Chapter Nineteen

Alone, the afternoon slowed, working its way only grudgingly toward evening. Slouch-splayed out directly in the glare of that now westering wheel of fire, Karl roasted on.

His skin stung as if Sol’s regard were some ethereal acid. When he closed his eyes, the incendiary red behind his lids and the blast-furnace heat led him to imagine endlessly falling into a volcano. While briefly cooling him, his dousing had washed off the protective oil. Now he burned steadily worse, with only enough stickiness remaining to trap the occasional arthropod. With that came the first bites of what would surely eventually become hundreds.

Karl couldn’t help it. This harbinger of all that still lay ahead made him erect. He was seriously suffering already, yet only enough to prick his ever more perverse libido. All night he was going to suffer so much more. And in the days following, when his badly burned and bitten skin screamed for scratching and he went under the whip for his daily sessions (plus extra for falling asleep again), he would have extensive opportunity for atonement. All arousal would be subsumed soon enough. He might as well wallow in it while he could.

The urinal tumbled away as the monster reared up. Its shelter scorned, the already burned, puffy, exquisitely tender whole strained for every last lick of flame it could get. With shaving now preferred to the daily ripping free of electrodes, not a scrap of hair remained on that entire lower half. Splayed out in naked invitation, damaged genitals begging for worse, the little slut groaned enraptured as the Goddess had her way with him.

Fierce rays beat relentlessly upon his seared penis, his addled head and everything else. Soaked with sweat, he made an irresistible attraction for insects. Drawn by the pond and finding him instead, flies of all kind supped from his oozing juices. Bees too came and went, crawling repeatedly over the head of his erection. Tantalized perhaps by some lingering pineapple, their fuzzy-bodied tickling made him bob and strain reflexively.

Expecting to be stung in the worst place possible, Karl was increasingly disappointed that he never was. Part of him wanted to see Nurse Drake poised over his penis with tweezers, gently working stinger after barbed stinger from the hideously swollen and discolored tip. He wanted her to sternly remind him that he was here to atone before engulfing that whole wounded bloat and suckling him slow and hard, using her mouth to draw out every trace of venom…

Blistering heat and insects aside, fancies like this helped make the occasion far more rewarding than merely hanging in front of the TV. That was unendurable banality; here was just the worshipful submission to necessity. Best of all, here there was no vibrator. Wallowing in incredibly welcome physical distress, Karl gradually passed from rapturous lethargy into stupor and then a tortured doze. Eventually as he baked and served as a bug buffet he even slept his champagne buzz away. When he voided on the dock again he wasn’t even aware of it.

This big circular dais housed a roasting pit. A huge bed of charcoal flickered and flared, throwing up heat and smoke and red and gold like the mouth of a volcano. The repentant sinner hung bowed from the spit over this, his crisping genitals closest to that laval glow. He could smell himself cooking, like a good grilled streak. The mob was roaring with triumph, and five or six bullwhips at a time continued to tenderize him even as he was slowly charbroiled alive. Dangling gratefully excruciated from his dislocated limbs, Karl saw grinning Krista with her shears already raised, eager to harvest his delicacies the instant they were finished…

Another dousing from the pond purged this madness from Karl’s mind.

A tsunami of sensation swept him from sleep, relieved his interminable (terminal) roasting, sent more spasms shuddering through him and sluiced the last of the oil and stuck bugs from his body (along with any residual piss). Recovering from his stunning he was instantly invigorated. All his appetites surged anew: for the night ahead, the divine lover who’d rejoined him and for the steak she’d brought, the smell of the grilling of which had infiltrated his sleep.

Red meat was a rarity in this health-conscious household, and never mind any silly subconscious associations. Doreen had a heaping platter with her, a carafe of a wine and a smile of understanding about his erection. Her eyes reminded him to record every detail he could bring himself to remember. Meanwhile it looked to be about an hour before sunset.

Though Sol’s fire was far less fierce at this angle, Karl’s shiny red skin flamed on even where it was spared her direct glare. Citronella candles had been set alight all around the dock to ward off mosquitoes, but of course he’d already been feasted on in his sleep.

Maddening itches bored into him in several spots, both in areas where his sunburn exacerbated the pain and those it did not. As Doreen leaned in with a first bite of T-bone for him (sautéed onions draping it), behind those savory aromas he caught the scent of the repellant she’d put on. Good for her, and good for him as long as she remained close to him. Karl ate and drank and basked in his goddess’ protective presence. When she put the platter aside at last, moved the wine closer and prepared to do so herself he was a million times more than ready for her.

Doreen unbelted and opened that short white robe. Then she climbed astride Karl’s body, straddling him almost exactly as she had in that crucial dream of the obstetrics table – the one he’d had his first night in her bed. Only in reality her weight and heat came down on his waist just above his genitals, so that his uprightness was pressed backward by the gap between her buttocks. Considerately Doreen pulled free a fold of her robe so that he nestled right in there, cupped by that crease on three sides and draped with silk on the forth. Karl was still staring rather stupefied at her breasts, trying to credit that yes, this goddess was as good as riding him. Smiling indulgently, she dipped a hand in a pocket and pulled out a home-rolled smoke.

“What was it you and Krista used to say?”

Karl’s voice quavered. This would be his first time since that disastrous night.

“Nothing like a buzz to get the best out of love.”

“Or even a sunset, for that matter.” She waved at the departing goddess, her job well done. “Or perhaps both. As your nurse, I prescribe a therapeutic dose of emotional and sensual enhancement.”

She pulled out a classy monogrammed lighter. She lit up and inhaled. She held it for Karl to do likewise. After a beat they both exhaled. That was enough. Karl could tell by aroma alone. Doreen knew what she was breeding. She put it out and they took a drink from the carafe.

“Darling Karl, my woefully atoning sinner: as you know, I must wait until you prove you’ve forgiven yourself before I can make proper love to you. Until then, I can only play at it. But without you in my hand or mouth I might misjudge how much you can take. Do you promise to stop me if you’re about to squirt all over my bottom?”

Straddled and squashed in the sling chair, still trying to cope with the level of incentive already swamping him rather than whatever might be impending, Karl could only be honest.

“I promise you I will try my damnedest. I don’t need any more extra beatings this week. I’m sure the one I earned by falling asleep will be trial enough.”

“Wise child. But control yourself for the sake of your therapy too. The pressure of unrelieved desire is a crucial subconscious tool.”

“I understand, ma’am. I will behave in good faith.”

“Excellent. Then let’s make the most of our buzz and our love, and of this beautiful sunset too. None are likely to last as long we’d like.”

Seated astride and looming over him as she was, Doreen had to bend to bring her lips down to his. Still she kissed Karl with savor and fervor and a ton of leisurely toying between tongues. Her oral organ knew tricks his former classmates could hardly have credited, like even invading the spaces between his lips and gum. Then again this was a tongue adept at far greater pleasures, wasn’t it? As always Karl wallowed unabashedly in the carnal education granted him. When his teacher-nurse-judge finally broke away they were both panting.

Doreen rose back up. Her hair was loosed, and the setting sun burnished its honey to gold. Framed by white samite, her naked torso was likewise gilded – and thrust forth tantalizing inches from his face. All his genius pointless, Michelangelo would have wept.

That aureate light gleamed on every downy little hair. It made pitted peaks seen in relief of each duct on those unimaginably succulent, already contracted nipples.

Karl imagined burying his face in those breasts and remembered thinking he should be hung for sheer stupidly for never exploring this position with Krista. He wondered how many million stiff-necked assholes out there were still similarly idiotically missing out. Since that first revelation he’d enjoyed repeated confirmation that being on the bottom while a dominant female took her pleasure must be as infinitely superior to laboring between a pair of passively spread legs as slouching in the sun was to watching TV. But of course he was still nowhere near to appreciating how sublime it could truly be. That would have to wait for Maui. Nevertheless it was once again time for epiphany at the wiles of an older woman.

Nurse Drake placed her palms on Karl’s lobstered shoulders. Her legs reached between the sling and frame of the chair, toes lightly riding on the wood of the dock. With those four points of anchor and the majority of her weight borne by her saddle, she began to gently pump her hips. Undulating atop her pinned-down little slut, she rubbed her vulva rhythmically against his burned pubis. At the same time her backside rocked the monster against its natural forward straining. As intensely erect as ever, this fellow slid up and down that crease, practically clutched by buttocks for most of its circumference with that heavy samite whispering along the last most sensitive underside. Velvety as they were, the friction of silk and skin against him was like a fire that both scoured and blessed. Even at such a sedate pace this simulation of female-superior sex was not only exquisitely painful and pleasurable, exciting and exalting, but even reassuring.

Yes, he had been stupid beyond words. He had been unconscionably cruel too to deny this experience to Krista. Judging by Doreen’s misted eyes and moaning, even playing at sex in this position was as heavenly for the ascendant female as her amazingly lucky mate. Yet even in the evidence of the idiocy of his sin, Karl’s soul-mistress’ beneficence continued to work its magic. Though he still looked back on his past with chagrin, his reflexive anguished blame and self-hatred remained safely buried. Not even the emotionally magnifying effect of a good reefer buzz could dredge those dread feelings back to the surface.

Every increase in intimacy saw the same confirmation. That part of him was cured. As for the rest, he was atoning for his sins, both asleep and awake. Like his failure to perform orally, the only other thing he could do about it now was to demonstrate that he’d learned his lesson.

That was easy of course. As Doreen began to increase her rhythm Karl could only sprawl there, gaze worshipfully up at the goddess rocking atop him and reaffirm to himself for the thousandth time that he would suffer whatever was necessary in order to be healed so that this icon of womanly authority would finally make love to him for real.

This was no epiphany though, merely a routine avowal. And it wasn’t any more revelatory how incredibly arousing he found their play. That was to be expected when quasi-coupling with Aphrodite. Nor should it be a surprise that the tissue-thin differences between this and actual intercourse should prove so torturously tantalizing. Yet for Karl it was. Even compared to oral pleasuring of a professional standard this was an incentive to get well with a vengeance. Even knowing he was being both trusted and tested severely here he was unprepared for the derangement that would assail him long before orgasm came into the picture.

Maybe it was it his cannabis-enhanced appreciation of the sublime that helped drive him nearly out of his mind. Karl kept confronting the bare torso before him in terms of great art, classical statuary perhaps, Venus on the half-man. No other metaphor seemed suited to such perfection. But then it made the leap to live performance art. And if there had been any lingering suspicions of deliberate malingering on his part they would have been swiftly obliterated. No person could endure such stimulation, or withstand such temptation.

So far Nurse Drake had been keeping her breasts to herself. Of course she flaunted them every morning and left them open to ogling on special occasions like today. She pressed them against him during sleep, snuggling, exercising and positioning, and often brushed him with them incidentally. Yet though Karl had confessed his nearly intolerable craving to make oral love to these for hours, to bury his face in their bounty and wallow like any breast-obsessed teen, Doreen still withheld such honors. He had yet to merit them. This edict was not being eased even now, as they jiggled and danced bare inches in front of his eyes and lips.

If Karl wasn’t crippled, he could lunge up those few short inches. He could nuzzle and burrow, kiss and lick and nibble and suckle to his heart’s content. He could lift his hands and fill them up with the biggest breasts he’d ever seen naked. He could paw and squeeze and fondle and marvel over textures of skin and nipple, or degrees of yield and resilience. He could do whatever he liked and his lover didn’t object to, maybe even squeeze his maddened penis between them and fuck those spectacular tits until he came all over them.

As it stood he was helpless to do anything other than gawk and fight with every iota of the madness tormenting him to break free of his stasis. Of course this was as futile as always. Not even Doreen’s new and fantastically exciting method of pleasuring that three-months-impotent-and-counting erection could shatter the subconscious block imprisoning him.

Her rubbing again gained pace. The monster-rocking gained amplitude, with that fellow being bent further unnaturally backward each time. Soon it felt like he had a baculum, an actual bone in there in danger of being broken. This oh-so evocative inner pain combined with that sandpaper-acid-fire friction of silk and skin on the swollen and sunburned surface to put Karl in a kind of universal penile agony. Yet at the same time there was ecstasy in being pumped this way, and the two were becoming increasingly inseparable.

Between this glut of stimulation, his nascent masochism, those off-limits tits bobbing just in front of his face and the incomparable thrill of this goddess seated astride him in all her weighty fleshy solidity Karl soon found himself so desperately aroused and yet frustrated he felt a bit of trapped-rat panic.

Panting and moaning right along with him, no doubt nearly as tantalized, Doreen could at least look forward to climactic release. After driving them both nearly to delirium with erotic excitement and suspense, she at last began building toward that. Swamped with love and lust and a nearly unbearable sensory surfeit, Karl kept frantically reminding himself that responsibility for his own orgasm denial rested with him this time. He had sworn in good faith to obey, and absolutely could not let either of them down. But oh what a glorious test continued!

Nurse Drake leaned forward more and more, until she was lying right atop him, their torsos squashed together. From inches away she locked eyes with him and accelerated her humping further. Her body stretched, pushing his erection almost flat. Now it wasn’t her gluteal cleft stroking him, it was the groove of her vagina. Doreen wasn’t rubbing off on his shaved pubis but his agonizingly back-bent shaft. Her juices slathered this, and as she ground her clitoris against his root Karl saw all awareness of anything but ecstasy leave those warm brown orbs.

She wasn’t trying to gauge how much more he could take, that had been entrusted entirely to him. Even as he gasped in incipient madness and drowned in those eyes anew she was doing likewise, jerking her hips urgently against him and grunting with feral passion.

Her breath puffed in his face like a zephyr from paradise. Her hair tumbled around them, a shimmering curtain that shielded their communion from even Sol’s last gaze. The breasts whose touch he so coveted were crushing and rubbing against him, hard nipples scouring his sunburned chest. Yet it was what he next saw in those doting windows to the soul that fired his passion the most: the eager acceptance of his mutely offered ownership.

Treatment needs aside, nurse and patient had essentially already become mistress and slave. Now this was formalized without a word needing to be exchanged. Indeed Karl nearly wept with the intensity of the love and arousal and understanding and commitment they silently shared. Fortunately his newfound masochism was no match for the accumulating agony in his prick, and he was still a good ways from danger when Doreen began thrusting and grinding more furiously still and crying out sharply as she drank him in. In fact he made it through this screaming peak, an interlude of kissing and murmuring, another slow build-up, extended rhythmic humping session and a second galvanic climax without his ever-more maddened monster managing to derail things. It wasn’t until his tireless owner was working her way toward a third that Karl finally had to cry uncle.

“I can’t…I can’t…please…I’m sorry!”

Despite their mutual frenzy Nurse Drake stopped immediately. She shushed his groaning apologies with tender kisses.

“Shhh, it’s alright, it’s okay, you’re a good boy, you’re a very good boy. Relax, it’s okay, I love you. It’s time to do some fishing anyway, the sun’s long gone. Now’s when they’ll be really biting, the fish and the bugs both. We’ll make love some more later darling, under the big full moon. Would you like that?”

“I would love that, goddess. Diana won’t, but what do we owe her?”

“Diana?”

Karl explained his earlier conceit, that the virgin huntress was jealous of her sister’s conquest. This might have contradicted his pantheon fantasy, where all goddesses were one, or different aspects of the same supreme being, the Goddess whose truest embodiment still lay atop him. That was all right though. The Goddess worked in mysterious ways. Just ask his imaginary missionaries. His wasn’t the first religion to ignore illogic that made more rational folks laugh. Doreen laughed too, though with indulgent affection.

“You flatter me, darling. If I am an all-powerful Goddess, why don’t I snap my fingers and make you whole right now so I can finally ride your monster for real?”

“Because sometimes the journey is as important as the destination. Because forgiveness without atonement is unsatisfactory. Because I need to grow up as well as heal. Because Maui will be so much more enjoyable once it’s been earned. But most of all because you can’t bear to give me back to the world so soon. You want to love me and demean me, play with me and even beat me for as long as you can.”

“Cleverly said, little slut. Okay, let’s do some fishing! I have to run back to the house a minute, so sit tight my love!” She kissed him and climbed off. With a brief tousling of his sweaty hair she pulled her robe closed and dashed off the dock.

Expecting to maybe void again the minute his erection receded, Karl immersed himself mentally in the heaven just past. Tellingly though the image that worked best at keeping him hard was the one he’d had during his sun-rapture: Nurse Drake removing stingers from his tip and then hoovering the wounded monster like some sympathetic succubus. This further evidence of deepening perversion no longer unsettled him; on the contrary he now reveled in it. Something told Karl he’d need all the perversity he could muster to get through the next few days, to say nothing of nine more months. Nurturing this kept him from slumping until he heard Doreen returning. Then when she arrived she took care of things.

“Are we wilting yet? Good, let’s put that urinal back in there.”

She set down her fishing pole, a tackle box and flashlight and a six-pack of Beck’s beer.

Ah, the Germans: cars and beer: did anyone make either as well? Karl hoped mightily for a share. As soon as he was flaccid and inserted he began to void again, not something he wished to draw attention to, but what could he do? He needn’t have worried though. Doreen produced her reefer, gave them each another toke and then spun the cap off a bottle. She took a drink and gave him one.

“Fishing isn’t fishing without beer.”

“You’ve got that right. Cigars are nice too.”

“Do they make you feel like a big man?”

“No, just a really cool one. And they help keep the bugs away.”

“I see. Well, let’s catch some fish!”

Nurse Drake took the urinal away, dumped it in the pond and slipped him back into it. She put the six-pack in the cooler and took her beer and beauty to the end of the dock. There she began expertly casting and retrieving her lure.

Karl could have used that cigar. With Doreen withdrawing the protection of her repellant the mosquitoes were quick to find him. The candles helped; rather than hosting dozens of parasites at once he only felt three or four feeding on him at a time. Those stabbing little needles piercing his badly burned hide (all wielded by females fittingly enough) hurt of course, but they were a minor irritant compared to his usual two-to-four hours’ afternoon atonement. Indeed his helplessness and the knowledge that Nurse Drake was purposely allowing this made the pain more exciting than anything. Already it was once again threatening to make him erect.

It wouldn’t do to upset the urinal already. Trying to distract himself from masochism, Karl gazed around the pond and sky.

Surface swirls indicated fish feeding; a first strike on the lure couldn’t be far off. The trilling of insects and croaking of frogs made a constant eerie racket that was soothing and unsettling by turns. Infinity was still early evening purple rather than black, with only the brightest stars yet out. One planet shined steady and bright from above, probably Jupiter, and Venus blazed gloriously in the west. Soon rising Diana would claim primacy. Meanwhile swiftly fluttering shadows wove through the ether, insectivorous bats out hunting. Buzzed Karl blessed them and urged them on. Every mosquito they ate was one less to feed on him. In sum it was just the kind of fantastically lovely night he’d fantasized about tied up in the bed that time. The atmosphere was wild, cathedral, friendly and erotic all at once. At first he was hesitant to disturb it. Finally moved to add more fellowship to the experience though (and further distract himself) Karl opened conversation. Doreen was a happy participant as she fished.

Marveling over the night’s offerings led to talk about astronomy and mythology. They bantered over their favorite constellations (Orion for Doreen; Cassiopeia for Karl) and characters (Cassandra and Perseus) and even did their fair share of philosophizing.

Having only finished the tenth grade Karl was thrilled to learn new things but abashed to have his ideas gently shown to be callow. In each case he was constantly aware of his educational inferiority. The landing of the night’s first largemouth saw the talk take a naturalistic turn, and from there it meandered all over the infinite wonders of biology. And of course like folk the world over they reminisced about their time at the clinic and shared harmless gossip and joking about the people they used to work with there.

Every time she caught a bass (which she carefully released) Doreen shared her beer with Karl and gave him either a hearty kiss or a playful twist of a flaming nipple depending on its size and fight. One at a time too she blew out the candles closest to him, leaving only those at the end of the dock alight. No worries; even the flashlight was soon superfluous. Aggressively argent, Diana climbed into the sky, turning the pond into a mirror.

At full brightness she allowed Karl to see as well as feel all the mosquitoes now closing in to feed on him. Eventually his end of the conversation lapsed in favor of watching them land, stab into him, fatten and darken, withdraw and lumber off.

At times he counted as many as a dozen with their probosces inserted in him at once, and in the draining pain rapture began to reclaim him. His penis climbed out of the recently emptied urinal. Stretching urgently up, just bursting with throbbing hot blood, the monster eagerly offered itself. As more vampires swarmed in to feast on this delicious new enticement, Karl finally groaned loudly enough for Nurse Drake to notice.

“I thought you’d gotten awfully quiet back there, my splayed-out, glassy-eyed, tremendously erect little slut. How are you feeling?”

Practically mesmerized was the truth. Karl spoke without a thought, and certainly without consciously intending the subtext.

“Like hundreds of little females have been forcibly penetrating me.”

“I see. So does that feel good or bad?”

Now Karl was trapped by his inadvertent innuendo. Still only the truth would ever serve.

“It hurts terribly. But since it happens by your will it excites me sexually and satisfies my craving for punishment.”

“That’s exactly how you should feel, darling. Good boy. I’ll leave you to your little females then until I catch three more fish or finish my fourth beer. Then I’m going to take advantage of your rapture.”

“I belong to you, mistress. Do as you choose.”

Four, five, six at a time or more, the hematophagous females gorged from his prick. Even needling into the glans and tip, the deserved agony of their attentions kept Karl quiveringly rigid. For what must have been forty more minutes he whimpered and throbbed and swelled up ever more sore and inflamed and perforated. Then his mistress was with him at last, lowering him down almost flat. She swung astride him in a sixty-nine and the mosquitoes fled. Then the passion and madness, the agony and the ecstasy reclaimed him.