Day 14 - Orgasm Denial - Tomb Raider

“Alright you little bitch, you had better tell me what it is you did to me.”

Natla panted for breath into the phone, Lara seemed to take her time on the other end.

“Why, Natla, I didn’t do anything to you.” The voice was unmistakably smug, even through the tinny tint of the phone, “In fact, it was you who had the guns pointed at me and demanded I hand over an artifact that you didn’t fully understand what it did.”

Natla quietly seethed for a few moments while Lara enjoyed her victory lap. Simply waiting for an archeologist or explorer to do most of the work in retrieving something ancient and powerful and then snatching it from them on extraction had been a working strategy up to a point. But there did emerge here a genuine aspect of weakness to it. She had done far less research into what it was that Lara was going after than Lara had. She really should have suspected something was afoot when Lara simply handed the artifact over without resistance.

The day after she’d landed with her prize, she’d woken up with a foggy head. Not the most unreasonable thing, jet lag was real even for those with expensive private planes. However, as the day had gone on she’d felt her body start to heat up. Her breasts seemed to have grown very slightly, her nipples were swollen and sensitive. Even these were things that could be explained away as a flash of hormones, a particular time of the month where her body was sending unsubtle biological messages. Then, when she’d sat down to relieve those urges…

“Now, you tell me, what is it exactly that the artifact does?” Lara taunted.

“You mean you don’t know?” Natla hissed.

“Until you actually have these things in hand, you only have mythology and historical record to go off of.” Lara tried her best to sound professionally disinterested, even if she was clearly enjoying herself, “I understand it’s an artifact from a Franciscan cloister, you know, the ones who debated on whether the church should practice poverty? That’s why it’s made of gold and covered in jewels, obviously. But, here’s the kicker, it was said to be created by a particular monk who had mastered his bodily urges to such an extent that he could practice a level of penitence and reserve so great that it put all the other monks to shame. Apparently they would give the artifact to young monks struggling to maintain their virtue, those who had a tendency to spill their seed.”

“So you did know what it did… Why would you even want it?” Natla barked, “Did you intend for me to steal it from you?”

“I retrieved it…” Lara spoke slowly and carefully, without a hint of malice, “Because somebody I know was willing to pay to have it brought to them. Your having stolen it is actually costing me a small fortune. But what I want to know now is what it does. Has it helped you maintain your virtue?”

“I can’t cum!” Natla wanted to throw down the phone.

“Oh?” Lara paused for a long moment in genuine shock, then started to laugh, “Oh, really? Wow. I guess you did me a tremendous favor taking it off my hands. Actually, after you stole it, I consoled myself by getting one of Britain’s most eligible bachelors to stick his tongue in my-”

“Take. It. Back.” Natla quietly fumed.

“Absolutely not, not now that I know what it does.” She could hear Lara typing, “And I can’t in good faith hand it off to my client without informing him about its power, which I think will kill his interest right out.”

“Then… what?” Natla stepped over toward the safe she had been keeping the item in, “I just destroy it and put us both out a chunk of change?”

“I most certainly wouldn’t. In my experience, and from the accounts I’ve heard, destroying a cursed item gives you about equal chance of it lifting and the curse becoming permanent. Though if that’s a risk you’re willing to take, I’m sure you’ll be able to get a lot more done when you aren’t constantly trying to poach my hired hands and use them as your boytoys.”

“It doesn’t make me not horny, you twit,” Natla jerked her hand away from the safe like it was hot, “I just can’t cum.”

“Are you certain it’s the artifact? Have you tried getting more relaxed? Perhaps changing up your vibrator settings?” She could hear the shit-eating grin on Lara’s face, “You know, some girls just find it takes longer, or a different kind of stimulation.”

“You…” Natla summoned every ounce of her willpower to not crush the phone in her hand, “This is as much on you as it is on me, and if you don’t want me to burn your mansion to the ground you will tell me what to do to fix this.”

“Well, the way I look at it you have three options, the same three I have any time I pick up a stray curse. You can try to put the item back, which only works very rarely. You can simply leave it in the middle of a crowded place and wait for somebody else to inherit the curse from you. Or you can get really into looking for magic men who can solve curses. I’d stay away from the Russian ones with beards who seemingly shrug off mortal injury. Seeing as the third option is only questionably realistic, it looks like you’re out an artifact.”

Natla opened the safe finally and looked in at the item in question. It was made of the kind of soft buttery gold that picked up finger indents the same way it picked up finger prints. Shaped like a clenched fist grabbing a snake who held an apple in its mouth, it seemed more like a table charm or room decoration than a personal effect, though perhaps the weight of it was meant as a kind of reminder. She took it out and held it in her hands. It caught the light occasionally, illuminating shining gemstones set into the eyes of the snake which made it bleed red light and seemed to follow you as two red dots. If she ever found the kind of person who would put an actual price on it, there would have been more zeros than deadly sins. Something turned in her gut.

“What does it take to break a curse?”

Lara took a very long time to reply on the other end, when she did, the smile Natla had expected to hear wasn’t there. She sounded genuinely concerned.

“My god, you can’t stand to part with it, can you?”

“I could,” Natla blurted out defensively, “If I found the torment to be too great. It would be no problem to part with it.”

“Then why don’t you?”

“Lara,” Natla set the item back in the safe and sat down, leaning back in her chair, “You give up on a prize too easily.”

Lara let out a barking, bitter laugh on the other end.

“It’s true, you really think you can have your cake and eat it too.”

“What do you know about it?” Natla spat, “You’re a child, you play detective at the mysteries of antiquity and call yourself the master of them.”

“I know an item is only cursed with the expectation it will remain so,” Lara responded flatly, “I haven’t broken one yet. Do you think that’s for lack of trying? Do you think I’ve never brought home something precious and then had to give it up?”

Natla felt her confidence waver and had to go back to the safe, taking out the item and holding it again, turning it in her hands. She set it down on her bedside table, where she could keep her eyes on it, watch it shine.

“Why are you so intent on me giving it up?” Natla felt a rush of blood to her cheeks, “I suppose that would leave it for you to take, wouldn’t it?”

Lara made a noise of disbelief.

“Why would I want it, knowing what I know about it?” She groaned.

“It could be a trick, you could have done something to it… or to me, and you’re counting on me acting irrationally and giving it right back to you. You’ve even got me believing in curses now,” She scoffed at the notion to put a point on it.

“Natla, listen to yourself, you’ve seen Atlantis, you lived there. You know as well as I-”

“We didn’t practice curses in Atlantis, the existence of one is not evidence of the other.” Natla barked, “You could have gotten one of your friends to hex me, you could have dosed me with something.”

“Natla, please-”

“All you can say in response is Natla, I know my name is Natla.” She was getting out of breath, “You. Can’t. Have. It.”

Natla slammed her phone down before remembering that things didn’t work that way any more, but some habits die hard. She reached down to where it had landed on her bed and hit the end call button, then sat in her chair and caught her breath for several long moments. She kept her eyes on the artifact, sitting on her bedroom coffee table like a holiday decoration. The red eyes, like a pair of warm calm points in the center of her vision, helped slow her racing mind. The anger subsided, as anger always did, and she came back to what she had been feeling before she made the mistake of calling the insufferable little cunt of an archeologist. A sort of panic like she was working with things far beyond her understanding and control, like a rat whose fur constantly brushed the humming air near a third rail without ever coming into contact. Below that, a churning, gnawing sense of dissatisfaction, the eternal low-level hunger which broke even the most secure illusions of clinical detachment, of transcending flesh.

Her vibrator, one of the finest advancements humans had made in the many decades she had been under ice in Atlantis, had been sitting near where her phone came ignobly to rest by her bed, and she took it into her hand. Flicking it back to the medium-low setting she was used to, she brought it back between her legs and kept her eyes on the artifact. Not any man or woman, not any other aspiration, looking at it seemed to give her mind the most stimulation, seemed to make her heart race and her clit throb the most rapidly. Immediately with the embrace of her mechanical lover she felt the edged, pent-up tightness in her gut return. Having only been distracted from but not relieved by giving her body up to anger and paranoia.

Shortly came the familiar feelings of choppy seas, of incoming tides. The sensation that she was slowly working up and building up something great and powerful within her body, something so wonderful that even the name and threat of it carried enough power to demand a certain reverence. There were lowly, bodily signs of it which came forward as she made her pilgrimage. The pearly-white wetness of her cunt coming to trail down and mark the chair, the fullness and throb of her swollen clit, even when she squeezed her nipples the microscopic telltale drops of milk which came together to form larger beads. She became a perfect temple and vessel to lust as she worshiped, a portrait of the feminine fertile and divine, an image in a way of a god more tangible and more capable of being grasped in hand than any church gave worship to.

And where her salvation should have been, the moment arrived like a promise that her previous suspicions and fears had all been fake, only to simply hang without releasing suspended until it merely passed, rolling back as waves which failed to kiss the grass on the shore, dragging only and forever on barren sands. The ache never subsided, the hunger remained. She turned her vibrator up, then up again, all the way to the maximum. The promises came faster, more intense, overlapping and building on each other until her whole body was alive like a coiled spring, like the single knot of rope being pulled between two lengths of chain moored to rocks which sought to split and roll down the sides of the mountain. And nothing snapped, the plates ground forever and shook the earth, but could not collapse under their own weight.

Natla tossed the vibrator back onto the bed in frustration and grabbed the glass of ice water which had sat on the bed, taking a sip with a shaky hand before upending the rest onto her own cunt. Feeling at least some kind of satisfaction in the discomfort of the shock and pain of it against her sensitive skin, some break in the endless pointless pleasure.

Taking the artifact in her hand, she stepped over to the window and threw it open, looking down on the grounds of her manor. If not here, if not one of the workers, just as easily a street somewhere. Anywhere in the world but her hands, her table, her safe. Somebody else’s treasure, somebody else’s curse. The eyes shone. She set it back down and pressed the button for her PA system.

“Bruno,” She breathed defeatedly, “I want you to look into mystics, magic men, whatever you want to call them. Those who specialize in curses, the divine. Leave no stone unturned.”

She was about to release the call button, then sighed.

“And… fill one of my baths with ice, will you?”

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