The Compound (18 page)

“Switch,” John said suddenly, pulling Paul from his brief reverie.

“What?”

John was already pulling the gloves from his fingers. He pointed to the small table, which contained the additional pair of gloves. “Give me the cane and the prod. You make her come.”

Paul took an involuntary step back, though his cock instantly rose at the thought of touching her cunt. “Let’s not lose the momentum.” John frowned. “Do you have a problem with touching the trainee?”

“No. No, of course not.”
Be professional. Keep your cool.

Paul handed the implements to John and pulled on the gloves. He moved to stand between
Alexis’s slender, spread thighs. The heady scent of her sex rose in his nostrils like jungle flowers and his mouth actually watered with a need to taste her musky sweetness. Her swollen cunt glistened with lubricant and her own juices.

John had already resumed the erotic torture, shocking and caning every exposed inch of
Alexis’s body as she jerked and twisted in her bonds. Paul ran his finger lightly over her outer labia, wishing the thin latex of the gloves didn’t prevent him from feeling its silky wetness. He pressed the middle finger of his left hand into the velvet clutch of her passage and felt the muscles clamp around it. Using his right index finger, he stroked the hard nubbin of her clit with a feathery stroke until her hips began to gyrate, her entire body trembling.

“She’s coming,” he said, his voice hoarse. Embarrassed, he cleared his throat. John didn’t let up. It should happen now. Either she was going to stop the action or she was going to fly.

John was murmuring near Alexis’s ear, no doubt giving her encouragement, as he caned her breasts, making the chain between the clamps sway.

Paul continued to move his finger inside her heat.
Come on, baby. Come on. You can do it.
Let go.
Fly for me.

“Now!”
John shouted. “You’re almost there. Give it to me.”

Paul could hear the cutting whoosh of the cane and the cracking sound as it made contact with flesh. Alexis was trembling, her muscles clenched, her body bathed in sweat, a high pitched mewling sound slipping past the fat rubber ball that pressed her tongue far back in her mouth.

She wasn’t letting go. She was falling into full-fledged panic. Paul leaned forward, looking at her hands. They were clenched into fists, her knuckles white. She wasn’t opening and closing them, but it was possible she was too far lost in her panic and pain to remember what to do. Again he wished she weren’t gagged. He felt his anxiety rising as she writhed and jerked, swinging in the rope harness, her toes curling and uncurling.

“John,” Paul said urgently.
“Stop. She’s not handling it. She’s crashing.”

John stepped back immediately, dropping the cane and the prod as he moved to stand in front of Alexis. Crouching, he leaned in close to her. “Alexis. Can you hear me?” His tone alarmed Paul, who moved quickly around the tethered girl, stripping the gloves as he went. John reached behind her head to unbuckle the gag. Her eyes were open, but their look was wild and unfocused.

“Let’s get her down quick.” John’s voice was calm, but Paul could detect the urgency beneath it. When the gag was removed, Alexis began to cry, deep, shuddering sobs that nearly broke Paul’s heart.

Though she wasn’t his charge, Paul couldn’t help himself. He crouched in front of her and took her face in his hands, stroking her wet cheeks as he looked into her eyes. “
It’s okay, Alexis. Shh, it’s okay. We’re getting you down.”

Though she continued to cry, her eyes seemed to focus as he stared into them, and the rigid tension in her body eased a little. Sam had joined them, and within seconds they had her lowered to the mat that had been placed on the floor beneath her, her wrists and ankles free and the harness removed. She yelped when the clamps were released. Paul cupped his hands over her throbbing nipples. “It’s okay,” he whispered. “You’re okay.”

Nudging Paul aside, John bent down and lifted Alexis into his arms. Sam ran ahead of him toward the screened off area where a makeshift bedroom was set up, including a twin bed, a night stand and a chair. Paul followed behind them.

John laid Alexis gently on the bed while Sam poured a glass of water from the pitcher on the night stand. Paul was relieved to see her sobbing had subsided and her body was no longer trembling. John sat on the edge of the bed beside her and took a tissue from the night stand, which he dabbed against her red, tear-stained cheeks.

“Don’t cry, Alexis. It’s okay.” John’s voice was soothing. “It’s all okay. You took a lot. I’m sorry I didn’t realize it had gone too far. Did you forget the hand signal?”

“Yes,” Alexis whispered. “I’m sorry. I was panicking.” Her voice rose. “I don’t even know what happened. Just all at once I felt like I couldn’t get my breath. I couldn’t tell you and I couldn’t think straight. It was just too much—” Her voice broke into a hiccupping sob and it took every ounce of self
-control Paul possessed not to run forward, thrust John out of the way and cradle her in his arms.

“
Shh, hush now. You’re safe,” John said in his steady voice. “We’ll try again another time. Drink some more water. A nice hot bath with soothing oils will help.” He jerked his head in Sam’s direction. “Sam, go find Marta and have her get a bath ready for Alexis.”

His eye fell on Paul. “We’re good, Paul. Thanks for paying better attention than I did. I can take it from here.”

It was a clear dismissal, but Paul didn’t want to go. Not until he was sure Alexis would be okay. “Alexis,” he found himself saying before he realized what he was doing. “Are you okay?” It was a breach of trainer etiquette, especially after John had said he would handle the situation with
his
trainee.

Alexis turned her lovely, large brown eyes toward him and nodded, though she looked miserable. “Yes. Thank you, Sir. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

John’s eyebrows were arched in surprise, his lips pressed together. But his voice remained kind, if firm, as he repeated, “We’re good, Paul. Thanks.”

Paul nodded brusquely, turned on his heel and strode away.

~*~

Alexis leaned back against the inflatable cushion and let the fragrant steam rise around her. Her back and ass stung beneath the water and her muscles ached as if she’d run a marathon. Her eyes still felt gritty and puffy from crying.

Marta was beside her, sitting on the wide lip of the hot tub. She had lathered Alexis’s hair and washed it with pitchers of clean, clear water she drew from the sink tap. Now she was patting Alexis’s neck and forehead with a soft, wet washcloth. If Alexis hadn't felt so utterly exhausted from her ordeal, she would have been embarrassed to be ministered to in this way. As it was, she was grateful for Marta’s gentle, healing touch.

“Sam told me what happened,” Marta finally said in a soft voice.

Alexis said nothing for a long while. Had anyone ever fucked up as badly and as often as she seemed to?

As if reading her mind, Marta said, “You’re not the first trainee to panic during a scene. You should have seen me when they did a sensory deprivation session during my first week here. I made the mistake of listing no hard limits on my application. I knew I had issues with being blindfolded and gagged, but I was convinced I could handle it. They had me bound to the spider web and when they put that hood over my head and zipped it up, I started sweating and shaking. I nearly passed out. I didn’t last more than like three minutes before they called off the scene and got me out of there. The relief was so great that I started bawling like a baby, even though I wasn’t hurt or in any danger. I was just so freaked out, I guess.”

“Really? You?” Alexis stared at Marta’s serene, composed face, trying to imagine her in full out panic mode. So even perfect slaves like Marta could fuck up? Some of the shame Alexis had been clutching around herself like a hair shirt slid away.

“Really.
Me.” Marta grinned, a flash of even white teeth against her smooth, dark skin. “The trainers are pretty good around here, some of the best you’ll find, but they aren’t mind readers. You have to communicate. You have to be honest and you have to let them know if something is going too far.”

Alexis frowned, the memory of that foul-tasting rubber ball thrusting her tongue back and making her drool. “I couldn’t say anything. They gagged me.”

“Did you have another way to communicate? A hand signal?”

“Yeah.
But that was only as a last resort. I didn’t want to let Pa—I mean Master John down.” She bit her lip, feeling her face heat. “I was doing okay, breathing through it, trying to flow with it, but then it started to be too much.” Alexis fell silent, remembering the clamps with the weights swaying beneath them, and the explosion of pain when the tip of the cane made contact with the clamps.

“Too much?”
Marta prompted.

“At first I was okay. I thought, I can do this, I can! Master John was touching me at first while Master Paul used the cane. I felt like I was getting close to whatever it is everyone talks about, but I couldn’t quite get there. Then when Paul, I mean Master Paul,” Alexis felt herself blushing again and she turned her face toward the wall.
“When they changed places and Master Paul was behind me touching me, I thought I was going die from the pleasure.”

God, was she really saying all this stuff out loud? When she’d realized it was Paul’s hands on her, in her, touching her like a lover, like
her
lover, every fiber of her being seemed to melt into a molten fire of pure lust.

Alexis wrapped her arms around her waist beneath the water and pressed her thighs together as she recalled Paul’s fingers slipping inside her and moving over her clit, sending her almost immediately into a powerful orgasm that just wouldn’t stop.

That’s when it should have happened, she supposed. When the pain from the caning intertwined with the blinding pleasure of Paul’s touch would meld into something more powerful than both, into that place of release and intensity that always, somehow, remained just out of her reach.  

“So you were almost there,” Marta said, cutting into
Alexis’s thoughts. “It sounds like you were very close to letting go.”

Alexis snorted. “Close but no cigar. That’s what my grandmother used to say.” She sighed. “Maybe it’s just not something I can attain.” She felt a lump rising in her throat, making it hard to swallow, but she pressed on. “I’ve been trying, god knows I’ve been trying, but something always stops me. It’s like there’s this wall inside me and
wham
, up it goes, just at the crucial moment. I was hoping this experience at The Compound, this total immersion into submission and training would break down the fucking wall but…” she trailed off, tears welling in her eyes and slipping down her cheeks. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to curse.” Angrily she wiped at her eyes, which were burning from too much crying already.

Marta dipped the washcloth into the water and wrung it out. “
Shh, you’re overwrought right now, Alexis. And you’re being too hard on yourself. Lean back and close your eyes.” She waited until Alexis obeyed and then placed the warm cloth over Alexis’s eyelids.

“Speaking of grandmothers,” Marta continued, “mine used to say something that’s always stuck with me. It’s something that might help you as well on this journey of yours.”

Alexis lifted the cloth from her eyes, for a moment forgetting how sorry she felt for herself. “Yeah? What did she say?”

“Don’t quit before the miracle.”

Chapter 13

Alexis was sitting cross-legged on her bed, her journal resting on her thigh. Part of her training was to write every day about her experiences, her thoughts and feelings. “No one else will read it,” Master John had told her. “It’s your private place to process what you’re going through. There’s no particular set of rules for what you write or how many pages you fill. It’s just important that you write every day. And that you’re completely honest with yourself.”

During the first week her entries had been short—a few sentences describing a particular training exercise and her feelings about how it had gone. She had always considered herself more of a numbers person than a word person, and it had taken a while to get into the rhythm of writing on a daily basis. But somehow, as the days had moved into weeks, she found she had nearly filled the small leather-bound notebook. On some days she wrote for over an hour at a time or made several entries in a single day.

Though she was conscientious about writing about the progress (and sometimes the lack thereof) of her training, not all the entries were directly about that. She found herself writing about various events in her childhood that had affected her, and events at work that had stressed her out. She wrote about Master John and Wendy, and her yearning for that kind of all-encompassing connection with another human being. She wrote about the other trainees, and what she witnessed of their experiences, and how they compared with her own.

And of course, she wrote about Paul. She filled many pages wondering what he would be like as a lover, as a Master, as a partner. She mused on if he’d ever been married, and what his dreams were. She knew very little about the man, and yet she felt closer to him in some ways than to any guy she’d ever been with in an actual relationship. She often fell asleep at night with the memory of his hand on her back, or the way he had cupped her face into his hands when she’d been so panicked in the harness. She would touch her face as he had and close her eyes, hearing his voice inside her head. His words had brought her back from the brink of a scary place. It was as if he’d reached a hand directly into her soul and pulled her back into safety.