Bound

He tied me to a pole because I asked him to. He used duct tape and he secured my wrists with it. There was the mattress within reach but only close enough to rest my head on. He tied a sock around my face but I could still see if I opened my eyes and squinted.

There was something strangely domestic about the morning. He filled the sink and I could hear the clatter of plates jostled together in the soapy water. Upstairs a similar scene was being repeated, our land lady washing her own dishes, a domestic parallel without the girl tied to the pole in the middle of the room.

The floor was concrete and I felt the chill bite of it in my knees. He had tied my hands low and with so little give that I could stand but not straighten. Kneeling was best. I knelt, resting my head on the pillow of my bound palms. My back arced up, my bottom raised. I knew where this was leading.

I imagined that he would look up from the dishes and watch me. I wondered if I looked ridiculous in submission, if he was grinning with the humour of it all. Perhaps he watched impassively, clocking the time by the fading heat of the water. I heard him empty the sink and fill it again. Time passing. The slow drip of dishes drying. The television upstairs chattering about nothing to no one.

My skin became my eyes. I felt the fingers growing out of my back, wriggling like an anemone, my tentacles of awareness picking out the slight changes in the breeze and temperature. If someone had photographed me like this there would have been a hazy outline, Curlian photography would have picked out the little bubble of awareness that enveloped me. I thought about the boy upstairs, his previous lover. The boy upstairs watching football on television as his mother did the dishes, and in the downstairs parallel universe, my lover, his ex-lover and me tied to the pole.

I grew restless. I wanted to call him over to me. I wanted his hands and his body and some relief from this stretching out of my skin.

He took his time over it. I imagine that he spent an age over the drying because he wanted me to enjoy my time of longing, but I am not sure I enjoyed the long minutes of waiting. When he came to me finally, I could have ripped the duct tape off the pole and finished in a second but I did nothing. Said nothing. He examined me, lifting, pulling, separating. I felt his hands still dripping with dish washing liquid. Of course I knew how this would end, but still there was the little shivery thrill of anticipation as he traced the ridge of bone arcing down from the centre of my back, slipping his finger over, but not into my anus, and hooking it into my vagina, testing the viscosity of the dampness there.

I think of dissection tables, dead things tied down, paws and legs splayed, belly's exposed to the glare of fluorescent light. The fact that this arouses me is perhaps a problem. The erotic appeal of the medical experiment has become a recurring theme.

It was the idea of him watching me like that, the openness, the vulnerability. There was no question that he would, eventually penetrate me, but he took his time. The joy is not knowing exactly when, and exactly where. The joy is the anticipation.

Of course it would end as expected but it was the time of waiting that made it particularly distinct. A shivery moment of breath on the skin, a sense of exposure, a vulnerability. Someone watching or not watching, but never knowing which. I remember the hot cold of the afternoon and the disappointment of the inevitable ending. The sound of his ex-boyfriend turning off the television at the moment of his orgasm, a sudden silence and the slight, pleasurable pain of his withdrawal. The normalcy of a Sunday morning creeping into afternoon.

I will always remember this, perhaps. I remember it now.