TWENTY

“YOU.”

The man singles me out of the crowd. “Come with me.”

His eyes are dark and I like his hands, so I follow him through a pearly white door with ornate candleholders on either side of it.

Room 328.

The walls are a deep crimson, and it’s fairly boxy, but the ceiling is high—almost impossibly high. There’s a raised platform in the middle of the room, and it reminds me of an altar. He takes me to it, and I wonder what’s going to be sacrificed here tonight.

My clothes are the first to go.

When I’m naked, he coaxes me up onto the platform and maneuvers me until I’m sitting with my legs straight out in front of me.

From a small drawer, he grabs a few lengths of rope, red to match the room.

He gently moves my hands out of the way as he binds my breasts, a strangely constrictive sensation, but I can still breathe comfortably. It seems strange that he’d strip me only to cover me again, but then again, he’s covered me the way he wants, so it’s not that strange after all.

It’s about control.

The ropes aren’t rough, but the way they feel against my nipples is a huge contrast in texture. They dig in with a dull pressure, and I hope I end up with marks in my skin afterwards. Anna used to speak of her rope marks as though they were badges of pride. I don’t know about that, but I do know that the rope feels good. Solid, tough, like the strongest, longest fingers pressing against me.

Next, he pulls out a shorter length of rope, also red.

There are two tall candles lit nearby, but other than the fragrance of hot wax, they’re unscented. The candles are red. I’m noticing a theme.

He uses the rope to tie my hands behind my back, looping it around my neck. It’s not tight, but when I try to move my hands, the rope tightens around my neck.

I’m to stay still.

My pulse kicks up in tempo.

One last thing—a long piece of silk. He trails it up my legs, my torso, and covers my eyes. I’ve had fantasies of being blindfolded like this for ages. What’s he going to do to me when I can no longer see him? He leaves my legs free, and I wiggle my toes, noticing other things now that I can’t see.

Rope has a scent to it, and this one could almost be made of sweetgrass; it’s sweet, natural, earthlike.

The room smells like wax and heat, tinged with my arousal.

Can he smell that sweetness yet?

I hear the hot sizzle of a candle near my head, and jump when I feel a lick of heat on my thigh, unable to stop from crying out, reflexively moving my hands and choking myself with the rope.

His hands stop mine from moving, and I can breathe again. He says, “What do you say?”

Instinctively, I whisper, “Thank you,” heart pounding from fear but also arousal at how he’s taking care of me, taking his time.

A drip of fire runs down my other thigh, and I jump and tense, waiting for the next one.

“No.”

“No?” I ask.

“Relax.”

It’s difficult to relax knowing he’s going to drip more hot wax on my body, but the places he’s already done are sore but manageable. The wax has already cooled and hardened against my skin. I take a deep breath.

“Tell me the things you want. Your desires.”

“My desires? What I want you to do to me? ”

“In general. And don’t anticipate the hot wax, or you’ll be punished more.”

At those words, the sweetness between my legs blossoms, the scent of it filling the air like an exotic flower even though my legs aren’t spread.

He changes that, easing them apart. He drips more wax on my inner thigh—higher this time, and I inhale sharply and remember his command.

“I’ve always wanted to be blindfolded like this.” I pause, feeling a slight draft to my right and hearing something scuffle on the floor. Another person, perhaps?

I wince as a river of wax drips onto my lower belly. “I want it rough.”

Something hard teases its way between my legs, slicking itself in my juices before easing inside me—rewarding me for my confession, perhaps? I continue. “I want to be taken. I want my”—don’t say Jack, don’t think of him—”partner to fuck me, to make it feel good but to make it hurt too.”

With every word, I’m being slowly fucked with mysterious objects, toys, and what I can guess to be a cucumber, or perhaps another phallic vegetable, I don’t know, but it feels good.

My hands spring free—someone’s released them, and I’m pushed flat on my back, the thrusting inside me never ceasing, but it’s impersonal when I’m not being touched anywhere else.

“I wanted to be hit during sex, too. Something, anything to show my partner had gone wild with me, on me, in me.” I shiver as someone sucks my fingers one by one, and when the person takes my whole hand into their mouth, fisting it, I tense, about to come.

But the person stops and I whimper. I feel another trickle of burning, slow, hot drips from my hip to my belly.

“I like being in control as well. I like knowing that someone’s helpless and that I’m the one making them that way. I want more. I always want more. I want sex to feel like a fantasy.”

The thrusting begins again, and hands creep over my body.

“I want it to be surreal, a dream, a nightmare.” I shiver with want, with what I’m getting, at the areas of my body that burn beneath the crust of cooled wax. “I want it to be surprising, alluring. Undeniable.” The hands stop and start, giving and taking away pleasure, making me crazy with want, with lust as hot as the wax. I’d even take the wax again, anything for them to keep going, keep giving. “It should erase me.”

I feel something soft on my arm. Breasts? The hands ram me full of something and I cry out, violently coming in waves of heat and ice, my body turning the orgasm painfully deep, like my pussy is angry it took so long and is punishing me instead of the perpetrator. I feel spurts of warmth on my belly, on my thighs. Come, and something warmer, more liquid. I think it’s pee, but I can’t be sure. I feel dirty and tattered, and there’s nothing better than this moment, now.

More hot wax, but now it’s on my arms and dripping into my pubic hair and the heat makes me come again. A woman moans near me, sounding as spent as I feel.

The blindfold is removed, and I’m surrounded by five people, including the man who brought me here. They smile at me, praise me with their words and soft voices and hands, and a man with long blonde hair like a Viking pulls something from between my legs — an enormous purple carrot—and takes a bite with a loud crunch, devouring something that was inside me.

I blink at them. “I want more.”

My new friends lead me through a low door we have to crouch to fit through—number 398, which makes no sense, because we were in 328 and that should lead to an odd number—but I don’t care, still dripping come down my legs and stinging from the wax.

This room is decorated with zigzags and swirls of black and white. It’s disorienting to the eyes, the patterns making me dizzy.

There’s a large St. Andrew’s cross, and my group presses against me, smothering me with their bodies as they tie me to it spread-eagled with my back exposed using the same sweetgrass-scented rope that was around my hands before. My breasts are still tied, bulging from the rope that binds them. They’ve never looked so full.

I look over my shoulder when they back away, revealing a masked man with a flogger in his hand.

I take a deep breath and smile.

I turn back to press myself against the hard wood, noting the slight citrusy scent—lemon oil or some kind of cleaner—and a woman on the other side of the cross steps forward, fastening an absurdly large vibrator to my mound before kissing me softly on the forehead. I almost want to laugh, but I want more, so I don’t interrupt. The flogging starts before the vibrator does, and it hurts worse than I thought it would, sharp, hot smacks on my thighs and ass.

But soon I’m leaning back, trying to get more of the pain to go with the buzzing on my clit.

I lose track of how many hits I take—slaps to the back as well, with the flogger or something he swaps in that’s thinner and bites my skin harder. My friends move to where I can see them, and they watch the masked man hurt me.

They watch him make me tremble and scream.

They come when he moves to stand between my legs and turn the vibrator as high as it will go before fucking me with something long, hard, and cold, adding a new sensation—temperature—to the mix.

He makes me come until I can’t breathe, but the cross holds me up; my ropes keep me standing.

I close my eyes and sag against the restraints, smelling the come and sweat, feeling the pleasure and pain mingle in my body and transform into something bigger than I can contain. He holds the dildo still inside me, and that makes me come from being so full, like he’s fisting me.

He moves it in and out, and that makes me come.

His chest hair on my back, tickling the places he hurt, makes me writhe, and I can’t tell if it’s from pleasure or pain.

It’s both. It’s the sensations Anna wanted me to understand, about what this can do to your body, and now I’m feeling it.

I’m feeling it so deeply I can taste it.

The flavor of letting go. The feeling of what happens when you become sensation and lose yourself completely. Silk and satin are nice on the skin, but I wanted to wear the red of stinging flesh and the rippled edges of rope indentations.

They’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever worn.

I didn’t want to be eased into anything. I wanted it rough—they got the truth from me and gave me my desires.

I beg for more.

My hosts serve me, their submissive.