever she did. Lora racked her brains, trying to remember if anything seemed out of the ordinary about Maeve in those brief flashes of emptiness, but all Lora could remember was the growing sense of hot, humiliated arousal she felt as Maeve took control of the interview. Whatever it was, it happened almost too fast for a camera to pick up. Lora didn't stand a chance of remembering.

With a sigh of frustration, Lora returned to the video, determined to see it all the way through to its humiliating conclusion. On the screen, Maeve stood up with startling speed and stepped over to Lora, cupping the seated woman's chin in her hand and forcing her to meet Maeve's gaze. "I didn't quite hear you, young lady," Maeve said, her voice icy with authority. "Do you think that you were being respectful?"

Lora watched herself try to hold that gaze, to challenge that authority, only to drop her stare and whisper in a defeated tone, "No, Queen. It, it wasn't respectful. To speak like that." It was absolutely infuriating to see her body slump into submissive acquiescence like that; Lora wanted to reach into the screen and shake her own shoulders, tell her to snap out of it. But at the same time, she could remember the sensation of utter powerlessness that swept over her at Maeve's words, that bizarre feeling like Maeve's commands pressed down on her too heavily to even imagine struggling. She did a quick check, and wasn't surprised at all to see that there was another frame of slack-jawed vacancy on her face just before she answered.

But Maeve was still just out of frame. The whole thing had happened too fast for George to react, so all Lora could see was her own meek, terrified face as Maeve said, "You've been a naughty girl. Haven't you?" It was barely even a question, barely even an assertion. It was more like a statement of fact, like Maeve was presenting a piece of incontrovertible evidence at a sentencing hearing. And Lora remembered reacting to it exactly like that, even though it seemed obvious now that there was no basis to it beyond Maeve's chilly demeanor and Lora's bizarre, inexplicable submission.

But hindsight didn't matter. The past was fixed and frozen in this tape that Lora could never let anyone see, and all Lora could do was watch herself murmur, "Y-yes, Queen. I've been a... a naughty girl." Lora didn't even bother looking for the frame of mindlessness this time. She knew it would be there. She remembered repeating the words in a trance of helpless, abject shame, her entire body begging to be punished for her cruel and hurtful words. She recalled genuinely believing that she was a bad girl who deserved a spanking. Lora didn't need to look to know that Maeve made her feel that way. She just needed to know how.

And she needed to know very badly. Badly enough to watch every second as Maeve took Lora's hand and guided her over to Maeve's chair, sitting down and watching with every evidence of smug delight as the unaccountably submissive journalist pulled up her skirt and pulled down her panties. Badly enough to sit through the vision of her past self climbing onto Maeve's lap and presenting her ass, whimpering, "Please, Queen, please spank me, I've been so bad, please punish me, I'm so sorry, my Queen, please..." Badly enough to stare at every single swat and slap and wallop of her reddening buttocks.

After all, what else was she supposed to do? Just burn the tapes and let Maeve think she'd won? No. Hell no. Lora was going to destroy that smug bitch. This wasn't even about keeping the 22nd red--nobody was going to vote for some kinky fucking whore in a county that went for Trump. This was about making Maeve pay for what she did, getting even for every single one of the smacks that she made Lora count in a whimpering, pleading gasp that was as good as an admission that the spanking was making her horny as fuck.

Not that Maeve stopped there. "Does it make my naughty little slut wet to be punished?" she asked, switching hands so that she could keep spanking Lora while she inserted two fingers into Lora's sopping cunt. "Oh, I think it does! Tell me that you're a horny little spank-slut who loves getting her ass paddled and her pussy filled." The words came in a lilting rhythm, with the rise and fall of Maeve's hand keeping time, and Lora's cheeks burned with embarrassment at the memory of how good it all felt.

There was no moment of blankness before the next response, only Lora's face contorting in helpless, humiliated bliss as she whimpered out, "I, I'm a horny little... nnnnh! Ss... spank-slut, Queen. I, I luuuuhhhh... love getting my ass paddled. And m-my pussy filled." Whatever Maeve did to her, it was done by the time she was lying on the other woman's lap squirming and moaning and writhing in an electric mix of pain and pleasure. Lora's treacherous cunt spasmed in remembered ecstasy as she noticed the exact moment on the video when she had her first orgasm under Maeve's touch.

She recognized her second climax, too, and even her third. After that, her memory melted into a continuous haze of overwhelming sensation, and all Lora had was the tape to go on for a while. She could only watch herself moaning, "F-fuck, sssoooo good, thank you my Queen, thank you for filling my c-c-cunt oh FUCK!" as Maeve added a third finger and then a fourth, her jaw hanging open in a kind of dull amazement at the sight of herself reduced to a whimpering, pleading mess of mindless arousal. Even knowing that Maeve had used some sort of, of corrupt influence to bring it out, Lora never imagined this side of her could exist. The shock almost numbed her rage at seeing it used against her like this.

Almost. When she saw Maeve push her down to her knees in front of the chair, hiking up that long velvet skirt so that Lora could eat Maeve's pussy with every sign of mindless, abject enthusiasm, Lora felt a quiet, impotent rage at the way her adoring eyes were framed by Maeve's creamy white thighs. She could remember the taste, of course, surprisingly floral on her tongue and awakening an irresistible craving for more, but... the video brought home the reality of it. Maeve broke Lora's will, turned her into a bisexual slut and an eager cuntlicker without any apparent effort. And she made her love it. That was the bit that Lora would never forgive. That in her memories, this was the best sex she ever had. Not her husband, not her producer, not any of her college boyfriends. This goddamn pervert.

Lora was going to fucking get her for that.

And then she saw exactly how. When Maeve finally finished letting Lora worship her pussy, when she dragged Lora up to sit on her lap and hump her thigh like a horny little puppy while Maeve programmed her some more, there was just an instant where Maeve slipped up. It was just a moment, quick like a flash, but Lora saw her own face going slack and vacant on the screen. And Maeve was looking into the camera. Lora grinned viciously. She rewound the moment, then played it forward one frame at a time looking for the exact instant where Maeve used her sinister influence. She knew it had to be there. She knew she would finally have the proof she needed.

Lora's eyes lit up with pure joy as she finally found what she was looking for.

*****

"So is this your studio?" Maeve asked, sweeping into the room behind Lora as if the blonde woman was her honor guard. "I mean, it looks a bit more like an editing room to me, but if you want to shoot here, that's fine. I'm sure we can put down some cushions for you or something." She flashed a cutting smile at Lora, but Lora made sure not to look too closely at it. Maeve wasn't going to catch her like that a second time.

Instead of snapping back an angry rejoinder, Lora kept her voice deliberate and calm as she sat down in front of the computer. "Actually, this is the editing room. Before we started the second interview, there's a little something I wanted to show you from the first one. Something I thought might interest the American people, especially the ones in the 22nd Congressional District." She kept her eyes firmly aimed back at the screen, even as she turned her head enough to let Maeve see her deceptively polite smile.

Maeve sat down next to her. "I think there's a lot that would interest people about that video," she said, her voice filled with amused disdain. "We can probably split the profits 60/40 if you're interested in distributing it." Lora's cheeks flushed, but she felt sure that she detected a tiny undercurrent of fear in Maeve's words. The other woman was trying to knock her off-balance, goad her into making a mistake. Lora refused to rise to the bait.

She just queued up the video to the moment she was looking for, scrolling through the time-coded footage until she got to the exact second that she spotted the previous night. "It took me a while to find this," she said, still trying to keep her voice light and friendly even as the slow burn of her anger began to take over. "I watched this video almost frame by frame trying to figure out what you did to me. But now I know."