Dolorosa Soror by Florence Dugas Read Free Book Online Page A

later, I surprised her in the bathroom looking in the mirror with an evident satisfaction at the gouges on her skin, touching the swellings of her laminated flesh with her fingertips.
    I knew who did it when, three days later, J. P. treated me in the same manner. But with me, he took care to tie me up head-to-toe first. I cried out; I begged like a madwoman for him to stop. He struck me twelve times, very hard. Then he came in my mouth. He loved that—after he had made me cry, he loved giving me his cock to suck, knowing I was half strangled, between his dick gagging me and my nose stopped up with tears.
    One afternoon...
    I needed her so much, had so much hoped she would come by that I leapt upon her as soon as she entered and, laughing, she let herself fall to the bed. I lifted her skirt, took off her underwear with an authoritative movement...
    The black lace was sticky with fresh sperm, as were her sex and asshole. I lifted my head.
    "Who was it?" I asked.
    "J. P.," she said. "At school. On a table, between classes. Without even locking the door."
    He had once taken me the same way, stretched me out upon a desk, my ankles around his shoulders, my skirt hiked up to my waist, my panties hanging at half-mast from the heel of my sandal—and him passing, with an insouciant air, from my cunt to my asshole. He did it often, and each time I would try to guess where he would come, even tried to provoke him, through the contractions of my sphincter, the suction of my cunt, to forbid him from moving from one to the other, from making me pine even longer. Come where you want to, but come!
    When Nathalie opened her thighs before me, I had the impression he had found the strength to ejaculate in both her cunt and her ass.
    I slapped her on principle, then was immediately ashamed, asked her to forgive me, took her in my arms...
    That was one of the only times she took power, briefly. She sat astride me, squeezing my face between her thighs, and made me lick her sex and ass for a long time, telling me to miss nothing, to forget nothing, to bury my tongue in her as far as it would go. Her cunt tasted like seaweed.
    ***
    During this period, I whip her nearly every day. Why, then, do I think I didn't want to kill her? I would like to kill her; I could die from wanting to kill her so badly.
    ***
    Moments like these were a constant with Nathalie, and became more and more marked as we neared the end: moments when I would confusedly sense the end coming without having decided anything. It was like hearing a blues fragment that echoes on the last note and refuses to let itself be reduced to silence.
    The blows, the humiliations, even the tortures I made her suffer, were for her, each time, new opportunities to be more tender, more sweet. She was my negative reflection, or rather, the positive reflection of the negative image I had of myself. The whip revolted me. My whole body rebelled against the blows, yet seemed to ask for more, as if to punish me for an ancient rebellion of uncertain origin. Nathalie, however, seemed to grow more perfect under the whip, as a river stone will be slowly polished until it arrives at its definitive form—a pure oval, a grain of sand, nothingness. Her torn flesh would bleed, and she would keep that half-smile, completely interior, that fourteenth-century Italian painters tacked on the faces of their martyred saints. I only struck her harder; I only loved her more; and I hated myself for loving her so, yet tearing her apart.
    ***
    "You know," she begins, "for a while now I have been studying the Way of the Body as a Japanese scholar might the Way of Wisdom or the Way of Tea: in order to isolate myself. At the end of all perfection, there is solitude and night. Others live in order to be filled: with love, money, alcohol, memories, and so forth. I live to be emptied. When I feel men come in me, when I feel them both proud and ashamed of having filled me with a tea-spoonful of sperm, I feel myself grow emptier