Chapter One

I’m aware of what I feel as I approach the train, and am having flashbacks of that other life inside my dreams. I wonder what it means as I embark on what should be an innocuous mission.

My compartment is small, drenched in the art of another time: gaslight fixtures, pearl handles, and inlaid woods etching patterns in the paneling that lines the walls with warmth. I’ve dressed in red, elegantly. My producer insisted we remain in keeping with the mood—I believe the tour company suggested this strongly. We’re supposed to blend in with the wealthy crowd of travelers. I’m sure I don’t blend at all in my brightly colored suit. I stand out from the other, drabber looking passengers. But this is a designer suit and I look damn good in it. Its deep neckline plunges almost to my navel, and the black lace beneath is nearly transparent. My blonde hair falls to my shoulders in a sensuous smooth cascade. I wear pale make-up, red lipstick, and dark mascara to highlight my sapphire eyes. These high heels will be killing me if I wear them all day, but they add to the effect of haughtiness. I smile to myself thinking that all I need is fur; but I do well to affect the mood without it. My dreams must have been proud of me as I boarded the train feeling as though I were stepping into that other world of the Orient Express.

I find some peace in the close confines of my antique compartment.

I’m glad to be leaving Paris. Sometimes big cities scare me when I travel alone (alone with my crew)—which seems pretty silly since it’s been my job for nearly seven years to comb the globe looking for interesting things to say about the places I land. Paris always unnerves me—I think because I want to stay forever in its decadence. It jars my cunt and reminds me of Andre.

I look forward to the sound of that first cachug as the train strains to leave the station, heading east. Until then, I will be thinking of my Frenchman, and the first time my body was bound for sex.

His face was reassuring and his animated eyes thrilled that I’d consent. I climbed atop a high four-poster bed in a tiny Parisian Inn, and lay belly down as he tied my wrists and ankles with silk scarves—two blue, one green, the fourth one gold. There was a pattern of birds in flight on the pale blue one, as though these tiny creatures were battling the wind on a sunny summer day.

With each extremity circled in silk and tightly fettered to a mahogany post, I slipped further down in lust. My heart reverberated like a marching band as he fixed my left hand, with sensation moving to my belly as he gave my right a hearty tug and secured that, too. By the time he had my ankles ready, my pussy was beginning to throb, pressing itself into the tousled sheets beneath me. It was ready for cock, but that’s not what it received.

Andre shocked me with a slap to my ass. The sting was sweet, but not the ones thereafter, when he kept spanking my cheeks until I was moaning for him to stop. My pleas only encouraged him to change his aim. Targeting the other cheek, I got the blistering ritual on that flesh until my whole behind was warmed and my cunt fondling itself with the mattress.

Thrashing frantically, I went nowhere. No escape, I only had the sensation; and there was little else to do but submit. In time, there was no pain or sting, just the happy hope that Andre would get me off with this alone. In that hour, tied between those posts, I learned about the miracle of restraint. I discovered that contentment finds a place to breed in me when I’m tightly bound.

Andre disappeared from my life as swiftly as a summer rainstorm. I sometimes think he was with me only for this simple exposition of sexual desire. Being tied with scarves, or rope, or the heavenly feel of leather became a compulsion after Andre vanished. Though after Andre, Jordan was the first man who didn’t look me in the eye suspiciously when I suggested my desires. I’m sure he was as pleased as I was, and perhaps relieved to find a lover who volunteered to be submissive during sex. Being naturally dominant by nature, Jordan needed a woman to yield to him in bed. And this was easy for me. Though yielding otherwise has never been simple—or even necessary. Now, though, with my dreams and my appetite for submission clawing at my insides, I begin to wonder if my life isn’t leading to complete abdication—even if that makes no sense knowing how much I love my work and my independence.

I gaze from my window on the countryside of France, as we travel from Paris to Frankfurt. France is resplendently verdant this time of year and my eyes get lost in the middle of the cool color and the fast passing fields that clothe this earth. My heart seeks the mountains. It’s been months since I’ve seen such vistas—I almost arranged a trip to Aspen, then this opportunity appeared and instantly grabbed my gut. But it’s more than the mountains that draw me to this trip—it’s the realization of my dreams. Do I have some precognition of the future? I ask myself. But I’m left without an answer other than my agitation.

As the kilometers pass by, I write copy, work with the camera crew and my producer. Though most of my time I spend alone, thinking; or if not thinking, feeling the lure of my past, and this history we’re dwelling amidst, push me deeper. From Frankfurt, the Orient Express takes us toward Budapest. I hear the name and my body responds erotically.

One afternoon, I move into the main observation car where I can see with greater scope the landscape that’s seducing me. My mind floats free, the dreams come; I’m drowsy, eyelids beginning to close. I feel the train start to slow as if it’s coming to a halt, and opening my eyes, I’m surprised to see a woman sitting in the seat across from me. The train picks up speed again.

She wears a peculiar look of longing in her chestnut eyes. Her ebony hair brushes her cheek line, so that I see the aspect of an Oriental woman inside its lines. Her skin is notably flawless, her cheekbones high; yet, hers is a wide open Eastern European face and supremely sensuous. It almost feels as though there is a cloud about her, weaving through the air like vapors through a mist. The thought is so strong that I look down at her hand expecting to see a cigarette with a trail of smoke rising toward her face. There is none.

“I am Amie,” she says after she sees me looking at her.

“Shelly,” I reach out my hand for her to shake. She does so listlessly, with an air of withering charm as if she’s just had sex. Perhaps, that’s what she’s telling me with all this simply stated beauty.

Her clothes intrigue me. She wears a close-fitting purple dress with a high neck, long sleeves and a provocative cutout that shows the tops of her full bosom and a soft tawny cleavage. The dress might graze her ankles if she stood—she’d be willowy and graceful like me, though not as tall. I see that grace as I stare at her shapely legs. With a slit cut nearly to her crotch—and this Amie is not modest—I admire a good deal of her flesh as she carefully crosses her legs at the knee and the skirt falls away so I can gaze at her muscled thigh.

“And your destination?” she asks carefully with a slight accent. It would seem to be affected for the purpose of being alluring. She manages it well.

“To Istanbul,” I reply.

“I am, too.”

“I’m with my crew doing a documentary on the Orient Express.”

“I’m with no one,” she replies rather strangely.

I would think she might be sad saying this, but she’s not.

“You’re American?” she asks me.

“Yes, and you?”

“I try not to be as much as possible, but I was born in Queens.”

“Really? And you’ve spent a lot of time in Europe?” This seems obvious to me even if she wasn’t born to her European sensuousness. The way she speaks, dresses, even the way she carries her body give her foreign air.

“Most of my last several years.”

“You came for college?”

“No, to travel.”

I wonder about her occupation—a question she answers quickly.

“My father died, leaving me, his only relative, a substantial insurance benefit. I live in Paris, Tuscany or London.”

“And all you do is drift?”

She smiles with her bright red lips forming an enchanting grin. I get the feeling that she’s hiding something, not only from me but everyone. A girl from Queens traveling like royalty on this train? It’s an odd thought.

As we settle back into our quiet, I note a sudden change of expression on Amie’s face. She rises, then walks past and behind me with an alert gaze as though she recognizes someone at the other end of the rail car. When I finally turn to look, she’s gone.

Following her trail some minutes later, I leave the observation car, passing three private compartments. I stop at the fourth with a startled gasp, seeing Amie beyond the slim compartment window in the arms of a man. They paw each other frantically, with Amie’s ass toward me so I can briefly see the man mauling her behind. He pushes away her skirt at the slit to show her naked from the waist down. I stare, unable to take my eyes from the picture they make of ravenous lust. More fascinating still, I’m intrigued by a flaw in the skin of her ass—not a tattoo, but not an accidental mark.

The man’s skin is a natural brown; his black, wavy hair clipped short. Though I can see little of his face, I know he’s handsome in a way that would entice me. And for one brief second I see the light and dark of his eyes, and his heavy brows. Then, as his lust takes over, his eyes droop and his lids turn heavy. He has a hand at her back, clutching both of her wrists in one fist. Amie swoons to be controlled just as I would.

He’s in the position of taking as though he might rip away her beautiful purple dress. He wants her naked.

With this eroticism clutching at my crotch, I take off, certain that he’s seen me and will accuse me of spying. My belly churns erratically.

Once in my own compartment, I lock the door, making sure that the blinds are closed, and then tear off my clothes to find the throbbing sliver of skin between my labia. It will not be content until I’ve played the fantasy my friend from Queens, Amie, has nurtured in my sex hungry brain. I hadn’t realized how horny I was, or how much this trip had fed my lust until I saw her ass naked and his hand holding her struggling wrists.

Reclining in my seat, my whole Venus mound throbs—not just the clitoris but the whole of it. I slip the fingers of one hand inside the hole while caressing my thighs, my belly and my breasts with the other. I moan unwittingly. Why bother to contain the noise, with the anxious, endless chug of the train playing as background music for my masturbation?

Seizing my clitoris, I draw it out, pulling with desperation, then begin to rub in earnest along that wet and tender inner fold. I see myself barreling toward this great unknown in me. The closer we get to Romania, the more my dreams turn into visions of sexual horrors, ones with Shelly at the center engrossed in nightmares of seduction and depravity.

Jordan hovers over me leering half the time; other times I’m alone with dangerous strangers. I’m bound, flogged and physically abused by lovers who don’t know the meaning of love. Their love wounds me. I see myself suspended in chains, my arms stretched, my feet dangling but shackled, and some bald-headed brute, half/Jordan, half/nightmare strutting with a cane before me. My eyes must remain on him, wide open to his plans, so that I see the beginnings of each cut he lands, and the end as it sears the flesh of my thighs.

As these pictures develop in my brain, my cunt floods juice over my hand. My rubbing becomes frantic. I squeeze my nipples to make them hard, and then arch my back as the first burst of climax darts through me like an arrow. I must look as though I’m offering myself in sacrifice. All this while the train moves on, cachug, cachug, cachug into the mountains, taking me to Bucharest, Bulgaria and finally Istanbul. These names are lovers, their sounds like lips upon the crest of my mound and lower at the doorway of my pussy where they lap my body’s hungering home.

Jordan where are you now that I need you?

***

We are waiting for Budapest with little to do until we arrive except admire what passes by the window at exhilarating speeds.

At night, I’m drawn into sleep by the very pictures I’ve tried to ignore all day. It does no good to deny them; I love them. They are my secret life. How interesting the chronicle would be if I were making a documentary of Shelly and her twisted state of being—not this Orient Express.

The day begins again. I’m restless. Going through my morning routine with the film crew, we finish quickly with plans to shoot again in the late afternoon as we approach our day’s destination. The territory outside the train is grim and abandoned. Viewing this much remote splendor makes me feel hollow from the inside out, though I cannot take my eyes from the stream of images that hastens by. It sometimes feels as though I am standing still and the world is flying. I believe that I’m by myself in my reveries, and only sense belatedly that someone’s close by—just off my right shoulder.

“Mademoiselle,” his voice touches me with an air of benign favor as though reaching to me from the unseen ethers.

“Sir?” I turn my head to see the handsome gentleman from Amie’s compartment. My blush begins at my throat, though he doesn’t seem to notice.

“May I sit?” he gestures toward the seat facing me in the parlor car. We are alone except for three men playing cards.

“Certainly.”

“I am Jorges Hanan.”

His presence puts me at ease and makes me tremble at the same time. Surely, he knows how my pussy dampens just staring into the dark secrets of his eyes.

“Michelle Monroe.”

“How delightful.” He smiles again as though my name has meaning. “You’re on the film crew.” He knows this for a fact and he seems impressed.

“They are my crew, my production company,” I clarify his information as though it’s important that he know my stature.

“Indeed? And how beautiful you are.”

My blush broadens. I could listen to his voice all day, while wondering what thoughts there are behind his curious expression.

“And you, are you traveling with anyone?” I ask.

“I am indeed alone, Mademoiselle Monroe.”

Humm. I wonder why the lie—or was what I witnessed just casual sex for both Amie and this Jorges? I wonder if he saw me watching?

“You’re from the States. Do you have lovers there?”

“One, yes, but why would you ask?”

The more direct he is, the more I’m quivering. The warmth in me spreads—delicious, bright white warmth that begins to burn the more it breeds, the more this stranger has his odd effect on my desire. I feel the way I felt as I watched him making love to Amie. Is this how he seduced her? With force and charm?

“I ask so that I understand you. But, in fact, your other lovers don’t matter now, do they?”

“No,” I’m whispering breathlessly, while my heart trips on and my entire body flushes with need.

“Yes,” he nods because he knows, “your lovers wouldn’t matter. I’ve watched you. You’re a woman of passion.” When has he watched me? “You look for men to help you reach the depths—and perhaps your current lover does. But too often, you live without what you really desire, just as you are living dispassionately now. You are afraid of men who can give you what you really want.”

My body wants to tackle him, or at the very least drag him by his red silk tie to my compartment; but my brain begs off—at least while it dispenses with my objections to this astounding appraisal. “Are you always so bold with women?”

“Only ones whose passions speak so loudly.”

“And you expect what?”

“I don’t expect, I know we’ll move to your compartment where I will… in the vernacular of your misbegotten language… rape you.” My cunt spasms with such speech. “Rape meaning abduction and ravishment of your body.”

“Abduct?”

“If only for a few minutes, you will be under my power.”

My head grows drowsy. Is there something in the air, some perfume that acts like a drug? It’s in his eyes, I think. In the way he moves, purposefully, the starched shirt and the immaculate substance of command.

I’m not even sure he scares me. He has so scrupulously zeroed in to my current frame of sexual mind that I should suspect him of being the devil. I should fear him, but I don’t.

He leans forward in his seat, and my face heats more as I turn my head to avoid his glance; yet, he brings it back as he takes one of my hands in his. I stare at his crotch wondering if this unplanned meeting has made him as aroused as I am. While his pants are curiously tented, I can’t tell if his erection is stiffening inside them. Still, I have no doubt he’ll be ready for me when he begins his rape. Now, he remains coolly detached in a way that reminds me of Jordan: intent, focused, but with a hard edge of rapturous control I cannot fight against.

“You assume a great deal from me, a complete stranger.”

He chuckles under his breath. “We’re hardly strangers, Mademoiselle. Time spent for introduction collapses in the face of shared desires. I know things about you just as you know things about me.” He pauses while I measure my response. I begin another objection, but he places a finger over my lips. “Open your blouse for me.”

My eyes are fixed on Jorges, while my heart pounds rapidly, beating even in my throat and temples, soon to overpower everything else.

He gazes around when I don’t act, “There’s no one here to see but me.”

The three men playing cards are all too focused on their game to let their eyes stray to me. We’re separate from the world, two on a train bound for Bucharest and Istanbul, staring with glazed and fixed expressions waiting for me to act.

I watch myself, as though I were floating above, against the coved and gilded ceiling of the parlor car. My hands tremble, but they don’t balk, as I slowly slip the white pearl buttons of my silk shirt through their tiny buttonholes. Beneath the blouse, a black lace bra cups my breasts, pulling them into a cleavage with my white flesh jiggling above the lace.

“See? You’re amazingly compliant even when you’re scared.” His eyes take in the feast though it’s not enough. “And your nipples, pull them out.”

I listen for the door behind me to open, but there is no sound. The three men play on, intent and silent with their shuffling cards, while the train chugs into oblivion. Reaching inside the bra, I draw out my pink nipples, which at their very tips are nearly purple from the chill I feel. Exposed to air they appear to blush just as my face has responded since this conversation began.

“Have you ever marked them?” he asks.

“Marked?”

“Has a whip or reed baton been applied to the skin.”

“No.” I shudder while at the same time imagining streaks of red cut into the expanse of translucent cream.

“You see it now, don’t you?”

I lick my lips nervously, answering without speaking.

“Put your breasts away, I’ll tease them later.”

Though I breathe relieved, thinking that he’s finished with this public display, Jorges has other things in mind. I can’t help but ask, “Is this how you seduced Amie?”

He cocks his head quizzically. He didn’t expect the question. “No. She is not like you, though she can be as submissive.”

Submissive. The word strikes me strangely. Although I’ve applied it to myself, I’ve never had a man suggest this to me. Obviously, he’s right.

“Raise your skirt, Mademoiselle Monroe.”

My heart leaps forward one more time as his eyes come to rest on my crotch. Parting my legs, I inch the hem of my knee-length skirt up my thighs. The gray flannel is quite tight about my hips and the material begins to bunch at my waist. I worry what he’ll suggest next. When I’ve gone as far as I can manage, I wait for his approval or another command. The erratic pulse in my chest beats on recklessly. What will he ask that I won’t do?

“Higher,” he says.

I gulp, nervously perusing my surroundings one more time, then hike the skirt another few inches, so it’s nearly off my hips and enough so Jorges can see the silk of my black panties at the crotch.

“Spread wider, Mademoiselle.”

This takes my skirt another inch or two so that my cleft is completely bared.

Reaching into his pocket, Jorges pulls out a shiny silver pocketknife, which opens to reveal its razor sharp blade. Moving on my panties, he adroitly slips the blade under the edge of the silk as I hold my breath. Have I lost my mind? The cool metal grazes my clit as sensuously as two lips might—though to tease is not its aim. A quick move of his hand, he jerks the sharp end through the crotch and then again at the side. With his free hand, he plucks the silk away.

My flesh is on fire, even my tiny pubic hairs tingle in anticipation. I’m tempted to squirm, to press my crotch into the chair beneath my ass; though I don’t, since this display is for Jorges, not me. My pussy is his to relish. It begs fingers to wander along the partially parted pathway to the center. I sway slightly as my inner muscles spasm, thinking that might entice him more, but of course he can’t see.

I get more than I ask for, as Jorges scares me with his knife, running the blade against that sensitive pink labia, gently.

“Ah, please,” I murmur quietly.

“No words,” he orders. Then he backs off saying, “Go to your compartment and wait for me.”

Rising proves difficult to do in a ladylike fashion. Then, as though to mock me more, two of my crew of three enters the car just as I’m on my feet, straightening my skirt. They begin to badger me with questions.

“We’re stopping in forty-five minutes…”

Will Jorges have time to rape me before we reach the station in Budapest?

His word—rape—intrigues me. It has meaning filled with horror, but I feel no horror now, only excited wonder. Having dismissed my crew, I continue toward my compartment as though obsessed. Certainly, I’m not in my right mind. Certainly, I should flee this man. But I cannot. He promises the darkness of Jordan with the added mystery of this foreign location and the urgency of the locomotive driving the moment.

I wait pantiless in my compartment, at first thinking he’ll follow me immediately, then, when he doesn’t appear for nearly ten minutes, wondering if he’ll follow me at all. We’ll be stopping in thirty-five minutes; my crew will be knocking on my door in twenty. How much of a rape can he enact in that time?

I stand, stare out the window, listen to the angry pulse of the train rumble under me and up through my feet, up the inside of my legs to my ticklish naked crotch. I’m desperate for a hand to finger the engorged flesh, but I refuse to touch myself.

Although I expect his advance, he comes on me unaware. The sound of the door opening and the feel of his body attacking mine seem superimposed on each other, as if they happen all at once. Jorges’ power surrounds me as his arms encircle my body, and like Amie, he captures my hands together in his fist behind my back. Instinct makes me struggle, but not enough to break the bonds he’s strung around my brain and body. I relent as the struggle implodes in me, as fire flows in rivers of sensation throughout my lower body and above as well. I’m bent over, my head thrown to the seat, while my ass becomes his target for abuse, the skirt bunched like a tourniquet around my waist.

From the corner of my eyes, I see Jorges pulling his leather belt from his pants.

“Leather,” he says caressing the words with his lips.

Ah, yes, leather! He presses it to my nose, where the aroma brings back memories of stables, tack and leather boots. As he wraps my hands in three concentric loops, I can still smell its potent reminder and my body responds. My crotch burns hotter turning into a liquid bath of seeking pleasure. The fact that he handles me brutally—as if this were rape—makes him a conquering warrior. Though I reveal my passion and my consent as my two, rear cheeks wave naughtily for him. Though the pose is awkward, I like being this lewd. It fits the fantasy.

Jorges rubs along my snatch with the heel of his hand. I clench—but there’s only air inside that emptiness. When his thumb fingers my rear hole, I shriek to myself, a sound drowned out by the winds of this charging beast of a train and its melancholy whistle. The late afternoon outside the window passes us by, too quickly for our eyes to see.

In seconds, Jorges has positioned himself with this clothed thighs pressed to my naked ones, and his cock poised for the rape of my cunt. I bear down as he enters, hearing his deep sigh follow. The plunge begins my orgasm, which comes quickly, unexpectedly violent and brief. He sweeps me clean of thought so there is nothing but the beautiful pleasure of climax.

Jorges is not so swift to climax. His thick cock batters me until I ache. I clutch, I squeeze, I shudder long. As he works me, my pussy begs for more, having moved full circle from frenzied to calm to frenzied again. All in split seconds.

My rapist gathers speed as he duplicates the motion of the train. Then the fire in him flares hotly just before he’s about to shoot. I sense this with my entire body and bear down hard to milk the cum from the spewing stalk. Pulling from me, his wet dick taps the dripping remains on my ass, then Jorges stuffs the wilting thing back into his pants. Zipped, he releases the belt around my hands and pulls me to my feet.

I’m hotter and hornier than I was when we started. I know Jorges sees this in my eyes and he thinks it’s validation for his efforts.

“So sorry we’ll be stopping for the night,” he says.

I’m sorry, too.

As he threads his belt inside its loops, I sit on the train seat looking up at him, longingly and lonely. My skirt is still a tangle at my waist. My hair’s a mess, my make-up smeared and I’m out of breath, while Jorges looks remarkably serene and immaculate. There is some crude thrill indulging myself this way, being fucked and left with no thought of tomorrows or intimate poems of the heart.

“Have I told you anything that wasn’t true?” he asks me.

I shake my head, “No.”

“Good, then. It will be a fuck to remember, Mademoiselle Monroe.”

“Yes, certainly.”

He leaves with the nonchalance to tip his hat politely—if he had one.

When he’s out the door and the train begins to slow, I smile. This is maddeningly good inspiration—I think even Jordan would be proud of me, that is, if he didn’t want to spank my ass for being this careless with myself.