Carried Away

by Whitney Williams

  He packed me in more carefully than before, taking time to make me as comfortable as he could. It was clear I would be in for a long ride. I get it! On the strike of that hammer, my mind recoiled like a shotgun. That was why he left me thirsty. That was why he didn’t want me to drink. It was all for my benefit. Either that or he just didn’t want urine on his clothes. I had a great deal of quiet, dark time to think about it.

  I was OK at first. I remember feeling the connecting flight take off. After that, I wasn’t sure. It must have been several hours. It seemed like days, rolling, sitting, being carried, waiting. Whenever I rolled, I envisioned the suitcase slowly moving up the jet way, through the long corridors of the airport, out to the waiting limousine. Every time, I watched the entire journey with my mind’s eye at least five times before the rolling stopped. Every time, I was certain we were almost there, which was good because I was also certain I couldn’t bear such an impossible posture any longer. Every time, the waiting limousine was a little bit bigger and fancier. Every time, we stopped, and I waited again.

  I tried to count how long it had been since I had slept: the long flight, the terrible night, the day in the lounge, card games. And hadn’t there been another airplane? Yes, and a theater, a field trip, a restless night waiting for the alarm clock to ring, waiting to do the impossible, waiting...waiting... It added up to a thought too large for my mind to assemble inside that tiny box.

  I tried to count again. There was an airplane, yes. And then something else. Or was that before?

  I felt a strange sensation in my arm. Both arms? Torso? There was light coming in from somewhere. Light? And sound... My knees are... Why can I move my legs?

  I reached out slowly with my feet, cracking like a statue turning into flesh. Slightly scissoring and flapping them confirmed that my legs had been attached in the traditional configuration. Am I on a carnival ride? I felt the safety bar snap down hard against my ribcage below my breasts, pinning me to the wall behind me and crushing the tunnel of hair through which I had last seen my feet. One arm fell, then another, then I saw something right in front of my face, gathering my hair, pulling it up toward me despite the bar, holding it tightly. It pushed my forehead, tipping my head back like a bucket, emptying it of the blood it had previously contained, and I fainted.

  Where am I? I felt immobile, but my feet were on the ground so I rearranged them to support my weight. I found a large hand on my forehead and an arm across my torso, holding me upright. Ah yes, right... I had been painfully and irreversibly contorted. The arm softened from binding to cradling, while the hand slid down my cheek (its tenderness reminding me whose it was), hooked my hair and drew back the curtain that had been hiding the world.

  There were people everywhere, and they had luggage. We stood in the corner of a large room, a baggage-claim, huddled near a mostly empty suitcase. There were...six counting me...seven of us. Feeling me standing confidently, he slid out from behind me to my right. The woman to his right took hold of his arm just above the elbow when he moved into place. She had fiery red hair, bright green eyes and a stunning hourglass figure. His elbow crowded her bosom through a navy blue skirt-suit as she leaned into him. With her right hand, she carried a small leather portfolio, held closed by her grip on its double handles.

  The leather’s rich finish went well with the tweed, three-piece suit of the gray-haired, Chinese fellow next to her. He looked like he had just watched a woman get unpacked from a suitcase. He managed an appropriately blank expression but fidgeted nervously with the cloth tape measure in his hands. The heavyset and elegantly dressed woman next to him had a cloth tape measure too. They would have made a cute couple.

  The next woman looked out of place. She had the meticulously curated face of an airbrushed model and wore some sort of impossibly impractical, high-fashion getup. If it was a lineup, she had to be the suspect.

  The last man wasn’t tall, but he was big, strong-looking, with the meaty hands of a mechanic or a riveter. He knelt, setting a toolbox far too small for a man with those hands on the ground. It was only just big enough to hold the Brannock Device he produced from it.

  Why are those all the same? Why does Louboutin use the same cast aluminum jig that they scatter on the floor at Payless?

  I was being sized up. Hamfist was a cobbler. That would make Little Miss Pinkhair a cosmetologist. Then Grandma and Grandpa must be a dressmaker and a tailor, and Gorgeous would have to be the sexy assistant. I shouldn’t have been surprised, nor jealous.

  My father was a tradesman. I never cared enough to hate him, but I knew what that kind of work was like. Hamfist had an honest way about him that made me want to trust him the way other girls trusted their fathers. I decided he was my favorite of the crew, and I obediently lifted my foot for the Brannock. The rest must have interpreted that as a sign of weakness, and they descended like jackals.

  Gramps made it in first. We covered sewing and alterations in Home Economics, so I knew where he was going and kept up with him for a while. Meanwhile Grandma circled, looking for her angle of attack. Pinky bobbed and weaved like a prizefighter, probably searching for the right lighting or some such nonsense. Hamfist’s finger lightly, so lightly, touched my right Achilles tendon. He needed my weight on the Brannock, and I obliged.

  Gramps must have seen that coming; that was why he had started with my outseam. By then, Grandma was on me, and she was indeed the dressmaker: neck and width, shoulder and depth, back, chest, bust, ribcage. Hamfist had figured out my arch depth and touched ever so gently under my distal fibula. He wanted me on my toes.

  I was opening the thought of well-fitting high heels like a Christmas present when Grandma goosed me for my depth line, which I’m sure earned me slightly higher heels. She kept busy: body rise, waist to hip, waist to knee. Pinky had snuck up behind me for a better look at my hair. She didn’t seem to have scissors, so I let her be.

  Hamfist’s finger politely asked for the Brannock back, and I gave it to him. He flipped it around and set it beside my right foot. He was measuring my feet separately, checking for symmetry. I moved to the right with him. He had a small metal ruler with which he measured the clearances of my tibia and fibula, then he went back to his toolbox for a cloth tape.

  I didn’t trust Pinky, so I periodically checked her for signs of intent to cut or dye, but other than that, I watched Hamfist and tried to ignore Grandma. Grandpa was back in place next to Gorgeous, writing in the flip-up notepad from his breast pocket. No, he was sketching, and Gorgeous was watching his pencil. Hamfist had the circumference of my calf. Knee-high boots? Oh, Hamfist! You shouldn’t! It’s too much!

  He took my kneecap, then above my knee. I pulled the front hem of my skirt tight across and raised it above my lacily trimmed stockings to give him my inseam and thigh, which he took. I wished I had worn underwear for that, but it was OK. Hamfist would understand. I needed to ask him for something, and I needed to do it before he left. I felt more nervous and self-conscious about that than anything else I had done so far. Maybe it was that special relationship between a woman and her shoes. I was afraid Hamfist might think less of me, that I might seem ungrateful for the work he hadn’t done yet.

  Steeling myself for rejection, I molded my face into the most plaintive supplication I could manage, then splayed my fingers and lowered my hand in front of Hamfist as he closed up his toolbox. He looked at my hand, then up at me. Bringing back his tape, he measured: length, width, thumb… Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you! …wrist, forearm, elbow… Oh, Hamfist, I love you!

  I needed to tell him how grateful I felt, but everyone was speaking a language I didn’t understand—everyone except Hamfist, who hadn’t said a word.

  As he closed up his toolbox for the second time, I fell to my knees, grabbed his face in my hands and kissed him more than a little bit.

  The man who unpacked me, the man whisking me away to a life of adventure and luxury, probably would have carried me to the car if he hadn’t been holding both his suit
case and mine. Gorgeous, who had a roller board of her own, pecked him on the cheek and walked off toward Departures.

  There had been a limousine in my imagination, but in the small corral of chauffeured cars on the lower garage level, I saw only a selection of roughly identical black sedans. One of the drivers, given away by his button-down shirt and cliché little hat, lurched into motion when he saw us, approaching quickly and taking both suitcases.

  It was a dark and stormy night. Should I have said that first? The entire passenger pick-up area was covered, including the traffic lanes, but parking garages aren’t designed to keep things dry. A puddle at the bottom of the half stairs leading down to the chauffeurs’ parking area permanently integrated my stockings’ collection of miscellaneous dust and debris, dooming them to run. I suppose I had lost my shoes first and was working upward. Would my skirt be next?

  The driver had opened the car door for him, but he held it for me. I slid in and across to the far seat. The car’s interior felt spacious like a 1972 Buick Battleship, but it was posh and modern. I had no idea they still made them like that.

  As soon as he closed the car door, he pulled my knee over next to his, then took a firm grip around my far leg and hoisted my hips around to straddle him. My shoulders and the rest of my torso followed, and as his hands pushed up my skirt, I was able to spread my legs wider and come in closer to him until my knees hit the back of his seat. Arching my back, I pressed myself against his chest and kissed him, my arms thrown up on his shoulders and crossed behind his head. His hands, however, kept moving.

  Just above my stockings, they changed direction, sliding forward behind the rounds of my thighs, finishing all the way at the tops of them. One hand turned upward, onto my buttocks, but the other kept moving around, propping my eyes wide and mouth agape mid-kiss as his fingers brushed my labia. Fortunately I had waxed everything before I left home. I am willing to work for it, but there was no way I could have shaved in the airport’s “WC,” as it had been labeled.

  Anyhow, dropping my jaw had given his tongue free reign, and he took advantage. He grabbed and released my buttock intermittently, reinforcing my intellectual knowledge that he had full access to my undercarriage with physical sensations from the relevant areas. Switching hands, changing directions and speeds, he progressively exploited that access, while I struggled to arch my back harder in my impatience.

  Back at the lounge, oh so far back, when he kissed me the first time, the tantalization tensed me. This time, in the car, I relaxed. With his fingers right there, the sensation was different. My vaginal walls opened, inviting him in. A finger dipped just far enough into me for lubricant, readily available, and he began stroking me harder, other fingers darting in as needed.

  Desperately opening my hips only ground my chest harder against his, bringing more erogenous zones into play. Every time I gathered enough wits to try to dance with his tongue, his efforts intensified. It was his litmus test: if I ever was not too aroused to lose control completely, he pushed me harder over the edge.

  Both of his hands must have been underneath me by then, but all my sensations and thoughts organized themselves as supporting details to the smooth track he traced around my hymen and its tacky screams of abandonment any time he changed fingers. Even the sweeps that pushed back my clitoral hood felt like deafening klaxons sounding collision for his anticipated entry.

  Upon reaching the hotel, he flipped me back into place even more easily than he had pulled me to him. No communicative utterance of man or beast could fully express my disappointment. Some people, it’s said, think with their genitals. My vulva thinks only for itself, and it was not best pleased by that interruption.

  Heavy rain cascaded down the windows, mixing kaleidoscopic colors. In flashes behind the wipers, I could see two other vehicles blocking the hotel’s portico. He opened his door and stood up into the rain. I was glad to see that neither of us wanted to wait. The incredulous chauffeur popped the trunk and hopped out to move our bags quickly under the portico and be done with it. I eagerly slid over and got out.

  It was nice that the thin sheet of water fleeing across the driveway washed the soles of my feet, but it was cold. Why is rain always cold? This rain was also heavy, not just a heavy rain, but every single drop was huge. They hit hard and each one clung a large patch of my blouse to my skin. He was unconcerned, ignoring the rain completely. I did the same, and our defiance only made it angrier. We walked casually over to the front door, getting fairly well drenched in the five slow paces that took us there.

  I had never seen a hotel with a whole staff of people working the door before, and I amusedly watched a bellman take over our luggage while the doorman welcomed us.

  We walked straight into the atrium, then he gently removed my hand from his arm and walked aside to the desk. I first noticed that the stone floor tiles were cut and laid so the grout lines formed circles and rays outward from my feet. I looked up and saw I was under the center of a low, domed ceiling, a fresco of clouds painted on it. They were obviously not the sort of clouds that could rain like it was. I remember a miniature colonnade of banisters around the base of the dome, up in the ceiling, but as my eyes moved around, all of the needlessly intricate architectural details blurred together.

  The fresco stood out for its simplicity. I was staring up at it again when he placed my hand back in the crook of his arm and we headed for the elevators, bellman in tow. The elevator had an awful lot of buttons, and we were going to the top. I felt kind of weird with the bellman following us, our two lonely little bags on his cart. I thought to myself that I should get used to it, leading, as it seemed I was, the life of luxury.

  Our suite had a large front room furnished to suggest a small dining area, conversation space, workplace. Ten-foot-high floor-to-ceiling windows looking out onto a large balcony, obscured by the rain, seemed inappropriately modern with the otherwise decidedly baroque decor. I looked around in amazement while he shrugged off his jacket and hung it over the back of an almost hideously ornate chair at the dining table. He took my hand, walking me into the bedroom to give me the tour. “What do you think?” he asked.

  I was amazed. The room was large with ample space for high-backed chairs and intricately carved dressers. Rain sheeted down the too-tall windows. Damask curtains wanted to apologize for the windows’ modernity, but they were drawn back with twists of…

  I wasn’t sure why at first, but that didn’t matter. My pelvis was suddenly moving backwards and my shoulders forwards. My hands rose reflexively to protect me from the low bedpost pointed straight at my face and moving toward me very fast. My feet left the ground just before my hands made it into position, and I kept rotating forward, buttons popping open up from the bottom of my blouse. My center of gravity was up near his shoulders before I understood what was happening.

  He threw me across the bed like a shot put, holding my blouse as it slid out my arms, which were still reaching for the bedpost. Why do people say “head over heels?” Doesn’t that just mean you’re standing? He threw heels over head. As my sense of orientation struggled to catch up with my location, I landed into the duvet on my back with a thick “FUMP!”

  He had ahold of my forearms and was rolling them around in fast, opposing circles like a referee calling whatever foul it is for which they do that. I didn’t understand why until my blouse got so twisted that it bound tightly around my wrists, which were still in the sleeves. Then he put a couple of twists in the cord that had been my blouse and looped it over the needlessly gilded flourish atop the bedpost. He leapt on top of me, knees beside my thighs, wet edges of the soles of his shoes cold against my then-naked flanks.

  Oddly, at that moment, I thought about the two dashes of mud his toes would leave on the duvet cover. They would have disappointed housekeeping if the stain I would later leave hadn’t entirely eclipsed them.

  Grabbing behind my knees, he pulled me tight from the post, then took my hips and flipped me—prone, supine, prone—tightening m
y binding. While I breathed the empty scent of goose down, he pushed my stockings down my legs, then pulled my ankles back, bending my knees. I felt him tying them to my ankles. I pulled with my arms to test how firmly my wrists were locked to the post, but nothing budged at all. I pulled harder, as hard as I could, and felt no hint that I could loosen them.

  I was flipped again, supine, bare torso, bare legs, hair now twisted around my bare arms, gently suggesting they remain in the position from which they could not escape.

  When he climbed off me and pulled my legs upward, I saw that a single stocking was tied to both ankles. The other hung from the middle of that one in a Y shape. He fed the long end between my neck and shoulder on one side and pulled it down my back, drawing my feet up closer to my head. I folded easily until my legs pointed straight to the bedpost. With the knot that marked the Y’s confluence then behind my back, he adjusted things so the two ends attached to my ankles came down on opposite sides of my neck.

  I’m flexible enough to put my feet behind my head, and if he pulled me any farther, I would end up doing so. The only problem was that my skirt wouldn’t let me spread and buckle my knees. He pulled off his tie and appended it to the long end of the stocking that ran down my back, as he moved around squarely behind my hips and pulled me tight from the bedpost again, refreshing my arms’ immobility. Then he grabbed my skirt at the small, rear slit with both hands and ripped it open, peeling me like a banana. I felt in great detail on my bare skin the seams tearing and clasp popping off.