Circus VII
FM BDSM
"She is ready," the Tattooed Lady says. Not to me. To Zora.
I turn my head enough to see Madame Zora's peacock feathers shifting in the light, her gold and silver rings catching the glow. She studies me with those creased eyes, the furrow between her brows deepening.
"Rise, child," Zora says. "The Ring Master waits."
My legs tremble as I push myself up. The velvet leaves patterns on my knees, my palms. I am naked, utterly, my blonde hair loose and wild from the Tattooed Lady's preparations. The oil on my skin catches the light, makes me gleam like something newly born.
The Tattooed Lady hands me a silk wrap—hers, I realise, the same low-slung garment she wears.
"For the walk," she says. "Only for the walk."
I tie it around my hips with fumbling fingers. It covers nothing, really, my breasts still bare, my fanny barely concealed by the draping fabric. But it is something to hold onto as I follow Zora through the beaded curtains and into the afternoon.
The circus grounds have transformed. The preparation for the final evening show. The industry—men hammering stakes, women carrying costumes, the smell of coffee and horse manure and something else, something musky and dangerous.
Lions. I smell lions.
We pass wagons painted with tigers and tumbling figures, pass a woman in a sequined leotard practising backbends against a wheel.
No one looks at me twice. Here, near-nakedness is currency. Here, I am already becoming invisible in the way that means I belong.
The Big Top rises ahead of us, its canvas billowing like a living thing. The central pole is thick as a tree trunk, hauled upright with ropes that still tremble with tension. Beyond the rope barrier, I can hear them—the lions. Not roaring, but breathing.
Heavy, patient breaths that carry across the wheat fields of my youth.
Madame Zora leads me through a slit in the canvas, into shadow.
The interior is vast, the light filtering through canvas in dusty beams. The air smells of sawdust and eucalyptus and piss—lion piss, sharp and territorial.
In the centre of the ring, surrounded by wooden cages on wheeled platforms, stands a man.
He wears black trousers, black boots, a white shirt open at the collar. His moustache is waxed to points sharp as daggers. In one hand, he holds a whip—coiled, for now. In the other, a paddle of polished wood, shaped for the curve of a bottom.
"Madame Zora," he says, and his voice carries to the canvas rafters. "You bring me the new initiate."
"I bring you Matilda," Zora says. "Prepared by the Tattooed Lady. Ready for your instruction."
The Ring Master steps closer. He is older than I expected, perhaps forty, with lines at his eyes that speak of squinting into spotlights and desert suns. His gaze travels my body with the same assessment the Tattooed Lady used—cataloguing, noting, planning.
"Remove the wrap," he says.
My fingers find the knot. The silk falls away, and I stand naked before him, before the lions in their cages, before Madame Zora and whatever shadows watch from the perimeter.
My nipples tighten in the cool air. My shaved cunt feels exposed, vulnerable, thrillingly so.
"Kneel," he says. "In the centre of the ring."
The sawdust is rough against my knees. I fold my hands behind my back, arching my spine without being told—the posture the Tattooed Lady taught me, the posture of offering.
The Ring Master circles me, his boots crunching in the sawdust. The whip taps against his thigh, a metronome of threat.
"You have been taught surrender," he says. "Now you will learn circus mystique. The mystique is this: we are not bound by the rules that bind others. We take what we want. We give what we choose. And we transform."
He stops behind me. I hear the whip uncoil, a whisper of leather. Then his hand in my hair, pulling my head back, exposing my throat.
"The lions watch," he murmurs. "They know submission when they see it. They smell your fear, Matilda. And your hunger."
He releases me. Steps away. I hear the rattle of chains, the creak of wood, and then—closer now—the warm breath of something massive. He has opened a cage. Not fully, I realise, but enough.
Enough for a paw to reach through, enough for amber eyes to fix on me from arm's length away.
"Fear sharpens pleasure," the Ring Master says. "This is the first lesson."
He binds my hands.
The rope is rough hemp, familiar from my father's shed, but here it means something different. He loops it around my wrists, pulls my arms forward so I must brace on my forearms, my forehead nearly touching the sawdust.
My hips rise, present themselves. The position opens me completely—pussy and asshole both exposed, both offered.
"Look at the lion," he commands.
I turn my head. The beast is massive, mane matted with dust and oil, paws the size of dinner plates. It watches me with the patience of something that does not need to hurry. Its tail flicks once, twice.
"The lion could kill you," the Ring Master says. "But it won't. Because I control the cage. Because submission is not weakness—it is trust. You trust me to keep you safe while I expose you. While I remake you."
His hands settle on my hips. His thumbs spread my ass cheeks, and I feel the air on my most private place, the tight pucker of my asshole that no one has touched, not even the Tattooed Lady with all her preparations.
"Ask me," he says.
"Please," I whisper. My voice shakes. The lion breathes, and I smell meat on its breath.
"Please, Ring Master. Teach me."
His tongue touches my asshole.
The sensation is shocking—wet heat where I expected only invasion.
He licks in slow circles, pressing closer, breaching me with the pointed tip of his tongue. I moan into the sawdust, my bound hands clenching into fists. The roughness of his moustache scratches my sensitive skin.
He is thorough, worshipful, degrading in his attention—he makes my asshole the centre of my world, the focus of all sensation.
His tongue tip burrows. His tip presses. He spits into my gape. Then his tongue bastes my arse with repeated swirls of his twisting tongue.
"Oohh! Mmm! Oohh!"
"Push back," he murmurs against me. "Open wider for me."
I do. I push my hips toward his face, spread my knees wider, offer everything. His tongue penetrates me, fucks into me with obscene wet sounds that echo in the vast tent.
A pucky, mussy, mushy squish and splash as my arsehole squirms in delight.
The lion shifts in its cage, and I imagine it watching, understanding something about hunger and satisfaction that I am only beginning to learn.
When the Ring Master pulls back, I am trembling, my asshole slick and pulsing, desperate for more.
"Lesson two," he says. "Pain transforms."
The paddle strikes my left cheek.
The sound cracks through the tent, followed an instant later by the sting. I cry out, my body jerking forward, but his hand on my hip holds me in place.
"Ahh! Ooff!"
The second strike lands on my right cheek, matching the first, and I feel the heat bloom across my skin, radiating inward, somehow finding my cunt and making it clench with need.
He paddles me in rhythm—left, right, left, right—until I am sobbing into the sawdust, until my ass is a furnace of sensation and my cunt drips down my thighs.
The lion paces in its cage, agitated by the sounds, the smell of my arousal.
"Colour," he demands, using a word I don't understand until he clarifies: "Your skin. What colour is it?"
"Red," I gasp. "Ring Master, it's red, it's burning—"
"Good."
He stops. His hand replaces the paddle, cool against my heated flesh, and I whimper at the contrast. His fingers trace the marks he has made, pressing into tender skin, and I feel how swollen I am, how ready.
"Lesson three," he says. "The deepest surrender."
I hear him unbuckle his trousers. Hear the rustle of fabric, the wet sound of spit on his hand. Then his cock—thick, hot, impossibly hard—presses against my asshole.
"Push out," he commands. "Take me."
I bear down as he pushes forward. The stretch is enormous, burning, exactly on the edge of too much.
"Hnnghh!"
I scream, a raw sound that the canvas swallows, and he pauses, lets me adjust, lets me feel the shape of him inside my most forbidden place.
"More," I beg, surprising myself. "Please, Ring Master, more—"
He gives me more.
Slow, relentless, he sinks into me until I feel his hips against my punished cheeks, until I am stuffed full of him, stretched around him, completely claimed.
The fullness is overwhelming, a pressure that finds some deep place inside me and presses against it with each slight movement.
He begins to move.
His thrusts are deliberate, educational.
He angles his cock to find the spot that makes my eyes focus on the trapeze heights, that makes my bound hands claw at the sawdust. Yet my mind flies with bliss.
The friction is intense, obscene, the sound of our bodies joining wet and rhythmic. I am being fucked in the ass by the Ring Master while a lion watches, while Madame Zora observes from the shadows, while the entire circus carries on its morning business just beyond the canvas walls.
"Ughh! Ughh!" I moan.
He is the true master of my ring.
"Excite yourself," he orders. "Your cunt. Show me how much you want this."
I can't reach with my hands bound, but I press my thighs together, grind my clit against the heel of my palm where it rests on the sawdust.
The pressure builds, tightens, coils in my belly like a spring. He feels it, my clenching, my desperation, and he fucks me harder, deeper, using my asshole with the same authority he commands the lions.
"Come," he commands. "Now."
I shatter.
"Arrghh!"
The orgasm rips through me from two directions—the climax the Tattooed Lady taught me to delay, amplified a hundredfold by the cock in my ass, by the pain in my cheeks, by the sheer filthy wrongness of what we are doing.
"Ooff! Orrghhh!"
I scream and scream, my voice breaking, my body convulsing around him.
He keeps fucking me through it, prolonging the waves, making me ride the edge of too-much until I am limp, weeping, undone.
He pulls out. I feel his spend hot on my lower back, marking me.
Then his hand, gentle now, stroking my spine.
"Well done," he murmurs. "Well done, little initiate."
He unties my hands. Helps me sit up, wrapping me in a blanket that smells of horses and smoke. Madame Zora emerges from the shadows, her peacock feathers brushing the sawdust as she kneels beside me.
"You have passed through fire," she says. "You have learned surrender, and fear, and transformation. The circus offers you a place, Matilda. Will you take it?"
I look around the Big Top—the cages, the central pole, the dusty beams of light. I think of my mother's kitchen, the mending basket, the train whistle, the arriving circus; that brought me here and now could carry my old life away.
"Yes," I say. My voice is steady now, though my body still shakes. "I choose this. I choose—"
"Wait." Madame Zora holds up her hand.
From her bodice, she produces my card—worn at the edges, painted with figures I recognise from her tent. The Lovers. Two bodies intertwined, reaching for each other across a gap.
"You carry this card," she says. "It signifies choice. Commitment. Who do you choose, Matilda? The sisters who taught you flight? The Knife Thrower who took your virginity with steel at your throat? The Strong Man who showed you your own strength? The Tattooed Lady who taught you surrender? The Ring Master who initiated you?"
I look at each shadow she names.
I feel them all in my body—the swing of the trapeze in my shoulders, Viktor's blade at my memory's throat, Goliath's oil on my skin, the Tattooed Lady's strap-on in my muscles, the Ring Master's cock still pulsing in my tender asshole.
"I choose," I say slowly, "to give myself to you all."
Silence in the Big Top.
Even the lion seems to hold its breath.
"I will not divide what I have become," I continue, my voice growing stronger. "Each of you has claimed a piece of me. Each of you has taught me something I needed. I am the trapeze and the blade, the oil and the whip, the surrender and the command. I am circus mystique now. And circus mystique belongs to everyone and no one."
Madame Zora's creased eyes soften.
She looks at the Ring Master, who nods, his waxed moustache twitching with what might be a smile.
"So be it," Zora says.
She tucks The Lovers card back into her bodice, but her hand emerges with something else—a collar, leather worked with silver thread, fastened with a small padlock shaped like a lion's head.
"The circus claims you, Matilda. And you claim the circus. All of it. All of us."
She fastens the collar around my throat. It sits heavy, permanent, marking me as surely as any tattoo.
"Rise," the Ring Master says. "Dress. There is work to do—the evening show approaches, and we have a new performer to train."
I stand. The blanket falls away. I am naked, collared, sore in every part of my body, and I have never felt more complete.
The Tattooed Lady appears from somewhere—when did she arrive? —with my clothes, but I shake my head.
"I will wear the costume," I say. "The one for the new act."
She smiles, understanding.
"The ringmaster's assistant. Sequined."
Nods of agreement.
I follow them out of the Big Top, as the sun lowers.
The circus spreads around me like a promise, like a map of all the pleasures I have yet to learn.
I am Matilda of the outback wheat town no longer.
I am Matilda of the collar, the open pussy, the willing asshole.
Matilda who chose everything, who refused to be limited.
Behind me, the lion roars—not in anger, but in recognition.