Fifty Shades of Submission (22 page)

"
Abuse me as you want, but don’t ever leave me!"

"Hush,” Saskia says
gently, rocking my head against her breasts. “I haven't betrayed you. I have not allowed any man to touch me intimately since you and I have been together.”

“
And Osiris?”

"
She’s a lesbian. I was humoring her. She has a crush on me. She’ll get over it. Be that as it may, I have come to a decision that will effect both of us.”

At the tone of her voice I felt a sickening feeling at the pit of my stomach.

She takes my face in both her hands and looks at me closely. “I have decided to take a lover. A male lover. I have been giving it some serious thought for days now.”
“Why?” I manage to blurt, my gut wrenching with agony.

She smiled serenely. “Why? Because I need a forceful man in my life – not just a submissive slave. I told you, I like being
dominated. I enjoy being treated harshly. And besides, if I did not take a man into my bed you might feel that I am not treating you cruelly enough!” She laughs. “Don’t look so sad, my darling. Just for today you shall be Julian again, the handsome young man whom I love and adore with all my heart. I will remove your slave collar and chastity belt and you will dress yourself as you used to when our love was wonderfully sexual and intimate. We will spend the day together and enjoy ourselves and forget all the horrible things that have happened between us. You will forget it easily in my arms, I promise - I shall kiss away all your sorrows."

She
removes the dog’s collar and unlocks the chastity belt with the key on the gold chain around her neck. She kisses me tenderly and smiles. "Go now and shower and get dressed – you’ll find your clothes on your bed. In the meantime I’ll also get dressed. We shall spend a wonderful day together!"

When I return
, freshly showered and dressed in jeans and T-shit, she is wearing the long white satin dress, her red hair framing her perfectly sculpted face. I marvel again for the umpteenth time at her perfect beauty. Is that at the core of my attraction for her, I wonder – the perfection of her beauty?

She dra
ws me down on the chaise longue beside her and puts her arms around me, holding me tenderly against her breast. She is no longer the stern heartless mistress, she has slipped back into the role of tender and adoring lover.

I
kiss her lips, captivated.

She
puts her pale, slender hand gently in mine. Her expression is soft, her eyes filled with tenderness. "Are you happier now, Julian?"

"Not yet."

She smiles and leans back against the chaise and pulls her dress down over her shoulder exposing her naked breasts.

I st
ared at them, mesmerized. "Saskia, you’re driving me mad," I stammer longingly.

"Kiss me
then," she murmurs, pulling my face down to her pale flesh, guiding my mouth to her hard nipples. “They’re yours. My breasts belong to you and only you.

"Are you happy
now?"
she whispers against my ear.

"Infinitely!" I
murmur.

She laughs suddenly. It i
s an evil, shrill laugh that sends cold shivers down my spine. I stop kissing her and freeze.

She pushes
me away violently. "You
dreamed
of being a slave,” she says maliciously. “You
longed
to be my plaything, and now you want to be a free again, my
lover
-
you fool!
A sign from me, and you are my slave again.
Down on your knees! At once!"
Her voice was shrill and venomous.

I si
nk down to the floor and kneel in front of her.

She yanks
her dress up over her shoulders, covering her breasts. "Oh how easy you are to toy with! One look at my naked breasts and you lose your mind. Look at you! You have the erection the size of a bull!”

I stare
back at her, speechless.

“
What’s the matter?” she cries malevolently. “Can't you believe that I have been merely toying with you since last night? The moment I mention the word love you turn instantly to jelly – it’s
pitiful
!
Laughable
! I was bored and wanted to play with you to relieve the tedium.
Don't
look at me like that—" She kicked me in the chest
viciously
with her foot.

"You
are no more than a
thing
to me! The moment you signed that contract you became an
object
for me to abuse at will! May I remind you that I can even kill you if I want to! And as each day goes by I want to more and more!”

She
reaches up and yanks the bell-rope suspended next to the chaise. The two black priestesses entered the room within minutes.

"Tie his hands behind his back!
"

I remain
kneeling and do not resist. They ripped the T-shirt off my torse and removed my jeans. Then they replaced the slave collar and the steel chastity belt. My heart sinks. For a brief moment she had set me free and showed me paradise – only to be hurled back into the darkness of despair once again.

“Take him out into the field and show him that he is no more than an animal to his mistress!” Saskia commanded. She laughed
shrilly.

The two women
clipped a leash onto my slave collar and led me out into the garden, past the vineyard to a fallow corn field beyond. The corn had long since been harvested and here and there a few dead stalks remained. A rusted, old-fashion plough lay abandoned in the long grass next to the field. It has been fitted with chains and a leather yoke.

The
two women put the yoke around my neck and harnessed me to the plough with chains. Then they pointed me into the field. Amun steered the plough while Osiris whipped my naked back to urge me to go faster.

It is getting dark and I am herded back to the house. My neck and shoulders are so stiff and sore from pulling the plough that I can hardly walk.

My mistress
is waiting for me. The look on her face frightens me. I have never seen her like this before - her face is deathly pale and her whole body is shaking with rage. Her green eyes are ablaze with hate. She snatches the whip from Osiris and strikes me in the face with the handle, opening a deep gash on my cheek that begins to bleed profusely.

“Take him down to the cellar!” she spits venomously.

It is the first I have heard of a cellar.

They drag me to a heavy wooden door
off the kitchen that had been locked since our arrival and which I presumed to be a pantry. But it is the door to a cellar and the women manhandle me through it. I am too exhausted to resist. They push me down a flight of stone steps into a dark, dank, windowless prison-cell.

I hear bolts being drawn on the outside and a key turns in the lock.

I am a prisoner, buried
beneath the house. If I die here no one will even come looking for me. I realize suddenly that I am the perfect victim for a crime. I have no family and a great deal of money. With me out of the way Saskia could think of ways to access my fortune. She was wealthy in her own right but I had inherited the kind of fortune that is capable of corrupting the souls of most men.

I
lie on the cold stone floor, hands bound like an animal ready for the slaughter. There is no light, no food, no water. There is a bucket for basic bodily functions, and a pile of straw to sleep on.

What is Saskia’s plan? Does she mean
to let me starve to death down here?

I am shaking
uncontrollably with cold. Or is it fever?

The woman I love hates me.
I am certain of that now.

I am
not exactly sure how much time has passed since they put me in the field to plough like an animal at the yoke, but I’m certain it’s been several days – the hours spent in pain and delirium. The raw chafing sores on my shoulder from the plough yoke is festering. I can smell myself. I stink. I am filled with self-loathing.

It is impossible to feel any lower than this.
The only other time I had felt as trapped and filled with despair as this was when my stepmother used to lock me in my father’s closet for days when he was away.

Finally after days of torment, a
white streak of light suddenly
floods across the floor as the heavy cellar door is thrust open. Saskia appears at the top of the short flight of stone steps. She is holding a torch and shining it down on me. She shines the light directly in my eyes and I blink like a rabbit caught in the headlights of a car.

"Are you still alive?" she says
.

"Have you come
to kill me?" I reply with a low, hoarse voice.

She come
s down the steps and kneels beside me in the straw. "Are you ill? Your eyes are glowing."

Her
small dagger glints in her hand and I recoil. I am certain that she is about to stab me with it. What will she do – plunge it straight into my heart as Osiris had wanted to? Or stab me multiple times to prolong my suffering?

I am too tired and broken to care.

“Go ahead, kill me,” I moan. “Put me out of my misery. You will be doing me a favor.”

She laughs.
“Of course I’m not going to kill you! I have come to save you.” She cuts the ropes that have been binding my wrists. It is a relief to have my hands free at last but my wrists and hands are painfully swollen from being deprived of blood circulation for so long. My fingers feel numb and unresponsive.

For a brief moment I contemplate putting my hands around Saskia’s throat and squeezing the life out of her. But I am too weak to
be a physical threat to anyone.

“Come on, get up,” she says. “You’re free to go. I think you’ve had enough punishment for the moment, slave.”

She turns and leaves and to my relief she doesn’t close the cellar door behind her.

Amun fetches me and helps me up the stairs and leads me in
to the kitchen where I sit weakly at the table and eat ravenously and drink a whole jug of water. My mistress has instructed Amun to remove the slave collar but not the chastity belt. Osiris cleans and disinfects the wounds on my shoulder and puts a bandage on it.
She is surprisingly gentle. She treats the deep cut on my cheek where my mistress had struck me with the handle of her whip.

“That’s gonna leave a permanent scar,” she says. “You should have had stitches for that.”

I shrug. What is one more scar on my body? It’s just another tangible token of receiving undeserved punishment from a wrathful and dangerous woman.

My mistress
has instructed the women to buy me new clothes and several pairs of jeans and identical plain white T-shirts have been left on my bed, together with a pair of Italian leather sandals. I am instructed to wash and get dressed.

I feel
strangely lightheaded and disorientated - like a prisoner who has been freed from solitary confinement after many weeks.

For the last number of
evenings after dinner my mistress has called me to her little sitting room upstairs. She asks me to sit next to her and read to her. She seems entirely transformed and treats me kindly. It is almost as if she is ashamed of the savagery which has occurred before.

She
displays a touching tenderness towards me, her eyes filled with compassion. Gradually I begin to forget the horrors of the previous week and find myself slowly beginning to trust her again, little by little - although I am always on my guard, alert to signs of her changing mood.

Now she takes the book from my hand, gently closes it and puts it on the table.

"Don't you want
me to go on reading, mistress?"

"Not to
day, Julian. Let’s just sit for a while, together – let’s try to forget all our troubles.”

"If y
ou command it, mistress."

"I do not command it,
I am
asking
it of you," she says gently. She rises, puts her hands on my shoulders, and looks down at me.

"
You have no idea how much it hurts me to see you like this! Do you believe that?"

I
look at her dully. “I don’t know what to believe anymore, mistress.”