April 7, 2013

Carrie's Story Blog Tour

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," à 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.


You can find Molly on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/MollyWeatherfield and on Twitter at @PamRosenthal (https://twitter.com/PamRosenthal).

Blog Tour Schedule
March 24 - Shanna Germain 
March 25 - Lelaine
March 26 - Alison Tyler
March 27 - Romance After Dark
March 28 - Romance Junkies and Amos Lassen
March 29 - Sinclair Sexsmith
April 2 - Kissin Blue Karen
April 3 - Dana Wright
April 4 - Erin O'Riodan
April 5 - Lindsay Avalon
April 6 - Laura Antoniou
April 7 - DL King


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