31: Performance Piece

on July 16, 2007 in 02: Love In The Time Of Magic

In Which A Nymph Kisses A Golem

I spotted Amaranth coming towards the pent as I reached it on my way to lunch. There was just no mistaking her, even from a distance… not the way her amber hair caught the sun, or the way her hips swayed and her breasts bounced when she walked.

There was also no mistaking the fact that she was not just walking alongside somebody, but holding their–her–hand. Amaranth was walking with another girl and holding her hand. My heart sank… I wasn’t really sure why it should, but it did. I’d seen her holding a lot more than somebody’s hand before, and while the sight hadn’t exactly filled me with joy, it also hadn’t bothered me.

Then she got closer, and I recognized the girl by her build. Like me, she was too thin… but Two the living golem was pretty-model-thin, not stupid stuck-in-prepubescent-boy-body thin like I was. That was better. Amaranth wouldn’t have done more than hold hands with Two.

Would she?

No, she wouldn’t have… she couldn’t have. Two would, as far as I knew, consent to anything she was ordered to consent to, but Amaranth had enough people clamoring for her affection, and it would be a huge violation of Two’s nature for her to take advantage like that. Besides, Amaranth had told me she was normally submissive, and the only person she felt dominant with was… was me.

“Hi! Two and I had class in the same building, so I thought I’d bring her over to the union,” Amaranth said as they approached. “Make sure she made it to lunch okay, you know?”

“Oh,” I said, feeling flooding back through extremities I hadn’t realized were numb. “Good… thinking.”

“Say hi to Mack, sweetie,” Amaranth said.

“Hi, Mack,” Two said in her dull, weary voice.

“That’s good,” Amaranth said, and kissed her on her cheek. “I’ve been trying to praise her,” she said to me. “I figure, she managed to work out her own preferences with regards to dessert pretty quickly when you encouraged her, so maybe she’ll respond to other sorts of encouragement?”

“I don’t think it quite works that way,” I said. When the look of pride started to fall off of Amaranth’s face, I quickly added, “But it shouldn’t hurt.”

“So how were your classes this morning?” Amaranth asked.

“Class… just one, so far,” I said. “And it didn’t go very well. I… accidentally set a table on fire… and burned a guy’s hand.”

I started to turn away, freshly ashamed after putting my actions into words, but Amaranth wasn’t having any of that.

“Oh, you poor thing!” she said. She let go of Two’s hand, threw her arms around me and pulled me in close… which incidentally put my face in the middle of her cleavage. I fought my way free with effort.

“Didn’t you hear me? I burned him,” I said. “Not the other way around.”

“I know, and it must be eating you up,” Amaranth said sadly. She went to hug me again, but I backed away, almost tripping over my feet. “I feel just terrible for you.”

“What about him?” I asked, fending off her arms.

“Oh! I feel terrible for him, too,” she said, giving up her attempt to embrace me. “But… he isn’t here to hear it, so I’m expressing my concern for you.”

“Please don’t,” I said, drawing further away from her. “I wasn’t the one who got hurt… I don’t need to be comforted.”

“Are you saying you don’t feel bad?” she asked me.

“Of course I do,” I said. “Aren’t you even paying attention?”

“Of course I am,” she replied evenly. I loved her smile, but at times like this it could be infuriating. “Aren’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“You had an accident. Somebody got hurt,” she said. “And you feel bad about it, even though it was an accident. Where am I supposed to get that you don’t need or deserve comfort from any of that?”

“You’re twisting it around!” I said.

“More like un-twisting,” she said. “You’ve really got yourself worked up about this.”

“So you really don’t think I should feel bad about burning somebody,” I said.

“I absolutely love that you can’t see somebody hurt without feeling something for them,” she said.

“So then,” I reasoned, “you wouldn’t love it if I didn’t feel bad, if I let myself be comforted…”

“No,” she said. “I would absolutely love it if you could go through life without beating yourself up over things that weren’t really your fault.”

“I hurt somebody, okay?” I said. As upset as I was with myself, I was frustrated at just how much Amaranth didn’t grasp this. She could be so understanding about some things, but completely clueless about others. “Somebody who didn’t do anything but try to talk to me… who probably couldn’t even harm me if he tried.”

“Unless he had a holy symbol, or holy water, or a blessed item, or pure faith,” Amaranth said. “Or could cast combat spells… or had a magic weapon, as just about everybody on this campus is required to have…”

“You know what I mean!”

“You’re really not going to let yourself feel better about this, are you?” she asked, sadly… which made me feel worse.

“No… I’m not,” I said. The sight of her eyes tearing up made me want to cry, but I was determined not to.

Amaranth put a hand behind her head and took a deep breath. Her chest rose impressively… I had another one of my increasingly common this is a naked woman! moments. She let the breath out before I broke completely.

“Two, hon, stay here,” she said, patting golem girl’s shoulder. “Wait for me to come back, okay? Don’t listen to any other orders from anybody else until I come back.”

“Okay,” Two said blankly.

“Unless we’re gone more than twenty minutes,” I added. “In which case go on to lunch and then finish your daily routine.”

“This won’t take twenty minutes,” Amaranth said.

“But what if we get delayed… what if something comes up?” I said. “You told her not to listen to any orders, so you’ll have to tell her what I said.”

“But your orders supersede mine,” she said.

“No,” I said. “You only told her not to let anybody else countermand my orders…”

“Oh, you’re probably right,” Amaranth said. She had a tone of irritation in her voice that I didn’t like, and which only seemed to come up when the subject was Two. I hated correcting her… I really did… but it was important. “Two, do what Mack said, and anyway,” she said, grabbing my hand, “you shut up and come on over here.”

She half-led, half-dragged me back across the pent towards the fountain on the other side of the wide field from the union. It was a big circular pool ringed by a low, broad stone wall, with a trio of dragon heads breathing arcs of fire which turned into water at the midpoint. Actually, it was probably just an illusion covering the water… and it wasn’t even that impressive by daylight. I wish I’d paid more attention to it on my twilight walk, the night I’d met Sooni…

While I was distracted by the fountain, Amaranth was all business.

“Now, take off your jeans,” she said.

“What?”

“Your jeans,” she repeated. “I want them off.”

“Why?” I asked.

“If I have to do it myself, I’m not going to be satisfied with just your jeans,” she said, sweetly but with a warning in her voice. Her smile held a hint of hunger.

“But… we’re in public,” I said. “People can see!”

And, of course, we already had a decent share of glances and outright stares… some because Amaranth was a nude and extremely beautiful nymph, definitely… but some also were certainly because I was me.

“Say no if you don’t want to do it… anything else is just excuses… and I am so not interested in excuses,” Amaranth said in her sweetest, most matter-of-fact tone. “The strictest standards of human decency only apply to humans, and legally, nothing you can do with a nymph is either indecent or obscene, unless it’s in view of minors.”

“But people can still see!” I said.

She pulled her glasses down to the very tip of her nose and fixed me with her most penetrating gaze. I knew I was in trouble before she even spoke… I knew she was going to use the voice.

“Pants… off… now.

I was stepping out of my jeans before I had even registered anything other than the burning in my cheeks… and somewhere else. While I stood there, wondering exactly what she was going to do, she picked them up and walked a full circle around me twice, looking up and down the length of my way-too-skinny, bony, ugly legs. My hands itched at my sides. They wanted to cover, to conceal… but what? How? I only barely noticed that on the second pass around me, my jeans were no longer in her hands.

I wondered if she’d set them down somewhere.

Somehow, I didn’t think so.

“You have very nice legs,” she said, moving to stand behind me. “And a really cute butt. It might help your confidence levels if you’d show some skin more often… you’d turn a lot of heads in shorts, or a tight miniskirt.” She stood almost directly behind me, putting her head over my shoulder, her face alongside mine. “Or, in nothing,” she breathed.

I shivered, and felt the sudden hot, paradoxically tight looseness I’d begun to associate with Amaranth’s attention. Arousal? It wasn’t what I’d always thought arousal would feel like. The thought of sex had always honestly scared me a bit, but not the way this did… and it had also excited me… but not the way this did.

She put her arms around me and gently turned us back towards the fountain.

“Bend over,” she said.

“What?” I asked, though it wasn’t actually that hard a concept to grasp.

“Put your hands on the wall,” she said. Standing directly behind me, she took my wrists in her hands and leaned forwards, her front pushing into my back. She guided me down into the position she desired, my fingers splayed out on top of the low stone wall, my legs spread, straight at the knees but leaning forwards, my torso inclined forwards.

In other words, with my ass sticking up in the air.

I’d said something before that she’d interpreted as me telling her I wanted to be spanked. I should have known this was coming.

I braced for it.

I closed my eyes.

I gritted my teeth.

I waited.

I waited some more.

…and then some more.

It finally came just as I was about to start working up the nerve to stand up and turn around, or at least ask if I could. Surprisingly, it wasn’t even very hard. It wasn’t as hard as Mariel had slapped me when I’d been freaking out over her attempts to use eyeliner. It wasn’t even hard enough to really qualify as a slap, outside of the context of me, bent over, and her, administering it to my ass. Pretty much, it was just a tap from the palm of Amaranth’s hand.

Of course, that didn’t stop it from being embarrassing… humiliating, even. Here I was, already an object of interest because of my companion and because of the rumors that were swirling… rumors which had no doubt intensified after my pyromantic display earlier… and now Amaranth had got my jeans off, had me bent over a the edge of the fountain, where I could look down and see my own reflection blushing furiously back up at me… and now she had just spanked me, in full view of the entire lunchtime traffic crossing the pent.

There was no way that we could have escaped notice.

No, the softness of the actual blow did nothing to diminish the humiliation factor…

…and the humiliation did nothing to diminish the disappointment I somehow felt at the softness of the blow.

“Oh, was that too soft?” Amaranth asked, her voice as innocent and light as it could be. I said nothing… I couldn’t lie to her, I just couldn’t… but the truth was way too fucked up for me to voice. Yes, it had been… I had been expecting something harder, something… more. I couldn’t say that, though.

“I’m asking you a question, Mack,” Amaranth said. She dragged the back of her hand gently across my backside, first in one direction then the other. “I’d expect you to be polite enough to answer.”

She punctuated that with another soft swat, in about the same place.

“Yes,” I said, still with closed eyes and gritted teeth.

“Yes… what?” she asked, emphasizing each word with a slightly firmer blow across my seat, in opposite directions.

“Amaranth,” I said, trembling. “People…”

“…are good,” she purred. “Knowing we’re being watched will intensify your excitement, but also keep you from enjoying this… too much. After all, this is…”

She whacked me again, still harder… hard enough that I jolted forward and had to catch myself. I re-braced myself against the wall. Somehow, I knew she wasn’t finished… or even really started.

“…punishment,” she said. “Now, you were saying something… something about how hard I’m hitting you?”

She emphasized that with another smack on my ass, the hardest yet.

“It’s… good,” I said. It really was. To the extent that it was possible to enjoy something like this, I couldn’t imagine anybody enjoying it any harder.

“No,” Amaranth said sternly, smacking me again, harder, “that’s not,” and then harder still, “what you were saying at all.”

Okay, if you’ve been reading this long, you already know this: I am a wuss. I’ve always been a wuss. The fact that I can’t be injured by anything short of magic or sanctity doesn’t stop me from feeling pain. Maybe I even somehow feel it worse, as compensation… or maybe I don’t. I don’t know. Amaranth was chronologically not quite eighteen, but was physically a very healthy young adult, and she could swing her hand through the air pretty hard and fast.

“I said it was too soft!” I cried, tears wetting my cheeks.

“So, you want it to be harder,” Amaranth said, and suited action to words. I didn’t have time to answer before her hand hit my backside, again and again… with nothing but the thin cotton barrier of my underwear separating my flesh from hers. As she worked, I felt an odd sensation growing within me.

It couldn’t be pleasure… it just couldn’t have been… but it might have been some sort of delusion or illusion of pleasure, my body was so confused by what it was feeling. It welled up inside, down in the deepest, dirtiest part of me, growing like an overinflated balloon until I thought for sure it was going to burst and take me with it. My breathing, in between involuntary cries (Of pain? What else could they be?), was coming in short, sharp shocks. The strange twisting knot of pseudo-pleasure continued to grow within me. My knees quivered. My arms shook. Bright lights exploded in front of my eyes. I was swimming. I was drowning. I was struggling to give birth to something completely intangible yet bigger and more solid than I was.

I kind of felt like I had to pee, if I was even remembering what that felt like properly.

Then the balloon burst, the knot unraveled… I no longer cared if it couldn’t possibly be pleasure that I was feeling, because it felt so damned good. I don’t even know when Amaranth finished. At the point I became aware that I was no longer being spanked, I was slumped over the stone barrier around the pool, my knees on the rough, rocky pavement. I was shaking all over. Amaranth knelt down beside and a little bit behind me.

“You feel really bad about losing control?” she cooed, soothingly stroking the spot that had received the brunt of her fury.

“Yes,” I whispered hoarsely. “Yes.”

“And you’ll be extra-extra careful in class from now on, to make sure you don’t have any more… accidents?” she said huskily, pressing her finger tips down hard on the tender flesh. I bit back a moan. She even made the word “accidents” sound sexual. I have no idea how that even worked, but it did.

“Yes,” I said, the moan I’d been holding in escaping along with the word.

“And… you feel better about it all, now that you’ve been punished?” she asked.

Again, I didn’t want to answer. There was already enough evidence in front of me that I was severely fucked in the head without me admitting that I’d liked having my ass beaten… by another woman… in full view of the public.

Amaranth responded to my silence with a backhanded slap across my bottom that let me know she’d been pretty much playing around before.

“Yes!” I shrieked, my body jerking half upright.

“Good,” she said brightly. She took me gently by the shoulders and helped me up onto my feet. Her voice had returned to its normal happy, sweet, matter-of-fact tone. “Then you’ll be ready to get on with your day and your other classes without dwelling on this, right?”

“Right,” I said weakly. I felt this was very likely to be true… at least insofar as I now had other things to dwell on. I turned away from the fountain for the first time since we’d begun, and was almost physically bowled over backwards by what I saw: a small crowd of people had gathered around us in a semicircle, none closer than the edge of the pavement around the fountain, but all watching with what I would not call polite interest. As I saw them, they all–more men than women, but not by a huge margin–burst into applause.

I felt like I was going to die. I felt like I did die. If I’d ever had any doubts about my level of mortality, they disappeared that day. The fact that I didn’t have a heart attack right then and there proved once and for all that I never would.

I turned and buried my face against Amaranth… in her chest, of course, which just prompted hoots and whistles. I heard Amaranth throwing gracious and appreciative bits of niceties to our audience while she stroked the back of my head before she eventually urged them to shoo.

“Shows over, folks,” she finally said.

We were a show. I was a show.

I was going to tell her there was absolutely no way in hell–or any other plane–that I was going to consent to this kind of thing in the future, so it would be better and less awkward for everybody if she didn’t even try it. I liked her, but she could just keep her hands and kinks to herself.

That’s exactly what I was going to say.

“I don’t want to do this in public next time,” was the way my mouth chose to interpret those words when I finally pulled away from her and forced myself to speak.

She looked at me for what seemed like a long while, through her glasses rather than over them… but I winced and shrank back, anyway. Although Amaranth really couldn’t have been more different from Puddy if she’d tried, the memory of my roommate’s drunken tirade poured through me and I broke, dropping my gaze to the floor.

“Unless you want to!” I said, too loudly.

“No,” Amaranth said, cupping my chin with her fingers and raising my face. “No, Mack, you’re right. Next time will be private… next time will be just for me.”

I thought she was going to kiss me on the lips, but instead, she kissed my forehead, then wiped a stray tear off my still-hot cheek, turned, and began walking away back towards where we’d left Two… leaving me wishing she’d kissed me on the mouth, or that I had kissed her.

“Um… Amaranth?” I asked, hurrying to catch up. I knew if I’d had a couple of mirrors and the inclination to check, my ass wouldn’t have shown a single mark… but it still throbbed, and the pain spiked with every flex of my legs.

“Yes, sweetie?” she said without slowing or looking back.

“Are you… are you going to give me my jeans back?” I asked. I felt an uncomfortable, unfamiliar moistness in the front of my panties, which also made it feel weird to walk. I wasn’t sure if it would be visible to anybody else… I also wasn’t sure how to look without being obvious. I really wanted my pants.

Amaranth still didn’t stop. She giggled. I wasn’t entirely sure I liked that giggle.

“Eventually.”


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3 Responses to “31: Performance Piece”

  1. pedestrian says:

    “A little skin ain’t no sin”

    Current score: 0
  2. Psi-Ko says:

    Slowly converting the shy girl into a nudist, amaranth you evil genius!

    Current score: 0
  3. ElectricHarpsichord says:

    Typo report: ““Shows over, folks,” she finally said.”
    “Shows” should have an apostrophe.

    Current score: 0