Tie Me Up

by Cathryn Cooper

  He strolled up to me, unhurried, pulled down the cups of my bra and took my breasts in both hands. The relief of a sexual touch, finally, rushed through my body, my pussy ached and I arched against the bonds towards him, my nipples burning under his hands. I sighed, closing my eyes, signalling for him to carry on. He either didn’t speak the language of normal sexual signals, or he chose to ignore it. Most men would have carried on giving me pleasure, done more to make me lose control, want to have me moaning and writhing in their arms, hoping they would get similar pleasure from me, but he dropped my breasts, leaving me bereft. ‘Please…’ And there was that look in his eyes, and I did fear him just a little bit. He shook his head again, tutted, and started scanning the floor of the stage. The dusty carpet was littered with drumsticks, bottles, screws and tools. What was he going to do to me? I was craving him so much I just wanted him to do something, but what if he hurt me? He picked up a roll of thick gaffer tape and tore off the tiniest thin strip, a centimetre or less wide, nipped my lips together and stuck it diagonally across my mouth. I could still talk through the sides of my mouth, but it was distorted. I tried. ‘Sean…’ His eyes were stone cold and he shook his head. Another strip came off, and another, and he criss-crossed them over the sides of my mouth like cartoon stitches.

  I wriggled against the bonds on my neck, chest and arms, playing with the feeling of having my lips taped crudely together, imagining how much the sight must be getting to him, how soon he wouldn’t be able to help himself. I played into his hands, starting to kick my legs around, and he played right back. Smiling now, in spite of himself, he got me out of my trousers, as I mumbled against the tape on my lips, pretending it wasn’t the thing I wanted more than anything. Again, my boots stayed on. There is something more exposed about being partly naked, my bra roughly pulled down, my pants half down from the roughness of him pulling my trousers off, and my work boots still on. Being totally naked seems natural, being like that seemed so much more wrong. Waves of humiliation and pain, as the wires started to numb my arms, piqued my pleasure at having his undivided attention.

  Another wire appeared and Sean had regained his composure, the glimmer of a smile gone. He looped the bright pink wire round one of my legs, slowly leading it round the back of the pole, and round the other leg at the knee, ending behind me with both ends. Gradually he pulled. The wires tautened, pulling my legs open. He stopped, and started, and stopped and started, pulling just past the point of discomfort before tying the wire at the back. I braced. The different bonds were working against each other now and it was uncomfortable. Every time I moved to take the strain off one part of my body it pulled another part.

  Sean walked in front of me, looking intently. I was as tied as I could manage, my breathing was slightly restricted, my legs hurt and my mouth was dry but my skin was going crazy for his touch. Pulling out his Stanley knife he carefully snipped the sides of my pants, and they fell away like nothing. And he smiled, really smiled this time, and lit a cigarette. I had never seen him smoke before but I do know that when someone is smoking they tend not to do anything else for a couple of minutes. I craved him so much I was going mad. I implored him with my eyes, moving in my bonds as much as I could to tempt him.

  He walked away from me. I could see he was hard through his jeans, but he walked away. I could hear shuffling backstage behind the curtain as he moved boxes around. I was so aware that someone could come into the marquee at any moment, but I was totally stuck, unable to get free if I wanted to. I wanted him to come back. My muscles seemed to hurt more when he was gone, and I was more scared of getting caught alone like this than with him. I was dripping wet and swollen in anticipation and I wriggled on top of the rough carpet of the speaker trying to satiate myself, different desires and emotions conflicting in me.

  It seemed like days, but was probably only minutes, ’til he came back. I was hot, red in the face, frustrated, and totally at his mercy.

  His fingers were welcome, but I wanted more, and begged through my taped mouth. His mouth on my nipples sent lightening through me, my head starting to spin and my eyes streamed. He bent down over me, pressing his lips to my pussy finally. I was dying to dig my nails in and pull him closer to me, but was stuck with the tiny amount of contact he deigned to give me, only touching my clit with the tip of his tongue. My frustration tipped and I came hard. I tried to scream and the tape checked me. My hips bucked and the wires tightened, the wheels of the speakers clanking off the wooden floor. He pressed two fingers inside me and flicked his knuckles against each other, sucking my clit into his mouth, and I came again, shuddering wildly, all control gone.

  Sean untied the sound system wires and left me alone, exhausted, to sort myself out of the tangle of tape and clothes.

  The next morning I left early, driving back over the rutted field now littered with cans and paper cups. A general air of hangover presided. The night before had left me shell shocked. I had never been so completely satisfied by a man, yet still left craving him so much. We never even kissed, yet it was one of the most intense experiences of my life. I wondered about Sean, his past, his life, his motivations. I hadn’t even begun to figure him out, but he had renewed my contract to work again next year, so maybe I’d find out then.

  I dug around in the glove box for my sunglasses, protecting my sleep deprived eyes from the early morning sun, and pulled onto the motorway.

  Mistress Of All She Surveys

  by Carmel Lockyer

  Valerie was waiting for a visitor. He was likely to be discreet, obsessively tidy and grateful. She had found him through the BDSM network, he was a Japanese devotee of shibari who had been transferred to a factory in Britain for a year or more.

  It was all so easy, as neat as the symmetrical knots that her new client would desire to have tied in intricate profusion around his body. Beside her on the seat were a white rope and a red cord. She stretched out her left leg, admiring her patent leather Jimmy Choo boots and then ran the white rope through her fingers. It was twisted hemp, a traditional material for shibari, and it was her welcome gift to her new tenant.

  Swiftly she roped her leg as though preparing for Aosagi leg suspension, finishing with a simple bight restraint. The binding was tight enough to make the blood surge and pump, loose enough to remain in place for several hours without causing her flesh to necrose. She was good at this. She was good at all of it: bondage, dominance, ritual humiliation and spontaneous pain. She could beat, bind, smack, provoke, restrain, inflict, subdue, ignore, frustrate and browbeat. But that was only half the story. People thought BDSM was an unequal process where one person got paid to hurt another, but from the inside the experience was intense, symmetrical, intimate. Doer and done-to shared richly textured pockets of time, where miracles were achieved by strenuous effort and complete trust.

  She began to untie the rope, coiling it neatly into her hand as she worked.

  It had been a labour of love, her apprenticeship. From the first time, at the first party, when she’d walked past the playroom and heard the unlikely rhythm of grunt, slap, gasp, sigh, she’d been hooked. Phil, the man she was ‘seeing’ then, had tugged her on towards the corner of the main room that was rich with resin and the pinched inhalation of huddled pot smokers. But she’d lagged, and – sensing her interest, still in the proprietorial phase of his lust – he’d wrapped an arm around her waist and steered her through the darkened doorway. As her eyes adjusted to the light – a red cloth swaddling the shade, she made out the scene as a kind of cameo. A roseate glowing, pearl-edged portrait of mutual need, being met in semi-public view.

  The man was face down, bent over the end of a bed; his body much elevated by pillows and folded beds. The compressed fabric lay under his naked body like strata; layers of soft support. His arms were outstretched, palms flat to the mattress, like a deep obeisance, silver bracelets on his wrists, but the object of his worship was behind him. The woman stood with relaxed posture, her upraised hand Gnostic in its immobility. The pr
one figure’s shoulders were high-hunched, his back ribs heaving gently. Pale except for his buttocks; they were rosier than a sunset. The first sense she could make of the image was that he resembled a rasher of bacon on its edge, pale and pink, thin and fragile. There was no detail to the woman, she was a dark form. Beyond her, shadowed and shadowy, a small audience clustered near the head of the bed. Phil tried to turn her round, but she locked her knees and his arm slid away as he half-turned back to the bonfire lure of Red Leb.

  The pale figure lifted his right hand slightly from the bed, just as far as the metal restraint allowed, and the woman swung her raised arm back, up, down. At the point of impact she grunted. The blow was deep, a resolute thwack, rather than a slap. The recipient gasped as the audience sighed. The smacked one lowered his arm, the woman raised hers and silence held the room until, after a few seconds, he lifted his hand again…

  Valerie left the room, following Phil’s energetic trek to mental wastage. She stood with him as he shouldered joshingly into the circle. But as he took his toke, holding the acrid smoke in his lungs with nonchalant ease, she slipped away, easing across the thin-carpeted floor heel and toe, heel and toe so as not to make any noise that could disturb the pot smokers.

  The room had been brighter on her return – the cloth removed from the lamp. The woman stood, arms folded. She seemed de-animated, like a statue. In the cluster of audience, which she saw now was entirely male, the man with the roseate buttocks was being assisted in raising his jeans over his coral buttocks. Valerie couldn’t conceal her disappointment; it scuffed her feet and pouted out her lower lip. Now, this Valerie looked back on that one with mild amusement. She had been only seventeen after all.

  The other woman raised an eyebrow. She was nothing special to look at, but she held the room’s energy contained within her. The huddle of men paused – rosy-bum even halted the zipping of his fly. They followed the woman’s gaze, to Valerie.

  That was the moment her love affair began. She could pinpoint it with the exactitude of a user’s first fix, or a lover’s first kiss. She had known then – without testing the knowledge against experience – that she could give so much more than the woman who stood before her. She’d gathered the eyes, assessing each man, reading their fluctuating levels of desire and fear, until she found the one who was most needy. She smiled at him, before looking back at the other woman.

  The choreography of the group played out before her like a minuet. Two men refolded the bedding to make an altar for the chosen victim. Another took his clothes as he undressed. Valerie was pleased to observe his gently bobbing phallus. The chorus grouped around the bed, one of them checking the chosen victim’s comfort as he stretched belly down on the heap of bedding, another laying the red cloth over the lamp with ceremonial exactitude, a third fastening the manacles around his wrists, trapping him against the bars of the bed-head.

  The woman moved back to her place at the end of the bed, between her victim’s parted legs. She quirked her eyebrow again, a mannerism Valerie would soon steal, along with the other’s clientele. The chorus regrouped, huddling at the bed head, and Valerie stepped forward, to share the other woman’s view.

  The room settled into a tense expectation. The wait for something to happen was prickly, a hot feeling of restrained energy. Valerie realized, with a sudden shock, that the power in the room had shifted entirely – the woman was not in control. As soon as the prone figure gave its assent then she would be again the controlling influence in the room, but until then she was a cipher. It was the victim, the chosen one, the man who would submit to her blows, who held the power. The realisation went deeper still, to challenge what Valerie had thought she knew about the world – if the man had the power but suffered the pain, then who was really in control? Who chose? For decades she would explore that conundrum, testing the paradox of dominance and submission, pain and pleasure, against her own understanding until she knew all the turns in the path that two people could take when one had agreed to suffer and the other to impose suffering.

  Then, in the moments that she waited for the man to abdicate his power and hand it back to his tormentor, she felt a vertigo better than sex. There, in that pause, she couldn’t get her breath, heat spread from her sex down to her knees, up to the hollow of her throat, into the palms of her hands, so they tingled. The thready beat of her pulse banged against her skin as though crying to be let out. All these were stronger than sex, more exciting than the fairground rides she’d taken as a kid, richer than the effects of the dope that Phil made her smoke. This was it.

  He raised his bound hand. The woman beside her swayed into the backswing of the blow, Valerie felt as though the air around her own body was throbbing with desire. The slap landed, the woman grunted, the victim hissed, the audience sighed. Valerie fell into the deep red space in her own heart that had never been troubled before. She had to be that woman. She had to do what the other was doing. And she had to do it soon, before the absolute lust for it destroyed her.

  After half dozen smacks the other woman moved to the side, curling a finger to bring Valerie to take her place. The tension in the room rose palpably. Now, Valerie knew, there were a dozen places in the world you could share that collective moment: an opera house before a tricky aria; a bullfight in the seconds before the toro was released; an operating theatre before the first incision; a courtroom before the verdict was returned. She had tried them all, played with all the sensations available to her, but still that moment that first strike, was the culmination of her self. It was what had made her whole.

  She had raised her arm, feeling her shoulder rotate out and back as though in tennis. She had waited for the signal from the figure on the bed, and then she had brought down her arm, hand open, neither tense nor limp but slightly cupped, flexed around a curve of air as palpable to her as a baby bird. Her hand connected with the flesh below her, compressing it against the bone beneath its domed surface. She felt her own bones, the phalanges of her fingers, spreading out from the impact, acted upon by the inertia of the form she had struck. It was delicious.

  She couldn’t hear anything now – if she grunted she was unaware, if the audience sighed she didn’t know it. All she knew was the reddening pattern of finger-marks on white flesh.

  It was only when the other woman took her arm and pulled her gently to one side that she realised the man had ceased to raise his arm. She would have waited all night for another signal from him.

  And that was another paradox. Who was really making the choice and who abdicating? Did she choose to hit him, or did he choose to be hit by her? Had she picked him out, or had he chosen her? What was the contract that had been made in the few seconds she had spent picking out the man she wanted? Had she even known what she wanted, or rather had he known what he wanted and – in possession of that knowledge – imposed his need on her? Was she servant or victim, and of his needs or her own?

  She had never found out. But the journey had been enough. It was like tightrope-walking with a balance bar of ice over a pit of flaming knives. The puzzles never ended. The best dominatrix was the one who’d trained as a submissive. The domme was the boss… although if the sub left they were still a sub, but the domme was nothing – her entire life was determined by the sub she dominated. BDSM games had rules as complicated and formal as chess, and yet the moment that everybody sought was the transcendent one when the rules fell away and sub and domme moved into headspace where there was no understanding of top and bottom, give and take, doer and done to, just the rapture of shared experience. Empathy and pain. Control and dissolution. Desire and repression.

  The buzzer sounded. In the empty flat it had a strange ferocity. She stood and laid the rope gently back into the black velvet pouch she had bought to contain it. She lifted the red silk cord and tied it into a Turk’s Head knot around the pouch. Only then did she stand and press the button that allowed her visitor to enter the building. Nakamura would be waiting patiently. It was in his nature.

 
; She waited. There had always been a moment of dislocation when she met a new submissive. There would have been a period of courtship, through mutual acquaintances, while they learned about each other, his needs, her fees and so on. Both parties would examine the others past relationships to see what flaws or accidents had broken the bond between domme and sub. When they finally came face to face in a carefully orchestrated first meeting, she had always needed to adjust her mental picture to fit the physicality of the man who would be taller or louder or more or less attractive than she had imagined.

  Twice she had been unable to accept the new client. The reality had been too alien for her to commit to the intimacy expected of her. The first man she’d rejected she’d heard no more about, but the second had gone on to become a real nuisance, a self-dramatist whose proclivity for dramatic self-harm and long name-filled suicide notes caused much trouble in the small BDSM community.

  So, as she waited for Nakamura to climb the stairs, she emptied her mind of expectation. He was quiet on his feet she noted, for there was no clatter on the stairs. She knew approximately how long it would take the man to reach the top floor and at the moment when she anticipated his arrival on the half-landing she heard his step.

  The knock on the door was moth light. Before she opened it, she rested both her hands for a second on the heavy wood.

  Nakamura was slim and excessively deferential. She’d researched him carefully and she knew his tentative social timidity concealed ruthless business prowess. Most people thought that sexual submissiveness was a determining personal characteristic but Valerie’s experience suggested there was no link between bedroom and boardroom. Some of her most extreme clients, who wanted to be 24/7 slaves, were powerful and decisive men in their offices.

  He bowed low and Valerie inclined her head. They straightened and he bowed again, proffering a package with both hands. Valerie took it, hesitated for a second, and decided to open it. Normally she wouldn’t open a client’s gift in their presence. It heightened their expectation – would they be rewarded on their next visit or would an inadequate present result in drudgery without gratification, for which they would still pay handsomely? If she was disappointed by a client’s generosity she made them brush the rugs with a toothbrush, or clean and polish her instruments of repression, before sending them home.