Chapter Nineteen

CLIO KNEW SHE HAD gone too far. When, with Jan’s help, she had placed Marty face down across the wide bed, she stared with genuine regret at the signs of her excess: the dark ripe blisters of the cane marks, aglint with bright red drops in places, the heaving movements of the thin shoulders and back, and the sounds of his soft groans and desolate weeping. There was a secret recognition of her own unease – she shied away from the word “fear” – at the extremes she had unleashed, mainly because she was forced to acknowledge the loss of control which had made her for a few wild moments almost as helpless in its power as her two naked victims. She had a weird sense of affinity with them. Now that this fit of hers had passed, almost equally scary was the excitement she could not ignore. She could feel the evidence of it in the clinging dampness of the narrow strip of the cotton briefs which snugged her pudenda.

Perhaps poor Marty, weeping with the pain and the shock of the severe caning, was not aware of Clio’s disturbed feelings, but Jan could not help but be conscious of it. The tone of voice and the expression on the lovely face made it apparent as Clio began to tend to Marty’s wounds, with Jan very much in a subordinate role as her helper. When she had finished bathing the quivering buttocks and slathering them with the blessedly cold antiseptic cream until they glistened, she bent close to the outstretched figure, her lips brushing against the neatly scrolled ear, and whispered, ‘Just stay there, Marty, love. It’ll soon ease now. Just lie still. I’ll get a cold drink. You can take some Co-codamol. Two every four hours.’ There was a slight, embarrassed pause before she added, ‘I’m sorry, sweet pie. I didn’t mean ... you shouldn’t be so gallant. Protecting your ladylove like that. But you were very brave. Wasn’t he, Jan?’

For once, Jan wasn’t afraid to meet Clio’s gaze directly, and she saw that flicker of apology. It gave her a strange, dizzying thrill. She, too, bent forward, her shoulders rubbed lightly against Clio’s bare arm, and her dark hair brushed against Clio’s lighter brown. ‘Yes, you were. You shouldn’t have taken my beating for me. I’m so sorry, my love.’ She bent closer, her hands tenderly caressing the back of his neck and his shoulders. She planted a soft but lingering kiss just below his left ear, and let her tongue flicker lightly against the soft lobe. She started as she felt Clio’s hands close round her upper arms and pull her upright, but realised instantly there was no threat in the movement.

Clio’s dark eyes were luminous with unshed tears. Jan felt giddy as she bathed in the intensity of that stare, unable to read its meaning fully, but aware instinctively of a new element, a kind of pleading, in the intimacy which held them both over the prone figure. ‘Jan! I don’t – I shouldn’t ... have lost my rag like that. I didn’t mean to. It just ... I’m really sorry. Please try to understand. Forgive me.’

Two tears escaped, ran in parallel tracks down her cheeks, but still that gaze held Jan in its thrall. She nodded, and Clio suddenly reached out, pulled her in close. Jan felt the cool, loose cotton of Clio’s blouse rub across her own bare breasts, felt the touch of Clio’s bosom beneath the light material. Their lips met, then parted as their tongues flickered, intertwined, in a long kiss.

They were both breathless when at last they broke. ‘I want to make love to you!’ Clio said, gulping out the words. The thrill of them passed through Jan’s entire frame, arousing every nerve of sexual excitement. Her throat closed, she swallowed hard, could only nod as their arms reached for each other once more, their mouths sought contact again, and they tumbled onto the bed, almost roughly brushing aside the sprawled limbs of Marty, who groaned, but managed to shuffle around on his stomach to give them room to stretch out. ‘Iwant to do it to you!’ Clio panted, dragging her mouth free of Jan’s, only to thrust her face and her avidly searching lips at Jan’s breast, seeking out the small, erect nipple, like a ravening babe in search of milk.

With an ecstatic whimper, Jan yielded, let herself be borne back onto the coverlet, not even aware of Marty’s limbs squirming to avoid the twisting, locked couple. Clio worried at the breasts of her slave-lover, in a reversal of roles she was helpless to control. Her wet kisses trailed across the flat bare belly beneath her, her arms gripped and parted the yielded thighs, and her face was buried in the springy tuft of pubic hair, and then the rapidly moistening and melting sex lips which rose, begging for violation from the rapacious features eager to immerse themselves in that fleshy, running furrow already inexorably soaring towards the climax waiting to consume the slender form. Jan’s narrow soles were brown with dust from their accustomed nakedness. They waved madly in the air in anticipation of the unstoppable culmination so swiftly approaching.

Lost to everything except that desperate soar and plunge towards orgasm, Jan lifted her belly and buttocks, her fingers fastened in the cascade of brown hair that spilt over her pelvis and thighs. In any other saner circumstance, she would have been horrified at the very notion of seizing the individual she now rightly regarded as her mistress, someone who had sovereign rights over every aspect of her life, in such a violent manner, but Clio merely drove her soaking face even harder into that gaping sex fount, and her fingers scrabbled alongside her frantically working mouth to assist in achieving the crisis she wished for as ardently as the recipient. Jan’s body arched in a new convulsion; she screamed as the spiral of her coming began, and passed through her in a glorious series of climaxes. She threshed and howled, and writhed, until, finally, she collapsed, utterly spent, wracked by huge, gulping sobs, as Clio’s face at last lifted from the gaping belly and thrust itself against the weeping features blindly proffered to her as eagerly as the sexual orifice which she had just possessed, and been possessed by.

The active role which Clio had performed changed the relationship not only between the two women but with the two male members of the complex quartet. Jan had been frightened at first that Clio might, in denial of her uncharacteristic assumption of aggressor in their lesbian activity, turn on her, and poor Marty, with even more vicious displays of physical punishment. But her fears proved groundless. In the hours and days immediately proceeding the caning, Clio continued to display a new sympathy and tenderness towards both Marty and Jan that indicated how disturbed and ashamed she was at the severity of the corporal punishment she had meted out.

Ant, too, could not help but be aware of it. For a start, there was the evidence itself, in the sight of Marty’s lividly enflamed behind, which rendered him incapable of movement other than a slow, crone-like shuffle, and totally incapable of sitting down for almost three days. Her lover did nothing to alleviate Clio’s sense of guilt by his forthright expression of criticism. ‘Christ! What the hell have you done to the poor bastard, Clio? You’ve flayed the hide off the poor little sod!’ It was largely that guilt which made her blurt out the secret she had intended to keep of the new dimension in her sexual relationship with Jan. She saw at once how his eyes lit up and watched the pleasure spread over his handsome features. She was blushing already, but now her lovely face flamed at his new look of such eager delight. ‘So you’ve discovered the thrills of playing butch, have you? I can’t wait to watch you making a meal of Jan’s fur pie!’ The gross crudity of the expression added to her chagrin.

He insisted on a demonstration of this new phase in their love play, and Clio, in a whirl of mixed emotions that both roused and embarrassed her, felt obliged to consent. With poor Marty lying awkwardly across the foot of the bed, this time purely in the role of spectator, Clio duly got down, literally, to the business of pleasuring the compliantly spreadeagled Jan, with Ant initially playing a similar role to Marty. However, the sight of his lover’s buttocks, lifted so prominently virtually under his nose, and the temptation of that pink-lipped, curl-fringed sex fissure peeping and beckoning at the base of the cleft, demanded that Ant, too, should play an active part in the splendid fusion of flesh. Already naked, he moved behind Clio’s crouching form, noting the widely parted thighs and jutting knees of the prostrate Jan, which framed it. He felt on his own knees the cool touch of the pads of Clio’s upturned toes and closely aligned feet as he positioned himself and guided the throbbing column of his cock to the moist, yielding folds of the labia. Once the tip of the helm nudged against the tissue of the vulva, he released the hold his left hand had on his shaft, to allow the deeply penetrating thrust of his prick into the narrow but welcoming grip of the vagina. His hands moved upward and outward to seize her hips. He drove fully home, folding over the downward sloping curve of the long back and dipping shoulders, staring down at the tangled spread of brown hair covering the thighs and belly of the prostrate figure she was making love to.

Jan, her head already rocking on the pillow in response to Clio’s lapping tongue, was vaguely aware of the sudden instant’s change in the rhythm of the loving, the increase of pressure as Clio’s frame responded involuntarily to the thrust of Ant’s entry into her, and Jan’s hands lifted instinctively as she gave a tiny moan of fear that the urgent loving mouth might cease its wonderful attentions. The fingers curled in the brown hair of her lover, holding her to her. However, she had no cause for alarm. Almost before her whirling senses had recorded that fragment of change in the strokes, the lips and tongue and teeth had resumed their wonderful excitation, and the ecstatic, helpless Jan felt the increase of pace and passion from the fierce pistoning drives which had transformed the couple into a trio of fused flesh.

Jan could not say whether the climax came swiftly or slowly after Ant’s participation in their love play. All she felt was that irresistible rise, that rush to the coming, which obliterated all other senses except the body’s maddening urging and then the explosion of its culmination. And then all she knew was lying there, trapped beneath them, her body slippery with sweat, their soft flesh sliding and clinging as her mistress finally lay upon her, groaning in her own helplessness as Ant’s body hammered into her in the last frenzy of their fucking.

The marks on Marty’s bum had faded until only the faintest of thin pink lines marked two of the deepest cuts. Both he and Jan had become so used to going without clothes that their nakedness no longer embarrassed them, even though Adamu and Muriamu, the cook and the maid, still grinned or sniggered every day. Few others saw them. They scarcely ventured outside the old bungalow, and Ant and Clio never entertained at home, centring their social pleasures around the Kengui Club, or, if reciprocating private invitations to dinner, playing host by inviting their guests to the local Kengui Hotel, despite its less than shining reputation for haute cuisine. By tacit consent, Marty and Jan sealed themselves in their insulated and isolated world. They tried not to think of what happened outside their tiny environment. They never mentioned mutual acquaintances, who were still going about their daily lives only a few miles distant. When they did talk about their past, it was the distant past: their childhood, or early adulthood. As they lay together on their mattress in the dark, they would share feelings and experiences, in soft whispers, their heads close together, their bodies and limbs entwined. Jan told Marty about her time with Patrick, how infatuated and subservient she had been since the age of 15. ‘I never knew anyone else – I never went out with another boy. I did everything he told me. I’d never had sex with another man, until Ant ...’ her voice faded, not only with embarrassment, but with guilt at her lie. And, eventually, she confessed, lying there, her lips brushing Marty’s ear, her legs wrapped around him, her warm breasts resting against his arm which lay across her; told him about her lesbianism, the secret she had hidden since childhood, and about her relationship with Mags Evans, how she used to sneak over to Kengui. And lastly, with tears halting the whispered confessional, she told him of Dave Evans’s discovery of her affair with his wife, and of the perverse triangular relationship it spawned.

Marty confessed too. He also shed tears, though they were largely of overwhelming relief and gratitude at the sudden realisation that at last here with Jan was the relationship he had always dreamt of, with nothing to hide, exposed like the naked bodies that clung together now, the flesh whose every inch they both knew and truly loved, and shared.

It felt strange, after their habitual nudity, for the couple to be presented with a stiffly pristine white kanzueach, the Victorian-style nightshirts which had become traditional daytime garments of the native Africans, who, in those far-off days, had been encouraged to emulate their colonial rulers. Though they were for men only, Jan received one identical to her partner, even down to the size. ‘I’m taking the pair of you up to Kendu tomorrow,’ Clio declared, enjoying the wide-eyed uncertain gaze fixed on her at the news. She reached out playfully and tweaked the dark little pubic curls of the modest patch covering Jan’s pelvis. ‘You’re getting far too hirsute, both of you!’

Marty guessed at once what was to happen, for he still vividly remembered his last trip to Kendu. ‘We’re going to be depilated,’ he told a wide-eyed Jan, when they lay in bed together later. He described the visit to the beauty salon in the capital, and the exotic Madame Carina, the Greek who ran the parlour.

‘Does it hurt?’ Jan asked. ‘I’ve only ever shaved myself. What do they use? Wax?’

He nodded. His arm tightened around her, but he tried to make his voice reassuring. ‘It stings a bit. They put on some paste, then put strips like sticking plaster over it. Then they peel them off. But it doesn’t take long. And then they rub this gorgeous scented cream all over – and two really lovely Toru girls rub it in, and give you a massage. It’s very sexy!’ he whispered, his mouth close to Jan’s ear.

‘It’s only down below, is it?’ she murmured tentatively. ‘The pubes?’

He felt himself blushing a little in the dimness. ‘Well, they did meall over, but it wasn’t bad. I’ve never been hairy, and you– your skin’s like silk, Jan. I swear, you’ll love it!’

However, when they duly arrived at Madame Carina’s salon just before noon the next day, there was a variation to the treatment which Marty had previously undergone which startled both of them. The exhaustive inspection of their bodies was as anticipated, and though uncomfortable and embarrassing was stoically endured. After all, they had no choice. But then came a startling addition which took them completely by surprise, and took twice as long as their body treatment. ‘We haven’t finished with you yet!’ Clio declared with a wicked grin, just when the naked pair had thought the operation completed. ‘You’re still far too hairy.’

Both Jan and Marty stared in astonishment. Their pale flesh was smooth as silk. Even their nostrils had been plucked, as well as all the other intimate orifices, and their pulses were in fact racing from the lengthy and intensely pleasurable attention given to them by the two brown-skinned girls from Toru, Madame Carina’s acolytes. The striking Greek woman led them through to a curtained alcove where clients’ hair styling and cutting were attended to. The puzzled duo were ordered to take their places in the black swivel chairs in front of the gleaming basins. They soon realised that this was to be far more than a conventional trim or styling.

Madame Carina herself wielded the clippers on Jan’s black locks, while one of the Toru girls did the honours with Marty. Bewildered as they were, neither of the nude figures crouching on the rather sticky softness of the black leather cushions had any thought of hesitating to obey or to question what was to be done to them. The electric clippers purred, scissors snipped, the clippers were changed and buzzed again, until Marty’s short brown hair and Jan’s fuller, richer, raven curls spread in ever increasing quantity about them, until the pale domes of their skulls emerged, covered only by the sparsest of dark fuzz through which the pale scalps shone.

But even this was not to be spared. The shorn victims were instructed to bend over the basins, their heads were soaped, and then fearfully sharp cutthroat razors were wielded, fortunately expertly, over newly bared skin now lathered thickly with fragrant foam, until even this last fine covering was removed. The residue of soap and whiskers was rinsed off, and the couple stared in fascinated horror at the smooth shaven pale domes of the skull revealed to them.