Welcome to the anchor leg of the Carrie's Story Blog Tour!
If you don't already know about Carrie's Story, (and its sequel, Safe Word) by Molly Weatherfield, you owe it to yourself to continue reading. The book is a modern classic and Cleis Press is re-releasing it. Here's a good chunk to get you interested:
He
led me down the hall to a very beautiful book-lined study. There was a low fire
burning in the fireplace, and he stood me in front of it. And very efficiently,
neither of us saying a word, he took off my shirt and bra, helped me out of my
jeans and underpants, took off my shoes and socks. He handed me a pair of very
high-heeled shoes and told me to put them on and walk around until I got the
feel of them. They fit pretty well, though I’d never worn anything nearly that
high. Then he put a leather collar around my neck, buckling it in the back. He
guided me by the shoulders, stood me near the fireplace again, and picked up
the remote from a little table. He pressed a button on the remote, and a chain
descended from the ceiling over my head. He put leather cuffs on my wrists and
hooked them to the chain. Then he fiddled with the buttons on the remote again
until the chain retracted back enough to be taut, and I was almost standing on
my toes, hardly using the spike heels at all. Hardly breathing, either.
Jonathan
sat down in a nearby armchair, leaned back, and surveyed me placidly. “I was
right,” he said. “You like this. Now answer my questions, and always address me
as Jonathan when you do. And keep looking at me—no turning inward toward your
own fantasy version of what’s happening. No talking out of turn, either. You’re
here to tell me what I want to know. You can ask me questions later.”
His
questions were cold and clinical, though of course enunciated with the most
careful civility. Age, height, weight. My family. Schedule and time
obligations. Diseases, allergies. Sexual experience, in minute detail. He even
scribbled down a few notes. It was hard to take a breath and find my voice, to
keep looking at him, to remember to use his name. The fire was warm at my back,
but I had to fight to keep off the shakes.
“Turn
around,” he said, finally. “I want to see your ass.”
This
was tough, given the shoes and the tautness of the chain. But—“Yes, Jonathan”—I
did it. He leaned over and grabbed me—thumb up my ass, middle finger up my
cunt, and held me as though I were some yard goods he was considering buying.
He used the other hand to trace the shape of my buttocks. I could feel their
roundness below and the two dimples above, as though he had drawn a picture for
me. I thought of buying grapefruit at a supermarket. All the images that
flashed through my mind, in fact, were of buying things.
Keeping
hold of me, he used the hand that had been fondling me to slap me, hard. I
gasped. What had I done to make him do that? I opened my eyes and looked around
to see what he was doing. But he didn’t respond, except to hold me a little
tighter with those fingers that were up me. Mostly he was just looking at the
spot he’d hit, at the bright pink color, I guessed. It seemed to me he liked
the way it looked, and I realized that this had very little to do with me, or
who I usually thought of as “me.” This had to do with the texture of my skin,
the shape and heft of my flesh. I had been right when I’d flashed on
supermarkets and such. He was shopping. And god help me, I wanted him to want
to buy.
Well,
I thought, he had, after all, used the word “slave” out there on the balcony.
But, you know, I’d thought of it differently then, more as in “slave of love”
or something equally silly. I hadn’t thought of him seriously inspecting, evaluating
the merchandise. My face, and most of the rest of me I guess, flushed deeply,
and I started to weep with humiliation. I was horribly embarrassed to be
exposed as silly, shallow—missing meanings that should have been clear as day.
Mostly, though, there was the obvious humiliation of being chained, helpless,
open, obvious. Not only was I doing this, I was mortified to realize, but I was
unmistakably turned on by doing this, soaking wet inside, in fact, and of
course he could feel it. And I didn’t even know if he cared one way or another.
Finally
he let go of my ass and turned me back around. Then just leaned back and
watched me cry, as though that were interesting, too.
When
I’d calmed down a bit, he asked quietly, “Do you like to be looked at?”
“Yes,
Jonathan, I do,” I sniffled, but I was surprised by the certainty that underlay
my weepy voice.
“Good,”
he said, and pressed the button to loosen the chain.
“On
your knees,” he continued, “but keep your back straight up and down and your
chin up. That’s a position I like.” He pinched my nipples, hard, and he slapped
my breasts.
“Have
you ever been whipped or beaten?” he asked.
“No,
Jonathan,” I said.
“You
will be,” he said. “Enough to leave marks but not enough to scar or break the
skin or injure you in any other way.”
He
pulled off his belt, doubled it, and stroked my breasts with it. He traced the
outline of my mouth with it, and the smell of the soft leather was
overwhelming. I drifted off into the sensations I was feeling, my eyes closing,
and began to moan.
“Quiet,”
he said sternly, and then, “Get back here and pay attention.” I opened my eyes
wide, startled by the new tone in his voice. He looked at me for an instant and
then continued in his polite, somewhat pedantic mode, “That’s the sort of thing
you’ll learn not to do. I’ll teach you. I have canes and whips. You can trust
me to give you just a little more pain than you think you can stand. I’ll beat
you if you break the rules or for any lapses in form or sensibility, and
sometimes I’ll just do it for fun.”
“Now,”
he continued, freeing my hands, “crawl over to the other side of the room and
make sure you keep your ass high in the air. Pick up that rattan cane from the
chair over there in your mouth and crawl back over here to give it to me. And
don’t slobber over it.”
“Yes,
Jonathan,” I said, and did it. The cane was about thirty inches long, just a
flexible reed that was a little thicker on the end he reached for when I came
back. He told me to kneel up again and to put my hand out.
“This
is the most painful thing I’ll use,” he said, “and only to punish you. So I
want you to know what it feels like. It’s what they used in all those famous
brutal faggy English boys’ schools.”
It really did whistle through the air and it really did hurt like hell, raising an angry livid welt immediately. I gasped again, but this time I held back the tears. I can't keep from crying if he hits me again, I thought. But I didn't think he would. After all, the point of this blow was to communicate, not to punish. It was to introduce me to the currency we'd be dealing in. At least that's what he'd said, and I realized that I believed him. I guessed that was a good sign. Still, I realized that, while precise, his message was also intentionally and profoundly ambiguous, because I knew that he wouldn't tell me how many of such blows I'd be receiving.
“Get
dressed,” he told me now, “and sit down over there. Do you want some
coffee?”
* * *
Carrie's
Story is
regarded as one of the finest erotic novels ever written—smart, devastatingly
sexy, and, at times, shocking. In this new era of "BDSM romance," Ã
la Fifty Shades of Grey, the whips and cuffs are out of the closet and
"château porn" has given way to mommy porn. Carrie's Story remains at the head of the
class. Imagine The Story of O starring a Berkeley Ph.D. in comparative literature
who moonlights as a bike messenger, has a penchant for irony, and loves
self-analysis as much as anal pleasures. Set in both San Francisco and the more
château-friendly Napa Valley, Weatherfield's deliciously decadent novel takes
you on a sexually-explicit journey into a netherworld of slave auctions,
training regimes, and enticing "ponies" (people) preening for
dressage competitions. Desire runs rampant in this story of uncompromising mastery
and irrevocable submission.
Molly
Weatherfield, the pen name of Pam Rosenthal, is also the author
of Safe Word, the sequel to Carrie's Story. A prolific
romance and erotica writer, she has penned many sexy, literate, historical
novels. She lives in San Francisco.
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