The Gift of Shame

by Sophie Hope-Walker

  Madame Victoria smiled. ‘And all completely English. We English are renowned for our expertise in this field just as the French, in England, are sought out for their cooking. Each to its own, as it were.’ Madame Victoria, whose eyes suggested she had seen everything, looked a little puzzled as Helen stayed silent. ‘Doesn’t she speak?’ she asked Jeffrey sharply.

  ‘Not at the moment. Her mouth is full.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Of me.’

  Victoria’s mouth wrinkled into a smile. ‘Excellent!’ she cried and immediately took Helen’s arm and walked her the length of the hallway and into a large room which seemed furnished entirely with a variety of couches. Here Helen registered two girls, one naked and one in an abbreviated rubbery-looking dress that constricted rather than fitted her, while a man sat crosslegged on the floor before the naked girl’s feet. Conscious that all eyes were on her, she was led to stand in the open centre of the room. ‘Kate!’ Victoria waved to the naked girl, ‘come here.’

  Kate came forward looking directly into Helen’s eyes as if expecting a challenge of some kind. ‘You kneel,’ Victoria said, and it took a moment for Helen to understand that the order had been directed at her. Thankfully the carpet was thick and quite comfortable against her knees. Helen felt her hair taken and grasped firmly, though not cruelly.

  ‘Be very careful, now,’ warned Madame Victoria. ‘You are going to open your mouth but when you do so you must not swallow. Do you understand me?’

  Desperate now that she could no longer see Jeffrey, Helen nodded, aware that she didn’t know how she could avoid swallowing. The moment she had agreed she felt a slight tug on her hair and bent her head backwards until she looked directly up at the worked plaster ceiling. The movement had caused her eyes to close, shutting out the sight of Victoria, but leaving her aware that the woman was peering deep into her mouth and must surely see the liquid which she could feel thickly coating her tongue.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ murmured Victoria. ‘Do you see it, Kate?’

  Helen felt a pang of excruciating humiliation as she sensed movement in the room and knew the others were coming to peer into her mouth. Kneeling there, mouth open like a hungry chick in a nest, she wondered how Jeffrey could have known how excruciating this would be for her. She had always dreaded visiting the dentist. Not because, in these days of sophisticated painkillers, she would feel any discomfort beyond the initial needle, but because the man would be peering into her mouth in a manner she thought more intimate than that used in a gynaecological examination. Gynaecologists didn’t loom over her mouth like a threatening lover!

  ‘Kate will clean your mouth,’ said Victoria in such quiet conversational tones that Helen didn’t understand the significance until, opening her eyes, she saw the bright-eyed Kate leaning closer to her. Her mouth closed on hers and a seemingly huge tongue probed into her, leaving her desperately breathless, while scooping and seaching out every last drop of Jeffrey’s deposit. Helen wanted to scream protest at being so intimately invaded by another girl. Her hands moved as to fend off Kate but were taken, even as they moved, and lightly but firmly clamped behind her back. Her vision filled with Kate, she was uncertain who had taken her hands until she heard, close to her ear, Jeffrey’s voice. ‘You are being tested.’

  These simple words flushed away the protest of her rational mind. What was being done to her was now sanctioned – gifted to her – licensing her to dismiss any consideration but that Jeffrey wanted this to be done to her. An overwhelming sense of relief flooded through her. What she was doing was being done for Jeffrey, which gave it sense and meaning.

  Eyes closed, she now gave her mouth to Kate’s searching tongue, opening to it as if she opened to Jeffrey. It no longer mattered if four people – or four hundred – watched her as, giving way to a gentle pressure on her shoulders, she felt herself being laid back to stretch full-length onto the carpet.

  Kate had shadowed her movements and now Helen felt the full length of another girl’s naked body on her own for the first time in her life as the tongue pressed deep into her mouth. Consciously or otherwise she had opened her thighs and Kate lay between them – one pubic bone pressing hard against the other – and to her astonishment Helen’s loins began to flow as if in answer to a lover. Confident that nobody but her could tell of this shaming response she became alarmed when Kate suddenly lifted herself and knelt to straddle Helen’s belly but, instead of covering her, she felt an unseen hand searching out the damning evidence of her arousal. Distracted now she sought to wriggle free of the unknown fingers that probed her outer lips before entering her, but Kate’s firm pressure restricted any such protest, which soon turned to writhing as she felt the hand replaced by the gentler pressure of a tongue. Doubly invaded she wanted to scream to them to stop before she betrayed herself totally, but then she heard the benediction of Jeffrey’s voice: ‘Relax. Go with it.’

  Tearing herself free of Kate’s relentless kiss she let go a long, repressed orgasmic scream as her entire body convulsed under tidal waves of release. Now, with Kate’s head tucked in against the side of her own, her eyes were freed to roam wildly and search out Jeffrey.

  In response to her silent appeal he came to lie beside her, his hands gently caressing her breasts. As she reached to embrace him he closed on her and gifted her a deeply searching kiss. The wave came again as the unknown tongue probed even more deeply and she was forced to break off from Jeffrey’s kiss as yet another wave engulfed her.

  Looking manically down to see who it was inducing such pleasure she saw the thinning hair of the other man, which unnerved her only momentarily until Jeffrey renewed his kiss.

  ‘Screw me!’ she gasped into his open mouth but was then shattered to hear Victoria’s voice cut through her consciousness. ‘Enough!’

  Suddenly, all activity had ended. Kate had gone, the man with thinning hair had gone, and Jeffrey was standing at a distance, leaving her spread and totally exposed on the carpet, the centre of all eyes and feeling like a beached whale. Wildly she looked from one face to the other, trying to divine the meaning of this sudden abandonment. It was then she realised that everyone was waiting for Victoria to speak. ‘Come with me,’ she said, and it was Jeffrey who reached down to offer a hand to help Helen to her feet.

  Looking at Jeffrey she saw him suddenly unwilling to look back at her, which filled her with foreboding. ‘I’m waiting,’ said Victoria from the door, and so Helen followed her flowing gown out of the room, along the hallway, and into another room in which stood a shower in what might have once been simply a bathroom, but was now swamped with closets and shelves.

  ‘Take a shower and then I will dress you,’ Madame Victoria told her, and then had her stand in the disconcertingly pliable plastic shower tray before turning on the water.

  As the hand withdrew from the cascading water Helen experienced a crystal clear image of another time and another place.

  Just short of her eighteenth birthday she had left home, for the first time in her life, to start a course of business studies. It was a confusing environment for someone so used to being completely cared for, especially as she sensed that none of the other girls were suffering the same maternal withdrawal symptoms as herself. It had been only after long and prolonged campaigning by her mother that she had been found a room in the scarce Halls of Residence accommodation without which her mother would have forbidden her to leave home at all.

  On the second night in the room which she shared with another girl they had been invaded by a group of girls from the more senior second year, who had told them they were about to be ‘initiated’. She and her room-mate, Caroline, had been frog-marched out of the Halls of Residence and into the nearby gymnasium. There they had been forced to strip naked and had their hands tied behind their backs.

  After a great deal of pummelling and squeezing of their breasts they had, now quite distressed, been taken to the showers where their hands were tied to the shower spigot pipes and the water repeatedly t
urned on, first cold then hot, until both girls were tearfully pleading for the torment to end.

  It was the vision of the girl’s hand that had turned off the water before leaving them there in the dark that had now returned so forcibly. Helen had hung there, helplessly listening to Caroline’s sobs until they were found in the early hours of the morning by a Security Guard who, having released them, made a report which somehow got lost in the bureaucracy and never came to anything.

  She and Caroline, although becoming firm friends, never talked about the incident, which Helen felt had shamed them both, until the celebration held to mark the successful end to their first-year. More than a little influenced by the amount of wine she had drunk Caroline had remarked how much she was looking forward to getting her hands on the new intake of first-year girls. Helen had been shocked. ‘You wouldn’t really do that to the new girls, would you?’ she had asked.

  ‘Damn right I would!’ Caroline had laughed. ‘And I will! Come on, be honest – that night – didn’t it turn you on?’

  Helen stared at the girl with whom she had shared a room for almost a year and who she never once suspected shared her own shameful secret. The incident, only in retrospect, had seemed exciting. In fantasy she had even extended the experience and made the middle-aged Security Guard into a handsome young buck who had taken advantage of her helplessness and ravaged her. It had never occurred to her that her emotions of that time could possibly be shared by another living being and, for the first time in her life, she began to think of her own fantasies as something other than a private sickness lodging in her head alone.

  Jeffrey had brought a great deal of her secret thoughts into the glare of reality and tonight she had taken yet another step forward. The memory reinforced in her the resolve to rise to his challenge, no matter how daunting it might become.

  Madame Victoria’s voice brought her back to the present. ‘You haven’t dozed off in there, have you?’

  She turned off the water, stepped out of the shower, and, taking one of many warmed towels, started drying herself as she watched the indomitable Victoria returning, holding in her hands an intricately worked basque in layers of appliquéd green and black leather. ‘I’m going to put this on you,’ she was told, before being peremptorily turned as Madame Victoria’s expert hands wound the leather about her waist.

  Submitting to what she considered to be the inevitable she stood passively as the corset was tightened about her torso to just under her breasts, which the leather left exposed, and then gasped as with firm hands Madame Victoria started drawing on the strings, causing the leather to groan as it compressed about her rib cage. She made gasping protests as the process continued until she was afraid she might faint.

  ‘Please …’ she pleaded. ‘It’s too tight. I can’t breathe!’

  ‘Nonsense …’ replied Victoria and gave another breathtaking pull on the strings.

  Helen’s body felt gripped as if in a vice as she desperately gasped for air. ‘I can’t …’ she managed.

  ‘Relax,’ Madame Victoria told her. ‘Enjoy the constriction, you’ll find yourself forgetting about it. Here …’

  Desperately Helen looked round to see impossibly high-heeled boots being laid at her feet. ‘Put these on,’ she was told. Knowing that she couldn’t possibly bend, Helen had to put one hand out to balance herself as she forced her feet into the tight-fitting boots. She was relieved to find them a little too large, so there was no crippling pain from her toes.

  Still trying to orientate herself to the new high elevation to which the heels had raised her, she felt her hair being brushed back from her face before being wound into a tight pony-tail. ‘Hold on to that,’ she was told as Victoria turned aside, only to return with a fearsome-looking headdress, combined with a mask made in leathers to match the corset. After threading her pony-tailed hair through a hole in the back of the headdress, it was lowered and fitted snugly about her face to outline her eyes but expose her mouth and nostrils.

  ‘Now you may look at yourself,’ smiled Madame Victoria, turning her to face a mirror set into one wall.

  There stood a fearsomely beautiful creature who might have stepped from a fantasy science fiction novel labelled as a bare-breasted Amazon queen. The heels gave her enormous height and, while the corset still felt oppressive and the boots constricting, she felt a surge of excitement as she registered that the creation in the mirror was a reflection of herself.

  ‘There,’ said Madame Victoria. ‘Don’t you think that image is worth a little discomfort?’

  Continuing to stare at herself she thought she had never imagined how her breasts could be so engorged by contrast with her tiny waist, and how firm and rounded her thighs could be made. In the mirror she saw not herself but a woman, so distanced and of such imperious sexuality, that it excited her incredibly. ‘Yes,’ she breathed.

  ‘You look wonderful,’ cried Madame Victoria. ‘Think what effect it will have on him!’

  Suddenly her mind was filled with Jeffrey and the excitement of showing herself to him like this. Guiltily, she became aware that her hands had gone, seemingly of their accord, to cup and caress her own breasts. ‘Can we go to him now?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course, my dear. But you will need this.’

  Looking down, Helen saw that she was being offered the haft of a shiny lacquer-handled whip. Looking up, eyes wide with surprise, into Madame Victoria’s clear, unblinking gaze, her question was transparent to the other woman’s greater experience before she had asked it. ‘You’ll see,’ smiled Madame Victoria and, still confused, Helen found herself being turned and urged out into the hallway.

  She had expected to be returned to the sitting-room, so was surprised when she was turned instead in the opposite direction and led into a room where another shock awaited her. Strapped naked to a wooden frame which dominated the room was a man – his back facing her. At first she thought this might be Jeffrey but was soon able to see this man was both heavier and older. Led to face him, she saw Kate kneeling naked before him, looking expectantly for her instructions.

  ‘How are you this evening?’ asked Madame Victoria in casual conversational tones.

  ‘Very well, thank you,’ replied the man, who Helen now saw was somewhere in his florid-faced middle fifties.

  ‘This lady is the Mistress Helen,’ said Victoria. ‘She is to assist me this evening.’

  The man’s eyes glowed as they lighted on the masked, tall, leather-encased figure. ‘Thank you, Mistress Victoria,’ he murmured.

  ‘I intend we play a little game,’ Victoria was saying. ‘Kate here, will arouse you – make you naughty – while the Mistress Helen will punish you for the naughty, filthy little tyke we all know you to be. You understand me?’ asked Victoria, reinforcing her words with a resounding slap about the helpless man’s face.

  ‘I do, Mistress,’ gasped the man.

  Turning to Kate, Victoria nodded. Still haunched, Kate sat up slightly and, reaching forward, took the man’s flaccid penis between two fingers and delicately addressed it to her lips.

  The man gasped. ‘No, please Mistress,’ he pleaded. ‘Don’t make me “naughty”. I promised Mummy I’d be good today.’

  ‘Silence!’ roared Victoria. ‘We already know what a liar you can be! Kate will prove it.’ Victoria turned to Kate. ‘Well?’ she demanded.

  For answer Kate withdrew her ravaging mouth and exposed the man as already half aroused. ‘Time for firm measures,’ said Victoria who, taking the whip from Helen’s nerveless hands, took a measure before delivering three quick blows across his buttocks.

  ‘Well?’ demanded Victoria of Kate, but she got only a muffled reply since Kate’s mouth was already back and hard at work.

  Helen felt absent – as if none of this was really happening. She felt that if she stayed silent they might forget she was there and so neither involve her nor dismiss her. These thoughts forced her to acknowledge that she would hate to be sent from the room. She felt hypnotised by the m
an in bondage, and the livid patterns Victoria’s whip had created. Having no doubt that this was what the man wanted – indeed had come to Victoria for – she found herself more than intrigued to find out just how such matters could be managed.

  ‘How old is your daughter?’ asked Madame Victoria of the man.

  ‘Please …’ the man sounded more pained by the question than the whip that had been laid across his quivering flesh.

  Madame Victoria’s hand made only the tiniest of flicks but the whip seared into the man’s flesh again. ‘I asked you a question.’

  ‘Twelve!’ gasped the man.

  The whip snaked out again. ‘Liar! How could she be twelve when you told me she was about to make you a grandfather. The truth now!’

  ‘Twenty-four!’

  Helen watched Madame Victoria nod. ‘Twenty-four. That’s more believable. Now let me see – that would make four groups of six strokes, would it not?’

  ‘Yes, Mistress!’

  ‘Good. You will keep the accounts and ensure no mistake is made. You understand me?’

  ‘Yes, Mistress.’

  When Victoria rapped out ‘Mistress Helen!’ she waited until the startled Helen looked at her. ‘You will go to his front and report on his condition. You understand me?’

  Nodding, feeling even less real, Helen moved to the front and saw how Kate’s kneeling efforts had raised the man yet again to full erection. ‘He is ready, Madame,’ called Kate.

  ‘I said that Mistress Helen would report to me!’

  Fascinated, Helen moved forward and reached out a hand to touch the rigid flesh, made slick and shiny by Kate, and then looked up into his eyes. They looked desperate as he met her gaze and, for a moment, she felt sorry for him. But then as her hand, seemingly of itself, began to stroke and caress the man’s penis, she saw a smile play about his lips and all sympathy vanished from her to be replaced by a sudden lurch in her loins.

  Madame Victoria’s voice cut into her reverie. ‘Well?’