Soul Custody

Chapter One I can already feel the rankling sensation in the pit of my stomach the moment I push open Jeremiah’s door. The aroma of coffee is so thick it makes me dizzy. It is my aphrodisiac of the moment; where with one whiff, the simmering heat of s****l need that tantalizes my body becomes so overpowering that I have just one thought in my brain and bones. Jeremiah is the owner of Jeremiah’s Coffee Bar, one of a dozen narrow façades along the busy street. His shop, like most of the others in this district, is part of an urban renaissance that began several years ago to revitalize a sagging and dispirited downtown that was fast becoming a haven for slumlords, the homeless and seedy thrift shops. Jeremiah’s renovated space looks artistically antique now, rather than squalid. The two-story brick building is a solid structure with the established date of 1872 chiseled into a slab of concrete above the second floor, and beneath that date, faded green lettering states the building’s original purpose, ‘Mercantile’. In the second floor is the loft where Jeremiah lives, in the basement is a makeshift dungeon, an unofficial play space for a small community of shadowy types who occasionally need to act out bondage s*x fantasies on neutral ground. As I swing my ass onto the barstool, Jeremiah notices my smoldering expression with one raised eyebrow. He studies me carefully while polishing glass mugs with a meditatively Zen-like dexterity. “We’re closed,” he finally says, as if the surly brute were talking to a drunk who just stumbled in off the street. “The door was open and the sign still on,” I remind him without trying to be flippant. I stare at my burly friend with great affection, while reminding myself why I’m here. The black-haired, beer-bellied, skuzzy, bearded brute cracks bullwhips with the finesse of a painter’s articulate hand. I shake now thinking of the cracker whizzing by my ear infusing the space about me with its high-intensity explosion as the fall splits the air. The thought alone sends a shiver of nervous anticipation up my spine, while afterwards a tingling at the back of my neck remains. I hear paper rustling behind me and turn around, seeing a light-skinned black man reading the newspaper at a table near the bar. He stares up briefly, observing the scene for several seconds then turns back to his reading. His face is familiar, but I don’t spend the time trying to remember where I saw him before. Returning to my sacred mission, I seek Jeremiah’s face with the gaze of a wounded soul with an outstretched hand. “Is it always this way with you, Hayley? Never gonna get any better?” “I wish,” I say, with a hint of hope in my voice. “I got work, you know.” “But I’m yours, honeybun,” I sweet-talk him, eyelids fluttering as obviously as a Playboy bunny’s. He chuckles under his breath. He’s thinking something about my sick character he’s not saying. I know how he judges me, how they all judge me. He called me a sport f**k once, but that’s not the truth. I do have moral standards, but I’m just confused, and now an injured bird with tattered wings in need of repair. I nod in the direction of the black man. “You want me to kick him out and close up?” I ask. Jeremiah gives me another few seconds to sweat this one out, before finally saying, “You can close up, but he’s good to stay.” What does that mean? “Is he going to join us?” I ask. He laughs aloud and hits the countertop hard with a glass. I practically jump from my skin. “Leave your clothes in the upstairs hall and get yourself downstairs, slut.” Unsure, I hesitate. The pokerfaced man gives the scene a unique twist, making me oddly afraid. I shouldn’t care. I’ve been naked before strangers more times than I can count. Am I wrong to think he is not as disinterested as he looks with his solemn face stuck in his newspaper? Jeremiah hates being made to wait—especially when he’s doing a female a favor. Scowling, he reaches over the bar and grabs my throat in his large hand, squeezing enough to shake me back to life. “Now!” he says tersely. “Yes, sir.” I practically fall off the stool getting to my feet, and move directly toward the far left corner of the coffee bar where the stairwell to the basement is walled off in a small alcove. It’s not much privacy, but it’s all I have as I slip out of my shoes, then strip away my winter coat, my best red sweater, and my jeans. I left off my underwear when I left my apartment this morning, as if I was beginning the script then in anticipations of the final act now. I am a fair-skinned blonde with hazel eyes, about five feet six inches tall, pretty average. Right now, my shoulder-length hair is wildly disheveled. I think Jeremiah likes it that way. My breasts hang out, jiggling softly against my chest, n*****s responding to the draft of air seeping through the old building. I remember one lover telling me that I have a body made for s*x—tight in the right places, but curvaceous where it counts, hips, ass and voluptuous breasts, as good as a 1950’s Playboy pinup when women had flesh enough to hold. I don’t know what makes me think of that lover now since, if I don’t want to make Jeremiah mad, I need to get downstairs. I don’t know if either man sees me naked, because I won’t look back before I hurry down the rickety staircase, shivering until my teeth chatter. My belly makes a weird jolt as the damp musk hits my nostrils. I think of this subterranean maze as the gateway to hell. In winter, the ancient oil furnace clangs in erratic ear-splitting rhythms, sort of mimics the bad hard metal that plays in the background of most dungeon play. Once hitting bottom, I wind my way in the dark along the narrow stone path toward the punishment room, feeling my way with my hands, mice and spiders surely following in my tentative footsteps. Suddenly, the corridor is awash with a feral glow. Jeremiah turned on the lights, thank God. For a second I linger, my body hugging the stone bricks. Every nerve ending has come alive, so what I touch feels like fingers grasping to take hold of me. My p***y aches; my belly spasms. My breaths come in ragged gasps, my mouth parched from the taste of s*x. I keep close to the stone, enjoying its support. For a moment, my hips gyrate against the scratchy granite, imitating the motions of f*****g. The more the rough surface scratches my belly, the more I want it cutting into me. I stop to feel a wave of orgasm that’s been dallying at my s*x for days rise up threateningly. I could come right here without Jeremiah’s help, but we’d both be pissed. Thankfully, my friend abruptly intervenes, grabbing my hair and shaking me from the erotic splendor just before I hit the edge. He thrusts me the rest of the way down the corridor to the Hall of Retribution—the space he so aptly named, where from every angle the tools of punishment hang in ominous array, inert now, but like jackals awaiting prey. “What a b***h you are!” Jeremiah comments. I see with some relief that he’s alone. I know my friend resents the way I come into his Coffee Bar: knowing that with a little p***y power, I can always finagle a trip to his dungeon. I don’t recall if he’s ever refused me, although I prefer not to think of what it means to have him so easily won—it would destroy the headspace I have so meticulously carved—Jeremiah in charge as I surrender. He locks my wrists in iron manacles, while my cunt drips its expectation down my inner thighs. “You’re hurting bad, huh?” he taunts. He’s noticed. “Rough week,” I say. “Any particular reason?” “I saw Daniel Mulray yesterday.” “Ah.” I’m so glad that I don’t need to explain more. He knows my neurosis, my psychosis, my hysteria, insanity, obsessions and phobias. He understands silently why I need him now. I’m bound to the stone wall, arms high, feet wide, and my waist strapped to the cold surface. In seconds, the chilling cold climbs into my belly where it joins the gnawing ache that keeps up a restive residence beside its companion—s****l fervor. I make the wall my lover as the first talons of Jeremiah’s braided cat s***h across my shoulders. My empty, open p***y hungers for each searing shock of pain and clenches taut. He pauses and I jiggle inside the bondage to settle my body and shake out the tiny discomforts. I feel his energy now. I sense his emotions running high, gearing up for the long battle with me. I’ll wear him out before I scream the first, “Stop, please stop!” which, of course, he’ll refuse to acknowledge. This pain feeds my pulsing s*x. I dance around the orgasm for a time, supremely content to have Jeremiah back off to quell the urgency, only to drive on again with this wicked cat o’ nine tails. I feel his blows all over my body, my back and shoulders, my thighs, my calves, my ass. Oh, how my ass burns! Harder, I want it harder! He reads my thoughts, responding to the dictator in my brain who directs this show. The master becomes the servant, not the reverse; all good subs believe that’s true. It’s part of our game. I only know for sure how grateful I am that Jeremiah knows when to lay it on hard, and when to say enough’s enough. Once I’m swimming though a sea of endorphins, it no longer matters what Jeremiah does to me. I feel my hard won satisfaction reigning down like something fresh, like petals of flowers, or the smell of dew come morning. He attacks me from behind, stroking my raw flesh with his fat fingers, feeling his way between my legs to the wetness drooling from the mouth of my v****a. He splashes his weapon over my shoulder, and I smell the scent of leather sexuality. The falls hang down, tickling my breasts and the peaked n*****s that have been chafed by the jagged stone. “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet, sweetheart. Not yet,” he threatens in a melodiously gruff voice; a poor Bogart imitation, but I love it. He speaks from his rumbling groin, which now wriggles in against my bruised ass. He bites my neck, gnawing it for a time, then starts a trek of bites and kisses down my back, as I smother the sounds of my satisfaction with a bitten lip. His hands maul my flesh as if it were dough; his inner heat pours out through his hands. They burn me now as hotly as his spray of stinging leather once burned my skin. He makes the ache far worse, bringing it to desperate straits that will take frantic turns before this torture ends. After all, he has me bound. I’m at his mercy. I asked for this, all of it, even the part that I didn’t script and can’t say I care for. I fight with him, hoping that he’ll allow my body to c*m and end the tease, even as I realize now that he’s in this scene for himself as much as me. I know he’ll f**k my ass before the night ends. After he mauls my backside with hands that clutch and squeeze, he finally reaches to my breasts with the same urgent passion. Their tender flesh throbbed with anticipation. “Oh, my gawd, Jerrrrr….” I lie back against his big chest and open my mouth. He fills it with fingers before I scream. “Do me hard, yes, yes…” My words are nothing but gibberish, as if he’s stuffed my mouth with a gag. I suddenly feel the chains give way, and the strap around my waist loosened. He’s setting me free, my first impression, which is swiftly corrected by the truth. I’m only being freed in order to be turned face forward where the tender part of me can be subjected to the worst pain. I’ll be openly vulnerable to a rash of possibilities that will scare away my endorphin-laden bliss. I only wanted him to f**k me. I sense now he won’t. Maybe he’s teaching me a lesson. Once I’m bound against his wall with my ass pressed into the stone, he turns my mind in somersaults once again. He grabs a thick lock of my blonde hair in his hand and zeroes in on me with his smoldering brown eyes flashing cold and stark as a primordial wind. Only then do I smell the ripe virility of his bared crotch. Feeling the harsh missile jutting from his pelvis, I know where it’s aimed. Not my ass tonight. He reaches outward to my manacled hands and holds them in his palms, then thrusts forward impaling me on his rod. Simultaneously, his mouth lands on my lips, and he pries them apart with his tongue. He f***s hard, like he’d rape, if he were that sort of man. I feel each jab of his erection burrow a little deeper inside my cavity. My fear soon falls away and my body responds. I squeeze his muscle with mine to draw his seed inside me. I’m grunting hard, while my back breaks with the pounding thrusts. Then I start to scream from my belly outward as the climax rips my mind away and takes my body on a long spasming ride. I hear Jeremiah groaning as the p***y-f**k ends. He finally withdraws from my cunt and pulls away, leaving a pool of our juices on the concrete floor. Exhausted, he slumps to a nearby stool while I still dangle in his chains. The iron manacles seem to cut my skin—which I only notice now that the demon had been purged from my troubled psyche. When Jeremiah finally pulls himself to standing and zips his pants, he starts toward the doorway of his Hall of Retribution without looking back. “Jeremiah, do you suppose…” I start to remind him that I’m still hanging and hurting in these cuffs and chains. He turns. “What? Let you down?” “Please, sir,” I implore him. “Oh, beg me more,” he snidely urges as he faces me again. “I am begging you,” I say with some emotion. My face is filled with utter woe. “Please.” He slowly saunters back to me and starts undoing the bondage. “Not that you deserve it,” he says. “No, no, I never do,” I agree. “But you know I’m grateful.” “Sure.” I sense some cynicism. He’s been this way since he found out about Rocco and his growing bitterness has me worried. I consider Jeremiah my best friend. Perhaps my only friend. When he has me freed of all encumbrances, he smacks my butt saying, “Get out of here, Hayley. I’m tired and ready for sleep.” Without his consent, I turn long enough to give him a wet kiss on his mouth, then I fly up the stairs, afraid he’ll smack my ass the whole way if I stay too close. The coffee bar is empty when I return. The solemn light-skinned black man is gone, having left his newspaper and dirty coffee mug on the table. Once dressed, I quickly clean up the mess in a spirit gratitude. By the time, Jeremiah returns to the room, I’ve scooted out the front door, the bell jangling. A moment later, I turn back to see that he’s already turned out the lights. Sometimes we used to sleep together after he beat me, but not in a long time.