The Zero Hour

And then-and then!-he felt the sting of her leather riding crop on the backs of his thighs, teasing and painful. And-my God!-even a sting on the head of his very penis!

“I’m going to keep you on my leash,” he heard from very far away. “You certainly haven’t behaved properly, not at all.”

He whimpered again, then moaned, and he realized he was gyrating his pelvis to some imagined rhythm, waving his butt at her, a coy offering.

“I’m going to flog the skin from your back,” she said, and he knew she meant what she was saying, and he could barely contain himself.

The woman could see that he was on the verge of climax. And she hadn’t even yet applied the device that was sold in medical supply houses as the Wartenberg Neurological Stimulator. From her black bag she withdrew a medical instrument that resembled a pinwheel at the end of a scalpel handle. Radiating out from the small-diameter pinwheel were dozens of sharp pins. She ran the instrument lightly across his legs and up to his chest.

His moans now came in waves, plaintively; he sounded to her very much like a woman nearing orgasm.

With her left hand she lightly grasped his testicles and caressed them; with the other hand, she ran the pinwheel over the backs of his legs, the backs of his knees. She moved her left hand up to the shaft of his penis and began slowly to pump, knowing it would not take much time at all. He was already throbbing, rocking back and forth, moaning. Now she ran the pinwheel up the crack of his ass, up the center of his spine, all the while masturbating him vigorously, and even before the pinwheel reached the sensitive skin at the back of the neck, he started to come, spasming and bucking, moaning, moaning.

“Now,” she said, as he collapsed onto the bed, “I’m going to your wallet to take what I deserve.” So blissed out was he that he didn’t even hear what she said, but it made no difference; he had utterly ceded control.

The blond woman got to her feet and briskly walked over to the desk where he had left his briefcase. She popped it open-he hadn’t locked it, rarely did-removed the glinting gold disk, and dropped it into her black leather toy bag, where it disappeared among the whips and crops and restraints.

She looked over at the bed and saw that he had not moved: he was still slumped over the side of the bed, still breathing hard and deep, the sweat pouring off his chest and his back in glistening streams, darkening the pale-green bedspread beneath him. The dark, damp border around him reminded the woman of the snow angels she and her sisters used to make years ago by lying prone in the new-fallen New Hampshire snow and waving their hands and feet. Then another, very different association: the even, wet border around the man also looked a little like the crude white paint tracings you sometimes see around dead bodies at crime scenes.

Quickly, she bent over and retrieved his wallet from the seat pocket of his pants, withdrew four fifty-dollar bills, and slipped them into her portfolio.

She returned to her spent client and caressed him. A submissive must always be brought back to earth slowly and gently. “Turn around and kneel in front of me,” she ordered with quiet authority. He did so, and she unlocked his handcuffs. Then she unzipped the leather hood, tugging at it with great effort until it began to slide off.

His silver hair stood up in crazed, sweaty clumps, and his face was deep crimson. He blinked slowly, his pupils adjusting to the light, his eyes coming slowly into focus.

She patted his hair flat. “What a good boy you’ve been,” she said. “Have you had a good time?”

His only reply was a faint, weak smile.

“Now I’ve got to run. Call me next time you’re in town.” She ran her fingers lovingly across his cheek, over his lips. “What a good boy you’ve been.”

***

Down the block from the Four Seasons, a gleaming black van was parked. The blond woman tapped on the mirrored, opaque passenger’s side window, which was then lowered a few inches.

She removed the golden disk from her leather bag and placed it in the outstretched palm.

She hadn’t even seen anyone’s face.

CHAPTER THREE

The flashing turret lights atop the cruisers pulsed blue and white along most of the block of Marlborough Street. Five patrol cars were double-parked on the narrow street, roiling the rush-hour traffic all the way to Massachusetts Avenue and infuriating the already short-tempered Boston drivers.

A dozen or so residents of this normally staid Back Bay neighborhood (although “neighborhood” wasn’t an accurate description of these connected rows of nineteenth-century town houses whose inhabitants did everything they could to avoid one another) leaned out of their bay windows and gawked like children at a schoolyard fistfight. Very un-Back Bay.