Fractured Crystal: Sapphires and Submission (10 page)

Kris stared at him incredulously. “You’re not fucking joking, are you?”

Daniel shook his head slowly, staring at her baldly as he continued to eat a piece of bread. “Nope,” he replied at last. “Wittgenstein worked as a gardener, you know. It helped him get a sense of proportion when he wasn’t writing, helped him think better. Who knows, a bit of exercise might help you.”

“I also heard he was gay,” she shot back, more tartly than she had intended. Then a dreadful thought suddenly crossed her mind. “Oh, God. You’re not gay, are you? This isn’t some dreadful trick on me, is it?”

He simply raised one eyebrow at this. “Would it matter if I were? In any case, I haven’t met the right man yet.” He took a sip of the orange juice.

“Oh, goodie,” she said, wriggling around in her seat in what she hoped was a naughtily enticing manner. “I do know what kind of physical exercise I’d like to engage in today.”

Daniel was having none of it, however. It was not that he was particularly mean to her, more that he displayed an indifference which
—
compared to his passion the previous night before
—
confused Kris. “Come on,” he said at last, standing and pulling a shirt from his chair. “You better eat up
—
you’ll need the energy. You can wear this
—
while it’s not too bad here in Summer, I still wouldn’t want to spend the entire day without any clothes on. The axe is by the front door. You can stack the wood in the pile near the Land Rover when you’ve finished.”

With that, he started to leave. “Hey!” she cried out to him. “Where are you going?”

“I need to attend to something,” he called back without even glancing at her.

“This isn’t part of the deal you know!” she shouted.

“You know where your keys are if you don’t like it,” was his only response. Then he was gone.

Kris was in a particularly sulky mood as she ate some scraps. Pulling on his shirt lightened her mood a little, if only because the smell of him reminded her of his lust the night before, in contrast to his casualness that morning. Returning to the living room, she saw her bag, she took out some jeans and pulled them on. She saw her pad on the table where Daniel had left it the day before, and idly wondered for a moment whether to spend her day drawing. She had the intuition, however, that while he hadn’t explicitly issued an instruction, Daniel would be displeased if she didn’t do something: in any case, she really wanted some hot water and realised that no one else would prepare the range for her.

The axe was heavy and awkward for her to use. Not for the first time, Kris began to appreciate something of Daniel’s strength as she fumbled a couple of times to try and hit a piece of wood, feebly letting the blade fall into a lump but unable to split it. Eventually, she worked out that the best way forward was for her to balance the axe on a window ledge of the croft, then
—
after angling her body beneath the long haft
—
to swing the axe down so that the momentum had a better chance of forcing its way through her target. She only nearly hit her bare feet once (after which she returned indoors to put on her trainers), and after an hour or so she had just about enough pieces of small enough firewood that would be able to start the range up for some hot water.

Inside the kitchen, she busied herself preparing the stove. Fortunately, Daniel’s back to nature instinct did not extend to the avoidance of matches, and so while it took a little longer for her to perform this basic operation nonetheless it was not impossible.

While the fire had started up in the range (heating water for a bath, she hoped), she began to clean up some of the things in the kitchen. Although the croft was bare, it was much neater than she had initially expected and she started to appreciate how Daniel arranged his life here for considerable simplicity. And it was then that it hit her.

She had, indeed, come to this place on an impulsive
—
possibly crazy
—
whim, motivated by the desire to be fucked in a way that she had never experienced before. She had certainly not come here to do housework or to be a drudge. And yet, through the simple expediency of being forced to do certain tasks that she took for granted, she had been completely taken outside of herself for a couple of hours
—
had enjoyed it even.

Feeling somewhat smug, and sure that she had passed the first challenge that had been set her, Kris settled into her bath, relaxing and treating herself. She felt a little less smug nearly two hours later, Daniel had not yet returned to the croft. In fact, it was not until the early evening that he did at last return, and by this time her previous aplomb had been replaced by more familiar sensations of anger, annoyance, frustration.

“Where the hell have you been?” she asked. “What have you been doing?”

Daniel said nothing, but stood in the doorway. He was still naked from the waist up, having evidently not decided to return for other clothing, and she had visions of him striding through the moorlands, half stripped of his clothes. The effect of this vision nearly undermined her anger with another, more animalistic passion, but her frustration was simply redoubled. She only had eight days left, damn it! This was not how it was meant to work at all!

“Why are you so angry?” he asked. The calmness of his tone was enough to push her into renewed fits of apoplexy.

“Why am I so angry? Why am I so fucking angry? Let me tell you!” She could feel her face blushing with rage. “I fucking need you, Daniel. I need... it! Don’t you understand? I have to... I fucking have to go back to real life in only a few days time. I just need to escape. Don’t you understand?”

She felt herself wanting to cry. It sounded pathetic even as she spoke those words, but Daniel nodded slowly. He crossed to her and held her softly by the shoulders. She wanted to punch him.

“You’ve got an armour all around you, you know,” he told her gently. “I recognise it
—
Christ! I’ve had it around me enough in the past. It’s stopping you enjoying everything, you know.”

“No! Not everything!” she glared at him. “Don’t try this psychobabble shit on me, Daniel.”

He was half-leaning over her, his body massive compared to hers. “Take your jeans off and bend over,” he told her.

Those words alone were enough to make her start to open up down there, and her breath came in fast, gasping jerks all of a sudden as she started to lose control of herself. She fumbled with her jeans, looking up at him with eyes full of lust. Yes, dammit! This was what she needed
—
a fast, hard, furious fuck, and forget how sore her vagina was. It needed punishing! Yes, this was what he owed her!

To her shock and renewed anger, however, when she eagerly climbed onto the old battered sofa, stretching out her slender legs and pushing her buttocks up into the air, her sex already moistening as she prepared for him, Daniel turned and walked to the front door. She was about to start shouting and screaming at him when he returned from outside, carrying a long, supple branch.

She watched in something approaching horror as he took a knife from his pocket and began to strip the smaller twigs away from the main bough, roughly cutting it into the shape of a switch. Putting the knife back in his pocket, he looked at her, his chest broad and strong, his face with an ambiguous expression on it as the shadows lengthened in the diminishing sun.

“I told you to bend over,” he said, and there was something in his voice that would not brook any disagreement.

Biting her lip, Kris returned to her earlier posture, her thighs trembling slightly as she curved her back and let her buttocks push up once more. Her sex was closing up now, her heart beating faster as genuine fear started to flood through her. She heard a swish behind her
—
did not need to be told what that sound was, but did not look back as a kind of terror took over her.

The first blow was a shock, but not as painful as perhaps she had dreaded. It made her jump, certainly, and she let out a cry but that was more surprise that agony as the switch landed across her buttocks. Her hips twitched, and she felt Daniel’s hands placed on one cheek, pushing her back into place.

The second blow was not necessarily harder but, as the tip of the switch caught her labia, this one genuinely hurt and her cry now was one of pain. She looked back at him, and now there was a tear in her eye, but Daniel’s expression
—
implacable, dominant, relentless perhaps
—
caused her protests to die in her throat.

He struck her again, and again. Each blow of the switch made her jump, and after he had used the switch on her a half dozen times she began to plead with him. “Please, Daniel!” she whimpered. “Please, stop it! I’m sorry! You don’t have to do this! OW! Oh God! Please, stop! Don’t hurt me!”

Yet he did not listen to her, but instead applied his instrument of torture another dozen times. By now, her buttocks were burning as red welts formed across the flesh of her cheeks, and those welts then began to form into bruises. His blows were sharp, efficient, and Kris had a feeling that this was far from the first time he had performed this act. At one point, her eyes dipped to the waistband of his jeans and she could clearly see the extending lump of his erection in his trousers. To her surprise, this also caused her pussy to clench the air, even as another blow made her lurch forward.

At last he had finished, dropping the makeshift cane beside the chair. Kris turned onto her side, rubbing her sore haunches and drawing up her thighs in a protective gesture, unsure what he would do next. He sat down beside her, however, and watched her with a half smile on his lips. The room was becoming ever darker and for a while they sat in silence. Kris had thought she was going to cry, but instead her feelings of distress were more anger and... she wasn’t entirely sure.

“You bastard,” she said at last. “You enjoyed that, didn’t you?”

“No more than you did,” he replied, his eyes glittering as he watched her.

“What do you mean? I didn’t enjoy it at all!”

He merely raised an eyebrow and shrugged. “Well, if you didn’t enjoy it, you can pick up your keys and go.” He lifted himself up and stood, looking down at her for a moment. She tried to keep her eyes on his shadowy face, although at this height it was almost impossible to ignore the huge lump in his jeans. “I’m going to bed,” he said, then turned.

When he reached the stairs, however, he paused and looked back at her. “Interesting, don’t you think? I didn’t rush, just now, but not once did it occur to you to use your safe word.”

With that, he climbed the stairs, leaving Kris in the darkness, her face burning almost as much as her painful buttocks.

Something had changed that night, for both of them. When he had taken her, he had allowed some of his more dominant nature
—
what Kris suspected was his more fundamental nature
—
to come to the fore. What had been between them before was a foretaste of the pleasure that he was willing to give her, but now he wanted to take from her. When he used her mouth, she felt that he was punishing her throat and she willingly submitted to that punishment. When he penetrated her, filling her womb, his hands pulled apart her stung, beaten buttocks and the pathetic cries she emitted were those of desire.

When she
opened her eyes
the next morning, she could feel that he was awake but he had remained in the bed with her, lying on his back. The lower part of his body was beneath the sheets, but she could make out the large hump of his cock beneath the folds of fabric, and the thought of that alone was enough to stir her weary body. She looked up at him, watching him as he stared at the ceiling deep in thought somewhere until, realising she had also woken, he turned his head slowly to look at her, smiling with his mouth but his eyes still distant, travelling elsewhere.

“I had a dream about you last night.” As she spoke, she let her hand wander to his chest, feeling the rippled contours of muscle lying over bone, then moving her hand slowly down his sternum towards his abdomen. She was still half on her front, one breast pressed beneath her, her hair scattered over the pillow as she moved her head closer to his raised arm.

“Yes?” he asked. He pretended nonchalance, but she was starting to become aware of subtle shifts in his tones that hinted at underlying seas and oceans of emotion.

“You were a bird
—
or, rather, a man with bird wings. Like Loplop.”

He laughed at this. “And what were you doing?”

She smirked. “I was waiting for you, to come to me.” Her hand continued its southwards journey
—
slowly, slowly.

“And what would I do when I came to you?”

“I’d prefer to show you than tell you.”

He turned his face to hers again. The eyes, captivating and alien all at once. “A sudden blow,” he said to her, as though out of the blue. “And the great wings beating over the staggering girl. He holds her helpless against his breast.”

She shivered at his words and placed her hand on his abdomen, resting it for a moment against the large mound that was so tempting. “Beautiful,” was all she said. “What is it?”