FOURTH KNOT
The tatami feels clean and dry. I’m sitting in the middle of it like a goddamn exhibit, barefoot and twitching.
My spine is too stiff, my hands are too loud, screaming for something to break through every still second I try to endure here.
I hate this kind of silence—not the one after a throat gets crushed or a gasp is collected, but this one, padded and controlled and patient, stretched all over me.
There’s shit hanging from the ceiling—black hooks, polished rings, rope coils lined up—and I can already picture what they’re for.
Hanging people. Hanging me. My skin crawls, but I don’t move.
I sit where Naoya told me to sit, jacket off, shoes off, body still humming with everything I haven’t hit in the last hour.
Naoya sits across from me, like this is a tea ceremony instead of whatever the fuck it really is. And then he speaks, soft and sharp all at once.
“Every time I see you, you’re bleeding. Today more than the last.”
I grin, show teeth.
“Killed four men earlier.”
I say it because I want to see what it does to him. I want to see something shift, anything. Disgust, fear, judgment, arousal—I don’t give a fuck what it is. I just want to make a dent. But Naoya just lets the words settle and studies me like I’m a case file he’s halfway through dissecting.
“Is that why you’re looking for silence?”
I snort.
“I’m not looking for silence. Just wanna get off.”
He nods once. Accepts it. As if that’s a perfectly reasonable thing for someone to want after killing four people. There’s no fucking lecture about right and wrong or violence or morality. I don’t even know what that’s supposed to feel like. It burns good anyway.
“I understand,” he says.
I don’t know if I believe him because no one understands. No one gets what it’s like to feel like this, like you’re a wire wrapped too tight, with everything under your skin boiling and you’d rather be ripped apart than keep standing still. But he says it with no irony. It feels weird.
“Before anything else,” he says, as if I just didn’t confess murder to him, “you need a safe word.”
I almost laugh. It’s not that I don’t know what that is—I’m not stupid, I’ve fucked around, I’ve heard about all this stuff—but because the way he says it makes it feel like it matters, like it’s really serious.
“Why? So I can beg you to stop once it gets too much?”
“No. So you don’t have to beg at all.”
And that does something to me. It doesn’t make me feel safer as it probably does to other people. It makes the itch worse. Because now I want to know what it feels like to actually use it. I want to find out how far I’d have to be pushed to say it out loud.
I want to know what he’d do if I didn’t.
Go on? Stop?
Try to break me?
“A safe word is not about weakness, Arakawa-san. It’s about the control you’ll have.
You say it, everything stops immediately.
That power is yours, always. No matter what we’re doing.
You can scream and cry and beg me to stop, and I won’t.
Unless you say the word. Then I do. Every time. Without fail.”
Scream. Cry. Beg.
Should I just kill him?
“So pick one. It can be anything as long isn’t something you’d say by accident. Not ‘stop’ or ‘no’ or ‘please.’ Something that stands out.”
I lean back on my hands, let the sting in my joints distract me for a second.
“Ghost,” I say, spitting the word just to make him stop staring at me like he’s waiting for something sacred to emerge from my mouth. “That good enough for you?”
He looks at me and his lips twitch. It pisses me off immediately, because I feel like I’ve said something stupid without knowing it. Well, fuck it. I don’t need to tell him it’s because he looked like one that first night—pale and fucking untouchable.
I glare at him and flex my fingers against the mat. I can feel my pulse in my knuckles, in my jaw, in the back of my throat. I want this to start already. I want him to stop talking and do whatever it is that makes people come to him to be tied up like animals.
“Now start doing the fucking thing already.”
“Then let’s begin,” he says, and I catch an amused flicker at the corner of his mouth once again. Faint, fleeting, almost nothing. It feels like I’ve given him a joke and he’s too polite to laugh.
He rises with that same smooth control that’s pissing me off more and more, then gestures for me to shift forward. He moves quietly, while I’m here vibrating, too close from tearing out of my own skin.
“You can keep the shirt on,” he says. “I’ll start with a single column.”
Whatever the fuck that means. I don’t ask.
I feel his hands on my wrist a second later, and that’s when something inside me stutters.
My muscles tense automatically, my fingers twitch, instinct flaring because my body’s wired to brace, to respond, to act when touched.
But this is not a punch or a slap. It’s not a body pressing down on mine, all sweat and urgency and the need to fuck or bleed or both.
It’s nothing like what I’m used to. His fingers move slowly, smooth, guiding my wrist into place, and I can feel how much he isn’t rushing.
He’s not groping, not pinning me down, not tearing anything open. He’s just arranging.
It fucks with my head.
The rope comes next, sliding across the skin of my wrist, looping once, then again, pulling tighter and making my breath hitch.
He moves with a quiet patience, looping, cinching, tucking the ends, and every motion is exact.
I don’t want to feel it, but I do. The pressure.
The pull. The heat blooming under the fibers.
It’s not pain—fuck, not even close to that.
It’s a kind of intimate control, and that’s what makes my jaw clench.
“Too tight?” he asks, and I nearly growl.
“No.”
“You sure? It shouldn’t cut off circulation—”
“I said no.”
He nods, checks one last time, then finishes the knot with a final pull.
Then he leans back.
“That’s it?” I snap, twisting my wrist, testing it. It holds, snug and warm and maddening. “What the fuck is this, beginner hour? Where’s the kink shit?”
Naoya meets my eyes, and his calm doesn’t waver.
“It’s your start.”
The only reason I don’t punch his face and tear this place down is because my wrist feels good. The rope feels good. I feel the beat of my own blood pulsing beneath it, and part of me wants to know what happens when he uses both arms.
“Do both,” I snap, pissed I have to ask instead of him just doing it.
Naoya doesn’t seem surprised at all. He moves behind me, and I feel his hands on the rope at my wrist again, fingers working the knot with this slow, fluid rhythm.
He grabs my other arm, positions it behind me, and I tense even though I’m trying not to.
He presses the arms together, wrist to wrist, and I feel the rope dragging, looping and pulling until both arms are bound, shoved back so tight I can’t move them.
It feels claustrophobic, like I’ve been locked into a new body.
My body strains instinctively, half-expecting pain to come next, but all that comes is stillness—tight, breathless, fucking terrifying stillness.
I can’t punch through it, can’t run from it, can’t fuck it out of my system.
I can only sit here with my arms folded back like a goddamn puppet and with my chest rising too fast.
He moves away once he’s done. That makes it worse, because now I’m left alone with it—this sensation of being held in place without violence and rage—and my brain starts spinning too fast.
Maybe Naoya’s trying to scare me. Maybe this whole thing is a trick, a slow-burn trap to freak me out until I storm out and never come back.
And fuck, it’s working.
Because I’m scared as hell right now. Not of this weird, thin man, but of the fact that I can’t get out of the hold and I know that.
Know it in a way I never have before. I’ve been tied too many times to count—gang shit, punishment shit, fucked-up threats or games or worse—but never like this.
Never this still. Never this precise. Never in a way that made me seriously believe I couldn’t get out.
This feels final. It feels like surrender, and I don’t do surrender.
I pull at it just to test. Nothing gives. Nothing. My shoulders strain, the muscles push, but the rope doesn’t move. It doesn’t shift. I can’t find an angle, can’t twist, can’t even shake loose the tension.
It’s perfect.
I hate it.
But I fucking love it.
My muscles twitch, not in protest yet, but because they don’t know what to do since there’s nothing to fight.
My body’s humming, nerves lit under the rope.
My brain’s snarling, calling this bullshit, telling me to move, to shout, to rip the ropes and the man and the whole fucking room apart.
But my body’s still and hard and aching and tuned to the pull of the rope in a way I don’t know how to explain.
I want to scream. I want to come. I want to punch a wall and fuck a stranger and fight a cop and shatter a bottle to make someone sing.
But all I do is sit here, arms wrenched back, cock hard and brain fried. I hate this. I want more. I want out. I want to see how far he’ll take me.
And Naoya hasn’t even said a word.