Hard Limits Read online

  Hard Limits

  Pascal Scott

  Blackout Books

  ©2017 by Blackout Books and Pascal Scott

  All rights reserved.

  No part of the book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published by Blackout Books®,

  a subsidiary of

  ABCD Graphics and Design

  977 Seminole Trail #233

  Charlottesville, VA 22901

  Pascal Scott

  Hard Limits

  EBook ISBN: 978-1-61258-320-4

  Cover Art by ABCD Graphics & Design

  This book is intended for adults only. Spanking and other sexual activities represented in this book are fantasies only, intended for adults. Nothing in this book should be interpreted as Blushing Books' or the author's advocating any non-consensual spanking activity or the spanking of minors.

  For Josette Murray, with love and gratitude.

  “Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.”—Oscar Wilde

  Contents

  1. Wynonna Fletcher

  2. Brett Wolfe

  3. Wynonna

  4. Brett

  5. Wynonna

  6. Brett

  7. Wynonna

  8. Brett

  9. Wynonna

  10. Brett

  11. Brett

  12. Wynonna

  13. Brett

  14. Wynonna Wynonna

  15. Brett

  16. Wynonna

  17. Brett

  18. Wynonna

  19. Brett

  20. Wynonna

  21. Brett

  22. Wynonna

  Epilogue

  Pascal Scott

  Blackout Books

  Wynonna Fletcher

  October 2013

  Nothing much happens in Hemphill County. The last time we had a murder here was in 2007, up on the Parkway. Two hikers got their throats slit by Gary Michael Brady, the so-called Blue Ridge Killer. Technically, it wasn’t a County case at all, it was FBI because the Parkway is Federal land. But we got in on it and with everybody working together, we caught the son of a bitch.

  The missing persons here are usually wives who have run off to the shelter in Charlotte or gone to stay with their sister in Greenville. What we get mostly are a lot of mouthy teenagers, lost pets, complaints about some fool shooting his Winchester into the night sky. On the weekends, there might be a DWI, a domestic violence, or a juvie caught with Mary Jane Rolling Papers. But most of the time it’s safety checks and traffic stops, that sort of thing.

  So, when the Missing Person Report landed on my desk that Monday morning in October, my ears perked up like a rabbit in open season. The case wasn’t in our county or even North Carolina—it was in Atlanta, something Carlene the receptionist thought might interest me because the MISPER was a lesbian - like we all know each other.

  Although in this case, it turned out she was right. The name sounded familiar, even though I couldn’t place it right away. Lucille Lyon. Who the hell is Lucille Lyon? Then it hit me. Well, I’ll be damned. Somebody got herself a gone girl.

  How I know that name is because of Brett Wolfe, the woman I shaved my pussy for. My three-and-a-half-week fuck. Brett talked about Lucy, and let me tell you, she had no kind words for Mistress Sinestra, aka Lucy Lyon. She talked about Skyler Somebody too, a girl in Atlanta. But I remember Lucy Lyon because it was an unusual name.

  “Lion?” I said. “Like the jungle cat?”

  “No,” Brett said. “Lee-own. It’s French.”

  Well, pardonnefuckin’moi. I took French in college, at Western Carolina U. I know enough to know that some people from California think they’re better than you if they can read the menu at Les Deux Magots in French.

  Hell. Fuck you Brett Wolfe. I gulped the last of a styrofoam cupful of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. I had resisted temptation on the drive-through - chocolate glazed is my weakness - on account of the extra couple of pounds I’d gained recently. I was forty-two and not burning off calories the way I once did. I used to have the metabolic rate of a Kentucky racehorse, but those days packed up when middle age moved in. Middle age. How the hell did that happen? I turned my attention back to the MISPER.

  Lucille Lyon. Reported Missing on October 3, 2013 by Shelby Mason of Atlanta, GA.

  Height: 5’3”

  Weight: 103

  Sex: Female

  Hair Color: Black

  Eye Color: Brown

  Ms. Lyon, 43, was last seen at The Indulgence, a private BDSM club on Cheshire Bridge Road on Wednesday night, October 2, 2013. She was wearing a white T-shirt imprinted with the words Leatherdyke, jeans, and white athletic shoes. Her silver 2004 Toyota Camry was found abandoned in the club’s parking lot. Anyone with information about the disappearance of Ms. Lyon is asked to notify the Atlanta Police Department Homicide/Missing Persons Unit.

  Shelby Mason, the RP (Reporting Party). That name sounded familiar, too. I logged onto ROCIC—Regional Organized Crime Information Center—and realized why. Shelby Mason showed the same address in Atlanta as Lucille Lyon and Skyler Leppard. ROCIC named three other tenants there, a man and a married couple. More importantly, it also showed that Skyler Leppard was the victim in Criminal Case Number 41400814. Charged with Criminal Homicide were Robert Mosby, Michael Flynn, and Sandra Camp Flynn.

  That was when I put it together. Oh, my lord. Brett’s Skyler is that Skyler. Skyler Leppard. The story was all over the tabloids last August, but I didn’t pay it much mind. “BDSM House Slave Beaten to Death in Atlanta.” So, Skyler Leppard, Brett’s Skyler, is dead in a kinky homicide in Atlanta and now Leppard’s roommate and her Mistress—I know all about it, Brett told me everything—Lucy Lyon is missing.

  I brought up HUMP— Homicide, Unidentified Bodies, and Missing Persons—which reported that Atlanta District Attorney Howard Paulson had charged Robert Mosby and the Flynns with murder and sexual battery. Lyon had not been charged, probably because she was cooperating with Paulson. Looked to me like the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma, the one who flipped first got the deal. That couldn’t have sat well with the others.

  I found the Arrest Record. By happenstance, the lead detective in the investigation was Tanika Washington. I served with Tanika on SGATF, the Southeast Gang Activity Task Force. After 9/11, bureaucracies started cooperating, something they should have been doing all along. Hemphill County isn’t exactly a hotbed of domestic terrorism, and we don’t have too many Crips and Bloods in these parts. But we’ve got ourselves some nasty white boys—Aryan Nation, The Brotherhood, The White Resistance.

  Tanika is a smart lady. I figured she’d get to the bottom of this, whatever this was. But something was bothering me already. My gut was telling me that Brett was involved. I couldn’t say why exactly. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my fourteen years on this job, it’s to trust my gut.

  Brett Wolfe. Damn. I’d finally stopped thinking about her, and now I was thinking about her again. What the fuck was that?

  “You know what vanilla is?” she asked me that first night in bed.

  “Vanilla?” I asked, being coy. “Like, sexual vanilla?”

  “No,” she said. “Like apple pie vanilla. Of course sexual vanilla.”

  “Hell yeah,” I said. “That’s what boring people do for sex.”

  Her mouth fell open.

  “Yer not my first rodeo, sugar,” I said, “I had me a Daddy awhile back.”

  “I’m not a Daddy,” she said. Way too serious.

  “No?”

  “No.”

  �
��Well, we’ll see about that.”

  I was so sure of myself. Thought she’d fall for me like a ton of red clay bricks. Should have known better. She talked too much about that girl in Atlanta. Skyler Leppard. Jesus. Brett must have been knocked sideways by her death. I was thinking I should send my condolences. Better yet, I should pay her a visit, but first, I needed a meet with Tanika about this MISPER.

  Brett Wolfe

  Four and a half months earlier, June 2013

  I was watching too much porn. I hadn’t watched this much porn since my twenties, with my first girlfriend. I took her to porn houses on San Francisco’s O’Farrell Street and watched horny heteros fuck each other. Debbie Does Dallas, Deep Throat, Behind the Blue Door. The movies didn’t turn me on back then. I was just curious. I was newly gay—I wasn’t quite ready to call myself a lesbian yet, much less a dyke—and porn was something I wanted to explore along with just about every fetish I could think of.

  I read Baudelaire’s “Lesbos” and misquoted my favorite lines to her in bed:

  Exhausted in your lesbian caresses

  You draw your pardon from your own excesses.

  I believed in excess, in decadence. The Divine Ms. M, Bette Midler, had come up through the bathhouses of New York City and was gaining popularity with the gay men of San Francisco. I adopted their sense of Divine Decadence. I believed in decadence back then, in excess that brought escape from the self. Because the self needed to be escaped. Because there was a self inside me that no one knew.

  I bought my first girlfriend a dog collar and asked her to wear it. I lit a candle and dripped wax on her naked body while she lay in my bed, a mattress on the floor of my studio in the Tenderloin. I didn’t know what I was doing; I had no role models. Leatherdykes and On Our Backs and Samois would come later but in the early days, I had only my instincts and desires. After a while she got tired of being my sex toy and broke up with me. In another month I had found another girl.

  The porn I was watching now was still het, and that surprised me. What surprised me even more was that I got turned on by it. I felt embarrassed that I did. After all, it was men, men fucking women. But it wasn’t the men who aroused me. Male porn stars are just a life-support system for a penis. It was the women who turned me on: the girls, sweat-soaked and misty-eyed, poised at the edge of orgasm. Afterwards, I would private-message my girlfriend in Atlanta. I need you. I need you in my bed tonight.

  My girlfriend. That’s what my friend Brigitte called her. She didn’t refer to herself that way. She was polyamorous. Poly. She dated other women. So did I. The difference was that to me Skyler was special. I’m not sure what I was to her. We had been dating for three months, since March. She was about to visit me for the first time.

  I don’t live in the Bay Area any longer. Eleven years before I met Skyler, I had taken early retirement and moved to Altamont, North Carolina, the so-called San Francisco of the South at one-fifth the real estate prices. Skyler was four hours driving distance from me, door-to-door. We met on Perv, “the Facebook for kinky folk.” I liked her photo, and she sounded smart and sweet, unlike a lot of the girls you find online these days. She was younger than me by fourteen years: Gen X to my Boomer, Gemini to my Taurus, submissive to my Dominant. Skyler was a writer like me. I liked that about her, too. She wrote ad copy. I write novels.

  In the porn, there was always a girl in pain. Usually she was restrained, sometimes with a ball gag in her mouth. Her hands were cuffed. She was collared. Often, she was wearing nipple clamps. Her eyes were wide. Or they were half shut, the whites showing as she slipped into subspace, into the transcendence of orgasm. She liked what they were doing to her, the men off-camera. The scene looked as if she didn’t but that was just for the audience. That was for the jerks, literally, the men who jerked off to this kind of crap. It wasn’t for me. Oh, I jerked off too, but after I got into the cool sheets of my bed.

  The difference between them and me was that I knew the visuals were all theater. It was the theater of sadomasochism. The woman got off on the attention. She was a star. This was her ticket, her entry into the world of celebrity. They gave her the ride, the men with the huge cocks fucking her senseless. Or the woman with the strap-on if it was lesbian porn. I didn’t watch much of that but I had seen it. My friend Brigitte was addicted to lesbian porn.

  “De goot stuff, not dis American scheisse,” she’d say.

  She meant John Thompson Productions, GGG, The German Goo Girls. She’d slip the DVD into her player and say, “Vatch dis.” A long-haired brunette would mount a long-haired blonde doggie style and fuck her with the biggest dildo on the market.

  “They’re not lesbians,” I would say.

  “I know,” she would agree.

  Brigitte was younger than me. Everybody in my world was younger than me. At sixty-two I was the old dyke. Brigitte was from Germany and still spoke with an accent. She was married to an American soldier, contracted HIV from him (“Za fuck vas fuckink around on me”) and had to be careful. But she was conscientious. She told girls her status before slept with them.

  She did sleep with them, literally sleep. One night. Brigitte was big on one-nighters with young girls. She picked them up at Rumors, our local queer dance club.

  “I like firm titties,” she said by way of explanation, as to why she didn’t date women her own age, fifty-three. “No way. Saggy. Terrible.”

  I wasn’t saggy, but I knew what she meant. You lose muscle tone as you age. It just happens. Gravity, nature. But you also become more forgiving. You look at other women’s bodies and think, not bad for her age. And I had looked better myself. I worked out nearly every day at the Y but still, you can’t turn back time. You have to accept what life gives you.

  Not Brigitte. She said, “Iv I can get young pussy, I vill be gettink young pussy.” And she got it. I didn’t understand the appeal. She was short, butch, nice body but nothing exceptional. Tough face, cropped hair, brusque manner. Blunt. German.

  Girls loved it. The young ones went home with her after dancing until four a.m. and let her bed them. She had a suitcase full of dildos, one of them is as big as a horse. That was her thing. “Eat zem out and fuck zem verrückt.” That was Brigitte.

  Brigitte loved her porn. I guess I did, too. I had a long history with porn. You could say I was born into it—another story—if you believe in that sort of thing. Plato did. Plato said we choose our parents, our fate, that we come into the world ready to live out our destiny. I watched the porn without feeling. What is there to feel? Is lust a feeling? I suppose, if you want to call it that. Lust is a force, a drive that makes you do things you never thought you’d do.

  A few days before her visit, Skyler had messaged me, confirming our weekend. I had told her I was cleaning house. “Don’t bother,” she had written. She wanted to see me, not the house. She had never been to my little cabin in Altamont. Technically, it wasn’t in Altamont. The place was twenty-three miles past the city limit sign, a simple A-frame off by itself near the top of a blue peak called Savage Mountain. I’d been to Atlanta three times to see Skyler. It was her turn now.

  Wynonna

  Tanika is easy on the eyes was what I was thinking as I watched her follow our host to a corner table at Babette’s Café in Atlanta. Under her burnt-orange tube dress was a perfect ass, round as a peach. The dress stopped mid-thigh, showing off her shapely legs. On top, the neckline stretched tight across her breasts. They were nice, full girls and her nipples, I noticed, were on high-alert. She had shaved her head, and it glistened like water on baby oil. She had big gold hoops in her ears, lots of mascara or maybe false eyelashes. Correction. Not Tanika. Nothing about Tanika was false.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she said. “I just worked a double twelve.”

  “Damn,” I said. “And I thought my ten-hour shifts were bad.”

  “Hungry?”

  “Starving.”

  “If memory serves, you’re a carnivore.”

  “You got that right,” I said
.

  “The filet mignon is excellent. So is the short rib. But then, so is everything here.”

  She ordered a bottle of Argentine Malbec while I considered my choices from the carte du jour.

  “You look good,” I said, after I’d decided. “Life must be treating you right. How’s Karen?”

  Her brows knitted above heartbreakingly green eyes.

  “Karen and I aren’t lovers anymore.”

  “Oh,” I whispered. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  I’m not sorry at all, is what I was thinking.

  Tanika hesitated.

  “But it’s complicated. We’re still living together.”

  Oh.

  “It’s just—well, it’s complicated.”

  “And none of my business,” I said.

  “But thank you for the compliment. I’ve been doing yoga, actually.”

  “Yoga, huh?”

  “Yeah, I joined a class at my gym. Our instructor teaches meditation at the Pure Land Buddhist Center and, as strange as it sounds, this ole’ Baptist gal has taken up Buddhism.”

  “Buddhism, wow.”

  “But not too strictly!” she added as the waiter returned. With his left arm folded every-so-politely behind his back, he poured a taste for Tanika. Lifting her glass to her glossy red lips, she let the wine meet her tongue. Her eyes shone with approval.

  “Yes,” Tanika told him.