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“The nicest thing about coming home from a trip,” Emma Jane Perkins proclaimed with great satisfaction, “is getting into our own bed, instead of a strange one.”
She suited deed to word, stretching out luxuriously on the crisp white sheets, the counterpane already being folded neatly down to the end of the bed in accordance with brick house ways. She had on her nightgown already, with lace all up to her throat and shining auburn hair falling down around her face.
“Then were none of the beds of Boston good enough for you, Emmy dear?” teased Rebecca Rowena Randall, who was still finding more pins in her heavy, rippling mass of dark hair. “I should hate for any of our hostesses to hear you say so, as they were so good as to have us.”
“Oh no!” Emma Jane protested. “Don’t you go telling any of them that I said any such thing when I never did. It’s just that there are things that you can’t do in any strange bed when someone may pop in at any minute to offer you a hot brick to warm your feet. It’s not possible. You know it isn’t.”
“Just think,” Rebecca said whimsically, “there was a time when it was this bed that you felt that you couldn’t do things in.”
“Oh, don’t remind me,” cried Emma Jane. “I only ever think of it as our bed now, so long as you don’t say anything about it being anyone else’s.”
For the bed that the two girls shared was that which had belonged to the “Sawyer girls” when Miranda Sawyer was the proprietress of the brick house. After Miranda’s death, Aunt Jane had ceded the room to Rebecca, saying that as the brick house belonged to her now, she ought to have it, and anyway she had no wish to stay there now that Miranda was no longer with her. Jane had taken a different bedroom, in which Aurelia joined her, and Jane and Fanny shared Rebecca’s old room, while Mark had one all to himself, with spare rooms left over for company, but Emma Jane did not fall into this category. She had moved in to “keep house” for Rebecca as soon as Rebecca had a house to keep, and Mr. Adam Ladd, who had at that time so recently extended a sympathetic ear to his rival for Rebecca’s attention, vanquished, or so he thought, by Rebecca’s graduation from Wareham, could only gnash his teeth that this maneuver was denied him and that all his wealth could not buy him access to this sanctum sanctorum.
“I expect that the bed has known us long enough that it can no longer be shocked by anything that we do in it,” Rebecca said comfortably. She took for granted that she and Emma Jane had been the first to introduce the bed to certain practices, although if the truth were known, she rather underestimated some of those previous sleepers; but the bed, after the habit of its kind, kept its own counsel, preserving the secrets of past generations and the illusions of the present one.
“If I thought that anyone was watching, I’d be too embarrassed to do anything, even if it was only the bed,” said Emma Jane with a shudder.
“I rather think I could make you forget that the bed was watching,” Rebecca said. Her eyes sparkled wickedly. “I’ve made you forget your own name, after all. Who shall I be tonight?”
“Whoever you want,” Emma Jane said. “I can never decide, and anyway you always think of something perfectly elergant. Just make it something where my hands are tied up,” she added.
“I think that can be arranged,” Rebecca said.
She produced from the top dresser drawer the soft silken cords that were to be as chains of iron to the helpless captive, who already held her wrists obligingly up to the wrought-iron bedstead which offered such interesting possibilities for bondage.
“Yes,” Rebecca mused, half to herself, as she knotted the cord that held Emma Jane’s left wrist in place. “I think that I shall be a wicked knight, and you my lovely captive, and I shall try to make you agree to marry me while you resist.”
In setting out these bedroom tableaux, Rebecca was wont to draw heavily from the well of material that had thrilled her in adolescence, for though she had since greatly expanded her horizons and refined her taste, nothing held the erotic power of those fancies and games in which Emma Jane had been her most loyal and submissive accomplice. From long habit, as well, she cast her roles to suit her players, allotting Emma Jane a part that would not overtax her imagination. Her long association with Rebecca had afforded Emma Jane enough practice to be able to hold her own in Rebecca’s dazzling flights of conversation, though nearer harmony than counterpoint, but she simply could not be expected to maintain her power of speech, much less her power of invention, when matters had progressed past a certain point in bed.
“Now then,” said Rebecca, and all at once she was the knight in all his wickedness, for all that her loose hair hung to her waist and she was wearing a nightgown every bit as lacy as her trembling captive’s. “Too long, fair maiden, have you imprisoned me with your beauty, offering me no hope of relief. At last, it is within my power to free myself, for I shall not release you from this confinement until you are sworn my bride.”
“Never!” Emma Jane said stoutly. She writhed deliciously in her bonds, secure in the knowledge that Rebecca always tied good, sturdy knots.
“Defiance becomes you like a bridal garment,” the unchivalrous fiend said approvingly. “Of course, no wife of mine would ever yield herself up so quickly. And yet you shall yield, for I will not have it otherwise.”
Rebecca stooped over her captive, fixing her with an awful stare, and stooped her head, as though to steal a kiss from those rosy lips. Instead, with quick fingers, she drew up the hem of Emma Jane’s nightgown until her plump calves and milk-white thighs were quite exposed.
“You cry for modesty?” the wicked knight sneered. Emma Jane had in fact uttered a rather wanton moan, not wholly appropriate to the chaste virgin, although a flush was creeping across her cheeks that suited her role nicely. “There is no one to hear your cries but I, and I am wholly without pity for your plight, for indeed, you are the one who has tormented me, lo these many years.”
Rebecca took between her fingers the sensitive skin of Emma Jane’s inner thigh and gave it a good firm pinch. “Ow!” cried the poor captive, as Rebecca surveyed her handiwork. Emma Jane’s pink-and-white complexion marked easily, and Rebecca delighted in making of her a canvas, leaving little bites and scratches and pinches where none but the two of them should ever see them. She followed by dragging her fingernails, catlike, along the inside of the opposite thigh, and comparing the little pink scrape marks with the rosy flush that had bloomed up from her pinch.
“See how your scorn has pained me,” the cruel knight proclaimed. “Yet you can put an end to each of our pains by simply agreeing to be my bride.”
“I won’t,” said Emma Jane, and then: “Oh!” For Rebecca had pulled her nightgown up further, exposing the little thatch of deep chestnut curls, though Rebecca first turned her attentions to the creamy, generous expanse of her bosom. Her mouth, with its neat, pointed teeth, she brought down to one pink nipple, nipping and suckling there, while its fellow was not spared, for Rebecca grasped it in her fingers, squeezing and pinching.
Emma Jane writhed, overcome by the sensation and also by the voluminous folds of her nightgown, which threatened to wash up over her face. When Rebecca noticed this, she swiftly tucked it back down around Emma Jane’s neck, and then bent her head again, biting gently at her collarbone, between her breasts, and in a line down her stomach, stopping just below her navel and looking up appreciatively at the results.
“Do you still defy me?” the knight demanded.
“No,” breathed Emma Jane, who was befuddled by the trick phrasing of the question. “I mean, yes. I defy you. I will never yield to you.”
The knight did not seem at all convinced by the maiden’s defiance. “Already, methinks, you are yielding,” she said. “All that remains is for me to claim my prize!”
Rebecca mounted the bed, sitting astride one of Emma Jane’s limbs as she felt with her clever fingers for the secret space hidden beneath the dark, damp curls. With quick, sure thrusts of her fingers she drew wordless cries of overwhelming pleasure from Emma Jane, all the while pressing her own sex firmly against Emma Jane’s thigh, feeling her own pleasure mounting with the pressure and the friction as she rocked back and forth.
“Oh—oh—oh—”
Rebecca felt the tremor as Emma Jane lost herself in rapture, and her uninhibited cries pushed Rebecca over the edge. It was the only thing that had ever made her feel like poetry did, and the only thing that she had never been able to put into one of her poems; it was all the beauty in the world, one brief glimpse at a time.
She soon recalled her responsibilities towards her captive, who was still bound to the bed. “Let me untie you, Emmy dear,” she said, reaching up for the silken cords.
“That was perfectly splendid,” Emma Jane said with a contented sigh. Her arms being freed from their chains, she wound them around Rebecca and drew her to her bosom.
“I think my writing will keep me at home again for the foreseeable future,” said Rebecca, and pulled Emma Jane into a kiss.