Chapter 22: Hung

She was right!

It was not the first time Manu nailed someone to a cross, or to another device. He knew that any hesitation on his part would only cause more suffering, to the helpless victim. That the victim who, arms extended, was his one true love, really did not make a difference.

But it did.

He waited, hammer upraised, not hearing the ovation coming from the stands, by the men who, foolishly, thought he was just prolonging the tension, and the fear of the victim. Lila, her heart beating an irregular, rapid, tattoo, in her ears, opened her eyes, unwillingly drawn to look at the nail, dimpling the skin on her wrist. She noticed his hand, holding the cruel iron spike steady, even the small hairs, on the back of his fingers; hairs that she liked to taste with her tongue. Lila knew that, whatever else, Manu was not delaying for her benefit; she looked up at his tortured face and saw the tears, crawling down his cheeks, dropping, slowly, from his chin.

And then the hammer came down.

Her world became white. White, as in the white explosion of pain that replaced her arm. The white wave of pain that crashed into her, only to return in an even stronger wave, shook her entire body, bound as it was to the cross, by her arms and knees.

Her shriek of horror, scattered the birds from the trees, and drew an unheard ovation from the crowd. Manu's strike was true, strong. It drove the nail cleanly through her wrist, and partly into the wood. Well bound at the palm and forearm, her arm could not move, so the nail remained stuck, on the wood. Only two more, well placed, strokes of the hammer and the wide nail head was flush with the skin of her wrist. Only a few drops of blood had splattered from the wound, so fast had the nailing been, and so well sealed was the wound by the bulk of the nail.

The second nail went into her wrist, while she still writhed and screamed from the agony of the first. Rather than giving her time to recover, Manu moved rapidly to the other arm and in three or four heavy blows, he had the poor girl nailed by her wrists to the crossbeam.

Now he had to wait. To fulfill his promise to her, he needed to untie her legs; he could not do that until she regained, at least some, control of herself. He would have preferred to just nail her feet now and be done with it, while her brain suffered under sensory overload; the pain of her new nailing lost in the prior horror.

But he had promised.

She knew not how long she screamed, how long she writhed, in agony. In the end, it was not of her will that she regained control of her body; it was sheer exhaustion. Her lungs, burning from the effort, her throat, raw from the screams, and her muscles, cramping in protest, all of them, at the same time, gave up.

She lay, upon the wooden board, defeated.

He knelt at her side.

"Forgive me, I should have done," he quailed at saying 'nailed', "your feet, while you were screaming; but you made me promise..."

Lila looked at him, her eyes empty, now lying motionless, she looked down one arm, then the other; she only realized now that both her wrists were now nailed to the wooden crossbeam. She looked back at his face, her memory returning, as the worst lashes of agony receded, slightly.

"Please, do it to me, once more."

Manu and Aisha started to untie her legs, bound at the knees to the cross. The crowd craned their necks forward to see what was going on.

Aisha had to coax Manu's member into erection with her mouth, and it took her a while to achieve this. Manu, standing by the cross that held his beloved Lila, tried to close his eyes and imagine Lila, with him, in the Morocco of his youth. Somehow, this figment of his imagination did the trick, and as he saw her, and their children romping around, he lifted her legs, and entered her.