Bound For Submission

Chapter Two-2

"See, you do have some emotion," he commented.

"I'm sorry, you just struck a painful chord in me."

"At least you're feeling something," he observed.

The waves were crashing joyously on the beach, at least it seemed a joyous sound when the sun shone brightly in the sky. How strange that that sound was immensely different when the sun was tucked away behind the clouds. Looking north I gazed at the fog bank hovering some distance away. Before the afternoon was over it would climb down the coast and swallow me and my beach house in its bleakness.

"Don't think you're so indecipherable Cassandra, it's really not that hard," Nathan said kindly, trying to lift me from my dark mood.

Despite his efforts to assure me, I wasn't about to be reassured with platitudes. I wasn’t sure I liked this conversation anymore. As well meaning as the man might be, he seemed to be leading me exactly where I'd led myself through hours and months and years of psychoanalysis. And I didn't particularly feel like hitting that brick wall again. "If it's so easy," I challenged him, "tell me, how do I know the truth about myself?"

"You feel it," he answered.

"So easy for you to say, but not as easily done."

"There's a fallacy in your thinking Cassandra. You do feel. You just don't know how to sense it."

I was not only angry, I was frustrated again. The conversation was fast approaching inane. Nathan was just another purported guru leading me in familiar circles of confusion. Wasn't it enough that I'd fled the Institute, here I'd attracted yet another person ready to tell me what I needed to heal myself.

I looked at him and shook my head, "thanks for trying Nathan, whoever you are," I said, "I think I'll go in." I closed my book and looked as if I was getting ready to leave.

"A suggestion?" he said.

"What's that?"

"Take off those jeans," he said staring at my crotch, "go naked from your waist down."

"What?" I responded half quizzical, half shocked.

"Take off the jeans," he repeated sincerely.

That was it! Who was this half-baked old fart giving me his old-world new-age wisdom?

"Listen, whatever you're trying to suggest," I was stammering nervously, a wave of shear panic racing through me, "I appreciate the thought ..." I was trying to be polite and extricate myself from the man at the same time. "But this is something I've got to handle myself." I rose to leave, my book dropping to the ground. I bent to pick it up and as I stood again up, his eyes caught mine and I was totally taken aback by their insistent stare.

"I'm not talking about s*x, Cassandra, but since that's what you've apparently inferred from my suggestion, tell me . . . have you felt one s****l thing in the last week? The last month? The last year?"

I didn't answer, but stood there dumbfounded. I’d never admit to him that, yes, I had felt something s****l that last time I saw him; and I certainly wouldn’t let him know that I’d m*********d to the thought of him.

"How can you feel anything with your pants bound around your body like a straight-jacket. Wear a sundress if you're too embarrassed to go naked, but give your body room to breathe."

At last, his eyes disengaged from mine and he rose from the rock before I could think to flee. Without a good-bye he turned and walked away, leaving me stunned.

What did he mean "go naked", "my body needed to breathe?" And who the hell was he telling me this?

I wanted to write him off in my mind as a ne'er do well bum with a second grade education and a pocketful of made up gibberish. But it wasn't that easy. What he said had agitated me so much, I couldn't ignore it; but by the same token, I wondered as I quickly tramped back to the house, why I'd left myself so open. In just a few short weeks my once well-sharpened defensive strategies against such attacks—that I'd developed out of necessity at the Institute—had totally vanished in this man's presence. Was I that hungry for companionship, that needy for advice?

Quickly returning to the house, I resolved to drop Nathan, the conversation and the bedlam in my mind. And so, I tore into the kitchen with feverish abandon, pulling from the refrigerator and cupboards the ingredients for the most complex recipe I knew, assuring myself that my state of woe warranted the pleasure of that culinary masterpiece blessing my craving lips, and that my state of mind required such ardent focus.

It was nothing but a ruse to take my mind off the feelings. A clever decoy perhaps, but I was too self-honest not admit after an hour of sweating from my armpits as everything went wrong with my masterpiece, and I was running from one end of the kitchen to another in helter skelter agitation, that Nathan and his observations were first and foremost in my consciousness. For all my attempts to do so, there was no way I was going to shake them from me. Strange, I'd been looking for "feelings", begging for emotions to consume me, and now that something had gotten through my exacting defenses, I was desperate to send it away. In my efforts I found myself mentally searching for reasons to explain myself to Nathan. I tried thinking of ways to improve my "psychic" appearance to him and his astute eye, proving his observations wrong. I argued with myself that his appraisal of my need was nothing more than blatant s****l innuendo, perhaps some clever new way of hitting on a woman. Yet the clamor not dying away, the truth bore down on me like a runaway locomotive. Was my sexless life so obvious even now?

I was reminded of the time one of the doctors at the Institute had called me the "perfectly frigid prig" in the middle of a staff meeting. The moniker stung, and it haunted me for years. Obviously divorce hadn't changed much when a practical stranger could read right through me. I didn't think of myself as frigid. God knows, I did have s*x with myself, on many occasions, if not with Peter.

With my masterpiece ruined, a steamy soggy mess on the stove, I gave up. Collapsing into a chair, I wiped my sweat- soaked hair from my face. "Damn!" I exclaimed aloud, letting a knife fly hard against the butcher block kitchen table.

That night as I undressed, I caught sight of my body in the mirror. Nathan's suggestion possessed my thoughts, especially when I wiggled out of my jeans and panties, as if I was struggling to free myself. Usually so critical of my physical appearance, rarely did I spend any time before a mirror unclothed. What surprised me was seeing my body this night with much less disdain than normal. At twenty-eight years I was lean, smooth and shapely, my breasts full, fitting sensuously into a "C" size cup, my hips well-rounded. Girl friends in the past always said I had the perfect figure, a compliment that I summarily ignored.

And yet, what captured my attention even more was something beyond appearances. It was the sensations, where skin to skin I felt my thighs rubbing against each other, caressing that place between my legs that I often forgot about for days at a time, even weeks. For the second time in one week, I began to feel a clawing in the center of my stomach, this one far more pronounced than what I’d experienced days before. Watching my body move as if someone else was directing me, the clawing feeling became stronger, making me dance seductively. I was horny. I could tell that much, and no doubt the inevitable rendezvous with my vibrator would soon take care of that. Yet the more I stared at myself, the more I found myself enjoying the feelings that were rising in me. The woman in the mirror fascinated me, the way she writhed before my eyes. Warmth replaced coldness, and as I began to touch myself, watching the tawdry look of it in the glass, the arousal grew by leaps and bounds.

This arousal seemed to come from something outside my fantasies.

(Ah! Yes, my fantasies! I'd grown to hate them, they seemed dysfunctionally bizarre and extreme. Of course Peter had confirmed that fact early in our marriage, when I tried to tell him what was in my head when I was aroused. Because of his edict, for years I'd actively avoided my fantasy life, pushing it from my mind as quickly as its devilish notions came to life in my waking, daydreaming life.

I never considered that Peter's rash judgments of my erotic imaginings was why I was so rarely aroused. But after he'd confirmed my worst suspicions, I tried to find other ways to "get off", thinking surely there was a more natural way to light my fires. Considering Peter's low s****l drive, it didn't really matter all that much since a well-lit erotic flame was rarely required in our bed.

When I did get that gnawing feeling in my stomach, I was quick to take care of it myself, knowing that Peter would have a difficult time satisfying me. That was one thing I never held against him. I made up my mind a long time ago, that my s****l trip switch was off kilter and it was unlikely any man could set it aright.)

But in front of the mirror touching myself, the tingling sensations were becoming blatant. It was having such an interesting effect I couldn't stop. The shame of it would get to me later, but at the moment, what was flooding into me was too preciously enjoyable to push away. I didn't stop, but continued moving my hands against my skin. Taking my breasts in my palms, I cupped them high seeing how the tight n*****s stood out beyond the soft flesh like two tiny, potent beacons. Raising them high, when I leaned down I could kiss that flesh and run my tongue over the satin surface. I let loose one so that my fingers could travel downward, press themselves against my undulating belly, and then part the sticky labia where the light brown pubic hair glistened. A finger delving deep inside the hole between came out covered with my juice. I licked it dry.

My thoughts bolted back and forth from lust to embarrassment. My nakedness scared me. This flagrant eroticism, so foreign to me was like delving into a deep well of decadence reserved for a world I knew existed somewhere, though it was not a world I knew in my lily-white life. Did other people do these things, did they move in front of mirrors making love to their bodies with their hands?

The oddest thing about my play . . . in the back of my mind I had the distinct impression that someone was watching me, a phantom of sorts. And curiously, I almost wanted someone else to see me.

As my mind wandered through a half dozen fields of fragrant fantasy, trying to pluck the right one to steer the moment, a face appeared in front of my brain, just as it appeared to me that night days before. His visage, a full-colored picture, living and breathing as I'd seen him earlier that day. Nathan. I wanted Nathan to be watching me.

No, I couldn't be aroused by that near stranger. I didn't want to be, it wasn't possible! Yet, it was the picture of his face that I could not vanish from my head.

I turned from the mirror and rummaged through my bottom dresser drawer, pulling out my vibrator. Instead of dropping to the bed however, I used the softly shivering dildo like a lover’s hands. Retracing my earlier self-play, I began with my breasts and their firm n*****s, and finally traced my way downward until I was again at the center where I could feel an end to the interlude near. At my pubis, I ran it between my parted labia, feeling the distinctive surge when it hit my c******s. Skipping over that intense spot, I moved the long erection- shaped latex to my v****a, pressing it against the opening until it eased inside. So wet, as if a damn inside me had burst, I let it slide naturally in and out to the beat of my musically moving hips.