Chapter 11
Group Sports
The sultry Walnut Creek night had kept most people of The Nail and Smith. The pub's food service room only some youngish 20's types clustered in a booth, tryi to be thoughtful. The three lads had glass half-pints black draft stout. One damsel sipped at bright ale; other poured foaming Anchor Steam Beer into her stein Ken Gormish waved through the doorway at a fi regulars in the hard-drinking bar, but he stayed in the f room and slid into a dark walnut booth.
The sound system droned with a nasal, north cou English voice.
"Come all ye young rascals who follow the sea- Come lift your bold voices if ye'd ever be free . . .
"I sing of black cruises, men broken with toil. I sing of blood staining our fleet's banner royal."
A tit-heavy chestnut-haired waitress wandered up to is booth with a smile. A laced bodice let her pectoral assets strut their stuff proudly under a pale, tissue-thin Gibson-girl blouse. An edge of stiff lace petticoat peeked from beneath her long maroon skirt with a calculated come-hither.
"Watney's and a steak-and-kidney pie," he ordered, stretching his legs. The worn wooden back and seat felt comfortable, despite no padding.
"The master's a hard man, all mercy he spurns. He rules mates and yeomen with whipcord and irons."
Behind the bar, a wide woman with saddle leather for a face and piled canary-yellow hair set to work drawing his beer. She passed the glass mug over the polished countertop to the waitress, then pulled a pie from the refrigerator. She popped it into the microwave as the Watney's reached his booth.
"The pasty's heating, luv," the waitress informed him. Her heavy chestnut locks had the same reddish highlights as the British beer.
Ken caught sight of Nora's bright, copper-coil hair flashing in the bar mirror. The counter had no stools, only a rail. Nora perched her foot on the brass and gave the room a bored, candid appraisal.
"How're the men tonight?"
The sun-beaten blonde shook her head sadly. She flicked a thumb at the boothload of kids. "Just lightweights."
"So sing bright and loud lads, or whimper like dogs.
All liberty's forfeit on each ship that flogs."
Nora's foot drifted off the rail. "Maybe I'll try the other side." She started for the arched door leading to the darker, liquor-serving barroom in back.
Her eyes scanned past Ken. Then they returned, locking on him. A speculative look crossed her face. She lifted an eyebrow at the blonde. The bartending woman shrugged. The timer chimed on her microwave.
Nora's confident footsteps approached his booth.
"Hello." She put a teasing challenge into her tone. "It's a warm night to be lonely."
He tried to match her frank, assessing expression. "But a good spot to cool off in. Have a seat."
She bent at the waist, picked up his mug and sipped. "Mmmm. You do have taste. Thanks."
She placed the beer back by his hand and settled slowly across the thick plank table from him. The brunette waitress brought his pie in its aluminum cup-sized tin. Ken tipped his head toward Nora. "A Watney's and a pasty for the lady."
"Steak-and-kidney, mushroom beef, or mashed potato?" the chestnut-haired woman asked, laying a fork and napkin down.
"The same," he pointed to his tin.
Nora favored him with a tight smile. "You look like a man who knows his pasties as well as his tipple."
She calmly appropriated the heavy white plastic fork and dug into the small pie's crust. "Flaky."
She blew on a forkful to cool it, then fed it to him. "Tasty? What's your name?"
"It's good enough to eat. I'm Scott." As he licked the fork tines, Ken felt every eye in the other booth riveted to them.
The waitress returned with Nora's mug. "Pie's comin', luv."
The redhead snapped open her purse. "How much for the lot?" She waved a hand over the table, including Ken in the pass.
"Eight dollars."
Nora flipped her a folded ten. "Keep it all." She leaned her shoulders cooly against the hard wooden booth back. "You better be worth it, mister."
Every Howard Hawks film he'd ever seen raced through Ken's brain. "No woman's fallen asleep on me yet. Not if she could handle her beer."
Nora's tongue peeled foam from the mug's lip. "At least the Watney's has a big enough head."
He began to play footsie with her slowly. The kids in the booth closest to the aisle strained to watch. He let an ankle travel up her thigh, lifting her skirt. She spread her legs and purred.
The blonde barkeep and the waitress exchanged whispers. The leathery face shook with laughter as the brunette brought the second pie.
"Hot and steamin', ducks." She served the steak-and-kidney pasty, then stepped over to the other booth.
"Another round, luvs? Ohhhh ... I see you're not drinking tonight."
Shamefaced, the guys began to noisily gulp stout. The girl with the Anchor Steam tracked the action in the bar's mirror, between the Bass Ale signs, as Ken and Nora continued to role-play.
The streetlight's cold glare made the shadows sharp and harsh at the street corner by Sigma House. Spicy, late-summer fragrance rose from the shrubbery, blue-green in the artificial light.
"Travel with God always, querida. You're somebody really special." Felipe supported Delinda's shoulder as he pulled her out of his van. He stood her on the concrete and patted her cheek.
"Phil ..." She had this pounding headache loose inside her skull. Little bursts of pain exploded randomly. Her body felt hollow with post-coital, post-alcohol hunger. "Can't we have dinner, even?"
"I'm burning rubber for the city, alma de mi vida." He shuddered as he slipped back into the van's front seat. "Can you believe I'm filling in as a sideman for a blue-grass one-nighter at Paul's Saloon? I hate like hell to think about my fingers wrapped around a fiddle after so long."
He slammed the door and hit the ignition. A blown kiss turned into a wave. Delinda stared at his van as it picked up speed, away from Sigma, out of Orinda, gone from her life.
"I mean it, Ken. I need some serious commitment to quality time from you." Delinda's voice fringed on angry tears. He could hear her breath against the phone mouthpiece. Background noises sounded like the St. Cloud Student Union or another public place.
He leaned back in his desk chair. The office curtains kept out the afternoon sun. He had the sound off, but his TV glowed as the VCR ran the Nu-West tape he'd gotten in the morning mail.
Naked but for shin-length white socks and downed panties, a trio of lovelies bent over metal folding chairs. A no-nonsense matron in a long dress aimed a Greek-lettered pine wood paddle at bare, nervous buttocks.
Ken recognized the thoroughbred bottom belonging to Margaret Morley, a Nu-West superstar who could do blistering dominant work over submissive males as well as indulge a taste for her own punishment. Just now the pale board scorched her expressive rear. She showed pain as if she meant it.
"I'm sorry I can't afford to put my car into the shop, but I'm still buying texts for my classes." His mind snapped back to Delinda's voice. She sounded really frayed. He sympathized. He hadn't seen her enough lately.
He hit the button pausing the tape. "You know Larry can't bear to let a company car out of the lot, unless I'm going to a job site. I even offer to pay gas. He's a freaking bastard about that. You know I want to be with you more and take you out."
"Oh, sure you do! You got real excited after I had my behind shelacked. I haven't seen you since that Laurie Lewis concert."
They'd had fun snuggling together on the lawn at the open-air Concord Pavilion. "Dee, you can come over again and we'll watch a video-" He grinned as he clicked back on Red-Bottomed Pledges . . . The Paddling. Perhaps she'd prefer a gloating Mildred Scott hairbrushing male hide over her bathrobed knee in The Disciplined Male.
"You can take BART from Walnut Creek to Orinda," she accused as Margaret Morley's rump rippled through eloquent agony.
No, he considered, Delinda would be into something more like that Kyrie Meets Electra number with the Rubenesque lady tanning a wide, responsive female bottom every way possible.
"Okay," he told her. "You name when and where.
Let's start with something light and walk around to get friendly again, before dinner."
"Okay, darling." She sounded like a puppy just given a new, bouncy ball. "Tonight. Five-thirty at Yoda Yogurt."
He wondered what he'd say to Nora if he met her on the street with Delinda in tow. Ah, well, he had to chance it sometime.
He agreed, mended some more emotional fence wire, then hung up. The tape rolled on, sound off. He pondered what his mother would do if she knew he'd been poaching on Sigma's preserve. As "spiritual adviser" to the house she'd probably get out her witch books and try to exorcise him ... or curse him.
Not his fault that the woman he dated had chosen to go to school and pledge to a sorority with the girl he'd picked up after the Grateful Dead had pounded it to packed Deadheads in the Greek Theater at Berkeley earlier that year.
He poked at the shipping box of video tapes. Executive Privilege had Edward Lee strapping one business-suited female executive and handspanking a very sexy secretarial rump. Ken enjoyed the fellow's stories from Nu-West's magazines.
The phone brrrred on an intraoffice line. He answered to get Larry Gunderman booming in his ear, "Ken-boy, I'm splitting. This work drought has my morale by the balls. I can't stand an empty desk. I sent Mercedes home. Lock up whenever you want to."
Click. He waited for the growl of Larry's Honda in the parking lot, then he turned up the TV sound to enjoy the scolding and yelps and slap of wood across temptingly ready bottom.
"Nora, I had to cut short a dinner date for this." Delinda's muffled voice came through the sturdy closet door as Ken stood behind her dresses. A smothering smell rose from her wool suits. No problem. He wouldn't have been any other spot on earth.
"Sigma takes the Boy Ban seriously," he heard. "The rules aren't here to fence you in. They're to show you the way ... I know some of what we do, the songs, the rituals all seem kid's stuff."
Nora answered slowly, less audible through the wood panel. "Scott called the dating restriction juvenile. Good for girls out of high school, but not appropriate for-for adults."
Images from the video embraced memories. He stood in the darkness envisioning Margaret Morley tilted hindmost-higheslt beside squeezeable, fuckable Nora. He fantastized those peerless tailcheeks being smack-paddled on tape for the world's enjoyment.
"The person who saw you wasn't some sneak, trying to dip you into shit. We all need help in obeying the rules, being true to ourselves. Our real selves, as Cal Roundsong likes to say."
Ken choked back a chuckle at Delinda's words. Nora's voice floated ruefully from the bedroom beyond.
"I'm sorry, Delinda. I broke the Boy Ban. Twice, in fact. Last week and yesterday. I guess I need to be ... I agree I have to be punished."
"You know the penalty should be a public hide-skinning ... if you take a paddling now, here, I won't make an official report to Maxine or Gerry or Wanda. The girls look up to you, and a public caning-" The senior actually sounded concerned.
The idea of an English whipping stick creasing his redheaded girlfriend's peachfirm rounds inflamed Ken. His phallus butted his shorts plaintively.
"I propose ..." Delinda let the moment dangle. He held his breath a dozen heartbeats. "Thirty."
Ruby spots spiraled joyfully before Ken's eyes as he strained to hear Nora mutter something. "... guess I need it, though."
Light battered at his sight as Delinda opened the closet door a careful five inches. He remained in darkness, able to see the painfully bright room beyond. She removed the long, tough sorority paddle from the hook inside the door.
Hot crimson Sigma Epsilon Xi letters had been painted on the frontside of the dusky brown, highly shellacked wood. Delinda's painted, spikey signature wiggled beside the house insignia.
"I'll have to ask you to . . . you know." The senior took a stance so that Nora would need to stand in his best line of sight. "I'm afraid Sigma's a bare bottom house. Nothing else does the job as well."
Ken had lovingly undressed both young women. He'd had them each naked in his arms, their taut, tight muscles straining against his.
Nothing he'd done with them seemed remotely as erotic as Nora's slow, trancelike strip. Her creamy white skirt unhooked gradually. She folded and carefully settled it onto the bed spread.
Ken could have climaxed simply watching her briefs and pantihose flex. The woman had a shamed blush tinging her face and neck as she drew her trim blouse higher.
The pantihose waistband peeled back, showing the welting creases where the elastic had dug in. Nora skinned the nylon down. Her blouse fell, the hem veiling everything above the tense buttock peaks.
"Is that ... far enough?" The redhead had her panties and hose taut between her knees.
"Fine. With thirty I'm going to be hitting pretty high as well as low. Perhaps you should take the blouse off, too."
Nora grimaced, face scalding. She crouched. "Maybe I'd better ..." Her hands unbuckled her shoes. She stepped out of them and rolled the hose all the way. Hopping, she pulled her pantihose completely off, then discarded the panties, a wrinkled translucent muddle.
Ken watched in an agony of frustrated erection as Nora undid her pale lime blouse. Eyes tightly shut, she gripped her shins, legs straight and widely separated. He imagined the wobble of her naked breasts.
He longed to be behind her for three minutes . . . maybe less. Instead, Delinda's paddle lightly nudged the flinching flesh.
"I'll need a clear count after each swat."
The senior slipped free of her shoes and kicked them toward the closet, with a furtive grin in Ken's direction. Her stockinged feet stood wide, bracing her on the rug.
Her hips wove, her body pivoting on the balls of her feet in a backswing. She put her weight behind the board's first stroke. The paddle clipped Nora's pale buttocks full across. Ken could feel the choice THHHWAAAP! vibrate from his ears to his balls.
"Don't forget the count." Delinda brusquely rubbed the flinching rear with her autographed bottom board. Nora forced out a curt, choked, "One."
The hardwood blade rose high, letting him luxuriate in the velvety sore-pink flush forming a clean rectangular blotch low on each taut netherglobe.
Delinda whipped the flat soundly across the left cheek only. Her sob-sister's hindend rocked drunkenly at the unexpected, single-mounded swat. Nora whispered the count quickly.
The paddle basted the unprepared right chub. As the hillock recoiled and squirmed, Delinda whacked squarely across the two fresh marks.
"Jee-!" Nora jacked her head back, her hands talons that ripped at empty air. Ken's erection rammed against his belt buckle in blind, desperate need. The woman bobbed in pain.
"So sorry, Nor'. I forget, you haven't had it like this before." Delinda's faced twisted toward the closet door, letting him see her gloating lips as the bared buttocks shuddered. Nora slowly took position.
The active hit high across skin still pale. She walloped a spasming upper thigh, then the other. As Nora danced in place, Delinda unleashed her strength squarely across the first blushing swat site.
"Tears already?" The active sounded incredulous. Her hips swiveled, her arms followed through. The paddle tanned the far right slope, driving the muscle mass inward. She slipped to her left and plastered the hardwood against the knotted left curve. The flat blade tip clearly indented the inner buttock crown.
Ken guessed that gluteal peak would hold a bruise for two weeks, minimum. He hungered to see the ripe colors blossom-burgundy, purple; then the fade to brown and greenish-yellow traces. All the while Nora would wince and remember at each tender seating.
"Amy Morgenstem didn't blubber before her first dozen." Delinda made an audible, speculative sound. "Then again, she is porkier in the beam, if not as cutely curved."
Judiciously, spacing the strokes at thirty-second intervals, the senior ran Nora through the same tail-pounding pattern a second time. She gave the older woman time to recover, but never let up on her strokes.
At the twentieth punishing swat, the redhead doubled her arms over her breasts and rose high on her toes. She gasped a gutteral, pleading sound. Then her body bowed at the waist. Her hands reached down, as she sought position.
"Look, Nora, you're feeling this pretty strongly." Delinda's honey tongue mixed sympathy and justice. "I can stop using a paddle and . . . well, it'll be easier for you if I just handspank you over my knee. I suppose it'll have to be more than the ten you'd have left from the board, but that won't be as bad."
"Ohhhh, thank you . . ." The punished pledge's fingers groped in teary blindness, pressing her guardian angel's free hand with gratitude.
Delinda pointedly sat on Nora's piled, folded clothes. She took the trembling body over her separated thighs. The scalded cheeks curved, bad-girlishly.
"Don't bother to count, Nor', just relax."
The senior primly spanked the sore peachcleft, swatting each buttock individually, then crisply walloping dead across the crevice.
She plainly intended to make it a good one as her palm roamed the twitching backside, learning its swollen contours. Slap . . . slap . . . SLAP . . . Nora just cried and squirmed her hips. The minutes passed.
Ken felt his trapped, engorged cock helplessly inseminate his tight shorts and steel-flied trouser front.
"There. All finished." Delinda blatantly fondled the heaving ribs and hanging right tit. "Try to forgive me, Nora; but never forget, you needed that."
Ken's hot tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. The sorority girl he'd banged in animal abandon reached be- tween two other silky, willing thighs he'd kissed and loved.
"Have you ever let yourself go with a girl, Nora?" Delinda purred soothingly. "I don't mean to take advantage. Just say no if you want to . . . but after punishment comes reconciliation; after pain . . . relief."
The scarlet-faced older pledge looked as confused as a high school freshman having the moves put on her by a football hero at the first sock hop.
"It's almost silly, me being your guardian angel." Delinda's fingers never stopped, caressing lightly as she helped Nora to her feet. Nipples, then soft belly, and un-paddled thigh fronts. "You've so much more experience than I have.
"You know your own body so well. Anyone can see that in the way you move, the way you dress." The active's mouth moved in slowly. A kiss, brief as a butterfly along the right breast. A licking tongue under the proud apple-curved tit. A trail of increasingly longer, wetter kisses down the belly.
The redhaired woman stood, thighs stretched, neck arched back. Her breathing was audible in the closet. Delinda sank to her knees and nibbled the rusty brown nest while she caressed the pain-quivering legs.
Nora uttered a cat-mating cry of reluctant surrender. Her guardian angel straightened to her nyloned feet. She peeled off her clothes, pausing from time to time and running the other woman's limp palm across a naked thigh or nipple-stiff jug.
Delinda swept the clothing off the bedspread. She reclined on the covers, drawing the sophomore pledge on top of her. Lip kisses, breast tickling, slow pussy rubs began in earnest.
Ken's aching eyes couldn't blink as his two nude girlfriends copulated not a dozen feet from his nose. He recognized Nora's favorite responses, clumsy at first from shyness, then increasingly fevered and skillful.
Delinda wiggled like a flounder, winding up with her mouth between her bed partner's legs. Some moments of dedicated muff-sucking elapsed. Then Nora's girl-virgin tongue tentatively licked the naked labia spread beneath her face. The pink probe gradually delved further.
Her hair spread out over Delinda's loins, veiling the action as she got down to serious cunt-kissing. Her paddle-hot buttocks shuddered with discharging lust.
"Oh, oh, that was so mean."" Delinda's breath exploded over him in giggles. Nora had vanished to stand her way back to San Francisco on a rapid transit train. Ken's clothes made an eager trail from the open closet to the thoroughly rumpled bed.
He rocked her hips back onto the woman-fragrant covers. He genuflected, his mouth kissing an abdomen come-spiced and slick from Nora's lips and tongue.
"Don't ever, ever tell anyone." She sighed.
"No way." He felt her foot rubbing his thigh, then her sole pressed firmly over his slimed prick.
"You enjoyed yourself in my closet," she accused. "Smelling my dresses made you all sticky and bothered, I guess. You ought to pay the price for masturbation, young man. My paddle doesn't make that cheap."
"A spontaneous emission. You two made a Mitchell Brothers live show seem as tame as The Nutcracker." He kissed his way up her body. She seemed relaxed for once. "Condom?"
"You know I hate the taste."
Nora's secretions flavored her lips, scented her face. He closed his eyes and enjoyed the fleeting fantasy of a dream threeway, his Lucky Pierre at play in between the two women he liked best.
"Now let me be Nora." He switched positions, his prong reaching down toward her mouth.
"Your clit's too big ..." She almost savaged it in her eagerness. Teeth shook it, lips suckled at the crown, tight as a thin fist trying to jack him off.
He heard a muffled "... maybe not ..."
"Why have I had such bad luck with boys until I met you?" Delinda demanded. She walked beside Ken past the Art Deco movie palace landmarking Orinda's tiny business section.
He tried to formulate something reassuring as he studied the moving headlights on the sterile highway gouging through the valley. Traffic fumes drifted through the night.
"The others probably all needed outside emotional strength," he told her. "You gave them that."
"I mean Hunt's mind was fucking out to lunch-out to lunch. Ron spent more time doing makeup than I did. Now he's playing with someone just out of high school."
"You've got passion and strength. You make a guy feel alive."
"Then why did they all-?" She shook her hair in the warm air. The strands were still damp from their postcoital shower. "What is it about me that attracts these . . . these emotional vampires?"
He patted her. "You're not to blame. You're full of life. You just need commitment from somebody who doesn't want your energy as a crutch."
She stopped and put her arms around his neck. "Have you really got that for me? When I need you you're so often not available . . . just not there for me."
"I'm not letting you go," he smiled easily. "Not you; no, ma'am. But I don't need you like they did." He touched his forehead. "I've got you with me here. That's the same as not needing you beside me always."
"I guess ..." She sounded uncertain as they continued walking toward the Bay Area Rapid Transit station.
"All right, you persuasive son of a bitch."
Ken listened delightedly as Nora laughed over the phone at him. He sat in his apartment living room. It had been just enough days since her Boy Ban whacking that he hoped to inveigle her into a date.
He specially wanted to get her into bed while the paddle and palm markings looked their tender prime. His fingers itched to touch the swat-stained cheeks.
He felt the hormones pound into his veins as her voice filled his ear reprovingly. "I had a real behind-tanning because of you. My fanny puts a C.B. de Mille sunset to shame-but I'll meet you."
"Can you manage sitting in a booth at The Nail?" He imagined her dainty squirms on the solid planks.
A deep, rueful chuckle fueled his gleeful fancy. "Not after Delinda finished . . . admonishing my bottom. I can't do dinner, anyway. Study hall session. Just be home at nine. I'll be there with my nightie ... the one God gave me for a birthday present."
He pledged his love and kissed across the phone wires. As he cradled the receiver, he wondered what he'd do when his two horny-hearted girls finally compared notes about men.
Ken checked the time. He slid the Rachmaninoff compact disc into the player. First the moody, spooky Isle of the Dead. Then the dark sensuality of the Second Piano Concerto. It should come on almost as his punctual Irish beauty came in, her hips still wincing from the Sigma paddle and Delinda's spanking.
He patrolled the apartment, careful to hide anything with his birth name on it. He slid the Opera News copy of his current review into a manila envelope with regret. Something had gone very vocally wrong with the soprano in The Flying Dutchman. Jose van Dam had ignited the boards as the tortured, God-cursed Hollander. But his redeeming lady-love had turned sour from the first shrill note . . .
Pity. He lettered his Scott Madrigal pseudonym carefully above the return address and left the envelope in the hall.
A hot-and-hugging fuck with Nora, a drink at a bar (standing up for her; he cherished the image), then whatever sleep he could grab. He had to be out prowling around a job site early the next day. Larry had all but turned cartwheels at the contract he'd grabbed right under the bigger San Francisco competition's noses.
The doorbell sounded noisily just as the string-heavy opening bars of the concerto glowered on the stereo.
"Good-evening, sexy-" His eyes tracked past Nora to a tall, golden blonde, sun-mellowed girl standing shyly. Two buttons open down the stranger's blouse left a lot of perfect, braless bounty on tempting display.
"Scott." His rusty-haired girlfriend had a broad leprechaun smile. "If you won't go for this, say so now. We'll both understand. Charlotte's also breaking the dating ban. She'll leave if you don't want a threesome."
"But I hope you do." Her voice had the breathy California girl innocence to match her doubloon-bright hair. "I read your article-oh, years ago, but I remember you writing that San Francisco Opera's Der Rosenkavalier had such sexy vibes that you wanted to hop in the sack between the Marschalin and Octavian."
Her words hit low, carnal registers of longing as she murmured wishfully. "Well ... I sing mezzo."
Ken gave Nora a glazed, incredulous look.
"Oh, listen!" The new girl's sky-colored eyes exploded in delight as the Rachmaninoff thundered around him through the doorway. "Remember The Seven-Year Itch"? 'It shakes me and quakes me.' " Her excited shiver eloquently mimed Monroe's laughing purity and vulnerable abundance. She seemed no older than a sophomore. He wondered if she was still virgin. Did Sigma initiate its maidens this way?
He led them in, his nerves alive with erotic fires. Nora pulled the door shut behind them.
When he turned around in his living room, he saw that both guests already had their clothes halfway off. The roundly curved blonde had skipped wearing panties under her pleatless linen slacks.
"Sorority sisters mean a lot more to one another than anyone else can ever guess, Scott." Nora let her stockings flutter onto his coffee table.
"Here, that's woman's work." Charlotte reached for his shirt. "You won't have to do a thing."
Iron-fingered notes rumbled across the orchestral background as the pianist meshed with the other players in a passionate exploration of Rachmaninoff's doubt-ridden, questing Russian soul.
Experienced hands-Ken scrapped the virgin dream- investigated his hard body as the two girls undressed him. The blonde cupped his scrotum delightedly, pressing her warm, nude hip against his and rubbing firmly.
"How about the floor, first? We can do bed later," Nora whispered. He glanced down at her to glimpse the liquid violets and indigo striations roll on her moving bottom.
Then the two female bodies had him on the rug, one on each side, his arms under them. Nora fingered his uncoiling prick. The blonde touched his throat lightly as she bent to kiss his face.
"Pizza delivery! Who ordered the pepperoni?"
He goggled from the floor at the flesh-heavy, New York-voiced brunette swaggering in from his entry hall. He tried to stand. Girl-weight held him in place. Nora's hand all but crushed his scrotum.
"An orgy! Come on, guys, a gang bang!"
College girls began to prance into the room, hard-faced and blood-eyed. The final one in pursed lips as severe as Maggie Thatcher's. A merciless English flogging cane swished in her grip.
"Turn that chair over," Nora ordered coolly. "Use my stockings to tie his legs to it."
"Don't worry," the hot-bodied blonde murmured next to him, "you won't have to do a thing, not a thing. We'll do it all for you, won't we?"
He felt a faint gratitude as a girl with silver glasses rammed a couch cushion against the hard bottom of an overturned armchair. The others dragged him up and over- his cock still halfway engorged. He grunted as it mashed into the thoughtfully placed cushion. Fingers roped him down with Nora's nylons.
Her backside flared with bone-deep ache from Delinda's whipping. She stiffly knelt and jammed his right wrist between her naked thighs. On the other side, Charlotte did the same. The girl had a spectacular non-chalance about her total nudity.
They held him stretched and immobile. Nora contem- plated her lover. Scott she had known . . . Ken came from some nightmare, a rip-off of The Thing or that silly War of the Worlds TV show Amy and Billie Bones liked to tel her about. The monsters from space infected your loved ones, seizing their bodies.
She had spent hours naked with Scott, skin to skin. His body lay before her, inhabited by something called Ken Gormish.
"First," Sarah Bothington punctuated her question with a light rap of the cane across his raised rear, "did Delinda know about your little Captain's Paradise?"
The flogging stick laced into his rump before he could answer. He huffed, obviously scared. She hit again before he could draw breath.
"I'm merely encouraging you to be truthful," Sarah informed pleasantly. A streak of scarlet began to swell into a weal. She prodded it with the sanded cane tip. "Did Delinda-?"
"NO!" His pleading eyes focused on Nora. She listened to him babble. "I kept her coming here-I met you in Berkeley or the city-" Sarah cut him off with a slashing stroke long on the thigh, stretching from just below his buttock to right above his knee. "How did you plan to handle your visits to Sigma, may we ask?"
"I don't know-I met Nora last year; I first saw Delinda a long time before Nora registered at St. Cloud." His broad, ruddy face had a begging sincerity. Nora wondered what mask he wore now-Scott, Ken, or someone else behind them both.
"I've been seeing you both for months," he insisted, "no problem."
The British girl lashed his other thigh sharply. Her eyes sparkled angrily. "Did you plan to tell them, ever?"
"I don't know-I didn't have control-if the whole thing blew up, it blew up."
"Too thin a story." Sarah scored the first thigh, crossing the weals deliberately. He screamed into the raging tide of Rachmaninoff's music. "I despise a liar, and you are a snotty-souled manipulating dung-wallowing pig of a liar."
She whipped him low on the hindquarters twice. He stammered broken bits of his story again. "Delinda knew all this," Sarah sneered down at him. "She's not so dense. We've slated you for a right proper hiding. Have you ever tasted the nip of whalebone? I've flogged my younger brother to the blood, you know, when the ironmonger caught him thieving."
She lashed his cringing buttocks. "Tell the truth and Delinda'll have half of what you're due. She ought to share it, oughtn't she? The truth, now!"
Nora watched the cane swing in, clinging to flesh she'd kneaded in her passion. The wood shivered, bent, then recoiled straight. A new mark seethed with crimson. She observed the puffy twin ridges forming where the cane strokes had landed-hard swollen on the outsides, shallow down the centers.
The strange man gibbered more. She'd felt good about Scott, relied on his strength, enjoyed his knowledge.
"I believe him," she spoke slowly to the other Sigmas, "or am I still a trusting idiot?"
Gerry Vestry crossed to the CD player and raised the volume. Sarah pointed and Susie Salton produced a whalebone birch from a tote bag.
Three long strips of grey baleen had been set with brass screws in an ebony handle. A triangular cross-section gave them a sharp bitting edge along one side and a flat stinging edge on the other.
"Delinda punished Nora for seeing you." Sarah held the Winchester-style rod before his eyes. With cold deliberation, she cleared her throat and spat into his flushed face. Phlegm bubbled down his forehead, streaking onto his nose.
"For being a bad boy," Nora explained distantly, "you get what she planned for me-thirty strokes."
Her thighs held his wrist in place as Sarah swung the vicious whalebone across his behind. His roars glided past her impervious soul. She could clinically marvel at the razor-thin burgundy stripes the bone birch raised. Ruby droplets oozed almost at once. She'd suspected Sarah would use the sharp side of the wedge-shaped strips.
After five, the British girl handed the rod to Gerry Vestry.
"You guys ..." Susie Salton rummaged in a cabinet beneath the VCR. "Video tapes. Naughty ones! You remember Womanpower 20001"
"He enjoys this sort of thing?" Gerry Vestry asked Nora, holding the whalebone over his lacerated rump.
She shrugged. "Scott liked music and fucking and food. I don't know about this guy."
The Sigma vice-president studied him critically. "If he comes on the cushion, I vote we repeat the dose."
She lashed him five times, buttocks and thighs, while he struggled. Nora and Charlotte both grabbed his elbows and bore down with their weight.
Susie accepted the rod when the laciniating cuts had finished. She sauntered in front of him, lowering her witch-tangled hair till it brushed his streaming face.
"You're getting boogers on your rug," she chided. "Listen: My sister Shelley works at the Nail. She saw you playing footsie with Nora and told Delinda. Now she's sorry, 'specially since she heard you with a client boasting how you screwed Dee-Dee after she'd paddled Nora's duff for breaking the Boy Ban by dating you. Big joke. Ha-ha."
She wrapped fingers in his sandy hair and shook his head. "If you visit the Nail again-if you ever even think about my sister Shelley-her husband will take you apart. He's not some soft-hearted girl, either."
She released his hair and stepped behind him.
Nora felt his panged sounds shiver through his arm into her bones as Susie branded his ravaged hide with the baleen. For the fourth and fifth strokes, the active turned the rod and used the strip's flat edges.
Two more girls followed suit. Then Nora relinquished the thigh-hold to Gerry Vestry. He had almost ceased to struggle. She could see the muscles along his back knot and spasm.
She stared down at his carmine-seamed buttocks. Spinning the whalebone rod in her hand, she hit him as hard as possible with whichever edge came uppermost. She spun and struck again . . . again . . . five times.
She tossed Sarah the birch. "I need some cool air. I'll be at your car." She dressed mechanically.
Nora stalked out of the apartment. The door slammed.
Gerry Vestry lowered the stereo to a sweetly rhythmed growl. She approached Ken. His forehead looked pale as milk. His eyes had closed in exhaustion.
"Delinda couldn't be here because we had to find out what she knew about your little two-faced game." She knew he heard her. "However, she's entitled to a scrap of hide, also. This one's for her."
She nodded to Sarah, who reached into her handbag.
"I have an idea, girls." Susie pointed at the VCR. "Let's leave him with something to amuse him while he figures out how to get granny knots out of nylons."
Charlotte had finished putting on her blouse and slacks. She and Amy helped jockey the overturned chair so that Ken faced his TV. Susie loaded a tape and depressed the controls. Nu-West's Womanpower 2000 flickered on, in flesh-toned color.
A scared young man hunched in a barred cell. A stern female voice enunciated his sins and the series of punishments he'd need to re-educate his insubordinate attitude toward women.
Susie picked up the limber English cane. She hissed it lightly in the air over the bare back while Sarah opened a baggie behind Ken's birch-raw backside.
"Have you ever heard Professor Porter talk on the Yoruba of Nigeria?" the British active asked. "I imagine not. Traditionally, the naughty youngsters among them receive rather severe floggings. Very bad boys and girls earn an additional refinement."
She callously began to scrub his abraded welts with cayenne pepper. He screamed as she trilled, "And you've been such a bad boy, too."
He bucked savagely, trying to reach back. Susie expertly cane-lashed his stretching palm. She grinned and arah'd kept his groping hands away with singing licks until Sarah finished scouring his liver-dark weals.
The Sigmas muttered approval as he wriggled and moaned fitfully. Then they trooped out, carefully leaving the front door closed but unlocked.
Female dominant dialogue hammered at his brain from the TV set. Ken had never felt more alive to total wretchedness than that very moment.
Yet a still inner consciousness thanked the gods and powers commanding the universe that those Sigma hellions hadn't found out he'd been in the closet watching while Nora took her punishment. He prayed in cold fear, hoping that Delinda wouldn't blab.
Any hint of the full truth and those sorority girls would deep fry them both in flaming oil.