(10)
“Does this dress clash with my stripes, honey?”
“Covers up too much of them. Just go naked!”
“But I can’t go out like that!”
“I thought you didn’t want to go out tonight?”
“Can’t I change my mind?”
“Where did you even get this?” - of course the dress came off as the last few had before.
“Spending all my credits on skimpy nothings that don’t even look any good on you!”
“Well, assume the position! I’m in the mood for giving you some .... extra stripes!”
She knew of course where those stripes would be going!
Traan stepped back to take in her figure, as she presented herself, hands against the wall, back arched.
From her feet up to just over the knee, her skin was a dark brown hue, a bit darker than that of Lys. There was something almost purplish to it. Except for a series of small pale dots sprinkled up her calf that looked almost like a seam. And her big toes that were pale also. A pattern of thin stripes started above the knees, alternating light and dark, with the stripes getting broader until, about an inch below the crease of the buttocks, there was one last dark stripe about two fingers wide. Her butt-cheeks, that quivered nicely under the firm smack of his hand, were pale, quite rosy though by now. Along her spine she was dark again, with light spots following the rhythm of the vertebrae, and from that broad dark centerline, stripes fanned out that curved over to the front. Her arms were patterned like her legs – dark up to the elbows, then alternating stripes.
A collection of tools that came with the suite was spread out on the hovering table, none of them too severe, as she needed to be as good as new after six days of recovery.
Crops and floggers, rods and canes, ropes, cords, whips and paddles, clamps and ballgags and assorted gadgets widgets and doodads where he didn’t even know where they went or what they might be good (or bad) for.
Traan snapped his fingers and the table obediently sidled up to him so he could make a pick.
He chose a supple, flexible cane, a bit shorter than one might expect, probably so that it wouldn’t hit too savagely – after all if the girl was still marked when the next customer booked her, the proprietors would have to give a steep discount and then they’d send a repo man after him!
Thwack, Ow!
“What do you say?”
“Thank you!”
“And don’t forget to count if you ever want this to end! Twenty strikes!”
Thwack! “Thank you Sir! I’m sorry! Ummm… two?”
Thwack! “Keep your hands away! We’ll have to start over, miss!”
Thwack! “Owwiieeeee!” – “Owie!?! That’s not acceptable as a response! Also it sounds silly! And you forgot to count! We start over!”
Thwack! “ow! One!”
Thwack! “What did I say about the hands?”
“Oh please sir tie me up! I just can’t help it!”
He walked around her, striking the palm of his hand with the cane.
“Now you’re asking me for favors? What do I get in return?”
Running the cane over her cheeks, watching her shudder, then up the insides of her thighs, as she set her feet apart a little bit further, giddy with anticipation.
“I’ll… take ... ten more?”
“Fine with me!”
.
They’d been playing this game for a while. A game within a game.
She’s very good, he thought.
Worth her credits.
Of course he knows that she’s done things like this a hundred times, that she can take a lot more probably, and that she could very well keep her hands where he told her to.
But that’s not what the game is about.
She plays the innocence so well, of the naughty girl who’s getting punished for the very first time, who always got away before but now someone’s putting her in her place and that someone is of course him. That’s half of what you pay for, that she can be convincingly innocent and inexperienced.
You buy level 1 at Joy, it’s a bit sordid. Walk into the cubicle, pull the chain, a bell rings somewhere, wait until the girl gets dumped in through the chute and you have your way with her. The lighting dim and diffuse so you can’t even say later on exactly what she looked like, and that’s how they want it to be.
At level 2 you can sort of stagger home without completely hating yourself if you have any conscience. He’d usually booked level 3.
This level of service though, and when you’ve booked for three days, it comes with a narrative. Truth is, you might want to think you can, but you’re not going to be fucking non-stop for three days and nights especially once you’re past fifty decicycles.
The story can be simple and silly but it’s something to build on. A make-believe relationship for those days.
And of course he’d made up a story himself, right the very first moment he’d stepped into the facility. About being some miner who dug up rock trilobites and got lucky. That’s what she thought he was, and the lie was believable enough for her.
For the game they’d agreed to play though, he’d be an interstellar smuggler, which was of course what he’d been before he’d gotten banished to the orbital station, so he was pretending to lie when he was telling the truth – and that she didn’t know. Except of course he’d hugely exaggerate the scale of his deeds. Afer all they hadn’t even bothered to send him to Realignment!
She, of course, would be his girl, faithfully waiting while he was adventuring through the galaxy, but when he came back he’d find she’d been wasting his money, blowing through his credits for trifles and luxuries, flirting with other men and all that, so she’d been naughty, and needed punishing. Until she cried, then he'd forgive her and they'd make love. Maybe that was the other half of what you payed for, that it actually felt like making love.
And by the time they were through with that she’d make something else up that she’d ‘forgotten to confess’ and they’d start over.
They would get tired of course sometimes and then there’d be rest, and talking.
It wasn’t hard to notice that she would cautiously take the lead, testing out topics, and if there was something the client was comfortable with she’d let it go in that direction. She was used to serving high class, superconnected buyers, Prime citizens, so she’d be much more well-versed in conversation than he was. Actually the discussions he’d had with Lys helped him quite a bit; Lys who was obsessed with First Empire legends, and somehow girls in general seemed to be crazy for lore from the First Empire, he thought.
But there was a game within the game here too… she was in control, guiding the session but very carefully creating for him the illusion that it was him at the wheel. That was her skill. And that was what she thought was going on.
What she didn’t know of course was that he’d walked in with a crazy plan of his own.
So peel away another layer of the onion and he was in control again.
And he was going to make it up as he went along, fake it till you make it, and all that. He was pretty much betting everything on one card, and you could think of a thousand ways how it could go wrong. He’d just focus on the way it could go right. Then it would.
Obvious decisions only need a single good reason, if you come up with too many arguments for or against you’re just trying to convince yourself to not do anything and stay in your rut. That was his philosophy, though he wouldn’t call it that, philosophy was something people like Lys would be splitting their heads over.
Traan himself, he’d see himself as more of a straightforward guy.
When he got his hands on a new piece of equipment, he’d chuck away the manual and get right to work.
Lixuari came with her own personalized ‘Instructions for Use’ that had been loaded into his pad upon conformation of his booking. Of course he’d skipped the fine print, but did skim the ‘Quickstart Guide for First Time Users’, until his pad had buzzed to inform him, ’Cherished customer, your product is now available’.
The first bullet point on the checklist was, ‘How to verify the authenticity of your purchase’ which told him to look for her tamper-proof holo-tattooed inventory number, and make sure it was the same he was billed for, ‘to rule out any delivery errors or tampering with the product’.
He’d decided to skip that as there was no comparable girl on the planet anyway.
What he did remember from Quickstart was that whipping her and such, was all fine and well so long as she didn’t say ‘scrambled eggs’.
He’d forgotten though what she’d do to signal discomfort when she was gagged; that was what he was going to do if he got another silly ‘Owie’.
He summoned the floating table again, and picked up a length of rope, and once her wrists were firmly secured against the rings let into the wall he picked a nice flogger and they went at it again.