Waiting For The Bus

Peony D Beckside

I lie in that half-awake state where one doesn’t want to admit it’s morning as that would be a commitment to getting up out of bed.  In my semi lucid state I recall the dream, or was it a nightmare with absolute clarity, yet for all that my mind grasps to hold it,  The dream is the very antithesis of what I am, an upwardly mobile business executive that takes no shit from anyone, let alone any man that tries to denigrate me or get in my way.  The dream frightens me on several levels.  It speaks to me as a threat to my ambitions.  It worries me, making me wonder even doubt what I am, the kind of person that I am or that I strive to be.  Its voluptuousness, and strangely, seductiveness threatens to engulf and overwhelm me.  Its barbarity and cruelty frighten me for themselves alone.  Its outlandish sensuality seems so addictive.  Perhaps that’s why in my semi slumber I yearn to re-enter the dream.  One part of me knows that if I allow myself to go back to sleep, I’ll have a different dream and I will lose my hold on the one I’ve just had.  Another part tells me I should be waking up properly and getting about my business.  They war with one another.  Me, the present me, in my lassitude am the spoils.  To the victor I go.  Right now this semi sleep with it’s memory of the dream is so luxuriant that I don’t really want to leave it.

Ah, yes, the dream…!  I play it out in my mind before it slips away.  Perhaps unconsciously hoping that by reiteration I can transfer it from a nebulous slide into forgetfulness into something that I can recall at will.  How does the dream go.

The man was introduced to me as a business associate.  I recall his eyes.  They have such a glassy look about them.  Why however, has his face become blurred?  I can’t recall it.  But for the eyes I could probably walk past him in the street and not recognise him.  We have dinner somewhere.  A restaurant.  A plain one; any one of a thousand in the city.  Conversation is convivial but non committal.  I haven’t made up my mind as to whether I'll invite him home or go to his place if he asks.  I recall the coffee.  It has a bitter taste to it, more so than  usual.  We leave the restaurant, the man seeing me home, I still haven’t decided about inviting him in.  A wave of tiredness, exhaustion comes over me.  I apologise to him, citing my tiredness.  I recall wiping the worst of my make-up off my face with a face-cloth, stripping my clothes off into a pile on the floor and falling naked onto the bed, asleep before my head touches the pillow.  A mind that doesn’t want to question, just re-live and record asks ‘Is the rest then, a dream within a dream?’
“Not a virgin.  Definitely red-silk”

I feel a sharp pin prick in my arm.  It awakes me.  I am fully aware of what is going on about me, but strangely powerless to change anything, to fight what is being done to me.  There are two women in the room.  They might be a matched pair.  Quite beautiful in a way.  Both are wearing very skimpy red dresses.  Both have something round their throats, something metal.  Both have a blemish, a scar on their left thigh.  They lift me up to a sitting posture.  I should be asking them who they are and what they are doing in my apartment, but so entranced am I by what is happening to me that I seem unable.  Even when one of them takes my arms behind my back and fastens handcuffs to my wrists, I still remain in thrall to the bizarreness of the situation.  Have I been drugged to a resistance-free state.  I recall the pin prick in my arm.  Clearly yes, but why am I not afraid, worried or concerned?  Is the drug that good?  Why aren’t I resentful, angered, furious at what seems to be some kind of kidnapping?

The other girl feeds my feet into a sack and pulls it up my legs.  The two girls lift me to standing and continue pulling the sack up to my neck.  One  of them holds my nose and the other pushes a wad of leather into my mouth carrying straps at the front of the wad round to the back of my head and buckling them,  I can no longer speak even if my mind could frame the questions.  The sack is drawn above my head and fastened with a chain and padlock.  The sack is made of leather, but it’s tight.  Not much broader than my shoulders and torso.  I look down and see light in a pattern from holes, air-holes?, lower down the sack.  I cannot shimmy down the sack to look out of them as the sack is tapered, at the bottom only big enough for my feet.  It’s not wide enough for me to bend my knees significantly.  I am picked up, by a man, I surmise.  It’s only one person, for neither of the women seem strong enough to lift my weight unaided.  I am carried over a shoulder for a minute or two before being laid onto a soft surface.  Some kind of strapping or webbing harness is passed over me.  I try to sit.  I cannot rise from the soft surface.  There is the sound of a motor and the gentle accelerating, braking and bumping of a vehicle moving for some ten minutes or so.  I, in my sack, am unfastened, lifted off the soft surface and again carried for a brief while.  I am put down on my feet.  The lock and chain securing the leather sack is withdrawn.  The two women who had put me in the sack unroll it down to my ankles.  With no conscious motivation I step out onto a carpeted floor.  Two men are talking in a strange language.  I couldn’t hazard a guess as to what language it is.  They turn to look at me.  One of them comes forward.  Speaking English he tells me to open my legs.  Is it that I am still under the control of the drug, that takes away my ability to resist, to combat, or is it that in a dream, things we would balk at, cannot be controlled by our conscious mind?  I do so.  The man gets down on his knees and with a finger gently parts my lower lips.

He rises.  I for my part wonder at the implication of red-silk implying no longer being virginal.  Is there a different term for one who is still a virgin?  Does such only refer to women?  Are men and boys categorised similarly?

“Will it effect her price?”

Price?  What are they talking about.  A price for a woman?  For her usage?  I don’t want to think on the implications of such.  Surely I should have been waking from the dream at that point.  However the dream continues to hold me in it.

“Not considerably.”

“She fits the order, the specification?”

“Certainly!”

“If she’s red-silk, then we can begin her training.  It might help offset any loss from her not being white-silk”

Ah!  White-silk, virginal, red-silk not.

“Looking forward to it.”

The two men take my arms and propel me backwards until my shoulders lean against a wooden board.  I can see little of what’s to my side and behind, being entranced by the glassy eyes of the larger man.  Where have I seen eyes like that before?  I cannot place the face.  The shorter man lifts me up an inch and stands me on a platform just big enough for my feet.  The platform has a slit in it between my two feet.  He reaches behind me and unfastens my handcuffs.  He takes my right arm and stretches it at shoulder height before securing it there in straps at wrist, and above the elbow.  The larger man takes my left arm and secures it identically.  Reaching down the smaller man fastens straps round my ankles before reaching to the side and turning a handle.  My lags are drawn inexorably apart.  At the point where I sense discomfort could begin, he stops winding.  Intellectually, but still within the context of the dream, I’ve a pretty good idea of what’s going to happen to me.  The feeling of vulnerability, of openness of utter helplessness and inability to stop, to delay, to mitigate such, strangely sets my pulse racing, my body awakening.

The men caress me, my breasts, my pussy, my thighs for what’s probably fifteen or twenty minutes.  By this time, I’m moaning, wriggling as much as the straps and the wooden frame allow.  I’m no longer worried that they will take me, more that they won’t.  The larger man steps up, and unfastening his clothes thrusts into me with his member.  I groan appreciatively.  It doesn’t take long before my moans become cries and I ride into another world.  If I think that’s the end of it, I am mistaken.  I am allowed to rest briefly before the caressing is renewed.  The smaller man steps forward when he senses that I am ready and rides me again to delicious orgasm.  I hang in my straps, quite exhausted.  I don’t quite take in what the men say.

“Up to standard?  Acceptable merchandise?”

“Yes.  I’d say so.”

“Very good.  We’ll mark her.  We can collect her when we are ready.”

The large man approaches.  In his hand he has what looks like a squared off metal truncheon.  He points the end towards my eye.  Inside the barrel of the truncheon I see a glowing red design, like an inverted flowery letter ‘K’.  He presses the truncheon to my left thigh.  A momentary memory comes to me, that the two women who’d helped bring me here both had marks on their left thigh.  I scream at the burning pain on my thigh.  Why doesn’t such pain wake me from my dream?  It’s incredible that such wouldn’t.  I suppose that dream pain only hurts the psyche, it not being real in the sense of being really real.  Back to the dream…  I am crying hysterically.  The large man slaps my face.  It brings me back to earth, or at least the dream earth.  He holds a piece of what looks like jewellery, like a choker but of metal.  The choker has some squiggles on it.  He opens up the choker, passes it round my neck.  There is a click.  I feel the coldness of the metal.  I suspect that it will warm up in time.  The smaller man comes to my side.  I feel another pin-prick in my arm and the dream ends.

By now in my semi-sleep, having catalogued the dream, I realise that I can no longer hold together this lazy ennui.  Time to wake up properly and start getting myself ready for the day’s work.  As I bring myself around, I begin to take in what my body is telling me.  There’s a sticky gooeyness between my legs.  Has the eroticism of my dream been sufficient to dampen me?  Clearly so.  I’m wearing a short nightgown, I suppose you’d call it.  It doesn't seem a familiar garment.  Besides, I was sure that in my exhaustion I’d fallen on the bed naked, or was that just part of the dream?  A little frisson of concern, of worry worms itself into my brain.  I send my fingers to explore the tightness of the neck band of my nightgown.  My fingers encounter metal.  The alarm bells in my brain begin to sound.  Is it possible?  Just possible?  I don’t want to complete the thought.  I send my other hand in exploration.  I feel all the way round the metal band.  It seems seamless.  I grab it in two places and tug apart.  It won’t come apart.  It won’t open.  I move it round my neck and try again and again and in desperation, again.  I twist the metal band, trying to find a way to get it off my throat.  I can’t remove it.  Remembering back to  the dream, I am reminded of the itch on my thigh.  There is a large band-aid on my thigh.  In horrified fascination knowing with certainty what I will find, but hoping otherwise, I gently pull the band-aid off.  I nearly faint at the truth that can no longer be denied.  The new and raw flowery ‘K’ scar burned in my thigh is incontrovertible!  My dream had been, was, is,  a nightmare, a real one!  I am utterly horrified and appalled.  Pulling myself together I reach for the telephone.  My intuition tells me that the line will be dead.  It is.  I tear the hateful skimpy red dress from my body and reach for the clothes I’d worn yesterday, still in a heap at the side of the bed.  Not wasting time with a shower or make-up I grasp the door handle.  The door is locked!  I rummage in my purse for the key that always resides there.  It isn’t there!  I head for the window.  Perhaps I can get out that way, and down the fire-escape.  The bars mock me.  They were not there yesterday.  I trawl the dream memory.  I wonder how long it will be before they come and collect me, whoever they are.  I muse concernedly on the concepts of ‘Acceptable merchandise’:  Acceptable to whom? What of ‘my price’?  And where will I be sold?  In my mind I’ve a pretty good idea what I will or have become, but who will buy me and where?  I begin to realise that from now on I’ll need a completely different skill-set to that which I have been cultivating.  The sassy go-getter business woman approach may be counter-productive to my future happiness or even to whether I live or die.  I wonder again, when they will collect me?  How long do I have to escape?  An atavistic thought sparks through my brain like a shooting-star.  Do I want to escape?