Rehearsal - sexually explicit

[mistermarkham]

Rehearsal
Part 1 of a short story by Penman

It never ceased to amaze Helen that it was perfectly feasible to become stuck in a 3-lane crawl of traffic even at 1 o'clock in the morning - even on a Sunday morning! As a result, the very positive feelings that had been growing in her all evening, as she and her partner, Mike, had sat at a very well-supplied table with their hosts, enjoying the benefits of Julie's culinary skills and of the refined oenological taste of John, Julie's partner - also CEO of the highly successful company where Mike was working - had all but vanished by the time they finally turned off the motorway and made their way along the side-road that led to the home that they had created together during the nine years that they had shared.
Helen went into the house whilst Mike parked the car in the garage. She threw her very expensive leather handbag onto the table in the hallway then kicked her equally expensive shoes off. Even though she had nothing whatsoever to prove to her partner or to their hosts for the evening, she enjoyed taking the time and trouble to look somewhat different from her normal workday appearance - which was by no means displeasing to anyone who met her. However, Helen had a mind of her own and she was not one for being deflected from her intentions, no matter how well-meaning people were in reminding her of just how attractive she was. This was not to suggest that she was in anyway unhappy with the way she looked - it was just that Helen liked things to be at their best. Second-best did not feature in the dictionary where she was concerned. Paradoxically, she was remarkably forgiving and tolerant towards others who did not always emulate her efforts at achieving the highest standards and who failed to make the best of their attributes and talents. Surprisingly, one such person was none other than her partner, Mike, whom she had known for a good 12 years and with whom she had shared the previous 9 years of her life.
Part of Helen's efforts at achieving the high standards that she had set for herself involved at least 12 hours a week at the gym, where she and Mike had joint membership. To look at them both, it would appear that their membership fee was well spent, but part of the credit for Mike having kept himself in fairly good condition had to go to a local and very successful rugby team in which he played quite regularly as a prop forward.
Mike was about 6 years older than Helen and, consistent with his sporting role, he was tall and ruggedly built. He was also ingenious and imaginative, characteristics that served him well in the workplace and in his social life. Having graduated from a very forward-looking Northern university with a first class honours degree in Chemistry, he had found a very promising position within the Research & Development Department at a small but highly successful and adventurous textile manufacturing company, which had had the vision to sponsor him, after 2 years' service, for a post-graduate course in Materials Sciences, in which he had specialised in textile research. Having again completed his course of studies with distinction, he had found himself appointed to the post of Deputy Head of Research & Development, where a combination of his academic and scientific skills with his lifelong interest in the natural world had led to a very promising career path.
If there was one thing that Helen had in common with Louise, Mike's younger sister, it was severe arachnophobia, yet it was these very feared insects, which - love them or hate them - carry formidable skills in their genes, that had attracted Mike's attention from a very early age, as he had, emulating Robert the Bruce, watched in fascination, one summer's afternoon, while a garden spider Araneus diadematus had woven an intricate web between two clematis plants outside his grandfather's garden shed deep in the English countryside. The fact that this web remained virtually intact after the storm that blew in during the following night had set Mike thinking.
It is true that Mike had not been entirely altruistic in the manner in which he exploited his love of arachnids in the presence of influential females, both family members and friends. One particular incident - involving a younger female member of the family fleeing at high speed from the bathroom, wearing nothing but panic and with skin of a pallor normally seen only on a funeral director's premises - had led to his only encounter with what he now regarded as the wrong end of a cane, wielded by a very irate older female member of the family, in the form of his grandmother, who had not taken kindly to the cruelty displayed by her grandson in depositing a very large and very alive arachnid in Louise's bath.
Whilst the ladies in Mike's life may not have been particularly enamoured of these incredibly talented little creatures, it was this species that had set Mike off on a research product that had led to the development of a revolutionary fibre that the company had patented and that now looked set to take the world by storm.
Helen walked slowly to the kitchen and filled the kettle, which she then switched on and prepared the requisites for a late-night hot drink and a brandy before she and Mike retired to bed.
Leaving the kettle heating up noisily, Helen climbed the stairs wearily and made her way to the bedroom, where she lifted her oyster-coloured silk dress over her shoulders before laying it over the back of a chair. She walked past the full-length mirror and turned to look at herself, dressed now in nothing but black lace knickers that highlighted her very feminine shape. She turned around slowly, allowing her hands to move from her hips round over her firm and well-toned buttocks. As she did so, she felt a shiver - almost akin to premonition - as her hands ran smoothly over the curves of her bottom. Slowly, she slipped her hands inside her knickers and pushed them down before stepping out of them and stooping to pick them up. As she did so, her eye caught a glimpse of her bent posture, her bottom pushed out in a manner that sent a second, even stronger shiver down her spine. This was not so much a case of narcissism as of a woman who was becoming aware of a growing sensation of need that she was not yet able to define in detail, but a woman who knew that her smooth and firm buttocks would play a very big role in the satisfaction of that need.
Sounds coming up the stairs from the hallway told Helen that Mike was in the house and she heard his footsteps moving from room to room downstairs as he looked for her. She giggled to herself and decided to let him find her in his own time. Helen moved to the laundry basket and deposited her knickers there before going to her underwear drawer and retrieving a pair of loose white cotton shorts that formed part of her favourite night-time apparel. She slipped them on quietly and, for reasons she did not understand, felt compelled to run her hands down her buttocks and thigh tops again, triggering yet another, even more powerful shiver down her spine. Quickly, she re-focused on her surroundings and put a white camisole top on before heading back downstairs to Mike, who was waiting in the kitchen.
Helen knew full well that she and Mike would fall asleep as satisfied lovers that night, but something else was going on in her mind, something enticingly but darkly erotic, and it was beginning to intrigue her. Whatever it was, her subconscious mind had yet to make it known to her conscious thinking, but of one thing she was absolutely certain - with a good measure of bewilderment. It did not involve Mike.
As Helen entered the kitchen, she noticed a long, fairly narrow, rectangular box on the worktop. She walked up to it and asked Mike what it was.
"Open it and see for yourself!", came the reply. The big grin on Mike's face told her that she should be prepared for a surprise.
Surprise was probably not an entirely accurate description of a sight that greeted Helen's eyes as she lifted the lid carefully, almost as if she was half expecting a tarantula to come leaping out of it. In fact, she experienced a fourth and visible shiver down her spine and a very strong tingling sensation in her bottom as she looked down upon a dark brown, not entirely straight cane, lying on folded sheets of tissue paper like some object of historical interest out of the distant years of antiquity. She froze for a moment, then looked at Mike, smiling.
"Oh yes, have you been having ideas without my knowledge?". Helen winked at Mike, who was now grinning even more widely.
"Well, not entirely my ideas..."
Helen frowned.
"So who's been planting ideas in that excuse of a mind of yours?"
Mike looked at her, in a way that made it difficult to read his mind.
"It's from John and Julie!"
Butterflies stormed into anarchic chaos in Helen's tummy, but not even Mike would have noticed this. Helen was very good indeed at keeping herself to herself when the need arose.
There was a brief pause in the conversation before Helen asked, in a half whisper:
"So is he coming to give you instruction?"
Mike looked inscrutably at his partner....
"I don't actually need instruction as I have already observed this cane in use..."
Helen looked shocked but was insatiably curious....
"How so?", she enquired, almost visibly impatient to hear how Mike had done this...
"John has given Julie three canings now...."
Helen looked at him, with just a flicker of an expression that suggested that she had been caught off-guard...
"And they both let you watch?"
Mike smiled as he answered the question slowly and succinctly...
"Not only let me watch, but also made sure I knew how to use their favourite cane."
Helen shuddered with a strange but potent mixture of fear and excitement that she had rarely experienced previously.
"You mean you..."
Mike went straight into his reply as he read his partner's mind....
"I mean I gave Julie 12 strokes with this cane!" He grinned and watched Helen's every move. She did not know whether to be angry that Mike had kept this from her or to give in to a powerful hunger that had suddenly developed in her pelvis and behind. She sensed that she was becoming very aroused, but this was not so much at the prospect of being caned by Mike as it was at the way in which her mind had tied this cane to the image of John, an image that she had found it impossible to ignore.
Helen had first met John and Julie when the company was planning to appoint Mike to the post of Deputy Head of Research & Development. She had struck a rapport instantly with Julie, a woman a few years older than her, still in very good shape, a keen member, with her husband, of a different gym and a woman blessed with the sort of figure and looks that would make many a girl half her age envious of her.
However, Helen had been far more guarded with John, who seemed to keep himself very much to himself, a man in his late 40s whose military training and sporting background were clearly evident from his physique and his demeanour. Here was a man with the gifts of extremely rapid and crystal clear thinking, a man who was used to taking control and who was not particularly well accustomed to dissenting views, unless they were well supported by evidence and logic and well presented, in a clear and articulate manner that matched his own. Whilst his looks were by no means glamorous, his well-manicured masculinity was in no doubt whatsoever. On top of that, he had something indefinable about him that niggled away at Helen's mind. He was a CEO through and through, but he was also something else that was beyond Helen's comprehension. She was not particularly happy about that, for she was a highly intelligent woman who liked to know people and understand them.
Now, images of John standing by Mike's side as her partner laid 12 strokes of the cane across Julie's bottom filled her mind. For some reason, she did not feel in the least bit angry. She knew Julie, she knew that she and John 'played', as Julie described it, and she had been aware that the cane was used. It had not gone unnoticed that Julie was sometimes a tad cautious when sitting down, but she, like Helen, was not a woman to wear her feelings or display her thoughts on her sleeve! Helen fixed the image of Julie's naked body, draped across the table, deep within her mind and felt a surge in the activities of the butterflies that had been tormenting her since they had returned home.
Helen brought her thoughts back to Mike and her surroundings and asked:
"What did Julie say?"
Mike looked at her and reached out to take hold of her hand...
"In that situation, Julie says nothing unless John tells her to. She simply stood up at the end of the caning, knelt in front of us both, then went, on John's instructions, to their bedroom to wait for him."
"She knelt in front of you?" Helen was struggling to grasp this image of a woman whom she knew to be so strong. She had always thought that kinky play was just part of her foreplay to lovemaking, as it had been for her and Mike. She knew that the fact that it was foreplay did not, necessarily, mean that a woman's bottom does not sting or glow with powerful incandescence. She had often made love to Mike feeling a sharp reminder of their spanking play whenever they found themselves in the missionary position. She knew what a hairbrush could deliver and she knew that it was a potent catalyst to the satisfaction that they both derived from their sex-life. Now, however, something new was percolating through her mind and what had appeared to be unrelated jigsaw pieces were suddenly falling into place, creating an image that was starting to make sense of the previously unexplained things that had been happening in her mind.
Helen squeezed Mike's hand and smiled at him. She focused on his face in a way that made it impossible for him to look away.
"So....", she hesitated, caught slightly off-guard once again as she dipped the tip of her toe into these new and uncharted waters.., "... do I get to experience what a cane feels like?"
Mike held her gaze and looked deep into her eyes...
"No time like the present, my love..."
Words would have been superfluous at this stage, for both of them knew what was coming next... Helen walked across to the table and bent over, stretching her arms out in front of her and spreading her legs slightly, for stability and to taunt her lover.
Mike managed to keep his raging emotions very well controlled, just as John had told him to do, as he approached the box and lifted the cane out. Carefully, he flexed it, then inspected the tip visually, whilst running his finger tip over it, then along the length of the cane, to make sure that there were no splits.
Mike walked towards his partner, who was now in a position, her bottom tightly wrapped in the thin white cotton, that generated a surge of pure lust, her well-muscled thighs and legs stretched out leaving her feet about twelve inches away from the table. Mike laid the cane very softly across the tantalising shape of the two full and separated buttocks, his head buzzing with sexual longing. Carefully, he adopted a stance that ensured good control of the cane, then moved his left arm to behind his back. Slowly the cane slid backwards and forwards, exactly as John had instructed him, until it was correctly positioned to avoid wrap-around. Helen clenched her cheeks...
"Relax, Helen!", came a very firm command from Mike. Helen complied instantly and within a few seconds, the first line of searing heat was forming inside the taut stretched cotton. There was a brief moment of complete silence following the sharp crack from the cane, as it landed and set up a ripple up and down the buttocks, despite the tautness of the fabric. Then Helen let out a choked cry of pain and shock .. and something else besides. Her bottom cheeks clenched and relaxed wildly, but her torso and legs did not move. Mike flexed the cane between his hands and watched as the first stripe formed visibly underneath the cotton.
After what felt like an hour, but was, in fact, no more than a minute, Helen felt the soft kiss of the cane again, as it was positioned at the junction of the mid and lower thirds of her buttocks. She shuddered and clenched... then relaxed just as the second stroke landed even more firmly across the muscular but beautifully rounded female cheeks...
Mike felt a new energy that was, fortunately, balanced by a degree of self-control that he had only experienced once before in a sexually charged situation. His mind went back to how Julie had taken her 12 strokes almost without a murmur and how her stripes had been so clearly visible as she had withdrawn, naked, from the company of the gentlemen who had overseen her caning.
Mike waited longer this time, in two minds as to whether or not to discontinue this new experience at that point. The course of events was, however, dictated by Helen, who stood up and reached back carefully to peel her shorts down.
Mike spoke to her very quietly but very firmly as he tucked the cane under his arm and walked slowly towards her. "Give me your hands, Helen!"
Helen blinked, still trying to come to terms with the amazing searing pain in her bottom and astonished at Mike's tone..
He looked at her directly and this time it was he who locked her gaze....
"Helen... when you are being caned, you wait to be told what to do. You do not act on your own initiative.."
His words were interrupted by a pleading defence uttered in a tone with which he was not familiar...
"But Mike, I just wanted to...."
Mike re-took control of the situation by placing his finger over his lips and almost whispering: "You do not speak until bidden to do so, Helen." She nodded, almost disbelieving her own conduct now.... Mike went on: "You were going to be allowed to stand after those two strokes, but..."
Helen looked as if she was on the point of coming back at him, but caution and common sense prevailed. Mike went on... "You will now remove your shorts completely then return to the table, to the position in which you took the first of what will now be four strokes...". He gestured with the tip of the cane towards the table.
Helen handed Mike her shorts, then turned to her punishment position, her mind still humming with wild thoughts, her bottom feeling as if she had sat on a barbecue griddle plate, but her butterflies now totally subdued... As she moved back to the table, Mike became aware of a satisfying slight dampness in an intimate part of the garment that he now deposited on a stool by the table... He returned to the waiting young woman and aligned the cane for the third time.
As the second of two sharp strokes, administered a mere 10 seconds apart, seared into the centre of her bottom, Helen was tempted to leap to her feet and clutch her bottom - but she did not succumb to this reflex response and remained, trembling slightly, spread over the table. Mike walked over to the sink and took a clean cloth from the cupboard underneath it. He moistened it under the warm tap, then carefully wiped the cane from top to bottom before drying it and returning it to its box. Slowly he replaced the lid and picked the box up, along with Helen's shorts. He turned towards Helen..
"You may stand up, Helen. You can bring the hot drinks up with you. I will take the brandies."
With that, he left the kitchen as Helen moved with exquisite care to stand up. Instinctively, her hands went round to her bottom and she gasped as her fingertips just brushed over each of the four raised weals in turn.
Helen lay on her side in bed, facing Mike, who was gently stroking her naked shoulder and arm. He smiled at her and planted a very soft brandy-flavoured kiss on receptive lips that parted for him in a tummy-churningly wanton way as his tongue slid along the line where they met, tasting the sweetness of her breath, also pleasantly brandy-flavoured. Suddenly, despite the high energy in Mike's mind from the caning and the fierce but very gradually subsiding pain in Helen's bottom, sleep overtook two very tired people, as the hand on the clock worked their way round towards 3 o'clock in the morning.
It was not the sound of rain on the window that woke Helen up as the clock was just approaching 4.45 a.m., nor was it even the pain that shocked her as she turned over, but the sudden rush of lust as her hands gently touched her caned bottom. She rested her head on her hand and allowed her free hand to run gently across the strong pectoral muscles of her sleeping partner's bare chest. He stirred slightly, but did not move as the soothing and inquisitive hand moved slowly down, brushing gently across his abdomen, which fluttered in a spontaneous reflex response to the touch of female fingers guided by a mind now fuelled by another burning - a desire for slow and deep intimacy. As her hand brushed over the upper edge of Mike's pubic hair, she felt stirrings under the sheet and it was not long before she wrapped her hand around a very erect manhood. She smiled and winced at the same time as she removed her hand, folded the sheet back carefully and changed position.
As Mike half awoke, he was greeted by the sight of a pair of strong but silky thighs spreading across his torso, striped buttocks parting invitingly and the soft fur of Helen's most intimate part moving slowly towards his waiting lips. Carefully, Mike placed his hands over Helen's hips and drew her body gently towards him, turning to caress the exquisitely soft insides of her thighs with his tongue before aligning his head to deliver the tip of his tongue to the parted labia concealing her clitoris. Just as his tongue tasted that tangy feminine sweetness, Helen's hands folded gently round his manhood, made all the more erect by the powerful pheromone effect of the sexual fragrance of a loved woman at the peak of her desire. He felt her tongue flick over the swollen tip of his rod and tease the little slit as two girly hands stroked gently up and down. Mike's tongue teased the tip of a glistening clitoris revealed by hands that gently massaged its swollen sides, sucking gently and teasingly and alternately flicking over the hypersensitive tip of one of the most powerful of Helen's sensory sexual stimulation points and sliding gently along the line of her labia to the inviting portal of her honeypot, dipping inside to feast on the elixir of female sexual pleasure, curling round to tease her G-spot. Slowly, as Helen's moaning became more audible and her sucking and massaging of Mike's erection became firmer and firmer, the passion took complete possession of both of them.
Arguably, it was after the most powerful orgasm (the last of multiple orgasms in Helen's case), miraculously simultaneous, that either of them had ever experienced that they again lay on their sides, brandy glasses in their hands, as the temperature and passion subsided to a gentle glow, Helen's bottom still a furnace from the caning, but her body now glowing with full sexual satisfaction and her mind at peace with emotional fulfilment. The clock was ticking slowly towards 6 o'clock in the morning before a gentle purring sound signalled Helen's and Mike's return to the Land of Nod.
The rain was now pelting hard against the window as the well-fed tabby cat at the imposing property across the road emerged from the cat-flap at the back door and sat in the very limited dry space available under the porch. A gust of wind blew raindrops under the porch, convincing a comfort-loving moggy - that needed convincing as much as it needed feeding - of the superiority of the warm and soft bed covers in the maid's currently empty room over the increasing discomfort of cold and inclement pre-dawn weather. Dawn would not streak the horizon for a good hour yet on this chilly November morning. The day would be well spent before Helen and Mike would stir again. As Helen had drifted off into a surprisingly deep sleep, she had asked herself if erotic experience could be any more powerful and satisfying - a question that was not to remain unanswered for long! There would soon be choices to be made.

[freudianchick]

Wonderful, MisterM! This was really hot ~ a very welcome and keenly distracting interruption to my work this afternoon...