Kaylee's Keeper (25 page)

The stall was large enough to occupy a real horse. Fresh clean sawdust covered the floor. A bed of straw crowned with a neatly folded blanket filled one corner. In the center of the stall, however, a female handler held her pony bent across her hip while she applied a short crop. Dressed in only her boots and tail, her hands concealed in restrictive mitten-style gloves, the woman gasped and squeaked with each snapping impact, tears just beginning to spill down her cheeks, and yet the only fight she offered was the internal fight to hold still and accept.

As they passed by, Master Marshall pulled a chart down off the wall and quietly read it.

“What did she do?” Kaylee whispered, not wanting to interrupt. Her bottom tensed, tingling that familiar sense of dread and anticipation with every fresh crack of the crop.

“Nothing,” he replied. “This is a nightly ritual by her request: ten strokes if she’s been obedient, thirty if she hasn’t. It looks like she’s been a very good girl today. She’s due a visit from one of the stallions.”

Kaylee glanced across the aisle at one of the real horses and then stared at him.

“No.” Master Marshall laughed and put the pony girl’s chart back on the wall. Beckoning for her to follow, he walked further down the row of stables and stopped again. “This is Race the Night, her assigned stallion.”

He stood in the center of the stall, tall and proud, completely still while his handler moved around him, grooming both his mane and his tail with a soft curry brush. He was tall, his head held high in spite of being dressed in nothing but a cock sleeve and his head gear. Though not aroused, he still looked impressive. His was the kind of body any submissive would have loved to see on her Dom. For some reason, it was a little harder to reconcile it on a submissive, although she knew body type had nothing at all to do with sexual orientation.

Removing his cock sleeve, his handler began to rub him, stroking his cock and balls, bringing him to a full and standing erection. In a low and sultry tone, she spoke to him, her words too soft for Kaylee to make out.

Race the Night stared straight ahead, looking boldly back at Kaylee. He stamped once but otherwise did not move, not even when his handler pulled a condom from her pocket, opened the package and slipped it on him. Affixing a lead to his bridle, the handler led him out of the stable and back to the pony girl’s. The sounds of the snapping crop had fallen silent.

Kaylee noticed Marshall watching her. “To each his own,” she offered, trying to be as open-minded as she knew how.

He beckoned for her to follow him again. To say that she had misgivings was putting it very mildly, especially when she realized that he was leading her not out of the stable but deeper into it. He found an empty stall at the very end, opened the door and gestured for her to precede him.

“I—” she hesitated. “I’m not sure…”

“You don’t have to be.” He reached for her, hooking his finger in her collar ring and pulling her to him. “You belong to me tonight, remember? Trust me and submit, that’s all you have to do.”

He pulled her inside and Kaylee went, her nerves tangling and her heart quickening. She liked it when he used that tone, and she really, really liked it when he dragged her by her collar. It made her feel so…owned.

Master Marshall positioned her in the center of the stall, just like Race the Night had been, and began to unfasten the buttons down the front of the shirt she wore. His shirt. Someone paused at the entrance, quietly closing the stall door, though that did not give them privacy.

“Is there anything that you need?” he quietly asked, hooking his arm over the top of the door.

Peeling the white cloth from her shoulders, Master Marshall glanced around at the equipment hanging neatly on the walls. “A training whip. And an audience, please.”

Before the panic could fully sink into her over that, he caught her chin between his fingers and turned her to meet his eyes. “What size shoe are you?”

“Seven,” she whispered, wringing at her fingers.

“Size seven hooves,” he relayed to the stableman. “And at least three of the nicest blue feathers we have. You,” he said, releasing her chin, “are going to look absolutely stunning in blue feathers.”

It was her favorite color. He’d remembered.

“Do you want a beginner’s harness?” the stableman asked.

“No.” Stripping the shirt away, Master Marshall bared her body for anyone who cared to look. He touched her face, soothing back her fears with gentle caresses. “My pretty little pony has already had her introduction to harnesses.”

Kaylee blushed so hot she could feel the air warming around her. Under his steady gaze, she stopped wringing her hands and gradually forced them down at her sides. It was the Rainbow Room all over again, only this time the lighting was better. It showed everything and offered no shadows for her to hide in.

Her breasts were too small. That was her first thought. Not modesty, just vanity. Her breasts were too small. And fast on the heels of that came the even less flattering realization that she probably could have used a few more hours on the treadmill before she came here. She wasn’t fat, but she definitely did not have an eighteen-year-old model’s pert butt and thighs. Not like the women in the spanking photos posted all over Tumblr and a few other Internet sites. Oh, she was pretty enough, and she knew that. But mostly, she was just normal. Average.

And then it struck her. What Master Marshall was doing didn’t have anything at all to do with how she looked. Like the chubby woman on that picnic blanket, bound up in her multicolored shibari ropes, this was about submission. Period.

The stableman returned with a pair of thigh-high boots and two other handlers, one man and one woman, the latter of which folded her arms over the top of the stall door and rested her chin on her wrist to watch while Master Marshall caressed her curves.

“The rules here are a little different,” he told her as he accepted a bucket of water from the male handler and came back to her. “A well-behaved pony pays attention to what her Trainer wants of her. You may not speak. I want you to relax. Listen to the sound of my voice and feel the touch of my hand.”

He set the bucket down in the sawdust before her. A trickle of soapy water sloshed over the rim and was absorbed. Reaching for the wall, Master Marshall flipped a switch and a heating lamp came on directly overhead. Within seconds, even before he bent to dip the sponge he retrieved from a low shelf into the bucket of water, the air around her had warmed.

Kaylee wasn’t prepared to be bathed, not in a stable, certainly not in front of a small audience, but that’s exactly what he did. He washed her, caressing her with the softest sponge, stroking every part of her body and letting the water run off her in rivulets. It felt so innocent. How he did that—touch her like this in the most personal of ways, washing her back, her breasts, her legs, and even up between, using his fingers to part her folds, and yet somehow keep his touch impersonal—she just didn’t know.

Her nipples tightened, but not from the cold. The heating lamp overhead kept off the chill and the sponge was hardly abrasive, but her nipples tightened anyway. When he grazed them with his eyes, she felt it as keenly as if it were a physical caress. He could just as easily have been plucking them with his fingers, rolling, kissing or suckling them—her breasts began to ache with such wanting. But he didn’t. He simply washed her, dipping the sponge often to keep the water running over her warm.

“That’s right,” he said when she began to weave a little on her feet. “There’s my pretty little pony. Don’t be embarrassed. Ponies don’t get embarrassed when they’re being rubbed down. They just enjoy being touched. Good girl, just like that.”

With each pass of the sponge, Kaylee relaxed just a little more until soon she was leaning into his touch.

Setting the bucket aside, Master Marshall exchanged the sponge for a soft white towel. He dried her the same way he’d washed her, starting at her back and shoulders and moving his way down to her legs and her feet. When he was done, he draped the towel over the stall door and picked up the same kind of curry brush she had seen Race the Night’s Trainer using on him. Slipping his hand under the strap, he fit the brush into his palm and moved around behind her. Then she felt it; the gentle lift as he gathered her long hair and began to brush.

No man had brushed Kaylee’s hair before, not since she was very small. As unprepared as she was for the bath, the feel of him working that brush through her hair was completely disarming.

“Good girl,” he murmured, so low and sincere. He was so careful with each tangle he encountered not to pull her hair. “My good, good girl.”

In spite of herself, of being watched and certainly of standing in a stable with sawdust between her toes, a bed of clean straw at her back and the smell of real horses tainting every breath she took—in spite of all that, Kaylee softened under his touch. Every pass of that brush as it moved from the top of her head to the tips of her hair, seemed to strip just a little more tension from her body. When it ran out of tension, it began to strip the bones from her legs.

Her knees wobbled. She tried to shore herself up, to concentrate on holding as still as he’d wanted, but the simple act of him brushing her hair was turning into something else. Like the deepest massage, she began to quiver under his hands and then to cry.

“Do you remember what your safeword is?” he asked, soft and soothing in her ear.

Kaylee nodded. She didn’t know if she could speak or not.

“Do you want to use it?”

She shook her head. She had no idea where these tears were coming from. She didn’t feel sad. She didn’t know
what
she was feeling, but tiny drops of traitorous water collected inside her anyway, welling up in the back of her throat first and then filling her eyes. They blurred out the world, reducing every awareness to nothing beyond the droning calm of his voice, "good girl… pretty pony…" over and over, as he gathered up her long, brushed hair and fixed it into a proper ponytail.

He dressed her and she just stood there while he did it, those strangely emotional and yet unfathomable tears falling down her face while he slipped the bridle over her head. Where he got the tissues from, she didn’t know, Maybe there was a box tucked discretely up on one of the shelves. Maybe someone in the gathering audiences passed them over the top of the stall when she wasn’t looking. Either way, he wiped her cheeks, blew her nose, and then he made her into his pony.

“Open,” he said, and she did, letting him fit the bit between her teeth. The bridle was much more comfortable than it looked. There were at least six places where buckles could be adjusted to better the fit and Marshall went patiently from point to point, attending to each one until the blinders fit perfectly to the sides of her face, narrowing her field of vision, and the straps followed the curves of her cheeks and jaw but did not pinch or chafe.

The chest piece was much more complicated. A series of straps crisscrossed from back to front around her waist, around her breasts, and in between her legs in a way that framed her pussy and the curve of her bottom rather than covering them. The ponies she had seen trotting their rider through the garden had worn something different, tight-waist corsets that left their bare breasts but supported them underneath, and their privates had definitely been covered. The one she wore was little more than a series of straps that hugged her curves, the black leather accentuating her pale skin.

“Deep breaths,” Master Marshall said, as he took a position behind her. She had been so busy admiring the harness that she hadn’t realized he’d picked up a horsetail butt plug until she felt his hand prize her bottom cheeks apart and then the cool, slickly lubricated head of the plug began to nose at her back entrance. “Relax your bottom. This might hurt a little. You’ve had a lot of use back here today. Breathe out for me, my pretty little pony—good girl—nice and slow.”

When he pushed, her body yielded. He was right; she was tender from use, but as the plug invaded, slipping up inside her, it didn’t hurt. She felt only the most fleeting pang of discomfort as the widest section of the base met and conquered the minor resistance her sphincter offered, but then it was in her and Master Marshall was pressing it deep into place. “Good girl.” His warm breath caressed the back of her neck. His even warmer lips pressed upon her shoulder. He took his hands from her bottom, leaving the plug in place while his attention turned to her harness. He adjusted the lie of the strap that ran between her legs, using it to prevent the plug from slipping out again when she moved. As he did with her bridle, he then went from buckle to buckle, adjusting each point to fit her curves and contours. “Normally I would bind your arms in a sleeve behind your back. But this is your first time and I want you to wear the hoof boots. Your beautiful body was made for all my favorite things: fucking, spanking and thigh-high boots”

He was right, too. The boots he put her in were black and shiny, zip-up-the-side, skin-hugging, fuck-me boots. Made to look like horse’s hooves, they were heel-less with metal horseshoe inserts on the bottoms. She imagined she could feel them under her toes. Even through the sawdust,  each practice step made a strangely satisfying clumping sound. Walking felt strange. She wobbled a little when he took hold of her bridle and led her in a slow practice circle around the stall.

Little by little, she grew accustomed to the strangeness, the slight weight of the horseshoes and the audience in the doorway, which had grown from three stablemen and handlers to five. The woman was smiling at her and it was so infectious that, without even realizing it, Kaylee smiled back. She felt…pretty. Exotic. Hardly self-conscious at all. And when Marshall crowned her outfit with those three super long, bright blue ostrich feathers, she even felt taller, as if she’d suddenly grown all those extra inches.

Clipping a lead to her bridle, he took the training whip the stableman offered him and, with more of a click than a tug, led her out of the stall. He went slowly, giving her plenty of time to get used to the boots, but her awkwardness barely lasted beyond that first breath-taking moment when he took her past the mirrors. Kaylee stared at her reflection. Between the bridle, headdress, feathers and harness, she hardly recognized herself. The heels made her look so tall, so slender—not just pretty or exotic, but gorgeous.