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)
“That you were already looking for the tree,” he said. “Before you ever found the cavern. Before you found the mosaic. You were already listening for it.” His thumb moved along my cheekbone. “And the tree was listening back. So you will remain with us. We have arranged a prestigious fellowship for you at a Danish university. Your dig team and your doctoral advisor have been notified. Your advisor was very understanding, and congratulates you.”
Then his hand pressed gently at the back of my head, and I opened my mouth again. He pressed forward more deliberately this time, past the point he had reached before, and the sound I made around him had no scholarly content whatsoever.
CHAPTER 16
Ilsa
My Herra began to fuck my face.
As if from the top of the cell’s dome, four or five feet over his blond head, I seemed to look down on the obscene act: a tall, strong man thrusting his manhood in and out of a naked, bound young woman’s mouth.
Face fucking. Fucking her face.
I had never experienced anything so degrading. I had never watched such a thing happen to a girl, even on some terrible porn video, perhaps out of the corner of my eye on a guy’s unguarded screen.
I had heard the phrase, though… and every time I had wished I hadn’t, because of the scarlet blush it had instantly brought to my cheeks.
Hovering there, above myself, I understood, with a clarity that arrived too late to do me any good, the expression that the artist had somehow captured on the faces of the women in the carvings, in the cavern of the longship.
It didn’t really represent suffering, but it didn’t represent pleasure, either. It seemed to occupy a territory between those two things: a place where the body’s experience outpaces the mind’s capacity to categorize it, and the face simply gives up trying to manage its own appearance, as the person inside the body the man is using floats upward and gazes down upon herself as his possession.
Henrik’s hand at the back of my head had no cruelty in it. That was a thing I had not expected, could not have predicted from my prior experience of the world, which had not included anything like face fucking. My Herra held me in place firmly and steadily, with obvious certainty about his right to use me for his pleasure.
That certainty… the complete, unhurried confidence that communicated itself through his palm… brought a perverse need between my thighs that made me contract the muscles there in a shameful quest for satisfaction. Instead of satisfaction, though, I only achieved more arousal, and I sobbed around the thrusting phallus at the urgency of the sensation.
He moved slowly at first. My jaw ached with the stretch of accommodating him. I gripped the iron posts until my knuckles hurt, and I breathed through my nose in the measured rhythm Nymphobus Oceanus had taught me in the intake room.
I focused on the breathing. The breathing gave me something to do, some small agency, a task I could perform correctly or incorrectly.
“Good,” Henrik said, above me. His voice had changed again. The lecturing quality had gone. What remained was lower and rougher and stripped of its careful construction, like a building under construction, before the siding goes on. “Good girl. Your mouth feels good on my tol. Keep breathing. Take your Herra.”
I took my Herra.
The phrase assembled itself in my mind as if I were quoting it in a scholarly article: take your Herra. As if it were a line I had found in a primary source I had adduced. As if I could hold it at arm’s length on the end of an academic footnote and examine it from a safe distance.
But I was on my knees between iron posts in a volcanic stone cell under Palermo, with a Viking’s massive penis in my mouth, and his large, warm hand holding my head still, so that he could enjoy himself. He taught me his rhythm, and my body learned it, the way a body learns physical tasks… not through understanding but through repetition, the accumulation of small adjustments, the gradual discovery of what works and what doesn’t.
I squeezed again, down there, and it worked. To my absolute horror, I produced a whimpering sound in the back of my throat that I could not have described as distress.
Henrik heard it. I knew he heard it because his hand stilled for just a moment, and then his thumb moved along the back of my skull in a slow arc that seemed almost involuntary, as if he hadn’t decided to do it. As if my small, treasonous sound had reached him somewhere he hadn’t expected to be reached.
Then the rhythm resumed.
I thought, from the elevated perspective at the top of the dome where it seemed I could form ideas, about the bride saddle. About the compulsion I had felt there in that bridal chamber, the little stone room like this one but also unlike it. I had spent considerable effort since that afternoon explaining to myself that my lewd conduct had represented merely an artifact of isolation and physical stimulation and the particular vulnerability of a confined space.