"Yes what?" she asked.

I sucked in a few gulps of air attempting to get the courage to speak. "Whip me," I cried, "some more."

Her lips pressed softly on my neck just below my ear for a fleeting moment before she stepped away. As she did a flood of tears began to pour from my eyes accompanied by a full-voiced cry of despair. Years worth of bunched up emotion began to flood from my body sweeping me along with it. I heard the sound of the lash slapping flesh and chain links rattling for several strokes before I even felt the fires that its bite ignited. And I screamed as loudly as I could.

After this point, I was no longer a reliable witness to the events that were unfolding in that small reflective universe. All I know is that the flogging seemed to last forever. Sometimes Anais used the flogger as gently as a brush. Other times the whipping was fast and furious.

Throughout the time, Anais encouraged me to scream and cry. She peppered me with questions that I do not recall. Nor do I recall if I answered the questions with answers relevant to inquiry, or even if I was capable of answering at all.

My vision was a fuzzy, gray canvas upon which swirls of color exploded and faded with each stroke. Vaguely, I sensed a renewed ferocity in the lashes. I could no longer react, or scream, or think as I hung by my wrists. Anais was swinging so hard, that she was grunting. Indeed she let forth a desperate cry between each stroke as if to give life to my own missing voice.

Finally, she let forth a piercing feral cry and the flogger popped like a whip. Unlike all the previous strokes which were like slaps, this final stroke was a laceration that struck like a genus of daggers across my left shoulder blade. I heard the chains rattle and stared at the floor far, far away. A few red droplets of blood splattered, making perfect little starbursts on the hard gray surface.

Surely, I was half dead - hanging limply in the silence - murdered by my own reflection. Who investigates inter-universal crime? Would this be considered a suicide?

A wailing cry slowly filtered into my head. I tried to move my mouth to see if the cry was mine. I do not think that it was. A roar intruded our small universe. A train perhaps. I opened my eyes to see cold metal links of chain falling all around me and tumbling across the floor. The cuffs holding my wrists fell away and I began to collapse, but Anais caught my body and lowered me gently and naked onto the soft blankets of the bed.

When I could, I curled into a ball and Anais wrapped herself around me, holding me when I felt like I might fall off her reality, stroking my hair, and shushing me to lie still and recover.

I faded in and out. Sometimes I was shaking uncontrollably. Sometimes I was lying beside both myself and Anais.

I felt a coolness on my back. Anais was dabbing my skin with lotion. It felt nice until she touched the one last spot on my left side and my own ragged scream informed me that my voice had returned from wherever it had gone to hide.

"Shhh," Anais comforted. "The salve will numb it in a moment."

My head was cradled in her lap. I wrapped my arms around her waist and held on as tightly as I could.

Later when I had some strength, I raised my head slightly and pulled Anais even more closely. I ran my hand up her back. It felt textured and hot. I looked into her eyes and saw that they were red and swollen from tears of her own. Indeed, her back was red and swollen as well. It was covered in raised welts and a viscious cut was ripped into the flesh of her right shoulder blade.

"Oh my god, Anais, you're bleeding!"

She nodded her head and coughed up a ragged chuckle. "Sympathy welts... I am your reflection after all..."

I reached for the tube of salve, but Anais snatched it before me. "No!"

She heaved the tube up towards the ceiling and I watched in fade into the haze.

"We need to put something on your back," I complained.

Anais pointed to a space on the bed, and, when I looked, a new tube of salve dropped from above.

I smirked at her, but picked up the tube and began applying it to her back just as she had mine. Soon, I found that attending to her wounds made me forget my own.

After I had applied the salves and they had absorbed into her skin, Anais rolled over and looked up at me smiling. She was so pretty and soft lying there beneath me, not the hard, whip-wielding bitch that she wanted me to think that she was.

I leant over and kissed her lips. She pulled me closer and returned my advance. She tickled my sides with the lightest touch of her fingers. We rolled onto our sides and looked at each other for a moment with smiles on our faces. Then Anais placed her hand on my abdomen and slowly slid it down until her fingers began to thread through the thatch of my sex.

"Marmot!" she croaked in a froggish voice and we both started laughing while tears ran from our eyes.

Once settled, though, we kissed again and the bed became flooded with a tide of arousal and we swam together - tucking and twirling, twisting and thrusting. Our hands sculled the arousal into small pools from which we drank with our tongues and lips. Belly to belly we porpoised atop the surface of the bed. We pressed one another for fingerholds and textured places and breathed when we could above the lapping waves of love.

We surfaced, legs kicking, holding one another closely. In a syncopated dance we raised an arm to the sky in a graceful curve. Our backs arched and we sang a note, then another, and another, sustained, then another and slowly sank below the surface - a descending spin until we settled, exhausted.

A coil of chains snaked their way onto the bed and gathered my limbs, neck, and waist. The links shortened me into a soft round drop. Anais wrapped her body around my back and pulled me close - a soft, warm fortress against the elements. Her breathing behind my ear became slow and deep. I was safe, secure, loved.