by Primula Bond
I’d heard of people who liked to be smacked. Men, mostly. Judges, politicians. And until I saw Natalia whimpering with pleasure on the chapel floor I’d always sneered at the idea. What pleasure could there possibly be in prostrating oneself, making oneself look utterly stupid and low down and submitting to horrible pain? Why would you beg to be punished for some made-up crime, just to feed a fantasy? What pleasure could there possibly be in wanting to be hurt so much it would make you come? What was so sexy about smacking and being subjected to that kind of humiliation?
Well, now I knew. Firstly my crimes hadn’t been made up. I really had transgressed, stormed the holiest of grounds, corrupting a priest and openly fucking a servant of the house in broad daylight. How was I to know about the spy holes everywhere? In fact, I wish I’d known. I’d have performed even better!
That brought me back to earth. As the whip lashed me again and my pussy squeezed tight with pure pleasure, I wondered if they had films of what they saw through the grilles, because it wasn’t just me transgressing, was it? Oh, no. Now I knew what they were all like in here, I wanted to see what the others had been up to.
But how dark this pleasure was. I thought I knew it all, but how wrong I was. I’d always been in charge. I’d never been dominated, not even playfully. I’d never been tied down without being able to escape. And I had never been lashed with a whip. A couple of playful cuffs, maybe, but not this. The smouldering delight in being brought low, because I deserved it, being sat and wriggled on by a super-sexy, arrogant, bossy nun clutching a whip.
And how weird was this? Now I was smarting with the lashes, my skin no doubt striped with thin red welts, I wanted everyone to see it. Straining on the scarf bound tight round my wrists, I so got it. Being helpless, out of control like this, was liberating. I could give it all up. Being a little scared, enduring a particular kind of stinging pain, was exhilarating. Being ordered about and struck and told what to do and what to say and what to be was a cheap, nasty thrill and it released me from all the stress, the cares and woes of my life far away in London. And all the excitement was both in my mind, where colourful pictures of Natalia and the others flickered and taunted me, but also right here, between my legs, delivered by Sister Antonia, my body responding, jerking and rising every time she shouted and smacked me.
‘You’re not supposed to enjoy this, you know.’ Sister Antonia’s voice was harsh with her own excitement. She rocked faster, riding my leg and leaning close to pant into my ear.
I tilted my pelvis towards her, giving her something to ride, and it snagged against the rough blanket, scraped my clit against the bed. My pussy opened, oh God, my bladder started to open, warm drops going into the blanket, a warm patch soaking through. Everything was pushing down, waiting to flood out of me.
‘Well, eat my dust because I am enjoying it, and so are you, you’re about to come, you dirty bitch, and I wish I could turn round and fuck you properly!’ I grunted into the pillow, my breath wheezing in my chest, astonished at the way I was speaking. Sister Antonia responded by starting to buck angrily, rubbing herself against my leg, her pussy lips spreading on my skin, everything getting wetter, and now she started slapping me wildly again as if she was a cowgirl whipping her mount.
As my clit scraped again and my bladder finally opened, my pussy squeezing to stop it then giving up completely, the relief of all that pressure made me come as I panted like a dog and that’s when I heard the soft, rhythmic clapping of hands.
Sister Antonia leaned over and undid the red scarf, flipping me over on to my back and into the warm wet patch, and I wondered if she’d seen the other Sisters clustered in the doorway. God, she was strong. Her freckled face was rosy with excitement, her veil askew, her skirts up round her hips and yes, there was that full bush totally au naturel, dark-red and glistening with moisture.
I thought she was going to frig herself to climax but instead she stopped and stared down at me, spread-eagled like a puppet across the bed, and she ran her tongue greedily over her big soft mouth. Cool air blew from the open doorway over me, and I wondered what had made her stop in her tracks. I wondered if it was seeing my Brazilian, my near naked snatch, that was so fascinating to her. Maybe it was like a magnet to her, because she bent over me, her breath hot on my stomach, her mouth sliding wetly down towards my pussy, and then the licking started. Soft, almost feathery caresses making my pussy pulse quietly and, God, here was the wet tip of her tongue flicking up my crack then smoothing itself flat over the swollen lips.
My head was spinning. Sister Antonia’s veil had slipped enough for me to see the russet fuzz over her head, and it was jerking in and out between my white thighs and I felt ridiculously shy, should I stop this, compose myself, sit upright, make her stop, I didn’t want her to taste my pee, was I going to come over Sister Antonia’s face?
I struggled a little, but Sister Antonia growled, ‘Keep still, Sister. I want to lick you.’
I moaned and strained, pressing down as her tongue lapped faster, sensations sizzling in my cunt as Sister Antonia’s mouth wrapped round my entire pussy while her tongue probed, forcing its way further in like a mini dick, its own form of torture as her tongue flicked mercilessly and started to encircle my clitoris. As I flung myself about I wondered where she had learned this. Practised on the other nuns?
She might as well have applied an electric probe when she tapped at that tiny bud and, oh God, now she was sucking it again and again, the flicking of her tongue regular as a tick-tock, building up the pressure, pushing in harder as she munched me. I rocked back and forth, opening my legs still wider so that I was a proper feast for Sister Antonia whose saliva slurped on my pussy juice. I rocked faster, my cunt and lips and clit rubbing against her tongue and nose and chin, my hips bucking more wildly.
A bell rang out into the night. Whose coda was it? Was it for prayers? But that was the end of my ability to think because she was driving me to a final frenzy, her mouth and tongue lapping frantically. Here it came. I gripped the bed post, drew my hips back in a final glorious convulsion and my body drew in on itself, grew tight as I rattled the bed post and started to come, pushing into Sister Antonia’s face, smearing my juices all over her, the thought of it driving me wild as I rubbed myself over her face until the climax had faded.
She hadn’t quite finished though, and while I lay back, gasping for breath, she hooked her knees round mine and started to kiss me greedily, nibbling and biting at my mouth, pushing her tongue through my teeth as she snaked herself up and down against my wet cunt, and I opened my legs to draw her in against me, enjoying her recklessness, her abandon, the fact that I was her object of desire. Now she was coming too, slapping and smacking me feebly while she smeared herself against me, her helpless prisoner and lover, moving faster, bucking and writhing, cunt on cunt, until she reared up and shuddered with her own climax and fell down to lie, very still, on top of me.
* * *
I’d lost track of time. I had no idea how many mornings I’d woken up here, but this dawn awakening was different, because instead of the usual rhythmic tolling of the bell there was a strange buzzing sound in my ear. I screwed my eyes shut, determined to ignore it. But it was making the whole bed vibrate. I groped about under my pillow and found – my long-lost Blackberry. I stared at it stupidly. What did it want? Where had it been?
‘Christ, who is this?’ I hissed, rolling on to my stomach to try to muffle my voice.
‘Who do you think it is, madam? Where the hell have you been, more like!’
I struggled desperately to get myself back into Jennifer Coombs mode.
‘Hazel. Honey. I’ve been, oh God, you’ll never believe it, I’ve been locked away and it was only meant to be for one night and now I can’t get out.’
‘Your friend told me you were ill, nothing serious, but that you’d call me after a couple of days. It’s been five days now, Jennifer. What’s going on? I’ve had that Signora Martelli calling saying you failed to turn up at an appointment o
n Murano, another supplier wanting you to sign off on an order.’
‘What friend?’
‘Some girl answered your phone. Luckily I’ve managed to pacify Signora Martelli and the other orders are still coming in. I don’t know what you’ve been doing over there, but –’
‘Hazel, I don’t know who that was, but I’m stuck in here, I don’t know when or how I’m going to get out but it won’t be long, I promise.’
‘Stuck in where? What are you talking about? We booked you into the finest hotel in Venice. Hardly a prison, is it?
‘It’s not as simple as that. I’m not at the Danieli. I’m in this convent somewhere near San Marco. I met this girl and came to help her, and we swapped places, and now I can’t get out.’
There was an Arctic silence. ‘I am seriously worried that you are losing it, lady. What is all this convent bullshit?’
‘Don’t get me wrong, I’m actually enjoying it. Bit of R and R, then I’ll be back to normal.’ I kept my voice calm, because I could hear how crazy it all sounded and how angry Hazel was getting. ‘I’m quite at home here, but I’ve lost all my clothes, my bag, my work stuff – I don’t even know exactly where I am, which is why I can’t leave just yet.’
My bed dipped as someone thumped down on it. Either it was Sister Antonia, come for some more flagellating pleasure, or I was in mega trouble. I turned over reluctantly, ready to confess all yet again, but it was Natalia, dressed once again in a grey habit. She looked radiant, blooming, plumper, so beautiful. But extremely sombre.
I started to reach out for her, but she put her finger to her lips and handed me my jacket and boots. Of course. She must have borrowed them to get around outside. The phone had been in my jacket pocket all along. Which meant she had answered my phone and spoken to Hazel, but my iPad was still lost. Bugger it. All the complications of real life were flooding back to me.
‘Well, you can get yourself out into the real world wearing sackcloth and ashes for all I care!’ The phone practically burst into flames in my hand. ‘Just get your sorry arse over to Murano today, lady, or the whole deal is off. And you’re sacked.’
‘You can’t sack me, Haze. We’re partners.’
‘Try me.’
I stared aghast at the phone, but now there were footsteps marching down the corridor. I hid the phone under the pillow again, gesticulated at Natalia, but she shrugged, pulling me to my feet. We both stood to attention, but it was too late.
‘Sister Perpetua. Sister Benedicta. You have both tested us to the limits with this extraordinary deception and misbehaviour. To be honest we are having trouble knowing what to do with you.’
Sister Antonia stood like a sergeant major with her two henchwomen Sister Agnes and Sister Frances on either side of her.
‘Now that Mother Superior has found Sister Benedicta skulking in the streets outside, it is up to her to decide.’
I bowed my head and crossed my hands over my chest in true supplicant style, but the two henchwomen simply took an arm each and marched me and Natalia along the corridor, down the stairs, through the cloisters and into the chapel.
Sure enough, Mother Superior was standing on the steps of the altar, her hands folded into the sleeves of her stalker’s coat where raindrops were slowly evaporating. She didn’t look serene any more. She certainly didn’t look like someone who might be handy with a pillar candle. She looked like the statue of some avenging angel standing at the gates of hell.
‘We are holy people who thought we would overlook the deception and rejoice in having a fresh new Sister living amongst us. But in return for removing you from the trials and temptations of your sinful life and welcoming you into our convent, Sister Perpetua – or should I call you Miss Coombs? – you have steadily gone about our holy house turning everything you touch into sin and ashes. We hoped the novelty would pass, drop away like the spring rain, but here we are about to start Lent and we have lost patience with you.’
‘Mother Marta!’ I fell on to my knees, my novice’s veil flapping awkwardly across my face. It sounded awful, now she put it in to words. Worse than being a naughty schoolgirl. ‘Punish me, I beg you, but don’t hurt Sister Benedicta. She went outside, yes, but in doing so she allowed me this heavenly opportunity to live with you all. It has truly been inspirational. I’ve tasted real peace here, as well as sinned most heinously. Sister Benedicta has been – all of you have been my guides. I’ve trashed my chance here, I know that, but honestly you all showed me what the holy life means.’
Mother Superior’s nostrils flared as Sister Benedicta came up behind me and placed her hands on my shoulders to silence me.
‘Don’t compound your sin by speaking any more about it, Sister,’ Mother Marta barked. ‘You are the cuckoo in this nest, and as such you will be punished.’
As I struggled to think of something else that might exonerate me, I was distracted by a movement up above the altar. Some scaffolding had been erected, presumably overnight, and someone had started to remove the flaking plaster. One or two of the peeling, fading fresco figures on the ceiling had been partly restored, robes brightly coloured now, limbs and haloes filled in. And as I stared a male forearm rose above the dust sheets, bare to the elbow and holding a dripping paintbrush. And round the wrist was a livid red scar.
I glanced at Natalia, but she avoided my eye. She had retreated way inside herself. She was staring at Carlo’s arm, too. She lifted her hands and started muttering silently in prayer, her face alight with a kind of heavenly glow. For the first time since I’d been incarcerated in here, my stomach contracted with the grip of real, icy fear.
The chapel door opened, and there was the swish of habits and the restrained tap of shoes on the polished flooring as the other nuns re-entered the chapel.
‘You will both be lashed.’
I cleared my throat but it came out as a kind of whimper. ‘Not me, Mother. I don’t belong here, as you have just said yourself. I’ve said I’m sorry, but now I must leave. I have business to attend to. I’ll be out of your hair before you know it.’
‘And what about loyalty to your supposed loved one? All that slavish devotion gone, in the blink of an eye, to save your miserable skin?’ Mother Marta produced a long wooden cane from the folds of her habit, far more lethal than any of our little toy whips upstairs.
‘Mother, please!’ I shrieked, beating at my chest. ‘I don’t deserve to be here! I’m like a, a canker worm amongst you, poisoning your sacred system, don’t you see? Just cast me out into the darkness like you did before!’
‘You mean set you free? Not a chance. We let you go the last time, and look what happened then? You simply insinuated your way back in, bringing all your filthy ideas with you.’ To my terrified amazement Mother Superior actually smiled, and though it was a cruel smile it transformed her. Her bloodless lips filled with colour as she drew them back over her neat white teeth. Her ballerina’s cheekbones rose as she shook her head sharply. Her black eyes glowed like coal. ‘You will be silent, Sister. This performance is extremely unbecoming. I thought you had more spirit in you than that.’
‘Mother, please!’
She held up her hand, and I knew all was lost.
‘We can punish whomever, however, and for whatever we choose. And you two have sinned beyond endurance. Now, lie down on your faces. Father Luca will do the honours.’
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Father Luca stepped forward, his eyes glinting with the same lust I’d seen before. I glanced again at Natalia, but her face was already alight with excitement. All around the nuns’ eyes were fixed on me, smiling like their Mother Superior as they started that weird humming sound. I searched around for the more familiar ones, Antonia, Frances, Agnes, and they were all there, stretching their arms as if they all loved me.
The fear shrivelled as the humming grew louder and the incense smoke wafted around us again, and something else caught fire in me as Mother Superior stepped closer, stroking her whip. The other self that I had become i
n here, the one that rejected the terrified Jennifer Coombs, rejoiced at the elation that was to come. The stinging pain that was to be meted out on my protesting, quivering, sinful flesh. The dark humiliation that I knew would turn to darker pleasure. And all at the hands of my sexy, ruined priest.
I gave up. I spread my arms out to embrace everyone in the chapel as if concluding an operatic aria.
‘I love you, Natalia,’ I cried, flinging myself forwards on to the hard wooden floor and awaiting the first delicious lash from the long, wooden cane. ‘I love you all!’
But my declarations of love didn’t amount to a hill of beans, because my punishment didn’t end there. When I returned to my cell a thick wooden door with a small food hatch had been attached to the hinges.
‘So that you have time to ponder on your actions and your position in this convent,’ Sister Antonia barked at me as she flung me inside and locked the door.
And ponder I did, with my little whip for company, and what I knew for sure was that I would never come back from any of this. I would never be the same again, even if I ever did escape. The pervading sense of enclosure and imprisonment inside these walls, the combination of peace and prayer with pity and pain, that sickening, low-down excitement when punishment was anticipated – it was all enhanced just now by hearing the blows smacking down on Natalia’s little bottom as she lay prostrate next to me on the hard wooden floor, hearing her own bestial moans of pleasure, hearing the muttering and moaning of the watching Sisters.
And so, Hazel, or whoever else is still reading this, in those hours and days of isolation I remembered what my little Natalia had said about trying to flagellate away her impure thoughts.
I started giving myself a few half-hearted slaps with the little whip while staring out at the grey haze of dawn from my little window, the sparse trees scratching in the garden and one or two spires pricking up tantalisingly beyond, but I quickly discovered a much more interesting ploy when I lay back on the floor one morning, still holding the whip, and forced my mind further than these four walls, started thinking of Zippo the gardener, his muddy fingers wrapped round the sturdy vines which presumably Natalia was tending again, his glossy black hair matted and tangled with leaves, his mouth wet with wine and greedy to suck on me, and what I wanted those hands to do to me if I was ever allowed back into the garden, and as I planned how they would push up my skirt, wrench away my clothes, open up my legs, kneel up between them while he scrabbled in his filthy trousers to get his cock out, my own fingers, still holding the whip, started pushing open my soft damp sex lips and held them open so that the thick handle of the whip could poke and prod at my secret hole, and I started thinking about Sister Antonia and her dark-red bush wet with excitement as she ground herself against me, and the sexy power she had over me, and little Natalia and her pretty breasts, and the other nuns watching through the various grilles and spy holes around the property, and what they would see on their flickering TV screens. Then I pushed the whip inside me, then further in, how brutal it felt, and before I knew it I was arching off the floor as I fucked myself with my own instrument of punishment.
