by Debra Hyde
Quinn grabbed her nipple, squeezed and pulled it taut. A sudden sting gripped Liv—a clamp, bearing down on her. She gasped at its sudden presence, its pain, yet welcomed the same sting to its twin. Quinn drew its chain upward—Liv expected a good, hard tug, one that would make her squirm—but Quinn gave her one better. She anchored the chain overhead to something that kept it deliciously taut—the hogtie ring, Liv realized.
More stings—severe ones, a clamp to each of her labia, parallel, she realized, to her clit. These, too, held snug. Another set, paired lower on her labia, spread her wide, their tug in perfect sync with their counterparts. Exposed, a throb racked Liv from deep within and, suddenly, she ached with want.
The void, at full roar. “Oh, yes!” Quinn hissed, pleased that the clamps had tempted it into the open. Liv sank into the sling, thankful that Quinn had accepted this inducement so freely.
At the crop's first blow, however, she became a howling ingrate, lurching madly in the swing. Quinn wasted no time in going for full-force blows, throwing herself into battle like a knight who'd lost his mount but still had his sword. She hurled epitaphs as Liv's thighs reddened under her strikes. Liv's skin burned and her soul resisted with fury.
Yet she refused to stop Quinn. Someone had to do battle with the void.
The crop reached her mons and suddenly gentled. It patted her labia, babying the spot. Liv wanted to hate it—she thought it patronizingly cruel—but when her cunt throbbed, she gasped and wilted into the swing.
Oh, God, yes. Make me come!
She ground her hips, gyrating against the crop. Another throb. Tension knotted, aching, climbing. She was so close, so ready—
And the crop slapped hard.
Liv screamed at its blazing pain. Only one thing felt akin to it and the memory flared forward: her, age eleven, ungainly but still too small for her bike, stopping too fast, falling forward. And landing square on the crossbar, crotch first.
Too quickly, both pain and memory faded. Only then did Liv realize another orgasm had seized her and already evaporated.
Over the next hour—or what Liv assumed might constitute an hour—Quinn dragged her back and forth between the pinnacle of pleasure's heaven and the pits of pain's hell, sometimes granting her an orgasm, more often denying it. How often she yanked Liv through this push and pull, Liv couldn't tell. Often enough to make it incalculable, to leave her in a endorphin-soaked delirium of sorts, conscious, aware, but stupid beyond reasoning.
When one last orgasm racked her body, Liv thought she would pass out. Weak now, every impulse either shattered or sated, she felt limp, used up, like a wet rag finally ready for the trash bin. But this too passed. Too soon, Liv soon found a semblance of intelligence welling up in sensation's absence.
Only then did she hear the hush in the room. Only then did she detect a scent—a perfume.
Distinct, unmistakable. Known but not quite familiar. It penetrated and mingled with the hood's leather.
Mother, she thought. A primitive response, she knew. She was in an adult playroom, not her childhood nursery, but the perfume! Like Mother's. Memory scanned back: a tippy-toed view of her mother's dresser. There, a large round doily of exquisitely embroidered cutwork. Upon it, four perfume bottles, gifts associated with her father's international travels and domestic absences.
Chanel. Demure sophistication. No, it wasn't Chanel.
Guerlain. Scent forgotten, only its round bottle and its pyramid-like stopper remembered.
Lanvin's My Sin. Art deco mother and child in profile, cuddling. The scent, provocative and mysterious, of white flowers and sandalwood.
But the tiniest of bottles? Round bellied, a frosted stopper accented with a wide-shouldered bow that hugged the bottle, its scent remarkable and elevating? That, Liv remembered.
And the leather hood did not keep Liv from recognizing it.
“Cabochard,” she blurted.
“What was that?” A voice, firm and confident. And Liv had startled its bearer.
“Cabochard,” Liv repeated. “Your perfume is Cabochard.”
Buoyant laughter followed—clearly, Liv had charmed the woman—with a pithy observation upon its fading.
“Interesting,” the woman said, “that the first word out of your mouth names my perfume.”
The entire room remained hushed, as if this woman could make or break this gathering. Who is she? Liv wondered.
A finger touched her at the hollow of her collarbone and traipsed the length of her torso, stopping short of her clit. Liv shivered. Delicious, and she felt not a scratch of nail.
“Is she available?” the woman asked.
Quinn must have nodded.
“What does she want?”
Quinn cleared her throat uncomfortably. Quinn, rattled? Who is this woman?
“Oblivion,” Quinn answered.
“Oblivion,” the woman restated. “Seems you had her there. Until my perfume drenched her senses. My apologies.”
“None needed.”
“Can oblivion can be had twice in one night?” the woman wondered aloud. “Perhaps she'd accept rapture instead.”
“Whatever you want, Cassandra.”
Cassandra? The Cassandra?
“Show me her toy bag, please.”
“Yes ma'am.”
Yes ma'am. It had to be the Cassandra. Quinn had unequivocally yielded; he never deferred—except to those truly senior to the scene.
As murmured voices and rustling movements spelled out an examination of her toys, Liv waited. Cassandra. A grand doyen—quite possibly the grandest doyen in this corner of S/M dykedom. Cassandra was already revered when Liv had joined the scene during grad school, known as someone who had seen it all, done it all, and would continue to do it all. She was someone whom countless bottoms and submissives longed for, a celebrity in leather. But you didn't dare approach her, it was said. At least not overtly. Better that you wait quietly. Better that you hover off at a distance, to Cassandra's right. Better to be a vague object in the corner of her eye than a gushing sycophant begging for attention. The former, she might deign to notice. The latter, she characteristically cast aside.
But when Liv joined the scene, she was contently partnered. Grad school obligated her and a PhD awaited her future commitment. Back then, Cassandra had seemed more curious dream than a reality to Liv anyway. Rarely did she make it to the club the same night Cassandra made an appearance.
By the time Liv finally had the freedom to indulge often, when she had secured a university position and was working her way up tenure's ladder to security, Cassandra had become something of a dowager, entitled to stature because of the decades she had spent in the S/M world, but rarely seen. Hers had been a world before Internet accessibility, a clandestine existence where finding a fellow leather dyke was a blessing and filling a room with them was a miracle.
If her mystique had captivated the women of those decades-past times, then her movement back and forth between dyke and straight circles only magnified it. Often, she would brazenly move from one world to another, as willing to pull a dyke into her arms as she was to put a man under her heel. She loved women. She used men. And never did the twain meet in anything beyond hallowed rumors.
Even now, as Liv waited, catching little more than snippets of words, the room stood largely hushed. Spectators had turned to watch. And those engaged in play continued, but their whips seemed less vigorous and their bottoms’ cries seemed less plaintive and pained. Even they kept half an eye out, curious about Cassandra's next move.
A cluck of approval sounded. Cassandra had chosen. Whispers rose, some in awe, others less reverently. And a cool swath of lube at her slit imparted Cassandra's choice to Liv, clearly and decisively.
Slick with invitation, Liv expected an intrusion. Instead, a finger circled her clit, toyed with its hood piercing, and provoked her to gasp. Liv was aflame. But if she thought it a teasing ploy, she learned otherwise when Cassandra asked Quinn to remove the clamps.
“T
hey'll get in my way.”
The clamps! They'd gripped her all through Quinn's scene with her, long enough that she barely felt them. Long enough that their evacuation spelled one thing: more pain.
Liv braced for fire.
She lurched as the clamps left her nipples. Blood flow, the source of this new pain, rushed back, reclaiming circulation. Yet the pain was far briefer, even softer than she expected.
When the first clamp left her labia, she knew why: Cassandra, her finger, still at her clit. In the immediate wake of the clamp came a delicious throb of arousal—pleasure chasing at the heels of pain.
A kindness, she realized.
With the second clamp, another throb, but thereafter, a greater ache, one deeper, from within, begging for penetration. Cassandra, however, did not rush. She lingered between each clamp's removal, coaxing Liv, watching her, indulging in a slow procession that all too soon primed Liv for orgasm.
At the fourth clamp, with Cassandra pressing hard, with her body unable to resist, Liv pitched forward. Climax seized her, opening her to the universe, and, gaping before it, Liv wondered if its contractions were shoving her lust out into some cosmic expanse.
But when she felt a finger embed itself inside her, this one sheathed in latex, and her cunt hugged it tightly, she knew the vision had been an illusion. Her cunt had not offered itself up to the universe like some sacred yoni.
A second finger found passage between her labia and nestled alongside its companion. Together, they slid back and forth, their inward dance urging Liv's cunt wider. More lube and a third finger joined in. Soon, the thumb and a hint of pinky. The press of fingers between flesh, the slow careful friction of hand within cunt, the walls of Liv's very self resisting, then yielding, all became part of a long slow dance that would unfold step by step.
Cassandra fucked her slowly, her strokes the means to an end. A rhythm developed—several strokes, then a deep press, several more strokes, the press repeated—all meant to open Liv, to turn her cunt into a swallowing hole.
Liv lay still, her breath, her heartbeat seemingly one with Cassandra's rhythm. Like courtiers before a queen at work, the room remained hushed and deferential. Everyone likely saw her as chosen, specially selected. Why her, Liv did not know. Perhaps Quinn's rough exercise had enticed Cassandra. Perhaps Cassandra had noticed Liv's fearless appetite. But maybe, Liv thought, she had sensed something greater—game worth hunting. The void. Maybe Cassandra had sniffed it out like a hound after the fox.
If only.
A tall wish. No one had ever scented out her desire. No one had ever latched on to it with relish. Most had seen it as a burden, a barrier. And it had downright frightened others.
“If only I could feel you. Really feel you. God, you hug me.”
Cassandra, her words wooing appreciation. When was the last time someone had actually wooed Liv mid-scene? Years ago, Liv decided. Nearly a decade.
The last time I was in love.
Cassandra stroked knuckle-deep now, her hand vertical and not yet a fist. The breadth of Cassandra's hand had yet to penetrate her. Now the dance would require patience in its purest form.
Like Ravel's La Valse, Liv thought. Cousin to his widely famous Bolero, it moved from quiet and slow to brash and frenzied, but where Bolero swirled in Spanish abandon, La Valse flowed far more French. Where Bolero spoke of peasant exhibitionism, La Valse sang of pairs coupled close. Where Bolero collapsed in exhaustion, La Valse coursed forward in restrained decadence.
“Ah, you are splendid.”
Another wooing compliment. Liv felt something fall away from within, a barrier of some kind. Suddenly, she ached to reach out, to touch Cassandra. An image flashed—Liv at Cassandra's feet, her head bowed forward, touching the toes of Cassandra's shoes.
Liv's masochism collapsed. Demolished, it was rubble. And submission stood in its wake, a new desire, at once pure and fresh. Liv moaned in disbelief before this sudden and new emergence.
“She needs to come again. Reese, help me, please.”
A hand grabbed at the meat of her mound, its fingertips lingering at the juncture of Cassandra's hand and Liv's cunt, a touch so exquisite that Liv shivered. It quickly retreated to a finger upon her hard nub, joining Cassandra's continued rhythmic push. Liv expected a perfect complement, one that would send her headlong into orgasm, but it was too much. Sensation assaulted her, irritating and grating, and every inch of her tensed against it.
A dissonance, it was a gale, wild and buffeting. Yet within this emerging storm, a small eye of pleasure formed and made itself known. Little more than a pinhead of pleasure and buried amid the hands that worked her, it found its footing, coalesced, then spiraled outward. It startled Liv—How could it rise into existence? How could it evolve amid this chaos?—but she knew her body was capable of many things, surprise most of all. Large enough now to encompass her clit, it beckoned to Liv and, now both helpless and yearning, she bent to it.
The dissonance fell away, becoming little more than flotsam to this mounting maelstrom. Like a ship caught in its vortex, Liv found herself in a Zen-like focus, her concentration riveted to the swirling path before her. Finally, a violent lunge struck—the point of no return—throwing Liv over the edge. In the space of a gasp, orgasm struck, its full force pounding and pushing and pummeling.
Sudden wetness cascaded, Liv's own storm surge, and a cheer went up—Cassandra, rewarded.
“More lube!” she cried and, once the lube was administered, her hand slipped home.
Liv gasped as her cunt yielded, as the breadth of Cassandra's hand slid past that last rim of resistance, as fingers folded against palm. A more beautiful fullness, Liv could not remember.
Cassandra had given more of herself—her time, her energy, her focus—than all of the evening's passersby combined. She had given Liv what she needed, turning her from a mere bauble into a coveted jewel. She was breathtaking.
Cassandra flexed her hand and pressed against Liv's G-spot. A mere iota of movement, yet its power was explosive and Liv shuddered from head to toe. Cassandra chuckled, fully aware of her command and more than ready to exercise it.
Liv knew there'd be no rushing this scene to its conclusion. Fisting was heavy play, not a trifle. It was not showy like a Florentine whipping or casual like a tie-and-tease bondage scene. Nor did it lend itself to the uninitiated or the flirtatious. Fisting required depth, patience, and finesse. And+ tonight, Liv was its sole beneficiary.
Cassandra flexed her hand again, but it took three presses before Liv responded. This time, the shudder left Liv quivering, weakness overtaking her. She remembered a fisting scene she had long ago witnessed. It had lasted hours and at its end, the recipient's thighs and cunt were left shaking like a gelatin mold. Liv had found it morbidly fascinating—fearsome and to be feared—and she never believed herself capable of that kind of endurance, not then and not now. Not even at the void's behest.
The void!
Suddenly, Liv remembered it.
And found it absent. Gone. Lost in the drama that Cassandra had orchestrated.
Yet something new flowered in its wake, something she did not recognize. Whatever it was, it had washed her clean. Every emotional battering that life had ever handed Liv had vanished. Dyke dramas, lovers’ departures, unrequited loves and lust, every disappointment of the heart, gone. Sheer radiance beamed from her and when Cassandra flexed her fist yet again, Liv exploded in an orgasm so strong, she saw stars. Magicked and among them, she cascaded downward like heavenly dust shimmering to earth, elated, euphoric, and, incongruously, grounded.
Was this rebirth? Had Liv risen from her own ashes? Had her heart shed its history of pain and disillusionment? Unanswered questions all—and Liv would sacrifice them all if only she could stay in this purified state.
The base of Cassandra's fist began to pull back, slowly, gently.
She's taken me as far as I can go.
Cassandra rocked her fist, gently fucking Liv. Little by little, she worked to
ward evacuating her, first by the breadth of her hand, then, fingers unfurling, by her knuckles. Finally, Cassandra slipped free.
Emptied, Liv groaned. But she did not feel barren or abandoned. She felt complete.
Later, her hood gone, lying in Cassandra's arms, Liv gazed upward. There, she found Cassandra's soft smile. She felt a silky kiss upon her forehead and received purrs of approval.
“You are exquisite, exceptional.”
Entranced, Liv treasured the words.
Chapter Two: Home
The new morning saw a new woman, one hampered by the heaviness of sleep inertia but glad for it. Liv cuddled into her pillow and imagined Cassandra's mouth hungrily seeking hers, a continuation of a dream she had drifted into somewhere between sleep and consciousness. In that misty place, Cassandra wanted her, pursued her, but when she caught Liv, she didn't embark on domination or rough play or anything comparable to the previous evening. She merely devoured Liv through kissing. She wanted Liv on the most basic level, that of undeniable attraction. Somehow, Liv's dream state always translated sudden infatuation into a makeout session. Why it defaulted to something so adolescent, Liv didn't know, but she loved the rush of attention and worthiness she always experienced in such dreams.
Sighing, she decided it was her soul's way of declaring it was still capable of love.
“Well, at least you're not snoring now.”
Tara, in bed, beside her, paper rustling. The Sunday paper. Tara always read it in bed.
Liv clutched her pillow tighter, not yet wanting to open her eyes. She groused, but gently so Tara would know she appreciated her company. It took one hell of a special friend to see you home and into the next day after a night's battle with the void, and Liv had two of them, the other of which was in the kitchen if aroma meant anything. To say she was doubly grateful was a clichéd understatement.
“You were moaning too, you know.”
That got Liv's attention. Her eyes popped open and she rolled over to face Tara.
