Professor Gustavus Fielding Porter reached for the blue book on his austere, worm-scarred 18th Century desk. The late August sun burned through the redwood-slatted Venetian blinds.
Judy Latimer took the essay book from him as if it were an angry cobra. Her eyes darted to her older sister with a touching desperation.
"Too little learning can be a dangerous thing." Helen Latimer patted the girl's tawny mane. "I'll leave you two to get on with specifics."
Judy stood outlined against the window, slowly rolling the blue book into a tight tube. Porter escorted her sister out of his study.
"Remember, professor," Helen spoke softly as they passed English hunting prints and startling New Guinea masks decorating the hallway. "Judy came through your gate a virgin. She should exit through it equally intact."
"Not subtle, but commendably succinct." He paused in the entry way while she plucked his tutorial fee from her purse. Accepting the check, he opened the paneled blond oak front door. Classic California summer heat mantled them as he bowed her out onto the masonry stoop.
Helen stood in the probing sunlight, gazing at the tree-dotted Orinda street. Beyond the brick and wrought iron fence, a gunmetal open SEL convertible waited at the curb. A man in his thirties watched them behind blue mirror shades.
Porter placed his name as something clerical. Helen had introduced him at a party. Jonathan . . . Parrish . . . Chancery ... no, Vestry; that was it.
The woman turned back suddenly, tilting her face upward. Her lips met the professor's in a swift, probing kiss. His English propriety felt deliciously scandalized.
Then her cool, brunette beauty retreated down the summer-scorched stone path.
Porter studied the tight sway of her posterior and closed his front door reluctantly. He flexed his robust shoulders. He'd been approaching 40 when he'd tutored dear Helen. 1977, 1978-could it have been so long ago?
She'd worn her hair longer, then. He'd often compelled her to rubber-band the black locks into a pony tail, heightening the juvenile effect when he made her fetch the tawse or one of his canes before her lesson.
She genuflected to set the instrument across his knees as he sat on his battle-worn Ashanti tribe stool. The wide, moon-curving seat rested upon the stylized image of a crocodile devouring a fish. Age and use had given the wood a venerable black patina.
She'd sat cross-legged before him as he tutored her in both his bread-and-butter discipline, physics, and his coy mistress, literature. She stumbled less in the precise realms of hard science.
Still, a clumsily executed theoretical proof or inattention to detail in researching experiments merited the girl punishment. He wistfully recalled the slap of hard leather against her pale, bare bottom.
A forest green sweater framing her round hips ... the wisp of ebony straying between her strained thighs ... the fire-toughened fingers mauling her right cheek as the split-end Scots whipping strap lashed once-twice-thrice!
She held her cries until six or seven. He had her choking down grunts thereafter. He punished. She wiped her eyes. The lesson continued, Helen kneeling on the rug, skirt and panties forfeited.
Lithe and wild in his arms, she'd responded more vocally to him later. Now, he sighed, salt and pepper dusted his broad mustache. He fringed 50 and some damn fool had called off the Sexual Revolution.
"Fair?" He rhetorically addressed a four foot tall Sepik River face seamed with incised half-moon designs. The tiny fanged mouth and cowrie shell eyes resembled the homocidal Queen encountered on the croquet fields of Wonderland.
"I ask you, sir. Where's the justice in altering the rules while I'm still hot for the game?"
He strolled back to his study. Judy had an appealingly fragile aspect in her lace-collared, berry-colored dress. The garment concealed her hip curve and breast swell in its pleats.
He remembered his Aunt Lola wearing a similar ankle-length gown as he romped on her lawn, home from Eton for the Long Vacation. Fortunately, dear Auntie Lo had been a cabaret dancer of no small ability before her marriage. She read to him in French from pre-War volumes appetizingly illustrated by Franz von Bayros and the mad, carnal Felicien Rops.
The tender association bolstered his professional smile as he gazed fondly at Judy.
"Don't worry so. You know the cane only stings a short while."
"Two or three days," Judy whispered demurely. Her lustrous gold-chased brown hair hung about her resigned face.
"I called it not wholly satisfactory. Yet," he rounded the desk to shut the blinds, "your organization had merit. You showed a clean grasp of Judge Woolsey's decision on Ulysses and of the Orwell terminology."
He drew the drapes and clicked on the floor lamp. As shadows changed, the African statuary atop bookcases and shelves seemed to shift about in anticipation.
"I thought your main theme diffused, however. The argument spent its energy in cluttered eddies of thought."
He hung his coat on a bronze serpent projecting from a Beaux Arts cloak tree. Three straight-handled Malaccas of differing lengths waited in a stick stand. He chose the 28-inch one.
A laser-straight British whipping cane, the handle had a cork wrap to enhance grip. The tip thickened percept\h\\ at the striking end.
"In acknowledgement of your very definite achievement in the essay, I shall permit you to retain your panties."
He wrenched the pencil-thin rattan in a tight arc and released it. The wood sprang straight, quivering with leashed fire.
Judy timidly placed her twisted essay book on a three-shelf bookcase, an offering before the blind, arrogant majesty of a carven Kuba king. She hiked her mid-calf dress slowly up her bare legs. The pleated cotton furled about her waist.
"What a charming color," Porter appreciated as the lowest triangle of her French-cut briefs came into view. "Does it have some coy designer name?"
"Uh, Blushed Beige." Judy bunched her dress higher.
"How prophetic." He watched the elastic waist band branded JOCKEY appear.
"You've had enough toe touching this summer. Let's try an innovation."
The cane swept toward a chromed steel tube fixed horizontally between two mighty mahogany bookcases. "You know the bar."
Indeed, he'd had her clutching at it, legs and naked cheeks spread for pedagogic effect while the tawse encouraged good scholarship.
"Lie on your back, head toward the wall. Make believe you're about to do that bicycle exercise your California gym teachers love so much."
The corners of her mouth quivered downward at the indignity. She wiggled onto the floor. Her hips rocked up, the weight going onto her shoulders. Legs waivered in the air till she tucked her ankles under the chromed bar. Her arms thrust flat to the floor, palms down, bracing her body.
"Admirable. Can you work yourself just a hair further from the wall, rounding that rump just a significant bit more?"
Her spine rippled, wormlike, as she crept that extra inch toward him. Her buttocks tightened, jutting apple-firm, ripe with the temptations of Eden.
He could scent the released heat from her body, damply spiced with girl-fear. Her eyes fluttered at him as the cane rose. He whipped the pliant stick downward, feeling it curve in the air.
The wood jolted along the length of one single cheek. The impact sang up his arm. The lithe shaft burrowed into panty and taut muscle, down the line of the V-cut leghole.
The girl's tremors ran through the cane. He let the punishing sting build, crest. . . . The Malacca flashed up and down again, before she could blink. Her shoulders twisted as the second lancing cut radiated pain.
Alas, her solid-colored briefs permitted no joyful sight of the swelling wealage. He concentrated on her panged, inverted squirms.
A third whistling stroke landed dead into the meaty curve of her Blush Beige buttock. Her lips bared her teeth as she whimpered.
He moved a bit to the right and flogged the other buttock. Three clean, hard licks marched from the center toward the panty edge.
He stared down at her. She looked lovely in red-faced distress, the breath hissing between set teeth.
"Six for an imperfect essay. Do you remember your first Hue book, in June?"
She gave a moist gasp of assent.
"A much more painful experience back then, wasn't it? You've improved markedly. You may rise."
She uncurled stiffly, each motion of her bottom plainly hurting. Under his tutorial gaze, she got to her feet and lowered her clothes. Her hands batted at wrinkles. She smoothed her disordered hair.
"Perhaps we should indulge in a moment before your oral recitation." He gestured toward the door.
She nodded gratefully. His eyes followed her panged carriage as she tiptoed away to wee. "Now, Judy, why did Connie dance naked in the rain?" Porter leaned forward in his brass-bound dark oak swivel chair. One hand pressed on his knee to communicate interest. The girl stood before him, her palms gingerly comforting her bottom.
She plainly longed to be elsewhere. Yet her eyes glazed and rote memory clicked in faithfully.
"According to Dr. Lyman Dean Carter, the dance symbolized the spiritually rich but physically impoverished Rousseauian individual, whom the British Empire had failed to imprison in the meshes of our Western Civilization's techno-pragmatic materialist trappings, and who would soon wed the socially revolutionary vitality-"
"Potency," the professor emphasized. "That's a key word in discussions of Lady Chatterley.'' "-potency symbolized by John Thomas in the novel and visible in the contemporary cultural sphere as Gandhi-"
"Mohandas Gandhi. Show you know more than the average film-watcher."
"-Mohandas Gandhi, whose Satyagraha teachings are represented-"
"Embodied," he enunciated firmly. "That's a very fleshy-sounding word and it's important to give corporeal heft to discussions of Lawrence."
"-embodied in the text as Lady Jane, the passive maistrye ..." She paused, uncertain of the Chaucerian syllables.
"You have the pronunciation. Very good."
"... maistrye arising from the natural forces, which absolutely vitiate Clifford, the aristocratic figure of decayed technarchy, but which renew the class-transcending consciousness latent in Mellors' . . . uh . . . peter principle."
"Lingam principle." Porter gave a curt nod to encourage her. "Quite good. It's vital to do it all in one, sustained breath so no one can interrupt and seize the floor. Never inhale while stating a thesis or you sacrifice the initiative."
He put a second hand on his knee and peered with theatrical intensity at her apprehensive eyes. "But. Never. Ever. Even begin. To let them know. That you refer privately to the central sexual symbols of the novel as 'Dick' and 'Jane.' "
"No, sir." She bobbed her head enthusiastically.
"I mean it. That's bloody meat waved before academic wolves. This is psycho-social interpretation of great literature based on historical-pastoral-" He caught himself. "Urn, tragical-pastoral . . ."
Porter let her see an abashed grin. "Now I'm doing it also. In a real discussion, the pack would swarm over me and rend my living carcass."
He cleared his throat dramatically. "A psycho-social interpretation based on the historio-symbolic school of preter-conscious criticism, pioneered by dear Dr. Carter. This is serious stuff, not The National Lampoon."
"Please, Professor Porter," Judy quivered at the edge of earnest tears. "I won't ever call Mr. Mellors' pud 'Dick' or 'Peter' again."
"Of course you won't." He sighed. "Don't mistake the dangly thing for a penis, though. Boys have willies. Lawrence dealt in eroto-political art, not glandular fiction. Males in novels-in 'emotiodramatic word scenarios' as the learned Dr. Carter affectionately styles them-male literary figures have lingams. Female counterparts have yonis."
He followed the anxious emotions in her face as she gradually comprehended that he wouldn't whip her for the lapse.
Actually, Lying Dog Carter's preter-conscious rubbish bored him intensely. Unfortunately, his old Oxford lecture hall mate had established his convoluted analyses as The In Trend, suitable for Feminist Literary Theory as well as for classic, dottering Freudian Patriarchal Models.
Porter wished that he could read about Connie Chatterley frolicking jaybird in the drizzle just once more with a proper hard-on, instead of having to summon up Carter's dynamic synthesis of Havelock Ellis and Arnold Toynbee . . .
. . . unless he'd combined Henry Spencer Ashbee and H.G. Wells. Porter recalled Lying Dog's fervid babblings about "seminal outpourings of pucilous Eloi" in The Time Machine. Small wonder that he himself had concentrated on adding a physics doctorate after picking off his litterarum baccalaureus.
He marshalled his thoughts. He was there to tutor a girl about to enter her freshman year in college. He had hired himself out to sharpen her scholastic in-fighting skills, not to have fun talking about books.
"Now, Judy, you told me you liked the ending, where Connie does a bunk with her husband's gamekeeper. Very well. Tell me why you ought to like it."
Judy's hand massaged her stung flank as her tutor sliced a dark, sharply fragrant Macintosh apple into wedges with an ivory-handled straight razor.
"No, really." He laid pale, red-veined lengths on the cheese board by the squares of smoked German Bruder Basil. "I'm fascinated by this sorority bid of yours. Another girl I know has the same itch.
"We Britons can't avoid our public school heritage. My generation and class could no more shirk the rigors of Eton and its ilk than a Pacific Coast pelican could avoid absorbing DDT. Both hazards came with the era.
"It defeats me why a young woman with full freedom to choose would elect a sorority such as Sigma Epsilon Xi, which proudly advertises how stringently it will restrict her liberty."
Judy hesitantly took a bit of cheese and slid it onto some apple. "I guess ... I don't know why you wouldn't, I mean ..."
She eloquently rubbed her caned bottom as she munched the snack. He watched her dress tighten and ease over the tender gluteal muscles. The sunlight from his dining room window touched her milky ankle.
"It's like you taught me about poetry, sort of." She fought to frame the concept. "There's this regular structure, an organized flow of things-like rhythm and meter and all that. We can be free within it and stronger because of that ... I guess it's like a skeleton. Without bones, we'd be a blob, sorta like an amoeba. That's free, but . . ."
She tilted her shoulders in a shrug, thrusting a fetching hip toward him. "Jonathan says everything's more rigid on the East Coast. I mean, they had Dukakis and we had Jerry Brown. Whole different heads. I guess a lot of people-lot of girls, particularly, want more framework. To give strength, not to just lock them up in a closet like Patty Hearst."
"I begin to comprehend." He furrowed his brow. "My terribly old-fashioned Old World British ways have become fashionable again, in this post-Warhol world. I've watched young ladies waft through Sigma House without comprehending-and there's a champion example, there."
She followed his glance and saw Lucretia Sue Merydith swaying along the sidewalk. Her smile broke out. "She's part of the reason I want to pledge. She's alum adviser to the new girls this year. I really want to get into her Basic Bio class next term, too."
"I've admired her as a colleague since she's been a lecturer at St. Cloud." The professor recalled the earlier attentions he'd bestowed during her very full course of his tutelage.
The six-foot redhead's body had been explosive and captivating, pliant as whalebone and rugged enough for the sports he loved best. A year at public school as an exchange student in England had polished some facets of the rough Georgian diamond, but she'd come to him with cold determination to have him finish the job. Her will had impressed him, and her stamina had led him to take her further than any girl he'd privately instructed.
Regret tinged his rosy memories. The woman who had blossomed under his hand now stood at the center of her own orchard, a revered alumna at Sigma, a graduate student already teaching as she thundered toward her doctorate.
He studied Judy Latimer. A sweet kid, and enough said.
"More apple?" He brandished the cut-throat razor over the cheese board.
"Why are you such an impossibly horny pig today, Mr. Scott Madrigal, hmmm?" The woman shifted her legs, which had been coiled on the park bench, so that he could burrow further down her black and grey skirt's waistband.
The pressure of his hand inside her pantihose, against her stone-chilled fanny cheek, felt warmly reassuring. A cold wind whipped along under slate-grey sky. Slivers of blue appeared and vanished in San Francisco Bay as the sun fought the overcast.
Nora Quincannon knew vaguely that the rest of the Bay Area languished in summer's heat. In the city, God's air conditioning lashed at the tiny Russian Hill park with full icy fury.
She loved the dank San Francisco climate. "Nora, I just don't believe this sorority thing of yours." Scott's breath tingled along her ear, down onto her neck where her hair had whipped back.
"I've been dogpaddling in the business world almost ten years. You and the people I know at Sherman and Michaels make up my whole social life. That's it." The woman hoped he understood her frustration.
"Okay, going back to college makes a pretty big change after the real world." Under her wool skirt and nylon pantihose, his hand reacquainted itself with familiar, friendly curves. "But a Greek letter hen house?"
He kissed her eyes, her chin, her fog-cool lips. Her errogenous zones blazed.
"I respect you for returning to school, but you're almost thirty. You just can't go home again." His voice vibrated against her cheek as she nuzzled his neck. Hairs he'd missed shaving prickled her skin. "I graduated from college seven years ago-"
"Sally Klein swore she'd give me a recommendation to Sigma Epsilon Xi."
He turned rigid against her. His fingers pressed stiffly into her bottomcheek.
"That's a . . . there's this gal at The Daily Cal who's in their Berkeley chapter. She claimed she couldn't sit for the first seven weeks of class."
His intense concern thrilled her. "Sally described it pretty graphically."
"Really? They walloped her when she didn't say 'please' and paddy whacked her when she said 'cheese.' I mean, writing for the paper at Berkeley I know that college is a whole different mindset from real life. Okay. But those gals are far fucking out."
She loved it as his free hand closed protectively over her breasts. "The hard part, big guy, will be giving you up during the Boy Ban. That's the total embargo on private dating from the first day of class until the Harvest Festival in . . . in . . ."
"October," he finished for her.
She twisted her face up to stare at him.
"Hey, I knew someone out at St. Cloud." He squeezed her reassuringly. "Harvest's the big party season opener. Hallowe'en, Veteran's, Thanksgiving-Playboy may give Chico State the rep, but St. Cloud knows how to boogie down-and-dirty. The action's right here in the Bay Area."
"Orinda? A party capital? Oop!" She struggled to sit up. "Get your hand out, now." She pulled herself up and leaned against him, crushing his buried palm between her flesh-padded right ischial bone and the stone bench.
A couple rounded the trees. He had a blue windbreaker and camera. A cap jammed tightly on his grey hair. She hugged at herself in her red and orange sweats. Sun had sizzled her skin to deeply seamed leather.
"How do you people live like this?" The woman demanded. "It's over 100 degrees in Tulsa!"
"That's why I stay in San Francisco." Nora felt the band on Scott's class ring bite at her bottom.
The guy in the windbreaker laughed. "They got ways of keeping warm, Alice. Figure it out." His eyes lingered. "I'll show you back at the Hyatt."
The tourists passed on.
Steam hammered and spat in the pipes heating Nora's trim studio apartment. She straddled her naked lover's chest on her open sofa bed. The stereo competed with the radiator, trying to wrap them in the tide pull of Debussy's La Mer.
Scott's fingers kept their own tempo, diddling with her breasts at an adagio appassionato pace. The University of California class ring brushed her left nipple again and again. She yearned for a fat, gaudy ring with St. Cloud University's emblem.
"Most of what I did at Chabot will transfer," she murmured dreamily. "In a couple of years, I'll have a real degree-not just units toward an A.A."
He bucked his hips, prodding her bare buttocks with his rubber-armored cock. "Hey, are we fucking or mapping your game plan for the future?"
"I just thought you'd care to know," her lips made a slow circuit of his cheeks and forehead, "that I intend to keep this place. I'll need it when I graduate."
He laced his fingers together at the nape of her neck, under her dark, rust-colored hair. She felt his strength as an insistent tug pulled her torso so that one elongated nipple entered his mouth.
"Besides, they don't house pledges. I couldn't live there for six months-assuming they'll have me, anyway."
His teeth marked a generous bite of tit. An exquisite fever scored her skin. He licked and nibbled, the hot flesh flaring with sensation.
The whole idea of a female support group seemed elusive and gossamer-thin. Nora remembered that party group Donna Earl had wanted to start-five or six women friends who'd throw regular, serious get-togethers so they could all meet and share new men.
Silly idea. She had Scott, after all. Other kinds of female support . . . maybe Sigma and St. Cloud had them; probably they didn't. A gamble. Maybe he had it right, some kind of bid for missed youth. A Peggy Sue Got Married trip on a college campus ...
"Boy Ban." Scott had started kissing along her upper ribs. She knew the routine and readied herself to rise on all fours, "Joy Ban."
His lips and tongue gently inflamed her belly as she straightened up on her four limbs. He slid further under her, kissing her cunt, his teeth teasing the blood-hot labia.
She clambered around over him, putting her knees behind his head. She faced the dark, latex-shrouded prick.
His tongue's lavish attentions drove her mouth down onto the impatient fleshy horn. The taste always reminded her of a dental clinician's gloved finger impersonally engorging her mouth. She sucked away, eager to get through that ritual section of their foreplay.
To the east of San Francisco Bay, behind the Berkeley hills, the shallow valley holding Orinda felt the late summer heat beat on dry trees and drought-burned lawns.
Six feet from her heel-less sandals to her carroty-haired scalp, Lucretia Sue Merydith ambled down the walkway toward the sorority house front door. Fat shingled pillars supported the porch roof that shielded the full width of the building's street side.
That classic Southern California architecture had been imported into the Bay Area sometime in the 1920's. St. Cloud University had been a lonely bible college, lost amid the hills of brown grass.
After its conversion to a full-range institution of higher learning, the school had accepted Sigma Epsilon Xi as its first Greek organization. The years had not treated that pioneering heritage kindly, Lucretia Sue reflected.
She swung open the beveled glass door and stepped into the cool entry hall. The Social Room on her right seemed deserted and forgotten. She had taken her B.A. only three years previously, and she remembered when it would have been alive with actives, even this early before the term began.
She turned toward the dining room and caught sight of a thoughtful Gerry Vestry.
"Well hug me blue and call me Babe," the tall Georgian drawled, "I thought that straggly-haired mess who yelled 'Suckers!' at us in Mardi Blanc had a familiar flip to her fanny. I should have recognized those tinsley li'l glasses of yours, but I never expected to see any Sigmas running for the boat fit to rupture a lung."
Gerry Vestry's mouth curved ruefully under her silver-rimmed spectacles. "That exit caning had me distracted, or I'd have known that flame-topped mop. This kid at the Customs Shed could really hit. But I guess you found that out."
She winced eloquently.
"Rank Hath Its ever-loving Privileges, sugar," Lucre-tia Sue informed. "My friend Ju's daddy, the local baronet, just oozes with it. He posted a bond in lieu of that tenderizing stick-though it did give us a wholesome fright until they learned whose kin she was."
"I can't believe it!" The blonde gaped. "You should have protested. That vile entry and exit caning routine is Mardi Blanc's most memorable custom."
Her sorority sister nodded. "I believe. The island's quaint and 19th century-kissing cousin to a Bronte novel, in fact."
"The brochure that Jan Ladrone's Aunt Tilly showed us mentioned 'an unspoiled lifestyle' and 'extraordinary Victorian architecture.' She booked us for the rancid pit."
"Extraordinary captures it," Lucretia Sue nodded. "The jailhouse comes right out of Victor Hugo. Maybe Jan's auntie had some trepidations about her niece's still-marketable virtue being scuffed up by a Mayfair remittance man pastured out on Bermuda, or by some island stud working the Bimini tourist crop."
Gerry Vestry shuddered. "She picked the right shoal to maroon us on. My career as a duena dripped with success."
She poked her thumb toward the dining room. "We'd better go on in. A serious pow-wow, once Irene gets here."
"I do imagine. What's all this about accepting a bid by some 29-year-old sophomore?" Lucretia Sue followed the blonde, noting her still gingerly hip motions. "I'm the alumna adviser, the grand old lady of bonded and aged wisdom this year, and she's four years longer in the tooth than I am."
CHAPTER TWO: Internal Relations
Her rhythmic hip-tosses ground her knees and elbows into the groaning sofabed's mattress as Nora humped her hunk. She had her eyes welded tight. Her nipples flicked and whipped his chest at each satisfying downward drive.
His fingertips ran along her spine, down her hips, leaving lava-bright trails. She moaned in bliss. Her bouncing loins slapped his smartly. She felt ignited by the meaty maypole she rode, rode, rode.
She felt gloriously in command of her body. Woman power! Freedom to drive on toward orgasm-to linger and let her blood boil on the edge of detonation-to come when and how she liked.
His palms toyed with her undulating hindcheeks. He stroked her thighs. Fingers kneaded her flesh as she swung her hips side to side, varying the pace and the motion.
She ground her belly against his and held still. His palms spanked her buttocks lightly. Right globe, left globe, right globe-she giggled and bucked her bod in a glorious rush of passion. His teasing, slapping hands urged her on.
Her tingling bottom fed the devouring lust in her cunt-in her ravenous, furious cunt, cunt, CUNT- she wanted to envelope him, to squeeze and absorb him-to merge with his body till they lay in oozy, salty, crumpled afterglow.
His lips kissed and bit her sweating throat as dark, cat-savage growls burst from her. White sheets of lightning contracted her vagina. She gurgled and screamed, blind in fulfilled ardor.
His hands gripped her backside, massaging, demanding.
Her ribs and breasts dripped with hot runnels of sweat. Her love grove imploded and her legs threshed mindlessly.
His fingers clung to her wild thighs. She braced her forearms, then her shaking knees. Her hips rose and dipped in irregular bursts. The bright lightning in her guts surged to bum at her throat. Blood pounded in her.
She ground and groveled against his loins, his hard chest, his adorable male flesh ... the low, grunting cries begged for release, for consummation . . . her orgasm rolled and peaked, retreated and crested . . . She hugged herself against him. Her skin felt slick and cold, but her muscles sang, hot and alive. He began to buck upwards, seeking his own climax, kissing and cuddling as she huddled" on top of him.
Nora coiled herself beside Scott, under the blessedly cozy covers. Her limbs felt luxuriously heavy. Her mind drifted at peace, united with the stars and the deep earth.
He moved, opening a flap. He took a towel from the endtable. The scent drifted to her as he peeled the wet condom off. He tossed it in the plastic-lined waste basket. Cool air wafted against her moist skin while he mopped himself.
"This sorority business. I don't know."
He left her side and prowled naked across her living space. He sloshed the black bottle in the silver bucket on her all-purpose table.
"There's enough champagne for a last glass." He found one of her hand-blown Danish flutes and poured the crisp, clean Lanson.
His feet drummed as he came back to her bed. "Nora? It's afternoon-do we call this a nightcap?" "A stirrup cup," she murmured lazily.
Rachel Tamura faced the table of twelve other sorority officers, plus Lucretia Sue, the sole alumna. The Japanese-American's brick-squat figure filled out her beige jumpsuit. She tapped the treasurer's account book ominously.
"We'll have to start without Wanda. Finance-wise, Sig-ma's in deep spit."
"Ladies of the Science Council," muttered Susie Salton, "Krypton is doomed."
"Not that bad, not yet. Our account at the national organization is still floatable, though it's sinking gradually."
"It's nothing that's not perfectly obvious." Sarah Bothington's British tones trilled. "We girls constitute the executive committee, which is traditionally the upper tier of actives, elected to lead while the lower tier girls form the working committees-"
"I believe Sarah means that we're the exec com and we are also the only actives this Sigma chapter has at all." Shandel'la Ruse pursed wide, lovely lips and furrowed her coffee-black brow.
"We did attract bids from nine girls, including some sophs." Rachel patted the ledger.
"And what about this older girl?" Delinda Humphrey demanded. "Is this for real? Is that just a money thing, because we're desperate for pledges?"
"The qualifications of the ninth bid meet all our standards." Irene Engelhinte's voice could etch glass, courtesy of her German father. She had a nasal, Eastern Seaboard accent, but Lucretia Sue always found herself thinking of jackboots on the march whenever the Sigma chapter president spoke.
"I'll admit that age has to be considered." Irene leaned forward at the head of the table. The waves of bronze tint streaking her black hair perfectly complemented her lustrous olive skin.
"I've asked Maxine and Gerry to research further, but I want to hear if anyone has objections to their decision being final." Irene surveyed them, her eyes hard as chipped flint. "Or are we back to those silly white and black balls Sigma dropped a generation ago?"
"Of course," Delinda remarked acidly, "they can't actually talk to the bid. It's Panhellenic Gospel to keep the rule of Silence, to prevent any undue pressure from influencing potential pledges."
"Dee-Dee, we know the written rules." The house president glared. "Do you object to Maxine and Gerry having the final yes or no? Does anyone?"
"Rachel, will you cover any bets with the chapter's money? Ten of my personal dollars to every one of Sig-ma's, cash on the line. I bet that this new girl gets accepted." Delinda stared rigidly at Irene. "I'll put up cash or certified check, this afternoon. Any amount you stake."
"No bet." Rachel shook her jet-black, heavy helmet of hair. "We need the money for party supplies if we want to host the bids."
"Buy smaller kegs," Susie suggested.
"I get those Anchor Steam tappers at wholesale price from the brewery. Gordy gives us a great deal." Rachel folded her arms defensively.
Lucretia Sue watched Delinda's finger trace dollar signs on the bright gloss of the varnished dinner table. She studied Gerry Vestry's heart-shaped face under its spun honey hair. The chapter's vice-president in charge of pledge training seemed a tad distracted. Perhaps the cane welts still bothered her.
The woman glanced around. So intent, so serious they all seemed. In a few years, the house would be a comfortably memory and real problems would be eating up their energy and concern.
Lucretia Sue smiled. If only the girls knew how carefree their college years would appear in hindsight.
Gerry Vestry saw her own face rippling back at her in the sideboard's glass doors as she stood bent, fingers cupped over her knees. Her hem had been pinned to her blouse. Dark tangerine-toned panties rumpled at her white-socked ankles.
"Ooooo, colorful little devils." The precise contralto contained a chuckle.
"Someone knew how to punish a bottom."
"Those mauve splotches with the inky speckling look tender." The third voice ended in a nasal giggle. Gerry Vestry wondered how Irene had survived so long without being strangled.
Uncaring fingers explored the long, lean marks left days ago by an English whipping cane. Her leg muscles tightened. She felt her spectacles slip slightly.
"Feet a bit wider, Gerry . . . Thank you. The cheeks must really have indented for the strokes to bruise along the inner cleft like that.'' "It all lends a good deal of credence to her story." Shandel'la Ruses low, merry voice didn't comfort the bare cheeked girl any.
"It's a good story."
"A very good story."
"And here's the beef." A hand firmly squeezed sore flesh. Gerry Vestry sought to keep her mind void and her face steady. Still, her glasses crept further along her nose as her expression hardened.
She stared at the reflections of her sorority sisters.
"I agree, she couldn't help getting back to the house late from her trip." Maxine du Pre's solid, flat Midwestern sound made it all matter-of-fact.
"No, not if she couldn't get a boat off of a teeny Carribean island forgotten by civilization." Shandel'la agreed.
"And yet . . ." Maxine's words floated indeterminately in the air.
"Yet-" Irene's chisel-sharp doubt intruded. "Did she exercise reasonable care in taking a trip so close to the new term, given her duties as vice-president in charge of pledge training and as our rush captain?"
"It did stick Maxine and Wanda and the rest of us in the house with all of her critical rush work."
"One must anticipate the unforseen." Gerry Vestry saw Maxine's broad, farmgirl face set itself.
"The unplanned delay."
"The X-factor." Irene's nails tapped acutely sensitive skin. "Some overlapping cuts sure X-ed this facet."
"A constant striving to surpass our limits," Maxine intoned. "That must be Sigma House's constant challenge and invitation to the younger generation."
"The pledges who come to us for sisterly guidance, under Gerry's direction." Shandel'la's spectacularly beautiful African features had a wounding grin.
"We can't short change youth."
"Not and survive as a sorority," Maxine agreed.
"We can't let down each other," Irene pursued. "As pledged trainer under Gerry, you suffered most from her absence. Since you're also the standards officer, could you propose an appropriate penalty?"
"Without mitigation, I'd call for a sustained dose of the board."
"Symbolic, yes. I'm afraid that Sarah's tenure on the standards committee biased us in favor of English methods." Gerry Vestry watched the slow nod and building enthusiasm in the house president's face. "A hot, hard paddling has generations of Greek tradition behind it.'' "Yet the circumstances do extenuate the fault."
" 'Ex-ten-u-ate,' " Shandel'la's sensual voice prolonged the word. " 'To lessen or try to lessen the seriousness or extent of by making partial excuses.' "
"Extent of what?" The mid-western girl looked puzzled.
"Anything. Say, a fault of tardiness."
"Auuuu," Irene made a sharp, knowing sound. "I sense someone's been bandying words with Professor Porter.'' "We should make him the Sigma House mascot." The black senior's wide lips curved knowingly. "So many of us have enjoyed his . . . pedagogic attentions."
"I vote for fifteen with the board," Maxine returned to track. "It'd be eighteen, except for the condition her be-hind's in. I'd go for thirty without mitigation."
"Should we consider her heinie?" Irene looked dubious.
"We-e-ell," Shandel'la's reflection twisted in the sideboard glass. "It's not as if she committed her fault after prior punishment, knowing better than to risk another shelacking of her tender buns."
"I guess . . ."
"Three thumbs up, then?" Maxine looked from girl to girl to naked buttocks. "Here and now would be best." . "No time better."
Feet ruffled the carpet on the way to the long rack that dominated the room's south wall. Gerry Vestry tried not to look. She found herself counting her breaths as the steps headed back toward her. Her pulse felt as if she'd downed three double cappuchinos.
Her eyes jumped to the sideboard's teasing doors. Maxine had a dark, lean maplewood paddle with Sigma's letters branded into the sturdy rectagonal blade.
Gerry Vestry's diaphragm contracted. She fought to still her buttocks as the cool wood grazed her goosebumped skin.
"Maxine, as chief pledge trainer, you lost her help when you needed it most." Irene stretched the moment. "Six."
The varnished, metal-burned wood lightly kissed her rounded peaks. The Greek letters felt broad and deep. Gerry Vestry squeezed her eyes shut.
The board lifted. Her breath caught on the inhale as a breezy, rushing sound filled the room. Splaaattt! The jolt rocked her forward on her toes. Her knees bent and she recoiled back, against the firm pressure plastering the blade to her backside.
A wide band flared in hot pain. She crushed her lip against her teeth. The flesh over the bony ischial protuberances ached like sudden hell.
The wood swept away and hit again, loud and harsh. Her glasses bounced toward her nose tip. She grimly kept upright. Each deeply branded letter pinched and stretched her skin, etching Sigma's initials on her rump with white-hot sensation.
The third bone-jouncing Smaaack! revived every cane-tender memory left from Mardi Blanc.
"I'd forgotten how those rosy hinds of hers could do the shim-sham shimmy." She heard a contralto chuckle.
"We all pledged so long ago, it seems." Maxine uncoiled the fourth stroke, dead across the lowest buttock curves and upper inch of thigh muscle.
"Seniors quiver and shake, just like Jello-heinied frosh." Irene sounded personally pleased.
"Those nasty stripes look less colorful now."
"I bet they feel like a hot grate on a cold winter's night."
"Nothing so comfortable, by the way her bottom puckers and frowns."
The paddle whacked across the long center field. Gerry Vestry rammed her tongue against the edges of her lower incisors to throttle back her involuntary grunts.
The sixth smack whipped in below, lifting the muscle masses. She rose and teetered on her toes, thrusting back against the maple wood.
"I hope her dates don't get that spectacular a floor show." "No, only sisters who care enough to correct bad habits. ShandelTa, you worked like three people helping out with those bid sheets. Five."
Pounding blood in her ears blotted the sounds as the girls changed places. She furtively nudged her glasses up.
"We know you tried, Gerry," the low voice soothed. "We just think you could have planned better."
The paddleboard volleyed twice against the single left cheek, first high, then low. The walloped senior shook her hips, her buttocks flinching. The wood waited, then attacked the right in two bursts.
Her knees buckled and she blinked down miserably at her forlorn panties. Then she straightened, legs locked.
The final swat rang across both mounds. She could no longer distinguish individual Greek letters. The Sigma sigil had been branded along every spasmy bottom sector.
"That leaves just four, but I want you to remember them."
Irene's voice ate into her nerves no less acidly than the paddle.
The unforgiving maple slapped solidly into her right thightop. Seconds of hot pain lingered by. The wood hit both cheeks just below the coccyx.
Gerry Vestry gasped and gritted her molars. I'm a Sigma, damn it! Pledges cry-I don't.
The blade sank into her left upper thigh. The muscles shrieked. She held her position fiercely, though her body begged to crumple up and howl.
The final full-armed swing bit bruisingly right behind her vulval gash.
Gerry Vestry's silver rimmed glasses flew as her head shook in a spasm. They skidded across the rug. Her neck and shoulder muscles bunched like iron bands as she controlled herself.
Maxine quietly picked up the spectacles and handed them to her. The lower left lens had Sigma's initials etched into the plastic surface.
Gerry Vestry stayed hunched over as she replaced her glasses with bloodless, clumsy fingers.
"Shandel'la?" Irene passed the paddle to the black girl.
"Five kisses, Gerry." She sounded almost apologetic.
The punished senior stared at the dark varnished blade, salt burning the rims of her eyes. She pressed her lips to the wood five times.
Maxine took a stance in front of her. "Six, Gerry, and make them so I can see the prints on my hem."
The girl reached ruefully for her friend's dress. She lifted the skirt and wetly left half a dozen dark marks across the soft cotton.
Irene unbuckled her shoes. She kicked them off.
"That's not nice," Shandel'la commented. "We only do that to pledges during the last month."
"As a test of loyalty." The chapter president raised up one foot, the pantihose meshed a brown line across her toes. "Some signs of fealty need renewing."
Gerry Vestry gently lowered herself so her knees pressed hard into the carpet. Her back bent and her fingers cradled the offered foot. She kissed the big toe, feeling the nylon grain and acrid taste as she carefully licked the nail, the tip, and the fat underside.
She pressed lips and tongue to the next toe.
"Thank you. Oh, there's housekeeping duty for you tomorrow." Irene stuck her foot back into her shoe. "Maxine will brief you."
She exited cooly, her hips making tight, precise arcs.
"We elected that girl?"
"Remember, Shandel'la, no one else wanted the job."
* * *
"Fanny's all bright and sore."
"Just rub on the cream, Delinda. I'm grateful for the loan of the numbing goop, but I don't want-"
"Gerry's ashamed of her pretty, peachcleft popo?"
"My what? Dee-Dee, I mean it-!"
"This hand has the anesthetic. It tickles a bit, then the sensation stops. This hand is just me. It wiggles a little and everything livens up. . . . See, just like that. Now, which do you want up front here, taking care of your goodie grove?"
"Neith-neither . . . DELINDA!"
"Now isn't that better than the cream hand? I can take the fire out of your bottom like this . . . Rubba-dub-dub . . . And start a backfire down here that makes you completely forget the big, bad board and nasty-mouthed Irene. This puts your mind where it belongs."
"Between my legs?"
"In Nirvana. You can feel the white light glowing before you can see it. The enlightenment starts right down here. This makes it rise . . . faster." "Not with your teeth! That's sen-si-tive-"
"Tender and tasty. Yum. Loves every nubbly nibble, too. Have I nipped the poor darling? This kiss makes it well again."
"I . . . want . . . you . . . to . . . stopppp . . ."
"But not too soon. Now is it better if I kiss along here while my finger does this and I soothe this poor sunburned bottom like that?"
"Don't . . . stop ..."
"Stop, don't? Or, don't stop? Now put your hand down here and try for yourself. Isn't it nicer to do that for someone else? Let me get these silly panties out of your way."
"If you breath a word about this to anyone, Dee-Dee-!"
"Please call me Delinda. I hate that nickname, and I want to just think warm, friendly thoughts ... no pain, just good vibes . . . Ooooo, very nice vibes . . . The girls used that awful paddle to be kind. They always say that. Isn't this much pleasanter . . . Ye-ess, just like that . . ." "Damn you for knowing that I need this."
"What talks louder than words, Gerry? Relax and enjoy it. I'm enjoying that soooo much ..."
CHAPTER THREE: Specialty of the House
"Th-thank you, Miss Tamura . . . Miss Vestry." Wanda Luckett wore only a baby doll nightie's powder-blue transparent top. She humped over in the palms-on-knees position. "M-miss Humphrey."
Delinda drank the sight like an aged cabernet. Wine-colored weals wavered across Wanda's flexing rump cheeks. Tears dripped slowly down the soph's sorrowful face.
"Missing an organizational meeting means a lot more when there's only fourteen of us. Remember that," Gerry Vestry advised.
Delinda politically pursed her lips to avoid a smirk. She glanced from Wanda's chubby, gowned teddy bear, Lauren Bearcall, to the day-glo pink poster of a dryad and satyr doing a yin-yang coupling.
College gave a girl the opportunity to collect a lot of nice, friendly junk she could treasure. Just now, Delinda treasured the mental snapshot of Wanda's whipped bottom.
Rachel Tamura flicked the cane that had left those classic, twin-tracked punishment welts. She had a sexy tan jumpsuit clinging to her arm-filling shape. "Come on, guys, duty still calls."
Delinda's hard nipples and risen clit wondered whether she could wait for her date later on with Ken. She intended to start the evening with a blitzkrieg fuck, to take the edge off her hunger before dinner. After food and niceties, she'd get down to some serious sex.
Her crepe de chine and lace panties tightened electrifyingly when she threw Wanda a mocking curtsey. She felt ready to start orgasming as she left the girl's room and walked down the Sigma House corridor. "Who's next?"
"Your old sob sister, Donna Nobis." Gerry Vestry led them past doors booming Grateful Dead, The Four Seasons arranged for Japanese koto orchestra, and strident dialogue from The Days of Our Lives.
The three stopped at a door showing Gloria Steinham's black-and-white features grafted atop Brigitte Bardot's heedless Technicolor nudity. The collage pasted to the artboard had been tided "Nouveau Chastity" in Revlon's Fire-and-lce.
"Come in," a pert voice called as Gerry Vestry knocked. They obliged. "What's up?"
The sylphine brunette muted the sound on her five-inch screen TV. Delinda almost exploded with glee. She'd paddywhacked Donna through six heavenly pledge months as the girl's guardian angel.
"Bottoms." The senior's body ached with memories. Punishments administered to the those trim rounds . . . carnal delights explored, some for the very first time. "A panged tush is always in fashion, alas."
"Housekeeping visit," the blonde vice-president announced. "Some scores have piled up, crying for settlement. Miss Humphrey has an urgent need to give you the cane."
Delinda accepted the slim, murderous ashstock from Rachel. She wound it through the air in a slow, swishing fencer's salute.
Donna's liquid brown eyes widened. Her pale coral lips parted with anticipation.
"After you take it from her, Miss Nobis," Gerry Vestry intoned solemnly, "I want you to use it on her rump with a certain controlled violence. Don't be afraid to put some oomph behind your strokes. It'll be half a dozen over panties, and Dee-Dee doesn't break easily."
Humiliation lanced through Delinda. Her lips curved downward. Donna's mischievous grin mocked her.
"After which preparations, we'll see if she's interested in visiting the Training Lounge for a touch of the cowhide. A rather lengthy touch, too."
Rachel folded her arms, her shapely bod brick-solid with muscle. "Time for your medicine, and it's coming by the spoonful."
Delinda's icy fingers presented the exquisitely painful English flogging cane to perky little Donna. She hoped demons would drag Sarah Bothington to Hell and bugger her backwards with broken glass for ever introducing her damned British punishment customs into Sigma.
"May I-may I know the reasons-" The words gagged Delinda as her stomach churned. She needed to know. Perhaps the rat-faced little soph hadn't spilled everything . . .
"While we don't discourage certain-um, physical relationships between girls ..."
So much for sisterly solidarity, Delinda decided. The mmx had reveled in every minute of it-at least, she ought to have.
"Thank you, I-I accept the judgement." Damage control, she thought, rumor damage control. "I'm not really- that way, you know. It was just an-an experiment."
The lithe brunette made a puckery face. "You should have asked, Dee-Dee, so I could have said no."
"Skirts aloft." Gerry Vestry peeked at her plain gold watch. "I have an appointment across the Bay."
"With Maxine?" Delinda couldn't help the comment. Everyone stood around waiting to tan her hide for bending the active-pledge relationship, while those two chomped at the bit to break the strongest Panhellenic rule.
So what's fair? A taunting voice gibbered in her mind as she hauled her light wool skirt up her legs. Static electicity snapped and popped as the cloth grazed her nylons.
"Planning to model those fancy panties for tonight's date?"
"Is it Ron, or Phil, or Hunt?" Donna's spoiled brat inquiry lashed at her. "Hunt has loot, but gets petulant if you don't try his custom-designed drugs, even though some cause liver damage if used more than once in a week."
Delinda's eyes hazed over red. She shut them, feeling the world weave around her. Loud-mouthed little bitch . . .
"I'm dating Ken tonight." She tried to get oxygen back into her brain. "You haven't met him. Hunt, if you must know, has gone up the Amazon on a U.C. Extension tour in search of the giant leech. Contrary to some people's expectations, he's trying to shake the chemical dependencies."
"I'm glad." Gerry Vestry sounded unyielding as a millstone. "Be sure he's succeeded before you invite him around the house."
Delinda never intended to let Ken or anyone she every really cared for within a mile of Sigma. She bent over, feeling the snug, high-cut briefs cut into her gluteal cleft.
"You'll have to start rather high to stay on panties proper," Rachel remarked. "No problem. We'll fill in below with the leather."
Zzzzzhhhhhttttt! Damn it, that hurt her rear! That scrawny vixen had been taking lessons.
Zzzzzhhhhhttttt! A single hot poker seemed to crush down on her spasming behind.
Zzzzzhhhhhttttt! Her nails clawed at her nylons, ruining them. The tip had crossed the second stripe. Her right buttock convulsed, about to burst ...
"One little formality before the Training Lounge."
The words scalded her as she hissed and squirmed after the last cut.
Delinda rose, her lips twisting back over her teeth. She faced Donna, who glowed pink. The soph's dainty digit clutched the pencil-thin cane.
"Thank you, Miss Nobis . . ."
"Outside convent walls, a sorority is the only feminist collective that really works."
Nora Quincannon eyed herself critically in the mirror. She felt like some serpent-tongued TV evangelist exhorting her flock to mail in folding money.
Her brown freckles and rusty red hair made her realize how far from the Saks sorority image she strayed. She turned around in her minute bathroom.
She made contact with the wide blue eyes on the calendar photo of Miss Piggy posing Dietrichishly under a lamppost. The seductive confidence the shot radiated gave her strength.
Deep breath. Okay. Ignore the dry palms. What did that book, Rush, tell her about joining a sorority? Show self-confidence. Smile. If an overweight handpuppet could get into People as one of the top celebs of their year . . .
She beamed with quiet assurance into the mirror. "Outside convent walls ..."
Nora felt like a lunatic at having made the silly bid in the first place. This hush-hush interview coming up with those two girls made her realize how stupid an idea it had been.
She didn't regret getting into St. Cloud University, though. After that high school reunion last year . . .
Ice rattled in the stainless steel sink behind the hotel suite's wet bar. The banquet meal and a load of sparkling wine and a warm ball of barely diluted Scotch lay like lava in Nora's tummy.
The dancing had ended. The band had packed its 1977 Blast-From-the-Past arrangements into its attache cases. A meeting space load of drunks in their late 20's had broken up into hazy room parties.
Nora laughed in the heavy, smoke-laiden air as she thought of Anne Rampling's Exit to Eden . . . The safe, predictable Marriott Hotel as a lovers' Venus Grotto, an otherworldly paradise for two.
"... starting a Catholic labor organization next month. We'll have a Mass and a meeting ..." Jack Nodens kept up a line of patter to Conrad Sanchez. Both had been wheels in the student government, Nora remembered.
As he talked, Jack flipped salted peanuts so that they skated down Sally Glossing's throat, onto the very long bare expanse above her formal gown's bodice. The oily nuts never made it into the deep bosom valley offered for the world's inspection. Conrad adroitly intercepted every one with his tongue.
Sally could barely hold her cigarette in her mouth as she giggled, chin high. Ash flaked onto the sun-beaten surfaces of her upper tits.
Nora shuddered and emptied the plastic cup's warm "I'm dating Ken tonight." She tried to get oxygen back into her brain. "You haven't met him. Hunt, if you must know, has gone up the Amazon on a U.C. Extension tour in search of the giant leech. Contrary to some people's expectations, he's trying to shake the chemical dependencies."
"I'm glad." Gerry Vestry sounded unyielding as a millstone. "Be sure he's succeeded before you invite him around the house."
Delinda never intended to let Ken or anyone she every really cared for within a mile of Sigma. She bent over, feeling the snug, high-cut briefs cut into her gluteal cleft.
"You'll have to start rather high to stay on panties proper," Rachel remarked. "No problem. We'll fill in below with the leather."
Zzzzzhhhhhttttt! Damn it, that hurt her rear! That scrawny vixen had been taking lessons.
Zzzzzhhhhhttttt! A single hot poker seemed to crush down on her spasming behind.
Zzzzzhhhhhttttt! Her nails clawed at her nylons, ruining them. The tip had crossed the second stripe. Her right buttock convulsed, about to burst . . .
"One little formality before the Training Lounge."
The words scalded her as she hissed and squirmed after the last cut.
Delinda rose, her lips twisting back over her teeth. She faced Donna, who glowed pink. The soph's dainty digit clutched the pencil-thin cane.
"Thank you, Miss Nobis . . ."
"Outside convent walls, a sorority is the only feminist collective that really works."
Nora Quincannon eyed herself critically in the mirror. She felt like some serpent-tongued TV evangelist exhorting her flock to mail in folding money.
Her brown freckles and rusty red hair made her realize how far from the Saks sorority image she strayed. She turned around in her minute bathroom.
She made contact with the wide blue eyes on the calendar photo of Miss Piggy posing Dietrichishly under a lamppost. The seductive confidence the shot radiated gave her strength.
Deep breath. Okay. Ignore the dry palms. What did that book, Rush, tell her about joining a sorority? Show self-confidence. Smile. If an overweight handpuppet could get into People as one of the top celebs of their year . . .
She beamed with quiet assurance into the mirror. "Outside convent walls ..."
Nora felt like a lunatic at having made the silly bid in the first place. This hush-hush interview coming up with those two girls made her realize how stupid an idea it had been.
She didn't regret getting into St. Cloud University, though. After that high school reunion last year . . .
Ice rattled in the stainless steel sink behind the hotel suite's wet bar. The banquet meal and a load of sparkling wine and a warm ball of barely diluted Scotch lay like lava in Nora's tummy.
The dancing had ended. The band had packed its 1977 Blast-From-the-Past arrangements into its attache cases. A meeting space load of drunks in their late 20's had broken up into hazy room parties.
Nora laughed in the heavy, smoke-laiden air as she thought of Anne Rampling's Exit to Eden . . . The safe, predictable Marriott Hotel as a lovers' Venus Grotto, an otherworldly paradise for two.
"... starting a Catholic labor organization next month. We'll have a Mass and a meeting ..." Jack Nodens kept up a line of patter to Conrad Sanchez. Both had been wheels in the student government, Nora remembered.
As he talked, Jack flipped salted peanuts so that they skated down Sally Glossing's throat, onto the very long bare expanse above her formal gown's bodice. The oily nuts never made it into the deep bosom valley offered for the world's inspection. Conrad adroitly intercepted every one with his tongue.
Sally could barely hold her cigarette in her mouth as she giggled, chin high. Ash flaked onto the sun-beaten surfaces of her upper tits.
Nora shuddered and emptied the plastic cup's warm Scotch down her throat. The liquor had only a memory of soda lingering with it. The fire that hit her veins made the tobacco level in the room more tolerable.
When had all these people started smoking? She didn't remember more than a dozen or so puffers in their senior year.
Raven-haired, sloe-eyed Holly Beale tired of kick-dancing to an imaginary beat in the corner. She lifted her heels out of her pumps and sent them spinning against the glass doors opening onto a terrace.
Holly hiked her black sequined dress to her hips. Down she peeled her patterned charcoal pantihose; down and off- She leaped for Hot Potato Brindsley as he tipped his squat fullback's head down to laugh at Stacey Brenner's joke. Holly caught him around the shoulders and squirrel-scrabbled up his back.
He blinked, spilling his drink, as her legs wrapped around his heavily muscled neck.
"Horsey, horsey! Gallop, goddamn it!"
He began to thunder his feet in place, making neighing sounds.
Nora wandered away and found Mark Da Silva on the couch, thumbing through the high school annual. She perched on the sofa arm, resting both her arms lightly on his back. She dropped her empty plastic cup onto an end table. It clattered over the edge and hit the rug.
She massaged his neck gently as he turned the page. She saw the Discussion Club photo, with the two of them standing on opposite sides of Miss Rutkowski. The teacher looked younger than they all did now, and her bad skin showed clearly.
"Ten years, ten fucking years." Her throat felt raw as she pitched her hoarse voice against the room's babble. "I had forgotten what a really good conversation could be."
Da Silva turned the page. The journalism class occupied two photos. He stood in both, the one with the typewriters and the one displaying the video cameras. He'd handled the 15 minute weekly closed-circuit press room in the fall and then edited the printed paper that last spring term.
"Business courses, work-I must have put my mind to sleep years ago.'' Nora felt hot, gritty air pressing down on her. "Thank you for tonight, Mark, thanks for talking. I want to go back to my room with you and fuck your brains out.'' She rested her cheek on his head. He'd already begun to go bald. Bald at 28. Virility. That meant sex hormones crystalizing out of his pores.
"Virility and variety. I've been at Sherman and Michaels too long to remember either.'' She lifted her head. "I want to fuck you blind-but let's wait until we can do it sober, and let it last for hours and hours, and then just sit up in bed and drink coffee and talk, and trade ideas ..."
Holly Beale's pale thighs and a wide handful of bottom cheek flaunted at the world under her rumpled black dress as she jiggled herself on Hot Potato's shoulders. She didn't look like she'd learned a damn thing since she'd given head to the entire boys tennis team during the graduation picnic.
"Bricked up into our own little tombs by 27 and 28 . . ." Nora murmured. "How many of us just need to communicate with someone who offers a new thought, something we haven't had buzzing in our walled-up skulls ever since graduation ..."
"Sit down, sit right here." Hands guided her around onto the couch seat. ' 'Lean back.'' She felt upholstery give under her shoulders. Waves of heat lashed through her, like a very bad pre-menstrual trip.
"If she's sick all over your suit, man, you'll regret it." Lateef Mathers grinned down from some lofty place. Light crowded around his glossy hair, sculpted into flat sides and sharp edges. His skin had reddish undercurrents amid the deep brown satin. His Malcolm X mustache and beard gleamed like silk.
He'd butchered her on the Forensics Squad.
"Fuck yourself, Mathers," she smiled affectionately, "and the whores you rode into town on."
"Hey, mama," he gave a wide-eyed innocent look.
"Just being careful." He tugged his wide grey lapel. "This sharkskin retains drunken pussy puke too easily. Maybe Mark's got a better dry cleaner."
"I always carry Basic H in my purse ..." Nora's head slid hard against Da Silva's shoulder. She went to sleep.
"Thank heaven I met Scott at the opera, Hes," she told her best friend. ' 7 need a man who can talk about something more than where we'll eat and what video tape we'll rent.'' She carved her fork into the heavy, pecan-studded cheese cake. Buoyant Baroque music skipped delicately around them. She stared at the for-sale artwork on the Coffee Cantata s walls.
"I've got to build an escape plan, though." She shook her head at Hester Parry. "That 10th year reunion last month-Jesus, how I behaved like an idiot! At least I realized how my life has painted itself into a corner. It's time to get growing again."
Her friend washed chocolate truffle cake down with creme de cacao-spiked coffee. ' 'I'm still trying to get my act together at the County. We've got so much work, and those state and Federal requirements change all the time.
"But who wants to complain about that? After we finish shopping, let's get a bucket from Colonel Chicken," Hester suggested eagerly.
She reached out and patted her purse on the ceramic tile-surfaced table. "I've got this great movie cassette I watched last night. Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn-a real oldie, and you'll never guess the ending."
"I wish to holy hell that C.E.O.'s had the option of getting their butts back to school and retraining." Gil Toliver touched the Air Force bomber model decorating his desk. He pivoted the sterling silver bird on its bronze mount.
"I left Korea and opted for security with the best damned printing outfit on the West Coast. I watched Sherman and Michaels shrivel around me and I swore I'd reverse that if I could get in charge.'' Nora had seen the corporate photographs. The short, wiry TOliver had sported a goatee even then, when facial hair meant Beatnik poets and experimental actors. His beard had turned bone-white, his skin had gained liver spots, and his energy had not even begun to recede.
"I think I've proved myself after thirty-five years, but at what? Is printing really an anachronism in an electronic age, in spite of our CRT digital link-ups with Honolulu and New York?
"I can't take time out to get afresh perspective on what I've committed myself to." Toliver shook his head. "I admired your vision when you started as my secretary. You knew your goals and headed for them. I'm glad to see you recognize when to shift your sights.'' "Customer Service has been a nice niche, but-"
"The only people happy in niches are in urns." His phone beeped respectfully. He tapped the speaker button.
"Miss Linda Byrd on 7131," the faint voice informed him.
"Two minutes," he told the outer office. He stood and reached for her hand. "Good luck, Nora, I hope you want to be where you wind up."
Wanda Luckett watched Delinda lead the way toward the Training Lounge. She wished the girls well. Dee-Dee needed all she got.
"I must say," Sarah Bothington's British accent fluted chipperly, "that if I had quite perceived the effect caning would have on Sigma House, I'd never have brought the bloody business up when I served on the standards committee."
Wanda winced. "I feel like I've been skinned, though a peek in the mirror only shows-'' The English junior dipped her head in agreement. "Merely the edifying sight of healthily penitent girlflesh, eh? Moderately grilled."
"Rachel can swing that stick of yours." She touched her skirt seat lightly. "Ooooo!"
"To paraphrase, it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that sting. It feels like hell, and looks like sin, as the marks age-and that's as it should be, to inspire improvement. But in a few days ..." Sarah shrugged blithely.
"In a few days," the sophomore observed glumly, "another hide-tanning comes along. Maxine makes a hell of a standards officer. She must have ears in her behind."
The Dutchman's Daughter awaited. Gerry Vestry had forgotten the misty origins of that rococo name. For as long as she'd known Sigma-and her paddle-aching buttocks made it feel a thousand years or so-the heavy wooden rod lodge horizontally between two sturdy posts had been The Dutchman's Daughter. Folks even capitalized the "The" reverently when they spoke.
Stainless steel hooks and brass eyelets had been rooted to the floorboards around the rod for convenience. It usually helped to secure a girl snugly, when she needed a session with The Daughter.
Rachel dipped onto her heels in a samurai squat. "Once you're down to belt and stockings, Delinda, try twenty deep bottom bends to restore circulation in your seat."
The condemned senior removed her tasteful wool skirt, its cool browns and greys reflecting the fashion-knowledgeable campus woman. Her muted rose blouse followed onto the long shelf bolted to the wall. She released the snap between her strapless bra's cups.
A pungent saddle soap flavored the air as Gerry Vestry swung cabinet doors wide. "Shall we try the split-ended tawse?"
"Too common," Rachel vetoed.
"Not the barber-grade razor strap, surely." The vice-president looked around as Delinda deposited her high-cut lace underpants on the shelf. Framed by garter belt, the netherglobes seemed broad and durable. "Hmmmm . . . the shot-loaded mini-bat? Lucretia Sue contributed that one. They use it on women's chain gangs in Georgia, or something."
Delinda bobbed up and down in rump-flexing exercise. Rachel observed from a low vantage, smirking as the girl's bottom opened and closed, the blood reviving her welts.
"How's the Sole's record?"
"That would be severe enough," the blonde agreed. She took down the 1987-1988 ledger. It had grown a bit dry and dusty. They needed some pledges around soon to properly care for the punishment books.
"Merciful heavens! You're right, it's been completely quiet since fall semester." She stared at mouse-quiet Donna. "What would past generations of Sigmas think?"
The brunette sophomore's face turned toward the hook holding a stiff two-foot length of sole-grade leather. Corrugations intended for mountain boots ran down the strap's striking side.
Gerry Vestry searched further on the page.
" 'Humphreys, Delinda Natica, 4I18I86, four; 2I28I87, six.' " She threw a testing question to the slender girl. "What is the first law of the Sole?"
" 'At least once on every Sigma bottom the better to know each other's trials,' " Donna recited letter-perfect from her pledge catechism.
Rachel piped up with the second law.
" 'At least once every semester, the better to recall its heritage.' " Gerry Vestry met Delinda's angry eyes. "The third law?"
" 'Always more than the last time,' " she quoted bitterly, her naked breasts vibrating, " 'the better to respect its instruction.' "
"Over The Dutchman's Daughter, please."
Rachel threw a heavy velvet comforter, worn and stained with use, over the thick wooden rod. She brought out a cardboard box for Donna to inspect.
"You have to judge these things carefully. Dee-Dee takes a small ankle cuff, inspite of those hefty hips and heavy thighs. See how her calves taper? You want a pretty small leg cuff."
She helped the girl select appropriate fetters from the box's collection. "These clip to those ringbolts. The stainless steel is riveted to oxhide, so don't worry about them taking her weight. The suade lining prevents chaffing. She kicks a lot when she loses her cool."
Gerry Vestry thought Delinda close to a boiling eruption as the nearly-naked girl presented herself before The Dutchman's Daughter. Her hose looked cruelly laddered.
Rachel showed Donna how to lock the cuff around the senior's left ankle.
"You judge the chain length by her height. She's pretty tall, so you want her middle over the bar, so that she bends down at the hip sockets."
Delinda rocked forward, onto the matted velvet padding. Rachel snapped the chain to a ringbolt in the boards. The gleaming links went taut. She had Donna cuff and secure the right ankle.
Delinda let her weight flop her over, her legs taut in a fully-exposing V. Her upper body wobbled freely, above the scuffed floor. The garter tabs stretched.
Gerry Vestry realized they had to get some pledge labor in soon to wax and polish everything to a mirror shine. A girl should properly be able to see her own facial contortions as she took her hiding.
"These elastic cords keep her arms from flapping about." Rachel let Donna restrain both wrists.
The senior spread over The Dutchman's Daughter like a stretched starfish. Her arched and open buttocks awaited. The stripes smoldered a hard purple on the right.
The vice-president straightened her glasses and approached with the Sole. "Tradition calls for ten strokes. Ten after six, sixteen after ten-that's the normal progression, though I think any girl would find even six heavy duty going. Most girls, anyway."
"There's a big steel fence running along that fine line between sisterly hazing and pledge abuse, Dee-Dee." Rachel slowly circled the exposed and trussed frame decorating The Daughter. Her fingers walked along nylon up the right leg, then skimmed grazingly over the worse of the cane marks on the bottom proper.
"If you don't agree, now's the time to appeal for cause," Gerry Vestry reminded. "Or petition for clemency. The full standards committee can give the facts and findings a review."
"Sixteen Sole strokes, Dee-Dee," Rachel enunciated arefully. "Donna's had fun with Sarah's stick. Gerry and I split these."
They observed the diaphragm contractions jerk Delinda's rib cage and pink-nippled pectorals around. The girl started to twist her head back, over her taut, fettered arm. Then her face dropped.
"I take it no objections." Gerry Vestry slipped her own heeled shoes off. The Japanese senior already wore some floor-clinging Asiatic martial arts slipper.
"Watch closely how we swing the Sole, Donna. It's part of your St. Cloud education."
The blonde let the stiff leather sway forward, her weight rising onto her left foot. She rocked back, the Sole stretching behind her. Her body shot ahead, coming down hard on the ball of her nyloned left foot. She pivoted, putting strength and body English behind the corrugated strap.
The Sole shivered, plastered to the left buttock. Its mountain boot ripples had intersected the low cane weals.
Gerry Vestry stepped away, peeling the leather off Delinda's hide. She swung in fast, before the girl could finish drawing breath to scream.
Wind broke from both ends. The whistling fart outlasted Delinda's shrill sob. Donna tried to hide her grin. Rachel didn't bother.
The vice-president paced over to the right. She changed hands and walloped the plum-streaked right chub, hard. The Sole clung, dancing while the anguished girl rolled through her convulsions.
Gerry Vestry pushed her spectacles into place. She let the hard leather sail dead-on into the knotted buttock muscle.
"Oh." Donna watched the violet striations zig-zag down her former guardian angel's tush.
Rachel took the strap from the blonde senior. She marched to the left, standing with legs slightly bent, as if miming a samurai in a Kabuki comedy.
The Sole flashed, faster and more painful than lightning. It thunked into one straining thigh. The chain holding the leg cuff to the floor jangled furiously, then went dead silent.
"I think she's trying to escape." Rachel observed Delinda's hips, stretching impossibly further over the padding on The Daughter. Both steel chains had been pulled rigidly taut by the threshing weight.
The Japanese sorority girl whipped the darkly burning thigh again. She didn't bother to go around as she followed with two lashing strokes across the other leg top, just above the tan-toned stocking.
A wet, panicked warbling sent Gerry Vestry around to haul Delinda's face up by the hair. Salt tears and snot trickled along the curled white lips.
"Bite on something?"
"Y-y-uugg-uugg-ahhh-"
"I think she said 'yeah,' " Rachel translated. She strode to the shelf with Delinda's clothing, bringing back a cream-colored pump. "Open wide."
"The airplane's coming into the hangar," Gerry Vestry coaxed. The weeping senior forced her jaws apart and bit bulldoggishly on the toe of her shoe.
Her head dropped all the way. She hung, face foolishly to the floor, grinding her teeth into her campus-fashionable pump.
"Sneaky Occidental. She bought herself a cooling off period." Rachel handed over the Sole.
"Not for long." Gerry Vestry slashed both rock-set hindcheeks high, above the prior markings. Seconds fleeted. She threw her body into a second all-out stroke, flush across the first.
The fisted bottom rounds expanded as Delinda's whole hip structure spasmed. She shrilled and bubbled around the gagging shoe tip. The strap rose on burgundy skin, chased with jagged inky lines. Her whole bottom contracted.
The cheeks seemed to huddle defensively. Gerry Vestry flogged the single left thigh, elongating Rachel's marks.
She passed the strap to the Japanese girl, who positioned herself on Delinda's right. Using a wicked backhand, she scalded the upper leg once! Twice!
"You could cook breakfast on that keister." She slapped the hard leather across the twin underglobes. The sound and the girl's moans echoed in the Training Lounge.
"Jus out for Just a reminder, Dee-Dee. Next time the Sole comes out for you, the number is twenty-four."
Rachel put her brick-solid body behind a hot, pivoting stroke. The leather indented the bottom summits.
As Delinda screamed, her shoe arced gracefully, tumbling in the air to clatter down the wall and bounce off her shed panties.
The punished girl's head whipped back and forth.
"Take your time," Gerry Vestry counseled. "No rush . . oh, and speaking of rush and Rush Week: You'll be getting a sob sister again this year. We've all agreed you have a lot to offer a new girl. You just needed a little reminder about your responsibilities. . . . Sisters?"
Time lingered, then a wet voice whimpered, "Sisters."
She sounded like a sick thing. The blonde vice-president watched Donna dig her teeth into her knuckles. The pale, thoughtful sophomore helped Rachel release Delinda's wrist restraints.
CHAPTER FOUR: Refreshment Rites
"Maxine du Pre." A broadly boned, freckled farm girl gave Nora a forthright handshake.
"I'm Gerry Vestry." Silver spectacles sporting the Sigma initials danced on the heart-shaped face. The blonde reminded Nora somehow of Theresa Russell, but chummier.
She showed them both into her compact apartment. A silver tray held china cups and a fragrant pot on the flat-topped, iron-bound antique chest she used as a coffee table. The two sorority girls deposited themselves on her sofabed, now in its couch mode.
"Coffee? I have water on the boil for tea. Darjeeling, Oolong, or herbal guck? I have cream, honey, or fructose."
"Coffee's fine, thanks." Maxine appraised the snug r studio. "That's really unusual. Is it stone?"
"Incised marble, with an acid wash to give that chalky background inside the design. I bought it from Noori Gallery when Rasul had a show of Sufi art from Dervish International."
The stone panel hung on her wall, imbedded in a glossy black plastic backing. The raised beige marble traced delicate geometric swirls, leaves, and tendrils.
"Miss Vestry?" Nora held up the pot after pouring Maxine's cup.
"I'd really enjoy some Darjeeling. It's frigid out there, compared to Orinda. Straight is fine."
The woman eased into her kitchen and returned with a porcelain tea pot steaming with fresh brewing smells. She set it by Gerry Vestry's cup.
Pouring herself some coffee, she occupied a slant-backed Morris chair upholstered in a quiet green paisley. She leaned forward attentively.
"You told me to keep this confidential."
"We're violating the national Panhellenic Conference's rules by talking to you, as you know from the St. Cloud Greek handbook," Maxine began.
"At your age you should know better than to consort with sneaks like us," the blonde laughed pleasantly.
"I'm afraid I do." Nora sipped her Kona blend. "You're worried that I'm too old for a sorority."
Maxine shook her head emphatically. "Wrong."
"We're petrified that we're too young for you," the Sigma vice-president explained. "It's not the same."
Nora had to agree. "That occurred to me when I wrestled over the whole idea."
"Also, you've suicided for Sigma House. To put no other choice on your final pref card usually means a rushee's so arrogant she figures she can't lose-"
"Or, she's so particular she'd only be good in a snob house, or one of the clone chapters where everyone carries the same couturier label, down to their ice cream cones."
Nora nodded. "Vanilla by Gucci."
"Exactly." Gerry Vestry surveyed the apartment. "You're not visibly that type. That Rutgers set of the Lincoln papers looks like it's been read."
"I got it used for thirty-five dollars from Writers Book Store." She lifted a shoulder. "Horace owned it. He shed a lot of books when he retired."
"But it's not Jackie Collins-or Shirley MacLaine."
"It's a hideous violation of rush rules." Maxine's voice dropped. "We had to know, however. Why a sorority at all-and why Sigma?"
Nora felt the moment of truth gallop, snorting, upon them. She inhaled calmly. "Outside convent walls, a sorority is the only feminist collective ..."
"Those goddamn girls whipped my ass!" Delinda stood on the platform at the Bay Area Rapid Transit station in Walnut Creek. She'd stood all the way.
Tears crawled from her eyelids and ran along her cheekbones as Ken Gormish touched her arm softly. His sandy eyebrows crinkled in concern. She crushed against him, arms like a vise around his broad chest.
"Those g-g-goddamn girls-" He massaged her teak-rigid back muscles. She cried against him, ignoring everyone else around. His hand dropped down to touch her skirt's seat. She twisted.
"Those goddamn girls! They whipped my ass! Whipped my ass!"
He closed both arms about her and rocked gently back and forth. "Not the first time it happened, Delinda. Just make it the last time."
She pushed him away, salt-eyed and angry. "Those goddamn girls whipped my ass!"
His head bobbed slowly. "My mother used to do that, with a narrow, hardwood lathe. 'Just make it the last time,' she'd say."
"Those-" Her voice cracked in a lost, frightened mewling. "Th-those god-d-damn girls ..."
She grabbed at her purse for a handful of tissue. A couple of minutes passed. When she'd finished, she glared up at his face, a few inches above hers.
"They whipped my ass-my ass."
"You know the best thing for that?" He enfolded her in his arms. She felt comfort, solidity in him. "The very, very best prescription is a good, thorough orgasm. A teeth-grinding come you can feel down to your pink-painted toe nails."
He kept one arm protectively around her as he led her out toward the street. She walked stiffly, the ache jolting up from her bruised leg and rump muscles.
"Those goddamn girls ..." She blotted at her nose with the tissue wad. "... whipped my ass ..."
She felt light and helpless. His arm supported her, guarded her, directed her. She dropped her head against-his raised shoulder.
". . . whipped my ass . . ."
* * *
Cold water trickled in the shower, coating her backside with a chill drizzle.
Delinda's mouth curved down in a hot, tight bow. She sucked the cool, damp air as Ken kissed her breasts. His fingers wandered lovingly over her thigh fronts and curly haired loins. He crouched on bent legs, lips and tongue roaming like cleansing fire over her taut love gourds, teasing her straining nipples.
Her forehead throbbed, furrowed tightly as she gasped and moaned, eyes shut. Bright lights flashed behind her lids.
She stood spread-legged, an oread bathing her nymphine tail in her mountain's bubbling waterfall while a satyr tongue-rasped her tits. Cold water whirled around her feet before gurgling away down moss-slick granite. Fiery lips roamed her mountain-proud breasts. Fingers worshipped at her demi-divine flesh, her portal of Aphrodite slick with the goddess's wine.
"More . . ." she murmured. "Do more."
"You want jumping jacks?" A hand reached behind, touching her chilled, aching rear. "Shall I fondle your fan?"
Her lids peeled up. She stared beyond his wet hair, at the blind serpent in the Eden, the fat worm rising between his spread, bent legs.
"That gets you off, doesn't it?" Electric ripples from his kisses ran into her scalp, into her spine, into her cunt. She winced as his fingertips glided into her cleft.
"Don't take this so seriously, Dee. You know I dig bottom."
He parted the sore buttocks, the shower-numbed skin a thin veneer over seething coals of deep, prickling pain. One hand played with her love dart. The other made whorls against her anus. Lips suckled at her.
An energy surged and discharged, violently.
"UHHHNNNHHH . . . UHHHNNNHHH ..."
She shuddered in a fit. Cold water crested her shoulders, attacking her breasts with high-voltage stabs. She shrieked, her vaginal muscles in spasm.
Her upper lip ground down on her canines till she tasted hot, thick salty nectar. Vulva and anus pulsed wildly. Her fingers and throbbing buttocks knotted as she rode out the ecstatic seizure.
She gasped for oxygen. So good, so blindingly good that she forgot who she was, what she was. A current pulsed through her-pain, rapture, warmth all mingled in a tidal, flowing release.
"You all right?" Cold hands touched her blazing, radiant face.
She whimpered something. Her eyes began to clear, focusing on his hair, matted over his forehead. A raised finger near her chin had a ruby spot that dissolved and vanished as shower drops battered it.
"Don't forget me, now."
He rose up, legs straight in front of her. The impatient male meatus stretched, the crown mottled as a Chinese tea egg-She fingered it listlessly. "Condom?"
"For a hand job?" she murmured, the chill damp getting down into her lungs. She averted her head and sneezed.
"Hand job? Oh no, oh, my heavens, not with all this wet, wonderful natural transplanted Indiana beauty to romp in." He reached under her battered hams, hoisting her with a grip just back of each knee.
She squealed, throwing her arms around him for support. Her hands made scuffing noises along his wet back. He jiggled her, the blunt prick poking at her thatched belly.
"Let me-here, just a min-ute." One arm over his shoulder, she used a hand to guide his blind thing into position. Her legs wrapped around his hips as he eased her down, her well-juiced vagina taking the impalement smoothly.
Soothing water misted her corrugated bottom as his strong hands buttressed her behind her knees. She wiggled her pelvis tentatively, then in a steady undulation.
He kissed her stinging lip, her cheeks, her wet and dripping ears. She got into the simple rhythm. Her lust rekindled, and the slow driving throb in her whipped hinds added fuel.
Her face felt his mouth. Her panged mind saw petite, dimple-bottomed Donna Nobis. Her sob sister. Her ex-sob sister. Pliant, round-duffed Donna. That paddle had felt soooo fine whacking against that pert, bare seat.
Hands on knees, Donna, panties down and tail to the sunset. Oh, see the sunset grow in your rosy cheeks, swat after swat. That had been wonderful, worth the battering today. Sure, thoroughly worth every lick and stab of exotic pain.
She rocked against his cock, legs crushing and holding him to her. He grunted in regular satisfaction. She wanted his flesh, his warm, living body. Her hunger, her aching muscles . . . Donna's scarlet buttocks, clenched tightly and shivering . . . her own voluptuously nude rump receiving the girl's kisses . . . whipped rounds yearning for relief ... a clutching cunt-tunnel trying to absorb her man, to stuff him up into her belly, her soul, her brain- She fucked him shrilly, yipping and crying as he laughed and aided her rockings. The cold water danced down her sweating back, tingling her ribs as they rose and fell at her wanton vixen yelps.
He snorted, eyes stupid with delight as he spurted inside her. She rotated her belly against him. Her sex tunnel grasped greedily for its own come.
She got it-incandescent sheets, pure sensation slamming through her-her body contracted into a white-hot star, seething endlessly in nuclear discharge, joy and the anguish of protracted ecstasy.
Her nails dug into his flesh and held him, held him, held him till he finally, gently lowered her to her feet in the chill drizzling stream.
"That used a hell of a lot of water in this drought." He shut off the shower. "I'm glad this building is all on one meter. I wouldn't be able to flush for a month, to meet the rationing quota, otherwise."
His lips brushed her numb, dumb mouth. "It was worth it for me, Dee."
The hormones ebbed in her veins. A long, gentle march toward normalcy began to quiet her body.
"Don't call me Dee," she whispered.
"Sure thing. Towel?" He stepped onto the bathmat.
She coughed, the damp air deep inside her. "You still got that rum?"
"120-proof Cruzan Clipper coming up," he dried himself briskly. "From the Virgin Islands to your lovely lips, without delay."
He padded from his bathroom into the rest of his apartment. Delinda stared at her angular face in the medicine cabinet mirror. Her lower lip had puffed up. Hair hung like seaweed around her skull.
She felt the sex fever abate slowly. Virgin Islands rum . . . she needed to get warm again.
"I can't walk." She felt the muscles in her behind tighten and lock. Her legs stumbled. She wrapped herself in a towel and rubbed.
The pain flared in her punished hide.
"I can barely move," she told him when he stepped through the door, still naked, his stocky chest water beaded.
He put a tall glass in her hand. "Cruzan Clipper can make the dead get up and fuck."
The first long sip cleared the phlegm from her throat. A fiery, buttery aftertaste permeated her mouth. She inhaled the fumes and drank more.
His mouth flirted with a smile as he studied her heavily marked netherglobes. "Dinner off the side-board for my bad girl."
"Not funny, Ken." She stood and felt the rum percolate through her while he used a second towel to dry her straggling hair.
"I'll call out. This gourmet place delivers. Chicken Kiev, spinach with nutmeg, spaetzle, Chocolate Decadence with fresh raspberry puree."
He ruffled her hair and kissed her Virgin Islands-flavored lips.
"... so I'm about to be out of a job. It's my own choice, since I won't lie and keep people in the field in e conditions and do some really illegal things my iployer wants." The sharp-nosed middle-aged woman glanced around at the other ten people sitting cross-legged on the living room floor. She inhaled, but didn't speak for another two minutes.
"We're so . . . defined by our jobs and our roles that to be without one is almost to be nothing. It's a funny time for me."
They all sat silently for a while. Then the Reverend Caledonia Roundsong smiled around the group. "Thank you all for sharing your thoughts."
She sat in front of a Maxfield Parish poster. The Errant Pan piped his lonely syrinx on a mountain crag above the broad, Earth-motherly minister. Directly behind her, rising tendrils of incense dissipated from a candle set in a holder shaped to resemble a startled troll.
"Zara has volunteered to host us here again next week. For that meeting, I'd like you to read the Krishnamurti quotes on that Xerox I gave you."
She held up a metallic grey trade paperback. "I'm glad Shambala reissued this book, Talks with American Students. It comes from the time of the keenest student upheavals and re-evaluations since the 1930's.
"By the late Sixties, I already had a child entering school. I was in my late twenties, with my life getting together. I saw the whole consciousness revolution from a different, more secure perspective."
She thumbed to page thirty-two. "Be prepared to share those personal experiences of yours which relate to Jshna-ji's statement 'to live implies to live with "what is" bring about a radical change in what is. And that is not ssible if you have a principle, a goal, an image of perfection.' " She tapped a pile of photocopied material. "Everyone has a quote sheet? Good. Judy, could you read the second selection for us?"
Judy Latimer ducked her head over the Xeroxed page of typescript. "Uh, 'To find out what you are then you have to die to the past and to the future. Then you will find out for yourself what it is, in that region where thought doesn't pervade, in that state which is something totally new instant.' " The subdued light made her face insubstantial under jer cascading hair.
"Thank you. Thais, you wrote us a prayer to end the evening." Caledonia caught one group member's eye.
The eleven young and middle-yeared women joined hands around the circle.
"Oh, Lady Most Sacred, do not show us your way. Any path undertaken as an obligation or through routine deprives the journey of meaning.
"Rather, sharpen our wills so that we may test and struggle and carve for ourselves the path that traces out unique, individual contributions to the infinite design of our Universe.
"May we be co-creators with you, co-inheritors of the sacredness you so brightly mirror."
As the thin woman in red velvet fell silent, the others let their hands drop.
"Our remaining duty for the evening," Caledonia concluded, "involves some poppyseed cake and brownies."
The hostess jumped up, her grey-streaked hair bobbing. "Thanks for a great group meeting, Cal. The plates are there. I'll get some cranapple juice from the fridge and some plastic cups."
She clicked on the ceiling light fixture as she left her living room. The other circle members rose gradually.
Judy Latimer crept to a worn, overstuffed brown and green couch. She sat, her auburn and gold hair making her features pale as milk.
"How did you like your first group?" Caledonia sat down beside her. The minister's big, matronly body nestled into the wide, friendly pillows on the couch. One thick braid fell over her dark Hindu medallion.
"Dr. Roundsong ... I mean, Reverend Roundsong . . . uh . . ." The girl's eyes moved everywhere but to the woman's face.
"Both are proper, dear, but call me Caledonia."
She took the limp hand. Confusion, anxiety, and sharp indecision radiated from Judy's flesh. The minister held the palm warmly between both of hers, trying to pour some confidence back along the circuit between them.
The girl focused her eyes around the woman's knees, where the light emerald ecclesiastical robes billowed.
"I went to that-you and Professor Porter and that lacchus Crusade at St. Cloud had that . . . that ..."
"We thought of it as an interfaith event, between my Church of Spiritual Liberation people and the Campus Crusade for lacchus."
"Yeah." Judy bit her lip. "All that naked dancing and whipping that guy with switches and . . . and him running around with that dong in his hands ..."
"Cake!" An elfin platinum blonde shoved a paper plate at each of them. "He didn't catch me, either," she reminded Judy in a diaphragm-strong soprano.
"Thanks. What he carried was a phallic substitute, dear. In technical parleyance, a solar-phallic wand, emblematic of male life force."
Caledonia still had one palm on Judy's hand. She caught the fierce image from the girl's mind of the bearded boy squirting his milk-charged dildo at the prancing pixy who had just forced poppyseed cake on them.
"We ... we don't do stuff like that in my church." Judy barely breathed. "There's been a lot of stuff about those TV guys and the Pentacostal crowd, but . . . we're just Lutherans. I mean, Dr. Scott isn't like that . . . he's so-so responsible."
She pulled her hand loose and fiddled with the plastic fork on the cake plate. "He doesn't want us to call him 'pastor' since he says he's not a sheep-herder, and he doesn't like 'reverend' since he tells us only God should be reverenced."
"Your parents must be very responsible people, too, I'd imagine." Caledonia ate some cake, to encourage Judy to relax.
"Yeah, completely. Grammy-she's so level-headed that she thinks Catholics shouldn't vote." The girl finally inhaled deeply. "It's not constitutional."
"I'll bet you learned a lot about self-respect from them. Did they ever learn anything from you?"
"Ma'am-Dr. Round-" Her fork dented the poppyseed slice, making some crumbs. "I mean, Caledonia?"
"Did they ever listen to your desires and hopes and hear your dreams and understand your abilities so that they could enjoy the kind of person you are?" The minister put all she had behind a motherly, open look. "Or did they just build a nice white box around your life and tell you to live in it?"
Judy looked her straight in the eye with an uneasy wonderment. "That's-it's the same image I have everytime Dr. Scott reads that Gospel with the whitened sepulchres in it." Caledonia ate more cake, giving the girl time to absorb the notion. "There's a psychological syndrome called the Madonna-Whore Complex. A lot of guys grow up thinking of their mother as pristine and untouchable, just like those alabaster statues in the Catholic churches your grandmother probably wouldn't care for."
The girl nodded vigorously. "Yeah, so they see women and want to kiss them and go to bed, but they think anyone they can neck with or sleep with is some kind of slut. Dr. Brothers talked about that on TV."
"Biology and our society tell them to rumple up some dresses when the sap starts to run at puberty. Their mental censors short-circuit that impulse." The minister touched a thick bronze pendant she wore, depicting Mayadevi flourishing a lotus and dancing, heavy-breasted and slender-waisted.
"The same thing happens in religion. A lot of women come to goddess worship thinking it's a creed they can put on, like a robe, so they can fuck, fuck, fuck without Christian patriarchal guilt mudstaining their plaster statue images of themselves."
Judy's face pinched and turned away.
"Was that a little too rapid? Or did the 'fuck, fuck, fuck' disturb you? That's how good Lutheran wives produced nice, scrubbed Lutheran families."
"I guess so." The girl's lips trembled toward a smile. "Mom and dad don't call it that."
Caledonia tapped her pendant's wise Hindu face.
"Mayadevi is goddess of the illusion of the world in India. I wear her to these faith-sharing groups to emphasize that we're trying to strip away the nice whitened sepulchres, and kick the plaster statues in their pristine asses."
This time they shared a full grin, nervous on Judy's side. "I guess Grammy would approve, if they're Catholic statues."
"I don't discriminate. Somewhere behind the safe white box, maybe meeping timidly in a hole in the ground, or maybe striding like a giantess through the trees, too tall to be seen without some perspective-somewhere each of us has a real self."
Caledonia gestured around the room. "These home groups aim at releasing that truer, more essential person. On the other hand, my classes at St. Cloud get into ideas- discussion, writing, debate, and try for the whole thesis-antithesis-synthesis Hegel schtick."
The girl looked suddenly shy. "I'd-I thought about registering for one, since I still have to fill a Humanities class for Fall, and Reg is next week."
"Give it a try. If you don't like this very personal, self-oriented setting, a classroom can be a more intellectually fulfilling experience. Or do both."
Judy gave a kitten-quick nod.
"Caledonia." The woman in red velvet approached, her arm around their blushing hostess. "I just asked Zara to marry me. She accepted. Would you officiate, once we've made some firm plans?"
CHAPTER FIVE: House Warming
The hot September sun put satiny luster into the grain of the rosewood paddle blade, iron-scarred with Sigma's initials. Mona Forbes knelt by the window, her mauve eyes giving the bottom-smacker up close and personal inspection. White linen slacks emphasized her buttocks.
"A refreshing way to start each week, to reorient the stale synapses, can be to contemplate the nastier consequences of straying from the narrow-and-true."
Susie Salton leaned on her bed. Her witch-wild brown hair framed a thin-lipped, beak-nosed face redeemed by her minxish eyes and ever-bursting grin.
"You remember that silly song from last night's welcoming ritual? Recite a verse."
Mona's backside still twinged from her cousin Rita's Sunday attentions. Her honed memory responded instantly. She focused on the fourteen actives' serenade, as the pledges stood in the chapterhouse Social Room under balloons and streamers.
"They're nine lovely girls, so soon to be sisters! We're all fa-mi-lyyy Through life's smiles and blisters! They've only six short months (Just six!) To pledge to us; And THEN-a lifelong sisterhood! How fabulous! Oh, lucky us!"
Her guardian angel beamed approvingly. "Very good. Now, each Monday morning, for those six short months, I want you right here at eight o'clock sharp. Here's a little ditty to start with. We'll vary it from time to time."
Mona took the hand-scrawled slip of paper. "Uh, same song-I mean, the music?" At Susie's nod, she cleared her throat and sang. "Just nine virgin bottoms, not yet deflowered. As judge and ju-ryyy Each active's empowered To warm and welt our buns (What buns!) If sin we dare. I'll see nine skinned and roasted rumps Taste justice bare In Sigma's lair."
"Memorize that for next Monday." The senior pressed a button on her watch. A liquid crystal Donna Summer dissolved into the time. "Whooo! I've things to go and places to do, and so do you. Nora called a meeting on the patio at 0200 hours sharp."
The active hopped off her bed and accepted the preferred paddle. A leather thong pierced the handle. She hung it by her dressing table mirror.
"You can get up. Didn't I say that? Sorry." Susie pulled on socks and shoes while Mona stiffly stood again. "I'm glad you girls elected Nora as pledge class president."
"It's nice she's in our group." The freshman hesitantly remarked, "I thought there'd be more of us."
"We've been bled by transfers. I think the chapter's larger at the University of the Pacific School of Dentistry in San Francisco." Susie bounced to her feet. "A banner year for Clairol at St. Cloud, though. Nine pledges, five blondes."
"My-mine's natural." Mona touched the ripe bronze-and-honey helmet mantling her head, a darker, more amber nectar than Gerry Vestry sported.
"We'll verify that the first time you have to skin your Can't Bust'em pantihose down for a reminder. That Bad Word Ban sneaks up on the best of us." The senior winked. "God help your tail if you cheat on the Boy Ban. Now-skaddle! Nora's waiting."
Lotta Desmond waved her hand out her open window to dry the purple metal-flake nail gloss. The Orinda heat baked her pleasantly. She loved it at St. Cloud where she could layer on a good, winter-lasting tan.
"Housekeeping. Reckoning comes as reckoning must." Maxine du Pre stood in the open doorway.
The bedroom suddenly turned chill. Lotta almost dumped her gloss bottle down her violet velour slacks. "Oh."
She felt extraordinarily vulnerable as Maxine moved into the room. Sarah Bothington followed, her Fergie-plump crupper rolling under a floral tea dress. Susie pranced in behind.
"I recall a conversation just last term about a serious mouth problem." Maxine shrugged. "Now that I'm standards officer, I find the matter hasn't gotten better, just older." "Marinated in its juices," Susie contributed.
"A sad case of gutter-mouth." Sarah's British inflections put the weight of English Civilization, from Eleanor of Aquitaine to Maggie Thatcher, behind her words. "An old school affliction."
The standards officer folded her arms. "We're St. Cloud girls, Lotta, not gum-chewing bimbos-the kind who lean on guys at barroom pool tables and go 'shit' and 'fuck' a lot."
"Boy, do they shit and fuck a lot!"
"Susie!" Sarah adopted her best vexed face. "I am perfectly aware that you pledged under the broad wing of Lucretia Sue Merydith. However, you have had three years to overcome that developmental handicap."
Maxine continued, "You hurt the house's image along with your own by using garbage language."
Bowing to Sarah, Susie employed her primest chapel voice. "That stirring rejoinder to Cynthia Lynch-how did it go again?"
She rested her index finger on her jawline in thought.
"Oh, yes: 'Up your twat with a week-dead rat.' Perhaps appropriate, given she's president of Delta Gamma Huche, but I can't believe you pronounced 'twat' properly."
Lotta's face twisted, "But she called the Reverend Roundsong a flake."
"Dear," Sarah spoke gently, "as elected chaplain of this chapter, let me assure you that our house's spiritual adviser is a flake."
"But she's our flake." Maxine glanced out the window at the drought-dried trees lining the street. "Susie, how would Lucretia Sue have responded?"
"Urn . . . taken Cynthia up into the hills and run her naked behind through some poison oak."
"See, Lotta," the British girl turned a palm upward. "Some insults should be handled privately. Now undue suspicion might adhere to Sigma, should any unpleasantness befall Cynthia."
"I guess . . ."
"Getting the sack over their heads quick enough so they can't identify you is the hardest part," Susie mused, "or so Lucretia Sue used to say."
"We stray from the task at hand. Lotta has also enriched campus culture with memorable aphorisms." Sarah began to enumerate, "In reference to an apt lyric by Bruce Springsteen, she shouted 'Fuckin' righteous-ON' in the St. Cloud lounge. Do I have the appropriate inflection?"
"Yeah."
Maxine took up the litany, "You dropped your Physics 1-B, telling your classmates, 'I won't eat shitcake for that goddamned Marie Martinet.' "
"Cute puns," Susie contributed.
Lotta coughed away sudden phlegm. "Professor Porter wanted us to-"
"Dismissing the thoughtful instruction of a highly celebrated academic, praised in the Humanities and Natural Sciences both, scarcely adds dignity to vulgarity." Sarah responded frostily.
"Miss Bothington, darling," Susie interpolated, "as a veteran of three classes with him, let me tell you that Professor Porter makes his students chew roadapple-flapjacks with sheepdip for syrup. But he's a limey, so he's your kind of flake."
"Shall we get onto the routine obscenities?" Maxine inquired. "Or will Lotta admit the faults?"
"Sure ..." The junior's gluteal surfaces twitched a mile a minute. "Are you going to . . . like last time?"
"Then you'd been man-stealing. Rustling a sister Sig-ma's private stock."
"Here we have mere incontinence of speech," the huggably hipped British bird rested both palms on her skirted nethercheeks. "Yet since you sinned so publically, we thought the pledges might benefit from a practical demonstration."
"Oh no."
"Would you rather shake your duff down Greek Row again?" Maxine had hard, serious eyes.
"Uh, of course not, no-" Lotta cringed. She'd had to march from the school quad to the house, dripping molasses and flocked with chicken feathers. "I accept the judgement."
Ron Ladrone scowled at the gabled roof of Sigma's chapterhouse as he ambled down the street. He told his two friends, "That's the cow palace Mona's gone and pledged to, with its jerk-brained Boy Ban."
"Perty impressive," The tall, loose-jointed one studied the high adobe wall. "Fortress-like. I stormed the portcullis on a lot of sorority pussy, but I never dated any regular-like." A wine-curdling shriek spilled over the dark ochre wall. Another followed, stopping the three boys.
"Jeee-sus fuck! They dissecting a live cat in there?" The small, bearded one glanced at Ron. "That how Greek twits get their kicks now?"
"My gal Mona says they're a lot like her cousin, Rita, only not as crazy." Another female screech made him flinch. "They have method, I mean, and procedure."
"I thought Method was what Strasburg gave Brando." The compact, Van Dyked student continued to stare.
"Hell," the loose, craggy one told him, "method was what Hamlet had in his madness. Don't you read Willie the Shake?" "Only when they're casting."
"Our man Ron's gonna Hamletize St. Cloud this fall." The tall student licked his lips. "I've got this lighting design written down ..."
"I can duel. You seen those guys in Oakland, down to the Rockridge BART station? Dress like old-time knights and bash each other with these fuckin' rattan clubs. I been taking lessons." The little one looked hungry as a wolf spying spring lamb. "You get me that friend's part, the girl's brother."
"Laertes. He's not Hamlet's friend." Ron began to walk faster. A girlish shriek pursued him from Sigma's compound. "Dorothy Tilden decides all that. She directs and casts and-"
"Just ask her to put on a play inside without lights." The tall one laughed. "Even a piss-in-a-bucket ashcan production gotta have lighting. Ever see the One Act Theatre when Simon Levy ran it? I coulda gone every night and creamed my jeans, they handled their lamps so well."
"Just make sure all the bulbs are screwed in, Pari," the short one yipped. "That time you put me in the fuckin' dark for my make-out scene with Blanche du Bois-"
"It says in the script it's dim. He can't see how old the hag-faced twit is-!"
Nine solemn sorority pledges stood on the sun-pounded flagstone patio reserved for their use alone. Hands flat on their flanks, spines straight, they watched Lotta Desmond express corporal pain.
The junior's naked toes danced on a hot wooden platform. Naked save for her bra, she arched forward, wrists and neck locked between hand-rubbed redwood pillory boards. End posts held up the horizontal planks, leaving bare legs, bush, and tan jiggly belly on full display.
Her hair had been knotted around a black iron loop bolted to the pillory's upper board. Her pain-gnarled face jerked from side to side on its tight leash.
Leather darted, sudden and black in the sunlight. The classic two-fingered tawse lashed into Lotta's strap-scored netherglobes. She howled, red and woeful at both ends.
Sarah peeled the strap away from the undulating cheeks. The split end had left a clear, pinched ridge on Lotta's left flank.
Susie stood opposite, her tawse ready, her arm cocked. She swung, the black length bridging the cleft. The ends whacked into the right buttock's lowermost curve.
The junior hopped an anguished parody midway between coitus and a Scots fling. She clutched her thighs together, then opened them. Her hips jounced with fiery energy.
"Twelve strokes," Maxine impassively announced. She shifted her gaze to the patio two yards away from the pillory. "There's a lesson here, pledge class. Learn it."
The tearful girl tried to whisper something. Maxine stepped closer to listen.
"Do and you'll mop it up with your panties and wear them wet for the rest of the day." She moved away. "Six final strokes for public vulgarity.
Sarah tawsed the preferred bottom briskly. Watching, Nora felt her pulse trip-hammer 120 times before Susie hit from the other side. The begging scream chilled Nora to the marrow.
Thick tears spilled down Lotta's wrinkled chin. Her bound hair sawed at the dark iron ring as her punishment continued.
After the final licking stripe, her face and hands drooped between the boards. Maxine let five minutes of shaming exposure tarry before she released the pillory lock. More time passed while she and Susie untangled the hairy knot holding Lotta to the upper crosspiece.
All three had to help the junior back into the house. Her hindquarters flamed a dark ruby, with beetish sour stria-tions from the tawse ends.
The nine pledges resumed their white metal lawn chairs.
"After that," Nora tried to breath normally, "there's not much to say. Today's word is 'tongue.' Going twice: 'tongue.' Third and final time: 'tongue.' Yes, Francesca."
"Uh, Nor'," the nondescript girl looked more colorless than usual. "The dinner menu tomorrow-?"
"Right. Since it's a paddling offense to use a forbidden word and since we're required to dine in house tomorrow, do I have any suggestions?"
She felt acutely conscious of the sullen pillory, its redwood beams and planks bound in black iron fittings and hinges, set with strong sooty bolts.
A hesitant hand raised. Radiant with athletic health, Charlotte Bosk sat spine-straight upright. Her pectorals strained the seams of her blouse. Nora estimated them at 44-inches, minimum, and in perfect proportion to the California girl's glowing curves. "Let's call it 'boiled mouth meat in Madeira sauce.' "
"That should save some bruised bottoms." The pledges voted to accept the euphemism. "Just remember, we get one forbidden word per day. Each word stays banned for a full month-calendar days, not just four weeks." Nora referred to her notebook. "I'll read what Gerry told me: " 'Customary obscenities, including recognized racial slurs, remain off pledges' working vocabularies for the full six months before initiation as actives. Or mama spank.' "As you've heard, scores get paid off on Thursdays. One swat per violation." The young woman shuffled her pages. "One very important announcement. As we all know, classes begin tomorrow. The Academic Senate has voted to bar all denim apparel from the campus."
She looked up. "That's jean and jackets. Not tote bags, backpacks, handkerchieves or whatnot. Corduroy jeans remain fully acceptable.
"The usual campus disciplinary rules apply. Each offense costs an hour in Jug-cleaning gum off the walkways, or washing down the library windows, and so forth."
Nora smiled tightly. "The Greek community has voted to support the measure fully. All fraternities and sororities will make special effort to prevent 'refractory incidents' and to punish them appropriately if they occur."
Amy Morgenstern's hard-edged New York voice rose from the group. "Mama spank."
Nora nodded silently. The pillory boards glowered in the hot sun beyond her.
"I hadn't been prepared for that, even after all that Sally Klein told me. I hope you weren't too shocked."
Mona Forbes touched Nora's arm. "That really got to you, didn't it? Look, my cousin Rita treats me about the same. That's why I pledged here."
They stood alone in the Social Room. Since the chapter's founding, each outgoing class had donated an ornate paddle to hang from the picture molding skirting the ceiling. Nora gestured at the array of elaborate, lovingly decorated bottom boards.
"You pledged to get more of that?"
"No! I mean-to get away. Rita won't stop for the four years I'm in college. If I can move out and live here, after initiation." Hope made her hair a Medieval halo. "My father and mother might agree to a disciplined environment like this."
"They know about this Rita business?"
"Look-it's not that bad. Billie Bones told me Sigma's just like the Aragon Outlaws, her old high school sorority- well, I guess it was really a girl gang. Nothing official. But they had all the rituals and paddles and everything."
Mona tried to seem cheery. "Rita's sort of like that." She looked at her watch. "I have to get home now. She warned me not to stay out too long."
"She throws a tizzy, does she?"
The girl blinked and touched her linen-trousered rump. "Mama spank."
"Come a minute." Nora strolled to the phone by the message pigeonholes in the main corridor near the stairway. The freshman followed, brow tense.
"What's her number . . . Don't look so frightened just tell me your phone number." Nora tapped it out as the girl recited. "Mmmmm . . . Hello, this is Nora Quincannonat Sigma Epsilon Xi. I've asked Mona to stay through dinner this evening, to get better acquainted with the girls . . . How flattering, no, I'm not the house mother, I'm pledge class president . . . Yes, I found a high school diploma didn't open quite every door . . .
"I called so that you wouldn't worry about Mona. She didn't say so, but I gather you fret over her . . . Rules certainly are rules, I agree . . . How clever. Did you invent that yourself? A simple garden hose, imagine . . . Yes, we silly sorority girls do have a lot to learn ..."
Nora hung up. "It's a dozen with the hose, no panties, unless you're home in fifteen minutes. That creature is rough."
Mona streaked for the main door. "She saw Aliens three times to get pointers from the alien hive queen."
The woman stood at the window as the blonde ran down the street, ripe and wholesome in her striped blouse and linen trousers. Wholesome and in blind terror.
"Mona," she muttered aloud to the window pane, "if this sisterhood talk is more than thick-sliced baloney, some heroine needs to slay that caca-brained dragon of yours."
She sighed. "And the eight of you did elect me, didn't you?"
CHAPTER SIX: Home Games
"Weighty triple-handfuls, aren't they?"
Thumbs indented the central buccal summits callously. Taloned fingers palped the abdundant outer buttock slopes.
"Perhaps, quadruple palmfuls. Bouncy as harem cushions, too. Any sheikh's sons been sharing these bountiful bedwarmers? Eh?"
The thumbnails carved indelicately just above her fear-tight sphincter, parting her ample rounds as Jan Ladrone squeaked a hasty negative. The girl crouched on knees and elbows, her lowered slacks bunched about her ankles at one end of the chill medical examination table.
"Just as well." Wildwood Secondary School's nurse inspected the brownish, innocently puckered anus. "The backdoor playpen has a nasty way of leading to the nursery foyer."
The grizzled woman let the wide posteriors slap back together. "Your hide holds the marks a good while, but you're recovering nicely. When did Miss Plimsoll promise you that livener?"
"Next Friday, ma'am. Five if my attitude has been proper during the week. Ten if . . . not."
The veteran school nurse snorted. "Fifteen more likely! We're overrun with you dainty snots, held back a grade here because your family was traveling, or lingering through her studies there because her folks didn't give a damn."
The woman's carpentry-callused palm slapped the gluteal crevice. "They should set all you dollies out on the street the minute you turn eighteen. Let the colleges nursemaid you."
Fingers probed between Jan's generous thighs and tugged playfully. "No longer looking like small mink is nesting in your britches. Zipper on your bell-bottoms uncomfortable, is it?"
"Without panties, it catches."
"Smarts, too, I'll bet." The nurse cackled. "Your chart says you're approved to wear panties again as of Monday. At least if you have to touch your toes in class, you won't be giving the other girls such an eyeful."
"Yes, ma'am."
" 'Lthough if Miss Plim had her 'druthers, you'd be showing a nice crop of blisters where those holes in her strap stretch the skin."
Jan sent a fervent wail heavenwards. Please, God, don't let her whip me more than five strokes Friday-anything, any cup of sacrifice-take my Prince autographed T-shirt- take my R2D2 Ovaltine mug-let Ron have a hernia hauling his next leading lady around on stage-only please, please, please don't let Miss Plimsoll tan my hide that hard again. So soon.
"You enjoy that position, or am I supposed to take your temperature?" the hard-faced woman demanded.
"Umm, sorry," Jan gulped, sliding off the table. "Uh, ma'am," she lamely concluded as she scooped up her bell-bottomed slacks and tried to fasten them around her naked hips.
A stabbing, matronly glare followed her out the infirmary door.
"Collins twins, next!" The woman barked into the corridor.
Two petrified fifteen year olds stumbled into her presence. One had a head of spikey black hair, darker than nature the other had a shoulder-length coiffure tinted a glowing licorice-whip red.
"Miss Plimsoll ordered you to wash that paint off. Since you haven't obeyed," the nurse chortled, "I get to help.
"You, pour some laundry detergent into that galvenized bucket and put it under the hot tap. And I do mean hot.
While she's doing that, Jeanne, you can get my can of turpentine out of the cupboard."
She slammed the door and rubbed her hands. "Don't lollygag, girls. You're scheduled for a long, tender session with Miss Plim after I make you both presentable. You know how she absolutely hates being kept waiting."
Ron Ladrone propped his arm against the kitchen wall. Mona's voice droned gloomily over the phone.
"... too dangerous, Ron, I mean it. I'm grounded. It's not just the Sigma Boy Ban. Rita's so spitting-poison mad at me for pledging that I can't even step onto the sidewalk unless I'm heading to class or to compulsory house activities."
"All we have to do is go down to the basement like we did before. That's not going anywhere. You have to be able to go down to the laundry room, right?"
"Suppose someone finds us-suppose it's Rita!"
"You always say that, and nothing ever happens. That bitch never comes home from work early."
"Well ... I do miss you . . ."
"We'll make it a party this time."
"A party in the basement?"
"Once you lock the door, no one can get in. If anyone jiggles the knob, you can tell them something while we hide behind the furnace."
"Who's this 'we,' Ron?"
"You're a Greek girl, now. They're a couple of guys from Theater Arts. They're in a fraternity, so it'll be old Hellenic homeweek for you."
"I can't-not without--it's a violation to talk to any boy for more than five minutes even at an approved party, and this is NOT an approved party."
"Look, you're my girl and I want to show you off. What about during classes. You can talk then, can't you?"
"Ye-ahhh ..."
"So we're conducting a class. Hank's into some serious enology. His dad has acreage and does grapes for some winery. Hank-boy's got some primo vino he made him- self. He can tell how he did it and we'll taste it to give our opinions. That's educational."
"Ron, I don't think you respect what I'm trying to a-achieve as a Sigma."
"To get your fanny out of Rita's claws."
"Well, yeah . . . that means I can't risk getting dropped by the chapter.'' "Word I heard from Greek Row is that the last time Sigma booted a pledge out into the cold she was wanted by the FBI, the CIA, and James Bond himself."
"Susie explained all that. It was just some Quebec separatist terrorist trying to hide out in this country. She called herself Yvette la Plastique or something. She wasn't serious about the house."
"I'm wondering if you're serious about me. What kind of big respect did you show our relationship by tying up with that Boy Ban crowd. I didn't complain, did I? We've got something special."
"Y-yeah, I know we do, Ron, but-"
"I haven't seen you since Saturday. This is already Wednesday. How about three tomorrow afternoon?"
"Wellll . . . better make it Friday. Rita'll be in San Francisco dumping off an order of Czechoslovakian bronze cats. She's just invoicing them now for Gypsy Wagon."
"I love you, sweet cheeks. Friday at three."
He dumped the receiver into the wall cradle. The silent, staring face of his sister Jan appeared at his elbow. He flinched back against the wall.
"Christ's bloody tears, Jan-"
"Call me Living Shadow. Musta been Mona," the girl diagnosed as she headed to the refrigerator. "You never get that intense when you talk to me."
He stared at the door leading from the kitchen to the cemented back yard. "I'm going to get the guy who oiled that screen door."
Jan investigated the fridge's hoard. Two six-packs of Coke without caffein, sugar, or any other purpose for existence . . . oranges and grapes ... the big pitcher had been filled with something alcoholic. She sniffed. Mai-tais?
"Sounded like romantic upsets." She settled for a double handful of flame-colored grapes.
"Between that damn Rita Henshaw-may she die with a dick in each ear-and this Sigma Epsilon Xi buffalo crap ..."
He rested his shoulders against the wall and stuck his legs out. There'd been a photo of Martin Sheen doing that-something like James Dean, only with Latin macho cool . . .
"They probably don't trust you after tomcatting around with Cleopatra on stage."
"Yeah, Shandel'la and I had a great thing going. In the play, I mean."
Jan popped two fat grapes into her mouth. "Everybody falls for a horny Italian with a cape and a padded pud. Look at poor Juliet."
"Toga." He swung upself forward, weight solidly on the balls of his feet. "I played Antony. Toga and armor and no codpiece."
"And Cleopatra's gown." She smirked, crunching more grapes.
"Damned Lesbo director. The text just refers to that. She didn't have to show it." He'd been forced to peel down naked and put on Shandel'la's costume, flickering rose lights playing over his body. It had been the play's sexiest scene, but Pari never stopped sniggering at him, even after six weeks of performances.
The dining room door swung open. A solemn, wide-eyed woman in her late twenties stepped through. She blocked the door's backswing with scarlet evening pumps sporting five-inch spike heels.
The memory of Shandel'la's ebony nudity on the play set couch melted from his mind. The woman entering the kitchen had only a canary-yellow baby doll top and a serving tray, aside from her skyscraper foot gear.
Her hair rolled in finger curls down to her saffron-misted boobs. Lips, cheeks, and nipples had been garishly rouged.
"Could you . . . please . . .?" Her eyes averted. Her skin burned in a blush rivaling the trollop-heavy paint.
"Oh, sure." Ron propped the door open.
Jan simply stared, mangled grapes dripping thick juice in her mouth. Bare silky flesh showed below the transparent nightie, from navel to ankles. The girl had never realized anyone could finger curl her pubic hair, much less want to.
She thought of her own shorn Venus locks. Maybe when the thatch grew out . . .
"Want me to get the booze for you? Jan, can you open the fridge and hold the door?" Ron had a face practically oozing with gentlemanly courtesy. Not a glimmer of male lust showed. Jan knew better.
She went to the refrigerator. The woman and her tray hobbled forward. Jan realized that the stranger wore the tray. A softly jingling chain harness around shoulders and waist supported the silver server. The woman's arms angled behind her back, thrusting her breasts out to maximum effect.
"Got it?" Ron carefully loaded the pitcher onto the bobbing tray. The visitor gave a gasp as the frosty cocktail jug slid back into the warm cradle of her breasts.
As she turned, Jan saw the woman's hands pressed, palms outward, against the crease joining buttock and thigh. Some sort of leather bands circled her inward-pointed thumbs.
"I'll get it!" Jan ran ahead of her brother and pushed the swinging door open. Big, robin's egg eyes batted thank-you and vanished.
The door swished closed behind her.
"Okay," the girl regarded her brother. "Just who was that? Some Nile lovely from drama class?"
"She did kind of look like our Charmion. We had fun with that line," he reflected. " 'Please, don't squeeze the-' "
"Who?" Jan stabbed a finger toward the dining room.
"She's part of the bridge group entourage." Ron bent over the kitchen table and plucked some grapes. "You know, Mom, Aunt Tilly, Mrs. Warden-Eleanor Warden, I mean. Dorothy Tilden." His nose curled slightly. "She's Cheslyn Warden."
"That's Mrs. Warden's daughter-in-law?" "She's staying with the family while he's on duty in Greenland."
"Rosalind mentioned it at school." Jan recalled the daughter-in-law from Christmas. She'd worn a lot more then. "What's with the floor show? A lingerie and bondage display to distract the players while Mrs. Warden deals from the bottom of the deck?"
"Mommy-in-law decided that her son's wife had been naughty. I didn't hear details." He stared at her poker-lipped. "You might ask when you face the folks."
"When I-?" Jan frowned quizzically.
She knew that their mother hated interruptions. That bridge crowd played for the taste of blood. Their father spent his Wednesday evenings with his parish Men's Club cronies.
"Something between you and Aunt Tilly." Ron's voice sounded marshmallow-innocent.
"Omigod!" The mortuary calendar, showing all the Saint's Days and fast days, hung by the oven. It told her anguished mind the truth. "Omigod-omigod-it's-" Her strap-tender rear tried to contract into a nonexistent point. She vividly recalled her bargain with God. How could He call in her promise so soon?
"Don't tell them I ever got home-" She jumped toward the outside door and the yard's safety.
"Ja-NET- La-DRONE!" The bell-clear purity of tone carved through the dining room door like the crash of doom rending the curtain of the temple.
"I'll be upstairs if you need me afterward." Ron fondled some fiery red grapes. "Here's looking up you, kid."
She dragged herself across the kitchen. "You can be replaced by a battery-operated zucchini, you know." She pushed the door open and trod the weary yards through the dining area to the living room.
"Myfavorite niece!"
Attilina Ladrone's chest-tones rang with the timbre of a Verdi soprano in heat. Her round, heavy-chinned face had never been graced by an abundant nose. The poor pug thing appeared lost between two cheeks as thickly laden with paint as any hand-decorated china.
"Where have you been, my precious darling? I thought school had dismissed hours and hours ago."
"Uh, I got a bite afterward. Mom said there wouldn't be dinner." The girl blinked toward the bridge table.
"Something nice?" Eleanor Warden glanced up from computing points from the last go-around. "I've heard of a lovely bean curd and stir-fry vegetable place down by your school."
"Yes," Jan's mother remarked. "That area's becoming terribly commercial. A video store seduces students on their way home."
"I dropped off the Naughty Victorians tape on the way to class," the girl reported. Her gaze kept wandering to Cheslyn Warden, standing face to the wall in the corner by the TV set. The backs of her hands still pressed against her leg tops and her bottom.
"What did you eat, dear?" Aunt Tilly pursued. "Mrs. Warden has been telling these frightful tales of how young people's diets positively cripple them for life."
"Just a quarter pounder and some fries and an apple pie at McDonald's." Jan tried to sound inoffensive.
"Rosalind and Eric ate at that place ..." Mrs. Warden scowled in memory. "No, I err. It was that Captain Nameless Submarine Shoppe. I marched them right back after a good dosing with castor oil.
"I made them each eat one of those Trident super-specials on the premises. They proved remarkably energetic about emptying themselves. I think the lesson did the other patrons good." ' Aunt Tilly bobbed her powerful chins. "Still I thought it needlessly cruel to rub their faces with Hostess Snowballs before putting them to bed."
"Aversion therapy." The guest fixed Jan with a basilisk intensity. "I want young people to live, not just to exist in a trance of avitaminosis."
"Ron still responds to light and pin pricks," the fourth woman at the bridge table laughed. Jan recognized the dark-haired, pale drama professor, Dorothy Tilden. "Have you finished making the deck?"
Mother handed the cards over. Mrs. Warden cut then into four equal piles.
"Aunt Tilly . . . could I . . . please ..." Jan fetl naked as a slug on a glass table. "Miss Plimsoll at Wild wood ..."
Mrs. Warden studied her coldly, analytically. "I Love A Mystery hasn't been on in years, dear girl. Speak up. We've cards to play."
"KPFA broadcast some of those," Dorothy Tilden mused "I never did learn how Doc and Reggie got out of that cave filled with vampires."
She accepted the deck and began to deal.
"A family custom." Mother sorted her cards as they slid to her. "Jan, do tell her."
"Do I have . . .?" Her face burned. "Okay, you see--"
"We all see. Let us hear, clearly and completely." Mrs. Warden barely turned her head. "Excuse me for reprimanding your child, Carla."
"Aunt Tilly is my godmother, you kn-ah, I was christened today."
"So late in life? Is that what kept you?" The visitor' capable hands packed her cards into a tight enclave.
"I mean, eighteen years ago today."
Dorothy Tilden rested her hands on the deck, stopping the deal. "Name of Names-to look back to the Seventies and Eighties as normalcy! To think of Ronald Reagan the way I think of-"
"FDR? Deal while you reminisce."
"-Eisenhower." She planted a card firmly in front Mrs. Warden.
"I thought your birthday came in late November." The matronly guest studied Jan. "You and Rosalind had that Sweet Sixteen affair together."
"Fucking during Lent-or did Easter come late that year?"
"Dorothy!" Aunt Tilly shook her formidable head. "Jan was baptised late, Eleanor."
"Joe had these agnostic persuasions," Mother confessed in a subdued voice. "Tilly finally brought him around."
Mrs. Warden stared. "I never knew. I thought he'd been ushering in the parish since Pius XII."
"So I became my dear little girl's godmother." Attilina Ladrone's voice rose with the majesty of Bellini's Norma appealing to her chaste gods. "Now tell them the rest."
Jan twisted her feet in shame. "Instead of giving me a birthday . . . uuummmm ..."
"Don't mumble. Only pigs grunt for speech."
Jan blurted at Mrs. Warden, "Aunt Tilly spanks me on my christening day."
Dorothy Tilden's low chuckle flowed through the room. She reached for the big pitcher and freshened her mai-tai glass.
"Very practical, actually." Mother glanced reprovingly at her partner. "This looks like a foot not a hand, Dorothy. The ritual preserves Tilly's godmotherly authority should she ever have to exercise her duties."
"How sensible." Mrs. Warden looked thoughtful. "I should have done that with Eric and Rosalind."
"They're not too old," Dorothy Tilden observed, "if cheeky Cheslyn constitutes any example."
"Young men these days have no idea of how to train their wives," the older guest allowed grandly. "I have given Robert my assistance as he needs it."
"Don't let Gloria Steinem in on the bitter secret. She's under enough strain trying to teach women how to live like a harem houri, with champagne and endless nookie, and yet not muff a shot at the corporate boardroom." Dorothy Tilden prompted, "Your bid."
"Really? Two clubs," Jan's aunt announced. "I can't see that Steinem woman's picture without wanting to scrub her face for her." The farded cheeks tightened.
"Pass." Mother continued, "A good scolding would do her wonders."
"Paddle her bottom before bed for a week to get her attention, first." Mrs. Warden studied her cards. "Two spades."
"You genteel ladies remind me of Havelock Ellis's Florrie and her fantasy of birching the suffragettes. You might try kidnapping Gloria at an ERA rally." Dorothy Tilden lifted an eyebrow and bid, "Two no trump."
"You remember the old Sigma House days?" Aunt Tilly flared with the malicious glee of a Tosca reminiscing over Scarpia bubbling in his dying blood. "Martha Daltry looked so foolish in that oak tree growing on the football frat house lawn."
"Naked as an unvarnished truth, except for that paper bag with the eyeholes. Pass." Mother indulged herself in a wistfully fond smile.
"She did have pluck, for a snooty thing. She almost made it out of the lower branches before we got that fire alarm to go off." Jan's aunt sparkled.
"Four spades," Mrs. Warden bid definitely. "I recall Martha was a Sigma Delta Tau. Very free about high-hatting Sigma Epsilon Xi, too. Their symbols are the torch and the rose. Her bottom resembled both when we'd done with it."
"Pass." Dorothy Tilden glowered at her cards. "You had the baby Bolshevik crowd out at Berkeley. St. Cloud gets the puppy Jean Kirkpatricks."
"Pass." Aunt Tilly benignly regarded Jan. "How lucky for you that I appear to be dummy, my darling. We can finish our business so you won't have to wait around for it."
"And pass. No time like the present," her mother agreed. "Would you care to have Cheslyn watch by way of object lesson, Eleanor?"
"Having fun while I battle for our honor?" An indignant sound erupted from Mrs. Warden. "Can't you stand her on a stool with her pants at her ankles or something while I try to salvage the rubber?"
"It wouldn't be fair to my favorite dear!" Aunt Tilly's painted cheeks furrowed as her lips pursed. "This isn't punishment, after all, merely an affirmation of my godmotherly commitment."
"The spanking will distract us as much as you, Eleanor." The drama professor watched as the dummy was laid out. She whistled, shaking her head.
"Cheslyn, turn around."
Jan could see tear smears in her whore's rouge as the young wife obeyed. The canary-hued nightie shimmered over pear-firm teats.
"That knockers-on-parade pose gets painful after a while, Eleanor," Dorothy Tilden commented.
"How ever would you know? Posture discipline teaches her to stand straight and not slouch when her husband wishes to fondle her charms."
"Janet! Don't you pay any mind." Mother had an alarmed expression.
"Let Jan have a peek at what real deportment training means," the college teacher suggested slyly.
Mrs. Warden wiggled a beckonning finger. Her daughter-in-law tottered forward on her absurdly tall spikes. The silver tray swung back and forth.
"Don't puff and fuss, Carla. It'll do your baby girl good. She'll be voting for Bush or Dukakis in two months. She should know something of the world."
The imposing woman motioned at Jan. The girl advanced. She froze at the command, "Kneel here."
"I suppose if it'll do her good ... do as she says, Janet." Mother disarranged her hand restlessly.
The girl sank to her knees, closely by Cheslyn's naked haunch. The projecting buttocks lifted the baby doll's pleated hem up and out. Mrs. Warden slapped one cheek lightly and the young wife shifted position, her substantial half-moons facing Jan squarely.
The young woman's hands still crushed tightly against her legs and fundament. Mrs. Warden explained succinctly, "Thumb cuffs."
She reached down and unsnapped the leather bands girdling each thumb. Cheslyn's arms moved freely. Her shoulders sagged, setting the tray wobbling.
Jan saw the thumb restraints dangle from a stout biforcated thong. Mrs. Warden gathered the ends and tugged. The lightly-haired valley between the thrusting hillocks widened as half an inch of scum-slick dildo emerged.
Jan could clearly see the distended rectal corona.
"Cute stuff, eh, kid?"
"Dorothy!"
"A tighter grip than usual." Mrs. Warden pulled harder. Gradually, as Cheslyn rocked on her torturous high heels, three more inches of stiff prong emerged into daylight.
"Now, you cannot be cooperating." The older woman pressed the firm plastic member back in with difficulty. "Surely suction cannot be a problem in insertion. I dislike a balky bottom, Cheslyn."
Jan's own anus felt gun barrel-hot as her clitoris rose to press anxiously against her slacks' toothy zipper.
"I hope you don't think I'm going to waste yet another dollop of Mrs. Ladrone's good Crisco."
"N-o-o-o, Mama Eleanor."
Mrs. Warden worked the solid ramus back and forth irritably. Cheslyn made a faint, nasal sound as the length appeared and disappeared.
"Your bid, Eleanor. Perhaps you could play a card." Mother viewed the exhibition with visibly mounting doubt.
"Oh, so sorry." The guest observed the three of clubs lead. She slid a card from the dummy. As Jan's mother topped it with a ten, Mrs. Warden set down a jack.
"You play the knave charmingly," Dorothy Tilden remarked.
The older woman rammed the piston firmly home with the heel of her hand. Cheslyn's buttocks quivered.
"Spine straight, hands on your head." The matron collected the trick.
"I'm afraid it's your turn, dear Janet." Aunt Tilly's voice chimed with good spirits. Jan thought dismally of Turandot summoning her suitors to the riddle game and execution.
The girl's fingers clutched at her belt in acute embarrassment. "Um, Miss Plimsoll ..."
"You mentioned her before-OH!" Mother's mouth stiffened into a perfect O. "Don't tell me . . . oh."
Aunt Tilly's eyes gleamed like hard ebony chips bracketing her runtish nose. "You see, Eleanor, my rule calls for one loving smack across each cheek of my darling girl's seat for each year of her life, plus ten to grow on, and ten to be good on."
"Did I read that somewhere?" Dorothy Tilden discarded a card atop Mrs. Warden's fresh lead.
"Perhaps not original," the aunt admitted, "but effective in practice."
"However, when Tilly finds signs of recent . . . correction ..." Mother gave Jan a reproving look. "Although all classroom teachers may administer corporal punishment at Wildwood, Miss Plimsoll does handle the major infractions in her office."
Dorothy Tilden leaned forward. "They still beat high school girls in California?"
"Chastise, please." Their hostess sounded prim.
"It's the verb the British used when I sojourned in England." The drama instructor's dark, inquisitive eyes studied Jan with fresh interest. "What happens when you scent the spoor of a hot shelacking, Tilly?"
"I must increase the count with ten additional smacks to behave on, ten more to be sorry on, and a final ten to beware on."
"Thirty-six plus twenty with thirty yet to go. A sizeable duff dusting."
"She's got bottom enough for it," Mrs. Warden appraised bluntly. "What was that card, Dorothy?"
The college professor exposed the queen she'd taken the trick with. "Sorry, no grand slam today. Only a small and inglorious one."
"Perhaps you should lower those slacks, Janet," Aunt Tilly encouraged, "though you wear them so snugly one should properly call them tights."
Glumly, Jan released her belt and downed the zip.
"No underthings?" Her aunt's powdered brow clouded. "How . . . modern."
Jan felt wee and timorous. "Miss Plimsoll says it's part of our punishment. Her orders."
"Not a coed school, I trust. Turn this way, my dear," Mrs. Warden directed. "I see you know how to shave your legs."
"That is not a leg," Dorothy Tilden chortled, "although it does its best to imitate a third one. Some boys go erect before a thrashing, why not a girl?"
"How ever would you know?"
"I taught a bit in England during my wild years. They still flogged in those days, both sexes at my school. The boys believed they hated the indignity more than the pain." The drama professor's eyebrows rose mirthfully. "I learned 'em different."
"Please, Dorothy!" Mother wore a shocked mask.
"Go on with your game," Aunt Tilly instructed. "My precious darling and I have business." A thick finger waggled an invitation.
Jan shuffled around her mother to confront her doom. Her aunt babbled on. "The dear is eighteen and world-wise, but still ..."
The stumpy finger probed indelicately. Jan had to squirm, rising on the balls of her feet, brick-faced with mortification.
"... a virgin."
"Don't be so eager, Carla. I hold a trump or two still." Mrs. Warden seized the hand. "That's exquisite coloration on your starboard flank, Janet. How much and with what?"
"Eight strokes . . . each side." The girl could recall the scalding impact of each well-aimed swing. "She used the Truro Terror."
"That what?" Dorothy Tilden craned her neck to stare.
Mother waved her hand disarmingly. "It's a kind of strap the school has, with perforations-"
"A paddle, really," Mrs. Warden contradicted. "Rosalind describes it vividly. Made of composition rubber and pierced with a dozen holes to diminish the air resistance."
"Something like Mrs. Spencer's old spanking paddle." Dorothy Tilden closed her eyes dreamily. "That had two rows of five major holes down the sides of the paddle blade, with four minor holes symmetrically grouped between them."
"Some of us may be ancient enough to remember," Aunt Tilly remarked, nettled. "Where's this Turbo Tanner from?"
"Truro Terror." Mrs. Warden led a king. "A principal in Nova Scotia designed it."
"An improvement over the old rubber-linen Canadian school strap." The drama instructor disgustedly slapped down a queen. "The holes leave those sore blistery appearing marks. Play, Carla; Eleanor hungers to make book."
"The skin stretches as the rubber strikes around those thumbnail-sized spaces." Mrs. Warden gloated genteelly while Jan's mother dithered over her cards. "A bump forms and the next swat, unless perfectly aimed, smacks the raised skin flat."
The woman pounced on the hand jubilantly. "My Rosalind squeals like the very devil when I birch her after a school tanning. She gets one stroke for every lick a teacher delivers, and twosies if Miss Plimsoll had to call the girl into the office."
She reflected judiciously. "Eric has those wicked cane marks from his school, of course, and he hates to feel the birch on top of them."
"Especially when you dress him in Rosalind's frock afterwards." Dorothy Tilden assured the other players, "He looks cute pouting in lipstick and red ribbons. Eleanor takes a half-hour braiding his hair."
"Raising a boy and girl together has advantages."
"Do you discipline Robert as strictly as his rather uncomfortable-looking bride?"
"Good heavens, I'm forced to lead with an ace." Mrs. Warden set the card down with a crisp snap.
"Of trumps, too. How showy."
"Tilly, would you care to borrow my riding whip?" the matron inquired. "I brought it in case Cheslyn proved willful. She sometimes misbehaves in public."
"Oh my, no, no." Aunt Tilly's palm massaged Jan's shrinking bare flank. "A spanking should always be with something flat. I brought our customary slipper. Be a darling and fetch you-know-what from my purse."
CHAPTER SEVEN: All In The Family
Ron Ladrone leaned hard against the doorjam, his ear on the door from the kitchen to the dining room. The next best thing to fondling Jan's plush hindend was watching the broad loveglobes being blistered to a winsome ruby color. If he couldn't see, he could at least listen.
Of course, he really got off on Mona's mobile rear. It had been days since he'd enjoyed a pure, muscle-melding, joint-relaxing fuck with his girl. And even longer since he'd coaxed her into sodomy.
Earlier in the summer, before Rita'd lain down the law, he'd taken her down the coast. They'd found some beach and flopped on a blanket, stinking of sun screen as they absorbed a Thermos of double-strength Ramos Fizzes. His whispered suggestions had finally won a half-reluctant, half-kinky giggle.
She willingly accompanied him back into the sandy rocks smelling of salt and scrub. They dipped out of the sight of strolling mothers and children. She took the doggie-fuck position. His urgent thumbing peeled down her bikini.
He'd brought some cocoa butter tan oil. His annointing fingers parted her golden, seraphic nates. His brightly latexed cockhead nuzzled her shy anus as he kissed the sticky nape of her neck.
Experimental digs only made her coo. His short thrusts became a full-scale ramrodding. She bucked her hips and mewled in delight as he stirred her clit and kneaded her tits, weight on one arm.
Her shoulder blades arched in a gentle cadence against his chest. He jammed her, crammed her, and slammed her tight, squeezing bunghole. Mona-his Mona-miraculous Mo' tossed her bottom against his loins like a trooper.
He held in place after a blasting come and let her jack him through a second orgasm. The condom's tip had streamed his cream onto the gritty sand afterward.
Ron loved her sincerely and fully, but he deeply .regretted that she hadn't put out for him that way since then.
"Cheslyn, you kneel with your eyes on Janet's pretty fundamentals."
His attention snapped back to the present. He glued his ear to the reverberant door.
"Such a broad base for learning."
"Those mai-tais have made you lyrical but quite intolerable, Dorothy. Don't insult the family shape."
Ron gave thanks for having inherited his father's sleek Florentine stud build. He'd worn paper-thin breeches in A School For Scandal. He expected that Dorothy Tilden would costume him in skin-clinging tights as Hamlet.
He wondered vaguely how she'd flitted into the bridge circle. She certainly didn't fit with the parish crowd. She and Eleanor Warden deserved one another, though. He could imagine where she'd picked up the idea to drape him in Shandel'la's diaphanous royal gown.
"OW!" A sound nastily like shoe leather on bare buttock mingled with the cry.
"I do believe we've made our bid," Mrs. Warden announced.
A volley of five slapping strokes rang distinctly and precisely. "The Cheshire Cat couldn't look smugger with a snootload of cream, Eleanor. Dummy's play." "The seven of hearts, then."
A redly hearty six cracked like rifle shots down Jan's rear. Ron heard her wail, more subdued then her first yelp. Aunt Tilly always worked down one cheek with a half dozen, before giving the other mound a sustained salvo.
He figured that would hurt over the Truro Terror's aching tracks.
"Another trick for us? Joy, joy. So sorry to have broken your small slam, Eleanor . . .Oh, look. Tears flowing like sea maidens'wine."
"Poetic, but most unnecessary, Dorothy," Aunt Tilly chided.
Eyes inches from Jan Ladrone's cushiony backside, Cheslyn Warden flinched at each leathery whap. The aunt put her stocky forearm behind her spanking volleys.
"Try to kick a bit less, my darling."
Jan's arm doubled behind her back, her wrist locked in her aunt's iron grip. The woman bore down, using weight and strength to control her niece over her lap. The stinging slipper paraded down the bruise-stained right buttock.
Cheslyn had to compliment Tilly Ladrone on her relentless method and Jan on her endurance. The eighteen-year-old girl made clear noise, but nothing like Rosalind's outbursts or Eric's shamed, angry howling.
The young wife blushed to admit her own lack of self-possession when Eleanor Warden got into a hide tanning mood. She'd earned a second whipping or a sobering session bound in a punishment corset more than once for "poor attitude" under the birch.
"Game and rubber," Mama Eleanor announced. She piled the final trick before her.
"Perhaps we need a break." Dorothy Tilden seemed fascinated by the gratuitous slipper-warming.
Cheslyn saw the bottom mounds ripple and shake. The gluteal crevice opened and compressed at intervals. She couldn't help but see the girl's heavy-lipped vulva. It spread vulnerably between threshing thighs.
"You could send Cheslyn for some of those brownies I put in the fridge," the Tilden woman suggested.
"Don't tempt her," Mama Eleanor vetoed. "I've had her fasting on fruit juice and Naturehoard vitamins since noon yesterday."
"I thought she'd learned to keep her weight in line." Carla Ladrone's sudden glance stung. Cheslyn concentrated on the swinging sole-splat, splat, splat, splat, splat, splat the strokes overlapped down one trembling thigh.
"Avoirdupois is a mere cover-up. The naughty creature would stuff herself with caramel creams and jog to burn off those empty calories. A lot of good that flopping did her pectoral endowment!" Cheslyn didn't recall any complaints from Bob.
"A liquid diet has its disadvantages. I thought she'd been trotting to the pot a lot," Dorothy Tilden noted callously.
"This is not that free-minded college you teach at. Please restrain your doggerel mind."
"I'm not the one who keeps a dong up her daughter-in-law's guts. Doesn't it put her off form?"
"She's learned to stand on the seat and squat. It's a common Third World skill. I mop the mess with her hair if she sprinkles the seat."
Cheslyn felt a red whirling rise from her chest. Prickly red spots freckled her vision as the blood drained from her face in humiliation.
Ron couldn't restrain himself. He pushed open the kitchen door and crossed the dining room. "Uh, hi. Just need a book." His sister's loveable netherglobes faced him from over their aunt's knee. The bare twin hills quaked, martyred and helpless.
He grabbed at something from the bookshelf almost at random.
"Harley Granville-Barker?" Dorothy Tilden recognized the grey, oversized academic paperback before he did. "Which preface?"
"Mmm," his eyes flicked down and back to hers, "the Julius Caesar."
Jan's face puffed as she gasped. Her wet orbs pleaded with him to leave, scandalizing him with his enjoyment of her punishment. The guilty joy set his cock throbbing against his trouser seam.
"You'll make a good Bernard Shaw's Caesar one day," the drama instructor distinguished, "once you've developed the balding maturity for it. The part needs someone who can clank on stage, as well as look sage and witty."
" 'Clank'? Can that be stage talk?" Mother inquired. "A line about Macbeth, when one of those ultra-civilized University gentlemen-Maurice Evans or Michael Redgrave -tried to impersonate the Scots barbarian warlord on the boards. One dowager cannily dismissed him with: 'When Macbeth enters you should be able to hear his balls clank.' "
"Who would you prefer? Bruce Lee?" Mrs. Warden sniffed disapprovingly. She seemed about to coil on her heaped bridge tricks, a dragon guarding her gold. "John Gielgud reads verse like Gabriel greeting the Virgin."
"Katie Hepburn." Dorothy Tilden smacked her lips in satisfaction. She took a long pull from her mai-tai glass. "Both the Divine Sarah and Dame Judith took on the Dane. If they could wrestle Hamlet to the mat, Hepburn or Redgrave's spitfire get, Vanessa, could slam Macduff and the Weird Sisters up against the wall."
Eleanor Warden blinked owlishly. "Really. Since Tilly seems to be resting, let me take Cheslyn to the powder room."
"Up the stairs to the second floor and straight ahead," mother directed.
"Does she need encouragement with that sausage crammed against her urethra?" Dorothy Tilden had a merry, boozed flush growing around her cheekbones.
"A little piston motion does help her squirt-oh, pardon, Carla, I forgot about Ron." Mrs. Warden hustled her daughter-in-law out to the entry hall and up the staircase.
"I'd ask Eleanor to explain that silly thing up Cheslyn's . . . hhrumphh ..." Aunt Tilly coughed tactfully. Her slipper lay idle on the small of Jan's back. The crimson, blotched hindquarters squirmed fitfully. "I suspect her response would not be for young ears."
"Haven't you finished spanking my girl yet?" Mother appeared puzzled rather than put out.
"We're up to the extras to behave on, be sorry on, and-"
"Be very wary on. Here, Ron." Dorothy Tilden summoned, an alcohol flame in her eye. He reluctantly trotted over.
She appropriated his book. "I've got to get into of Harl's notes before we start rehearsals. Hmmm.
" 'Calpurnia and Portia,' " she read randomly.
" 'The boy Lucius has sometimes been played with by a woman. This is an abomination. Let us not forget, on the other hand, that Calpurnia was written to be diddled by a boy-' "
"Dorothy!" Mother expressed displeasure. "I believe you made that tropical punch far too strong, Tilly."
"I cut way back on the curacao," the aunt declared primly. "Just enough to flavor the rum."
"Have you finished spanking my girl yet?" Mother made a wry expression of distress at the cocktail jug.
"We're up to the extras to behave on, be sorry on-"
"And be very wary on," Dorothy Tilden intoned. She handed the grey book back to Ron. "To be very aware as she stands and sits and goes to the-"
"Dorothy!"
"-library." The instructor wrinkled her nose in playful innocence.
A rushing sound of flushing from upstairs heralded the Wardens. Cheslyn seemed paler than before as she set her teeth and squatted on wobbly high heels, gaze riveted on Jan's smoldering bare bottom.
Ron's own eyes swung between his sister's seat and Cheslyn's bent, porcelain-pure cheeks. He knew he could seriously get off on having her bounce on his lap. The yearning began to hurt as his trousers seam foiled an urgent drive toward erection.
Aunt Tilly's left hand seized good hold on Jan's wrist. Her forearm bore down on the small of the girl's back.
The slipper swatted high and hard on a quivery crimson mound. Jan's leg kicked briefly. Four more crisply walloped the same buttock. Her hips rose. The stung fanny shook.
"Behave, now!" Aunt Tilly cautioned, the slipper edge rapping against naked thigh. She spanked the opposite mound in a driving cadence from top to base.
Ron felt his shorts dampen with warm pre-come ooze as his sister cried softly. He held the Harley Granville-Barker at groin level and watched.
Aunt Tilly varied her routine with some bold, loud whacks along the outer slopes. Three popped down the righthand curve, then two on the left. Jan gasped, her broad hinds rippling as they clenched.
The slipper whipped across the broad cheeks' base. The swats slowly overlapped for a scalding five where Ron guessed she needed them least.
"In two months you'll be nineteen," their aunt scolded. "I should think you'd be ashamed to need these extra spanks at your age. Yet since you do . . ."
The arm rose high. The leather sole jolted the bottom squarely across the crevice. The next hard slipper lick covered the same darkening patch. Jan squirmed, her heels in the air.
Aunt Tilly double-spanked both buttocks along the cleft. Her final fiery swipes whipped in where taut hillocks and thighs churned in unison.
Jan boiled over with hiccuppy sobs.
"There, there," the woman comforted, setting the slipper on the bridge table. She patted and bent protectively over her niece. "All over, all done, my precious darling."
"Until next year?" Dorothy Tilden leaned forward. "How long do you intend to godmother that melony tush?"
"Until she's out of college or married," Aunt Tilly informed with a chill. "Why don't you ask Eleanor about Cheslyn?"
The drama professor offered a boozy, insolent grin. "Perhaps I know."
"That reminds me," Mrs. Warden searched about. "I did promise that girl a lacing before company for her diet indiscretions. This group should be as instructive as any for her."
Ron's fly bulged. He made a dignified break for the stairs, all his stage training keeping his crotch away from the women's sight lines.
"Have fun reading while the adults play," Dorothy Tilden called after him. "My god, Eleanor, you could train ponies with that riding whip!"
A thousand red ants nipped along his skin as he closed his bedroom door and pressed the button lock. It felt impossible to breath in enough air to meet his thumping heart's needs.
Ron spun the grey academic paperback onto his bed and dove for the wooden footlocker under the springs. His hand could barely manipulate the dial on the combination padlock.
He eased out the cool blue Morocco Memoirs of Doily Morton. The thumb-darkened gilt-edged pages fell naturally open to a favorite illustration. Roy Krenkel's evocative ink sketch showed the heroine, drawers down and petticoats a mass of lacy foam at her waist. She writhed over Randolph's knee.
His broadly splayed fingers pressed into one plump Victorian buttock as he spanked her. Dolly's pleading eyes searched wildly for surcease. Her mouth O'd in a panged scream.
Behind, on the mantle, a flaringly erect satyr switched the bottom of a nymph stretched along a ladder, her wrists tied to the uppermost rung.
Ron unzipped his pants and let his own cock leap into full-rutted growth. He grasped it as a trickly syrup trailed from the indented tip.
His bedroom's doorknob rattled insistently.
He fumbled the book shut and back into the foot-locker. Crudely belting his trousers, he yanked the zip over the velvet penis skin. It felt like cold teeth as he waddled to the door.
"Yeah?"
"M-me." The wet warble ended his panic. He turned the knob and let his sister in. Her slacks wadded under her arm, she stiffly paced toward his bed. She gave the unlocked wooden locker a teary glare. "I should have guessed."
"What're the ladies, uh, doing?" Ron followed her, trying to put a comforting arm about her shoulders. She shrugged him off.
"Punishing Chesty Warden." Jan took a stance by the bed. Her vivid vulval projection made the closely cropped pubic hair less a veil than an accent. "First Mrs. Warden whips her hands, then her fanny, with THAT."
The girl shuddered. Ron got an arm around her. "Hey, let me try to-"
"Damn well better!" She grabbed his hand and jammed it between her thighs, sawing herself back and forth on it. "I need ... I need ... I hurt ..."
Her fingers undid his trouser front. The pants dropped to the floor. His shorts followed, and she touched the egg-headed prong longingly.
"I wish I could, I m-mean just once, get it up my cunt p-properly. Damn hymen-centered morality."
She swiveled and braced her arms on his bed, her bloused back arching up toward her broiled, burgundy-splotched backside. Her legs stretched apart. Ron hoped she wouldn't start squalling like an air raid siren again. They'd stopped coupling with the window open when the neighbor lady had asked if they had cats fighting over there.
An ominous shriek penetrated the floorboards. Ron guessed the bridge party would be busy with Cheslyn for at least twenty minutes.
"Never mind the background music, and keep your hand on my snatch this time," Jan demanded.
She hissed as he Vaselined between the slippered-scalded lovemoons. The sphincter relaxed under his fingers. He eased his dripping lance toward the warm entrance. Contact ... a gentle inch of penetration . . . another inch . . . another . . .
He began a slow hiproll, keeping his belly off her en-chantingly rosy buttock surfaces. His right hand found her clitoral button. She stiffened and wiggled her hips, shaking the plunging cock.
A scream from below made the prick fatten further. He agitated her teasing, squeezing anus with faster hip thrusts.
Cheslyn Warden danced divinely as she swore, or so it seemed to Dorothy Tilden. The blonde had two ridged weals lining her palm. The apple-hard breasts bounced under her fragile nightie top.
"That hurt too much, Eleanor."
"Would it be effective if it didn't, Carla?" The long, silk-wrapped riding whip lashed the twitchy palm a third time.
"I think she's being a bigger baby about it than our darling," Tilly Ladrone spoke to unheeding air. She downed her second mai-tai in five minutes.
"Other hand."
Dorothy Tilden's whole frame rocked to the blow that laced into the palid, naked palm. "Shit, shit, shit-SHIT!"
"She does that to distress me," Eleanor sighed. "I despise that inelegant word."
The drama instructor transferred the waving canary-brilliant nightie from Cheslyn's tit-solid torso to Ron Ladrone's and back again. The possibilities glowed in Dorothy Tilden's mind.
Two welts later, Cheslyn tucked her hands under her armpits and blew, her facial and neck skin hotter and brighter than the sullen whore's makeup.
"I confess a natural weakness. Upstairs?" The urgency put Dorothy Tilden on reluctant feet.
"Second floor and second door down. Green tile." Carla Ladrone pointed vaguely toward the entry hall.
As the guest ascended the staircase, she felt her thighs brush one against the other, ready to discharge arcing volts of sexual current. Only the dampening effects of her alcohol luncheon kept her from creaming violently.
She paused at the landing. An open door invited. She walked toward it, passing a closed one. Muffled sounds reached her ear.
The woman paused. What familiar noises did she hear? A fantasy rolled through her head, and she almost chuckled aloud. She cocked an ear toward the closed door. Temptation beckonned with a mai-tai smile.
Surely a quick "oops-wrong-door" peek could do no harm. It might even shame the totsy girl into restraining her masturbations until the company had left.
Her fingers brushed the knob. Cruel, cruel. Perhaps she'd regret this. A yearning mewling, a girl-pitched sexual noise reached through the door.
Well, she'd regretted thousands of things since kindergarten and look where they'd gotten her.
She turned the knob and peeked through the opened door.
Ron gaped stupidly at the delighted, incredulous face in the doorway. Jan's hips bobbed automatically. Then she saw. Her anus locked around his rigid meatus. She jammed her wrist into her mouth to stiffle a shriek.
"No, no, don't move a muscle. Don't stir a single gummy hair."
Ron couldn't have withdrawn without a cattle prod. He tried ineffectually to cover his sister as Dorothy Tilden elaborately tiptoed into the room. She shut the Judas door.
The hot vise of Jan's rectum made his whole erection ready to explode. He couldn't breathe for mingled fear and lust.
"Oh fuck!" Jan wailed.
"Silly girl, I guessed that." Dorothy Tilden swaggered forward. She gave a low, drunken laugh and slapped his buttocks proprietarily.
That did it. A black haze punctuated by red galaxies blurred his vision. Roman candle fire gouted along his male channels. He orgasmed in copious spurts down his sister's fear-clenched anal tunnel.
Jan bawled in helpless shame. He hung his head, conscious of the woman's hand pressed against his naked buttock.
"The family that reams together creams together?" Dorothy Tilden peered down mirthfully. "You coming, too, little one?"
Jan babbled something in terror. Ron's palm felt familiar spasmodic movements. Her clit nuzzled his flesh as she rolled over the climactic edge.
Fear as the ultimate aphrodesiac? He fought to breathe, not to understand. His stage-trained diaphragm could barely operate.
"Please-don't tell!"
Fingernails pinched his undercheek toyingly. "If mater and pater knew, there'd be bells ringing, books slamming, and candles snuffing all over the parish, wouldn't there?"
Dorothy Tilden's voice became obsidian-sharp. "No plenary indulgence for this kind of ejaculation, is there? I'll bet nookie-tookie Jan would be exiled to Aunt Tillie for life. No more creamy tush treats. Papa might even haul down the bolt cutters so that the next time you strut and fret the stage in Antony and Cleopatra you can play Mardian the Eunuch from life."
Ron had a horrified premonition that she was dead-on right.
"Look-!" His stage-commanding voice squeaked.
"Not a word." Her fingers tiptoed along his bare flank. "I'll be mum as Tut's cherry tomb and twice as cheerful. No need to carry tales."
She patted his haunch, then hers. "No need as long as we're all friendly. Very friendly."
Jan gasped a heartfelt, "Anything!"
"Both of you swear here and now to do exactly what I say, when I say it for-oh, six months should exhaust my slender imagination. It certainly won't be daily drudgery. Not toilsome at all, really."
"What-?"
"The Thirteenth Amendment frowns on my intentions. You don't tell the U.S. Attorney and I won't smutten up mom and dad's alabaster tranquility."
"I'm still a virgin!" Jan whispered fiercely.
"Only in Terra Haute," Dorothy Tilden shook her head doubtfully, "and I wouldn't take bets there these days. All right, your snatch stays intacta intracta, preserved for Aunt Tilly's magic finger massage. That's my only compromise."
"I promise," Ron murmured.
"Honey hinds?"
"Me, too."
Dorothy Tilden pressed her palm to Ron's dry lips. "Just a formality. A kiss of fealty, like a faithful pet." His mouth pressed the center of her hand quickly. "Now for the cornhole queen ... I must teach you to use your tongue when you do that." The woman removed her palm from Jan's face.
"I'll be in touch." She drifted through the door and weaved into the empty powder room before more adventure could thwart her relief.
Ron jammed the knob's lock button home. Idiot, idiot, idiot!
"I'm sorry, Jan," he mumbled lamely.
"Like fun," she accused, a tissue pressed to her gluteal crevice. "I thought I was trying to sh-shit out a Coke bottle."
"I wish it hadn't happened."
"Then why is your prick rock hard again?" she puffed her cheeks in indignation.
He stared down and wondered. A womanly scream from Cheslyn Warden ripped up from below. The revitalized cock quivered.
CHAPTER EIGHT: Morning Drill
A Confessional Interlude by P.N. Dedeaux Goddamn sheeut, hissed Rita Henshaw, staring at the tousled tangle on the mattress-less bed. Why does taking exercise always make me horny?
"Mona?"
There was a slight stirring-of the coarse horse blankets, the knuckling of an eye, no more. "Show a leg."
Or preferably a little more. Just go on pulling down those blankets and watch how that banana splits. One slice up and over.
Rita had risen early, gone through her daily dozen, plus twenty punishing push-ups, each of which had squashed her grapefruits on the polished bedroom floor, she was that conscientious about her shape.
Anyway. Into her taut track-suit, two pieces of royal blue terylene stretch with nothing underneath, tying up her sneaks with chin on braced-back knees, plus a quick look back in that position at the mirror to appreciate the big glutes on which Professor P for Pig had whipped his white-hot cane, and out to the fog-pale park for two good miles.
She was sweaty now and panting hard, but that, she well knew, wasn't entirely from the setting-up exertions. Her legs were astride, the elastic gussets hauling the thin britches taut, and she could actually feel her ass bucking a bit, bumping by itself, scooching her hotly cornered cat into a delicious little tickle from the rough stuff of her pants.
The inner planes of her thighs were a-quiver as she remembered the dry knifing cut of the cane on her underneath. Just as well she had on longs or she'd have her fingers in the cookie jar and be tossing herself off right there in front of Mona's single eye.
"Rise and shine!"
What you need, my girl, is a lung-deep fuck. Tough gristle up your guts. Scads of spewn. A private dick. With a big deposit in your vault. Christ on crutches, up the ass on one and in the snatch on two. She hadn't heard herself protesting exactly, had she?
For a moment she concentrated hard on the rasp of stuff on the pulp of her love-core and no darn doubt about it, full clitoral erection was available there. Maybe with a little more scrunching she could induce a fast, sharp, butt-shaking one. But no. She wanted to be in full tension for what was to come. She was intending to be as unpleasant as possible, in fact.
Her throat was quite pink. For the girl on the bed had now tossed off her covering and stretched. Lately Mona had been allowed to wear a flannel pyjam top but that was all, and the metal springs had marked her slightly, behind. In the center of the now writhing limbs the close-clipped purse looked curiously swollen this morning.
Rita groaned and all but gritted her teeth. What dude with pulsing prick or cum-laden cock would not want to pound it into that puss and swab up the gash? Rita unzipped her top, let it gasp for burning breasts. Son of a bitch, she was in rut. The girl most likely to catch eye and tee this day sprawled before her.
"Come on, hon. There are no movie cameras about, as far as I know."
"Whassa time?"
"Time. Or it wouldn't surprise me if someone not a million miles from here got a hunk of her tail licked off, sooner than soon."
Mona squeaked off the springs, grimacing, stood sleepily erect in the middle of the room.
"Gosh, Rit', those things hurt. How much longer am I going to have to sleep on them?"
"First we'll just do twenty squat-bends, then twice as many toe-touchings. After that, it's knees up, Mother Brown. I want to see you strut your stuff, like you do in the house. Remember wet T-shirt night? Well then. With a one and a two. Come on, make those boobies bounce."
While she put the gorgeous girl through her morning callisthenics, Rita idly unhooked the MONA-marked paddle from the wall and slapped it on her own slabby side in cadence. It stung.
The doublings became more desperate. A calculating eye came back, beneath the frown of effort. When it was over, she stood astride before her charge, the stretch of pitch pine held behind her hefting up her own lower person.
"Homage!"
This was a new routine she had insinuated into Mona's increasingly miserable Sunday mornings. The kid had to kiss three parts of her mentor's so marvelous body-three only was she allowed-and one of them had to score on that delicious dainty mentally selected beforehand by Rita. If she failed, it was three good ones across the saucy saddle.
Mona looked about. "Please, Rit'. There are so many bits and pieces of you ..."
"All of them delectable, dear. Each one worth a nice big buss."
". . .'n I never seem to get it right."
"Nonsense. You did twice last month. Off scot-free, except for that bit of shoe-leather later. Right nip and left earlobe. I can still feel the kisses you gave me there."
". . .'n besides, you seem to think it some sort of joke, three swats with that paddle. Gosh, they really sting, the way you give 'em ..."
"Would you want them any other way?"
"Well, you needn't hit quite so hard. I mean, like if I get the, the cane later it makes it five times as bad."
"And ten times as good for you. Anyway, sweetie, if you ain't bin bad you won't get the cane, will ya! Now quit stalling and start kissing. These I want to feel to your tonsils."
Shaking her corn-blonde mane the girl advanced, ducked and gave Rita's exposed navel a slobbery mouthful. It made the older girl giggle.
"Idiot! That's my salt-cellar. Midnight snacks in bed."
With a hopeless shrug Mona then tried her friend's nose and lastly her lantern chin.
"Wrong on all counts," chuckled Rita. "Three smackeroos across those princely pillows is just the way to start the day. Come on, butt up. Spirit of Seventy-Six!"
Mona sulked scowling. "Bet it was your big right boobie."
"Wrong again. No witch's milk for you this mom. Look, let's say, double or quits. I'll give you three more guesses and a hint first-it's somewhere on my lower bod. Beneath the waist, that is. You can't miss. And I won't fry your fat tail if you do."
"Will you give them all just as stiff as usual?"
"Regular grind. There's no other way."
"Six really stings, y'know it."
"I had no idea."
Mona dropped to her knees. For a while she remained there, staring at the tautness of material across the bulging bump of heaven. Holy Chee-Rita went dry-throated. If she kisses me there I'll explode. Won't need no ying-yang from the prof this day.
With a sigh Mona bent and pressed wet bee-stung lips to the toe of Rita's scuffed right sneak.
"Uh-uh."
Left calf.
"Sorry again."
With a crayfish shuffle Mona went to the rounded rear. She kissed Rita's right cheek hard and its owner gave a telltale wince.
"Warmer, but no dice. Too bad."
"Oh no," groaned Mona, getting to her feet. "What was it then?"
"Asshole, asshole!"
Rita was exultant but Mona merely moaned-"Good grief, I don't believe it. That's not fair."
"In color it's not, I agree. Pinky when something gets rammed up you there-only of course that's never happened to little Mo, has it?"
Whacked into a chairback the paddle made a pistol shot. "First you do your twice-around-the-block and first one in's a sore fanny. I'm timing you, mind, and I'm hitting hard-you're getting too fat back there anyway, though I doubt if the boys in class complain. Think about it as you run, give you something to do. Me, I'll just practice on this cushion."
"First I gotta go."
Paddle-tapping Rita peeked-just to see new rules were being reasonably regarded, the door left open and our hefty heroine of the scarlet, show-stopping sorority line properly astride the bowl. These days Mona had to pee as she took her punishment-like a man. She let fly with arms indignantly akimbo, and Rita watched the gush with surprise, then sheer outright admiration. Apprehension did it to them, but this was ridiculous. As the rubbery shudders of the royal butt wrang out the last droplets she thought grimly: first, we'll purple those peaches a mite, my love, then we'll get THE TRUTH out of you!
Into her clingy skivvies (Mona's track suit was kelly green) and on with her sneaks and out the door as the second-hand on Rita's tanned wrist cruised past zero. No sooner had the door slammed then Rita inspected the blankets and opened a drawer. It was as she had thought.
"Your things really are in a mess, hm," she thought grimly. She turned on the shower to let it run really cold. Mona came back in, panting like a dog.
"Three minutes under this morning, missy. And don't dry yourself after. I like the sound better wet."
"Rit', please. You're so tough on me . . . all the time."
"All the time? Get in there quick!"
She aimed a kick and connected, bumpily, with a bun. While the water ran she swatted her cushion harder and harder, with growing excitement. When Mona came through she was dripping and dejected, furze-bedewed in front and rosy of rear. Slowly Rita removed her track top, released bouncy breasts, and flexed a bicep.
"Bend," she said coldly. "Paddle position."
"Ah gosh, Rit', six can really hurt. Please don't lay them on flat out."
"It was your choice."
"Hardly."
"Did you varnish your cane again yesterday?"
Mona sighed. "Three times. Like you said."
"Good. I want those last few inches a little stiffer for your butt, girl. You like things stiff, don't you?"
Mona shrugged. She stood back from the end of the bed, visibly made up her mind to do it and, like a diver, bent to grip its rail, legs together. Her hair fell forward. Her regal bottom bloomed. And Rita breathed.
"Arch your back and thrust it up. Come on, you can do better than that. Knees back."
Mona shuffled. Dropleted from the shower, the well-fed rounds thrust sturdily to the ringmaster's command, at their base the split plum of her person, unsutured wound, a true Cape Cod pink.
"Get it up!"
"It is up," Mona complained.
"Ah so it is." (Beg your pardon, Ms. Hardon.) "But I think you can still get more division if you straighten your thighs harder. There, that's much more the total woman."
Rita placed herself. She wanted to let it work on her a little longer. Minute squirrelings went on inside her. Slight coppery traces quivered on the downy skin. Again Mona shuffled, waiting.
"Oh do get it over with, Rit'."
"Six."
"I know!"
Rita held the taped handle and patted the mounds. "Do these know?" "Oh yes!"
"I think so, too. I'm awfully sorry to say I feel in real form today, honey, and I hope you'll let me know if I'm not doing my job properly."
Two, three, she painted the bands across the buttock-meat, noting how dark they turned at the ends. After the fourth there was a scunching of the butt in pure-pain spasm.
"Get to you a bit, there? Righty. Stick . . . it . . . OUT!" FLACK!
"Furffffffyve ... oh my God . . . thanks."
Rita wondered. Was it possible? She had never had an orgasm actually in the process of whipping Mona, but the to-and-fro'ing of her belly in this itchy-kitchy stuff of her pants was making her kitten fairly keen, within, increasing the bitchiness of her disposition.
"Ooooh Christ, not another ..."
There was a perceptible twitching of the inner thighs, followed by a churning of the halves. Rita leant forward- Don't pop your jollies yet she told her aching self.
"Umm. Use bubble bath or my soap in that shower, huh?"
"Please, Rit', you're skinning me silly with that thing."
"Good for you to have your ass gunned every now and then, dear. Now stick that rump up. Make like a burley queen. Set it for the darning needle now."
The mauve staining across both pulpy loaves had brought up the cane lines beneath. The mottled edgings on the right told her she'd hit harder than she realized.
"One more for size now."
She whacked the wood home. It detonated into fat and with a squeak Mona jacked up, arching back, grabbing handfuls. Rita felt her insides coil at the sight. For a second Mona's face was wrinkled as a nut. She puffed and stamped, on scalding coals.
"Hough! You didn't have to . . . not that hard ..."
"Not much of a war dance this morning, huh." Rita replaced the paddle and took down the lighter and thinner of the canes available. If she looked any longer that mite inside would retch.
"Come along, hon." She swished the limber limb. "You know what you get for losing position before permission."
"Oh gosh no, oh darn it, Rita, I mean like you can't jus' keep on whupping me like this ..."
Can't I just, she thought unsteadily. She took a pencil from the table top. Today we're getting down to the BARE FAX of the case, missy. I have a surprise in store for you.
"Hurry up. You know you have to stay over till I say up."
Ruefully rear-rubbing, Mona shuffled forward. More wretchedly she knelt. More miserably still she put her left hand on her bottom and her right in a line level with her chin.
"Fingers stretched right out, please. Thumb down." Rita arranged the mute offering, palping the fleshy palm. Hand canings could be quite sexy, really, when you had palms as rosy as Mona's. "Keep it that way."
"Oh gosh, how you roasted me, Rit'." She wiggled behind.
Rita bent and lifted up the girl's left jug. She put the pencil under it and let the slab of flesh fall back, holding it in position there.
"Each time you drop it, one on your tubby toko, luv."
"Only three on each hand then? Promise? Gee, I could hardly write after those last ones."
"Should have thought about that before leaping up so lustily."
"Yeah, but it gets me in . . . with Sigma ... if I can't write out my . . . OWWW!"
From on high the cane whistled and bit. It drew a surprisingly livid line across the outstretched hand. Mona squawked and, still managing to hold out her hand, rolled her head on her shoulders.
"Aaaaagh, Pete's sake!"
"Hold it out. And-open your eyes!"
Rita steadied the trembling fingers and-hhhuitt!-sliced again. With a stricken cry Mona ducked forward, jamming her boiling palm between her thighs. The pencil dropped.
"I'll say one thing. You're sure a glutton for it on that ass, dearie." She looked down at the slowly shaking head, that of one not understanding of a sum, cascading silken wheat over smooth-skinned gourds of breast. "D'you think it hurts more there than across the soles of your feet? I'd really like to know."
"Oh, I don't . . . yes, I think ... I mean, uh, like, oh God . . ."
"Well pick up the pencil and put it under your bub and handy out."
Mona managed. Rita readied her rod for the last this side.
"This one's coming from the ceiling."
Mona took her hand away, snatched it back, took it out of place again, put it out, took it back with a panicky gasp. Rita waited, white of face, waves of heat rippling in her tummy. With a final pleading expression Mona held out her hand again. Rita cut, but the cane slashed empty air.
"You know what you get for that, too!"
"Please, Rit', please . . . you don't know how ..."
"Oh stop being monotonous. Get it out. A ten-year-old could do better than this."
The hand was out, its whipped skin stretched. This time Rita sliced it spitefully.
"Hhhhaieee!"
Mona rocked, shaking out her hand and wringing it in the air. But the pencil stayed in place. "Other one now."
So tenderly did Mona put her scarlet right hand back on her bottom, so well-trained a hand changed the pencil to her right breast's embrace, so gingerly did she extend her left for three more lashes that Rita's skin crept within her britches.
The three given (the pencil fell but once), she turned, no longer able to control her facial muscles. To the whining wounded girl behind her she said crisply. "Donkey position, donkey."
Keening still, Mona took it slowly up. On all fours, head up, staring ahead, back arched, butt braced.
"I'm giving you four. Two for each drop and two for taking away. Actually that last little habit annoys me considerably, Mo, and I've decided it's got to stop. The tariff's going up to three each time you do it. I've been letting up on you lately."
"You hhhhaven't been . . . letting up on me," panted Mona back, barely audibly.
"Well, I don't want to start a debating society. I just want to teach you that the consequences of not staying put and absorbing your punishment when it's doing you most good are apt to be painful. This time keep it cocked up and let yourself really feel it."
She bent her knees. Calmly she took aim at the quivering patches of blue beet. The cane knifed into them nicely and sprang back to a hectic dark weal. Mona panted, bucked.
"You were made for the Roxy back there, honey!"
When the four had been given, grilling neatly one under another, Rita turned once more and stood with feet apart.
"Now give me the kiss, silly billy, and get on with it."
Mona, slowly mastering coursing agony, shuffled on her knees, hands kneading white-hot hinds behind. She put up her puckered face and grasping the elasticized waist of Rita's track trews in her teeth, started to ease them down. Rita gasped, swallowing hard as she felt sticky tears on her hot hips.
All at once she stiffened. The kid would see ... had seen? Quickly tugging up she called casually, "That won't be necessary today. Just through the material will do. Let me feel your tongue."
She couldn't last much longer. She was coming unglued inside. She felt the head butt between, the mouth worry out its morsel, the stub of tongue pressing.
"So you do understand then, don't you. If you remain bent over, however hard to do so, and don't get any relief the shellacking will do you that much more ... ah, no, I did not say give me a colonic. You always overdo things, Mona." She strode off abruptly, tossing the cane aside. "Jus' skin-tight cut-offs and an Island shirt, nothing under. I'll get your brekker for today."
The last sight she had of mournful Mo was actively licking her right palm on her knees.
Rita seemed to have to heave herself across the living room. She never made it.
"Bitch!" she hissed, reviling herself. She stood with legs mashed together a moment, the contractions building under the double-ply at her crotch, then she staggered to a sideboard, bucking. Her ass hunched, went into sudden lewd trounces. Was Mona watching through a crack in the door? Was Miss Opposite opposite? Rita could not care. The world was coming apart. Somehow-hot damn-she got into her bedroom, dazed, eyes glassy, face wet.
"Now let's get this tea party on the road. I don't want to sound as if I have a depraved mind but are you quite sure there's no more to Sunday Settlement than a borrowed bra, one cup of which you split?"
Rita folded her arms under the slope of her chest. It was an hour after "brekker" and she had inspected Mona's pot and perused the funnies in peace, having changed into chocolate silk, a mini that clung and cupped and kept getting caught in behind. There was just a smidgen of sulkiness in Mona's face as she reached and unfastened a further button of the thin shirt.
"Ummm? Like your mams handled, don't you. So you're sure. Shame on my suspicious mind," she clucked, "but I am your appointed guardian, dear. Fabulous titties. Remind me to paste them with honey one day and suck them clean after. Nothing that shouldn't have been there, then, in any of those adorable orifices?"
Mona shook her head. "Four whaps then. Over you go."
"Not with that . . . that hose thing again."
"Yup. Worked wonders last time. And think what an eyeful for your sisters when you get to do the greasy pole next week."
"Jeepers, it hurts."
Rita hefted it tensely as the girl got into position. It dangled from her hand over the jutty, halved globes which squirmed under faded blue cut-offs. The pineal seam of this was triple-sewn and made them really stand up. The tan thighs wriggled silkily together as Mona eased her pelvis full on the hassock, stretching legs out straight, all the way to bare toes. Rita stared down, her eyes hazed in sensuality.
"Four where the trousers are tightest, honey."
"Gosh-sake, please get them over quick. You really lammed into me just now."
"Let your buttocks burgeon, luv. The breadth of the ship astern, from the tuck upwards. On second thoughts, I'm going to use the thongs."
"Pete's sake, Rit'!"
The martinet was black and Rita let the lightly loaded tails lie on and convey their sensible weight to the plumpnesses a moment. Then she whistled them in a nearly horizontal sweep that snapped them under the butt, with a flocky sound.
Mona jerked and ground her hips, hunching into the hassock. Rita waited and thucked again. This one brought a right leg bounding up, revealing a melon-slice of white flesh over the tan as the cut-offs rode up.
"Aaaangh! It's . . . houh ... too much!"
"Legs back, ducky, and stick them up."
The cut-offs remained high that side and in the buttock-bulge there Rita saw how the tip-marks of the hard hide thongs had brought up angry black peas of weal. For the last two she lashed, and Mona rolled, grabbing.
"Aaaaaghh!"
Rita turned, barely breathing. It was just the sound on the tape. She felt her tough clit begin its drumbeat under the sleaze of her mini as she put back her flail, got out the tape recorder, slipped in the cassette. Mona was still massaging her burning loaves, her face torn.
"Good grief, that h-h-h-urt!"
"Now, my girl," said Rita sternly, holding the little recorder behind her, "up on your feet. You stand over there with your back to me and touch your toes."
"Wer-why?" Mona was aghast. "What are you going to do to me?"
"I'm not going to do anything to you, angel pussypie," Rita continued through her teeth. "I'm just going to ask you to listen to something with me. In position now."
Mona bent, her butt broadening, its bottomside showing the clawmarks of the thongs. Rita clicked and a sudden harsh man's voice rang through the room-"Who wants to cork her cunt?"
"Okay. One more time. Then Pari gets to ram her bunghole."
"Please," squeaked Mona's voice from the tape- "Aaaahhhhh!"
There were slapping and shuffling and squishing sounds, completed by a loud grunt-a man's, a boy's.
"Clumsy bastard, Ron. A ten-year-old kid could throw his arrow into that target."
"She movin'. Hold her still. There we go-aaaaah!"
"BEND OVER!" yelled Rita. "And not a peep out of you, mind."
For with a forlorn wail Mona had arisen, hand to mouth, flushing furiously-"Wur-where ... did you get ... ?"
"Get over!" Rita picked up the hose-length and Mona doubled swiftly . . .
Her face darkened to ripe plum at the sounds that now ensued, squishy socky slurpings, pantings and groans and wet-sounding slappings.
Rita tutted. "Such noises."
"Ggggaaaaa," gurgled the girl's voice on the tape.
"Tight fuckin' tunnel," panted the man.
"She takin' the locomotive right up to the last of yer box cars, Ron," prattled yet a third.
Three of them there on her. Rita shook her head. She could see Mona gnawing her lip.
"Her insides are startin' to crawl. Her fuckin' fuck-muscles are milkin' me, man."
"Sock the jizz to her, Ron, I'm so hard my teeth ache."
Mona's whinnying could now be heard.
"Lookit her upfuckin' her butt for it like that."
"Ghhhaaaa . . . HORN IT TO ME, RON!" Mona shouted.
Some consummation was clearly in the air. "My, you fems are really lib on that campus," Rita sighed.
The whimperings crescended and catapulted into a shriek of mutual animality. There now appeared to be some heavy scuffling going on.
"Slam her out flat, man, belly down on the old mattress."
"No . . . aaaaagh!"
Four or five sharp slapping cracks on bare flesh resounded then, succeeded by squeals.
"Up on your knees, babe. You're now going to get it."
"Naaa . . . ner-not there . . . it's too beeeeeg . . ."
"Palm her butt open for me, Hank. Yeah. Stretch it in two, can't hurt her. You're tearing a loaf of bread there, man."
"Hey! Jes' look at her pucker string coil and twitch. The twitch!"
"Pry it open, Pari!"
"Hold her still for me and keep her from bucking. Now!"
"OOOWWWWW!" wailed Mona's voice then.
"Aaaaaagghhh!" it yelled.
"Atsit, Parly, drill it in her now."
There was panting and grunting and weak womanish whimpering, when the man yelled, "What a cornhole beauty! This has to be the hottest asshole in the West. Hold her, Hank."
"Much more?" came in a weaker pant from Mona now. "You get-got much more to go?"
"Oh, I'd say coupla inches, babe. Want it in one?"
"All right. Go ahead. Give me the rest of it. AAAAAG-GGHHH!"
Rita dabbed her forehead. She licked her lips. She stretched her wrists. There was white heat growing behind her eyes. Son of a gun, she was hard as rocks again. Looking at the girl's upraised ass-Mona was crying now, it seemed-she could see the huge cock slunking into it.
"Get ... go on," Mona's recorded voice was mumbling. "Shoot your jizz and get your filthy prick out of my ass."
"Such words," Rita purred.
"Why don't you shut up and let's fuck," cried the man in rut.
"I'll shut her up," said another voice . . . Hank's, at her head.
"Ner-no, Hank, please." Blub-blub the sentence ended.
And then the gurgling and the slurping and the slapping and the . . . yes, the sucking.
"Straighten her neck out, Hank, so's you can get a straight drive into her throat. Yeah, so."
"Now fuck her face."
Sobbing sounds, cooing, sucking.
"Cheeze," cried Pari, "I'll swear she's starting to steam this end."
And Rita's nails drove into her palms. She could see Mona as she had been then-a fuck-tunnel. Her body spitted on cock.
"Ready to go, Hank?"
"Am I ever . . ."
Rita clicked. She realized she was panting hoarsely. The silence in the room surrounded her, as she stood up and tried to control her trembling.
Mona, doubled, divided, was quivering, too. She was sobbing softly.
Rita roamed the room, humming to herself. She was so intensely conscious it hurt. Only when she stood behind her charge, one hand roving over the widened end which had been so thoroughly plugged by the unspeakable Pari (whoever he was, sounded like a name out of a cheap novel) did she come to herself.
"Quite a time. I'll spare your chaste ears the last centimeters of that scalding tape I had secreted for me in that furnace. My oh my." She patted the bulgy rump. "You can stand up now."
Mona did so, knuckling an eye. "I just cer-couldn't bring myself to tell you, Rit'."
"Sorry about that."
"I didn't enjoy it, really."
"You didn't seem to object to the investigation in the vestibule, dearie. No, the problem is, what are we going to do to you. For you're going to have to be punish order to teach you to keep a tight twat. Aren't you?"
Mona's fingers twiddled. " 'Spose so."
Just then the doorbell rang.
CHAPTER NINE: Visiting Rites
A Neighborly Insertion by P.N. Dedeaux "I'll get it," Rita snapped icily, as the mellow fellow ding-donged at the door again. "Little man in there's impatient.
"Stay right as you are," she added, noticing a mellifluous move of Mona's majesty, "whoever it is, see. Touch those toes and stick up that toby. This time, in view of your recent behavior, you're in the soup and I'm going to see to it, it's sizzling."
Opening the door, however, Rita double-took. A slant-eyed glory of a girl, with a river of inky hair, stood poised and smiling, clad in a square-shouldered military tunic, well decorated, and little else-black lace step-ins became visible when she paced forwards in, long-gartered black stockings, platform shoes. An Oriental Olga Korbut. Rita goggled.
"May I come in?"
"I see absolutely no reason why not." Rita clicked the door to.
"A womanly position." The newcomer's eyes swept the room, and its other, butt-blatant occupant. "One in need of the unguentine, hm?"
"Mona's my roomie."
"She is that. I've seldom seen one, well, how shall I put it?" The elfette giggled shyly. "So tremendously there!" "If you must know I just whipped her ass." "That's evident."
"Getting a little too liberated."
"At the moment she looks like she's trying to liberate it from her cut-offs. I saw you go to work on her tail with that flail, and I just couldn't resist dropping over. Even those new Zeiss glasses I got ..."
"You! To what do I ... ?"
"My full name is Lo Due Thong. Just call me Miss Opposite."
"You!" Rita was stunned. Pensively she pulled the sleaze of stuff out of her ass-cleft again and pensively her fingers felt the dying wealings on her own fat. "But I thought you were an old crone!"
"No, I'm a young crone." The girl giggled.
And again Rita goggled. It was true. With that varnished nut of a face you really couldn't tell, say between twenty and forty. The Dietrich legs were now straddled equably apart but there was a potential ferocity within this exquisitely rounded body.
"How did you get across the street? Like that?" Without half the local windows breaking, she wanted to add.
"I shook it. No, it's a long time I been watching you educate kid sister's ass and I jus' thought it was time you and I got together. For a moment just now, over that hassock, I mean, she looked real uncomfortable. You swing a mean one."
Rita's mouth went chisel-hard. "Well, this time the little twitch has gone too far. She's got something really to look forward to." Her fingers trailed her heavy hips.
"What was it this time? Putting a button in the collection at the chapel?"
"Let some of the boys in the frat house put the blocks to her."
The other whistled. "I can see their point."
"Asshole, too."
"I can see their point."
Suddenly Rita saw the skewering image again, Mona spitted on cock, and she shut her hot eyes tight, her sweet spot curling.
The intruder was shaking her head. "Those fellows. If they don't get their ashes hauled on time." She sashayed toward the brick-faced target of their conversation and Rita saw the the khaki tunic had the regulation vent behind, exposing about as cute a pantied can as it had been her fortune cookie to see.
"She's got a real lesson coming to her this time, and no mistake," she said grimly. "I don't mind you helping me at all."
Sadly smiling, arms akimbo, Lo Due savored the spread of seat.
"Sometimes you have to really hurt them, y'know."
"Any suggestions are perfectly welcome."
"Were you thinking of . . . the bone?"
"I was thinking of trimming her ass, that's what."
"Bone or birch should do it for you."
"Uh-huh. Don't have the twigs."
"I do."
Rita's brows went up. This was becoming interesting.
"Trouble is, Miss Mushy Twat has double lumps due her. Not only did she let the dear boys drill her, but she tried to hide it from me, too. Fibbed. Sunday over here's Repentance Day and Penance Day."
"Don't I know it," said Miss Opposite. "But ouch! for someone's buns. Just as well there's plenty of them. Looks to me as if . . . did you beetroot her with the board a bit, too?"
"Hazed her a few." Rita shrugged crossly. "But with that heinie ..." "May I feel?"
"Sure. Grab yourself all you want."
"Please!" The whimper was emphatic. "Can't I stand up? I'm not a . . . not a . . ."
"What? A fuck-tunnel was what you were, luv, and if you're not careful I'll let our guest hear that tape."
"Naaoo! Please!"
Lo Due's sensitive strong fingers were feeling out the resilience of rotundities, under the sweet snug stuff. A sepia thumb indented the whip-streaked and exposed gluteal fold below.
"There's certainly plenty of meat in this young seat to work on. Did you, uh, employ a cane beforehand, too?"
"A few cuts, nothing much." How wise was this extraordinary creature who now, tossing back her black mane, stood back and, hands on hips, head cocked, assessed the broadly parted beam before her, atop the stalwart, slightly quivering thighs.
"Thing is, all your lessoning just doesn't seem to be getting through to her, dear. Do you know Professor Porter, by any chance?"
"Only too well," said Rita.
"Well, once or twice it's good for a girl to go really over the top. I mean it, Niagara without the barrel. That hose idea of yours was swell, really made her move her can, but this one's due for something special, if you ask me."
"Any help in the general direction would be appreciated," said Rita gravely. "And listen, Lo, I wish you'd call me Rita."
"The real fear of God. Brrrh!" Slim shoulders shook.
"They don't do badly in the sorority."
"My place was in Lisse, Holland, where the tulips are, y'know. Pledges were only supposed to use rear entrances. Hell, they taught us butt-fucking the hard way. Did they ever!
"The senior girls had this whacking dong, see, biggest artificial or living pecker in the west, sculpted slightly on the curve with a ski-slope head and corona like a cobra. Made you feel sick to look at it.
"Some girls swore it was solid gold, but actually it was bronze. Boy in Perpetual Flight some wise-ass called it, my year. Anyway they lined you up in cheerleader nothings, sans culottes, needless to say, and mounted this monster hip-height on a staunch tripod. Then wired it up and dolloped it with grease.
"It heated all through. Oh, not enough to hurt you- much, but enough to melt the grease. Then, with the actives grinning like Cheshire cats at the side and slapping their calves with their paddles, Girl Number One for the treatment, looking about as miserable as it was possible to look, even in Lisse, backed toward her destiny-The Rectifier was what it was officially called-butt on, and holding up her skirt in back.
"Swallowed the hog-head with a look of horror and slid the greasy pole all the way. Usually with a squeal. They adjusted it so's you were lifted slightly off tiptoe, swinging. Then they turned up the ultra-sound."
"The what?" said Rita, who had been going red during this recital.
"Makes like kinda hundreds of pins and needles, getting stronger all the time. Gee, what a goose that was! You were supposed to take up to four degrees-the dial turned to ten but two was bad enough-for ten seconds, or depending how mean they were feeling that night.
"I tell you. Damnedest sight. Bird in flight was what it was when a girl somehow got herself off that throbbing bugger. And if you hadn't made it for the time given there was that line of actives dying to baste your buns.
"I went through it twice one night when the hot squat was a full fifteen seconds and they skinned me to jelly both sides. Hot damn. That was what fear was. Just the sight of The Rectifier turned my tummy over. Hey, what say you let Sof'-Spot stand up now, with her back to us, natch, and see how she bulges."
"Get up, Mo'."
"She bulges," grinned Lo Due Thong, watching Mona trying with little success to tug the cut-offs over cut-ups. "And you say the wicked boys were actually allowed to use the, ah, waste disposal channel?"
"Asshole," corrected Rita, whose language grew fouler with her disposition. "If you can help make this slut really sorry for herself I'd be only too grateful."
"I might have just the thing." The Oriental cupped and joggled the heavy rounds. "First, some long division, if I may."
From one military side-pocket she produced her namesake, a thong. It was thin and worn, with little brass studs along one side, and when Mona's Island shirt had been pushed up it dug snugly into her lower waist; to the ring that hung down from the buckle of this belt in front was fastened a twin thong, deftly run down Mona's one and only, through her legs and up the Great Divide behind. The difference was that the worn-brass studding was in this case on the inside.
"Hey, that hurts!" Mona warbled, bucking backwards and thrusting fluttering fingers against the haul of the saddle strap. Lo Due kneed her back and notched it home, almost taking the sinner off her toes.
"Eeeek! Phew!" Mona cambered absurdly, holding her split sides.
"You must confess that separates 'em and makes them stand out as a pair of sitters, about to catch It, should."
"Why didn't you give her the waist-belt with the studs inside? Wouldn't that have hurt her more?"
Lo Due shot her a pitying smile. "The side of the belt is sewn with short needle tips."
"Pur-lease," pleaded Mona, moving her legs like some restless colt, "they're agony."
"If she writhes, as writhes she must, they will be, I fear. Mama scratch. Of course, they would be far too severe for the pineal separator. I think you'll find those dull-headed studs do the trick, though. Make her want to throw off the shackle. See." "Please!" Mona was standing astride, holding apart her hefty hams. "Honest, I'll try to take it, like a, a trooper. I know I deserve some'pin, any rate. But you don't have to do this, first."
"What are you doing now?" asked Rita, as this time, from her other pocket, her interesting visitor produced two shorter thongs in twin, these of thin rounded leather, like stable harness.
"Sulcus straps or gluteal garters. Watch."
Rita did so intently. These thongs circled each thigh at its very top, disappearing under the overhang inside and buckled bulging-taut on the outside.
"Like so," said Lo Due. "Now there's a pair proud to be called firm, upstanding buttocks for you."
True, they were, thought Rita, studying the outstretched and separated halves of her "roomie," whose cut-offs had ridden almost to mid-point of cheek-curve-a girl in mint condition and no mistake.
"Did you, uh, is there ... I mean on the inside of those two?"
"Natch," laughed Lo Due. "She keeps her little bottom still when it's whopped and she'll be much, much happier. Otherwise, like I say, Mama scratch. Now: if I might just use your phone. Taylor will bring something over."
"Who's Taylor?"
"Taylor's my man. Okay?"
"Help yourself, go ahead." Rita could not take her eyes off the choice curves, only slightly marked up, after all, even when Lo Due took the phone up and spattered into it some angry-sounding bizarre foreign tongue.
"Taylor will be over in a tic. If he knows what's good for him. Now: if you have a stiff vodka. Thanks."
As Rita mixed it her skirt moved and so did Lo Due, humming. Rita felt fingers under her mini behind-"Et tu, Brute?"- and just had time to put a hushing finger to her lips. Mona had not noticed, however, being inordinately preoccupied with trying to ease her cheeks apart.
"Who gave you those?" the Oriental whispered, her teeth nipping Rita's rosy earlobe.
"No one you know."
"I like them when they're real raised twin-tracks, don't you? Them slice one into the middle."
"What are you going to do with her?"
Lo Due rolled her eyes and downed her drink. "Mama spank. Ah, there's Taylor," she said, at another bell-yodel.
A contrasting apparition, no less remarkable, was ushered in, this one a vast Nordic beauty from Wilhelm Tell country. Madame Schroder-Devrient, as it were, at her prime, and in drag.
For this extremely solemn Amazon wore skin-tight blue serge trousers, a bum-freezer bellhop top, braided scarlet in front, over the opulent whoppers. Her almost white hair was dragged back in a braid. She had to be six-one, thought Rita, and she filled her breeches to bursting. In one hand she carried a long black box.
"You sent for me, sir?" she said gravely, looking at no one except Lo Due.
The latter explained. "Taylor's my little playmate, from the land of mists and Dutch-doll buttocks. Like her? Actually, she was a trapeze artist in her teens, believe it or not. Turned twenty-eight last March but still has the muscles. Quite interesting, really. Turn around, Taylor." "Yes, sir."
It was an astonishing breadth of beam, without being flabby at the base. The pair were long and deeply divided by the clinging stuff which was worn enough to show, in places, glaze.
"Now squeeze."
"Yes, sir."
"Now spread."
"Buttock muscle," pronounced Lo Due with satisfaction. "Special exercises for it. I've seldom seen such masses so muscular. She could grip a guelder between them for an hour and often has. It doesn't seem to make them hurt any the less, though. In fact, I think it even brings the nerves more to the surface. Now gimme."
She seized the box and opened it on the sideboard. Rita caught wicked gleams within. Three needle-thin lengths of ebony whalebone were laid reverently out.
"Her real name is Hanneke," said Lo Due, then crossly tscked. "You forgot the Tickler."
"No, sir. If you pardon me," came the ready retort, in the woman's accented English. "I put in the Tickler."
"Not the one I asked for, idiot." She lashed out, clumped the woman in the middle and she doubled. Gawking, Mona put a hand to her mouth.
"For Pete's sake," she gasped.
"Don't sorry, you can't really hurt Taylor. Anyway, he has to be punished. What would you recommend for Miss Wobblebum here?"
Rita, roiling within, ran a tongue over her lips. "Well, I have some canes. It would do Mo a deal of good to watch."
"Gimme," cried Lo Due, kicking off her platform shoes. "A nice long hickory-dickory. Oh what a beauty!" She slid the limb Rita had given her through her fingers, nearly crooning. "A few clips across your commodiousness, Taylor. Pull your trousers up."
They could hardly be tauter, Rita reflected, thinking they must be held up by galluses.
"I'm giving you ten," she heard, and jumped in her stomach.
"Yes, sir."
"Looking forward to it?" "No, sir."
"Twelve where the trousers are tightest, eh, Taylor? And if it's going to do Ms. Luscious here good to watch, it's going to do Taylor even more good to feel."
"Not to mention me to see" breathed Rita fervently.
"Stand with your legs apart, Taylor, and pull those trews up TIGHT."
She was now making gushy slashes through the air which had Mona mouthing an incompleted "For Pete's . . ." as she still held onto her frightened fundament.
Lo Due kicked out the hassock. "This has seen good service, I don't know why it shouldn't see some more. Put your palms on it, Taylor, and your legs stretched out behind you."
Rita saw that the woman stared lengthily at the hassock top, her forehead frowning, before she put her hands on it and her legs straight out in an angle behind her. This bowed up the buttock basin which at once, in Rita's estimation, took on considerable character.
From being a pair of rather hard, heavy hams they became an intensely whippable couple of rumps, exactly molded by the material (held taut, indeed, now she saw, by British braces fire-engine red to match the braiding); Rita particularly relished the rotundities at the base, dumb soulful curves that met, rather than merged into, the thrust of the thighs. "On your insteps," instructed Lo Due, explaining in a smiling aside-"Makes her muscle 'em up a bit more. See!"
"There's certainly plenty to hit."
"Cut," corrected the other, dreamily flexing her stick, one that shivered eagerly in complicity. "Actually, I'm going to take her about as low as she's showing. On the real sitting part. Don't you think that'd be best?"
"Sure thing," said Rita, smoothing her skirtlet.
"Rib 'er about four inches wide there. Too many on the same spot tend to numb." "I find about an inch above the crease induces the most lasting repentance. Aren't you going to strip it first?"
"Uh-huh. Like the sound of wood on serge, m'sel'. Tell you what, though. We have a rule in our house. Taylor just ain't allowed a wrinkle in his britches. Do you have a paddle?"
This plaintive plea answered, the Oriental stood grinning, hefting the varnished sorority board over the beefy breeks.
"Mo'," Rita commanded. "Kneel down, and observe, No, closer than that. And keep your eyes on that butt while it catches it, and tell yourself you're going to get the same shortly."
"On'y worse," said Lo Due. "I see a wrinkle," she chanted, and brought the board whacking down on the right flank. The woman called Hanneke grunted. Mona, gingerly kneeling and shifting, trying to pull at her saddle, simply blinked.
"Haven't quite flattened it out!" Another thunked down, reverberating the crupper.
"One on the left," showed Rita. "On the inside."
It was remarkable how the woman held braced her rump, though the color of her facial cheeks darkened perceptibly-only after five (for the last of which Lo Due let the bat hang down her back) was the stuff declared perfectly skintight and prepared for punishment.
"Gimme that slinky beauty," slinked Lo Due, accepting the ready limb.
"I like my meat tenderized, too," said Rita, a little breathlessly. "You, Mona, count."
The Oriental girl drew back. "Get it right up, Taylor. I'm sorry about this but it has to happen."
Tunic-skirt swinging she praced and cut. Mona positively jerked as the cane-tip whistled under her nose. She saw the limber tip bed itself into the slab of gluteal flesh, low down, cling in and then pluck itself out.
"Wer-wer-one," she gulped, dully.
"That was a good one," Rita said, having seldom seen more sheer venom in a cut. "Whupped right in there."
"Think so? Ya gotta do better than that to hurt Taylor. And hurt he has to be, I fear."
She thrashed the seat again. "That's better."
"A squirm, a palpable squirm," Rita agreed, nibbing herself.
"Two!" now piped Mona.
"Hot damn!" laughed Lo Due. "I love caning this butt. Taylor gets to five or so, then it's punishment time."
The cane whistled in again, a punishy snip of pain. The twin sides were locked jammed, yet an eloquent cringe at their very base made Rita hiss in appreciation-"Less comfy all the time."
"Only six more to go."
"Alas."
The mellow ding-dong siren-called at the door anew, no less insistent than the fat little fellow yowling out Rita's uttermost need.
CHAPTER TEN: Dalliance
"So how'd the dragon bitch take it?" Delinda Humphrey asked Nora as they strolled past the two-story storefronts on Berkeley's Telegraph Avenue.
"Miss Rita Henshaw had the widest eyes in all of Christendom as Mona's parents, Lucretia Sue, and I waltzed into that living room." The Sigma pledge studied the jewelry displayed at the curb by a sidewalk artist. Grimly sardonic African sandcast faces had been strung with oblong and round beads into striking necklaces.
"Lucretia Sue told us the quainter details. It sounded like an international S&M convention." Delinda lingered by a table to finger a hand-sewn leather purse with brass and wood decorations.
"Sally Forbes has this way of just tuning out the world," Nora related, "but she came awake quick enough. Mona's cousin tried to babble about some tape and how naughty their girl had been. I thought Jack Forbes would throttle her with one of those weird leather thongs."
Delinda opened the purse clasp, a warm brass sun with a lozenge of polished redwood. She felt inside. "Satin lining?"
"Nylon and I pass the saving right along." The craftsman wore dundrearies and a midnight blue velvet Medieval cap and tunic. He quoted a price. Delinda shook her head. He quoted down. She shrugged and started away.
"Final price, and you're busting me, ma'am, but I need to get the cash flow moving." He quoted a rock bottom figure. Delinda studied the purse. She fingered a broad burgundy belt with a non-European dragon buckle.
"That's a Balinese earring I adapted-feel the weight. They used to make them of gold." He tugged at the thick silver Hammer of Thor dangling from his own right lobe. "Imagine carrying that."
"Talk about S&M ..." Delinda fiddled with the purse again, measuring it against her own bag. She abruptly twitched the corners of her mouth down and sauntered away with Nora in tow.
"I like to see how far they'll bargain," she told her sob-sister airily. "I actually wish I could afford it, but until I get my damn car fixed ..."
The woman nodded. "Anyway, thanks for the vote on the actives' council. Irene reported you all unanimously approved accepting Mona to live at the house."
"I don't know how we'd stand up to an audit by Sig-ma's National. It's a strict law that pledges can't live in house-calling her a boarder just evades the issue." Delinda had a tight, brittle smile. "Rachel and Irene appreciated the check Mr. Forbes signed for Mona's board. It certainly showed his gratitude."
"Hey, hey, classy lady!"
Delinda smothered a shriek. Heavy fingers tiptoed up her spine. She wheeled in icy anger.
"Phil . . ." The emotion evaporated. "My god!"
"In the still-living flesh." He bowed to her and then to Nora.
Conquistador and Aztec had given Felipe Navaj6n high cheekbones and deep cinnamon skin. His jet black hair flowed loose to his shoulders, a bright obsidian tide. A Spanish Main captain's goatee made him seem a prince from a buccaneer stronghold.
His turquoise shirt opened to the navel. An intricate gold chain supported the Australian fire opal burning in reds and blues on his nearly hairless chest.
"I haven't seen you at St. Cloud." Or at all, Delinda finished silently.
"I been movin'." He gave a slow wink. "Not too slow, not too fast, just right to stay free but very easy."
She hoped he knew what he. meant by that. "So how're . . . things."
"I missed you. A lotta lonely nights out on the road." He touched his shirt, baring his left nipple. "Put blues into my heart, made things work for me."
"You were on a gig!" She put it together. He parked his thumbs in the animal-patterned sash that cinched his narrow-waisted blue Levis. "Nora, Phil's got this tremendous talent. Guitar, sax, flute-he writes his own poems and works them into his music-not songs, exactly, but-"
"I kinda recite while the guys vamp behind me." His lips twitched playfully. "Sometimes that goes over outside the Bay Area.
"Mostly we worked truck stop cafes, cholo bars where women got half a pound of makeup painting their eyes, places that paid us in beans and enough gasoline to get us to the next joint.
"They don't know poetry on that kinda road." He shook his slick, heavy hair. "Did a little bit of business along with the fun. You still seein' that Hunt guy?"
Delinda tried to signal NO with her eyes. "He's gone on a field trip up the Amazon. In search of the giant leech. For real. It's a University of California excursion."
She turned quickly to Nora. "Uh, I think the Boy Ban rules apply here. Phil and I have some catching up to do. You have your car-"
"Shall I meet you some place?" Nora glanced at her watch.
"Um, why don't I just take BART back?"
"I got wheels." He cocked his head. "You don't need rapid transit while I'm with you. I remember that Boy Ban stuff, though-this elegant lady is one of your pledges? I figured her for faculty or somethin' special."
"Slow learner," Nora grinned. "Sigma's helping me with my social skills. Okay, let me get on to Moe's, then. I've got books to look for. See you again, I hope, Phil, after the Ban's over."
She waved and started into the crosswalk. The bookstore lay across on the shadowed side of the street.
"Damn, you soror' whores know how to recruit." He squinted at Delinda. "Some coffee or somethin' more serious, mi corazon! Papa Pierre's out on Solano got Pedro Sangre rum in its well-thick and brown and sweet."
His lean muscles locked around her arm. He piloted her down the sidewalk. An aquiline-nosed street artist with a droopy mustache smiled welcomingly over his stand of earrings, nose rings, and finger rings. A woman hawking woven skirts and shawls shook a mini-cut wraparound in front of a customer in electric blue sweats.
"Too bad about Hunt," Phil murmured as they stepped aside. A motorized wheelchair whirred down the shallow cripple dip from the sidewalk into the intersection. "He knew how to score serious designer mind candy."
"He's given up drugs and everything like that."
"Including you, the stupid bastard?" He laughed. "He won't find anyone as beautiful and good to talk to no matter how many rivers he travels."
Two guys with heavily sunburned bare torsos and mashed, idiot faces flipped a cherry-red frisbee back and forth over the moving cars.
"Scott, I'm in Berkeley and free. Delinda met a friend and they're reminiscing." Nora thought the starry look in her guardian angel's eyes wouldn't fade for a week. The visible electricity between those two had made her instantly sex-hungry.
"I've got some stuff to look for here-Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith, Toni Morrison. I know it's an imposition, but if you could come out on BART somehow I could meet you . . .
"No, Delinda's headed down Solano Avenue way. I overheard them. If you meet me at the Ashby station she couldn't possibly see us . . . Okay, I can drive you back to Walnut Creek . . . Sure, we can do the Telegraph stroll. She won't be back this way for hours."
Nora hung up and pressed her head against the grey cinderblock bookstore wall. She felt so excited, so in need of Scott. The cool cement helped. The thrill of breaking the Boy Ban added to her mounting joy, but she basically just wanted him-to talk to, to dine with, to fuck, fuck, fuck out at his place while his stereo surrounded them with moonless seas of Ravel or Rachmaninoff.
"I really enjoyed that review you did of The Rake's Progress." Caledonia Roundsong hugged her husky son. "You caught Nick Shadow's character and what Stravinsky did with him. I only wish you used a less derivative pen name."
Ken Gormish patted her cheek. "I had to think up one at the last minute, when The Daily Cal printed my first article. I knew only one person who'd changed her name."
"When I went from Alicia Rae Gormish to Caledonia Muse Roundsong I thought I expressed something quite personal and me. 'Scott Madrigal' makes a cute variation, but does it reveal your secret self?"
"It keeps the family spirit alive, and it's been too many years to change, at this point." He gave an elaborate hand flourish. "An architectural drudge by day, a glamorous music columnist by night. And speaking of my secret life, could I get a ride back to Orinda so I can catch the BART to Berkeley?"
She nodded. "I'd take you all the way, but I've a class at three and notes to mull."
"Thanks for the birthday gift." He held up the compact disc. Leopold Stokowski graced the cover, looking a grey witch ready to roast Hansel and Gretel into gingerbread. "This Alexander Nevsky has never been out on black disc."
"I thought you'd enjoy it." Caledonia pulled her keys out of a broad pocket in her ecclesiastical-style robe. "I'm glad you could go to lunch. You never come to Orinda."
He lifted an arm. "I've just got things to do and people to be ... I love you just the same, mom."
"So how're you and the girls taking it?" He pushed open the Dutch door of The Blue Nile Restaurant. Nora preceded him into the warm, spicy atmosphere.
"The paddlings or the Boy Ban?" she asked as a small, delicately formed chocolate-brown woman appeared. She wore a snowy, flowing dress sparsely embroidered with bright red and blue. Nora felt like an ungainly tourist by comparison.
"Both." They passed through a rattling wood-bead curtain and were seated. "Have you had Ethiopian food before?"
Nora studied the menu. "Never. I think Sarah's cane-crazy. She whipped Renee Chandon's bottom for sneaking off with some walking gland on the tennis team. The Bad Word board-whackings are bad enough. Renee hasn't that much meat on her behind."
The waitress returned. "Can I get you something to drink? A Nile Smoothie, right?" She gave him a merry-cheeked look. An early bulge of pregnancy showed.
"Mimi's got a good memory," he explained as Nora raised her face. "Try the Nile Eggnog, it's nice and creamy. Also some tej, please. That's honey wine, something like mead, but lighter."
The exquisite, smiling woman vanished back to the kitchen area.
"How long have you lived around here?" Nora realized how hazy her knowledge of his background actually was after a year of keeping company.
"My mother used to be a campus character in the early Sixties, before Mario Savio and Jefferson Fuck Pollard-no kidding, this guy legally changed his middle name to Fuck and started the Sexual Freedom League."
She shook her head. "The Bay Area. They'd have put a torch to his beard in Riverside."
"I don't remember him having one. Anyway, I think Julia Vinograd has my mom in a poem-but it could be another Telegraph crazy she wrote about."
"Is she still around?"
"Vinograd? Definitely, she's got a new book out. She's Berkeley's foremost street poet." He grinned like a big, sandy-haired imp. "You may meet mom, but she's definitely got her own agenda."
A different Ethiopian woman arrived with a tray. Two small glasses held golden liquid. A tall, handled mug carried something orange juice colored; another had white contents with a foaming head.
He picked up the sun-colored wine. "To the two lady loves of my life."
His devoted eyes made her blush as she lifted her glass and drank. Something pure, sweet, and exciting rolled along her tongue.
"A van ... ? The back of a van?" Delinda felt blissfully afloat on warm, wide tides. Hot coffee had mainlined caffein and rum into her blood. She giggled incredulously. "I haven't fucked in a van since . . . since high school."
"Hey, querida, not in some teenage traveling sex wagon!" Felipe leaned against the gold-flaked gun barrel-blue back door. "I had a pro fix this up. I tour in here. I live in this mobile space."
"A whorehouse on wheels, we called them back in Bloomington." She tried to control her giggly bubblings. "We had this bozo ... he had his van lined . . . just like Jane Fonda's spaceship in Barbarella ... all fuzzy fake fur on the inside ..."
She sat on the barely protruding black plastic-coated bumper, trying to stop her erupting laughter. "We'd just roll around ... all of us, in this big, wet tangle ... we thought we were having an orgy . . . God knows he couldn't keep it clean ... it got all matted down and smelled like hell ..."
Felipe popped the side door open. "Well, I cured that, azucar de mi alma. Replaceable rugs."
She stepped around and stared at the great white polar bear fur interior. Delinda felt the laughter burning her eyes. "Jesus . . . don't get me hiccuping!"
His hands moved gently over her as he bundled her into the van. Its closed curtains kept the interior a mysterious twilight.
She felt her blood surge as he gently stripped her baby-seal naked. Warmed by her booze-charged body heat, the long synthetic fur felt good matted under her. She jacked her hips down into the thick foam padding beneath as he mounted her body.
His hands stroked her as she embraced his firm, lean muscles. Strong, certain ... he pistoned in a sure, steadily mounting tempo. His long hair felt like a waterfall across her face as he kissed her throat and sweat-hot breasts.
He licked along her jaw and kissed her blind eyes. Passion thundered in her veins. She drummed her heels without rhythm, sounds rising unstoppably from her vitals . . . urgent, demanding noises. She had to climax soon, had to break the tension . . . too soon, for she wanted it to last, to never end as she lay there strung tight as a wire singing in the wind . . . needed that exquisite, taut torment of gratification unyieldingly deferred ... for ten minutes more, five at the least . . .
She screamed as it broke. She clawed him as she came, so soon, so terribly soon ... He hissed and held himself arched, jammed fully up her, laughing as she threshed and moaned, her violent contractions yanking and wanking his rigid pud.
His hips began short, brutal digs that made her gasp anew. Her fingers tightened over his rocking muscles as he humped her in staccato bursts.
His weight began to tire her. Her back itched. She longed to change position. Her eyes focused on the dim van ceiling beyond him as he vaulted himself further and further toward ecstasy.
She felt his gutteral moans as a vibration shivering from his chest through hers. She automatically twitched her hips faster, slapping her belly harder against his . . . letting him ride her to his grunting culmination.
The alcohol flickered steadily in her cramped muscles, warming them. She twisted restlessly under him as he continued to kiss her, whispering in Spanish.
The fake fur strands smelled of recent dry cleaning.
Caledonia Roundsong's broad bottom warmed a grey formica-topped table set in front of her classroom at St. Cloud University. Her portly blue robe blossomed about her, more Medieval coat hardy than choir garb.
Thick brown braids framed a Naga Necklace with over two dozen strands of minute green beads, lustrous as darting lizards in the flat fluorescent light. A Rajasthani medalion hung below that, the old silver worn so that the two central figures resembled androgynous Salvador Dali creations frolicing in Dionysian dance.
Her Theology 1A students listened attentively, scribbled dutifully, or studied the room clock faithfully.
"Twenty years ago," she continued, "kids still starry-eyed from the high school senior prom bounced into college and hit a royal shitstorm."
She slid to her feet, went to the green chalk board and lettered it out in bold, dusty yellow print.
"Shitstorm-that's technical jargon for a force-ten hurricane load of debris and detritis from the Eisenhower years. I know a member of the law faculty here who still sputters over his beer about how much better everything was in the Fifties.
"Sure. White male lawyers from Indiana and Iowa ran the world as groundskeepers for the people who owned it. That facade could not hold against the revolt of suppressed reality." She paced before the board.
"By the late Sixties, sexual taboos, drug no-no's, and political barriers had drooped so that Eldridge Cleaver, not June and Ward Cleaver, had a book out telling the Beaver the societal structure that had made Eldridge a rapist. Real revolutionaries and let's-pretend-Trotskys played with bombs and AK-47's.
"What replaced the world manicured by attorneys in three-piece suits and Havanna cigars? When I visited the headquarters of the Red Mountain Tribe in Berkeley, I saw the other side of the nickel, the ass-end of the buffalo." She leaned on the room's lectern.
"I saw a decaying house with people huddled in sleeping bags in big, empty rooms. I saw a hill of dirty dishes as high as Mount Tarn, with no one feeding them to the dishwasher in the middle of the kitchen floor. I saw hardcore badass radicals talking all power to the people-and no one taking care of basic business."
She nodded. "So what do all these fond tales have to do with religion, you wonder. Time Magazine had a black cover in 1965 asking Ts God Dead?' The shitstorm hit religion even more strongly than it did politics.
"Now that white male preachers from Iowa and Indiana don't run the world as gardeners for the fat asses who own it, is anyone minding the basic relationship between people and their universe?"
She waggled a finger in the air. "Good point to ponder. For next time, read the Starhawk Dreaming the Dark, Chapters Five and Six, and also carefully go over Krishna-murti's Notebook through the August 25, 1961, entry."
The clock's minute hand hit ten till the hour. Students bundled up their sketchy notes and books and began to chatter as they filed out.
A slender, curly-haired boy with granite eyes came up to the lectern.
"Could I ask you about this?" He pulled a heavy, huge paperbound book from under his arm. The cover had been creased, the pages thumbed grey along the edges.
"The Voudon Gnostic Workbook could take up an entire seminar by itself," Caledonia responded cautiously. "Michael Bertiaux has an ambitious reach. Magickal Childe Bookstore apparently printed his home study course pretty much intact."
"Yeah, I didn't understand about that becoming a Lucky Hoodoo part at first." He inhaled, his face getting even more muscle-locked. "I thought when I read it that The Satanic Bible was the most complete collection of blasphemy I'd ever read."
"I like Anton, he never forgot his origins as a carny entertainer."
"This ..." The student held up the big book. "Satan worship is kid's stuff by comparison. What I want to know ..." His voice dropped. "Does it work? Is this real?"
"What do you want to do?"
"Have power over people." The skin ran taut along his jaw and neck. "Waste them when I want to. Control their minds."
She propped up an elbow on the lectern and stroked her chin. "That's not uncommon coming out of adolescence. Could I ask you to raise that in class next week? It's very relevant to my lesson plan then."
He nodded. "But can this stuff work?" His thumb rubbed the bent cover. "How much is real?"
"I haven't practiced Bertiaux's rituals, but I would advise against you trying them without a very thorough grounding-more thorough than one book can give."
She pondered how much to tell him. "Kenneth Grant writes that Bertiaux is very into astral lycanthropy and using Voodoo to create H.P. Lovecraft manifestations. I think the man has taken Aleister Crowley and gone rather far."
"He seems to hate Crowley."
"They definitely disagree over whether certain sex magic rituals involve sodomy or simply a rear mount." She beamed encouragingly, "We'll deal with a lot of the concerns I sense you have next week."
Judy Latimer approached as the boy went out. "Seth, he's the fellow I go with-not during the Boy Ban, I mean-I went with him in high school-"
"Good." Caledonia smiled.
"He gave me this book on Hassidism, 9'h Mystics." Judy seemed bloodlessly pale. "A very informed work."
"Only I'm not Jewish and it seemed kind of . . . old-fashioned, like The Diary of Anne Frank. Anyway, Seth said that a lot of things in that . . . interfaith ritual came from Aleister Crowley."
"Crow-ley, dear, like the black bird."
"Oh. I overheard that boy just now ... is it right to want to have power over people?"
"Of course." Caledonia tried to sound reassuring. "The trick lies in coming to terms with that want. Crowley dragged a fat sack of personal quirks and outright neurosis with him-and the old fox knew it. Central to his system of magical development is direct confrontation with the horrid flaws, the petty desires, the killing weaknesses, and the hidden sins in our most fundamental selves.
"Confront and assimilate-get into a working relationship with your worst self. You can't cut your wicked nature off like a diseased Siamese twin. You have to live with the total you." She gestured broadly. "That's religion, that's magic, that's mysticism. Life consists of coming to terms with your real self in the universe as it is."
"Is everything okay, then? Do . . ." The student stumbled over the Sixties commonplace. "Do your own thing? Whatever works?"
"No." Caledonia shook her head emphatically. "You disobey the laws of the universe at your peril. I knew a young boy who tried to fly by flapping his wings. Cute kid. He did that from a rooftop while on an acid trip and died."
Judy developed a pained intensity as the minister went on, "Study aerodynamics, master the way the air really works-then you can fly. That's true religion. Some say it takes lifetimes.
"Mary, Kali, Ishtar!" Caledonia laughed. "I've just given you my entire course. Now how'll I hold your attention till the end of the semester?"
CHAPTER ELEVEN: Group Sports
The sultry Walnut Creek night had kept most people of The Nail and Smith. The pub's food service room only some youngish 20's types clustered in a booth, tryi to be thoughtful. The three lads had glass half-pints black draft stout. One damsel sipped at bright ale; other poured foaming Anchor Steam Beer into her stein Ken Gormish waved through the doorway at a fi regulars in the hard-drinking bar, but he stayed in the f room and slid into a dark walnut booth.
The sound system droned with a nasal, north cou English voice.
"Come all ye young rascals who follow the sea- Come lift your bold voices if ye'd ever be free . . .
"I sing of black cruises, men broken with toil. I sing of blood staining our fleet's banner royal."
A tit-heavy chestnut-haired waitress wandered up to is booth with a smile. A laced bodice let her pectoral assets strut their stuff proudly under a pale, tissue-thin Gibson-girl blouse. An edge of stiff lace petticoat peeked from beneath her long maroon skirt with a calculated come-hither.
"Watney's and a steak-and-kidney pie," he ordered, stretching his legs. The worn wooden back and seat felt comfortable, despite no padding.
"The master's a hard man, all mercy he spurns. He rules mates and yeomen with whipcord and irons."
Behind the bar, a wide woman with saddle leather for a face and piled canary-yellow hair set to work drawing his beer. She passed the glass mug over the polished countertop to the waitress, then pulled a pie from the refrigerator. She popped it into the microwave as the Watney's reached his booth.
"The pasty's heating, luv," the waitress informed him. Her heavy chestnut locks had the same reddish highlights as the British beer.
Ken caught sight of Nora's bright, copper-coil hair flashing in the bar mirror. The counter had no stools, only a rail. Nora perched her foot on the brass and gave the room a bored, candid appraisal.
"How're the men tonight?"
The sun-beaten blonde shook her head sadly. She flicked a thumb at the boothload of kids. "Just lightweights."
"So sing bright and loud lads, or whimper like dogs.
All liberty's forfeit on each ship that flogs."
Nora's foot drifted off the rail. "Maybe I'll try the other side." She started for the arched door leading to the darker, liquor-serving barroom in back.
Her eyes scanned past Ken. Then they returned, locking on him. A speculative look crossed her face. She lifted an eyebrow at the blonde. The bartending woman shrugged. The timer chimed on her microwave.
Nora's confident footsteps approached his booth.
"Hello." She put a teasing challenge into her tone. "It's a warm night to be lonely."
He tried to match her frank, assessing expression. "But a good spot to cool off in. Have a seat."
She bent at the waist, picked up his mug and sipped. "Mmmm. You do have taste. Thanks."
She placed the beer back by his hand and settled slowly across the thick plank table from him. The brunette waitress brought his pie in its aluminum cup-sized tin. Ken tipped his head toward Nora. "A Watney's and a pasty for the lady."
"Steak-and-kidney, mushroom beef, or mashed potato?" the chestnut-haired woman asked, laying a fork and napkin down.
"The same," he pointed to his tin.
Nora favored him with a tight smile. "You look like a man who knows his pasties as well as his tipple."
She calmly appropriated the heavy white plastic fork and dug into the small pie's crust. "Flaky."
She blew on a forkful to cool it, then fed it to him. "Tasty? What's your name?"
"It's good enough to eat. I'm Scott." As he licked the fork tines, Ken felt every eye in the other booth riveted to them.
The waitress returned with Nora's mug. "Pie's comin', luv."
The redhead snapped open her purse. "How much for the lot?" She waved a hand over the table, including Ken in the pass.
"Eight dollars."
Nora flipped her a folded ten. "Keep it all." She leaned her shoulders cooly against the hard wooden booth back. "You better be worth it, mister."
Every Howard Hawks film he'd ever seen raced through Ken's brain. "No woman's fallen asleep on me yet. Not if she could handle her beer."
Nora's tongue peeled foam from the mug's lip. "At least the Watney's has a big enough head."
He began to play footsie with her slowly. The kids in the booth closest to the aisle strained to watch. He let an ankle travel up her thigh, lifting her skirt. She spread her legs and purred.
The blonde barkeep and the waitress exchanged whispers. The leathery face shook with laughter as the brunette brought the second pie.
"Hot and steamin', ducks." She served the steak-and-kidney pasty, then stepped over to the other booth.
"Another round, luvs? Ohhhh ... I see you're not drinking tonight."
Shamefaced, the guys began to noisily gulp stout. The girl with the Anchor Steam tracked the action in the bar's mirror, between the Bass Ale signs, as Ken and Nora continued to role-play.
The streetlight's cold glare made the shadows sharp and harsh at the street corner by Sigma House. Spicy, late-summer fragrance rose from the shrubbery, blue-green in the artificial light.
"Travel with God always, querida. You're somebody really special." Felipe supported Delinda's shoulder as he pulled her out of his van. He stood her on the concrete and patted her cheek.
"Phil ..." She had this pounding headache loose inside her skull. Little bursts of pain exploded randomly. Her body felt hollow with post-coital, post-alcohol hunger. "Can't we have dinner, even?"
"I'm burning rubber for the city, alma de mi vida." He shuddered as he slipped back into the van's front seat. "Can you believe I'm filling in as a sideman for a blue-grass one-nighter at Paul's Saloon? I hate like hell to think about my fingers wrapped around a fiddle after so long."
He slammed the door and hit the ignition. A blown kiss turned into a wave. Delinda stared at his van as it picked up speed, away from Sigma, out of Orinda, gone from her life.
"I mean it, Ken. I need some serious commitment to quality time from you." Delinda's voice fringed on angry tears. He could hear her breath against the phone mouthpiece. Background noises sounded like the St. Cloud Student Union or another public place.
He leaned back in his desk chair. The office curtains kept out the afternoon sun. He had the sound off, but his TV glowed as the VCR ran the Nu-West tape he'd gotten in the morning mail.
Naked but for shin-length white socks and downed panties, a trio of lovelies bent over metal folding chairs. A no-nonsense matron in a long dress aimed a Greek-lettered pine wood paddle at bare, nervous buttocks.
Ken recognized the thoroughbred bottom belonging to Margaret Morley, a Nu-West superstar who could do blistering dominant work over submissive males as well as indulge a taste for her own punishment. Just now the pale board scorched her expressive rear. She showed pain as if she meant it.
"I'm sorry I can't afford to put my car into the shop, but I'm still buying texts for my classes." His mind snapped back to Delinda's voice. She sounded really frayed. He sympathized. He hadn't seen her enough lately.
He hit the button pausing the tape. "You know Larry can't bear to let a company car out of the lot, unless I'm going to a job site. I even offer to pay gas. He's a freaking bastard about that. You know I want to be with you more and take you out."
"Oh, sure you do! You got real excited after I had my behind shelacked. I haven't seen you since that Laurie Lewis concert."
They'd had fun snuggling together on the lawn at the open-air Concord Pavilion. "Dee, you can come over again and we'll watch a video-" He grinned as he clicked back on Red-Bottomed Pledges . . . The Paddling. Perhaps she'd prefer a gloating Mildred Scott hairbrushing male hide over her bathrobed knee in The Disciplined Male.
"You can take BART from Walnut Creek to Orinda," she accused as Margaret Morley's rump rippled through eloquent agony.
No, he considered, Delinda would be into something more like that Kyrie Meets Electra number with the Rubenesque lady tanning a wide, responsive female bottom every way possible.
"Okay," he told her. "You name when and where.
Let's start with something light and walk around to get friendly again, before dinner."
"Okay, darling." She sounded like a puppy just given a new, bouncy ball. "Tonight. Five-thirty at Yoda Yogurt."
He wondered what he'd say to Nora if he met her on the street with Delinda in tow. Ah, well, he had to chance it sometime.
He agreed, mended some more emotional fence wire, then hung up. The tape rolled on, sound off. He pondered what his mother would do if she knew he'd been poaching on Sigma's preserve. As "spiritual adviser" to the house she'd probably get out her witch books and try to exorcise him ... or curse him.
Not his fault that the woman he dated had chosen to go to school and pledge to a sorority with the girl he'd picked up after the Grateful Dead had pounded it to packed Deadheads in the Greek Theater at Berkeley earlier that year.
He poked at the shipping box of video tapes. Executive Privilege had Edward Lee strapping one business-suited female executive and handspanking a very sexy secretarial rump. Ken enjoyed the fellow's stories from Nu-West's magazines.
The phone brrrred on an intraoffice line. He answered to get Larry Gunderman booming in his ear, "Ken-boy, I'm splitting. This work drought has my morale by the balls. I can't stand an empty desk. I sent Mercedes home. Lock up whenever you want to."
Click. He waited for the growl of Larry's Honda in the parking lot, then he turned up the TV sound to enjoy the scolding and yelps and slap of wood across temptingly ready bottom.
"Nora, I had to cut short a dinner date for this." Delinda's muffled voice came through the sturdy closet door as Ken stood behind her dresses. A smothering smell rose from her wool suits. No problem. He wouldn't have been any other spot on earth.
"Sigma takes the Boy Ban seriously," he heard. "The rules aren't here to fence you in. They're to show you the way ... I know some of what we do, the songs, the rituals all seem kid's stuff."
Nora answered slowly, less audible through the wood panel. "Scott called the dating restriction juvenile. Good for girls out of high school, but not appropriate for-for adults."
Images from the video embraced memories. He stood in the darkness envisioning Margaret Morley tilted hindmost-higheslt beside squeezeable, fuckable Nora. He fantastized those peerless tailcheeks being smack-paddled on tape for the world's enjoyment.
"The person who saw you wasn't some sneak, trying to dip you into shit. We all need help in obeying the rules, being true to ourselves. Our real selves, as Cal Roundsong likes to say."
Ken choked back a chuckle at Delinda's words. Nora's voice floated ruefully from the bedroom beyond.
"I'm sorry, Delinda. I broke the Boy Ban. Twice, in fact. Last week and yesterday. I guess I need to be ... I agree I have to be punished."
"You know the penalty should be a public hide-skinning ... if you take a paddling now, here, I won't make an official report to Maxine or Gerry or Wanda. The girls look up to you, and a public caning-" The senior actually sounded concerned.
The idea of an English whipping stick creasing his redheaded girlfriend's peachfirm rounds inflamed Ken. His phallus butted his shorts plaintively.
"I propose ..." Delinda let the moment dangle. He held his breath a dozen heartbeats. "Thirty."
Ruby spots spiraled joyfully before Ken's eyes as he strained to hear Nora mutter something. "... guess I need it, though."
Light battered at his sight as Delinda opened the closet door a careful five inches. He remained in darkness, able to see the painfully bright room beyond. She removed the long, tough sorority paddle from the hook inside the door.
Hot crimson Sigma Epsilon Xi letters had been painted on the frontside of the dusky brown, highly shellacked wood. Delinda's painted, spikey signature wiggled beside the house insignia.
"I'll have to ask you to . . . you know." The senior took a stance so that Nora would need to stand in his best line of sight. "I'm afraid Sigma's a bare bottom house. Nothing else does the job as well."
Ken had lovingly undressed both young women. He'd had them each naked in his arms, their taut, tight muscles straining against his.
Nothing he'd done with them seemed remotely as erotic as Nora's slow, trancelike strip. Her creamy white skirt unhooked gradually. She folded and carefully settled it onto the bed spread.
Ken could have climaxed simply watching her briefs and pantihose flex. The woman had a shamed blush tinging her face and neck as she drew her trim blouse higher.
The pantihose waistband peeled back, showing the welting creases where the elastic had dug in. Nora skinned the nylon down. Her blouse fell, the hem veiling everything above the tense buttock peaks.
"Is that ... far enough?" The redhead had her panties and hose taut between her knees.
"Fine. With thirty I'm going to be hitting pretty high as well as low. Perhaps you should take the blouse off, too."
Nora grimaced, face scalding. She crouched. "Maybe I'd better ..." Her hands unbuckled her shoes. She stepped out of them and rolled the hose all the way. Hopping, she pulled her pantihose completely off, then discarded the panties, a wrinkled translucent muddle.
Ken watched in an agony of frustrated erection as Nora undid her pale lime blouse. Eyes tightly shut, she gripped her shins, legs straight and widely separated. He imagined the wobble of her naked breasts.
He longed to be behind her for three minutes . . . maybe less. Instead, Delinda's paddle lightly nudged the flinching flesh.
"I'll need a clear count after each swat."
The senior slipped free of her shoes and kicked them toward the closet, with a furtive grin in Ken's direction. Her stockinged feet stood wide, bracing her on the rug.
Her hips wove, her body pivoting on the balls of her feet in a backswing. She put her weight behind the board's first stroke. The paddle clipped Nora's pale buttocks full across. Ken could feel the choice THHHWAAAP! vibrate from his ears to his balls.
"Don't forget the count." Delinda brusquely rubbed the flinching rear with her autographed bottom board. Nora forced out a curt, choked, "One."
The hardwood blade rose high, letting him luxuriate in the velvety sore-pink flush forming a clean rectangular blotch low on each taut netherglobe.
Delinda whipped the flat soundly across the left cheek only. Her sob-sister's hindend rocked drunkenly at the unexpected, single-mounded swat. Nora whispered the count quickly.
The paddle basted the unprepared right chub. As the hillock recoiled and squirmed, Delinda whacked squarely across the two fresh marks.
"Jee-!" Nora jacked her head back, her hands talons that ripped at empty air. Ken's erection rammed against his belt buckle in blind, desperate need. The woman bobbed in pain.
"So sorry, Nor'. I forget, you haven't had it like this before." Delinda's faced twisted toward the closet door, letting him see her gloating lips as the bared buttocks shuddered. Nora slowly took position.
The active hit high across skin still pale. She walloped a spasming upper thigh, then the other. As Nora danced in place, Delinda unleashed her strength squarely across the first blushing swat site.
"Tears already?" The active sounded incredulous. Her hips swiveled, her arms followed through. The paddle tanned the far right slope, driving the muscle mass inward. She slipped to her left and plastered the hardwood against the knotted left curve. The flat blade tip clearly indented the inner buttock crown.
Ken guessed that gluteal peak would hold a bruise for two weeks, minimum. He hungered to see the ripe colors blossom-burgundy, purple; then the fade to brown and greenish-yellow traces. All the while Nora would wince and remember at each tender seating.
"Amy Morgenstem didn't blubber before her first dozen." Delinda made an audible, speculative sound. "Then again, she is porkier in the beam, if not as cutely curved."
Judiciously, spacing the strokes at thirty-second intervals, the senior ran Nora through the same tail-pounding pattern a second time. She gave the older woman time to recover, but never let up on her strokes.
At the twentieth punishing swat, the redhead doubled her arms over her breasts and rose high on her toes. She gasped a gutteral, pleading sound. Then her body bowed at the waist. Her hands reached down, as she sought position.
"Look, Nora, you're feeling this pretty strongly." Delinda's honey tongue mixed sympathy and justice. "I can stop using a paddle and . . . well, it'll be easier for you if I just handspank you over my knee. I suppose it'll have to be more than the ten you'd have left from the board, but that won't be as bad."
"Ohhhh, thank you . . ." The punished pledge's fingers groped in teary blindness, pressing her guardian angel's free hand with gratitude.
Delinda pointedly sat on Nora's piled, folded clothes. She took the trembling body over her separated thighs. The scalded cheeks curved, bad-girlishly.
"Don't bother to count, Nor', just relax."
The senior primly spanked the sore peachcleft, swatting each buttock individually, then crisply walloping dead across the crevice.
She plainly intended to make it a good one as her palm roamed the twitching backside, learning its swollen contours. Slap . . . slap . . . SLAP . . . Nora just cried and squirmed her hips. The minutes passed.
Ken felt his trapped, engorged cock helplessly inseminate his tight shorts and steel-flied trouser front.
"There. All finished." Delinda blatantly fondled the heaving ribs and hanging right tit. "Try to forgive me, Nora; but never forget, you needed that."
Ken's hot tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. The sorority girl he'd banged in animal abandon reached be- tween two other silky, willing thighs he'd kissed and loved.
"Have you ever let yourself go with a girl, Nora?" Delinda purred soothingly. "I don't mean to take advantage. Just say no if you want to . . . but after punishment comes reconciliation; after pain . . . relief."
The scarlet-faced older pledge looked as confused as a high school freshman having the moves put on her by a football hero at the first sock hop.
"It's almost silly, me being your guardian angel." Delinda's fingers never stopped, caressing lightly as she helped Nora to her feet. Nipples, then soft belly, and un-paddled thigh fronts. "You've so much more experience than I have.
"You know your own body so well. Anyone can see that in the way you move, the way you dress." The active's mouth moved in slowly. A kiss, brief as a butterfly along the right breast. A licking tongue under the proud apple-curved tit. A trail of increasingly longer, wetter kisses down the belly.
The redhaired woman stood, thighs stretched, neck arched back. Her breathing was audible in the closet. Delinda sank to her knees and nibbled the rusty brown nest while she caressed the pain-quivering legs.
Nora uttered a cat-mating cry of reluctant surrender. Her guardian angel straightened to her nyloned feet. She peeled off her clothes, pausing from time to time and running the other woman's limp palm across a naked thigh or nipple-stiff jug.
Delinda swept the clothing off the bedspread. She reclined on the covers, drawing the sophomore pledge on top of her. Lip kisses, breast tickling, slow pussy rubs began in earnest.
Ken's aching eyes couldn't blink as his two nude girlfriends copulated not a dozen feet from his nose. He recognized Nora's favorite responses, clumsy at first from shyness, then increasingly fevered and skillful.
Delinda wiggled like a flounder, winding up with her mouth between her bed partner's legs. Some moments of dedicated muff-sucking elapsed. Then Nora's girl-virgin tongue tentatively licked the naked labia spread beneath her face. The pink probe gradually delved further.
Her hair spread out over Delinda's loins, veiling the action as she got down to serious cunt-kissing. Her paddle-hot buttocks shuddered with discharging lust.
"Oh, oh, that was so mean."" Delinda's breath exploded over him in giggles. Nora had vanished to stand her way back to San Francisco on a rapid transit train. Ken's clothes made an eager trail from the open closet to the thoroughly rumpled bed.
He rocked her hips back onto the woman-fragrant covers. He genuflected, his mouth kissing an abdomen come-spiced and slick from Nora's lips and tongue.
"Don't ever, ever tell anyone." She sighed.
"No way." He felt her foot rubbing his thigh, then her sole pressed firmly over his slimed prick.
"You enjoyed yourself in my closet," she accused. "Smelling my dresses made you all sticky and bothered, I guess. You ought to pay the price for masturbation, young man. My paddle doesn't make that cheap."
"A spontaneous emission. You two made a Mitchell Brothers live show seem as tame as The Nutcracker." He kissed his way up her body. She seemed relaxed for once. "Condom?"
"You know I hate the taste."
Nora's secretions flavored her lips, scented her face. He closed his eyes and enjoyed the fleeting fantasy of a dream threeway, his Lucky Pierre at play in between the two women he liked best.
"Now let me be Nora." He switched positions, his prong reaching down toward her mouth.
"Your clit's too big ..." She almost savaged it in her eagerness. Teeth shook it, lips suckled at the crown, tight as a thin fist trying to jack him off.
He heard a muffled "... maybe not ..."
"Why have I had such bad luck with boys until I met you?" Delinda demanded. She walked beside Ken past the Art Deco movie palace landmarking Orinda's tiny business section.
He tried to formulate something reassuring as he studied the moving headlights on the sterile highway gouging through the valley. Traffic fumes drifted through the night.
"The others probably all needed outside emotional strength," he told her. "You gave them that."
"I mean Hunt's mind was fucking out to lunch-out to lunch. Ron spent more time doing makeup than I did. Now he's playing with someone just out of high school."
"You've got passion and strength. You make a guy feel alive."
"Then why did they all-?" She shook her hair in the warm air. The strands were still damp from their postcoital shower. "What is it about me that attracts these . . . these emotional vampires?"
He patted her. "You're not to blame. You're full of life. You just need commitment from somebody who doesn't want your energy as a crutch."
She stopped and put her arms around his neck. "Have you really got that for me? When I need you you're so often not available . . . just not there for me."
"I'm not letting you go," he smiled easily. "Not you; no, ma'am. But I don't need you like they did." He touched his forehead. "I've got you with me here. That's the same as not needing you beside me always."
"I guess ..." She sounded uncertain as they continued walking toward the Bay Area Rapid Transit station.
"All right, you persuasive son of a bitch."
Ken listened delightedly as Nora laughed over the phone at him. He sat in his apartment living room. It had been just enough days since her Boy Ban whacking that he hoped to inveigle her into a date.
He specially wanted to get her into bed while the paddle and palm markings looked their tender prime. His fingers itched to touch the swat-stained cheeks.
He felt the hormones pound into his veins as her voice filled his ear reprovingly. "I had a real behind-tanning because of you. My fanny puts a C.B. de Mille sunset to shame-but I'll meet you."
"Can you manage sitting in a booth at The Nail?" He imagined her dainty squirms on the solid planks.
A deep, rueful chuckle fueled his gleeful fancy. "Not after Delinda finished . . . admonishing my bottom. I can't do dinner, anyway. Study hall session. Just be home at nine. I'll be there with my nightie ... the one God gave me for a birthday present."
He pledged his love and kissed across the phone wires. As he cradled the receiver, he wondered what he'd do when his two horny-hearted girls finally compared notes about men.
Ken checked the time. He slid the Rachmaninoff compact disc into the player. First the moody, spooky Isle of the Dead. Then the dark sensuality of the Second Piano Concerto. It should come on almost as his punctual Irish beauty came in, her hips still wincing from the Sigma paddle and Delinda's spanking.
He patrolled the apartment, careful to hide anything with his birth name on it. He slid the Opera News copy of his current review into a manila envelope with regret. Something had gone very vocally wrong with the soprano in The Flying Dutchman. Jose van Dam had ignited the boards as the tortured, God-cursed Hollander. But his redeeming lady-love had turned sour from the first shrill note . . .
Pity. He lettered his Scott Madrigal pseudonym carefully above the return address and left the envelope in the hall.
A hot-and-hugging fuck with Nora, a drink at a bar (standing up for her; he cherished the image), then whatever sleep he could grab. He had to be out prowling around a job site early the next day. Larry had all but turned cartwheels at the contract he'd grabbed right under the bigger San Francisco competition's noses.
The doorbell sounded noisily just as the string-heavy opening bars of the concerto glowered on the stereo.
"Good-evening, sexy-" His eyes tracked past Nora to a tall, golden blonde, sun-mellowed girl standing shyly. Two buttons open down the stranger's blouse left a lot of perfect, braless bounty on tempting display.
"Scott." His rusty-haired girlfriend had a broad leprechaun smile. "If you won't go for this, say so now. We'll both understand. Charlotte's also breaking the dating ban. She'll leave if you don't want a threesome."
"But I hope you do." Her voice had the breathy California girl innocence to match her doubloon-bright hair. "I read your article-oh, years ago, but I remember you writing that San Francisco Opera's Der Rosenkavalier had such sexy vibes that you wanted to hop in the sack between the Marschalin and Octavian."
Her words hit low, carnal registers of longing as she murmured wishfully. "Well ... I sing mezzo."
Ken gave Nora a glazed, incredulous look.
"Oh, listen!" The new girl's sky-colored eyes exploded in delight as the Rachmaninoff thundered around him through the doorway. "Remember The Seven-Year Itch"? 'It shakes me and quakes me.' " Her excited shiver eloquently mimed Monroe's laughing purity and vulnerable abundance. She seemed no older than a sophomore. He wondered if she was still virgin. Did Sigma initiate its maidens this way?
He led them in, his nerves alive with erotic fires. Nora pulled the door shut behind them.
When he turned around in his living room, he saw that both guests already had their clothes halfway off. The roundly curved blonde had skipped wearing panties under her pleatless linen slacks.
"Sorority sisters mean a lot more to one another than anyone else can ever guess, Scott." Nora let her stockings flutter onto his coffee table.
"Here, that's woman's work." Charlotte reached for his shirt. "You won't have to do a thing."
Iron-fingered notes rumbled across the orchestral background as the pianist meshed with the other players in a passionate exploration of Rachmaninoff's doubt-ridden, questing Russian soul.
Experienced hands-Ken scrapped the virgin dream- investigated his hard body as the two girls undressed him. The blonde cupped his scrotum delightedly, pressing her warm, nude hip against his and rubbing firmly.
"How about the floor, first? We can do bed later," Nora whispered. He glanced down at her to glimpse the liquid violets and indigo striations roll on her moving bottom.
Then the two female bodies had him on the rug, one on each side, his arms under them. Nora fingered his uncoiling prick. The blonde touched his throat lightly as she bent to kiss his face.
"Pizza delivery! Who ordered the pepperoni?"
He goggled from the floor at the flesh-heavy, New York-voiced brunette swaggering in from his entry hall. He tried to stand. Girl-weight held him in place. Nora's hand all but crushed his scrotum.
"An orgy! Come on, guys, a gang bang!"
College girls began to prance into the room, hard-faced and blood-eyed. The final one in pursed lips as severe as Maggie Thatcher's. A merciless English flogging cane swished in her grip.
"Turn that chair over," Nora ordered coolly. "Use my stockings to tie his legs to it."
"Don't worry," the hot-bodied blonde murmured next to him, "you won't have to do a thing, not a thing. We'll do it all for you, won't we?"
He felt a faint gratitude as a girl with silver glasses rammed a couch cushion against the hard bottom of an overturned armchair. The others dragged him up and over- his cock still halfway engorged. He grunted as it mashed into the thoughtfully placed cushion. Fingers roped him down with Nora's nylons.
Her backside flared with bone-deep ache from Delinda's whipping. She stiffly knelt and jammed his right wrist between her naked thighs. On the other side, Charlotte did the same. The girl had a spectacular non-chalance about her total nudity.
They held him stretched and immobile. Nora contem- plated her lover. Scott she had known . . . Ken came from some nightmare, a rip-off of The Thing or that silly War of the Worlds TV show Amy and Billie Bones liked to tel her about. The monsters from space infected your loved ones, seizing their bodies.
She had spent hours naked with Scott, skin to skin. His body lay before her, inhabited by something called Ken Gormish.
"First," Sarah Bothington punctuated her question with a light rap of the cane across his raised rear, "did Delinda know about your little Captain's Paradise?"
The flogging stick laced into his rump before he could answer. He huffed, obviously scared. She hit again before he could draw breath.
"I'm merely encouraging you to be truthful," Sarah informed pleasantly. A streak of scarlet began to swell into a weal. She prodded it with the sanded cane tip. "Did Delinda-?"
"NO!" His pleading eyes focused on Nora. She listened to him babble. "I kept her coming here-I met you in Berkeley or the city-" Sarah cut him off with a slashing stroke long on the thigh, stretching from just below his buttock to right above his knee. "How did you plan to handle your visits to Sigma, may we ask?"
"I don't know-I met Nora last year; I first saw Delinda a long time before Nora registered at St. Cloud." His broad, ruddy face had a begging sincerity. Nora wondered what mask he wore now-Scott, Ken, or someone else behind them both.
"I've been seeing you both for months," he insisted, "no problem."
The British girl lashed his other thigh sharply. Her eyes sparkled angrily. "Did you plan to tell them, ever?"
"I don't know-I didn't have control-if the whole thing blew up, it blew up."
"Too thin a story." Sarah scored the first thigh, crossing the weals deliberately. He screamed into the raging tide of Rachmaninoff's music. "I despise a liar, and you are a snotty-souled manipulating dung-wallowing pig of a liar."
She whipped him low on the hindquarters twice. He stammered broken bits of his story again. "Delinda knew all this," Sarah sneered down at him. "She's not so dense. We've slated you for a right proper hiding. Have you ever tasted the nip of whalebone? I've flogged my younger brother to the blood, you know, when the ironmonger caught him thieving."
She lashed his cringing buttocks. "Tell the truth and Delinda'll have half of what you're due. She ought to share it, oughtn't she? The truth, now!"
Nora watched the cane swing in, clinging to flesh she'd kneaded in her passion. The wood shivered, bent, then recoiled straight. A new mark seethed with crimson. She observed the puffy twin ridges forming where the cane strokes had landed-hard swollen on the outsides, shallow down the centers.
The strange man gibbered more. She'd felt good about Scott, relied on his strength, enjoyed his knowledge.
"I believe him," she spoke slowly to the other Sigmas, "or am I still a trusting idiot?"
Gerry Vestry crossed to the CD player and raised the volume. Sarah pointed and Susie Salton produced a whalebone birch from a tote bag.
Three long strips of grey baleen had been set with brass screws in an ebony handle. A triangular cross-section gave them a sharp bitting edge along one side and a flat stinging edge on the other.
"Delinda punished Nora for seeing you." Sarah held the Winchester-style rod before his eyes. With cold deliberation, she cleared her throat and spat into his flushed face. Phlegm bubbled down his forehead, streaking onto his nose.
"For being a bad boy," Nora explained distantly, "you get what she planned for me-thirty strokes."
Her thighs held his wrist in place as Sarah swung the vicious whalebone across his behind. His roars glided past her impervious soul. She could clinically marvel at the razor-thin burgundy stripes the bone birch raised. Ruby droplets oozed almost at once. She'd suspected Sarah would use the sharp side of the wedge-shaped strips.
After five, the British girl handed the rod to Gerry Vestry.
"You guys ..." Susie Salton rummaged in a cabinet beneath the VCR. "Video tapes. Naughty ones! You remember Womanpower 20001"
"He enjoys this sort of thing?" Gerry Vestry asked Nora, holding the whalebone over his lacerated rump.
She shrugged. "Scott liked music and fucking and food. I don't know about this guy."
The Sigma vice-president studied him critically. "If he comes on the cushion, I vote we repeat the dose."
She lashed him five times, buttocks and thighs, while he struggled. Nora and Charlotte both grabbed his elbows and bore down with their weight.
Susie accepted the rod when the laciniating cuts had finished. She sauntered in front of him, lowering her witch-tangled hair till it brushed his streaming face.
"You're getting boogers on your rug," she chided. "Listen: My sister Shelley works at the Nail. She saw you playing footsie with Nora and told Delinda. Now she's sorry, 'specially since she heard you with a client boasting how you screwed Dee-Dee after she'd paddled Nora's duff for breaking the Boy Ban by dating you. Big joke. Ha-ha."
She wrapped fingers in his sandy hair and shook his head. "If you visit the Nail again-if you ever even think about my sister Shelley-her husband will take you apart. He's not some soft-hearted girl, either."
She released his hair and stepped behind him.
Nora felt his panged sounds shiver through his arm into her bones as Susie branded his ravaged hide with the baleen. For the fourth and fifth strokes, the active turned the rod and used the strip's flat edges.
Two more girls followed suit. Then Nora relinquished the thigh-hold to Gerry Vestry. He had almost ceased to struggle. She could see the muscles along his back knot and spasm.
She stared down at his carmine-seamed buttocks. Spinning the whalebone rod in her hand, she hit him as hard as possible with whichever edge came uppermost. She spun and struck again . . . again . . . five times.
She tossed Sarah the birch. "I need some cool air. I'll be at your car." She dressed mechanically.
Nora stalked out of the apartment. The door slammed.
Gerry Vestry lowered the stereo to a sweetly rhythmed growl. She approached Ken. His forehead looked pale as milk. His eyes had closed in exhaustion.
"Delinda couldn't be here because we had to find out what she knew about your little two-faced game." She knew he heard her. "However, she's entitled to a scrap of hide, also. This one's for her."
She nodded to Sarah, who reached into her handbag.
"I have an idea, girls." Susie pointed at the VCR. "Let's leave him with something to amuse him while he figures out how to get granny knots out of nylons."
Charlotte had finished putting on her blouse and slacks. She and Amy helped jockey the overturned chair so that Ken faced his TV. Susie loaded a tape and depressed the controls. Nu-West's Womanpower 2000 flickered on, in flesh-toned color.
A scared young man hunched in a barred cell. A stern female voice enunciated his sins and the series of punishments he'd need to re-educate his insubordinate attitude toward women.
Susie picked up the limber English cane. She hissed it lightly in the air over the bare back while Sarah opened a baggie behind Ken's birch-raw backside.
"Have you ever heard Professor Porter talk on the Yoruba of Nigeria?" the British active asked. "I imagine not. Traditionally, the naughty youngsters among them receive rather severe floggings. Very bad boys and girls earn an additional refinement."
She callously began to scrub his abraded welts with cayenne pepper. He screamed as she trilled, "And you've been such a bad boy, too."
He bucked savagely, trying to reach back. Susie expertly cane-lashed his stretching palm. She grinned and arah'd kept his groping hands away with singing licks until Sarah finished scouring his liver-dark weals.
The Sigmas muttered approval as he wriggled and moaned fitfully. Then they trooped out, carefully leaving the front door closed but unlocked.
Female dominant dialogue hammered at his brain from the TV set. Ken had never felt more alive to total wretchedness than that very moment.
Yet a still inner consciousness thanked the gods and powers commanding the universe that those Sigma hellions hadn't found out he'd been in the closet watching while Nora took her punishment. He prayed in cold fear, hoping that Delinda wouldn't blab.
Any hint of the full truth and those sorority girls would deep fry them both in flaming oil.
CHAPTER TWELVE: Compromising Solutions
"Las Palomas. The doves." Ron turned the car onto the narrow, tree-lined lane, high on a hillside far from Orinda's center. Houses clutched perilous toeholds on the steep landscape. The November sky shone clear.
"More like a hawk's nest." His sister frowned. "What's Spanish for 'chickenhawk'?"
"That's her house." He pointed as they drove slowly past. He looked for a place to park. There didn't even seem to be room to turn around without plummeting into some home's parlor.
"Remember all those stories about the Hardy Boys or somebody going into the dark mansion when they should know better?" Jan asked.
"It's daytime and her place is a bungalow, not any kind of Dracula's castle." He eased the car behind a dust-streaked Toyota claiming on a bumper strip to be a Federation fleet vessel.
"We still know better."
Back down the road a burly fellow with mutton chop whiskers strode up the driveway to another house. A heavy brown belt girdled his gold tunic. A long scabbard swung at his left side. He carried a half-gallon jug of something murky and organic-looking.
"Jan, I think that guy has a sword." Ron felt disoriented. They got out into the chilling autumn air.
"Let's ask if he's a knight," she sniffed. "We could use one."
They mounted flagstone steps to Dorothy Tilden's front doorway. A flurry of rain earlier that week had refreshed her drought-struck tarns. They looked glossy.
Ron pressed the bell button . . . and electronic chimes promptly pealed the opening theme from The Lion In Winter. He felt a tug at his shirt. Jan's finger directed his gaze down the narrow street again.
A sun-bright, flesh-heavy matron and a stately, tranquil-faced woman carrying a Celtic harp marched up that same driveway. Both dressed like Medieval abbesses.
"So Caledonia Roundsong sets fashion trends." He shrugged. The door opened by his elbow.
Dorothy Tilden leered at them both. A nasty whipcord martinet dangled its lashes from a shiny leather handle firmly in her grip. "Bibbity-bobbity-fcooI" She ushered them into her front room. Pointedly, she chained the door and threw the second bolt. A panther-black pants suit presented her body, its short jacket ornamented by a silver rose pin. A single tear-shaped ruby glistened at the end of a thorn on the polished stem.
The martinet swung languidly, but effectively. It didn't look at all like those soft leather, broad-lashed sex toys Ron had seen on sale in San Francisco.
"Just a reminder in case you forget your vows of impurity and obedience." Dorothy Tilden threw back her head to yodel: "Hickery, dickery dock Up sprang Ronnie's cock. The whip licked down And kissed his crown. Whimpery, limpery jock."
She gestured down a hallway. "Through the magic arches you'll find some duds laid out for you. Last door on the right. Don't be long. It's dress-up time, children."
Ron felt the clammy sweat at the small of his back as he grasped Jan's nail-bitten hand. He led the way toward an unknown and fearful destiny.
"Damn Professor Porter and his anti-denim jeans campaign." Gerry Vestry hoisted a snifter of Drambuie.
"Damn the Academic Senate for endorsing it." Lucretia Sue raised her Martell Cordon Bleu. Her lean legs coiled under her chair. Burgundy corduroy boot-cut Levis matched her wine-dark satin blouse.
"And damn whoever thought up that protest march that landed our kidlets in steaming shit." Susie Salton lofted, then drained her third Cherry Marnier. Ears pink from liquid cheer poked from her wild brown hair.
"How did the beloved professor phrase it?" Gerry Vestry watched as Susie carved herself another slice of carrot cake. The Just Desserts box lay on the desk in the Sigma executive office.
" 'Corporal correction applied with requisite vigor to the inferior portions of the torso,' " the tall Georgian grad quoted. "Could be tolerably unpleasant, given his usual specs."
"Better than a two-week suspension." The vice-president wrinkled her nose. "I'm just glad you hustled those three out of the crowd before the campus police arrived to take names and numbers."
"Professor Porter won't peach, provided justice gets administered for the revolt." Lucretia Sue swirled her cognac and inhaled. "A fair man, I recall, and he did do Mona a nice turn by trying to discourage that cousin of hers."
Susie sniggered rudely. "Striping Rita Henshaw's buns for the crime of doing what Rump-and-A-Dozen Porter would love to do himself, sure."
"So whipping Rita only caused her to run amok. He tried." The carrot-haired grad shrugged. "That's how Mona got into the jeans protest-she'll worship Nora's sandal prints forevermore."
Gerry Vestry brooded. "She seemed so sensible at first- Nora, I mean. That thing with the Gormish clown really festers at her."
"I dragged her down to the Psych Department to talk with Carrie Mott-Dronkers. Nora feels somehow responsible for loving the cowflop and needs to be punished for cleaning him off her shoes." Lucretia Sue finished the Martell. "Either that or awakening to the fact of male exploitation has turned her militant against patriarchal rules."
"You bets your money, you gets your explanation." The blonde v-p stood up. "The girls should meet us at his house. Professor Porter will provide all the necessary?"
"When he tutored me in Old Icelandic," the Georgian drawled, "he had the finest collection of punishment props outside of Torquemada's basement. It can only have grown since then."
Susie seized the Cherry Marnier bottle for a splash in her glass and a parting guzzle.
Her face naturally colorless, Judy Latimer looked frozen to the bronze lawn seat; She shivered from moment to moment. More than the late autumn chill beset her. At intervals, Mona Forbes threw a furtive glance up the rising land at the ominous sUmmerhouse ornamenting Professor Porter's two-acre lot.
"Bred into the blood, like Wilkinson steel and xenophobia," Nora Quincannon murmured. "Sarah says Porter's great-uncle introduced Swinburne to the Marquis de Sade. Maybe not in person, but at least his writings. There's nothing more superfluous than giving an Englishman a handful of French flogging books."
She favored the rear of the professor's spreading, manoral home with a hard glare. "A British public school education makes the whole elaborate canvas of Les 120 Journees de Sodom redundant."
Judy's eyes darted uncertainly from Nora to Mona. "Is she all right?"
"I think she was raised Irish," the other girl whispered. "They're funny about the English."
A dapper figure in tweed jacket and Orkney Islands fisherman's sweater strolled around the side of his house. The ends of his mustache appeared to quiver in anticipation.
"Welcome, young ladies. I see you have the, um, articles with you." He noted the three demurely rolled paper grocery sacks at their feet. He touched his jacket pocket. "I have the Polaroids."
"To quote Lord Nelson-" Nora began.
"Chill weather to strip in, professor." Lucretia Sue's drawl knifed down the path he'd come along. "And all that Judge Jeffreys jazz."
A red-and-blue checked coat of Pendleton wool made her hair a delicate halo by contrast. She inhaled briskly. "This sudden, nippy weather could put roses in a girl's nefhercheeks."
Professor Porter beamed genially at her and the two sorority officers who followed her down the white-graveled way. "I apologize for not meeting you all properly. As you know, I do interviews on the university radio station. I should have had one with Honey Fitz Sullivan, the celebrated film star.
"However, that distinguished personality failed to show up at the studio. I ran late finding a substitute in Reverend Roundsong. Pity," he tilted his head in regret, "I so wished to ask Miss Sullivan why she insists upon lending her endorsement to a manufacturer's line of designer blue jeans."
His voice curdled expressively at the final words.
"Sarah claims they're the only model comfortable for the . . . amply seated," Susie chirped up, "unless you want to mail order from Frederick's."
"That's valuable to know," Lucretia Sue assured her. The woman turned to Nora. "You and I arranged this compromise with the professor."
The pledge stood up, a short fur-trimmed jacket ending above drumskin-snug, heavily ribbed, murky navy serge slacks. The effect powerfully suggested Lo Due Thong's ganymede, Taylor.
"We've agreed to his terms," Nora stated slowly, " 'sound physical punition of . . .' " Her lip wrinkled. "Our 'steatopygenous persons.' " Judy and Mona exchanged blank glances. Susie chortled. "Your fat asses." Her eyes glowed, merry and feral.
Lucretia Sue raised an eyebrow at her. "Sounds to me more like he meant 'forming fatty or generous buttocks,' by extension from the Greek for cushions, specifically referencing the muscle masses upholstering the ischial prominences."
Porter inclined in a bow. "Most learnedly discoursed, Miss Merydith."
The grad student eyed the three pledges. "You will all note that the agreement does not limit the punishment to the callipygean zones. It does call for infliction of disciplinary distress to your plump-bottomed bodies."
She grinned suddenly. "An' y'all should know that I learned that bit of citified quibbling the hard way from the master himself." Her head tilted toward the prof.
Nora's face hardened ever more solemnly. "We have also agreed that he reserves the right to judge the adequacy of the execution. However," her chin lifted in minute defiance, "in the interests of delicacy, nothing could be conceded about observing the infliction."
Porter waved toward the summerhouse. "You'll find everything to hand there, even a golfing glove for grip, if you wish."
"Admirable foresight, professor." Lucretia Sue nodded to Gerry Vestry and Susie. "Now, we have three sorry-eyed culprits, three pairs of forbidden jeans, and-by a strange synchronicity-three of us."
"Right on, 'Cretia Borgia." Susie Salton slapped her skirted thigh. Hair thrusting in all directions, she seemed mad as Ophelia. "Three medicinal doses of stick for each wayward girl."
Her flushed face twisted in a smile toward Mona. "With a special supplement afterward to my own dear sob sister, for breaking guardian angel policy. I strictly laid down the law: running afoul of campus rules would mean MURDER on your tubby tuberosities."
She winked at Porter. "Is that acceptably orotund?"
Gerry Vestry interposed quickly, "We never settled the issue of whether Nora should have any augmentation since she definitely should have known better."
"Leading youth into sin by bad example." Susie's admonishing finger quivered at the older woman.
"Perhaps that should depend on deportment under disci- pline," Lucretia Sue suggested. "We've already agreed on a penalty of six of the best ..." Porter's countenance clouded.
"... from each of us. Eighteen stripes across the felonious fannies."
His expression lightened. "Thrice six? Satisfactory."
Lucretia Sue extended her thumb toward the blue sky. "The first batch appropriately over the damning britches." Her index finger uncurled. "The second set across panties."
Her middle digit saluted. "The third lot slathered across the next logical progression."
Gerry Vestry tapped a brown-booted toe at one crumpled sack. "Since this isn't the campus, let me suggest you girls put the jeans on."
Judy quickly hefted her grocery bag. "May we be excused?" Her pale face showed innocent hope.
"Why?" The vice-president's silver glasses flashed brit-tlely in the sunlight. "Do you have to pee?"
A crisp breeze roving down Orinda's valley stirred the wintery bare limbs of a drought-chastened tree in the quiet back yard.
"I understand." Nora sighed and bent to unbuckle her shoes.
"I guess she likes movies." Jan Ladrone surveyed the posters covering every inch of wall in the neat, obviously spare bedroom. "Who's that?"
"Suzy Delair. She made a fortune getting spanked in French films in the Fifties, along with Dany Robin." Ron picked up the filmy blue Cleopatra gown he knew too well. "The Postit says His."
He peeled off the yellow scrap of paper and started to undress. His sister looked around the room. "I guess this must be Hers."
A bead-swinging Marilyn Monroe winked come-hitherly to advertise Some Like It Hot above a knotty pinewood dresser. Draped across the bureau top lay a flame-colored set of harem pajamas.
As he began to strip, Ron set his shirt and trousers on the bed beneath Honey Fitz Sullivan's naughtily curved rump and flouncy skirt, raised almost to the critical point for The Sins of Emile Zola. FILMDOM'S FABULOUS FANNY! the poster announced, IN THE FIRST AUTHENTIC CAN-CAN E*V*E*R FILMED!
Ron turned his back discreetly on Topkapi's lecherous, canary-haired Melina Mercouri to shed his shorts. He doffed his undershirt and slid the Serpent of Old Nile's queenly array over his body under the smoky insouciant eyes of Dietrich incarnating The Scarlet Emperess.
"Okay. Showtime?" Jan asked. Her nether assets ballooned the diaphanous pj pants. The long filmy sleeves on the top met around barely opaque breast circlets that loosely tied under the girl's pectoral thrust.
"I hope someone breaks a leg," her brother muttered. Above the door frame as they exited Mae West reclined in a florid honkey-tonk odalisque.
Mona shakily unhooked the wide black lace belt cinching her green pencil skirt. The outfit gave her hips the aspect of a bottle, one pleasingly full.
"The lass with the most undy veiling her dainty rear gets first licks," Susie proposed as her sob sister hesitated.
"Take them down," Gerry Vestry advised Judy. The freshman's fingers had frozen on the fasteners of baggy-seated candy-apple slacks. Eyes shut, she fumbled and yanked them far below her blue, down-filled jacket.
A soft morsel misted her loins, displaying the Nordic blonde pubic moss vividly through the sheer robin's egg fabric.
"A gal's small clothes certainly earn their name, these days," Lucretia Sue observed.
Mona stepped out of her skirt. Lime-colored tricot and spandex, with an inch of lace along the waistband, barely gave her bikini-sized coverage. She tore at her grocery bag, her dignity in rags.
Beside her, Nora had peeled down and stepped free of her navy stuff. Sturdy, unflattering undies cut to near directoire length gleamed an uncompromising white over her loins and bottom. She folded the serge thoughtfully before exchanging it for the denim jeans in her sack.
"Toe-touchers for the initial six," Gerry Vestry pronounced. "The benter the better, when it's over real clothing."
Mona zipped and buttoned her faded britches. She huddled her arms around her torso. The HONEY FITZ SASSY ASSETS logo rose in arrogant gold thread across her elegantly curved right posterior pocket.
"The second dose, coming down like a hot knife into butterballs, with hands glued to knees." Susie demonstrated with firmly planted palms and a skittish wiggle of her coyly cocked seat. Professor Porter's gaze lingered upon the sight.
"The final half-dozen on tiptoe, leaning over the table," Lucretia Sue determined.
"Table?" Susie waggled her rump and came erect. She glanced from the lanky Georgian to the summerhouse and back. Her beaked nose quivered on the scent of knowledge.
"Table," the grad student repeated. "Stout oak, from a New England colonial taproom, I believe."
Porter nodded. "My dealer claimed it came from The Fox and Hind Inn, a feature of Arkham, Massachusetts, until that silly university on the Miskatonic bulldozed three blocks of historic downtown property for its Business Department annex. The table's pegwork and solid as a Puritan Father's oath."
"Miss Merydith, may I impose upon you to begin?" Gerry Vestry gestured toward Nora's washed and threadbare jeans. "I should explain to the professor that we required the girls to perform some preparations."
"About twenty separate launderings, in a galvanized tub with a stone and washboard," Lucretia Sue specified. "Remembering the house rule, shall we agree to remit a stroke if a seam splits?"
"The purpose is punishment, not sport," Porter considered slowly, "yet, unlike new wine and old skins, the more mature bottoms tend to burst their sacking. I am agreeable to the stipulation."
The carroty redhaired grad student began up the flagstone steps to the summerhouse. "Shall we .... ?"
The rusty redheaded pledge followed, gravejawed.
"You two face the rest of us and listen," Gerry Vestry admonished.
Susie had her eyes on the haunchy sway as Nora climbed, her gluteals rippling under the wash-bleached denim. She spoke dreamily, "Mona, dearest, keep your eyes on mine. No squinting or winking and absolutely no blinking at the sound of the cuts. Watch me and focus your soul on Nora."
Stillness hovered over the bare tree limbs. In the distance, a creature yelped. The brisk air livened their senses as words came clearly through the summerhouse windows.
"Touch your toes. Those weekly Bad Word paddlings have been giving you practice, I see; but let's try for a tighter fit along the deep south." A dry chuckle. "Stand up with your hands over your head . . . Reach for the stars . . . now dig into your drawers and tug hard on that waistband just behind the small of your back. Nevermind that piss-pickle sour face. It may grab you in the crotch, but that's not the point, is it?
"There, now bend over again, TIGHT! Brace those knees, and keep tugging . . . Good, you can touch those toes. Let's see if I can't win you a little reprieve by popping some of that finest quality Levi Strauss stitching."
A live-sounding thing hummed sharply in the tangy autumn air. "Oooo-eeee! What British penal institution manufactures this indecorous tail-slicer, I do wonder? Could that tip be weighted?"
A vicious singing cut the expectant silence.
"I'm plum-pluperfect-positive that has a steel core, as well."
Judy Latimer's eyelid fluttered in dread. Thhhhhwhomp!
The pale girl jumped. Beside her, Mona showed whites around her irises as she stared at Susie's gluttonous grin. The leathery larrup quivered tangibly in the air about them.
Thhhhhwhiiick!
Judy sucked breath across her teeth, face strained. The sound echoed, long and harsh. ThhhhhWHACK!
Mona's face seemed transfigured by shared agony. Her lips crinkled, bloodless. Splayed fingers clutched her denimed thighs. THHHHHWHOCK!
"Ten-second intervals," Susie broke the perfection of mood. "I guess with three stiff courses in a meal you can afford to gulp the soup-and it's steaming hot."
The fifth juicy stroke rolled through the air.
"Nose down," Lucretia Sue's voice demanded, "and hold that rear up at attention!"
The sixth thumped most meatily of all. A high, strained warble grudgingly followed: "Hhhieeeee-!"
The sounds quieted but for a distant sniff at ragged intervals. Finally the lean grad student appeared, arm stretched behind her. She towed Nora, firmly pinching one reddened and twisted ear shell.
The woman's tightly screwed face showed brick-dark under her rusty hair. She walked antsily, fists waving at her sides, as the two paraded down the stone-paved steps.
Gerry Vestry nodded thoughtfully at Susie. "Play through."
"Goodie." She gripped Mona's shoulders and rotated her toward the summerhouse. The freshman's mouth strained down at the corners, hard and sad as she saw Nora. Susie prodded her on forward.
The star-endorsed blue jeans showed Mona's classic inverted-heart bottom to succulent advantage as she climbed the uncaring stones. She passed the descending pair with a flinching, averted face.
Lucretia Sue grinned at her terror.
"Oh, run into the roundhouse, Nelly- They can't corner you there!"
The Georgian trooped her charge down to the bronze bench. "That's a little Okefenokee calypso," she explained.
Her fingers released Nora's tweaked ear. "Now stand and listen, Ms. Ringleader. You didn't organize that damn fool dress code protest rally, but you're the pledge class president at Sigma, and neither Mona nor Judy would have their sausage-cased pork buns on the scalding iron if you hadn't been there yourself."
Susie's rapid chatter spilled through the summerhouse window. "Fingers on toesies . . . Those back pockets of yours look ready to burst without any tugging. I guess we can forget your scanties, too. I've seen sturdier veils on flower girls at weddings."
Swwwuuuttt!
Nora's nostrils flared. She raised a hand to wipe at a red-rimmed eye, then dropped it. Swwwaaattt!
"Ngaa-ngaa . . . Miss Salton, p-please-!" Sppplaaaccckkk!
"I'll bet you could-" The fifth driving scorcher interrupted Lucretia Sue. "-broil liver over her-" The sixth raised a pleading whine. "-broad-cheeked assets right now."
Mona emerged as if carting live coals in her rear pockets. Her honey-soft hair flew from side to side. She gulped down sobs and blotted her sleeve at her eyes. The gait down the stone steps resembled a lizard scuttling on sunbaked rock.
"I take it that hurt." Gerry Vestry nudged her glasses higher. Susie had not left the summerhouse.
"Intensely, m-miss." The pledge wiped salty runnels from her chin. Nora watched her ruefully.
"So will the next six." The vice-president took Judy by the hand. "Let's see if we can shake any lingering starch out of those jeans. Professor Porter indicted denim before the Academic Senate as 'shapeless, stiff, unyielding and unfeminine.' " His attention seemed divided between the very female jut of Mona's blue cotton britches and the tight fit clothing Judy's peachcleft as it wiggled up to punishment. The freshman let herself be drawn along, ashen in surrender.
Indistinct voices came down the hill. Susie finally emerged, face flaming. "Sorry, Ger' ..."
She stumbled down the steps to stand silently.
"Whacking off after whacking away?" Lucretia Sue diagnosed, as the active rubbed her hawk's nose with a disappointed finger.
"Damn," the frazzle-haired girl muttered, "I thought just a touch would send sky rockets out my-"
"A prime waste of Kundalini energy," Porter disapproved. "Limitless potency without direction characterizes today's hasty generation."
Thwwwlllccckk!
The keen, biting cane strokes came at twenty second intervals.
"Even money Judy wets the floor before we're done." Susie attempted a snide grin.
"You will, too, sticky finger." Lucretia Sue gave a critical frown. "But not with piss cider."
"Oh, my GOD!" Jan squeaked in awe. "It's her."
Smokey-lensed Foster-Grants regarded the brother and sister under a distinctive crown of auburn-streaked midnight hair. Honey Fitz Sassy Asset jeans hugged spray-can tight around the multi-million dollar hip structure of Honey Fitz Sullivan herself. She stretched lynx-like on the living room couch.
"So kind." The star flashed a name-above-title smile, the ivory dazzling between full sex-goddess lips.
Ron glared at Dorothy Tilden, his gut tight with betrayal. The Cleopatra gown swayed about him, tailored for ShandelTa Ruse's lush African hips and gourd-ripe breasts.
He'd worn the color off the video tape of Lulu-Hotpants Hooker. The troilism sequence with Max Schell as Alva Schon and Ingrid Bergman portraying Countess Geshwitz had kept him masterbating till he'd exhausted the family supply of vaseline.
His mind retained every incredible pink square inch from the three separate bathing sequences in Sabre Tooth Women. His hands moved self-consciously as he felt the ego-stunning inspection by the screen icon.
"Don't cover it up, thunderpud." Miss Sullivan spoke, the velvet of her voice tickling down his spine. "You musta wowed 'em in the first rows."
"Some of the flightier faculty members acted as if the asp had gotten loose up his leg," Dorothy Tilden reminisced. "Dr. Burgesson foamed something about Russ Colombo as they carried her out."
"They shoulda known Elvis," the goddess assured her. "I came every time he touched me in Hound Dog Harem Holiday-but so did he, after his 'vitamin' shots."
"How-how was he?" Jan whispered, entranced.
"Just like he sang, blunt and filling the aching void in your belly till you hadda scream. He had these pink pills could keep him stiff for . . . well, I clocked it once to four hours, twenty-eight minutes, and seven seconds." She shrugged. "Coulda been longer, but we hadda shoot a scene that day."
"You could lend her your plaster-caster souvenir," Dorothy Tilden suggested wickedly. "But I forget, the demure young thing only takes deliveries in the rear."
"Chacun a son gout." Honey Fitz Sullivan's Technicolor lips parted farther on the right. She popped her gum with the crisp authority of a Brooklyn veteran.
"I'm glad you approve." Professor Porter spoke to Gerry Vestry as he drank in Judy's wine-like wriggles. The girl's newly-warmed jeans seat could not stand quiet.
"That cane had to be custom made," the senior marveled. "It slices like a dream."
"Off the rack. No, I assure you-but not the netherside of the line. Willoughby and Pratt produce them for Harrod's in London, along with a superior grade of tawse and . . . um, sundry domestic discipline tools."
"It should feel worse over teddies," Susie intruded brightly. "Rump steak ala mode next on the bill o' faire. Pucelle tartare, with only a wisp of dressing."
She scowled at Nora. "Except for extremists."
"Lead off," Gerry Vestry suggested. Her set, serious face followed the slow march up the scaffold steps to the place of execution.
"Peel them down, Pledge Quincannon . . . right to the ankles, if you please . . ." Susie's giggle rose. "Does your mother mail those jogging shorts to you? Nobody under forty has worn anything like that . . . well, Sarah has some British undies that would look prudish in a nunnery, but an American!" She chortled.
"So! Palms smack across the patellas. Show me the full cleft of your ca-ca crack under those white bloomers. Pity I can't see 'Cretia Borgia's marks. I'll have to overlap them, if we aim for the same areas."
Somewhere in the Orinda hills, a beast gave mournful tongue, seeking a mate.
"Unnnggg!" The sudden girl-cry blended with a thwacking report, cane curving across clothed meat. A second, rapping slice evoked a heartfelt moan.
Susie's gleeful face appeared at the window. "She cuts like fresh-drawn butter! A Moulin Rouge skirt-tosser couldn't shake it better."
The minx grin vanished. A third stick lick resounded, echoing slightly from the main house wall.
"I wondered if those matronly drawers would earn her extra for padding," Lucretia Sue commented, her eyes on a ragged cuticle. "What's the penalty for trying to pad your hindend under correction, professor?"
"For my Chaucer students, never less than nine with the heated coulter."
"Yiiiii! . . ." Nora's fortitude audibly crumbled. "Yaow! . . . YOWWWW!" The woody strokes popped in the air.
-"Hark, something nasty thakked hire aboute the lendes weel . . . and pleyeth faste, and maketh melodie." The Georgian drawl flavored her pronunciation.
"The back of the lendes, to be proper, but otherwise, most to the point." Porter genially regarded the rugged, rangy grad student.
"Even, he kiste hire sweet and taketh his sawtrie-?" Lucretia Sue softly inquired. She paused as Nora appeared above. All eyes focused on the stone stairs.
The young woman took the steps in a near crouch, knees wavering as she planted her feet. Her hands seemed welded to her tremulous bottom. Tears roamed freely to her chin, unchecked.
Susie stood on high to watch the whole penitent progress. Then she all but skipped down to the bronze lawn seat. She licked her lips as Nora painfully straightened.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Willow Weep
"Call me Fitz." The Tinseltown legend expanded her epic-making dugs under the silver-on-black Love and Rockets T-shirt. Hopey and Maggie eyed one another from opposite nippled mounds over the flowing script LAS LOCAS.
"That Honey crap had something to do with the Kennedy mystique. My first agent stuck me with it." She rose to her thonged Gucci sandals. Her sculpted nails scratched one decorously denimed thigh, then she plucked her gum and parked the wad in a Limoges candy dish on a glass-topped parsons table.
"Gotta get the formalities outta the way." She loosened a sculpted gold belt buckle depicting the horseback pursuit of Mickey and Minnie by Pegleg Pete. With a zip and a fast shimmy, she had her name-brand jeans at her knees.
"Guido still trimming your mons?" Dorothy Tilden inquired. Her guest's pubic hair formed a plush acey spade design in darkest New Wave black.
"Not since his last blood test . . . Oh, that. He thought a heart looked silly on a brunette, so Cristobal got creative." She rotated her evenly lamp-tanned hips until the Tookie They'd Love To Touch glowed in Ron's unbelieving eyes.
The lively, satin-sheened flesh rolled invitationally. Widely separated mirror-twin hills danced, the whole line of her musculature from knees to T-shirt hem in winking, wanton motion.
"My publicity guys keep telling me that every red-blooded boy in America hankers for my heinie."
"A few girls, too," Dorothy Tilden watched with unashamed delight. "It kinda inhibits some people, you know, the first time; so I figure, get the introductions done with." She canted her bankable buttocks toward him. "Dorothy tells me you're a tush man. Wanna kiss?"
Ron knelt reverently and pressed his lips to the springy, fine-grained bottom in glazed devotion.
"I think sister dearest feels neglected." The drama instructor studied Jan's glowering pout. "By the look of that tentpole doing push-ups under Cleo's peignoir, there'll be well-gristled meat enough for all comers.
"You've got a good start on analingus. While you three make friends, I can introduce myself to jellybun Jan." The woman slid off her pants suit jacket. Her fingers slowly opened the satin blouse buttons. "Playtime ..."
Miss Sullivan pitched her hips in sudden, nerve-thrumming pleasure. "Oooooo, you're the first goddamn college boy to know a perineum from Pinesol . . . that's niiice!"
Dorothy Tilden ran the backs of her knuckles lightly along Jan's jawline. "Don't flinch. Big brother's ramrod frisking up and down your rectum like a bucking bronco has to be a lot less pleasant than my finger . . . here."
Her other hand softly invaded the harem pajama bottoms and found a convenient slit along the seat. The girl's formidable gluteals stiffened to iron as a finger tickled her anal rim.
"Oh, oh, oh, now, stiffening up in back!" The drama professor shook her head. "Perhaps we should start with a course of that nine-tongued cat, licking its way along your tense tambo until . . . that's better."
She guided Jan's reluctant mouth to a bare aureole peeking from the open blouse. "Ever suck your sibling's pecker? This is almost the same, but without having to unhinge your jaw. A brisk circular motion . . . juuust like that . . . and a slow clockwise twirling back here."
Her finger kept caressing beneath, the tip pressed to the worried sphincter. "Not as brutal as Aunt Tilly's rigid digit, is it? I thought not."
She gently led Jan toward the wide couch. Honey Fitz Sullivan already had her jeans off and posed on all fours, her Foster-Grants bobbing in time to Ron's lingual thrusts and swirls.
"You look good enough to birch, darling," Dorothy Tilden observed the open rump. "Have you ever tried S&M? It gets these two all hot and bothered."
She slid onto the upholstery, cuddling the girl in her arms as her guest raised her head.
"Orson . . . unnngg . . . offered to show me . . . ahhhh ... the flogging scene Fox cut . . . ooooo . . . outa his Jane Eyre . . . mmmmm . . . seems little Lizzie Taylor . . . uhhhh . . . took it like a trooper . . . ah-ah-ah-ah . . . but the censor shat his plus fours . . . UNNNGGG-GUGGG . . . more, more!'" Dorothy Tilden found she could use both her hands to remove her satin blouse. Jan's mouth roamed between the hard coraled teats without needing encouragement. The woman found the pj's drawstring and slipped the filmy harem trousers onto the hot, ample thighs.
She explored the nerve endings at the base of Jan's coccyx and felt the girl vibrate with response. She began to caress her playmate's broad, round duff. The loins rocked against her in yearning.
"Hark, forest murmurs." Professor Porter cocked an ear toward the summerhouse where Gerry Vestry had taken Mona.
Thhhlllaaap!
"I'll swear that tip fell on bare skin."
"With panties cut that high, a long lick can get a good hand's breadth of haunch," Lucretia Sue opined. She studied Judy Latimer as the whirring strokes progressed. The pale blonde's face held pure, liquid terror. She shook at every ear-filling swipe.
"Remember," the grad student murmured gently, "any flinching away earns a penalty cut."
The light-boned girl nodded glumly.
"Aaaaiiii!"
Gerry Vestry stood in the doorway and adjusted her glasses. "That tail-whacker practically swings itself. Just a little arm motion and some rudimentary wrist control, and-WHAM!"
"Good, I'll bring a book to occupy myself while Miss Latimer brushes up on her one-bottomed Conga." Lucretia Sue massaged the pledge's shoulder reassuringly. She gave a pat and followed her up the chill stairs.
An extremely preoccupied Mona Forbes blubbered quietly on her way down. Her brow and chin worked, wrinkled and wretched.
She stood by Nora and sniffled. A vague breeze brought a sound as of silk being shredded by a Crusader's sword. It terminated in a CRACK and a nasal squeal.
Four more cheerless whups raised clench-jawed bleats. Then indistinct voices filled a pause.
Lucretia Sue's carroty head thrust through the window. "Our li'l chum claims she must go. Is there a bucket or watering can-? Ooops." Her head ducked in, then reappeared. "No more problem."
"The boards have become used to it," Porter related. "I used gallons of creosote against such eventuality."
The final whistling THWACK heralded an almost immediate apparition. Judy waddled, face brick-bright and streaming. She carried her jeans. Soaked briefs had taken on a piebald coloration, plastered to her skin.
She shuffled down to the lawn seat, backside stiff with pain. A sharp, foolish scent preceded her, carried by the light wind.
". . . 'm sorry ..." She grimaced at the ground in self-conscious agony. "... couldn't help myself ..."
"Quite all right, I assure you." Professor Porter manfully maintained a sober countenance. "It adds to the air of rural informality we country dwellers cherish. My grand-sire used to have the milkmaids in regularly to sluice down the library parquetry at our Fen Country place."
"Similar circumstances?" Lucretia Sue stepped carefully to avoid a drippy trail.
"No. The old gentleman favored a whipping scale and shot-weighted thongs."
"Of course, we must exact an additional penalty," Gerry Vestry broached, "but I think we can decide that later."
The Englishman studied the vivid markings visible through Judy's damp, transparent stuff. He seemed content.
"Firstly she should get those wet things off," the redheaded grad proposed, "before her cunt starts sneezing. She can mop herself dry with her jeans and wear those sexy crimson slacks. The next round'll be bare bottom, anyhow."
The girl flashed a miserable look at Porter, then peeled down her skimpy, sodden panties.
"Don't worry," he reassured her. "After all, I am a doctor."
"Of philosophic dans le boudoir,'I Lucretia Sue specified under her breath.
Ron Ladrone lay on his back, his hands striving heroically to encompass, to knead, to fondle the full reach of Honey Fitz Sullivan's epicurean buttock rounds. She purred, rocking atop his firmly entrenched cock.
"N-i-i-c-e." She eased herself up and down, completely nude atop his naked body. "You college men certainly got more on your balls than when I simpered down the ivy-cluttered halls of learning."
Ron tenderly nipped her throat as his fingers sought her inner gluteal curves, still slick from his tonguings.
"G-god, I haven't had a fuck like this since that film teacher at CUNY," the star gasped.
"Where?" Dorothy Tilden lifted the last veiling scrap from Jan's bountiful young body.
"Pu-den-da Ci-ty U. in New Dork." She arched, writhing. Her swinging knockers battered at Ron's retreating chin. "Ahhhh ... he had this seminar, with Russ Meyer and me as guest lecturers ... Ai ... ai ... ai .. . Mill!"
The magnificent cleft contracted, imprisoning his hand. She ground her belly onto him, his scepter trapped in a maelstrom as she shivered and quivered her way through orgasm.
"Im-Iwc�mg-pressive, lover," she cooed. "I'm a jelly inside and he's still got a Saturn missile aimed up my twat."
The screen star stretched her limbs luxuriously and removed herself from his sticky latexed length.
"Don't cool off, big stuff. I gotta tinkle."
Dorothy Tilden chastely brushed Jan's mouth with her pursed lips as Miss Sullivan vanished. Her hands busied themselves. The girl's palm palped a breast she'd kissed with hesitant interest before.
Jan inhaled sharply as the heel of a palm caressed her clitoris. Her lips parted, the woman's tongue darted swiftly inside, then out again.
"Just some healthy girl fun, angel tush . . . nice and wholesome for the glandular system, and a great cardiovascular workout that takes no special shoes."
She placed the shy hands on the waistband of her black brushed-cotton trousers. "Be a pet and help me get these off, so we can try some nice, old-fashioned tribadism. Do you know the scissors position? It gives a heavenly fuck, and without poking anything up anybody."
The two had stripped her down to midnight mesh panties when Honey Fitz Sullivan returned. The drama instructor craned her neck to watch her guest remount.
"Was it Germaine Greer or Phyllis Schlafly who wrote that every man should have the be-jezus buggered out of him once, so he'd know how it felt to be penetrated?" Dorothy Tilden asked as the star inched down the maypole.
"Truman Capote." Miss Sullivan clamped her thighs around Ron. "I heard him at a party."
"Skinny whipping time!" Susie beamed at Nora. "I want to see what we've been engraving on your underneath that makes you so sad-mouthed."
"I believe it's my turn with Miss Quincannon." Gerry Vestry started up to the summerhouse. "You know, there are two ways to lay prone over a table."
"Miss Merydith said on tiptoe." The pledge had a startled expression. "That was stipulated."
"Did I?" the Georgian questioned. "Madam Vice- President, has the custom of lipping officers been instituted at Sigma since my days in the active ranks?"
The heart-faced blonde stopped on the steps and faced the group. "Miss Salton, do you recall any motions mandating sass from pledges under correction? I may have missed an executive meeting."
"A compulsory backtalk proposal got amended to backboard in committee." Susie giggled.
Nora stood, frozen faced. "I'm sorry, Miss Vestry."
"Downright pathetic, I'd say." Lucretia Sue watched the pair climb the rest of the distance.
Judy's lithe body juddered in the chill red slacks as they waited.
The sorority officer personally yanked down Nora's blue, plebian jeans. She scowled at the white step-ins, digging her thumbs in and tugging. The undies slithered along the woman's legs to the damp, vulgarly scented floorboards.
Gerry Vestry walked all the way around the somber pledge. "No wonder you've been pulling faces. Miss Merydith's?"
She ran two fingers indentingly along blood-gorged purple-red welts. Nora yelped.
"That regular barring would be hers. The others run all over the map." Tip marks had lapped heavily across the first six, ruler-straight ridges. "I'd guess you'd been arguing with a barbecue grill if I didn't have inside information."
A long, yellow straight-handled assassin's cane bisected the dark colonial table. Gerry Vestry raised it and held the fattened striking tip under Nora's nose.
"Sarah makes you pledges sand all her canes to a rounded point. I wonder why. This thickened tip leaves much more colorful markings. Tender, too, I bet."
She gestured at the table with the yellow terror. "Over, flat on your tummy, legs straight across the top, torso hanging down." She pointed at the floor. "Put your fingertips in Judy's wee and support yourself. No palms or hand heels, and don't take a single finger off the boards until I finish.
"Feel free to kick and squirm on your belly like a reptile, but if even your pinkie lifts, the count rolls back. One for the first offense, two for the second, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera."
Nora crawled onto the antique wood. She slithered over the side, arms extended, and came to rest as ordered. Her rump curved, the weight of the muscles stretching the surfaces normally nethermost.
"I can't claim to know your problems at this time, Nora." Gerry Vestry rested the whipping stick across the angriest wealage. "Two week suspensions in their first college term would really have screwed Mona and Judy's academic records. They elected you pledge president because they trusted you."
She swung the cane high and hacked down with arm and shoulder behind it. The stiff wood furrowed and the swollen tip burrowed.
Nora's jeans flapped into the air as her calves jerked toward zenith. Her taut fingers bounced like springs. Gerry Vestry watched them closely.
When her eyes returned to the stung bottom, both halves pulsed with mounting pain. She whipped them again, harshly. A heartfelt scream erupted.
"I'll bet you didn't know your knees could get that far apart. If you weren't wearing denim along your ankles, you'd have split your britches," the sorority officer observed callously. "As it is, I think those Mother Hubbard drawers look the worse for stretching around the waistband."
She tried to avoid Lucretia Sue's marks, but the cane had to cross Susie's spoor. The wood lashed into those diagonal striations without pity.
"Please fart less noisily, I can't hear you lubbering. Salting down Judy's puddle, are you?"
She hit the martyred cheeks full across their midpoint. A half-minute of sincere threshing about, then she landed the cane hard where buttocks crease into legs. The active monitored Nora's pumping fingers. The woman's inverted face looked a teary, runny mess.
"Be glad we're your friends," she murmured just above the gasping sounds.
She straightened and cane-welted the virgin thighs with all her strength. Her gaze critically fell on Nora's spasming hands.
"The count just rolled back one."
"A hit, a very pulpy-" Susie was smirking.
"Shush!" Lucretia Sue silenced her.
A seventh whickery, lickery slice chased a strangled shriek into the air. The group waited, Mona's red-rimmed mauve orbs glistening with pity and horror.
A minute passed. Two. Nora Quincannon pranced from the summerhouse door, cradling her denim pants and white briefs in her arms. Her behind bucked and weaved all the way down. Gerry Vestry followed her, face a stony mask.
"Place your things there." The blonde active jabbed a thumb at the bronze bench. "Now kneel on them, sunny side toward us."
Nora cried in broken whimpers as she obeyed. Inky violets and raw livery colors streaked across brick-dark weals. The twice-flogged thighs trembled.
Judy rocked like a wind-blown reed. Susie caught her and held her tight in a sisterly hug.
Lucretia Sue traded an approving glance with Gerry Vestry. Then the tall grad student quietly hustled Mona up the hill.
". . . we'd suckle these red hots out at Coney Island Beach to watch the boys' swim trunks fill up in front, and if they asked real, real nice we'd go out into the waves to do something about it." Honey Fitz Sullivan reminisced. "Pure frottage. Nothing serious.
"The innocent days before JFK got killed," she sighed. "None of us knew he hadda waiting line taking numbers to bang him on the Oval Office rug."
"IT'S TOO B-BIG!" Ron Ladrone bellowed, his eyes begging for clemency from Miss Sullivan or Dorothy Tilden.
"My snatch or her dong?" The star frowned below her ebony shades. She reclined on a layer of velvet-covered floor pillows, her torso rising on a cradle of thicker bolsters.
Ron's palms dug into the cushiony mass. His belly covered hers, his prick jammed to the cods. He reared back, arms rigid. "T-too big!"
"I told you that for years," Jan muttered behind him. The dildo harnessed to her loins had only marginally entered his rectum. "Didn't do me any good."
"I thought you got off on backdoor incest," Miss Sullivan chided. "Your sport, not mine."
"Where's that goddamn martinet?" Dorothy Tilden stalked nude around the living room. "I mean it this time. No more coddling male prima donnas."
She swished the leather-handled, whipcord-lashed cat. It sang cleanly. Stalking to the center of the room she scalded Jan's gibbous rear.
"Eeeeee!" The girl's hips jabbed forward as nine scarlet ribbons rilled her backside.
"UUUUUUHHHHHH-!" Ron tried to crawl deeper into Honey Fitz Sullivan and couldn't.
The drama teacher striped the struggling bottom again. "That's only halfway."
Ron's lips drew back over his teeth. He goggled pitifully down at the super-star's impassive Foster-Grants. Jan rocked forward with full-muscled digs.
"Hey," the sister marveled. "That felt nice."
"The dingus at the root of that custom-model gazookas ought to tickle your slit and lips at every forward motion." Dorothy Tilden grazed the lashes along Jan's haunch impatiently. "I prefer natural girl-humping, as you discovered, but some women want a kinder, gentler cork-screwing than a man'll give."
The girl swung her hips back, then fought to drive them forward. "You're not co-operating." She jabbed an elbow against her brother's ribs.
"Get into Cheslyn Warden's head," the college instructor suggested. "Show Fitz some serious acting."
"Yeah," the star reached to languidly caress the taut cords on his neck. "I'dda thought fucking bored you, except I felt that cattleprod of yours grow another inch just now. Musta been the prostate massage, eh?"
She laughed as he resumed his copulations, his timing complicated by Jan's, and both their motions co-ordinated by Dorothy Tilden's acid tongue and whip.
"Have we got this daisy chain on a paying basis?" The woman asked finally. "Good. Room for one more."
She retained the martinet as she clambered onto the pillows, straddling Miss Sullivan's face. Ron twisted his head aside, naked nethercheeks menacing his nose.
"Pussy, pussy, come to mama," the film legend coaxed as Dorothy Tilden's muff got closer to her mouth.
"You brushed up on your rimming once today." The instructor flicked Ron's shoulder with a backlash of the martinet.
He understood fully as she covered Honey Fitz Sullivan's million-dollar face, her legs spread and her buttocks imperiously parted. He tried not to grit his teeth at his sister's full-bored thrusts. Opening his mouth tentatively, he buried his nose in the Lesbian's cleft and licked.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Liebestod and Verklarung
Distant university chimes staidly announced the ho with Here Comes The Sun. The blue, dry sky continued chill the summerhouse and rustic garden behind Profess Porter's home.
Mona Forbes had joined Nora on the bench, her nak knees pressing on her rumpled jeans. The British academ' contemplated her squeezeable, teaseable sitzfleisch. He wo~ dered if she'd consider doing a TA in Meryl Beveridge' Humanities 237 course next semester. Certainly "Ruski and the Victorian Nude Revolution" needed more spi than slides of Alma-Tadema's tepidarium matrons.
"I trust our li'l arrangement hasn't inconvenienced yo schedule," Lucretia Sue murmured beside him.
"I'll muddle through. My generation trained to the ri ors of the Englishman's Burden."
"I thought that came from doing it ala St. George." "He is our patron saint."
Badinage gave way to correctional banter from the su merhouse window.
"Lines like a musical stave," Susie Salton marveled. " can fill those in to profit, if you hold your pear-sha cheeks quiet."
Thwack!
"Stop trying to out-point Cynthia Gregory. You haven had the training." Thwiiip!
"Mer-mer-mer-!"
"Merde? Nice talk for a St. Cloud girl." The next fleshy whop elicited a hysterical sound.
Judy Latimer clawed the impervious taproom table. Her behind seethed with pulsing brands of pain-pain-pain. She couldn't feel her stiff feet, trying to maintain tiptoe at a desperate cost.
Her dignity had gone with that peeing eruption during the prior round. Her command of her body receded minute by minute.
THLAAACK!
The loudest sound she'd ever feared beat at her ears. Hotwired agony laced up her nerves. A gibing, mocking voice belittled her incomprehensibly.
Her soul crawled into a tiny place and shut its eyes. Her face lay on the hard boards, hot and panting.
Let it be over, let it be over . . . she prayed from a dark, formless void within.
A white-hot stroke made her body jump and gibber.
Judy emerged into the light, shepherdessed by Susie, who prodded from behind with the cane.
The pledge held her balled red slacks against her cheek like a rag doll. She drifted down the flat stone steps and limply knelt on the icy bronze bench. She continued to clutch her pants to her cheek.
"I think naughty Nora had some extra promised for being flip," Susie remarked pertly. "And my own true sob sister Mo' ..." She chuckled brightly.
Lucretia Sue stepped forward to take the proffered cane. "Gerry and I have been having a li'l conference while you decorated Judy's tail lights. The pledges have all withdrawn, so they're only we three and our guest. You understand?"
Susie's eyes blinked at the three bare-bottomed college girls kneeling on the lawn seat. She stared at the tall grad student.
"It seems appropriate to settle an item of house business," Gerry Vestry explained. "While engaged on quasi- official duties, one of our number has behaved in disorderly, uncooth, hasty, inebriated fashion."
"Not skunk-drunk, you understand, not puking tipsy, but irresponsible and un-Sigmalike," Lucretia Sue specified. "Masturbating during disciplinary exercises sets a bad precedent."
"Now we could employ a formal hearing . . . but this being an unofficial assembly anyway ..." The vice-president shrugged. "I know you'll understand."
A complete and total education registered in Susie's crestfallen expression. "I request summary punishment, Miss Vestry."
"Professor, could you get a mug of tea into Judy and Mona before they catch a dose of the punies?" The redhaired grad nodded toward their blued and beaten behinds.
"Assuredly." He gallantly extended a hand to each. "The 'punies' sounds a dreadful hazard to run."
"Epstein-Barre Syndrome for you city folks."
Judy thawed from her trance and rested her head on his familiar shoulder as the trio processed to the iron-grilled kitchen door.
"Miss Quincannon, could you step over and plant your legs akimbo on this patch of bare dirt here?"
Nora gingerly left the lawn seat. Goosebumps pebbled her loins and limbs. Her Celtic skin seemed bloodless save for stark blue veins and her swollen stripes. She stood like a Rhodes Colossus.
"Supine, Miss Salton," Gerry Vestry directed. "Nose right under . . . um . . ."
Susie plopped her body onto chill earth, eyes straight up at the Quincannon quim. "Let me guess-leg lifts?"
At a nod she canted her hips and swung her limbs. The sturdy autumn skirt retreated to a tangle, showing her pantihose to the world. Her legs tottered and fell. Digging her palms under her haunches, she hoisted valiantly. Her untamed hair spread in the dust.
Nora caught the ankles in a vise grip. Gerry Vestry moved in and skinned the dull cream-colored hose to Susie's knees.
She stepped back and refused the offer of the wicked yellow cane. "You first. I want to use your marks." The pretzel-bent girl blanched.
"Eyes wide. No blinking during a stroke." Lucretia Sue swished the evil wand playfully over the inverted rump. She raised the stick to heaven and swung in with fully wristy follow-through.
The steel-springy wood lapped lustily across the sulcal border between rump meat and thigh. The tip quivered into the rounded right cheek base.
Susie grimly fought winking as her raised nether portions swayed. The cane pressed firmly.
". . . eight . . . nine . . . ten." Lucretia Sue tolled the seconds. The flogging stick lashed up and down in an instant. Susie yipped, whites showing clear around. Her ankles fought Nora's hold.
"... nine . . . ten." The cane flashed and sank exultantly into nerve-screaming girl flesh. The three welts formed a continuous band.
"Pity," Gerry Vestry observed. "She blinked."
A fourth wrist-snapping slice left a seared ridge wide as two fat fingers. Lucretia Sue drawled, "Perhaps she has something in her eye. Look, actual tearing."
"Perhaps some theraputic irrigation would float the foreign object out." Gerry Vestry's glasses sparkled as she stared at Nora. "You're a woman of wide experience and talents. Can you pee standing?"
The pledge braced her left forearm behind Susie's heels. She projected her right index and middle fingers in a V and reached down to her vulval folds.
"I can squirt any mark you set."
Lucretia Sue grinned. "Eyes and mouth wide, Miss Salton. Let fly, please, Miss Quincannon."
A bright, warm fountain jetted downward in the frosty autumn air. The foaming stream hit the sorrowfully gaping girl's forehead, then played deliberately over her eyes, puckered nostrils, and mouth.
"No wonder the Irish drink beer by the pint." Gerry Vestry retreated before the widening puddle. "They need steins to match their bladders."
Lucretia Sue paced back as the crackling flood laved the dismal face with unabating vigor. The vulgar sea broadened; the flow began to pulse in uneven spurts. It slowly slackened and dribbled to an end.
"Did we do this right?" The blonde vice-president studied the golden pond. "I have to stand in that muck to hit her, don't I?"
"Liberation or no liberation," Lucretia Sue averred, "I am not playing Sir Walter Raleigh." She folded her arms across her red and blue wool jacket.
Susie bubbled and snorted, her mouth welling. She expectorated a torrent, coughing miserably.
Gerry Vestry began to unstrap her footgear. "I'd hate to mar my designer originals. Cobbled in South Korea from Uruguayan cowhide according to a design stolen from Enrico of Veneto."
She tugged off her calf-high woolen socks. Her toes squished into the mire as Nora resumed a two-handed grip. The sorority officer took the professor's cane.
"Diagonally, two down each hind."
The yellow doom whistled shrilly and thumped the bent cheek. The tip fell fatly across Lucretia Sue's burgundy mark.
Susie's sodden head rocked, her hair churning in the acrid slush.
"Professor P. calls those doubling tip marks Christmas kisses," Lucretia Sue informed.
The blonde whipped down again. Susie pedaled in frantic fury. Vile foam rose from her lips. Nora bore down hard, imprisoning the wild legs.
Gerry Vestry flogged the other cheek, scoring thickly on the pulsing sulcal weal. Susie grunted rapidly, like a demon in heat for its absent lover.
The final stroke creased the buttock. The tip drummed home excruciatingly. Susie's legs burst apart. Nora clutched at them futilely.
"Bad luck, she's split her pantihose." Lucretia Sue viewed the frenzy dispassionately.
Susie curled on her side in the foul mud. As she puffed and blew, Gerry Vestry approached. She lifted a mucky foot.
"Do you remember how much I like having my toes sucked?"
"I'm ge-get-t-ting off on th-this!" Jan wailed with delight. Her hips wove and plunged. The curving prong's skillfully designed base rubbed her toward the creaming point.
Honey Fitz Sullivan rode on the ever-higher wave of a skimming orgasm, rippling bursts of mini-climax shaking her as Ron jackrabbited her cunt in helpless time to his sister's thrusts.
The star lay back, hands spread over her head, fingers clutching at elven webs of dreamland delight. Her tongue lolled. She barely seemed conscious.
Dorothy Tilden had reversed her position. Ron's tired tongue twanged her ripe clit and inflamed pussy lips. She contemplated the sodomized sibling coolly.
The two suggested such marvelous plans . . . Fitz had been bored down in Hollywood. She'd weathered breaking the Big Forty tape last year, her stardom intact. Each new year would be more and more threatening.
Dorothy Tilden had some script ideas, some projects she might cash in on while her friend had the ambition and box office clout and bankroll to consolidate a mid-life career around imaginative new vehicles.
Ron and Jan-dear, coconut-jugged Janet-would keep Fitz entertained, keep her coming back until some of those ideas coalesced into hard contracts.
The drama teacher squealed with a sisterly delight as she saw the orgasm nova blossom in Jan's wondering brown eyes.
"Cuh-cuh-COMING!" The broad-hammed girl slapped her thighs against her brother's heaving hips. She threw her weight fully onto him.
He collapsed toward Miss Sullivan's throbbing teats. His elbows took the shock, barely bracing his torso off her gold-plated sternum. The star twisted like a blind slug in unfulfilled passion.
Ron lay on her, immobilized by his sister's squirming mass.
"Don't . . . no . . . gotta . . . gimmee . . ."
"Haul ass off her, you two," Dorothy Tilden directed. "She needs an old family remedy."
Jan unplugged her dildo from Ron's rump and retreated, the plastic prong at attention before her. He took longer to extract his still-sturdy prick from the spasming honey pot. His own girth lost nothing by comparison with his sister's artificial ram.
Their hostess cautiously draped herself over the moaning, starfished screen legend. Her long tongue stretched down to console the open, foam-slick love grove. Her own lubricated Venus lips teased at the million-dollar mouth.
Jan squatted on her heels, frozen with fascination as the women shuddered and sucked through a prolonged 69.
Behind her, Ron felt the raw throbbing in his fucked rear. He formally apologized to God for every infidelity he'd ever intended, much less accomplished, toward Mona. He pleaded abjectedly for the privilege of kissing her lap in contrition while he begged her to go steady with him forever and ever. Amen.
For real. This was it. No foolin', Lord.
He glanced around the Sapphic pleasure pit, wondering when the two women would get their rocks off so that he and Jan could go.
Or would Dorothy Tilden demand they stay for coffee and cake? He quailed to think of the table talk. Jan worried him, the way she wore the strapped-on dildo with a military pride as she concentrated on the heavy-duty face fucking.
He absently fondled his condomed cock. The nuts below ached from a weary need to ejaculate.
Abruptly, he began to watch the entwined women with new interest. His hand jogged along his well-juiced jock as they tongued their way to earthly Paradise.
"Thank you for the offer of a restorative, professor." Lucretia Sue wandered about his arcane study, crammed with peculiar books and odd statuettes. She touched a wooden cup decorated with a carven face and a broad human foot base. A set of copulative metal gold weight figures looked familiar.
"I'm glad the others chose not to stay." He gestured at a compact bar of ebony wood strips set with copper panels. "Cognac, Stolichnaya 100, Paddy's, Glendullan?"
"I need a good bracer." She inhaled deeply. "A straightener, to be precise."
"Ah." Amazed delight transformed his ruggedly tanned face. The grey at his temples had expanded, marginally, since she'd studied at his knee and over it.
"I behaved too severely. I lost what perspective my addled brain should have." She shook her head. "Messin' in pledge training's silly at my age. That's for gals who still remember what it's like. I went overboard."
"You mean, Miss Salton?"
"Salty?" She blinked. "Merciful heavens, no. Mona and Judy-I skinned their tails fit to peel armor plate off the Devil. Nora's different, being all grown-up and supposedly responsible. Those other two didn't deserve the lambasting I gave them."
"It would have to be over skin, to be just," he remarked lightly.
"Bare hide and severe." She doubled her arms. A breath swelled her wine-dark blouse. "Thirty with those thongs."
She purposefully drifted toward the hallway leading to a room she had reason to hold in memory.
"I'm obliged to issue a warning." He followed close behind. "I shan't be responsible for any reactions to your punishment."
Her gaze caught an African bronze, a sassy-hipped woman in a skirt, her stately titties on parade as she strutted a deep basket on her elaborately coiffed head. The lips curved wide with confidence, the broad metal nostrils flared boldly.
"Neither shall I." She led the way to his west wing discipline chamber.
The grad student stood before the parallel bars. They stretched along a wall coated with mirror mylar. Behind her, Porter unbuttoned her deep, blood-colored blouse. He slipped a sleeve off her arm.
'"George Randolph in The Memoirs of Dolly Morton speaks to the pleasure of undressing a pretty woman." His lips brushed her bare shoulder. His breath warmed her nape as he continued, "Other authorities find a piquance in compelling a beauty to strip herself."
He cast aside the satin. The buckle on her belt proclaimed in brass THEY'LL TAKE MY GUN FROM ME WHEN THEY PRY IT FROM MY COLD, DEAD FINGERS. He'd already loosened it. Now he opened the buckle and lowered her burgundy cords.
"The joys of taking down a lovely woman's panties must be weighed against the cognative frisson inherant in watching her peel her own pants completely off."
... a beauty ... a lovely woman . . . she saw her reflected long-line figure and lean-boned face. Her disorderly carroty hair could never have decorated those rounded, petite marshmallow-and-cream belles who'd ruled as Nature's princesses in Georgia.
"The memory of you has intoxicated my dreams." His spidery fingers skimmed the waistband of her insubstantial panties past her pubic zone, onto her thighs. She remembered a eunuch, by the Persian Gulf . . .
"I don't recollect such cavalier's courtliness when you carved Old Norse runes into my resisting hide." His mothwing touches set flame to the coatbed left smoldering by the canings.
"Then the whipping served as main course, punishment for an errant lady scholar. The . . . aftermath came as dessert." The lips tasted her buttocks' peaks fleetingly. "Now the flogging acts as aperitif."
"You must give a guest lecture to Women Against Rape-Daughters On Guard. They'll find your arguments fascinating."
He eased her sturdy shoes off, her corduroy trousers away. She stood in sensible cotton stockings and luxurious, cobwebby briefs. He relaxed on his heels. She saw the mustache twitch up in a Sybarite's grin. A face of sculpted mahogany . . . shaped by a master.
"You may conclude the disrobing."
She watched her own foolish efforts as she struggled to lip off socks with dignity and panties at her knees. She stepped from her nylon nothings and tossed them onto her tangled clothing.
"Make this more than foreplay." She set her hands on her hips. Six feet of whalebone and rawhide . . . cussed-ness and steely muscles and self-satisfaction. "I need a reminder, to take me down a peg."
"First the savage," he promised, "then the sweet."
"De Gustavus non disputandum." She mounted the springy-railed parallel bars, spreading her legs so that her knees hung along the outside of each bar. She rested uncomfortably, the wood pressing under her thighs.
Porter bent her right calf until the ankle ran along the blond wooden bar. He wound a latex strap three times around both and clipped it, lashing her calf against the outside of the rail.
He repeated the trussing on the left. She twitched herself forward, her rear rising as she brought her shoulders down. Her forearms lay on the bars. Her knees gaped, gripping the wood. The calves quivered, tied but not bearing weight.
A damned awkward position only a maniac could have designed. She felt precarious and vulnerable and immobilized. If she let loose, she'd split in two.
Her lowered head dipped. She stared back at her parted loins. "I look like one of Judy Chicago's hairpie plates."
He'd gone behind her, where the buttocks parted fully. Tantalyzjngly, he puffed cool air over her anus. She goosepimpled in a sudden rush of humiliation.
"Twenty on the hinds, ten on the hams." He undipped the three-thonged whip at his own military belt. She knew each leather strip to be oblong in cross section, a quarter inch thick, three-eights broad. Twenty-nine inches, viperishly notched down the final hand's span, and fire-hardened along that last length like a tawse's striking tails.
She felt the strain in her forearms and thighs. A hot, familiar dread began to suck the breath out of her. She tried for calm. "Shall I-count?"
"Only if I lose myself in contemplation of your mobile grace." His left hand proprietarily enjoyed the inner curves of her open bottom. "I prefer your mind to dwell on pain rather than Pythagorean feats."
He stepped away. She cursed her subsconscious as she realized that she'd mounted to give best advantage to his backhand cuts. She knew his squash court arm and terrible prowess . . .
Three spreading thongs darkened her mind as he pivoted in a backhanded stroke. Each lash seared her crupper in exquisite fire. The hardened last inches galled her shocked flank.
Her recoiling body rode the bouncing rails. Hold on- don't fall-take it like a . . . like a . . .
The leather whipped her spasming flesh, goading her to weaken, to fail, to fall. Her spread inner cheeks glowed with accusing weals, hot as burning fuse trails, bracketing her screw-tight anus and gaping, greedy cunt.
She caught a glimpse of her body, crouched and pantherlike. The parallel bars vibrated. That piss-and-vinegar English school she'd attended had flogged her stubborn behind for unladylike decorum. Other girls had been stretched over the gym's vaulting horse after physical training. Steaming and naked from the showers, they'd been cane-striped again and again for insufficient savagery at field hockey or other group games.
The whip's punishing tongues licked deep along her hide . . . a third time ... a fourth ... a fifth . . . the bars bounded beneath her, shaking her like an earthquake's immortal, demanding fist.
Her fingers hooked around the rails, white as ivory. Her knees gripped . . . don't fall . . . don't fail . . . take the pain like a man . . . you've earned it . . .
Adderlike, the insidious triad bit her inner thighs. Weals blossomed along the back of her right leg. Her knee wobbled, almost failed. She rode out the mounting agony.
Miss Maelstrom had caned her for wearing britches like a man, for sassing back like a man, for playing poker like a man, for drinking bourbon like a man . . . Spite-minded praelictors and senior form girls had not scrupled to torment her for refusing to crawl into their beds like some love-starved kitchen slut lapping after scraps of queenly favor.
Porter . . . Professor Porter . . . the Englishman Porter broiled her convulsing thigh with four more iron-stiff strokes. Then he lashed her fire-lined buttocks.
Take it like a man. Not like a simpering, lace-handkerchief-waving, bonneted Southern princess too pure and goddesslike to leave stench in an outhouse. Take it like a mud-crawling Okefenokee Merydith, half-gator, half-cottonmouth, all-varmint. She clutched her blazing thigh and aching knee to the bar, stiffened her spine under her armor-rigid muscles. Let those marshmallow women sticky their drawers in fear over a li'l whippin' . . . she braced her body and soul like a man, proud and sneerin'.
Nine flogging strokes . . . twenty-seven fresh, sizzling welts . . . passed in a pulsing red haze. She knew the shame of defeat when she tasted the tears fouling her hot face. She blinked them down, tried to clear her vision. A blurry sight in the mirror mylar showed a hell-tailed catamount writhing her hips in slow circles as her bunched muscles rippled.
Satan-red hair hung in wet tangles over a sweat-beaded forehead. Salt-rimmed eyes faced salt-rimmed eyes. She realized her lips parted foolishly as she puffed from pain. She drew them taut over her lips.
Her naked snatch pulsed, jelly-centered, yearning for the lightning strike of his lust-gorged cock. A eunuch by the Persian Gulf had taught her the terrifying resources of her own body, the forces surging like subterranean magma- beyond human control or comprehension.
Her traitorous being clamored for Porter-prod, for the driving penetration of the prick named Porter, for the chance to melt the presumptuous professorial prong, to lick the praelictorous prick into submission.
Five lacerating strokes of the three-thonged whip scarlet-ridged her left thigh. Her knee slipped and she slumped, off-center, heathenishly spread for pistoning like a mare in a box. Voltage leapt along ancient channels of energy.
Wild mammals mate in the position of pursuit. Fear- flight-capture-copulation. Intellectually she'd known the linkages. Not until the Persian Gulf and tortured rapture at a eunuch's hands had she applied the knowledge to the primal centers within her brain, within her body.
Her thighs strained to be parted, to split her up the center as she fell. She clung with her hands. Her legs kept their unbalanced grip. The iron-ended thongs, the hissing firebrand thongs striped her lopsided bottom. Creaming cunt and spasmy anus churned as the soul-purging flame raced on interlaced weals across her buttocks, through her being.
Mona twisted in her mind's raging winds. Mona, her sumptuous adolescent hips tossing against the summer-house table's edge. The excessively purplish markings etched across her tender cheeks had moved Lucretia Sue to clemency. The final stingers had been high on the ham, to avoid crossing Susie's wild traces. The grad had laid in with a will.
The triple lashes sang o'er their supper. The rebel flesh sizzled in lust and mortification. She felt a total union, every member and nerve joined in a white, roaring sheet of sense perception.
The tension in her body and spirit dissolved. Fingers unleashed her ankles. Hands caught her torso. Arms eased her as her grip melted, the blood flowing into cramped talons like prickly white sparks dancing at the edge of a forest conflagration.
Lips and tongue traced their own fires on her beating, salty face. The man kissed the tears from her eyes. His mustache nuzzled her cheek, tickled her nose . . . teased feather-like between her breasts . . . rested warmly across her loins, its waxed strands tangling with her untamed Okefenokee thatch . . .
She'd taken IT like a man . . . she took him now as a woman. She cried out slightly when her freshly wealed thighs hugged his naked, hairy hips. Her nipples roared and radiated pleasure, like additional clits, as his tongue and teeth worried them.
She enveloped his blindly questing member. Her fists hammered his chest, she laughed like a valkyrie riding down upon a battlefield. They bumped and thumped boisterously.
Forces imploded within her. She came crushingly, gruntingly, seeking to throttle the serpent reared within her. Vaginal muscles wrestled the intruder.
She squealed and climaxed . . . without dismounting the erotic night's mare she rode . . . her energies at once cycled back, to build toward another rapsodic eruption.
The mystified, delighted man's face swayed inches from hers. She kissed him, trying to devour his flesh at two ends.
An eternity of orgasms later, she realized that he foun-tained inside her, his seminal sluice gate gushing freely.
She boldly forced his wide hands over her flinching corrugated buttocks. She rubbed his fingers along her flame-rilled thighs. Her teeth ducked and nibbled his shoulder, his cheek, his own dark nipples.
The erotic St. Elmo's Fire within her whipped about him, setting him aglow with shared energies. Her hips unflagging, she fucked onward, driving their copulation beyond satiation.
The unity of sensation within her enfolded him, consumed him, absorbing his muscles and nerves. She shared one flesh in a white, jagged haze of ball lightning being.
Each spurting summation he reached only spun their joint rapture to a higher level of attainment.
Judy Latimer touched her eyes with a tissue. A lanolin-based lotion laced with aloe vera extract and vitamins A and D covered her burgundy-streaked posterior with a greenish glaze.
Knees on a seat cushion, she rested her middle on the back of a once-elegant sofa in Caledonia Roundsong's parlor. Next to her, Mona's bare bottom mooned the peeling, Tudor-beamed walls.
Neither girl wore anything below the waist. They held hands and Caledonia clasped their linked fingers between her sturdy palms.
"Let the healing calm move through you . . . from those cold, tense toes ... let the blood flow freely, easily up your legs . . . relax the muscles as the warmth rises higher ..."
Judy's gooped gluteal cleft squeezed.
"Now those poor muscles have far too much heat. Let that bunched energy distribute itself. Nothing in excess. Let the ache and sting disperse with the blood and the lymph fluid as they go back to their normal business. Those capillary cells need to concentrate on repair, not on panicing the rest of the body."
Caledonia's consciousness moved actively through the two pledges' nervous systems. She'd already had their brains release endorphin pain blockers. Now she encouraged each autonomic nervous network to rebalance its damage controls.
A touch of her mind eased the constricted tummy muscles and helped the girls breathe smoothly, freely.
Judy blotted at her nose with the Kleenex. "I guess I picked the wrong plaster statue to kick ass on."
"That's on the Bad Word list," Mona torpidly reminded, "with and without 'hole'."
The other girl flinched. "I guess I'll have to report that. And get paddled. Dividend week, too."
"Two swats from our guardian angels in private for each one awarded in public." Mona's mouth looked as if she'd just licked pond scum. "I won't be able to zip on a pair of jeans till after Christmas, I bet. But Nora's still right-the denim rule is dumb."
Caledonia gave a shrug and an earth-motherly smile. "She's correct, but unless the revolution's worth the cost in wear and tear, stick with the system."
Judy looked at her, puzzled. "What about the Eisenhower conformity and all that?"
"That mindset collapsed from its own internal contradictions-to crib a line." The minister gently extracted her psyche from their healing bodies. "The late, dear Grady McMurtry used to expound on the diversion theory of government."
"The academic senate forbids denim pants and tops to distract us from the tuition costs and from some reading lists that haven't been updated since Jimmy Carter?" Judy's whey-colored brows lifted.
"I'm glad you've been following that controversy. Yes, Morse Peckham goes on to point out that the movers and shakers sincerely wish to create a world where brushfire terrorism doesn't need to occur, and where mid-level executives don't blow their high-five figure incomes and minds on cocaine smuggled by dictators we arm."
While Caledonia talked, she watched the long, blistery welts fade to a paler color as the girls' bodies worked. "But those movers and shakers can't.
"So, to discharge the trust they've been given to make the world a tidier place, they turn to regulating sexual behavior irrelevant to major economic purposes.
"Instead of chasing crack-running high school kids, cops bust massage parlors for massaging body parts that feel just great when they're massaged. Pressure lobbies who can't stop the spread of AIDS or AFDC get nasty pictures of shameless ladies yanked from 7-ll Stores and Waldenbooks."
Caledonia raised an open palm. "That gives a feeling of accomplishment you just can't get by trying to tackle carcinogenic waste clean-ups without raising taxes." Her other hand squeezed snugly.
Mona's mauve eyes sparked. "So Sigma can't recruit enough pledges to pay its bills-but it can break me of saying 'shit.' "
"I guess my buns won't be alone come Bad Word board time." Judy peeked over her shoulder at her friend's sore, salved bottom. The cheeks quivered in sudden self-consciousness.
"Susie never got around to that extra, either," Mona gulped. Her bare pink toes curled tightly.
"Wear loose skirts and very stretchable panties for the next couple of weeks," Caledonia suggested.
Nora Quincannon rose on the escalator from the underground transit station and walked past the California Street cable car terminus. Her cane-bitten sit-upons flared at each step. She held an even pace as she strolled by the Hyatt Regency Hotel.
Night had arrived. San Francisco's festival of light reflected back from the low overcast sky.
Nora entered the Embarcadero Three complex. Four city blocks of retail shops supported four tall, narrow office highrises.
She passed the Cinnabon sticky bun store and took another escalator up to the open air. The lighted office buildings stretched toward the pearly night clouds like a radiant science-fiction city from the 1930's frontiers of imagination.
"... this is a legendary land, a fabled city like Oz or Camelot ..." Broken blue veins enlarged the nose on a square-faced man in a blazer. White hair poked from under his bowler hat. He leaned forward onto a small metal table, while a woman with heavy Manchu features poured more Rainier ale into his glass. Her Russian sable coat drooped over the back of her white aluminum chair.
Nora nodded. Her bottom tormented her every inch of the way up the stairs to the rampway crossing over the street to Embarcadero Two. Pain had a cleansing quality. Over and done. Paid up, paid out, paid off. Go on fresh.
She considered wandering into the Holding Company. She could drink with the singles crowd while standing. It had been an interesting place to be . . . before Scott . . . before Ken.
Instead, she drifted to the escalator by the McDonald's. Women laden with booty from the boutiques and men nursing attache cases scarfed salted-and-sugared fast food. Perhaps a cup of coffee . . . but not there.
She rode down to street level. A B. Dalton's stayed open, merchandising print to a video society.
Deciding, she stepped out to the curb to catch the 41 Union trackless trolley. The Coffee Cantata could offer something hot and friendly with enough alcohol to blunt the sting.
Christmas buying had already started. Places would be open. The Enchanted Crystal with its blown glass art and rock crystal fantasies . . . Silk Route's Aladdin's treasure cave of Afghani rugs and Turkoman jewelry . . . The gallery windows with Erte's gold-stamped graphics and Icart's boneless, murky women . . . Nora loved Union Street's shopping district.
She thought of phoning Hester. No . . . Hes lived across the Bay. Besides, enough sisterhood for an evening. She could use the solitary meditation her buttocks' pain brought her. Forget stupid denim dress codes; bury soured memories in the compost heap and grow some fresh, healthy experiences from their sadness.
Her hinds throbbed as she stepped on board an electric bus and flashed her transit pass. A harried mother flopped into the last remaining seat and roundly scolded her squinting, teary daughter for dawdling while they shopped. Packages festooned the woman's lap.
"Now you'll just have to stand all the way home! I told you the bus'd be full!"
The girl looked nine and shamed to her bones.
Nora held onto a chromed steel pole and set her feet for the long, hilly ride. A razor-cut Brooks Brothers type gave her the eye. He started to rise, pointing at his molded plastic seat.
She shook her head firmly. No chance, guy.
Not until the last twinge of regret and the last yellowed bruise fades from my too-tender tail. Then . . .
Then: watch out, you rootless nomad hunks! Nora's back on the prowl, and she's getting her life in battle station-ready order.
"Gustavus, I'm glad you're available." Caledonia walked widdershins, twisting the phone cord as she talked. "I've sent Mona and Judy back to Sigma for evening prayers after practicing unlicensed medicine ... I noted traces of your presence before me, easing the physical shock.
"I called because Delinda Humphrey mentioned something in passing today, after our interview, that makes me believe my son has done something incredibly selfish . . . Yes, I'd feel blessed to have your help in teaching the overgrown snot the lesson I obviously failed to convey.
"My fondest to Miss Merydith, you fortunate hound . . . Oh, just tell her I can hear her heavy, passion-struck breath as she licks your neck ... I thought she would."
A peal of swamp-bred laughter from the receiver blended with her belly chuckles.
End of Autumn Scandals The Sigma Cycle, Volume II Watch for Spring Fevers
