The Final Veil: Who had kidnapped America's favorite belly dancer? Page 8

  April breathed deeply through her mouth. She loved being gagged, but there were always a few panicky seconds of adjustment when she felt the gag closed on her and realized that her ability to talk was taken away, and would not be returned to her until her master removed it. Of course, there was always the safe sign that she would give that would immediately lead to her being ungagged. But it had been a long time since she had used her safe sign. That was mostly because she had learned her master could be trusted, though.

  "Now, lie upon it on your back, with your butt right on the edge, slave," Kitten commanded.

  April allowed herself to fall gently to the soft surface of the bed, enjoying the luxurious feel of the silk sheets beneath her. She was not in the least surprised when Kitten and Jeff each siezed an ankle and tied a rope from the shackle on her ankle to one of the frames at the edge of the bed, spreading her legs wide.

  April and Kitten always wore shackles, collars and cuffs whenever they were home with Jeff or at a Gorean meet. They were his slaves, the shackles, ankles and cuffs expressed that beautifully. They were Jeff's to bind and use however and whenever he wished. They loved being reminded of that whenever they felt their slavish gear upon them.

  Of course, the slavish gear wouldn't have nearly the same effect if it wasn't put to use, and Jeff understood that. Plus, he liked putting them to slavish uses. They would not have had much use for him if he did not.

  With her legs spread wide and her hands tied behind her back and a dildo gag filling her mouth, April felt wonderfully helpless.

  Jeff eased his forefinger into April's pussy, or 'heat” as the Goreans liked to call it. She shuddered a bit with pleasure as she felt his finger parting her silky walls.

  “Wet as can be,” Jeff said with a bit of a smirk.

  “Yes, Master,” Kitten said, her voice also a bit smirkish.

  “Hair, kitten, legs spread wide,” Jeff said.

  Kitten immediately bent over at the waist with her hands crossed behind her back, spreading her legs wide apart. “Hair” was a Gorean slave position designed to allow a slave to be easily led about by the hair. It normally did not involve having a slave's legs spread wide apart, as she was supposed to walk about, which was why Jeff had specified that kitten spread her legs wide.

  Jeff slid his middle finger into kitten's heat and it slid in easily.

  “You're as wet as April .. wetter,” Jeff said with a voice that was even smirkier than before.

  “Yes, Master,” Kitten said, her voice betraying a certain pleasure about that.

  “Good thing for you that you are permitted no shame, girl,”

  Jeff said to kitten as he used a catch in the rings attached to kitten's wrist cuffs to fasten them together behind her back. “Now go sit on April's face, girl, and make yourself even wetter. Put that dildo gag to good use.”

  “Yes, Master,” kitten said happily. She crawled onto the bed and knelt with her knees on either side of April's head, careful not to pull her hair, working the dildo that projected out of April's mouth into her heat, then sliding her butt down it so that April's vision was ultimately completely obscured by the twin fleshy moons of kitten's butt.

  In the meantime, she felt Jeff's cock sliding between the lips of her heat, filling her as it was already quite stiff. April moaned and squirmed as Jeff and kitten used her body for their pleasure, in the process giving April all sorts of pleasure, as was only right and fitting. Soon kitten was sliding her ass up and down the dildo projecting from April's gag with gusto, her moans of pleasure fully expressing what effect the dildo was having on her.

  Jeff's cock meanwhile rammed her heat fast and faster, his cock swelling and growing harder as he did so, April's wide spread legs unable to resist him in any way, as was also fitting. She was his, like kitten was. She knew that as they fucked April they were kissing one another, could feel the weight of them both leaning toward one another. She could not see them kissing because the only thing she could see was kitten's ass, her face was just a chin projecting from between kitten's legs. They formed a triangle, a perfect triangle together, as their bodies thrust and squirmed and twisted toward orgasm.

  That was a sweet memory, and there were many more just like it, even though her life was not all composed of dancing and fucking. Oh, if it were. But there were the media appearances. She did not really like doing them, but Lady Astra had convinced her to do them.

  “Oh, I hate all the travel just for talking with someone who does not know a damn thing about dance or Gorean life, and who just wants to ask questions about my sex life anyway,” said April to Lady Astra when the topic had come up.

  “Yes, I know, the popular media is nothing if not tiresome,” said Lady Astra. “I have done many interviews, collectively, their ignorance could fill the biggest landfill on Earth, and they are smarmy and obnoxious and, as you say, full of curiousity about sex. But still, I think you should do as many media appearances as you can stand to.”

  “Why?” asked April. “I mean, I know it will help my career as a dancer, but I would be just as happy dancing for Goreans and ethnic dance fans, and no one else, as I am dancing in arenas where most of the people can barely see me and know very little about ethnic dance, much less Gorean dance.”

  “It's not just for you, April,” Lady Astra had responded. “It's for all of us, every belly dancer and Gorean dancer out there. When you go out there and do a media appearance, you do all of us good.”

  “How is that?” April asked.

  “Because you publicize what we all do,” said Lady Astra. “More and more restaurants are opening up to having ethnic dance performances as part of their entertainment, and to paying their dancers. Strip clubs are now hiring Gorean dancers to perform and are paying them top dollar. Articles, videos and news reports are making ethnic and Gorean dance much more well known. So many dancers that might never have had a chance to perform for anyone but their loved ones are getting the chance to perform in public, because of you. Troupes that were struggling are now successful, because of you. Troupes that never existed before have sprung up, because of you. And it's all because the media are fascinated with you. This has been a godsend for the art, and who knows how long it may last, but we should take every advantage of it so long as we can.”

  “I never thought of it that way,” April said. “It was fun to get all that attention and celebrity and doing all that traveling and meeting famous people at first, but it got dull fast. Then I was doing it just because it was part of making money at my craft. But I guess it does help out my sisters in dance as well, and I'll be very happy to continue doing it for their sake, if nothing else.”

  “I knew you would,” said Lady Astra, smiling.

  “But it's still a pain in the ass,” April said.

  Now she was bound and gagged and blindfolded and secured in some kind of trailer, by people who had only ever seen her on TV, probably. Pain in the ass didn't even BEGIN to cover it.

  April sighed, and thought of another good time with Kitten and Jeff. She knew how to pass the time while bound, and it was by enjoying happy memories, not unhappy ones.

  Chapter 7

  Your Nasty Butt Twitching

  Now that I knew it was a group that had done the kidnapping and not some desperate loner nutjob, I decided the emails were worth taking a hard look at. So I drove to the nearest coffee shop and got myself a thermos full of the stuff and a couple of doughnuts, then drove into the shopping center parking lot, shut off the engine and moved to the back of my van.

  I had outfitted the back with a table and some portable file boxes that converted it to a mobile office. I hauled out my laptop and connected to the coffee shop's wifi, something I knew from past experience I could do if I parked near the door.

  I established a remote connection with my home computer, then sat down with my laptop and pulled up my copies of the emails and read them more carefully, with a cup of steaming hot coffee beside me. As I read each letter, I checked for names and enter
ed them into a custom search manager I had, looking for links between the author and the Net. Generally found them, too.

  Most of the emails were clearly just venting done behind the relative safety and anonymity of the written word. Most sought to explain with a characteristic mixture of earnestness and anger, why April was a very bad woman.

  "You sad little hussy," one letter began, "I have seen you dancing for the pleasure of men. You think it brings you power, that you can control men with your body. But it is men who are controlling YOUR body! You are nothing but a puppet dancing to the tune of your masters. Your dance is nothing but submission to the sick sex drive of the most testosterone-poisoned members of the patriarchy. You betray women everywhere when you dance. Beledi dance is meant to be danced by womyn, for womyn. Men are not an appropriate audience for it, and the kinds of moves you do, displaying your breasts, belly and ass for male consumption, are a corruption of the true empowering moves of beledi dance. Stop being a male puppet, cut the strings!"

  That was one of the two most popular approaches. The other popular approach ran, "You probably think men find you attractive, and they do, but only for the purpose of satisfying the unnatural lust that your blatant sex dancing creates in them. Real men only seek long-term relationships with real women who know how to be chaste and proper in public. Your dancing only marks you as a fallen woman, one who can be bought and sold in the public markets. Please, read the Bible and seek counseling and learn what the real role of a woman is in decent society. Your nasty butt-twitching has no place in it."

  "Nasty butt-twitching." I liked that.

  This was the general run of cant in the emails, but many had personal observations to offer as well.

  "My husband Arthur watched you dance on the Lennoman show," said one. "I could tell by the gleam in his eye that he was watching you with lustful eyes. I realized that he was near to committing the sin of Onan, and that by the time of the commercial break he would probably be going to the bathroom to relieve himself, and I don't mean of body wastes. I was forced to get down on my knees in front of him and take him in my mouth to prevent this sin. He watched you dance while I did so. He was very glad of it and very affectionate toward me afterward, but I want you to know I was disgusted by the whole proceeding.

  “When he said afterward that I was so sexy that it was just like having a slavegirl of his own, I could have just slapped him. But I didn't. What he doesn't know won't hurt him. But I want you to know how sick I think you are, arousing lustful desires in men which their wives and girlfriends must slake to avoid sin or worse. I would tell you to go to hell, but since you are an admitted voluntary sex slave, I figure you are already there."

  Reading both sets of emails in such close proximity made their unifying theme obvious -- whether written from a radical feminist perspective or from a moral conservative perspective, all the emails were from women who felt deeply threatened by the sexuality of others. In the case of the radical feminists, it was overt displays of heterosexuality that bothered them, which they perceived as fundamentally submissive in nature. Conservative women were bothered by the same thing, but it wasn't the submissiveness that pushed their buttons, but the sexuality itself. Women who expressed an open interest in sex, who displayed themselves as sexual beings, as April most certainly did when she danced, were a threat to them, much as cheap foreign labor was a threat to relatively expensive workers. They cloaked their objections in the language of morality, but it was basically an economic issue with them: April was a cow who gave the milk away for free, so what man would be interested in the many terms and conditions they wanted to impose in exchange for sexual access to their bodies?

  The fact that April was a sex slave as well as a dancer added to her mystique in the public eye, but of course it enraged the feminists and the moral conservatives all the more.

  "Go to your master for that validation you have such a sick need for!" said one letter. "I know what you feel. You feel you cannot be a real woman unless you have that approval, that validation that only a man can give, and only the most slavish devotion to a man's every whim can get you the approval you need. I know because I used to be like you, but I woke up, and so should you! Learn your true power as a woman and stop being a masculine plaything!"

  Another read:

  "You probably think that you cannot help being a shameless hussy and slut. But you can. First you must learn shame. You must learn that your sexual feelings, too freely expressed, are evil and filthy. Many young women start out as you do, proud of their beauty and their sex, pleased that men look upon them with lustful eyes. But then what happens? They wind up on the covers of smutty videos with one man's cock in their mouth and another man's cock up their ass, looking at the camera that will transform them from one of God's creature into a vision of pornographic filth, and nothing more. Is that what you want?"

  The cant was all pretty much the same after awhile. So I started looking for threats. Most of the emails contained dire predictions of doom, but few promised that the doom would be hastened along by the author.

  "You will burn in hell forever!" was a popular one from the moral conservatives. I had always thought this punishment rather extreme for most of your garden-variety sins. I got the impression the letter-writers thought so, too, they just thought it was a pretty spiffy line to use. I mean, "you will suffer a fate that is appropriate to your misdeeds!" isn't very threatening, especially if you didn't think you were doing anything very bad.

  The feminists tended to come up with less pithy threats like, "You will never know freedom until you escape from the chains of the patriarchy. You may think your bondage in a sexual game but it is real, all too real, as you will someday discover."

  A letter from a Mother of Propriety made things very clear:

  "I have heard you talk about your dance on television and so I know that honesty is very important to you, so I will be honest with you.

  "You make it very hard for the rest of us, honey. Not all of us are as beautiful and graceful as you, but as women we all want to have a man to love, and to love us. I'm sure you understand that. And we also want to live with our men on decent terms. (I'm not sure you understand about that.) Imagine the experience of being an ordinary woman, sitting on the sofa with hubby late at night, watching him watch you dance. Of course, television is full of beautiful women, but not many who dance in such a sexy, provocative manner. I imagine if a man went to one of those disgusting nudie bars he'd see the same sort of dancing, done without any clothes."

  (I had been to a few nudie bars in my time, and had seen very little dancing that even came close to the skill and grace of April's dancing -- mostly the women just stood there and waggled their butts in the direction of men who looked like they might tip them. But the mention of nudie bars did give me an idea.)

  "Imagine such a woman glancing across at her husband to see if he is catching this, and her feelings when she sees him riveted to the screen. Then imagine her horror as she sits listening to you tell the host of the show that you are a sex slave who will perform any act your man pleases, any time he pleases. She sees her husband glance over at her when you say this, and his expression is not a happy one. He's thinking about all the sex he isn't getting from her, about all the times she said "No" to him, even for perfectly good reasons. But you NEVER tell your master no -- you call him master and do whatever he says! And you're beautiful and you dance wonderfully. And she's not all that beautiful either, nor does she dance for him. She loves him, though. But what he's thinking is that he's made a huge mistake. He has married her when there are women like you in the world.

  "I know you cannot help being beautiful. I know that you probably feel that your dance is wonderful thing that you should share with everyone. But do yourself and most other women in the world a favor. Share your beauty, and your dance and your sexuality only with your master or husband or whatever he is. There's no telling how many perfectly sound marriages you have destroyed with your brazen sexuality. P
lease stop."

  There were even some that were furious with April for her dancing technique:

  "Your every move is an affront to the Moon Goddess," went one. "Instead of worshiping She Who Rules By Night, you degrade and prostitute the gifts that She has given you, and for what? The leering attentions of men who will praise your beauty and grace to the heavens while they want you, but who will call you a stupid slut when your back is turned. The fact that you publicly account yourself a sex slave only confirms them in their belief that you, and all women, are fit only to kneel before them and suck their cocks.

  "The pathetic brevity of your costumes, such a tiny fraction of proper beledi dance wear, is mirrored in your dance, with its unbalanced and desperate remaking of proper dance technique to please the ignorant men who understand only the way your ass wiggles and your tits shake. You are a poor, pale imitation of a beledi dancer and your dance is an affront to the Mother Goddess rather than worship of her. Go dance before women only, and learn our true craft, or die a slut who dishonored her greatest gift in life."

  The problem I was having with these emails was that there were no direct physical threats directed at April. I mean, "I will tell the Mother Goddess of your transgressions in my prayers and ask that she deal with you appropriately" is just a little vague and metaphysical. "Your sluttish behavior will surely have tragic consequences for you" could mean anything from an attempt on April's life to some arcane act of Fate that would occur decades in the future.

  The problem was, a nutjob -- or group of nutjobs -- could easily describe whatever awful things might befall April in completely abstract terms, but to themselves it would be perfectly clear that they would be the instruments of her tragedy. While your average windbag would be happy enough to spew her venom in the form of words only, and believe that some kind of karmic justice would be wreaked upon April without the need for human intervention.