It was enough.
She breathed . . . two . . . three. Reveling in this moment that seemed to stretch out forever, made so sweet by the combination of pain with pleasure.
Swoooosh. She listened as Daniel put the crop back into the metal stand. She knew what was coming next and she arched, against the restraints, into it. She could almost feel Daniel—stoic Daniel—smiling behind her back. Amused.
Morgan heard the deep buzz of the high-powered vibrator and, as Daniel pressed it to her clit, it wasn’t even two hard heartbeats—not even one and a half—before her body, previously relaxed into a state of pain-induced bliss, wound itself up, twisted itself into knots, as pleasure shuddered through her. She felt the muscles of her vagina clench and spasm and grasp, felt the arch of her back even as she pressed her torso into the padded leather, felt the rasp of her throat as she groaned. She was a tangled, coiled spring. And then she was limp.
She relaxed. Fully.
She was warmth personified.
She hurt and yet she felt nothing. She was oblivious and yet she felt everything.
Every red bloom of every old word that was both intangible and immortal, every abrasion from the leather cuffs against her wrists and ankles, every choice that had led her here to this moment of beauty.
“All right, love,” Daniel murmured as he knelt beside her. He unbuckled her wrists and ankles and, slowly, helped her rise from the bench.
“Let’s get you in a bath,” he said. He gathered her into his arms and carried her down the hall and into the first room. It was a big, open bathroom with a deep porcelain tub and bright copper pipes winding through the whole place. The tub was already full and steaming, smelling a little like lavender and a little like cedar and a little like Daniel.
He helped her step into it and then sat on a wooden bench behind the tub, pushing up his sleeves, as she settled in. The welts up and down her legs stung but she knew they would fade soon, so she cherished them as one does the cherry blossoms. Fleeting. Beautiful. Alive and then gone.
Is it degenerative?
Daniel ran oil through her hair, massaged her scalp and neck and back. She let herself lean into his hands, let herself close her eyes and give herself—again—over to him.
Was this different than what she had felt only moments before?
Was it the opposite or merely the other half?
Vicious whipping. Tender bathing.
Were they not two halves of one whole? Morgan thought they were.
She could never have taken a bath by herself, in her own home. No, there she had a special chair to keep from passing out, falling over, slipping, bruising, breaking, dying. Here, she was safe. Every moment, safe.
Soon, probably in less than an hour, Morgan would be dressed. She would thank Daniel, pay him, embrace him, tell him she hoped to see him soon. She would ease herself into her car and she would drive back home. She would get some more work done and she would crawl into bed and wait for another day to begin. Another day of pain. Another day of pain she didn’t choose.
But not now. Now, she was safe. Here, she was in control.
Morgan thought about the question again.
Is it degenerative?
She sighed into the empty space the question left.
Her voice surprised her. It echoed, bouncing off water and porcelain and pipes as she recited, “Consume my heart away; sick with desire/And fastened to a dying animal/It knows not what it is; and gather me/Into the artifice of eternity.”
Life is degenerative, she had answered. All life.
All any of us had, Morgan knew, were moments.
And, in this moment, Morgan was free. Free to be in her body, free to exist outside of it. Free of her pain because she controlled it. Free of whatever happened next.
She was hammered gold and her soul sang.
BACK IN THE SADDLE
Page Chase
Vanessa straightened the flogger to lie parallel to the riding crop. Perpendicular to both on the dining room table were a set of nipple clamps and a small bullet vibrator with a wireless remote. The leather on the impact play implements was supple and well oiled. The electronic items were fully charged. After all, it was important to maintain one’s equipment. The gears on her cassette, chain, and chainring sparkled like sterling and were sufficiently lubricated, as were her derailleurs. Her frame was the same candy apple red as when she first bought it. She took care of her bicycles as if they were children. But the most important torture device sat waiting nearby.
It was a top-of-the-line smart trainer. She didn’t even need a trainer wheel for it; she could connect her chain to a cassette attached to the flywheel. Inside the device were magnets to increase or decrease resistance. It was another expense on top of her remaining medical bills, but she considered it an investment for her future.
As soon as the doctor cleared her for activity, she met up for a group ride. Her body had more or less healed. Now she just wanted to get her fitness back. What she hadn’t considered was the state of her mind. After she took her bike off the hitch rack of her car, she stared at it, remembering how its sister looked crumpled on the side of the road right before she faded out. When she clipped in, she slowly pedaled toward the group in the parking lot. A car screeched to a stop at a nearby light and Vanessa hit the ground, shaking. Before she knew it, a crowd had gathered around her and teammates helped her back to her feet. She hated everyone fussing over her, pitying her. So, she strapped the bike back to her car rack and drove home.
For all her bravado telling her friends and family the first thing she’d do was get back in the saddle, just the idea of riding her bike to the store to pick up milk terrified her now. She had climbed mountains and had descended them at eye-watering speeds, for fuck’s sake. She had lived for the sprint to the finish line, her heart beating at an inhumanly fast rate. She had rubbed elbows with some of the best regional racers in chase groups and counterattacked her fair share of breakaways for her teammates. She trained through inclement weather, from rain to snow and that one time it hailed. She and the bike were as one before The Crash. But now, the bicycle looked like a torture device, and not even a fun one.
Her non-cycling friends had suggested taking a spin class to ease into her comeback after the group ride incident. Like hell if she was going to grind it out with some suburban Lululemonwearing hausfraus to shitty remixes of already shitty pop music on a sore-inducing squishy saddle. No, this was much better. Damian with the piercing eyes and steady hand would know what she needed. All she had to do was prepare for his arrival.
When one of her friends had recommended Damian as a ProDom for more recreational purposes, Vanessa was a bit skeptical. She was all the more skeptical when she invited him into her apartment. With his thick glasses and lanky form, he looked more likely to be the guy IT sent to fix the wireless connection than a specialist in “recreational discipline.” His soft-spoken reserve seemed better suited to a hipster coffeehouse open mic night.
It felt strange wearing only her cycling bibs. Granted, Vanessa usually did her time on the trainer without a jersey, but she usually had her sports bra on. Still, she followed Damian’s instructions to the letter. With her shoe cleats clipped in her pedals and with the nylon ropes tying her wrists to the handlebars, she was tethered to the bike. The ropes were loosely looped, more of a formality, or physical reminder of one fact: Damian would not leave until the job was finished, one way or another. There was no going back.
“Allez!” Damian shouted, striking the flogger across Vanessa’s back.
Even though this was a warm-up, Vanessa had to maintain at least a 100 rpm cadence lest she feel the lash. This was challenging, considering Vanessa was always more of a masher than a spinner pre-crash. Still, this was going to be a cakewalk compared to what Damian would put her through later. He circled her like a beast of prey, eyes alternating between her and the data displayed on her cycling computer. There was a time Vanessa would have been self-conscious at being so expos
ed, unable to hide the scars on her back, chest, and legs from where the doctors stitched her back together like some sort of Frankenstein’s monster. Now she didn’t care and she knew Damian didn’t care. He was there for just one reason.
The leather against her skin stung even harder this time. Vanessa yelped and looked at the display; her cadence had dropped to 89 rpm.
“Focus,” Damian said. “I don’t think your head is in the game. Let’s see if we can fix that.”
He walked over to the table and grabbed the nipple clamps. Even though they had some sort of silicone coating, they still pinched quite hard. Vanessa gasped as he placed them on. He pulled on the chain that connected them.
“Did I tell you to stop pedaling?” he growled in her ear.
“No, Sir.” She shuddered, but spun back up to 100 rpm.
Vanessa gritted her teeth and got ready. She had programmed the trainer herself, so she knew that a threshold interval was approaching. Sure, the flogger hurt. The nipple clamps hurt. The nylon rope chafed her wrists. Yet she knew true pain. She knew what it was like to be shattered and reassembled like a goddamn vase. She had regularly done threshold workouts prior to The Crash. This shouldn’t be too bad.
“Allez!” Another crack signaled the start of the interval.
Now it was no longer about cadence so much as power. She had to maintain 200 W for five minutes. This was easier back when she was fully trained and peaking. She could hold an average power output of 300 W for anywhere from twenty to forty minutes in her prime. Now, after her forced sedentary rest period, this might be harder.
Her eyes were fixed on that 200. Nothing else existed. The nipple clamps were just a vague sensation, like the sound of a television in another room. She felt the familiar increase in heart rate, a rise in temperature followed by the burning of legs and lungs. Five minutes was a lot longer than she remembered.
“Recover,” Damian said gently, stroking Vanessa’s back as the resistance on the trainer eased.
Vanessa let out a sigh of relief. It would be a five-minute respite of easy spinning followed by another five minutes at threshold. This would repeat until she had completed five threshold intervals, followed by ten minutes of recovery spinning before she could get off the bike. She noted that it took longer than before for her heart rate to recover, but her legs felt warmed up.
The second interval was fine, as she was now getting to know her own body again. Her legs were warmed up, her breathing and pedaling had fallen into complementary rhythms. Damian decided to mix things up during the following recovery period.
The bullet vibrator nestled inside the chamois of her bibs thrummed against her clit, causing Vanessa to moan.
“Consider this your reward for a continued job well done,” he said coolly, pressing the button to increase intensity, not on the trainer, but the vibrator.
“Oh! Th-thANK you, Sir!” Vanessa could barely get out the words, but knew she would be punished if she did not show gratitude.
Eyes stinging from the sweat dripping down her face, she could barely make out the stopwatch counting down to the next interval.
“Allez!” A harder thwack followed since she did not ramp up to 200 W in time for the official start of the interval.
Damian had moved on to the riding crop. Vanessa dreaded this one in particular, worrying it would potentially damage either her glutes or her hamstrings. He had assured her that if any marks would be left, they would be skin bruises and not muscle, but if she was uncomfortable with it, he wouldn’t use it. She decided that she trusted him as a professional and said the crop would be fine. Besides, it would give her further incentive to stay on target, right?
This third interval was more challenging, given how ragged she had felt from the previous intervals plus the vibrator. She reminded herself that if she could survive despite her heart stopping in the ER, she could damn well do anything if she put her will to it. The first thing she remembered hearing was the steady beep of the EKG machine in her hospital room. It reminded her of the beep that alerted her whenever—
She heard the leather crop whistle softly in the air before the loud crack as it hit her ass. She had let her power drop to 153 W.
“Concentrate.” Damian gave her ass a lighter tap. “Come on, out of the saddle. Hammer!”
Standing efforts. Christ, she hated doing those before, but now having to be prompted in such a humiliating way made her hate them even more. Still, it was a way to boost her power and give her quads a bit of recovery while she let her hamstrings do most of the work. However, she knew that there was no way she could maintain a standing effort for much longer than half a minute and she still had three minutes left on this interval. Her legs burned, but it would only hurt worse if she let her power drop again.
Vanessa almost collapsed in relief at Damian saying, “Recover.” She wasn’t so certain she could do one more threshold interval, let alone two. It was taking longer and longer for her heart rate to slow down. Without that, it would have been almost like she was going from one threshold interval immediately to another one. She was relieved to not be “rewarded” again, as that would have made it even harder for her heart rate to slow. Damian was a goddamn mind reader.
The clock counted down again. “Allez!”
She remembered that this interval would be particularly unpleasant since she was supposed to do a standing effort for thirty seconds followed by maintaining the same power while seated and repeat until the five minutes were over. However, the signal this time wouldn’t just be Damian’s stern “Allez!”
She gasped as the vibrator went off and stood up instinctively. She was hit again despite doing it in time.
“Form,” Damien chided, tapping her legs and back to guide her into position. “No stomping. Stay smooth with your pedal stroke.”
Vanessa was starting to regret being so specific in her instructions about what to target. However, better form meant more efficient energy usage. She closed her eyes and got into the rhythm, moving right as the vibrator went off. She looked at Damian for a moment. Gone was the gangly, awkward gentleman who she’d greeted at the door. She noticed his broad shoulders and impressive sprinter-like quads that filled his jeans nicely. Slim, but well-muscled arms could easily provide strength with every strike, yet with slender-fingered hands that could temper that strength when needed. Cool, impassive eyes gave him a mysterious air.
Yes. Vanessa would definitely fuck Damian, but that was not what she was paying him for. That couldn’t stop a woman from fantasizing though. She closed her eyes again, imagined it was his shoulders she was grasping instead of her handlebars. Every thrust of the hips as she stood made her think about what it would be like to have Damian between her thighs, his wrists bound above his head and his cock inside her as she rode him. Since she wasn’t watching the numbers on her cycling computer, an occasional strike of the crop would bring her back to the task at hand.
By the end of the interval, she was drained, dripping in sweat, but also more turned on than she had ever been in her life. Vanessa was practically soaking through her chamois. Her wrists almost slid from the nylon ropes.
Damian brushed back strands of hair that were plastered to her face with sweat and looked at her. “Just one more to go. You’ve got this.”
That sudden but gentle touch followed by deep eye contact was almost enough to make Vanessa come right then and there if not for the realization that she still had to make it through one more threshold interval. The lactic acid had built up in her legs to the point they were almost useless. She could barely breathe. Yet one thing kept her going.
“Attack!” Damian’s order was as sharp as the sting she felt on her thigh.
One to go. Either way, this was going to hurt. Each subsequent time, it felt like she had to push herself even more to get back up to 200 W. This time, she could practically feel years of her life burning away. Of course, she knew that wasn’t how this worked, but it sure as hell felt like it did. Yet no matter how much it hur
t, she would never give up. It never even occurred to her to use the agreed upon safeword: arrêtez!
It would be the last “fuck you” to the judge who ruled that the driver was not at fault and this was just an accident, warning her to “be more careful” while riding her bike. It would be the last “fuck you” to the internet assholes commenting on the news story of her crash by bringing up cyclists blowing red lights as if that were relevant. It would be the last “fuck you” to every idiot driver who couldn’t be bothered to put their goddamn phone down and look at the goddamn road. Not least of all, getting back on the bike and riding again would be the last “fuck you” to the driver who’d hit her. The son of a bitch had passed too close after trying to intimidate her by yelling various slurs and obscenities while coal rolling a thick cloud of black smoke, ultimately running her off the road.
Vanessa was immolated, like a dry prairie struck by lightning. The pain coursing through her was exquisite and terrible. Vanessa was a reborn phoenix. She thought she would completely burn away.
“Recover!” With that gentle hand on her shoulder, Damian brought her back.
Vanessa slumped over her handlebars, gasping. She forced herself to do the ten-minute easy spin, or else her legs would hate her even more the next morning. Her heart rate slowed. She felt the sweat cooling against her skin. She became aware of the nipple clamps again, one of which had fallen off through the course of her final push. Damian removed the remaining clamp, then undid the nylon ropes tethering her to the handlebars.
Once the end workout timer had sounded, Vanessa unclipped out of her pedals, but nearly fell off the bike.
“Easy there. I’ve got you.” Damian helped her to the couch. He handed her a towel and a water bottle, which she gulped down greedily since she had forgotten to drink during her workout.
Best Bondage Erotica of the Year, Volume 2 Page 3