Chapter 8
Emptying his glass, Lew smacked his lips to at-tract the attention of the girl who was sitting alone next to him, her back half turned from him. She cast a glance in his direction. He smiled. She was older than he had imagined but her vampish smirk and her half-closed eyes intrigued him as much as the provocative curves of her back and bottom.
Her answer, "Gin and lime," to his question "What are you drinking?" made him wince but he bravely ordered her drink and his own Double Diamond ale. As they drank she took care to let him know she was very much in demand by moneyed gentlemen who lavished presents on her, took her to the smartest clubs and most expensive restaurants and delighted in taking her to Brighton for extravagant weekends. She claimed to be the sort of woman who appealed especially to handsome, wealthy Americans. She went to great pains to ex-plain that although she liked going to bed with a man as much as the next girl, she was very particular and offered that reward only to a very small percentage of her benefactors As she had expected, Lew was flattered that so popular a woman should accept a glass of gin from him and he had her glass filled whenever he noticed that it was empty. Quite sure he would be recompensed (as were few of the men who paid for her drinks) he did not greatly mind his encounter with her having cost him thirty shillings. He was a little less happy when she agreed to allow him to escort her home only on condition that he called a taxi.
"I always say," she said, her Liverpudlian accent forcing its way up through her Mayfair veneer, "you can tell a gentleman from a hick by whether he orders a taxi or expects her to endure the under-ground. None of my friends take me home on public transport. Most of 'em have cars and the others go everywhere in taxis."
Lew did not like the idea of taking a taxi from the Strand to Holland Park but he was going to de-vote the whole night to squeezing thrills out of the slim body of a. "high-class dame," so another ten shillings would be well spent. In the taxi they kissed and cuddled, but less ardently and daringly then he wished, since, being a "lady" she associated only with the best type of man-who was very reserved in public however hot and wicked he might be behind closed curtains. Guessing that hitherto undreamed of refinements of obscenity and perversity were in store for him, Lew disciplined himself until he had dismissed the taxi at the door of her house. There, on the front steps, he grabbed her, and kissed her with all the brutality he could summon from the frustrated depth of his three months of sexual abstention since Valerie's death. That she was his, as much in need of him as he was of her, was evidenced by her open-mouthed tongue-and-teeth response to his ardor. He forced her uncorsetted body so far back that their heads were but two feet from the front steps of her house. His left hand, its fingers outstretched to their limit, wandered up and down her front, squeezing her firm little breasts, prodding her belly and thighs, and feverishly patting her crotch. When their mouths separated his inviting tongue licked her bruised lips and she breathlessly murmured "Good night!"
He laughed and reached for her again, thinking one more kiss like that and and he would have the courage to cross the threshold. But she was out of his reach and slipping her key into the door before the laughter died in his terrified throat. The door opened as he sprang up the steps but she did not hurry to enter the building or place the protective door between herself and him. Simply and coolly she repeated her "Good night!" and added "Thank you!"
"Aren't you asking me in?" There was incredulity mingled with an almost tearful menace in his question.
She clucked like a mother gently admonishing a slightly naughty child.
"Oh no, dear!" she answered "As I said, that doesn't happen often with me-only when I know a man's a real gentleman. And that takes time."
"You can't drink a man's liquor, let him spend half a nicker on taxis bringing you all this way home, and then give him the brush off."
"I agree, darling; but I'm not giving you the brush off. I let you kiss me and paw me in the taxi. And well the kiss you've just had-a little runt like you ought to think he's getting very good value for his quid or two if he's allowed to stick his stinking tongue into the mouth of a woman like me. Any-way, I'm not a whore. I don't sell myself, I give myself to the man whose generosity, looks, charm and manners prove him worthy to lie naked on top of me. It's about time somebody told you, you don't qualify. Ta-ta, wack!"
Alone, Lew thought of heaving a rock through her window, but what was the use! A spiteful god bestows looks, intelligence, wit, charm and wealthy, influential paints on one man while he thrusts another into the world too stupid to make an honest living, so small and ugly that women laugh him to scorn, and of such parentage that he knows poverty from his birth. The ill-favored one has to accept his role and achieve by evil means what is not his by right. Fits of temper don't help. Deeds do. And so-to deeds! He began divining his plan of action as he journeyed home-by underground.
Brenda was dozing before a dying fire when he entered his apartment. She was fully dressed. Whenever she had reason to believe he would re-turn at a reasonable hour she stayed up until he had gone to bed. She felt that fully dressed she offered less temptation to him than she would lying in herbed, within a yard of which he had to pass to enter his room. As long as she was not in bed and not attired for sleep, the room was no more feminine than any other living room, but her changing from daywear into a nightie, her opening the sofa, so it became her bed, introduced a womanly aura to the room, a maninebriating ambience.
She stirred, realized where she was and who had roused her and sprang to her feet, trying to be in attitude at last the business like person who would not awaken the animal in a man.
"Would you like some tea? There's some cheese."
His sullen "No!" told her that he had been disappointed either in a shady business deal or in his endeavours to seduce some female. As if to convince her it was the latter he put his arms about her, not so much roughly as with a sad sort of clumsiness. He had come home intent upon submitting her to something akin to rape; and she almost was defusing him by staying out of bed to brew tea for him on his late return. What he had planned was wicked he had a deep ache in his loins and she had the wherewithal to soothe his pain but proudly refused him even a little salve, although it was of such a nature that one could never empty the barrel, how-ever often one dipped into it. He had raped her in his room in the Parisian hotel, but then he had not known she was good, generous and loyal. He had found her there naked, her desire for a boy oozing out of her vestal vagina, and he had supposed she was a strumpet, so he had blackmailed her into giving her young body to him. He was going to do the same thing again but this time he could not use the excuse that he thought her loose. He was sure she spoke the truth when she said she had had no lover other than he, and so he also knew she had been heterosexually abstemious for more than a year. Could a man ravage such a woman and then defend himself by insisting she deserved no better? On the way home he had thought of many good reasons for gratifying his frustrated lust but in her presence it seemed to him unjust to make her pay the penalty for his Creator's spitefulness in making him repulsive.
He simply held her in his arms, one hand motionless on her waist, the other on her left shoulder. And she didn't struggle.
She was not struggling. Not struggling! Could he hope for a better excuse? A girl who has been a glutton for copulation (and she had been eager for it all hours of the night and day when she had lived with him previously) does not lose her appetite when she leaves her lover. Her yearning goes on and it grows. She either casts around for another stallion or she lets desire, like a worm in the bud, feed on her entrails until her guts can stand no more of it whereupon she either goes off her head or rubs her long dammed oceans of dam juice over the belly of the first man who grabs hold of her. Brenda had been too long between the shafts of the jaunting wagon called virture and Lew reckoned she was ready to kick over the traces. Haughty head held high, she would not give in he decided-least of all to him-without a struggle. He had to make her be good to herself-confront her with a situation in which she was obliged to cut the knot of her own denied desire by the simple act of lancing the abscess of his maddening lust. It had been on his journey home that he had perfected a hither-to vague scheme for "putting . on the screws."
What Lew did not know, could not have conceived, was that Brenda's surrender to his seemingly innocent and unhappy embrace was a gesture of compassion, not a symptom of any erotic struggle which he fancied was raging in her flesh. She was quite prepared to stagnate sexually as long as the only alternative was to give him the satisfaction of lording it over her body as he had done previously. If she pitied him in his frequent rebuffs at the hands of other women, her sympathy stopped short of according him the pleasures which they denied him-as he was shortly to discover.
His sad embrace developed into a lewd hug and his mouth sought hers. She turned her face away abruptly disgusted by the odor of stale beer. She exerted every ounce of her strength in an endeavor to throw him off.
So he could not even have a kiss! He cast off all remorse. He would teach her a lesson. He would have her crawling on her belly for the privilege of sucking his anus!
Fortified by anger, he forced her down into the armchair, her back against one of the arms. He pushed her head backward until it was hanging down almost to the floor. Fearing that she would fall on her head she pedaled her feet in the air, inadvertently shaking her skirts down onto her belly. The sight of her long, slender, agitated legs, the thighs glowing rosily in the light of the dying fire, and of her rainbow-hued nylon panties made his already erect penis swell even more; and the cloth of his trousers martyrized it. His cunning plan was forgotten. He was really going to rape her.
He ran his free hand up and down her thighs, first one, then the other, pausing to squeeze the up-per reaches above her stocking tops. He fondled her lower belly in its smooth, pretty envelope of many colors, saying to himself ". . .first the lean years, and now the fat years!"
He tried to stick a finger into her vagina without taking off her clinging, stretched-to-the-limit scan-ties.
"Let me go, you fool!" she commanded in a whisper. "You'll wake Ian."
He had forgotten the child. The sudden reminder of the boy's presence put him off his guard for just the couple of seconds Brenda needed to scramble to her feet. Sleeping baby or no sleeping baby, she slapped Lew's face with such indignant force that his head swung violently and his chin crashed into his right shoulder. Her blow shook out of his fuddled brains all thought of rape.
"Do that one more," she hissed, "and I swear before almighty God, I'll have you put away for a long time."
He adopted an aggressive and aggrieved attitude to hide his humiliation.
"It's your own fault," he replied. "You made me see red by getting all excited just because I tried to steal a little kiss. There was a time when you felt my kisses weren't enough You had to have the rest too and you used to lap it up. And now when I've had a few beers-well you can't blame me..."
"All right! Forget all about it! You're going to wake baby!"
"The baby can go to hell!" he cried.
"Lew! You should be ashamed of yourself."
"Well, I'm not. And we're going to have a serious talk about your bloody baby-here and now."
"Oh no! You're in no state to discuss anything without making a hell of a row-and the child is yours, not mine."
"You know bloody well it's not mine. I don't see why I should go on working for him and you when I'm getting nothing out of it-not even an occasional kiss."
Brenda knew what was coming and her misery almost sucocated her. She wanted to vomit. She walked toward Lew's room.
"Come in here," she whispered, "and close the door softly!"
The eagerness with which he sprang to obey her make her regret the suggestion. "and don't imagine you'll succeed in your bedroom where you failed out there." She said in warning. "Now, what's eating you?"
He threw himself on the bed and stretched luxuriously trying to suggest that his fortunes were taking a turn for the better.
"It's like this;" he said. "You know as well as I do that I'm hot-blooded. Highly sexed. And I'm not one o'them 'ypocrites as pretends it's otherwise. I need a woman and I'm going t'ave one, by hook or by crook. But on what I earn, how can I keep you, Valerie's blasted brat and myself and still 'ave enough left over to run after a skirt!"
Brenda said in all sincerity. "It ought not to cost you a farthing to get a woman,"
"If they knew you as Valerie did, and as I do, they'd pay you to lay them."
"Well, they don't," he hissed bitterly. "They laugh at me, because I'm small and as ugly as a horse's butt. Most of 'em, that is I know a few though as'd be very happy to go to bed wi' me-if I could provide the bed. Only they wouldn't come here. I can't even let 'em know about you 'cos they'd be jealous and embarrassed and I can't afford to take a tart to a hotel every time I want a bit o' that there. Besides, what a girl wants is a home. Some of 'em don't mind if I won't marry 'em as long as I give 'em a ome. And I can't do that as long as you and Ian are here; so you'll both have to go"
Brenda had known from the beginning that he would play just such a filthy trick on her but she could think of no way of preventing his breaking faith with her and, more importantly with Valerie. The only thing to do was to "play for time."
"What do you mean we'll 'have to go?" she asked feigning amazement.
"Man and Sylvia want Ian," he replied lazily, a cunning glint in his eyes. "You can always find work. Your doctor er?-Peter Buxton?-he'll get back into his hospital-and into his bed."
His last remark was intended to anger and hurt her but her mind and brain were too busy to heed his sarcasm. She was thinking of Peter as a solution to her problem. He would have been happy to marry her and adopt her friend's motherless child, but Valerie had insisted that Brenda should help Lew to rear the babe. And Brenda was determined to keep her promise, cost what it may.
"Lew, you and I both made a solemn promise to Valerie," she said., calmly, sweetly and reasonably. "And we're not going to let her down. I've given up my job and my lovely flat and I've sold most of my furniture, just so that I could help you with Ian. You couldn't turn me out now. So take your time!. . .don't try to rush your women! Work on them subtly and you'll find one here and one there who'll be very happy to invite you to share her bed. I'd rather you didn't bring any of them here, of course, but as long as Ian's too young to understand what's going on, I suppose I don't mind all that much."
He sprang to his feet with surprising agility, gripped the muscles of her upper arms until she winced.
"Shut your silly mouth!" he shouted. "I know what sort of woman I can get. Just as long as I'm keeping you and the kid I can't afford to go with whores and that leaves only deserted wives and women who can't get a husband and what they all expect of a guy like me is a roof, a bed, a table with food on it, a frock, a coat and a pair of shoes from time to time. They'll not come here as long as you stay. And anyway I can't afford to keep such women as long as you and the baby take all my money.. .so he's going to Alan and Sylvia and you'll have to look out for yourself."
She decided it was all a bluff and to call it.
"'very well," she sighed. "I'll leave first thing in the morning. But you must promise to take Ian to Sylvia without delay."
He was defeated but still had some good cards in his hands.
"I knew it'd be you and not me who broke your promise to poor Valerie," he sneered.
Brenda's Achilles heel bled profusely. She lost her head. "Bastard!" she cried, and the tears coursed down her cheeks.
He was now holding her sobbing body tightly in his arms. He whispered gruffly. His throat was scorched by his lust for her.
"I want to keep my promise to Valerie," he rasped, "but you make it too difficult. I'm only human. I've always k vi d you. There's really never been any other women for me-even Valerie."
He could scarcely have chosen words more injurious to Brenda than.. . "even Valerie." She pushed him vigorously from her and moved towards the door. But she stopped her hand on the cold door knob, and she asked herself "Why cut off Valerie's nose to spite her face. He doesn't mean what he said. Val was more to him than I ever was . or could hope to be. I must give him one more chance to prove himself worthy of her trust in him."
But when she halted he took it as his cue to play his trump card.
"I'll keep the child if you'll stay here to look after him," he said, challenging her with a double-edged sword, baiting her.
She rushed to him, her hands extended to him.
"You know I'll stay," she cried happily.
He seized her and drew her dangerously close to his boiling body.
"Stay then," he commanded, "but get out of your head all those imagine ideas about staying here to please me! You'll be his nurse and my house-keeper: I'll give you ten bob a week, board and lodging and you'll do as you're told."
"And you promise we'll keep Ian? For always?"
"As long as you take good care of him, of me and the flat. As long as you bear in mind it's my flat. My home and Ian's. I pay for it-for every-thing. And I pay you to look after it and to do as I tell you-just like any other servant. None of your interfering, criticism, pride. None of your reminding me of my "duty to Valerie" and all that. Either I'm the boss.. .The Boss.. .or you go your way and Ian goes to Alan and Sylvia, O.K.? "
She thought he was asking her to promise to do no more than she had hitherto sought. Why argue?
"Agreed," she said, smiling.
"Right! This is my first order. Get down on your knees, just like you used to, and beg me-beg me to give it to you!"
Horrified at his duplicity and suddenly ashamed of her own gullibility, she freed her hands from his grasp with one wild movement. Wild-eyed, mouth open and distorted by sorrow, she retreated from him until her back was to the wall.
"Lew!" she groaned.
And his broad, stunted right hand delivered two bloody blows to her mouth. Pressing herself into the resisting wall she waited for the third blow, knowing that even should he beat her to death she could never retract the silly promise she had so recently made to him. She had sold him her person as surely as Goethe's Doctor Faustus had sold his soul to Mephistopheles. His third slap did not fall immediately, his hands being too occupied with the ripping off of her flowered frock.
He threw her across the bed, grabbed the shoulder straps of her multi-tinted slip, and tugged down-wards until he was able to feast his eyes upon her trembling body clad only in brassiere and almost negligible panties.
"On your knees! Beg me!"
To appease him, she wanted to obey; and knew she had to. But something prevented her from doing his bidding.' Did fear or horror paralyze her or was she seeking to provoke him to agonizing delicious brutality? If she had to surrender to him again, why not go the whole way back to where she had been during her first weeks in Great Britain?-in those days she had been the deliriously happy slave of a demanding sadist and ever since, while her pride and her reason had kept her from his bed, her flesh had been sick with the nostalgic longing for degradation.
She writhed on the bed, cowering from the feared blows for which she yearned.
"Beg me!" he repeated.
She shook her head "no" and silently thanked God for finding ways of obliging a reluctantly girl to play the strumpet. He searched crazily for an instrument of correction until his eyes, and then his hands, fell upon her slip and the remnants of her frock. He twisted the two garments into a whip with which he beat her until she cried "come to me Lew! Into me! Lew! Take me! Give"
He stared down at her battered, sweating body, which was his body, one of his two bodies. He had always had a male body and mostly it was hungry and wracked with pain. But sometimes, rarely, but sometimes, his man-body had not been tortured with desire. Rather, it had been titillated by a lust which he knew could be satisfied; and those had been the times, the too infrequent occasions, when which could go into the other, stealing and giving he possessed two complementary bodies, one of odor-stealing and giving the aroma of sexual ecstasy. This was one of those moments. Flesh which knew his flesh, cried out for his flesh which was proud on that occasion. Brenda's cries constituted an informed recommendation; the satisfied client returns and thereby sets the seal upon the merchant's reputation.
The flattered salesman may take certain liberties with his customers. Lew felt he could safely make Brenda wait for what she demanded of him. He had to wait-not minutes, but months. 'vengeance, how sweet is they breath!
On his knees, but not on subservient knees, Lew contemplated the dark patch on Brenda's delicate, pastel-tinted, multicolored panties. The spilled juices of her loins paid homage to him. He was omnipotent. He buried his nose and mouth in the moist nylon of her pantied sex, sending a thrill through her too-long-abstemious meat. His hands overwhelmed her thighs and belly, her bottom and breasts, her shoulders and mouth. Her entire body was submissive-even pleading. She was open, defenseless, obstinately vulnerable. She was asking for it; and not only "it," but everything. Lew would have been a fool had he not exploited to the full his long-awaited instant of power.
She groaned and sighed, but it was mainly the trembling of her hot bottom, belly and thighs which testified to her impatience to become his thing. Lew was in no hurry. If not the years, at least the weeks (and perhaps the months) were on his side. He peeled off her panties with such care as to suggest they were made of the most fragile cigarette paper. They lisped away from her flesh with a mucous lack of enthusiasm.
He was so deft hi removing her brassiere that he concluded instantly that her breasts were somewhat firmer and smaller than before. He couldn't be sure however, that the memory of his deceased little wife's tits was not influencing his comparison between Brenda's torso "pre-Valerie" and "post-Valerie."
While his lips and voracious tongue renewed their old acquaintance with her vagina, his hands fondled her breasts, making her already lust-inflated nipples swell and harden even more. Her humid thighs gripped his head and her loins jerked forward to meet his teething onslaught against her rippling clitoris. Her curses and prayers inebriated him, swelling his imprisoned penis to incredible proportions. Drops of his colorless penis "blood" spilled into his underpants and he became afraid he would throw away the seed for which Brenda's fur-row yearned. As he liberated his rod, Brenda raised her head, eager to see again that which she had loved and enjoyed many moons previously. The sight of it made her head swim. Admiring its throbbing, scarlet glow, she sank back onto the bed sighing "Mine!"
Her thighs opened wide and her sex was a wide, almost bleeding gash. The muscles of her loins made the mouth of her vagina open and close like a winking, bloodshot eye. The flaming blub of his phallus understood and blinded the would-be optic organ of her crotch with a ruthless poke which buried his scarlet skewer in tender, living meat.
Lew's "soldier" was not snatching forty-eight hours "leave." He had been "transferred" to the "reserve" and time was his-, ally. Having all the time in the world (and his bitter disappointment of a few hours previously washed away by the warm waves of success) Lew possessed Brenda in the most liesurely of fashions. The sweet depths of her pit were his to bathe in, and he dived down to her pearl-infested oyster bed.
She dung to him, rejoicing in the knowledge 'that her joy in his violation of her was equalled by the pleasure he smoothly, deeply squeezed out of her vibrant guts. Lew had been too long without a woman and the thrill of having a tall, slender, beautiful, young and devastatingly attractive female prostrate herself before him was more than his testicles could stand. He gritted his teeth in his endeavors to hold back the flood of his fertilizing fluid, but it broke down the barriers of his will and rolled into her, oceanic buffeting her, tearing her apart, reducing her into thousands of screaming, grateful chunks of quivering flotsam and jetsam.
Lew's first climax seemed to set him free. It was usual with his that when he got hold of a girl, after several months of famine, he reached the apex of pleasure too quickly but that after his first ejaculation he was able to settle down to a gentle confident rhythm of copulation which carried him and his mistress up to the exquisite pastures of an erotic paradise. Fortunately, on this occasion Brenda was in an even worse state of sexual privation than he, so that her apogee almost coincided with his. For her, as for him, it came so effortlessly that it was but the starting point for a session of real fornication. They devoted a tireless night to their divinely bestial activities. Words being quite unnecessary, they spoke only the sort of indecencies each knew would inspire the other to wilder and more revoltingly luscious excesses. When Lew wanted her to mouth the mixture of his cream and hers from his deflated penis he did not need to articulate his desire. She sensed it and having filled the hollow of her tongue with the muck harvested from his phallus, she pressed the tip of her oral lizard-tongue into his anus, seeking to pour into his rear orifice part of the slime which had issued from the tap of his sex. Her assiduous labial caressing of his rarely-washed posterior quickly brought back life to his limp genitals and she was quick to derive the maximum benefit from his restored virility.
Toward dawn they were both still eager for each other though Lew no longer had the energy for normal copulation and Brenda crept headfirst into bed, until her mouth was able to take possession of his penis. One of her long, slim thighs on each side of his head, she was thus in a position to surrender her clitoris to the blandishments of his lips, tongue and merciless teeth while she licked, sucked, tickled and gently nibbled his scrotum and penis until her mouth was full of his priceless filth, which she swallowed with the joy a connoisseur derives from drinking vintage wines and devouring fresh salmon or sturgeon roe. Brenda was as much a giver as a receiver, so that her tunnel of love did not fail, in the later stages of her ecstasy, to lubricate Lew's mouth with its pungent balm and to drip over his face and onto the Brylcream-scented pillow.
Having given the baby his early morning bottle of milk, Brenda returned to the bed in which Lew was sleeping soundly. She joined him in Lethe's arms and all too soon the sun was high and he woke her insisting on giving her anus its midmorning penisful of cream. Lying on her belly terrified she buried her face in the saliva-moist pillow to stifle her cries of agony as his white-hot, vermilion poker crashed into her tight sleeve of perverse love. She was his to do with as he pleased. He had bought her with a promise, so he was entitled to pillage any and every morsel of her body. He had the right to inflict suffering on her; she had given him that right. If in abusing her unnaturally he did her some permanent harm, she would have no cause for complaint. From one moment to the next she could re-fuse to go on. But she was willing to endure pain and run risks for Ian's sake (out of loyalty to Valerie) and she derived satisfaction from his excruciating boring into her rear passage. He would keep Ian as long as she played the role of slave and as long as her slavery was an erotic one, she was pleased that he forced her into it. If he could thrill her with the usual sex tricks, in addition to finding new ones, however humiliating, she would feel that their bargain was heavily weighted in her favor. She had been determined not to resume her former intimacy with Lew; but since she was his again, she wanted to be unstintingly of him, for him, under him.
As the pain of their unusual coupling diminished, his thrusts into her became less difficult. He was able to flash in and out of her, whipping her anal tube into a delicious frenzy almost equal to that which her vagina experienced when he took her as she supposed her creator intended she should be had by men. At the same time, the fingers of one of his hands rubbed and pinched her clitoris and he tried to push four fingers into the silky sleeve. The result was that her loins were entirely given over to pain and a double pleasure, the joy which is independent of anguish and the thrill which, for a girl like Brenda, has its origin both in the suffering it-self and in the knowledge that her lover is establishing or proving his mastery of her by deliberately hurting her.
The sensations within her sex mounted towards the inevitable. explosion and her rejoicing ass felt the moment to be imminent when his pipe would spew its soothing mess into her soreness. It was too much joy for two people to share. She feared her part of it would craze her. She had know delights in Lew's arms, but never anything like this double-barreled frenzy. She moaned, thrust her buttocks up to meet his ever more violent onslaught, and beat the pillow with her tightly clenched fists. The front pleasure fused with the back one and she was one big, dripping singing vagina. Bellowing like a bull, he fired a gigantic "salvo" into her. It "tore through her" and "scored a direct hit" on her "magazine" whose explosion was "fireworks display" to end all fourths of July and all fifths of November. Delirious, she ripped the pillowcase to ribbons with her teeth, creating a snowstorm of swan's down. When he pulled his reduced sex out of her, blood trickled down the her cleft.
Brenda swooned and Lew fell asleep until the cries of Ian roused them both. She sprang to her feet, but Lew told her to "let him cry himself to sleep! He can't be hungry again."
Paying no heed to her lover, she hurried to her charge who needed milk" and a change of diaper. Having attended to the child's needs, she took her sex-thirsty body back to the fountain of its only nourishment.
"Didn't we agree the baby was to be brought up my way," Lew demanded. "And didn't you promise to do as I told, you?"
There was no point in answering him. He did not really care whether she fed Ian or not and he wasn't angry because she had done so. She knew he merely wanted an excuse to beat her again and that was how it would be as long as they were together. He would beat her to warm her up for fornication and to put himself deeper in the mood for it. And he would beat her as a punishment, not because he was dissatisfied with her, but because he was her master who rejoiced in a proud, beautiful woman's subservience to him.
"Why can't you do as you're told?"
"Ian was hungry and he needed a clean nappie. Pull me down on top of you, Lew, and do it all to me again! I'll be a good girl in the future."
He got up and broke a length of willow twig off a dilapidated wicker chair.
"The trouble with you" he said waving it menacingly in front of his sneering face, "is you can't do as you're told. You had to leave home because you couldn't behave yourself. You're a bag, but you think your posh talk an' all them imagine high schools makes you better than me..."
His tone frightened her. He had only been looking for an excuse to thrash her but he had succeeded in convincing himself that he had a grievance against her and she feared that his bitterness plus the erotic frenzy into which he was trying to put himself might push him further along the road of sadism than he intended to go. She could not stop him from beating her, nor did she want to, but she prayed to the God in whom she did not believe to intervene when she had as good a whipping as was good for her.
"Don't torture yourself, darling! I didn't mean to offend you. It was just that I thought the quicker the baby was attended to the sooner you could shove it up me again. Piddle on me, Lew, like you used to!"
"You didn't mean to disobey me! That's what makes it worse. Your feeling of being better than the-likes of me is so deep that it makes you act superior instinctively! Even when it'd pay you to be a bit humble, even when you think you're being obedient and when you're trying to be. Well, I'm not standing for any more of it. I'll thrash it out of you and I'll go on giving you regular whippings until I see some change. Go down on your knees and beg me to whip some sense into you."
Much as she wanted him to give her a taste of the switch, she felt ludicrous kneeling before a man who was more inarticulate beast than human being; but she had no choice. She went down on her knees-so close to him that her breath warmed his genitals.
"I'm sorry I didn't do as you told me, Lew," she said, "and I want you to punish me every time I disobey or offend you. Whip me, Lew! Whip me. And when your arm aches, tell me I'm forgiven and then make me give you pleasure until I can no longer stand or keep my eyes open. Hurt me, Lew, so that I shall stop feeling guilty for having made you think I imagine myself better than you! Beat me! Beat me!"
Once on her knees, the scent of his loins in her nostrils, she had ceased to feel foolish and she was able to put into words her genuine longing. She was looking up at Lew, who glowed with pride. He ordered her to stand up. She hastened to obey. He fondled her lithe young body prior to giving her a long, lewd kiss, at the end of which he threw her roughly onto the bed, face downwards, His switch whistled through the air and landed diagonally on the upper reaches of her back, leaving a weal from her right shoulder to the left side of her waist. The impact of the blow caused her body to rise abruptly from the bed and then fall deeper into the disarranged pile of reeking sheets. The thin cane fell again almost immediately this time on her buttocks, and again and again, no part of her back being spared. Hoping to add to her suffering, he tried to concentrate half a dozen blows on one section of her prior to moving to another section, where he also delivered a number of brisk strokes. When the whole of her back was crisscrossed with scarlet lines the speed of his beating diminished, but then he whacked her six or seven times so hard that the redness turned to an ugly blue-black. Here and there the skin broke and blood bubbled out. That was the sign that the beating had gone on long enough. It had continued longer than Brenda had hoped, and she had not expected him to lay it on as hard as he had towards the end; but it was over.
Raw though her back was, she turned onto it offering her cruel lover the sight of her unblemished breasts, belly and parted, inviting thighs. He had tired himself, but her sensuous beauty put new life into him. He leaned over and spat on her sex. He did it to humiliate her but, proud of his insult, she voluptuously caressed the front of her body until her hands reached her pubic hairs. Her right hand went further, until her fingers made contact with his spittle, which she rubbed into her vagina and around her clitoris, which quivered at her thrilling touch. Her pawing of her sex made a moist sound, like a messy kiss, and her juices flowed onto her fingers. She needed Lew. She looked at him and knew he was as impatient as she was.
Raising her dripping hand to her mouth, she licked it clean. Then she reached out for Lew, who kneeled on the bed between her thighs, and sank the full depth of his staff of masculinity into her "throat" of womanliness. He was delicious and so was she and they went on delighting each other until dusk, when he went to his favorite bar for a few hours of beer drinking, while she restored some semblance of order and cleanliness to the apartment.
She was still occupied with her household chores, when he came home and dragged her unreluctantly to bed.