“Yes, Mistress.”
“Good.” She curled up her whip again and sat it on a table while she pulled out wrist cuffs. “Got a safe word?”
“I do. Semper Fi.”
“Semper Fi? Isn’t that the motto of the Marines?”
“It is. Why do you think I equate it with surrender?”
“You know, my father was a Marine,” Nora said, cuffing Lance’s left wrist to the cross. She had to get on a step stool to reach high enough.
Lance winced. “I’m sorry, Mistress. I have nothing but respect for the Corps. I’ve served with them, and they’re all brave and honorable men and women. It’s all good-natured rival—”
“I’m just fucking with you. My dad was a lowlife, two-bit crook who never made a legal cent in his life.”
“You’re the devil, Mistress.” Lance sounded impressed.
“I might have forgotten to mention that. Glad you noticed.” She cuffed his right wrist and picked up her whip again. Pausing, she took a moment to study his back. The scar tissue ended about six inches above his back belt loop. That tissue was tough, but she didn’t want to fuck with surgical scars. Dominatrixes hurt but they didn’t harm. She pictured landing the lashes from shoulder blade to shoulder blade and down to the second-to-last rib of his rib cage. With his arms bound high up on the cross, she could see all the taut muscle of his back and arms and count his ribs. The man had a beautiful back. All it wanted for was a few dozen welts.
“We use the red-yellow-green-light system down here.” She unfurled the whip and held it by the handle in her right hand with the tip in her left. “At any point, call out any of those colors as needed. You say green and I’ll give you more. You say yellow and I’ll pull back the pace. You say red and I drop the whip and we play with a new toy. Got it?”
“Yes, Mistress.”
“Good. Also, if you want, you can say ‘Ouch.’ And that won’t stop anything at all.”
At that she let the whip fly. She struck the dead center of his back between the shoulder blades. He flinched then—everyone did—but he didn’t say “yellow” or “red.” He didn’t even say “Ouch.”
She let the whip fly again and dusted his broad back with red welts. Like a good pain-artist, she let the whip dance over his skin, not landing in the same place twice in a row. That way he would never know where the next blow would land, would never be able to brace himself. She counted in her head as she whipped him—ten, twenty, forty, sixty. By sixty she started hearing “Ouch.” By seventy it’d turned into “Fuck.” At seventy-five she hit a sensitive spot hard enough for a genuine cry of pure pain. But still she heard no red, no yellow.
“Green?” she asked as she gave him a minute to breathe. “I won’t think any less of you if you say yellow or red.”
“Still green...” His breathing had turned ragged. “I just need a minute, if it pleases you, Mistress.”
“It pleases me. Read me how many minutes we have left.”
Lance craned his neck to look at the stopwatch hanging next to the St. Andrew’s Cross.
“Thirty-seven.”
“Goodie. I stopped at seventy-five. Let’s make it an even hundred. Then we’ll play a new game. And maybe get rid of some more clothing. Yours.”
“Anything you desire, Mistress.”
She desired to give him twenty-five more lashes. Again the whip danced over his skin. She focused on his sides now and his shoulders. By the time she hit twenty his back had turned bright red. One welt even oozed a small amount of blood.
“Stay there,” she said as she put her whip in the pile of toys needing to be cleaned. “We have breakage.”
Lance peered back over his shoulder.
“Much blood?” he asked, seeming entirely untroubled at the idea she’d broken the skin.
“Not much.” She snapped on a pair of latex gloves and cleaned the small wound with Betadine and ointment. “Okay, we have two Band-Aid options—Snoopy or Sesame Street?”
“Snoopy,” he said.
“Perfect.” She applied the Band-Aid, tossed her gloves, and dropped a quick kiss onto the center of his back. The beating had left his skin burning. She felt the heat against her lips.
“You’re good, Mistress.” Lance turned back to face the wall. “I’ve never been with a Domme who plays as hard as you.”
“I appreciate that. I trained under the best sadist in the world.”
“Interesting. What do you consider a good sadist, Mistress?”
Nora tapped her chin as she thought about the question.
“Talent is part of it. Takes a lot of talent to hurt someone without injuring them. A baseball bat can inflict pain, but it also breaks bones. How do you inflict real and serious pain but without causing harm? The sadist I learned from is amazing at that. He knows all the pain pressure points on the human body so he can cause you acute agony without leaving a single mark.”