‘Shush, shush, shush,’ he said.
The material over my face was sheer and I could still see the light, but then he added a piece of brocade and I was cast into darkness. I lay there listening to the subdued activity above decks. I heard a loudspeaker and I was sure I heard words of French, but it was too distant and muffled for me to understand anything that was being said.
I heard boots crossing the deck above me. There was a quiet moment, then the boots drew closer. The cabin door opened. I heard French being spoken in a gruff way, then the door closed again. I realised I had been holding my breath and breathed sharply through my nose.
The boots clattered about outside, then the stillness returned, and I lay there trying to work out what all this had meant.
Were they pirates seeking plunder? The Coast Guard searching for illegal immigrants? Or me?
Several more minutes passed and the sheikh returned. He unwound the cloth from my head and pulled the gag from my mouth. He smoothed back my hair and as he looked into my eyes it was as if he were gazing into the depths of the ocean. Then he smiled, and I realised I had never seen him smile before.
Five
South of Nowhere
WHERE DO DAYS GO? They arrive with pink dawns and pass with red sunsets. The hours were long, the air clean and hot. The sky was the shade of blue taken from a picture book, the sky at night low and close, shot through with a billion stars. I ate figs, bananas, dates, and learned not to drop food down me as I shaped balls from the rice and vegetables cooked in the galley by Mo.
I had grown to know the sailors names: Mo was Mohammed, a wiry, older man with a single gold tooth, a hooked nose like a bird’s beak and the face of a thief from a story in One Thousand and One Nights. On those long hot days he wore nothing but a loin cloth and cooled himself dropping a bucket on a cord over the side of the boat and showering in seawater. Five times a day he unrolled a mat and bent to the east to say his prayers, a ritual the other men seemed to admire but felt no need to observe. They were Moslems in the way I would call myself a Christian, as the sheikh had black hair and mine is blonde, these accidents of birth and background assuming no importance; the men on board were not weighed down with opinions or guilt and seemed at ease with themselves and each other.
Azar was the engineer. He had coffee-coloured skin streaked in stripes of oil and fingernails that would never be clean. The boat carried a solitary mast with a lateen sail that barely billowed in the soft winds, and I had the feeling that it was the genius of Azar that kept the craft going. When he came up from below decks, sweating, drying his face on an oily cloth, he would light a cigarette and stand at the prow gazing at the sky and listening to the beat of the engines just as a mother at night listens for her babies.
Umah was a teenager, seventeen, maybe eighteen; slight as a girl with a high voice and delicate hands that he moved like a dancer. He wore a string of beads around his neck and you could hear the silver bracelets jangling on his wrists as he moved about the boat like a bird moving through the branches of a tree. His darting eyes followed me, not with lust or desire, but in the continuous state of surprise a child has watching a monkey at the zoo. When our eyes met he nervously smiled and looked away. Umah stitched the rents in the sail and took turns with Mohammed in the wheelhouse, the silver bracelets growing still as he navigated our course across the unvarying vista of empty sea.
Samir was my lover, my protector, my reason for being. He was a god we obeyed and worshipped. He wasn’t a tyrant; a bully, a slave driver. It is the wise master who leaves the whip coiled in the drawer. The sheikh simply saw the world and everyone in it in clear uncomplicated terms. Like pieces on a chess board we had our positions and the man in the black turban and the crew on the boat understood and accepted that. Once you know who you are you can let go of the things you crave and just be yourself.
Of course it was much easier to be myself on board the boat. There were no magazines telling me what to wear and what to think, no advice on how to win your man, please your man, keep your man. I had found my man and he seemed content with me just the way I was. Time, that inflexible substance always racing and running out, had ceased to have meaning. The days that passed were seamless, the sun cut by the cooling breeze that appeared in the afternoon, the stars at night shining like jewels, guiding the way as the star from the east directed the Magi to Bethlehem with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh, a balm with all the fine qualities of bananas ground with spittle and applied to flaming bottoms.
I saw villages along the coast, the mud- and dung-walled huts huddled around a white mosque, the desert beyond stretching out like a silent sea. Our journey appeared to have no purpose. There was no hurry. We stopped for whole days, anchoring to sand banks, resting the engines. We swam, the sheikh and I, two creatures at the dawn of creation. The men lit cigarettes and cast lines strung with corks and feathers that lay on the surface and pulled from the sea wriggling fish of countless colours. They wrapped the catch in wetted cotton and we gorged ourselves on grilled tuna, lobster and crab. On days when there was no fish, we ate rice, some dates or figs, feast followed by famine with equanimity.
Slipping in and out of the sea and in and out of the cabin with my lover, I ceased to recollect whether or not I was naked and when the taboo is broken it is easier to break the next one, to move further from who you thought you were and closer to who you might become. In me there were many women, infinite nuances and possibilities. Sometimes a mist fell, consuming the boat and as we moved through the void I watched Samir’s long fingers turning the brass bolts that locked the portholes. He would place a taper to the lamps, his movements performed with the minimum of effort, his shadow multiplied against the chiffon flags. The moment our flesh touched, I was seized by an intense passion that made the breath catch in my throat and his strong hands would stroke my arms, my cheeks, my breasts, calming the violent forces that gripped me. We lived in a fantasy on board the boast and when night fell I was afraid that tomorrow the fantasy would come to an end.
In the morning, the sky clear once more, I would watch Samir shave over a bowl of water content that the sun was rising and the crewmen were going about their ablutions, Azar smoking his first cigarette, Mo unrolling his prayer mat. Mo’s beard was pointed, neatly trimmed. Azar’s hair sprouted in a carpet from just below his eyes, covered his broad chest and was kept in a long coil below his grubby red turban. Like the sheikh, the boy was clean-shaven, bare of body hair; all were lithe, muscular and keen-eyed, a primal archetype to which I was slowly conforming. My mind was clear, serene, my memory in focus. Colours grew brighter, the edges of things more distinct. Fish tasted as the first fish must have tasted; as the fish on the Mount of Olives must have tasted. I knew by the smell of the air if on that day there would be a breeze or whether it was going to be sultry and still. I could distinguish the different cries of the birds that joined us like spies on soundless wings, following our course before returning back to the coast fed on the fish heads and scraps Mo threw overboard, maintaining the cycle, wasting nothing.
Just as I had shed my papers and clothes, my preconceptions and past, the superfluous bulk I had brought with me from London vanished from my tummy, my thighs, my cheeks. I became sharper, sleeker, my hip bones and cheek bones more defined, my bottom a dome divided in perfect halves. The cherry stripes and blue bruising left by the cane and whip faded and I turned golden, flawless, a goddess built it seemed for one thing, and it wasn’t writing cover notes for new books. I was born to open my legs and open my mouth and bathe in the sheikh’s syrupy semen, to swim like a fish in the sea by day and swim over and under the smooth satin skin of my lover in the glow of the oil lamp at night.
Like a parched nomad arriving at a desert spring, Samir would throw off his white turban to kneel as if in prayer below the arch of my legs, his palms cupping my bottom, his tongue supping from my open cleft. No matter how many orgasms oozed from me there was always more sap pressuring to escape. We are ninety-nine pe
rcent water and by some miracle I turned the water into wine, the vintage of the gods.
We mated on every cushion and mat, in every corner, against every wall. I sucked him dry and I sucked him until he was hard and hot and ready for me again. Like hunger and thirst, our sexual nature is coded into the lingering compulsions of our primeval genes. My deepest instincts had been buried in a quagmire of social conditioning and the sheikh, during those intoxicating days on the boat, brought them bubbling to the surface. I wept in pleasure when his cock nudged my clitoris, my song piercing the portholes, floating over the sea and drifting into shells that washed to shore where beachcombers would hear my voice as they raised the shell to their ear.
On those days beneath the blistering sun I was wild, insatiable, feverish. I had everything I desired but still there was something missing, some stone left unturned, some bridge uncrossed, some knot left untied. I recalled as a little girl the ache at Christmas when I saw the parcels below the tree with my name in Mummy’s big looping letters on the labels. I studied the parcels with their ribbons and bows trying to imagine what was inside, and on languorous afternoons in the cabin I found myself cast back into the past doing the same, my eyes drawn to the chest of drawers, even though I knew perfectly well what it was that lay curled and sleeping inside. I kept thinking about the whip, the way that fiery tongue licked across my backside, driving me like the stem of a lily through murky waters until on the surface of the pond my pink petals opened and bloomed.
Was it really like that? Orgasms I’d read in my old life release endorphins that give you a high and take away pain. I had climaxed under the whip. It was hard to believe and, stirred by impulses conjured less from memory than imagination, I dropped to my knees, slipped my fingers under the brass plates of the facia and opened the bottom drawer in the walnut chest. I raised the coils of the whip to my face and the lingering smell of my own discharge was like a drug, a ripe perfume that filled my nose and brought tears to my eyes.
My fingers closed around the handle and the whip uncurled as I waved my way through the forest of chiffon back to the mattress. We lay together entwined like serpents, the brown leather turned in spirals around my golden flesh, the short handle between my legs, the tail slipping between the cheeks of my bottom, crossing my stomach and circling my back to emerge under my breasts where the knotted tip lay in my cleavage like a talisman. The rough touch of the plaited leather made my nipples sprout from my heaving breasts. I squeezed the pink buds until they stung and panted with a sigh of relief.
It was sweltering hot, the air clammy, the slap of the sea against the hull a gently striking cymbal to the heartbeat of the boat’s big engines, the light diffused through the open portholes. I lay perspiring, dreamy, lazily turning my distended nipples and fighting the temptation to put the handle of the whip to some practical purpose.
When the door opened, the chiffon drapery shivered and Samir appeared with a look of ambiguity and surprise, the tic on his neck that I watched when he shaved vibrating as if a small insect was burrowing beneath the surface of the skin.
He unwound his turban and folded the material, his eyes never leaving me. He then took the whip handle as King Arthur took Excalibur from the clutches of the rock and paused as if history were being made. I wriggled as he pulled at the handle and the whip slid beneath me, the leather slicked and shiny as it slithered through the lips of my sex.
There was no need to speak. There was nothing to be said. I wanted him so much. I wanted him this way, a faithful slave with an indulgent master. I went up on my knees to display my perfect bottom, my sex wet as a dew-kissed flower. I was sopping, my labia running with the juices of anticipation, the puffy lips in a nest of golden fleece peeled open and pushing through my thighs, pink and inviting, fruit from an enchanted tree. My mind had turned off. I was all instinct, all animal, and hungered for the searing swathes of the strap across my hide.
The sheikh cleared the flags from above, giving the whip space to draw breath. I clenched my stomach muscles and the first crack was like a shot from a starting pistol, its retort detonating a crimson flare across the small of my back. I cried in agony and ecstasy and appreciated for the first time why those words are placed together. I kept my eyes pressed tight and felt the glow from that first stroke warm every part of my body.
Samir tested the whip, splitting the air, and brought it down again, the second lash falling just below the first, the two lines like tracks vanishing into nowhere, my limbs bucking, sweating, the fire on my naked flesh awakening all my primitive longings. I dreaded the pain as the whip crossed the mounds of my posterior, but it is at that moment when you feel the height of your sensitivity and awareness, unconditionally alive. It is a level of being beyond the commonplace, the accepted, the understood, where mind, body and soul dissolve into the unknown. With that quill of perfumed leather the sheikh was writing his name on the parchment of my bare skin. I had wrapped myself in the whip because without words it was the only way for me to show that his will was my will, that with the whip he would mark me as his.
As the pain subsides, a luxurious warmth winds through your guts and heats the oils of your womb. I could think of nothing more feminine than being on my hands and knees being disciplined in this way by my lover. My days had been lost in eating and swimming, to hedonistic pleasures. I needed the taste of the whip to remind me that I was alive to the point where even death had ceased to be frightening. I could feel contractions. The lighthouse of my clitoris was awash in pleasure and desire. If I died now, at this second, in the petite mort of orgasm, my life would have been worthwhile. I would have lived the way I was born to have lived. I would have transcended the mundane and touched the sublime. This, I thought, is true happiness.
A momentary pause. A moment to draw breath. Then one more, a little lower, placed expertly, the whip’s flashing tentacle scorching his name into the unsullied flesh. The liquids gathered about my vaginal lips let go with a scented spray fine as mist that filled the cabin with the aroma of ardour and want. I had taken three lashes and was still sturdily on my hands and knees, stomach stretched tight as a drum, my body wet, my mind wandering.
I remembered when the beachcomber bent me over and beat my bottom with his hand. Even then, that first time, a turmoil of warped feelings began to emerge in me. When I opened my mouth for his cock, it was such a relief from being spanked I found perverse pleasure being abused in this way. He released his come over my face and then pissed on me, over my cheeks and into my eyes, my mouth with the sour taste of his sperm, my breasts, his hot pee trickling down between my legs where I knelt before him wrists bound like a slave girl.
That scene came often to my mind. It was … amazing, sadistic, so bizarre that such a thing could happen, that something in me at that moment died and something came unexpectedly to life. I was the baby bird breaking the shell and seeing that there was another world outside the nest. My life had always been a lukewarm bath of mediocrity. My great fear wasn’t in being violated by a stranger, it was slipping inexorably into cliché, familiarity and insignificance, an ant on the ant hill with my short skirts and Wonderbra.
The beachcomber had changed all that with the first strike of his palm, the pleasure he took in spraying me in piss all the greater because he must have known it was something he should not have done, that stolen pleasure may taste sweet but it will come at a price. It was little wonder that he was terrified and stood there wringing his hands as the sheikh took the cane to the man in the black turban.
After beating the man, I followed the sheikh to the waiting dinghy. I didn’t think about what I was doing. I had no plans. I had no future or past. It was the logical conclusion of my long swim from La Gomera, a way to reconstruct the present. My thoughts were still taking shape, but I was aware, I had even felt it at the time, that the obscene thrill that had touched me when the man in black spread my caned cheeks was shameful and disloyal. I had stolen a moment of pleasure that belonged in truth to Samir. I needed this se
cond chastisement to pay for that disloyalty.
I remembered back on the beach watching the two men staring out to sea. I had been caught up in the drama of waiting. The boat was late. My fate was delayed. But I should have known, somehow I should have known, that my destiny lay just across the horizon. When the man in black violated me I should have wept for him to stop. I had wanted to believe he was raping me. That’s what my mind kept saying. But not my body. As I lay across the black hull of the Zodiac gasping, I didn’t cry out in pain, I cried out for more.
Who was that girl in that other place, at that other time? That girl with a boyfriend and a passport containing her photograph and a name no one had spoken for more days than she could recall? That girl with invisible blinkers and sixteen pairs of high-heeled shoes occupying closets and corners and dusty spaces below the bed? Thoughts. Memories. They drifted away as the whip spoke once more and I had to scramble back in my mind to remember how many I had taken.
That was number four.
Three in straight lines, the fourth unfurling across my hips and tickling the fine-skinned area just above the groin. At all the points where the stripe cut across the first three lashes, little fires burst into life, pinpoints of agony on a field of pain. I was rocking back and forth, sweating, crying, doing my best, remembering again what Mummy said: beware of what you wish for. I girded my loins, I pressed my eyes tightly closed, I steadied my arms and took deep breaths through my open mouth.
Girl Trade - full length erotic adventure novel (Xcite Erotic Romance Novels) Page 9
