Midnight. The Rutting Season. Winter came early to the pine forest of Tannochbrae. Snow fluttered down in heavy flakes, white poppy petals on an alien Remembrance Day. Cascading in swirls borne on the chill wind before settling on a blank canvas that stretched between her window and an electrified perimeter fence. Blanketing the flat rooftop of the institution in a shroud of secrecy.
Every so often, Toy would hear a loud crack as a bough bowed, bent, then snapped under the weight of it. Clumps of snow tumbling down, forming mounds, filled with the souls of those who lay so deep. There were eight mounds inside the fence, mounted with inconspicuous little red crosses like Christmas decorations. Testimonials to their earlier efforts. Failed experiments.
She thought of her parent’s grey-stone cottage on the outskirts of Oban, the privet hedge, the clapped-out Cortina immobilized by snow. Janice and Peter waiting, snug in woolly waistcoats and tartan carpet slippers, sipping single malts in front of a roaring fireplace, wondering if they would ever see their missing daughter again.
Missing. That was the official explanation. Toy had gone missing from her studies at Edinburgh University. Her bedsit: left pristine, bed-made, laptop still on. Vanished without a trace. Except, her real name wasn’t Toy. Her name by birth was Lauren Jane Smart, aged eighteen. An Oban girl, last seen boarding a Glasgow-bound Highland train. Never to be seen again. She cast her mind back to when she was a little girl, a lonely girl, an only child. God, how her Mammy and Daddy would be missing her.
What had possessed her to be Pearl’s plaything? Money to pay for her crack addiction. The money was good: live-in, shared bed, free food, full board and lodgings, all expenses paid. Or was it the intrigue, the fascination of Pearl, the need for Lauren to be her dolly, their intimacy?
She recalled her childhood. Playing in the snow. Hard ice on a pavement. Ruts in the roadway. Skidding down the road with Mammy. Building a snowman. The other children, laughing at her, playing hide and seek behind closed brick walls. Jack Frost at her bedroom window. Cat’s paws! Dripping icicles hanging off leaky gutters. Shards snapping off, falling. The back garden: yellow leaves sticking out of an imperfect blanket. Mam, sprinkling rock salt on the path. Snow, heaped against their garage, coating the wheelie bins. Tiny footprints: a robin redbreast. The elderly, struggling. The young, daring to break free.
And, in her solitary childhood, not a living soul to play with. Perhaps that was why she was here, as a toy, in a snow year. The full moon shone on her face: her figure, her body, silhouetted in dark relief against the vermillion sky, twinkling starlight, distant planets, far-off suns. Pearl.
‘Come into the warm. Shake off your coat. Take off those gloves. Dust yourself down. Come and sit beside my fire. You must be freezing. Hot chocolate, warm minced pies, rich fruit cake!’
‘Shtop teashing me,’ Toy whistled with the lisp she’d endured: taunted and jeered at since birth, ‘There ishn’t a fire. Or a coat. Jusht me in thith thilly thlip.’
‘Come to bed with me, Toy. I’m a big girl now!’
‘I know that do you think I don’t know that?’
‘Well then, come to bed.’
Toy was wearing a regulation institutional white slip. She pulled it off over her head and held it aloft like a white flag of surrender. Looked around in the half-light, at Pearl, lurking, half-under the sheet on her giant-sized bed. At the unblinking security cameras. At least Beattie, the security guard, had had the decency to switch them off at eleven. When they were intimate. Sensually intimate. In the way that only eighteen-year-old girls can be.
Beattie would be at his control desk, scanning the white-walled corridors for signs of suspicious activity. Not that there ever was suspicious activity. Tannochbrae was impregnable. Access and egress were controlled, limited to specific individuals by iris optical recognition. Beattie would be sprawled, half-asleep more like, over his unfinished ten-minute crossword in this week’s edition of The Tulloch Herald.
Toy appraised the dark void behind the toughened glass window. There were no ghouls or deer, stags, or bucks, watching her. She went to take off her pale grey thong.
Pearl protested, ‘Leave it on! I want to love you with it on.’
In the end, she left her thong on. After all, the weft accentuated her smooth buttocks. She went to lie in the bed with her mistress.
Pearl felt for the fluffy pillow, placing it in the centre of the bed, creating a soft plinth for her toy’s head. She pushed back the duvet with her feet, admitting her lover to the centre, the heart of her bed. It was important that her plaything was relaxed before they were intimate. The toy had a habit of squealing like a piglet when she became excited, a risk Pearl could not afford to take. For fear of activating the noise sensors positioned around the bedroom door, attracting Beattie’s unwanted attention. She recalled the last time her toy squealed – Pearl’s use of pleasant leather restraints, buckles.
Pearl set about relaxing her toy. Straddling her soft tummy. Gently stroking her locks of ruddy hair, her rosy freckled cheeks, with the back of her hand. Massaging her gilded neck, her narrow shoulders. Lifting off her own white shirt so that her toy could play with her small breasts while she rubbed herself on her belly.
‘Now what would you like to play, girl?’ she whispered seductively, unusually for her.
Pearl felt the strangest sensation, all tingly in her wingly.
Toy smiled at her nervously. Felt like squealing. Felt like kissing. Felt most peculiar if she was truthful. And she was a truthful Oban girl.
Why had Pearl asked her what she wanted to play? She was the toy here, not her girl? Why girl? And why now?
She lisped, more than she’d ever lisped, ‘Kithes.’
‘Kisses?’
‘Mm, pleath say yeth?’
Pearl seemed mildly amused, ‘Kisses! Do you love me, Lauren?’
Lauren! Pearl named her toy Lauren! She’d never named her toy before! Named her Lauren!
‘Yeth,’ Lauren lisped, ‘I love you very much. You mean everything to me, Pearl.’
‘Where would you like me to kiss you?’
‘On the lipth, first.’
‘What do you say?’
– to your owner, your child-thing, your alien puppeteer, Pearl reflected sadly.
‘Pleath, kith me on my lipth.’
Pearl kissed Lauren Smart upon her wet pink lips, kissing her deeply, looking down at her. She, in turn, gazed up at her waxy complexion, the squashed-cherry lips, her dark, hollowed, eyes.
‘What isth it Pearl? What ith it?’
‘I want to kiss your cunt.’
Lauren Smart duly pulled down her thong and squatted on Pearl’s mouth, so that her mistress could kiss her cunt. She felt her clit swell and erect as Pearl kissed her wet, lubricious cunt in the French style, sliding her lambent tongue deep inside her girl’s creamy fuck-hole.
‘Thqueeze my breathsts! Fuck me with your tongue, Pearl! Fuck me with your tongue and make me thquirt!’
Pearl grabbed Lauren’s breasts and fondled her ruddy teats until they were stiff, fucking her toy with her tongue until she came for her, gushing a viscous slop of thick creamy girlie jus down her throat making her gag and swallow and mess herself with arousal.
‘There,’ said Lauren, having orgasmed, ‘ That shut you up, girl!’
She smiled at the thrill of losing her lisp deep inside her lover’s throat!