Scent of Ginger

Chapter 05: Denial and Disobedience

It was impossible to sleep.

The days were a challenge, as I was given work around the hospital and expected to perform diligently despite the corset that cut my breath shallow and the strap that dug between my legs. Simply moving about caused the stays to clasp and the leather to rub me, building a tantalizing friction through my core that was not yet enough to become pleasure. My step wavered as I carried washbasins and hung out laundry, and I have no doubt that my eyes held some wildness which caused visitors to the asylum to flinch from me as I stood aside, docile, while they passed. They had no way of knowing what an effort it was, what a humiliation, to stand passive before them given the sensual agitation my body was continually experiencing.

Still, during the days at least my hands were occupied, and I could distract my mind by watching the flight of birds and hearing their calls as I fetched the sheets from the courtyard. At night, when my eyes were closed and the thick stone walls muffled all sound, the only sense left to me was touch. The feeling of my tightly-bound body filled my entire physical world. My breasts, always tender, ached to be pulled free and caressed back to their natural modest fullness. My skin, so sensitive, was patterned by lacing and boning. And between my legs, where so recently I had discovered an eminently tactile something, there was nothing to meet my fingers but hard, unyielding leather.

I aimed at first for restraint and decorum, as the Doctor ordered. I tried to sleep properly arrayed on my back with my hands outside the blankets, giving no sign of the powerful, confusing new needs that coursed through me. I did not speak in my sleep because I did not sleep –or at least, I dozed so lightly that the slightest stir of my voice woke me. I placed my cushion below the small of my back to support the tight arch the corset wrought there and prayed to the Virgin Mary, at first for chastity, then simply for comfort.

But the lack of rest slowly wore down my resolve. On the third night, I took to lying with my hands under my pillow. On the fourth I allowed them to move under the covers. After the moon set but before the pre-dawn light, in the darkest part of the night, I gave in to compulsion and carefully began to explore my curved, corseted body. It felt nice, to my hands, to follow the smooth slope of my flat, black-satin-bound breasts, down the valley of my waist and up again to the flare my hips. I traced the voluptuous line on my thigh where sensation began again. But down my centre line, from breast to cleft, I could feel only the steady, restrictive pressure of the binding, which embraced and stimulated me all over, but denied me any way to either concentrate or release the grip. My body was no longer my own. I belonged to him. Or so it seemed.

As the fifth day dawned, I began to feel a kind of erotic panic growing in me that came ever nearer to overmastering my self-control with each passing moment. My hands stroked my sleek waist over and over, my hips squirmed almost uncontrollably. Even as my desperation mounted, however, I refused to request an appointment with the Doctor. He would not have the satisfaction of seeing me beg. Instead, I conducted myself as coolly as I could when the nurse he'd set over me came to bathe me.

"And how are we today, then?" The Head Nurse –a severe woman of indeterminate years– inquired as she undid my buckle to allow my morning wash.

"As well as may be expected under the circumstances," I replied tersely. Frowning, she launched into one of her habitual monologues.

"Complaining again, are we? Well, it is your own fault that you find yourself here, I am sure. I have never met a patient yet who could not improve herself with a little more self-discipline. Yes, discipline! Discipline is what is lacking in today's servants! And discipline is what you shall learn here. We are not an institute of incarceration for common criminals here, we are an institute of education for the mind and soul. Hygiene is your lesson, and a proper sense of proportion."

"'Proportionate hygiene'?" I allowed the slightest irony into my voice.

"Just so." She stamped my irony back down with her own iron-heavy tones.

"In the name of hygiene, then," I replied, and wiped my bottom soundly. As I reached the end of the stroke, my fingers delved in perhaps more than was strictly necessary.

"Now now, none of that, or we'll delay you another day," she snapped, and made a disapproving mark on my checklist for the day. I could have slapped her then and there, or cried, or both. Instead, I simply muttered,

"You insist on civil behaviour here. But it is demeaning to be watched at my toilette as a child is watched in the nursery."

"A pity you need to be watched so." She parried heartlessly. "That'll do. Fetch your corset now, and I will lace you in."

How my hand trembled as I picked up the object that tormented me! The urge to toss it out of the window gripped me so strongly that the muscles of my fore-arms twitched. Seeing this, she took it from me and turned me roughly to face the wall.

"Brace your hands here, and mind you don't struggle. I will be quick."

Quick she was, quick enough to burn my skin with the lacing. And yet, as always, her cruelty had the opposite of its intended effect on me. My legs shook and my belly grew taut as my helplessly oversensitive body responded to the pain. The Nurse tsk'd as she drew out a cloth from her skirts to wipe the liquid that trickled between my thighs. Then she clasped the leather over my sex more firmly than ever. I pressed my flushed face to the wall's cool plaster. If she had looked, she would have seen my lips moving a silent irrational plea: hurt me, pleasure me, O anything, but let me feel-!

That night, driven by desperation, I began to work in earnest at my bindings, seeking any way out I could find. I lay on my belly, twisted my arms back awkwardly and fumbled with the buckle. It was locked. I wove my fingers through the lacing, tearing at it. I had not enough leverage to break the cord. Finally, I tugged on the strap between my legs as hard as strength and stealth permitted. Though the leather did not give, it did something else to me. Pulled tighter than ever, it dug into my bound flesh in ways that, while painful, caused my already-shallow breath to catch. I pulled again, then again. Even the slightest changes in pressure there were now amplified by my heightened perceptions. A pleasure born of pain flooded into me, hot and sharp and genuine. My frantic hands acquired a rhythm. I felt the strap grow slippery with my fluid arousal, allowing me to move it more freely, to move myself against it. My hips flexed, pressing forward. I had to bite the coverlet's edge to stifle a moan. Closer, closer now-

My movements must have reached some tipping point of frenzy, for at that moment the bedsprings gave a shocking squeal. I tried to still myself, but the sensations I had built up were so strong that they were like a floodgate opened: the momentary jolt of frozen terror only caused me to convulse with pleasure again, harder, a moment later. The bedsprings resounded a second time, echoing loud. Footsteps in the hall gave me just enough warning to free my hands from the strap and thrust them out from under the blankets in a parody of innocence.

But no, it was too late. There stood the Head Nurse in her uniform, and arriving behind her the Doctor, a dark red silken dressing gown thrown over his nightshirt. He set down a reflecting oil lamp on the table, so that it cast a brilliant steady light onto my bed, like the limelight of the stage. My cheeks were inflamed, and he could not mistake the sweat on my brow.

"Feverish again, Hannah?" he suggested mildly.

Before I could respond, he stripped the coverlet from my bed and bared my curled-up body, my legs crossed tightly around the strap that bound me to suffering. His suspicions were immediately aroused by my posture. With the Nurse's help, he wrestled me onto my back and forced my legs open. I cried out a protest, but a single dagger-glance from his impatient eyes was enough to still my tongue. He probed methodically with one finger at the edge of the leather strap. It came away slicked with the wetness that seeped between leather and flesh. He shook his head in mock-sorrow.

"This won't do. I suppose we have no choice but to further restrain you," he said with relish. "Head Nurse, kindly fetch a strait-jacket."

After she left, he turned to me and continued to lecture.

"The strait-jacket is not an ideal solution for one of your type. But given that you continue in your defiant ways, it is necessary. Naturally, the release scheduled for the day after tomorrow must be postponed---"

"No!" I shouted without a thought of restraint or decorum. "Let me free! This binding is inhuman. No woman could be cured by such torment as this in a thousand years!"

"I shall inform the medical establishment of your expert verdict." He smiled his wicked taunting smile at me. I struggled to sit in a fury of passion.

"You say I want punishment and humiliation. Then prove it! Do it to me! Punish me as you used to, with ginger and crop! Whip me, leave me bound to the machine! Only don't deny me any longer or I—I—"

At this I had to stop because the tight lacing of the corset hindered my breath, and indeed I could hardly draw enough air in the stifling room to speak, much less shout. But even as I choked my passion still burned in me, as demanding as a hot iron. Breathlessly, I rolled onto my belly to shield myself and gripped the leather strap once again, pulling until it cut my thighs and bottom deep. My mouth opened as I cried without sound, my whole body spasming in a hysterical fit. The laces—so tight—worms of black lace gnawing the corners of my vision, moving inwards as waves of dark pleasure rise to meet them from below—

"Nurse!" I heard the Doctor call distantly. "She's having an attack! Shears, now!"

At the very edge of consciousness I felt his hands hot on my back pulling my strings up to cut them. My head fell to the side and I saw his robe part to reveal a bulge straining against the fine linen of his nightshirt. I fancied I saw a glistening dampness spread there between his legs, at the very moment he cut me open.

But oh, who knows what I saw? For the instant my laces snapped I surged up gulping air in one ecstatic gasp, and with eyes closed I pressed my breast to the sky and my hips to the bed, crying out in defiant joy as my body took its course before him. He too made a strangled sound, a protest or growl or throaty gasp. As I fell panting to my side, he closed his robe hastily and stepped back as the Nurse held up the strait-jacket she had brought.

"Secure her," he said curtly. The words had barely left his lips before he left the room.

And so my supple, pulsing body was bound again. I was closed up tight until the next morning. My scheduled release was cancelled, and I was left to wait even longer. And yet I felt for once that I had the victory, even in my physical unseemliness. For the very morning after this incident, my monthly indisposition began, and the freshly-laced corset was necessarily put aside for looser linens that would not disorder the movements of my wandering womb nor hinder the flow of my blood. I had found respite. I saw nothing of the Doctor during this time. I could only wonder what he was preparing next.