The wooden chest has a handle on each end, and Penny has hold of them. It’s big — her arms barely wrap around it to grab them both, and it strains her shoulders, corners jammed into the meat of her arms. If she wasn’t a vampire, she wouldn’t be able to lift it.
She can’t see where she’s putting her feet. Or where she’s going, really. When they left the road, she got five or six whimpering steps, then had to wobblingly kick off her cute kitten heels, left behind forever, and go barefoot over the rocks and scrub.
The handcuffs chaining each wrist to a handle bite and chafe.
This is all Penny’s fault for running her mouth, a whole year ago on her last birthday. Endorphin-drunk and giggly, well-fucked, beaten to within a perfectly-controlled inch of her safeword, tucked up safe against Belle’s chest in the aftermath, she’d unwisely said, uncontainably fond:
“You suck at sex roleplay.”
“Is that so,” Belle had said gravely, running her nails gently over Penny’s scalp. God, Penny wanted to weld a length of anchor-chain around her own neck to give Belle the end of it. Crack open her own ribcage and put Belle’s name on twitching cardiac muscle with a tattoo gun. Brand IF FOUND PLEASE RETURN TO— on her ass with the sear of blessed silver. She’s not sure how long you’re supposed to know a girl before failing to hide that you’re that kind of crazy.
“Mhm,” she’d said, burrowing her face into sculpted muscle, kitten-licking at Belle’s sweat. “If I said let’s play sexy pirate captain you’d probably give a historical lecture about scurvy in the middle of railing me—”
So. Exquisitely handmade wooden treasure chest. Penny thinks Belle got the werewolves over Alexville way to make it, probably had to ask them the whole year ago to get it done, just because she said a random thing about sexy pirate roleplay. Which is malice aforethought.
She stumbles on a loose rock, the sheer fucking weight of the wooden chest dragging her around as she tries to recapture her balance. She teeters.
Belle helps by grabbing her ponytail so she doesn’t go face-first and break her nose on the back of the box; counteracts the backward yank with a firm, shock-absorbing grab of her ass cheek.
“You monster!” Penny says.
“Walk,” Belle tells her, deep and stern.
Penny obediently walks, wailing and complaining and accusing all the way. Sweat soaks her shirt; her arms ache and burn and tremble. Every stern repetition — “Walk” — makes her cunt clench.
When Penny yelps about a thorn in her sole, Belle makes her stand on one foot, carefully extracts it; keeps her standing there, wobbling, one ankle lifted behind her in gentle examining hands, for long enough to make absolutely clear that even taking care of her is an instrument of sadism.
Finally Belle lets her stand on two relieved feet again, murmuring something soft in Spanish.
“You’re oooooold,” Penny had crooned delightedly at her, a while back, as Belle lay in the porch hammock with an actual printed language book, polishing up her Spanish into line with contemporary usage. “You know they have apps for that? What have you got against apps?”
Penny’s not sure how old Belle is, exactly; but Belle is dadcore. She looked at Penny levelly, over the top of her book.
“Ask inter-war Europe what I have against the data-tabulating machines,” she said, and Penny recognised that, like the fact Belle can barely look at a serrated kitchen knife, this is just one of those tree-ring layers of trauma she’s accumulated, and penitently shut up. Besides, Belle’s smarter than any app, and when she talks languages it does melty things to Penny’s spine.
“Walk,” Belle says, and Penny walks, whimpering and whining along until Belle tells her: “Here.”
Penny starts to put the chest down, then hesitates, grits her teeth. Holds it.
She can hear the smile in Belle’s voice when she says, “Good. Put it down.”
It’s big and awkward and keeps Penny’s arms spread wide, and she’s exhausted and noodle-limbed. She ends up kneeling, wrapped across it, cuffs rattling. Whimpers.
Belle makes sure Penny hears the opening clack of her folding knife. Snicker-snack; no more crop top.
“The pop cultural gestalt impression of the pirate,” Belle says, and Penny groans, exhausted head resting on the treasure chest; what kind of sicko uses your words against you a year later and turns a scene into a lecture — “revolves around a well-known set of nautical touchstones, however fictionalised or entirely anachronistic.” Fingers hook into the waistband of Penny’s jeans; a fierce yank of the painstakingly-honed blade parts denim. Belle’s voice takes on lesson-plan-bullet-point cadence: “Scurvy—”
“Oh my god,” Penny whines in protest, and another yank rips open her really nice pair of jeans, all the way down the back to the crossroad of seams in the crotch. Wet cold makes Penny shriek; lube, down the crack of her ass.
“Sodomy—” Belle says, with stern lecturer relish, and the obscene slurp of a slick fist around her strap makes Penny’s brain ring like tinnitus.
“Oh fuck,” she sobs in reply to briskly efficient warmup fingers, rapidly hitting the bargaining stage: “slowly slowly slowly I’ll take it I’ll be good let me relax you’ll like that more give me a minute—”
Belle goes at exactly the pace Belle wants to go at. Penny makes a high noise in the back of her throat at the implacable easing-in; heaves in great gulps of air when Belle pauses to let her get used to it.
“See,” Penny says shakily, when it feels like she can talk again, “you’ll like it more when I’m relaxed and it’s easier to rail me—”
“—And the lash,” Belle interrupts, and Penny clenches tight as a miser’s purse when Belle’s belt comes down, and then yowls inhumanly as Belle fucks her through it.
Things go a little floaty.
“You’d better come,” Belle says, after some time. Penny’s face down, handcuffed to a treasure chest with her ass rudely stuffed and her back striped, who even knows how long it’s been. All night. Forever. Half an hour? “You took ages to carry it here.”
“I can’t,” Penny whines.
“You’d better,” Belle says darkly, and yanks her head up. “See?”
Penny has no idea what she’s meant to see, jolting limply, eyes rolled nearly back into her head—
No, wait.
“Oh fuck,” she blurts, facing eastward, to the lightening sky. “I can’t I can’t you know I don’t come from having my ass fucked—”
“Sun’s gonna come up, right in your eyes,” Belle growls.
“I can’t,” Penny wails. “I can’t I can’t you gotta help me—” and her fuzzy brain gropes around the shape of it; Belle’s not helping, so Penny hasn’t said The Thing, she needs to say whatever The Thing is — “please please please?”
“Hm,” Belle says, stern, as if she might say No, which is enough to make Penny nearly panic even though she knows it’s fake, and then shifts and shoves herself closer to the chest in a way that folds Penny up, howling; reaches over with her long arms to unlock one cuff. Twists Penny’s arm up behind her back, instead. Shifts herself over the other way, uncuffs that hand, twists that up behind her, too.
Cruelly hauls Penny’s ass a little higher.
“You come or you burn,” she says, in a voice like Old Testament god, bends herself over Penny’s straining back, and fucks.
(Penny, screaming and sobbing and seeing stars, still can’t come until Belle finally puts rough fingers on her clit; but she does, so who cares?)
“Buh,” Penny says, after a while, then whimpers pitifully about Belle pulling out; slides limply off the chest into a heap when Belle walks around it and raises the lid. From the ground, she watches Belle pull out a trash bag, and out of that, her long coat, gloves, wide hat, and aviators to keep the sun off. Then, instead of any other clothes being forthcoming for Penny, Belle grabs the box and tips it, biceps flexing distractingly.
A heap of rocks rolls out.
“You bitch,” Penny says dreamily, and Belle pulls her up and slides the remains of her jeans off her, leaving her limp and snuggly, leaning against Belle in just her cute, very sticky, pushed-aside panties.
There are no other clothes. Penny squints around and into the now-empty chest, just a dusting of soil and a few pebbles in the bottom of it, trying to connect the dots in her melted brain before the sun does arrive.
“What am I gonna,” she says, and looks at Belle’s smirk, at the significant slant of her gaze.
“You know what pirates do with their plundered booty, Penny,” she says, with the condescension that makes Penny squirm and want to crawl back onto her strap. “Go on,” and Penny looks at the brightening horizon and Belle’s hot evil smile and gets in the fucking box, sinking to her quivering knees, curling up on her side, looking up at the rectangle of sky with Belle looming in it, looking right back down at her.
“Don’t worry,” Belle says, though Penny isn’t, not for a second. “I’ll be back for my treasure,” and quietly, firmly, closes the lid. In the shut-in dark, the turn of the key in the lock is shockingly loud.
For a few minutes, Penny imagines being buried treasure, Belle dropping the chest into a hole and piling the rocks on top; whimpering with her hand in her panties. She knows she won’t; she’s gonna sit out all day, barely safe from the hot sun, keeping safe what’s hers.
God. How’s Penny supposed to be normal about her at all?
