Sisterhood - Temptation Ch. 01

Katharina lifted the doorknocker and held it in her hand, poised to bring it down against the worn brass nub beneath. She hesitated, not quite ready to announce her presence. She thought she might be a little early, but she didn't have a watch on her, and there was no clock in the corridor either.

At six, was when Miss Vera had said to come to her chambers. Katharina had set off already at half past five. Half an hour was far more than enough time to make her way up from her dorm room one floor below and then traverse the long corridor. But she hated being late for anything, and hated especially having to hurry to be on time. She had walked quickly nonetheless, just as a matter of habit, powering her way along the hallway. And now her heart was pounding unreasonably, and she needed a moment to compose herself. She drew slow, tightly controlled breaths, worried that her unseemly panting would be audible through the wooden door.

She steadied the arm that held the doorknocker, and tested its weight. Then suddenly she lost her grip on it, her hand slightly clammy against the cold brass. The knocker fell in a silent arc until it struck the nub fixed to the door and smacked out a single dull metallic thud. Hurriedly, Katharina grabbed it again and struck down twice more, harder. The uneven pause between her first, accidental, knock and the two after it jarred in her ears.

There was a soft shuffling sound from behind the door, maybe footsteps. Katharina's breathing seemed if anything to have gotten faster and more labored. She wanted, rather more desperately than she cared to acknowledge, to make a good impression on Miss Vera, and her clumsy mistake with the doorknocker had unsettled her. She made a last effort to calm herself, drawing in one deep breath as she smoothed down the front of her gown and hooked her hair behind her ears.

The door opened a few inches, seemingly of its own accord. Then Katharina looked down and saw the figure of an extremely short, slim girl with blonde-brown hair holding it open. "Oh. Hi," Katharina said, laughing awkwardly, then quickly pulling her face straight.

"Hi," the girl chirped back in a high-pitched voice, "It's you. Katharina, right? Come in."

"Or Katja if you like," Katharina nodded. She stepped in through the doorway as the girl pulled it open.

It was Katharina's first time in Miss Vera's chambers. She took in the room at a glance, trying not to appear to be looking around. It was decorated sumptuously in gold and deep purple, with drapes covering the stone walls, and a translucent lace curtain in front of the one large exterior window. Around the edges of the room stood tall lamps between various wooden chests of drawers and a couple of dressing tables. In the center, on a worn purple rug, there was a haphazard semicircle of armchairs and chaises, upholstered in various subdued colors. And in each corner of the room, either side of the window, there was a four-poster bed of the sort that Katharina had seen a few times in other rooms of the house. Both beds had their dark gauze curtains drawn.

"So, have a seat," the short girl indicated one of the chaises in the middle of the room, "She's up in her study, but I've called her. She'll be down in a moment."

"Thanks," Katharina sat primly at one end of the chaise. It was plush and comfortable, but she didn't feel sufficiently at ease to spread out or lean back. After shifting a couple of times, she sat up straight and brought her legs together in front of her.

The girl who had shown her in skipped cheerfully over to sit at the opposite end of the chaise and smiled at Katharina. Katharina supposed she should chat. A silence would be awkward. And it would be nice if Miss Vera didn't just find her sitting there like an expectant lapdog when she walked in.

Katharina recognized the girl. She was a dmurrhisi, or non-Sisterhood girl, and was one of several resident pets that usually stayed here year-round, carrying out various tasks in the running of the Summer House, preparing events and parties, looking after guests and so on. She was extremely short, maybe a little over a meter tall. The other Sisterhood girls called her 'minigirl', along with a few rather unkinder things. Katharina thought she might once have learned her real name, but couldn't recall it now.

"Vera says you're a very good student," said the girl. She had a coy, flirtatious look on her face, gazing up at Katharina and batting her eyelids.

"Oh, I don't know," Katharina laughed awkwardly, "I study hard, is all, I guess."

"No," the girl insisted, "She has high hopes for you."

"Well, thanks." Katharina found it excruciatingly uncomfortable to receive praise. Privately, she thought, or hoped, that she was doing quite well with her studies. At least better than most of the other girls she knew. But it always felt rather crass to acknowledge it, at the same time as it felt impolite, and a little insincere, to completely dismiss a compliment. She groped for something to say to change the subject, and spoke the first question that entered her mind, "Whose, er... ka'ini are you again?"

"I'm Anna's. But I get shared a lot," the girl replied matter-of-factly.

Katharina hadn't got as far as thinking of a follow-up. "Does she... Um, is she nice?"

"As long as I'm good," the girl giggled. She leaned across the chaise towards Katharina and propped herself up on her arms, looking up with the same girlish, mock-shy pout on her face and fluttered her eyelids exaggeratedly, "So can I see it?"

"See what?" Katharina asked, feeling her cheeks redden.

The girl looked down at Katharina's lap, then back up into her eyes. Katharina had guessed already what the girl wanted to see, but had hoped to deter her gently by feigning ignorance. Katharina knew that girls gossiped, and she had sometimes caught snippets of what they said about her, from a conversation that cut off just a little too late as she entered a room, or she heard it through one of the flimsy dividing walls in the toilets.

"They call me names, you know," the girl said, still looking intently at Katharina.

Katharina was momentarily thrown by the apparent non sequitur. Then it occurred to her that the girl was trying to curry sympathy by drawing attention to the fact that she, too, was the subject of ridicule and of perverse fascination because of an unusual physical feature.

"What is your name, by the way?" Katharina asked.

"If I tell you, will you show me?" the girl replied eagerly.

"It's really not that impressive," Katharina sighed.

"Mari," said the girl, turning her gaze away for a moment.

Again it took Katharina a moment to process what the girl had said. "Mari is your name?"

The girl nodded. She bit her lower lip and smiled, "Now you have to show me."

Katharina shifted on her seat. Despite her embarrassment, she felt a slow, warm throb right between her legs as she spread them a tiny bit further apart. The girl was very strikingly pretty. Petite, with bright, catlike eyes and long silky hair with a golden gloss to it. She was barefoot, one of her dainty feet propped up on the chaise, and she was wearing a comfy-looking pair of slim leggings and a small white t-shirt cut short to reveal the tanned skin of her almost flat stomach.

"Maybe another time if you like. In private," Katharina ventured. Under her long gown she had on only a standard pair of the tight black shorts the Sisterhood provided for everyday concealment when guests were in the House. The first guests for the Summer Ball were still a couple of hours away, so she hadn't bothered to wrap herself as she would normally for an event at which outsiders would be present. Now it felt as if the shorts were slowly getting tighter and tighter each time she looked into Mari's eyes.

"You know it's nothing to be ashamed of," Mari insisted, "You have something really special, something exotic. More exotic than other Sisterhood girls, I mean. Me, I'm just short."

"That has its advantages, though, doesn't it?" Katharina countered.

"Yeah," Mari rolled her eyes, giggling, "Ideal height for sucking dick, you can carry me around over your shoulder, and so on, blah blah. None of those are actually much use in reality. Anyway, for some girls I'm even below the ideal height for sucking dick."

"Well, back at you," Katharina laughed. Mari's cheerful humor was disarming, and Katharina felt herself warming to her. She glanced down at her own lap, "You think this is actually useful?"

"Try me," Mari stuck out her tongue, "I bet I can find a use for it."

Katharina found she was quickly getting properly, uncomfortably hard. What she always found most awkward was how much her dick lengthened when she got turned on. At rest, it was more or less manageable, not so much bigger than other girls'. She could pull it back between her legs and tuck it away, either under one cheek of her backside, or between them, as she had done just before leaving her dorm. It wasn't a fabulously comfortable solution, especially for her balls, which she just had to squash tight between her legs, but so long as it stayed soft it wasn't too conspicuous, and she could wear her gown or a long t-shirt to cover her behind. But now it had flopped free of her crack and was starting to grow out behind her, something that she was aware probably looked particularly ridiculous, and was more than a little painful.

Katharina winced, and leaned slightly to one side to ease the discomfort of keeping her dick bent completely backwards while half hard. She gave a short, embarrassed laugh, "I guess you've kind of, um, how to put it... made it difficult for me not to show you now."

"Ooh," Mari clapped her hands together excitedly, "I promise I'll only look. I won't touch it or anything."

Katharina began inching the hem of her gown up her legs. Then she saw Mari's eyes dart across the room and hastily back again. Katharina followed her gaze and saw a door at the nearest side of the room swing open. She let her gown fall back into place and straightened up in her seat, sitting down firmly and painfully on her still stiffening dick.

"Damn it!" Mari shrieked. She folded her arms in a theatrical huff, "She was just about to do it!"

"Just about to do what?" said Vera as she entered the room.

"I wasn't..." Katharina's voice caught in her throat and she felt her cheeks redden. She looked up at the figure of Miss Vera, standing just in front of the open doorway. Her hands were on her hips, which she held slanted, and her face wore a bright, kindly smile.

Looking at Vera didn't do much to ease Katharina's discomfort. Flirting with Mari had been a case of simple, physical lust. But the sight of Vera, Katharina's mentor and the woman whose approval meant more to her than that of any other in the Sisterhood, stirred in her a very different, deeper pang, one that Katharina found vaguely shameful for its adolescent intensity.

She wasn't in love with Vera, not quite. Having only just left her teens, Katharina didn't have all that much experience to draw on, but she knew enough to recognize the symptoms of an unreasonable, self-destructive crush. She had had them before, and by now she was adept enough at keeping them in check, by walling her feelings off into the realm of pure fantasy, and saving them up to ration out to herself when she was alone and could enjoy a moment of harmless self-indulgence.

As a senior girl, one who had already been under the Sisterhood's orders for several years, Vera was mentor to a group of novice girls, with some of whom Katharina shared a dorm. At times when she let fantasy get the better of her, Katharina flattered herself that she was Vera's favorite. The two of them shared a passion for the history of the Sisterhood, and for searching out lost pieces of lore in the library. They did extra study together, they spoke from time to time in the language of the old Sisterhood, at least for simple things that Katharina could manage with her still incomplete mastery, and once or twice they had even exercised together in the gym. And now, of course, Katharina had been invited for the first time to Miss Vera's own chambers. But Katharina was never sure how many of these favors Vera also showed to other girls. She was at times ashamed of just how compulsively she sought out tiny scraps of evidence that she, and no other girl, was a special student.

Vera was beautiful, too. Katharina had no idea how old she was. She suspected about thirty, though her tireless enthusiasm was like that of a much younger girl. She was perennially cheerful, and had a simple, friendly smile that nonetheless at times seemed to carry a subtle sting of mockery or of superiority. She had long, light brown hair tinged with auburn. She was slim, athletic, small-busted, and liked to wear very tight sports clothing, like the black yoga pants and long-sleeved red top that she had on at that moment. She also rather conspicuously eschewed the constricting undershorts that many Sisterhood girls chose to wear even when outsiders were not present in the house.

"Okay, leave the poor girl alone, you pest," Vera called out to Mari.

"You told me to entertain her," Mari protested.

"Indeed," Vera smiled, "And I'm sure you have. Now shoo. I hear your mistress needs some items reaching down from high shelves."

"Very funny," Mari's face scrunched into a frown. She hopped down off the chaise with a sigh. "See you later," she waved at Katharina as she skipped over to the main door and let herself out.

"She's cute, isn't she?" Vera said after the door closed behind Mari.

"Yes," Katharina replied weakly. With some relief she felt the pressure on her dick begin to ease as it softened. She concentrated on not looking too intently at Vera's tightly-clad legs.

"So, Katharina," Vera beckoned, "Come join me in the study. We can do a bit of reading." Vera spun on her heels, her hair flouncing out behind her, and she walked back through the door by which she had entered.

Katharina wondered whether, by walking out of the room without first waiting for her to follow, Vera might be deliberately giving her a moment's discretion with which to rearrange herself. Vera seemed always to be able to tell when other girls were aroused. And she always let them know it, albeit subtly. Sometimes she glared at them benevolently, sometimes she simply coughed and looked away. Katharina found it excruciatingly embarrassing to be so easily read. She stood up, then quickly pulled up her gown and reached into her shorts to yank her dick back through her legs and tuck it up between her buttocks as firmly as she could. She waddled quickly over to the door, twisting and crossing her legs as she moved so as to settle herself back into a semblance of comfort.

The next room seemed to be a small bedchamber. A metal-framed single bed stood in one corner, and opposite it a tall wardrobe. The bed was unmade, the duvet crumpled to one side, and scattered piles of clothing lay on the floor beside it. Katharina didn't stop to look around, as her attention was drawn immediately to a wooden ladder that led steeply up from the middle of the room to a square hole in the ceiling.

"Come. Up here," Vera called out, standing at the top of the ladder with her head and shoulders already through the hole.

Katharina took hold of the ladder, testing its stability against the thin sole of her light indoor shoes. It felt reassuringly sturdy. She put her foot on the first rung and began climbing. As Vera crawled up through the hole in the ceiling, Katharina caught one quick glimpse of the contour of Vera's dick inside her tight pants. Then she looked hurriedly down at her own feet and climbed up after her.

Katharina poked her head up into the darkness on the other side of the ceiling. Her eyes adjusted quickly, and she looked around at a fairly spartan attic space, bounded by unpolished wooden floorboards, a stone wall, and the steeply sloping eaves of the roof. To her left and right, the space extended quite a long way, probably over the neighboring rooms, until finally cut off by makeshift dividing walls made of unclad bricks and mortar.

Vera extended a hand and helped Katharina up as she hoisted her lower body through what turned out to be a trapdoor, with a hinged panel. Katharina clambered to her knees and then to her feet, and took a broader look around. This was clearly Miss Vera's private study space. A stretch of the stone wall was lined with low bookshelves, each shelf stacked with books, some glossy and new, some old, and some very old indeed, little more than sheaves of crumbling paper, the spine falling away. More books were stacked in towers on the floor. Opposite, wedged into the angle where the floor met the roof, was a table strewn with writing materials. Beside a sloping lectern on the table there was a glass-covered oil lamp that shed a dim yellow light.

"A bit dusty, I'm afraid," Vera looked around her and up at the cobwebs spanning the wooden rafters above.

There did seem to be an especially thick layer of dust in places. But it was a curiously clean-looking kind of dust, an almost pure white, like the chalk dust off an old blackboard. There was rather a lot of it on the floor, in uneven scuffs and smears.

"It's okay," said Katharina feebly, "It's kind of cozy."

Vera reached onto the table and extinguished the lamp and for a moment the room went dark but for the square of light glowing up through the trapdoor in the floor. Then there was a rustle and the sound of a curtain or blind sweeping aside, and it was suddenly light again, much lighter than before. A broad skylight in the sloping roof was uncovered, letting the late afternoon sun shine down directly onto the table.

"Better for reading," said Vera. She pulled two stools out from under the table with her foot, "So, Katharina. Come. I want to share something with you."

Over many years of practice, Katharina had perfected a particular technique for sitting down on stools or benches while concealing herself. She knew she didn't especially have to conceal herself now, in Vera's company, but as a matter of habit she spread her legs for a moment and slid quickly onto the seat of the stool, inclining herself forward and letting her groin land at the very near edge of the seat, so that she could then drag herself onto the stool while sitting down, pressing her dick backwards and tucking it away as she closed her legs. The slight tugging pain as her dick was pulled back was reassuring, in a way. It felt like being wrapped up tight and safe.

Vera swung gracefully onto the stool beside her, legs spread. She took a book and propped it up on the lectern. Then she glanced sideways at Katharina. "You know, you don't have to make yourself uncomfortable," she said.

Katharina looked intently at the book in front of them, not meeting Vera's gaze. "It's okay," she said, "I guess I'm just used to it." She meant to communicate that she was used to tucking her dick away, even when in the company of other Sisterhood girls, simply because it had become a matter of habit. But she realized that her remark was probably a little oblique. "I mean, used to, you know, sitting like this."

"Well, as you wish," Vera took a pair of wire-framed spectacles from beside the lectern and set them on the bridge of her nose, "But it's only us here. I promise you that girl Mari won't be coming back to pester you again."

"Oh, it's okay," Katharina repeated. She hesitated, wondering what it might be diplomatic to say, "She was nice. I didn't mind."

"Do you like her?" Vera asked, turning to face Katharina.

This time, there was no avoiding Vera's gaze. "Um, by 'like her', you mean...?" Katharina began hesitantly.

"Never mind," Vera spun back round on her stool to face the lectern, "Sorry. It was an impertinent question."