“I didn’t care.”
WHAP!
I bring the lash down across her cheeks, and watch a bright red line appear across both of them.
“You must care. You must always care for your life, Lucky, because your life is the most important thing to me.”
“Is it? I thought protecting your king and doing his bidding was.”
WHAP!
“You were supposed to be on the ship I was protecting too, brat,” I growl.
“Ouch,” she barely whimpers. I know her taste for pain, and her capacity for punishment. I am toying with her for the moment, giving her little sips of heat. She is already responding, the two lines making quite a pretty display on her upturned flesh.
“This isn’t fair," she says. I know it is a play argument. She knows very well that this is fair. She asked for it herself. But I play along.
“What isn’t fair?”
“I’m not allowed to die for you, but you’re allowed to die for me. They could have shot your ship into smithereens. You could have been captured and tortured, or worse…”
“I think we have both seen that capturing me was their biggest mistake.”
“Okay, you’re good at fighting. Better than I ever imagined. But you’re not immortal.”
WHAP
“OW!” This time her cry is more indignant and real.
I know I am not immortal, but she makes me feel as though I could do anything. I have always been a competent and deadly warrior, but I have never been quite so brazen as I was with her by my side.
She is right. There is something greatly unfair in my having ever asked her to stay behind. I have forged a carnal bond with her and she has become emotionally enmeshed with me. She would lay down her life simply to suffer with me.
I said once I needed loyal, strong soldiers. Even as I bring the lash down against her rear, I find myself convinced that I have found one in her. She is a perfect, constant, deserving companion, and I have not treated her as such.
WHAP
WHAP
WHAP
She must obey.
She must be punished.
She knows it, and so do I. I paint her flesh such a pretty hue of pink and red, applying the lash over and over until the lines begin to cross and create little welted nexuses of punishment. Lucky asked for this. She begged for it. She craved it.
I once thought she was broken for her responses to me, and to the pain I imparted. Now I know better. She is not broken at all. She is bent. She has adapted to use resources and inputs most would shy away from. Where others would scream and whimper and beg for mercy, she grasps the covers and curls her toes and begs for more.
“Do you want me, Lucky?” I pause for a moment to let the heat settle, and to put some of my thoughts into words.
“What!? Yes! Of course!”
“Is that why you crawled into the shuttle, prepared yourself for death? Just to be with me?”
“I’m pathetic, I know that.” I hear the defeat in her voice, and it makes me ache in sympathy and disappointment in myself. She should never have put herself at risk. But I should never have allowed her to become so uninvested in her own life that she was ready to throw it away just to be close to me.
“I do not think that you are pathetic. I think you are starved. And I think that I have starved you, as have others. I kept my distance from you, thinking that you needed stability and authority. But you didn’t. You needed intimacy and affection. You needed to be loved by a mate unafraid to love you fully…”
I deliver this romantic speech with the lash in my hand, trailing the tip of it over her cheeks lightly, letting the very end of it describe a scratching path across the light bumps and bright spots of her quivering rear.
“I love you,” I tell her. I watch goosebumps appear on her skin, little prickles which nature intended to make her fur rise to keep her warm, but now respond to emotion as much to temperature. Those words are powerful for her. They feed her.
“Do you really?”
“Yes.”
“I need to hear that kind of a lot,” she mumbles into the bedding.
“You will hear it daily,” I reply, whipping the lash down across her ass with a flick of my wrist, bringing a fresh, sweet, red curlicue of pain to her flesh. She hisses and groans in response, but I know that these are not the signs of resistance and anguish I once mistook them for. This is her desire. This is her need.
It grows with every subsequent lick of the lash. It makes her part her thighs and arch her back and present the soft inner core of her body to me, her lower lips engorged and slicked with hot juices. These gleaming, glistening droplets call to me, beg for me to sink myself inside her. But she needs to be made sore first.