A Bestiary of Unnatural Women Read online

  “How old is he? Where did he live before university? What was his major?” He spent a few minutes soliciting as much information from her as he needed. She sobbed her answers to his questions, one at a time.

  Finally, he said, “I’ll be back.”

  She suffered agony, straddling the horse while listening him clicking on her computer in the spare bedroom.

  To her, subjectively, it fell like hours passed, but it was only six minutes on his watch when he returned with a piece of paper in his hand. “You didn’t try very hard to find him. His number’s listed on 411.com. There’s only one ‘Brent Kovaks’ in the state and he’s living in your Brent’s hometown so, unless he’s named after his father, it’s got to be him.”

  “Okay. I’ll call him like you want. Let me down. Please.”

  “First, tell me the truth. Did you try looking for him? Did you even type his name into Google?”

  She moaned. “I was going to do it today. I’ve been busy. I’ve been meeting with my thesis supervisor every day this week. I’ve got to get my proposal done by the end of the month and he’s not giving me much help.”

  “While I’ve been waiting for you all week, you didn’t even try to do what you promised,” he stated flatly.

  “I’m sorry,” she sniffled. “I’ll be better from now on.”

  “You sure will. And just to make sure that you remember to keep your promises, you’re going to ride that horse for another twenty minutes.”

  “No!” she shrieked. “I can’t last that long. I’m in agony.”

  “Next time, you can save yourself a lot of pain by doing what you promise promptly.” He looked at his watch, and then said, “I’ll let you down at four twenty-five. That’s a promise and I keep my promises.”

  “You bastard!” she screamed.

  “Oh, dear. You shouldn’t have said that. I don’t like to be insulted. For that, you’re going to ride your horse for another twenty minutes again tomorrow evening.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. Please. Have mercy. I’m in agony. A person doesn’t mean what they say when they’re hurting this badly.”

  He shrugged. “I’m not hurting, so I do mean what I say. Tomorrow you’ll take another twenty-minute ride. I just hope you learn your lesson. From now on, if you can’t say something nice to me, keep your mouth shut.”

  For the next twenty minutes, he tried to ignore her sobs while he read a little Kafka.

  When he finally let her off the horse, she fell to her knees and clutched at her poor tortured pussy with her hands.

  The next day, every time she looked at the horse standing in her living room, she moaned in fear of the pain that was coming. At seven o’clock, Trevor ordered her to mount her horse. He would never understand the courage that was required for her to comply. But comply she did. She was writing a proposal for a thesis on the effects of public debate about torture on social norms and allowing herself to be tortured was giving her insights that she would get in no other way.

  Her entire crotch was already bruised from the previous day’s mistreatment. It was so tender that she began screaming as soon as she put her weight on the saddle.

  Twenty minutes later, her entire chest was soaked with her tears.

  Even after the stirrup was lowered, Trevor had to help her put her dismount; she did not want to move even the little bit that would be required to push her foot into the stirrup and shift her weight onto it.

  Again, she fell to her knees, clutching her crotch.

  Trevor said, “I’d like a blowjob now. Will you give me one voluntarily or do I have to put you back in the saddle to get one?”

  She whimpered and scrambled to service him before he made good on his threat.

  He was already as hard as hickory and came in her mouth in record time.

  Torture definitely had an upside.

  “Brent? This is Cindy Crouse.” Her voice echoed from the computer speakers and Trevor nodded in satisfaction.

  “Cindy?” the strange man’s voice replied. “God, it’s been years since we spoke. How are you?” He sounded happy to hear her.

  “I’ve been fine. How about you?”

  “Couldn’t be better. I’ve been selling home and auto insurance since graduation. It’s a good job. How about you?”

  “I went to graduate school. I’m about halfway through my doctoral program.”

  “Hey, that’s terrific. You always liked school.”

  “Yeah.” She paused, then said, “There’s something that I’ve been meaning to talk to you about for a while. Something that I should have said years ago.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah.” She took a deep breath. “You remember when we broke up.”

  “Sure. That’s not something that I’m likely to forget any time soon. It was… Well, it was a surprise. Let’s put it that way.”

  “I know. But there was a reason for it. I wasn’t exactly honest with you. I’d met another man and went out with him on a date.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. I should have told you about it at the time, but I didn’t.”

  “I see.” There was a pause at the other end, and then he said, “I know that we weren’t like engaged or anything. Not really committed. But I thought that we were at least a little bit exclusive. I wasn’t going out with other women.” He sounded hurt when he said that.

  “We were exclusive. I guess we would have called it ‘going steady’ if we had been a little younger. I felt like I was cheating on you. It was just that once, but I shouldn’t have done it. I’ve felt bad about it for a long time. I won’t try to make any excuses. It was my mistake. Purely my mistake. I’m sorry.”

  “Oh. Well, you should know that I’m married now. I have a wife and a baby on the way.”

  “That’s great,” Cindy replied. “Really great. Congratulations.”

  “Yeah. Well, it’s been nice talking to you.”

  “Wait. Before you go, there’s one other thing that you should know.”

  There was a long pause, then Brent said, “You’re not going to tell me that I got you pregnant, are you?”

  “Oh, no. Nothing like that. As near as I know, your wife is having your first child.”

  “Okay. That’s good to know.”

  “No. There’s something else. The guy I went out with that one time?”

  “You mean the one that you cheated on me with?”

  “Yeah. Him.”

  “Did you marry him?”

  “No. I never saw him again. He wasn’t much of a man. You were the better man by far. I knew that from the beginning.”

  “Okay.” He left the word hanging, waiting to hear what else she had to say.

  “Well, he was quite a player. I found out later that he gave me syphilis.” She rushed the last words in her haste to get her confession out.

  “What?”

  “Syphilis. He gave me syphilis.”

  “Oh.” He paused. “I don’t know what to say about that. I’m not happy to hear that you cheated on me, but I don’t think you deserved that. Are you all right?”

  “Oh, yeah. I got it treated right away. I’m fine.”

  “So why are you telling me all this now?”

  “I… I should have told you at the time. I’m calling to apologize. I’m so sorry.”

  There was a long pause while Brent digested the information, then he said, “Wait. I get it. You think you might have given it to me. Is that it? You kept sleeping with me after this jerk gave you syphilis and you could have passed it on to me but you never bothered telling me? Is that it?”

  “I’m so sorry. I was a coward. It was a shameful thing to do. I’m so, so sorry.” She began to cry.

  He heard her sobs. “Are you crying about it?”

  “Yes,” she admitted.

  “Well, don’t cry. I’m all right. After you dumped me, I started going out with another woman. You probably don’t remember Lucy Cho. I broke up with her when she told me that she had syphilis. I
always thought that she was the one who gave it to me. She had a reputation for being an easy lay. But now that you’re telling me that I probably already had it, and it was probably me who gave it to her, not the other way around.”

  “I’m sorry,” Cindy sobbed. She was beginning to sound like a broken record.

  “You should be apologizing to her. She was the one who had the guts to tell me that I had it. It just about killed her to have to tell me and then, when I dumped her for it, she stayed in her room and cried for like a week. I know because her roommate called me up and gave me blazes for being so insensitive.”

  “God, I’m sorry.” Cindy could think of nothing else to say. “I didn’t mean to wreck your life.”

  “It’s okay. I wouldn’t have been happy with her, anyway. She was too wild for me. You wouldn’t believe some of the things we did. It was fun in a really scary way, but if I’d stayed with her, I never would have met Eve. She’s a wonderful woman. I’ve never been happier.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “Me too. You know, you and me? We were never going to make it. We would have been miserable if we’d tried to stay together. It would have been worse even than if I’d tried to stay with Lucy.”

  “I’m glad that you found someone better than me,” Cindy sniffed, a touch of sarcasm breaking through her tears.

  “Me, too,” Brent replied in all sincerity.

  “I hope you have a good life.”

  “You, too, Cindy. You too. If you ever need insurance, let me know. Otherwise, I don’t need to hear from you again.” There was a click as he hung up the phone.

  Trevor looked at Cindy. “Well, that was quite a call. Talk about heavy life experiences. How do you feel?”

  “Better,” she admitted. “It’s a load off my mind knowing that everything turned out well for him. I don’t have to wake up in the middle of the night any more worrying that I’d killed my first real boyfriend by giving him the syph.”

  “Good.”

  “Also, in a way, it’s only fair that I gave him a chance to shit on me a little. It feels like the books are balanced.”

  “Do you think that he’d want you to ride your horse for fifteen minutes, just so that you could feel some of the pain that he felt when you dumped him?”

  She did not say a word, just began crying quietly and peeling her clothes off with trembling hands.

  After her fifteen minutes had passed, Trevor told her that he would only release her if she agreed to give him a first-rate blowjob.

  She didn’t hesitate even for a second. Big, sloppy blowjobs were becoming routine. She was learning to be a first-rate cocksucker.

  That night in bed, as she snuggled in his arms relaxing into sleep, she said, “You’re going to have to think of something a lot more distasteful for me to do. Just sucking you off is becoming too easy for me.”

  Trevor fell asleep thinking of distasteful sex and coming up blank. Most of the things that he thought would disgust her would disgust him as well. He wasn’t about to put himself through anything unpleasant just to make her as unhappy as she wanted to be.

  Cindy had been riding her horse for a few minutes and was moaning in pain. “What do you want from me?” she asked. “Just tell me and I’ll do it. Riding this thing doesn’t get easier, you know. It gets worse every time.”

  Sadly, he had not thought of anything to demand from her that was worse than a blowjob. He had only mounted her on the horse because it had been a week since the last torture session and he knew that he was supposed to keep her constantly fearful of the horse.

  Now that she was up there, suffering again, he had to come up with some rationale for doing this to her. “Just be patient, you’ll find out soon enough.”

  She whimpered loudly and said, “Please tell me what you want. Really. I’ll do it. Anything you want.”

  He felt a twinge of pity for her. He had to come up with something soon so that she could agree and stop the torture. Suddenly, a brilliant idea flashed into his brain. “I’ll tell you what. Sue and Saul are throwing a Halloween party next Saturday night. It’s a costume party so you’re going to dress up special for it.”

  “How special?” she gasped through her pain.

  “You’re going to dress up like a hooker. I mean you’ll be the world’s most obvious streetwalker. False eyelashes and bright blue eye shadow and eyeliner that’d make Cleopatra blush and lipstick the color of ripe cherries. Hair bleached blonde and giant cheap earrings. And super high stiletto heels and fishnet stockings and a miniskirt so short people can see the ends of the garter belt straps and a tube top two sizes too small that shows your belly all the way up to your ribcage and no bra. And, after everyone’s arrived, you take me into the bathroom, or find a quiet corner in the back yard or find some other place in the house. And that’s where you get down on your knees and give me the perfect whore’s blowjob.”

  “I can’t do something like that in public,” she screamed. “Everyone’s going to know me at the party.”

  “Yup. And you’re going to look and act like a hooker because if one person, just one person, asks you what your costume is supposed to be, then you’ll have failed and you’re going to be stuck right back up on your high horse for the rest of the night.”

  She dangled quietly across the wedge for a minute, thinking about what it would be like to dress like a whore in front of all her friends and colleagues. For years she had deliberately worn shapeless, sexless clothes to the university to prove to everyone that she was nobody’s sex object. “I can’t do it,” she insisted. “I just can’t do it. Ask me for something else.”

  “You can do it. Either you decide that you can do it or you can keep riding that cock horse until you get to Banbury Cross. If you don’t agree to go to Sue and Saul’s party looking and acting like an absolute whore, then you ride that horse until four o’clock.”

  “Four o’clock,” she wailed. “That’s three hours away. I can’t stay her that long.”

  “It’s three hours and seven minutes, to be exact,” he replied, checking his watch. “And you don’t have to stay up there for that long. You can get down as soon as you promise to play the hooker at Sal’s Halloween party.”

  “I can’t promise that.”

  “Then you can stay up there for another three hours and seven minutes.”

  “That’s too long.”

  “You’re right. It is too long. Much too long. You could suffer permanent injury. You know that you can’t keep riding the horse that long, so you may as well save yourself a lot of pain and agree to my terms right now. You have nothing to gain by waiting.”

  “Let me know when it’s four o’clock,” she said flatly.

  She lasted for almost an hour. Her suffering must have been intense. Trevor was amazed by her unwillingness to play a hooker at a costume party. He would have thought that it was no big deal – that she would have agreed to his terms right away. Clearly this was something that she desperately did not want to do.

  But eventually the unrelenting pain made her more desperate to get off the horse than to avoid public humiliation.

  “I’ll do it,” she shrieked in the end. “I’ll do it. I promise. Just let me down. Please. Let me down now. Please.”

  He let her down.

  That night she made love to him with exceptional enthusiasm.

  He didn’t see how she could do it; her crotch had to be sore from the afternoon’s activities. There was no understanding women. Or at least for him, no understanding Cindy.

  On Saturday night, Cindy let Trevor have the bedroom and she changed in the spare room, the one that she used as an office.

  He had spent a long time pondering possible costumes. What would be the appropriate escort for a hooker? His first thought was pimp, decked out in purple jacket, gold chains, white patent leather shoes, and a fedora, but that was wrong. She was to service him, not work for him servicing other men. Then he thought he would dress as the classic medieval torturer, garbed in a black
hood and wearing a whip on his belt, but that was wrong, too. He was only her torturer at home, not in public. Finally, he realized his true métier. He was her devil. His job was to bring a little corner of hell into her world, to make her suffer for her past sins and to force her to sin some more. That was the role that she had imposed upon him and, tonight, he would look the part. He was the devil, complete with red horns and a long tail, who had driven her to prostitute herself for his amusement and who would be happy to slake his lust in her.

  His costume was understated; a business suit with a long red pointed tail poking through a hole in the seat and hair neatly parted in the middle with small red horns poking through his coiffure. A neat black goatee, mustache, and eyebrows that rose high at the outer tips gave him a nicely sinister look.

  When she finally emerged from her own room, her costume was as over-the-top as she had promised: pink fake leather micro-skirt too short to cover the tops of her black fishnet stockings; tight pink blouse tied at the waist that left no doubt she was wearing a black lace bra; and black stiletto heels so high that the balls of her feet barely touched the floor. He recalled that he had specified a tube top, but he liked the blouse better. She had left it completely unbuttoned and was held closed only by being tied at the bottom of her rib cage, not only leaving her entire midriff bare, but also exposing the center of her black bra almost to the edge of her nipples. And the material was sufficiently transparent that he could see the lace pattern of the bra underneath.

  Her hair was bleached blonde and had been teased into a loose haystack that was piled high above her garishly made-up face. Her lips were ruby red and her eye shadow sapphire blue. Thick eyeliner made her eyes look as big as saucers and a generous application of rouge made her look like she was suffering from a high fever.

  She was chewing gum with open-mouthed enthusiasm that drew his eye right to her mouth where he could see the tip of her tongue darting around behind her open lips. He could not help but imagine those lips wrapped around his cock while her tongue tickled it fiercely. He was sorely tempted to forget the party and stay home, letting her suck him right here for the rest of the night.