The Classmate Read online

  Towards morning, she again heard heavy steps descend the staircase. Then the voice of Damien: “Fuck her, she’s yours...” Two men entered her immediately: one in her cunt, the other in her mouth. As she didn’t suck, he held her by the temples and fucked her mouth like you would force an ass. From the smell, she thought he was African. Their cries, that they couldn’t hold back, “ah the whore, she’s really good, this slut...” “Hey, can I fuck her ass, Boss?”convinced her that they were both black.

  The man who was in her mouth ejaculated a thick, pasty cum. “God that was good, ” he concluded, as he buttoned himself up, “I’ve still got to finish my route.” It was then that she realized that she had been handed over to the neighborhood’s trash collectors.

  Chapter Two

  Atramontane wind overwhelmed the university campus. V*** was late and wanted to run towards Lecture Hall B where the first class in English literature would be held. But the wind was like a wall, and she could only advance by taking small steps, her head leaning forward against the gusts.

  The lecture hall was full. There were no seats and many students were even sitting on the steps. V*** imitated them, taking out, as best she could, a thick pad and pen, and waited. The brouhaha was intolerable. She threw a glance to the right and to the left. She could only see rows of shoes. She raised her eyes. The girl sitting to her right must be very big, because she had not managed to tuck her long legs under the plank of the desk. She held them together at an angle, her knees at the height of V***’s face. She rapidly crossed and uncrossed her legs. V*** smiled. The girl had a very cool white skirt. She looked at her. She only saw a refined profile, very fine, a little like the head of a swan, a sublime neck, the line of her shoulders showed an extraordinary purity. “She can’t be real,” she thought, “she’s stepped out of a novel.”

  The bustle in the back ceased suddenly and V*** turned her attention towards the stage. The professor had just come in—a man between two ages, as would befit a permanent student, a little grey around the temples, glasses like half-moons perched down on his nose, an aquiline profile, hollow cheeks, and as she must have noticed from hearing his first phrase, a curiously metallic voice, mocking and cocky.

  —There’s a lot of you, he said.

  He looked over them all with a certain authority that ended in dominating them, given that he was down below.

  —There’s still time to change careers, he continued. Chinese, perhaps? Or quantum physics?

  There was some servile laughter. V*** was becoming impatient. But she reflected that there are thirty-six thousand ways of breaking the ice.

  —I would like to propose something, if I could, the professor continued. A way of obtaining your university course credit without even having to be present—without having to take any tests, or any other measures. And one that will permit me to empty this lecture hall.

  There were murmurs of interest. The comedian had his public. Nothing like promising them the moon.

  He went to the blackboard, picked up a piece of white chalk and wrote, in a weak hand, hardly legible,

  Once below a time, I was a child...

  Then he turned back towards his audience.

  —It’s a verse from Dylan Thomas, the greatest Welsh poet of the century—one of the greatest poets of the century. The beginning of a poem. Now, pay attention: I offer full credit to whoever provides me with a satisfactory translation of this verse. But if you cannot by next class, you will remain here until the end of the semester, and you will take hundreds of pages of notes and you will sweat through English literature.

  He smiled.

  —That’s the deal, he added.

  —My name is Lauren, the stunning blonde said.

  She had bumped into V*** in the confusion at the end of class. They each excused themselves at the same time, using the same words. They laughed, and decided to invite each other to a chocolate at the university cafeteria. V***, keeping in mind social niceties, could not detach the spirit from the perspective seen from between the tapered thighs of her classmate, that glimpse of a little white panty, so cute, and the very pure line of her pussy. “What would she think if she knew that my Master had prohibited me from even wearing a thong? After he had me pierced with the rings, even wispy fabric is a discomfort. And what would she think if she saw my ass?”

  The session at Master Damien’s had taken place just five days before. V*** had just started to scar. The deepest gouges would still bleed if she stayed too long in the shower. The hot water softened the skin and the scabs; the wounds would reopen. “What would she say if I told her that I had been whipped, fucked and assfucked for an entire night? I am sure that she is a virgin…”

  But there wasn’t time to ask her the question. The young girl was splendid, but with a bewitching beauty—bewitching under her uniform skirt, under her sensible skirt, her tousled hair. As if she had never been out and about.

  Pens in hand, they tried to find an adequate translation for the verse by Dylan Thomas. They could see the inversion, the “Once below a time” instead of the archetypal “Once upon”: the “I was” instead of the classic, “there was” but how to render his intent?

  —It’s as if he’s saying he comes from a buried time, —Lauren said. She had a Northern accent and at first V*** thought that she had said “tie.” —We’re all from a subterranean time,—added the tall blonde.

  —Yes, V*** said, —it’s true that we are not what we seem…She felt embarrassed by this banality and blushed—not exactly, she felt herself redden, all the while knowing that her half-Magrehbi skin wouldn’t let her show any redness. But Lauren wasn’t so naïve, she had spotted the brilliance of her brown eyes.

  —So, you’re not simply a liberated young woman, right? You’re whose slave, your parents’? The suddenness of the question startled V*** and left her speechless.

  —Why do you ask me that?”

  —No reason, evaded Lauren.

  She recovered by switching to English, talking about the class, her options, her future career. She saw herself as a translator, but being stumped by the first phrase she had been asked to translate irritated her deeply.

  They would see each other again in class and each looked forward to their second meeting. Lauren invited V*** to dinner at her place that evening. She had just arrived in Toulouse and didn’t know anyone. —No more than me, V*** lied, I just came from Pau.”

  It was a strange evening, full of half-secrets, false laughter, stories from childhood. Their adolescence still stuck to their shoes. Lauren had just finished high school, V*** had taken a year off. They were the same age—twenty years old—just within a few months of each other.

  And just as V*** had thought, at least based on what was said that evening, Lauren was a virgin.

  Just two unimportant, no future flirtations, she insisted.

  V*** got home late. The wind was still blowing and made it difficult to think. It was only when she finally got to her little studio that she thought again of Lauren, or perhaps, that she realized that she had been thinking of how the young girl had accompanied her in her wanderings through the windy labyrinth of the Pink City.

  She got undressed and into bed with the firm intention of sleeping. But the thought of those long legs, the bright glimpse of the little white panties just didn’t stop, and for the first time, she began to caress herself while thinking about the body of a woman. Then, quite consciously, as if she wanted to correct a mistake, she started thinking about a story in which she seduced Lauren, just enough to lead her to her beloved Master, who would make her his second slave…

  Beloved? She had better think again, she did not want to see Lauren turned over to the hands of that old sodomite. She visualized clearly her tall, vine-like body, whipped in every sense, but it was not her Master who held the whip—she did.

  She stopped touching herself. She did not have the right.

  She turned on the night light, then the ceiling light. She looked at the walls. On the l
eft, the Master had made her install a wall of mirrors, so that she would always be able to see her body marked by the whip or the lash–he knew that she had a terrible and strange feeling of pride upon seeing herself so slashed. On the wall in front of her, photographs, by the hundreds: to establish his hold on her, even when he wasn’t there, J.L had made her pin-up all of the hardcore shots in which she is the broken heroine. Overviews of her lacerated body, penetrated in every way, standing, hung on a St. Andrew’s Cross, on all-fours—and still her same plowed flesh, the same cocks that opened her, that were buried in her. V*** sitting, her hands tied behind the back of a chair, doing her best to swallow the large cock that smothered her. V*** on her back, irrigated by sperm or urine—depending on the circumstances…

  When she first looked in the mirror, the traces of the whip remained, the blues turning yellow, the worst time for bruising. As she examined one of the photographs, she feasted her eyes on the humiliations, as if she wanted to convince herself that she was only that—flesh for cocks. Above it all the image of Lauren floated and what she had seen that afternoon–the long legs and the demure panty.

  She stopped fighting it and her hand plunged between her thighs.

  It didn’t take her long to cum.

  Chapter Three

  They kept seeing each other–in class, and elsewhere. For snacks, study sessions, sometimes in the late evenings. V*** profited fully from the absence of her master: she healed, and she came to think that her soul was also healing, and that Lauren was the agent of her recovery. She had hidden in the black notebook the photographs that made official her status as a submissive, and she had many times invited Lauren to her little shabby but discreet student apartment. Without making the ambiguous gesture that she never dared to do. Curiously, (wasn’t she curious, really?) she didn’t even dare touch her, she who had spontaneously dared the worst, and all the rest of it.

  At the fourth or fifth meeting, after an afternoon spent working on a particularly arduous English version of Henry James, she realized simply that she loved her. That she wanted to take her in her arms, drown her face in her straw-colored hair, tell her tender things, kiss her full on the mouth…

  That evening, the most she dared was a kiss on the cheek. Later, after Lauren left, she caressed herself while it was still light, her hand thrust inside and while caressing herself saying out loud everything she wanted to do to her friend, her lover, her; Lauren…

  Towards the end of the second week of that standstill relationship, Lauren suggested that they get together in the evening at the swimming pool. V*** accepted enthusiastically, but once she got home she started to have second thoughts. She took off her clothes and examined herself thoroughly in the mirror There were a few traces of the bruises remaining, very pale, with only light discolorations. “In the water,” she thought, “they won’t be noticed.” Then she looked for a swimsuit. There was nothing except the one that she had used in high school for swimming class, a one-piece suit, designed more to conceal than to reveal. She decided to go the next day and buy a sexy two-piece.

  At last, just before sleeping, she took a tweezers and trimmed her bikini line (to “make the swimsuit” as they say). After her master left, she had let the hair grow back—a major infraction, according to their rules, but she figured that she would shave on the day of his return. Her hairs grew back, very dark. She hesitated: what if she were to shave completely, all at once? She thought the little wire-like hairs that grew back would give even more volume to her Mons Venus.

  She bent over between her thighs, catching each hair with precision in the tweezers. The contact of the cold steel on her skin make her shiver. Suddenly it reminded her of the day when a mistress opened her with a speculum before inserting an inflatable cock in order to widen her, to widen her to the dimensions of all the cocks that would come that evening to fuck her. Was it the memory of that scene, or was it the image of Lauren as the mistress that wouldn’t let go? She felt overwhelmed and pushed a prying finger into her sex. She was on fire—and dripping. She lubricated abundantly—and undoubtedly had been for a while. Her body had reacted to her own secret thoughts even before she had brought them to the light. She needed to finish what she had started, to surrender later to the masturbation session, the only moment of the day when tension was satisfied for a moment—though it would return, even stronger, a moment later.

  Three days before, she had lunched at the university cafeteria with Lauren. They had run into each other, and the two young girls were sitting pressed next to each other with the trays holding their deplorable in-flight meals. V*** felt the warmth of her friend’s leg against her thigh, and towards the end of the meal, not being able to take it anymore, she went to the Ladies’ Room and made herself cum, very quickly. When she came back, Lauren looked at her and said, with her ordinary innocence:

  —You look kind of worn out…

  If she had only known that at the same time beads of wetness continued to glide down V***’s thighs.

  The two young girls eagerly jumped into the warm water of the pool. Outside it had started to drizzle and it was still windy.

  V*** had eagerly anticipated seeing her friend undress, but Lauren was already wearing her swimsuit underneath her clothes—a real swim-team one-piece. While her classmate stepped into the shower installed in the foot bath, her only minor satisfaction was to let her eyes linger on the line of her neck, so desirable, and to the undulation of her buttocks, so tempting.

  Lauren was a vine, both in length and in quality. V*** thought that in comparison her hips were too big and her breasts were too large for her small frame.

  In the water, it was much worse. Lauren swam like a professional, with a fluent crawl that let her cover two lengths of the pool before V*** had completed three strokes. Then she agreed to swim breast stroke with her, to chat—and while waiting, V*** out of breath, responded with monosyllables. She looked at the drops of water lingering on Lauren’s face like tears—and the desire to make her cry overwhelmed her. Then she recalled her sobs at Master Damien’s. She wondered if these were her own tears that she saw flow down the face of her friend.

  They showered together. With native fluency, Lauren slid the straps of her suit off her shoulders. She had very white small breasts ending in a barely defined point. V*** slipped off her bra–she was suddenly ashamed of her breasts, the dark aureoles that testified to her Mediterranean origins more than anything else.

  —Your breasts are magnificent, Lauren murmured, —I would like to have such beautiful boobs.

  Did she like them?

  In the locker room, it was much worse. Lauren, having slipped off her suit completely, finished by drying her blonde pubis—and even there, with a clear gesture of grace. And then she slipped on the inevitable white panties. —You don’t wear panties? she asked V***, seeing her slip directly into her jeans. V*** asked herself what her friend would say if she knew that wearing pants was itself an infraction of the code imposed by J-L, and that she loved to feel the rough fabric cut sweetly into her sex. She smiled mischievously. —I’m an idiot, I forgot them. Apparently, Lauren had not seen the two small rings that pierced her labia.

  Afterward they went for chocolate. Just like in the pool, Lauren dominated the conversation. And V***, normally so witty, found little to respond to in the banter of her friend.

  She accompanied her to the entrance of her building, rue de la Chaîne, two steps from Saint-Sernin.

  —Well, OK, ’til tomorrow, said Lauren.

  She turned her cheek. V*** kissed her as close as possible to her mouth, and her friend imperceptibly moved back. She started to laugh.

  —A little more and you’ll knock me over, she said.

  —Who knows? V*** answered, —maybe you’d love that. Lauren shrugged her shoulders and went upstairs.

  V*** remained for a long time in the street. She looked up at the two lit windows on the fifth floor. “I’m an idiot,” she thought, “I’m acting like a teenager.” Then she realiz
ed that was what she had missed, precisely that.

  Slowly she walked back to her own place. In the mirror, for once, she did not look at her scratched buttocks or manhandled breasts—just her face. She scrutinized it for a long time. For the first time in her life she saw that it was her soul was broken, and that was more painful than the blows of the whip.

  Master J-L would return the next morning. She went up into her tiny bathroom, and she shaved and plucked completely. She observed her sex and her anus up close in a pocket mirror, to make sure that she had missed nothing. “Do I really want to do this?” she thought. “Do I really want to be whipped, this time?”

  At the same time, she said to herself, a passion for Lauren was a major inconvenience.

  She hadn’t mentioned her to J-L, who without a doubt would insist that she introduce her to him. She would atone for that under the blows of the whip, starting tomorrow.

  She had been taken by all kinds of men and women in front of her master without ever having any feelings of betrayal. On the contrary, all that the others did to her reinforced her attachment to him. But the very idea of her love for Lauren was a major infraction—a betrayal.

  —Why a betrayal? she all of a sudden said aloud, —I don’t love him anymore.

  Having said it aloud made her happy. She lay down, naked, and caressed herself softly, as Lauren would certainly have done if she were there. Her fingers moved on that beardless skin like a prepubescent little girl touching virgin silken flesh. Light touches, an imperceptible stimulation, the scratch of a fingernail…She put her finger in her cleft and dripped steam. “I love you,” she said, I love you, I love you”…She repeated it like a mantra while frantically stroking her clitoris. When she came, she pushed two fingers into her cunt and cried out, drowning her hand in her woman-fountain.