Bacchanal Of Bones Chapter One

Chapter One

“Shall we begin?” Mistress Isabelle asked.

Rennie knew it wasn’t really a question– and if it had been, it wouldn’t have been directed at her, but rather at Rennie’s husband. He stood watching as the Pro-Domme untied her and pulled her up from the chair where she’d been waiting, naked.

Mistress Isabelle led her over to the only other piece of furniture in the room, a St. Andrew’s cross. She started to tie Rennie to it with hemp rope.

“No,” Pete said. “She needs to be tied tighter than that.”

The Mistress, startled and indignant, looked for a moment as if she was about to say something.

But then, she shrugged, and complied with Pete’s wish (which was every bit as much Rennie’s wish– she just wouldn’t have ever said so in a situation such as this).

 

Mistress Isabelle started things off with a heavy, thuddy rattan bundle, then switched over to a quirt and began alternating between that and a wooden branding hoop, varying the speed and angle and force of her strokes. Rennie appreciated the woman’s technical skill and the fact that she was trying to keep things interesting, but unfortunately, her efforts did more to lull than to arouse her. It all felt like something closer to a massage than to a thrashing.

Well, that’s part of why we’re on this quest, Rennie reminded herself.

Her mind began to wander. She couldn’t help it. She wasn’t a slave, she was a Libertine.

So she let her thoughts drift. Briefly, she wondered what the other travelers who’d been on the plane were doing at that very moment. Surely at least a few of them had found their way over to De Wallen, too. The layover in Amsterdam was only three and a half hours long, but a lot could happen in three and a half hours.

Then, her mind returned to the subject it had been dwelling ceaselessly upon over the last several weeks: the goal of her and Pete’s journey, and how close they would be to it once the plane landed in Paris. They had actually been obsessed for years with that which they sought, but never had their hopes been quite this high.

There was, according to an obscure legend, a book that could essentially be described as the ancient Roman equivalent of the Kama Sutra, only much kinkier. It was known as the Sexus Divinus, and was said to have surfaced at various locations around the globe throughout history. These appearances were rare and had always been brief.

One of Pete’s former students, Ray Casey, had called him recently to let him know there were rumors that the book had shown up in Paris. During his Harvard days, Ray had become friends with Pete, and they’d begun writing each other on a semi-regular basis after he’d graduated. Even after Ray had moved overseas (he, along with several other archeologists, had gone to France on an expedition, during which time he’d fallen in love with the City Of Lights and decided to settle there), they’d continued to keep in contact.

When Pete had first shared the news about the book with her, Rennie had thought its purported location sort of random. But he’d pointed out that Paris was actually quite an appropriate place for it to materialize, since Rome had once occupied the land that was known to the modern world as France.

Nobody who was believed to have found the tome had actually lived to tell the tale, as it was cursed, the legend claimed. Any mortal who read it would experience untold pleasures, but this mystical, ecstatic experience– this “divine sex”– came with a price. And, naturally, it was the ultimate one.

Most would-be adventurers who were familiar with the legend found that last bit off-putting enough to let it dissuade them. But neither Rennie nor Pete considered it a problem.

Anyone who didn’t know them would’ve looked at them and seen just another middle-aged couple. And a lot of people probably would’ve assumed that they were making their pilgrimage to Paris in order to revive the romantic spark in their relationship, but that couldn’t have been further from the truth– jaded though they were, they had somehow, paradoxically, managed to remain romantics. Dreamers. A pair of hopeless cases.

The problem was that, sexually, they had done it all. Or, at least, they had done all that they had ever wanted to do. And that was a lot.

The Marquis de Sade had mentioned the ancient Roman sex manual in one of his journals, though he’d had various personal reasons for not going in search of it himself– not the least of them being that he’d been far more interested in the physical world than in the spirit world.

Over the years, Pete and Rennie had indulged in things that not even the notorious nobleman, in the wildest of his pornographic imaginings, had ever dreamed of– latex and PVC clothing, electro-torture, ponygirl training, ballet boots, phone sex, public fetish parties, remote-control vibrators, dollification, high-heel locks… and more.

That was where the Sexus Divinus came in. They hoped that the entire legend was true, including the part about the curse. They were tired. They were bored. They were ready to experience a pleasure that they would literally die of.

This wouldn’t be the first time the lovers had embarked on a journey for the purpose of fulfilling their erotic desires. She recalled the first time they’d done so. They’d gone on a cross-country road-trip, starting in Miami, where they had gone to a club where a fetish performance night was being held, and ending in New York, where they had been in an amateur porn movie.

Such soft, innocent days. We were so young then, she thought. That had been years before she had opened the bed & breakfast, years before Pete had started teaching at Harvard.

During the first year or so after his getting hired there, they had worried that their involvement in the making of that video in New York might somehow wind up coming back to haunt them. But it never had. They had eventually arrived at the conclusion that it had sunk so far into obscurity that the chances of it being seen by anyone who knew them were practically nil.

As for the nightclub in Miami, they had actually “crashed” its fetish event. With Pete’s help, and under the guise of being one of that night’s performers, Rennie had gotten to live out one of her longtime fantasies: being covered in whipped cream and having it licked off of her by a roomful of strangers.

All those tongues, all over her body, had been only half the kick. The other half had been in the knowledge that she wasn’t really supposed to be up on that stage, and yet there she’d been.

Before then, neither of them had considered themselves part of “the S&M scene.” But that night had changed them both in ways they never would have predicted.

Suddenly, Pete said something, and the whipping ceased.

With a start, Rennie realized that she hadn’t been paying any attention at all to what had been going on, and that she didn’t have any clue how much time had passed.

 

“Let me show you how it’s done,” he was saying.

For a few seconds, Mistress Isabelle just gaped at him. She had just about had it with these two.

The wife, while she had seemed lively enough during their pre-session discussion, had been what the French (according to one of the Mistress’s past clients) would have referred to as a “starfish”– spread out and inert– ever since she’d started flogging her. There were different types of clients, and Mistress Isabelle had names for all of them in her head. By now, she’d decided that this woman fell into the category of “Bottomless Pit.” And that was her least favorite type to work with. What kind of point were masochists like her trying to make?

And the husband! Who did he think he was? The thing with the bondage, she’d understood, since she knew that not everyone was a fan of the “two-finger rule.” But this… this was getting ridiculous.

She had half a mind to kick them both out. But then she had a better idea– she would show him that her job wasn’t as easy as it looked.

“Okay,” she said evenly, handing him the quirt. “You think you’re so much better? Go ahead.”

“This is how you whip her.”

The Mistress barely had time to get out of the way before, without any further preamble, he began taking the lash to his wife’s skin with a ferocity that would have left most people not just physically bruised, but emotionally scarred as well.

“Have you lost your mind? You can’t do it like that!” Mistress Isabelle protested.

He ignored her.

For the first time since she’d been bound to the cross, the wife began to respond. Under the brutal caresses of the quirt, she came to life before the Mistress’s eyes, her body moving in a very subtle sort of dance, inviting more and more strikes. But she didn’t scream. Well, at least not in pain, anyway. She sounded almost as if she was coming. Mistress Isabelle wondered if she was.

Horror swiftly gave way to reluctant arousal, and after voicing her disapproval a few more times (each one of these objections a little weaker than those preceding it), she gave up.

Fuck it, she finally decided.

The Mistress had never exposed herself with clients in the same room before. She did it now, pulling her skirt up and her panties off. Consoling herself with the certainty that neither of the people in front of her were even aware of her presence anymore, she let herself sink down into the chair.

A wave of humiliation cascaded through her as she watched the whip snap and undulate with the motions of his arm, his wrist, his hand. Her hand, meanwhile, moved in its own unrelenting rhythm.

 

He untied his wife himself, and then, turning and looking at Mistress Isabelle as if noticing her for the first time, he handed the whip back.

Mistress Isabelle, now ignoring the husband in turn, watched the wife get dressed.

As the couple was leaving, the Mistress stopped her and asked her, “Are you alright?”

“I’m as alright as anyone in this world can be.”

Mistress Isabelle gave her a confused look.

The wife then said, “You believe I need to be saved from myself. And it’s true, I do need to be. Just not in the way that you think.” She followed her husband out the door.

Mistress Isabelle knew she ought to be resentful at having been shown up– and by an amateur, at that. An American amateur. But somehow she just couldn’t muster any feelings of anger over what she’d just experienced.

TO BE CONTINUED