Tangled Passions Pt. 03 Ch. 32-34

There wasn't, in the confusion, even time for them to say good-bye. The staff members escorted them separately from the office. It was only after she started down the corridor that Jenn realized Matt wasn't with her. Whirling around she saw him, reluctant to pull his wistful gaze from her as his escort guided him in the other direction. They shared an unsure smile for a single instant, then, gathered by their respective guides, they turned silently to follow their separate paths.

They were shown, simultaneously, to their quarters – small, stark inside cabins, much like university dorms except that they were windowless. Jenn surveyed her new home, unaware that Matt saw an almost identical berth. A bed took up most of the space. It was a simple, single cot mattress and pillow housed in a sturdy wooden frame and covered with a light blanket style spread that hung to the floor. A desk and dresser combination sat along one wall, before an upholstered chair, and backed by a large wall mirror. There was a small sink with a single faucet next to the head – a closet sized toilet, and a tiny wardrobe, in which sat her unopened bag. A small bookshelf hung above the bed. Jenn stepped boldly past her escort, into the room, taking in its layout.

"Undress please. Someone will be with you shortly," the woman said before closing the door. There was no handle on the inside, only a keyhole. She knew that she shouldn't have been surprised at all – perhaps she wasn't, really. She walked to the bookshelf, kicking off her heels as she read the array of spines – the titles includedThe Story of O and theSleeping Beauty trilogy, as well as many others Jenn recognized – all, of course, erotica. Get undressed, she had been told. She mechanically shed her clothes, suddenly exhausted by the strain of adventure as well as by the long day and late hours. She let herself lie down, just for a moment, and fell instantly into a deep satisfying sleep. She didn't wake at all when, throughout the night, the door opened quietly and pairs of eyes studied her appraisingly.

XXXIV.

The next days were a jumble of instruction and routine establishment. There seemed to only be six of them – six greenhorns – two men including Matt, and four women, although two of them seemed to be hardly more than girls. Jenn only saw Matt from across the room during the lectures – lectures informing them and reminding them of rules – new and old. Their eyes seldom met. He seemed engrossed by the lessons. Jenn felt a little sad that they couldn't communicate, at least somewhat. It wasn't really very complicated. Don't speak unless spoken to; keep your eyes averted when with guests; question nothing; comply.

They were all eventually fitted with tack – bracelets, anklets, collars and belts; but were otherwise kept naked. Introduced to keepers, they learned the routines – albeit very flexible routines – of bathing and toileting and eating. They were paraded and displayed in the main dining lounge, before the guests, who laughed and pointed and apparently made notes; yet, other than the occasional pat or light smack on the bottom, they were left untouched. For Matt the waiting just made the inevitable more inevitable; but for Jenn, the heat of anticipation was too much. By the third night she had to stroke herself to climax before sleep would come.

All of the newcomers, along with some veterans, were given shifts bussing in the dining room during and after the main meals. Despite their nakedness, Jenn was disappointed at such a menial task. Matt bided his time. Nearer to the end of the first week, the six neophytes were told to serve the after dinner beverage. As much as it had been eagerly awaited, the first groping hand, suddenly sliding into her crotch took Jenn by surprise. She let out a stifled yelp as the unexpected fingers pinched and spread her labia, and she had to juggle in order not to spill her tray. The perpetrator gave a jovial laugh at her consternation while pushing his finger deeper into her. The evening rapidly became a miasma of probing and groping, cocks and quims. Was it only less than two hours later that a keeper led her back to the shower, toileted her and put her to bed, her heartbeat having barely settled, her skin still flushed?

Quickly, as the first week ended, Matt and Jenn both found themselves busy for much of each day, given dining room shifts at some of the meals, catering to individuals in the lounges, or being requested for the entertainment of one or more guests in a private cabin. If breakfast shift had been drawn, or a request for wake-up sex, then the keepers would get them up early, otherwise they usually stayed in bed – or at least in their rooms, until late morning. Into their second week on board, Jenn began to wonder if that was all. Her treatment was generally tame – civilized. Where was the humiliation? The degradation? Although certainly not unsatisfied, Jenn felt just a bit disappointed. She could have stayed back atCelebration for this. Mind you, there was the aspect of being held for a year – no way out, and that fact, in itself, provided a sensual backdrop to the rest of it.

Sometimes, alone in her quarters, Jenn would wake from a late morning dream with a start, suffering through an adrenaline rush; feeling decidedly disoriented. One recurring dream involved being subjected to the machinations of mechanical apparatus; being fastened down over a bolster or a padded horse, while a large thrashing machine mercilessly thrashed her backside. The machine was a big, slow moving wheel from the rim of which hung leather thongs in bunches. The wheel was positioned so that, as it turned, the whips flogged her derriere inexorably, with a lash every two seconds or so. This went on, in the dream, for hours on end.

She also dreamt of huge mechanical fucking machines; great big steaming, snorting, hissing monstrosities with impossibly huge shiny metal cocks that rammed into her – in and out, in and out. There was never anyone else around in these dreams – these nightmares; never anyone to hear her pleas. And she always woke with a start, heart pounding, breath coming in gasps, vagina wet and tingling.

The organization of personnel on the ship was a complexly layered weave. Management – the executives and administrators and the few powerful people to whom the enterprise belonged – was at the top. They were, however, virtually indistinguishable from the guests who were to be addressed – and only when appropriate – as milord or milady. There was service staff – stewards, cooks and orderlies who doubled as handlers and keepers; they were to be addressed as sir or ma'am. The cruise directors were trainers as well and were to be addressed as master or mistress. The ship's operating crew – that is, officers and sailors – was like a fringe, surrounding the others but having little contact. Somewhere in the milieu were the employees like Matt and Jenn – the vassals.

TheCelestial Concubine could travel up to 500 nautical miles in 24 hours. Like a regular cruise ship, it usually came into a port in the morning and left at night, although it sometimes stayed in cities of special interest for more than one day. It had stopped in San Francisco and Los Angeles before reaching Vancouver. From there it would cross the Pacific to stop, among other places, at Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai, Taipei, Hong Kong and Macao. After that the itinerary included Manila; a cruise amongst the islands of the Philippine archipelago and across the top of the Moluccas to New Guinea, with stops at Jayapura, and Port Moresby in Papau; possibly Darwin in the Northern Territories of Oz; various ports throughout Polynesia including Jakarta; north to ports like Banjarmasin in Borneo, and Brunei; across to Saigon and Bangkok before dropping down to Singapore. Its space-age hull would grace many Indonesian and Southeast Asian ports and coastal villages, climbing back up again to Rangoon, before gliding across the Bay of Bengal and into the Indian Ocean. It would continue its meandering, visiting places such as Calcutta, Madras and Colombo. Bombay would probably be the last stop before it headed for Aden or Abu Dhabi and the alien reality that was Arabia.

Their personal experiences were added to by degrees. Every few days another small twist would be introduced into their repertoires – or, more often, reintroduced, having been first encountered ashore, in their most recent pasts; yet, despite the continual arousal, the sometimes overwhelming sensuality, the days and nights became soothing in their repetition. There was a tranquility in the ebb and flow of required sex. For both Jenn and Matt, day and date on board theCelestial Concubine soon ceased being at all relevant. Matt wondered, puzzled by the concept, "Would such a loss of relevance, once acquired, persist forever?" Indeed, time itself had very little meaning – certainly there were sleeping intervals; and eating breaks a few times a day; there was even occasional downtime – but day and night, am or pm ceased to have any significance. They completely lost track of duration – sometimes it was light out and sometimes it wasn't, though usually they had no idea. Traveling in the tropics and subtropics meant that season was of little or no consequence, either. Slowly both Matt and Jenn realized that their lives on the ship had become temporally disjointed – they were no longer in the regular space-time continuum. They existed in a separate world with no apparent passage of time – they were in limbo or, perhaps, as Matt thought, purgatory.

After an initial long stretch – as it plowed its way deliberately across the wide Pacific – the ship stopped now and then for extended periods. They could only assume that it was anchored in some oriental port, because life for the Andersons went on very much as before. They could not have noticed that several of the guests disembarked for day trips ashore, some of them taking vassals with them. Matt assumed, correctly, that the first stop was Tokyo, but they were not told and could not ask, so the identity of the next stops remained unknown to most of the vassals. Those taken ashore were rarely informed but could sometimes deduce the locale incidentally. It mattered not at all. Only the newest of them, like Matt and Jenn, gave it the slightest consideration; the ship simply seemed to be still for a while, then, after one or two sleeps, it got underway again. That's all.

One night – and it was, indeed, night, for the dark outside the windows was pierced with tiny lights – shortly after the stop in Hong Kong, as it happened, Jenn was in an upper lounge in waiting when she overheard a conversation that followed her and prickled her for quite a while afterwards. The ship had apparently slowed and was creeping through the inky black of the South China Sea, ostensibly toward Macao. The lights of a large yacht, or perhaps a small ship, were passing to starboard, heading east. As Jenn stood beside, and slightly behind the guest to whom she 'belonged' for the evening, he concluded a leisurely visit over dinner with another couple, whose vassal, like Jenn, stood silently aside. Jenn allowed her downcast eyes to stray from time to time to the profound blackness that descended over the final wisps of the day. She wondered if her nakedness was visible to any prying lenses aboard the anonymous passing vessel. In the interceding darkness, she could gradually discern very dim lights approaching theCelestial Concubine. As the lights neared her vantage-point, the soft glow from the large lounge windows illuminated, very slightly, a small craft, just before it slipped out of sight below their gunwale.

The guests had noticed the approaching boat as well and their talk turned casually to its presence. Without consciously doing so, for she usually tuned out the ambient conversations completely, Jenn found herself inadvertently eavesdropping.

"Coming for their pick up, I s'pose," the other man remarked.

"Who's taking delivery here?" her master asked.

"Chaing Tse, I believe."

"Oh," the women chimed in brightly, "he's so... I don't know... mysterious? wouldn't you say?"

"He pretty well has to be, operating in the PRC as he does," the man stated rather uninterested.

But his companion continued, "And smuggling them back into the country – it's a bit odd, isn't it."

"He knows where to get the quality well trained – uh," Jenn sensed that he subtly acknowledged her presence in choosing his words, "- commodity he demands."

"And how does he get them in?" her possessor asked.

"There," they stopped and, sure enough, the dimly lighted boat, accelerating smoothly away from them, was soon swallowed by the night. "They'll just motor up the Zhujiang Kou tonight..."

"Where?" the woman interrupted.

"The Zhujiang Kou, the Pearl River, its estuary at least. I think they disembark at Zhuzai or some little place like that."

"You sound like you know a lot about it."

"Not really. Tse joined us on a cruise a few years back. I asked him about it then. He said that Guangdong Province here...” Jenn caught the man's sweeping gesture out the window in the corner of her periphery, "is infamous for its smuggling and corruption. Still he avoids the capital, Guangzhou, when he takes his new possessions home – to his estate back in the hills."

"How does he manage to keep his property from the communists?" the woman asked.

Jenn's master muttered, "Probably involved with the Triad."

"Probably," the other fellow agreed, "I understand his holdings and his stable are both very impressive."

Looking surreptitiously out of the tops of her eyes, Jenn watched the point where the mysterious craft and its even more mysterious cargo had disappeared. The voices next to her faded into the background as she tried to see if she really understood just what was being delivered out there. Before she could work it out, the three at the table all stood. Wishing the others a pleasant evening, Jenn's possessor took hold of the leash hanging from her collar and began to walk, with an abrupt, "Come with me." Jenn followed him passively into the dim passageway heading who-knew-where.

Later, during occasional moments of solitude or reflection, Jenn would wonder over and over who it was who was secretly taken up the Pearl River to the mysterious estate in the hills; how old had she been; in what aspects had she been well trained; and how had she fared? There was no doubt in her mind that the well-trained commodity had indeed been a 'she' – a vassal like herself. Had she been beautiful? Asian or white, or something entirely more exotic? And how had she felt? What had she thought as the small, darkened boat pulled away from the ship? Had she been frightened? Often Jenn tried to project herself into that position. How would she feel? But who could ever know? The future was as difficult to divine as the past was to understand. Stay here, she would tell herself. The present is exciting and confusing enough.

In Jakarta, Matt was requested to accompany a guest on a sortie into the city. Wandering through the crowds, they had sought out the underbelly of the city, and true to the image of Southeast Asia, it seemed to Matt a dark and dangerous place, alive with curious sights and sounds, redolent with exotic scents. Matt was dressed in loose silk trousers and a silk shirt, both in shades of blue. He had sandals on his feet that exposed, as he walked, his leather ankle cuffs. The outline of Matt's pelvic harness, occasionally visible through the thin material of his pants, would be of identifiable interest to those in the know. The guest, a portly man of indefinite extraction, barely older than Matt himself, continually caressed Matt's bottom, punctuating his clutches with random smacks and sending vibrations up through his butt plug to keep him on the edge of stimulation. After sauntering through the milling, frightening crowds, through the wall of unintelligible cries, they finally stopped at a dirty, sinister hovel – a place where, even less than the market through which they had passed, there was not even the tiniest trace of western culture. On entering, they were assaulted by the pungent aroma of hashish smoke, curling in thick tendrils from the depths of the room, obscuring the details of a starkly alien environment.

Matt's escort settled himself back onto a cushion and, patting his hip, wordlessly indicated that Matt stay at his side – like getting a dog to heel. A small, dark boy obsequiously loaded and lit a water-pipe for Matt's lord, before backing away like a groveling sycophant. Matt knelt impassively as the man began to puff the hookah earnestly, while reaching with his free hand to squeeze and fondle Matt's genitals. After the initial frenzy required to establish the glow of burning hashish in the bowl of the pipe, he settled into a tranquil rhythm, reclining a little more and reaching to his own crotch, he opened the front of his trousers to reveal a large but flaccid penis. Without even a sidelong glance, he pulled Matt's head into his lap.

Quickly bringing his hands to his face, Matt fed the limp member into his mouth. Sometimes he surprised himself at the relish he took from such degradation. His eyes remained open, both literally and figuratively. At times, he thought he knew exactly what he was about; at other times he had no idea. As he proceeded with the lingual caress, holding the meat with both hands and slurping it like a popsicle, the fleshy mass stayed lifeless – in no small part, he realized, due to the hashish. Nonetheless, the disappointment of his lack of instant success caused him to redouble his efforts. Bobbing his head in broken, random cadences, Matt squeezed and stroked with his hands until slowly, an extra warmth and integrity began to infuse his living lollipop. Matt's jaw began to ache long before the glacially slow erection stood unsupported, yet it continued its slow growth, for what seemed like ages, undoubtedly due to increased lethargy brought on by the smoke. Without stopping, Matt was aware of the houseboy returning to refill the nigreh.

Exhaustion threatened to overtake him while the cock in his mouth reached colossal proportions, but, just in time, Matt felt telltale tremors originating in the depths of his possessor's groin, and quiver up the shaft's surface to its glans. Invigorated by the approaching climax, at long last, Matt pumped the huge rod energetically with his mouth and hands, battering the back of his throat with the engorged helmet. Like an arrow hitting him unexpectedly from behind, Matt became suddenly and intensely aware of his own raging hard-on. Hands formed around the back of his head, pulling him heavily onto the throbbing erection, and as it finally began to spurt and spit, pulsing wildly into the back of his throat, Matt experienced a surprise detonation of his own. His own inflamed cock fought wildly against its confinement, straining painfully, bucking uselessly, it spasmodically jetted gobs of semen into his pants, at the very same moment he fought to swallow the issue that threatened to gag him and back up his nose.

The pressure on his head, while still holding him firmly impaled, relaxed to stroke fingers through his hair. Laving the still impressive cock with his tongue, Matt heard the dreamily muttered thanks above his head. He could feel the painful swelling in his groin recede; he could also feel the cooling wetness of his pants smearing against his pubis. Gently pushed away at last, he stood waiting as his escort straightened and led him back out into the street. "A slight loss of control, I see," the man said with a smirk, reaching to plaster the sticky mass back against Matt's crotch. He then lifted his slickened hand to Matt's mouth, to be licked clean, before striding back in the milling crowds of foreign humanity. Matt felt crushed with mortification, the dark stain on his trousers a loud declaration of his humiliation. Still, there was satisfaction, of some sort, in abject humility. He followed, with downcast eyes, as they meandered back to the docks, but the flush of Matt's face extended further and deeper into his soul. It may not have been right, but it was good, nevertheless.