We are all chameleons acting out different roles, trying to find the role that suits us best. As I stood at the top of the hill in that unknown place, it felt as if the atoms and cells of my body were at that very moment dividing and reforming, that another version of myself was rising to the surface and, like a negative in a tray of chemicals, a more authentic picture of that girl who had set out in search of adventure was about to appear. I was terrified of the man, of the power he had over me, but my fear was contained in a heightened sense of self. Within my fear, I experienced a sense of being at centre stage, no longer an observer watching life, but the star of my own implausible production.
The air blustering about the tower was briny and pure and tasted as if it had been charged with an extra shot of oxygen. Just as we had stopped at the tower, the sun seemed to have stopped in its progress across the sky, the slow steady heat baking my skin and putting a vibrant tint on the colours of everything around me: the sea and sky, the black rock, the green cactus plants, the intense red and yellow blooms of wild flowers. It was as if the veil had been lifted from my eyes and I was seeing everything more clearly. Far out to sea the faint mist was turning to cloud and I thought there would be a storm when night fell.
The tower was a little taller than me and was probably the remains of an ancient lighthouse. It was circular and made of blocks of stone cut from the rock. The island, too, was perfectly circular, the tower like a pert nipple on the low hill.
The sensuality of the landscape, the fact of being naked in the sun, was inhibiting my judgment, lessening my fears. I dug my nails once more into my palms to wake myself up, to remind myself what had happened to me. This wasn’t a holiday romance, a diversion. I was a prisoner, beaten and abused. It was hard to keep that fact lodged in the front of my mind, even with my bottom tingling still, even with the taste of the man’s sperm in my mouth.
It was so weird having been bent over by a stranger and spanked, so bizarre having his urine drying on my skin, my conscious mind seemed to be rejecting that fact and dwelling on the beauty of nature, the warmth of the day, the wild flowers, the scent of the sea air. I had to keep my wits about me. I didn’t want to antagonise my captor. The worst that he could do to me he had surely already done. I had to go along with him without complaint, lull him into a sense of security until I found a way to escape.
I took a deep breath and calmed myself. If there was a bright side, and usually there is, I hadn’t been harmed, not really, and if nothing else I was getting the overall tan I’d always wanted. The thought went through me and I shuddered with the shame of my own stupidity. Escape. That was the only answer.
The man still scanned the horizon, for what I wondered, a boat, the past, a message?
From the tower, I could see at the bottom of the hill the roofs of some buildings and, as we set off down the rugged path towards them, I wasn’t sure if I should feel more afraid or faintly relieved. Surely, there would be someone there who could help me? Someone who spoke English. Girls can’t just be tethered, led around without any clothes on, used as a urinal. I had decided to behave myself for now, but when I was free to report the man, bring him to justice, get my revenge.
My resolve made putting one unshod foot before the other easier as the path curved down to the sea. We walked along the dunes above the beach. The buildings turned out to be two sheds that could have been built from driftwood and thrown up by the wind. They were roofed in corrugated plastic sheets of different colours and I imagined those, too, had been carried to shore on the tide. Beyond the sheds in a grove of bent pines I could now see several huts built from black stone with thatched roofs. They seemed to be abandoned and mostly in ruins. If there had ever been a community on the island it had long since gone.
Beyond the first shed, there was a bay hidden from view below a wall of rock. The inlet was ringed with volcanic outcroppings coated in cockle shells, which made a natural harbour and protected the black sand beach where the remains of three old fishing boats lay like dead animals on their sides. There were two rubber Zodiacs, heavily patched, looking anything but seaworthy, one half in and half out of the water, the other pulled up on the sand.
As we drew closer to the bay, I began to think we were completely alone, just the two of us, and was processing the implications of this when another man popped up from behind the beached Zodiac. He had been working on the outboard motor and shook his head in an irritated gesture that revealed that whatever he had been trying to do, he had not been able to do it. He approached, wiping oil from his hands with a greasy rag. He said something to my man, and they didn’t exactly shake hands, but touched their fingers lightly together.
The newcomer was dressed in a similar fashion as the beachcomber in a black tunic and matching black turban. He was younger with a precise pointed beard and clear lively eyes that studied me with the concentrated gaze of a scientist looking at a rare specimen through a microscope. He said something and the other man laughed. The younger man pinched my narrow waist as if to show there wasn’t much meat on me and then took a grip on my breasts, turning to the other man as if to say they at least were satisfactory.
They carried on talking and I wasn’t sure what to do, what to say. Their language was completely unknown to me; with French, Spanish, Italian, even German I could have understood something, but their guttural sounds held no clue to their meaning and I was trying to follow the conversation by studying their impenetrable features. They moved down the beach to look more closely at the open outboard and I followed automatically, as if my will had gone. When they finished discussing the problems with the motor, I plucked up the courage and took a step closer to the man in the black tunic.
‘Can you help me, please,’ I said. ‘Do you speak English? Habla usted español? Parlez vous francais?’
He stood back as if in shock and shouted at me, waving his fist as if I had done some terrible thing. He then spoke to the beachcomber and they both laughed.
‘I haven’t done anything,’ I said.
The man in black stared at me, sealed my lips with a stiff greasy finger and said a single word I did understand. ‘Shush,’ he hissed.
He then waved his finger at me as you may wave a finger at a naughty puppy. That’s what I was in their eyes. I was secured by a leather thong, a dog being trained to behave itself. I stared at the man and he stared back until I lowered my eyes.
My captor removed the conch shell from his bag and the man in black turned it through his hands like a connoisseur with a rare gemstone. He examined the pink glaze on the inner lip of the shell, running the tips of his fingers over the smooth surface. He looked up and, as our eyes met, I knew instinctively what was going through his mind. He gave the conch back to the other man and then did something revolting and inexcusable. He ran the side of his hand like a saw between my legs, opening the pink lips of my vagina. I tried to back away, but his hand slid around my waist and he held me still as he wormed his fingers up inside me. He removed his hand and showed me his palm slicked and shiny with discharge. I couldn’t believe he had done this and I couldn’t understand why I was wet.
The man rubbed his fingers together, held them to his nose and stared at me at the same time. I would have slapped him across the face, but couldn’t with my hands tied behind my back. I understood how controlling this is, that with your hands bound in this way you can really do nothing but accept what happens to you just as the wind-bent pines bend to the prevailing wind. I was gritting my teeth. My knees felt weak. My heart was pounding in my chest. I had thought as I stood at the foot of the tower that being in the hands of fate was liberating, but it was confining, too. I was imprisoned by the whims and lusts of others.
The two men now started arguing, shrugging, raising their voices, turning away and turning back again. This went on for several minutes. The man in black was punching the palm of his hand. The beachcomber was shaking his head and making a clucking sound with his tongue.
‘Agh. Agh. Agh,’ he kept sayi
ng.
The man in black finally took out some money, three or four folded notes, and slapped them down on the side of the Zodiac. My man looked at the money, shook his head and the other man angrily grabbed the money, stuck it back in his tunic and went back to work on the outboard motor.
We turned away and were making our way towards the sheds when the man in black shouted what sounded like a terrible insult. My man stopped, threw up his palms as if in defeat and we returned once again. The man repairing the motor wiped his hands on the same filthy cloth, drew out his money and counted out five 10 euro notes that the beachcomber squirreled away in his blue tunic.
It was only at that moment that I realised that the two men had not been shouting at each other in anger. They were bartering over the price for that bonded piece of bric-a-brac. I was valued at 50 euros, the price of a meal in a good Barcelona restaurant.
Had I been sold, I wondered? Or was this a rental? Was I now a hooker and the man in blue my pimp? Was this how he made his living, searching for conch shells with pink lips and stray girls washed up on the beach? Was that what I had become, an object to be sold or hired or exchanged?
Yes, that’s exactly what I was. I had stopped being the girl who catches the bus along the Fulham Road with its cinemas and antique shops and bars and restaurants. I was no longer the girl who, with the toss of her long blonde hair and her pouty lips, had entrée to every club in the West End. I was no longer one half of a happening item. I was merchandise in the market. I was a slave like the people once stolen from Africa.
The younger man studied his prize. He felt my breasts, did that revolting thing of running his hand between my legs and, as if I were a horse, he even looked at my teeth; the only thing that appeared to impress him, good private dentistry and not one single filling.
‘Please, please don’t …’
‘Shush,’ he said.
He took out a worn knife with an ivory handle and a curved blade that gleamed in the sun. He turned me around and slashed through the leather thong binding my wrist. He then pushed me down over the rounded hull of the Zodiac. He said something which I assumed was ‘don’t move,’ and I lay there with my bottom in the air and my waist resting over the thick rubber sides of the inflatable boat.
The beachcomber, my owner, had moved around the bay and sat in the shade of one of the beached fishing boats with a clear view of the action. He crossed his legs and lit another cigarette.
The younger man used his foot to spread my legs wider and I had never felt more exposed, more ashamed, with my bottom in the air, still smarting from being spanked, and my wet pussy pushing through my thighs. The man started massaging and smacking my bottom; not hard, but what on another occasion I may have described as playfully. I heard him spit. As his moistened finger pressed at the delicate ring of my anus, a surge of fierce, uncontrollable anger rose up through me. I pushed myself up from the Zodiac, turned and slapped him across the face.
The sound rang out like a gunshot. I heard a bird lift on flapping wings from the undergrowth and fly like a stray thought across the empty sky.
The man didn’t look angry. He was amused. He lifted his hand to slap me back and, as I raised my hands to protect my face, he slapped my breasts, first one breast, then the other. I am not sure why this was so shocking, but it was. I hit him again, and he hit me again, two swift blows as if my breasts were punching bags. Tears streamed from my eyes and a scream rose into my throat.
‘You bastard,’ I cried.
I rushed at him. I got my hands around his throat and tried to throttle him. But men are always stronger. He took a firm grip on my wrists, pulled my hands down, turned me around and shoved me back against the black rubber Zodiac.
The beachcomber was grinning, his brown teeth on show, the cigarette in the crook of his fingers.
I caught a glimpse of the man in black as he stepped away from the Zodiac and grabbed a curving strip of bamboo from what looked like the remains of a beached lobster trap. He snapped the bamboo in half and I heard the two-tongued cane come down through the air with a screeching sound that made me shudder. He did it again once more and, the third time, the cane bit like the teeth of a serpent into the soft flesh of my bottom.
I wailed in agony. I wasn’t going to take this. I pushed myself up again, my fists clenched, but before I could hit him, the man caught me by the shoulders, held me still and stared into my eyes. He spoke slowly, his voice low and threatening. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t understand a word. He turned me round and pushed me back against the side of the Zodiac, the weight of my body springing me back up and, as it did so, that terrible cane came down once more, the two sinewy fingers biting into my flesh, the pain like no pain I could ever have imagined or will ever be able to fully describe: a pure, unmodified pain, the pain of loss, perhaps, a pain beyond the physical, a pain that touches your soul and reshapes the strands of your DNA.
What fight there was in me had gone. I lay slumped on the black rubber hull of the boat, tears falling from my eyes, snot falling from my nose, my body trembling involuntarily. I had to take this, I had to take everything and, when the moment was right, when fate was on my side, I would flee. If it took the whole of my life, I would escape.
The bamboo cane rose up again, the air split like ripping fabric, and two lightning stripes of sheer agony carved their cruel message into my flesh. It felt as if the first four pairs of smarting wounds were kindling and the last two twins of evil lit a forest fire that burned up my spine and down over my thighs. My body was coated in sweat and I could smell the pungent whiff of the beachcomber’s piss coming back to life on my clammy skin. Somewhere at the back of my mind was the fleeting thought that having my bottom spanked and sucking off the man who had found me on the beach hadn’t been so bad after all; that there had been a perverse pleasure in the obscenity of being defiled in this way.
I was aware that the man behind me was lifting the cane one more time, but before it came down across my bottom, the beachcomber shouted at him. There was a moment’s pause, the earth stood still, and the man in black tossed the instrument of torture back on the sand.
A wave of gratitude went through me as my cheeks were prised apart and the man’s cock entered my pussy as a shark glides through the sea. I should have been dry and tense. I wasn’t. I was an ocean. I don’t know why. I was drenched with sweat and fruity discharge. The man’s erection slid into the depths of my vaginal passage, he drew back and pushed in again, the springy side of the Zodiac making the action effortless, even graceful.
Something had happened to me. Some wires had crossed. The pain from being beaten with that cane was beyond words, but the pain immediately began to diminish. It was as if my mind and body had drifted apart. I hated the man. I felt abused, ashamed, hysterical. And yet, and yet, my body felt a relief, from the pain, yes, but also from all the pent up fears and anxieties and uncertainties of life.
This man, this stranger, was fucking me. Fucking me. Fucking me. In and out. In and out.
Fucking me.
Fucking me.
It wasn’t a word I ever used for the act of making love. But we weren’t making love. I was being fucked. And I realised that I had never been fucked before. This was a first. I had lost my virginity before I left school. There had been several boys since then, not that many, not compared with most of my friends. But that was the problem. They were boys. They didn’t know what foreplay was. They didn’t know how a girl’s body reacts to different stimulus. And I didn’t know either. Not until now.
I had been terrified, beaten, despoiled and now I was being well and truly fucked. The pressure from his thrusting penis was nursing and nudging my clitoris and I realised with horror that I was pushing back, I was spreading my thighs wider and drawing him in deeper. I wanted more. I wanted his hard cock to tease and tickle all those nerve endings and pleasure points that had never been reached before.
Fuck me. Fuck me. Fuck me.
I heard the words echo round t
he little bay and over the sea and couldn’t believe it was my voice coming back to me.
Fuck me. Fuck me. Fuck me.
The man in black gripped my hip bone in one hand and began to slap the side of my bottom with the other hand like he was clutching a riding crop and driving a horse to the finishing line, the beat of those slaps keeping pace with the pumping thrust of his cock and the pounding rhythm of my heart.
Fuck me. Fuck me. Fuck me.
My voice was a whisper now. My mind had gone to mush. My body didn’t belong to me. It belonged to that driving hard length of oiled cock drilling into the depths of my soul. My eyes were closed. I was biting my bottom lip. This was the fuck of my life.
He started to come and, at that precise moment, I had my first real climax. My body shook and went into spasm. My breath came in short, sharp gasps and, to my eternal shame, I screamed not in pain but in pleasure as that cruel cock ignited my orgasm.
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
I was quivering, wiggling my ass, my vagina muscles holding on to that cock like it was a hand reaching out in the darkness. He took hold of my hipbones, he pushed into me as hard as he could, and I had a sense that while thrashing me with the cane and fucking me from behind had only been for his own bestial pleasure, he was now allowing me to ride the last fading ripples of my orgasm before he withdrew.
He fell across my back, satisfied and exhausted. I lay beneath his weight, shuddering and ashamed. What the hell was happening to me? A man beats my backside with a stick and then I start coming in a tidal wave, the little aftershocks still running through my trembling body. His cock was still stiff inside me and I felt our juices trickle down my thighs. He said something and there was laughter in his voice as he pushed himself up from me. He slapped me, not that hard, but enough to awaken the pain in those ten razor welts scored across my bottom and the contractions from my orgasm let go with another little rumble like the last seismic shifts from an earthquake.
Girl Trade - full length erotic adventure novel (Xcite Erotic Romance Novels) Page 3
