Natalie And Ruth: Student And Lecturer — A Tale Of Obsession free porn video

The summer break. Natalie is back home from uni.

In her room undressing for bed, she can't get the video footage she has just watched with Eva out of her head. Now she wonders about the blonde teenage girl; the one who had been the centre of it all, how gorgeous she looked as they strung her up and readied her for a thrashing.

And then those two equally beautiful girls, keen as terriers, given free rein with school cane and riding crop. And all for what? Merely depraved theatrics to titillate the licentious appetites of Lord Dammarti and his rich cronies.

Naked now, Natalie plumps up the pillows and eases herself onto the chilled surface of her duvet, stretching for comfort. She adjusts her hips, bucking them to propel herself further up the bed so that her pillows support her shoulders to give her torso the angle she needs. She draws back her knees and widens her legs, makes arches of them and imagines how her cunt might look to someone standing at the foot of the bed. Would it be blatant, as plain as day, that roaring centre of absence at the confluence of her silky inner thighs?

Of course it would. She is sodden down there, her cunt awash with her need. The thought of the beautiful blonde whose name was Rachel has driven her to this and won't let her be. The girl was still a teenager, Eva had said, just nineteen years old, two years younger than herself. She pictures the girl just as she was in the film, her arms drawn high by rope, her muscles straining from taking her weight. What a picture she had made as she hung there waiting for it all to begin, her pretty face soured by apprehension, her body athletic, yet feminine and soft looking perfectly ripe, good enough to eat, every inch. Then the caning and lashing began. The scratching and pinching. Those two girls with strap-ons fucking her, over and over again, front and rear.

Natalie cannot comprehend what drove the girl to give herself over to such humiliation. Why would someone so utterly beautiful — a girl whose looks could rob the world of all its bounties — allow herself to be the object of such debasement. Money talks, she tells herself. Eva had said the girls had been paid hundreds of pounds.

As she mentally replays the footage, she draws her knuckles lightly over her own chest, letting them skim her nipples. And the same action again, but this time scouring her breasts with her long nails. When the two buds spring to life, she pinches them spitefully, the hurt sending thrilling ripples of pleasure thought her body. And then with only one hand, returning to repeat the manoeuvre, this time plucking and twisting while her other hand goes searching for her aching clitoris, her fingers slathering the slick honey of her cum over and around the core of her yearning.

The memory of the girl named Caroline, naked and fabulous. How she had raised her cane and sent it swooping down to strike the girl Rachel. The thought of it fills Natalie with bitter-sweet longing. The way its slender length had bit into the girl's unblemished skin makes her wonder how it would feel delivered more cruelly to her own flesh. She decides that if ever she were to be thrashed like that, she would not want her persecutor to hold back. The strokes delivered to Rachel by those two girls in the film were quite measured, meant only to tease, the entire charade played out only for effect. She could see that plain as day. No, if she were ever to hang bound and helpless like that, she would want no skating around the edges of pain. Physical suffering would be an ameliorative, a cure-all for her inner turmoil, something to purge her of the guilt that plagues her, day after day.

Her wrist steadily rotating, unwavering, increasing the pressure in her fingertips until they are like Brasso wadding on silverware. Oh, what a shine. As she works herself, she imagines repeated strikes on her buttocks and how the blows might rid her of regrets, make her mind a blank and lovely space.

                                                    *****

Eva and Natalie are talking on the phone.

"Are we still on for tonight?" Eva asks her friend.

"I've been thinking," Natalie says.

"Really? That's so unlike you."

"Ha-ha. Funny-Funny. Not! I need to get something straight."

"Oh, what is it?"

"I was wondering . . . when we watched — you know ?"

"Looked like fun, don't you think?"

"You really got off on it, didn't you?"

"You know I did."

"Were you hinting —?"

"— I was hardly subtle."

"I need you to be cruel."

"I can do cruel."

"You understand why, don't you?"

"Because of Ruth?"

"It's what I deserve."

"So can you be at the warehouse by eight. I have a rope — and a cane just like Caroline's."

"Is there anything I should bring?"

"Just your lovely buttocks."

"And you want me to be like that blonde girl, right?"

"Am I asking too much, being incredibly weird?"

"If we're talking Weird, take a look at my life, why-don't-you."

Then a silence between the two friends, broken when Natalie asks:

"Do you have one of those strap-on-thingies."

"I have Mark here with me now."

"You call your strap-on Mark?"

"Don't be obtuse, Nat. Mark is a fellah?"

"What's he like."

"Oldish — but handsome. I've shown your photo to him, and now he's very keen to meet you. "

"So a stranger gets to fuck me while you whip me, is that right?"

"Pretty much what I had in mind." She laughs in spite of herself. "So do you want the part, or what?"

"I shall be fabulous, darling."

"And you don't mind Mark? I can tell him to do one if you're not keen."

"Why should I mind? It's ages since I've had a man's cock."

"Only polite to ask."

"Such a well brought up young lady. Bede would be so proud of his only daughter,"

"Wouldn't he just. One more thing —"

"— What's that?"

"I thought we could film it all?"

"That's asking a lot."

"No one will ever see."

"I bet Lord what's-his-name promised the same to those girls."

"But this is me, not him. I'll make it digital. Encrypted. So what about it?"

"Only if I can be Sylvia."

"I thought you were done with her?"

"I am. Just that Sylvia isn't done with me."

"It must be hard for you."

"Maybe tonight will be an exorcism."

"So, you'll do your hair? The Alice band, clothes? Everything!"

"I'll even recite some lines."

                                                           *****

Two years earlier.

Natalie's first evening on campus. She is in the Students Union bar with Andrea and Emma, her roommates from halls. The three girls are getting to know each other, lager and wine oiling their tongues in a mutual unpacking, a laying out of the stalls of their personhood for each other to browse. It is an uneasy sharing for Natalie, never sure how much to tell. She smiles nicely at all the right moments, laughs at Andrea's silly jokes as she tries to forget Eva's smile and last kiss, her mother's goodbye tears.

Emma is talking now, telling the others about her pony named Major, how she is heartbroken to be away from him. Natalie scans the room while half-listening to her new roommate. Her eyes settle on a group of girls at the bar, a striking redhead the focus of attention. The redhead seems old for a fresher, Natalie thinks as she stares. It is not just her shoulder-length dark red hair that is so much like Eva's that has drawn her eye, more because the woman has an air of certainty that Natalie finds compelling. A mature student, Natalie decides. The other girls are hanging on her every word, their eyes bright, their laughter spontaneous and full of pleasure from being in her company.

It is Natalie's turn to talk. She tells about her home town, the Cathedral, and how she sings in the choir. But she is distracted now, the face of the woman who looks like Eva repeatedly calls to her. She snatches another glance and is ambushed by eyes that pierce her soul. Two sniper shots straight to her heart.

                                                          *****

Five days later.

Early morning autumn sunshine as Natalie hurries across campus. She wants to change one of her modules and needs to speak to Doctor Manning. Emma has told her about Ruth Manning's module, how the academic's twentieth-century women's poetry lectures are famous for inspiring passion in her students.

Already ten minutes late, Natalie taps on Dr Manning's study door. A woman voice tells her to enter.

Ruth Manning is writing at her desk, and when Natalie peeps around the door she glances up. It is a moment when everything ceases to matter for Doctor Manning. Her eyes are ice on the surface of a river loosened by the undercurrent of a sudden spring thaw far upstream. But Natalie does not see the cracks forming, has no inkling of the effect her presence has on her future tutor. There is no premonition, no sense of foreboding. There is not an inkling of the coming debacle that will submerge both Natalie Atherton and Doctor Ruth Manning.

"Miss Plath. How good of you to join me at last," Ruth, says, her attempted casual snark is herculean as she desperately tries not to stare at Natalie's face.

Natalie is feeling foolish, embarrassed to be mistaken for another. But more than that, she feels her face flushing red, now recognising Ruth Manning as the redhead from the bar, the one she had exchanged glances with on her first night on campus. But now the woman's wild and fabulous hair is strangled tight, tied back to show her sharp yet delicate features.

"It's Natalie Atherton, Doctor Manning," Natalie says, becoming self-conscious under the academic's intense gaze. "It's my name." She pauses as if waiting for confirmation of her own selfhood before continuing. "That's who I am," she now says brightly, proud to set things straight — and then feeling idiotic for having declared her own identity quite so emphatically.

"Please sit down, Miss Atherton, and then perhaps we can finally begin."

Later, in Andrea's room, Natalie tells her friend about the mix-up, her cheeks flushing as she talks, now embarrassed to even think of it again.

"She was teasing you," Andrea says.

"Why would she do that — call me by another girl's name?"

"Surely others have remarked on the likeness?" Andrea says and waits for confirmation. Getting none, she joins the dots. "So no one ever told you how much you resemble Sylvia Plath?"

"Sylvia Plath? I've never even heard of her."

"Oh, you poor, sweet, darling child! Your Doctor Manning is going to gobble you all up," Andrea says, hamming up the patronising affection as she reaches out to gently touch Natalie's cheek.

"Quit it, will you," Natalie says, jerking her head to the side to avoid her roommates touch. "She's not my Ruth Manning. It really pisses me off when people try to make me look stupid."

"You mean people actually have to try?"

"Cheers for that, Andrea!"

"Don't sulk. You should have studied your prospectus?" Andrea says, losing interest now.

"I'm only doing the stupid module because Emma persuaded me."

"So you didn't read Professor Manning's résumé — the bit about her being the world's leading Plath scholar? I'm told darling-Sylvia is the only reason you lit-chicks sign up for Manning's courses. After all, she's the poet you all cream your knickers over, isn't she?"

"Not this lit-chick," Natalie says flatly, opening her laptop and tapping out a search.

So many images: Sylvia as a teen; Sylvia as a wife; Sylvia as a poet; Sylvia as a blonde bombshell; Sylvia as a divorcee. Sylvia as a mother. Natalie stares at one picture in particular. The poet probably in her late teens, her hair neatly bobbed and parted at the right while looking blonder than ever. There is a coy wariness in her eyes.

They're right, Natalie thinks. That could be me.

                                                                           *****

Doctor Manning's lectures. Natalie's growing obsession with Sylvia Plath. First the poems, their rawness stirring her own inner darkness, illuminating the gloom she has always shunned. And then Plath's life: her childhood, her time in New York, and then her coming to England.

During lectures, Natalie is unsettled by the covert glances Doctor Manning throws her way, those snatched looks that betray a hopeless longing. They disturb Natalie at first, but Ruth's eyes have an insistence that provokes fascination. In subsequent lectures, Natalie becomes reckless and takes a seat at the front of the auditorium. She is determined to catch Ruth's eye, return her looks fearlessly.

In the lecture hall, Ruth Manning reading lines of Plath with Natalie as her sole focus. Her gaze is unwavering, and a vortex of innuendo surges between student and lecturer. The secret intimacy blooming in plain sight is watered by Ruth's every word, nourished by the sunshine of each spoken line. There are secrets within the texts of Ruth's lectures that Natalie must decipher, occult meanings meant only for her.

Ruth's dangerous dark red hair, its shade so much like Eva's. At night Natalie remembers her girlhood friend, the secret kisses, the pretence of being a boy to please her. Their last night together. Now, Natalie in her bed alone, the images of Eva and Ruth become conflated, one becoming the other as her fingers work herself to completion.

Over autumn days, Natalie gaining insight after insight. She is convinced Ruth will be the light to illuminate the neglected corners of her mind, hoping she will reveal the darkest shadows as illusions. But then at other times, in moments of clarity, she dismisses her own inner melodramatics. She thinks them, like the girl-crushes of her adolescence, no longer worthy of her. She hates herself for entertaining the silly, fevered fantasies that she and Ruth might become more than student and lecturer.

Late November. Ruth asks Natalie to her house. She says she wants to discuss a recent essay. Natalie can hardly believe it, wonders if it is usual for a lecturer to invite a student to their home. She asks around, but no one admits to having visited Doctor Manning's house.

Natalie has three days to prepare herself. She spends hours on her laptop studying photographs of Sylvia in her Mademoiselle Magazine guest editor days, every detail scrutinised, makeup and clothes. Then shopping for what she needs. Trawling charity shops for that fifties chic.

A white short-sleeved top similar to the one Sylvia wears in that iconic image. A broad dark belt that emphasis her slim waists, her long skirt flaring fabulously at her calves. She already owns shoes that will pass for fifties vintage. She wonders if she should wear stockings and suspenders, but nearly doesn't bother, and then relents. She visits a hair salon and shows the girl the photo she has printed off the net.

Natalie has done what she can. Before she leaves her room, she stands before a mirror and becomes unnerved by what she has created. Smiling for herself — just like Sylvia would, she imagines — Natalie is reassured. Now she can make a statement Ruth will be unable to ignore.

Walking across campus wearing the heavy wool coat she got for a fiver from Oxfam, her hair protected from the bluster of wind and showers by a silk poker-dot scarf. The clatter of her heels on the paving stones make her self conscious, the late autumn wind snatching at the unruly hem of her skirt as she hurries on her way. Her eyes dart back and forth, from side to side, alert as a doe on a forest path. Please, God, don't let anyone who knows me see me dressed like this.

Ruth opens her front door. "Natalie! You're early." Then looking the girl over, "Oh-my-god! And you've dressed up for me. How lovely. But you really shouldn't have gone to all that trouble."

Natalie is blushing, Ruth Manning's sarcasm deflating her smug bubble.

Her essay lies flat on Ruth's study desk. Natalie scans the copious handwritten notes in green ink that clutter the margins as she sits waiting for Ruth to move beyond polite conversation.

Then Ruth is telling Natalie, "Your essay brims with insight. You have a keen mind. It is almost as if you have a direct line to the poet's soul."

Natalie responding, speaking words she hardly dares own: "Sylvia Plath has always fascinated me, Doctor Manning. She is why I signed up for your module. Ever since I was fourteen her poems have spoken to me, haunted me, even." She feels her chest prickly hot as she mouths the lies.

But Ruth has hardly noticed Natalie's discomfort. She is quite animated, her eyes sweeping the girl's face as her voice becomes passionate: "I like to think that our inner lives can manifest beyond the confines of our skulls, Natalie. Often our thoughts — especially our obsession — can take on a reality independent of our conscious will, manifesting in our everyday world in ways unforeseen. Your coming into my life is a case in point." She looks into Natalie's eyes with an unwavering intensity. "Have you ever felt that way, Natalie, that you are on the edge of something greater than yourself?"

Thinking fast, searching for something to please.

Natalie says, "Sometimes when I'm reading her words... It's as if I had written them myself somehow. It's so hard to explain!" She places her hand flat between her own breasts as she says, "I truly feel I am connected to Sylvia, Doctor Manning." A shiver of meaning chills her spine, and she winces wondering if she has gone too far. But even so, the corners of her mouth twist into a self-satisfied smile as she thinks, You're beginning to believe your own bullshit, Nat. "At times," she continues, "as I worked on my essay, it was as if Sylvia was guiding my thoughts."

Ruth is reading extracts of Natalie's essay out loud, praising a line of the text here, an entire paragraph further on. Natalie gets up from her chair, goes and stands behind Ruth, wanting to read her own words as Ruth says them aloud.

Oh, Christ! What are you doing? Somehow her fingertips have found their way into Ruth's lustrous, dark red hair, lifting strands and letting them flow down as thoughtlessly as if they were her own.

Ruth's voice falters. She coughs, gathers herself and then continues. "And here," she says, "where you say how this line brings together the previous..."

The stitching holding Ruth's composure together is coming undone. Her voice is growing ever more strained. Now Natalie brushes hair back from the woman's forehead and gently strokes the pale and freckled skin she has revealed. Ruth stops talking, sighs and looks up with eyes that say do you have any idea of the effect your presence has on me.

Ruth swings her feet round so that she faces the girl. She is preparing to stand up. A decision as grave as going to war. On her feet, she reaches out and gently cups Natalie's cheek in her palm. "Do you really want to ruin me, Natalie? Why have you dressed up like her?"

"I know how much you love Sylvia, Doctor Manning. I wanted to be her. Just for tonight, for you," Natalie says, her eyes as agent provocateurs daring Ruth to throw off the rule of self-censorship.

"This is so wrong," Ruth says, her eyes heavy with barely contained need.

"I thought you liked me — wanted me. I've seen the way you look at me from the podium in the lecture hall. And you do like me, don't you? I know that you do! So is wanting to please you so terrible?"

"It is often the most beautiful things that are the most terrible," Ruth says in a half-whisper, as if to herself.

Natalie wonders if Ruth is toying with her, her intense sincerity the vehicle for some coming snark to prick her bubble again. She scan's Ruth's face for hints and clues but sees no cruelty in those focused points of brilliance that were once her eyes; there is only the gravity of insistence, a weight of longing that captures her and draws her down into an inescapable orbit. Her thoughts are racing. Oh-god, Nat! What have you done?

No person's eyes have ever made her feel this way. She is unravelling under the focus of Ruth's desire. Just go, Natalie tells herself. Go now, this minute — before it's too late. There's still time. Think of the aftermath, all the crap that is sure to follow if you don't run away right now.

Ruth's hand remains against Natalie's cheek while the girl returns her gaze as she desperately searches for the right thing to say. She is thinking, thinking, thinking. And then the words have flown the nest. "And do you seduce all your students, Doctor Manning?" Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! Even so, a flare of jealousy is ignited by the thought it might be true.

"Not one — ever!" Ruth's disbelief and outrage. "How could you ever think such a thing?"

They are eye to eye, breast to breast, Ruth's lips inches from Natalie's, their exhaled breath stirring the air between them, mingling. Natalie anticipates the inevitable kiss as Ruth Manning's perfume settles around her, its dark, rich fragrance soothing her fears, suppressing all thoughts of consequences, delicious beyond any scent she has ever known. Then Ruth's right-hand resting in the small of her back while her left-hand takes hold of the hand that dangles by her side, fingers quickly entwining.

Ruth's kiss is a heavy weight's punch that sends Natalie's mind staggering back to its own far corner. She has never felt so desired, so precisely the focus of another's craving. She wants to gasp out loud, suck in air to fill her legs that are in danger of deflating. But she is determined not to swoon like a wilting girl in some cheesy romance. She pulls Ruth to her, holds her like life itself and sends her tongue to greet Ruth's as it begins to probe her mouth. This countering causes Ruth's tongue to waver, make a hasty withdrawal as Natalie's follows up, chasing the impertinent initiator back from where it came.

A scramble to undress. Ruth's passion overwhelming Natalie as her hands become twin feral creatures wrenching the girl's top up over her raised arms. Hurrying to unhook her bras, and then her lips kissing each newly exposed breast, saying how they are perfection. Ruth draws the half-naked girl tightly to herself and kisses her as if on the next breath she might melt away. Her tongue becomes rapacious again, begins its counteroffensive. It sweeps the length of Natalie's pouting lips before the final push, plunging deep into the girl's mouth where it remains to slip and slide, twist and curl leaving her desperate for breath, gasping like a spent athlete and breaking free.

Natalie's skirt undone, it falls to the ground. She feels ridiculous in just her pantie girdle, stockings and tottering heels. Ruth standing back to see what she has unveiled, hardly believing what she sees. "Oh, you sweet, sweet thing. Stockings too!" She kneels before Natalie and fumbles with garter clips, releasing the sheer stockings and peeling each one from its leg, kissing each painted toe when free of the nylon.

The pair naked on the leather couch, it's chilly cushions adhering to their warm flesh, the soft tanned hide creaking as they each jostle for advantage. There is no gentle petting, no shy tenderness. Girl and woman are in the grip of something atavistic. Both want to be cunt to cunt, tit to tit, mouth to mouth, thigh to thigh — all at once, joined in an unattainable singularity. But nothing can be agreed, both are yet too reticent to speak their minds. And so their bodies writhe, vie and twist uncertainly.

Ruth has gained the upper hand. She straddles Natalie, looks down on her as her hips begin their long succession of undulations, her cunt creaming Natalie's mons pubis, her lower abdomen, skating its pudgy softness, seeping joy until the girl's flesh is slathered with passion.

Advantage Doctor Manning! Natalie, from the depths of her subjugation, reaches up to squeeze Ruth's nipples, coaxing her into the self-loss of orgasm.

All night long in Ruth's bed, Natalie's body is worshipped by Ruth as devotee, a pilgrim at the shrine of some holy relic.

For Natalie, this is not like those shy and tender moments with Eva, the quiet fumblings and uncertain caresses. Ruth's desire for Natalie-as-Sylvia is absolute, her lovemaking unchecked, voracious, hands and lips a pillaging horde stripping her body of all resistance, all selfhood.

Ruth's mouth against Natalie's cunt, lapping up her cum like sweet prasad. Then Ruth's two hands slipped under Natalie's soft, plump buttocks, bunching and angling them and drawing them against her jaw so that her cunt's unctuous secretions can grease her jawline while her tongue licks the bud of Natalie's swollen clit.

After the storm of their sexual first sexual encounter, there is a night of mutual holding, entwining, limbs plaited, incessant gentle kissing. Natalie still cannot believe she found sleep that night. But she must have, for she awoke in the stilled darkness of a November morning alone in bed, the sound of Ruth girlishly singing to herself travelling up the stairs from the kitchen below, accompanied intermittently by the clattering of crocks and pans as she prepares breakfast. Natalie finds them such pleasing sounds that say all is well with the world.

In the weeks that follow, it is like an abduction. Of course, Natalie is still free to walk the streets, come and go to lectures, drink with her friends in bars and clubs, but her soul is no longer her own, now held hostage by Ruth's implacable obsession.

The Christmas break. Natalie lies naked and limb-tangled with Ruth on a bed of oceanic breadth. The pair are spending the holiday sequestered away in a penthouse apartment overlooking Morecambe Bay belonging to lecturer friend of Ruth's at Lancaster University. Beyond the window, unseen from the bed, the Lakeland hills fill the horizon, their peaks in the bright December light are snow-capped and beautiful. It will be ten winter days of Natalie as Sylvia; the pin-up Sylvia, the Ted-unsullied Sylvia.

In the months that follow, Natalie wants to believe she is loved by Ruth for the person beneath Plath's likeness. She cannot accept herself as the plaster icon into which Ruth has lovingly breathed new life.

— No! Not that. More than that. Natalie has become the magic circle that Ruth employs to summon the long-dead poetess. Months of spells and incantations, the gathering of magical paraphernalia during shopping trips to Manchester for vintage clothes that become ceremonial robes to be donned when reciting Plath's poems as invocation, those lines of verse chanted over and over into the depths of darkly erotic nights, each syllable electrically charged with passion.

Ruth is Natalie's voice coach, the girl is channelling Plath with Shakespearean solemnity. But it is never enough for Ruth. She is always demanding more from Natalie, pushing and pushing. Afternoons listening to old radio interviews, Ruth saying Natalie must get the voice just so. To Natalie, Plath's voice sounds too old, authoritative beyond her years. She has a dominatrix's voice, Natalie tells herself. She cannot equate it with the poet's image, the girl she holds in her mind.

Natalie incanting become the darkest necromancy. Those midnight recitals going off-script. Ruth naked, lazy on her bed with knees up and legs wide apart commanding Natalie as Sylvia to repeat, "I want to taste your cunt's 'red plush.'" Then ordering her to brush her hair back from her face, corralling the lustrous strands with ribbon-as-Alice-band to keep them from her lips before going down to taste what Plath might never have tasted.

Afterwards. Talking.

"This coming May, I'll be in London for a week. A big symposium.

"Symposium?"

"A chance for all us Plath Scholars to get together. I want you to come with me."

"You want to show me off, is that it? Be your pet on a leash!"

"Don't be like that, darling."

"It's how I feel sometimes."

"I thought you enjoyed our times together."

"But it's never me, is it? You don't even know me. It's only her you want, isn't it?"

"Come with me as you then: my beautiful Natalie Atherton.

That springtime at the symposium, Natalie in character on the podium, delivering her lines of "Daddy" as if it's nineteen-sixty-three. And then the cheering, the wildest applause and calls for more. Afterwards, Ruth introducing Natalie to Verity Tamsin, the academic's sultry Iberian darkness stirring a want in Natalie that is immediate, undeniable, undermining. Too late did Ruth realise.

The way Ruth watched when Natalie and Verity chatted about Verity's upcoming Ted and Sylvia, a tome that becomes notorious for its off-piste view of the unhappy couple. How Ruth Manning's soul seethed to see them so at ease with each other. In the weeks that follow, roles will flip. Ruth as guru no more, reduced to beggardom, emotional servitude.

Verity and Natalie and their secrecy, their snatched weekends. Ruth suspicious, growing needy. Demanding. Repulsive.

                                                                      *****

Driving through the night, Ruth's fateful journey to Verity's seaside bolt-hole. The early hours. Verity and Natalie naked in bed together quiet as mice, entangled in each other's arms, their minds honey hushed in the afterglow and exhaustion of lovemaking.

And then the commotion outside. Natalie thinking that it's a neighbour's domestic, none of their business. Then an insistent hammering on the door, and the dawning realisation, the shocking certainty. Ruth is out there screaming their names, demanding admittance. Verity, ignoring Natalie's pleading not to let Ruth inside, tosses on her robe and goes to face her rival.

The front door is open and the racket is suddenly louder. The swearing! Never once has Natalie heard Ruth swear. "Where the fuck is she! I want to see her. Tell me where the little whore is!" The sound of things thrown. The opening and banging of doors. Ruth in the hall outside the bedroom calling for Natalie to show herself.

Ruth's silhouette at the doorway. Verity behind her, pleading, "Ruth, please, we have to talk."

Ruth's twisted sadness when she sees Natalie sitting up in bed. The duvet is pulled high but not high enough to hide from Ruth the bare breasts she so loved to kiss, the rosy pink of her nipples.

Ruth walks to the foot of the bed with murder in her heart and disbelief in her eyes. Natalie sees Ruth's look of utter betrayal, how at that moment every drop of meaning is leeching from her life. She cannot hide her shame.

Afterwards, Natalie would ask herself, but surely she knew? Why did she drive eighty miles through the night just to confirm it with her own eyes? Perhaps she hoped against hope that she had misread the signs, that Natalie was away with other students from her halls, or maybe at a family get together.

Natalie had lied, had said she was going home for the long bank holiday weekend, said the words with glee in her heart, delighted in cleverness of her deception.

"Did you ever love me?" Ruth asks, tears filling her eyes.

"What! Like you loved me? Really! I was only ever Sylvia-fucking-Plath to you. Do you know how that made me feel!"

Verity mediating, "Ruth, please come into the lounge, and I'll fix you a drink," she says in a voice to comfort the bereaved. But Ruth turns and pushes Verity aside and is quickly through the door and out into the night.

Whenever she remembers the night, Natalie pictures what she never witnessed. Ruth's scramble through the dunes under the star-speckled inky sky, down to the beach where the waxing moon would have been low on the ocean's horizon. Natalie still cannot explain why she and Verity had not gone to look for Ruth when they realised she had not driven away in her car. Instead, they had talked while sipping gin, discussing what their future might now be.

Later the shame of knowing as they chatted Ruth had stood at the water's edge watching the incoming breakers. Then deciding, walk fully clothed into the breath-snatching waves, pushing through them gasping, on into the moon-silvered calm beyond the surf, eventually out to a depth, off her legs and swimming until exhausted and letting the water take her down, cover her in a shroud of deep, chilling silence.

It was two days before she and Verity learned of Ruth's death, her body washed up fully clothed five miles down the coast from where they said she had entered the water.

                                                                         *****

We're back where we started. It's two years later.

Natalie dressing for Eva just as she had for Ruth all those years ago. She should have got rid of theses clothes after the inquest. Now she looks at herself in the mirror and sees only Sylvia. The poems are already forming, unbidden, those lines practised hour after hour.

"... And a love of the rack and the screw.

And I said I do, I do.

So daddy, I'm finally through.

The black telephone's off at the root,

The voices just can't worm through... "

She applies magenta lipstick, tidies her eyebrows and thinks, Do I know you any better than I did the first time Ruth mentioned your name? In the mirror, Sylvia smiles back. It is a young girl's smile, an Ivy League American girl's smile, the one Natalie has practised time upon time. This is the smile that beguiled Verity on their first meeting, the smile of a girl full of expectations of life's goodness. Such a lie. Just like Sylvia, Natalie is old beyond her years.

The taxi drops her at the warehouse entrance of Minster Books. The metal door rattles as Mark raises it from inside. Eva is ecstatic that Natalie has arrived. She had feared her friend might get cold feet. Natalie has never seen her so happy, so hyped.

Natalie kisses Mark. Just a peck He's pushing forty. Still, not bad. Well preserved. Tonight his cock will be the emetic to purge her of her past.

Two video cameras, each positioned to Eva's specifications. A third, handheld. Eva showing Mark how to use it, telling him the angles she requires. Later she will edit the footage into a seamless wonder. Eva will cut and splice, transform raw footage into art.

Natalie and Eva undressing side by side, stealing glimpses of each other as their garments fall away. Natalie is shedding Sylvia item by item: blouse, skirt, shoes, stockings, pantygirdle, ditching the holy relics so adored by her dead tormentor, expecting metamorphosis. But it will not be enough, even naked the dead poet's essence still permeates her every pore. So now the lash will have to be her medicine. It is the one remaining psycho-antibiotic in her brain's pharmaceutical arsenal.

Mark and Eva have rigged things up. Everything makeshift. An old rope tossed over a beam. Mark tying boy scout knot to bind Natalie's wrists while inhaling the sweetness of her shower time scents, her hair fragrant with shampoo and conditioner.

Naked and cock-sure, Eva assumes the role of mistress, her breast firm and proud, her school cane's practising strokes flying through the dank cellar air as she circles Natalie whose arms are stretched taut by the cheap and grubby twine that cuts her wrists.

"They say you've been a bad girl," Eva says, running the tip of her thin cane down Natalie's chest, leaving pale tracks etched into this summer's tan. Every nerve in Eva's body is galvanised by perverse delight. She is intoxicated by the power she wields. All the entreaties of her girlhood are thrown to the wind. All those: You girls play nice now; Don't bite or scratch; Oh, be careful, sweetheart; That's not very lady-like, is it now?. This is what Eva has waited for all her life. The tightly wound coil of repression begins unwinding as she steps into the part she was born to play.

"Who says that about me?" Natalie asks, even though she is past caring.

"I ask the questions, bitch!" A single thwack bites the back of Natalie's thighs. Eva's first strike is not to tease; it is as unapologetic as her words.

Natalie, shaken by the cane's first sting, hisses her response. "Fuck-it, Eva! Oww! You piggin bitch!" The reality of pain is a wakeup call, her pride and flesh dealt a humiliating blow. She wonders if she was rash to agree to this.

Mark opens his mouth, begins his rebuke, "Hey, Eva, Steady on—

Thwack.

"Owww!" Natalie cries as she glares at Eva, nearly swears but bites her tongue.

"Shall we try again?" Eva says.

Silence.

"I said, shall we try again? The words you are looking for are, 'Yes, mistress'."

"Yes, mistress."

"Now, that didn't hurt, did it?"

"No mistress."

"Good. You're a fast learner. I like that in a slave."

"Is what they say about you true, bitch? That you've been a bad person?"

"Yes, mistress."

"In what way?"

The very worst kind."

"Do you want to confess how worthless you are."

"I can't."

"I'll try to help you then, shall I, little miss poet?"

"Oh, Eva! Please don't. Not so —"

— Thwack. "Shut up, bitch."

"Owww!"

"Did you make someone unhappy, sweetheart," Eva says with mock sympathy.

"You know I did."

Thwack! "That's not good enough, is it?"

"I tormented her."

"And now she's dead because of you and your selfishness."

"I never realised how much she cared for me."

"You drove her to it. You betrayed her love."

"Oh, god. I am so sorry. Please, Eva, make it better. Make it all go away."

"I can't be doing with your self-pity." She turns to Mark. "For God's sake, gag the evil little cunt, will you Mark."

Mark's fingers forcing the bunched nylon of discarded stocking into Natalie's mouth, and then the other stocking as a band stretched tight, a binding to girdle her head. Implacable as wire-ties, the fabric cuts into the corners of her mouth. There can be no appeal now. This will be her martyrdom.

Eva turns to Mark and says, "Would you like to sample her before I begin? Perhaps have a suck on her tits. Anything you fancy, really. She said it'll be okay."

Mark studies Natalie and wonders what depths of guilt she endures to seek out such a means to assuage its ache. He reaches out for her waist and runs both hands up her sides as if she is fully dressed and he a cop frisking her for concealed weapons. He weighs both breasts in his palms, wants to kiss her pretty mouth. But her misapplied stocking bars his way.

And so he runs his tongue along the slither of stressed of nylon as it cuts and distorts Natalie's face. He licks each lip, top and bottom, gently circumscribing a circle, around and around, tasting the magenta lip-gloss as if some sugary fondant. He tries to get his tongue beyond the nylon again, feels the rasp of micro-mesh as he sends it worming beyond the gagging fabric. But he finds not tongue, only the saliva-sodden fabric.

And so, instead, he kisses her neck, licks it over and over in long slow sweeps: one time, two times, three times. Her skin is garnished with a just discernable soapiness, a hinted fragrance so feminine and arousing. He relishes her flesh with lips, tongue and teeth, and then moving on, down to her underarms where the tang of her antiperspirant is bitter, its reek intoxicating him as he nuzzles and slurps. Her breasts next, spending moments with each, her pliant, stiffening nipples springing to life.

More kissing and licking, his arousal growing until he is in the grip of carnal frenzy. Sucking becomes nipping, and then his jaw as wide as a shark's, his mouth gorging on the abundance of her right breast.

Eva watches Mark's growing sexual frenzy while her words torment her captive.

"Man or woman, you drive them all fucking-insane, don't you, bitch!. What a slut you really are. How quickly you said yes when I told you about Mark." She stands behind Natalie and strikes her across the buttocks with a blow of such ferocity that it causes her hips to arch forward, her entire body curving improbably where it hangs. Her body rigid, she stoically endures the incessant crack of the cane on her haunches.

"Was it a shock when Ruth found you and Verity together?" Eva asks as she strikes again. Thwack! "Or had you planned it — to humiliate her?" Thwack! She turns to Mark and says, "Do you know what she did, Mark? Little Miss Innocent, here?" Thwack! "She left Ruth clues to find. Tell-tale titbits of her and Verity's affair. And then the cruellest hint: a letter from Verity telling of their weekend away, accidentally let slip from her bag to find its way down between cushions of Ruth's sofa."

Eve strikes Natalie again, three times in quick concession. Harder than before: Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! "Didn't you, you evil little bitch! Why didn't you just tell Ruth that you wanted out?"

The cane rises and falls. In her fucked-up head, Natalie relives the night of Ruth's death. I deserve it. I deserve it. I deserve it, she mentally repeats to herself, over and over, even as Mark goes on his knees and parts her legs, angling his head to begin lapping at her pussy, savouring the tang of her shower time mingled with her essential female pungency, the metallic tang of her most intimate tissues.

He nibbles her flesh, snaps his teeth, licks and nuzzles, sucking at Natalie's cunt while Eva's cane delivers its cruel kisses from behind.

Such pain in her calves and thighs and buttocks. Pain like she never thought could be. Then the small of her back, her shoulders, again and again. With each stroke, Natalie is learning how to ride the pain. She no longer anticipates each blow, no longer rebels against the strike, wincing at the thought of it. From her acceptance, pleasure is harvested from hurt. Her entire body hums, the rawness of fresh pain sublimated becomes something joyous. She feels her endorphins surging, transmuting the suffering into something other; something she will never be able to articulate.

Natalie on the precipice of a new and utterly strange kind of bliss. This is not a punishment. The thrill is sweetly intense, unlike anything she could have foreseen. Each stroke fuels her approaching orgasm; each pass of Mark's tongue over her clit is petrol on the bonfire of her desire. When it erupts, her orgasm overwhelms her like a barrelling pyroclastic flow. It incinerates her guilt, her self-loathing, her identity.

When Natalie is still, the paroxysms of orgasm a passing storm moving away to the horizon, Mark stands and looks into her eyes.

He sees her rapture, the look of otherness that grips her. He is unsettled, wonders if Eva has gone too far. "Eva! I think she has had enough," he says.

"Awww! Don't be a spoilsport, Mark. You haven't fucked her yet," Eva says as she comes from behind Natalie and looks into the girl's eyes. She sees what Mark has seen. "And you were so looking forward to Mark fucking you, weren't you, slave?" she says to Natalie, intimately, regretfully.

Eva unties the stocking that still gags Natalie's mouth, and the girl spits sodden fabric to the ground, coughs and slobbers. Mark brings bottled water and lifts it to her lips and tells her to drink, asking, "Are you okay, Natalie?"

There is a new serenity in Natalie's eyes as she holds Mark's gaze and says, "You can kiss me now — fuck me if you like."

And so he kisses her, long and deep. And then Eva is kissing her friend too, Natalie lovingly shared as they take turns with her lips. There is such tenderness in the kisses the three exchange.

Eva and Mark take Natalie into the warehouse office where a leather chesterfield awaits their naked bodies. Mark will fuck Natalie while Eva straddles her head, lowers her pussy on to her face for her to lick. In this way, each will show their gratitude, each in their own unique way.

                                                        Author's Note.

If you would like to learn more about Eva and Mark's story, you can do so in my earlier story, "Found Footage".

https://www.lushstories.com/stories/occupations/-found-footage-.aspx