The Choice

by Monica Belle

  I was about to do it, but he broke first, muttering something unintelligible and snatching the front of his shorts aside to expose himself. With his cock and balls free to the weak autumn sunlight I took a moment simply to admire him before running the tip of my tongue all the way up, once, twice and a third time before popping him in my mouth. He gave a groan of satisfaction as I began to suck. His hands settled on my head, holding me firmly in place on his erection to stop me teasing, and I got down to work.

  He was eager, pushing into my mouth and occasionally releasing his grip on my head to squeeze at his balls and tug on his shaft, until I was sure he would come at any moment. I wasn’t ready, and needed more despite the thrill of paying court to his cock, and pulled my top up to hold my breasts as I sucked, sure I was going to end up masturbating in front of him one more time. He saw, his voice hoarse with pleasure as he spoke.

  ‘Bad girl. I’m going to have to fuck you.’

  His words were music to my ears. I pulled back immediately, turning my back to him and bending down with my hands on the branch. He’d twitched up my skirt and pulled my knickers down in an instant, baring me to his erection, but the position I was in and the act of being exposed behind had instantly turned my mind to Violet and the birch.

  I tried to make it go away, but even as my body was filled I was imagining a variation of that awful routine, in which I’d be beaten and then fucked as my thank you instead of made to suck cock. To make it worse, Stephen was thrusting into me so fast and so deep that his hard belly was smacking against my bottom, adding to the fantasy. I gave in, telling myself that what he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him, but full of guilt as I thought of myself in the same position to Dr McLean, my skirt lifted and my knickers pulled down, my bottom smacked and his cock inside me as I was made to say thank you for my punishment.

  There was as much despair as ecstasy in my groans as Stephen pushed into me, faster and faster, but I couldn’t stop myself. My hand went back to find my sex and I was playing with myself as I was fucked, already close to orgasm as I imagined the humiliation of being stripped in the woods, beaten and fucked.

  I think I must have been mumbling something, or maybe it was because I was playing with myself, but Stephen suddenly slowed down and pulled out, only to enter me again as he spoke. ‘You are such a bad girl, Poppy Miller, but I know you like to come first so I’ll let you, but you’re going to have to pay for it.’

  My first thought was that if I was such a bad girl I ought to have my bottom smacked, and I was so far gone I might have asked, but for the rest of what he said. I knew what he meant, that he’d make me suck and swallow, or do it in my face, but my mind reacted differently. He’d said I’d have to pay, but I was immediately imagining that he had paid me, and not just to suck him or bend over for entry, but for the whole crazed fantasy that had been building up in my head.

  Again I tried to stop myself, but I was too close to orgasm and he’d begun to repeat the same trick, pulling out and entering me over and over again, adding a final, utterly filthy detail to my fantasy. In my mind’s eye I was no longer just with him, or James McLean. I was bent over the same branch, my bottom bare and rosy from a good whipping, a bundle of fifty-pound notes tucked into the waistband of my pulled-down knickers, as Violet watched Stephen, James, Giles and the entire membership of the Hawkubites take turns with me. They’d be lined up behind me, the cocks I’d just sucked erect clutched in their hands, penetrating me one by one, again and again, just as Stephen was doing.

  I came, screaming out loud at the awful thought of being made to prostitute myself with a dozen men, for a whipping and sex, without even being taken somewhere private so that they could take me one at a time, but in public and in front of my friend so that they all got to see how dirty I was, and that there was no possible doubt that I’d been paid.

  8

  CURIOUSLY, LETTING MY imagination go so completely helped me to come to terms with what was going on in my head, at least to the point that I realised I would have to accept it as part of me, and cope. After all, I was developing fast in an unfamiliar world in which for the first time in my life I had to take responsibility for my own actions and, by and large, I felt I was doing quite well. I’d been reasonably careful with my money, kept to a fairly sensible amount of drink and avoided picking up any new vices such as smoking or drugs. I was doing fairly well at work and at sport, very well at the Chamber, and all of that because I made an effort to keep my life under control.

  There was no reason my sexuality should prove any different. I’d developed an old fantasy, being a high-class call-girl, and found a new one, being whipped, but there was no reason I should give in to either, any more than I had needed to accept the challenge some of Giles’ friends had given me in the Chamber bar one evening, to try to drink an entire magnum of champagne in one go. Even my faintly disturbing feelings for Violet didn’t need to intrude on real life.

  A few days after pushing Giles Lancaster into the river I’d got my head around the situation well enough to deliberately bring myself to orgasm over a complicated fantasy involving being paid to give oral sex to just about everyone I’d met in recent weeks, or at least all the attractive ones. I even included Violet, briefly, and was left feeling satisfied both sexually and because I felt I’d got things under control.

  I had, at least for a while, and things stayed pretty much the same for the rest of the Michaelmas term. Stephen and I grew gradually more intimate, until he was calling me Miller as a matter of course and he knew how to please me better than any man before, both in bed and out. Giles Lancaster treated me with at least a measure of respect and didn’t make any more rude suggestions, while both of us kept what had happened firmly to ourselves. The regatta went well, if not exceptionally so, and I passed my first collections without any real difficulty. The Hawkubites held their dinner without me, trashed the restaurant as they had trashed so many before. Two of them were arrested, but not Giles.

  It was only when I returned to Exeter that I realised just how much I’d changed in the space of just two months. Everything seemed smaller, or rather, lesser; my old friendships, my parents’ authority, even the buildings, everything but the landscape. That was bigger, the dark bulk of Haldon and the great sweep of the estuary raw and primitive beside the gentler hills and slow waterways around Oxford.

  I spent most of my time at home, consciously avoiding Ewan and his friends, only going out occasionally and then with girls I’d known since childhood. Even there things had changed, and not just what they wanted to talk about, but their whole attitude to life. One was getting married in the spring, another was pregnant, both things I couldn’t even consider for at least ten years. They had no more understanding of my attitude than I did of theirs.

  Christmas was the usual family affair, with aunts and uncles and cousins all together around a colossal turkey, presents and drink and arguments and a long afternoon walk beside flooded meadows. At New Year I tried to recapture something of what I felt I’d lost by going out to a party with all my old school friends, but found myself repeatedly defending my decision to leave Ewan, despite the fact that he was now comfortably shacked up with Carrie Endicott. I left early and listened to the bells ringing in the New Year as I walked home through empty streets.

  Hilary term didn’t start until the middle of January, leaving me two long weeks with very little to do and everybody I knew was either away or wrapped up in work. In the end I went back up a few days early, only to find Oxford empty and cold. I’d known perfectly well that Violet was spending the break in Florence and wouldn’t be there, but I still found myself expecting her to pop her head around the door and offer coffee, while I found myself visiting Emmanuel simply to be where Stephen and I had walked together so often. Like Violet, he was abroad, but in Florida, teaching high-school children to row as a volunteer.

  On the third occasion I found my steps taking me to Emmanuel I got such a peculiar look from the head porter that I walked on
past the lodge. Not really knowing where I was headed, I carried on along Broad Street and turned up Parks Road. There was frost on the trees and a cold clear sky overhead, but I was well wrapped up, as was the man walking towards me, so that I didn’t recognise him until we were just yards apart – Dr James McLean.

  ‘Poppy? How nice to see a familiar face. You’re up very early.’

  I could have made any one of a dozen excuses but found myself telling the truth. ‘I was bored at home. Everything had changed.’

  ‘The loss of childhood pleasures is the price you pay for growing up, I fear.’

  ‘My friends didn’t seem to have changed.’

  ‘But you have. I remember feeling the same when I first came up.’

  I smiled, grateful for his understanding and he carried on.

  ‘But you must be bored stiff?’

  ‘There’s plenty of work I can do.’

  ‘And no play, what with the boats in and hardly anyone about. Come to dinner with me this evening and we’ll console each other over a bottle of something.’

  ‘Thank you. I’d like that.’

  I had accepted without a second thought, and it was only after we’d parted that I began to have misgivings. Never once in the time I had known him had we been alone, while he had figured so prominently in my fantasies that I wasn’t at all sure if I could resist any advance he might make. I told myself I would simply decline, and that I had a dozen good reasons to do so – Stephen, Violet, his age and what he would no doubt want to do to me – but I knew deep down that only the knowledge that I’d be betraying my friends really mattered. Yet that was enough, while I needed company and didn’t want to find an excuse after having accepted his invitation.

  He lived just east of Oxford on the Eynsham Road, a house I knew Violet had visited frequently, although I’d never been before. As I cycled out along the Botley Road I couldn’t help but think of what the two of them got up to, so that by the time I’d crossed the ring road I was imagining some vast and Gothic mansion with ravens flapping around the turrets and heavy iron grilles across the windows.

  Nothing could have been further from the reality, a converted barn set back from the road in a neat garden, now colourless but which looked as if it would be beautiful by the spring. The interior was no more threatening, a single open space beneath the original beams with the bedroom and bathroom built into an upper level. Only one feature was remotely suspicious, a huge iron hook bolted through the width of a beam directly above the centre of the living room, but even that looked ancient, so no doubt was original and used for something to do with farming rather than hanging up recalcitrant girls by their wrists for a dose of the whip. He was friendly and relaxed, suggesting juice rather than wine as I would have to cycle back later, although his conversation was typically profound and difficult to follow.

  ‘… did you see the installation outside the Saïd? You must have passed it as you cycled over.’

  ‘Um … there was a laser show.’

  ‘Now that is a very telling statement. David Warburton says it is art. But is it?’

  ‘I’m not sure. It’s very pretty.’

  ‘You are very pretty. Violet is very pretty. But neither of you is art, because no skill went into your creation: presupposing the absence of a creator, that is.’

  ‘It’s your subject. Do you think it is?’

  ‘If you look in a dictionary you will see that the primary definition of art is skill, in which case it is not art, or if it is the credit should go to the people who designed the laser lights rather than to David for arranging them.’

  ‘But surely it’s the effect that counts?’

  ‘Given the equipment, I expect you or I could have done as well, if not better. You see, David’s argument is that it’s art because he, the artist, says it’s art, and he has managed to convince a great many apparently sensible people to part with a great deal of money on the assumption that it is art. On the other hand, a cynic might argue that he is forced into that argument because he wants to be an artist but has insufficient skill.’

  ‘And what’s the answer?’

  ‘The point remains open, but I suspect that should history remember him at all it will not be as an artist but as a charming rogue.’

  ‘A con-artist?’

  ‘Very clever! I’d put that in my review, but he’d probably sue me.’

  ‘Do you write reviews?’

  ‘I write whatever I can persuade people to take nowadays. I am, as you know, in disgrace.’

  I found myself blushing, embarrassed for having inadvertently caused him to bring up the subject of his expulsion from Mary’s. It was tempting to ask what had happened, to see if he would talk about it, or lie; or, if he told the truth, how he would explain himself. I didn’t dare, instead I changed the subject.

  ‘Whatever you’re making smells delicious. Do you cook?’

  ‘Yes, but only in so far as a bachelor has to if he’d rather not sink to ready meals and take-aways. It’s tagliatelle with porcini mushrooms, and will end up as tagliatelle with mysterious burned bits if I don’t attend to it.’

  He went to the cooker and I sat down at the table, sipping my juice as we talked. There was nothing sexual in his conversation, no sly innuendos, no hints that there might be something between us, nothing beyond the casually delivered remark that Violet and I were pretty. I wondered if he was trying to lull me into developing a false sense of security before he pounced, but if so he was in no rush. We ate, drank coffee and talked, covering subjects as commonplace as the approaching election and as obscure as French theatre in the late nineteenth century. He seemed to know a little about everything and a great deal about many things, rather like a younger version of my dad, except that he had few firm opinions, preferring to keep his mind open at all times.

  It was nearly midnight by the time I left, and he had not made so much as a suggestive remark, despite having drunk the best part of a bottle of strong red wine and a glass of whisky. I’d been tempted to flirt, just to see if I could provoke a reaction, but thoughts of Stephen and Violet held me back, along with the possibility that I might get more than I’d bargained for. He didn’t even kiss me goodnight.

  Cycling back towards Oxford, I was conscious of a strange sense of disappointment, almost of loss, as if something import ant was supposed to have happened but hadn’t. I tried to tell myself that his behaviour had been perfectly correct, and it had, between a don and a female undergraduate, only he wasn’t a don any more, but an ex-don who’d been disgraced for seducing a much younger girl into kinky sex.

  I stopped outside the Saïd to look at David Warburton’s light installation, which before had seemed a pretty display if nothing more. Now I found myself wanting to criticise it for being pretentious, or write some suitably scathing comment on the pedestal. Fortunately I had no way of doing so and moved on after a few minutes, wondering why I felt so strange.

  The next few days passed slowly. With the empty college and the cold clear air, Oxford had taken on a dreamlike quality for me, very different to the bustle of my first term and yet more compelling. I took to exploring, on long walks beside the different waterways or among the smaller streets of the city’s heart, but never far into what I’d come to think of as town. Again and again I found myself following Jackdaw Lane.

  On the Saturday I decided to treat myself to lunch at The Boatman’s, drinking beer and then gin and tonic to leave me feeling pleasantly tipsy and nostalgic. I visited the little space among the trees where Stephen and I had made love so often, then turned down the bank and past the sight of my boat wreck, where I’d seen Violet picking birch.

  The tree was now bare, the twigs black and scratchy against the eggshell blue of the sky and the silvery bark, each one outlined by a trace of frost where the feeble sunlight had yet to reach. I reached out to touch, imagining I was Violet as I rolled the thin brittle stem between finger and thumb. She’d had to pick a bunch in the knowledge that she would be beaten
with it, a thought that set my stomach fluttering.

  I could imagine her feelings all too easily, vexation at the thought of what was to be done to her, resentment for having to make her own implement of chastisement, embarrassment for the watchful eyes of people along the river, some of whom might know what she was doing, but those same emotions causing an irresistible thrill and kicking off an arousal that would not be satisfied for hours, until she’d been exposed, beaten and put on her knees to suck her tormentor’s cock.

  Just the thought had my breathing ragged, and I’d have picked some birch if there had been anybody to deal with me – that wonderful expression James McLean had used, implying that a good thrashing with birch twigs was something I’d benefit from and which he could give me. As he’d deal with my request for a book or an application to join a society, only what he’d be dealing with was my bottom, my bare bottom, after which I’d have to say thank you.

  I almost ran to get away from that tree, and would have done had it not been for the two bar staff from The Boatman’s smoking in the otherwise deserted beer garden. Instead I walked, frightened by the intensity of my own reaction, despite having thought I’d got it under control. At that moment I realised that fantasy would not be enough. I had to at least try it, and maybe that way I could break the spell.

  Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, there was nobody to do it for me, as Stephen was still away and I’d never have dared ask Dr McLean. That did nothing to reduce my need. As I continued my walk down river I tried to tell myself that I was being silly, but it was no good. I needed to know how those twigs would feel across my bare skin, and to suffer the whole awful ritual, and I needed it soon.

  I walked fast, telling myself I shouldn’t have drunk so much at lunchtime and the disturbing feelings would go away if I got some fresh air. The path grew fainter, then gave out altogether and I found myself skirting some allotments that ended at a road. Not wanting to turn back into the city, I crossed Donnington Bridge and set off down the river again, along a well-worn path.