As She’s Told
: Chapter 18

>Yes, I am arrived, though with no thanks to U.S. Customs which was deeply mistrustful of my student visa and suspected me of conspiracies to steal the job of an honest American.

>You have a lean and hungry look, Cassius. Just be glad they didn’t take you for a terrorist.

>The apartment is not bad, on third floor of a walk-up building near campus, and if the furniture was not so execrable I would be quite pleased. I must replace something to spread over this couch of much too cheerful orange before I vomit.

>May I suggest you seek permission before you paint everything black and bruised purple?

>supervisor is still a thorny fellow, but this is just his way with everyone, I am told. His accent is easier to understand when we are face to face. So all is well so far. I am sorry I could not visit you and see your ménage on my way, but this must wait for spring; then I hope that Ria and I can come together.

>I’m looking into a couple of possibilities for next summer. I’ll keep you posted. Svend may be interested also, but that depends on what he’s up to by then.

>fixed the webcam setup. Ria is already planning scenes with me, but the time difference is awkward for all concerned. It is good to see her even if I cannot touch her, in spite of this delayed and jerky style. But even with us directing each other’s hands it is not very satisfying.

>There must be a major scene in Chicago; have you checked yet? I think you were wise to leave the leather with Ria; just imagine what Customs would have made of it.

***

I went to work without the ‘extras’ on Monday, starting out at a comparatively manageable level of arousal. That one bizarre orgasm in the middle of a crowd had temporarily relieved a little of my endless horniness.

Unfortunately the memory of it kept recurring in the course of the morning in fantastic little jolts, and on balance I ended up hornier than I’d started. I was trying to concentrate on getting through my cataloguing project before the summer ended, because in September everything was supposed to get a lot busier. By then I’d thought I was pretty good at dealing with internal distractions, having had plenty of practice. But I was having trouble moving past the weekend. The orgasm alone seemed to have so much weight that its gravity was sending my mind’s orbit out of kilter.

That evening Anders decided that the septum piercing was more than ready to use. I knelt as high as I could at his feet, arms strapped tightly behind me, my attention shifting anxiously back and forth between his face and the hand that held my new nose ring in a tight grip. ‘Tell me,’ he said conversationally, ‘have you been, shall we say, experimenting with your chastity shield? Maybe in the bathroom at work?’

‘Ah – experimenting?’ I muttered. He gave the ring the tiniest twist, and I squeaked.

‘Yes, girl, experimenting. Trying to use it to get off.’

‘I – no, not exactly – ow –’

‘What, then? Exactly?’

‘Just – sometimes – pressing it against me – ‘

‘And?’ He tweaked me again.

‘Ah! I – twisted it sometimes, pulled a little – tried to rub it against me

– just for a few seconds – ‘

‘And? What happened?’

‘Nothing, master. Ow! Really, I was just kind of – desperate and it just made me – hornier – .’

‘Did you try it today?’

‘Please!’ I whimpered, stretching higher.

‘Did you?’

‘Oh, please! Yes, I tried it today!’

‘Any luck?’

‘No.’

‘Do you think you might ever have any luck?’

‘N-no – may- Aah!’ My head was tipped back as high as it could go, and my thighs were trembling. ‘I don’t know, master, maybe if I had more time!’

‘Hmm. Thought so.’ He relaxed his hand, and I sank onto my haunches, breathing a sigh of relief. Naturally this was short-lived. ‘I’m not punishing you for the other times,’ he said, in his sudden, scary, pissed-accent voice.

‘Frustrated wrestling with your restraints is one thing. An amusement. For me. But today you knew you might get somewhere.’

I got a very thorough spanking that reignited the recent cane strokes and left me bawling. Then I had to stand in the corner with my nose ring clipped high to the wall for what felt like hours.

The ring got used a lot in the next little while. He’d actually had one made with a fixed bead that could be snapped shut, but could only be opened with a tiny screwdriver, like the locking mechanism on the nipple rings.

‘Micro-micro management,’ he called it. One more example of his leaving absolutely nothing to chance, or to any discretion on my part. But at least it meant I didn’t have to wear the ring to work.

I did have to lock it through my nose myself, however, when I got home from work. Among all the other accoutrements. I frequently found myself staring into the hall mirror, slipping the retainer out, easing the ring through, clicking it shut, and then locking a chain to it. I stared at myself, noting my shameful bovine resemblance, and tried to imagine what the next item was going to be on my master’s agenda.

Nose ring alternated with nipples as the attachment points for tugging me around the house, morning and evening. The electronic leash, scary as it had been, was benign in retrospect. At least with that one I had been up on my feet. With the nose or nipple leashes I was usually crawling, and let me tell you, the motivation to learn to heel was intense. He made me crawl through the house, and one dark night he led me through the yard by the nose ring lead, gagged and bridled and harnessed, the grass springy and damp beneath my naked knees.

On the other hand the sexual torments had abated a little. My master was doing some construction on the house in the evenings, and didn’t have as much time to keep me quivering on the edge. Not the fireplace; he was beginning to think that the mantelpiece was nowhere to be found. Eventually he’d have to cave and make one to match, but as he disapproved of such patchwork inauthenticity, he was putting it off as long as possible. What he was doing was converting a storage closet under the main staircase to a small bathroom. A powder room, as the real estate ads would say – just a toilet and a sink. I figured this was for my benefit, when the restraints restricted my range to the ground floor. I wouldn’t mind giving up the humiliating chamber pot, I thought, both using it and emptying and cleaning it.

Did I make any more experiments with the chastity shield? No, I did not. He interrogated me daily, I was incapable of lying to him, and now that it had been expressly forbidden, it wasn’t worth the heavy consequences, especially since such attempts got me nowhere without the ‘extras.’

Something told me he was going to replace a way to use those again. In my experience Anders never gave up on anything he wanted; setbacks only made him more creative. Hot, humid weather continued into early September. The bathroom was finished at last on a sultry, wet Saturday morning. Given its location, it was of necessity a narrow room shaped like a right triangle up on one edge, now tiled and painted, with the sink at the high point and the toilet in the lower space, as far back as it could be without making the user duck. My master cleared away the last of his tools and had me wipe up the drywall dust and scrub drops of grout from the tiles. I had been locked by the nose ring to the wall opposite his desk, out of the way while he worked, and in the course of the morning had had to make use of the chamber pot more than once. Now I emptied it in the new toilet and washed it out in the new sink, I hoped for the last time.

I worked my way through the salad and cheese in my red bowl, crouched and bound as usual. The kitchen windows were open to what little breeze there was. My nose ring, ridiculously, got food on it, and I couldn’t get it off, little head flips doing nothing but rattling it against the side of the bowl. When I glanced up guiltily my master was frowning at me; I wasn’t supposed to make any noise at meals. I put my face back into my dish.

Anders kept me crawling that afternoon, fetching whips from the hall cabinet with my mouth for him to beat me with, fetching weights for him to hang from my nipple rings, fetching his newspaper and being smacked for bringing the wrong section and for getting it wet. I polished his shoes with my tongue, and I sucked his cock. Then he seemed to be done with my mouth, because he locked it up in a bit and bridle.

When I signalled a need to pee he nodded, clicked a leash to my collar and had me crawl to the new bathroom. I put my hand on the toilet; one foot under me to stand. ‘No.’

Surprised, I looked up, and watched him lean over me and push on the low wall behind the toilet. It wasn’t a wall at all but a little folding door. As it moved aside, I saw the litter box. My body went hot all over, then cold.

There was a singing in my head. My limbs were trying to back up. I felt the nudge of his foot and I groaned a protest, frozen in place. Hands and knees took one step forward, half another one.

My childhood cat Amaranth had been very dignified using her litter box. Sitting up calm and straight. Sniffing afterwards; no, I didn’t think I’d imitate her there. I couldn’t sit up as it turned out; the ceiling sloped down too low, meeting the floor not six inches from the back of the box. The only way to get there was to back in. Head down, I squatted with my feet apart.

Camping trips, peeing in the woods behind a tree, I thought encouragingly.

My bladder obligingly emptied itself. I managed only the briefest, most humiliated glance up at my master for instructions.

‘Cover it,’ he said. There was no cover; he meant with kitty litter. I shifted to one side, turned, pushed some dry litter over the wet with my foot.

‘You’ll do that even if your hands are tied, you hear me?’ I was still for a moment, imagining this, and then I nodded. ‘All right, get out now. Wipe yourself on that towel. There was a damp towel folded in a shallow rectangular pan next to the litter box. I knelt over it and blotted myself, wiping the last drops of pee from my shield. I didn’t use my hands. The setup had clearly been arranged so that I wouldn’t need them.

‘Close the folding door. Come out along that piece of carpet; make sure you don’t track any litter. I don’t want to replace any outside this bathroom, is that clear?’ He gave my ear a little yank. Head down, I nodded again.

My master unhooked the leash, looped it through the banister rails and locked it back to my collar again. Then he went out the back, carrying twine and some steps.

I sat leashed to the stairs, arms hugging legs, bridled face resting on my knee. Distracting myself with regrets about the chamber pot, the genteel qualities of which I hadn’t appreciated sufficiently when I’d had the chance.

As if what I appreciated had anything to do with what happened to me.

My shallow breathing made a warm mist on my knee.

I’d been warned. An animal on a very short tether. And here I was, using a litter box. With him watching. Of course with him watching. He’d undoubtedly have a webcam in there for my weekday afternoons. Would it be any less humiliating when I was ostensibly alone? No, not in the least.

Just an acknowledgement that I really was what he was making me.

I sat very still, breathing lightly, maintaining the kind of calm that tethered animals acquire so as not to flail around and hurt themselves. My thoughts were looping themselves into painful, twisting knots: Tangles of fear and lust and horrible anxiety. Would he still love this animal thing I was becoming? Would I love myself? I hugged my legs harder.

I could do this, and I could love it – I could so easily sink into it, like an amphibian into its native swamp – so long as there was no contempt on my master’s part for the crawling thing I had become.

His step sounded at the back door. From the other end of the house, there were his eyes on me, brows furrowed, his footsteps coming straight for me, as if my thoughts had spoken themselves out loud. He crouched down, held my face with one hand and searched it, while fingertips brushed down my body like sensitive antennae: chest, belly, back.

The contact brought the wrenching tangle inside me almost to a breaking point. Tears started to form in my eyes, the reactive rage of the despised was lurking, and I desperately wanted to prostrate myself at his feet. I also wanted him to fuck my brains out.

‘It’s all right, girl.’ The voice was deep, soothing. Both hands were caressing me now. I began to cry. ‘Shh. It’s all right. I told you before. I’d never make you into anything I’d despise.’ His voice seemed bottomless; a deep pool drawing me in. He held me tight for a minute, my sobbing ribs heaving against his arm, and then he lowered me down as I clung. I ended up on my belly on the floor, his feet before my face. The bit was some impediment, but I licked his shoes as best I could.

Outside in the dark that evening I followed the pull of the leash. He’d tugged me around back there in the late summer evenings any number of times by now, by one attachment point or another; this time it was just my collar. But I knew what must be coming. I’d signalled my need to pee, and instead of being directed to the litter box, the leash had led me crawling to the back door.

It was damp out there, muggy and still warm, smelling of the brief rain that had just passed. I shivered as I crawled across the spongy grass, still bridled, naked breasts swaying between my arms. I was aware of a full bladder, and ass cheeks stinging. The leash at my throat was a living link to the very tall and upright being by my side, a nerve fibre belonging to us both along which messages continually hummed.

And with a need to obey as basic as my life, I crouched beneath the maple tree in the darkest shadows, and did what I was meant to do.