Saving Sara (Masters of the Castle)

by Maren Smith

  “Oh!” She locked her muscles, but with every motion the inner ball rattled against the outer and the vibrations made her sex spasm in orgasm-like waves.

  “Oh! Oh no!” She rolled her lips to keep back her protests when she felt his hand push back between her legs and another object was inserted. Smaller than the pleasure ball, more oblong than round, without seeing it, she had no way to identify what he’d put inside her. The second pleasure ball that followed it, however, sandwiching the unknown object between the two weighted spheres, was easier to figure out.

  “Don’t let them drop,” Jackson warned, his breath hot against her ear.

  “Yes, Master.” She concentrated on tightening her vaginal muscles and brought her legs in tight together in an effort to keep the balls where he’d put them.

  Another soft whisper, this time of leather tails swinging free, was the only sound that betrayed that otherwise silent moment when Jackson picked up the suede flogger with intent. Sara breathed in slowly, closing her eyes, bracing herself all over again. Once upon a time she had lived for this. She had never missed a munch or play-party, hungrily seeking out this moment. They called submissives like her either scene hogs or scene whores by those who both admired their stamina and sought to partner with them. She couldn’t remember half of their faces now, but she did remember this thrill, this insatiable hunger to be taken, conquered, made to feel.

  The suede flogger struck, a whisper of force that slapped her buttocks with barely any force and yet it jolted her hips and rocked the pleasure balls deep inside of her, sending those delicate spasms racing up through the walls of her sex. Sara gasped, heaving up on her arms as if to get away from the sensation, which only made the spasms worse. She tightened her muscles and her thighs, fighting herself not to move, praying for the balls to be still inside her, but that never happened. Jackson struck again, and the pleasure rocketed through her, like nothing she had ever known, and yet it felt so much like coming home. Foreign, yet familiar. Comforting in a way that barely even stung.

  The attention of the flogger began to wander. No longer content to strike her bottom, it branched upward to lay its first soft kiss across her shoulders—right blade, left blade—and back to her bottom again. The pleasure balls hummed and her knees buckled. Sara locked her legs, clinging tight to the restraints that hugged her wrists while the orgasm-like spasms rippled through her sex and womb.

  The music in the dungeon changed and Jackson changed with it, finding a seductive rhythm, soft strokes caressed her shoulders, heavier ones bit her bottom—oh yes, it was stinging now, but if she writhed…oh, if she writhed, the pleasure balls knocked together and her whole body sang.

  She began to moan, fighting not to move and failing in the most minute of twitches, wiggles, and reflexive impact jerks each time the flogger found her again and again—shoulder, shoulder, bottom, thighs.

  She was warming now, and she couldn’t stop moaning or moving when those weighted balls inside her moved.

  Shoulder, shoulder…

  Vibrating inside her, making her vibrate, too. And hum. And sing way down deep in her skin.

  Bottom, bottom…thighs…

  Every muscle locked up tight when her hips bucked, rubbing up against the padding of the A-frame that held her, unsteady but upright even as the spasms became shudders, became wave after unstoppable wave, rolling up through the walls of her pussy to crash against her womb, engulfing her in pleasure so hot and high it was impossible to hold still. Which made the balls sing longer and the waves crash harder, and she heaved up in her bonds with all her strength, both groaning and screaming through gritted teeth, “Oh! Fuck me! Please!”

  Mercifully, gradually, one spasm at a time, it stopped.

  Sara felt so hot she steamed the air. Tiny beads of sweat had popped out all over her. She could feel the tickling, trickling stream of liquid dripping down the inner slope of both thighs. She panted, leaning heavily against the frame, afraid to move for fear of starting it up again.

  Fingers skimmed the warm skin of her back an instant before she heard Jackson’s voice in her ear, a dark chuckle that asked, “Have you found heaven yet, baby?” He dangled a small pocket-sized controller over her shoulder, letting her see his finger on the button. “Or is this hell?”

  Her eyes barely registered what he held before he clicked it on and suddenly the tiny, cordless vibrator he’d slipped in between the two pleasure balls came shockingly to life. Those rocking waves of pleasure erupted inside her all over again, only now it jarred both weighted balls at once, making the vibration a thousand times more intense and far stronger than she could fight. She came, hard, as if she’d been perched right there on the cusp all along, ecstasy exploding through every molecule of her, her sex, her womb, her chest, her throat, spilling wildly out through her mouth in the form of a cry so guttural and raw it felt as if it were being physically ripped from her.

  “Oh God!” She sucked shrilly, dragging back in all the air that she could. Her knees buckled, but the A-frame held her, the cuffs keeping her upright for the next stroke of Jackson’s flogger. And the next.

  And the next.

  He caught her bottom three times in a row, each one harder than the last, leaving her humping helplessly against the frame. The pleasure balls refused to be still. The vibrator amplified the effect. There was liquid pouring down her thighs, thin rivulets of dripping arousal that saturated the padding until it squeaked with her grinding, and the pleasure balls were slipping.

  Don’t drop them, he’d said, and so Sara squeezed her thighs as tightly together as she could make her flesh press, except that the vibrator suddenly changed its insidious song. Instead of a constant high hum, it began to rattle out a varied pulse that went from deep and low—a demon’s hum—to high and hard and fast, and she seized all over again. With the flogger falling constantly now, harder and harder, its kisses employing nipping teeth—shoulder, shoulder—

  “Oh my God, Master,” Sara begged, her voice so hoarse it was unrecognizable. “Please!”

  —bottom, bottom—

  “Please!” She was shrieking and she didn’t care. She didn’t care who heard her, who she disturbed, who paused in the shadows of the long dungeon all around them to watch.

  —thighs—

  Her muscles failed her. The bottom pleasure ball slipped slick and hot right out of her, and in the next second, the vibrator and the first ball followed it, riding the slick run of her pussy’s oils down her thighs and falling to the floor between her feet.

  Gasping and shaking, Sara continued to buck and ride against the cross until the last of the orgasmic waves had faded. Her flesh still hummed, her pussy tingled, vibrating in time with a toy now singing harmlessly where it had tumbled into a fold of her forgotten panties.

  A soft touch at her back. Not the flogger this time, but Jackson’s hand. His breathing was only slightly heavier than normal, but his voice was still as smooth as silk. “Did I not tell you, Sara, not to drop them?”

  She shivered, too breathless to reply.

  His tone dropped, becoming teasing and dark. “Bad girl.”

  She clenched in hard, so hard it almost hurt.

  Tsking, he let his hand wander a caressing path down her spine, coming close but not touching the stinging mounds of her whipped bottom, before rising back up again. His fingers slipped around her neck to cup and grip her throat.

  Her eyes closed in spite of herself. She loved it when he held her like this—not squeezing or choking, simply holding her.

  “Bad girl,” Jackson said, hot behind her ear and shivering her all over again. “Naughty girl. I’m going to pick them up and clean them off, and then I am going to put them back inside you. We will start again. Only this time, because you can’t be trusted to do as you are told, I am going to clip your pussy shut—” He kissed the soft flesh of her neck just below her hair, tasting her sweat and her skin. “—until you learn…how to obey.”

  Sara’s knees buckled all over again,
but not because she was afraid. She curled into his hold as much as her bonds would allow. She tried to turn her head, needing nothing more in that moment than to feel his lips on hers, until everything came to a fiery stop when a flashing wand suddenly ignited at the play station directly across from them. Flashes of light lit up the shiny varnish on the A-frame, splashing into her eyes, and before Sara even recognized what it was she was looking at, she was screaming and scrambling to get back from the flames.

  At first (though she would come to later recognize it as the most ridiculous thought she could ever have had), she thought she broke her restraints. It wasn’t until she was squirming and fighting against Jackson’s chest, being rushed in his arms back through the startled crowd to get as much distance between her and the fire as possible, that she realized he’d hit the fast-release clips to free her.

  “You’re okay.” His words like his breath were hot against her neck, but it took several repetitions and almost a full minute before she could make them make sense. “Sara, it’s all right. Calm down.”

  She had only screamed the one time, but it took until then before she became aware she was making desperate grunting, squeaking noises. Tiny screams that kept getting locked in the back of her throat because she’d clamped her mouth so tightly shut to swallow them back.

  Where was the fire now? She couldn’t find any trace of the orange-yellow light. Somehow, that made it worse. She struggled to turn around, needing to know where it was, but Jackson held her too close and walked too fast. She was stumbling against him just trying to keep up. They reached a door, but Sara didn’t recognize where it led until they were inside of it with the door tightly shut and locked behind them.

  Jackson didn’t bother checking under the stalls first. He took her straight to the sink, picking her up by the hips and dropping her to sit on the counter before he seized her face in both hands.

  “It’s okay, baby. Shh, shh.” Grabbing a handful of paper towels, he wet them in cool water and began to press them to her face. “It’s okay. Calm down, honey. Calm down.”

  Sara fought to control her breathing. She tried to stop making that obnoxious noise. She tried to stop being so damned pathetic over something that hadn’t hurt her and posed no real threat to her safety. It was a controlled fire. A tiny, two-inch flame that had to have been at least ten to fifteen feet away from her at the time. Jackson was right. She was okay, so why couldn’t she just stop?

  Oh God. She stared at the urinals on the wall straight ahead of her. They were back in the same bathroom that Jackson had found her in two days ago. At least this time she hadn’t wet herself.

  Her mouth began to water then, a sick and cloying taste filling up the back of her throat. Shoving out of Jackson’s arms, Sara fell off the counter and ran for the nearest stall. She barely reached it before vomiting.

  Collapsing to her knees, bent over the toilet with her arms braced against both stall walls, Sara burst into tears.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Rinse. Spit. Rinse again.

  Sara wiped her mouth, her eyes and then her nose on the wad of paper towels Jackson handed to her. She blew, threw the wad away and then despondently gathered another handful of towels to start the process all over again.

  Beside her, Jackson half-stood and half-sat on the counter. He watched her, arms folded across his bare chest, and didn’t say anything. He hadn’t said anything in a long, long time.

  “Verdict?” she morosely asked.

  A slight twist of a smile pulled reluctantly at the corner of his mouth. He snorted a soft breath and shook his head once (at her or himself; it was hard to tell), “Honey, it doesn’t matter what you do. Even puking up your guts, you’re still beautiful and I still want you.”

  She stared at him, not at all knowing why that didn’t make her feel better. But it didn’t. Not at all.

  “Would you please snap out of it!” she finally exploded. “What is wrong with you?”

  He arched an inquiring eyebrow and tipped his head, that warning incline that meant he was methodically thinking through how best to handle her.

  That didn’t make her feel better, either.

  “What are you trying to do?” She didn’t mean to hit him; she just couldn’t stop herself. And maybe if he hadn’t been braced against the sink, she might have budged him more than the pitiful inch or so that she actually did. “Why can’t you just stop? Look at me! Just—just look at me!”

  A faint narrowing of his eyes was her only warning before he shoved off the sink and grabbed her by her ass. In one heave and thunk, he had her sitting on the counter again. Then he bent, bracing his knuckles on either side of her, bringing himself down to her eye level. “I am looking at you,” he said softly. And he was, too. The sort of look that went right through her, stripping away her anger as it went and leaving her feeling nothing but bereft.

  “No, you don’t,” she sadly replied. “You see who you want to see. Me as I was, not who I am now. I’ve changed, Jackson. I…I can’t…I…”

  “I love you,” Jackson said.

  She groaned. “You love who I use—”

  He caught her chin, stilling her when she tried to shake him off. “I. Love. You, Sara. What are you so afraid of?”

  She shrank from him, trying to pull her chin back out of his hand. “I’m not afraid.”

  “No? You ran away three years ago and you haven’t stopped running yet.” He tsked, giving his head a little shake, but then he smiled. A real smile, not one of those fake ones he liked to give the other clients. It was small, but it was still real. “Baby, neither of us is who we used to be. You aren’t as different as you think you are. Not where it matters. So, I ask again: what are you so afraid of?”

  She wished she could lose herself in his seductive reason, but Sara knew better. “It’s not real, Jackson.”

  “What isn’t?”

  And just like that, the anger inside her exploded back into being again. “You! You’re not real. I’m not real and neither is this place! It’s all make-believe! Why are you trying so hard to want me? Can’t you see how messed up I am?”

  “You’re not—”

  “I am!” she shrilled. “I am. I’m messed up! And you? You’re so busy trying to make something permanent out of what’s only make-believe, that you won’t even see it! What do you know about me? I mean, what do you really know? My favorite color, what foods I like, what foods I hate, what I do for a living?”

  “I know you,” he said, but she was already shaking her head, stubbornly insisting no over and over again. “Yes, I do. I know this.” He took his hand from her throat and placed it flat upon her chest. Her heart beat frantically beneath his palm. “You think you’re so different, but the core of you, the part I do know, isn’t as changed as you want it to be.”

  She groaned. “You don’t understand!”

  “Oh no, baby.” Jackson stroked the soft skin between her breasts, just above her heart. “I understand better than you think I do. My favorite color is yellow. I love Mexican. I can’t stand green beans. I work security for a living, and sometimes I top the occasional submissive who needs me. And none of that matters, because what’s important is this.” He gestured between them. “It’s the thing inside of you that needs and completes the thing inside of me. I love you, Sara. So, you sit here and you think about that. And while you’re thinking, you can think about this, too: the next time you feel like running, you’d better keep one eye over your shoulder, because I’ll be coming after you. I won’t let you go again. Not without one hell of a good reason why.” He turned only far enough to point back at the bathroom door. “What happened out there is what isn’t real. It’s that out there that doesn’t matter. You and I, we’re everything. You may not believe that right now, and that’s fine. I can wait. I can be patient. I’ll tell you every day—every time I take you across my knee, every night when I make love to you in my bed—until you do believe it. You’re the only thing in my life that makes a difference. So don�
�t you dare tell me this isn’t real again, or I promise, honey, you won’t sit for a week.”

  She stared at him, her bottom tingling and her heart quickening. She believed him. Funny, how that didn’t automatically make everything magically all better.

  Lowering his hands, Jackson stroked his hands up and down her hips. “Tell you what, at this point we’ve been in here long enough that I can all but guarantee we’ve lost our place at the A-frame. So, why don’t I leave you here to think about things. I’ll go get our clothes and we’ll go up to the Castle bar, have a drink, figure out what you’re really afraid of and see if we can’t find a way to put those fears to bed. All right?”

  Managing a small nod, Sara sat where he left her, picking at her fingernails and watching until he had gone. She climbed down off the counter, turned and bellied up to the sink again. The water was still warm when she turned the faucets, but she didn’t wash. She looked at her reflection instead.

  She looked at her naked body. Her scars.

  I’m messed up…I am…

  She stared at herself until her eyes burned, hating what she saw, hating herself in ways that went deeper than the scars. It was hard to believe that she could ever allow herself to fall into a place where a flash of igniting fire—nothing more threatening, really, than sparks of yellow light—could become so panic-inducing.

  She used to enjoy it. Flogging and fire-fleshing: they used to be her two most favorite dungeon activities. The heat playing down her back, the caress that brushed the flames back out again. She used to love feeling the grip of the cups. She used to love the marks they’d left behind.

  She used to love not being so completely, pathetically afraid.

  How fucking dare you let it define you…

  Sara shut the water off, stared at the ugliness that was her reflection until she couldn’t stand it anymore, and quickly turned away.