Riding the Devil’s Horse

by Ashley B. D. Zacharias

Cindy’s eyes narrowed when she saw Trevor looking at the sign over the dark doorway. “You don’t want to go in there,” she said flatly.

“It might be interesting, don’t you think?” He sounded hopeful.

“I think it might be disgusting. That’s what I think,” she replied.

“Oh, come on. How often do we come to Amsterdam, anyway? I bet you’re curious. You’re curious about everything. You don’t want to miss this opportunity.” He grinned at her. “Come on, be a sport,” he said, took her and tugged her toward the doorway. “It only costs five euros.”

She rolled her eyes heavenward. “It costs a whole five euros? Apiece?” Then she relented with ill grace. “If it’ll make you happy, okay. But you owe me for going along with this.”

“Yes, dear,” he replied, already distracted by the possibilities that lay within.

“You owe me big time!”

“Yes, dear.”

So she followed her boyfriend into the torture museum and dutifully began studying the crudely-constructed medieval devices on display, one after another; taking time to read the English text on the yellowing didactic plates and examining the pictures that illustrated their use. She studied the information so thoroughly that one would have thought that she was preparing for an examination. Trevor was not surprised. She studied any new subject with equal attention to detail. That was what made her such a successful graduate student in the Sociology Department of the University of Chicago.

After an hour, he was bored stiff, tired of looking at device after device that was designed to stretch, pierce, burn, crush, and break parts of the human body in the most cruel ways that evil, brutal men had been able to devise. He had begun hinting that he was ready to leave after the first half hour but she had ignored him. Now, after a full hour had passed, he was bluntly nagging at her to hurry up. He was hungry and his feet were tired.

Her only response was to remind him that he was the one who wanted to come inside; and that they ought to make sure that they saw everything because they were unlikely to get back here again.

He replied that if you’ve seen one iron maiden, you’ve seen them all.

She did not respond; she was too busy reading about a pear, a small device shaped like an elongated iron pear. According to the description, it would be inserted into an orifice, like a woman’s vagina or a rectum or a mouth, and then screwed open. The two halves would unfold like petals of an evil iron flower, pushing against the vaginal or rectal walls, slowly stretching them until they burst asunder. The pain would be excruciating, the damage devastating.

Cindy imagined her own womanhood being ruined by such a device. The fantasy was abhorrent. Knowing that it had actually been used on real people in their vaginas, rectums and mouths was appalling.

She took a picture of the device, as she had of every device in the little museum, presumably so that she could remain appalled in years to come.

Trevor could only shake his head.

She did not talk to him about any of the devices until they reached a simple thing called a Spanish Horse. It was nothing more than a large wooden wedge supported on tall legs. The victims would be placed astride the device so that their legs were stretched apart and hung freely on either side, leaving their entire body weight pressing their crotch against the upper edge. The working edge was not particularly sharp but the area of the body that was being tortured – the genitals, perineum, and rectum – are especially sensitive to pain. She commented that this was the first device that she had seen that would hurt a person without being likely to cause permanent damage.

Trevor pointed to the part of the text that explained that weights would often be hung from the victim’s feet to increase the pressure. If enough weight was hung, parts would rupture, and eventually the dull edge would break through the victim’s flesh.

“No, I mean if it were only my weight resting on the edge without any additional weights attached. I weigh about a hundred and twenty pounds and the edge is not that sharp. It’s only about a forty-five degree angle. I don’t think that I’d suffer permanent damage from resting astride it for a while. I wonder how long I’d be able to ride it before I was screaming for mercy, saying anything, offering to do anything to be released. I bet I could stand it for quite a while before I got to that point.”

Trevor was more than a little disconcerted to hear his lover talking about being tortured personally. Surely this was just idle fantasy. She looked too intense for comfort. He hoped that she was engaging only in idle fantasy. She was a stubborn woman and, when she made her mind up about something, she could not be dissuaded. He had a bad feeling. “I’m getting out of here. I’ll meet you outside.”

“Okay,” she said with an air of distraction. “I’ll be out in a minute.” As he walked toward the exit, the walls were illuminated by flash after flash from her little point-and-shoot camera. She was taking pictures of the device from all angles.

No more was said about the Torture Museum for the remainder of their vacation, nor when they returned to Chicago.

Trevor assumed that Cindy had left her interest in the topic inside the museum and spent the next two weeks living and working with a light heart.

That changed when he came home one afternoon in mid-July and found her in the spare bedroom, the one that she used as an office, typing madly on her computer. “Whatcha working on?”

“Sociological aspects of modern interrogation techniques. It’s a broad survey. I’ve decided to write a comp on it.”

“Oh. Good.” Being in her first year of her doctoral program, Cindy was required to write two comprehensive examinations to demonstrate her understanding of general topics in sociology. She had written the first one before their Amsterdam trip and he was pleased to see that she was making progress on the second one. She would be a lot easier to live with once the pressure of her comps were gone. Then he thought about what she had just said, “Wait a minute! What do you mean by ‘modern interrogation techniques’? You mean torture?”

“Sure. Torture is only part of the topic, but it is the biggest single part.” She kept typing.

“Since when does the University of Chicago administer comprehensive exams about torture?”

“Since I petitioned the Director of Graduate Studies. He agreed that it has become an important issue since the administration launched their so-called War on Terror so he would allow it.”

“That’s sick.”

She stopped typing and turned around to look at him. “It’s an important issue. People are being tortured by our government as we speak and that is affecting our whole society in ways that the Bush administration never anticipated. Not that we should be surprised by that. They never seem to have anticipated the consequences of any of the foolish things that they’ve done.”

He sighed. “Okay. You’re right. It’s important. Good luck on your comp.”

“Thanks,” she replied and went back to typing furiously.

Trevor consoled himself with the thought that as long as her interest in torture was only academic, it would do no harm.

Cindy sequestered herself like a medieval monk until she had completed her comprehensive exam. A week after it was over, he was not surprised when she mentioned that she had passed with distinction, as she had on her first comp. Her ability to focus on a topic was astounding. He had never met a woman who could be so single-minded. To his distress, her single-mindedness in the six weeks before the exam had excluded any interest in sex. To his delight, in the week after the exam, she was interested in almost nothing but making love.

On a Thursday night in early September, after making love for the fifth time in seven days, she turned to him and said, “Trevor?”

“Yes?”

“You’re good with your hands.”

“Thank you,” he replied, stroking her soft, full breast. “I’m glad you like it.”

“That’s not what I mean,” she said, putting her hand over his. “I mean, I do like that. But what I really meant is that you know how to build things.”

“Yeah?” he drawled, wondering what project she had come up with now.

“I want you to build a Spanish horse for me.”

“What? A horse?” He was confused.

“You remember. Like the one in the Torture Museum in Amsterdam. It won’t be hard. It’s just a couple of pieces of wood mounted on four legs. I’ve got lots of pictures if you need to look at them. I bet you could build one in a couple of hours. It doesn’t have to be fancy. You just have to make sure that it’s strong enough to hold my weight. Even if I’m wriggling around on it.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“What do you think?”

He didn’t want to think what she was thinking.

“What do you think?” he asked.

She looked at the device standing in the center of the room. It was a large wooden wedge, about two feet long with sides about a foot high. The sides met at about a thirty-degree angle making it a sharper and even crueler looking than the one in the museum. Supported by four sturdy, well-braced legs, it stood a little higher than her waist. When she was perched on it, no matter how desperately she pointed her feet and strained, the floor would remain at least six inches beneath her toes. “It’s lovely. Just beautiful. I thought that it would be a lot more rustic looking.” She reached out and stroked the smooth wood.

“I made it out of maple. I thought that oak would be too rough, too porous. And I finished it with linseed oil because polyurethane would have been too sticky against your skin.”

“I love the way the grain shows in the wood.” She ran her fingers across the upper edge. “It’s not too sharp.”

“I planed the edge off to about the diameter of a pencil because I don’t want it to cut or cause any injury.” He hastened to add, “But I did give it a more acute angle than the one in the museum to ensure that the victim would be less able to support himself by pressing down with his thighs.”

“That’s good. I don’t want to be injured when I use it.”

“I don’t want you to use it at all. It’s just for show.”

“No, it’s not.” She began unbuttoning her plaid shirt. “I’m going to try it out right now, just to see how it feels.”

“It’s going to feel painful.”

“I bet it is.” She unsnapped the waistband on her jean and unzipped them. “I bet it’s going to hurt like hell.” As soon as she had removed her sports bra and cotton panties she said, “I’m going to need a chair to climb up there. I can’t just jump up on it from here.”

“I’ll get one.” While he brought one back from the kitchen area and set it beside the horse, she slipped her white tube socks off, leaving herself entirely nude.

As soon as the chair was in place, she stepped up and swung her leg over to the other side, just like she was mounting a real horse.

She gingerly lowered her crotch down onto the apex of the blunt wedge. “Ouch. I still have to spread my legs pretty wide to get on this thing.” She kept a running commentary as she adjusted herself. “Ooh. It feels a lot wider than it looks. Let me get my foot off the chair and let you pull it away. Ouch. I have to rest all my weight on the edge. That hurts. It’s pressing real hard into my crotch. Ouch,” she said more emphatically. “I thought that I’d be able to take some pressure off by squeezing my legs together and lifting myself up, but I’m just hurting my legs when I try.” She rested on the edge for a minute, then said, “Ow. It’s really starting to hurt now. A few more minutes and it’ll be real torture. I wonder how long I can stand it.” She swayed from side to side a bit. “I have to work to keep my balance on this thing. If I don’t keep working at it, I’ll fall right off. I guess my upper body is heavier than my legs.” She put her arms down in front and back, placing one hand between her legs and the other behind her butt and pushed down. “This is no good. I can use my hands to lift myself right off the edge. We have to do something about that. You can’t let me get relief like this.” She rocked her pelvis forward an inch before lowering herself back onto the wedge. She replaced her hands and repeated the action. “This is no good at all. I can scoot myself right off this thing if I can use my hands.” She inched forward again, and then said, “Nope. I’m going to run out of room for my front hand. I have to go backward.” Following her own instructions, she began to inch backward along the wedge. “It feels like I’m scraping my thighs raw against the wood this way, but that doesn’t hurt as much as sitting on the upper edge. It’s no deterrent. The edges rubbing against the sides of my thighs by my knees are a bigger problem than I would have guessed. I don’t feel them much when I’m stationary, but when I’m moving, they makes two more pressure points that add to the pain in my crotch.” She kept slowly scooting backward until she had no place to put her hand behind her. Then she simply put both hands in front of her, leaned forward and put her weight on them. “This kind of hurts my hands, but a lot less than it is hurting my crotch. Oops. There we go. I can feel the corner right underneath me. One big push and I’m off.” As she described her action, she leaned far forward on her hand so that her crotch was clear of the corner of the wedge and then pushed back hard with a little bounce.

She screamed as she dropped feet first to the floor. “Damn! Damn! Damn!” Her eyes teared up and she grabbed her crotch with both hands. “Damn, that hurts. I hope I didn’t injure myself.” She bent forward at the waist and parted her hands to peer through them at her pubis. “I banged my damn clit against the corner when I went down. Ooh wee that hurts. It isn’t bleeding.” She looked at herself again. “I don’t think I’ve got any permanent injuries there, but sex isn’t going to be much fun for a few days. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. It’s going to be bruised for sure.” She clutched at herself and rubbed gently. “We’ve got to fix that problem. I could probably have climbed off to the side if I’d tried. That would have been better. The only reason that I didn’t was because I was worried about catching my foot and dumping myself on my head, You’ve got to find some way to stop me from moving around and jumping off. Or falling off. I shouldn’t have to keep myself balanced all the time. And, while you’re at it, I was wondering if you could think about some kind of stirrup arrangement. I love the idea of being able to put myself on the horse without help. The only thing is there’d have to be some way to get rid of the stirrup once I’m on the thing so I can’t use it to lift myself up after I’m on the edge.”

A week later, Trevor showed her the upgraded Spanish horse. It looked more complicated, being adorned with assorted straps and chains.

When Cindy saw it, she said, “That looks more complicated.”

“It has to be. The medieval device in the museum was used manually by the torturers. They would have put the victim on it and then kept guard to make certain that he did not climb off. If you want a self-contained torture device that doesn’t need assistance, then you need mechanisms to perform the same functions as human torturers.”

“Okay. So what do I do?” she asked as she began to shed her utilitarian grad-student clothes.

“First, you buckle this belt around your waist.” He handed her a black leather belt with a pair of handcuffs attached to a D-ring in the center. “And when that’s done, you mount the horse. You’ve got a stirrup now for mounting and dismounting.” He pointed to a wood and steel strap hanging from a short chain. You put your foot in it and mount up.”

When she was nude, but for the belt with attached handcuffs, she mounted the horse.

“That’s right. Now you reach down and buckle the belts about your legs on each side.”

Cindy had already begun to buckle the black leather straps around her legs, just above the knees. Their purpose was obvious. They would attach her legs to the lower edge of the wedge. Once buckled, they were not tight enough to support any part of her weight but she would not be able to move forward or backward; nor would she be able to tip to the side. While she buckled the left strap, she kept as much of her weight as possible on her foot that was resting in the stirrup, but when she bent forward and to the right side to buckle that leg into place, she had to press her crotch to the wedge. “Ouch. That puts pressure right on the old clit. Ouch.” She buckled it as quickly as she could.

“Great. Now, this thing that looks like reins is attached to the stirrup. It’s got a weight underneath that’s heavier than the stirrup, so when you pull on it, it’ll pull the stirrup up out of the way. When you’ve pulled the weight over a bar underneath the wedge, it’ll drop down and hold the stirrups up out of sight and out of reach. You can drop the reigns where they are or toss them over the front. Either way doesn’t matter because pulling on them won’t do anything else after the weight has been pulled over the bar. Now you just slip your hands into those handcuffs that’re attached to your belt and you’re as secure as can be. You can cuff yourself in front or in back – it doesn’t matter – you won’t be able to get your hands anywhere useful. Now you’re held in place right on top of the wedge. No place to put your feet; you just have to let them dangle. I imagine that hurts a lot. You just give me the word and I’ll push the stirrup back down and unlock those cuffs.”

“No,” she said emphatically. “Torture has to have a purpose. You have to make me do something. Don’t let me off this thing until I’ve promised to do something that I don’t want to do. You have to make is something that I really don’t want so that I’ll try to hold out for as long as I possibly can before I break down and agree. Go ahead. See if you can make me agree to something that I don’t want to do. Give me an incentive. Tell me that if I can hold out for long enough then maybe you’ll let me go without making me do it. But that only happens if I suffer for a long, long time. Longer than I can endure. Two hours. Tell me that I can stop the torture any time if I agree to do something awful, otherwise, I’m just going to have to sit here and suffer for two hours. If you do it that way then you can turn a deaf ear to my crying and pleading for mercy. You’ll know that I can stop the torture any time I want just by giving in.”

“Okay. So you mean like I have to make you agree to wash the dishes every night for a month.”

“No, silly. I wash them most of the time anyway. This thing is already hurting so much that I’d agree to that right now. It has to be something that I really, really don’t want to do. You may as well make it something that you really want.” Her eyes were gleaming. “Make me give you a blowjob.”

“You already give me blowjobs.”

“I never give you a real blowjob. I just suck you a little bit before I make love to you the regular way. And I don’t do that very often and don’t even try to do it very well. Make me agree to give you a full-blown blowjob. Down on my knees and swallowing and everything, just like a whore would do. And you don’t have to do a thing to get me off in return. I have to give you blowjob and I don’t get to cum.”

“Okay. I’ll let you get off when you agree to give me a blowjob. Just think about what it’ll be like, slurping away for all you’re worth. Me, standing over you, loving every minute, trying to make it last.”

Cindy was quiet for the next few minutes, thinking about it, partly not wanting to do it, mostly wanting to see how long she could stand the pain. As the minutes, ticked by, she began to moan, quietly at first, then more loudly.

Trevor knew that she was suffering and said, softly, “Come on, dear. You have to end this sooner or later. You’ve stood it longer than I would have expected. Do it for me. Now that you’ve got me all excited about it, I really want a proper blowjob. Please give me what I want. If you want to be tortured again some time, then you can do this again. If you don’t give up and end it soon, then I’m going to be reluctant to do this to you again.”

She moaned and jerked feebly at her handcuffs.

“Come on,” he cajoled. “I really want to get that blowjob now. Let me get you down from there and you can give it to me, just like you promised. Will you do that for me?”

He was hard as a rock. He wasn’t kidding when he said that he really wanted to get her off the horse so that she could suck him off as soon as possible.

She looked at him with watery eyes, then dropped her gaze down to the prominent bulge in his pants and nodded. “Okay. Get me off this thing and I’ll service you just like you want.”

The handcuff key was hanging on a cup hook that had been screwed into the end where the tail would be if it were a real horse. He reached underneath and pulled the stirrup into position, helping her put her foot into it. As soon as she could, she pushed down to take her weight off her crotch and gasped in relief. “God, it feels so good to get off that edge. You wouldn’t believe it.”

“I’d believe it,” he said, unlocking the cuffs, then helping her unbuckle the straps from her legs.

As soon as she was standing on the floor, he said, “Keep going down. You’ve got a promise to keep.”

She fell to her knees and began unfastening his belt.

She put her entire effort into giving her man an enthusiastic blowjob. He lasted less than a minute before dumping his load into her mouth.

She swallowed every drop without complaint and licked him clean as a whistle.

No more was said about the horse for the next two weeks. It sat silently in the middle of the room, its malignant presence studiously ignored by both Cindy and Trevor. But it was obvious that she had been thinking about it a lot because, one evening after supper, she took Trevor by the hand and said, “I’m going to make a promise to you.”

“Oh?” he said, suddenly nervous about what she was going to say, her tone was so serious.

“Yes. This is really important to me, so I want you to pay close attention, ok?”

“Okay.”

“I promise that I will mount the horse any time you ask.”

“Ok-ay,” he said, drawling the word, conveying his uncertainty about what she had said.

“That’s all. Any time you tell me to get on the horse, I will. That’s a promise.”

“Okay,” he replied with only a slight increase in certainty, wondering what the catch was. She obviously wanted something; she had been thinking about this promise and making it was not a trivial thing for her. There had to be some hidden clause here.

“I mean it. I’m putting myself entirely in your hands. I’m giving you permission to torture me whenever you want for however long you want. That means that you can make me do whatever you want at any time. If you want me to do something and you think I might be reluctant, you can put me on the horse and leave me there until my reluctance disappears. If you want to know my secrets, just put me up there until I’m willing to talk. If I’ve done something that you don’t like, put me up there for long enough to be sure that I have been properly punished and won’t dare do it again. Any time you give the word, I’ll keep my word and climb up there and lock my hands away and I won’t be able to get down again until you decide to release me. I’m putting myself entirely at your mercy.”

“Okay,” he replied, feeling relieved. If it were entirely in his hands then it wasn’t a problem He never intended to make her get on the horse again.

“Don’t take that tone of voice with me,” she snapped. “I mean it. I’ve made my promise. I’ve given you power over me and I expect you to use it.

“Okay,” he replied, trying to sound authoritative.

“Okay,” she replied and picked up a book on the psychology of interrogation.

Half an hour later, he asked, “Why?”

She looked up from the book that she was reading, “Why what?”

“Why do you want to give me power over you?”

“Because I want to understand torture – really understand it at the gut level – and that’s what torture is. It’s not about feeling pain. I feel pain when I go to the dentist. I feel pain when I work out. Pain is a necessary part of torture but it’s not sufficient. In fact, it’s not even the most important part. The most important part is having you use my pain to force your will upon me. I can’t claim that I have really experienced torture unless I’ve been forced to submit to someone else’s will. There’s no one else that I’d trust with that much power over me except for you, so you’re it. It’s up to you to torture me.”

“And if I won’t?”

“Then I’m mistaken about you. Look at it this way. I thought about my promise for a long time and I know what I’ve committed myself to. If I didn’t want you to do your part then I wouldn’t have made my promise. You don’t need to worry about the ethics because you have my ongoing consent. I haven’t told you that you can assault me. You don’t have permission to beat me and grab me and force me to mount the horse kicking and screaming. Any time I want the experiment to end, I can just break my promise and not climb aboard and that’s it. Your part is easy. All you have to do is to want something from me and then ask me to mount the horse until I agree. Don’t worry. If you start feeling too uncomfortable then you can release me again as quickly as you want. It’s not such a big thing. I will do my part and I expect that you will do your part. Just think of it as helping me with my research. And the bonus is that you can get anything you want from me. Not many men get a deal like that.”

He fell silent and she began reading again. After a few minutes, he interrupted her. “What if I want another blowjob?”

She did not look up from her book. “I’m busy right now. Maybe I’ll feel like it later.”

“I feel like it right now.” He looked down at the erection bulging in his crotch. Thinking that he could have a blowjob any time he got in the mood was enough to put him in the mood right now.

She looked up from her book. “I don’t. I don’t find giving blowjobs much fun.”

“Oh.” He felt rather crestfallen. She had acted enthusiastic enough the last time that he had been hoping that she would have discovered that she enjoyed giving them at least a little. “Maybe we should just go to bed and do something that you like, too, then.”

She threw her book aside. “You idiot! Why would you settle for second best when you can get exactly what you want the most, no strings attached?”

“I mostly want to do something that you’ll like, too.”

“Well, you’re not going to get that. I’m not in the mood for anything. In fact, it’ll probably be a long time before I’m in the mood again if you’re going to disappoint me like this.”

He looked at her angry face. She wasn’t kidding. Either he played the game her way or she was going to pick up all her marbles and go home. He had never heard the phrase, topping from the bottom, but he was fast learning its meaning. “Get up on the horse.”

She immediately stood up and began disrobing.

He was getting harder by the second.

She gasped when she pulled her foot from the stirrup. “I forgot how much this thing hurts right off.” But she did not pause as she strapped her legs into place, used the reigns to pull the stirrup up underneath the body of the ‘horse’, and then locked her hands behind her back.

She spent a few minutes moaning softly, then said, “Okay. I’ll do it.”

“Do what?”

“Give you a blow job.”

“Tell me exactly what you’ll do.”

She whimpered a little from the pain and then said, “I’ll get down on my knees in front of you, unbuckle your belt and pull down your pants and take your cock in my mouth and lick and suck you until you cum. Then I’ll swallow every drop and lick you clean. I’ll be eager and enthusiastic and sloppy. Okay? Now you can let me down so that I can get started.”

“Okay.” He stepped toward her and reached for the key to the handcuffs.

“Stop right there!” she screamed.

He froze. “Stop what?”

“Stop letting me off so easily. I agreed too quickly. Just a blowjob isn’t such a big deal. You have to ask for something more. Something that makes it worse for me or I’ll always agree right away. This thing is starting to hurt real bad. You wouldn’t believe how much pain I’m in already. You have to come up with something that’s worse than the pain I’m in now.”

He began thinking furiously. He had to come up with something quick but nothing was coming to mind.

“Ouch. This thing is getting to be a real torture. Hurry up and tell me what I have to do.”

Suddenly Trevor realized the truth of his situation. “No, dear. You’re the one who’s in a hurry, not me. I’ve got all the time in the world to think about what I really want from you.” He sauntered over to the easy chair and sat down slowly. “All the time in the world.”

“You bastard!” she screamed. “Tell me what you want. Anything. This is hurting like hell. It’s splitting me in two.” She kicked her feet impotently then squealed when her squirming ground her crotch harder against the wedge. “Just tell me what you want and I’ll say ‘yes.’ I’ll give you the blowjob, just like I said. No problem. To hell with gender equality. I’ll get down on my knees and suck like hell and swallow every drop. I’ll lick you clean as whistle when you’re done. I’ll give you the best blowjob ever.”

“Nope. Like you said, that’s too easy. I could get you to agree to that even if you weren’t hurting much. I want something a lot more interesting than that.”

“What do you want?”

“I’ll tell you what I want. I want two blowjobs.”

“Okay, two blowjobs. One today and one tomorrow.”

Suddenly he got an idea. “If you want, but there’s a hitch. You stay naked until I get the second one. Naked and your hands stay cuffed behind your back. You only get to use your mouth to arouse me. No hands. And I’m going to be playing with your tits until my second coming. So you can take as long as you want to give me the second B.J. but I’m betting that you’ll want to get me aroused again as quickly as you can.”

“What if I don’t agree?”

He was about to say, Then you stay right where you are until you do, but then recalled that she had once told him that she needed some hope that she would be released eventually without consenting so that she would have an incentive to try to hold out as long as possible. “Then you stay there for an hour.”

“An hour?”

“That’s right. It’s seven thirty now. If you can hold out until eight thirty, then I’ll let you go free.”

“I can do that,” she said, defiantly.

“Then go ahead and sit there,” he replied. But he hoped that she would cave. He had his heart set on getting his blowjobs.

As the minutes passed, her moans turned to whimpers. She rocked back to shift the pressure off her perineum and onto her anus. She remained in that position for a few minutes, then rocked forward onto her vulva to shift the pressure again. That only lasted for less than a minute before her eyes began to water and her whimpers increased in frequency. Trevor thought that it was a silly idea to protect her less tender parts by shifting the pain to her most tender parts.

“How much longer?” she gasped.

“A long time,” he replied, glancing at his watch. “Time passes really slowly when you’re suffering. You’ve barely begun.”

“You bastard.” She tried to snarl, but all she could manage was a pathetic grimace.

His heart went out to her, but his cock really wanted to feel her tongue and lips.

After a few more minutes, she said, “One blowjob. I’ll give you one blow job and then let you play with my tits until you get bored with them if you let me down now.”

“I’m not negotiating. You’ve heard my terms. Agree to them. Just as a favor to me. Okay? Two blowjobs and tit play with the handcuffs on.”

Tears rolled down her cheeks. “I can’t take this any more.”

“Then you’ll do it?”

“I’ll do it without the handcuffs. Keeping them on is too much like coercion. Take the handcuffs off and I’ll give you both blowjobs with my hands clasped behind my back and I’ll keep my hands below my waist voluntarily any time you’re playing with my tits. It’ll be the same as if my hands were still cuffed.”

“Okay. If you can do that, then that’s good enough.”

“I can. I promise. Let me down. Please. Please let me suck your cock now.” She sounded like she was begging.

He was surprised to realize that he liked hearing her beg to suck his cock. He liked it a lot.

As soon as she was standing on the floor again with her hands freed, she grabbed his wrist and looked at his watch. “You bastard!” she screamed. “It’s eight thirty. You said that I’d barely started but I was up there for the full hour.”

He shrugged and grinned, “You expect that your torturer is going to tell you the truth? Don’t be naïve. Besides, it’s only eight twenty-eight. I would have let you down at eight-thirty like I promised.” His voice turned hard. “But it’s only eight twenty-eight so now you have to do what you promised.” He pushed gently on her shoulders and she sank to her knees in submission.

As soon as his pants had fallen to his ankles, he said, “No hands, remember?”

She obediently clasped her hands behind her back and went to work on him.

It was good for him. Both times.

And he loved playing with her tits during the two hour interlude. He cupped them, massaged them, kissed them all over, and then caressed them some more. She had wonderful tits, not too big, but full and round. She never before let him play with them for as long as he wanted, but now, she kept her hands in her lap and arched her back to present them for his use, keeping with the spirit of her promise.

There were definite rewards for being a torturer.

As soon as Cindy came into the living room, she saw that the horse was missing. Though Trevor had not made her mount it since getting dual blow jobs the previous week, it had become a persistent feature of her world. Whenever she was in the apartment with him, she was constantly anticipating him asking her to mount up and was slightly disappointed when he did not torture her, day after day. They were making love as often as ever – she did not want to deny him regular sex just to force him to punish her – but she had presumed that he would want something extra, something distasteful to her, more often than this.

The last time that he had forced her onto the horse, she had suffered more than she expected. Her crotch had been tender for more two days afterward. She felt a pang of fear when she thought about being forced astride the wedge again. But a pang of fear was insufficient for her purposes. She wanted to feel absolute dread every time she saw the thing. She wanted to feel like suffering was imminent and inevitable all the time.

She had begun thinking that, if he were not going to force her to do something distasteful more often than once every couple of weeks, she might have to pull a Lysistrata maneuver and refuse to have any kind of sex unless he forced her onto the horse and made her submit to his will. She did not want to have to take that step, mostly because she liked making love to Trevor and would not be willing to endure much torture to avoid it. She wanted him to force her to do things that she would really hate to have to do.

Now, though, it looked like she would have little choice. The disappearance of the horse was a certain sign that things were going in the wrong direction. It looked like he had not only decided to stop torturing her altogether, but had decided to remove any reminder of it from her life.

This was intolerable.

When Trevor came home from his semiotics seminar, she asked, with no small degree of anger, “Where’s my Spanish horse?”

“Oh, that. You noticed that I took it away, eh?”

“Yes, I noticed. What do you think you’re doing?”

“I think that I’m making a modification to it. I figured out a way to make it a lot more effective.”

That was an answer that she had not expected. “More effective?”

“Yeah. I got to thinking about how you were sitting on it last time and realized that I could make it hurt you more by adding a minor improvement.”

Now she had a new reason for concern. “What would hurt me more? It hurt like hell before. What are you doing to it?” She had visions of a knife edge, spikes, electricity. “I don’t want to be permanently injured, you know.”

“Do you trust me?”

She paused for a long time. That was the question. Did she trust him? Really trust him? Not just trust him to treat her properly, but trust him to not make a mistake through ignorance or negligence? She looked at his face. He looked worried. It was as important to him as to her that she trust him. If he was that worried about being trusted, then he was going to be careful that he kept her trust. “Yes, I trust you.”

“Good. I think that you’re going to be pleased with the new accessories that I’m making.”

She smiled, “Then I guess I’m safe from torture for the next few days.”

“Not for long. Enjoy your relative safety while you can because, in a couple of days, you’re going to be pining for this brief respite.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.” He sounded like he meant it.

She was happy to make love to him that night without coercion.

The following afternoon, he was waiting for her when she returned from the library. The horse was back in the middle of the living room, but now had a vertical piece of wood, almost an inch thick, rising from the center of the top edge. The piece of wood had a deep semicircle cut from it that it barely cleared the top edge of the wedge at the lowest point but extended about four inches higher, front and back.

“I added a saddle to your horse,” he grinned.

“I see,” she replied. She did see. When she was perched astride the horse, she would not be sitting on the edge at one point. Rather, her entire crotch from her mons pubis to the top of her ass crack would be settled into the semicircle so that her weight would be resting equally on every part of her crotch, from her clitoris to her rectum. The vertical board was braced with triangular pieces front and back so that it would support her weight without breaking, no matter how hard she pushed sideways against it.

“It’s going to require some adjustment. Unlike the general purpose medieval device, this one will be custom fitted to you. So, if you’ll kindly remove your jeans and panties and climb aboard, we’ll get started.”

While she was doing as she was told, Trevor brought two chairs from the kitchen and placed one on each side of the horse. She was instructed to stand on the chairs and squat down carefully into the semicircle, but not try to put her entire weight on it.

When she squatted down, she found that she could not settle into it because her pubic bone and tail bone were pressing against the front and back before her perineum was anywhere near the bottom.

Trevor took a thick carpenter’s pencil from his shirt pocket and made marks on the wood, front and back. “Okay. Hop off. No sense getting dressed, I’ll be back in a couple of minutes.

After she dismounted, he lifted the ‘saddle’ off the horse. He had not actually modified the horse itself, but had manufactured a kind of cap that fit over the top. When the ‘saddle’ was removed, the original wedge remained. He carried the saddle into the spare bedroom and she heard his saber saw burring loudly.

For the next two hours, he kept repeating the process, making her climb astride the saddle and gingerly lower herself into it while he marked the places she first began pressing against the wood as she settled down. No man had ever examined every inch of her crotch with such meticulous care and she felt a blush of humiliation every time his face drew near. She hoped that she was clean down there. He was only satisfied when she finally lowered herself into position and could feel every part of her crotch touching the wood, from high in the front to high in the back, with equal pressure. By that time, her legs were aching from the exercise.

Even then, he warned her against resting her full weight on it. “The edges are sharp and splintery. Getting splinters is not supposed to be part of your torture. I’ll have that fixed by tomorrow night. Then we’ll give this thing a serious test drive.”

She quailed slightly at the word serious. Even though she had not yet let her full weight rest in the saddle, she could already tell that it was going to be a worse experience than she had yet suffered.

The next evening, she looked at the completed saddle with a mixture of curiosity and fear that tied her stomach into a hard knot. It was lovely to look at. The wood had been shaped and sanded so that the edge against her crotch had about the same radius as her little finger. As well, the maple had been oiled and its prominent grain gleamed like a piece of fine furniture. But it was also humiliating to look at because she knew that the irregular curve was a perfect representation of the shape of the most intimate part of her body. In the curve, she could recognize the base of her mons pubis, her vulva, perineum, and anal crease with a slight bump for her rectum, extending right up to the end of her coccyx.

If a stranger looked at it, would they know what they were seeing?

“We have some things to discuss. Please mount the horse.” Trevor’s voice was soft, but unyielding.

She realized that he would have been looking forward to this moment all the time he was planning, building, adjusting, and finishing the ‘saddle’. He must have something specific in mind for her.

She stripped off her jeans, tee shirt, and underwear, buckled the handcuff belt around her waist, stepped in the stirrup, swung her leg over the saddle, and, for the first time, settled her full weight into it.

Her first impression was that it was not as bad as she had feared. In fact, because her weight was distributed over a much larger length, it barely hurt at all compared to her previous experience on the horse. She confidently buckled the straps about her legs – that was a little more difficult now because she had considerably less freedom of movement – and then pulled the reigns until hidden weight fell and the stirrup was snatched up out of reach.

About the time she finished clicking her second wrist into its handcuff, she realized that her first impression about the saddle being less painful than riding the wedge bareback was wrong. It only took a minute for the saddle to begin working on her. Under the inexorable pressure of her own weight, the curve of the saddle edge was pushing hard into her pussy; her labia were being crushed against her legs. Worse, a significant amount of her weight was resting directly on her clitoris and she could not shift her position even a millimeter to get relief.

At the other end, the slight bump that was pushing against her asshole now felt like a tiny relentless fist. It was not so much a feeling of penetration – it was not large enough to actually penetrate – as a feeling of inexorable pressure such as might be caused by severe constipation.

She pulled at the handcuffs, but could not reach anything that she might use to relieve some of the weight.

She whimpered as the pain increased rapidly.

She kicked her legs against the straps that restrained them and had to muffle a scream. Even the slightest movement of her legs added to the pressure against the most sensitive parts of her anatomy and multiplied her pain

“How long?” she asked though gritted teeth.

Trevor glanced carelessly at his watch. “A few minutes. I don’t know. I didn’t bother timing you.”

“What do you want?”

“I want you to talk to me.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“We’ll chat about that soon, but not right away. I don’t think you’re quite ready yet.”

“I’m ready. I’ll say anything,” she gasped. “Just tell me what to say.”

“We’ll talk when I get back.”

“No!” she shouted at his back as he walked out of the room. “Don’t leave me. Please.” Her voice dropped to a whine. “Please stay with me. Please.”

Her pleading was wasted. He was already gone.

The pain in her crotch rose to a level of intensity that she had never imagined; her clit was a button of pure white-hot agony by the time he returned.

“How long?” She had to struggle to speak.

He shrugged. “A few more minutes. Do you want to talk now?”

“Yes. Please let me talk. What do you want me to say?”

He sat down on the couch and looked up at her. “I want you to be honest. I want you to tell me a secret. A true secret. Something that you have never told anyone else.”

“Oh, God. I don’t know. I can’t think. This thing is killing me. Please. Ask me something specific. Any question. I’ll answer. Ask me how I lost my virginity. I’ll tell you that,” she offered.

“That’s not a secret,” he scoffed. “You let your first boyfriend do you after the Christmas formal during your senior year of high school. You already told me that.”

“I didn’t tell you any details.”

“You would have told me the details if I’d asked. I wouldn’t have had to torture you for them. I want to know something that’s really secret. Something that you’re ashamed of. It has to be something that would horrify you if I passed it on to anyone else.”

“I can’t think of anything like that.”

“I can wait until you do.” He picked up a book and began flipping through the pages.

She began to cry. Tears slowly welled over her lower lids and soon began trickling down her cheeks. “This hurts so much. I can’t stand it any more. Please let me go. Please. I’m begging you. I’ll give you a blowjob. I’ll spend the rest of the night giving you one blowjob after another. Please.”

He looked up from the book. “I’d like a blowjob all right. But I’m not letting you down until you tell me your most shameful secret.”

She pulled ineffectively at her handcuffs. “Please.”

“Your secret.”

“Okay. Okay.” She shut her eyes tight and said, quickly, “I got V.D. once. Syphilis. I was in my third year of university and I’d gone to a party with a guy I didn’t know very well.” She groaned in pain and paused, before continuing. “I was seeing some guy, Brent, casually, but never made him any promises so I told myself that it was all right to go out with other guys once in a while. Richard was this handsome dude that I’d seen around.” She whimpered and paused again to gather enough strength to continue. “I wasn’t all that hot looking so I never thought that he’d noticed me until, out of the blue, he asked me to go to a party with him. I found out later that he was telling his buddies that he was going to make love to every girl in Weber’s seminar on the Sociology of Human Sexuality so I was just another item on his shopping list. Anyway, I didn’t know that when he asked me out. I thought maybe he was entranced by my sparkling personality.” She grimaced through her pain, an attempt at a smile. Brave girl. “Oh, God, this hurts. Anyway, to make a long story short, I was flattered and pleased to go to a party with such a hunk on my arm. He didn’t have much of an approach to seduction. I think his exact words were, ‘Want to get it on?’, and I figured that I owed him some consideration so I let him fuck me in the back seat of his car after we left the party. He was a lousy lover. Two weeks later, he called and told me that he’d just been diagnosed with the syph so he was calling all the girls that he’d fucked recently and telling them to get checked. Sure enough, I was one of the lucky recipients. I couldn’t have sex for a couple of weeks while I took the antibiotics. And that was that. I’ve never told anyone before. So please, please let me down from here.”

He looked at the tears that were flowing freely down her cheeks.

“There’s more. I want to hear the whole story.”

“No. I don’t have any more secrets like that. Nothing nearly as bad. I told you what you asked. Please let me down.”

“Not until I hear the whole story. What’s the rest of it?”

“Please. There is no more.”

“Yes, there is,” he cajoled. “Come on now. You’ve got most of it out. Give me the last little bit. The part that you’re really ashamed to tell me. Get that off your chest and you’ll feel a lot better. I want to stop the pain as much as you do, so just come clean and let me release you.”

“No. Please unlock me.”

“Yes. Come on.”

“I can’t.”

“Let me know when you can.” He picked up the book and began leafing through it again.

She tried to rock backward to take some of the pressure off her clitoris, but only succeeded in hurting her rectum more. She groaned pitiably.

“I didn’t tell him,” she shouted.

“What?” Trevor looked up from the book.

“I didn’t tell Brent. As soon as I was diagnosed with the syphilis, I was so ashamed that I called Brent and told him that I couldn’t go out with him any more. I didn’t tell him why. He wasn’t that upset, we both knew that we weren’t in love with each other. But I felt like such a slut, going out with someone else behind his back and getting infected with a venereal disease that I chickened out and never told him that I had the syph. That I might have given it to him, too. I was a total coward and, for all I know, he might have got it from me and never got it diagnosed and died of it. Oh, God. I’m so sorry. I should have told him. I should have had more guts. I’m so sorry.” Tears were flowing freely down her cheeks and dripping off her chin.

“Where is he now?”

“Brent? I don’t know. I never spoke to him again. That was four years ago. He could be anywhere. Please let me down. I’ve done what you asked. I’ve told you the most terrible thing that I ever did. Please. The pain is terrible.” She was sobbing so loudly that she could barely get the words out.

“I’ll let you down as soon as you make me a promise.”

“Anything. Whatever you want. I want to give you a blowjob. Okay? It’ll be great. Let me down and I’ll give you the best blowjob ever.”

“No. That’s not it. You have to promise me that you’ll find Brent and tell him the story that you just told me.”

“What?” she shrieked.

“You heard me. You’ll find Brent and you’ll confess and you’ll make sure that he got proper treatment and you’ll ask him to forgive you.”

“I can’t do that,” she howled.

“Then I can’t let you down.”

“Please. Have mercy on me. Please.”

“Have mercy on Brent. Find him and tell him everything.”

“Okay. Okay. I’ll do it. I’ll tell him everything. I’ll make it right.”

“And you’ll record the phone call and play it for me.”

There was a long pause while Cindy’s sobs filled the room. “Okay. I’ll record the call.”

“Good. I’ll find out how to patch a recorder into your phone. You can try to find his number, but don’t make the call until I’ve got the equipment set up.”

“Okay.”

He walked to the rear of the horse and plucked the handcuff key off the hook.

As soon as her hands were unlocked, she pushed herself off the saddle as best as she could and held herself up while he unbuckled her legs and lowered the stirrup.

She spent the next half hour naked, curled up on the sofa with her head pressed to his chest, soaking his shirt with her tears.

He liked that even better than getting a blowjob.

The next day, Trevor found a device at Radio Shack that fit between the phone and the wall socket and would record calls to her computer. He showed her the device and explained how to use it. He had her start recording all her calls just to make certain that it was working properly, but let her erase them without asking to listen to them. There was only one call that he needed to hear.

He waited for three days before asking her if she had found her former lover, Brent.

She said that she had been unable to find him.

“Please mount the horse.”

She began whimpering immediately. “Please, no. I’ll try harder. Give me another chance to find him. Please.”

He was implacable. He waited silently while she undressed, buckled the handcuff belt about her waist, and climbed into the saddle. She began crying almost immediately. “I’m still sore from the last time. I need time for the bruises to heal,” she sniffled.

“It’s supposed to hurt,” he replied, coldly. “What’s Brent’s last name?”

“Kovacks.” She spelled it out and he wrote it down.

“How old is he? Where did he live before university? What was his major?” He spent a few minutes soliciting as much information from her as he needed. She sobbed her answers to his questions, one at a time.

Finally, he said, “I’ll be back.”

She suffered agony, straddling the horse while listening him clicking on her computer in the spare bedroom.

To her, subjectively, it fell like hours passed, but it was only six minutes on his watch when he returned with a piece of paper in his hand. “You didn’t try very hard to find him. His number’s listed on 411.com. There’s only one ‘Brent Kovaks’ in the state and he’s living in your Brent’s hometown so, unless he’s named after his father, it’s got to be him.”

“Okay. I’ll call him like you want. Let me down. Please.”

“First, tell me the truth. Did you try looking for him? Did you even type his name into Google.”

She moaned. “I was going to do it today. I’ve been busy. I’ve been meeting with my thesis supervisor every day this week. I’ve got to get my proposal done by the end of the month and he’s not giving me much help.”

“While I’ve been waiting for you all week, you didn’t even try to do what you promised,” he stated flatly.

“I’m sorry,” she sniffled. “I’ll be better from now on.”

“You sure will. And just to make sure that you remember to keep your promises, you’re going to ride that horse for another twenty minutes.”

“No!” she shrieked. “I can’t last that long. I’m in agony.”

“Next time, you can save yourself a lot of pain by doing what you promise promptly.” He looked at his watch, then said, “I’ll let you down at four twenty-five. That’s a promise and I keep my promises.”

“You bastard!” she screamed.

“Oh, dear. You shouldn’t have said that. I don’t like to be insulted. For that, you’re going to ride your horse for another twenty minutes again tomorrow evening.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. Please. Have mercy. I’m in agony. A person doesn’t mean what they say when they’re hurting this badly.”

He shrugged. “I’m not hurting, so I do mean what I say. Tomorrow you’ll take another twenty minute ride. I just hope you learn your lesson. From now on, if you can’t say something nice to me, keep your mouth shut.”

For the next twenty minutes, he tried to ignore her sobs while he read a little Kafka.

When he finally let her off the horse, she fell to her knees, clutching her poor tortured pussy with her hands.

The next day, every time she looked at the horse standing in her living room, she moaned in fear of the pain that was coming. At seven o’clock, Trevor ordered her to mount her horse. He would never understand the courage that was required for her to comply. But comply she did. She was writing a proposal for a thesis on the effects of public debate about torture on social norms and allowing herself to be tortured was giving her insights that she would get in no other way.

Her entire crotch was already bruised from the previous day’s mistreatment. It was so tender that she began screaming as soon as she put her weight on the saddle.

Twenty minutes later, her entire chest was soaked with her tears.

Even after the stirrup was lowered, Trevor had to help her put her dismount; she did not want to move even the little bit that would be required to push her foot into the stirrup and shift her weight onto it.

Again, she fell to her knees, clutching her crotch.

Trevor said, “I’d like a blowjob now. Will you give me one voluntarily or do I have to put you back in the saddle to get one?”

She whimpered and scrambled to service him before he made good on his threat.

He was already as hard as hickory and came in her mouth in record time.

Torture definitely had an upside.

“Brent? This is Cindy Crouse.” Her voice echoed from the computer speakers and Trevor nodded in satisfaction.

“Cindy?” the strange man’s voice replied. “God, it’s been years since we spoke. How are you?” He sounded happy to hear her.

“I’ve been fine. How about you?”

“Couldn’t be better. I’ve been selling home and auto insurance since graduation. It’s a good job. How about you?”

“I went to graduate school. I’m about halfway through my doctoral program.”

“Hey, that’s terrific. You always liked school.”

“Yeah.” She paused, then said, “There’s something that I’ve been meaning to talk to you about for a while. Something that I should have said years ago.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah.” She took a deep breath. “You remember when we broke up.”

“Sure. That’s not something that I’m likely to forget any time soon. It was… Well, it was a surprise. Let’s put it that way.”

“I know. But there was a reason for it. I wasn’t exactly honest with you. I’d met another man and went out with him on a date.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. I should have told you about it at the time, but I didn’t.”

“I see.” There was a pause at the other end, and then he said, “I know that we weren’t like engaged or anything. Not really committed. But I thought that we were at least a little bit exclusive. I wasn’t going out with other women.” He sounded hurt when he said that.

“We were exclusive. I guess we would have called it ‘going steady’ if we had been a little younger. I felt like I was cheating on you. It was just that once, but I shouldn’t have done it. I’ve felt bad about it for a long time. I won’t try to make any excuses. It was my mistake. Purely my mistake. I’m sorry.”

“Oh. Well, you should know that I’m married now. I have a wife and a baby on the way.”

“That’s great,” Cindy replied. “Really great. Congratulations.”

“Yeah. Well, it’s been nice talking to you.”

“Wait. Before you go, there’s one other thing that you should know.”

There was a long pause, then Brent said, “You’re not going to tell me that I got you pregnant, are you?”

“Oh, no. Nothing like that. As near as I know, your wife is having your first child.”

“Okay. That’s good to know.”

“No. There’s something else. The guy I went out with that one time?”

“You mean the one that you cheated on me with?”

“Yeah. Him.”

“Did you marry him?”

“No. I never saw him again. He wasn’t much of a man. You were the better man by far. I knew that from the beginning.”

“Okay.” He left the word hanging, waiting to hear what else she had to say.

“Well, he was quite a player. I found out later that he gave me syphilis.” She rushed the last words in her haste to get her confession out.

“What?”

“Syphilis. He gave me syphilis.”

“Oh.” He paused. “I don’t know what to say about that. I’m not happy to hear that you cheated on me, but I don’t think you deserved that. Are you all right?”

“Oh, yeah. I got it treated right away. I’m fine.”

“So why are you telling me all this now?”

“I… I should have told you at the time. I’m calling to apologize. I’m so sorry.”

There was a long pause while Brent digested the information, then he said, “Wait. I get it. You think you might have given it to me. Is that it? You kept sleeping with me after this jerk gave you syphilis and you could have passed it on to me but you never bothered telling me? Is that it?”

“I’m so sorry. I was a coward. It was a shameful thing to do. I’m so, so sorry.” She began to cry.

He heard her sobs. “Are you crying about it?”

“Yes,” she admitted.

“Well, don’t cry. I’m all right. After you dumped me, I started going out with another woman. You probably don’t remember Lucy Cho. I broke up with her when she told me that she had syphilis. I always thought that she was the one who gave it to me. She had a reputation for being an easy lay. But now that you’re telling me that I probably already had it, and it was probably me who gave it to her, not the other way around.”

“I’m sorry,” Cindy sobbed. She was beginning to sound like a broken record.

“You should be apologizing to her. She was the one who had the guts to tell me that I had it. It just about killed her to have to tell me and then, when I dumped her for it, she stayed in her room and cried for like a week. I know because her roommate called me up and gave me blazes for being so insensitive.”

“God, I’m sorry.” Cindy could think of nothing else to say. “I didn’t mean to wreck your life.”

“It’s okay. I wouldn’t have been happy with her, anyway. She was too wild for me. You wouldn’t believe some of the things we did. It was fun in a really scary way, but if I’d stayed with her, I never would have met Eve. She’s a wonderful woman. I’ve never been happier.”

“I’m glad.”

“Me too. You know, you and me? We were never going to make it. We would have been miserable if we’d tried to stay together. It would have been worse even than if I’d tried to stay with Lucy.”

“I’m glad that you found someone better than me,” Cindy sniffed, a touch of sarcasm breaking through her tears.

“Me, too,” Brent replied in all sincerity.

“I hope you have a good life.”

“You, too, Cindy. You too. If you ever need insurance, let me know. Otherwise, I don’t need to hear from you again.” There was a click as he hung up the phone.

Trevor looked at Cindy. “Well, that was quite a call. Talk about heavy life experiences. How do you feel?”

“Better,” she admitted. “It’s a load off my mind knowing that everything turned out well for him. I don’t have to wake up in the middle of the night any more worrying that I’d killed my first real boyfriend by giving him the syph.”

“Good.”

“Also, in a way, it’s only fair that I gave him a chance to shit on me a little. It feels like the books are balanced.”

“Do you think that he’d want you to ride your horse for fifteen minutes, just so that you could feel some of the pain that he felt when you dumped him?”

She did not say a word, just began crying quietly and peeling her clothes off with trembling hands.

After her fifteen minutes had passed, Trevor told her that he would only release her if she agreed to give him a first-rate blowjob.

She didn’t hesitate even for a second. Big, sloppy blowjobs were becoming routine. She was learning to be a first-rate cocksucker.

That night in bed, as she snuggled in his arms relaxing into sleep, she said, “You’re going to have to think of something a lot more distasteful for me to do. Just sucking you off is becoming too easy for me.”

Trevor fell asleep thinking of distasteful sex and coming up blank. Most of the things that he thought would disgust her would disgust him as well. He wasn’t about to put himself through anything unpleasant just to make her as unhappy as she wanted to be.

Cindy had been riding her horse for a few minutes and was moaning in pain. “What do you want from me?” she asked. “Just tell me and I’ll do it. Riding this thing doesn’t get easier, you know. It gets worse every time.”

Sadly, he had not thought of anything to demand from her that was worse than a blowjob. He had only mounted her on the horse because it had been a week since the last torture session and he knew that he was supposed to keep her constantly fearful of the horse.

Now that she was up there, suffering again, he had to come up with some rationale for doing this to her. “Just be patient, you’ll find out soon enough.”

She whimpered loudly and said, “Please tell me what you want. Really. I’ll do it. Anything you want.”

He felt a twinge of pity for her. He had to come up with something soon so that she could agree and stop the torture. Suddenly, a brilliant idea flashed into his brain. “I’ll tell you what. Sue and Saul are throwing a Halloween party next Saturday night. It’s a costume party so you’re going to dress up special for it.”

“How special?” she gasped through her pain.

“You’re going to dress up like a hooker. I mean you’ll be the world’s most obvious streetwalker. False eyelashes and bright blue eye shadow and eyeliner that’d make Cleopatra blush and lipstick the color of ripe cherries. Hair bleached blonde and giant cheap earrings. And super high stiletto heels and fishnet stockings and a miniskirt so short people can see the ends of the garter belt straps and a tube top two sizes too small that shows your belly all the way up to your ribcage and no bra. And, after everyone’s arrived, you take me into the bathroom, or find a quiet corner in the back yard or find some other place in the house. And that’s where you get down on your knees and give me the perfect whore’s blowjob.”

“I can’t do something like that in public,” she screamed. “Everyone’s going to know me at the party.”

“Yup. And you’re going to look and act like a hooker because if one person, just one person, asks you what your costume is supposed to be, then you’ll have failed and you’re going to be stuck right back up on your high horse for the rest of the night.”

She dangled quietly across the wedge for a minute, thinking about what it would be like to dress like a whore in front of all her friends and colleagues. For years she had deliberately worn shapeless, sexless clothes to the university to prove to everyone that she was nobody’s sex object. “I can’t do it,” she insisted. “I just can’t do it. Ask me for something else.”

“You can do it. You can do it or you can keep riding that cock horse until you get to Banbury Cross. Either you go to Sue and Saul’s party looking and acting like an absolute whore or you ride that horse until four o’clock.”

“Four o’clock,” she wailed. “That’s three hours away. I can’t stay her that long.”

“It’s three hours and seven minutes, to be exact,” he replied, checking his watch. “And you don’t have to stay up there for that long. You can get down as soon as you promise to play the hooker at Sal’s Halloween party.”

“I can’t promise that.”

“Then you can stay up there for another three hours and seven minutes.”

“That’s too long.”

“You’re right. That is too long. You could suffer permanent injury. You know that you can’t keep riding the horse that long, so you may as well save yourself a lot of pain and agree to my terms right now. You have nothing to gain by waiting.”

“Let me know when it’s four o’clock,” she said flatly.

She lasted for almost an hour. Her suffering must have been intense. Trevor was amazed by her unwillingness to play a hooker at a costume party. He would have thought that it was no big deal – that she would have agreed to his terms right away. Clearly this was something that she desperately did not want to do.

But eventually the unrelenting pain made her more desperate to get off the horse than to avoid public humiliation.

“I’ll do it,” she shrieked in the end. “I’ll do it. I promise. Just let me down. Please. Let me down now. Please.”

He let her down.

That night she made love to him with exceptional enthusiasm.

He didn’t see how she could do it; her crotch had to be sore from the afternoon’s activities. There was no understanding women. Or at least for him, no understanding Cindy.

On Saturday night, Cindy let Trevor have the bedroom and she changed in the spare room, the one that she used as an office.

He had spent a long time pondering possible costumes. What would be the appropriate escort for a hooker? His first thought was pimp, decked out in purple jacket, gold chains, patent leather shoes, and a fedora, but that was wrong. She was to service him, not work for him servicing other men. Then he thought he would dress as the classic medieval torturer, garbed in a black hood and wearing a whip on his belt, but that was wrong, too. He was only her torturer at home, not in public. Finally, he realized his true métier. He was her devil. His job was to bring a little corner of hell into her world to make her suffer for her past sins and to force her to sin some more. That was the role that she had imposed upon him and, tonight, he would look the part. He was the devil, complete with red horns and a long tail, who had driven her to prostitute herself for his amusement and who would be happy to slake his lust in her.

His costume was understated; a business suit with a long red pointed tail poking through a hole in the seat and hair neatly parted in the middle with small red horns poking through his coiffure. A neat black goatee, mustache, and eyebrows that rose high at the outer tips gave him a nicely sinister look.

When she finally emerged from her own room, her costume was as over-the-top as she had promised: pink fake leather micro-skirt too short to cover the tops of her black fishnet stockings; tight pink blouse tied at the waist that left no doubt she was wearing a black lace bra; and black stiletto heels so high that the balls of her feet barely touched the floor. He recalled that he had specified a tube top, but he liked the blouse better. She had left it completely unbuttoned and was held closed only by being tied at the bottom of her rib cage, not only leaving her entire midriff bare, but also exposing the center of her black bra almost to the edge of her nipples. And the material was sufficiently transparent that he could see the lace pattern of the bra underneath.

Her hair was bleached blonde and had been teased into a loose haystack that was piled high above her garishly made-up face. Her lips were ruby red and her eye shadow sapphire blue. Thick eyeliner made her eyes look as big as saucers and a generous application of rouge made her look like she was suffering from a high fever.

She was chewing gum with open-mouthed enthusiasm that drew his eye right to her mouth where he could see the tip of her tongue darting around behind her open lips. He could not help but imagine those lips wrapped around his cock while her tongue tickled it fiercely. He was sorely tempted to forget the party and stay home, letting her suck him right here for the rest of the night.

But she looked so perfect, he had to show her off to her friends and colleagues.

“Want to party, you devil, you?” she asked.

He was thrilled that she was getting into the spirit of the event. “You’re going to blow some minds tonight, dear.”

“I’m going to blow your cock tonight, mister,” she answered and led him out the door.

The party was in full bloom by the time Cindy and Trevor arrived. Music was playing, but not too loudly – academics and preferred to hear themselves talk – and the acrid odor of grass wafted from some back room.

He let Cindy walk through the door before him, not to be a gentleman but because he wanted to watch the reaction that she caused when she entered the room. To sharpen the effect, he hung back a few paces so that she was entirely inside the house before he appeared at the door.

He was satisfied to see that most of the men and women in the room had turned to stare at Cindy. The first expression to flash on the faces of the men was lust, the women, disdain. This was immediately replaced by shock as people realized that the tastelessly-dressed whore in their midst was Cindy Crouse, the self-assured feminist graduate student who had written research papers decrying the exploitation of women in assorted ways. Only after she had traversed the room and begun nodding and greeting people, did they start intellectualizing and complimenting her on the ironic statement that she was making to emphasize the tragic circumstances of workers in the sex trade.

But Trevor could see that the initial reaction of lust and disdain still lurked beneath the intellectual veneer that the academics were erecting as quickly as they could speak. No matter how educated, people were creatures of their biology. Men remained men and women remained women and sex was biological dynamite.

As he followed her around, he could hear the lust that men were expressing through endless blunt innuendo, simple-minded double entendres, and false irony.

“Well, Cindy, I see you’ve finally figured out what graduate studies are all about.” Fake snicker.

“I always knew that you know more about how to give a guy a good time than you let on.” False giggle.

“Maybe we can have our own party some time, just you and me.” Forced bray. That was the department chairman – what an ass.

“What will twenty bucks buy on the street?” Guffaw.

Trevor could hear a slight ring of hope underpinning each casually-phrased proposition and proposal. No man in the room could successfully hide the truth: that he wished that she would actually act the hooker in full rather than merely dressing the part. He had to give Cindy full credit. She could have used her position to cut these guys to ribbons, rejecting their crude advances by belittling their manhood, criticizing their appearance, or sneering at their clumsy phrasings, but she did not once insult anyone. For the most part, she parried their thrusts with comments about their own costumes and characters. “Gee, Mickey, what would Walt say about that?” or “I couldn’t take money from a hobo; I’m sure that you need every penny for your next meal.”

Trevor admired her self-restraint.

She did not stint on fulfilling her promise to attend the party. She could have dragged him into the bathroom within the first ten minutes, blew him, and then fled directly back to the safety of her own apartment. But, she did not. In large part this was because, once here and forced to face the ill-concealed base emotions of the men and women in attendance, she could not leave quickly. That would be interpreted as an admission that her choice of costume was a mistake. When beset by a pack of academic wolves, the only safe response is to be bold and brave. They will fall upon any sign of weakness like the ravening beasts they are.

If she failed to stay and prove that she was as tough as her costume implied, she would spend the next three years fending off one snide, underhanded attack after another.

It was a full two hours before she took her devil by the hand, leaned close to his pointed ear and whispered, “Follow me, John. We’ve got a business deal to conclude.”

He followed her upstairs, hoping that no one noticed the bulge that was threatening to burst open the zipper on his trousers.

She walked past the door to the main bathroom and into the master bedroom. There was a lock on the door that she used to secure their privacy. Trevor realized that, when she had excused herself to go to the loo earlier, she had taken the opportunity to scout the upstairs facilities. And that she had chosen this particular moment to drag him up here because she had been watching and seen that no one had gone up the stairs in the last few minutes.

As soon as the door was locked, she said, “I hope you brought money. This is going to cost you forty dollars and I get paid up front. Only a fool would give a john credit.”

She waited until he drew his wallet from his jacket pocket and handed her two twenties. It annoyed him that she had referred to him as a ‘john’ and that she was making him pay her, but he had to admit that he had put her in the role of prostitute and could not now blame her for acting her role too well. Besides, judging from the size of his erection, his cock wanted this degree of realism more than his mind would admit.

She tucked the bills into her bra, sank to her knees, unzipped him, wrapped her hands with their blood-red nail polish around his shaft, and began sucking for all she was worth. God, she had become a great cocksucker during the past couple of months. He almost fainted from pleasure as he gushed into her mouth. She was worth every penny of the forty bucks. He would have paid a hundred bucks for this service. Or more.

As soon as she stood up, she started chewing her gum aggressively and said, with deliberately fake sincerity, “That was great, mister. Look me up again next time you’re in the neighborhood. Just look for the red light and ask for Roxanne.” And she left the room.

Had she taken the gum out of her mouth when she had been blowing him? He thought not. She must have tucked it into her cheek, out of the way for the minute or two, when she needed to use her mouth for business. What a girl!

He waited in the bedroom for a few more minutes until his tumescence subsided to a decent level, then went back downstairs.

He was shocked when he saw Cindy again. When she had tucked his money – now her money – into her bra, she had left the tips of the two bills peeking out of her cleavage. Everyone knew that the money had not been there before and would infer that she had been paid for sex. People could not know if it had really happened or was just part of her act, but it was a brilliant touch. The other male graduate students and professors were practically drooling; the females in the room were unable to hide their feral snarls any longer.

Trevor could tell that Cindy was on the edge of laughing openly in their faces. These were the same people who had been tut-tutting about the exploitation of women by contemporary society for years. Now, coming face-to-face with the mere pretence of a sex worker, they were almost overwhelmed by their desire to exploit her and rabid in their eagerness to place themselves above her.

“Well, it’s time for me to get back on the street,” she announced to everyone nearby. “My night’s just beginning. Hope you all have a ball without me.” And she sauntered out the front door, her ass twitching and swaying beneath the tight faux-leather like two piglets in a bag.

Every eye in the place tracked every twitch.

Trevor rushed to catch up with her.

Someone called out, “Gotta run like the devil to keep up with that woman!” A couple of others brayed at the quip.

Outside, Cindy was laughing with a mixture of glee, bitterness, and relief. “What a pack of hypocrites. It’s so easy for them to theorize endlessly about the plight of sex workers, but put a hooker in the room and they’re about as compassionate as a Taliban vice squad.”

They did not make love that night. The next morning, when Trevor got out of bed, he found Cindy in the living room, sitting on the couch, staring at the horse. When she saw him, she said, “It’s the Devil’s horse,” then rose, grabbed his hand, and pulled him back into the bedroom for a half hour of some of the most satisfying sex that he had ever experienced.

From then on, they always referred to the wooden horse as “The Devil’s Horse.”

The next month fell into a pattern of torture on the horse once or twice a week on the excuse of forcing her to perform some sexual act for his benefit – usually oral sex or sometimes doggy-style. The rest of the time, she initiated love-making.

The torture on the horse tended to be brief – a few minutes most times, never more that ten minutes – because she began begging for release and offering to do anything he wanted as soon as she felt the pressure of the saddle against her crotch.

His requests for sex tended to be unimaginative. Even though he was certain that he could have forced Cindy to accommodate any request – had, in fact, been explicitly invited to do so – he was not interested in trying the more outrageous sexual variations that were described in sex manuals. He only added the doggy-style sex because he needed to do something to her besides demanding blowjob after blowjob and she mentioned that she found kneeling down or bending over to offer her backside to him humiliating. Also, she never came in that position, so it satisfied her requirement that he torture her only to obtain satisfaction for himself.

The love-making that she initiated was more interesting. Before she introduced torture into their relationship, she made love to him about twice a week on average, mostly at his request. Now, though, she was asking him for sex daily; and more than once on some days. And, she was much more enthusiastic and less inhibited in bed now. She frequently added oral sex to her foreplay, not just kissing and sucking his dick, but also his nipples and balls. She insisted on trying different positions, often putting herself on top. And she was as likely to want sex in the kitchen, bathroom, or even in his car as in the bedroom. As well, she was vocalizing noticeably more loudly during sex now, not just moaning, but screaming and shouting words and phrases – often earthy, blunt language that had seldom passed her lips before.

And, whereas before she had only been orgasmic about half the time, now she had an orgasm almost every time they made love.

There was fallout from the Halloween party.

Around the end of November, she explained that the personal dynamic between her and the members of the faculty had changed. “I’ve read claims by some strippers and prostitutes that they enjoy a position of power over their clients. Like almost everyone else in academia, I was quick to dismiss those statements. We would shake our heads and say ‘tsk-tsk’ and agree with each other that the poor women were so badly subjugated by the male power structure that they were incapable of seeing how powerless they were. How arrogant is that? To decide that we are so smart and the sex trade workers so stupid that we know what they are experiencing and they don’t. I’m ashamed to admit that I was ever such a patronizing asshole. Well, after just one evening of role-playing, I see the world in a rather different light. Now, if I want something, a meeting, signing off on a travel authorization, co-authorship on a research paper, whatever, every man in the department, from my thesis supervisor to the chairman is falling over himself to accommodate me. And the women? They can barely look at me. They’ll give me whatever I want just to get me out of their offices. It’s like everyone thinks of me as cultural nitroglycerine that could explode into unrestrained sexuality if I get bumped the wrong way. I’ve been sexed-up in their minds and they can’t unsex me again.” She grabbed her crotch. “There’s power in this pussy. More power than I ever dreamed. I’ve grabbed men by their fantasies and I can shake them senseless any time I want.”

He looked at her crotch and was inspired to mount her on her horse for a few minutes until she agreed to bend over the kitchen table and let herself get fucked from behind. He loved her powerful pussy. Just loved it.

A few days later, Cindy asked Trevor a critical question, “Do you like torturing me?”

Trevor pushed his spaghetti aside and looked at the wooden horse standing in the middle of the living room. “That’s a difficult question. I like making love to you. We make love a lot more now, so I like that. And I like the idea that sometimes I can have selfish sex, get myself off without worrying about getting you off, too. So, to the extent that torturing you gives me that, I guess I like it. Also, I like doing things for you and you’ve made it clear that you want me to torture you, so I do it. But, if it comes down to watching you suffer, no, I don’t like that. You remember when I made you tell me about how you mistreated your first boyfriend, Brent, and then made you call him and confess. Well, that wasn’t any fun for me at all. I only came up with that because I figured that you needed some kind of experience that wasn’t so erotic. Hurting you just to see you suffer and make you do stuff isn’t that exciting for me. Getting unlimited sex from you has been my real payoff.”

“So you won’t mind if I don’t want to be tortured any more?”

“No. I don’t mind,” he said, but he looked a little forlorn as he gazed at the wooden horse.

She smiled. “I’ll make you another promise instead. I promise that I’ll let you have selfish sex whenever you want it. All the blowjobs and doggy style that you want, within reason. ‘Within reason’ means that I still get regular sex with nice orgasms for me, too, more often than not.”

He looked happy with that. “Then I won’t miss hearing you whimper in pain.”

“Then it’s a deal.”

She felt like he deserved some kind of explanation. “My thesis is well under way so I don’t need to experience torture so frequently any more. More important, I’ve come to the realization that the games that we’ve been playing with is nothing like the real torture that political prisoners are suffering. You and me, we always knew that we had limits. There was no way to force ourselves beyond them. You would have had to force me onto the horse around the clock, would have had to disrupt my sleep cycles by waking me up in the middle of the night and forcing me to mount up. I couldn’t have taken that kind of real torture and would have refused. I don't have any illusions about that. Actually, a big part of my thesis is about misconceptions of torture in the public mind and I understand that a lot better now. Thank you.”

After that conversation, Trevor thought that he would never have to ask Cindy to mount her horse again. He was surprised to find that she wanted to keep the horse in her living room; and, even more surprised when every couple of months, she reminded him that she had never revoked her original promise by whispering in his ear, “I bet there’s something extra special that you’d like me to do for you. Something that I won’t be willing to do until I’ve had a good ride on the Devil’s horse.”

And she was always right. Every time he saw her mount her wooden horse, he was always inspired to think of something extra special that she could do for him. As he exercised his imagination more; he often found that he was surprising himself as much as her with his devilish ideas.

And she always let him know how much she loved him for it.