Page 11 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
I’m happy that I’m here at Thornchapel, no matter what horrors had lain waiting for me in the ruins.
I’m happy that my sore hand and cunt remind me the ruins yield just as much magic as they do pain.
“On your feet, Poe,” Rebecca says. As Auden stands and helps me up and as she pulls her jumpsuit back on, she asks, “Am I correct in assuming you’ve been flogged before?”
“Yes, Mistress.”
“Do you like it?”
I’m too deep in the moment to do my usual cost-benefit analysis of telling a Dominant the truth. So I say, “I love it,” entirely honestly, knowing that she might deny it from me simply because I love it, or flog me within an inch of my life instead. Who knows with sadists?
But Rebecca steps forward and cups my cheek in her hand, raising my face to hers. “Good,” she says softly, and I’m happy again, because I can see so clearly, in a way I can’t always in a scene, how much she wants this for me. To help me. To give me some release from the pressure swelling and swelling inside my chest and threatening to rupture into something noxious and sticky, like a balloon filled with tar.
“Help me cry, Mistress,” I whisper. “Please.”
Her eyes are dark and gentle. “I will,” she promises, leaning in to kiss my temple. “Over to the middle of the room.”
Auden has redesigned the rooms in the south wing around the idea of leaving several of the original beams exposed, and this particular room has a pitched ceiling with a beam and its braces running across it in such a manner that you could toss rope over the beam and—for example—use it to tie up a librarian so that her wrists are stretched high above her head.
Which is what happens to me now.
Rebecca shows Auden how to wrap my wrists in rope and how to keep my bonds snug while still ensuring good circulation. In the dim light, he seems to have trouble making out the knots, and puts on his clear-framed glasses, which should make him look arty and pretentious, but only make him more beautiful.
And then he bends studiously over the rope, examining each wrap and each flex of my fingers as carefully as he would a building plan—as if seeing my body and his restraints in the clean, precise dimensions of diagrams and elevations.
And every time I flinch—which is often since the jute is rough as hell on the hand still healing from the thorns—he pauses to drop kisses against each and every cut, just like he did last night. His lips are so soft and so warm on the parts of me that hurt, and for every kiss he drops onto my hand, I want to drop fifty onto his feet in return.
Rebecca has him restrain me while I’m standing flat-footed, rather than up on the balls of my feet, which I appreciate, even while I suspect it’s so she can beat me for longer without my leg muscles tiring. And then she has Auden get her the first flogger.
I love a good clamping, I adore being spanked, I could be tied up every day for the rest of my life—but there’s something about flogging that scratches the deepest itches I have. It’s pain that dances, it’s pain with melody—it starts off waltzing between stinging and tingling, it spins and pirouettes between smarting and soothing; it stitches steps and leaps of ecstasy right beneath the surface of my skin until my entire body is taken over.
So I’m breathing hard in anticipation, my denied orgasm still aching in my groin, but nearly forgotten now that I’m awaiting one of my favorite treats, and when Rebecca throws the first strike, I don’t gasp or whimper. I sigh in relief.
Again and again she goes, warming up my back, talking quietly to Auden the whole time about where to aim, how to avoid wrapping the falls, how to gauge distance and force. I try to listen, to be present, but the more she hits me, and the more my skin heats and my flesh stings, the less I can absorb. Endorphins drug my blood, pleasure and pain fight with each other in my mind, and my cunt grows so heavy and wet between my legs that it feels obscene.
“This one was suede,” I hear her say, and then I hear her ask for the next flogger. She tells him that it’s made of pressed cowhide with the falls cut at an angle.
I take a deep breath.
Fire sears across my back, and then again right away. I dance up to the balls of my feet, letting out a low noise, but Rebecca moves with me, following my body with hers so that each flick of the flogger lands with the same agonizing heat. The tips of the falls—what feels like hundreds of them—move across my skin like knives dragging sparks across stone, hot and bright and dazzling—and soon my entire body is on fire, I’m a pillar of flame.
I grunt, I arch, I crumple, and still the fire comes, like a relentless destiny. Like a blessing.
Rebecca moves to my ass, careful of my kidneys and tailbone, and to my thighs, as cruel there as she was everywhere else. I can feel welts and even the hot/cold pinpricks where the skin is broken through, and there’s a low sound welling up from my chest, wordless and elemental, like a keening, wailing prayer.
I don’t know how long I’ve been making it, because I don’t know how long she’s been flogging me, but it feels like forever, like I’m as old as the thorn chapel itself, like I’ve been here in this room dancing between pain and delight long enough for thorns to grow around my feet and roses to bloom in my hair. I’m sweaty and on the edge of—something—not orgasm but something like that, like release maybe, or reprieve. Tears are close and the air feels thick around my body, like Thornchapel itself is caressing me and tormenting me, just like Auden and Rebecca are.
“One more flogger, Proserpina,” Rebecca says. She sounds slightly winded, which makes sense because flogging is toil for everyone involved, not just for the person being flogged. “And I don’t think it will take long.”
“Long until what?” I hear Auden ask quietly.
“You’ll see.”
I hear Rebecca set down the cowhide and hear her pick up the last flogger, and I know, I just know that this last one is going to break me. It’s going to crack me open and everything will spill out and I’ll be empty.
I want to be empty. I want to be no one and nothing.
“You should stand in front of her,” Rebecca tells Auden. “Support her if she needs it.”
