Girl Trade - full length erotic adventure novel (Xcite Erotic Romance Novels)

by Chloë Thurlow

  Though I had chosen to follow the sheikh, now I was standing on the deck of that dilapidated vessel, I paused again to wonder what madness had urged me to do so. I had passed my exams. I had a job. Friends. Contacts. I moved in charmed circles. The young, the gorgeous, the privileged. I am a Pisces, a good swimmer, prone to opposites, moving in two directions at once, not unerringly cautious, but I wasn’t impetuous either. So much had happened that day, it was like many days, weeks and months condensed into one gulp of time I didn’t want to end.

  Every second from the moment the beachcomber found me like a conch shell on the sands had been vibrant with new and disparate experiences, fear, of course, but incredulity, too, my shame and humiliation set against a lewd and promiscuous pleasure – so Piscean! I had detested being naked before the eyes of strangers, but was aware of that feeling transforming during the day into an immodest sense of daring, a sense that I was doing something that I had always secretly wanted to do. Lurking in my subconscious was the notion that all women want to be seen undressed, taken against their will, that pure satisfaction comes from impure desires.

  I could rightly claim that everything that had happened to me until the moment I climbed the rope ladder on to the boat had been against my will: my mouth and vagina being used as a receptacle for the abusers’ semen, the spanking, the beating, even kissing the sheikh was only a subterfuge in my plan of escape. The wanton side of Pisces was in the ascendant and my caution must have flown away with the seagulls I’d watched abandon ship.

  I could recall a thousand and one days walking along the Fulham Road feeling bored, fatigued, lost, my heels clacking, my fingers reaching for my top as it slid from one shoulder then the other, the breeze lifting my skirt, each movement displaying little slices of bare flesh as if I were a book jacket tempting the browser to open the covers and reveal the nude girl within.

  Do girls with their clothes carelessly slipping from their bodies know what they are doing? Of course. We are told to expose ourselves by magazines, the movies, the giant hoardings on the sides of buses promoting perfume and knickers are a form of mind control whispering constantly flatten your tummy, push out your breasts, wiggle your bum, take off your clothes, open your legs, dress is nothing but the sensual aroma of the latest scent. In PR we create false hopes and dreams, a chimerical world full of laughter and stripped of that deep-seated feeling that there are better times to be had if we just have the courage to break the bonds of the life we are living. I never made my own decisions, not really, not until that moment.

  The sheikh moved around the deck, checking something or other. Each time our eyes met he looked away. I wasn’t exactly sure why he had beaten the man in black, but I was somewhere in the mix of his anger and emotions. The sheikh smuggled Africans to Europe, and he could of course just as easily now have been smuggling me to Africa. People are commodities. In a free market everything has its price. And I was sure that, like tiger skins and rhinoceros horns, white girls like me carried a premium. Perhaps that was why the sheikh had punished the other man, for damaging property. His property.

  When the sheikh had finished his spurious inspection, he beckoned and I followed as he gave me a tour of the boat. It was larger once you were on board than it had appeared from shore. At the bow, the wheelhouse was crudely made from weathered planks of wood. There was one long low cabin with portholes above the level of the deck and, below decks, was the open hold that, over the years, would have served to carry fish and other goods, the scattering of discarded blankets evidence that its primary use today was human cargo.

  We climbed back up the narrow stairs, the sheikh shouted an order to one of the sailors and we entered the cabin. I was surprised to find myself in a boudoir opulent with silks and satins in pastel colours made exotic with the rich aroma of incense. Below my feet was an intricately woven carpet and around the walls were big cushions hemmed with golden tassels. I made my way through the clouds of chiffon suspended from the ceiling and wondered why they were hanging there, what purpose they served other than to make the cabin appear like a room in a palace, a floating harem, a place for lovers. There were divans, a chest of drawers, low tables of carved wood, copper cups and bowls, tall lamps that he lit and in the reflection of the round mirror I saw a blonde girl with wild eyes and an expression just as hard to read as the man in white standing just behind her.

  In my sarong with the St Christopher glittering on the chain around my neck, I felt like Scheherazade from One Thousand and One Nights, a book I had read with rapt passion as a teenager. Scheherazade was dreamy, doe-eyed, ethereal but it was through guile alone that she survived the terrible curse of the Cuckolded Sultan in a story of treachery, vengeance and sex that had captured my young imagination.

  It was long ago in ancient Persia when the Sultan returned victorious from battle only to find his wife entwined in the arms of another man. They were instantly executed, but the punishment wasn’t enough to assuage the Sultan’s wounded pride. He had come to believe that every woman was guilty of his wife’s betrayal and took long and gory revenge. Every day for three thousand days he married a virgin, and every morning at daybreak his bride was beheaded. The people lived in fear and the kingdom became barren and impoverished.

  Scheherazade lived in the environs of the palace where her father was an official. The Sultan had watched her grow up and at that exquisite moment when the child like a flower was budding with the curves and contours of a woman, he asked for her hand. Scheherazade knew what had happened to all the girls before her but still, against her father’s wishes, consented to the marriage. Scheherazade had a plan and enlisted her sister’s help.

  After the ceremony, on the way to the bed chamber, she asked if she could bid farewell to her young sister. The Sultan, delighted with his prize, agreed and, when the girl arrived, she asked Scheherazade to tell her a story. The Sultan stretched out indulgently on his divan to listen. The tale his bride told had many twists and surprises and, when she had finished, the Sultan was so intrigued, he asked for another story.

  He had not realised that dawn was breaking and Scheherazade promised that she would tell him another, much better story, before they slept that night. One thousand and one nights passed. Scheherazade gave birth to three sons and every night she wove a new parable of morality and kindness. The Sultan never cut off her head and became a wise and respected ruler.

  I had always loved that story. I loved to think of myself as Scheherazade, but as I stood in that cabin among those silk and satin cushions I had no tales to tell and no language in which I could have told them.

  My throat had turned dry. The sheikh, as if he could read my mind, filled a cup and I drank with such thirst the water trickled from my lips and over my chin. I wiped it away and smiled. I felt silly. A doe-eyed girl. The sheikh placed the cup back on the table. He unhooked the fold in the sarong and flung the material across the cabin. He then took my arm and guided me through the quivering pennants of chiffon to one of the open portholes where he set my fingers over the curved rim. The night air cooled my bare skin. I was bent over with my bottom displayed like a model in an advertising shot from the 1940s, and wondered what is it with men and bottoms. My bottom. The beachcomber had spanked me, his companion had caned me, and I was now prepared for another thrashing.

  I wriggled and made myself comfortable. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed the sheikh remove something from the chest of drawers and my flesh erupted in sweat when I realised what it was. He was holding a whip with a short handle, the long coil unwinding as he crossed the cabin towards me. Our eyes met once more and I looked away, down over my breasts at the blue arabesques on the carpet below my feet.

  The sea slapped against the sides of the boat. The engines thumped like a distant drum. I closed my eyes and clung tightly to the ledge of the porthole. I had fought the man in the black turban, but I didn’t fight the sheikh. I knew there was no point. I was trapped, the butterfly back in the cocoon. Like the Sultan in the story from
One Thousand and One Nights, the sheikh had to take revenge – on the man in black, on my bottom that he had cruelly caned.

  I took deep breaths. The sheikh was going to whip me. I knew that. But I knew, too, that he was doing so without anger or malice. He was defining our roles. With that whip licking my backside he was going to demonstrate that there was no use to which I could not be put, no humiliation that I could not be made to endure. He was the master and, as his concubine, any pleasure I experienced would come from the pleasure I gave and from the obedience I showed. It was a new world, a different way of looking at things, but it made sense standing there naked on that hot night with my pussy moist between my thighs and my breasts swaying like udders below me. I had always been looking for a role and my being bent over in this way in the costume of nudity felt oddly natural, that without papers and possessions and choices and haste I was free to be me.

  The whip cracked, splitting the air. Then the whip cracked as the lash wrapped itself like the arms of a lover across the rounded hills of my rump. The pain was immediate, all-embracing, overwhelming. Unlike the man in black when he took that beating on the beach, I didn’t hold back, I screamed, my voice piercing the porthole and frightening the night. When you understand why you are being disciplined it is easier to accept, but that doesn’t mean it hurts any less.

  It hurts. It really hurts, the long snake hissing as it uncoiled for a second taste of my damp flesh, carving a groove into the soft skin. I screamed again. My body was shaking, but I spread my legs and didn’t move. When you know your place in the drama, when your bottom is the star, you steady yourself, you hold your legs firm and you count the lashes so you don’t forget how many you’ve been given.

  Down it came again. Number three. A snatch of lighting burning my poor little bum and sending messages of pain up my back and down my thighs. He must have changed his position and, when the leather crackled and uncoiled, the next stroke snapped below the crease of my bottom and sent a finger of fire burning up the canal of my vagina, boiling the liquids of my womb. Tears coursed down my cheeks, snot fell from my nose, discharge coated the lips of my pussy.

  How many was that?

  Four. Yes, four.

  Then five, that ribbon of plaited leather finding a fresh course across my bottom to sow and reap an excruciating harvest of agony. I screamed and in the moment of screaming the pain didn’t seem quite so bad. I squirmed and trembled. I writhed and wriggled. I was a fish. Liquids poured from my naked body. My nipples sparked and fizzed like they were charged with an electric current. I could smell the sugar almond sweat of my underarms, the smell of the night air, the smell of sex, pungent, ripe, earthy, an aroma that is feminine and carnal, the perfume of desire. I bit my lips. I almost went down on my knees, but pushed back with my arms, holding myself steady. I gasped and I groaned and I thrust my blazing bum out for the next one.

  The whip struck like a snake’s tongue and the leather fangs took another bite. I didn’t shake. I didn’t tremble. I panted for air. I sniffled and sobbed. This was my first proper beating. I was a virgin. I was Scheherazade and my story was about a girl who ran away without any clothes and discovered the unassuming garments of submission.

  I wanted the sheikh to be proud of me. I deserved this. I had cried out fuck me, fuck me, fuck me when the man in the black turban rode my wet pussy to a stirring climax. He beat me and then he fucked me. Fucked me until I screamed for more. Fucked me until I screamed in bliss. Fucked me to a sniffling state of hysteria and shame. I was a bad girl. A slut. A slag. A harlot. The sheikh was angry. He had every right to be angry. Like the first wife of the Sultan of Persia in the story of One Thousand and One Nights, I had betrayed him. I had betrayed the future.

  I had taken six lashes from the whip. The sheikh paused. I thought it was over. I went to push myself up, but he tapped my bottom with the flat of his hand and said something, and what he said must have been stay there, stay exactly where you are. You stand up when I’m good and ready. I sucked air through my teeth. My hair hung in a soggy curtain over my face. My breasts were trembling below me. I clutched the porthole so hard my fingers hurt and the pain was a little outpost of the pain that ran from the nub of my neck to the balls of my feet.

  The sheikh tested the whip once more, flicking the coiled length of hide out across the room like a lion tamer in the circus, snap, snap, snap it went. I heard him draw breath as he took a step back. I pressed the lids tight over my eyes, and the leather tail hissed with the sound of a sword being taken from a furnace and plunged into water, the line of agony cutting a diagonal stripe across the smouldering cheeks of my bottom, the knotted tip slipping over my hip to nip at my pubic bone.

  The scream in my throat died. There was no air in my body. I was like a house on fire at that point where the fire cannot be put out. The house was crumbling to ash as my strength left me and I collapsed in a heap on the swirling arabesques of the carpet, weeping, the agony threaded through with an indescribable sense of delirium. I could smell seared flesh and erotic discharge as warm juices drooled from my vagina, coated my thighs and I gasped in obscene pleasure.

  Seven.

  I hoped it was a lucky number, that I was a lucky girl, and I felt like the luckiest girl in the world as the sheikh lifted me from the floor, one arm supporting my shoulders, the other under the crook of my knees, and carried me along the cabin to a feather mattress where he put me down as tenderly as a mother lays her newborn baby in a crib.

  He rolled me on to my tummy. I lay there throbbing, panting, glowing. I heard him shout. I heard the door open and close again. Cool air whispered through the portholes. I was vaguely aware of the sound of his chewing. I heard him spit and I felt the fire go out of the burning welts as he rubbed a paste delicately on to my bottom. He had beaten me and now he was caring for me. I felt safe, protected, at peace.

  He chewed and spat, he chewed and spat, coating the welts in a creamy substance that took away the sting and made my bottom feel cosy and warm. I felt like a princess. Like Scheherazade. I had survived. My head was still on my shoulders. Tomorrow was another story.

  I must have fallen asleep and I dreamed that I was in my bed at home in Fulham; content after getting myself off with the dildo Bobby had bought in Old Compton Street for a joke, and he never knew on those nights when I stayed home to wash my hair that the joke was on him. Bobby was the same age as the sheikh, but Bobby was an apprentice in the art of sensual pleasure. The sheikh was a master.

  The moment I opened my eyes, I was fully awake, relaxed. I rolled over and gazed at the chiffon hangings moving faintly in the misty light. The sting in my backside had gone, completely vanished, and on the table at my side were the skins from about a dozen Canary Island bananas. I remembered the sheikh making the poultice that had hardened across the cheeks of my bottom and had new respect for that clever yellow fruit with the pinprick freckles and a neat zip down the side for easy opening. I pulled three bananas from the stalk and ate them one after the other, gobbling them down, and I couldn’t recall ever having eaten anything so sweet and delicious.

  I pushed myself up, swept through the drapery and stood staring out of the porthole massaging my sticky bottom. The fear of a thrashing is really much worse than the thrashing itself, and I would spend many days trying to understand how having your bottom disciplined can stir your body liquids into a molten magma that erupts over the engorged lips of your pussy and leaves you breathless, panting, in a state of euphoria.

  Mmm. Lovely. I wriggled.

  Just thinking about it made me feel moist and I took a big gulp of sea air to calm myself. As I peered out at the churning ribbon of foam whipped up along the side of the boat I thought how marvellously logical it was that I should be carried away on the tide. My sheikh was Neptune, God of the Sea, his trident that whip coiled in the drawer. He was a torrent of quicksilver emotions, hidden depths, sudden storms, subtly shifting currents. My mind was filled with the poetry of watery images that made me wonder if he, too
, was a Pisces, that we were two fish joined in the ebb and flow of the same ocean.

  The air was clean, clear, and soporific. I felt as if I belonged in a way that I had never felt clipping along the Fulham Road. There had always been something bogus in the way that I hitched up my skirt and puffed up my boobs to glide over dance floors, along office corridors, to step on the tube and climb the stairs on the bus. I craved attention. I’d suck air through my teeth and turn in mock anger every time a stranger touched me on the tube. My body was a celebrity craving to be recognised. It had always irritated me when Mummy called me a poseur, and I giggled as I thought: what if she could see me now?

  I was wearing nothing but my suntan with a sticky dressing on my bottom as the boat slid quietly over the dark blue sea – the same colour as the planet Neptune, as far as I could recall. I didn’t feel phoney. I felt like me, natural, real, living in the present. If the sheikh wanted me naked I wanted to be naked. If he wanted to dress me, I wanted to wear whatever he dressed me in. All through my life I had worried about what I looked like and what I wanted, what passing caprice was going to please me. It was liberating to be standing there knowing that from that day on my only role was to please him.

  The last shadows of night had lifted and I became aware of the outlines of an earth-coloured city emerging out of the dawn light. I could see castle battlements and the domes and minarets on the mosques rising against the red-streaked sky. Clouds glowing with pink underbellies hung over the mud-walled buildings, but the clouds seemed to evaporate under my gaze and my view was drawn beyond the city across the endless waves of the desert.

  A horn sounded, ending the silence. I thought at first it came from the city, but it was closer, the second blast bursting into the cabin, breaking the harmony. I heard feet slapping over the decks and the sheikh appeared, speaking fast as if I might have learned his language in the night. He pulled a woven quilt from the bed where I had slept and wrapped it around me. He carried me back to the divan. He held me still and stared into my eyes as he pulled a chiffon scarf from the hangings above and pushed it into my mouth, cramming it in until I was all but choking. He draped another piece of cloth around my head, covering my face, and I was barely able to breathe. He rolled me in another length of material and I felt the bundle tightening as he wrapped rope around me and tied firm knots.