NINETY-SEVEN

I Reminded You of You

Very much intrigued, Tristan’s eyes follow his female as far as they can, before she leaves the front of the row of men in order to reach the back of it. Once there, she knows how many behinds to count from the beginning of the line from the right, before she reaches the right master’s. As she travels quickly, her ears remain attentive to the possibility of hearing herself called out and disqualified, but no such words are spoken.

When she walks by her master, Catherine reaches up to tap him a couple times on the back of one of his upper thighs, and immediately wonders why she did so. Seconds later, once behind the master she seeks, she takes a few licks of the glistening that dripped and hugged the man’s form due to the thick fluid’s properties, which made it spread out from this master’s frontal nether area to his thighs, without dropping to the floor. The man is surprised to feel himself thus appreciated from behind.

Once the colour is developed in her mouth, Catherine spreads it upon her body, runs back to her board, places the last picture by the last colour, and then waits to face the judges’ call. As the race continues, these men discuss her breaking of the rules. Neither Catherine nor Tristan is happy to see the host join in as well.

At one point during the men’s conversation, all of them look at the contest clock and then obviously compare the time upon it to what was registered as Catherine’s finish-line crossing, which was recorded after she stuck the last master’s photo next to the last remaining hue on her board, after sampling not that man’s staff, but his thigh, from behind him.

One of the judges eventually walks to Tristan, who has two women at his manhood as the contest continues, and hops up behind him, on the platform. “We’re giving your female a time penalty. If no one else completes the race within the next ninety seconds, she wins,” he announces.

Tristan nods his head and seeks Catherine’s eyes, but his female, however, has not looked in his direction since she broke the rules a second time, and does not do so now either, despite being allowed to look at her master again, since she is done competing. Although Tristan does consider that she is perhaps not aware of this rule, he also senses something more.

“Men break the rules all the time, to get what they want,” Catherine recalls her writer-friend sharing. “They break their promises, their vows, and in so many ways, the very foundation of being human. They don’t care. They force a comparison between being human and being God, and say that to err is human, not godly, and they do so so that women feel that they have to accept men as they are, but they never force a comparison between being human and being animal, and therefore, never say that to be superficial and to lack empathy is animal, not human, because doing so would prevent them from being accepted as human. Men just always use whatever allows them to do what they want and to get what they want, no matter the price, the cost to anyone else. And women are always expected to just bear that cost, to suffer it over and over again, in every way.”

You’re done competing. You can look at Tristan now, and you should, healer reminds her.

I wanted to know before, if he was angry, because not knowing was feeding my fear, making it grow, but now, I just want to be out of here. It’s not about him. My thoughts are clearer.

Don’t swing to the other extreme, Catherine: don’t stop caring altogether. That wouldn’t end well. That couldn’t end well.

I know that he loves to win, but it shouldn’t make me feel good to win a stupid contest for him.

“Mistress Tristan, you won,” an attendant announces to Catherine, after the designated time has elapsed and no other woman has finished her matching.  “Congratulations.”

Seriously. Winning shouldn’t make me feel good in any way.

But you had to be clever, for this win, and that’s something, healer points out. Those women made the game more complicated, but you figured out how to win anyway, how to come out on top. You really should look over, Catherine. Whatever points you scored with Tristan for winning might otherwise be lost. 

Catherine, however, does not move.

Despite the declaration of a winner, every submissive must finish the race, or otherwise face punishment, and no one is more pleased than Tristan is when three of the submissives who were allied against Catherine’s win have not completed their task seconds before 9:50 p.m. strikes, which is the cut-off time.

When the buzzer sounds ending competition, he immediately retrieves his manhood from the mouth of one of those women by sending one of his hands to abruptly break the connection. His face is anything but pleasant as he then allows his fingers to spread out and enjoy a shove of the woman’s face as well. The submissive knows who Tristan is, but since his hue resembled two others that she had not sorted out yet, she was at him once again. Or, perhaps she just wanted to be there, at him, and then lost track of time, surely, since no woman wants to suffer punishment for not finishing in time.

“Losers, approach,” the host calls out to the women who did not complete their task. “And all cheaters as well,” he surprises everyone by adding. Since the cheaters do not self-identify, attendants do it for them and force them to join the losers.

When Catherine turns her attention to this gathering, her eyes come to rest upon Red, who stands with the others since she was roped into the second on-the-fly alliance. As the loss of that ear returns to Catherine’s mind, she then oddly finds herself fearing what might happen to Red, despite her strong dislike of her.

“Behold: your punishment for being embarrassments as females and to your respective masters,” the host announces, as an attendant removes the covering of a bowl that was just wheeled in on a cart.

Good. So, whatever is about to happen won’t be ear-loss bad, Catherine decides, her eyes now on this bowl. What it contains is easy to recognize on the one hand, but not as simple to explain on the other, as there is so much of it.

“A collection of every drop of creative material produced during the shows, that is, every drop that could be gathered once the acts were offstage,” the host explains. “And more.”

What’s the more? No. I don’t want to know, do I, where it’s from? Catherine decides, before her eyes come to rest on a baster-like device that has a finer end than the regular cooking kind. What’s the point in using that? Non-refundables can’t be soiled more than they’ve already chosen to be soiled, day in and day out, more than they already are, by choice. So, how can those women even possibly care? And what’s the point of a punishment if the ones being punished don’t care? And how does it entertain the masters, this punishment, if . . . Would that thing be used on true as well, if one had not completed the race, or would a different punishment have been used?

“Keep that thing away from me,” a non-refundable in the alliance of cheaters, however, firmly warns the attendants, indeed wanting nothing to do with what that “baster” will do to her.

“You don’t get a say, female, submissive,” an attendant snaps at her.

“Submit to my licking my a--, jerk,” the non-refundable snaps back.

“If you don’t shut up, your mouth will submit to my a--, after I’ve just taken a dump, so it can be my toilet paper,” the non-refundable’s master barks in turn at his plaything.

Germaphobe Catherine makes a face, not that non-germaphobes would consent.

“Too fat to wipe yourself, loser?” The non-refundable, however, does not quit.

“Why is it that so many women don’t know to just shut up and not make things worse?” A true submissive standing close to Catherine thinks out loud.

“Why is it that women ever even have to consider shutting up because they have to consider things getting worse if they don’t?” Tristan’s female counters.

The weekend plaything who spoke up is the first to be restrained by attendants, and without care for her art. As she struggles and screams out, she is then soiled by the baster loaded up with some of the blend from the bowl. To the sound of similar screams accompanying more female struggle, attendants then jab into the nether area of all of the other women labelled as losers and/or cheaters until the tip of the device has found its way furthest in in every instance, either by natural means -- that is, through the natural, small opening at the end of a woman’s pleasure corridor that entertains malehood -- or by piercing its way in in whatever way, at this same end, in order to allow some of the blend to be released deeply within the punished.

“That’s not enough,” Tristan objects, once the women have all been poked. “For the ones who cheated,” he adds.

I cheated! Catherine of course has not forgotten.

Minutes ago, when the attendants gathered the women who broke the rules, a part of Catherine wondered if they would include her in the round up as well, even though she was declared the winner and not penalized for her response-cheating. With Tristan now requesting more, Catherine’s fear is greater than it was then, because she can easily imagine her master demanding that she now also be included. For that reason and more, she hates that most masters instantly voice and/or gesture their agreement to further cruelty. Despite being angry with the women who hindered her win, Catherine herself did not enjoy act one, and she most certainly does not want a second one, even if she is spared from it herself.

“Dunk their faces in the bowl,” a master suggests.

“Eyes and mouth opened,” another further instructs. “So we can teach them to truly know their world and their place within it.”

The noise level in the grand room instantly increases by much, as most masters add their piece to that suggestion. As seconds tick by, Catherine is relieved not to hear her master’s voice demand to have her included, but she is once more most uncomfortable at the masters having been riled up yet again.

“How dare females work with one-another. How dare they create a connection, an alliance with anyone else but their master, who they are to serve in every way that he desires, and without complaint, ever,” she clearly hears a master declare, among other voices simultaneously expressing such maleness.

Especially when to hinder another woman, Catherine adds to herself.

“If you were true females constantly benefiting from a master’s care and nurture, you wouldn’t have behaved the way that you did,” the host scolds the cheaters, after a moment of taking in all of the master comments that he could make out, in all the noise. “No true submissive behaved the way that you did,” he adds, as proof.

“That’s because they’re idiots,” one of the non-refundables facing further punishment dares to return.

She is consequently the first to have her eyelids taped opened, and to then have her face shoved into the blend and held within it until she must take a breath again.

“You pathetic excuse for human beings!” She angrily screams at the masters once she is allowed out of the bowl, out of the world of spewing that she was forced into.

“Says the one drenched in come,” one of the men returns.

Catherine’s eyes lower to her abdomen and travel upon other areas of her body that are drenched as well, even if in a different way, through her art and designs.

The other cheaters suffer the same fate in quick succession.

“It could’ve been worse: you could’ve been stoned to death, for cheating,” a master points out, teeth clenched, to the complaining punished.

None of those women is thinking nor feeling that it’s just creative material, and therefore, no big deal, and that’s because there’s so much more to it, and there always is. “It’s never just a dick, just come, just a stint on a woman’s knees or her being erased as a person in any other way, which are takedowns of women and humanity that aren’t even good enough for many men’s fragile ego anymore, because now, now we have a cold, intimate-violation culture all around us. A plague of pure hatred openly directed at girls and women. And the reasons that men give for it says everything about them, of course. Their insecurities, their failings and failures.”

File check, healer reminds Catherine, after yet another of her writer friend’s just opened up.

All the women here appear to be calmer, but the ones who were punished just now, they’ll hate me so much more, and there’s an entire cycle left. Four hours. Tristan should’ve just left it alone. Why didn’t he just leave it alone?

Just stay close to him. Masters will continue to keep women in check, when necessary.

How did I become so despised? I’m one of them, really.

“Clean her up,” Tristan instructs an attendant, referring to the contest colours that remain upon his female’s body.

Catherine thus soon feels a cool liquid upon her skin, one put to work on those colours, to remove them through the gentle rub of several towelettes. The attendant saves the removal her master’s colour for last and thus releases from his attention Catherine’s chest, as well as Catherine altogether, once it is removed.

“Why won’t you look at me?” Tristan immediately inquires, once he is by her side again. “Why would I be angry? You won.”

“Why did you cause them more pain? Why did you ask that . . . ”

“That’s not why you weren’t looking at me. I gave you permission. The second time, anyway. Now look at me.”

Catherine looks up at him without moving anything else but her eyes.

“Good job,” he then praises her.

The longer he looks into her eyes, the more he can see that she is indeed more like herself, that she indeed feels more like herself. He could have decided to sit out this race, knowing its consequences, and thus, to have maintained what he and other factors had built up in his female, but he did not.

Disappointing for what I want, but I’ll find another way, he reassures himself.

He must then once more ignore the barely audible voice within him that yet again asks if getting what he wants from Catherine might not end up destroying her. That same voice was not ignored, at the beginning of the race, when it whispered about what has happened in the past to some women who did not race, this late in the weekend.

“Their pay’s at the finish line, and they can see it again,” Catherine comments, after seconds tick by and her master says nothing more. “The feel of the room is different than it was before the mini-contest, not that the women who were close to their master have taken a step back, but they do seem more in control of themselves. Why is that?”

“Running made your heart beat faster, which made your blood circulate more quickly, which helped your organs to rid it of some of the accumulated elements within it, as in those from the fixative. But not all of them,” Tristan explains, but only for Catherine to hear.

“Seems counterproductive,” she replies.

“I don’t decide what contests will be included during weekend play, much less their order.”

“I meant for all the masters.”

“Emotional women not playing by the rules, not obeying during an entire cycle, that’s just no fun, and not pretty,” a master interjects.

Catherine keeps her eyes within Tristan’s, as he looks down into hers.

No more silliness from me until the end of the weekend, then. Right? She considers.

I’ll find a way yet to have all of your mind, all of you, at my service, Tristan, for his part, reaffirms to himself, as the connection through their eyes continues.

“I very much enjoyed your daring, creative, outside-the-box, against-the-rules answer to being bullied by those non-refundables.”

I reminded you of you, didn’t I? Catherine replies to him in her mind, but in no other way.

“That ‘take her down’ thing was entertaining as well,” her master adds, a small smile upon his lips.

Catherine lowers her eyes when she finds herself having to stop an identical smile from appearing upon her own lips, but not for the same reason as the one behind Tristan’s. She shakes her head.

“Hair,” her master gently reminds her.

I feel better, but I don’t have that piece of my mind back, do I?