Captive Weekend - Chapter 3
Here's a third sample from Captive Weekend, my debut Femdom erotic novel, now available in the Kindle store.
Please enjoy this further sneak peek into my new novel, Captive weekend, which just released into the Kindle store. You can find links to the first two chapters below, as well as a link to the Amazon buy page.
Recovering from the demise of his marriage, committed submissive Gary Severson sets out to rekindle his faith in kink at a BDSM fantasy paintball weekend, where he will be hunted by dominant women. Through his inevitable capture and the recreational bondage, torture and enslavement that follow, Gary learns he may actually have been caught by love.
Here’s a link to it in the Kindle store.
3 – The Women
The image of the pleading man, fallen beneath the swell of Mary’s ample curves, stuck in Gary’s mind as he hurried down the front steps. The sound of her slap reverberated in his thoughts, chasing him across the yard. The stolen glimpse had been hot as all get out, but also sobering, even frightening. The speed and force of her rebuke landed on Gary like a bucket of ice water, showering him with fresh doubts. What was really going to happen here? Was he ready for it? He put on his best unflappable smile and tried to force these worries down as he returned to find the party now in full swing.
Towering over the crowd was Gretchen, an older, loud, horse-faced Londoner with short hair, brown going gray, and large breasts. Winner of the last two hunts, she couldn’t have been anything less than 6’4” in her chunky heels. She held court near the center of the gathering and didn’t take off her polarized, visor style sunglasses until long past sundown. All her anecdotes were of hunting actual big game in Africa, which she described in anthropomorphic terms: “You should have seen the ass on this gazelle, thighs like an Olympic sprinter.” Beside her was Jane, holder of some vaunted European whip master title Gary had never heard of. He couldn’t tell if it was a leather thing, like “2025 (INSERT CITY/REGION/NATION HERE) Leatherman of The Year,” or simply a vanilla athletics award. Everyone uttered her name with a tone of fearful reverence, as if she were a deadly gunfighter.
More and more, his eye was drawn to a brunette in her 30s with rosy cheeks and a button nose. Her curly hair fell in dark ringlets over her alabaster skin, and her beautiful green eyes bore a shrewd and malicious glint that prickled his neck. She was short, with a shapely compact body and small but bewitching breasts. She wore knee high, black biker boots and a short patent leather jacket that made her look both delicate and powerful. He managed to politely insert himself into her conversation. He learned her name was Penny, and she lived in London. She was easy to talk to in that way that seems like a magic trick to shy people. It was all going smoothly when a loud, Scottish redhead interrupted to give Penny an enormous hug. That touched off a cloudburst of chatter, which became a storm of other Dommes pushing into the conversation and flooding Gary out.
The loud woman was named Agatha. She was in her 40s and had a thick Edinburgh accent. Her face was cherubic with a slightly upturned nose and big green eyes, and her body was on the plump side and pear-shaped. She wore a fringed, black, wool poncho with flat-soled hiking boots and jeans, and her long curly red hair, going scraggly in what he guessed was a near perpetual bad hair day, looked extra frizzy in the evening wind. She had a hideous guffaw of a laugh that sounded to Gary like a train derailment, and exerted an overbearing control on any conversation, even talking over the other Dommes, which Gary found thoroughly off-putting. She was totally unlike the women he was drawn to. He preferred a clean line, like Penny, or Charlotte, the statuesque, imperious German who was somehow always on the other side of the party. Moreover, Gary deeply distrusted loud Dommes, because he worried their bluster was a tell that their true kink was narcissism or exhibitionism, not dominance.
But then Gary scolded himself over these thoughts. He was in no position to judge anyone for their choices. His own choices had failed him completely, leaving him alone again, rootless and middle-aged. He had spent his whole life believing that following his heart, however unorthodox its passions, was the only path to happiness, but it hadn’t been true. He had believed in this more than he had ever believed in anything. If he was wrong about something so important to him, what couldn’t he be wrong about?
Following his heart had led him like a blind man into the brick wall of a doomed relationship. While their love affair had been thoroughly kinked, once they married, Erika’s interest in BDSM had evaporated almost overnight. Their power exchange and D/s dynamic, all of it withered and disappeared from their lives. Eventually, she confessed she had lost her desire to dominate but was trying to get it back. They struggled in vain to make their passion blossom again. Nothing worked. Their love turned to resentment, then anger, then sorrow, and then yearning to escape was all they had left in common.
He had loved her more than anything, but to him love was inseparable from ownership, and when she lost interest, he couldn’t feel that love anymore. At the end, during therapy, Gary realized that at his core, he wanted a woman who viewed a weekend getaway as an opportunity to escape into her authentic dominant self, just as he dreamed to escape into his submission to her. Erika simply didn’t dream that way anymore.
When the marriage was finally over, he spent months adrift, just trying to get his bearings. Sometimes he thought he was in one of those movies where the hero wakes from a long hibernation and doesn’t recognize the world anymore. He was suddenly old and joyless. Friends said he looked fine for his age, yet he doubted that anyone could find him desirable now. His disconnection from his submissive self ran even deeper. He simply couldn’t believe in it, that his submission was in any way worthy or good. His faith had failed, and now he was both pretender and apostate. Try as he might, he couldn’t connect with Dommes anymore. They looked through him, or perhaps saw him too clearly, finding the charred and blackened place in his heart where the fire of that faith refused to relight. He began to fear that the love he sought now lay permanently beyond his reach.
Worst of all was the uncertainty of it. Erika never gave an actual reason why she lost interest, no explanation besides the empty bromides of “people change” or “things happen.” Lack of a definitive answer cast a pall over his entire life and brought everything he said or did into question. No aspect of his person was safe from blame, no facet of his character above suspicion. He began to hate himself for the things he craved, to feel alienated from his heart. He felt like there was a person he was supposed to be, yet some unsympathetic gatekeeper was always blocking the way. He was defined by a failure he couldn’t explain, brought on by some mistake he couldn’t name.
Eventually, after more than a year of this, he resolved to find something that might approach the kind of vacation experience he’d thought of in therapy. He couldn’t live any longer on the dust of dreams. He needed something real to make himself believe again. When he found the Captive Weekend, it seemed like just the thing. Here the Dommes would pursue him, so even if he was no longer desirable, he would at least get to experience the feeling of being wanted. He had clicked buy, and three months later he was here, being elbowed aside by a brassy redhead.
Ashamed of his lack of humility toward Agatha, he moved away from Penny and went looking for Charlotte. She was tall, even in flats, and Gary found it alluring to always have to look up at her. She was a Berliner with a lithe, runner’s body and long, platinum blonde hair. She wore a light nylon jacket with thigh high suede boots in a way that projected power like a strategic air wing. She was funny too, and as a cineaste who loved Hollywood, she warmed to Gary immediately when she learned he was from Los Angeles. Gary had nothing to do with Hollywood, but he quickly impressed her with the “I saw so-and-so at Whole Foods” shtick that was every Angeleno’s favorite conversational power move. She ate it up, making deadpan quips at all his anecdotes.
“So there I was, standing in the checkout line at Ralph’s, and I can feel the dildo working itself out of my ass, and I look up and see Bob Odenkirk.”
“From Breaking Bad?! How cool!” she blurted, hanging on his every word.
“Yeah, right?! He’s my favorite, I never say hi to celebrities, but for him I would have made an exception.”
She made some shocked utterance in German and then asked, “Did you?!”
“I was about to, but then I felt the dildo slip again and panicked that it would end up on the floor. So I gingerly walked to a deserted corner of the frozen food aisle and tried to act casual while I pressed my ass against a cooler until I felt the rubber balls touching my sphincter.”
Charlotte laughed and rolled her eyes.
They were soon joined by an older, silver-haired French woman named Carmen, who was at least 70 and had completely ignored the dress down memo. She wore a long evening gown with a mink stole and elbow-length opera gloves. Gary soon realized that Carmen’s license to preen came from her position as Mary’s organizing partner. The farm’s seen-but-not-heard crew of bustling factotums was in fact Carmen’s stable of personal slaves. She too warmed to Gary, showing him the little sparkle in her eyes that was somehow both diabolical and grandmotherly at the same time. Her velvety soft accent made everything sound vaguely seductive, and Gary briefly entertained visions of being happily caged and fattened in her gingerbread house.
He felt his confidence rising. It was going well. Charlotte seemed to like him. She might pursue him. He was just about to tell them his one really good L.A. celebrity story, about being stuck in an elevator with James Spader and Madonna, when Agatha ran over shouting a cacophonous greeting to Carmen. She threw her arms around the older woman, elbowing Gary aside. He flashed with anger and glared at Agatha in burning annoyance. But he instantly remembered his place and calmed himself. This would be a good time to say hello to the few women he still had yet to meet, so he might as well take it. However, as he backed away, Charlotte touched his shoulder and looked down at him, her perfect blonde hair shining against the darkening sky.
“It was very nice to meet you, Gary. Perhaps I shall seek you out tomorrow.”
“If you do, I’m sure you’ll catch me. I doubt I could ever escape from you, Miss.” They shared a tiny grin before Agatha enfolded Charlotte in her loud embrace, and Gary departed.
He caught himself looking at Charlotte’s finger as he walked away and swore under his breath for doing so.
He kept having to fight this frustrating impulse. He had finally emerged from the wreckage of his last relationship. How could he yearn to find another so quickly? How was he always mooning over some new love object that he wanted to surrender his life to? It was his life; couldn’t he make use of it for a fucking change? Wasn’t there more than searching for the right pair of feet at which to fall to his knees? Didn’t he ever deserve to live for himself? He said all these things to himself over and over, yet he still reflexively checked every Domina there for a wedding ring whenever he felt any interest toward her. Charlotte’s finger was empty.
Having sighted the absence of a ring, Gary turned his head back to see where he was going, but he was too late. He walked right into Gretchen, almost knocking her over, luckily catching them both at the last second. He levered her back onto two feet and stepped away, sputtering apologies. A look of incandescent outrage blazed in her face.
“I’m so sorry, Miss. I was just—”
“Just not looking where you were going?” she snapped sharply, cutting him off.
Gary had no response and just nodded in contrition.
She chuckled, her tone pitiless and flat, her eyes shiny and black behind her visor. “Bloody idiot, tomorrow I’ll whip you for this.”
Gary became aware that all nearby conversation had stopped. He looked around to see everyone watching him, but he had no idea what to say. The men were aghast at his gaffe, but the women looked like a schoolyard eagerly readying to watch a bully crush a clueless newcomer. His blood ran ice cold with fear, and the image of Philip pleading on the kitchen floor filled his mind, and yet he was powerfully turned on amid his terror. Carmen mercifully stepped in with a loud laugh that broke the tension.
“Really, Madame Gretchen, you’ve scared this nice boy half to death. You know that is against the rules for this party.”
Gretchen’s mood stopped on a dime, and suddenly she became all smiles and warmth, as though her anger from the instant before was simply an act.
Gretchen said, voice like honey, “So sorry, Carmen, you know I just can’t help myself when I scent blood. You’re a good chap about it, aren’t you…?” she trailed off, fishing for Gary’s name.
“Gary,” he said, regaining his composure.
“Lovely. You’ll have to forgive me, Gary, just mucking about.” Then Gretchen fixed him with a hard stare that seemed at odds with her conciliatory tone, “Don’t worry, it’s all in good fun.”
Carmen laughed extra hard at that, and then so did Gretchen. Gary laughed too, if only to move past the uncomfortable moment. The laughter spread, and conversations resumed as the focus shifted away from Gary. Still, Gary realized he didn’t believe that Gretchen had been playing, despite her show of clemency. Her anger had appeared too truly felt to have been affected. The danger of tomorrow suddenly seemed more real than it had only minutes before. Worse, he began to feel a visceral ache, the memory of past whippings, faint but palpable, whenever Gretchen was in sight. It stung in his mind, and made his penis feel warm and thick.
He noticed then, as the sun moved low in the sky, that many of the women now bore shades of the hard eyes and cold laugh that Gretchen had shown him. None of them were as intense as she had been, but once he had been introduced to the tone, he heard it everywhere. A new timbre of menace colored the melodies of the women’s voices. A new predatory squint framed their eyes, an emergent primal cunning as the pack fully encircled the herd.
He also noticed, revealed in the lengthening shadows, that the farm seemed to have a lot of superfluous eye bolts screwed into walls and beams. The horizontal sun made them cast long black ovals on walls and fences. He caught himself trying to make sense of two that were drilled eight feet up a barn wall only to suddenly imagine a man’s hands cuffed above his head and tied there. From then on, he couldn’t help but see men dangling or bound to these pervasive attachment points. He would see these things, and hear Mary’s slap, and feel the memory of pain that Gretchen inspired. For the rest of the day it was work to talk to anyone at all, but he still managed to make a good showing, despite his rising fear.
Where will you be bound? How will you be beaten?
As the sun set, Carmen’s boys made a bonfire in the big fire pit beside the picnic tables. Mary climbed onto a bench and quieted the crowd.
“I just want to say thank you to everyone. We have quite a few people this year, and it’s a tremendous milestone. We even have a couple blokes from America! Let’s give them a hand.” There was a smattering of applause. Gary raised his drink in honor of himself and his countrymen. By then he was loose enough that any toast felt appropriate.
“Anyway, tomorrow we’re all going to have a lot of fun, but I want to remind you boys to consider the rules tonight. This is your last chance before the sword of Damocles comes crashing down on your sweet little heads. Wait, heads…? Maybe cocks is the better term here?”
That got a riotous burst of laughter from the women.
“You should all have your Get Out of Jail Free card now. If you don’t, come find me. Remember, you can only use it once. So, if you get taken early, and you want to run around some more, that’s fine, but get taken again and there’s no escape. You hear that, boys? No escape.”
There was a general nod from the men, but a catcalling “Oooh” from the ladies, a gentle tease at the dire situation in which the men would soon find themselves.
“So, with all that said, I want to remind everyone to get a good night’s sleep tonight, because tomorrow is going to be bloody great!”
This got a smattering of cheers and applause before a gray-haired Brit named Albert shouted, “Three cheers for Mistress Mary and all the goddesses! Hip, hip!”
“Hooray!” came the unison shout from the crowd. This call and response went a few more rounds before a final surge of cheering applause drowned it out.
After that, Gary circulated for another hour, drinking and chatting. As Carmen had alluded, one of the rules was that the first night had to be purely social, a convivial meet and greet, no play, no roles. Get everyone calmed down and at ease with each other. No pressure. But as such, the evening hit an early wall. The giddy excitement for the next day had become intolerable, and the tension couldn’t be released with mere conversation. Indeed, conversation only heightened it. People became casualties of the suspense, heading to bed if only to get to tomorrow faster, slipping off to their tents or departing in cars to the hotel. The party dwindled early.
Feeling all of this acutely, Gary made a few goodbyes and found his tent. For a brief instant, he considered scrounging another beer, and then the jet lag overcame him like a highwayman with a lead sap. He lay down on his sleeping bag and passed out cold.