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“If you are!” I told her

Dolly shivered.

“When I are……am” she said.

“At six o’clock tonight. Hotbitch’s text said”

There was milk on her chin and a stray cornflake in her hair and little spots of blood, like red buttons on the tiled floor between her feet.

“Must I go back?” Dolly asked querulously.

“You must!” I told her “We had a deal……”

“And you want your……your wife back?”

“Damn right I do!” I said.

“Do you think Mistress will have beaten her?” she asked.

The thought had occurred to me.

“I don’t think so” I said “Otherwise I’m sure Annette would have phoned me”

“But if she was liking it! What then?”

That thought had also occurred to me in turn.

“Then I’ll have no complaints” I said.

“And if she hasn’t then Mistress will beat me all the harder!”

I was rapidly running out of options, that much was becoming plain to me. Maybe Annette had wanted to phone me but couldn’t for some reason. That thought was worse but, short of actually going over there early there was little I could do about it. There was no guarantee Hotbitch would see me before the appointed time in any case, especially if I was bringing Dolly back before I’d finished with her.

So I made some toast and marmalade and cut it into small squares for her. She ate it like a dog off the bowl on the floor without thanking me.

“Are you still hungry?” I enquired when she’d finished.

There was marmalade on her nose and on her forehead but the stray cornflake had now disappeared.

“Hungry? Yes!” Dolly said to me.

I watched her eat two more slices of toast in her bowl, crouching low down with her back end in the air.

“Better!” she announced when she’d finished it all “Better now toasts all gone into me!”

“Anything else?” I asked.

“Only drink” Dolly replied “then you must take me outside to pee……”

“W……with your leash on?” I asked suddenly hearing her very clearly.

She nodded.

“So I don’t run away……”

………………

Dolly made quite a noise drinking the water and quite a mess on the floor to add to that which she’d already made. I left her alone for a moment and went in search of her leash and when I came back with it I found her crouched down by the back door waiting for me dutifully.

I wanted to say “Walkies!” when I clipped the leash onto her collar but thought better of it so I opened the door and led her outside instead. It was a natural bodily function after all and I didn’t want to make a big thing of it.

“You must tell me which way” Dolly said.

“Which way what?” I asked stupidly. Surely there could be only one way to pee.

“Crouching or squatting or on hands and knees?”

Those differences had never occurred to me.

“Whatever is easiest!” I said.

“No, you must tell me” Dolly said with more patience than I’d ever possessed.

So I told her to squat and watched as she watered a considerable area of lawn.

I was in another predicament after that, without paper or anything for her to wipe herself dry but she did it anyway, with her hand which she then smeared on the grass as she’d done a thousand times before it seemed.

“Good girl!” Good girl!” I said.

I felt faintly ridiculous.

………………

I’d mixed feelings when I led her indoors again. Muddled feelings I have to say. Feelings which turned over and over in my head and one after the other fought for supremacy. She’d have to do something really naughty if I was to punish her in the way she was expecting. No, I’d punish her anyway regardless. Maybe I could make some excuses for her when I took her back to Hotbitch. What if I did hit her and hurt her……

And so on.

Were there jobs she could do for me. Were there jobs we could do together. Should I allow her to dress, to wash herself, to have a shower or a bath. What the hell was I going to say to Annette?

And so on.

She stood silently in the kitchen waiting for me to do something. I knew she did. I could feel it.

I cleared away the breakfast things while she watched me impassively, skeletal and pale with her bejewelled navel betraying the only colour in her being. I wanted to ask her what she expected but knew it would be the wrong way to go about it. I wanted to tell her what to do but did not know what.

The dishwasher hummed into life when I pressed the buttons and Dolly smiled when it’s light clicked on. It occurred to me that washing up might be one of the tasks assigned to her by Hotbitch but I really did not want to ask her that either.

Mixed feelings! Muddled feelings! And not a single clue to a way to start anything with her.

She returned my gaze emotionlessly when I stared at her. Innocently, brazenly I suppose you could say, challenging me in a way, daring me even.

Yes that was what it was. She was daring me!

If I mentioned lunch would she go all hungry on me again I wondered. Would she want to start eating things all over again.

“You aren’t really going to do it are you?” she asked abruptly.

“Do what?” I asked, my thought chain interrupted.

“Return me like this” Dolly said.

“What else can I do?” I asked peevishly.

“You must make your marks!” Dolly said.

All the mixed and muddled emotions came to head at that point believe me! Here was I, a grown man, wrong footed by a naked waif of a woman in my own kitchen! A woman who’d already given me ample opportunities to use her in the way she expected. Opportunities which I had been too……too what, to take. Afraid? Reserved? Refined?

What the hell was it?

And here she was, once again, almost in desperation offering herself to me.

“Dolly I……” I began miserably.

“Are you a man or a mouse?” she taunted sarcastically “Call yourself a man do you? A real man! A lover?

She pulled a face at me.

“Fuck you!” she hissed “Fuck you and your bed! I am going to get dressed and get myself a taxi……”

“W……”

“No fuck you and you stupid……stupid……!”

I realised what she was doing a split second after I made a grab for her. A clumsy, half hearted grab and she easily eluded me.

“Stupid!” she hissed from somewhere behind me.

She pulled a face when I turned then once again dodged away.

“Man!” she spat “Call yourself a man? You’re not man enough to fuck meeeeee……!”

I had her by a strand of hair momentarily, a strand which pulled away from her scalp and brought forth a sharp little scream. Then the corner of the room caught her pinioned her so that she could not get away.

“Not man eno……!” she taunted again but my first slap, catching her crookedly across the top of her buttocks cut the rest of her question off unasked.

She didn’t yell in fact she didn’t make any sound at all and the stinging feeling in my hand made me smack her a second time and that much harder.

That time she did allow a single sharp yelp to escape her lips but it was obvious I was hurting myself more than I was hurting her.

She didn’t cower or make any attempt to escape, except in a way meant only to goad me into striking her again.

And against my better judgement I did.

This time my blow caught her fairly and squarely, and entirely accidentally on her left buttock. Maybe she’d presented herself that way purposefully, I cant be sure but it wouldn’t surprise me. Whichever, my right hand met her left cheek with a resounding crack.

A raised a bright, rosy redness immediately.

“Better!” she taunted “A teeny bit……!”

Even then she hadn’t cried out, although when I looked back on the incident I did recall her emitting a little gasp. It was enough to get me going in the way she wanted however.

“……teeny bit……” she began to say again when I reddened the other cheek so that she had a matching pair. By which time my hand was hurting enough to convince me that I’d need to get a cane or something similar if I was to proceed any further.

An unfamiliar urge stirred within me then, a thought stream which, until that moment I have scarcely ever before experienced in my life, an urge which perhaps, until that moment I had fiercely suppressed. Dolly exhibited, exuded even, something which brought out the worst, or maybe the best in me, a trait which I knew with a startling clarity I would have to develop.

When I struck her again it was with the determination of an enlightened man. That’s not the instrument used, merely the method. The instrument came five minutes or so later when I hauled her by one skinny arm out through the garden door and into the garage.

She weighed nothing and yet she twisted and turned and clung onto things desperately to no avail. A kitchen chair became overturned and a pile or newspapers and magazines dragged onto the floor in our passing, both occurrences only adding to my quiet, singleminded determination.

There are a lot of garden canes by the back door of the garage. Thin pliable rods of rattan, knot free and pliable, all standing together in the corner of the wall, some as thin as a pencil and as long as my arm, one or two a little thicker and longer.

By some miracle her arm did not dislocate when I dragged her into the garage and by the same miracle my free hand found exactly the right sort of cane. To begin with anyway.

She did scream then but I didn’t really hear her, scream and sob when the thin cane caught her and whereas that same scream would have stilled my arm without a doubt on a previous occasion it now served only to urge me to strike her again with a greater determination.

There is a kind of music, a coarse yet smooth cacophony within the swish and smack and sharp despairing scream, arpeggios of sounds which rose and fell as she turned her body this way and that, writhing into the arc of the cane, unbelievably, rather than away from it.

At first I swiped at her clumsily, blindly, not caring where the blow might land. I saw she’d curled herself so that he back was towards me so the first four or five swipes fell across her shoulders in an even, crossways pattern. She ought to be tied, I said to myself in a moment of distraction. Then I stepped back half a pace and gave her three stripes from the other side.

They were not really heavy blows, no more than a stinging sharpness made by the thinness of the cane but the effect on her skin was immediate and startling.

I might have drawn those lines on her back with a fine tipped pen so perfectly straight and thin were they. From shoulder to waist two of them ran, exactly parallel bisecting the three on the other side so perfectly that I recognised the angles. Ought to be tied to something, I said to myself. What if she tried to escape? But she didn’t. she made no attempt to and the cane fell again and again, drawing those same thin lines on her flesh lower down, this way and that until both her buttocks and the backs of her legs were patterned in red.

She should have been tied I said to myself looking down at her wonderingly. Tied and……

I realised I had finished with her when I could raise my arm no more. And if she hurt then I was hurting with her, from the pain of broken taboos and the unforgettable, unforgivable sight of her poor body.

“Even better!” she quavered and dissolved at once into tears.

What the hell was I to do after that? Say sorry? Sorry? What would be the use? Like a collection of sticks she hunched and snivelled, bruised and broken and leaking noticeably onto the garage floor. And yeah, in the heat of the moment I had forgotten all about that. All about her bleeding I mean.

Mixed emotions, mixed reactions. Elation, worry, quite a lot of fear.

Had I injured her permanently?

No, had I injured her at all?

And what to do with her. She……

“Mistress would approve!” Dolly sniffed. “Now you must fuck me properly. Like a man!”

© Aahlu. 150611.