Beauty's Release - By A. N. Roquelaure & Anne Rice Page 0,39

her look up.

Inanna’s eyes were large and glossy, and the tears clung to her long black eyelashes. Her face was rent with pain, genuine pain.

“It isn’t wrong,” Beauty said. And she bent to kiss Inanna, but the woman wouldn’t allow it.

Beauty waited. She sat back on her heels with her hands on her thighs, and she looked at Inanna. She remembered how forceful her first Master, the Crown Prince, had been with her when he first claimed her. She remembered how she had been overpowered, whipped, made to yield to her feelings. She had no leave to do such things to this voluptuous darling, and she did not want to do them. But something was very wrong here. Inanna was desperate, miserable.

And now, as if to answer Beauty, Inanna sat up and brushed her hair back from her wet face, and then, shaking her head with the saddest expression, she parted her legs and reached down to her own sex and covered it with her hands. Her whole attitude was one of shame, and it hurt Beauty to see it.

She took Inanna’s hands away. “But it is nothing to be ashamed of,” she said. She wished Inanna could understand her words. She pushed Inanna’s hands to the side and parted her legs before Inanna could stop her. And Inanna rested her hands on the bed to steady herself.

“Divine sex,” Beauty whispered, and she stroked the place between Inanna’s legs reverently. Inanna cried softly, brokenheartedly.

And then Beauty spread the legs wider and looked into the sex, and she saw something that startled her so completely that for the moment she could not recover, could not say what she meant to say, could not reassure Inanna.

She tried to hide her shock. Perhaps it was a trick of light and shadow. And Inanna was sobbing. She would not hold steady. But as Beauty bent closer, as she forced the beautifully shaped thighs wider apart, she saw that she had not been wrong. The sex was mutilated!

The clitoris had been cut out, and there was nothing there but a tiny smooth pad of scar tissue. And the pubic lips had been sheared to half their size, and they too were thickened with scar tissue.

Beauty felt such horror that for a moment she could do nothing to conceal her feelings but stare at this dreadful evidence in front of her. But then she swallowed her revulsion for the act itself, and looked at the enticing creature before her. And then impulsively she kissed Inanna’s trembling breasts again, and she kissed her mouth, not letting Inanna shy away. And she licked at the tears that spilled over Inanna’s cheeks, locking her in a long kiss that finally subjugated her.

“Yes, yes, darling,” Beauty said. “Yes, my precious one.” And when Inanna had calmed somewhat, Beauty looked at the multilated sex again and studied it more completely. The little kernel of pleasure excised, yes. And the lips too. And nothing left but the portal that the man might enjoy. The filthy, selfish beast, the animal.

Inanna was watching her. Beauty sat back and lifted her hands to ask a question in gestures. She indicated herself, her hair, her body, to mean “women,” then made sweeping gestures all around to mean “all women here” and pointed to the scarred sex inquiringly.

Inanna nodded. She confirmed it with another sweeping gesture of her own: “Yes,” she said in Beauty’s own tongue, “All ... all....”

“All women here?”

“Yes,” Inanna answered.

Beauty was silent. She knew now why the women of the harem had found her such a curiosity, why they had delighted in her feeling. And her hatred of the Sultan and of all the Lords of the palace became something dark and full of anguish.

Inanna wiped at her tears with the back of her hand. She was staring at Beauty’s sex, and her face had lapsed into quiet, childish curiosity.

“But something strange is happening here,” Beauty murmured. “This woman does feel! She is as hot as I am hot.” She touched her lips as she thought of the kisses. “It was desire that impelled her to come to me, free me from the bindings, bring me here. But has this desire never been consummated?” She looked at Inanna’s breasts, at her exquisitely rounded arms, and her long curling brown hair that hung down over her shoulders.

“No, surely she can be made to feel it to the pinnacle,” Beauty thought. “It is more than these external parts. It must be.” And she gathered Inanna into