The Story of X: An Erotic Tale (12 page)

He does it. With a smarting and shameful pain, I sense the slap of his hand. My buttocks
quiver.

“Count.”

What? What does he mean? I manage to speak: “Celenza?”

“You must count, as I spank. In Italian.”

A pause. He is leaning to his left and doing something. Then I realize he is drinking
red wine. The casual, offhand nature of this is no doubt part of my submission; my
initiation. And it too is bizarrely stirring. I can feel the sweet, urgent irritation
of a very serious pleasure, like gorgeous pins and needles down there, down there.
Oh more. More please. Scratch this gorgeous little itch. Stop this, don’t stop. Stop
this, but
don’t stop
.

He spanks me again, harder this time. My bare ass is in the air and he is spanking
me. And men are watching. And I am counting, aloud.

“Uno.”

Spank.

“Due.”

Spank.

“Open your legs.”

I resist this, as best I can. but his firm hand is between my naked thighs, prising
me open. And maybe I actually want him to do this. Because I can feel myself dissolving,
where my legs meet.

He spanks me.

“Tre.”

Again and again he spanks me, and I start to breathe deeper, and then I gasp, with
a mixture of shame and shameful delight. I don’t know where this gasp comes from;
I don’t know where this embarrassing
desire
comes from, but it is brilliant and glittering, it is candlelight on glorious porcelain,
it is rose and red and fabulous. I want him to spank me
harder
. The humiliation is delicious.

“Celenza.”

“X?”

“Spank me harder. Please, sir.”

He obliges. This one stings, very beautifully. I am nearly full up, I am almost topping
out. Nine, ten, eleven.

Spank
.

It is like someone applauding my nakedness. I feel wild; I want to be totally naked.
I am tremblingly close to some kind of outrageous and unexpected climax.

“You ran away in Pompeii.”

Spank
.

“You didn’t do what I said.”

Spank
.

I am half moaning. And wholly desirous.

“I am sorry, Celenza, spank me harder.”

Spank
.

Oh, his hand on my bare ass. I want it forever. I don’t care if men are watching.
I want them to watch. The pain is so sweet, so delicate, so erotically naughty and
delightfully embarrassing. How can you feel all these things at once? Now I can sense
his hand delicately fluttering on my clitoris—then spanking me again—then trembling
and soft on my clit—then spank, and spank, and once again spank.

That one was the hardest. I bite my lips. But it doesn’t work. I am gasping.

Yes yes YES.

SPANK ME.

As his fingers press with sweet firmness on my clitoris and his hand hits my bare
ass, I think of these servants watching
me,
Alex Beckmann, being spanked so hard and so firmly by
him,
Marc Roscarrick. And as he spanks me hard and then hard and then harder, three or
four or five more times, this triggers some inner release, some strange, different
climax, like a waterfall of silver roses, a cataract of platinum dollars, a glorious
uprush of scintillating relief.

“Oh God, oh God . . . ohhh . . .”

“X?”

“
Grazie,
Celenza . . .” I am mumbling, and panting. “
Grazie.
”

C
HAPTER
F
OURTEEN

I
LIE DRAPED
over Marc’s lap, half naked and quite replete. He snaps an order in Italian—this time
in dense Neapolitan dialect—and his manservants set down their candelabras on side
tables and disappear. It is just him and me and the room of prancing porcelain antelopes,
eternally jaunting in the guttering light.

I rise unsteadily to my feet, reaching for Marc’s shoulder by way of support—my knees
are actually wobbling—but he picks me up and carries me to the end of the room. Brusquely,
he kicks open a door and transports me into what appears to be a dimly lit bedroom.

I am woozy, made incapable by my strange climax. I nestle my head on his shoulder
and kiss the crook of his neck, inhaling his bodywash, inhaling
him
, as he carries me across the room and gently lays me down onto a vast bed. And so
I lie there happy, strange, dreamy, and half asleep, yet still significantly aroused.

Then he takes off the dress, strips himself, and begins to make love to me.

First he pushes my thighs apart, slowly and firmly. It is all somehow the opposite
of what has gone before: caressing, very tender, and gentle. And I am lost in smooth
and bewildered delight. I clutch at the sheets as he descends my body and licks me
there, again, where it counts. Celenza, Celenza.

Excellency.

For several minutes he pleasures me, licking my clit with unnerving expertise, biting
softly on my thighs, then licking again. Just as I tire of one, he does the other;
he senses my sexual moods telepathically—bite, lick, then bite and lick. And as he
does this, I lie back in my swooning state and I stare into the darkness, and I gasp
and I sigh and I think of the spanking.

It was so erotic, but why? What has he done to me? How could I enjoy that? My feminist
self is incensed, but my sexual self is abandoned and gleeful. Positively
gleeful
.

“Marc—”

I am close to coming, oh so close to coming, but I want to kiss him. My handsome man,
the man who spanked me.

“Marc?”

He lifts his face from between my legs, he ascends my naked body—and he kisses me
deeply, and again. And then he stops kissing me and he slips a thumb into my mouth.
For a moment I suck on his thumb—but then I suddenly bite down, pretty hard, to punish
him for spanking me. I don’t know why I do this.

“Ow,” he says. And he smiles.

And I open my mouth, and I say, “You bastard, Roscarrick.”

“But you were so beautiful, darling, your beautiful white ass.”

“Marc.”

“Though, truth be told, it is a little pinker now.”

“But they all
saw
.”

He smiles again. His breath is scented with wine. We are entwined. He kisses my nose
and says, “And you enjoyed it, didn’t you?” His pale blue eyes are inches from mine;
we are staring into each other’s eyes, maybe into each other’s souls. “Didn’t you?
You enjoyed it a lot.
Bad
little girl.”

I cannot lie. I cannot even shake my head. I just want him inside me. I just want
another delicious orgasm. Like the prosciutto rolls at the Gambrinus. These orgasms
are so more-ish.

“Make me come.”

“Sì sì, bella donna
.
”

He descends once more and pushes my thighs apart; his expert tongue touches me
there
for about seventeen seconds and then I simply orgasm. Just like that.
Seventeen seconds
. I am grasping the air, my toes tighten, I remember the spanking, and the climax
is intense. And oh so easy, so easy.

What is happening to me? It used to be so hard for me to come, so difficult with my
boyfriends; now it is like the best kind of childish trick, this is all you do, you
see, this is the knack, the way you ride a bike, the way to juggle, just this, just
this, just here, just like that, there, you see? Ahhhhh.

Silly, X, silly. It could have been like this all along. All you needed was a handsome,
expert, Anglo-Italian billionaire aristocrat; you could have gotten one at the drugstore.

And now I am exquisitely tired.

“Good night . . . Good night.”

He kisses the tip of my nose.

“Piccolina.”

I am slipping into sleep on Marc’s vast white bed. That music is still playing. Choral
and sublime. It is now a lullaby. Sleep comes, quick and demanding. I have final thoughts.
Sweet, final thoughts. For the first time in my life, I am going to spend the night
in Marc Roscarrick’s bed. The sensation is of infinite luxury; cool, clean sheets,
and a distant yet profound satiation.

I
WAKE TO
bright but filtered sun. Marc is sleeping next to me, tanned and handsome with his
tousled hair. A stripe of sun illuminates his dark shoulder. I see he has a small
scar there: a curious, subtle, curving scar, like a minor knife wound.

Now the memories return, surging and urgent. I try to calm the renewing fight between
guilt and happiness inside me. Did I really let Marc spank me in front of his servants?
How on earth did that happen?

And yet it was a turn-on. It just
was
.

Public submission. Is that really the first of the Mysteries?

If it was, the Mystery is: I feel
liberated
. Something has unknotted inside me, a psychic tension has been released, a complex
knot has been unraveled. So I was naked, and very sexual, and submissive in front
of others? So what, who cares, what gives?

Marc sleeps on. I rub my eyes, yawn hungrily, and gaze around the bedroom, seeing
it for the first time in real daylight.

It is
not
what I expected. I’m not quite sure
what
I anticipated: four-poster beds, Louis XIV chairs, gilding and paneling and lion
paws? But Marc’s bedroom is decidedly modern.

The bed is huge and low, dark and wooden. The walls are pale, painted a northern creamy-gray,
inset with acres of windows, partly shuttered. Marc must have had these new big windows
knocked through. The main table is an entire cross-section of a tree—exquisitely polished—and
decorated with an abstract, hand-blown glass sculpture. Minimalist yet expressive.

A few neckties lie discarded on the parquet floor; just the right amount of disorder.
The rugs might be from London, modern blocks of color.

My eyes eat it all up greedily. Two Barcelona chairs stare at me from the distant
corner. I may not know my Baroque and Renaissance so well, but I know modern art and
design. These are surely original Barcelona chairs by Mies van der Rohe.

A large bookcase stands against the opposite wall—full of reassuringly well-read,
spine-cracked books. Two sizable and carefully framed photos decorate the wall above
me. Are these Gursky? Andreas Gursky? It is all subdued and personal and modern—yet
supremely comfortable. You could sleep here for a year, only to be woken by
Vogue Interiors
come to have a look.

The sole touch of historicity—the only sign you are in a Bourbon-era palazzo—is an
eighteenth-century portrait of a beautiful woman in a billowing and sumptuous blue
dress on the final wall. It looks English. It could be Gainsborough; hell, it probably
is
Gainsborough.

I wonder if that is Marc’s great-great-great-whatever grandmother. Probably it is.
She’s beautiful and slightly sad, framed by her dark room, with a human skull on the
table next to her. Symbolizing mortality? Her cleavage is very visible and her lips
are very red. Symbolizing sex? There is a riding crop on the floor, too. Symbolizing
flagellation? Was she the first Roscarrick initiated into the Mysteries?

Intimations of anxiety begin to needle me. I rise, embarrassed by my nakedness, and
cross the room. I’m looking for the bathroom. Here? Or here?

There are two bathrooms. One is darker and masculine. full of aftershaves and razors
and shaving mirrors and badger-hair shaving brushes by “Geo Trumper of Curzon Street
Mayfair.” I see fencing masks and two swords stacked in a dark wooden cupboard. So
that’s how he keeps fit. Fencing. Dueling.
Swordplay
.

Then I step back out and walk into a second, much more feminine bathroom, which is
almost as big as my apartment. Grabbing a bathrobe from the hook on the door, I investigate—feeling
a little guilty as I go. And wondering just who else has been in here.

The bathtub is maybe a yard deep; you could wash sheep in it. The fittings are bright
and sparkling, the enormous mirrors glitter with decorous lighting. I open a few cupboard
doors. The soaps are new and from Firenze, the towels are possibly laundered in heaven.
It is like a five-star-hotel bathroom, only nicer.

Maybe Marc could let me live here—just let me live in the bathroom. That would be
fine. I could have sandwiches brought in.

I shower under the half-meter-wide showerhead, grab one of the many spare toothbrushes,
clean my teeth, dry my hair, then slip into the robe again—still feeling slightly
awkward, like this is a hotel but I haven’t paid. I step back into the bedroom.

Marc is standing there, also in a bathrobe. He smiles and crosses to my side, then
runs his fingers through my shower-wet hair and kisses me deeply. He draws back.

“Good morning, X.”

I hesitate. I speak.

“
Buongiorno
, Marc.”

We kiss. We kiss again. Three times. He smells of soap and shampoo and himself. The
disturbing desire for him returns. The warm sorbet inside, melting sweetly. Wanting
to be licked.

Be careful, X. Be careful.

Then I notice that breakfast has appeared, and sits on the bed on two shining trays.
This
is
just as I imagined it. Silver carafes of pink grapefruit juice, silver jugs of dark,
rich coffee, two tiny silver juglets of gorgeous cream. And plates of brioche, sfogliata,
pain au raisin, and various fruits—mango, white peach, and tiny wild strawberries.

“God, I’m hungry,” I say reflexively. We are both sitting on the bed now, divided
by the breakfast tray.

“You are?”

“Yes. Sorry. Is that wrong?”

“But . . .” He sighs. “All you had to do was lie there, over my lap.” He is gazing
at me, his face expressionless. “It’s not like you burned a lot of calories.”

I look at him. What is he saying? I realize—belatedly—that he is joking. I throw a
chunk of brioche in his direction. He laughs, and tuts.

“I had to do
all
the work, X.”

“Marc!”

“My right arm might never recover. Do you think I should see an osteopath?”

He laughs again. And his laughter is genuine and contagious—and somehow a very serious
relief. The tension in me instantly subsides. Now I laugh with him, and I crawl across
the bed and push him back onto the pillows, and then I climb up and straddle him.
I am pinning him down, his chest under my thighs, and I laugh as I lean down and kiss
him, and he laughs as he leans up and kisses me. And then I say, “You were pathetic,
anyway, Lord Roscarrick.”

“What?”

“Call that a spanking? I barely noticed.”

“Oh really?”

“Really,” I say. “I think I actually fell
asleep
at one point.”

He smiles and sits up higher, but I am still straddled over his groin. I can sense
his arousal, hard under me, as he looks at me. His eyes are blue, yet dark with desire,
as he says, “Show me your breasts, Miss Beckmann.”

“No.”

“
Per favore, signorina
. Take pity on a humble billionaire.”

“Sorry. I need my breakfast. Then I have to go do some work.”

“Really?”

“Really,” I say. “We can’t all sit around in our
Barcelona chairs,
wearing Gieves and Hawkes suits.”

He looks up at me, shrewdly.

“I am gratified.”

“Why?”

“No one ever noticed the chairs before.”

“They’re original, aren’t they?”

“Yes,” he says. “Purchased them at auction four years ago. I’ve never . . . well . . .
since my wife died. There’s never been anyone who really understood . . .
anything
. Not my life, not my interests, not anything.” His smile is sweet, almost boyish.
And tinged with sadness.

“Well, I’m hungry,” I say—though I am glowing a little inside. Climbing off him, I
return to my breakfast. He drinks juice and coffee and checks his phone for messages.
I eat, happily, and drink coffee, and taste those wild strawberries and sweet brioche.
Because I really am famished. Who knew that spanking could be so appetizing? As well
as arousing?

“So,” I say, swallowing a mouthful of buttered brioche, “Marc.
Tell me
. Was that the First Mystery?”

“Yes.” He drops the phone on the bed. “The First and the simplest.”

“But what’s it meant to prove? I don’t get it. I mean . . .” A faint blush rises to
my face. “It was erotic, Marc, don’t get me wrong. Surprising, but, yes, erotic. Very
erotic.”

“I gathered.”

“But I don’t see how they fit . . .”

“The Mysteries are public and often sexual, and to complete them you must show an
ability to submit. You passed.”

“I did?”

“Oh yes. Top marks. Alpha plus.”

“But, God. My bare ass!”

“Is divine. You are Venus Callipygia.”

I squint his way.

“Sorry? Venus callywhat?”

“Venus Callipygia. Venus of the beautiful buttocks. Venus of the gorgeous bottom.”

“She’s a Greek goddess?”

“Yes. And you are her avatar.”

He is reaching for me. I giggle and rise, skipping away from his grasp.

“I have to get dressed, Marc. I really do have work to do—studying. Where are my clothes?”

He sighs, semi-seriously. “They’re in that wardrobe. Cleaned and pressed.”

Of course. Why wouldn’t they be cleaned and pressed? He has about six hundred staff,
he probably has a whole team of valets, ready to sew new buttons on old shirts overnight.