Return to the Chateau by Pauline Réage

during the meal, her breasts crisscrossed with scars. She raised her eyes until they met Frank’s eyes, staring fixedly at her. They were dark blue, gentle, almost compassionate; he had realized that she was lying when she had told him that her lover had never called her a whore.
    Responding to his unspoken words, she murmured:
    “If he does, it’s with good reason.”
    He kissed her on the mouth.
    “Do you really love him all that much?” he said.
    “Yes,” O said.
    That seemed to close the conversation, or at least Frank did not feel like pursuing it any further. He caressed her, with his lips, so long and tenderly in the hollow of her thighs that her breathing came faster and deeper until she could no longer control it. When after having penetrated deep inside he shifted position and entered her from behind, he called her, in a near whisper: “O.” O felt herself tightening around the pale of flesh that filled and burned her. He lost himself within her and quickly fell asleep, snuggled against her, with his hands on her breasts and his knees pressed tightly against the hollows of her knees.
    It was cool. O pulled the sheet and blanket up over them and fell asleep too. The day was drawing to a close when they awoke. How many months had it been since O had last slept for so long in a man’s arms? All of them, first and foremost Sir Stephen, slept with her, then left her, or sent her away. And this one, who only a short while before had treated her so coarsely, so churlishly, was now seated at her feet, asking her jokingly, like Hamlet to Ophelia (Ophelia because of “O,” he said), whether he could curl up and sleep in her lap. With his head against O’s upper thighs and belly, he toyed with her irons, turning them over and over. He lighted a lamp the better to see them, read out loud the name of Sir Stephen inscribed on the disk, and then, remarking on the crossed whip and riding crop engraved beneath the name, asked O which Sir Stephen preferred to use, the whip or the crop. O did not reply.
    “Come on, answer me, child’ he said tenderly.
    “I don’t know,” O said. “Both, I guess. But with Norah it was always the whip.”
    “Who’s Norah?”
    He spoke so unreservedly, in such a candid and trusting manner, he gave such an impression that it was perfectly natural for her to be answering him, that it was as though she were answering herself, as though she were talking to herself out loud, that O replied without even giving it a second thought.
    “His maid,” she said.
    “So I did well to have Jos=E9 whip you.”
    “Yes,” O said.
    “And what about him,” the young man went on. “What does he prefer to have you do to him?”
    He waited, but this time O failed to respond to his question.
    “I know,” he said. “I want you to do the same to me, O: caress me with your mouth.”
    And he raised himself till he was over her, and she caressed him. Then with both hands he took her by the waist, to help her to her feet, saying: “Slender, how very slender!” then kissed her breasts and laced up her corset. O let him do whatever he wanted without even thanking him, overwhelmed with a feeling of gentleness and comfort, like some tamed creature. He was talking to her about Sir Stephen. When he said to her, before he rang for a servant to take her back to her quarters, after she had put her dress back on: “Tomorrow I’ll send for you again, O, but next time I’ll whip you myself she smiled because he added: “I’ll whip you the way he does.”

VIII
    O was later to learn from Noelle, that evening in fact, that if the valets were forbidden to touch the girls in any of the common rooms, with the exception of the refectory where their word was law, they were free to do with them as they pleased wherever their duties called them (but only there): in the girls’ quarters when they were there alone, in the dressing rooms, and even in the hallways and lobbies. As chance would have it, the person who