by K. Bromberg
I couldn’t put it all together. Maybe I’d gone just a little heavy on the flake. Deacon would be pissed. I’d apologize. We’d do a knotting, and I’d get better.
The last thing… Deacon had gone away. He’d put his face in my neck, and I was surrounded by peppermint and sandalwood. He’d gotten in the limo, and I watched it glide down the hill and past the gate of the private road, splashing in the rushing water of the drainage dip. Maundy Street. Left turn past Debbie and Martin’s place, and away.
Christmas. He said he’d be back for Christmas.
The house had seemed big, and I’d thought about spending the week at home in Bel-Air. Avoid Debbie. Avoid Martin. Their eyes and their temptations pressed against me. I could handle it. I could handle anything. I was strong.
Was that decision even worth remembering? What was the last thing that had happened?
I only remembered stuff from long ago. A knotting, the last one, my favorite. Deacon had laced me to hooks in the ceiling with patterns of knotted rope, turning my body into a work of art. I was upside down, naked, falling from the sky, and he crouched on the floor, caressing my head and shoulders. I always felt at peace when he knotted me, but that time, when he became part of the work, my very identity and all the anxiety that came with it melted away.
Something about a horse, but I must have been dreaming. I hadn’t touched a horse in months. Years, maybe.
And the last party. The knots of skin and fluid.
A stinging drip in my nose.
When? Yesterday? Last month? Never?
Now. Here. In Westonwood.
Fuck.
two.
Having eaten a meal in a tiny pale grey room, and walked down wide, pale grey hallway, showered in a white-tiled stall, and gotten into a stainless steel elevator, I found the office jarring. It could have been my headache that grew more potent by the moment, or it could have been the presence of actual colors.
Pale blue curtains drawn against the rain pounding the window. Green lantern. Rich brown wainscoting and desk. Burgundy carpets. I squinted. Even the light from the desk lamp felt intentionally painful.
“Thanks, Bernie,” Dr. Chapman said from the corner of the room.
He wore a grey jacket and a sage-green sweater over a white shirt. His voice didn’t hurt my head, though when Bernie, the orderly, clicked the door behind him, I felt as if someone had hit my temple with a crowbar.
“Headache?” the doctor asked. I nodded, and he sighed. “For what you pay to be here, you think they’d be on the ball with the analgesics.” He slid open a desk drawer and removed a bottle of over-the-counter medicine. “Let me get you some water.”
I held out my hand. “Don’t need it.”
He shook two into my palm. I kept my hand out then spread my fingers wider. He shook out two more. I kept my hand out.
“That’s plenty,” he said.
I threw them to the back of my throat and swallowed. One caught on the back of my tongue, releasing a wave of sour and bitter, but I took it all.
“Would you like to sit?” He put the bottle back and slid the drawer closed.
“Is that a question? About what I like?”
“It’s a suggestion phrased as a question.”
A padded leather chair in soft green and worn dark wood sat to my left. I touched the brass studs that kept the leather attached and sat down. Doctor Chapman sat behind the desk, settling his right elbow on the arm of the chair. I didn’t know if I was supposed to start with questions about what had happened or why I was there. I didn’t know if I should rattle off a list of what I remembered and didn’t, or ask just how much trouble I was in, or when Deacon was coming to get me out.
But he saved me the trouble. “Can you tell me the last thing you remember?”
I stiffened. My mouth locked up. I couldn’t tell him. “When can I leave?”
“Do you think you should leave?”
“Do you think I should leave?”
“It’s more important to know what you think,” he said.
“It’s more important for you to know what I think, and it’s more important for me to know what you think. So you first.”
He rubbed his upper lip with his middle finger, an odd gesture, then dropped his hand. “You’re here for your own protection, at the great expense and effort of your family. I have seventy-two hours to report on whether or not you’re a danger to yourself or others.”
“How am I a danger?”
“You don’t remember?”
“You know I don’t.”
He put his elbows on the desk and looked right into my eyes. I wanted to know what he saw, other than what everyone saw—a party girl with a permanent smile and spread legs. A balls-to-the-wall princess with an entourage and two wrecked Bentleys in the garage. But more than that, I wanted to know how old he was. He looked so young and so wise at the same time.
“If I tell you why you’re here,” he said with that gentle voice, “I want to warn you, that you’ve probably blocked it because it’s painful to you.”
“Okay.” I didn’t believe him, but I let him think I’d blocked it. The reason I didn’t know was because I’d been drunk or high. Whatever sweet chemicals I’d taken had kept my neurons from connecting.
It must have been bad, and I could never feel guilty about it because I didn’t remember it. I’d had a drunk driving accident. I’d given someone bad pills. I’d been gang-fucked and dumped in an alley. I’d killed some random paparazzi. One of the entourage had turned on me. All the things Mom had listed as a fear and Dad had implied with his look.
“You’re making me nervous,” I whispered even though my headache abated.
“Do you know Deacon Bruce?”
I heard his last name so infrequently, sometimes I forgot he even had one. “Yes.”
“Do you remember what he is to you?”
“Yes.” I refused to clarify further. He was my safety. My control. The hub on the wheel of my life. Without him, the spokes didn’t meet.
And he was coming for me. All I had to do was stall.
“It would help if you told me the last thing you remember.”
“I don’t remember anything.”
“Do you remember going to the Branwyn Stables yesterday?”
“I haven’t been to the stables in years.” As if the back of my face had a surface all its own, it tingled. A corset tightened around my chest. I was going to cry, and I had no idea why. “I need you to just tell me, Doctor.”
“Call me Elliot.”
“Fucking tell me right now!”
“Can you stay calm?”
I swallowed a golf ball of cry gunk. “Yes. I’m fine. Yes.”
Seconds passed. He watched me as if casually observing a churning barrel of worry.
“I’m fine,” I said. “You can tell me. I’ll be cool.”
“We don’t know what happened exactly. There are details missing. Mister Bruce isn’t well enough to be interviewed.”
I tried to hold myself together, but my fingers gripped the edge of the chair. He saw my knuckles turn white. I knew it, but I had nowhere else for the tension to go.
“Go on,” I said.
“There are some things that are known for sure, and some questions. If you remember any portion of what I’m telling you, please stop me.”
“Is Deacon okay?”
He cleared his throat and looked away before turning back to me. I realized he didn’t want to tell me at all, and that barrel of worry filled up with panic.
“You stabbed him in the chest.”
three.
I woke up strapped to the bed with a brain full of fog. Then they took me to a room with a balding doctor and a nurse whose face I couldn’t make out through my drug-induced lethargy.
The doctor clucked and groaned as he read things off to the nurse. I could barely sort through what he was saying, and I could barely remember what had happened a few hours ago. Had I attacked someone? The therapist? I’d ap
ologize. He seemed nice. I hoped I didn’t hurt him. What had he said to make me freak out? Something about something I did. The reason I was here.
I was in incredible physical shape—I knew that because suspending a woman from the ceiling in rough hemp ropes took hours of work, days of practice, and stamina and strength from both parties. And Deacon, Master Deacon, did not fuck around. I had to get off the flake, reduce the alcohol, and sleep eight hours a day, even if they were when the sun was out. He’d had to watch me sometimes to make sure I ate right, stretched, and stayed off substances, but it was worth it.
Except I was here.
Had Deacon been away?
If he’d been around, I wouldn’t have done whatever it was I’d done to land in Westonwood. He’d come and…something. Something was wrong. Something about Deacon. I couldn’t find the specifics, but it was something huge and upsetting. My heart beat faster when I tried to think of it. I got impatient with the nurse as she moved my wrist and said a bunch of gibberish as if I wasn’t there. She was keeping me from thinking the things I needed to think. Facts lay a layer under the sand, and I was trying to dig them up, but the bitch kept taking my shovel.
The doctor looked at my teeth and poked a molar. A shot of pain cut through me, and I pushed him away so hard he crashed into a tray of torture devices.
Fucking meds. I was going to have to detox again. Once I was curled up in my bed again, I would get the itchy skin, the broken lethargy, the attacks of consciousness that cut into my thoughtless reflections on my sensory space. I’d spent a lot of time trying to get away from my thoughts. Most of my days, actually. I had it down to a science. I never thought about a damn thing.
Or more accurately, I thought plenty and drowned it however I could. When the therapist had told me I’d done something so terrible, such an anathema to me, and I didn’t have a substance or an orgasm to drape over the news, I did things without thinking. My determination to be good had gone out the window, and I’d lunged for that lying doctor. I remembered being hauled away screaming, strapped down, and I remembered the injection.
It wasn’t until I woke up secured to the bed in a mental ward that I knew what it was like to be distanced from my brain. I could separate the drug thoughts from the real-me thoughts. The drug thoughts were blank and foggy, and the real-me thoughts were black holes where information should have been. Things floated by as if someone was changing the station from a comedy to a thriller to a terror fest to colored bars that went eeeeeeee.
I’d stabbed Deacon.
No, it was a lie.
You know it’s true.
Not.
Yes.
Not.
You did it.
Never.
I turned my head. Nothing in that room could upset me, because the space was absent of stimuli. The room was still grey, still bathed in light, and in the corner, a silver disk got lost in the vents and alarms dotting the ceiling.
A camera.
If I screamed—and I believed I could—they’d know, and they’d come for me. Or not. I wasn’t ready to find out.
I’d been strapped to beds for long periods of time, usually with my legs spread farther than they were now, often with my knees bent. When I was left in that position, it was so I couldn’t press my legs closed and give myself an orgasm. By the time Deacon came in, I was wet with anticipation and ready for anything he dished out.
In the hospital, my ankles and wrists were bound so I couldn’t hurt myself. I was wet all over again. I tried to close my legs and couldn’t. And no one was coming to slap or fuck me. Not even one of Deacon’s friends. Not even Debbie. I wasn’t strapped down so I could stew in my own lust. I was strapped down because after Elliot had told me I’d stabbed Deacon, my mind had gone white hot.
Fuck.
Even as I got angry at myself over this forgotten thing, I felt the bloat of arousal.
You’re swelled, kitten.
Swelled didn’t mean horny. That was easy enough. Swelled meant I needed it. Sex. Hot and dirty fucking. Masturbating couldn’t stop a swell. Rubbing my cunt on the pillow, vibrators, dildos, eggs, none of them chased away a swell. Only penetration, anywhere, by a warm-blooded man, took care of it. Until that happened, I couldn’t function.
It had never been a problem. I took what I wanted, made no commitments, found willing participants wherever, whenever I needed it. I was on three forms of birth control, for fuck’s sake. I got tested weekly. I wrapped it up. Past that, my first priority to a swell was getting rid of it, and I was mindless in my pursuit. For Deacon, it became a challenge—to know when I would need it, predict it, and put me in a position where he could withhold penetration. He created the unique torture of being tied in knots, naked, cunt out, ready as he tugged the rope and I begged him to take me.
“I need to finish, kitten. How would it be to have people arrive to a party without the table set?”
He’d hurt me to forestall satisfaction, leaving my ass a deep shade of pink and my little tits sore, putting me on the edge and keeping me there for hours, until I wept.
Had I killed Deacon? My master? Why? How? Oh God, what had I done?
The holes in my mind closed, filled with the thick caulk of sex. I needed it. I needed to feel good. I needed my mind to go blank with pleasure for a second or two, to clear the pain out like a firehose. I could be in for a swell. I needed to feel good. Needed.
“Now!” I cried. “Bathroom!”
Bernie, a big, dark-skinned guy with a kind face, came through the door seconds later. “Hi, Miss Drazen.”
He smelled of man, and though he wasn’t the best looking guy ever, I was painfully aware of the cock under his blue cotton pants.
“Bernie.”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Do you know anything? About my case?”
“No, ma’am.”
He unstrapped me. When his hands touched my wrist, the feeling went right between my legs. I tried to catch his gaze, but his eyes wouldn’t meet mine, and I noticed he was trying to avoid touching me. It was as if he knew.
“Thank you.” Despite everything, I said it in my softest, most inviting voice.
He let me in the bathroom without another word or touch. When the door snapped shut, I stripped out of the jumpsuit and hitched my leg over the sink. The cold porcelain edge lay hard against my cunt, and I shuddered, clasping my left hand on the faucet, and my right on the edge in front of me.
“Let me come, Sir,” I whispered so it wouldn’t echo, and I called to mind our first knotting.
***
The twenty-two year old me, the taste of flake a bitter, recent memory, kneels on the wood floor of his loft with light pouring in the windows. I am naked but for simple panties. He says that when he ties me naked, he’s taking me. We haven’t fucked, though our relationship is intensely sexual. He’s worth waiting for, this delicious man with his scorching eyes and knowing smirk. I want to obey the rules for him. I feel right when I take care of myself for him.
When Deacon returned from Africa, he sailed, and when he sailed, he knotted mast ropes and women. He’d been led to what Westerners called shibari. In its ancient form, it was the art of binding prisoners to maximize pain and humiliation. In its modern form, it is the art of patterning rope around a subject for an aesthetic—drawing the lengths around the body to create patterns, to press against erogenous zones, to provide a sexual partner with a compliant, accessible body. The black and white photographs of his work are erotic and sublime, and I knew as soon as he showed me them that I wanted to be part of it.
He puts my hands behind my back and begins. He handles me roughly, moving my body to tie it. There will be no suspension today. Just me, on the floor. It’s too soon to risk suspension. I’m not practiced enough. And he won’t put anything through my nipple rings until he’s sure I can stay still. He’s still keeping it simple—teaching me how to hold my hands, checking my reactions, my ability to take instruction, my commitment to safety.
&nbs
p; He touches me more than he ever has, and though I’d promised many men I’d be their fuckdoll, for the first time, I actually feel like one. My arms twist behind my back, hands clasping elbows, wrists facing away from the ropes, protected from the pressure. I’m to tell him if anything tingles or feels wrong, but so far, everything is exactly right.
He loops the rope around my ponytail, yanking it so the short rope can be tied to my ankles, and he’s done. I’m immobilized, calves to the floor, back arched, forced to look at the hooks in the ceiling from the pressure on the back of my head.
I’ve never been so aroused. From the tips of my toes to the beating of my heart, my tranquility vibrates with awakening. I feel him standing over me, cutting off the light.
“You doing all right?” he asks.
I open my eyes halfway. He’s down to his bare feet and trousers. Shirtless, magnificent Deacon. I can’t make words, but my smile answers in the affirmative. He kneels and puts his fingers to my lips. I part them, and he slides them in.
“I’ll gag you next time,” he says. “The cloth will go around the ropes.”
I wet his finger with my tongue. I usually have a ton of dirty talk at my disposal, but I’m so high from this, I can’t even speak.
“You’ll only be able to grunt, but I’ll understand you, kitten. You and I, we’re going to speak without speaking.”
Lightly, so very lightly, his fingers stroke inside my thigh. I feel my spit drying on them.
“I’m going to tie you and fuck you breathless.” He slides my panties aside and runs his finger along the length of my slit. “I’ve never seen a girl so wet. You really want to fuck.”
“I need it.” I whisper the only three words I have at the moment.
He gathers the wetness at my tingling opening and moistens me all over, asshole to clit. His pressure is perfect, delicate, gentle. He’s not trying to get me to come; he’s trying to get me turned on. He slides two fingers in my cunt so slowly, I feel my soul go to heaven.
