Note: Think carefully before reading this one at work. –AE
In Which A Bit More Than A Spanking Occurs
Amaranth arrived at my room after I’d finished what little homework I had and taken my requisite shower. She accomplished the trick of taking my breath away the moment I opened the door, despite not looking the least bit different than any time that I’d seen her. Somehow, she wore her nakedness like a badge… or maybe I was simply more aware of it than normal, because I knew what she was there for.
I stammered out a greeting that may have actually been a takeout order run through a blender. She laughed, and I burned with embarrassment… but knew I wouldn’t have given up that silvery sound for anything.
“So…” she said coyly, once I’d closed the door behind her. “It seems to me that I owe you a spanking or two… don’t I?”
I could’ve leapt at this announcement, as I knew that–apart from deserving punishment–I needed a good spanking before I tried calling water in class the next day, but that thought put a bit of a damper on things. I remembered what Barley had said, about nymphs being able to read people… I’d kind of skipped over that when I had told Amaranth about the encounter, focusing more on what had happened than on what had been said.
I told her now, though… it seemed important for me to know the truth, before I did anything else with her. I trusted Amaranth… I loved her… but I still needed to know.
“Well,” Amaranth said cautiously, when I had finished, “how would you feel about that, if it were true?”
“I told Barley it didn’t matter,” I said. “I said you were a good… uh, you know, lover… for me, because you know what I want,… and it doesn’t really matter why.”
“Do you… do you believe that?” Amaranth asked. There was a wince in her voice, like Two sometimes had.
I nodded. She let out a breath.
“I do,” I said. “I really do.”
“Good,” she said. “Because it’s the truth… the best lovers will always have a feel for you, and I don’t come by the knowledge dishonestly or use it maliciously. It’s just part of what I am.”
“How does it work, though?” I asked. “I mean, you don’t always seem to… well… I mean, you thought I’d enjoy the Mechan circle more than I did.”
I hated bringing that subject up again, but I really was curious about it. Sometimes Amaranth seemed to be able to read me like a book, and other times she was almost… well… oblivious. I suppose I could chalk it up to her only being human… or rather, to her being fallible.
“We aren’t mind readers,” Amaranth said. “But… we do have good instincts about sexual wants. I couldn’t tell that, for instance, you wanted a pony for your birthday… unless, of course, you really wanted a pony,” she said. Her voice and facial expression both underwent a sudden change, from her attitude of lecturing to one of utter enthusiasm. “Of course, I’d be totally supportive if you did, though I’d be forbidden from participating… though watching isn’t really participating, so… um, but that’s getting off topic, isn’t it? What I meant to say is that I’m in touch with the sexual needs and desires of those around me, but not necessarily the other needs and desires… like how Steff talks about emotions being multidimensional?”
“Yeah,” I said, though I hadn’t fully understood that conversation.
“For instance,” Amaranth said, “I might see like a college professor and just know what he really wants is for somebody to put a diaper on him and stick a pacifier-shaped gag in his mouth… but that doesn’t mean he’d actually appreciate somebody acting on that.”
“Um… that’s a purely hypothetical example?” I asked.
“Right,” she said, nodding. A playful smile curled her lips. “A purely hypothetical example involving my healing arts instructor.”
“Some day, we’re going to have a talk about the meaning of the word ‘hypothetical’,” I said, very glad I would never have any reason to take a healing class.
Amaranth giggled.
“Um… so,” I said. “Earlier… that is, last week… when I was… when Puddy…”
I tried to find the best way to put what I needed to know, but I could tell from how fast the smile was chased off Amaranth’s face that she knew what I was getting at.
“I knew you were looking to be dominated,” she said softly. “I knew you wanted domination and a side of suffering, from the moment I saw you. I also figured there was a total lap baby somewhere inside you, and then I see Puddy taking you on her lap and… well… I was just so damn glad to see you acting on your wants.” She gave her head a little toss, and then looked away, down at the floor, as she spoke. “I used to think I was pretty, you know, empathetic… on top of the nymph stuff, you know? But now I’m wondering how much of that’s just being around people whose emotions ranged from ‘I want to fuck you hard’ to ‘I want to fuck you harder.’ The bottom line is that I saw Puddy giving you what I knew you wanted, and I thought you were happy about it. I messed up… and you got hurt.”
“No!” I said. “That wasn’t anybody’s fault but mine. I could have said something… I could have done something… and I didn’t. You didn’t mess anything up.”
“I did,” she said, shaking her head. “I messed things up, and I’m still messing up… and now even more people stand to be hurt by it.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “You’re doing a… a wonderful job.” I meant it, too… okay, she had odd lapses like her fits of vanity about her intelligence, but nobody was perfect. “Not just as my owner, either. You’re like… you’re the glue that holds us all together… you, me, Steff, and Two. None of us would be hanging out with each other if it wasn’t for you.”
She gave a little choked-off sob, and turned away. She took a couple steps towards the dresser, with the mirror hanging over it.
“Amaranth?” I asked.
She took off her glasses and set them down on the dresser, then turned on the small light over the mirror. She turned back to face me, and there was a kind of resolution on her face.
“Let’s not have any more talking,” she said. “Turn out the lights.”
“But I don’t…”
She gave me a great impression of her over-the-glasses look, considering she wasn’t wearing them, and I scurried over to get the overhead light. I turned back around to face her, but found that she’d came in very close behind me… I almost ran my face into her chest as I turned.
“Amar…”
“Don’t talk,” she breathed. “‘Yes, ma’am’, ‘no, ma’am’ if I ask you a question… nothing else, for the rest of the night. Got that?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“You’re my toy,” she said. “I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to say that, but tonight, you’re my toy, and…”
“I’m not going to just leave…” I started to say, but she reached around to grab a chunk of my hair and jerked. Her other hand was at my lips.
“‘Yes, ma’am’… ‘no, ma’am’,” she purred… or maybe “growled” would be the better term. She unshushed me, and released me just long enough to adjust her grip on the back of my head. The hand behind my head tilted it back, to look up at her face, strangely hungry and strangely blank.
“Yes, ma’am,” I mouthed, barely daring to speak.
“Good,” she cooed, and led me… still yanking on my hair… over to the bed, where she released me and began to undo my jeans. I started to help, but she pushed my hands away.
“You stay still,” she said. “If this is my last night with you, I’m going to do everything to you that you’ll let me.”
She got me undressed without allowing me to help beyond raising my arms and lifting my legs. It wasn’t smooth or elegant, and when she finished I was feeling far more self-conscious about my naked body than if I had simply stripped myself.
The dorm beds were raised fairly high off the floor, so that the space beneath could be used for storage and so that one could be stacked on top of another without further modification to make bunk beds. When she pushed me face-down against the mattress, my legs spread and hanging over the edge, it wasn’t totally uncomfortable, but it wasn’t totally comfortable, either.
She knelt behind me. There was a wet popping sound, something like a lollipop coming out of a child’s mouth, and then something cold and wet was pushed into the crack of my ass.
It felt like a tongue… or like I imagined a tongue would feel there. I whimpered… bit my lip to suppress a yelp… and then realized it was her thumb, wet from her mouth. She flicked the ball of her thumb around a bit, and her long nail trailed across the sensitive skin.
She was going to stick it in, I knew… the fat thumb and sharp biting nail… she was going to jam it in a place where it was never meant to be, and it was going to hurt, like nothing else I’d ever felt had.
I knew it.
It was coming.
I knew it.
She toyed with me, teased me, drawing it out… making me wait, making me guess, as her moistened digit circled and prodded and probed without penetrating, without opening. Then, it was gone, and I knew she had only drawn it back to prepare… but, no… she was on to the next game.
She kissed the base of my spine, and then extended her tongue and licked it. She trailed down, licking as she went.
I curled my lips under my teeth, sucking my mouth inward. I wanted to say something… a warning, a reminder of what was off limits, but she was following the letter of the law as I’d laid it down.
Her face was buried against my ass, her tongue trailing the bottom of the cleft, but she jumped over the one explicitly prohibited spot and picked up again beneath it, to lick up and down the tiny interval between the one thing and the other, stopping just shy of the place where it had to be said my ass had ended and my… my pussy had definitely begun.
She kept her attention there until I almost wanted her to beg to move on, in either direction, just so that it could come to some kind of an ending… and then she retraced the path upwards, this time not licking with her tongue but pressing with her lips and sucking.
Again, she skipped over the opening to end by planting another kiss on the base of my spine that sent an electric shock right up into my brain. She pulled her head back, planted her hands on either side of my ass and pushed it apart, spreading the cheeks wide. I felt… sensed… imagined… her attention trailing over it, tried to imagine what she saw.
I didn’t spend a lot of time looking at my rear in the mirror under ordinary circumstances, to say nothing of bent over with my cheeks spread, and the… well, let’s just say that I had an image in my head of what an asshole looked like. I’d never really stopped to examine how accurate that image might have been, either in general or as it concerned me.
If the hot, hungry breath I felt was any indication, what I saw in my imagination was nothing like what Amaranth was looking at.
She’d talked about licking me there, about sticking her tongue up in there the first night we’d been together… she was thinking about it now… and, if there was any truth to what she and Barley had both told me, then she knew… she knew what I wanted.
That was more than I knew. I was still forcing my mouth tightly closed, and the word I was holding in was “please.” Please… please what? Please don’t? Please do? I wanted it. I didn’t want it. It was sick, it was disgusting, it was disturbing… it was… it was…
Then, she was moving behind me, and her mouth was again open wide, sucking in as much of the soft flesh of my behind as she could accommodate. She bit… soft, like she was chewing taffy, and then hard… hard enough to draw blood if my flesh had been human. The scream of pain tore open my mouth, and had barely subsided when she’d done the other side, just as hard… bringing a second, somewhat diminished cry.
I went limp, and almost slid off the bed… would have, except that Amaranth slumped forward, covering me… her breasts pushing into my back. I shook beneath her, panting. The pain and the screaming had released some of the tension, but it wasn’t a true release.
“My toy,” I heard Amaranth whisper, her voice tinged with a touch of sadness. “My teeth can’t mark you… but for now, you’re mine all the same.”
She stirred, rose. I didn’t move. I hadn’t been given permission to. I don’t know if I could have stood, anyway. She sat down on the bed beside me, and she took me by the arms, pulling me up onto the bed and then laying me across her lap.
She scooted us back from the edge, adjusted my position a little so that my midsection was more hanging off her lap than laying across it, and then parted my legs. Her hand went between them, reaching up underneath me, and she stroked drawing her fingers across me from just below my dark curls of pubic hair to that same spot where her tongue had stopped. Her fingers were forked like a trident, and she alternated, middle finger trailing oh-so-lightly, oh-so-gently up the middle, skimming the surface without breaking it, and then index and ring finger rubbing hard against the outer surface on either side.
It was exquisite agony.
The certain knowledge that Amaranth was a nymph, that she was inherently clean and pure, couldn’t cancel out the rising tide of awareness of how filthy it was, how filthy I was, how filthy what we were doing was… but the feeling of pleasure, of anticipation, of denial… which built with each double-stroke quickly outpaced that awareness.
It went on forever. It was over too quickly. When I felt like I couldn’t possibly stand any more and I was about ready to lose all control and buck and heave and jam myself against Amaranth’s hand or any other part of her to relieve the pressure building up within me, there was a break in the rhythm… a half-second hitch in the pattern that let me know something had changed, something was about to happen… and then her hand struck my ass.
She made up for the spanking I’d missed on Sunday. She made up for everything. She made up for my whole life, if only for that moment. My vision swam. Whole universes exploded into being and faded into nothingness inside my head.
This is just like orgasm. This is what sex feels like.
Stupid. Absurd. I’d never had sex, so how could I know? Anyway, Amaranth hadn’t once in the entire process penetrated my body in the tiniest way. There couldn’t possibly be any comparison. I didn’t care. I pushed the foolish thought away and rode out the rest of the feeling.
I was still feeling aftershocks when Amaranth carefully slid me off her lap onto the bed, turned off the remaining light, and then lay down beside me and pulled the blanket over us.
My face was by her breast. I kissed it. Not the nipple, or even the front of it… just the side, where it was practically touching my mouth anyway. I wanted to open my mouth wide and suck, as she’d done before biting my ass. I wanted to move around and get my lips around her nipple. I didn’t, though. I didn’t know if it would be allowed and hadn’t been given permission to speak. Still, I did kiss it, and she made a small, appreciative sound before her breathing changed and I knew she was asleep.
I myself felt drained… or maybe satiated. Used up? No… fulfilled. I felt fulfilled.
There was a dim thought echoing around the back of my brain, which wanted to know what it was Amaranth was so worried about… why she seemed so certain there’d be a falling out among our tight little group. It wanted me to wake her up and demand answers, if only so that something could be done about it… but it was a tiny voice, and it was shouting from a long way away.
Happiness is when two people can agree upon the same destination.