Chapter Thirty-Two

“I’m sorry I’m late, darling. I should have foreseen what would happen.”

Doreen kicked her shoes off. “Oh my aching puppies!”

“Are you okay?”

Karl had never seen a more lovely sight than disheveled Nurse Drake striding in, her suit coat over one arm, sleeves pushed up and three of the pearl buttons on her blouse undone. Now she pulled the pins from her unraveling hair and shook it out. Admiring that honey-brown cloud in the argent of the lantern had Karl wishing for the richness of candlelight. Doreen outshone all his fancies then as she gave him a dazzling smile.

“You are such a sweetheart! That was supposed to be my question for you! I am fine, just a little footsore. As I said, I should have expected it.

“They’re still chasing their tails over there. The second I walked in they put me to work.

“I really couldn’t refuse to help out – in their shoes I wouldn’t have taken an excuse. It took me forever to check in with the right people, let them know we were okay and everything was on course for my six-month report in a few weeks. Then I had to escape without being shanghaied into working all night. They had me running all over that place!”

“I’m sorry, mistress. Is it anything a tongue-bathing can cure? I’ve never given a lady a foot massage (or a back rub for that matter), but devoting myself to developing expertise at both is high on my list of priorities for as soon as I’m cured. Which I’m sure I made great progress toward today by the way. It seems your incentive is as effective as your treatment.”

“How wonderful!” Doreen set a bag on the bed and began taking off her pants.

“Wait until I get comfortable and you can tell me all about it. Then I would truly love a foot bath darling, and a perineal one too. Pants are just so awful! I don’t know how you guys can stand it. Honestly little slut, haven’t you been far more comfortable spending these past few months naked and shaved?”

“As you say, mistress. Maybe we should run away to a nudist colony once I’m healed.”

Doreen laughed. “How about a hippy commune – free love, lots of drugs and all the Grateful Dead you can listen to?”

She removed her shirt and bra, then pulled the fancy ruffled shirt back on, leaving it unbuttoned. Wearing only this and her panties she climbed on the bed, the creamy silk clinging to her curves as alluringly as ever as she settled down Indian-style by his side. She turned the computer so that she could use the keyboard.

“I think as a reward for your progress you can bathe the sore, sweaty crevice under my breasts as well. Bras are tools of the devil – or maybe of the hated patriarchy. Would you enjoy that duty too, my beautiful young grooming tool?”

“I would be transported to soaring euphoria by that, my glorious Aphrodite.”

“Wonderful! I couldn’t get you a surprise darling. I’m sorry. So cleaning under my boobs will have to do. Now, tell me about your day. Then we can eat and play. I brought some fresh fruit and bread home so we don’t get scurvy from eating so much meat.”

“Why don’t we start by replaying the last few entries in my dream log? I was making notes while I paged through Imajica.”

Together they listened. Then Karl explained his new insights further, expounding upon them excitedly. Doreen shook her fists exultantly and kissed his face all over upon hearing of the revelation that came to him during the tornado: clear evidence that his will to live was strong and instinctive. She similarly celebrated his triumph over his recurring panic attacks.

“Yes! I knew it! I know it was difficult for you darling, all the times I deliberately left you susceptible to your nasty heebie-jeebies. But it was only a matter of time before you found your inner strength. How ironic that you found it with the crutch of your distractions back in place! But continue please. You said you were tormented by unbidden visions of me in danger. Explain more thoroughly. Tell me how you dealt with this.”

Hesitantly, his blushing face betraying him as always, Karl described his lurid imaginings and the way he’d used a rescue fantasy to hold them at bay. Sticking to her standard admonition that he omit nothing, he even stammered his way through his sappy dreams of marrying and belonging to her forever.

Doreen’s eyes were kind, full of doting possessiveness at these admissions. She showed neither pity for his unrealistic wishes nor any indication that they might not be so unrealistic after all. She just gave him the sweetest of kisses on the lips and a fervent hug. When she pulled back her eyes were glistening with emotion.

“These are indeed splendid breakthroughs, darling. If you ask me, you are substantially cured already. It really is amazing after your disastrous setback last month. In a way we got hugely lucky with that hurricane. Neither of us was hurt yet it really shook things up, allowing you to gain back lost ground and then bound on ahead.

“The knot is unraveling fast now. I think you could even say the real crisis is over. Deep inside you have decided on recovery. You’re just not ready to follow through yet. You feel your atonement is incomplete. You’re still holding out for the ultimate punishment your subconscious insists on but that your awareness refuses to recognize. That’s all right though. We still have half a year and more to either convince you this is unnecessary or give it to you until you’re satisfied.

“In the meantime, physical pain is working beautifully and will continue. So will your incidental degradation. I’m sorry little slut, but we can’t afford to let up now. And come the next quarter we will begin combining these even as they are again increased substantially.”

“Whatever you say, Nurse Drake. I’m willingly in your hands until the end.”

“Fabulous! Okay, let’s eat. Then you can bathe me and we’ll make love and sleep naked together. Tomorrow the usual routine resumes.”

Karl was enraptured already. Dismissing the question that begged to be asked much as he’d avoided opening the Fourth Quarter Protocol, he let his heart sing paeans of love and hope while Doreen doffed her panties and lit candles all around. She turned off the lantern, radio and laptop. She moved this last and settled in its place, straddling him while she fed them a deliciously simple meal of fresh fruit and bread and water from his super-straw. Then she leaned in close, pulling the elegantly scalloped sides of her shirt wide. Gently she directed his head for him, nestling his face up under the heavenly press of one firm, heavy breast.

Frantic with gratitude, rejoicing in the progress that had earned him this honor, Karl scoured her slavishly. He tasted sweat and Doreen and felt little bits of grit rolling along his tongue: skin and fabric that had rubbed off on each other through hard activity while harnessed. Karl’s heart broke a little at the suffering societal pressures forced on his beloved and all women, and he coaxed forth more juice from his glands to sluice these little bits up, to sooth as well as cleanse this incomparable goddess in a swoon of fervent penitence.

Nearly smothering himself deliberately, he slathered the lower junction of torso and teat from one end of each long, semicircular curve to the other. As the highlight of a day of challenge and triumph he could hardly have asked for a better. He got to clean her other most erogenous areas as promised as well. Like another taunting taste of the nirvana he’d envisioned they made love and slept together afterward like man and wife and not nurse and patient, mistress and slave. Then as agreed their improvised routine and the appropriate protocol resumed.

Still restricted to sponge baths for his own hygiene, Karl got a treat when Doreen hung his head over the oversize commode and used water she’d stored in the sink to finally wash his hair. After nearly a week full of sweaty oral service and no proper bath this was filthy, oily and itchy beyond description. Buoyed by its cleansing (not to mention recent developments), Karl plunged back into his daily ration of physical pain with an eager will.

Infallibly he greeted the paddle, strap, cane or whip with rapture. He wallowed in the masochistic thrill of his torture as long as he could, milking it for every iota of arousal. Then he manfully endured the no longer welcome agony as long as he could once again. When it broke his stoicism into abject weeping and piteous shrieking at last, he turned his face away. He would assiduously avoid influencing his disciplining mistress until medical necessity was satisfied.

His afternoon-and-evening demeaning remained his greatest challenge.

Unwilling to have him lying on the bed with his skin in constant need of healing, Nurse Drake took to suspending him excruciatingly swaybacked or degradingly splayed out from the manual lift. Nipples stretched and twisted or dangling swinging weights, clothes-pinned all over the place (right to his ever-eager tongue), pussy-stinky panties snubbing back his snout, his collared balls buzzing or dangling weights of their own and of course his poor asshole once again cruelly invaded and vibrated, he could at least confirm that hysteria was no longer going to be a problem. He even received a rare and cherished treat, ironically enough.

With the power still out there was little to occupy Nurse Drake once she’d kept his paperwork up to date. She took to sitting with him and reading aloud from her paperback copy of Imajica, occasionally resuming their discussion of its relevance to his situation.

Karl listened, groaned articulately, shook or nodded his head. He garbled out simple replies from time to time, as the pin clipped him miserably and the slaver ran helplessly down his chin and neck. He spent his nights bound up contorted and whimpering almost continuously as his lover cuddled him in slumber. So they persisted in roughing it, until finally ten days after Diana knocked it out the power came back on.

In more ways than one it was perfect timing.

The hurricane had struck, providing just the deus ex machina he’d been mocking to rejuvenate his recovery. Now he was ready to move on, but without power their options were limited. His endurance had grown prodigious, while his skin could only take so much damage. Karl was supine on the mat, one leg pinned flat and the other stretched so far above his head the toes touched the mat as well.

Where the state home would have him in contractures, Nurse Drake had him more limber than some gymnasts by now. Perhaps this spoke to the limited scope of their current physical therapy protocol. In any case she lay bodily atop him in her uniform. The lantern was turned up high, the little gasbags inside blazing like blue-white super-giants. A weighty silhouette against that glare, Karl’s therapist was crooning soothingly over his groaning when suddenly the overhead light bathed everything in yellow.

“Whoo-hoo!” Doreen cried in a passable Homer Simpson. She crushed him flat and gasping as she leaned down to claim a kiss. “Good thing I left the light on, huh little slut? The power might have come back and we wouldn’t even have known!”

“How dreadful it would have been to needlessly miss out on my FNS for another day.”

“I don’t hear any irony in that at all, my favorite patient. Okay, let’s get you peddling that bike while I police up the suite. I have got to get some music jamming while we do it though. We’ve gone far too long without blasting tunes. What do you think would suit?”

Doreen stood and reached to turn off those little twin suns. Karl took a shot, his legs still quivering with stress-relief.

“Joe Satriani, Flying in a Blue Dream.”

“Good choice.”

Five minutes later the skylight was flooding the suite with sun, instrumental guitar was detailing mad tapestries of energy across the aural spectrum and Karl was once again twitching and jerking to the flail of electricity.

Later he hung belly-down from all four limbs and jittered like a live wire, as the ones connected to his weight-swinging nipples, his harnessed-hard genitals and the stretched-open circumference of his vibrator-occupied bum kept jolting him relentlessly with electricity. Teeth sunk deep in the mouth-guard, eyelids fluttering like window-shades, Karl heard Nurse Drake speak with satisfied dispassion. The current dropped to just an agonizing tingle.

“It’s s so good to get back to this. I can’t stress enough how important this is boy. If anything can spare you the fourth quarter it’s this. So concentrate, sinner! Tell me again: What do you regret about your relationship with Krista? What makes you so yearn to put your penis on the chopping block? Tell me and I will make your monster think he’s already burning in hell.”

So they launched into the last two and a half weeks of quarter two. As always this was more challenging than anything yet. Doreen seemed to glory in having use of the lift again. She restrained and suspended him with insidious inventiveness almost literally around the clock. Yet still she managed to use him sexually with the insatiability of a nymphomaniac and the callous disregard of a pimp her property. Similarly she was also making up for exercise and atonement missed because of the power interruption. As a result Karl found himself so constantly debilitated that dreams were the least of his worries.

That was surely by design. So Karl sucked it up and endured and somehow he made it through the ever more intense culmination of the first half of his treatment with his restored honor and optimism intact. By the time Nurse Drake left him home alone again to make her quarterly report, he managed to take advantage of her absence to snatch a quick nap despite being strung up humiliatingly stretched, his extensively whip-calligraphied flesh subjected to all the usual middling torments. Pig-nosed in his mask of stinky panties, he even drifted off for the first time ever with six thick inches plugging him up and buzzing away.