[Her · The Woman]
That night, what J drew out of his canvas bag was nothing else but a coil of hemp rope. Coarse, yellowed, carrying the smell of dry hay and raw fiber. I laughed a little, thinking it was a joke. He didn’t laugh. He wound the rope twice around his palm, and the way he looked at me was so quiet it made my heart skip a beat.
“Turn around. Hands behind your back,” he said. His voice was soft, but it left me no room to refuse.
I hesitated. We had been together two years, and we had done plenty, but he had never looked at me like that. Behind the yard was a stretch of grassy slope where no one ever came; the night wind rustled the blades, and the moon overhead was thin as a film of water. I don’t know what came over me, but I actually put my hands behind my back.
[Him · J, the Sadistic Boyfriend]
The moment she obeyed, all my blood rushed downward. I had wanted this for a long time — not to hurt her, but to see her held completely in my hands. The hemp rope circled her slender white wrists; I tied a knot and pulled it tight. She hissed, and that sound bored into my ears, harder than any moan could make me.
She was tall, just past five foot seven, with a long length of leg below the waist. Ordinarily she looked so clean and composed in her clothes, but now, wrists bound behind her, shoulder blades jutting out, the whole line of her upper body changed — changed into something for me to do with as I pleased. From behind I pressed down on the back of her neck and slowly pushed her down.
[Her · The Woman]
My knees hit the ground first, then my face. One of his hands clamped the back of my neck and shoved my whole cheek down into the grass. Cool, prickling, wet with dew. The blade tips jabbed at my face, one by one, tiny stinging points. Instinctively I tried to struggle, but my hands were bound fast, and the moment I moved, the knot bit into my wrist bones, that little pain shooting up like electricity.
The strange thing was — I should have felt humiliated, should have felt absurdly wretched, kneeling on the grass with my rump in the air, my face buried in the dirt. Yet that little pain of the rope cutting in, that prickle of the grass against my face, seemed instead to flip some switch inside me. My skin suddenly turned so sensitive that even the wind brushing the fine hairs on the back of my neck made me shiver.
From behind, he lifted my skirt. The night wind poured in, and my bare lower body was abruptly exposed to the cold air. Flushed with shame, I wanted to clamp my legs shut, but the kneeling posture wouldn’t let me close them, so I could only stay open like that and let him look.
[Him · J, the Sadistic Boyfriend]
She was already wet. When I slid two fingers in, she was so drenched inside I could hear the wet sound. This woman, usually so unbearably reserved, bound like this by me, her face pressed into the dirt — yet her opening was clenching and unclenching, sucking at my fingers. That contrast nearly drove me out of my mind.
I took myself out, held it, and pressed against her. Her back arched into a bow, the rope drawing red marks across her wrists, marks stark and glaring in the moonlight. I wasted no more words; gripping her waist, I drove all the way in.
[Her · The Woman]
The instant he entered, I cried out. Not my usual throat-swallowed whimper, but an “Ahh—” that burst up from deep in my throat, long, trailing off at the end, startling even me.
Too deep. This position was too deep. Hands bound, face against the ground, I had nowhere to brace, nowhere to hide. Every thrust drove to the very bottom, the hard head shoving open the deepest place inside me. Because I couldn’t see, because I couldn’t move, all of my awareness shrank down to that one place below — I could feel with perfect clarity how hard he was, feel him withdraw to the opening and then ram fiercely back in, feel the tremor each time his belly slammed against the flesh of my rear.
Before, when we made love, half my mind was always elsewhere: worrying whether my expression looked good, whether the pose was pretty, whether I was being too wanton. Now all of that was gone. My hands taken from me, my face pinned down, there was nothing I could do but take it. And it was precisely that helplessness that made the pleasure purer, more overwhelming than ever before.
[Her · The Woman]
One wave of climax hadn’t receded before the next crashed over me. I never knew I could be like this — wave upon wave, with almost no breath between. My face rubbed back and forth in the grass, the green scent of crushed blades mixing with the smell of earth flooding my nose, and tears, at some point, had spilled out, wetting a small patch of grass beneath my cheek.
I heard myself begging. What for, I didn’t even know. “No more… it’s too much…” Yet my body was plainly pushing back to meet him, my hips slamming back again and again, the exact opposite of the words in my mouth. That shame of body and mind at odds did not sober me — it was fuel, feeding the fire hotter.
[Him · J, the Sadistic Boyfriend]
She was crying and begging me, but her rear kept pressing itself up against my hips. I knew she had come, once, and again — she was clamping down on me violently inside, contracting in waves, sucking me in tight. Her whole body shook: the wrists bound by rope, the cheek against the ground, the knees pressed to the earth, not one part of her was steady.
I held her waist and quickened the pace. Pubic bone slapping against her rear, smack, smack, smack, ringing clear in the silent night. Her cries climbed higher and higher, until at the end they became broken, incoherent sobs. The moment I burst inside her, I felt as if I had finally found something I had been searching for all along.
[Her · The Woman]
When he came inside me, I climaxed once more. The scalding rush poured into my deepest place, and my whole body went limp, my cheek burying itself completely in the grass — only my bound hands still tilted high behind my back, holding that humiliating shape.
Afterward he untied the rope for me; there were two deep-red welts on my wrists, burning and stinging. But looking at those welts, I felt an unspeakable, secret satisfaction in my heart. J gathered me into his arms and said against my ear, “This is a secret between the two of us.”
Leaning on his shoulder, gazing at that coil of hemp rope tossed on the grass, I suddenly understood: some doors, once pushed open, can never be closed again. And I — I seemed already to be waiting for the next time.