Daughters of Sacrifice

Chapter One-1

Chapter One

Summer – Sixyears later

It’s dreadfully hot. Everything sticks to my skin, my clothes—the bugs that land on my arms, the sweltering heat, the miniscule particles of dust in the air, and my s****l addiction. It sticks to me worst of all in this weather. I start thinking languidly. If I close my eyes, I can feel hands pawing me, climbing along my thighs, inside and in-between, fusing with the undersides of my flesh. I’m all inside out with erotic need, wanting. Times like these, it always happens; the monsters in my spirit begin to rise and latch onto my brain. Sometimes they taunt me from afar, pelting me with images, with strange fantasies no girl of eighteen should ever dream of. But I dream of them almost daily in this oppressive heat. Like I say, my s****l addiction sticks to my skin, my insufferable companion.

I find myself moving toward an inevitable conclusion. I sit in the box office of the Wicked Women Theatre — Summer stock for semi-gifted actors and those learning to act. I act too, but more often I sit in the box office, answer the phone and smile pleasantly at those who are smart enough to purchase tickets in advance. In the heat of day, I fan myself with last week’s program—Brigadoon. A real smash hit, rave reviews, the summer season’s shining accomplishment. But the programs, poured over with great interest last week, are useless now, tossed in the trash from which I pluck one. In my box office hell, it makes a decent fan. I should explain that the air conditioning broke two weeks ago, and the Wicked Women Theatre is still polling the board of directors about fixing it. Thus, I sweat, until the ladies decide if it’s feasible to spend the money with the season nearly at its end.

I feel an inner urge in this oppressive heat. The s****l, sticky urge, and its baser counterpart, my secret fetish. How I do despise the word fetish. Makes me think I’m some sort of freak. I worry that I am.

“Tarin, go home. Cool down,” I hear a voice of reason wake me from my lethargic stupor. “We’ll need you fresh tonight, not a wilting rose.”

I smile my thanks at Ginny, the fifty-year-old lesbian with the mole on the side of her face and the sunny smile. She’s immeasurably happy. I can only hope I’ll be as content when I’m her age. Is it because she swore off men? I wonder silently. Men/boys aren’t half my problem. I can live with their quirks and shortcomings. I’m not sure, however, if I can live with my secrets.

By the time I gather my purse and head for the old Dodge my father loaned me for the summer, the obsession has already wrapped around me like an overcoat. I feel as if I’m diving into a lazy, sonorous dream shrouded by a cloak of cunning subterfuge. If I’m lucky, the house will be empty and I can let my role play out with no interruptions. If not, I’ll have to be more cautious, more inventive to give my body what it wants.

My parent’s house was built in the 1920s, with stone along the front porch, heavy beams supporting its rustic roof, and thick molding inside. Character they call it. Ashford Glen is an old town, so it should genuinely reek with character. Truthfully, I can’t wait to leave. I feel like I’m living a lie here, and so is everyone else. I’m hardly aware of that lie now; it has submerged itself so deeply inside that it comes to me barely recognized, like a clear, cold breath of air that snares the body then disappears. I feel the lie inside my body, clinging there like tissue paper. I can’t shake it off, and I can’t make it real. A touchable thought.

But I’m here now in the old house, and there’s a note from Mom.

Going to be late, darling (Ah! Just what I wanted to see) I probably won’t see you until morning if you’re going to be at the Theatre tonight. There are snacks in the fridge. Love, Mom.

Yes. This is how I like it. The whole house, all mine for the rest of the afternoon. Mom’s carefully tended the windows, pulling shades to block the harsh sun, while keeping certain shaded windows open to maximize any cool breeze. “We don’t need air conditioning! All it takes is a little effort.” I can hear her now. It’s dark inside, shadowy and a little restless, as if there are spirits wandering between the walls, looking on. Sometimes I almost blush with embarrassment thinking that I’m being watched.

I climb the stairs, moving past Mom’s sewing room—once my sister Ellen’s bedroom—and move immediately, with some purpose to my room and to the closet where I find the purple velveteen drawstring bag that my grandmother gave me several Christmases ago. I furtively grab the soft cotton rope inside, while looking over my shoulder to make certain no one has suddenly appeared to witness my indulgence.

Touching the smooth texture of the rope, I feel the effect as a wave of pleasure stirs my already awakened desire. Pulling the tangled mass from its velvet home, I toss it to the bed in haste, then begin to strip while standing in front of the dressing table mirror. I used to hate this ugly relic of the past: the severe lines and dark wood; its massive, overpowering presence in my small bedroom. Mom says there’s no other place for it—I could think of dozens, like the Salvation Army Thrift Store. But then, my opinion can’t hold a candle to one hundred years of family history locked inside this silly cabinet. It belonged to Mom’s grandmother, and thus it is a treasured work of art, a prized antique—likely worth thousands of dollars, she’d be quick to tell you, if she only had time to take it to the Antique’s Roadshow for appraisal. I thought lady’s dressing tables were supposed to be delicate, dainty as the feminine spirit. But perhaps my great-grandmother was not a delicate woman, rather a practical one as staid, austere and hefty as her dressing table.

Much as I’ve hated the thing, in the last few months I quit fighting it. Once it became useful, an important centerpiece in the fetish ritual that burns in me, it took on the character of a stern, omnipresent being presiding over the complex scheme I conduct for its critical appraisal. I doubt my ritual would be as potent without it.

As soon as I’m naked, I gaze into the mirror feeling my wanting bubbling up like water about to boil. When I’m standing, I can barely see my eyes in the mirror—so sometimes I sit in the little chair to conduct the early stages of the ritual. But I rarely allow myself that much time anymore. All I need to see is the feral look in my eyes, the smirk on my lips and the undulating nakedness of my body, as I begin to run my hands along its slopes, along the lazy curve of my hip, and the small cushion of budding breast flesh. I think critically of myself as most teenagers do—my brown hair is too plain, my lips too pouty, my mouth too large, my eyes just a simple, uninspiring hazel. But I don’t think critically now, not when the ecstasy is so close. My brown hair sways erotically as it moves across my shoulders like a fondling hand and my pouty lips reflect my ability to please a man. My eyes seduce.

Licking my lips like an exotic dancer before her s*x-hungry audience, I squeeze my pert, pink n*****s, showing off. Then I squeeze them harder still, until I feel a current of painful energy skirt down through my groin and into my thighs. I hear a silent, masculine whisper telling me to ‘do it harder… make it hurt’, so I obediently pinch them again and watch my groin thrust forward and my hips roll with this wave of pleasure.

And now the rope.

I don’t know what decides for me, the desire alone or the voice in my head. Maybe they are one and the same. I start with the rope around my waist, tying it tight enough to cut into my flesh. Once I knot it at my belly, I thread it through my crotch, pulling unmercifully hard through my open labial lips to the right of my love bud and then up my anal crack to the small of my back. Secured at the waist rope, it takes another deep dive into my nether regions, where I thread it along the left side of my swelling bud. I can barely touch the little thing now, afraid I’ll trip the glory switch and come too soon. The inner me would be angry if I took shortcuts. I live for the tease, celebrate the edge and the teetering on the brink and the painful ‘almost there’. I can taste the desire, the hunger on my tongue. The thirst makes my mouth dry.

In a command performance for my stern mirror, I yank the ropes with cruel intensity. When this is over, there will be rope burns in the crevice and raw places that will ache for days. I love this fact—a fact that will draw me to my masochistic pleasure again, before the remnants of this scene fade. I finally tie off the rope at my waist in a twisted, messy knot. My belly flesh bulges crudely around it. I’m no great beauty any day, by my skewed estimation, and now I’ve marred the image even more, grotesquely distorting the smoothness of my youthful contours.

I kneel on the small low-backed dressing table chair that barely fits my butt. Bending forward, I rest the weight of my torso on the left side of the table. The formidable mirror is even closer to me now, which makes me worry that I’ll be sucked into its one-dimensional reality. This tawdry view of my tied groin sends a guilty, gratifying shiver though my bones. But I don’t linger with this vision of my dark insides. I’m urged on by the incredible force of my desires.

I reach to my right, for the fat amber bottle. No one knows but me the real purpose of the colored bottles carefully arranged on the lacy dresser scarf. Mom must think they represent a tacit acceptance of the hated dressing table. Nothing could be further from the truth. The bottles are cheap glass items I found in an antique store and Woolworth’s six months ago, when I deliberately searched for phallic objects that I could stuff into my p***y and ass on days like this one, when the inner voice will not be denied. I realize the danger in using glass. But there’s a certain thrill involved, too, knowing that if the glass breaks while it’s inside me, I may have my ritual necessarily exposed to an emergency room of snickering doctors. I tempt fate every time my pubic muscles squeeze.

The amber bottle is my favorite because it forces my p***y wide. Coated with my juices, the bottle slides into my v****a with ease. While leaning on one arm, I pump the phallic piece with my other hand, shoving it hard, shoving it deep, and feeling it finally crash land at my cervix with a painful thump. I’ve lost myself to the moment, taking instructions from the fantasy.

Holding the bottle in place with my vaginal muscles, I open the dresser drawer and pull out a handful of hairpins. On strict orders from my inner self, I affix the pins to my labia lips, one-by-one. These don’t have the bite of clothespins—which I’ve also tried—but they have their own allure, turning my labia into a porcupine of prickly pins. Eventually, even this soft bite will have an alarming effect.

I go back to bottle-f*****g, abandoning all previous careful form for the impulsive ride to my s****l end. When the moment calls for another change, I withdraw the bottle, listening to the slushy, sucking sound as it slides from my v****a. The slick amber glass, with some maneuvering and manipulation, will fit into my ass, but it takes some additional effort to push the ropes off my anus. Kneeling upright, I manage the feat without much problem—I’ve done this before. In this position, there’s just enough slack in the rope so I can wedge the top of the bottle into my rectum. I have to nudge it slowly and allow the muscles to slacken, but my intention is very clear, and not even the pain accompanying the forced entry can dissuade my desire. In reply, my belly grinds with precum spasms.

My little world, my little fantasy demands more of me now, conspiring, insisting, ordering compliance, telling me to swallow the bottle whole, disappear it completely so I have to s**t it out. But I stop short of that brutal twist, as some internal censor edits this nasty plan in favor of a better, safer one.

Withdrawing the bottle from my anus, I move from the chair to the window, which opens onto the upstairs porch. In my parents’ bedroom, there’s a door to the small balconied perch but I routinely crawl through my bedroom window. This seems much more inventive and deliberately naughty.

In the hot afternoon, the sun beats across the porch, which overlooks the treed backyard. There is solitude here, and a small degree of privacy behind the three-foot high railing; although I must crawl on my hands and knees across the wood floorboards to assure that I won’t be seen by adolescent neighborhood boys who’d be more than happy to point and snicker at my naked madness.

My mind begs to use the chaise lounge where my mother sometimes sunbathes—in her bathing suit, of course. I could sink into the cushioned comfort, a lady of leisure sprawled out to enact my crude m**********n. But that would be another drama and it is not how my fantasy plays out. I swear some day I’ll break form to spite myself, for the added, guilty pleasure, but so far, in nearly a year of convoluted fantasy scheming, it’s never happened.

Instead of using the comfortable lounge, I’m required to lie naked against the hard wood, to feel the heat of the sun bearing down on me in my rope harness, to feel the searing burn of the hot wood, which makes my backside as toasty as my front. Every atom in me and around me swelters in this miserable heat. At the same time, the heat makes my skin crawl with life, as if there are bugs combing my flesh—maybe there are, tiny gnats and crawly things drowning in my sweat.

On cue, I thrust the bottle in my ass again and lie immobile, soaking up the tawdry fact of my sleazy behavior, loving it, craving it and craving more. I wiggle my ass into the wood beneath me, feel the bottle drive deeper into my rectum and realize how wet my p***y has become. I wait, f*****g air, feeling the tiny hairs on my pubis start to tingle from the dripping perspiration. The prickly sensation sets me afire, as I listen hard to my inner voices. Waiting for permission.

And then, like some torrential rain, the universe bursts into action and I begin to play with myself, jerking at the hairpins, pulling them off, pulling my labia, yanking, tugging the swollen flesh and finally fingering the center—the wet, empty hole.

It’s difficult to describe the rest of the magic scene as it evolves from that first reckless, heedless surge of pleasure. I never quite have permission to come, but I take the liberty anyway—as the spasming climax torridly rips my being from breasts to cunt, to ass, to my thirsty lips. My desire has its own mind about these things, and being totally irrational, I’ve ceased trying to make sense of it.

I’m a mess when my ritual is finished, my hands covered in p***y juice, my ass sticky, my body covered in porch grit, and I suppose a few gnats dead in the crook of my arm or leg. But I am sated. For good measure, I stuff my hand in my cunt a few more times until it quits wanting more, and all the minor discomforts I’ve ignored become unbearable.

I worry then that I’ll be caught and, slightly panicked, crawl to the window, slide myself inside and sigh relieved once back in the safety of my bedroom. The cool interior of the house refreshes me.

But I must shower quickly.

***

Recently, there have been daring variations in my s****l scheme… like this morning when I duck out of the house in my bathrobe while my parents are eating breakfast. Mornings like this are rare; it usually takes a day for the desire to build before the obsession becomes unstoppable. But apparently, my desire worked all night long in my shadow places; at first light I feel the surges of s****l need overtaking common sense. I could easily finger myself to a climax while still in bed, and thus neatly dispense with the obsession. But I won’t allow myself such a simple, blasé solution. Something else spurs me; something I can’t clearly identify. I suppose it needs no explanation.

I run into the backyard, into the shed, where I throw off my bathrobe and f**k myself against the woodpile—arranged so that one rather sizable log is lodged firmly against my crotch. When I spread my legs, I open my labia lips before setting my p***y against the small protuberance that actually rubs the little bud and pokes into my v****a. I then recline forward and start to move, letting the rough surface of the firewood cover my skin with a rash of scratches. I begin spanking my ass—this a ‘woodshed’ obsession; it seems only right. I want it mean. Self-spanked is certainly not enough… if only someone were there behind me, lashing me with a razor strop. Oh! What heaven!

Because I can’t expand the fantasy rightfully, I let myself come more quickly than my desire would like. Bt at least the obsession is satisfied and it won’t be nagging me for the rest of the day.

***

My obsessive summer continues and I try many forms of self-flagellation during the three weeks before I leave for college. My ass and breasts are streaked with red; that is easy enough. But the pain is hard to come by, the real pain. For that, I need someone to join me.

Like hell! That would ever happen!

I’m afraid that the best of the fantasy will remain unrequited, forever.

This is damnable behavior. I should do penance for months to absolve the damage to my psyche, but I won’t. I’ll just keep coming back until time runs out.

I often think of Ellen when I finish my m**********n. I wonder if she did the same crude things to herself when she was eighteen. And did they have anything to do with her disappearance? Probably not, I reason. I think it’s unlikely that there is anyone on the planet like me, let alone someone in my immediate family.

I’m eighteen now, will be nineteen next month, and am on my way to college. I’ll end the madness once my life takes this new turn. There won’t be time or opportunity living in a dorm for imaginative s****l interludes. It will be as good a time as any to turn my s****l attentions elsewhere—to men, I suppose. I think I am one woman who’d be better off losing her virginity, so I can finally express myself normally. I’m not sure what normal is, but it’s certainly not what I experience now.