Free Chase by Flora Dain

with approval but he scoops my breasts out of my bra-cups and rests them on the double rim of lace, testing the shoulder straps for resilience and tightening the straps a little at the back so they bulge in a perfect horizontal.
    His touch is light, almost clinical.
    He gathers my hands together as if in prayer, clamps my wrists into the glinting steel ring awaiting them. This part I understand – we’ve done this before, but here, under a spotlight and with all this kit bristling round the walls, it feels much more intense.
    I try to focus on his power and his strength. Maybe some of it will rub off on me.
    I don’t want to seem scared.
It might be unwise.
    ‘Do you trust me, Ella?’ His eyes are full of heat, his voice thick with need.
    This is my last chance to wriggle out, but all at once I need this too.
And I want it to work for him.
‘Yes. I’ll always trust you.’
    He kisses me on the forehead – the calm before the storm – and all at once he’s brisk. ‘Good. You’re going to wear this.’
    Before I can protest he slips a sleep mask over my head and everything goes black.
    ‘Bend over.’
    I bend low as he pulls lightly at my hips and splays my thighs. I know what’s coming now. Heat flashes through me in spurts of flame as fear and adrenalin surge and blend. With light blotted out my other senses sharpen instantly, primed with fear. I strain to hear what he’s doing.
    ‘Relax. You’re very tense. You’re shivering.’ His hands are smoothing my quivering shoulders, sliding round my tense, clenched rump, easing my bunched globes apart, his fingers warm and invading, testing and quelling my urge to stay tight. He lands a few experimental slaps on my backside and I fight to keep still as I whimper with excitement.
    He walks away for a moment, leaving me bereft, my skin super-sensitive to the sudden emptiness around me. Now he’s moving around the room. I hear a drawer open and close, a rail of equipment clatter.
What’s he going to use?
    ‘What’s happening?’
    An explosion of pain at my rear end makes me gasp.
    ‘What’s happening,
what?
’
His voice is husky.
    I hang in the cuffs, rigid with shock, my mind a blank. ‘What’s happening – sir?’
    His hand lands again, gentle now, and soothes me once more until my quivering eases. ‘That’s better. No more talking now. Use a safe word if you have to. “Finish” will do it, if it gets too extreme. Got that?’
    I breathe deep and fight for calm.
I can play too.
‘Yes, sir. “Finish.” I’ll remember. Sir,’ I add quickly.
    I hang my head as he starts to kiss my back, his mouth hot and hungry. He’s feeling me all over, reaching round to fondle my breasts, teasing and tugging at my nipples, smoothing long, loving caresses all along my flanks and my inner thighs where the soft skin quivers at his touch, almost ticklish. And all at once I feel it, the slick of leather as he draws something across my back –
a flogger.
    I was sort of expecting it but it’s still a shock. And now his hands leave off and the whip takes over, its touch lingering and cruel, the strands like long, evil fingers.
    When it slides under my body and up over my front it grazes my nipples. I clench my teeth, desperate not to cry out as they harden and tense into puckered pebbles. When the leathery snakes cruise back through my legs and slither slowly through my splayed, pulsing gap I
do
cry out, hypersensitive now.
    ‘I said
silence.
’ He jerks up my head with a yank on my braid and the whip lands on my bottom. Slivers of excitement slice through me like lightning, electrifying every nerve in my body into instant attention. And now it begins, the long, slow breakdown of my will, as the blows fall, stinging at first then glowing and warm, some soft, some sharp but all relentless, on and on, until my nerves give up deciding if they sting or soothe.
    Now he’s barking orders, the onslaught not enough to slake his needs. He wants my legs straighter, my feet