Small matters drove a wedge between Emerson and his wife. Anyone looking with fresh eyes on the situation could have guessed that the tension among all six of them was mounting. The repartee between writers had virtually ceased—no one had written a word, or even attempted to work on their craft for nearly ten days. The gaiety they sometimes shared, even the invigorating arguments ceased. Everyone retreated to their own worlds to brood. Penelope, Kathy Ann and Bo would go into town to eat, or sometimes drive back to the city for a day. Oddly they felt forced by the circumstances to return, when returning only meant that they’d be thrown back into the uncomfortable environment of their dark desires.
While the others certainly shared in the disquieting malaise, the increasing anxiety was most painfully evident between the married couple.
He griped at her. She griped at him. They left each other alone for hours. She’d tell him she wanted a day away to herself and he’d refuse her. Refused, she’d storm off, afraid to say more to her edgy husband.
One afternoon, however, Daphne was gone for nearly four hours before anyone realized that she wasn’t in the house.
“Anyone seen my wife?” Emerson called to Zack and Penelope who were reading on the porch.
The brunette looked up absently, her eyes tired from reading. “No.”
“Zack?” he tried again for a response.
He sat up a little startled. “Uhh, no, buddie, don’t think I’ve seen her since lunch.” He went back to his paper.
“Well, if she’s not in the house, where would she be?”
Penny looked up again, annoyed this time. “Dear, if she’s not in the house and not about the house, she must be in the woods or down at the lake. Or maybe she’s taken a car into town. God knows, she has to be bored with this scenario by now. Aren’t we all?”
Emerson didn’t reply, although the look on his face was bewilderment mixed with his normal degree of frenetic energy.
“Maybe she’s taking a nap,” Zack offered without looking up.
“Don’t think so,” Bo said, as he moved from the interior of the house to the porch eating a fresh peach. “You guys up for a swim?”
“Soon as I finish this chapter,” Penelope said.
“So, no one cares but me that she’s gone?” Emerson tried one more time.
“You’re her husband. Maybe you’re the one who should be caring the most,” Zack suggested.
***
Three hours earlier, Daphne had roamed the house, alone. The day had been hot, not one for high-energy activity. Kathy Ann had gone to town for a haircut and groceries. Bo and Zack had been fishing all morning and were not yet back, and Penelope, claiming her stomach was off, had spent most of the morning in bed. After a hike in the woods, Emerson had taken off in his car.
There weren’t many thoughts in Daphne’s mind, which seemed common in this period of time. She felt as if she were wasting away—as if they were all wasting away. The game that had occupied so much of their time and energy had reached a bitter impasse. Her own soul was despairing and in need, but of what? She couldn’t say for sure.
She was wearing her favorite sundress to keep cool, a thin blue chambray that floated about her perspiring skin with any hint of a breeze. The hem tickled the backs of her shapely calves, and the front was cut so low that when she bent over you could see all the way to the bush of ash blonde curls at her pubic mound. She walked barefoot from the second floor to the empty first floor of the house, and then, without much thought she opened the cellar door and peered down into the darkness. Feeling a rising heat between her legs, she slipped inside the door, closed it behind her and carefully took the stairs until she reached the bottom and cracked open the cellar door.
“Veronica X,” she said to the darkness.
“Hum…um.” The girl had been sleeping and stirred hearing the voice emerge from the silent and inky black.
She was tied to the bed, not her pallet, and Daphne moved forward until she reached the languid form of the bound female. She lay down next to her, resting a hand on the girl’s chest where she could feel her breath move in and out as her flesh rose and fell, inhaling, exhaling, a rhythm continuing undisturbed.
“You’ve been sleeping?” she asked.
“I sleep a lot.”
“The sex tires you out?”
“I suppose so.”
She seemed tentative but willing to talk. It was good for Daphne to hear her speak. “You don’t have to worry. It’s just the two of us here,” she said.
“I don’t know which one you are. I think I know the sound of your voice but then I get confused. And I have no names to go by.”
“We can’t have names,” Daphne said.
“Yes, I know.”
She listened to the girl’s breathing. She felt no significant emotion. Weeks before there was always a prickly anxiety in the cellar. Not now. “What’s it like to be down here?” she asked her,
“Lonely.”
“But it’s quiet.”
“Sometimes. Except when you all stamp your feet up above. I can’t rest then.”
Daphne’s hand dropped to the “V” of the girl’s pubic mound. Her finger poked a path between the labia and settled for a moment on her clit.
There was a sharp intake of breath from the girl and Daphne pulled her hand away.
“Do you hate us?” she asked.
“I don’t know now. I did at first, but I was scared then.”
“But you’re not scared now?”
“My feelings aren’t the same. Sometimes I don’t know what they are.”
“Oh.”
“It’s just sex, sex, sex. I think my mind is wasting away.”
How curious that she would mimic Daphne’s own feelings.
They were silent for a long time. Daphne moved in closer so she could put her arm around the girl and hold her. Veronica’s warmth seeped under her skin and her skin became hot, their perspiration mingling, their energies mingling as though they were friends.
“I have a hard time thinking of you as a real woman,” Daphne finally said. “If I do, I start to worry about you.”
“You’re all worried about me,” the girl replied. “I can tell that. Lying here I can feel things from you all. How you’re happy and sad and aroused.”
“You can feel it from us all?”
“Yes. Although, I feel the most from sir.”
“Sir?”
“The one I call sir. Is he special to you, maybe?”
“If you’re talking about the man who runs this show, yes, he is.”
“I thought so, but then I have a wild imagination and I couldn’t be sure.” She actually seemed pleased with herself.
“I know this may sound terrible,” Daphne went on, “but sometimes I envy you.”
“Why is that?”
“You have no obligation but to lie here and inspect your feelings and your thoughts.”
“And you think that is easy?”
“Easier than the life I have.”
“Well then, you must have a rough life. Although, I would think you have your hands full with sir.”
“Yes. In some ways he is quite a handful.” It made it sound as though Emerson was a child, and here she’d always considered herself the more childlike of the two.
“Here,” Daphne pulled an oatmeal cookie from her pocket and fed it to Veronica little bits at a time.
“Humm.” She ate it hungrily.
“I thought it was cruel not to let you have a taste,” she said. “You want some water?”
“Yes, please.”
Daphne fumbled in the dark for the flask of water beside the bed and let her drink from the straw.
“If you don’t mind now,” a weary Daphne sighed, “I’ll just close my eyes a while.”
“No. I don’t mind.”
Eyes closed, Daphne fell asleep and Veronica X, awakened now, drifted in and out of conscious thought as she often did when she was left like this. She hoped that later today she’d be allowed the reading lamp and some books, as she often was on long days when her captors didn’t use her for sex. But this was all right too. A first. The woman beside her was the sensuous, tentative one, whose fire burned like glowing embers when it was hot, and felt like a cool wrath when the fire was out.
“Dammit, where it she!” the voice rang out like a tolling bed. Emerson’s voice.
Daphne’s eyes shot open and she pulled up, surrounded by darkness. “Oh my, I have no idea how long I’ve been here.”
“Hummm…” the girl was coming out of a dream.
“I’d better scoot.” She was off the bed, moving swiftly by feel alone to the cellar door.
“Bye now,” Veronica’s voice was soft, bearing a trace of regret as she listened to the woman leave.
As Daphne pulled open the cellar door and walked through, she saw the kitchen was empty, but the noise brought Emerson from the other room. His eyes lit on her with question marks, then rage.
“What were you doing?”
“Visiting our captive. I fell asleep.”
“What? Four hours ago?”
“Oh, my!” She put her fingers over her mouth and giggled softly.
“Who gave you permission to go down there?”
“I didn’t know I needed permission.”
“What did you tell her?”
She shrunk back a little with the force of his accusation. “Nothing. I promise, nothing. I was deliberately careful.”
“But why? What are you trying to do, fuck up this arrangement?”
“Arrangement? What arrangement?”
His fury demanded more than this insipid interrogation was yielding.
“Daphne, what are you trying to do?” Penelope leaned against the kitchen door with her arms crossed over her chest. “Even I can see the wisdom in keeping the proper distance from the slut.”
Zack stood behind her, his eyes shooting darts.
Daphne backed further away, awed by their collective stares.
“I didn’t say anything, I swear.”
“What did you say?” Zack asked.
“I don’t remember exactly.” They all spoke in heavy, hushed whispers to keep the girl below from hearing what they said.
“Well, maybe you’d better remember. You give her our names?”
“Absolutely not!”
“What, then?”
“I don’t know. I went down there with one thought on my mind and then I couldn’t remember any questions to ask her. I wanted her to know that we weren’t demons.”
“And you expected to win her over with that assurance?” Zack was livid, sounding more like an enraged Emerson than even Emerson was now.
Daphne’s cheeks burned hot as their eyes drilled into her. Her once passive emotions began to rise like a hot desert wind across dry sand.
“What were you trying to do?” Her husband moved in and backed her into the wall, then he stood back. Zack and Penelope moved a few lethal steps closer.
Daphne’s stomach soured and her lips thirsted for the refreshing feel of her pent-up emotions pouring forth like cool water. But the anger, the anger kept bubbling up… “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” She covered her face with her hands, then flung her arms wide. “This place is like a morgue. We’re like the walking dead here, caught in a hellish web. Don’t you see it! Can’t you see it, Emerson?”
“All I can see right now is the need to punish my wife,” he said, curtly.
“Then do it!” Daphne raged, her voice rising.
Emerson met the noise, by pushing her out the door, through the living room to the porch beyond. The others followed. “Oh? Is that what you were after?” he shook her. “Punishment? You haven’t had enough?”
“I want something to change!” she pulled out of his grasp. “I want this over! I’m tired of feasting on the spoils of our lust. There’s no joy in it.”
He looked at her strangely. As if he actually understood what she was feeling. As if she was saying everything they all refused to think.
“I think you’ve been remiss, Em,” Penelope cut through the tension, her voice emotionless. “She needs a good turn in the shed to answer this silly raving.”
The sound of the kitchen door startled them all. They stopped speaking and paid attention, as if they expected Veronica X to appear in the doorway. They looked toward that direction, motionless, until Kathy Ann suddenly emerged from the gray gloom of the house.
“What the hell’s happening here?”
A collective sigh followed.
“Your friend’s going off her rocker,” Zack explained. “Been sleeping with the captive.”
“What?”
“We’re taking Daphne to the shed for a turn with the razor strap,” he boldly announced. “You want to join in, then come on. Otherwise you can hold down the fort—and stay out of the cellar!”
Kathy Ann looked from one dreary face to the next and shuddered. She knew it might well have been her in Daphne’s place.
“No, I – I’ve got all these groceries to put away. I think you’ll do just fine without me.”
Penelope took that as her cue to move forward and pluck the sundress from Daphne’s body. She then grabbed her hair, while Zack followed on her heels smacking the bobbing white behind with a wooden spoon he’d thought to lift off the kitchen counter. Bo tagged along; it would be a good scene, he thought. And Emerson, still stirring with an angry stew of thoughts, moved through the woods, lagging some distance behind.
Zack started the lynch-mob mentality, driven by demons he would never face. For Penelope this was righteous justice—plus, she liked the idea of seeing someone’s ass getting blistered, as long as it wasn’t hers. Bo would come along as he usually did because it was more interesting that sitting on the porch drinking beer. And Emerson did what he knew had to be done. He’d seen it happening at least two days before, as if everything that ever happened now was all pre-ordained and written in his brain.
When Emerson belatedly arrived at the shed, his wife was already strung up to the bar, making her entire backside a pristine target on which to paint weeks of collective frustration. After one blistering round with the wooden spoon, no one argued with Zack when he changed from the spoon to the razor strap Emerson had left hanging on a nail beside the door. Zack’s emotions were high, not nearly spent. He thrashed his best friend’s wife with a fury he’d never used on any woman. He heard her cries of mercy long before he stopped.
Nothing intelligible came from Daphne’s mouth. But the string of twisted expletives revealed the anguish exploding within her body from Zack’s first blow until the last one. Her face screwed up remorsefully, her body jerked in erratic rhythms. She cried, a full stream of tears falling from her eyes. Finally having had enough of his own anger, Zack handed the strap to Bo, while Penelope approached her bound friend, sidling up to her side with her groin wiggling into Daphne’s hip. She’d just lit a cigarette.
“You know, I’ve been called the ashtray of this group, and I’ve taken the humiliation like a good girl. But how about you get the honors this time, girl,” she said with a vicious smirk, as she abruptly pressed the glowing end of the cigarette into the raw burn on Daphne’s ass.
“Yeeeeeeeeaashh,” she grimaced with a painful wince as her whole body seemed to sizzle.
Penelope turned to Bo. “Don’t let me keep you from doing the deed,” she said, and she sashayed away.
Like a hulking executioner, Bo took up the task with an earnest expression on his face. He doubled the long razor strap because he liked to move in close and lay his hand on his penitent, hold her down, make a show of force beyond the weapon. He liked punishment swift and hard. To that end, he beat Daphne’s ass for possibly sixty seconds of pure hell, until she was stomping her feet and screaming for him to stop. He then stepped back, satisfied.
“That’s all I’ve got.” Thinking that Penny would want a turn, he handed the strap to her.
While Daphne withstood Penelope’s rain of blows, Emerson stood back, passively watching. He eyed them all critically. His wife had touched a raw nerve and deserved everything she got. He wanted to punish her too and he would. He felt cold, fearful and excited. Cold, because he liked that sort of detachment; fearful, because he dealt with an animal in him he feared; and excited because this sort of scene thrilled him. He also understood the underlying tension that created this scene, an issue he would deal with after he’d finished with his wife.
When Penelope finished smacking his wife’s behind, she stepped back and Emerson moved in close to Daphne’s side. He reached up and unknotted the ropes around her wrists with a sharp yank. Her arms fell limp and she slumped against her husband’s chest.
“Oh, no! You’re not done. You’re not done with me,” he said. He pushed her back against the wall, her front, her pussy and breasts exposed now. “Hands in the air.”
This was Zack’s cue to retie her to the bar. Daphne hated this kind of punishment most of all. Pain, hurt, humiliation, arousal came over her, equal and vicious in their power to move her. Initially, she could hope that Emerson would tease with her until they both achieved some sexual satisfaction. But this was a foolish hope.
Just as she expected he would do, Emerson began spanking her pussy with his right palm, delivering blow after blow to her naturally tender skin. Her body readily seized up as the pain began and quickly increased. Instinct made her close her thighs to prevent the hurt on her aching genitals, but Emerson would not allow that.
“You keep your legs open,” he warned, “or I’ll tie them wide apart and leave you like that all night!”
She did her best then. Her smarting pussy throbbed with every crack of his hand. The temptation was great to twist away, to clamp her legs together and fight him off. She beat back the need and willed her body to offer up her enflamed and burning cunt.
“It was thoughtless, Daphne. Reckless. Utterly stupid! You understand that, girl!” he swore. He emphasized every word with a smack of his hand, and didn’t wait for her answer.
“You can’t take matters into your own hands! You can’t strike out on your own! You will not ruin us all with careless and unthinking whims!”
“No, no, no, Emerson, I won’t. I promise I won’t!” she cried.
He kept on hitting her pussy hard, cupping his hand against the lovely mound that was turning a fiery red color underneath her blonde curls. “Oh, Emerson, please. Please. I won’t!” she wailed. It seemed useless to beg. Begging never worked with Emerson. But she would try nevertheless, because there was nothing for her to do in face the mounting pain but to plead for mercy with all her heart and soul.
“Cry all you want, wife! This is one you do deserve.” His scorn seemed unrestrained.
His hand came down harder than ever, with force enough to make her entire body shake violently. Her legs closed again, unable to deny herself some defense. And by then, Emerson had finally had enough. Stopping, he backed away, letting himself and Daphne catch their breaths.
In the quiet that followed, no one moved and no one spoke, yet the air was prickly with life, with agitation swarming all around them. Far outside the shed, the sound of thunder rumbled in the distance. A late season thunderstorm moving in from the West.
As the minutes passed, the energy in the shed seemed to wane, exhaustion taking up its place inside them all, as it did so easily during these long days together.
“I think we’ve done enough,” Emerson finally announced.
He untied his wife himself, and held her. Since she’d collapsed in his arms, he had little choice. Zack, Bo and Penelope filed out of the shed, Penelope saying as they left, “You know, we all needed this.”
***
You must have felt like a whipping post.
I’m sure I did, but I don’t recall thinking much of anything that afternoon, once the punishment was finished. It did seem like the right kind of exhaustion, if that makes sense. I needed something that vicious to wipe away the thoughts that kept coming to me hourly. Only when I’d been with Veronica, and then after my punishment did I feel otherwise. Peaceful? Not exactly.
I do remember telling Emerson after the others were gone, ‘Your anarchy is the most restrictive sexual thing I’ve ever experienced.’
The idea came straight from my gut. I’d never thought this before that I remember. But it came to me like a clearly channeled truth from God. I looked into Emerson’s face to see how he’d respond. Something between startled and thoughtful, I think. Once I said that, I knew the turning point was upon us. I’m not sure how clearly Emerson understood that, but I knew he would feel it, too.