Modern day Bathory

So vampires. Vampires come from a lot of different places, a lot of different sources of myth. One of them is Elizabeth Bathory, who believed she could remain young by bathing in the blood of virgins. She killed as many as 650 girls for this purpose.

I don't advocate that. (do I need to make that clear?) But the idea of bathing in blood... well, it's very intimate.

So for today's request, I tried to update the idea to a more consensual situation. A more leather-centric example.

Modern Day Bathory

“You know I’m not a virgin, right?”

            “Have you ever done this before?”

            I shake my head.

            “Then you’re a virgin. I don’t care if you’ve had vanilla sex before. I don’t care what you’ve done before. This is new territory. Virgin territory.” She bends her ankle, the leather creaking and sending a shiver down my spine. “So you count.”

            “But it’s not going to do anything.”

            “It will show your devotion.”

            I take in a deep breath, the leather of my mask overpowering any other scent. Would it overpower the copper scent when I went through with it? Could I go through with it?

            She looks up at me, the deep red of her lips standing in sharp contrast to her porcelain skin. She smiles, her eyes wide and innocent in all the ways that I knew she was not. “It doesn’t matter if it keeps me young or not, does it?”

            “No,” I say.

            “Do you think I look old?” Her voice is cold. The smile remains, but the eyes shift. The eyes offer damnation, threat, destruction.

            “N-no, of course not.” I stammer over the words, briefly taken aback that she would ever even think I was suggesting something so crass. “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”

            Her smile turns to a smirk. “Am I the fairest in the land, then?”

            Behind my leather mask, I blush. The last time she asked me that, I ended up hanging on a wall, trying to hold a mirror steady so it wouldn’t pull too heavily on my favorite body part. I don’t want to be a magic mirror again. But I know better than to remain silent when she asks me a question.

            “Your beauty is beyond compare, far outside the reach and ken of mortal men,” I say. “I am honored to be permitted even the tiniest glimpse of your magnificence.”

            She laughs at that. “You do have a delightful way with words,” she says. She puts her long fingers into a steeple, the nails shining as red as her lips. “You know how to go almost too far, without quite going over the line.”

            “You make me want to be delicate,” I say.

            She runs a fingernail down my bare chest, pressing just the edge so it feels like a knife slitting me open from chin to groin. Then she drags all ten fingers down my leather pants, hard enough that I wonder if there will be trails left behind, sensual enough that I’m not sure I care.

            “It isn’t safe,” I remind her.

            “You’ve been tested,” she says. “So have I. It’s as safe as we can make it. I’ve got alcohol and sterile bandages.”

            “It’s still dangerous.”

            She stands, her own leather pants creaking and purring along her body like a second skin. She moves close enough that I can feel her breath on my face even through the mask, close enough that her scent mixes in with the leather, close enough that her body heat pulses into me. “Everything worth doing is dangerous,” she says. “It’s only through danger that we really feel alive.” She runs one hand delicately over my leather pants, sliding up along either side of the zipper. “Don’t you agree?”

            “Yes Mistress,” I say, my voice edging into a growl.

            “Besides, I’m not going to do anything to you,” she says, stepping away fast enough to pull out a brief whine at her sudden lack of attention. “When you’re ready to give me what I want, you’ll do it yourself. And you’ll be careful, won’t you?”

            I nod.

            “It will hurt,” she says, walking slowly around the table. Her smirk has become a sadistic grin, which I glimpse in between desperate looks at the curves of her legs, at the small of her back, at the shape of her breasts. “Pain is a good thing. It’s how our bodies warn our brains about damage.”

            She lifts a surgical cloth off a steel tray. There’s a box cutter on the tray. A butcher knife. A scalpel. A bone saw. A sheath knife. A needle. A rubber strap to tie around the arm. Bandages, alcohol wipes.

            “Pain tells you to stop. The instinct is to pull away. An animal would pull away.” She puts her hands on her hips and gives me a look that is both pouting and challenging. “Are you an animal?”

            “No mistress.”

            She tosses her hair back, and I watch it cascade down over her shoulder. “Good,” she says. “Because pain is a warning, not an absolute. There is damage, and then there is injury. Do you know the difference?”

            She doesn’t expect me to answer. She takes a few casual steps around the table, her feet coming down in a casual heel-toe, heel-toe.

            “Damage is simple. A paper cut is damage. A sprained wrist. A bruise. All damage. All pain. All temporary. Injury is permanent. A broken bone never heals as strong as it was before. A severed tendon never heals. I don’t want you injured. I just want you hurt. I want you damaged.”

            Heel-toe. Heel-toe. She puts her hands on her hips, her fingers gentle rubbing the leather as if she doesn’t know that I can’t look away from her curves. “I could do it myself. I could whip you for a while. Pinch your nipples. Scratch your skin until I have your skin under my nails. I could do all that.”

            She sighs dramatically and crosses her arms, tapping one red nail against her bared teeth. “I could torture you until you begged me to let you do it. I could hurt you until you begged me to let you hurt yourself.

            “But if I do that, where’s the devotion? If I hurt you, then you’re only doing it because you want me to stop. That’s not enough devotion. I want you to do it freely. I want you to give it to me because you want to. Do you want to?”

            “Yes Mistress.”

            “You want to please me, don’t you?”

            “Yes Mistress.”

            “You don’t need to be tied up.”

            And she’s right. I’ve been standing against the wall with my hands behind my back, held as if they’d been cuffed. But there’s nothing holding me there. There’s nothing keeping my back ramrod straight. Nothing stopping me from kneeling in front of her.

            “Careful,” she says as I drop to my knees. “Don’t get your hands dirty. You’re already going to have to wear gloves. Worse if you have to wash them too.”

            I look around. There’s no sink in here. There’s only one way I could wash my hands. She’s right; better if I don’t.

            She stops in front of me, legs spread out, every inch of her body language screaming command and control. I tell myself that I’m keeping my eyes at her waist level because I like looking at the leather. That I’m looking at her boots because I love the way the leather curves around her calf and over her toes. I tell myself that my eyes are downcast because I’m looking at what’s sexy, or because looking up at her would hurt my neck. I tell myself a lot of lies.

            I’ll look up when she tells me to, when she gives me permission. Without her permission, I just don’t think I can do it.

            “What do you think you’ll use?” she asks. “I’d recommend against the bone saw. To be fair, though, it’ll give you a nice rip in the skin. You don’t have to push down all that hard. No need to actually saw at bone. I don’t want you doing that.”

            “Because that would be an injury,” I say.

            She pats my head like she’s proud of a dog. “Exactly,” she says. “So which will it be? And where?”

            I hadn’t really thought about it. Not the palm. They always do the palm in movies. Maybe it won’t scar as much if you cut along the creases. But the skin will pull while it’s healing, and I use my hands a lot. Not the face; scars feel much more permanent there. I could do the scalp; that bleeds a lot. But it’ll bleed down my face, and that’s not what I want.

            “I was thinking the sheath knife,” I say. A scalpel is too sharp; it will cut deeper than I realize before I feel any pain. The same is true of the box cutter. Sharper means cleaner cuts, but it also means deeper cuts. I don’t want anything too deep.

            I don’t want to cut any muscles or slice any tendons. Don’t want to sever any major arteries. Not anywhere that makes platelets.

            “Are you ready?” she asks.

            “I’m ready, Mistress.”

            She sits down, crosses her legs at the knee, and leans back in the chair. She pushes her hair out of her face, tying it up behind her, and lays with her eyes closed. “Then prove your devotion to me,” she says.

            I force myself carefully to my feet. Over at the table, I put on the surgical gloves, feeling the latex on my skin as I grab the knife and step closer. I could nick myself on the thigh, on the outside of my hip. Far enough from the femoral artery, but still lots of blood there. But too many tendons.

            Not the wrist. Not the forearm. Too many muscles too close to the surface.

            I rub alcohol on the blade, then use another wipe on my skin. It tingles, cold as the alcohol evaporates.

I take a deep breath as I press the cold steel to my stomach. I don’t do a quick jerk. A quick jerk might get the job done, but it won’t be as controlled. It won’t be as intense. It won’t show my devotion quite as well.

            No, for her, I go slow. For her, I press in enough to feel my skin start to split and I drag the blade along. For her I make a cut, not a gash. For her I grit my teeth at the pain and savor it. For her, I let the blood flow. For her, I pull at the gash, letting my life seep out, letting it drip down onto her face.

            I wince and grit my teeth. She smiles as the blood begins to cover her face, warm and fresh. I can’t smell the copper of the blood. Just the leather. Leather and pain. There isn’t anything else.

            She moans softly, and the pain becomes less important. I let more flow out of me, out of my love handle and onto her face. She reaches up and pushes it around on her face, as if rubbing it into her pores.

            I stop long before I feel dizzy. The blood flow slows, the cut already starting to clot, and I step away from her. I feel the sting of more alcohol, then the foreign feel of the sutures that will stop me from scarring. I cover the cut with a bandage and tape it in place.

            She wipes my blood from her eyes, licks her lips, and looks at me with a smile.

            “I really thought you’d just use the needle,” she says. “But you didn’t. You cut yourself for me.”

            “Yes Mistress,” I say.

            “Thank you.”