The Big Book of Bondage

by Alison Tyler

  When it was Rosie’s turn, she sat as still as she could, enjoying the peace of the concentration. It was refreshing to do nothing but be for a while. Hold a warm teacup and a pose. Remember to breathe. There was a strange acceptance to be found in doing it—holding someone’s interest because of exactly what you were, being concentrated on without judgment. She saw herself become a curving tangle of lines, of light and dark. Each smile, each laugh became a picture. It was a welcome sort of attention.

  People came and left the small space, weeks on and off. In week four, someone brought Arlo.

  Amidst the bustle of cheery greetings and shivers at the start of the evening, Arlo entered, and there was a momentary hush. Rosie’s friend Clara came in, and then the atmosphere in the room shifted. Behind her was a lean, dark-haired man, the first male to join the group. They’d all said that would be nice, and it was, of course, but the dynamic became charged the second he walked in the door.

  Arlo smiled hello as the women greeted him and quickly sat down and started setting out his pad and pens. He waved at Rosie. They’d been in college together and had had mutual friends. She’d spent an evening talking to him at a boring party, but that seemed so long ago. He didn’t look that different, though. He was still lean and well dressed, straight-backed in a way that made his modest frame seem taller. She marveled at the way he could walk into a room full of women without seeming ruffled or making anyone else uncomfortable. He looked like a man anyone would want to know better.

  Arlo quickly became engaged in drawing Jane, a tall, slim woman with long, flowing, dark hair. Rosie watched his eyes flick from model to paper and back, watched him look through the woman leaning against the chair back. She took in the lean line of his cheek and his full lips, and her fingers itched to trap them on paper.

  She watched him from behind the cover of her board. His dark hair fell into his eyes as he looked down and he would blow it away each time he looked up again. His hand moved deliberately. Clean lines, Rosie thought. After ten minutes, Jane called time. She stood and stretched, perhaps a little ostentatiously, and took her seat again. There was the usual who’s-next? dithering. Rosie waited. She’d taken a turn fairly recently. She sat resolutely still, yet thought about how she’d feel, out there under his measuring gaze. She smiled to herself, tingling in her seat thinking about his eyes on her. Looking over again, she met his stare. He was watching her, too. Holding her eye, he stood. There was a smattering of appreciative noise as Arlo moved into the center of the room.

  “I’m game, ladies, if you think I’ll do?” A chorus of agreement broke out. “Where do you want me?”

  “How about against the wall?” Jane called out, to a round of guffaws. Arlo just smiled. He took off his jacket, then bent to unlace his boots. He peeled off his shirt and socks and leaned against the wall in jeans and undershirt. Rosie looked around to see more than a couple open mouths. This was…a treat.

  “Two minutes?” The women nodded. It was different, drawing a man. Rosie willed her fingers to work. How to draw him? She scribbled vague outlines, trying to learn the lines of him. It was frustrating, to see each line of tension, each smooth surface misrendered in pencil. She gave up and drew him in little segments; his hair, the line of his profile, his bare arm and shoulder. Engaged with his bicep, she forgot about the rest of him and was shocked to glance up and find him looking at her. Their eyes connected and she faltered for a second. Then she smiled and kept working, cursing the blush she could feel working itself into her cheeks.

  They went to the pub after class that night. Arlo wove through the crowd, balancing pints in two hands. He sat down beside her.

  “Are you busy Sunday?” he asked. She looked up at him, licking Guinness off her upper lip, eyes wide. She shook her head. “It would be nice to catch up. Would you like to grab some brunch, maybe? Stop by my studio first?”

  “Come up and see your etchings?” She tried to make it come across light, and then worried she sounded like a dirty old woman. But he laughed.

  “Maybe. I haven’t gotten to draw you, yet.”

  Tit for tat, she wanted to say, but repressed the flip remark. “I’d like that.”

  His smile was warm and she felt her nerves burn off as they chatted. She’d forgotten the feeling of his easy company; she liked the quiet attention. In college Arlo had been all energy, the kind of person who never stopped moving. Now he was unexpectedly still, and it suited him. She felt quite grounded in his presence. To the extent that she’d said yes to being drawn! Unless that had just been banter. It was hard to say.

  That Sunday, at his studio, the stairs were broad and winding. Painted white. She felt her floral skirt swishing around her thighs as she walked up them, held tight to the banister so as to stay the boss of her heels. Above the concentrated grip of her hand, there was a framed photograph. A startlingly beautiful Japanese woman stared at her, lips stained with dark rose, eyes moist. She wore a silk kimono that looked traditional and expensive. Her arms were pinned behind her back, and her torso was bound with rope, above and below her breasts, binding her belly. She looked at the wisps of hair falling into the model’s face, the only real evidence of disarray.

  Rosie turned to look at Arlo, remembering he was standing behind her. Her mouth was open a little too wonderingly, maybe, and he smiled at her.

  “Araki, that one. Not me. I’ve got lots of others,” he offered, without a trace of a leer. Laying a gentle hand at her back, he moved just past her and guided her to another picture. This one was more explicit, black and white and artfully shot, a woman tied and stretched and her face a picture of repose above the white, bright-lit length of her taut neck. And beyond that, spread legs and smooth belly, black and white again, the Y of her crisscrossed with a girdle of black rope that framed her abdomen, her shaved pussy lips and protruding labia. A belly ring gleamed in the dark light of the photo.

  Rosie forgot the sunlit day outside as she looked, so compelling were the shadows in the photographs, the lights and darks from which the women emerged. She looked at Arlo again, and swallowed.

  “They’re beautiful,” she said, and was rewarded with such a smile she realized that it was he who’d been the nervous one. He hadn’t intimidated her at all; rather, she was the one who was in a position to judge by being frightened away. Or worse still, disgusted. She wondered how many women had failed the test in the past.

  In the studio, there were more pictures, some sketched, some painted, and lots of photographs. Not all were of women, there were couples too, even families. Arlo clearly drew people with their clothes on as well. The room itself was a beautifully lit attic, with a padded canvas floor. It smelled of wood and paint, and something sweet she couldn’t identify.

  “Did you mean it, Rosie? Can I draw you?”

  Up until that moment, Rosie hadn’t decided. She hadn’t been sure if he’d meant it for real. And now she felt extraordinarily flattered by his request. She inclined her head shyly.

  “If you’d like to?”

  “Great. I thought we’d eat afterward? I don’t want anyone feeling self-conscious about a swollen belly.” He rubbed his own, and winked.

  “Am I taking my clothes off?”

  The question hung, bald and final, in the honeyed air of the studio.

  “If that seems like a nice thing to do on a Sunday morning, sure,” Arlo answered, nonchalant. “Your heels, at least,” he amended, reaching for them. They were burgundy suede pumps, soft, little worn. She slipped them off one at a time and placed them in his outstretched hand.

  “Sit. Show me your toes.” He arranged her chiffon skirt around her bent knees, his fingers lingering on its soft material, touching the tiny flowers of its print. “Pretty.”

  She looked up, into his face, which seemed startlingly close to hers. The dress was feminine, not a little girlish, she knew. It was provocative for that reason.

  Arlo drew back, pulled up a chair and grabbed a big drawing pad. “Now it’s my turn.”

&nb
sp; Rosie closed her eyes and settled into her pose. She spread her fingers on the floor and thought of how she’d felt when she’d drawn him, how he’d looked to her. She listened to the sound of his pencil on the paper, felt the warmth of the sun on the back of her neck. What could he see? She stretched her shoulders and looked past him, realizing that a coil of rope hung from the wall behind his head. He followed her eyes, turning to look at it.

  “Would you like to touch it?”

  She nodded. It wasn’t rough hemp like the one in the first photo. It was black, and it looked…silky. He took it from its peg and brought it to her, placing it in front of her like an offering. She stretched out a finger and stroked its surface. The rope lay coiled between them, a neat thing. Rosie imagined it unfurled, its length a straight line across the floor, between them. She saw it looping around her wrists, her back, its soft strength binding her. She cleared her throat.

  “I’d like to know what it feels like.”

  “Wound around you?”

  “Yes. Would you draw me like the women in the photographs?”

  “I’d love to.”

  He picked up the rope and unwound it. There seemed to Rosie to be a lot of motion, the swish of rope running through fingers, looping, tugging, repetition. At first there was just knotting going on, Arlo’s fingers jerking at her back, running under her breasts, but she soon noticed that she was beginning to feel constricted—her chest was crisscrossed with ropes that formed a harness. He’d drawn her arms back behind her and folded them, and now they were immobilized. Her breasts stood out, tight cord above and below them. Rosie felt dizzy. A vertigo overtook her, as if she might fall from a great height. A sense of accompanying panic threatened her. She was sitting on the floor, but she felt an expanse open up beneath her.

  “Breathe.”

  Arlo’s voice came soft in her ear. He pressed a gentle hand to her breastbone. “It’s fine. You’re fine. Just don’t forget to breathe.”

  She let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. He raised her chin and looked at her expectantly.

  “I’m fine.” She laughed, breathlessly, and breathed some more. “Yes, really, you’re right, thank you.”

  “Good,” he said, and went back to his pad, pacing round the room, viewing her from different angles. His pen scratched some more, reimagining her in black and white.

  “Rosie, there’s just something…I just want to see what happens when…”

  She felt a gentle pressure on her shoulder, and before she could grasp what he meant, she found herself tipped over onto the soft floor. With her arms behind her back, she panicked going down, and her legs flailed a little bit. She lay there, hair in her face, her legs akimbo and her dress risen to crotch level.

  “Arlo!”

  “Shh. That’s perfect. Stay there, please. Are you okay?”

  “I’m upside down.”

  “Mmm-hmm. Not really.” His tone suggested he’d seen far more upside-down women in the past.

  Rosie pressed her face into the soft padding and tried not to wiggle. A hot blush rose in her cheeks when she thought about how she looked. Her arms were pressed tight to her back and her shoulders felt stretched. If she tried to get up she knew she’d flop about like a fish. So she lay there. She closed her eyes and thought about the woman in the photo, her mouth full and relaxed, her eyes closed as if in sleep. She had been laid on her side too, wrists and ankles tied, breasts bound. It was a much crueler position that Rosie was in, yet she seemed to revel in it. Rosie tested her bonds and found them strong. She was held by them. She tried to be aware of every point where the rope touched her, to sense the pattern of it as it looped and bound her body.

  A shadow fell across her. She looked up.

  “Hey.” Arlo was looking down at her. There was another length of rope in his hand. “Would you like some more?” Rosie considered. “You’re doing so well.”

  “Where?”

  “Hmm?”

  She blushed again. “Where would you tie me?”

  He knelt beside her. Stretching out a hand to her, he ran his fingers around the inside of her naked thighs, up over her hips and around her waist, and then down, across the top of her mons and down toward the creases of her thighs.

  “All around here?” he offered, stroking her buttock with butterfly fingertips. She tipped her pelvis toward him, greedy from the sensations he’d awoken. Her knickers were wet, she knew, and she knew he could see. Even smell, maybe. But it made her understand something. She had arrived in a place from which there was no going back. So she nodded. And she asked a question.

  “Arlo. Would it be better if… Would you take off my underwear?”

  His hand slid up to cup her cunt, pressed lightly there.

  “That would be perfect, Rosie.”

  His polite response to her faltering request seemed ridiculous, but the pressure of his hand stopped her giggling, stopped her feeling embarrassed. She breathed deeply and waited while he rolled the elastic down off her hips, lifted her up off the floor as he pulled them down her thighs and dropped them behind him. Then his fingers followed the path they’d traced and soon her underwear was replaced with a girdle of rope that ran around her belly, biting into the soft skin there. It looped under her ass and framed her cunt and tied thickly around each thigh. She strained to close her legs, hide herself from his gaze, but he laid a firm hand on each knee and tsked softly, shook his head.

  “Stay open for me.” His eyes met hers, completely serious. “That’s right. Good girl.”

  The rope felt hard against her soft places, the cushion of her inner thighs, her ass. His fingers tripped over it, not touching her bare sex. She longed for the feel of his warm palm against her again. But he withdrew, picked up his pad. This time, she felt scrutinized. It was the first time she’d posed naked in any way, and now she was not only naked but completely exposed. The dress that was rucked above her waist made her feel even more bare below, turned her sex into something a little more obscene in its contrasting nudity. Arlo’s eyes on her felt like hands now, she was so completely aware of herself. She fought to keep her legs open. She wanted to please him, to be like the still, serene models in the photos on his walls. Not this heart-pounding, wet-snatched mess of a woman lying sprawled on the floor.

  So she breathed. And tried to contain the urge to move her hips. She lay in the bonds he’d put her in and relaxed, as much as she could with the ache in her legs pulling at her. She risked a glance at him and was shocked at the intensity with which he was looking at her. His eyes were dark as they moved from the paper to her body with a keen, concentrated interest. His gaze met hers and locked, it seemed to penetrate all of her—her open legs, the way her flesh pushed between the ropes, her nudity and constraints peeled away by its force. His stare cut through the layers of self-consciousness and nerves and insecurity to whoever lay beneath. He’d tied her up and set her free. Rosie wanted to ask him who he saw. She bit her lip and closed her eyes and heard the reassuring scratching of pen nib on paper again. Her cheeks burned, but her modesty was overruled by the erotic impact of the thought that his pen was tracing the lines of her cunt. She could feel it, stroking there, feel him outlining her, drawing her anew.

  It occurred to her that she was giving herself to him completely. She could withdraw and let him do what he wanted with her, make her into whoever he chose. It was a relief, almost, to have someone else in charge of her image. Rosie lay there while Arlo rendered her in ink. She found herself feeling quite safe after a while, settling into a drifting kind of peace. He drew and drew, staying close to her. She could hear his breath, smell his cologne as he moved closer.

  “I think it’s time to get up now.”

  She was going to protest, such was the languor that had come over her, but she stretched her fingers and found her arms buzzing. Arlo lifted her upright with ease and began working to untie the ropes, releasing her arms first. Red lines appeared as the rope fell away. She was marked all around, and the bloo
d flowing back into the places where the ties had bitten tingled and sang. He rubbed at her wrists and shoulders, squeezing out the ache there.

  Arlo stood and went to a shelf on the wall. When he turned back to her, she saw he had a camera in his hands. He pointed it at her as she stretched, easing out the tension and cramp, the pins and needles. The sleepiness stayed with her—her usual horror of being photographed remained a gentle tension in the background and she just looked up at him, intrigued by the concentration on his face, his measuring gaze. He knelt by her again, showed her the photograph he’d taken. In the tiny screen sat a woman she hardly recognized, softened and hazy.

  “This is probably what I’ll use in the end. This one, when the ropes are unwound but their mark is still on you. When you don’t think you’re on show anymore, and you’ve relaxed. This is the one that looks like you.”

  Oh. A means to an end? It was hard to see it as a process, the rope, when it had felt like such an end in itself when she lay there.

  “Rosie?”

  She looked at him.

  “Are you wet?” He knew she was. When she moved her thighs together she could feel the liquid smooth between them. “Will you touch yourself for me?”

  I couldn’t do that, she thought, and her fingers found their way under her dress, toyed with the softness of the rope that ran down between her legs, pushing her swollen sex lips together and pressing into the crack of her ass. Oh, oh, I couldn’t, in front of someone I don’t know that well, her voice sang in her head, as she slipped her fingers up and down her labia, into her wet cleft and back, back to her clit that thrummed as she touched it, rubbed behind it, first gently, then with increasing speed. Her bound hips lifted off the mat as she explored herself. She was framed for him, her legs bracketing the roped space between, sectioned. She heard the camera again. And she let out a little moan, an exhalation of all the arousal that had been building since she got ready that morning, never realizing where she’d actually find herself, tied on a floor and masturbating for an artist she hadn’t seen in years with her fingers crammed inside her…oh…