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The Truth About Marianne

by Lizbeth Dusseau

ISBN 10: 0-9769679-2-8

A Pink Flamingo Ebook Publication

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Chapter One

One would think that an image with the power to break loose a wall of stifled passion would be bold and shocking to the senses. But this image was neither bold nor shocking. She was passing through a neighborhood with tall, leafy, sun-drenched trees and large stately homes, some trimmed with neat iron fences painted black or white, some without fences but with great lawns that stretched out open and inviting. Marianne Ridgeway suddenly stopped short and stared, going into a dreamy trance for a time, while her memories slowly converged. It was just a gate, a black wrought-iron gate with a snarl of bushes behind it—there was something a little wild and reckless about those bushes. Something about stumbling through a gate like this to reach the other side… no, no! she corrected her memory with a subtle shift; it was more like the black gate leading to a hideaway she shared with Havel and Miklos. So long ago.

She remembered the sweetness of the flowers and the briars.

Her heart began to beat a little faster than was normal. Her hands began to sweat. Fear trickled through her veins like the creeping vines entangling the entrance to that lover’s sanctuary, long ago.

She gulped and caught her breath then started out walking faster than she had before, frantically gazing at house numbers until she reached her destination where she delivered the package she clutched firmly to her chest like an act of self-protection.

Returning home, she walked three blocks out of the way to avoid the gate… and the memory.

But memories are not so easily dispatched.

Returning home to the big two-story city house, her belly ached, belligerently churning, tearing away at her firmly practiced calm with reckless disregard for all she’d tried to do these last few years. The façade began to crack like dinnerware and threatened to shatter altogether. The house was empty, but like a womb—mellow, comforting and throbbing with expectation. The afternoon sun cast shadows of flickering leaves across the warm chestnut woods and the creamy plastered walls danced with light.

Marianne sank down on the couch feeling the leather swallow her body, sending her deeper into places of memory and fear. Her mind began to unravel a scene knit so tightly she’d been certain it would never work loose… and yet now, it appeared in her mind in exacting detail …

She moved through the gate, barely hearing the metal clang as it hit the fence behind her. Running gracefully up the path and the six creaky wooden stairs she shoved the door with her shoulder and entered the big wide room. Clutter was everywhere—books, piles and piles of books both neatly shelved and haphazardly stacked, beer cans, wine bottles, plates of day old food, clothes thrown without thought to where they landed. Havel and Miklos were there, too. Miklos, as if he were waiting for her, spoke sharply as soon as their eyes met …

“You sorry bitch, you’re late.”

“I am sorry,” she bowed her head with a sheepish grin, thinking of the news she had to tell him. But he didn’t give her time to speak; instead, he strode across the floor and grabbed her long dark mane of hair in his fist.

“You bring me what I asked for?” he asked, as if he already knew the answer.

“No, but—”

“But nothing,” he snarled.

He pulled her to the saddle—his make-shift punishment bench—and thrust her roughly over the bar. “Told you what you’d get.”

She didn’t want this. In fact, she had the antidote to his vicious mood. But by then the scene was set in motion and unalterable. Already, she could feel the hot throbbing of his energy. The bar cut her thighs in two where it pressed hard against the flesh. A draft of cool air tickled the base of her behind. She did her best not to move a muscle, hard as that was.

A fistful of birches came down across her bottom, biting brutally into her skin. She shuddered, feeling a sob sweep through her and a sexual spasm make her bare pussy dampen beneath her skirt. Dissatisfied with the effect of the birches on a covered behind, Miklos flung the short skirt off the flesh of her ass. Lustrously bare, the round globes invited his response. Beating her bottom hard until it was a rash of scarlet and her eyes a fountain of tears, he had his first satisfying feeling rush through him. It seemed to conquer the inner demon for that moment. Nothing else could touch the thrill of hurting her.

Dropping the birches once his cock was stiff, he removed the thick member from his pants and plunged deep into the velvety moistness of her sheath. His thumb rubbed her anus as he pumped her hard. Then ready to explode, he grabbed her hips and banged without stopping until he was quickly spent.

Pulling out, he turned around and spoke to Havel, “You want her?”

Havel looked up from his papers and sighed with contempt and longing registering in his expression undisguised. “Not now,” he answered and returned to his work.

Yanking the girl upright, Miklos dragged her to the corner and threw her down. Her collar hung from a thick metal chain that was bolted into the crumbling plaster deep enough to hold.

“Buckle it on,” he ordered.

After she finished, he pulled her arms behind her back and bound them together with rope.

“Spread your legs,” he said.

She looked up into Miklos’ imperious eyes and slowly obeyed his command, bending her legs and parting her thighs to reveal the glistening snatch below. The juices from him had leaked out into her pubic hair and were smeared against her thighs. Kneeling down, Miklos reached into the wet furrow and cupped the nectar in his fingers, bringing it to her mouth. She eagerly licked the sticky juices, while playfully grinning. Satisfied with her effort, he stuffed his hand back inside her slit and asked: “You horny?”
“Yes,” she said, imploring him with her limpid eyes.

“Good, we’ll leave you this way so you’ll be good later,” he said, backing away.

A wry smirk crossed his shadowy face. He hadn’t shaved in days, his hair was uncombed as usual, but still the aroma of his body aroused her, as did the hard lines of his grim face. His eyes drilled her for several seconds, until they could both feel her feral physical response. He chuckled and stood up, towering above her in a lordly way that made her craving for him deepen…

Marianne’s spread thighs revealed a wet snatch where her fingers plunged inside a sloshy hole that smelled of pheromones, of dark things like the sodden earth, wet leaves and a man’s sour crotch. Thomas had been there earlier that day leaving traces of himself lingering even now. But it was the other men she thought of now, of Miklos and how it felt to sit miserably in the corner of that room on the floor, collared, leashed, hands bound, often gagged, silenced, smothered by the omniscient force of her Dominant lover.

Her fingers played hard, rubbing against her clitoris, sometimes driving deep inside the hole, while her belly swelled with sexual energy. This obsessive craving would know only one end. With amazing speed a crashing orgasm ripped her wild, through cunt, belly, ass and outwards to her limbs, causing her mouth to open in a silent scream. Then the silence turned to moaning, a prudent quiet moaning. Spasm after spasm tore away the last tattered shreds of her propriety, until she was finally too exhausted to go on. She jerked her hand away and sank deeper into the leather couch. She passed out for thirty seconds when the sound of the front door opening with her husband’s key startled her awake.

“Marianne, what a nice surprise! I didn’t expect you home so soon.”

She sat up straight, righting her clothes and turned, looking over her shoulder at Thomas. He was a sandy-haired, middle-aged man, with a slight slouch and a worn look about the pleasantness that was natural to his manner. He wasn’t particularly handsome, but his eyes were sharp and inquisitive, and his zeal for learning was unabated, all of which made him attractive to most women at the University where he was a professor of Sociology. Marianne had married him three years before.

“I was a little tired after delivering the package to Professor Trent,” she told him.

“You found him all right then?”

“I must have since it was his name on the doorplate. His housekeeper was very kind.”

He smiled. “Good.” But then he looked at her a little worried, cocking his head questioningly. She looked dazed, even drunk. “Tired are you? You’re not coming down with something?”

“No, no… I didn’t sleep all that well.”

“Oh?”

“But I’ll be fine.” She took a deep breath, pressing her skirt with her hands. “I think I’ll make dinner.” Rising from the couch, she moved toward the kitchen, rolling her hips a little more than was normal. Thomas admired her through every step until she disappeared beyond the swinging door. Admiring her beautiful form was one of his favorite pastimes.

Marianne Ridgeway was a tall woman with dark hair and a Slavic face—though not so remarkably Slavic that she didn’t blend in with her neighbors, friends and colleagues at the university like any other melting-pot American. Her eyes were dark—if not black, then grey, dreamy, lustrous, sometimes wanting, sometimes exuding hurt, although she was well aware of how her moods could play across her face and tell tales she should tell to no one. Thus she was careful, like the actress she once aspired to be, holding back, reigning in emotions, carefully modulating sweetness and good cheer, presenting to the world a sunny disposition and a smile too genuine to question.

For one unguarded moment in her living room, her carefully constructed persona was vulnerably breached. Hopefully, she recovered enough not to alarm her husband.

***

One moment of uncontrolled passion turned into a desperate obsession thereafter. In the days that followed that first rash moment of self-pleasure, Marianne came home from work and repeated the ungoverned scene of masturbation to memories she once vowed she’d lost. It wasn’t always Miklos at the center of her flight of fancy…

…Havel tied her to the pallet where her two lovers made her sleep. The bed was no more than a rickety construction of used boards, hammered together with nails and covered with a thin mattress and a few rough woolen blankets. Her arms were outstretched above her and tethered to a rail, while her feet were more loosely bound to a bar below. Havel’s hands were soft and warm, more comforting than Miklos’ rough ones. She had no preference for one man over the other, even though the way they each expressed their dominance was quite different. Havel liked her bound when he made love to her. He liked to caress her as he did now and whisper love notes in her ear, watch her belly fill with fire and then toy with her privates until she was at the edge of completion. Seeing her struggle to climax, he would torture her further, lifting his fingers away just as she was about to climax. He insisted she wait.

“You want it bad,” he noted, dispassionately.

“Oh, I do,” she implored him with her big eyes opening wide and her breath short. She was starting to sweat and the sweat made her itch, and a fly buzzed her nose. She shook her head to shake off the pesky insect, but the fly returned seconds later.

“So naked,” Havel said as he sat beside her, admiring the swells and the depressions of her body, the curves and the linear lines, like those of her collarbones. “You know, sometimes you’re more naked than other times.”

“Sometimes I’m dressed, sometimes I’m not,” she reminded him.

“No,” he shook his head, “when you’re undressed, naked, you’re sometimes bare to the bone, other times you’re wearing invisible clothes. But not now, you’re really naked now.”

He ran a finger along the top of her pubic bone. She wanted to scream for him to enter her, but should she beg, he’d only back off and leave her like this, painfully unfulfilled. Havel didn’t punish; he trained her by dismissing her, giving her a cold shoulder, nothing more. He often walked away looking offended or disappointed by some terrible fault she’d made known only to him. The teasing finger dropped into her pubic hair, though not far enough to suit her, not to her sex lips that were filling with blood, or the clitoris that was already engorged, or the slit where she poured forth a cup of nectar that seeped out on the sheet where it was starting to turn cold.

He saw her distress and kept on teasing, drawing a line from the top of her pubic crest to her navel, which he circled ever so slowly, before he continued to each breast. Reaching a nipple, he took it between his fingers and squeezed firmly. Pain followed, but she was utterly silent, just as she’d been trained. She so hated to be gagged, a punishment that would follow any verbal objection.

“You know, I can feel your heart beating.” He thought this miraculous. “I know that your pussy spasms, that it feels hollow and wanting. Ready to grab for anything.” He could read her mind, read her body, every nuanced reaction. He took a roll of cloth tape and began wrapping it around her face—her mouth, not her nose and eyes. He didn’t want to worry that she’d say a word, break a promise, forfeit their quiet game by answering one of his probing rhetorical questions with real words. “I just need to see your eyes for you to speak to me,” he told her. The first time he’d done this, it felt a little creepy to her, as if he was losing his grip on sanity. Later she discovered that it was scenes like this one that kept him sane.

After a long while, an hour, maybe more, Havel stopped the tease and carefully removed his clothes. He climbed on top of her bound body, straddling her hips with his erection poking at the hot wetness high between her thighs. He lunged then pulled back, then lunged again and pulled back, again and again, soon hitting painfully against her cervix with the head of his erection. She made herself not scream. He stared down at her face as he remained propped over her body, watching for any tiny alterations in her expression.

When she finally began to come, he saw her nostrils flare even before the first squeeze of vaginal muscles against his hardened penis. Her eyes then drifted, losing focus, and as her lids closed, he moved his angular body down on hers. They fucked until he came, shaking the pallet so that it creaked and groaned. She feared the unstable bed would break apart.

Marianne’s lids closed as she lay on the couch, fully stretched out against the cool leather, naked—loving her naked skin against the smooth surface. Feeling guilty with pleasure, she took as long to reach the sweet zenith as it might have taken Havel to bring her to a painful edge. While using her fingers to poke and rub and massage, the space inside her soon flowed with nectar. It ran out over her hand and made the leather sticky beneath her bottom. She rocked back and forth with her firm belly rising, contracting and falling to the rhythm of her fingers’ burning touch. Her long sleek legs quivered and her breath became ragged. She stuffed her fingers into the one hole and then the other lower one, setting off sensations that made her moan loud enough to fill the room with sound. She was assured the masturbation would remain a private matter; Thomas would not be home that night until after midnight. The house was hers, the couch was hers, her body hers—this place and these few moments alone were her secret playground. And yet, while she played alone, she belonged to her memories and to those men, and to that other time, where in that distant place, the obsession for such sexual things began.

She wanted Havel again inside her, pounding her selfishly as he always did with little thought about her own pleasure. She wanted to feel used by him again, and to later feel discarded when he was done with her, to feel abandoned like a wolf would abandon an eaten carcass. She wanted to feel that lonely and alone, for in some ironic way, accompanying that kind of loneliness was an inexpressible exhilaration.

But Havel was dead, and all she could do now was recreate those scenes in her mind and respond with her body just as she had so long ago.

Of course, Havel would have made her wait to come. But distanced by years and his rotting grave, Marianne wasn’t strong enough to take that difficult path of denial on her own. At the end of the scene, her body crested, breasts reaching toward the ceiling, hips grinding on her hand, as she sank deliriously over the edge and cried aloud, relieved at last.

***

It was night and Marianne was in her bed. Thomas was softly snoring beside her, sleeping peacefully. Earlier in the day, he’d returned from the university while she was upstairs in the bedroom getting off to her potent memories. She couldn’t remember now how many days it had been since the ritual started, but the behavior seemed firmly entrenched and immutable, beyond her ability to end. It was a rigorous practice and the only thing that would keep the flood of memories from disrupting her life.

Several nights, when she was unable to find a private moment during the day, she became captive to her thoughts and their obsessive force after she went to bed. Once Thomas was safely asleep beside her, the bed shook, as it did this night, while in her mind she re-experienced another of Miklos’ many tortures.

… “Take off the clothes, slut,” he ordered.

There were six men in the room waiting for her to obey the command. She stood transfixed with her feet feeling like lead and her heart beating rapidly. She’d begun to fidget wondering what she’d do, how this would end, what would Miklos want from her?

“Do it! Dammit!” he snorted, not disguising his irritation. He was a mean, impatient man, but he had an ability to grab her sexually by the crotch and shake every nerve in her awake. He started to rise from his seat, but before he even made a move in her direction, before his palm arced toward her face in rebuke, she could feel the heavy impact of his hand on her cheek. She began to undress immediately to avoid the dreadful sting.

Sexual nectar leaked down her thigh; her face reddened; her heart thumped hard; her ears burned hot with shame. Just a skirt and sweater and a pair of boots separated her from the men’s leering eyes. Undressed, there was nothing. She was naked. Was she naked to the bone, as Havel would tell her?

“Shove this up your ass.” Miklos handed her a beer bottle.

Her cheeks were on fire.

She gulped before asking, “Dry?”

“Your pussy is wet, bitch,” he drawled amusedly. “Use what you got.”

Her hand moved from her pussy to her ass, slathering the nectar until the opening of her anus was well-lubed. She bent enough to shove the bottle inside her rectum, then seconds later felt Miklos above her, shoving her to the hard wood floor where he then knelt beside her and used the thing to fuck her into uncontrollable spasms.

“Oh, gawdmygawdmygawd…” the moaning sound was deep and guttural, like some beastly animal mating. She felt the men around her, their eyes fixed on the crude sight as it caused their pricks to swell inside their pants and their hands rub their crotches.

She continued into the night being Miklos’ whore, sitting on laps, kissing hard bearded faces, feeling erections plunge at will and depositing the seeds that swam inside her body and flowed away or were wiped off in preparation for another man.

As Marianne’s fingers played with the soft folds of her pussy, and her motions became harder, faster and more uncontrolled, the bed shook hard and her mouth opened letting out an errant moan. Where was the gag when she needed one! she thought as she remembered where she was.

Afterwards, she let her body drift and her mind escape. Thomas stirred next to her, but his gentle snores seemed uninterrupted.

Chapter Two

Marianne and Thomas sat drinking coffee in the kitchen. Its white cabinets and pale blue walls made a cheery backdrop for breakfast, especially when the sun splashed through the windows and bathed them with the morning light. Morning was her best time of day now, with the eerie thoughts from her past most distant in those early hours. With a new day, she could always hope that she’d been cured by her last savage masturbation and the obsession would not rekindle. By afternoon, a stray thought or two would creep through the cracks of her resolve and the memories would trickle in again.

Thomas was later than usual leaving for the university where he chaired the department of Social Science and was up for Dean of Students. He was a natural as a university professor and perfectly suited to the added responsibilities he had been given. He understood the politics of higher education and could easily grasp the mood of his student body, keeping up with an ever-changing environment dictated by a moody brew of post-adolescent angst and the naïve idealism of youth. He loved the challenge of the changing years, it gave him energy and inspiration, much the same way his younger wife could energize his thoughts and dreams and sexual energy.

He was often studious, careful and guarded when he considered new proposals, but he was capable, once he finally digested a challenge, of adding his own unique perspective to an idea—one that was routinely respected. His opinions were sought after. His viewpoints were rarely off. It wouldn’t surprise anyone if he ended up becoming the university president a few years down the road.

Thomas thought of his wife as a friend, his best ally. But in the last three weeks, she’d become distant and distracted. He’d caught her brooding, and had several times awakened her from daydreams seeing a scant blush on her cheeks. She quickly changed her mood, forcing her lips into a smile.

He loved a genuine smile. He remembered the day they’d met when he interviewed her for a position in the department. She was young and cautious, carefully brushing a lock of her dark hair off her face. Her hands were sweaty from nerves. But she answered his every question with a professional politeness he liked, and though she stumbled over her prepared speech, he found the baubles endearing. He heard her laugh and fell in love. Coming from a well of emotion deep inside, the sound engulfed him, sending a strangely warm tingle of joy through his body. He hired her without review from his staff, not the usual procedure. She would be his personal assistant—a move that could have been questionable in some eyes. But Marianne buried herself so quickly in several projects that even he had to deliberately draw her out of the cocoon she knit around her. She seemed determined to lose herself. Something dogged her. Although when he finally pressed her on the subject of her past—it was some months later—she insisted that her grim work ethic was simply the nagging sound of her mother’s voice reminding her always to be useful and never in the way.

Her parents were dead, and Thomas expected that there had been lovers in her past. But that was New York, and she took great pains to assure him that that part of her life was over. Thomas looked beyond the vague recounting of her past, almost feeling afraid to probe too deeply lest he stir up something sad or ugly, or find something that would tarnish his picture of her. He preferred to think of his wife as the gentle, hardworking and delicate beauty that she was to him.

It would have been easy to worship this ‘girl from nowhere’, but Thomas understood his motives all too clearly; to worship Marianne could be dangerous. Unfortunately, the longer the pair worked together, the more at ease with him she became, the more she laughed, the more she let the unguarded slip and a tender look in her eye engage him. Their growing affections were hidden still, but very close to the surface. Too much familiarity would not look good, not in a university environment like this one.

After nearly eighteen months as his assistant, Thomas sat her down in his office.

“I’m afraid, Marianne, that my work for you here is complete,” he started what he knew would be a difficult but very necessary conversation.

“It is?” She looked at him in disbelief, while her big round eyes instantly filled with tears. “But you—”

“I’m going to table those projects,” he said—too crisply, he thought later.

“I’ve done something wrong?” Her face twisted miserably.

“No, no, no! You do everything right. Your work has been exemplary. And you’re not being fired, just transferred.”

“I don’t understand.”

He smiled briefly and returned to his point. “There’s an opening in the English Department that I think you’ll neatly fill with your talents.”

“English department? But I like working with you.”

“Just as I enjoy working with you. But you being in this position prevents…” he stopped, feeling a little embarrassed with his next admission, but resolved. “It prevents me from becoming more personal.” He gulped and took a deep nervous breath. “I’d like to see you outside work.”

She looked confused.

“I’d very much like it if we could… date?”

It took some seconds for the thought to register, then her mouth broke into a sheepish grin and her eyes lightened.

“I didn’t know… I mean, I wasn’t sure…” she giggled—not that whole-hearted natural laugh he loved so much, but he loved this youthful sweetness too.

“If you’ve felt something more from me than academic admiration, I’m not surprised. But in my position, things get delicate. It would be better, especially considering the difference in our ages, if we were to separate ourselves at work, and at least to start, keep the dating outside the University.”

“You mean keep it a secret?”

“Not secret, no. I see nothing wrong in a relationship. It’s just one of those delicate matters. You have to be careful.”

“Careful of what?”

Her puzzled expression said it all. This was not the first time he noted a strange response from his assistant when he thought that the social nuances of some matter should be fairly clear to her. It almost felt as if Marianne was not quite operating from the same basic understanding of American social norms. But then maybe she was raised in a different environment, removed from the societal propriety he took for granted. She was an interesting study in contrasts, which was likely what made her so appealing to him on not just a physical but also an intellectual level.

Once Marianne was settled in her new position, her relationship with Thomas became intimate almost immediately. Long dinners began to bristle with sexual energy until one night after pizza and a movie, she invited him to her room and they exploded on each other. She was completely silent throughout the entire process of making love, but her passion spoke quite loudly.

Marianne’s living room was dark so they could hardly see each other. When she turned to him after locking her front door, they seemed to leap out towards each other, kissing, touching, fervidly groping with a wildness that poured from her and delighted Thomas to the point that he was spasmodic from the start. His penis could hardly fill fast enough to suit her. They were rolling on her bed without giving the matter any thought. This was a first for Thomas, though it was hardly a first for Marianne. He was more a vessel for her to use than a man to love. Although her affection for him was real, the wild uproar was clearly pent-up emotion pouring forth in the silence of the darkened bedroom. Whatever its source, he would not complain.

He tried to whisper in her ear, but she shushed him kindly, with a smile he could just barely see as she hovered over him in the darkness. They made love with nothing but the sound of the slapping, grunting, panting bodies for accompaniment. An odd quiet stirred all around them, like the rushing of the wind, or surf pounding against a beach.

Only afterwards, only after they were fully recovered and the lights went on did she speak or Thomas dare to. This form of lovemaking never changed in a year of courtship and three years of marriage. But Thomas couldn’t complain. She was lavish in her affections. She sucked his organ from limp to engorged many times, she oozed over his body with kisses and lay under him, a squirming confection of saucy sniggering brat who almost begged for a harder, more aggressive fucking. Sex was wonderful between them, sometimes tender in the beginning, raucous in the middle and full-throated at the finish. But it was never discussed. Not one word that Thomas could remember ever crossed their lips about the nature of the physical passion they shared. Early on, when he’d tried to engage her in a conversation about their sex life, she’d smile, she might shrug, and she usually walked away leaving him wondering what could be going on inside her head.

“Would you like a cup of coffee to go?” Thomas heard Marianne ask him as she moved around the kitchen.

“No, hon, but I’d love it if you’d sit down so we can talk. I know you have the morning free.”

She stopped and looked at him, suddenly wary of this odd request. But, she did sit, and waited sheepishly like a child for him to begin.

“Is there, Marianne, perhaps, some … some secret sexual fantasy you’re afraid to share with me?”

Her eyes could not recover fast enough from a moment of startled fear. Good God, did he know?

And yet, there was no accusation in the question, even if it was unusually blunt coming from Thomas—more like an interaction he would have with a student. With her hands on the table nursing her coffee cup, she felt the wall of lies that surrounded her beginning to crack.

“Why would you—” she stumbled on the words that crowded into her mind.

He reached out and covered her shaking hand with his, speaking ever so gently. “You think I can’t feel you at night?”

She stared ahead, blankly.

“You play with yourself, masturbate. I don’t recall you doing this before…” He waited for some response.

“I…uh…I’m sorry Thomas. I can stop if it offends you.” She grew increasingly nervous.