Carrie's Story: An Erotic S/M Novel (15 page)

Sir Harold and our guy from this morning came over
to where we were standing. The guy unhooked Cathy from
the maypole and led her away, and Sir Harold said to Frank,
"Let's see what you could do with her." Frank commanded
me to trot, and I was off.

It was harder to do without Cathy in front of me, but
my muscles seemed basically to remember the rhythm. Frank
kept quiet and let Sir Harold bark out corrections and lay his
riding crop on me. He hit harder than Frank, of course, but
even he didn't hit every time I went around, so I figured I was
ahead of the game. And when I stopped, and he curtly told
Frank to clean me up, adding, "You can have her if you want,"
I knew I hadn't disgraced Frank or myself (or Jonathan, I
surprised myself by thinking).

Frank quietly led me back down to the stable. I saw that
most of the other ponies had already been taken back and
been cleaned up. The only ones left in the yard were some
girl who was still being dried off and Stephanie, whose hair
Aerosmith was lovingly brushing. That hair, I thought, God,
it must take hours of their time to wash out the dust and brush out the tangles. Still, Aerosmith looked like he was in heaven
(it didn't look to me like this was just a job for him, and I
wondered how he could stand it), and Stephanie, once again,
looked like she wasn't here at all.

Frank took off all my hardware, putting it in a neat pile
on the ground. Then he turned a spigot and aimed a hose of
cold water at me. I gasped. I hadn't expected that. The water
pressure was hard against my bruises, though nice against my
sore muscles, as he thoroughly soaped me down head to toe
with a soft brush and then rinsed and dried me.

"Okay, okay," he sang softly to me, picking up all my
straps and other assorted hardware, "back in your stall, just
a little more work this afternoon and then you get a nice
dinner." He slapped my ass and I hurried in, wanting to get
both the work and the yucky dinner over with and just collapse in the straw.

He came into the stall with me, hung all the hardware
neatly on its hooks, attached the chain collar, and then surprised me by kissing me on the mouth, a long, deep, tonguey
kiss, that made me moan and kiss him back. "Pretty mouth,"
he murmured, "so pretty without its bridle, oh yes..."

And then he surprised me some more by whispering in
my ear, "And forget about this stupid horse thing. For the
next little while you're a girl, not a damn pony."

Then he went over to the straw and lay back, leaning
on his elbows, sticking a piece of hay between his teeth and
jerking my chain to pull me along. He pushed my shoulders
down to the floor so that I was on my knees, and lifted one of
his feet. "Now, darlin'," he drawled, "you can use that pretty
mouth to clean my boots."

Oh yuck. His old cowboy boots, leather and snakeskin,
were covered with dust and dirt and pieces of grass and hay.
I thought of licking Jonathan's meticulous shoes, of that first
silly little humiliation when he made me lick the lipstick off.
Welcome, I thought, to the great outdoors, city girl.

It took awhile-quite awhile-to clean off those boots
and my mouth really tasted awful, when I'd finished. Frank
gave me some water to drink, and then he undid his buckle
and pulled off his belt.

"Now suck me good," he said softly. "You treat me as
good as those boots, Carrie, or I will whale hell out of that
little ass, and not with a riding crop, but with my belt, maybe
with the buckle end."

If I was a girl, I figured, I could use my fingers to unzip his
jeans and take out his cock, and I thought I'd test these new,
local rules a little. So I whispered softly, "May I use my hands
to take out your cock, Frank? May I touch it with my hands?"

He grinned and cuffed me lightly, "Polite, aren't you?
Well yes you may, darlin', if you hurry the hell up."

So I did. I unzipped him, fished around just a little until
it practically) umped out of his pants, and sucked and sucked,
while he grinned and moaned, his big hard hand on my neck.

After he came, rested for a while, and put his belt back
on, he jerked the chain attached to my collar and whispered,
"Pony time." And then we were back to the pony game, me
standing quietly at the stall door and him whistling, patting me,
and crooning animal inanities as he got me some more healthy
Science Diet for dinner. And as I crawled between the blankets
on the straw, hoping my sore muscles would get rested enough
overnight for whatever was in store tomorrow, I wondered just how many levels of mindfuck I'd have to deal with in this
place.

And then, just as I was about to drift off to sleep, I noticed
a really odd thing. A little piece of rubber hose, maybe two
inches of it, was snaking its way through a knothole in the
wall of my stall, the wall, I realized, that I shared with Cathy.
And softly but unmistakably coming out of the hose was a
whispering sound, "psssst," to get my attention.

I put my mouth to the hose and whispered, "Cathy?" and
then put my ear to it.

"Yeah," she whispered back. "So, what do you think?
What was Frank like?"

"A pervert," I answered. "He likes to talk to the ponies as
if they were girls."

She stifled a giggle. "I caught some of that. Sir Harold
sure wouldn't like it if he knew."

"How'd you get the hose?" I asked.

"Yesterday, or day before," she answered, "they had me
crawling around the yard with a little saddle on, and I found
it on the ground and palmed it, just in case I got a neighbor I
wanted to talk to."

I felt like a new kid in summer camp who had j ust made
a best friend. Life was looking up.

Cathy had been here for four days and would be here
another three before Madame, as she called her, picked her
up to take her home.

"She's thinking of showing me at those dressage shows,"
she said, "so she sent me here to get some basic training. She
may put in a ring, all that stuff, at her house. Hire a trainer,
even."

"How do you feel about it?" I asked.

She surprised me, then, by a total transformation of her
whispered voice. The bratty, giggly tone disappeared completely, and she answered simply, "I'm honored, of course. I
just hope she'll be pleased when she sees what I've learned."

I didn't know what to say to that, so she continued,
"And your master-he's the beautiful man with the gray hair,
right? -why did he send you here?"

I explained, as best I could, about my training for the
auction being interrupted by Jonathan's trip to Chicago. She
knew about the auctions, but not much more than I did.

"But to have to leave your master. I'd die if it were me,"
she said. "How did you displease him, Carrie? Isn't your heart
breaking?"

I was pondering how to answer all this when we heard
footsteps. One of the guys was coming through, doing a bed
check, I guess. I snuggled into my blanket and pretended to
be asleep. And the next thing I remember is waking up the
next morning in a pool of bright sunlight.

Feed, groom, harness. The routine really wasn't going to vary,
I realized. My leg muscles were stiff, but not horribly so, and
when the guy-it was Aerosmith this time-came to put on
my bridle, boots, and all the rest of it, he skillfully rubbed my
calves with some stuff out of a brown bottle, which seemed to
help.

When they'd gotten us down to the ring, they harnessed
me to a cart. This one, however, looked a whole lot more like
a wheelbarrow. I mean, it was clearly a practice cart and
might as well have had a sign on it that said STUDENT DRIVER.
Still, I stood very straight as Don pulled the straps tight and attached the rings in my cuffs to the cart handles. Then he
came up to me and silently showed me the whip he'd be using.
It was long, braided, scary-looking dark brown leather, and
he looped it in his hand, stroking my breasts, my pubis, my
face through the bridle.

Finally, he climbed into the cart, pulled the reins, and
yelled, "Walk!" I started up and soon came to a fork in the
road. It was easy to tell, though, that he wanted me to turn
right by the sharp tug on the right rein, so I did, and we were
off, soon trotting along what looked like a pretty hiking trail,
up and down hills, through copses and over ridges. When he
wanted me to change gaits, he'd yell that, but he'd also accompany it by a coded set of tugs and pulls on the reins. And after
about half an hour, he stopped yelling anything, just testing
me on my understanding of the tugs and pulls, and flicking
the whip over me whenever I was slow to get a signal. It was
difficult. I was scared I'd lose my footing, step into a hole,
or turn my ankle on stones in the path, particularly as I ran
down the steep downhill slopes.

And when I began to feel a little more confident about
where to place my feet on the path and how to understand
the signals, he started laying the whip even harder. Because
it wasn't enough to follow instructions, keep up a steady clip,
and keep my balance. I had to look good, keep my head up,
tits out, knees up, ass bobbing. Well, what did you think,
I chided myself, that the folks who'll be driving you will be
paying Sir Harold for a look at the pretty countryside? And
I found myself flashing on mental images of racehorses, their
snorts and the angles of their heads, and the fastidious ways
they placed their hooves. I tried my damnedest to look good,
and I began to feel a perverse pride in it all.

We were back on open, level ground now, heading,
I guessed, back toward the ring. We turned a corner in the
path, and I realized that we were heading straight for a low
stone wall. I wasn't getting any instructions to slow down
from Don-had he fallen asleep at the wheel? Hey, I might
be perverse but I'm not crazy, I thought, and began to prepare for a halt, when all hell broke loose. The reins jerked my
head back, the whip started raining down on my shoulders
and ass, and Don started shouting insults, "Bad, bad, no! Bad
pony! Stupid girl!"

I stopped running-the reins were certainly telling me to
do that now-and he jumped out of the cart and ran up to me
in a fury. "Did I tell you to slow down?" he yelled. "Did I tug
the reins or yell to slow down? What the fuck made you think
you could decide that? What the fuck made you think at all?"

Of course. The wall was supposed to be a test. And I'd
flunked immediately. After the fact it seemed so simple. Of
course they wouldn't let me go into the wall, and they did not
fall asleep at the wheel around here. Don would have jerked
me to a halt in plenty of time, I realized. I was stupid. And
bad. I hung my head and wept in front of him.

He watched me for a while and then slapped my cheek
lightly. "Head up," he said, but not unkindly. "We'll try it
again."

He got back into the cart, reined me around, and we
went back a few hundred yards along the path. And this time
I just kept running toward the wall, proudly and trustingly,
until at the very last minute he jerked my head back and I dug
my heels in and stopped-well, I stopped every bit as short as
Stephanie had done the day before. And as we trotted back to
the ring, which wasn't far from the stone wall, I was delighted by Don's murmurs of praise and encouragement and almost
ignored the thought that crept unbidden into my head just
then: Sir Harold was right; Jonathan won't know me.

Don reported to Sir Harold that he thought I could pull paying
customers now, giving him the specifics of the morning. Sir
Harold looked almost convinced and said he'd think about it,
and Phil unharnessed me and took me back to the stable for
grooming, food, and a nap. And that afternoon, I got my first
paying customer.

Given my luck, of course, it turned out to be a Muffy.
I mean, not one of Jonathan's Muffles, just a specimen of the
generic type. Which means, even though I think I did reasonably well, I got hit quite a lot. I think that there's something
about me that gets to them, that I'm a symbolic stand-in for
themselves, for their fevered imaginings of how they'd do in
my place.

But then, as Sir Harold said, I think way too much. I'll
never be able to change that, but I realized that first afternoon
that I was learning how to keep it at bay while I was pulling a
cart. I mean, there's just so much physical data to have to deal
with -the light, shade, and colors whizzing by, the shape of the
path under my feet, the complicated embrace of the bridle, tail,
and harness, the pleasure and desire of the driver, translated into
tugs at the reins and slaps of the whip. Then there are the ache
of my own muscles and bruises, the pounding of my feet and
heart, the sharpness of my breath in my chest, and the burn of
salty sweat dripping into my eyes. And the challenge, the ceaseless challenge to look good, proud, upright through it all.

Well, wax poetic over it as I might, my new pony persona didn't stop me from gossiping and giggling with Cathy through the hose after dark. It was a nice break, a way to
be myself. But not too much myself, or too deeply. Because I
discovered that although Cathy liked nothing better than to
talk endlessly about Madame, her elegance and her cruelty,
I didn't want to talk about Jonathan. I was confused about
what I felt about leaving him.

And Cathy was cool. She didn't understand me, but she
did understand that each slave was unique in what made him
or her tick, and she stopped asking me things I clearly didn't
want to answer. So we just used the evenings to compare
notes, on customers, on the stable guys-especially when, as
bonuses for extra good work, Sir Harold let them use us -
and of course on the other ponies. We pieced together the
information that while most of us were temporary boarders,
our masters and mistresses doubtless paying obscene sums
to Sir Harold for our training, Sir Harold owned four girls
himself. Those were the ones who could goose-step, or even,
Cathy whispered to me in awe, negotiate the path through the
woods in heels. I found this difficult to believe, but I watched
them whenever I got a chance, Gillian, Cynthia, Anna, and
Jenny, and they were so astonishingly surefooted, so proud
and gorgeous, that I thought maybe it could actually be true.