The Stapler Game

by Aesexual Pseudonym

Jessica misbehaves at Grandma's house, and must then face her beloved Nelson for punishment and atonement, at which time he tries to cure the delicious jezebel of her unwholesome deathwish.  This vignette is an excerpt from Story #1, for those of you who require enticement before committing to read a 500,000 word book. 

       The voice mails from  Jessica's maternal grandmother persisted on a daily basis, like clockwork.  Jessica had been trying to avoid the issue.  She needed her weekdays for study, and her weekends belonged entirely to Nelson.  Jessica would be damned before she would waste a day, or even a morning, to indulge the obsession of this dim character who meant nothing to her and had been utterly inconsequential to her life.  But then, toward the end of February, the frequency of messages doubled to twice per day, and Jessica decided that enough was enough. 

       On a Wednesday morning, while Daddy snored in the otherwise empty house, Jessica called Nelson and asked whether she could borrow the midnight blue Maybach and Mr. Saul, the company driver.

       "Yes.  It will be at your doorstep within the hour."

       "Thank you, love."

       "Just out of curiosity...."

       Jessica  giggled.  The driver was most likely already on his way to the car, and Nelson had not yet asked why she needed a ride.

       "I've had it.  I want my phone back on the hook.  I've decided to visit Grandma Christy, and tell the miserable old cunt to stop calling."

       He sucked in a deep breath and asked, "It is fortunate that she is able to meet you on such short notice."

       "I haven't called her yet.  I am about to do that, to tell her to expect me."

       "Jess, it's Wednesday morning.  Most people, even retired people, run errands, meet appointments, have lives. "

       "All the better.  Either I will see her, or I will tape a note to the door.  Nelson, thank you.  I love you.  Gotta go."

       He blurted out, "Hold on.  May I see you later?  When you get back?"

       Jessica smiled into the phone and chided, "Sir!  You don't have to ask!  Just come right over.  Anytime after Mom gets home will be fine."

       "Yes, I could do that.  Or, Saul could drive you back here."

       "To finally see your office, Sir?"

       "Yes, Miss.  If you'd like.  To be followed by dinner, at a location yet to be determined."

       Jessica began to glow.  She inquired, "If I were to wear my black cocktail dress and black shoes, with tasteful accoutrements, would you take me somewhere posh?"

       "This isn't like you, Miss.  Ordinarily you do not like to be spoiled."

       "I have a suspicion that I will be in the mood to be spoiled tonight, Sir.  And before you answer, let me add that there will be something in it for you.  After all, I will be wearing the dress without panties.  And my naughty ass may have to be severely punished for wantonness."

       He groaned, and she returned her evil giggle.

       "If you wear that dress, sans panties, and if we make it to dinner at all, I can assure you that the setting will be posh."

       "Sir, I just might dress up after all.  Gotta go.  Love you, see you soon."  Click.

       Then she called another number.  After three rings, an old woman picked up the receiver and timidly asked, "Hello?"

       "This is Jessica Turner, and I will meet you at your house sometime between noon and twelve thirty.  Be there."  Click.

       Jessica wore her black cocktail dress, pearl necklace, pearl bracelet, and charm bracelet.  With neither pantyhose nor panties.  After all, she had certainly not dressed up for her maternal grandparents.  She would be meeting Nelson later, for dinner.  Somewhere posh.  And she must look good on his arm.  Then again, they might never make it to dinner.  He might commence with punishing her wantonness immediately, and get carried away, which would suit her just fine.  In any event she matched the car.   She rode in the back seat of the midnight blue Maybach, with the white cashmere coat folded neatly at her side, and penned a laconic note on a torn sheet of college rule paper, just in case Grandma Christy chickened out and failed to show up at her own house. 

       The note took almost no time at all to write.  It essentially said, "Leave us alone, crazy lady," in almost that many words.  She would  slip the letter under the door, if her grandmother was not home.  She set the letter on top of her coat, and watched Route 1 pass in the window.

       She had gone on the Internet and printed the map to Grandma Christy's house.  Wenham, on the North Shore.  The name of the town had no meaning to her.  Not until she had handed the map to Mr. Saul, the driver of the midnight blue Maybach, had she made a meaningful connection.

       "Thanks, Miss Turner, but I know that area well."

       Jessica inspected her own directions, which Mr. Saul evidently didn't need, and remarked, "Says here it's a fifty minute drive north.  Is it anywhere near Topsfield?"

       Mr. Saul replied, "Next town over.  Wenham is between Topsfield and Hamilton.  The towns kind of run into each other, to be honest.  Impossible to tell them apart, once you're in them."

       Now Jessica stared out the window, with the map crumpled on the floor.  Could Mummy really have grown up in a town adjacent to Nelson's beautiful wooded community?  No, that couldn't be right; she had met Daddy at school.  But maybe a regional school.   Had they not met at some regional Catholic school, at a glee club or a drama club?  Had they not gone together, to a prom that had taken place around Christmas, at a Christmas Cotillion?  Mummy and Daddy never, ever talked about the period of their courtship, and Jessica had only gained a few random snippets over the entirety of her thirteen years.  Well, even if Mummy had not grown up in this place called Wenham, she could well have ended up there, if she had moved with her parents, perhaps after high school, while attending college, that is, if she had ever gone to college.  Mummy certainly had been intelligent enough for college, but her life had ended with Jessica's conception.  Yet, in an alternate universe, Mummy might have met a nice, college educated gentleman during her summer breaks in Wenham, and that fictional couple could have borne a precocious daughter named Jessica.   In that long-lost alternate universe, Jessica could have grown up there, too, within a few miles of Nelson.  She would have jogged on those forest-lined roads after school.  Nelson might have seen her, jogging on those wooded avenues as a child, as he drove home from work.  In that alter-reality, she might have first caught his eye at nine or ten years of age.  Their proximity would have thrust them together ages ago.  But Mummy's parents had disowned her, and the families had been torn apart; her parents had moved on to a lovely place called Wenham, and Mummy had been relegated to a purgatory of ashes, gas tanks, and smokestacks.  On the one hand, the enormous implications of chance and fate filled Jessica with resentment.  On the other hand, being an optimist by nature, she took heart, counted her blessings, and silently acknowledged that the very brightest jewels are forged in crucibles of violence and flame.

       As the regal Maybach passed the Hilltop Restaurant, a super-kitsch steakhouse decorated with life-sized plastic cows, she leaned over the front seat.  The car's privacy screen was down, of course.  She enjoyed the company of the taciturn, brooding driver.  She asked him, "Mr. Saul, are you packing today?"

       He just chuckled.

       She sighed, leaned way over the seat to get his attention, and put on a fake scowl.  She had a hard time acting tough around Mr. Saul.  She had to give it a conscious effort.  Mr. Saul was even bigger than Nelson, if that were possible.  She did not like to think of the violence the pair would ever commit to innocent furniture, if they were ever to get together and arm wrestle. 

       "Mr. Saul, why the Christ are you packing?  I'm only going to see my grandmother."

       Mr. Saul chuckled again, and said, "So was Little Red Riding Hood, and look at what happened to her."

       Jessica fell back into her seat, holding her stomach as she laughed.  She really enjoyed Mr. Saul.  Perhaps too much.  She might have to confess that enjoyment to Nelson later on, and face his retribution.

       Being an inordinately brilliant young woman, Jessica had come to recognize the power of her feminine wiles, and with her darling Nelson for inspiration over the past several months, she had honed that power into an immensely dangerous weapon.

       She leaned back over the seat and had another go at Mr. Saul.

       "So, you're not joking.  You really are packing."

       He gave her a toothy grin, and said, "Mr. Spencer's orders."

       "Mr. Spencer, as in my dearest darlingest Nelson, Dr. Spencer?  Or Mr. Spencer, as in Vernon, my Nelson's debonaire Dad?"

       "The latter.  Miss, whenever you are in my charge, I am packing.  Mr. Vernon Spencer's orders.  No one gets to you without cutting me down, first."

       She turned on her wiles.  Not up to ten, of course.  Only her Nelson ever got the full treatment.  Still, she felt unconscionably guilty, just going up to four or five, for Mr. Saul.  She would have to confront Nelson later, and confess, and make an act of contrition, and endure the fury of his wrath.  She anticipated and dreaded that encounter with an intensity that compelled her to squeeze her thighs indecently.

       "Mr. Saul," she demanded, making it sound like a tease, "who would want to rub out little old me?"

       To Jessica's intrigue and delight, Mr. Saul chuckled again, in such a way as to lead the girl to speculate that her dreams might be somewhat improved if they included Mr. Saul.  In a minor role, of course.  Her Nelson would ever take the starring role as the godly Male protagonist.

       Mr. Saul said, "I am more concerned that your adoring fans might kill you with kindness.  You don't know this grandmother of yours."

       "You're going to escort me, aren't you?"

       He nodded, and suggested, " Pass me off as your big scary uncle, if that will make you feel more at ease."

       Jessica fell back into her seat with a small, slightly peeved expression, but she had to smile, too.  She said, "I'm hoping this ordeal will be quick.  But if she drags me inside for milk and cookies, I'll make sure you get some, too."

       "I look forward to it, miss."

       "Mr. Saul, given that you appear to be prepared to take a bullet for me, would you please call me Jessica?"

       "No chance in hell, miss."

       She sighed and shook her head, but she caught his expression in the rear view mirror, and laughter teased the corners of his eyes.

       A half hour later, the car pulled up to a sidewalk curb.  A two story cape was set back perhaps thirty yards from the street, on a gentle, snow-covered rise.  The house was framed by the skeletons of maple trees. 

       As Jessica wriggled into her cashmere coat, she observed a somewhat rotund old man standing in an open garage bay adjacent to the house.  The man started to come down the driveway.

       Mr. Saul said, "I thought you were greeting Grandma Christy."

       Jessica surmised, "That old bastard must be my grandfather."

       Mr. Saul grunted and ordered, "Stay here.  I'll get the door." 

       Before Jessica could protest, Mr. Saul stepped out of the car and started to walk around.  Sure enough, the mere sight of the imposing driver and bodyguard caused the old man to stop short.

       Jessica's maternal grandfather could not have had any idea what to expect, but he did not imagine, in the farthest reaches of his imagination, that his long lost granddaughter would pull up in a chauffeur driven limousine.  No, check that:  the driver was a bodyguard.  Jessica's grandfather had spent enough decades in law enforcement, prior to his retirement, to recognize the bulge of a shoulder holster.  The bodyguard opened the passenger door of the midnight blue car, and a fantastically beautiful young woman stepped out, dressed to kill.  No, check that:  his thirteen and a half year old granddaughter.  The bodyguard intentionally left the car door open, faced the house, and assumed the posture of parade-rest.  No one else stepped out of the car.  Jessica had come alone.

       Jessica walked carefully up the slick driveway in her glossy black shoes, and the old man approached as well, closing the distance.  Jessica observed that her maternal grandfather stood much taller than Mummy and Daddy, perhaps six-one.  Nelson would have dwarfed him, of course, but in the back of Jessica's mind a small conniving portion of her brain churned with speculation that she just might grow up to be tall.  The little girl so longed to be tall.  Was it really asking too much, on top of all the other graces she had been given?  Did her desire to be statuesque make her greedy?  She supposed it must, but she didn't care.  She wanted to be tall, and there was nothing to be done about it.

       They stopped four feet apart.

       "Jessica, thank you so much for coming.  Your mother is not with you?"

       "She will not come."  Jessica replied.

       The man's composure crumbled a bit, not only with the confident, musical ring of his granddaughter's voice, but also with the news that their daughter must remain estranged, which would shatter Christy.

       Jessica's mind whirled, too, and threatened to upend her with vertigo.  She realized, at that moment, that she had no idea how to address this man.  Mummy, Carol Turner, had so thoroughly obliterated all traces of her former life, and so adamantly refused to discuss it, that Jessica did not know her mother's maiden name!

       The girl asked, "Are you my grandfather?"

       "Yes.  I am so happy to meet you again.  It has been too long, but we have been watching from afar."

       Jessica chose not to respond to that claim.  Instead, she inquired, "I expected to have met my grandmother.  Where is she?"

       "Inside.  She is too ashamed to come out. She realized, when you called, what all her voice messages over the past couple months must sound like to you."

       Jessica set her jaw and scowled.  She had not planned on this.  After having been scorned in absentia all of her life, she had not expected the man to sound kind.  But she had come with an objective, and she was determined to see it through. 

       "Nevertheless, I have come all the way up here.  You have a lovely home, from the outside, anyway, but it is a little bit out of the way.  It is unlikely I will be back here again."  This spoken supposition made him wince with pain, but she soldiered on.  "Are you certain my grandmother won't come out?"

       Her grandfather shrugged and said, "You're welcome to come in, Jessica.  To meet her halfway.  It might put her at ease."

       Jessica laughed shortly, and he cocked his head inquisitively.

       The girl sniffed and demanded, "Why would I want to put her at ease?"

       His next words sounded like a plea.  "Jessica, our falling-out with your mother has been killing your grandmother—killing us—for years.  We are so sorry, more sorry than you can possibly know.  Please come in."

       Jessica just scowled for a moment, and then coldly said, "Sir—damn it.  'Sir' doesn't work.  What the hell am I supposed to call you?"

       Then, inexplicably, her grandfather became incensed, and raised his voice, saying, "You could start by acknowledging that I'm your grandfather," and he wanted to say more, but suddenly Mr. Saul was moving very fast, and stepped between them with all the subtlety of a cinderblock wall.  The old man staggered backward, clutching his heart, and had to lean against the mail box.

       Jessica offered him neither assistance nor sympathy.  She coldly said, "Whatever you are, you are not 'Sir,' so for now, I'll stick with 'you.'  Let me explain something.  I am here at Christy's invitation.  She has called me every day since January.  But you seem to be under the misapprehension that I have a purpose for being here, apart from asking, as politely as possible, that she cease and desist, so that my mother can put the phone back on the hook.  Because the voice mail messages make my mother cry.  And I don't like to see her cry.

       "I would advise you of another misapprehension.  In the view of my escort, Mr. Saul, the customer is always right.  As far as Mr. Saul is concerned, you are not his customer.  I am his customer.  If you raise either your hand or your voice to me again, Mr. Saul will do his job.  He is very good at his job.  Do you understand?"

       Before the stuttering old man could gather enough air into his lungs to reply, the front door opened.

        Jessica, Mr. Saul, and the old man watched as a feeble woman carefully negotiated the salted brick walk, and then the driveway.  She wore a full length black wool coat, with the hood up.  The woman's eyes were hazel, like her daughter's eyes.  Jessica saw her own mother in the woman's features, despite the gray hair and deep lines.  The woman did not take her eyes off the driveway until she came to a stop, three feet from Jessica.  She looked up, and made an effort to straighten her hunched back.  She had once been tall, before she had curled her own back into the shape of despair.  Everyone on Mummy's side appeared to have been tall.  Jessica might grow tall.

       "Thank you so much for coming, Jessica.  You are as courageous as you are intelligent.  I cannot begin to understand how hard this is for you.  Would you please come inside?" 

       Jessica looked back at her escort, who just shrugged noncommittally.  She turned back to her maternal grandmother and said, "I will, if my grandfather would be so kind as to keep Mr. Saul company. " She leaned toward Mr. Saul, smiled wryly, nudged his arm, and whispered, "Maybe he's into cars."

       Jessica's casual repartée with the hulking bodyguard raised the anxiety level of her grandparents by several orders of magnitude, a fact which she enjoyed observing.

       Grandma Christy replied, "Charles would be pleased to wait outside." 

       The old man did not appear to agree in the least. 'So,' Jessica silently mused, 'the pitiable bastard has a name after all.'

       The old woman held out a hand.  "Please.  You've come all this way.  At least let me warm you up."

       The interior of the house struck Jessica as a thematic complement to Vernon and Abby's Winchester house, on a less ostentatious scale.  Smaller and fewer rooms, lower ceilings, less luxurious appointments; yet clean, tastefully furnished, and with everything in its proper place, an ordered repository for the odds and ends collected inadvertently by the living and dying. In the foyer, Grandma Christy took Jessica's cashmere coat, and set it on a bannister, in plain view.  As she took her own coat off, she bashfully appraised Jessica, from the girl's glossy black shoes, to her skin tight black silk cocktail dress, to the charm bracelet that ringed her wrist with platinum and diamond seashells, to the heavy pearls that accentuated the slender nape of the girl's neck, to the long dark hair that she had tied back into a bun with an onyx and silver clip.  The old woman did not comment.  She simply turned, and led Jessica down a hallway that was lined along an entire side with framed press clippings featuring the girl, herself.  The entire length of the hallway had been fashioned into an improvised shrine of Jessica.  The girl stared straight ahead, seethed through her teeth, and walked.

       Grandma Christy offered Jessica a chair at a marble island in the spacious kitchen.  She had already set out several different kinds of cookies, each specimen carefully arrayed upon Lenox platters, on the off-chance that she might succeed in luring Jessica inside.  She didn't know what to do with her hands.  Her eyes darted from Jessica to an elaborate, gleaming coffee machine.

       "According to one of the news stories I have read, you are partial to cappucino."  With an embarrassed shrug, she confessed, "I bought that machine a couple months back, on the hope that you would come.  But I don't know how to work it.... I could try, or you could even show me...."  But even as the exhaustively rehearsed suggestion spilled from the old woman's lips, guilt washed over her like acid, and threatened to engulf her, as she recalled the day she had made the purchase, and had brought the gleaming chrome prop home, and had imagined herself at the kitchen counter, together with her long lost, long scorned granddaughter, finally reunited with the full-grown, heart-breakingly beautiful, famously erudite girl, laughing and conversing about successions of nothing, while making coffee and testing its varying degrees of bitterness through an afternoon of silly and happy experimentation.  Here and now, with the girl finally here against all odds, sitting here in this kitchen, openly wary and glaring with eyes like slits, Grandma Christy realized the impossibility of the fantasy's attainment, and that awful realization threatened to consume and destroy her.

       Jessica gulped, took a deep breath, and murmured, "Really, I'm not thirsty; it's not necessary—"

       And then her grandmother softly wept right where she stood, staring at a point somewhere over Jessica's head.  Jessica's maternal grandmother had fallen prey to the affliction suffered by so many who painstakingly plan an encounter, and prepare elaborate contingencies for what they deem to comprise every conceivable angle, without once giving consideration to the inconvenient fact that the other party inevitably has her own concerns, motivations, and objectives.  Grandma Christy had scripted this encounter on the assumption that Jessica would willingly comply with her directives, like an automaton.  Only now did Grandma Christy realize that Jessica would have none of it.  Now, for the first time, she dreaded Jessica's own reasons for coming, and wondered, with considerable trepidation, what those reasons might be.  So she regrouped, and dug herself deeper with every word.

       "The phone calls will stop.  I am so sorry.  Getting you here was my only objective.  I never thought it through; never considered how this meeting would proceed, if it were ever to happen.  And now you've come, and I am so ashamed.  You can't imagine how sorry—I can't begin to imagine what you must think of us, of me—oh God—" and then she collapsed into one of the chairs and sobbed. 

       Jessica made no effort to comfort her.  She just sat and glared.

       The woman peered up at Jessica from a deep well of pain and said, "You would not have remembered when we last met; you were so young.  Yet you already talked like a girl beyond your years...."

       A question had been nagging Jessica for months, and she blurted it out now.  "I remember a long drive, and toll booths.  And trees.  More trees per glance than all of the trees in Everett.  A wedding.  Cannoli that I was too small to reach, and no one would give me some, even though I saw trays of it thrown into the trash at the end.  And a fight over wedding cake, between the bride and groom, and a bride in tears on her most special day.  I think I was three or four."

       With a broken voice, the old woman said, "Angie's wedding.  You were two."

       Two. 

       "Who is Angie?"

       "Your aunt.  Your Aunty Angie.  Your mother's oldest sister."

       "Oldest?  How many are there?"

       "You have two uncles and three aunts, dear.  Oh, God.  Your mother has never told you?"

       "Do I have cousins?"

       "God.  Oh, my God.  Please—"

       "Ma'am, shut up and tell me.  Do I have cousins."  Expressed as a demand, as callously as she could convey it without expletives.

       "God.  Yes.  Nine."

       Nine cousins.

       "Do they know me?"

       The old woman emitted a cry of despair and choked, "They know of you."

       Jessica glared and muttered, "Good for them."

       "Charles and I have missed you.  We have all missed you, all of us.  You have grown so beautiful, more beautiful than I ever could have imagined.... the press pictures do not do you justice, Jessi—"

       "It's Jessica," the girl asserted.  "And I did not dress up for you, per se.  I have a date tonight."

       The woman's eyes went wide with apparent confusion.  She murmured, with frank astonishment, "A Date?  Dating?  But aren't you just  thirteen?"

       Jessica abruptly stood up and snarled, "That's rich."

       Grandma Christy wailed, "What?"

       "That you are judging me."

       "No!  No, not judging!  Not judging!  Oh, God, please!"

       "What, then?  And what business is it of yours?"

       "Not judging!"  Grandma Christy insisted, her eyes full of tears.  "It is just that I have missed so much, and you are so much older than your years!  I've missed out on your entire life!"

       Jessica scowled.  She felt the blood in her cheeks, and fought to control herself, and just knew, given the emotion of the encounter, that she could not effectively assess the woman's sincerity.  Moreover, it did not matter.   Grandma Christy was begging Jessica to return to her seat, but Jessica declined.  She stood over the broken woman with her expression locked in the form of a snarl.

       "I came here with a purpose:  to implore you to cease and desist from calling our house in the future.  Every message you leave is a blow to my mother's heart.  I cannot have it.  I will not tolerate it.  You have already told me that the calls will end, and I will hold you to that.

       "But I am curious.  You have called every day, religiously, since the day my story made the national news.  Surely you had a purpose of your own, and I am curious as to what you want from me."

       Grandma Christy sobbed anew.  Jessica stood and waited, with her hands on her hips.

       "I— I— don't rightly know— I suppose just to have the opportunity to ask whether... it is too late—"

       "Too late for what?"

       "I don't know!" the woman wailed.   The remainder of her reply came out as questions.  "To make up for some of the lost time?  To be a part of your life, however small, however belated?  Is that so wrong?"

       Then Jessica stepped forward, and approached the miserable woman for the first time, and took her frail trembling hand, and kissed her palm.  Tears fell down Grandma Christy's cheeks.  She shuddered with the heat of the soft kiss.

       Jessica tenderly replied, "Perhaps it would be wrong."

       Grandma Christy looked up at Jessica, appalled, through her tears.

       Jessica continued to kiss the stricken woman's hand, and to gently, softly explain, "You live in a beautiful place, Grandma."  The old woman shuddered, with the sound of that simple word, so hard that she might shatter.  "I would have loved it here.  Easters.  Christmases.  Summers.  Here, in this beautiful place, playing with my nine cousins, among the parents and family of my mother, the person I love more than anyone else on this earth, my mother, whom you broke past mending."

       "Nooooo—"

       Jessica gently kissed, and whispered, "Tommy would have loved it here, too.  "

       "T- T- Tommy?"

       "My six year old brother.  Your grandson."

       Grandma Christy collapsed against the marble island, and her chest heaved with broken sobs.  The revelations, and pain, struck repeatedly, like waves, and she broke under the force.

       Jessica gently, softly observed, "Hmm.  We have shielded Tommy from the limelight.  You didn't know I have a brother.  No matter.  Perhaps he is better off, too.  You see, you turned your back on my mother fourteen years ago, when she refused to abort me.  You stood by and let my mother raise her failed abortion in hell, while you 'watched from afar,' as Charles expressed your devotion just moments ago, and judged us from heaven.  Hell made me stronger, Grandma.  I have graduated high school six years early, thanks to hell, and I am now a freshman pre-grad math student at a world class university, thanks to hell, and I have turned my back on your fucking God and blossomed into an unabashed, wanton atheist, thanks to hell, and I am blithely inured and immune to your judgment, thanks to hell.  If I had spent my Easters and Christmases and summers here, in heaven, would the experience have improved me, I wonder?  Or would I have grown to be a coddled, pampered brat, spoiled by the expectation of having every trivial wish granted on demand, an empty debutante, devoid of aspirations, having neither the will nor the incentive to thrive?"

       From somewhere beyond the personal hell that now engulfed Grandma Christy, the broken old woman felt a soft kiss upon her forehead, and the voice of a precocious thirteen year old stranger who gently, softly said, "Every day since January I have received voice mails to the effect that you love me, and have always loved me.  You will  be gratified to know that I, too, have always loved you, and will always love you, with the selfsame fervor.  Goodbye, Grandma Christy, and thank-you."

       Jessica let herself out.

       An hour later, the midnight blue Maybach pulled up to a twelve story office building, two blocks from Charles Street.  The car drew stares from random passersby.  Jessica gazed out of the shaded bullet-proof windows at a burnished aluminum plate adjacent to the building's glass double doors.  The plate bore two words, etched in the color of gun metal:

               

               DYMETRIX CORPORATION

       Jessica sighed.  She had never seen this place before today.  She might work here some day, might make a career within this building's walls of concrete and glass, and thereby expand her association with her beloved Nelson from soul mate, friend, confidante, and lover to colleague and business partner.  The prospect filled her with longing and anticipation for the future.  Their progress together would just grow and grow.

       Dymetrix would present a challenge.   Over the past couple months, both in soulful letters and in quiet conversations while ranging far and wide in the hills and crags of Crawford Notch, Nelson had shared, without restraint, his angst filled misgivings over the company's antiquated sales and marketing methods.  Jessica knew all about the unwritten, implicit demarcation between the producers and the so-called 'furniture girls' and 'furniture boys.'  She understood that in spite of the arcane nomenclature, the uncomfortable fact was that the furniture were producers, too.  In corporate Japan, the furniture girls would have been called geishas, and would have enjoyed an accepted class status.  Here in the United States, the corporate practice of providing illicit entertainment did not enjoy the imprimatur of social acceptance.  Yet the sales and marketing departments of Dymetrix had to compete on the international stage; had to attend international tradeshows in locales where social mores and rules of business decorum were much different.  The furniture practice had evolved over the years as a means to allow the company to compete upon that stage while immunizing itself from blackmail and litigation.  No furniture girl or boy had ever been coerced or pressed into duty.  While sometimes they deplored and suffered the specifics of their ordeals, they could never claim that they had not asked for the afflications that they had sustained.  And while their ordeals might be rough indeed, and sometimes even over the top by any standard of common decency, the post-tour satisfaction surveys were always overwhelmingly positive.

       Someday, with the changing of the guard from Vernon Spencer, Andy Donner, and Jeff Anderson to Dr. Nelson Spencer, Max Westford, and Jessica Turner, the company might evolve and acquire the ability to conduct international business dealings from a position of strength and command.  Dymetrix might someday be able to engage its competition, in the international marketplace, on its own terms.  The furniture girls and furniture boys might be phased out, along with every other obsolete and arcane practice.

       But now, today, the practice had to persist, and the sales department had no lack of college age volunteers:  invariably well-to-do young adults who had business or familial connections to the company or its customers; dispossessed or bored youths  who would sign up for ninety days, or six months, to sate their thirst for kinks while staffing the trade show booths in Japan and Singapore.  Not a bad gig, really.  To take a few months off from one's life, to pull an occasional three hour shift on a tradeshow floor in Hong Kong or Kyoto, glad-handing passersby and passing out business cards, then to spend the rest of the day sunning on a Pacific beach, and then the nights, wild nights in hotel suites and on moonlit strands, burning off calories through long evenings that tested their limits and quenched their thirst for debauchery.  The furniture girls and furniture boys burned out fast, but the supply appeared to be endlessly replenishable.

       The practice had become self-perpetuating, and would persist until the changing of the guard finally put a stop to it.  And that would take time.

       Jessica knew that Nelson had participated in the furniture program prior to their relationship.  She could not be entirely sure of how she felt about that, because her feelings on the matter tended to canter from one extreme to the other.  Though she did love Nelson unreservedly, she sometimes wondered whether or not their devotion to each other would be that much more amplified if she had first been introduced to a different Nelson, a less worldly variant, Nelson as the chaste boy-prince.  Yet, through the early weeks of their improbable courtship, she had positively thrilled at receiving the romantic attentions of Nelson the lusty Male.  As Mummy had predicted, that courtship had evolved and tranformed, at a breathtaking pace, from prurience to resplendence, and Jessica had to concede, in hindsight, that it had been the contrast between the two extremes that had made the transformation so sweet.

       Yes, she decided, she definitely preferred having first met Dr. Nelson Spencer, the lusty, masterful Male.  But what about Nelson's feelings on the matter?  On their first acquaintance, had he not formed his initial attachment to Jessica the 'tweener exhibitionist and fucktoy?  Had he not thrilled at those first pictures, long since destroyed, of Jessica posing just for him and flaunting her naked, freshly spanked bottom?  She idly wondered if he now missed that Jessica, the initial incarnation, the embarrassed exhibitionist, the reluctant fucktoy who had bashfully posed naked, with a rosy blush on her cheeks, for an adult stranger.  Maybe he also secretly missed the furniture girls.  The Vanessas and Lauras and Pamelas.  Well, she would find out.  She would march into his office, dressed to kill, and offer Nelson the exclusive use of Jessica the 'tweener tart, in a reprise of her first starring role.   What better way, she mused with a note of dispassionate cruelty, to celebrate her reunion with her dearly beloved Grandpa Charlie and Grandma Christy.
       She took a deep breath and asked Mr. Saul, "Does my fame precede me here as well?"

       Mr. Saul just chuckled and said, "I'll walk you in."

       He tapped the button for the hazard lights, got out, and opened the door for Jessica.  He escorted her into the building and straight to the lobby receptionist, a smartly attired woman in her mid-thirties, who took one look at the girl and exclaimed, "Good God!"

       "Pardon?" asked Jessica, uncertainly.

       Mr. Saul interceded, "Jessica Turner to see Dr. Spencer."

       An errant thought crossed Jessica's mind in that split second.  Would Nelson need time?  To compose himself?  To clear his office of visitors?  To clean up the mess left behind by females hastily ushered out the door, half-dressed?  Then she chastised herself for the thought.  Her Nelson was trustworthy, and she trusted him implicitly.  That the errant suspicion had even occurred to the girl, however unbidden, deeply troubled her.  Yet another intolerable transgression, that must be addressed by Nelson with severity.

       Not half a moment later, the receptionist said, "Miss Turner, the elevator is just down there, toward the end of the lobby."

       "Thank you, Ma'am."

       "For the future, I am on standing orders never to challenge you at the door.  You don't even need a visitor badge.  Next time, head straight that way to the elevators.  And please let me also say that you are a heroine and inspiration to my eleven year old daughter."        

       Mr. Saul rode the elevator up with Jessica.  They stopped on the sixth floor, and he led her back toward the front of the building, down a central aisle of cubicles ringed on all sides by the offices of sales and marketing managers.  She stopped at a floor to ceiling faux wall, on which were mounted examples of some of the high precision metalloceramic alloy products that the company manufactured for aerospace, defense, and heavy industries.  She examined an exploded view of a low friction laminar surface used in the bushings of jet engines. 

       Nearby, a young man leaned so far out of his cubicle that he nearly toppled his chair.  "Whoa," he gasped, his eyes roving from Jessica's glossy black shoes to her thighs.

       Mr. Saul whirled and snarled, "Stow that."

       The head disappeared.

       Jessica looked up at Mr. Saul, and he shrugged apologetically.  "You'll get a lot less of that sort of attention, after Dr. Spencer has given you the tour."  He nodded toward an open door at the far end of the aisle.

       Jessica nodded with a smile.  Therein awaited her Nelson.

       An elegantly attired, middle aged woman stood up from behind her desk as Jessica and Mr. Saul approached.   She held out her hand, and the girl took it.

       "Miss Turner, I am so pleased to finally meet you.  I am Nancy, Dr. Spencer's assistant.  Dr. Spencer is on the phone.  If you would please have a seat— oh, wait.  He's hung up.  Go right on in."

       "Thank-you, Nancy."

       Jessica stepped around Nancy's desk and peeked into Nelson's large, glass-walled office.  He was already coming around his desk.        

       "I heard you come in," he explained, nodding toward the phone.

       "You didn't have to cut your conversation short, Sir.  I could have waited."

       "No.  They can wait.  You jump to the front of every line, Miss.  Saul, thank-you."

       "You're welcome Dr. Spencer.  If you won't be needing me, I should go move the car."

       "Yes, good.  Thanks again." 

       Jessica stepped into the office, out of view of the doorway, to bring herself out of range of the heads that were peeking over and around cubicles again.

       Nelson understood immediately, led her into  a corner of the spacious office, and took her into his arms.  They kissed warmly.

       "Mr. Saul as much as warned me that my fame would precede me here.  But he also suggested that there will be a little less rubbernecking, once the face becomes a bit more familiar."

       Nelson nodded briskly and said, "We'll take the tour.  Straight up to the twelfth floor.  Mom and Dad know that you're coming today.  I've told them that you have demanded a posh dinner, and by the way you're dressed, I might just have to fly you to New York in order to deliver.  But with dinner several hours away, Dad just might drive you out to the machine shop and the foundry."

       Jessica chuckled, and reflected that there was no way this conniving man could have forgotten that she had advised him she needed to be punished for her wantonness.  Nelson had just offered her an out, by suggesting that Vernon would happily monopolize her entire afternoon, leaving no time for harsh chastisement, if given half a chance.  Jessica said, "Oh, I am certain that your Dad would regale me all the way to dinner.  If you were to take me on the tour and into his clutches  this very moment."

       " But I am not doing that, Miss?"

       "No, Sir, you are not."

       "What am I doing?"

       "You're going to ask Nancy to hold all calls.  Then you are going to lock your office door, so that I can confess, and make an act of contrition, and entreat you tearfully for forgiveness."

       He scoffed, "What could you possibly have to confess?"

       "Oh, you'd be surprised, Sir.  I have a very long list.  Regrettably, we do not have my beautiful leather lash, the one that causes more pain than damage."

       "It is a pity," he croaked, "but if I had known, I would not have left it at home."

       "No matter.  Sir, that is why you are going to have to improvise, with whatever you happen to have at hand.  Even if the odds and ends available to you cause as much damage as pain.  With any luck, you'll draw my punishment out for so long that Vernon will not have time to drag me hither and yon."

       Nelson forced his legs to move.  He had to instruct Nancy, and lock the door.

       Jessica looked around.  Though she could not know it, Nelson had redecorated, to some extent, since her mother had briefly worked here.  Gone were the table and wooden chair where Mummy had once sat.  Nancy, his assistant, now sat outside the door, and the vacated office space had been filled with additional files and shelves.  The filing cabinets ran along the walls from one side of the office to the other, interrupted only by the door on one end of the office, by the glass wall on the other, and by a small shelf-lined alcove that led to a private bath.  Above the filing cabinets, a course of book shelves ran all the way up to the high ceiling, and he had a rolling stepladder to reach the highest books.. 

       By the time Nelson had returned and locked the door, Jessica had wandered to his sturdy desk, and gently brushed a finger over the polished surface.  At the doorway, he reached into a circular brass umbrella stand and retrieved a three foot long, half inch thick cane. 

       He returned to the girl, kissed her forehead, and set the cane down on his desk.  She looked at it and shuddered.

       "I keep this cane as a memento.  A testament to the furniture era, which with any luck will soon be a thing of the past."

       Jessica smiled wanly and said, "Which brings me to my first transgression.  My presence in your life, and my impetuous and undeserved demands for exclusivity, have taken you away from the furniture girls, and Correction Days, and all the delights thereby.  You miss them, Sir."

       "Jess—"  He started to contradict her, to deny the charge, but then he stopped himself when he realized where she was going with the thought.  She sounded accusatory.  Yet, as she continued with her confession, he realized that the girl was actively indulging him by setting herself up.

       "Sir, you have told me that you have not so much as glanced at a furniture girl in an untoward manner, since having made my acquaintance.  I have believed that claim implicitly.  Do you repudiate it now?  Have you been shaming me by shafting those filthy little harlots behind my back?"

       "Absolutely not, Miss.  I turned my back on them without a glance on the first moment that I met you, and I have been true ever since."

       She nodded, satisfied, and concluded, "And thus, you miss those wanton little sluts, and look back nostalgically on all the ways you once used them for your pleasure and retribution, and it is all my fault."

       He took a deep breath, straightened up, and said, "You make a good point."

       She nodded and went on, "So there is my first sin, my impetuosity.  Secondly, I must confess my presumption, calling you at a moment's notice to demand the car and the use of Mr. Saul's time, as though the world itself revolves around me and must stop on its gimbals to satisfy my whims."

       "It is true, you have been disturbingly self-possessed lately."

       She nodded with a thin smile, encouraged by the increasing ease with which he accepted the charges that she laid against herself.

       "The third confession, of course, would have to do with my vanity, the way I have put myself before all your other affairs, and have expected you to just drop everything, and by the way I have just strutted into your offices, dressed in this desultory fashion, and flaunted myself like an easy little tart."

       "You certainly are," he growled.

       "Oh, I know, Sir.  And I am most contrite about it, but I don't expect you to take my word for that."

       "I certainly don't.  I think I need you to undress now."

       "Yes, Sir," she complied sadly, and immediately reached  back to unbutton her tight little cocktail dress.

       "You filthy little slut," he accused, "you're not wearing underwear of any kind, are you?"

       "Not a patch, Sir.  Neither bra nor panties.  And I confess I am not the least bit shamed by it; in fact, my nakedness under this dress, flaunting myself and playing the tease for Mr. Saul and the men of the office, is making me aroused and wet.  As I've told you, Sir, I have been terribly naughty, in more ways than even I can count."

       "Yes, you have.  And I am afraid that every single part of you that should have stepped outside this morning in underwear is going to have to be marked with the cane."

       "Every part?"  she whispered.

       "Yes, every intimate part.  And I will remind you that you are in a busy office.  Your screams would agitate Nancy.  You will have to hold yourself open, and stand still, and remain quiet, for the cane."

       "Yes, Sir." the girl said sadly, but with impressive resolve.

       She had reached her last button, and now slipped out of her tiny silk cocktail dress, caught it at her ankles, folded it neatly, and set it at the corner of her desk.

       "Take all the jewelry off, too, slut.  I will be working on that scrawny body of yours strenuously in a moment, and I don't want pearls rolling all over the floor.  And besides, naughty sluts don't get to wear fine jewelry; they just wear cheap collars that say Bubba's Whore, and plastic bracelets that say "Free Hole."  You'll have to earn your jewelery back, if you can."

       "I'll try," she whispered with resignation, as she took her jewelry off.

       Then her beloved Nelson declared, "I did not bring a change of clothes.  I do not wish to perspire in this suit, given that we will be going to dinner tonight.  At the same time, I plan on exerting myself forcefully as I administer your punishment.  I expect to perspire profusely, as I lay into your flesh with the bamboo cane."

       Jessica exhaled, staring at the floor, hands behind her back, exposing her vulnerable little breasts, her flat little tummy, and the chubby hairless lips that protruded from between her parted thighs.  She quietly said, "I would be pleased to undress you, Sir, so that you can beat me with vigor, and not spoil your beautiful clothes."

       "Hit the button first, to draw the shades.  And then get to work."

       Jessica began to breathe fast.  She had set herself up for this, had been goading him into punishing her, ever since that morning, when she had called to request the car.  And, he would see it through.  He would administer pain, and hurt her cruelly, for as long as he desired.  Jessica glanced fearfully at the long, thick cane, which he would soon use to raise welts on the most sensitive parts of her body,   She knew it would hurt worse than the leather bound lash that she had received for Christmas; it would hurt worse than his calloused palm upon her ass; it would even hurt worse than Daddy's belt.  Jessica pressed a button on the wall, and the windows instantly turned opaque. 

       Naked little Jessica first helped Nelson with his jacket.  She took it off his shoulders and draped it over the back of his chair, to keep the wrinkles out.  Then the girl knelt at his feet, and worked  on the laces of his shoes.  She kissed the glossy leather as she untied the laces,  He lifted a foot and said, "Clean the soles, too."  Jessica licked the dirt and grit from each sole.  While she worked on one foot, he put the other up on her back, and used her naked body as a footstool.  She carefully took his socks down, rolled them up neatly, and placed them inside his shoes.         Then she crouched up on her knees, unbuckled his wide, thick belt, and gently tugged it off.  Jessica kissed every inch of the belt until she had it entirely off.  Then she folded  it in half and presented it to him. 

       Nelson declared, "I wish to warm up your naughty bum.  A dark red bottom will be more responsive to the cane.  Put your face on the floor, between my feet, and lift your ass high up, legs apart."

       She looked up at him, not yet with resignation or acceptance, because all she could feel was disbelief.  He intended to beat her with the belt, to prepare her for her actual punishment?   She wondered what a "warm-up" must entail, how hard he must beat her, with the belt, to turn her poor condemned bottom dark red.  She had been struggling to consign herself to the awful looking cane, and now, knowing she must endure a preliminary belting just to prepare for the cane, her addled mind could barely cope, and she had trouble drawing breath.

       He had not taken off his trousers, yet already her suffering would soon begin—not with the cane, which would presumably be the culmination of her punishment, but with his belt.  He would first beat her naked ass with his leather strap—her Daddy's preferred method of dealing with her.  Jessica put her face on the floor between his feet, tightly clutched his ankles with her two hands, and raised her cute ass right up into the air, and parted her legs, so that he could easily burn her asshole and chubby cunt with the belt if he so chose.  Like a penitent supplicant before a cruel and terrible god, she upended herself and presented her bottom, as a sacrificial offering, to her glorious and omnipotent lord.

       Nelson looped the belt and held it tightly in this fist while he waited for the girl to get into position.  He declared, "Nancy is right outside the door.  The seams of the door are insulated, so the blows of the belt upon your ass will be muffled.  But if you scream, she will hear you, and you will be a cause of embarrassment for me.  Do you think you can keep your bitch-mouth quiet while I beat you?"

       "Uh huh," she replied in strangled whisper.

       "Good.  Because if you can't control yourself, and start screaming—if you embarrass  me with childish theatrics—you won't be able to come back here anymore.  I will send you home with Mr. Saul, and let him use your fuckholes for his trouble, while I entertain myself with a furniture girl who knows how to obey."

       Jessica let out an inarticulate cry, and murmured "I'll be good, I'll be quiet, I swear."

       "Good.  Because I am not going to gag you this time.  Nor am I going to tie you down.  I will expect you to take your punishment willingly, and submit to the blows quietly and obediently, for the next four hours.  After I have warmed you up with this belt, you will finish undressing me, and you will see how much your suffering arouses me.  Will you resent that, I wonder?"

       "I would never, Nelson—"

       "We'll see."

       Nelson watched the little girl tremble.  She had pinned her long dark hair back in a pretty clip, so he had an unobstructed view of her entire back, from her slender neck all the way down to the dimpled base of her spine and her upended ass.  She had obediently arched her back, and pressed her budding titties to the carpet, so that her ass would point straight up for the belt.  She had also spread her legs for him, so that the belt would curl right around her cheeks and burn the chubby sex between her legs.  She prostrated herself, and offered her body submissively to be punished by his firm hand, and she was determined to remain in that position, submissively presented for punishment, no matter how cruel, for as long as he deemed necessary.

       He did not know how he felt about hurting her.  He had meant what he had said, on the day after Christmas, when he had taken her to his house for the very first time, plied her with cruel devices and restraints, and then had used them on her for an extended punishment session.  He had told the girl that abusing her had taken a lot out of him psychologically—that hurting her had been difficult for him.

       Yet he had to confess, to his innermost self, that hurting the girl had thrilled and aroused him, too,  And when he had emptied himself into her throat at the tail end of her punishment, it had been one of the most intense climaxes of his life.

       There had been spankings since then, over his knee, such as the time upcountry, on the night of Jessica's reconciliation with Greta, long, grueling sessions that had taken as much out of Nelson as the girl.  And then hours, long blissful hours for cuddling, lovemaking, and reconciliation.

       Now here she was again, in a new setting, her first time at the company headquarters, and he understood that he had a duty to make it memorable for her.  This way.  She had as much as begged to be punished severely.  He would grant her request.

       And it would not be hard for him.

       Hurting his beloved Jessica became a little bit easier, and much more thrilling, with each episode.  He suspected that Jessica must derive gratification from submitting to him in this fashion.  Or why else would she crave it?

       His domination of Jessica, and her submission to him, had become progressively easier for both of them, and it troubled him.  Where would it end?  Had she been correct, that time in the woods, when she had wondered aloud whether she would eventually have to put her own head in a noose, and offer her very life, just to arouse him?  Nelson knew that he would rather not find out,  that they would have to somehow find a way to disabuse themselves of this reckless and potentially destructive pasttime.  Yet he had no idea how they should go about doing that, because he felt himself getting hard just with the anticipation of lashing her enticingly presented ass with the heavy belt.  He suspected the solution would necessarily involve some sort of trial by fire, the specific composition of which currently eluded him.  And that was just as well, for now, because he had a job to do, a job which, incidentally, he would enjoy.

       He draped the heavy leather belt on her back.  Her whole body trembled. 

       He quietly said, "I am going to strike your body at least thirty times with this belt.  I may go over.  You do not have to count.  In fact, you are not to make a sound.  I forbid you to cry out.  If you embarrass me  by screaming so that Nancy and others outside the door can hear you, then the punishment will be over and I will send you home.  Do you understand?"        

       "Yes," Jessica sobbed, "Please don't give me to Mr. Saul."

       "Don't give me a reason to."

       "Never—"

       "Mr. Saul wants you, did you know that?"

       "Sir, please don't—"

       "You've done a good job, teasing him like some filthy harlot.  He would fuck you unconscious, given half the chance.  And you would love that, wouldn't you, you dirty slut?"

       "No, you, Sir, only you, don't give me to Mr. Saul, I'll be a good furniture girl, I swear!"

       "No, cunt, no!"

       His sharp rebuke had brought her up short, and she just trembled silently, waiting in dread for the awful heavy belt to fall.

       He raised the belt and said, "You are not a furniture girl, Jessica, and you never will be."

       "Okay...."

       "Jessica, furniture girls can scream, and cry, and beg.  No one is surprised by their antics, not even Nancy, who hears it regularly from across the office.  I want more from you than that.  The people in this office must respect you, not as a tawdry little tramp, but as a strong, confident woman.  So you must take your correction not like a tramp, but like a lady.  I want you to be quiet, and hold still, and take whatever punishment I give you."

       "Oh god...."

       "Nor are you a Barbie doll.  Barbies don't feel pain.  You will.  And you will accept the pain, from start to finish."

       "God Nelson, I'm sorry I was bad—"

       "Is your body mine, Jessica?" 

       "Yes, Nelson, of course—"

       He swung the belt with all his strength, aiming for her incomparable ass.

       SMACK!

       Jessica heard the loud impact of the leather upon her flesh before she felt it.  And then she felt the pressure before the pain.  Then, the pain blossomed in her mind with all the grace and subtlety of a bomb. 

       She gripped his ankles tightly and wept into the floor.  The pain was horrible, worse than he had ever administered before; worse than Daddy in his most drunken rages; worse than that time when, at six years old, she had run into the curb with her bicycle and had flown off the handlebars.  She recalled his promise to strike her bare bottom with the belt at least thirty times, before moving on to the cane. 

       How would she ever endure it?

       Staring cross-eyed at the carpet through her tears, with her head pinned beneath his powerful calves, Jessica could not possibly know when he would raise his arm again, or when he would lash the belt down.  Would it have been better if she had known?  All she could do was concentrate on forcing herself not to scream.  And she also had to keep still.  To keep her back arched, her legs spread, her bottom up.  Her poor bottom, which felt like he had just held a blowtorch to her flesh.  How could she possibly stay still, knowing that she must endure at least twenty-nine more lashes of the belt, knowing that this ordeal was really just the preamble, to warm up her bottom, and tenderize her flesh for the harder chastisement to follow, to make her battered nerve endings more receptive to the cane?  Jessica had to fight against the instinct for self preservation, and to engage a battle of wills against every fiber of her being.  Her brain desperately recommended a hundred different evasive actions at once.  Guard with your hands.  Roll over, knees up.  Raise your fists and fight back.  Drive a fist straight up into the adversary's unguarded balls.  Kick him again as he fell.  Get up, run.  Scream, scream, scream for help.  Do anything, her brain raged, anything at all, except remain prostrate and unmoving to accept and invite the next awful blow.

       Nelson fought his instincts, too, and his adoration and veneration for this girl, this young woman who crouched prostrate on the carpet with her ass up in supplication to the belt, this young woman he cherished and adored above everyone and everything else upon this earth.  He had rashly promised Jessica thirty, and he never went back on his promises; had never lied or deceived her before; had earned her love and implicit trust in a thousand ways, not only in the large, grand ways, but also in the myriad small ways that never seemed to escape her attention.  How could he betray her now, by casting the belt to the floor after a single blow, and picking her up, and comforting her and holding and loving her as he longed to do with every minute aspect of himself?  How could he strike this beautiful person again, and amplify her agony?  But he had promised her thirty.  And God help him. God hate him, God damn him, he could feel himself getting hard. 

       He felt his arm go up, back over his shoulder; felt the leather fall back and drape his forearm.  Then, with a force of will, he called upon every muscle from his hamstrings to his forearms, and put his entire mass into the next blow.

       SMACK!

       Minutes later, Jessica's tortured mind struggled to comprehend that she had only received two blows of the belt, and that twenty-eight remained.  She knew that Nelson was far more powerful and masculine than Daddy, but how could this punishment feel so much worse than anything Daddy had ever meted out, that the spankings of her childhood memories now seemed like cuddling in comparison?

       Maybe she could stop it, or at least suspend it.  Yes, he still wore his trousers.  But his beautiful Maleness  was so close, so accessible, just a couple feet over her head.  Could she not appeal to that part of him for mercy?  Could she not reach up, and kiss Him, and take down his fly, and nuzzle Him, and suck Him, and love Him, and earn a blessed commutation, or at least a reprieve?

       SMACK!

       Yet another bomb detonated  in the vacuum left in the wake of the last, and hit the nerve endings of her tortured ass like gasoline poured onto a fire.  Jessica had told him, innumerable times, that she was his to love or hurt or break as he wished, and that she would refuse the offer of a safeword, that no one but Nelson could decide how long her punishments would last, or how hard the blows would be meted out, or how long she would be required to heal.  But couldn't she gather a big breath and cry 'uncle' now?  Even though she had refused all safewords, couldn't she just utter that universal safeword, the plea of surrender, and would he not know what it meant?  That she had been wrong, that she was not strong enough, that she did not love and adore and cherish and worship him quite enough to endure this?  Would her beloved Nelson, her resplendent prince, her darling love, understand her entreaty and grant her mercy?

       SMACK!

       That fourth blow struck the sensitive, meaty underside of her ass just halfway along the length of the looped belt, and the remainder missed the backs of both her thighs, and instead followed a path right between her legs, and when the heavy leather struck the vulnerable flesh of her hairless, chubby cunny, it felt like he had shoved a pack of firecrackers into her vagina and lit the fuse.

       From his vantage point, standing above her shoulders, could Nelson even have known exactly where the terrible leather had struck?  How could he have knowingly treated her most intimate femaleness so cruelly?  Surely he could not have driven the heavy, damp leather up into her delicate vaginal slit intentionally!

       But then she learned, to her fright and despair, that he had known exactly where he had struck her, because he hissed, "Hold that naughty cunt still, or I will use the buckle."

       Then a cry of shock caught in her throat as, SMACK, yet another fierce lash of the belt struck her in the exact same place.

       Jessica set her jaw so tightly, in her efforts to hold back her screams, that she felt like the cords in her neck might snap.  Her dearest Nelson might have realized this, too, because he reached across his desk and handed a thick wooden ruler to the girl, with instructions to bite down on it for the remaining twenty-five.

       She had only endured five out of thirty.  Sixteen point six six seven percent.  The next blow would be an even twenty percent, with no repeating remainder.  And the one after that would be twenty-three point three three four percent.  And the next, eight out of thirty, would be—

       SMACK!

       Jessica resigned herself to the fact that belt whippings at the hand of her powerful beloved Nelson were not, and never would be, conducive to mental calculation.  She tried to set a multiplication problem for herself.  Not a septillions problem.  Not a quadrillions problem.  Just thousands; two numbers of four digits each, with a result of between nine and ten digits.  Easy.  The eighth blow struck before she could think of two such numbers.  SMACK!  A cutting diagonal blow that scorched the bottom crease of her ass.

       Nelson had struck Jessica's bare bottom just seven times with the belt.  Seven times out of thirty.  And God help him, it was starting to excite him.  Although the girl could not know it, as she cowered on the floor with her head between his ankles, gnawing upon the wooden ruler that he had handed down to preserve her teeth, his cock now snaked down his trouser leg and strained so insistently to rise that it tented the fabric.  He wanted to take it out, but she would hear the zipper go down, and she would use all her wiles and talents to distract him from administering the punishment.  But he did indulge himself just a little bit, with his free hand, by slowly stroking himself, down the leg of his trousers.  Nelson had entered a zone wherein he anticipated delivering the next blow to her sweet proffered ass, and relished in the thought that this first onslaught was really only a prelude, to warm up her delicious bottom and make her lean buttocks and chubby cunt more receptive to the cane. 

       He raised the belt for the eighth time, and felt a thrill of guilty pleasure as he looked down on the cowering girl, because he had reached the point where he was enjoying himself at her considerable expense.

       SMACK! went the belt upon her rosy, quivering flesh, another bottom-up diagonal, in the opposite direction, that seared the other bottom crease, wrapped around, and striped her flank.

       Still she did not cry out.  Yes, she wept, and yes, she panted more rapidly than a newborn bird, and yes, sweat had blossomed all over her lovely petite form as she trembled and suffered, but she had not yet screamed, or cried out, or even begged.  She had not said a word in supplication, had not begged for mercy, or a reprieve, or a pause.  Yes, she had promised that she would submit willingly and obediently to as cruel a correction as he deigned to administer, and yes, he had threatened to send her home, and never invite her here again, if she should cry out loud enough for Nancy to overhear them outside of the door.  But still, he had been hoping that at some point instinct would overrule her brain, and that he would shame her, by making her scream.  He had twenty-one more blows of the belt, to make that happen.  And then the cane, of course.

       He waited for the little girl to compose herself and get her breath, so that she could properly anticipate and dread the next lash of the belt.  He was in no hurry.  He had plenty of time.  Hours, in fact.  It was only three o'clock.  He could call his Dad, tell him that he was busy, and that it would have to be a late dinner tonight.  He could make the reservations for early evening, and make Jessica suffer for the next five hours.  He teased the terrorized girl a little bit by running the end of the belt loop up and down her knobby, fragile spine.

       "Jessica, can you hear me?"

       "Yes, Sir," she wept around the soggy wooden ruler.

       "The next several to your naughty cunt, I think."

       Her sobs amplified.

       "Spread your legs some more, wench."

       Jessica moaned in desperation as she obeyed by spreading her knees wide. 

       "Hold still, now.  Twenty-one to go.  Then a rest, while you finish undressing me, and perhaps attend to my cock, and give me pleasure.  And then the cane, until dinnertime."

       Jessica cried with despair and happiness.  Despair, that she had still received less than half of the promised belt lashes, yet he seemed determined to carry through with his promise to mete out every single one.  And happiness, that he always kept his promises, big and small, and he had just promised her a rest, a reprieve, a brief interlude, an opportunity to bring pleasure to his beautiful sexy cock.

       As though reading her mind, he informed the girl, "You know, love, you are beginning to excite me.  Your suffering is exciting my balls.  I think I am going to have a whole bellyful for you, when the time comes."

       Jessica wept with gratitude.

       He leaned far forward, so that the fierce velocity and full impact of the belt would strike the pink meat of the girl's cunt first.

       SMACK!

       That tenth blow induced the girl to move for the first time, and drove her forward, straight into the carpet, so hard that her shoulders struck his shins and nearly tripped him up.

       "Hold still, naughty girl, and take your punishment!"

       SMACK!

       He intentionally struck her right down the middle again, but this blow broke across her tailbone, dissipating the bulk of his effort, which irritated him.  He aimed a flurry of lashes straight down between her legs.

       SMACK!  SMACK!  SMACK!  SMACK!

       Nelson struck Jessica four times in rapid succession, aiming the belt at an angle between her slender legs, and for the first time since the chastisement had begun, she twisted her trembling bum in a desperate, futile attempt to escape the blows.  One of the lashes burned the taut tendons of her groin, and she pivoted her whole body, exposing her front, and the fifteenth lash broke with full force right upon her lower belly.

       Jessica would need time to recover, he knew, or she would barely feel the next fifteen.

       She sobbed into the ruler.  She had been gnawing at the wood, and could taste wet sawdust.  She wanted it to end, she wished it could end, she wished her beloved Nelson would pick her up, hold her, comfort her, kiss all the places that hurt.  The girl wanted nothing more than to feel his gentle hands upon her head, her face, her breasts.  She wanted to tremble against him, rub herself on him, bare her inner soul for him, and shudder through endless climaxes against him.  But now she felt  the leather caressing her bony spine, and the backs of her shoulders, and she trembled against the leather, pressed herself to the carpet, tried to escape its caress, but the leather followed her down, and teased up and down her vertebrae, and she knew her punishment must not be over.  Hadn't he already struck her thirty times?  Had her beloved cruel powerful Nelson not gone over thirty?  Hadn't he struck her forty, fifty, a hundred times already?  Could he really be intending to go over a hundred?  Did he want, that much, to ruin her?  And what would happen when he picked up the cane?  How could she possibly stay still for that thick hard rod impacting her flesh, crushing vulnerable skin and muscle and nerves between hard cruel hickory and the unyielding bone beneath? 

       "Jessica," her glorious powerful terrible angel whispered.

       "Sir?" the suffering girl replied between the ragged breath of her weeping.

       "This posture isn't working for me.  I need you to flip onto your back, for the last fifteen."

       Her sobs broke into desperate cries.  The girl ordered her body to obey, to turn onto her back for Nelson, but her brain rebelled and defied her.  She cried incoherently and shook her head.

       "I have given you simple instructions, you stupid twat.  On your back, cunt.  Head between my shins.  Now."

       A direct order, by her beloved, to turn onto her back, and expose her breasts, tummy, and burning vagina to the full wrath of the belt.  She had not received thirty or forty or a hundred.  Jessica had only received fifteen blows of the belt out of thirty.  Only half.  How could she possibly endure the rest?  He was taking too long, giving her two much time to think, forcing her to endure and anticipate every agonized response of the tortured nerves beneath her burning skin. 

       "Get on your back now, hole, and spread your legs, or we'll start over."

       Jessica forced herself to move.  Her flank burned afresh as she pivoted and rubbed fresh beltmarks against the scratchy carpet. 

       Nelson looked down at her and watched as her ribs swelled and contracted with her panting breaths, and her stomach convulsed. The belt had curled under her crotch, wrapped around, and struck her hollow tummy in several places, as he could see by the faint pink weals.  Not hard enough.  The force of the belt had broken and dissipated upon her lovely ass, which had taken the brunt of his exertions.  He would remedy that now, by raising his arm and delivering the blows straight to her upended cunt.  And he would make her watch the belt descend.

       "Put your arms behind my legs and hold your hands together.  Don't let go, or we start over."

       Jessica sobbed and obeyed.  How could he expect her not to defend herself, as he struck not the somewhat padded surface of her lean, slender ass, but her vulnerable, bony front?

       "Spread your legs in a straddle.  Spread your cunt for the belt, and don't move, while I hurt it, or we start over."

       Did her beloved Nelson no longer love or lust for or want her poor femaleness?  How could he hurt her so?  What could it mean?  Why would he wish to ruin her most feminine and intimate self?

       "Maybe you will disappoint me after all."

       "Never—"

       "Perhaps I'll just let the salesmen have you tonight, and take my parents to dinner to tell them I am finished with you."

       "Sir, oh god Sir please no—"

       "And then Mr. Saul can take you home, and use you like a dog."

       Jessica just shook her head in desperate denial.

       "But first I am going to make sure you don't enjoy it, when the salesmen take turns fucking you full of cum, by lashing and caning this filthy naughty pussy until it doesn't feel pretty anymore, and can't give you pleasure anymore.  Then you'll just be a suitable dog for Mr. Saul, and he'll keep you in a steel cage with a bowl of dirty water when he doesn't feel like hurting you."

       "Don't dump me, Sir, please don't leave me, I'd rather die—"

       "We'll see," he said coldly.  "Roll your bum up, Jessica.  Touch your toes to the floor, on either side of you.  Get that cunt up in the air to meet the lashes, and don't move, or we start over."

       How could her beloved Nelson ask her to meet the belt halfway, to offer her femaleness to this torment, to put her own head in the noose and pull it tight?  How could he ask her to defy every instinct for self preservation?  An animal could not do it; a dog would not have done it; even the most loyal of dogs would have defied the order and fled.  He might as well ask her to put her hand into a fire and hold it there, or immerse her head in a tub of water and keep it there, or shove a curling iron up into her belly, and plug it in, and grip the handle, and fuck herself as steam rose up from her boiling juices and cooking flesh.  How could Nelson ask this of her?  Did he not love her anymore?  And if he did not love her anymore, what hold did he have on her?  Why should she obey him?  Why could she not simply stand up and put her dress back on, and walk home?

       "Do it, Jessica.  And open your eyes.  I want you to watch the belt descend."

       Her body obeyed his order.  She rolled her spine into the shape of a fish hook, raised her agonized cunny up into the air, straddled her legs, pulled her legs way back until her toes touched the floor.  She looked up at him in silent supplication, and her cries caught in her throat, because the belt was already raised, and preparing to descend.  Then he lashed her, putting every muscle, from his waist to his wrist, into the effort.

       SMACK!

       The leather broke upon the upended pink hood of her clit, burned her labia, and expended itself upon her anus. Although her body arched in agony off the floor, the delirious girl somehow managed to keep her hands tightly clasped together behind her head.  But he warned her anyway.

       "Don't move those hands, or we start over.  Look up at me, wench."

       He raised the belt again.

       SMACK!

       Jessica wanted to pass out, wanted to stop feeling the belt, the pain, the burning.  How could he do this to her?  How could he expect her to love him through this torture?  Yet she did love him, inexplicably, and she was his, to love and to hurt and to break past mending, if he so chose.  She noticed, for the first time, that he had been rubbing himself through his trousers, all this time, with his free hand, and her little heart filled with pride as she realized that her suffering was giving him pleasure, and thereby had a purpose, after all.

       SMACK!

       The next blow would be the nineteenth, and the torture of the belt would be sixty-three point three three four percent complete, if he stopped at thirty.

       SMACK!

       Nelson, god help himself, wanted to strike her budding breasts.  He wanted to turn her sweaty, warm, babysoft handfuls pink, then red, then purple.  He wanted to strike her breasts until her nipples stood out like thimbles and bled.  Could he get away with that, and still take her to dinner tonight?  Would the marks show?  He tried to visualize exactly how the neckline of her black silk cocktail dress broke over her delicate shoulders, and draped down her slender torso.  The neckline was rather high and conservative, almost demure.  He could strike her breasts, as long as he took care to avoid her neck and sternum.  While he debated the extent of his liberties this afternoon, he passed time by aiming the next blow at her bellybutton.  He swung the heavy belt with all the strength of his arm, because he wanted to knock the wind out of her, and watch her writhe soundlessly.

       SMACK!

       Jessica fought so hard, as the belt descended at her stomach, against the instinct to protect herself, that every muscle in her torso stood out beneath her skin like bales of wire, and she very nearly lost the battle.  Through the blaze of fire that engulfed her brain, she heard him warn her to keep her hands together.  She had mastered the instinct to block the belt with her arms, but only just.  And in her agony she could see him raising the belt yet again. 

       "No, no, no no no," she heard herself cry.

       "Be silent, you naughty little cunt, and take your punishment!"

       SMACK!

       While Jessica writhed silently and awaited the twenty-second lash of the belt, he gave further consideration to his compulsion to hurt her budding breasts.  Her breasts looked so small and lovely on her panting chest, so delicate and vulnerable, the puffy nipples pointed straight up into the air.  When he had met the girl, not six months ago, her breasts had been just small mouth-sized bundles of nerve endings atop her ribs, and he would delight in suckling each one entirely into his mouth, sucking hard on the nipple, pulling it right into his mouth and swirling his tongue upon the nascent warm aureole, while she trembled beneath him, on the cusp of climax, moaning with delight through the exquisite torture, and he would keep it up for hours, giving all his attention to just one, until finally he gave the girl her release by finding her clit with his finger, and she would shake through a delicious orgasm as he devoured her, and her convulsing femaleness would soak his hand, and gush upon the knob of his cock, which teased at her labia all the while, and she would beg him to make love to her, to fuck her, to impale her, to kill her, to fuck her dead, but she would have to wait, because his mouth would come off  the swollen nipple, and move to its partner, and the delicious torture would start again, inducing the unabashed little atheist to appeal to God, Jesus, Mary, and all the saints for mercy.   Her lovely breasts had grown since then, slowly and steadily over the past six months, and he had not missed the transformation, but had reveled in it and perhaps even actively assisted, since he had given her growing breasts hours of stimulation, and squeezing, and caresses, and suckling, and pinching, at every single opportunity, because he loved to please and delight her, and she had confided many times that his attentiveness to her growing breasts constituted her most favorite form of foreplay.  Jessica had certainly given him full credit for the growth of her breasts, the appearance of a fresh, new, beautiful pair of breasts into the world, and had thanked him innumerable times for suckling them and helping them to grow.  He observed, in passing, that her training bras would have to be traded in, that she was busting out of them, that she really did need A-cups now, and he idly wondered whether she would let him buy them for her.  As to lashing her delightful, nascent udders, he still had not made up his mind, so he aimed for her vulnerable tummy, her womb, once again.

       SMACK!

       Jessica felt the blow to the depth of her innermost core; the belt appeared to have sliced straight through the muscle and sinew of her belly to scorch the incipient uterus that cowered within.  And through the harsh white noise that rattled her brain and cut into her cranium like steak knives shaken inside a drawer, she  heard, through the haze of her delirium, the soft, kind, abiding voice of her Nelson, telling her that she had eight more coming, and that she would receive them upon her chest, four lashes to each breast, that he had to warm them up, and tenderize them, and make them extra-sensitive, so that her breasts would respond properly to the cane, because after he had finished beating her body with the belt, and after he had used her broken body for his pleasure, and relieved the ache of his balls by emptying himself inside of her, the real punishment would begin, the caning, and he still had not decided how many lashes of the cane he would force her to endure, but he did know, without a doubt, that she would receive the stripes not only across her burning ass, but also between her legs, upon her poor tormented cunny, and across her belly, to punish her naughty uterus from the outside, and of course her breasts, too, there most of all, because he knew her nipples were perhaps the most sensitive region of her lovely exterior, and he conceded, lovingly and almost apologetically, that the mere notion of striping her breasts with the cane, and searing them with fire, and making the bleed, was making him almost unbearably hard.  Jessica heard him say that he was done punishing her naughty cunt, for now, and she could rest her pelvis, and put her feet back on the floor, but now he had to hurt her beautiful breasts with the leather, and he wanted her to watch the belt descend, and to not move her clever little hands, and to hold still.  She heard him say that he would punish each breast in turn, four successive blows to the left, so that she would endure the pain, yet be forced to anticipate that it would all start again, when he finished with the left and moved onto the right.  And all the while the right would suffer, too, like a miscreant child, forced to sit upon a hard chair, with her skirt up over her waist, with her bare ass against the wood, and await her turn over the headmaster's desk, while being forced to watch and listen while her mate suffered upon the same desk, under the cruel wrath of the headmeaster's cane upon her tortured, bleeding bottom, for hours and hours.

       SMACK!

       The wide, heavy leather of the belt landed straight down upon her left nipple and flattened her entire breast against her ribcage.  The impact seared her nerves as though a steaming clothes iron had been pressed lovingly to her chest, and somehow, even now, she found the strength and the will not to scream.  She panted up at him, with her chest heaving, with  fingers clasped so tightly together behind her head that her fingernails cut into the backs of her hands, and her expression, as she watched him stroke his enormous erection through his trousers, and witnessed his arousal, his enjoyment of her bitter torment, with a look of incomprehension.  How could her torture be arousing him?  Could he possibly claim to love her, and still do this to her?   He raised his arm again, as she watched, high over his head, and paused on the upswing, and looked into her eyes with a malicious sneer, and she knew that he was enjoying this, that her torture excited him, that he enhanced his pleasure by drawing the torment out as long as possible, to make her wait, to compel her to dread the inevitable fall of the lash.  The blow to her left nipple had occurred  minutes ago, yet still the agony refused to crest, and the expectation of more of the same filled all her consciousness, and her entire future reduced to the next three horrible lashes to come.  How could he expect her to endure three more blows upon the first,and how could she ever survive it, irrespective of his expectations?  She watched him wrap his long fingers around the immense pole that ran down his leg, and slowly stroke, as his right arm came down, for the second time upon her left nipple, and the whole time, he looked right into her eyes.

       SMACK!

       Jessica's back arched up into the air, taking the form of a bent bow, and for three straight seconds, no part of her except the back of her head and her feet touched the carpet.  Tears dripped down her cheeks, and made puddles in the carpet, and through the duration of her agony, even still, she neither cried out nor took her eyes off his, and as she watched his arm raise again, and pause upon the top of its ascent Jessica recalled a promise he had made on one of their first meetings, back on the afternoon that she had introduced him to grown-up-Kens-and-Barbies, when he had promised that he would someday address her with words that she would not be able to reconcile with his earnest assertions of uncondtional love, and he would do things to her body, and hurt her in ways, that she would be at a loss to comprehend.  And did her beloved Nelson not always keep his promises, both the grand sweeping ones, and the small pledges, uttered in passing, to equal degrees?  Because, as she watched him stroke himself, and glare down with bestial savagery, she found herself at a loss to comprehend her suffering at the hands of her lord, protector, and master.

       SMACK!

       Jessica had not yet screamed, but the third blow to her nipple induced a soft, keening cry, barely audible, a soft yet shrill falsetto, at the upper end of the auditory spectrum.  Neither Nancy nor anyone else out in the office would have heard this diminutive wail of agony, but still he felt it only fair to remind her of the terms.  He chuckled softly, and she looked up with him with renewed incomprehension and horror.

       "Careful, dearest.  Control yourself; if you move to protect your breasts, we start over.  And if you scream, I will have to send you home, and call in a more experienced furniture girl."  He looked down at the girl cruelly as her expression collapsed into silent bawling, as she steeled herself and tried to summon the strength and courage to prove herself worthy to receive this horrible torment.  "Eyes open, darling," he quietly advised.

       Jessica desperately shook her head, eyes crushed shut.

       "Cunt.  Open your eyes."

       Jessica looked up at him.

       SMACK!

       He spoke right through her agony.  "Now the other lovely breast, whore."

       She wept, "No.  No, no, no.  Please Nelson, please...."

       "Yes, whore.  I must prepare you for the cane.  I need your breasts to be flushed full of blood, the nerves standing on end, for the optimum receptivity to the cane."

       "Noooooo...."

       "Jessica, I have chosen the oldest cane, the one I used to use on Vanessa, and Sara, and others.  It has been worn to a venerable condition.  The whole length is covered with hairline cracks and splinters that will stick your flesh, and break off in your skin, as I saw the length of the cane back and forth upon your welted ass, and your rosy cunt, and your bruised udders, and play your body like a fine violin, between the blows."

       "Nooooo, Nelson, noooo...."

       "Do you love me, Jessica?"

       "Yes, of course, yes...."

       "Your right breast, now, for the final four."

       "Please God...."

       SMACK!

       With the one remaining glimmer of lucidity in Jessica's demented brain, she perceived that the blow to her right nipple felt like her whipping had begun all over again from the very beginning, that the steaming iron had been placed upon her unsuspecting, vulnerable flesh yet again.  She arched her back in agony, and twisted onto her right side to guard herself, and desperately kissed Nelson's shin through his trousers, a silent entreaty for pity and mercy.  She couldn't take three more, she couldn't.  She wanted to be gone, to never see her Nelson again, to drown in her despair, to leave him forever, and to die.  If he had offered her release that moment, in any fashion, either dismissal or the painlessness and finality of death, she would have taken him up on either offer.  Any offer at all, anything at all but the next lash of the belt.  Her right nipple felt larger than her chest, larger than his office, larger than the world, and every minute portion of its endless expanse sang with bitter agony.

       SMACK!

       Jessica heard him speaking.  A quiet, cruel monologue.  She heard only some of it.  He was rambling on about where he would strike her with the cane, and how many cuts each region of her body would receive.  He would cane her six times to her ass, which even now burned so badly that she couldn't set her posterior on the carpet and strained her ankles and calves past the point of exhaustion and endurance just to avoid making contact between the rough carpet and the fire beneath her skin.  And three to her poor cunny, that most intimate feminine part of her, the part that he purported to love and adore most of all, her precious femaleness, the part of her that kissed and loved and pleasured his Maleness with selfless adoration and devotion at every opportunity, often to the detriment of its tender, delicate self, since she really was too shallow and tight for a glorious, manly organ such as his, and had to stretch and strain just to accept its formidable length and girth; all the same, her poor cunny would receive three, a cut to each of her sensitive babysmooth labia, and one right down the middle, to light her pink delicate interior on fire and slice her poor clitty so badly that it might never feel nice or look pretty again, that is what he promised,  and three cuts of the cane across her flat, vulnerable tummy, hard and merciless cuts that would slice straight to her ovaries and her womb, and then her breasts, three cuts of the cane to each of her poor breasts, which he claimed to love and claimed to regard as beautiful, but how could he love her breasts and find them beautiful, yet still achieve arousal and pleasure while hurting them so badly as to slice and score them past mending?

       SMACK!

       One more to her breast, one more would make thirty; she had suffered ninety-six point six six seven percent of her punishment, and just one more, upon her right breast, would complete the expression of his cruel artistry, but how could she possibly endure it?

       "No, noo, noooo, no more please please no more, I can't take it—"

       SMACK!

       She had endured all thirty lashes of the belt, and had never guarded herself, nor had she ever screamed; nor, he now noticed for the first time, had she once brought her thighs together to protect her sex, not even since he had transferred his concentration to her belly and breasts.  He impulsively decided, just as she began to comprehend that she had endured all thirty, to mete out one more, right between her legs.  He leaned over the girl, and she saw him do it. 

       Now she closed her legs, one over the other to protect herself, and moaned, "Nooooooo, noooooo!"  Hadn't he finished?  Had she not endured all eight to her breasts, the last eight, had they not reached thirty?  How could she have miscounted?  How could he wish to continue hurting her?

       "Ah ah, cunt, manners!  Open those legs wide!"   He waited, the belt raised high, leaning right over her torso, waiting for the girl to sacrifice herself to the belt.

       She opened her thighs to a full straddle.

       SMACK! SMACK! SMACK!

       Three vicious lashes, straight down the center of her cunt, and then he dropped the belt upon her abdomen, and stepped away, and she curled into a ball.

       Nelson had been standing over her, and it was several minutes before she noticed his bare feet in front of her face.  She arched her slender neck forward and kissed every toe that she could reach.

       He said, "You punishment is not over yet, cunt, and you have a job to do."

       She looked up, cringing, with her face upon the floor.

       "Get up on your knees, and take my trousers down."

       Jessica had trouble picking herself up.  Her legs did not want to move.  How could her punishment not be over?  Could he really be serious that he would soon beat her again, with the awful cane?

       She reached up, unbuttoned his trousers, and carefully pulled down the zipper.  She pulled his trousers down, and he stepped out of them.  Jessica folded his trousers on the creases and set them carefully upon his desk, beside her black cocktail dress.  Then he sat in his chair, and the tormented girl had to stand to remove his tie.  She had never taken a man's necktie off, and he lost patience with her. 

       "Here, idiot, I will show you how to do it, but I think I will have to increase your caning, too, for your ignorance."

       Jessica softly wept. 

       She botched his cufflinks, too.  She took too long fumbling awkwardly with the clips, and eventually he gave up, and she had to kneel and watch, ashamed of her inadequacy, while he unbuttoned his white shirt, took it off, folded it, and set it upon his trousers.  Now he wore nothing but his boxer shorts, and half his cock protruded down the leghole.  Jessica crawled up between his legs and nuzzled the oozing, bloated knob with her lips and and tongue, lapping at the copious precum.  A new rush of shame engulfed her.  The harsh belting had aroused him almost to the point of climax.  Her suffering had nearly made him cum. 

       On the one hand, she wished he could have achieved a climax from the pain that he had inflicted on her with the belt.  On the other hand, the cane awaited, and if he had climaxed during her belting, she might have been denied this brief respite.

       Nelson hitched his muscular butt off the chair, and instructed the girl to take his boxer shorts down.  She rushed to obey, and now her beloved lord and master wore nothing but his gold watch.  She knelt at his feet and looked up at him with reverence, and he presided over her like a cruel despot upon his throne.  He took her little hand in his, and she kissed his hand, and rubbed her cheek against his palm, even as he guided her up onto her feet, nearly pulling her up to do so.  Then, before she could try to distract him further, he turned her to face the desk, and gently pushed her shoulders down until she bent, naked, right over the desk, with her knees straight.

       Then he gently said, "Knees up on the desk, Jessica, put them up.  Then spread them wide apart, as wide as you can.  Try to straddle, so your ass hangs right over the side."  As the girl obeyed these commands, a thrill ran down her spine.  He would use her now, and perhaps forget about the rest of her punishment, or at least put it off for awhile with other, happier distractions.

       Nelson sat back in his chair and admired that rosy, spread bum  and thighs that she presented to him.  The cheeks of her ass were crisscrossed with wide, angry red belt marks that were turning into weals.  Some of the stripes extended down the backs of her thighs, and would definitely show under the hem of her little cocktail dress from the back if she bent over tonight even a little bit.  The thought aroused him further.  And her entire cunt looked red and inflamed.

       But wet, too.  And now he indulged himself in teasing and humiliating her a little bit.

       "My, my, fuckhole.  I don't think I've strapped you hard enough.  You're pretty cumhole looks wet and aroused.  I think you enjoyed your punishment a little bit."

       "No, Sir, no, it hurt so bad...."

       "Yet you're positively gushing back here.  You know, I do have to relieve myself now, and I think I am going to push myself into your naughty vagina, into your tummy, and pleasure myself in the inside of your cunt until I fill your tummy with Sperm."

       To press the point, he grasped his immense tool and pushed the sensitive swollen knob up and down between the hot tight lips of her rosy,lashed slit.

       "Thank-you, Sir, oh god, thank-you—"

       "And as I've said many times, we are lovers, dearest, and you should always feel free to climax yourself, if you can, even when you are being punished—"

       "Oh, I won't, Sir, I won't, I promise, not without permission—"

       "But you have permission, dearest, and I want you to cum as hard and often as you can, if you can.  But this is still a punishment, after all, and by rights I am the only one who should be enjoying myself, so I think I would like to make it a little bit hard for you."

       Her cries caught in her throat as she digested these words.  What could he mean?  How would he make it harder for her to cum?  Would he punish her with the belt while he made love to her?  He opened a narrow drawer on the right hand side of his wide open desk, and he took several items out, and set them beside the girl's fearful eyes, so that she could see.

       First he set a small bottle of rubbing alcohol, right before her eyes, which she furrowed in consternation.

       "We do not want any infections, do we?  But I am afraid it will sting a little bit, if we have to use it."
       Next he set a box of staples, and her eyes went wide.  What did he plan on doing with those?  Then he answered her silent question by setting, beside the box, a heavy duty staple gun, the kind that could shoot a half inch staple all the way into a two-by-four.

       "No doubt you'll want to know what all that is for.  Just an idea for a game.  For when I am ready to cum.  And we won't have to play, if you don't want to.  I'll leave it up to you."

       She dismally sobbed, "Whatever you want, Sir, anything...."

       He chuckled and set three one inch long, black binder clips beside the staple gun. 

       "The clips we will be using shortly, I am afraid.  We will have to protect your most sensitive spots from the cane, you see."

       She emitted a strangled cry, yet humped her sexy straddled cunt in mid-air.

       Then he took from the drawer a small package containing what looked like large foil-wrapped pills. 

       He enigmatically explained, "A little something to remind you, as we proceed, that you are still being punished.  So, let's get started, shall we?"

       Jessica just moaned plaintively.  She did not know what that little foil-wrapped pill did, and she did not want to find out.  Couldn't she just cry uncle now?  He would stop, wouldn't he?  He would understand that she was just a girl, and he had taken he punishment too far, way past her ability to endure it, and he would have mercy, and go back to simply loving her, would he not?  Her breasts hurt against the desk, and her tummy hurt so bad she couldn't imagine taking him inside of her, and the welts on her ass burned like brands with the stretch of the posture he had forced her to assume, and her poor cunny which hurt worst of all, now seemed  intent on betraying her.  How could her most precious female self be wet and aroused, when pleasure and orgasm were the furthest concepts from her mind, buried under thoughts of more crucial imperatives, such as flight, and self defense, and self preservation?

       Nelson first took up the heavy black binder clips, and explained, "We do not want the cane to slice or split your pretty nipples, or your naughty little clitoris.  So we will protect those special places.  With these."

       Jessica shook her head in desperation.  She knew those heavy clips would feel ten times worse on her nipples and clitty than the colored  clothespins that he had attached to her erogenous zones once at his house.  He picked up a binder clip, and squeezed it open, strained  his thumb and index finger to do it, before her anguished eyes, so that she could see how much effort he had to expend to open it, and consequently how tightly it would snap back on her sensitive nipple.

       "Lean toward me a bit," he ordered, "so I can put this on your nipple."

       Her chest heaved in forlorn sobs as she raised her right breast to receive the cruel adornment.  He grabbed her small, palm-sized breast and cruelly squeezed, to force her little nipple to stand out.  Then he abruptly let the binder clip go, so that it snapped like a pair of jaws upon the pencil eraser sized nub of flesh.  Jessica sucked in ragged breaths.  the pain was horrible.  Through her tears she saw him pick up a another binder clip, and he compelled her to lean the other way.  He repeated the procedure on her left nipple. 

       She felt like her sensitive nubs were being stung by bees.  She looked down at herself, at the horrible black clips that dangled from her breasts and crushed her nipples flat.

       "Sir, ohhhhh, ohh God it hurts so bad—"

       "Yes, he remarked unsympathetically, I am told that it does."

       Then he proceeded with the third clip, and sportingly told the suffering girl, "You don't have to move for this one.  All you have to do is hold still."  He went behind her, and she cried with despair as she realized what he was about to do.  He softly explained, "We can't have that awful cane ruining your sweet little clitty, now can we?"  He put the open binder clip around her thin girlish clittyhood, and when she felt the metal on her most precious spot, she impulsively bucked forward. 

       "Now, now, dear, come back here.  If you resist, you'll only make it worse for yourself."

       She cried with despair as she pushed her straddled cunny back in place, over the edge of the desk.  He let the binder clip snap shut around her clit.

       "Owwwww!" she cried, forlornly.

       He sportingly said, "There, now.  All your protections are in place.   Now we have to do something about the fact that you just seem determined to get a few good cums out of this punishment."

       Nelson had not used the suppositories since his days with the furniture girls.  She watched in morbid fascination, and could not help being curious, as he unwrapped one of the slender foil packages.  From it, he took a clear pill, about the length and thickness of the first joint of his middle finger.

       Jessica raised her eyebrows, expressing her unarticulated question.

       "Glycerin and ginger paste," he explained.  It can be put either in the cunt or the ass, as punishment.  Since I will be using your cunt momentarily, it is clear where this has to go.  Just hold still while I insert it."

       She supposed she knew where he would be putting it, but she still did not know why, did not know what the thing would do to her.  It looked innocuous enough.  Yet presumably the benign looking device would somehow prevent her from cumming while he made love to her .  Sure, she had just endured an awful strapping, and yes, she had to concede that her punishment had not ended yet, and the binder clips on her nipples and clitty felt just awful, but for all of that, how could she not have been aroused, knowing as she did that her beloved Nelson would soon be rutting into her and pumping her full of lovely potent Sperm, in her womb, her baby place, where it belonged?  She always came on Nelson's cock.  She achieved climax on his beautiful Maleness effortlessly, as naturally as breathing.  How could this silly little pill, which he obviously intended on inserting into her ass, prevent that?

       Nelson placed his left palm upon both cheeks of her ass, and while he was only holding her steady, to prepare to torment her in some new way, she could not help thrilling at the contact.  She loved when he held her bum.  It was a casual form of touching, much like holding hands, except more intimate.  She held hands with lots of people, under many different pretexts.  Mummy, Colleen, Greta, Vernon, Abby.  But only one person on earth held her ass in his hands, in a casual, fond fashion, and got away with it, and that person was her beloved Nelson.

       With his right hand, he pried the innocuous looking pill into her anus, and used his middle finger to push it deep into her rectum.  She accepted and submitted to the incursion of his finger with calm acceptance.  Her asshole and rectum belonged to him, and him alone, to tickle or fondle or love or hurt or ruin, as he wished. 

       Yet already, even as he pushed the gelatinous horsepill up into her bum, she had an inkling of its insidious purpose, because she felt her bottom starting to heaten up.  He popped his middle finger out of her anus, and her bottom snapped shut, leaving the evil little pill deep inside.

       The heat intensified.  She began to sob with foreboding.  Every time she thought she could endure the burning in her rectum, the fire raged hotter and hotter inside of her, to the point that she clawed at the blotter and had to fight with every fiber of her being to restrain herself from clawing her own belly open with her fingernails to make the pain go away.  The pain blindsided her, at first because she had thought she had earned a reprieve for comporting herself so well through the "warming up" of the belt, and second, because she could not have imagined he would force her to endure worse pain than the horrible binder clips.  But the fire in her intestines raged so intensely now that she couldn't feel the clips anymore, couldn't feel the welts on her breasts and buttocks and cunny, couldn't feel anything at all, nothing but the horrible burn.

       Through this new veil of agony, she did hear the sweet baritone voice of her beloved, who gently said, "Now, my love, you have permission to cum as much as you want, while I fuck you.  That is, if you can."  He went on to explain, "The suppository will slowly melt inside you, and you will burn the whole time.  But do not be troubled.  The fire will have subsided three hours from now, when we go to dinner."

       Jessica felt his hands upon her sex, pulling her open, and the blunt weapon, his lordly cock, pushing at her interior wetness, and the pressure renewed the agony of the harsh strapping he had inflicted on her sex with the belt.  She felt pressure down below, and the sensation of stretching, but that was all; every other sensation was overwhelmed and lost beneath the waves of fire.  She had a dim awareness of his hands upon her waist, pulling her tiny pelvis onto his tool, shunting her back and forth on his manly spear, but she could not feel his hands, or the pressure, or his sex inside of her, because there was nothing but the burn, which inexplicably refused to dissipate, but crested and rose in waves of torment, with an intensity that eclipsed and mocked Dante's hell.

       She felt him lean over her back, and she watched in stupefaction as he popped the catch on the staple gun.  Before her very eyes, which were half-blind with tears, he pried the box of staples open, removed a strand of fifty half-inch deep staples, so that she could see them, and poured rubbing alcohol on them.

       Then he took the strand of staples, popped the staple gun's magazine, pushed the strand into the stapler, and closed the magazine with a snick. 

       Jessica, at this point lost to some perilous depth in a flashback to her nightmares from the weeks leading up to her graduation, looked at the stapler with wide eyes, and then up at him, beseechingly, craning her neck back to see him, and he gently placed the loaded staple gun into her hand and forced her to curl her little hand around the handle and trigger.

       "Nelson?  Nelson?  No!  NO, NO!"

       "Just a game, love.  Safer than Russian Roulette, not quite as final.  I told you that I would find a way to give you the experience."

       "Please, no, no!"

       He continued to push himself in and out of her belly, monstrously hard, but she no longer felt him, no longer felt the burn, no longer felt anything but her own hand wrapped around the trigger of the staple gun.  What was he going to make her do? 

       He rummaged in his pocket and retrieved one more item, which he had borrowed from Donner earlier that day.  A little accessory that Donner used to determine the severity of his Monday morning corrections of the furniture girls.  He set the item before Jessica.  A single six-sided die.

       "NO!  No, Nelson, No!"

       He calmly said, "I told you that I would find a way to cure your deathwish.  One die, six sides.  A one in six chance."

       He took her hand, the little hand that gripped the heavy staple gun, which he loaded with alcohol soaked, half inch staples, and he guided her hand to her own torso, and compelled her to force the stapler around to point at herself, and positioned her hand until the stapler's ejection point pressed right up against the warm, pale pink aureole of her right breast.

       The mere act of forcing her to make her own lovely breast the target of the stapler excited him so alarmingly that he rutted her in double time and felt his climax building up with unprecedented rapidity.  He would not last long, not long at all.

       He said, "I am going to cum soon.  Just before I climax inside of you, I am going to roll the die.  If I roll a six, you pull the trigger of the staple gun."

       "Nelson, oh god Nelson, please no!"

       "You will do it, Jessica!"

       "Oh god!"

       He pounded himself savagely in and out of her, shunting her body forward on each thrust with such desperate ferocity that it was only his own hands, tightly gripping her waist, that prevented him from throwing the girl right off the opposite side of the desk.  She leaned on her left arm to support herself, and tried to hold the stapler to her breast, as he commanded, but it was so heavy, and she was so exhausted— and now his right hand gripped hers and he jammed the stapler into her breast, and his ragged voice warned her that he was close, and he warned her to hold the stapler there, but it was so heavy, and her ass burned from the inside, and his animalistic rutting shunted her violently back and forth on the desk, and in the midst of this ordeal that she could only classify as rape, a corner of her mind registered the sight of Nelson picking up the die, and shaking it in his palm.

       "Here I come, here I come, oh God, oh God, here I come, fuck, fuck," and then the die fell from his hand, and rolled to a stop in front of Jessica's bleary, defocused eyes.

       It landed on a two, not a six.

       A different, complementary heat, flooded her birth canal, a soft, warm, deliciously slippery heat, and Jessica knew that Nelson was cumming gallons into her uterus, and somehow, although his semen filled a different space, his copious ejaculatory pulses somehow soothed and assuaged the burning in her ass as well.

       He had stopped thrusting, and just buried himself as deep as he could go, and she could feel herself stretching in time with his heartbeat, as his beautiful cock pulsed and expanded with each beat, and stretched her inside, and the sweet slippery ropes of sperm just kept coming and coming, and it was so beautiful, being fucked and bred by her beloved Nelson, that for a brief respite, the agony of her punishment faded into the background.

       As his climax subsided, he gently pulled her hand away, the hand that still gripped the stapler, pulled it away from her breast so that she would not inadvertently impale herself.

       Now that he had finally relieved himself, and briefly sated his hunger for her, and emptied himself into her, he wanted to stop, and hold her, and comfort her, and take her into his private bathroom, to gently irrigate her anus, to dilute the suppository that had only begun to melt its fire into her bowels and would continue to do so for the next two hours, at the very least, in the absence of forcible intervention.

       But he had promised.  He had pledged to administer a caning, and to make it last until dinner, and he kept his promises.

       He began to pull himself out of Jessica's warm interior.  She felt him doing it, felt her respite ending, knew what was coming, and desperately pushed herself back at him in a frantic bid to maintain that intimate contact, because she knew that with his full withdrawal, the punishment would recommence, and he had left the awful three foot long, half inch thick hickory cane in her plain view upon the desk.  As he had promised, it was an old, venerable, ghastly weapon, replete with hairline cracks and frayed edges that woud splinter and cut into her flesh as she endured the torture.  Jessica knew the culmination of her punishment must happen, but dreaded its commencement and would have done anything at that point to delay it for even a moment.

       She wept, "The Stapler Game, Nelson!"

       "Hmmm?" he inquired.

       She sobbed, "You heard!  I can't take the cane!  Not yet!  Not yet, oh god, it hurts so bad!"

       He chuckled, picked up the cane, pushed his cock back into her warm abdomen, relished the sensation of his instantly renewed arousal, felt himself swelling and hardening deliciously inside of her, and mused, "What do you propose?"

       "A wager!  Oh god, oh god!"

       "Intriguing," he conceded.   He picked up the evil, tattered cane, and twirled it in his hand in front of her face, so she could see him do it.  "Let's hear your wager, then."

       She panted with the fire in her bottom which had found new fuel with which to burn, and had a resurgence, and blossomed into renewed agony in her intestines.  She panted, "I— I won— I won the first round, Sir— Four more.  If I win, no caning— oh god, ahgghhhhhh," and she had to pause in the explication of her proposal to cry into the blotter, because the pain of the suppository, slowly melting in her rectum, made the girl want to rip herself open.  "If— if— if I win all five, no caning; if you staple me, even once, I get double!"

       The wager tore at Nelson's heart.  He wanted this to end.  He did not want to cane her.  She had already been so brave and beautiful under the belt, and he had punished her so thoroughly, on every intimate part.  He did not want to administer one dose of the cane, much less double.  Yet her so-called wager weighed so heavily in his favor, that double was almost certainly exactly what the girl would get.  The odds that the girl would roll four more times, five total, without hitting a six, were almost nil.  She would hit a six, and have to staple her own breast, and then he would have to cane her double.  Twelve cuts of the hickory to her beautiful ass, six to her precious femaleness, six to her soft, vulnerable tummy, and six to each adorable breast.  He couldn't imagine doing it; couldn't see how he could possibly summon the will to complete the task of inflicting that many cuts upon the body of the young woman that he loved more than anyone or anything on this earth.  Yet, she would sense his hesitation to punish her, and his equivocation.  She would know if he tried to change the terms of the wager to her favor, and would perceive it as patronization.  She wanted so much to prove herself to him, in all things, that she would kill herself trying.  He had to cure herself of this dangerous, self-destructive deathwish, this need that she had, to place herself in peril for his arousal and sexual gratification.  He loved her as an equal, and did not need these acts of submission from her, but he was at a loss as to how to cure her of the need.

       No matter how she perceived his equivocation, he could not bring himself to accept the wager on her terms.  He would cut the girl to pieces.  He decided to be brusque  He would attempt to turn the wager in her favor, while masking the effort behind belligerence.  He wondered, even as he began to speak, whether she would fall for it. 

       "You won't last through four rolls, idiot!" he berated her, hoping that the cruelty of his words would bite her deep enough to make her miss the fact that he was offering her an out.  "You'll roll at least one six, guaranteed!  It's not even sporting.  I might as well cane you double right now!"

       "Then do it!" she cried.  "Cane me double!  I can take it!"

       "No.  I like the Stapler Game.  But it has to be a competition; we have to make it fair.  You get the original caning, as agreed, if you roll one six, and you get double for two sixes, and you get triple for three sixes."

       Jessica did not even hesitate.  "Deal!" she sobbed.  "Fine!  I'll roll three sixes!  Cane me triple!"  The girl defiantly rolled onto her back, and rolled her sweet crotch up into the air, both so she would not leak a precious drop of his Sperm, and also to lift her burning ass off the desk blotter.  Then, she did something else that shocked him to the core:  she grabbed the heavy binder clip that he had attached to the hood of her clit, and she ripped it right off without even loosening it, grimacing through spirals of fresh agony as blood rushed into the tortured flesh for the first time in fifteen minutes.  But before he could rebuke her for pulling the binder clip off; before he could even react at all, Jessica shocked him yet again, when she snatched up the heavy staple gun with two hands, gripped it tightly, and jammed it hard right against the bright red, inflamed hood of flesh over her clit. 

       "Roll a six, Sir, I'm ready," the girl sobbed.

       This act of contrition appalled the man over anything else that had transpired, but how could he refuse her, when his cock throbbed, rock hard, with need?  Her capacity for invention both enthralled and appalled him, and the debauchery of the Stapler Game, invented on the fly in the depths of her dementia, had him utterly hooked, and he had no idea how, after today, they would be able to abstain from its perverse allure.

       "Yessss, hold that thing against your fucking cunt," he hissed maniacally, "and I'll fuck you as I roll."  Even as he uttered the words, his mind raced ahead frantically; instantaneously, the Stapler Game had intertwined itself inextricably in his mind, and had hooked him:  a way to play Russian Roulette, and make her suffer, and achieve the ultimate climax, without killing her in the process.  How on God's earth would he ever break himself of this habit?  He supposed next time he would have to press the loaded stapler to his own balls, and demand a wager of his own.  That would be the only way he would be able to force her to stop playing.  To call her bluff, and submit himself, quid pro quo, by sacrificing his own balls.

       Meanwhile, Jessica was raving.  "Yes, Sir, put it in me, fuck me deep, fuck me all the way, and roll a six, and I'll staple my own clit as you fuck me, and I'll bleed all over your beautiful cock while you pump me full of cum!"  She rubbed the body of the stapler on her lower abdomen, pressed it against her mons, frigged her wet clit with its horrible business end, ground the hard shiny steel against her trembling clit with such mindless ferocity that her fingers depressed the trigger halfway down in the process.  She would shoot herself in the clit with the stapler inadvertently, at the rate she was going, if he did not distract her somehow.

       "Hold on, cunt, let me get into you."

       "Please," Jessica gasped, "please fill me up, god, oh fucking god, I have to cum so bad!  Make me cum, Nelson, or I'll do it myself!"

       He thrust eight inches, all at once, straight into her soaked, dilated cunt, stretched her adolescent slit to the ripping point, bashed himself right up into her cervix.  She moaned with gratitude and went back to frigging herself on the stapler's ejection point, squeezing the stapler's trigger as he pulled it into herself.

       "Keep that fucking thing away from my cock, you little whore!"

       "Yes, Sir," she moaned, grinding the steel harder against her clit, using the hard corner of the device to drag her erect clit out of its hiding place.

       Her eyes had been closed for the last few minutes, and he had been content to just pound himself in and out of her, but now she was building up to her climax, and looked up at him, as though in agony, which on some plane she must be, since all this time the ginger suppository had been melting its burning poison into her rectum, but when she did open her eyes and peer up out of her pre-climactic reverie, he took that moment to hold the white and black die over her eyes.

       "Yessss," she gasped, "Yess, roll, oh god Nelson, oh my fucking god I'm so close!  Roll it just before I cum, roll a six, and I'll shoot myself with this fucking thing as I cum!"

       "I'll roll it on your stomach, slut, I'll roll a six and watch you shoot yourself," he avowed.

       "Yesss, let me see, let me watch," and the exhausted, fucked out girl hunched herself up, and watched, so she could see how it would land, just in case he might try to cheat her, by mercifully lying to her, when it rolled a six.  The peril, the danger, sent her higher than ever before.  She couldn't imagine what it would feel like to be impaled a half inch deep into her most intimate, sensitive flesh by the staple gun, and for her trouble she would earn a full dose of the cane....

       He theatrically shook the single die in his palm, and thrust his cock deep, jamming himself hard against the entrance to her uterus, and warned, "Here I go, wench," and she sobbed that she was cumming, she was so close, so close, she was going to cum right now, and he let the die fall.

       It landed on her sternum.  A three.

       And then her climax struck, the biggest of her young life, and she threw herself backward against the desk, and arched herself right up, and jammed the stapler hard into her clit, and Nelson felt her vagina convulse with powerful, rhythmic labor contractions, pulling at him and milking him as though he'd been caught in a vise.

       He openly mocked, as her climax crested and overwhelmed the pain, "You dodged two bullets, love, but the cane awaits!"

       "Yes," she sobbed, "three more rolls, you can still cane me triple!"

       "Your luck won't hold, you little whore!"

       "Yes, Sir, roll sixes, I'm begging you!"

       He drove himself into her, ground his cock roughly against the pit of her womb, and snarled, "You'll get fucking sixes!"

       "Yes," she sobbed, trembling, inexplicably close to climax, on the heels of the mindwrecking orgasm she'd just undergone.  The girl had never really come down from the last one, so turned on was she by her proximity to peril, as he dangled the fateful white die over her torso, for her to see.

       As he fucked her, he snatched up the old hickory cane, with its hundreds of splinters, cracks, scratches, and he rubbed it lightly on the undersides of her harshly strapped, bright red breasts.  Jessica groaned with pain, too busy grinding her clit against the ejection point of the staple gun to protect herself, but she went cross-eyed, watching as he gently rubbed the cane against her breasts.  This whole time two remaining binder clips still quivered upon the girl's crushed nipples, and now he tormented her by flicking the clips back and forth with the hickory.  She began to groan, and he gently admonished, "I think you're beginning to enjoy it," and Jessica desperately shook her head in denunciation, but it was too late, he pressed the cane hard into her budding breasts and sawed it back and forth, sticking her tenderized titflesh with a hundred splinters, and she wept,"God, god, I'm coming again, god help me, god fuck me to hell, I'm coming again Nelson, roll, roll a six, let me shoot myself and die on your cock!"

       He flung the cane down on the desk, and Jessica watched through her tears as he shook the single die in his palm and let it drop on her sternum.

       A two.

       She went into stricture, pulling the steel staple gun right up onto her slit above his cock, double-fucking her tight little thirteen year old self, and her climax washed over her again, the ecstatic release gushing and lubricating the tireless piston motion of his cock.  Barbie had never been fucked like this; Barbie had never even imagined the possibility of this, and with epiphanic triumph Jessica exulted in the undeniable fact that she was not dreaming, that this was real, that she was  being fucked straight to hell and back by the most glorious archdeity in all of creation; her imagination paled, her dreams paled, her darkest, most lascivious nighttime fantasies were relegated to inconsequential, dessicated nothings, in contrast to this glorious edification.  After this, Jessica would never confuse dreams with reality again.

       "Please, Nelson, please, my  beloved!  I'm begging you," she somehow found the strength to implore.

       "Please what, slut?"

       "Please roll a six!  Please!  I need to feel it, I need to fill this stapler fire its steel into my clit!  I need to bleed for you!"

       "You will, under the cane!  There are two more!"  Still he pounded her, and his voice came out belabored.

       "I'm too lucky!  I've always been lucky!  We have to extend the wager!"

       "Patience, you little pain-whore!  You'll get your fucking six!  Goddamn it, fuck, you fucking devil's whore, I have to cum!"

       "Yes, Sperm me!  Breed me, Nelson, I'm your slut, I'm your whore, breed me, cut me, rape me, kill me!  Rape me all the way!  Fuck Abby!  Fuck her!  Rape me deep and rip me inside, fuck me into my lungs, Nelson!  Ruin me and take me back to Abby to show her!  Oh, fuck, I'm gonna shoot myself, I'm gonna do it!"

       "No!"

       "Yes, Nelson, yes, love, yes, I have to, I have to hurt for you, bleed for you, rape me, rape me!"

       "No, Jessica, NO!  Wait for your fucking six!"

       "Roll now!  Roll it now, and I'll pull the trigger as you cum!"

       Nelson was so close to climax as to be far beyond reason.  He shook the die, and dropped it between her breasts.  It rolled down her sternum and off her neck.  She twisted around to see.

       A one.

       "Oh, no!"  she cried, "Nelson, do it, roll a six, please!  Bleed me, and cum your Sperm into my womb, and then make me pay and cane me hard!"

       According to the terms of the wager, they had one roll left, and either Jessica or Nelson would win the game.

       "Extend the wager, Nelson," she cried desperately, feeling her ultimate act of submission slipping away.  "Five more rolls!"

       He threw his cock in and out of her clutching vagina, gasping, "We won't need five more!  You'll get the cane, you'll get it, I promise!  Oh, fuck!  I'm cumming again, Jessica, I'm cumming, I love you—"

       "I love you, too, Nelson—"

       He snatched up the die and dropped it on her chest, between her sweaty, crimson, blood-spattered breasts.

       Four.

       Jessica wailed, "Noooooo!"

       That had been the last roll; she had won the game.

       Nelson pounded himself in and out, utterly elated that he had spared her the caning with an honest wager.

       "Roll again, Sir, roll again!"

       "No, you win!  Gotta finish!"

       Jessica took one hand off the stapler, snatched up the single die, blindly tossed it against the desk.  It bounced two feet high, ricocheted off the computer, rattled on the blotter, and landed.

       Six.

       With an elated cry, Jessica pulled the trigger of the stapler, and shook through the most intense and exquisite agony of her life.

       And then Nelson's climax broke over him like waves crashing, and Jessica joined him in her own edification, and their bodies intermingled in a catharsis that felt so much like dying that their bodies lifted right off the desk under the buoyancy of their souls.

       Nelson was furious.

       Once his orgasm crested, and the last pulses of Sperm shot into her womb in languid warm jets, he snarled, "You crazy, insane, stupid little cunt," and reached down, and savagely ripped  the embedded staple out of her vagina, leaving a rush of pulsing blood in its wake. Then he unceremoniously thrust the wooden ruler back into her mouth, knowing damn well she would need it for what he was about to do, and poured rubbing alcohol into the leaking wounds.  Jessica writhed on the desk like a spider dropped upon a hot frying pan.

       He snatched up the cane.  His cock was still embedded in her interior, but he was so beside himself with furor that her punishment had to commence immediately.

       "Get your hands behind your head, you crazy twat!"

       Jessica sobbed and obeyed.

       The caning of her ass and naughty little twat would have to wait, but he could certainly reach her upended tits and belly while fucking in and out of her tight clutching hole.

       Nelson tapped the hard hickory against the frail striped skin that stretched taut over her slender girlish tummy.

       "You asked for it, slut.  Watch for every cut.  Three to your belly."

       "Yes, Nelson, yes, I'm sorry—"

       The cane whistled through the air and struck with a high, frightening timbre that echoed off the surrounding file cabinets.

       THWACK!

       Jessica screamed silently, robbed of breath, and impulsively clutched her tummy before she even realized her hands had moved.  She had thought the belt strapping had hurt, but the belt had felt like feathered caresses by comparison.  The cane even eclipsed the recent impalement of the awful staple into the hood of her clit.  This was worse, worse than anything she had ever felt—any physical pain, anyway—and she had seventeen more to go.  Thank God she had not earned double, or triple.  She didn't know who she would survive the single dose.

       "You'll have to do better than that, slut," he chided.  "Hands behind your head, and be silent.  This hurts much worse, but you should have expected that.  Two more to your belly, and then three to each tit."

       Jessica clasped her hands behind her head.  He noticed, as he raised the cane, that she had snapped the ruler in two with her teeth.  While muttering imprecations, he knocked the shards of the ruler off the desk with the back of his hand. 

       She wept, "You're angry."

       "You're damned fucking right I'm angry, you mindless little cunt!"

       Now she really was scared.  If he had been holding back before, even to the slightest degree, he would not hold back now.

       He snatched up his leather belt, thrust it at her face, and forced her to bite down hard on the leather.   She had won the Stapler Game fair and square, and absolved him of his obligation to continue hurting her, and she had defied him.  He would cure this perverse, sick hunger of hers, this desire to hurt, to ruin herself, to die for him, as though he wanted that, as though it actually pleased him, once and for all.  How could the girl possibly think he enjoyed torturing her?  What must she think of him?  The notion sent him into apoplexy.  Yes, he would cure the little jezebel, even if he had to burn her at the stake to do it.

       With eyes that gleamed with manic fury, he struck again, harder than before.

       THWACK!

       Jessica's hands were up again, protectively, even before the cane had landed upon her tummy, just below her bellybutton.  She trembled and writhed from head to toe.  Her belly convulsed.  It was agony, agony.  She could no longer feel the ginger in her rectum at all.  Nothing but the cane.  All the world disappeared; all of space, the moon, the stars, life, death, all gone.  There was nothing but the cane, and the vast warrior deity had raised it up into the air again.

       "I have been tolerant, but you have to keep your hands away, or we will start over.  Do you understand?"

       "Yes Nelson—"

       THWACK!

       Somehow she kept her hands behind her head that time.  She had no idea how she had managed it, because that third below had been the hardest of the three, so far.

       But now they would become worse, a lot worse.  The would only get worse from here.  Now he would strike her breasts.  Three lashes apiece, six total, upon her budding tits.  The binder clips, which had seemed like the cruelest torture when he affixed them, she now recognized to be a mercy.  The cane would break against the binder clips if it strayed too close to her nipples.  At least her poor nubs would not be split by the cane.  Someday, he had promised, her nipples would feed their babies, and how could their babies feed and grow, if he ruined her nipples today?

       He raised the cane over her right breast.

       THWACK!

       A cruel diagonal stripe, on the inner slope of her babysmooth, sweaty breastflesh.

       She panted in agony.  Her ribs rose and fell with the pace of hyperventilation.  But she kept her hands behind her head.

       THWACK!

       A second cut, to the outside, another cruel diagonal that drove the awful hickory across her breast and out as far as her underarm.

       Jessica thrashed her head, ground her teeth so hard on the leather belt that she surely would have shattered them in its absence, but somehow she managed to hold her hands out of the path of the cane, for her beloved Nelson. 

       He took aim again.  The cane rose and fell like a bedeviled gavel.

       THWACK!

       Right across her ultras-sensitive aureole, just missing the binder clip upon her nipple, so that the reddish, puffy top of her breast withered under the full force of the cane.

       Jessica closed her eyes tightly shut and lost herself in fathomless depths of agony.

       Meanwhile he took aim at her left breast.  The next blow, executed with all his strength, shook the girl out of her stupor.

       THWACK!

       The blow drove a hickory splinter deep into her mammary, and she bit down so hard on the belt that the cords in her neck looked like they might snap out of the strain.

       Before she could gather breath to scream, He struck again.

       THWACK!

       A fire had been ignited on her breast.  The devil himself had doused her breast with lighter fluid and had lit the pyre.

       "Across the center, now.  If it strikes the binder clip, it doesn't count.  One more to your front, and then we'll turn you over and cook your ass."

       Jessica wept with despair.

       Still he fucked her, hard as ever despite two orgasms, but she couldn't feel him inside her, couldn't feel anything at all, but the throbbing burning agony of her chest.

       He took aim carefully.  He did not want to have to repeat this blow.

       THWACK!

       A perfect, exquisite cut, straight across her left aureole, a lash so  hard and perfect that beads of blood aggregated and formed into droplets on her puffy nipples.

       Then he worked the fire upon her chest into a roaring conflagration by pouring rubbing alcohol over the cuts.  Jessica nearly bit right through his leather belt.        

       While the girl suffered, he unceremoniously ripped his cock out of her twat andflipped the her onto her tortured breasts and stomach.  She writhed with agony on the desk.  He grabbed her hands, forced them over the far edge of the desk, and warned her not to move them.

       Now he stood astride the girl, the better to lash her pink, tenderized ass.  He aimed the first blow across the top of her ass, just below the cute dimples that adorned the base of her spine.

       THWACK!

       The cane bit into the top of her posterior, leaving a vicious purple weal.

       Nelson raised the cane again, aiming a bit lower, across the top of the curve.  She watched in horror as he raised the cane way over his head, and brought it racing down upon her ass with vicious savagery.

       THWACK!

       Jessica wept unrestrainedly.  Seven more to go.  Four more to her ass, and then the worst, three to her upended cunny.  How could she ever have thought she could endure a double dose, let alone a triple dose?  How could she have offered those fates in such an insane and unbalanced wager?  What could be wrong with her?  What if she had rolled two sixes, or god forbid, three sixes?  What would she be feeling now?  Dread, of course, but how could she have endured it?  Of course she could not have.  She would have died from sheer terror by now.

       THWACK!

       Nelson had six more blows to deliver.  He had long ago passed the point beyond which this had ceased to be enjoyable for him.  Yet, as he stood there, adjacent to the trembling girl's flank, and raised the cane, preparing to make it descend for the fourth time upon the girl's tortured ass, he stroked himself again, with his free hand, and startled himself by realizing, all of a sudden, that he was doing it.  He was enjoying this, after all, on some subliminal level, and he had to cum again, so he should get this over with, so that he could bury himself inside her once again.  She had begged him to rape her, and by god, she was going to get it.

       THWACK!

       Jessica's feet came right off the floor, and she bent her knees, and arched her back, and hitched her legs right up onto the desk, with her ass in the air, and writhed on her knees and elbows, entirely unaware that her transports of agony induced her to present an alluring and irresistable target.  Even as she struggled to control herself and master her agony, he aimed the hickory cane most cruelly at the sharp crease between her slender thighs and  the firm, jutting underside of her ass.  He swung the cane in a cruel side-arm blow, to hit that crease upon the tops of both thighs.

       THWACK!

       She rolled onto her side and writhed on the desk, making soft, dismal cries and poorly articulated pleas for mercy.  He took one of her ankles, and lifted her slender leg high, opening her thighs into an improvised split, to give the cane an unimpeded path to her tight little rosette, which still burned in its own purgatory, due to the slowly melting ginger, deep in her rectum.

       Jessica saw him draw his arm back in a sidearm, and knew what he was going to do, and beseeched him, "Nelson, pleeeaassseeee—"

       THWACK!

       The blow struck perfectly, right up the center crease, from the bottom of her vulva to her tailbone, and send the girl off into new transports of hellish torment.  As she lay on her side with her back arched and writhed mindlessly, Nelson realized that her present posture afforded him the means to deliver the last blows straight into the pink interior of the cunt.

       He aimed the cane at the tender groin tendon that stretched from her spread labia to her right thigh.  He knew the stripe might cut her there, might draw blood, but he had to make the last three cuts memorable for her.  And then he would thrust himself into her again.  He had to cure this unrepentant jezebel of her perverse and self-destructive fascination.

       "Bite down hard on the belt, Jessica.  Don't scream."

       She desperately shook her head, shaking the belt back and forth in the process.  'No,' she beseeched him, 'I'm cured, I swear, I swear on all that's holy, I'm not an atheist, not anymore, I'm a mendicant, a medieval flagellant chastizing herself for her sins, I have faith and you're my God and I'm cured, and I will take cuddling and fondling and caressing and loving, I will love to be tickled, love to be kissed, love to take you inside me, and I will never, ever, ever covet the pain of your retribution again, I will break the cane in two, so you can see, and I will light the pieces on fire, and together we'll hold hands and watch it burn, and you'll never have to beat me again, but please, don't cane me there, not between my legs, please, I've had enough, please, I'm not a jezebel anymore, I'm not a slut anymore, I'm not a person anymore, I'm nothing without you, and I just want you to love me and let me be whatever you want, but please just don't, don't, oh God don't hit me anymore—'

       He swung the cane sidearm, from behind his back straight around, straight into her groin, and she watched the approach of the cane as though it flew through the air in slow motion.

       THWACK!

       She panted and wept into the belt.  Minutes had passed since the impact upon her innermost precious self.  She had no idea how much time had transpired.  It could have been hours, for all she knew, and somehow, through the blinding veils of constricting torment, she heard him patiently breathing above her, and waiting for her return to the living.  Why could she not pass out?  But maybe she had lost consciousness for a time.  Maybe he had awaited her return.  Why could she not drift back into the aether again?  Why could she not just get it over with and die?  Two more.  How could she survive two more?  She tried to imagine having a whole other round coming to her, after these last two.  Yes, death would have been preferable.  Surely, she would have willed herself to die.

       THWACK!

       The penultimate lash struck the opposite inner thigh, cutting right across her hairless babysmooth pinkness, raising red droplets from the force of the cut.  Already the cuts upon her tummy and breasts were forming into vivid purple weals that would show for days.  He pulled her leg way up high, and aimed the last right down the middle.

       "Grab your labia.  Jessica, pull yourself wide open, so you'll feel the final lash deep inside."

       "Nooooooooo, no, Nelson, please...."

       "Do it, cunt."

       Jessica betrayed her most intimate feminine self; she reached down with both hands, and looked up at him with worshipful reverence, and pulled her cunny wide open.  He aimed right down the center of her slit, drew his arm way back, and struck with a final, evil flick of his wrist to further amplify the velocity.

       THWACK!

       Nelson dropped the cane and slammed himself deep into the tortured animal that writhed beneath him.   He bent over the girl's arched back, and further tormented her body by ripping the binder clips off her nipples.  Blood flowed into the tortured nubs for the first time in more than an hour and a half, and the replenished nerves sang an aria of bitter agony to her brain, but Nelson joined in, and entered his own theme, suckling first one tortured nub and then the other into his mouth, squeezing them alternatively with a free hand, and suckling them, and pulling her entire breast into his mouth, and milking it, feeding from it, as he pounded his swollen red cock in and out of her guts, and then they came for each other, soaking each other with the mutual release that flowed like a river; their wetness soaked the blotter, ran upon the desk in turbid rivulets, and dripped into the carpet, but they made love obliviously, over and over, so as to express a mutual adoration that would never end.

       Fortunately Nelson's office had a private bath and shower, tucked behind a small door partially obscured by the ubiquitous file cabinets and shelves.  Eventually they made their way into the shower, and washed each other, and licked and sucked each other to yet another round of mutual orgasms, and still they were not sated, so  Nelson rutted little Jessica from behind as she bent over the vanity with the blow dryer and looked back at him, through the vanity mirror, with worshipful reverence. 

       This time he had not held back.  He really had cut her poor little self to tatters, first with the belt, then with the cane, and of course her own penchant for callous self-destruction had been no help:  her poor pussy, and the double wounds where she had stapled herself, burned anew, under a fresh infusion of rubbing alcohol.  But, for Jessica, this was merely the fantasy become real.  No longer would she have any reason for Kens and Barbies.  Finally she had outgrown the dollies.  This ordeal had been a waypoint in her formative development, whereby she could now service her Nelson body and soul, to be loved or hurt or broken, and she would wear the stripes and wounds with pride, as constant reminders of her voluntary, joyful subservience, until the scars faded and necessitated replenishment with another round of horrors.

       Even now, he rutted her masterfully, while she dried her hair, and thrust into her body powerfully, and pounded her femaleness with his ardor.  She loved him so much that the tribulations she'd suffered were nothing as compared to the limits she was prepared to endure.

       "You are my lord and god, Sir," the girl pronounced to the resplendent sculpted male form who growled his lust and need into the mirror as he rammed her so hard over the counter that he lifted her right up off her feet.

       "No," he snarled, "I am a savage, a monster."

       "You are that, my lord," she conceded.   "You're my god of the underworld, my glorious Prometheus with his iron hammer, and your retribution for my transgressions has been cruel.  God, my lord, fuck me harder, damn me to hell and fuck me for eternity in the fire!"

       "I've already done that, Aphrodite.  I've beaten the living shit out of you."

       "No more than I deserved.  And I will dress up well.  You've only spoiled the parts that no one will ever see but you.  And if the evidence of our passion shows, so be it.  No tattoos for this body, love!  Brand me!  Brand me with red-hot iron!  No restraint, Nelson!  No mercy!"

       He wrapped a giant hand around her quivering belly, and fondled the raised weals that crossed her bellybutton, and the iron hammer of Prometheus bashed her so hard that the godly balls slapped her thighs with the upstrokes.  At some point, as the satyr rutted the nymph, he became dimly aware that she had offered herself up for branding with red hot irons, and he realized that he had not cured her, not even close.  He found himself completely at a loss.  He had exhausted his ability to beat her, for now, but he endeavored, with little hope, to penetrate her compulsion with words.

       "Aren't you pregnant yet, goddess?"

       "Alas, no, my liege, I sadly confess that I am not."

       "How is that even possible?  I've done my job, damn you!  You have semen coming out your ears."

       "I've told you I'm inadequate, my love.  I've been begging you to cane me double."

       She felt his cock swell inside of her, and stretch her, and slam into her guts, and throb in her womb, and she thrilled at the visceral evidence of his desire to love her, use her, beat her over and over, endlessly, and she didn't care how hard and cruelly he used her, how viciously he tore her up; she would never tire of servicing him, and being used by him, and being encunted and bred and raped and broken by him, never.  Jessica would never deny Nelson, not in their bed, though all her exhausted, fucked out mind might want to do was escape into sleep; not in their wooded glade, should he feel the compulsion to defile the sanctity of the setting by bending her over a rock or a fallen tree; not as she sweated and screamed through labor, and wrenched her guts so hard as to turn herself inside out, and shrieked with triumph upon the apotheosis of her femininity as she birthed his flawlessly beautiful progeny; not as their lives attained maturity and basked in a state of grace in the company of strong and swift sons and daughters; not as they ailed, and grew old, and were gradually left alone and bereft by the departure of their children, progressively devoid of purpose as their loved ones blithely waved good-bye and danced off the stage; not as their bones became brittle, and with incipient senescence their minds increasingly wandered, and they forgot themselves, and could barely recall the arcane mechanics of intimacy; and not on their deathbed, when fleeting, capricious life itself wavered and lifted its wings to cease its all too brief visitation; not as they died together in each other's arms, their last memories as their souls departed being their final communion, mated to their very last heartbeats as their souls wrenched free of their corporeal shackles and ascended, intertwined, and raised themselves aloft through interstices of cloud and air; and not even at the gates of some petty tinhorn simulacrum of heaven, some trite, meaningless place that they would mock and deride until time itself succumbed to rust, and lurched to a shuddering halt, and seized upon its titanic axle, and even then, Nelson and Jessica would goad and torment God himself, a luminescent pair of recalcitrant archangels, by expounding their love and fucking each other for eternity against the locked mother of pearl gates, indifferently smashing the walls of heaven itself with the seismic aftershocks of their passion. 

       Nelson roused the girl out of her blasphemous ruminations by shuddering above her, dripping sweat from his chin, as he shook and groaned and emptied himself into her yet again, and with a thrill of illicit pride, as her god and lover filled her belly with potent semen, she moaned with the otherworldly transports of her own climax, awash in the fulfillment and affirmation of knowing that he would never tire of her, neither in life, nor in death, never for eternity.

       So much for being careful, her mind whirled in its damnable post-apolcalyptic haze; so much for restraint, so much for being sensible and acting responsibly!  With a norepinephric rush of blissful, guilty glee, Jessica thought, 'Poor Abby would be terribly cross, if she were to see us now!  Very cross indeed!' 

       Nelson  and Jessica took their time dressing each other.  She held still, back straight, while he tenderly doted upon her, and gradually draped her black cocktail dress over the cane weals and cuts, but he kissed every mark, every sore little bit, with such gentle attentiveness that the vulnerable girl very nearly had to climb up onto him and impale herself upon her glorious archangel's omnipotent hammer once again.  But there was nothing for it, she conceded with a weary sigh; she needed food, water, and air, at least sometimes, and at the rate they were going, their plan to treat themselves to a posh dinner might have to yield to chipped plastic plates in a greasy all-night diner.  But his demure, devilish Aphrodite had to be properly accoutered, and he took his time with her necklace, and attached the clasp behind her neck, and draped it over her breasts, and made the full circuit around her head and delicate shoulders, kissing every last pearl, and the soft skin beneath.  Then he attached her pearl bracelet, and kissed her small slender fingers, and her cupped palm, and the soft hollow of her wrist, and his lips lingered against the pulse at the base of her palm while the heavensent girl caressed his hair; and then he enclasped the heavy charm bracelet upon her opposite wrist, with kisses from her fingertips to her elbow and back, and she moaned with desire through every kiss, because her omnipotent Prometheus was still naked, and desperately, massively hard, and Aphrodite felt her wetness and desire dripping down her thighs, and how in God's name would they ever make it to dinner?  But somehow she controlled herself, and passively allowed him to attend to every little bit of her, and all too soon, he had dressed little Jessica elegantly once again, an evil, wanton minx adorned in platinum and pearls, her hair tied back into a bun by her favorite onyx clip, awash in the cloying perfume of Nelson's virile Sperm, and it was now her turn to dress him, and she attended to his beautiful, handsome clothes as an attendant cardinal would handle the formal vestments of the pontiff, and she gently kissed every last part of him that his clothes covered, and she kissed every tooth of his zipper as she carefully pulled it up, tooth by tooth, over his straining erection, and she nuzzled her cheek against the front of his trousers, and drank in the heat and musty aroma of sex that diffused through the wool, and she lost track of time and self as his fingers caressed the nape of her slender neck with featherlight touches, until somehow, after an eternity, she summoned the strength of will to lift herself upon her knees, to reach his starched white, paper-crisp shirt, and she kissed every button that she fastened, and she kissed his palms and fingers as she attached his cufflinks, and she kissed his feet as she laced and tied his shoes, and she kissed his neck, and whispered her adoration in his ear, as she helped him, once again, with his silk tie, and the necktie did still present a problem; its mystery eluded the thirteen year old genius, but he assisted her, patient and kind, and she watched his hands in the mirror, from behind, pressing herself against his back, and soothed her aching breasts by rubbing them on his powerful shoulder, and mimicked his hand movements with concentration, honestly baffled by the conundrum that neck ties presented, and swore to herself that she would master and perfect this mundane culmination of his morning ritual. 

       Five and a half hours after she had arrived, they were dressed and  ready for dinner.  But everyone had gone home.  The company tour would have to wait for another day, which suited both Nelson and Jessica just fine.

       They stood beside each other, arm in arm, before the vanity, and just looked for awhile, both at themselves and at each other.

       "Dear sweet fucking Jesus, are we ever beautiful," Jessica declared.

       

       They sat upon meticulously upholstered French provincial chairs, opposite a candlelit white linen tablecloth; the rippling flame glimmered upon paper-thin Rosenthal china, and danced in the prismatic facets of the Waterford goblets.  They looked out on the dim path lights of the Boston Public Garden, and spied the shadows of lovers moving surreptitiously among the dark looming trees.  As beautiful and posh as the setting might be, Nelson and Jessica outshone it to a degree that left witnesses and passersby alike in astonished awe.

       Yet, contrary to all appearances, their conversation had none of the grandeur that one might have expected of gods and goddesses come down from aethreal heights to slum for an evening among the feeble living.  No, they did not casually discuss the fate of the earth, and all the poor cannonfodder upon it, and the fates of vanquished souls cast into an indifferent universe.  This god and goddess still basked in the afterglow of their union, which consumed their thoughts, and commanded all their attention, and the devious playfulness of their repartée threatened to devolve into the carnal; even here, in this elegant setting, they continually forgot themselves, and had to drag themselves back, grudgingly, from the mutual compulsion to jump right over the lovely table, and smash the fragile china, and shatter the crystal, and make love with wanton abandon among the shards.

       Nelson gazed into Jessica's gleaming espresso eyes and griped, "I grow weary of telling you that this day has been the very best day of my life.  I find myself saying it all too often."

       A thrill of electricity rippled from the nape of her neck to her toes.  "No worries," she assured him, "You have not begun to wear out the words.  After all, it is your fault, love, that you insist on ever improving our days."

       He scoffed, "You certainly indulged my cheap thrills this afternoon, Miss, but please tell me you didn't enjoy it."

       "How could I possibly say that?" the shocked girl demanded.

       "Well, some parts of it you might have found tolerable."

       She quietly laughed a soft, mellifluous laugh, and assured him, "I found this afternoon much, much more than tolerable."

       "Which parts?"

       "Well, every part, I think, apart from the beginning, of course, which I could have done without."

       "You mean the belt, the 'warming-up.'  Too much?  You should have said something.  I would have understood, and adjusted, without falling out of character."

       But Jessica was quietly giggling to herself.  She looked up and said, "No, no, the strapping was quite satisfactory, indeed.  You beat me beyond my ability to endure it, all the more so, for my constant knowledge that it was just the prelude to the cane.  You warmed me up masterfully, Sir.  I mean the part before that.  Before I arrived."

       "Ahhh.  The meeting with your grandmother must have been memorable, to have elicited the reaction that it did."

       Jessica said, with a dismissive wave, "One had nothing to do with the other, apart from the first meeting cutting into my time with you.  I would much rather have spent twice as long suffering under your wrath.  And my much-anticipated reunion with Mummy's parents really was not all that memorable, to be honest.  Largely a waste of time."

       He waited; he could not read her mood, and could not discern whether she wanted to talk about it.

       Jessica played with a silver knife, a warm roll, and a dab of rosemary infused butter.

       "Oh, the interview with my Mom's parents was tolerable, I suppose," she finally decided, "if we take as a precept that I knew nothing of them, and expected nothing from the meeting.  My grandfather irritated me from the start, so I left him in the company of Mr. Saul.  As for Grandma Christy, we talked for all of five minutes.  I expressed my reciprocation of the love she has shown me all of my life, no more and no less."

       "I am sorry, Jessica."

       "Don't be.   I am fairly certain that the bitch will henceforth desist from tormenting my mother with voicemails, so I am satisfied with the outcome."

       "All the same, it is a pity that they have not been a part of your life."

       "I have no need of them.   You are my darling love, Nelson, and I want for absolutely nothing.  Let us never speak of Grandma Christy again."

       He held her hand across the table and pledged, "Agreed."

       And they never did.

       "So," he hesitantly resumed, "back to our previous discussion.  You found the strapping tolerable and satisfactory, yet also unendurable."

       "Love, I found every part utterly delicious," she averred, "each and every dreamy, wondrous part."

       "Jessica Elizabeth, please.  I've cut you to pieces."

       "I am yours to cut to pieces," she said simply.

       "So you would endure it again?"

       "Endlessly.  Tonight, if you'd like.  Reopen my wounds, and work on me all night in your basement, until I scream myself raw and run out of tears.  Of course, Nelson.  You need never ask.  Just take me, and use me, however you wish."

       "You are a precious princess of the hereafter, come down to earth to transport me straight to heaven."
       "And you are my dearly beloved Satan incarnate, arisen straight up from hell to smite heaven's crystal walls, and rob me from an angel's bassinet, and carry me back to damnation impaled to the lungs upon your bestial cock."

       Nelson gasped, "Holy fuck."

       "He he he.  College-level English Composition and Grammar has been improving my imagery.   Tell me, Nelson, and be honest.  Topically related question."

       After a moment to gather his wits, "Bring it."

       Her eyes sparkled deviously as she whispered, "You enjoyed the Stapler Game, didn't you?"

       "That game does have its qualities," he conceded.  "Seriously, and blasphemous poetry aside, be honest.  You would really play that game again?"

       "Anytime," she promised, her eyes fierce.  "Better than Barbies, better than Monopoly, better than chess.  Oh, yes.  You leave me breathless, Nelson, by your genius, and your invention, and your delicious cruelty.  Sorry, poetry again.  But the answer is yes.  Yes, to the Stapler Game, anytime."

       His eyes smouldered from across the candlelit linen table.  "I need you again."

       "Take me now," Jessica commanded.

       He groaned.  How would he get through dinner without launching himself over this fucking table?  Why had they come here?  What could have possessed them to aspire to some prosaic standard of decency?

       "Well," he groused with frustration, "at the very least, please tell me whether I have succeeded in curing you of your neurotic and somewhat alarming deathwish."

       She chuckled with an impish grin and confessed, "I am afraid not, love."

       "Seriously," he demanded.

       She gazed at him from behind the candlelight and said, "Nelson, the Stapler Game suits me fine.  For now.  But you are not limited to that.  Anything, Nelson.  Your imagination thrills me, and I am enthralled.  I am leaking into this fancy chair, just thinking about the tortures you'll come up with next.  Call it a deathwish, if you will.  So be it.  Anything, dearest.  No safewords.  No limits.  Ever."

       He sat back in his chair, and said, "I don't know what we are going to do about that."

       She sighed, "Nor do I, my love, nor do I."

For much, much more, read Story #1.