Lecture Notes (20 page)

I open my mouth. He means to make me wait.
Not so surprising; it’s a well-known Sinclair tactic. All the same, I am surprised that he does not want to lay into me here and now. The mystery is soon solved.

“And now we have this ev
ening’s business to attend to. Fetch me a riding crop, Beth, then stand in the centre of the room with your hands on your head. We agreed eighteen strokes in the event of my serious displeasure, did we not?”

Oh, of course.
I head towards the bucket to retrieve my old friend, the crop, with its tight, twisty braids of leather. We’ve been seeing so much of each other lately it’s a wonder Sinclair isn’t jealous of our close relationship. I hand it shyly to him, then go to stand as directed, waiting for him to prowl up behind me and strike.

From behind my shoulder he informs me that any movement will result in extra strokes, then eighteen scorchers are laid systematically across my bottom and thighs while I whimper and arch my back and grit my teeth against the overwhe
lming temptation to jump away. Somehow I call up reserves of WonderWoman-like strength and maintain my position to the last whoosh-crack.

“Well done, Beth,” says Sinclair, running a finger along the raised rid
ges he has scored into me. “You are getting much better at taking the crop.”

Could be familiarity breeding contempt there, Professor.

“Now go and wait for me on the bed. On all fours, please, legs spread wide, head on the mattress. I want to be able to look at these while I’m fucking you.”

I comply
. See how obedient I am?

Chapter Ten

It’s Friday. Our last day together before I head home for Easter. He is going to some conference in Rome, the jammy dodger, then on to spend a week with friends in France. I wish I could go with him; I fantasise over breakfast that we are looking up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, hand in hand. I’m not sure how I’ll cope without him for two weeks; I’ve forgotten how to make my own decisions.

“What would you like to do today?” he asks me, knocking the top cleanly off his boiled egg.

My immediate impulse is to say ‘sex’ but we’ve done that twice already; once in the bed and once in the shower, so perhaps some other pastime might be in order.

“I might have misheard here, but it sounded absurdly as if you were asking my opinion on something,” I say.

“Beth, you can choose something you’d like to do today, or I’ll choose for you. And my choice will involve pain.” He flashes his eyes at me, dipping toast into his yolk.

“OK, poin
t taken. Can we go to the zoo?”

“The zoo?”

“Please! I haven’t been since I was six. I want to see the tigers again. And the penguins.”

“Not the reptile house?”

“Oh yes, I’m very fond of snakes.”

“I know.”

We smirk through the steam of our coffee mugs for a few seconds.

“So you want to spend the mor
ning looking at caged animals. Do you identify with them?”  Trust Sinclair to find the s&m angle in this.

“Should I?”

“Oh yes, I think you should. You are caged. You are caged within my desires. My rules are your bars, and they are not susceptible to bending or warping. And the best thing about your cage, Beth, is that you walked into it voluntarily. What do you think of that?”

“Then it isn’t a cage, is it?
It’s a dwelling I’ve chosen for myself. It’s a…cocoon.”

His face flickers but it’s impossible to tell what he’s thinking.

“I’d like to keep you in a box, under lock and key for the next two weeks,” he says. “I’d like to cage you. Just because I will be in another country, you needn’t think you will be beyond my reach.”

“I don’t think that,” I say. “I don’t thi
nk of it as…escaping from you. I don’t want to be beyond your reach.”

He t
akes my hand across the table. “I will keep you within reach, don’t you worry, Beth,” he says, and I wonder what he means, but he changes his tone to the brisk no-nonsense version and says, “We’d better go then. Zoo, lunch, then back here to discuss the next fortnight.”

*

The Zoo is fun, especially the humid gloom of the reptile house, where Sinclair takes advantage of the low lighting to slip a hand up my skirt and massage the area between my legs while he stands behind me. “What do you think, Beth?” he breathes hotly into my ear. “A nice big thick snake…would you like one?”

“Shut up!” I giggle, my hand over my mouth muffling my word
s. “You’re awful! I’m going to tell the BBC about you.”

“They
’d probably give you a camera. Tell you to make a video diary. Would you like that, Beth? Would you like to have hundreds of thousands of viewers watching you bent over for the crop with your legs spread wide, nothing left to the imagination?”

“No I wouldn’t!
Stop it!”

“Would you like to have passers-by in the street nudge one another and say ‘That’s her.  I’ve seen every part of her, exposed to the camera; she looks even more wanton in the flesh. Do you
think he’s had her yet today? Do you think her bottom is sore right now?’”

“Don’t! I’m going home!”
He gets his fingers inside the gusset of my knickers and chuckles.

“You protest too much, Beth.
You’re more slippery than these snakes down here. I could enter you in one stroke.”

I give up and sigh.
Luckily there is nobody nearby; he starts to work on my clit and the imagery he has put in my head ensures that I come on his fingers within a couple of minutes, shuddering into his hand over my mouth, grabbing blindly at the hem of his coat behind me while I melt.

“I think we should go
now,” he says thickly. “I’ve seen enough wildlife.”

Keeping me in front of him, his monstrous erection prodding between my skirt-covered buttocks, he steers me out of the zoological gardens and across the road to the
Downs, almost running to the birch grove I know so well. As soon as we are out of sight of prying eyes, he unveils the masterpiece and pushes me down to my knees. “You know what to do, Beth,” he says gruffly.

Ye
s. I do. 

*

Half an hour later I am washing down his semen with a chilled glass of Chablis and a crayfish salad at an expensive bistro in the Village.

“We need to discuss rules,” he says.

“Do we?”

“Of course. For the next two weeks.
It’s important that you don’t feel that you are…off the leash…in any way. I still require you to obey me in word, thought and deed. At all times.”

“Oh.
I know that.”

“So while I may be physically absent, on every other level, you will be aware of my presence.”

“Good. That’s what I want.”

He smiles at me – indulgently. I wonder if he loves me. Does he love me?
Does he know what love is? Do I?

“Here are my rules then.
I’ve printed a version of them for you to take home, but I thought we could go over them here first. Number one: You must ask my permission to leave your parents’ house. You will do this by text message. If I cannot get back to you straight away, you will wait. You will not assume my consent and go out before you hear from me. Agreed?”

“Oh. All right.
You won’t be unreasonable though, will you? I mean, I can go out with my friends?”

“If you can afford it, Beth.” Hm, he knows I can’t.
“You will drink no more than two units of alcohol per day and you will not smoke. You will be home by eleven o’clock each night, at which time I will call you, using Skype, on your laptop.” He waits for me to protest, but I do not; I simply wait, pressing my lips together, for his next directive. “You will exercise for forty-five minutes a day; the choice of how to do this is up to you. I appreciate that you can’t afford the gym, but I daresay there are parks to run around, or tennis courts, or even a swim in the sea if you dare.”

I shiver.
“Not at this time of year!” I exclaim.

“I have a list of as
signments for you to complete. Some are simple reading assignments, some are written. Not all relate to your degree; some of them require you to find things out about the nature of a relationship such as ours. Of course, I will expect a daily progress report from you, which you will email to me each afternoon.”

I sigh.
This is not sounding like much of a holiday.

“I will call you each morning at
eight a.m. with a list of requirements for the day. These will cover your dress, appearance and any extra instructions I may have for you. During my evening telephone call, I will also have some duties for you to perform, but we won’t go into those now. I will be lending you my webcam for the purpose.”

I open my mouth wide. He wants me to be a cam slut!
In my parents’ house! Have I mentioned that I adore this man? I’m not quite sure about all the other conditions though. Are they really necessary? Does he genuinely think I might forget him if he is not impinging on my consciousness with his demands twenty-four hours a day?

Is…hang on a minute…is Professor Eliot L. Sinclair, the university’s premier heart-throb, television hotshot and ultra-confident control freak
insecure?

Here comes my answer.

“So will you be seeing…old friends…while you’re home?” he asks, appearing to squint at the label on the wine bottle, as if unconcerned by my answer.

“Of course.” 

He turns his eyes to mine and they are hooded, unreadable. “Old…lovers?” he asks.

I half-laugh with disbelief.
“Do you think…seriously…do you mean?” I can’t spit the words out; the notion is too preposterous to entertain.

“Well?”
His tone is sharp now, hostility is in the neighbourhood.

“You don’t think I’d be unfaithful to yo
u? Surely?”

(But why not?
My own fear that he will leave me for somebody else is the big fat fly in my ointment of contentment too.)

“Y
ou’re young, Beth. And beautiful.”

“Oh, I’m not!”

“You are. There will be men around you wherever you go.”

“But I don
’t want anyone else. I want you.”

“They will try to persuade you…”

“And I’ll tell them to fuck off!” He frowns at me, but I persist. “You have to trust me, sir. I won’t ever, ever look at another man. I love you.”

He says nothing to that for ages and I want to hide
my face behind my empty plate. Why did I say that? What an idiot! I was supposed to be waiting for him to say it to me, à la ‘The Rules’ or whatever. Finally he murmurs, “That’s good,” and my agony is complete. He didn’t even say it back. I am officially the world’s most clueless buffoon.

He takes my hand and says, “Let’s go, Beth,” and we leave for home, a long and desolate walk t
hrough an emotional wasteland. Have I just misjudged everything completely? Am I just a random fuck to him, a plaything, a bit of fun? I am too choked and fearful to talk to him and I wonder if perhaps, once I am out of his way, he will realise that I am not that important to him after all.

But when we reach the vestibule of the apartment, he pulls me against him, runs fingers through my hair, resting his bristly chin on the crown of my head.

“I’m not going to make a definitive declaration, Beth,” he says ruminatively. “At my age, one has usually learned the dangers of impulsivity. But if what I feel for you can’t yet be defined categorically as love, it is certainly as close as I have come to it in a very long time.”

“Really?” I say, my heart pounding fit to bring the skies down.

“I have something with you that I would absolutely hate to lose, Beth.”

“Oh God, so would I.”

He squeezes me tighter. “I’m grateful for that.”

“Will you trust me then?”

He is silent. Then, “I can’t promise you that. But I’ll try.”

It’s a start.

*

An hour later, we are in bed where an intense session of bodily exploration has been building up, so slowly, so surely, to the poi
nt where the bodies will meet. Sinclair has been different – less calculated, more unrestrained, granting me more license with his skin than I am accustomed to, which is good, because I want to memorise every pore and freckle and navel-to-groin hair so I can call it to memory on the fourteen long and lonely nights ahead.

We are in the sixty-nine position; my teasing tongue has brought him to the perfect pitch of stimulation and I have already drenched his mou
th with my juices twice. He wriggles up from underneath me, leaving me on all fours without an occupation for my mouth or my lower orifices. “Oh,” I say.

“Keep those legs spread,” he cautions me, and I can hear some scrabbling around in his drawer of dec
adence going on. Oh blimey. Ropes? Toys? Blindfolds? “I want to try something new today.”

He plunges deep into me from behind without warning and I utter a long ‘aaaah’ at
the sudden filling of my void. This is not new, I think vaguely, though I am highly aware that my walls are a little tender after two earlier skirmishes and my attention is fixed on the sensation of it. He soon settles into a leisurely back and forth stroke that rubs pleasurably against my front wall, keeping my bottom high and my head pressed down so that my spine forms a perfect downward slope.

“To whom do you belong, Beth?” he asks, commencing an oft-rehearsed mantra, rather like a catechism in its call and response nature.

“To you, sir,” I gasp.

“That’s right.
What parts of you belong to me?”

“Every part, sir.
All of me.”

“Yes, Beth. This part?”
He reaches around to fondle my breasts as they jiggle and bounce in the wake of his fucking rhythm.

“Yes, they belong to you, s
ir.”

“This part?”
He moves one hand beneath me to twiddle my clit.

“Yes, it belongs to you, s
ir.”

“This part?”
He lays a smack on my backside, hard enough to leave a handprint.

“Yes, it belongs to you, s
ir.”

“I need hardly ask about
this
part,” he says laconically, thrusting his cock in emphasis.