Beyond Elly Betting

Sam walked down the staircase into the group house's common area and saw Kelly sitting on a couch. Dressed in a shapeless t-shirt and faded jeans, she didn't look like anything special, but he knew better. At the sound of his footsteps, she looked up from her laptop, one eyebrow slightly raised in inquiry.

"Fancy meeting you here," he opened.

"I do live here," she said, "What brings you by?"

"Just finished talking market stuff with --" he gestured back up the stairs at a cluster of bedrooms. "But now that that's done and you're here, would this be a good time to, ah... redeem the bets from Sunday?" He smiled. "Unless you're in the middle of something, of course."

She paused, closed her eyes and ran her hands from shoulders to hips as if checking on something internal. "Yeah, I'd probably be up for that. And I was just reading clickbait anyway." She closed the laptop decisively.

"Glad to rescue you from that, then."

"Oh, yes. Rescue," she said, putting a double layer of sarcasm into her voice. "You know, I issued a bunch of tokens that game and then they changed hands a bunch more. What did you wind up with?"

"Twenty cane strokes to your breasts."

She gave a happy little shiver. "Definitely up for that." She bounced to her feet. "Shall we?"

"We shall."

They walked together down the next set of stairs. Living in a six bedroom group house had its frustrations, but it also had benefits. Like enough room to comfortably host poker games. And a common basement that could be made into a decently equipped dungeon. The former sometimes involved the latter.

He wasn't sure exactly which of the residents were in relationships with each other at the moment, but all were sexually comfortable enough with each other (and with frequent visitors like him) that mere strip poker had lost its edge. So they'd raised the stakes.

(There'd been a long discussion of game theory and how to define a raise, but they'd thrown it all out and gone honor system. Thus far, this had worked.)

They arrived in the dungeon and she casually peeled off her shirt. She had nothing on beneath. "Where do you want me?"

He took a moment to admire her breasts: a bit more than a handful each, perky, with dark nipples already erect, bouncing slightly from the energy with which the shirt had been removed. Then his verbal loop ran her question past him again and he answered, "St Andrew's Cross good?"

"Sure," she said, leaning back against it and raising her arms.

He gently buckled her wrists into the cuffs, then ran his hands down her arms, through her shoulders and onto her chest. First tracing the skin lightly, then pressing deeper, pushing her soon-to-be-caned breasts to and fro, and massaging the solid muscle beneath. Then he pulled back to rest his fingers gently on her nipples, leaned forward, and kissed her lightly on the mouth. She returned the kiss with equal lightness.

"Like you," he said.

"Like you," she answered.

He stepped to the side briefly to examine the selection of canes hanging on the wall. He selected a long thin rod of clear lucite -- probably the meanest cane on the wrack.

"Eep!" she said, and gave a shudder considerably less happy than the one from earlier.

He gave an evil smile. She returned the smile uncertainly.

He stood to her right and extended the cane, laying it softly across her breasts, halfway from the nipple to the upper crease. He pressed it to her ribs firmly, enjoying her fear.

Then he drew the cane back and brought it forward at full speed with a solid crack.

She let out an incoherent "gaah!" -- half scream and half gasp, mangled further by the panting that followed.

He waited for the panting to subside, then delivered another blow, perhaps half an inch below the first one.

Again an incoherent noise and a sharp inhalation, but quieter this time.

Slowly, he delivered three more blows. Each time the reaction was more muted, and a serene smile had started to appear about two seconds after each strike.

After five stroke he paused, looked at her chest and how the cane lay upon it, and commented, "This isn't really hitting symmetrically, is it?"

"No," she agreed, her voice only slightly dreamy, "left boob is certainly getting it harder. End-of-the-cane swings faster as it were."

"Well we can't have that," he said, and crossed to her left side. Lining up the cane was a bit more difficult from here, but he found a place.

The first strike from this side drew a response like the very first, but she sank back into serenity quickly.

At ten blows, he switched back across, and thought he heard a faint whimper at the pause.

At twelve, the first trace of a whispered "please".

At thirteen, an unambiguous "please".

He left the cane pressing into her chest and smirked: "Please what? Please have mercy or please go harder?" Either answer would result in harder. As she should have known.

"Please make me come"

And she said it so quickly that he didn't think it was a way out of the bind, but simply what she'd meant to begin with.

"You can come from this? I think I'd like to see that."

He started with the cane again, a little harder and a lot faster. Instead of giving her time to process each blow, he let the energy build. At fifteen he didn't switch sides, but did start shifting back and forth so sometimes the end of the can struck the near breast.

Far too soon, he'd reached the planned twenty. She was panting and shaking, but not quite coming.

He stepped directly in front of her and set his fingernails on her reddened and heated breasts. "I think coming's going to require something a little more. You up for it?"

"Please make me come," she whispered again.

And suddenly all the long conversations they'd had about edge-cases of consent were totally worth it, because he knew that her future self would uphold her fuzzy-headed self's decision.

He dug the fingernails of his left hand deeper into her chest while he sent his right hand to set the cane down briefly and search through a nearby drawer. It returned with a pair of clover clamps.

He attached the clamps to her nipples quickly and unceremoniously. Under other circumstances, the sudden bite of the clamps might have been a big deal, but now she barely smiled. He did make sure to place the on her nipples, and not behind them.

Then he lifted the chain with his left hand, pulling her breasts up with it. They kept their shape, but the nipples started to elongate. That might have produced a slight uptick in breathing.

His first cane-strike to the underside of her breasts definitely got a reaction.

So did the next few, as he wandered back and forth from the extra-senstive crease at the base to the outer edges of the areola, where the sudden yank on the clamped nipples must have hurt more than the impact itself.

Her screams, moans and pants mixed together in a meaningless melange of sound, and the chains around her wrists grew taught.

As he struck, he increased the pull on the clamps, gradually elongating the breasts into cones. The shocks of the cane's impact traveled faster and surer along the tense tissue. He felt the clamps starting to budge, and made a mental note that when one went, he would yank the other.

At last the clamps came off -- both almost at once. Her incoherent noises turned into more of a scream, and she tugged hard at the chains, but didn't quite come. The breasts fell and bounced into their normal position, and then, acting on instinct, he brought the cane in to strike directly on her far nipple, still in the process of reinflating itself with blood.

She came.

It took a while.

And then, as the orgasm seemed to be wearing down, with only intermittent aftershocks, he gave the symmetric strike to her near nipple. Not perfectly symmetrical, as it had been out of clamps longer, but it restarted her orgasm all the same.

As the jangling of the chains began to subside, he set down the cane and stood directly in front of her. Gently, he opened the cuffs on her wrists. As expected, she flopped forward onto him: her much-abused breasts pressing into his chest, and her arms draped loosely around his shoulders.

He wrapped his arms around her supportively and half-walked half-carried her to a nearby couch. Carefully, he sat down, bringing her on top of him. He stroked her back and kissed her forehead as she simply squeezed him.

Some time later, they were lying on the couch, still pressed against each other, though now skin-to-skin with his shirt removed as well, and she seemed potentially verbal.

"You know," he commented idly, "it was twenty strokes before the clamps. I didn't count what it took to make you come, but I think it was more than twenty more. You should start betting higher on poker nights."

"bankroll edge, payoff plus one, minus one, all over payoff..." she recited sleepily, head still pressed to his chest.

Then she pulled herself up a little, kissed him lightly on the lips, and said more coherently, "Everyone talks about edge uncertainty. Nobody talks about bankroll uncertainty..."

She kissed him again. "All's well that ends well," she said.

He couldn't argue with that.