Chapter 1: Where Were You Last Night?
The door to my apartment blew open, and Molly flung herself through it like an April thunderstorm. I set a pot of water to boil and wiped my hands on a dishtowel. By the time I got to the living room, Molly had already thrown her jacket in one corner, her shoes in another, and herself across my recliner.
“What, aren’t you going to offer me a drink?” she chided jokingly.
“Hi, Molly, it’s nice to see you, too.”
She jumped out of the chair almost as quickly as she’d jumped into it, throwing her arms around my neck and kissing my cheek. “Oh, Nick, you know I’m just giving you shit. Dinner smells great; what are we having?”
“Nothing special,” I said, returning her smile.
“Come on. Your ‘nothing special’ would be the special at most restaurants I’ve been to lately.”
“You’ve been eating in the wrong restaurants then. It’s just my personal twist on Beef Stroganoff — and it’ll be ready in about fifteen minutes.”
“Perfect. I’m starving.”
Molly had a dancer’s body: tall, lithe, sleek as a cat and just as graceful. She wore her usual black tank top over a comfortable pair of black jeans, which made her short dyed-silver hair and undercut stand out. I let myself stare for a moment as she turned away from me and picked a different chair to sit in this time.
“Can I get you a beer? Red wine?”
“You ask that as if you haven’t already picked out a bottle of wine for dinner.”
“You got me. A glass of Côtes-du-Rhône for the lady, then.”
“If I’m a ‘lady’ then you’ve been hanging out with the wrong women.”
Molly was an old college friend. In those days I fancied myself a writer; she studied chemical engineering. We flirted shamelessly all through college, but I was too boring for her and she was too wild for me. We’d even lived together for a short while after we graduated. When I couldn’t support myself with writing and took a job washing dishes, she covered part of my rent; when she got laid off from her first engineering job, I made sure she didn’t go hungry. Some old unresolved sexual tension stuck around, but mostly we just laughed it off.
“Can I change the playlist?”
“Does it matter if I say ‘yes’ or ‘no’?” I yelled from the kitchen, turning down the heat on the steak and picking two wineglasses off the shelf.
“Not really.”
I’d left my laptop open on purpose. There was no point making the music player hard to find; she was going to mess around with it regardless.
I never gave up on writing, but I never figured out how to make a living at it, either. At least working in restaurants paid the bills. From my start in the dish room, I’d worked my way up to serving tables, then tending bar, and eventually back to the kitchen. Along the way I’d made some friends in the industry, learned how to loosen up a bit, and turned into a pretty good cook.
The music stopped abruptly. I set a glass of wine for Molly down next to my laptop just as the opening riff of “London Calling” blasted from my stereo.
“The Clash? That’s a throwback. Not what I would have picked–”
“–‘for a quiet, romantic dinner for two’, I know, dummy. You say that every time.”
Molly and I got together every few weeks for dinner; I shopped for the ingredients and cooked, and she paid for everything, even the wine. She always said it was cheaper than trying to eat at the restaurants I worked in. I was just happy for the opportunity to see her semi-regularly. Molly was one of those people who moved through life from peak to valley and back again, never standing still for very long. It made her incredibly attractive, frustrating as hell, and nearly impossible to schedule with.
“Are you writing anything right now?”
“Eh, kinda. I’ve got a piece kicking around that I’d like to pitch to The Toast, or maybe McSweeney’s. It’s only half-finished.”
“Can I read it?”
“Check the ‘Drafts’ folder on the desktop.”
While Molly read through my latest effort, I turned my attention to finishing up dinner. I dropped the egg noodles into boiling water, combined the roux with stock and vegetables (and a few secret ingredients), and seasoned the tender beef strips.
It had been a while since I’d listened to this album. Actually, it was funny that she’d picked it; The Clash always reminded me of Molly, and the first and only time we tried going on a date. We’d ended up at this awful late-night diner off campus; the only things it had going for it were an actual vintage jukebox that ran on dimes and the fact that it was open all night. Molly had declared that “Rudie Can’t Fail” was the only song worth listening to in the entire jukebox and she’d dropped an entire dollar’s worth of dimes in, punching the same song ten times. Around the third time through, the manager figured out what she’d done, unplugged the jukebox, and asked us to pay our bill on the spot. Molly laughed all the way back to campus, dropping me at the front door to my dorm with a goodnight hug.
Like I said: unpredictable, attractive, and frustrating as hell.
I started plating our dinner. After all we’d been through over the years, Molly and I had emerged from our early 20s with a comfortable friendship that I really enjoyed. We were still close, or as close as possible given our various schedules and commitments. Whatever feelings I had for her back then, apart from the occasional pleasant flashback, I’d found ways to set them aside just like I had for the rest of my college crushes: tucked away in a mental shoebox, taped shut, and placed gently in a dark corner.
A bright burst of laughter eminated from the living room. “Nick, did you write this?”
Without turning around, I said, “Probably, why?” On second thought, why would she even ask that question, unless… “You’re not poking around in my Drafts folder any more, are you.”
“Uh… maybe?”
Of course she’d gotten bored and gone looking through my hard drive looking for other stuff to read. Of course she’d found the folder full of erotica I had saved up from many years of browsing the Internet. I could tell from the tone of her voice. Well, that was basically harmless.
“What did you find, Molly?”
“It’s called Careful What You Wish For. Is it yours?”
I froze.
Of course she’d found not just the folder full of erotica, but the hidden folder full of stuff I’d written, back when I was writing smut for practice and occasionally a few extra bucks.
Of course she’d found the one I’d written about her.
I put down the dinner plates and turned to step into the archway between the kitchen and the living room. Molly had turned the laptop around to show me what she was reading, with a goofy grin on her face. I didn’t actually need to look at the screen to know, but it was easier to do that than to look her in the eyes.
“Uh, yes. That’s one of mine.”
How had she found it? Why hadn’t I deleted it? At least I’d changed our names. Maybe she wouldn’t notice.
“You wrote smut about me?”
Of course she’d noticed.
She arched an eyebrow. “You wrote smut about us?”
Shit.
“Molly, it’s just a story. It’s fiction. I didn’t even submit that one anywhere.”
She laughed. “Why’d you write it, then?”
“Creative process. I write, edit, rewrite, and throw away hundreds of pages of text that never get seen by anyone else.”
“Including the people you write them about.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to. Oh, Nick, don’t look so surprised that I figured it out. You’re not the first erotica author I’ve met — well, scratch that, you probably are the first erotica author I ever met, even if neither of us knew it at the time. Anyway, it’s not the first time somebody’s written a story about me. It’s actually kind of flattering, in a perverted sort of way. And you really nailed some of my– well, anyway.
“Besides,” she said, gesturing to the screen, “it wasn’t even a challenge. ‘Sarah’ is built like me, dresses like me, even has the same hairstyle as me. And you’re obviously ‘Ryan’. All you did was a find-and-replace on our names. Tell me I’m wrong.”
I had, in fact, put in slightly more effort than that, but I found it difficult to argue at that particular moment.
Taking my silence as a confession, she stood up. “So why didn’t you tell me?”
“Tell you what?”
“That you’d written a bunch of porn about me. About us. About tying me up and–”
“You don’t just say stuff like that to people, Molly. Most women would slap the shit out of me for writing something like that, and then never speak to me again. And,” I said, half under my breath, “it’s not like I was ever going to show it to you.”
“And yet, you did.”
“Oh, no! I didn’t show you anything. That folder isn’t exactly sitting next to ‘Drafts’; you went looking,” I said, accusingly.
She at least had the courtesy to look a little bit sheepish, but she was still smiling. “You knew I would.”
“I have met you, yes. But you still went snooping through my files.”
“Well I’m not sorry.” Just then the smell of beef, noodles, and cream sauce hit her, and she inhaled deeply. “Oh my god I want to eat that right now.”
Grateful for the change of subject, I hastily agreed. “Good, because it’s ready. If you can grab the plates, I’ll get the wine.”
———-
One thing I’ve always liked about Molly is that she is the best conversationalist I’ve ever known. We never run out of things to talk about, regardless of how long we’ve known each other or how long it’s been since we’ve seen each other. On the other hand, one thing that I’ve always found frustrating about Molly is that if she doesn’t want to talk about something, she won’t. She’ll find ways to twist your questions and pivot onto another topic, and usually you won’t even notice she’s done it.
So, despite the elephant in the room, dinner was really nice. I expected her to start teasing me about That Story again as soon as we sat down, but she didn’t. The conversation flowed naturally just like it always did, although I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was just slightly off. Fortunately, the bottle of wine I’d picked out paired perfectly with the beef. And while Molly was always thankful for whatever I cooked, tonight she was absolutely effusive with her praise.
“Nick, the stroganoff is incredible. I know I’m biased but this is seriously amazing. I don’t know what you did to the sauce but there’s this delicious earthy element to it that’s totally not what I expect from a cream sauce like this.”
“Ancient family secret.”
“No, c’mon.”
“Okay, I actually picked it up from one of the other cooks at La Marque. It’s coffee, believe it or not. I mix a little into the beef broth before I put it all together.”
“Fucking hell. I knew it was something. Now tell me about this bottle of wine.”
Molly, of course, knew that I could talk about food and wine practically forever. Hazards of working in a professional kitchen. Still, I was thinking about the unfinished conversation from earlier. She’d laughed it off, just like any other time the undercurrent of sexual tension between us came to the surface. That was basically our normal state of being, anyway: we flirted, it was clear no one was going to take it seriously, and if we ever got too close, Molly would laugh and change the subject. Maybe that’s all my story meant to her — just another way of flirting. I could live with that. The last thing I wanted was to lose my best friend over a story that I was definitely going to go delete as soon as she left my house tonight. And then the shoebox could go back into its corner where it belonged.
By the time I got up to fetch dessert, I’d convinced myself the whole thing was a non-issue. I brewed a shot of strong coffee in a Moka pot and brought it to the table alongside three scoops of vanilla ice cream with a dash of chocolate syrup and some slivered almonds on top: an affogato. Molly dove in before I’d finished pouring the coffee on top of the ice cream, which meant she finished her first bite before I even got my spoon into the dish.
“Mmm, this is really good. The almonds are a nice touch. So, where’d you learn to tie rope like that?”
That’s when it hit me: the weird thing about our dinner conversation was that Molly hadn’t been flirting with me. Normally a topic change like that wouldn’t even have registered, but this wasn’t a normal conversation. Or a normal topic change.
“Sorry, like what?”
“Like in your story, dummy.”
“What makes you think I can tie, after skimming one story?”
“What makes you think I only skimmed one story?”
“Molly!”
“I love your non-fiction, you know. You’ve always had a way of painting with words that makes it so easy to see what you’re picturing.”
“I told you, that story– if you’re so convinced that story is about you and me, then you already know it’s fictional.”
“Yes, I’m pretty clear on the fact that you’ve never taken me to bed and tied me up. But your smut is too good, Nick. Nobody writes that stuff well unless they’ve done a lot of research. And usually that means personal experience.”
“Okay, sure. Since you asked, yes, I’ve been tying for a while now. You remember Kathy from school? I dated her senior year.”
“Kathy taught you how to tie?!”
“Eh, more or less. She told me early on that she was really into bondage, but it turned out she hadn’t had the chance to actually do much. We learned it together. I certainly got plenty of practice tying her up. She tried it on me a couple of times, but neither of us was really into it the same way. It was good for me to learn how the ropes felt, though. Maybe that’s why I can write it from both sides.”
“You two were still dating when you and I moved in together.”
“Yeah. By that point we’d figured out some stress ties that she really liked. Uh,” I coughed, “really liked. I tried to make sure you were out of the house before we played that way though.”
“Well well well, you sly dog,” she grinned. “I always thought you were the boring one in this relationship, Nick. Maybe I ought to change my mind on that.” Molly took another bite of ice cream, but wrapped her lips around the spoon and looked straight at me. That was more like it; that was the Molly I knew. I relaxed a little bit and decided to return her serve.
“Soooo… what about you?”
“What about me?” she smiled mischeviously.
“Are you into rope, too?”
“Of course I am, dummy! You obviously knew that already!”
“What makes you say that?”
“Well ‘Sarah’ is certainly into it, isn’t she?”
It was suddenly much harder to breathe.
“C’mon Nick, how could you not know? Did you find a pair of handcuffs in the couch cushions one day? Or was it just the boxes of mail-order sex toys in the recycling bin? You didn’t– no, you wouldn’t–” She gasped, but it was exaggerated for the effect. “You didn’t go through my stash of toys, did you?”
“Molly! I would never!”
“No, of course not, and even if you had you wouldn’t tell me. But you must have known somehow. Did you listen in on me having sex some night? I’m not exactly quiet, even with a ballgag stuffed in my mouth. I bet you could tell, couldn’t you?”
“Molly, I–”
Her laughter rang clear as a bell. I knew that laugh. That was the laugh that said we’d pushed the flirting far enough, and she was letting us both off the hook for getting too close to the edge of doing something–
“Oh, Nick, you’re so easy. You don’t have to tell me how you figured out that I’m kinky. I’ve got a much better idea, anyway.”
“Better idea?”
“Come show me.”
“… what?”
“That’s what they tell writers to do, right? ‘Show, don’t tell’?”
“Uh, something like that, yeah?”
“Great. Come on.” She grabbed my hand and pulled me out of my chair, and it was two or three steps before I realized she was leading me towards my own bedroom.
“Molly.”
“Yes, Nick?”
“What are you doing?”
“Having some fun with you, I hope?”
“Making fun of me, more like. This is a joke, right?”
That stopped her. “What? No!”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Why not?”
My mind was a blur. This wasn’t how things went between us! Dinner was supposed to just be between friends. We’d have a couple of drinks, she’d compliment my cooking, we’d talk about all kinds of stuff, I’d get a hug goodnight and a promise to schedule our next dinner that she wouldn’t follow through on. We’d flirt just like we always did, and then it would stop. It always stopped. She always stopped it. Right before I had to admit something I wanted. Surely we were going to stop again before that point.
… right?
For a moment, Molly met my dazed look, but then she sighed and her eyes dropped away from mine.
“Look, Nick, cards on the table here. Your writing is good, I mean, really good. Yeah, it was a little weird at first to find out you’d written bondage porn about us when we’ve never actually wound up in the sack, but given our history I can’t exactly say I’m surprised. And, frankly… it was hot. Really hot. And way more accurate than it had any right to be. I seriously don’t know how you figured out some of my kinks, but that story pushed all of my buttons in the right way. That’s why I wanted to know how you knew.
“But right now I don’t actually care. All I know is that I’ve been super fucking turned on since we started eating dinner — hell, your cooking usually does that to me anyway — and it’s been months since anybody tied me up with even the faintest bit of skill. I’ve got somebody I know and trust right here in front of me, and I’m banking on the fact that you’re as good with your hands as ‘Ryan’ is.”
This didn’t sound like “stopping”.
Molly — the woman I’d lusted after, danced around, lived with, cooked for, taken care of, been friends with, trusted more than anyone else I could think of — was standing here, in my living room, and I’m pretty sure she was asking me to take her to bed for the first time ever and… what? Tie her up? The inside of my head was filled with a cacophony of voices yelling advice, most of them conflicting with each other. But the “rope top” portion of my brain heard “tie” and was starting to wake up.
“So… how about it? Help a girl out?”
Holy crap, Molly wants me to tie her up.
The rope top voice was calm, clear, and easy to hear amidst the chaos. And he knew what to say.
“Of course.”
Between her eyes and her smile, Molly could light up my entire apartment.
“Oh, Nick, this is gonna be so much fun! Oh my god I can’t wait. What are you gonna do to me?”
“Well,” I said, feeling the chaos melt away and a swirl of possibilities taking its place, “you did say you liked my writing…”
———-
An hour later, I stood up from my bed and wiped a drop of sweat from my forehead with my undershirt. Molly lay on her stomach, her chest propped up with her arms underneath her, elbows lashed together and wrists tied off to an anchor point on my headboard. Her legs were wide open, ankles held apart with a spreader bar and tied off to the bottom corners of my bedframe.
Her jeans and my slacks lay in a pile in one corner of my room, along with the shirt I’d been wearing, but we’d left the rest of our clothes on. After negotiating our way out of our pants and through my insistence that she pick a safeword (“I’ll just call you Ryan”), it had become a question of what we were actually going to do.
“I figure we’ll start with something that isn’t restrictive, just to sort of feel each other out.”
“Oo, can you put me in a body harness?”
“Perfect.”
I opened my rope bag and looked for a length long enough to do a full harness. Molly hopped onto the bed like a cat diving into a basket full of clean laundry, tossing the blankets off one side and then turning to face me with the grin of a hunter. It was such a predator move that I was knocked off my stride for a second. The chaos in my head threatened to come back as it occurred to me who I was doing this with. But the bundle of rope felt good in my hands, and as I started to uncoil it I remembered that this was my element as much as hers. She might have gotten us here, but I knew how to run this part of the show.
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and dropped into that space in my head that I always went when tying. I fell onto my knees on the bed, gesturing for Molly to put her arms up and sit back on her heels. The voices in my head fell away and I plunged straight into a state of hyperfocus: the texture of the rope, the soft sheets on the bed, Molly’s breathing, the slight flush of her skin, images of the harness I wanted to tie, and all the skills and techniques I’d practiced.
Uncoil the rope. Find the midpoint. Make a bight. Put the bight over her spine. One wrap around the torso going under the arms and over the breasts. Pull through the bight and wrap the other way, going under the breasts this time. Take your time; don’t let the ropes twist. Pull through the loop in the back, split the tails and go up over the shoulders. Let her put her arms down. Tuck under the wraps in front and pull through.
“How’s that so far?”
She’d never stopped smiling. Her eyes had glassed over a bit, but her breathing was calm and even.
“It’s great.”
“It’s gonna get tighter in a minute.”
“I certainly hope so.”
One loop around the wraps, then a second. Careful not to drag the rope against her skin too fast. And then, ever so slowly, pull tight.
“Still good?”
“Yep.”
Lark’s head knot right between her breasts to hold the tension. Split the tails again, up over the shoulders to the back, and loop around what’s there.
Now the square knots. Takes a while but the look is worth it. Three down the back — she’s got a long torso. Get her up on her knees so you can run the ropes between her legs. Another knot in the middle in just the right spot — leave that one loose so you can move it around later. Two more up the front. Loop around the chest harness and tie it off.
“You cheeky bastard,” she said, as she felt the tension taken up and figured out what I had done.
“You okay if I adjust that so it’s in the right place?”
“Please.”
Slide a finger under the rope, just above that middle knot where it’s resting much too far down. Ignore how wet her underwear is. Tug the rope away from her underwear to make it easier to move the knot. Don’t think about how turned on she is. Loosen the two halves of the square, slide one half up so it’s resting near her vagina, slide the other half up to match and pull–
Molly gasped and grabbed my shoulder. I looked up, but her eyes were closed and she was holding her breath. An eternity passed while I waited for her to exhale. I slowly pulled my hands away from the knot I’d just tightened and let the rope rest against her skin. It wasn’t even a little bit tight… yet.
“You good?”
“Yes. Very. Keep going.”
Find the tails where you left them. Have her sit back and lift her arms again. Separate the tails and wrap back and forth, feeding one around each side of her torso, through the gap between the knots in back to make a diamond, then working around to her stomach and doing the same. Leave it loose for now. Tie a sloppy finishing knot just to hold it in place.
“Ready?”
“Do your worst. I wear corsets for fun.”
Start at the top of the diamond wraps. Gather up the slack in the line until it’s taut. Feed that tension down the line and around her sides to the back. Find that first gap with your hands and pull through until it’s a diamond shape. Feed the tension down the line to her front and do it again. Snug the lines each time. Watch that middle knot sneak up, up, up as you pull the lines tighter until it’s pressing up against her clit. Retie the finishing knot.
Give her a moment to breathe, to feel the constriction as the rope corset closes around her. Let her get comfortable. Match your breathing to hers; make sure it’s not too fast or too shallow.
Take a step back. And enjoy.
Molly’s eyes were half-closed, and I’m not sure she noticed that I’d gotten off the bed.
“Molly.”
Her eyes fluttered open and she breathed out slowly.
“Do you want to see it?”
“Yes, please.”
I extended her my hand and helped her up off the bed. The inside of my closet door had a dressing mirror in it, and I opened the door and turned her to face it.
She was, in a word, stunning.
The red rope I’d chosen contrasted perfectly with her black shirt and panties. The top half of the harness did its job of outlining her breasts and just compressing them a bit, while the diamonds of the lower half were about as good as I’d ever tied them. Not bad, especially for the first time tying someone.
“It’s perfect, Nick. I love it.” She spun around to try to look at the back in the mirror, which had the effect of sticking her chest out at me. She turned back to me with that gorgeous smile on her face again, threw her arms around my neck and gave me a big hug. “You’re every bit as good as I hoped,” she whispered.
To this point, my focus had mostly been on the rope work, and despite only wearing a pair of boxer-briefs, I hadn’t really popped much of an erection. But now, Molly was giving me a full-body hug while half-dressed and tied up in my rope, and all of that control from earlier started to melt away. My cock, already semi-erect and trapped between us, sprang to full attention when I felt her breath on my ear. I could feel the knots in the rope brush against me — no, “brush” isn’t the right word. She was grinding against me.
“My only question is, what are you going to do to me now?” Her breath was ragged but her words were whisper-quiet. I wanted to tell her exactly what I wanted to do to her, what I’d always wanted to do to her. She had to know how turned on I was. But I had no idea what was on the table at this point. Besides, she was still wearing underwear and I’d tied a rope through her crotch that was going to be too tight to move out of the way any time soon. So I did the only thing I could think to fall back on:
“I’m going to tell you a story.”
She gasped. “Really? What kind of story?”
“Something I wrote a while back. It’s called Where Were You Last Night?”
“I like your stories,” she grinned.
I outlined the plot for her while I gathered some more gear. It was about a guy who discovers his wife has been cheating on him, so he ties her up and spanks the daylights out of her as “punishment”, then fucks her. Yeah, I know, it’s cheesy as hell and the plot is completely ridiculous, but you’ve read worse, haven’t you? Anyway, as far as I was concerned it was just a roundabout way to offer to tie Molly up some more, and to see… what else… she might be interested in doing.
“So you’re saying you want to tie me down to your bed and spank me a bunch?”
“Yeah,” I said, trying desperately to sound casual and probably failing. “If you’re into it.”
“Fuck yes,” she said, walking back to the bed and rolling onto her stomach. “Sounds like my lucky day.”
And that’s how I found myself standing there staring at the gorgeous friend that I’d just tied up and then tied down. Lying there with her eyes turned up to me, smiling that same smile she’d been wearing for most of the evening, I was mesmerized. I’d tied her elbows and wrists together so she could prop up her head and chest. After I’d tied her ankles to the corners of the bedframe, the spreader bar was mostly gratuitous, as was the rope connecting her wrists to the eyebolts hidden in my headboard. Sometimes I just felt the need to complete the illusion of helplessness. And it gave me time to think about what was about to happen.
Tying someone up involves some fairly intimate touch, to be sure, even on top of clothing. But most rope bottoms I’ve played with are after the feel of the rough surface of the rope, the constriction of the harness, and the feeling of being restrained. They don’t object to my hands as I run rope all over their bodies, but that’s not really what it’s about for them.
Spanking someone, though, is one hundred percent entirely about what your hands are doing to their body. There really isn’t any way to dance around that. Molly and I had been more physically intimate over the years than most people who called themselves “friends”, but this was going to be a line we hadn’t crossed. Still, if that’s what she wanted… well, I guess we could figure out what it meant later. So I knelt on the bed and rested my right hand between her shoulder blades. “So, Molly, how many do you want?”
“Oh, you’ll know when I’m done.”
I ran my left hand up the back of her leg, feeling the slight tightness caused by how far apart her legs were spread. I rubbed the muscles there and let my fingers drift down to her inner thigh, prompting a moan. I could feel the heat and dampness radiating off of her. I cupped her buttcheek and squeezed, switching to my right hand to cup to the other one for another solid squeeze, and then drifting down the opposite leg. Just a friendly hello, before moving on to the warmup.
I kept my arm loose and swung, landing the first slap with my left hand without much force behind it. A series of shorter slaps followed, covering as much ground as possible. Switching hands, I covered her left cheek with my right hand in the same fashion. Back to my left for some more light strikes, then back to my right to match. Molly was vocal enough, humming with appreciation at first and building up to a small yelp or two just before I switched hands. After a few minutes, I could see her skin starting to redden up a bit around the hem of her underwear, and the appreciative noises had changed over to moans.
“Doing okay so f–”
“I swear to God, Nick, if you stop I will fucking kill you.”
I chuckled. Guess she was doing okay, then. And obviously it was time to step it up a bit.
The next two shots produced a satisfying crack. Molly groaned and bucked backwards into my hand when I left it there. I paused for a split second and then hit her again in the same two spots. Switching hands and coming more from the side than above, I struck more lightly at the tops of her cheeks a few times, then landed a shot on her upper leg that left a mark. That one needed a twin, of course, so I hit the far leg just as hard, which got an actual “Ow!”
As I stepped up the intensity of my spankings, Molly’s reactions got more and more pronounced. She was tensing up her muscles every time I went to hit her. I’d smack her several times in a row until she started to hold her breath, then I’d stop until she exhaled. Any time I let my hand rest on her skin or rub the place I’d just struck, she’d push her butt back into my hand. And then I’d rear back to strike again, and she would draw a breath, clench up, and buck her hips forward into the bed.
At one point I threw my leg over her so I was straddling her but facing the other way. I rested my weight on my left hand and reached back with my right, and saw her push her hips forward again. From this angle I could see the crotchrope flex and tighten up as she did it, and that’s when I realized why she was bucking her hips so much. She wasn’t trying to instinctively get away from my spanking; she was dropping her weight down onto the knot in the rope that sat under her clit. And every time I hit her, she was grinding herself against it. Sure, she was enjoying the endorphin rush from the spanking, but she was also on the edge of getting herself off at the same time.
As soon as I figured that out, my dick went rock-hard in my underwear. I wanted nothing more than to make her come under me like this.
Instead of hitting her again, I dropped my hand to the fleshiest part of her ass and squeezed, letting my fingers trail down towards her cunt but not touching it. She was starting to soak through her underwear. I felt Molly’s groan in her chest almost as much as I heard it from her mouth, and I pulled my hand back to spank her again. I slapped the same spot I’d just left, still landing on the fleshiest part but being less careful about how low my fingers ended up. More intense and less frequent, I switched sides back and forth, trying to strike as deeply as I could into her muscle tissue. I could see her grinding down on the knot constantly now, riding out each shot by sliding forward slightly, and preparing for the next by sliding back.
Picking up the pace again, I turned my attention to her breathing and was rewarded with a delightful set of sounds that started as a low growl, changed to a staccato of grunts, and then to a higher-pitched series of “ah!”s. My hands were starting to sting, but I dialed up the intensity a little further and really started to push her. Molly’s voice jumped another octave and she began to sing out with what I assumed was the first wave of an orgasm. Her hamstrings contracted against the ropes holding her ankles out and her glutes tensed up as well as I kept hammering her with my palms, until finally she went taut all over and screamed out her climax.
———-
The door to my apartment slammed shut, and I stood there just staring at it for a minute. After I’d untied the ropes holding her down to the bed, Molly had refused to let me take off the rope harness, promising me she’d take good care of it and bring it back next time she saw me. I definitely enjoyed watching her gingerly bend over to put her jeans back on, and then again to tie her shoes. Her leather jacket didn’t do much to hide the red diamond pattern crossing her stomach and chest, but it was dark out and she was driving, so I didn’t worry about it too much.
All of which is to say that she definitely walked out of my apartment wearing a tight rope harness and a cat-that-ate-the-canary grin. I threw the deadbolt on the door, went to the kitchen, and poured myself a glass of whiskey.
What the hell had just happened?
Six hours ago, I was prepping dinner for my best friend. Somewhere along the way things had taken a sharp left turn, and instead of our usual pattern of ramping up flirtatious conversation until Molly put a stop to it… this time she just didn’t stop. I remembered her taking my hand and leading me away from the dinner table, and then she was lying on my bed in a blood-red harness, coming her brains out while I spanked her. And now she was gone.
It was certainly the most fun I’d had in that bed in some time, but even while it was happening, most of it felt like a dream. Now that the reality was starting to sink in, so were the questions. What changed? What made her decide that after years of dancing around each other, seemingly with no interest on her part of doing anything about it, that tonight was the night she wanted to take me to bed?
It was that damn story.
But that didn’t make any sense. There were plenty of good reasons why I never showed her that story or even told her I’d written it. Okay, maybe I hadn’t done a very good job of obfuscating the details, and maybe, maybe, I’d let some of those old feelings creep into my writing. Could she tell? Was it that obvious? Never in a million years did I think she would like that story. Why didn’t she tell me off and storm out of my apartment? Or call me ‘dummy’, like she always did, and go back to ignoring any sort of potential attraction?
I picked up my laptop and stopped the music player, which had long since run off the end of the Clash album Molly had cued up. I had too many questions and not enough answers, but maybe I could find some clues in that story. Maybe I’d try to see things through her eyes, somehow. She said it had pushed all of her buttons in the right ways… that surely wasn’t enough to explain what had just happened, but maybe there was something else there.
Careful What You Wish For was still open, right where Molly had left it. I started reading.
Shit. She was right; this story was good. Definitely one of my better pieces. The flow was good, the dialogue wasn’t too artificial, the characters were believable, the sex… damn. Looking at my own work through a fresh set of eyes got me to turn off my usual “everything I write is crap” filters, but it wasn’t answering any of my questions. All it was doing was reminding me of Molly getting herself off on my bed, in my rope, under my hands.
I closed the laptop. Maybe the rest didn’t matter right now. Maybe I could figure out what it all meant tomorrow. Maybe we’d talk about it the next time I saw her, whenever that would be. Maybe this was a one-time deal, and we’d go back to being friends just like we always had.
Or maybe the lid wasn’t going to fit on that shoebox the same way ever again.