Total pages in book: 106
Estimated words: 96271 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 96271 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
My mistress spoke again, her words much more dismaying, “No, Ilsa. You’re not done. Put your finger inside your anus and clean yourself properly there.”
Biting my lip, I obeyed, pressing my middle finger into that most private place. I scrubbed, my forehead creasing, while Giovanna watched with her arms folded inside the wide sleeves of her red robe and her expression carrying the impersonal patience of someone who had seen this particular mortification many times and found observing the process faintly enjoyable.
“Good,” she said, when at last she seemed satisfied. “Again.”
I did it again, hoping the little whine I heard from my throat would be lost in the echoing dripping of the bath water.
“That’s sufficient,” Giovanna said at last, and held out her hand for the cloth.
I gave it to her. I climbed the carved stone steps out of the bath with as much dignity as I could manage. That didn’t amount to much. The leather cuffs, collar, and belt clung to every surface they covered, making me hyperconscious that I was naked everywhere else, and that the welts on my bottom had gone from a sharp sting to a deeper, settled ache of which I seemed to become more aware with every movement.
She wrapped a red towel around me, of the same deep shade as her robe. It was very thick and very soft, and Giovanna used it with the same intensity she had brought to everything else, her eyes moving to my face regularly, obviously knowing the distress she would find there but wanting to assess its exact degree.
She pressed the cloth against my hair, working down my shoulders and arms, crouching to dry my legs from the ankle upward. When she straightened and moved the towel between my thighs, I held very still and stared at the far wall and tried to think about the mineral composition of volcanic stone.
“Think, columba,” she said, moving the towel with the obvious purpose of making me think in a very specific way. I let out a whimper as I remembered her telling me in the bath to meditate on the hair she would soon take away.
I didn’t want to look at her, but it seemed I couldn’t help myself. As she rubbed more firmly, and I whimpered again, I met her eyes. The little smile on my mistress’s face, to my dismay, made me bend my knees and try to press against the towel.
“There,” she said, and took the towel away.
I closed my eyes and swallowed hard to keep from sobbing.
The air of the preparation chamber settled against my damp skin. I stood before her in my leathers, bare everywhere the leather didn’t cover, and waited.
Giovanna moved past me. I turned to watch her, because not watching felt more dangerous than watching, and I saw for the first time the far end of the chamber, which the angle of the bath steps had kept from my view until now.
The bench occupied what looked like a deep alcove in the volcanic stone wall. That was my first impression, that it belonged to the wall, that it had been built into the chamber rather than placed within it, as though the men who had carved this space had known from the beginning what would stand here and had shaped the stone to receive it. It was low to the ground, long enough to accommodate a woman’s full length, made of a dark stone that I thought might be basalt, with surfaces worn, I sensed, to the same particular kind of smoothness I had felt on the rowing bench of the longship. Not merely the smoothness of age but also the smoothness of use.
She took my hand and led me. I couldn’t stop my feet from taking the steps they took. My treasonous curiosity and its even more distressing connection to the helpless need between my thighs drew me on. Giovanna positioned me in front of the alcove, and the bench that extended out from it.
I could see inside the recess. I saw that they—whoever they were—had put a leather-covered cushion there, perhaps an inch thick, at the far end of the alcove. It matched the cushion that I now noticed on the bench itself.
That one occupied a raised section at the bench’s center, wide and padded, its surface worn in a pattern I recognized with a cold lurch of my stomach because I had spent the better part of an evening studying exactly this kind of wear on exactly this kind of surface.
Knees. The wear pattern was from girls’ knees.
My mistress showed me the bench with a kind of ironic pride, as if she felt grateful for the centuries-old traditions of her mystifying organization, but also could see how odd they might look to modern eyes. Her hand indicated the knee cushion, then the alcove, then the relationship between the two.