Betting on God

by Ashley B. D. Zacharias

The auditorium was filled to capacity; people who could not find seats lined the walls at the back and side of the room. A lot of people wanted to see a renowned biologist and atheist debate an even more renowned television evangelist. But the audience was coughing and shuffling their feet – a certain sign that the debate was failing to hold their interest.

Thomas Stone – “Dr. Stone” to his students, “Doubting Thomas” to Brother Jeremiah, the preacher standing behind the opposing podium – realized that he had to add a little spice to the debate. He might be able to grab the audience’s attention again if he made a sufficiently dramatic statement. He stopped himself from droning on about the robust nature of scientific inquiry and executed a perfect verbal about face. “But all that aside, the bottom line is that it is better to believe that there is no God at all than to worship the evil being that is described in the Bible.”

Brother Jeremiah rose to the bait immediately. He pounded his podium with his fist and shouted, “Blasphemy will not win this debate. You present yourself as a man of logic, yet you are reduced to calling God names. I despair for your immortal soul.” The audience fell silent; the debate looked like it was going to be fun after all.

Dr. Stone shook his head. “I’m not simply calling God names; I’m referring to His actions as recorded in the Bible. You do believe the Bible, do you not?” This was a purely rhetorical question and Stone continued without waiting for an answer. “The Bible says that God ordered Abraham to kill his own son, Isaac. Abraham claimed that God stayed his hand at the last minute, but it seems more likely that, when Abraham had his knife posed above the chest of his innocent son, he knew that he was about to commit an evil act. It was not God, but his own conscience that stayed his hand. It may have been the style in ancient times to call a man’s conscience ‘God’ but I think everyone in this room today would see it differently. They can imagine that if they were in that position, they would realize that murder is evil. And if they thought that God had commanded it, if they thought that God had ordered them to commit an evil act, then that God would have to be evil and He should not be obeyed. I say again, it is better to believe in your own conscience than in an evil God.”

Jeremiah shook his finger at Stone. “You are deliberately misinterpreting the story by omitting the lesson that God was teaching. He was testing Abraham’s faith. When Abraham showed that he trusted God even to the point of being willing to sacrifice his own son, God rewarded him by saving the boy. We are all tested by God. He made the story of Abraham exceptionally clear so that when we are tested in more subtle ways, we will recognize that He is doing the same to us. Every single day, I invite God to test my faith with equal severity.” He turned his eyes to heaven, and intoned, “Lord, please test my faith. Let me show you how I trust you completely. Lord, I dedicate my life and my daughter’s life to Your will.” He turned back to the audience, “I do not suffer the least fear that my Lord will abuse my trust. My daughter and I are safe in His hands.”

He nodded at a beautiful young woman wearing a conservative skirt and blouse in the first row. She stood, raised her clasped hands above her head and shouted, “Amen, father. Praise the Lord!” This was Jeremiah’s daughter, Susanna. She was always present at his sermons and public appearances. She was part of his brand identity; she had been featured prominently in his literature and on his television program since she was an infant. Since turning twenty-one last year, she had been taking an even more prominent role in Brother Jeremiah’s ministry. Clearly she was being groomed to serve as the second-in-command, a role left vacant five years ago when her mother, Sister Ruth, was killed in a tragic automobile accident.

The audience applauded the woman’s support for her father. Stone suspected most of the women were applauding the heroic way that she had borne the tragedy of her mother’s death and continued to honor her by maintaining her mother’s memory, while most of the men in the audience were applauding her long blond hair and finely featured face; not to mention the full figure that her conservative-appearing clothing had been tailored to emphasize in a subtle way.

The preacher was wily; Stone wanted to call that tussle a draw but he knew that he had press harder or it would be seen as a loss for the side of reason. “Your problem is that Abraham’s situation was not unique in the Bible. God commanded others to commit similar evil acts with a different outcome. Surely you are familiar with the story of the Levite priest and his concubine in the Book of Judges. A Levite priest and his concubine are invited to spend the night with an old man and his daughter. A mob gathers outside his door, demanding that the priest be sent out so that they can sodomize him. Instead, the old man and priest offer the man’s virgin daughter and the priest’s concubine to the mob so that they can satisfy their lust with the women rather than the man. What’s God’s message there? That raping women is all right as long as it doesn’t involve homosexuality? And what happened? The concubine was given over to the mob and gang raped all night – raped to death – and her body left on the doorstep in the morning. Guess God forgot to stay the mob’s hand that night. Maybe He doesn’t like women who’ve been sold into slavery by their fathers. These are not unique stories. The Bible is filled with rapes, murders, slavery, wars, all in the name of God. I’d rather believe in men of conscience than in an all-powerful God who could stop these crimes with a twitch of his nose, but prefers to let evil rage rampant throughout his Holy lands.”

“Again, you are deliberately misinterpreting the lessons being taught. Those are not God’s actions. Those are the actions of men. Your ‘men of conscience.’ God gives us the gift of free will and tests us to see what we do with that gift. We don’t always pass the test. And when we don’t pass the test, we are doing evil, not God.” Jeremiah thundered in his familiar powerful voice, “Read your bible a little more carefully, sir. In every story you cite, it is the conscience of your men who failed, not God.”

“And you don’t think that is evil? A God who lets men do His dirty work for Him when He could stop it at any time?”

“What alternative do you propose? That He turn men into automatons? Oh, yes, I almost forgot. That’s exactly what you think men are. Just machines made of flesh and bones that have been shaped by evolution to do only those things that give them pleasure and avoid pain. I prefer God’s way, thank you very much.” The preacher grinned with satisfaction.

At that point, Dr. Stone had little choice but to launch into an explanation of natural selection and evolutionary psychology. Brother Jeremiah let him drone on without interruption; he knew how to give a scientist enough rope to hang himself. Within five minutes, the auditorium was again filled with the sound of coughing and shuffling feet. Stone had lost them again. He had to go back on the offensive. He abruptly wrapped up his explanation and shifted gears. “We have concrete evidence for the scientific view, you have no evidence for God whatsoever. Worse, for centuries, every time religious leaders have pointed to anything, from lightning striking a tree to the sun rising in the east to the complex structure of the human hand, as evidence of God, science has given us a better explanation that does not require God’s intervention. Science has learned so much that you have to deny evidence that we can all see with our own eyes, like dinosaur bones or geological strata, just to give God a place in the world. Open your eyes to the truth and the world will be better for it. Scientific explanations tell us how to solve our problems. Religious dogma asks us to keep suffering in the dark.”

The preacher had to defend himself against that charge. “I see the same world that you see, but I see God’s hand at work throughout the whole world, the same way this podium is proof of the carpenter’s hand. This podium, this room, this building didn’t assemble itself by parts random pieces of wood falling together in a chance arrangement. The world itself proves the existence of a creator. Your sin is denying the evidence that you see all around you. Science prides itself in seeing a leaf here and a branch there, but fails to see the forest.”

Jeremiah was trying to lure Stone into delivering another long, boring monologue about the details of evolution. Stone knew that he would lose the audience permanently if he got sucked into that trap a third time. When he glanced down at the front row, Susanna caught his eye and smiled with the brilliance of an Easter dawn. Damn, she was a beautiful woman. And she was doing her best to distract him. He almost lost his train of thought and had to force himself to look away from the siren. Concentrating his gaze on Jeremiah, he realized that logic wouldn’t win here, entertainment would. Instead of leaping to defense of evolution, he stayed on the offensive. “I don’t need a whole world to convince me of the existence of God. All I need is for him to pop up for a few seconds in person and say, ‘Here I am.’ I believe that you exist because you’re willing to stand right there in front of me. I believe that every person in this room exists because they all are right here.” He gestured at the audience and, reflexively, glanced down at Susanna again. She winked at him with one of her big, deep blue eyes. He almost lost it, but, with a heroic effort, looked away and kept talking, “If God exists and He’s all-powerful and He wants me to believe in Him, all He has to do is walk onto this stage as a concrete, physical presence, wave His hand, and say, ‘Hi,’ and I’ll be an instant believer. In fact, I guarantee that every single person here will believe in God if he just shows up in person for a few seconds.” Stone looked around theatrically. “Well? Where is He? We’re all waiting.”

Jeremiah was not intimidated. He laughed deeply and sincerely. “God did appear in person and speak to us. Don’t you remember? That person was Jesus Christ. Jesus is all the proof that any man needs.”

“Not good enough. Jesus was a great man, but he was born of a woman like any other man, ate and slept like every other man, bled when he was wounded, and died like any other man. The world was filled with men claiming to be the Messiah. Jesus simply happened to be more persuasive than the others. Jesus was a great man but he is not evidence of God.”

That got the preacher’s attention. He flushed with anger and shouted, “You deny Jesus and you will burn in hell. The Bible tells us that he was the son of God and he performed miracles to prove it.”

Stone answered fire with cool reason. “Probably not. You are aware that no one who wrote the New Testament saw him perform any miracles. None of them ever met Jesus in person. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote their gospels decades after Jesus died. They were merely relating stories that had been passed down to them through oral tradition. Actually, most of Jesus’ life and death was taken from much earlier pagan mythologies, including the virgin birth, rising from the tomb, the whole shebang. We have earlier writings of other people performing every miracle that the gospels say Jesus did. It’s a lot like saying that the latest Batman movie is the truth and that all the earlier movies, comics and television shows were not.”

Now he was really hitting hard; Brother Jeremiah was furious. “Comparing Jesus to a comic book character insults us all. You will burn in hell if you do not repent. I pray for your soul.”

“Don’t bother praying for my soul. Pray for God to step onto this stage and introduce himself. That’s all it would take to make me religious. Just ask him to come here as real as you and me and I’ll believe that he exists just as surely as I believe that this podium exists.” Stone knocked on his podium to emphasize his point.

Jeremiah looked at Stone with a wily expression in his eye. “No you won’t. If God appears here in the form of a man, then you’ll dismiss Him the same as you dismissed Jesus a minute ago. If He appears here in his true form, the power of his appearance would strike you dead on the spot, along with everyone else in this auditorium. If He appears as a burning bush or in some other symbolic form, then you’ll dismiss that as a parlor trick. You don’t have an open mind. You are so fixed in your disbelief that there’s no way that God can appear on this stage that would convince you.”

“Not true. I would be willing to accept any violation of known natural physical laws as evidence of a supernatural event as long as it is clear and unambiguous and as long as safeguards are in place to rule out trickery or accident. There is a standing prize of a million dollars that will be awarded to anyone who can reliably demonstrate a supernatural event. Unambiguous evidence of God would certainly qualify.”

“What is money when a man’s soul is at risk? You can keep your money. All I ask is that you give your soul to God. I propose that if God reveals his presence through a sign tonight, that you’ll submit to God’s will. You’ll come to my church, be baptized, and attend Christian service weekly. Will you allow Him to save your immortal soul?”

Stone was taken aback. He had not expected to have to risk his time and reputation on the outcome of some spurious test of God’s existence. He looked at the audience and saw a thousand eyes watching for his response. He was trapped. “As long as the test is clear and cannot be won by trickery, I’ll accept your challenge. But what if you fail? Are you willing to give up your faith and deny God’s existence?”

“It is against my religion to risk my immoral soul, but I’ll offer you what you value more – my daughter. I have seen you looking upon her with lust in your eye. As Abraham offered to sacrifice his son, as Lot offered his daughters to the Sodomites, as the old man you mentioned in Judges offered his daughter to the mob, so I’ll offer my virgin daughter for your base and vile use if God does not answer my prayers.” Jeremiah considered it a coup to get away with describing the atheist as ‘base’ and ‘vile.’ That was an association that would stick in the audience’s mind.

The audience buzzed with excitement at the preacher’s proposition. They loved titillation. Jeremiah was a master of public relations and he knew that he would get national attention for such an audacious proposition.

Stone tried to temporize. “I can’t entertain that bet. Your daughter is a free, independent person. She’s not chattel that you can give away.”

Susanna leapt to her feet once more, raised her arms heavenward and shouted, “Praise the Lord. I put my trust in God. You can do as you wish with my body as long as my soul is safe in the Lord’s hands.” With her hands held high, her breasts strained against her blouse, thrust toward Stone like a pagan offering. He felt a stirring in his pants and suddenly grew fearful that he would get a hard on right here in front of the entire audience. Once again, he had to force himself to turn from daughter back to father by brute force of will.

Jeremiah raised his arms in imitation of his daughter and shouted, “Hallelujah, Lord. Test us and you will find our faith strong.”

The audience applauded enthusiastically.

Stone was losing them to cheap theatrics; and he hated to lose. “Name your test, then.” If the test were fair, he did not doubt that he would win. But that was as far as the theatrics would go; father and daughter would find some way to squirm out of their commitment afterward. If nothing else, they would pray together and God would tell them privately that he had relieved her of any obligation to slake the lust an unbeliever. The faithful had the benefit of thousands of years of finding cheap justifications for doing whatever they wanted at the moment.

“No, sir,” Jeremiah replied, with false piety. “It is you who is testing our faith so it is up to you to tell us what you would consider a fair test. We only risk these frail bits of mortal clay and dust, you risk your indestructible immortal soul. What would you take as indisputable evidence of God’s presence on Earth?”

Stone shrugged. He was tempted to ask for a burning bush to appear on stage, but realized that asking for something ridiculous would only make him look ridiculous. He needed something that looked scientific. Something that was simple to understand, quick to execute, and foolproof. He plunged his hand into his pocket and drew out a quarter. “The chance of a tossed coin landing heads up is fifty-fifty. There is about one chance in four thousand of throwing heads twelve times in a row.” He did not know why he chose the number ‘twelve;’ maybe because Jesus had twelve disciples. “It’s not entirely beyond chance, but I’m willing to risk one chance in four thousand and I’m sure that your all powerful God would have little problem influencing the outcome of a dozen flips of this coin.”

“No problem at all,” Jeremiah blustered. He looked at his daughter. “Let us pray.”

She mounted the stairs at the end of the stage and walked gracefully toward her father. She had been raised in front of cameras and crowds, her comportment was perfect. The crowd stood, en masse, and cheered wildly.

Stone was reminded of the story of the mob screaming at Lot’s door. A screaming crowd evoked primal fear. With a flash of insight, he realized that an outcome in his favor could be physically dangerous for him.

Jeremiah had brought this ‘debate’ to exactly the place that he wanted it. Logic and reason had been obliterated by raw lust. The stage was his workshop, emotion his tools, the mob his raw materials. No matter what happened next, Stone knew that he had lost.

Still, he had to go through the motions of a fair test. He raised his arms, asking for silence. It was a long time coming. While he stood there, Jeremiah and Susanna stood apart, side-by-side, arms raised, his hands clasping hers in a gesture of joint prayer, eyes turned to heaven, praying loudly, begging God to spare her the humiliation of ravishment by an unbeliever, begging Him to reveal Himself tonight.

Slowly, the audience began to sit back down, but it was a good five minutes before Stone could be heard. Eventually, though, the only sound in the auditorium was the prayers of the preacher and his daughter. Stone pointed to a distinguished-looking man sitting in the second row. “You, sir, in the gray suit. Would you mind stepping up here and helping us out for a few minutes.”

The man nodded and made his way onto the stage; he had considerably less grace than Susanna and less charm than Jeremiah. He looked stolid and honest.

Stone handed him the coin. “Is this a regular quarter, two-sides, not weighted in any way?”

The man looked at the coin carefully, before saying, “Looks like any other quarter to me.”

“Jeremiah, if we could interrupt you for a minute.”

Jeremiah and Susanne continued to pray, oblivious to Stone and his volunteer.

He walked over, stepped behind the daughter to get close to the father, tapped him on the shoulder, and said, “I would like you to inspect the coin and observe the process. I don’t want any accusations that anything was done wrong later.”

The daughter turned to look at him and, as soon as her face was turned from the audience, she let her distaste show. She hissed quietly, “I bet you don’t,” then turned back and resumed praying loudly along with her father.

Stone hissed back, “I don’t need to risk accusations, the chance of a half dozen heads in a row is slight, a dozen is miniscule.”

“Odds mean nothing when God intervenes,” Jeremiah responded gravely. But he lowered his arms and released Susanna’s hands. “We will watch your test if you wish.”

“I wish it.”

The three stepped over to the volunteer. Stone asked Susanna, “Would you like to inspect the coin?”

“I have no need to trust you. I trust God. He could make even a two-headed coin land tails up if He desired.”

“Flip the coin into the air, not too hard, we don’t want to lose it, and let it fall to the ground,” he instructed the volunteer.

Jeremiah began to pray again, but Susanna watched the coin, aware that it was her lovely ass at stake.

The coin fell, bounced and rolled a few feet, then dropped flat. The volunteer bent over it. “Heads,” he announced without touching it, waiting to see if Stone wanted to confirm the result.

“Praise God,” Jeremiah intoned.

“Thank you, Lord,” Susanna echoed.

“Toss it again,” Stone instructed without walking over to look.

The volunteer retrieved the coin and tossed it again.

The audience held its collective breath; the ring of the coin bouncing on the floor echoed.

“Heads again,” the volunteer announced.

“That’s two,” Stone said, wondering if maybe God was intervening. Two heads in a row was hardly unlikely, one chance in four, but the test was already going in the Christians’ favor.

Jeremiah and Susanna continued to pray loudly, thanking the Lord for his mercy.

The volunteer tossed the coin again and bent to look.

“Tails,” the volunteer announced.

Stone felt unexpectedly smug. The Weak Law of Large Numbers had triumphed over God.

Jeremiah and Susanna continued to pray loudly, but they had heard the result – their prayers changed from pleading for intervention to acceptance of God’s will.

The crowd was silent, waiting to see what the Christians would do.

Jeremiah continued to speak to his God, making brief references to Daniel in the Lions’ den, Jonah in the belly of the whale, and the trials of Job. Finally, he promised to abide by God’s will, however difficult his trials and fell silent.

Susanna looked less happy with the outcome of the coin toss, but kept her face composed in a mask of serenity. Stone could only see her emotion as a twitch in her eyelids and a quiver at the corner of her mouth. Lovely eyelids, luscious mouth.

He had nothing to say so he waited for her to speak, curious how she would play her hand.

She spent a moment in silence, wrestling with her emotions, then, when she was sure that her voice would be strong and steady, said, “I will spend tomorrow praying for strength, praying for God’s forgiveness for our arrogance in daring to put him to our test, and then will allow my father to deliver me to your door at seven in the evening. I will allow you to use my body in any way that you desire throughout the night.”

The crowed erupted into a powerful roar of combined lust and anger. Stone feared that they might begin to riot in the auditorium. He feared for his life.

Jeremiah turned to the crowd and held up his hands in supplication. Without waiting for the roar of the crowd to abate, he shouted, “We accept God’s will. As always, God will do whatever is best for us.”

The crowd roared more loudly. Stone could barely hear Susanna say, “Give me your address so we can get out of here.”

He wanted nothing more than to be gone as quickly as possible, so he pulled a business card from his wallet, scrawled his home address on the back, and handed it to her.

As calmly as though she were taking a stroll through church, she walked alone across the stage, down the stairs, and up the aisle to the main entrance. She was fearless. She was the perfect martyr. The crowd parted like the Red Sea before Moses’ staff and let her leave unimpeded. Not a single person dared reach out to touch her. Not a single man in the audience wanted to be identified with the vile, base atheist.

While all eyes were on her, Jeremiah, tapped Stone on the shoulder and said, “We’ll leave by the stage door. You and I can’t go down there.”

Thus, when the crowd looked back to the stage a minute later, it was empty. The debate was over. After a minute of silent confusion, people began to mill around in the aisles and then trickle out through the doors, discussing what they had witnessed in loud and confused chatter.

The next morning, the city newspaper carried the headline, “Atheist Wins Virgin in God Bet.” The story covered the debate briefly but inaccurately, giving considerable weight to Brother Jeremiah’s demonstrated faith in his God and completely ignoring Dr. Stone’s long explanations of science and evolution. The story highlighted Stone’s belief that God could be found by tossing a coin. It drew a clear parallel between scientists’ belief that random mutations drive evolution and this scientist’s belief in the randomness of the coin tosses. The stakes of the wager, the woman’s body against the man’s soul, were described in sarcastic terms that made Stone look like a lust-obsessed pervert and Susanna like an Old Testament martyr. Jeremiah was quoted extensively in the article; the reporter had not bothered to phone Stone for a comment. He concluded that the reporter must be a Christian fundamentalist, possibly a member of Jeremiah’s extensive video congregation.

The story was accompanied by a full-color portrait of Susanna in a choir robe. She looked ravishing. The picture alone would double the number of men who bought the paper to read the story.

Stone did not consider himself to be a lust-obsessed pervert, but his loins stirred involuntarily when he saw the picture and remembered the terms of the bet. She was gorgeous. And she had, at least for the moment, offered herself to him.

Of course, Susanna would never present herself at his door. Even Stone himself could come up with a half dozen religious reasons for her to renege on the bet.

And, of course, if she did show up, he would have to send her away without laying a hand on her; without even a chaste kiss on the cheek. As desirable as she was, as horny as he was – his wife had left him for a mathematician last year and he had had little time for dating – he was still a gentleman to the core.

He looked at the picture again. He had managed to date a couple of women over the course of the last few months, but none had been as young or beautiful as Susanna. Even when he had been young, he had never dated a woman as beautiful as her. It would take no small effort to send her away without even a kiss, but send her away he would, even if he had to spend the next two days jerking off in regret.

He was sitting in front of his computer when his doorbell rang at exactly seven that evening. He had spent most of the day trying to write a chapter on punctuated evolution for a book that he hoped would become a best-selling undergraduate text – that was the only academic writing that paid well – but had not managed to write more than a dozen words. His emotions were in turmoil; Susanna’s promise to “deliver herself to his door for his use” filled his imagination with images of her naked, nubile body. That kind of biology was not suitable for inclusion in an undergraduate text book.

He tried to pretend that he did not want her to show up at all, but knew in the depths of his heart that he wanted to see her lovely face, close and personal, even if only to tell her that she was relieved of any obligation to him. He had made his point; he did not need to exact revenge on her.

When he rose from the chair, he had to reach inside his briefs and adjust his erection. He wished that his prick knew what his brain had decided: that it was not going to see any action tonight. At least, not with the lovely Susanna.

When he opened the door, she was standing on his porch, dressed in a calf-length pleated gray skirt and white blouse, almost the same clothes that she had worn to the debate. Her makeup was perfect, not quite enough for him to know that she was wearing any cosmetics, but just enough to make her look stunning. Her long blond hair flowed over her shoulders in great golden waves. Her head was slightly bowed; she did not meet his eyes. She looked ready to submit to his will.

She was holding a small overnight bag. Her pajamas and toothbrush? She looked like she was going on a sleepover.

Looking past her, he saw Jeremiah standing beside his car, a white Lincoln Continental. A uniformed driver was holding the rear passenger door open for him.

The porch was bright under the glare of a spotlight mounted on a television camera. A bulb flashed. Then another and another from different directions. Someone had invited the press. It hadn’t been Stone.

Before he could say a word, Susanna pressed past him across the threshold. The brush of her breasts against his chest was electrifying. As soon as she was inside, she told him to shut the door.

“Wait a minute,” he replied, stunned by her determination to get inside quickly. “You have to leave. I don’t want you in here. I want you to go away.” He was not sure where he had found the strength to tell the lie.

She pulled the door out of his loose grasp and shut it firmly herself. “I’m not going anywhere until noon tomorrow. You’re going to spend the night raping me, sodomizing me, utterly degrading me.”

“No, I’m not. Don’t get me wrong. I want to make love to you. You’re a desirable girl. Very desirable. But I won’t rape anyone.”

“Don’t be an idiot. You have to. You don’t have any choice. Don’t you get it?” She looked at him with the pity that one would give a retarded child. “If you don’t rape me, then Daddy will win. He’ll say that, just like Abraham, God spoke to you and stayed your hand. If I’m still a virgin tomorrow, then he’s going to announce to the world that my virginity is living proof of God’s existence. Your silly coin flipping wasn’t a symbol of anything. I am the symbol. If I’m still intact tomorrow then I’ll spend the rest of my life being my father’s Daniel, having spent a night in the lions’ den and emerging unscathed because of my faith in God. If you don’t touch me, he’ll have a hundred thousand new converts within a week. Suckers will be lining up to give him donations. You can’t just take my virginity; you’ve got to bust me good. You’ve got to make a statement. When I walk out of here tomorrow, I’ve got to be bleeding from both ends so the world can see that Daddy’s just a psycho whoremonger, pimping out his own daughter in God’s name. Those are the rules of the game.”

“I don’t like those rules.”

“Tough. Them’s the breaks. You made up the game, now you’re stuck with the outcome. Look at this as your golden opportunity. This never happens. Beautiful young virgins don’t come into men’s houses asking to be ravished. But it’s happening now. I’m standing here demanding that you ravish me. Be selfish. Be brutal. Take what you want. You can do anything you want short of maiming or killing me. I’ve given you my consent, publicly and irrevocably. I want you to rape me and keep raping me until noon tomorrow, no matter what I say later. It doesn’t matter if my courage fails and I scream and beg you to stop, you have to keep on using me every way you can imagine.” She dropped her bag by the door and walked through an archway into his living room. “The sooner we get started the better. You want to ravish me on the floor right here, right now? Or flip my skirt over my head and take from behind like a dog, bent over that chair? Or do you want to drag me upstairs to your bed? There’re good points and bad for each option. The bed would be most comfortable and the bloody sheets will be a terrific prop. You do have white sheets, don’t you? On the other hand, the chair is the most degrading and that counts for a lot. But the floor will leave nice bruises and burns on my back if you pound me hard enough. What do you think? You’re the rapist, so it’s your choice. Just go for it. You’ve got to assert yourself or I’ll just run right over you. I can be bad that way. Don’t let me get the upper hand.”

“Are you really a virgin?”

“In every orifice. I’m a public figure. Daddy barely lets me out of his sight long enough to take a dump. No guy’s ever had a chance to so much as kiss me on the lips, much less make me. Now, you get to do it all and I expect you to plow me like a rutting goat on crack.”

He winced at the metaphor and tried to soften the image. “Do you really want to make love to me?”

“No!” She was emphatic. “If I did that, then I would be committing the sin of fornication. I won’t commit a sin. I have to be unwilling and you have to rape me. Then I’m a victim, not a sinner. That’s my rules.”

“Can I get you a drink?” Stone needed time to think about his situation. He had been so busy lusting after Susanna during the last twenty hours that he had not considered the implications of winning the God bet. She was right. If she walked out of here untouched, her father would have the greatest propaganda tool since the Resurrection. He was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. Damn.

“I don’t drink,” she replied. “But you go ahead if you need it. I won’t mind. I hear that a glass of whisky can help stir up a man’s lust. You are a man, aren’t you? I mean a real man? God, I hope you aren’t homo. You don’t look like one. If you are, it’s all right. You can bust me up with your hand or a cucumber or something, but I’d rather get the real thing the first time, you know.”

“I’m not gay.”

“Good. So how about having that whisky now. Or vodka or whatever real men drink.”

“Scotch. I’m partial to single malt scotch.”

“Well, you tell me where it is and I’ll pour you a glass. Think of it as part of the service. The first part of a lot of service.”

He gestured toward the kitchen. “I’ve got a bottle in the cupboard above the refrigerator.”

He waited in his living room, listening to her bang around in his kitchen and trying to think his way out of this mess. He hated thinking that he was capable of rape but the idea of making love the beautiful virgin in his house was making him as hard as a rock. And she was consenting, wasn’t she? Hundreds of people had heard her offer herself to him last night. There were photographs of her voluntarily walking into his house. She had told him explicitly that she wanted him to ravish her. He was free to do anything he wanted.

And his prick was telling him exactly what he wanted.

It had been weeks since he had had sex with a woman. And Dr. Worther hadn’t been any great shakes between the sheets. And he had never made love to a virgin.

He tried to imagine what was going through her mind, but was at a loss. She seemed to be volunteering to be raped, but it wouldn’t be rape if she volunteered, would it? Wouldn’t that be consensual sex? Her whole attitude seemed to be tongue-in-cheek, but there was considerable potential for the night to go badly for her. Did she not realize the risk that she was taking by coming here? He was a rational man, but she was putting an awful lot of pressure on him. He could feel his logical shell cracking under the pressure of his animal emotions. She was young and naďve, but, when he looked at her, he did not see anything particularly naďve about her. She seemed to know exactly what she wanted and was determined to get it.

Susanna returned with a water glass half filled with scotch. Fourteen-year-old Oban cost sixty dollars a bottle – she was handing him about ten dollars worth. He was glad that he had not splurged on thirty-two-year old, or he would be downing more than he could afford.

“Here’s your glass of liquid manhood. Drink up.”

He cringed at the implication that he needed to get drunk to perform. She had a vicious tongue. He set the glass on his coffee table, untouched.

“You want this?”

“Do me. Or call a friend over if you’re not up to it yourself. Or call a few friends over and let everyone do me. It’s up to you how I get done, but I will be done before I leave.”

“Let’s go up to the bedroom. The stairs are down the hallway.”

“You want me in the bedroom, you can drag me up there.” She tossed her head of long, thick hair at him in defiance.

“I’m not dragging you anywhere.”

“Don’t be a pussy.” She slapped him hard across the face. He froze in shock at the sudden pain. She slapped him again. “Are you just going to stand there and take it, or are you going to act like a man and defend yourself?”

She raised her arm to strike him a third time, but he grabbed her wrist. “Stop that.”

“Make me,” and she slapped him with her left hand. “Pussy.”

His face was stinging. He grabbed her left wrist, too, putting them at a momentary impasse – both his hands were occupied holding both her wrists. She jerked her arms back, trying to break his grip, but only managing to press her body against his. His chest felt on fire where her breasts were crushed against him; his groin inflamed where her crotch was grinding against his cock. Her face was thrust into his, her eyes glowing. Hate? Lust? Desire? He could not discern her emotion. He tried to kiss her, but she squirmed and turned her face away. He released her wrists and grabbed her hair on each side of her head to force her face back to him, then ground his lips against hers. She opened her mouth and pressed back against him, wrapping her arms around his back to clutch him tight.

When he broke from her, he kept his hold on her head, looked down into her eyes and said, “You want this? Take off your clothes.”

She snarled back, “You want my clothes off, you can tear them off.”

He dropped his hands passed her neckline, grabbed each side of her blouse between the second and third buttons and pulled hard in opposite directions. Buttons flew across the room and some part of the material tore at the shoulder. Jerking the front of the blouse back past her arms, he yanked it from her shoulders, leaving it tangled around her wrists, the tight buttoned cuffs keeping it from falling over her hands.

She froze in shock at the sudden exposure of her torso, clad only in a lacy white bra. Without pausing for thought, he slipped his fingers around the inside edges of the bra cups at her cleavage and pulled that apart, too. The bra parted in the center, far more easily than he would have expected. He would never realize that she had used a seam ripper to weaken the center section of her bra, as well as other critical parts of her clothing, anticipating this eventuality. His motion jerked the cups away from her tits, and snapped the straps off her shoulders. The ruined undergarment dropped down her arms to rest on the blouse that was still wrapped around her wrists, further restraining her.

She tried to raise her hands, as though to cover her breasts in a classic gesture of maidenly modesty, but the fabric that was tangled about her wrists kept her arms lowered at her back and she could only jerk at it ineffectively, making her tits bounce and jiggle.

Stone’s wife had been more modestly endowed; he had never dated a woman with such large, perfect tits. He grabbed them firmly, one in each hand, and began to squeeze and massage them.

Susanna moaned. He did not know if she were moaning with pleasure or moaning because he was hurting her. But she pressed herself forward into his hands so he chose to believe the latter. He pushed slowly against her, with his weight behind him, forcing her to step backwards until her calves were pressed against his ottoman. Continuing to push, she bent at the knees and sat on it. He put a knee beside her hip and pushed her all the way down on her back until her head and shoulders were lying on the sofa cushion, her blonde hair spread in a golden corolla around her head. Only then did he release her breasts, and stand back to look at her.

She remained where he had put her, her chest was heaving, her lips parted to draw air. Her eyes stared at him, wide, waiting to see what he would do to her.

She looked unbelievably desirable.

He had to have her.

Her hands were still trapped in her torn blouse and bra, now trapped between her hips and the ottoman. When she tried to sit up, her lean abdominal muscles rippling with the effort, he swooped down, grabbed her ankles and pulled her feet off the floor to the height of his waist, preventing her from rising.

She struggled against him, but was not seriously trying to escape, merely flexing her muscles, further arousing him.

When he spread her legs, her skirt slipped past her knees. Her ineffectual struggles worked it down her upraised thighs toward her hips.

He saw bare flesh above the tops of nylons that were held up by a white garter straps. He pushed himself between her spread knees, released his hold on her ankles, and pushed the front of the skirt past her hips to her waist. Rather than pantyhose, she was wearing a traditional garter belt and cotton panties. Not erotic fantasy-wear, but simple, functional undergarments that a housewife would have worn in the early fifties.

Stone was more excited by the naďve innocence of these undergarments than he would have been by some black leather and lace thing that had been designed to appeal to a fetish connoisseur. These were real. Almost without volition, his hands reached to her hips, pushed the garter straps aside, grabbed her panties at the waistband and pulled in two directions. The material tore away, first along the seam at the waist on the left side, then across the crotch, revealing tight golden blonde curls surrounding swollen pink lips that parted to reveal slick red flesh, glistening with moisture.

She was ready for him.

His hands were trembling, almost too much to unbuckle his belt and unbutton his pants, but he managed. He did not bother with the zipper, but slid his pants and boxers down to his knees as soon as he had loosened his waistband.

He fell upon her, full length, grabbing her shoulders with his hands and staring directly into her eyes as he pushed and thrust against her vulva with his rock-hard cock. He found the entrance to her cunt and watched her face as he pushed into her. She grimaced in pain as her maidenhead parted under his pressure.

She had told him that she wanted to be busted open hard. So be it. He pounded deep into her without hesitation. She whimpered and he pounded harder. She began to cry softly and the tears welling in her eyes spurred him on. He was beyond caring what she wanted; he had to get what he wanted.

He took her long and hard with utter selfishness. When he finally spent himself into her, she was sobbing, already mourning the loss of what she had had been saving for a decade, what she had expected to save for her future husband. It did not matter that she had asked for this violation – had deliberately taunted and humiliated Stone until he had done as she demanded – she had been violated by a man that she did not even like, much less love. He had taken something from her that she could never get back.

Even after he withdrew, she felt his seed inside her, deep where only her true love belonged. She drew her knees together and brought them to her chest. Finally extricating her arms from her ruined blouse, she wrapped her hands around herself.

He stood and pulled his pants back up to his waist, then looked down at the woman who had drawn herself into a fetal position. Her flat shoes had been knocked off during his assault and lay askew on the floor in front of the ottoman. She looked bereft. Stone touched her shoulder gently and whispered, “I’m sorry.”

She twisted around to look at him though tear-blurred eyes and replied, coldly, “Get some rest. You’ve got a lot of raping left to do before noon tomorrow. You haven’t touched my ass yet and you’re going to have to fuck my mouth sometime as well. And, if you can manage to get it up after all that, you have to fuck my cunt again. Once is not nearly enough. You’ve got to be man enough to do it right or it won’t be worth the cost.”

Hearing such brutal language from the beautiful, tender, abused woman rocked Stone back on his heels. Very well. If she wanted brutality, he would give it to her. He looked at the blood from her deflowerment smeared between her legs and across the beige ottoman. He had made a good start, but if she wanted more, then he would carry on with pleasure.

Only a few minutes after finishing Act One and he already felt himself twitching in preparation for Act Two. He, too, could be a five-times-a-night man when he had such a delicious object to slake his lust.

He took a deep swig of scotch from the glass on the table, sat back in his easy chair to enjoy the view between the curled woman’s legs, and began to stroke himself in preparation for the next round.

Taking him in her round little ass would be a damned hard trial for her, but a pure joy for him. He had seen The Last Tango in Paris with his wife. She had wanted to try the experience and had helped him recreate what had happened in the movie, so he knew how to do it. If Susanna insisted that she wanted him up her butt, then he would be happy to give it to her in spades.

He warmed his gullet with another gulp of Oban.

Damned happy.

All had been quiet for a long time. Half an hour? An hour? Stone didn’t know; he never wore his watch inside the house and deliberately kept no clock in the living room. He had furnished this room for reading, conversation with friends, and quiet contemplation. And now, apparently, for raping virgins.

The raped virgin in question mumbled something.

“I beg your pardon?”

Susanna gathered her courage, turned her head to look at him and said, loudly and clearly, “Are you ready to sodomize me yet or do you have to call up a couple of your friends to do your job for you?” She let her head fall back on the sofa cushion.

He looked at the woman. She was still curled into a fetal position, but sometime in the last little while, she had pulled her skirt back down to cover her ass and thighs. “I can do just fine without any help,” he snarled, rolled to his feet and strode across the floor.

She flinched at hearing his footsteps approaching. Her mind might be telling her that she wanted to have her asshole raped but her body certainly did not want to suffer the pain. While he approached, she kept telling herself that it would be over soon and that she would survive.

He wrapped his hand deep in her hair at the back of her head and pulled her to her feet. She shrieked in a small voice. He told himself that, soon, she’d be shrieking with a hell of a lot bigger voice. He was appalled to observe his own cruelty, but that did not deter him. He told himself that it was the scotch warming his gut was in control now, but he knew that the drink was just an excuse that would allow him to do what he most wanted to do.

When he started to drag her away from the sofa, she reached behind her head and grabbed his hand with both of hers, trying to reduce the pressure on her scalp and keep him from pulling out her hair by the handful. The pain was intense. She screamed.

He half pulled, half dragged her to the kitchen. Without letting go of her hair, he yanked the refrigerator door open and grabbed a handful of margarine from the butter dish. Left hand cupping a generous scoop of margarine, right still wrapped in her long blonde hair, he pulled her across the room to the kitchen table and roughly bent her over it. He kicked her legs apart, and then released her hair so that he could use his right hand to pull her skirt up to her waist and push her ass cheeks open to reveal her puckered little pink asshole. She was clean as a whistle. Her asshole pulsed involuntarily in anticipation of imminent abuse.

He smeared the margarine over her hole and then jammed as much into her as he could with his middle finger. He couldn’t get much inside, she wouldn’t be particularly well lubricated, but that was her problem. She had told him that she wanted to bleed from both ends. He would give her what she asked for. He only cared that he had enough lubrication to keep himself from getting chafed.

He wrapped his hand back in her hair to make sure she stayed bent and open to him, then shoved his pants down. He was hard again; this was way more exciting than making love to a woman his own age in the dark in the traditional missionary position.

He forced himself into her slowly; the extent of his mercy was to give her a few seconds to try to accommodate him. It was almost no mercy at all. She screamed loudly; beat a tattoo against the floor with her stockinged feet, and twisted her head back and forth, desperate to get free; desperate to move her asshole away from the cock that was straining her tight little ring of muscle. He wrapped his left hand into her hair as well, smearing greasy margarine into her lovely locks, and applied unrelenting pressure to force the head of his cock further and further into her asshole, feeling her rings of muscle resisting at first, then contracting in an attempt to expel him, and then slowly failing and allowing the inevitable violation of her anus. He began thrusting in and out, slowly, regularly. Looking down, he could see fresh scarlet smears on his shaft. A blood vessel had burst somewhere inside her. She was getting exactly what she had asked for; she was bleeding from both ends. He kept fucking her anyway.

She never stopped screaming.

She was so hot, so tight around his cock, he was lost in ecstasy. This was heaven on earth.

He came and came.

Her screams were the song of a fallen angel in his ears: a hymn to lust and pain and degradation.

Finally, he pushed himself off and collapsed back into a kitchen chair where he slumped in exhaustion. Feeling immensely satisfied with himself, he watched the woman laying across his table. She had stopped screaming moments after he had extracted himself from her and was crying quietly; copious tears were running down her face and puddling on the plastic-coated wood. Two lethargic rivulets of fresh blood were dripping slowly down the backs of her thighs, bright red at the top and dark red toward the bottom where they almost reached the tops of her stockings before coagulating into thick dark masses.

She might have wanted to have her asshole brutally raped, but that did not make it easy for her to endure. Or make her like the man who had violated her. At this moment, she hated Thomas Stone with all her heart.

She could remain bent over the table no longer; her back was aching from the strain. She pushed herself up, gingerly, until she was almost standing erect. Her skirt fell to cover the evidence of the two brutal penetrations.

She staggered and almost fell when she tried to walk; the pain in her crotch was crippling. Grabbing the edge of the table, she lowered herself to the floor and lay on the cool tiles, her back turned to her rapist, suffering the pain of her violations as quietly as possible.

“Oh, Susanna, don’t you cry for me,” Stone sang out at her, surprising himself, both by the cruelty of his jest and the degree that he had shed his inhibitions. Before tonight, he had never sung aloud to another person. Finding himself capable of singing was more surprising than finding himself capable of rape.

She did not reply.

“You had enough, yet?” he asked.

She shook her head resolutely and whispered, “More.”

“More?”

“I can take more,” she replied. “I can take whatever you can do to me.” She was confident that he could not achieve another erection this soon after sodomizing her, but was determined that he would rape her again as soon as he was able. She only hoped that he was finished with her back door – getting fucked up the asshole a second time tonight would break her. But if he forced her, she would allow herself to be broken, regardless. She would never ask for mercy and, as the evening progressed, he was slipping into the role that she had assigned to him. His reluctance to use force was rapidly evaporating.

When she challenged him to continue abusing her, she did not consider that he did not have to be erect to take pleasure from her.

“Get over here,” he ordered.

She did not move. “Make me,” she whispered.

“As you wish.” She heard the creak of a chair as he rose, then his footsteps on the tile floor. She saw his slipper-clad right foot step in front of her face. Some distant part of her mind noted that he wore slippers at home, even when he was sodomizing a virgin. How ironically civilized. Chair legs scraped across the floor and wood creaked as he re-seated himself at her head.

“Get up here,” he snarled, but did not wait for her to obey. He grabbed her hair at the side of her head and pulled her up to his waist. She grabbed at his wrist and scrambled to her knees, only to reduce the pain from being pulled by the hair, not because she wanted to help him. He pressed her face into his crotch. His pants and boxers were nowhere to be seen. She did not know if he had removed them before he had sodomized her or afterward. He said, “Lick me. Suck me clean,” as he pressed her mouth against his limp, dirty cock.

She was repelled by the olio of margarine, semen, and blood that was pressing against her lips. There was probably shit mixed in, too, but she could neither taste nor smell any evidence of it and was glad that she had thought to evacuate her bowel and wash herself before coming here, in anticipation of what would be done to her.

She would have told him to “make her” again, but realized that he could only force her to use her mouth by beating her into submission. Unlike her cunt and asshole, a mouth could not be used without cooperation. A real rapist could use the threat of severe bodily harm or death to force cooperation, Stone could not. She would only have her mouth penetrated if she allowed it.

It was time for her to prove to him that she had been sincere when she had given him access to her entire body to be used as he wished. She told herself that cooperation at this point would not be considered fornication. Really, this was just an extension of the anal rape. It helped that it was happening almost immediately after.

But that logic did not make the act any easier. She reluctantly pushed her tongue against his limp dick and gave it a little lick. His dick tasted as bad as it smelled. She suppressed a gag.

“You can do better than that. I want to see a little gusto here. Some genuine enthusiasm.” He released her hair to give her freedom of movement.

She wet her tongue and licked again. And then again. As she licked the wrinkled skin on the underside, she was licking it clean. As she licked the nauseating taste away, she found his cock more palatable. When she moved to the side, his limp dick flopped away from her oral ministrations, so she had to reach up and grab it with her hand to steady it.

She had never held a man’s cock in her hand before and she took a little time to explore him with her fingers. When she pushed his foreskin back, she uncovered the head and went to work on it with as much enthusiasm as she could muster; there was a ridge around the head and a depression on the other side that had collected more material than anywhere else. She forced herself to suck it clean, swallowing every chunky little crumb of drying cum and coagulating blood.

This was more nauseating than anything that she could have imagined. This was the epitome of degeneracy. This was the degradation that offended her sensibilities beyond description. This was exactly what she desired.

When she had cleaned him as much as possible, she tipped her head back and looked up at his foul face, leering down at her.

“That feels good. Don’t stop until I tell you to.” He pushed her head back into his crotch. She began licking and sucking again.

And a miracle happened. Though it had been less than ten minutes since he had finished plowing her asshole, he began to swell again.

As she continued sucking valiantly, he grew hard. His cock engorged with fresh blood until it filled her mouth completely. She had to stretch her jaw wide to admit him at all; she could only fit the head and first inch of his shaft into her mouth without gagging.

He did not care; with his hands still on the back of her head, he pushed her hard onto him.

When he forced his cock so far that the head pressed against the back of her throat, she began to gag again. This was not the disgusted gagging caused by a bad taste, but was a hard-wired physiological reflex that she could not repress. But when she gagged and heaved against him, he was only stimulated more and forced himself deeper into her throat. He snarled, “Swallow me and keep swallowing.” She forced her throat to make swallowing motions, but it only helped slightly. Now he wrapped both hands in her hair again and began lunging in and out of her mouth in a steady rhythm by raising his hips out of the chair and yanking her head down on him at the same time. She gasped for air on the out strokes and gagged uncontrollably on the in strokes. She feared that she was going to choke to death; if not directly by his cock blocking her airway, then indirectly by vomiting and being forced to aspirate it. Having her cunt raped had been devastating, having her asshole raped had been excruciating, but having her mouth raped was life-threatening.

She struggled against him, but he was relentless. She tried to gain her feet, but he held her down. She pounded his legs with her fists but he did not care. She choked and screamed and cried and he kept thrusting into her over and over for so long that she was beginning to lose consciousness. Finally, mercifully, he managed to come into her throat. He arched his back, screamed, ground her head into his crotch, and dribbled thin watery jism into her throat in a series of weak contractions. Cumming for the third time in less than two hours was hardly a cataclysmic event; she had licked more semen off his cock after her ass-fucking than she was getting injected into her mouth now.

But it was still an orgasm. It still counted. Her mouth was virgin no longer; she had been fully abused in every orifice. She had already passed the basic milestone and still had more than twelve hours to accumulate as much additional abuse as possible.

He released her head and she fell back to the floor, gasping for air.

She felt so bad in every way, physically and emotionally, that she was astounded to hear the man looming over her say, quietly and sincerely, “You are so good.”

She whispered, “More.”

He laughed aloud. “Not until we’ve both had some rest. Come on up to bed.”

“Make me,” she whispered.

“Yeah, right,” he chuckled and reached down to give her a hand and pull her to her feet.

When she stood, he looked down at her, naked from the waist up and commented, “Before you leave tomorrow, we’re going to have to do something with your tits. They’re too amazing to ignore.”

She looked down at her naked chest. She had good tits. She was proud of them and used them to attract male television viewers and hold their attention. She knew exactly how the right blouse and bra would look modest and chaste but subtly make her tits thrust forward in perfect definition; how she could stand and walk so that her tits would move and heave with promises that would never be fulfilled. She could hypnotize a man with her tits and break his heart in two. But she had no idea how her tits could be used to give sexual gratification to a man.

“Take off the rest of your clothes. I want to enjoy your beauty.”

She shrugged. “If you want them off, you can tear them off. Nobody is stopping you.” Her voice was banal, matter of fact; she was too tired of being brutalized to care about a little thing like being naked.

He grabbed her waistband and yanked it apart. Her hips jerked toward him from the force of his action. Two buttons went spinning across the room, a seam parted with a loud tear, and he was left holding the ruins of her skirt. She was left with her golden bush framed by the straps of her white garter belt.

He gave her garter belt the same treatment, then pushed her stockings down to her ankles, one at a time, letting his hand caress the length of each leg.

She had to step out of the feet of the stockings to render herself completely nude for his lecherous inspection.

It was the first time in her life that she had ever been nude in the presence of a man. Even as an infant, her father had stayed out of the room when her mother had bathed and changed her. She realized, wryly, that she had been thoroughly raped and sodomized before a man had even seen her naked body. This was not the usual order of events in a young woman’s maturation.

Stone spent a long time looking at her before he finally led her upstairs. She was more beautiful in person than she had been in his imagination. The degree to which she allowed him to despoil her only made her that much more beautiful in his eyes.

Every part of her ached as she followed him up the staircase to his bedroom. Not only was her vulva bruised, her anus abraded, and her jaw stiff, but the muscles in her back, legs and arms had been stretched and strained. She felt the drying fluids caked on her inner thighs and the margarine streaked through the hair on the left side of her head. She wanted to spend an hour soaking in a warm tub. She wanted it so badly that she would take satisfaction in denying herself the pleasure if it were offered. She would allow herself no relief of any kind until noon tomorrow when her ordeal was over.

She need not have worried – Stone offered nothing. He merely escorted her to his bed, shucked his shirt and socks, crawled between the sheets, and rolled over, leaving her to tuck herself into the other side. She had told him to be selfish and he was following her instructions to the letter.

Judging by the changes in his breathing, he fell asleep within minutes. Despite her pain, despite her unfamiliarity with her surroundings, despite her mistrust of the man that she was permitting to abuse her, physical and emotional exhaustion soon took her into the same place.

Susanna was awakened by someone pushing on her shoulder. It was dark and she was disoriented for a minute, not remembering where she was. First, she became aware of the pain throbbing in her ass from its violation a few hours earlier, and then she realized that it was Stone waking her up. “What’s wrong?” she mumbled.

“Nothing’s wrong. I've got a stiffy and you’re going to take care of it.”

“What?” she asked, still half asleep.

“Roll over and get on your knees, head down.”

“What?” The green glow of the numerals on the digital clock said 3:30. No wonder it was still dark.

“Come on. We don’t have all night.”

Actually, she thought as she began to clear the sleep from her head, we do have all night. All night is exactly what we’ve got. She did not want to be raped again. Except, she thought, getting raped again is exactly what I want. So she rolled over, tucked her knees under her hips and raised her sore ass high in the air.

As soon as she felt the fresh sting of cool air on her abused asshole, she thought, It’s my ass. He’s going to rape my poor asshole again. I don’t think I can take it.

But he left her asshole alone. He forced her legs apart wide so that he could kneel between them, and, without ceremony, thrust his stiff cock into her cunt. The raw edges of her torn hymen were painfully sensitive, but that was not the worst. There was some moisture still in her from the previous evening’s fuck fest, but she was not lubricated well enough to accommodate his cock comfortably. It felt like he was rubbing her inside raw when he began pulling out and slamming back into her as deeply as he could.

She bunched the corner of her pillow into her mouth and chewed on it to keep from screaming.

After a couple of minutes of lunging and pounding, she had secreted enough lubrication to give her some ease.

She laid her head on the sheets and let herself be used. What did it matter? What was a little doggy-style fuck to her after her asshole had been ripped out to a new size and her tonsils roto-rootered last night?

Eventually, he pulsed, squirted, withdrew, turned out the lights, and went back to sleep. He had not said a single word to her after ordering her to present her rump to him. Now, lying in the dark, his cum again leaking from between her cunt lips, she understood that a new humiliation had been added to her account. Being used as nothing more than a convenient hole without the slightest acknowledgement of her humanity was more degrading than anything she had yet experienced.

Things looked different in the morning light. She awoke in an empty bed to bright sunlight and the smell of bacon and eggs.

Too sore between her legs to walk with any grace, she waddled to the on suite bath, relieved her bladder, and drank deeply directly from the faucet. She did not wash herself. Looking in the mirror, she was satisfied to see that she looked as bad as she felt. Her hair was a tangled, greasy mess from sweat and butter; her eyes were red and puffy from crying; her face was streaked with dirt from lying on floors. Looking down at herself, she could see the dried blood crusted between her legs. From head to foot, she looked like a woman who had been abused beyond her limits. Soap and water were out of the question; they would destroy the mask that she had endured so much pain and humiliation to acquire. A clock in the bathroom said that it was almost ten, so she had to endure this for only two more hours.

She would use the remaining hours of her ordeal to good advantage.

In the movies, a woman always wraps a sheet about her to preserve her modesty when she gets out of bed. Real women disdained such foolish artifice. She limped down stairs, naked as a babe, to find that Stone had folded and stacked her ruined clothes, shoes on top, next to her overnight bag.

Stone looked cheerful as he buttered toast. When he saw her, he said, “There’s a robe hanging on the back of the bathroom door. You can wear that after you clean yourself up. I’ll keep your breakfast warm until you get back.”

“No sense putting on a robe if I just have to take it off again right away,” she croaked.

“Why would you have to take it off again?” His voice conveyed genuine puzzlement.

“It’s easier to rape me if I’m naked, isn’t it?”

“You can’t want more.” He sounded dismayed.

“I want more. It’s not noon yet.”

“I’m too tired,” he admitted.

“So what? I’ll do whatever I have to do to get you aroused again.” She put her hands under her breasts and lifted them slightly. “You said that you wanted to use my tits. How would you do that?”

He looked at the lovely young round tits that she was offering to him and sighed. “I would spread lubricant on them, maybe baby oil or K-Y jelly, or even cooking oil if that’s all I had. You would press them together to form a cleavage and I’d rub my penis between them until I ejaculated. If I were fresh enough, I might be able to ejaculate hard enough to hit your face.”

“Okay. You got any baby oil?”

“No. I can’t do that. I’m worn out after everything we did last night. Your breasts are beautiful enough to make me weak with desire, but tit-fucking wouldn’t give me enough stimulation to get me off this morning. If we had started out with that last night, there would have been no problem, but not now.”

That was a problem. If he needed strong stimulation this morning, then she would have to take him up her ass again; that was her tightest hole. Her asshole ached when she thought about being penetrated there again, but she would do it anyway. She would endure anything for the greater glory of God. “Well, you’re going to have to rape me at least once more before I leave. One for the road, so to speak.”

“I might manage that if you really want it.”

“I do.” Her aching body did not want to be touched again, but she had needs that her body did not understand.

“Well, then, you better eat a good breakfast because you’ll need your strength.”

“I already have all the strength that I need. But you go ahead.” She smiled grimly. “I need you to be as strong as you can be.”

He raised an eyebrow. The woman was a glutton for punishment.

As she watched him eat, her mouth watered. It wouldn’t hurt to eat just one egg and a couple of rashers of bacon. Then she reminded herself that that was exactly the point. Depriving herself of food would hurt and that was her goal. When she left the house, she would look like she was hurting because she really would be hurting as much as possible. Her exit was too important for her to trust her acting skills, even as experienced on the stage as she was. She would deliver the real goods.

Between bites, Stone wanted to talk. “I’ve been trying to understand you. Why are you doing this?”

“Not eating?”

“This whole thing. Coming here, letting me have sex with you. No, not just letting me have sex, forcing me to use you as crudely as possible. Is this your idea of an S and M game? Is this fulfilling some kind of fantasy for you? Losing your virginity in the worst possible way?”

She nodded. “I’m a masochist. Surely that’s obvious to you. I’ve fantasized about being hurt and abused since I was a child. This is as much abuse as I can take in reality, but in my fantasies, I’ve been tortured to death in more horrible ways than you could possibly imagine. But you should expect that. I was raised as a religious fundamentalist.”

“Huh?”

“Surely you realize that religious fundamentalism is a sadomasochistic lifestyle. People submit to their religious leaders for the sole purpose of being abused in the name of their religion. And they glory in their own suffering and the suffering of their neighbors. Look at the Catholics, kneeling on the floor, looking up at depictions of their saints’ agonizing deaths immortalized in stained glass. Look at the orthodox Jews restricting their own freedoms. On their Sabbath, they will sit in the dark rather than turn a light on. And don’t even get me started on the foods that they deprive themselves of. Look at the way the fundamentalist Muslim women submit to their husbands’ commands; and the way their husbands, in turn, obey every whim of their imams. Don’t even get me started on fundamentalist Mormons and their so-called marriages to underage relatives. And what do we Christians choose as the single symbol of our religion? Do we choose the Star of Bethlehem that marked Christ’s birth? The fish and loaves that were the bounty of the Sermon on the Mount? Not on your life. We decorate our spires and altars with the instrument of torture that the Romans used to execute Christ. I spent my entire childhood on my knees looking up at statues of a young man’s nearly naked body racked on a cross, his muscles defined by his agony while his face looked up with an expression of ecstasy. Of course I fantasized about taking pleasure in suffering. What else would you expect? You show me a religious fundamentalist of any stripe and I’ll show you an honest-to-God masochist every time.”

“So you enjoyed being raped?”

She smiled wryly. “Enjoyment is a complicated word when you are talking to a masochist. The simple answer is, ‘No, I did not enjoy being raped.’ It hurt. It was degrading. There was nothing about it that I could enjoy. And you will do it to me again before I leave and it will hurt again and I will hate it. You are going to force yourself into my asshole one more time and I’m sitting here, dreading it more than anything. But that’s the point. I’m not supposed to enjoy the pain. Masochism is forcing yourself to endure something even though you don’t want to do it. The dread is wonderful. The anticipation of the inevitable pain is lovely. You could say that I’m enjoying my feeling of dread if you like. And there’s the aftermath. I will revel in knowing that I survived the pain and fear and triumphed. I will thrill at feeling my body heal and become strong again. You could say that I enjoy that, too, but, really, joy is simply the wrong word. Excitement, anticipation, triumph, and satisfaction are the positive emotions that a masochist strives for. It isn’t about enjoying pain at all.”

One sentence stood out from all the others in Susanna’s monologue. “You think that I’m going to fuck you in the ass again this morning?”

“Sure. Why not? This is your last hurrah. I’m not coming back here, ever. You’ll never get another shot at me. This is your last chance to wring the last drop of pleasure out of my body. You have to go for it or you’ll spend the rest of your life regretting that you let the opportunity slip away. You may as well get as much pleasure as you can now, because you’ll be feeling plenty of pain of your own in the days to come.”

Her words startled him. “What do you mean?”

“Did you think that you were getting a free ride, here? I’m giving you a merry dance, but you’re going to have to pay the piper for the tune. Let me tell you what’s going to happen to you in the next little while. In a little over an hour, I’m going to walk out of here and I’m going to be the most famous martyr since Jesus himself. My picture is going to be front page news around the world. Television superstars will be lining up to interview me. You, on the other hand, are going to get hit hard. You’re going to be Judas, Pontius Pilate, and Christ’s executioners all rolled up into one. You are Satan’s tool in my little melodrama. Or maybe I should say, Satan’s fool. The story is simple. My father was arrogant and God punished him by letting Satan send his brutal atheist to wreck His vengeance upon his virgin daughter. I’ve suffered horribly for my father’s sins. The public will love the story. It’s got sex, violence, and a moral lesson. Sugar coat sordid pornography with coat of piety to make it palatable and people will gobble it down with gusto every time.

“The police will be falling over themselves in their rush to interrogate you about what happened. You can expect to spend the rest of today and most of the night in police custody. But don’t worry; they’re just trying to get their names in newspapers, too. Don’t say a word, call your lawyer, and you’ll never be charged. I’m an adult and I consented to everything you did to me. That’s in the public record. You never physically restrained me or kept me from leaving and I’ll not lie and say that you did. And I’m not going to dilute my story by submitting to any medical examination. I already served God by submitting to you and I don’t need to suffer any further abuse at the hands of the authorities. You’ve committed no crime under the law and no prosecutor will be able to bring any charge against you.

“Of course, your lack of ethics is another matter. Your unrestrained lust is going to be a matter for public discussion for years, if not centuries. I will be making it clear that an avowed atheist was eager and willing to rape an innocent young woman half to death when given the chance. My language will be pious and circumspect, but I will not lie. Everyone will know exactly how I suffered at your hands and how much joy you took from abusing me. You will be infamous. I don’t hold any ill will against you, but I don’t hold any affection for you, either. I needed a villain and you stepped up to the plate. Blackening your name is simply a necessary part of my plan and I’ll be happy enough to do it.” She smiled weakly and shrugged a shoulder.

Stone’s heart sank. “What plan?”

“This whole thing is the culmination of a power struggle between my father and me over control of the church. Ever since he had my mother killed, I’ve been waiting for my chance to depose him. I’ve spent years walking a fine line; on one side, gaining as much personal status with the congregation, and on the other side, never giving my father any specific reason to act against me. He knows that I’m a threat, has known for years, but he can’t take action against me without endangering his own position. I’m too popular and I’m not the only person in the high ranks of the church who’d like to kick him to the curb. If I suffer the same kind of ‘accident’ as my mother, the jackals will be picking his bones clean before mine are in the ground.”

“You think he killed your mother?”

“I know he did. Everybody at the top knows it. She was using drugs and spending the church money too freely. The auditors were sniffing around. Reporters had her scent. The police were becoming aware of her. She was beginning to spin out of control and he had to get rid of her before she became a public embarrassment. Divorce was out of the question, murder the obvious solution.”

Stone was intrigued. “How did he get away with it?”

“With the greatest of ease. He didn’t do it himself, of course. He uses other people for everything. He’s rich and he controls a lot of people. A little money to a coroner, a couple of cops who were members of his congregation, and presto-change-o, assault with a blunt object becomes a drunken automobile accident that morphs into a sad misfortune. God’s will is done and father thrives.

“He’s pulled the same trick with you. The sick old bastard has lusted after me for years, but he never dared touch me. He knew that if he raped me himself, I’d go straight to the police with his sperm inside me and get him sent away for life. That’s why he jumped at the chance to deliver me into your hands. If he can’t rape me himself, then he figured that he could rape me by proxy. I’ll guarantee that he spent most of the night jerking off thinking about what you were doing to me.

“He made a mistake, though. I couldn’t believe it when I heard him offering my virginity to you. It would have taken me years to set him up myself, but you and he set yourselves up perfectly. He started weaving this fantasy up on stage, but he thought that he could keep it under control. That was how his arrogance did him in. You primed him with the story of Abraham, then got him hot with the Levite priest’s concubine, then gave him the opportunity to act when you started asking for proof of God’s existence. He saw an opportunity for a terrific story – evil atheist tries to abuse innocent virgin, is thwarted by God’s intervention – and jumped at it. His miscalculation was thinking that he could be the hero who would hear the word of God and rescue his virgin daughter in the nick of time. He had set up a ‘miracle’ that was going to have God appearing at the last moment to answer his prayers and save me from defilement. It never occurred to him that I would refuse his ham-handed rescue. I threatened to expose his fakery and forced him to deliver me to your door for a night of rape and sodomy. He loved the idea, but never thought that he would have to follow through. He misestimated my determination and failed to understand my masochism. Which was stupid because the sick old sadist spent years making me the masochist that I am today.

“And this will give you control of the church?”

“Damned right,” she laughed. “The multitudes will fall at my feet in gratitude for the suffering that I’ve endured on their behalf. I have expiated their sins and freed them to go forth and sin some more. There’s no sight more beloved to a crowd of masochists than seeing one of their number endure the pain that they secretly wish were being inflicted on them. Masochism by proxy, so to speak. I’ll have a mandate to push dear old dad into retirement within a year and there’s not a damned thing he can do about it. The wheels are already turning. That’s the only way that I can hurt him bad enough. He is a natural sadist. He cares about power. He loves seeing people submit to his will. He’s bullied and abused me every day since I was old enough to walk, just because I was too weak to defend myself. But now, my weakness is my strength. I’m going to take all his power away from him and he’s going to suffer more than you would believe.” Her eyes were bright with excitement over the fall of her father from grace.

Stone wondered if Susanna were entirely sane. But she was not stupid; she knew what she was doing. Only one point troubled him. “So did you press me into this because you wanted to fulfill your masochistic fantasies or because you wanted to execute your Machiavellian plan?”

“Both. A smart girl can kill two birds with one stone. Of all the ways that I could depose dear old dad, this is the one that gives me the most satisfaction.” She glanced at the clock on the microwave. “The vultures of the press will be circling outside your door by now. This is your last chance to have me. As you must have realized, I’ve fucked you but good. You may as well get your revenge on my while you can. Make me suffer now and you’ll at least have a little satisfaction to sustain you over the hard days to come. Take comfort in knowing that, for the next few minutes, you can make me wish that I had never been born.”

She walked to the stove, scooped a dollop of congealed bacon grease out of the frying pan, reached behind, and rubbed it around her asshole. She knew that it was not nearly enough lubrication, but it was enough to get him started and that’s all she wanted.

She bent over the back of a kitchen chair, reached back to spread her cheeks wide and said, “Go for it, tiger. Let’s see if you can take all the joy out of my life.”

He had nothing more to lose. Looking at the way she was offering herself for his use, hearing her invitation to vent his rage on her body, he grew rock hard. He strode over to her, dropped his pants, and pushed himself into her without hesitation. She screamed in agony. By some small miracle, her sphincter muscles did not split, but the tender skin around her anus tore in several places. More blood than grease lubricated him as he pounded into her mercilessly. The pain that she had suffered during her first anal rape was dwarfed by the agony that she suffered this time. She grabbed the seat of the chair and pushed back into him to try to keep from slamming against the wood, but she could not hold his weight. Her entire lower abdomen would be bruised purple and yellow; it would be days before she could walk without pain.

The pounding seemed to last forever – this would be Stone’s fifth orgasm since she had arrived the previous evening and he could not come quickly or easily. Susanna had to endure a full quarter hour of searing pain before Stone finally gasped as his seed pulsed into her ass.

When he finally did pull out and collapse into a chair, she could barely stand. Her asshole felt like it had been burned with a hot poker. She limped into the living room, one baby step at a time, tears streaming down her face in silver tracks and blood streaming down her thighs in crimson cascades.

Bending down to open her overnight bag brought a new wave of agony and fresh tears. She drew out a blouse and skirt that were identical to the ones that she had worn the night before. These, though, were torn and stained more artfully. A martyr’s robe had to be rent properly. The blouse had all the buttons torn off. As well as one sleeve was torn open at the shoulder – the standard symbol in Hollywood movies for a woman who has been raped. Every saint needs his own symbol to identify him. Strategic rents at the sides of the chest would allow glimpses of the white curves of the outer sides and bottoms of her perfect, unrestrained breasts. It would be clear to everyone that her bra was long gone. Generous cleavage would be exposed when she clutched the front closed with her right hand below the level of her nipples. Unlike the skirt that had been torn from her, this one had an intact waistband so that it could be worn about her hips but was torn in exactly the right places, all the way to the hip on the left side and almost to the crotch on the right front. When she held the long tear closed with her left hand, both of her smooth, tanned legs would be exposed to the tops of her thighs and the top of the tear between her hand and the waistband would gape at the hip to prove to the world that she was wearing no panties. That tear alone would incite a million men to jerk off over the next two days.

She had expected that her original clothes would be torn too badly to cover her private parts, so she had brought this replacement clothing that would cover exactly the right places to allow her photograph to appear on the front page of any newspaper in the industrialized world, but still expose ample flesh to titillate their readers. The world would not need medical evidence to know that she was no longer a virgin – these ruined clothes would provide irrefutable proof.

She left her feet bare – the ancient symbol of humiliation. Religion is ninety percent semiotics.

When she stepped out of the front door, she was assaulted by a storm of flash bulbs. As she limped to her father’s waiting car, she kept her head bowed in shame and ignored the barrage of questions that were shouted at her. Today she played a non-speaking part – Thomas Stone would bear the brunt of the press’s fury. The day after tomorrow, when the furor over Stone began to abate, she would emerge from her room where she had been praying and healing and begin to preach that redemption that could be in submission to God’s will. And, by extension, the congregation could find redemption by submitting to her will.

Her physical pain was real – severe enough to nearly debilitate her – but, as the car drove away, she managed to smile to herself. Over the next few weeks, both the preacher and the atheist, the two unwilling instruments of her brutal deflowering, would learn who had really been raped during the past seventeen hours.

They had a hard lesson coming.