Free Sample
Preview from chapter one
The skinny ropes were my orchestra. Each note was cinched, knotted, looped, twisted into a logic that only I understood as I tightened him by increments, made him a living diagram of attention and intent. I liked to stand back as I worked, a pace or two away, picture what he must look like from the ceiling, or from the thickening dusk outside the big window, the way each line of red paracord mapped his skin, made a nervous, urgent geometry of limbs and longing. I built the predicament slow as patience, as hunger.
He was naked, of course, because suffering and beauty blossom best with nothing between them. One wrist, then another, tied to opposite sides of the slatted chair back. Ankles drawn behind and under, splayed and tethered to the back feet. A harness around his chest, not decorative, but utilitarian, a cross-breasted seatbelt of friction cords. And the main feature: another line leading from the base of his cock and balls (a tight little package in hemp-twine division) and running upward, through a ceiling hook, down to a wand-thick rod rigged just beneath the seat so that any shift of his hips pulled the cord taut. Every muscle trembled on a hair-trigger. Any movement at all and the rope yanked him up or dragged him down, a shifting war of applied physics around the pulse in his sex. Stillness, then, was its own reward, and its own torture.
I let him soak in it. I circled. The dress was new, black lamé that shimmered even in candlelight, and I walked in a way that made the column of my legs glint. One heel, then the other, a click on the tile. His pupils followed, a dog chasing a crow, and inside the lines of pain he was more mine than when I'd first carried him, slick and wailing, out of the miasma of a C-section haze.
“Tell me how it feels,” I said, pausing at his shoulder, palming the sharp angle of his clavicle.
He tried to nod but the ropes denied him. “It burns, Mom.” The word stuck, embarrassingly tender, and I rewarded him with a fingertip to the corner of his eye. A tear, already there.
“It’s meant to,” I said. “It’s a harness for remembering.” I crouched, leaning forward so the bodice gaped, the scent of sweat and expensive perfume a deliberate promise.
He tried to rock his hips away. Oh, clever, clever, trying to escape sensation by running toward more. The chair groaned as the cords bit, and a deeper shade of red flushed his tip.