Lecture Notes

Sinclair takes my arm and helps me from the machine, which is just as well, because I am wobbling like a weeble and unable to put a foot in front of the other.

“Good girl, well done,” he murmurs coaxingly into my ear, bringing me down to sit on the floor between his legs. “Come on, I’ll help you stretch.”

I lean back into him and he slowly, sensuously pulls one arm up into the air, massaging it from elbow to shoulder, repeating the process with the other one. Then I lie down and he scoots in between my thighs, lifting one leg up and rubbing its burnt muscles back to life, then the other leg, then he lets me lie like a knackered starfish, immobile on the floor for a beautiful, peaceful age. I have floated off beyond the Beth. I am just an elastic band that has been pulled tighter and tighter and tighter until all resistance has gone slack and limp. I am just a body in stasis.

Until Sinclair nudges me with the toe of his boot and says, “Come back now. Go and shower and I’ll be waiting for you in the bedroom.”

*

My shower has the magical property of washing away all the sweat and negativity and leaving only a beautiful buzzy endorphin-high. I smile widely at my glowing reflection and wrap a towel around my invigorated, but rather overstretched, body. Sinclair is waiting for me in the bedroom. Finally, my reward.

He is lying on the bed in his satin robe, reading L’Heptamèron, one hand behind his head, protecting it from the wrought-iron bedframe. It really is the perfect bed for tying things (i.e. people) to. I wonder if that was his sole purchasing criterion when he bought it. Bet it was.

“Eww, medieval French,” I say, wrinkling my nose. “Isn’t that hard to read?”

“Scarcely any different than the modern version,” he tells me. “Come and see.”

I sit down next to him and have a quick look. He’s right. It’s almost the same. “Not like Shakespearian English, full of words that have fallen out of the language,” I note.

“Quite.” He puts down the book. “Take off the towel.” I shrug it off and sit docilely while he runs a hand slowly over my refreshed upper body, creating exquisite whorls of sensation with his fingertips. “You have a beautiful body, Beth,” he tells me, frowning in concentration as he plucks a nipple between thumb and forefinger. “You need to maintain it. Do it for me.”

Ah, he has me there. I will do anything for him. I want to be the best I can for him. I resign myself to dull hours of treadmill-pacing hereafter, since it is his will.

“Lie down on your back,” he intones, his voice now low and hypnotic. I look up at his face, which is transfigured by desire, his sensual lips slightly parted and his eyes ferocious. He continues to move his long, pale hands over my sensitive skin in sweeping motions, circling my belly, cupping and tweaking my breasts, moving down to my pubic area, which I remembered to depilate after my shower, thank goodness. “Mmm, good,” he murmurs, resting a thumb on my mons while his hand slides sideways between the crevasse of my thighs so that his fingers can access my innermost parts. He flexes them lazily – “You’re wet,” he tells me unnecessarily – and gives the area a thorough digital inspection, moving his other hand up to my face and stroking the thumb insistently across my lower lip until he pops it into my mouth to suck on. “I had no idea when I decided to take you on,” he says, still in that trance-inducingly deep tone, “that you would be so very responsive to me. You’re like a little circuit board….all I have to do is put the wires together and your light beams out and your bell rings…until I take the wires away…and then I put them back together again…All I have to do is touch you, Beth, and you’re wet. Why is that?”

“Because I want you,” I gasp, pressing my clit down against his probing fingers, the words thick and sticky around his thumb in my mouth.

“Yes, you do. You want what I give you, don’t you? You want me to take your will and surrender it to mine.” He pushes his fingers, oh, just there, oh, just right and I begin to jiggle and whimper, feeling the pre-tremors of the quake building. “I want to see your face,” he hisses intensely. “I want to see your face when you come; you do it so sincerely, you give yourself up so completely. I want to see it. Come for me.” My heels drum into the duvet, I chew down on his thumb, singing out and undulating my hips like a bellydancer while the fire flows out of me, my gift to Sinclair.

“Not bad for starters,” he whispers to me, dropping a kiss to my famished lips. “Let’s see how far I can take you.” He takes advantage of my depleted condition to fasten my wrists to the headboard again, then he reaches into his bedside drawer and produces something…something that buzzes when he flicks a switch. Oh, what the hell? It’s a silicone vibrator, thick and flesh-coloured, and with attachment at the base. I feel instantly swamped with coyness. Sex toys just make me want to giggle schoolgirlishly. Can’t take them seriously. If my hands weren’t tied, I’d cover my face with them. I content myself with biting down on my lip to keep the giddiness from spilling out, looking away from the peculiar thing.

“Something amuses you, Beth?” He returns to his twixt-thigh billet and begins to circle my entrance with the rubbery tip of the vibrator.

“No, sir, just…”

“Just?”

“Those kinds of things always make me think of…I dunno…bad seventies comedies, I suppose.”

He smirks a little, looking up into my eyes with vivid interest. “Curious girl,” he says. “Let me assure you that within, oh, a few minutes, bad seventies comedies will be the last thing on your mind.” He edges the vibrator into me, little by little, jiggling it as he does so, judging the level of stretch needed to accommodate it. It feels nice, but I wish it was him. I’d always rather have him. Once it is ensheathed within me, the small rubber tongue at the base rests snugly against my clitoris, just pressing down enough to induce urge to rub myself a little harder on it. The strange flesh-but-not-flesh feel of it is intriguing. Sinclair fiddles about with it until it is in exactly the right position, rammed up hard enough that I can’t expel it, nor shift aside from the clitoral stimulator, then he flicks a switch and watches my reaction, sitting back on his heels. A low buzzing emanates from my private parts and – oh my! – waves of delicate, trembly pleasure begin to radiate outwards from the double-core of me. I think the shaft bit is rotating; I can feel all kinds of wrigglishness in my channel, not quite like penetrative sex, but enough like it to…ah…powers of description starting to tail off….off the cliff…over the edge…cruel vibrations against my already-swollen clit….ah….wow…

Then Sinclair says, “You may not come until I give permission.” And I snap out of my woozy spell and lift my head as far as I can in my state of bondage.

“But…you can’t stop me…I can’t stop myself…” It is difficult to find words when you can feel yourself slipping away…past the point…way past it…

Sinclair picks up the riding crop which has been resting on the nightstand after our gym session. “You can stop your

self,” he says firmly, running the flat tip up and down my writhing thighs and flicking it slightly at the sensitive inner flesh. Ouch! That does…help. Puts it off. Can I put it off? Oh, I don’t think…it’s as if my orgasm is that fellow in The Shining, hacking his way through with an axe, and it’s inevitable that he will find his way to me in the end, however hard I push my shoulder up against the door, but I try, I push my shoulder so damn hard, and Sinclair is tapping the crop against my thigh again, which just turns me on even more, and I say, “I can’t…I can’t…”

And he says, “Not without my permission, Beth.”

And I say, “Pleeease….”

And he says, “Not yet.”

And….heeeeeeere’s Johnny!

Bliss, torment, failure, humiliation, gushing torrents of bliss again, my hands working desperately but uselessly at slipping their bonds, my eyes screwed shut. I very much don’t want to look at Sinclair at this moment. The vibrations continue and it feels tortuous. I want to remove the damned thing but I just can’t.