Page 112 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
Emily flips up my short skirt with flourish, and I don’t even need to see the audience—I can feel their reaction. Their murmurs, their shiftings in their seats. They like seeing my bottom exposed like this. They like seeing me exposed like this, patiently and sweetly humiliated.
There is a stillness that comes, then, after I kneel and after I’m presented to them.
It’s like the stillness before a rifle shot, with fog in the air and damp Scottish heather scratching at my boots. It’s like the pause before the first swipe of lipstick over my mouth.
It’s the first barely-there hiss of water against a boat’s hull, just as it starts to move.
The quiver that shivers through me settles low in my belly and takes root between my legs. It’s trepidation and delight and reckless anticipation.
The first strike is so sudden, so swift, that I don’t even have time to react before the second one hits in the exact same spot. I let out a surprised oh, and the crowd stirs again, watching and watching with eager eyes.
Emily moves to the other cheek, and then back again, alternating sides but stuttering her rhythm so I can’t guess where and when she’ll hit next. There’s no regularity, no certainty, no mental comfort. My comfort will come from her, and only when she allows it.
And she can read me with eerie precision: when I flinch, she waits, when I cry out, she strikes again, faster and harder. Heat stings across my skin and settles beneath the surface. I feel parts of my body that I hardly think about otherwise—the blood flushing up in the shape of her hands, the muscles quivering underneath. The hollow architecture of my skeleton jouncing with each strike. The parts of my body that move when she hits me, and the parts that don’t. My breasts flattened underneath me, my heart beating like a drum behind them, my lungs dilating inside my ribs, my teeth clicking together on the particularly nasty spanks.
The crowd is beyond warmed up now, they’re hot, they’re hot and restless with me. They breathe when I breathe, they gasp when I gasp. When I open my eyes and peer past the lights into the first few rows, I see people openly petting and sucking each other while they watch me.
I am their living pornography—their object of lust and their shameful catharsis all at once.
I love it so much that I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to unfold myself and walk off this stage. Maybe I can stay here, maybe I can live in this moment forever—
Emily finishes with a flurry so fast and vicious that I begin to cry. Big tears, lots of them, spilling effortlessly down my face, and it feels so good, not only for the release from the pain, but for the release from the empty, numb anguish of earlier today. Of yesterday.
It’s a release that’s almost like orgasm, but even more intimate for how vulnerable it is, how wit
nessed it is.
How savored it is.
I cry and the people watching moan—in envy or in appetite or both—and we’re bound together by it. By the witnessing and the savoring.
I’m smiling into my arms as I cry.
Emily smooths her hand over my bottom. It wasn’t a bad spanking—certainly not the kind that calls for cold packs or arnica—but after anything like this, I need to be petted and soothed. I need to be called a good girl. I need to be loved on.
And she does, she does all the things I need. She rubs my sore skin as she leans down to murmur tender appreciations, she carefully rearranges my skirt to restore my modesty, she helps me back to my feet. She doesn’t fondle me, she doesn’t palm anywhere she shouldn’t.
She doesn’t do anything wrong.
And yet the minute I straighten up and blink out into the audience, everything feels wrong.
Guilt comes crashing down onto me; it breaks over my head and shakes me down to my marrow, leaving the rubble of the last ten minutes in a heap around my feet.
Shame comes next, then more loneliness than ever.
And I know exactly why. It’s because the moment I shifted position and stood, the moment my thighs pressed together, I could feel how wet I’d become. I could feel how my nipples pushed and pebbled against the lace of my bra and snagged against my sheer blouse.
I told myself before we came up here that it was supposed to be a friendly spanking, that there was nothing sexual or improper about it . . . and now here I am with a ready body and a racing heart standing next to someone who’s not Rebecca.
The wrongness of it sends me abruptly off the stage, down the steps, and hurrying through the tables to find a way out of here—a way to anywhere, I don’t even care. A hallway, the lobby, the street. I can’t be in here a single second longer, and I only just barely force myself to move calmly, to keep my face serene, before I find the exit at the back of the theatre and take the stairs up to the main floor. I know I left Emily on the stage, I know that might have looked strange, but I’m past caring, I’m past everything—
“Delphine, wait.”
Emily’s voice echoes across the marble-floored lobby. I force myself to stop. I force myself to turn.
When she sees my face, her lips part. “Are you okay?”
“No, I’m—I’m not quite okay.”
