CHAPTER 12
Ana
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“There is nothing in this room tonight that I have not shown you first.”
He had laid it out on my bed in the order he meant to use it. Cotton rope, new, still holding the coil it was sold in, and a folded black blindfold squared to the rope. Then the shears, then a filled glass and a towel, each a hand’s width from the last.
The lamp was turned to the wall, and the light came back off the paint and made everything on the coverlet look like exhibits.
Rain had come again after dark and hit the sealed glass hard enough to hear through it.
The room smelled of starched cotton, and under that the paper of the legal pads stacked by the bed.
I had walked down the corridor past the kitchen and knocked one knuckle against the pinned page as I went by. Behind me the wardrobe runner drew itself the last inch closed, and that small sound got further into me than the weather did.
He picked up the shears and held them flat on his palm. “The shears live on that table all night.” He turned his hand so I saw every edge. “You can reach them from anywhere on this bed.”
I squared my shoulders to him, which is what I do instead of stepping back. He is six foot three, and the iron at his temples was the only bright thing in that room.
“Before any of that,” I said. “In this room, am I a principal or am I a pet?”
He did not answer quickly, and I had not expected him to.
“In the corridor you are a principal,” he said. “I am a contractor with a duty of care.”
I let that sit where he had put it. “That is a job description and I asked you a question.” He started to answer and I went over the top of him, which I do only to correct a fact. “Give it to me as a sentence with me in the subject of it.”
He set the shears back down on the table before he answered. “In this room you are a woman I am borrowing authority from.” His hand stayed flat beside them. “I give it back at the end of every sentence.”
“Better,” I said. “Give me the third one and then we can start.”
The rain came at the glass in a burst and he let all of it go past. He had stopped a half-step short of me when he came in, and he had not moved since.
His eyes are very light and they did not leave my face. “You are not a pet. A pet cannot fire me, and you can fire me in the middle of any sentence in this building.”
Something came loose behind my sternum and my next breath came in two pieces.
“Ask me the rest of it now,” I said. “Ask it the way you were going to ask it.”
He had written the question down beforehand. I could hear the writing in it.
“Do you consent to being tied at the wrists and across the chest?” He waited for the whole of it to land. “Blindfolded, touched, kept from coming until I say the word.” He waited again. “And then fucked on this bed by me tonight.”
“I want your answer to the whole of that,” he said. “You do not get to answer the parts of it you like.”
“Yes to the rope, yes to the blindfold, and nothing at all over my mouth.”
“Nothing goes over your mouth tonight, or ever, by me,” he said. “Tell me the rule.”
“Rule Seven,” I said. “Any hour, to any of you, about anything.” My voice had gone quiet. “Everything ends, and no question comes after it.”
He took the brass casing off the table, put it into my right hand himself, and closed my fingers over it. He kept his hand around mine while he spoke. It was warm already, and it is always warm already.
“And if my hand opens and this falls, the same thing happens,” I said. I looked down at my own closed fist. “I do not have to find a word for it first.”
He held my hand shut a moment longer. “If that hand opens, everything in this room stops and nothing follows it, including a question.”
I took my clothes off and folded them over the chair. The card was in the left pocket where it lives, and I felt the torn corner through the cloth as I set the trousers down. The gray key stayed on its bootlace at my throat, and he worked around it all night without mentioning it.
He stood at the far end of the bolted frame, hands empty. “I am going to count down from three.” The rope was still coiled behind him. “On the last number I put my hands on you.”
He counted it down without hurrying the numbers and without softening any of them. My fingertips had gone cold before he reached the end, which is the order my body does things in.
He pulled the whole length of rope through his hands so I could watch it come off the coil. “I am going to take your wrists behind you.” He turned the rope once around his palm. “Crossed at the small of your back, left over right.” Then he waited. “Say yes to that exact thing before I touch you.”
“Yes,” I said. “Make it tight enough that I know it is there.” My voice went quieter again. “Tight enough that I know it when I stop paying attention.”
He named each wrap as he laid it instead of counting them.
Wrists first, crossed, the cotton biting and then settling just above my ass, then one wrap over my breasts and one under, laid so the rope framed my nipples and never crossed them.
His right hand pulled the tension out of the last turn, and the burned skin across the back of it went tight and shiny in the lamplight.
He held the blindfold up where I could see it.
“This goes on last.” He folded it once more against his thigh.
“Before it does I am going to give you the whole order out loud.” His voice stayed level, the one he uses for a floor plan.
“So the dark has a shape and you are not lying inside it guessing.”
“I am going to use my fingers, then my mouth, then myself, in that order.” He fitted the cloth over my eyes and tied it behind my head. “I will say each one before I do it.”
The room turned into sound. My heartbeat came up in both wrists under the rope and in the hinge of my jaw. The fitted sheet had been made into hospital corners by somebody who was not me, and I could feel the ridge of it along my calf.
The mattress took his weight beside my hip. “My fingers now.”
He put two fingers into my cunt slowly enough that I heard my breathing change before I felt all of them. His thumb found my clit and stayed there, patient and exact. The chest wrap pulled at me every time I tried for a bigger breath than the rope would allow.
His hand did not change pace. “You are wet enough that I can hear it.” The thumb kept its rhythm. “I am telling you so because you cannot see it.”
Then his hand was gone and there was nothing at all. I made a sound before I had decided to make one.
“You will not come until I have said the word, and I have not said it.”
His weight moved up the bed. “My mouth now.” He put his palm flat under my breast, over the lower wrap. “I am starting where the rope has been framing you all this time.” His breath came warm across the skin. “You have been thinking about that since I laid it.”
His mouth closed over one nipple and his teeth came in light. Then the other one. The rope did all the work of holding me still. He went down the bed and put his tongue on my clit, and he kept it there through the part where my hips came up off the mattress without being sent.
Then nothing. The rain had stopped and I could hear the fan in the comms room down the corridor, and my own pulse was louder than it.
He spoke from somewhere near my thigh. “If you come before the word, I stop where I am.” His hand rested on my knee and did nothing. “I open every knot, and the rest of tonight is water and talking.” Then the last of it, level. “I will not be angry with you and I will not be argued out of it.”
I believed him, and believing him is the entire technology of the thing.
His cock came against my clit and slid the length of my pussy, slick from all of it, and did not go in.
“My fingers, then my mouth, then myself.” He said it in the same voice as the first time.
“You have had the first two and you will not have the third until I decide it.” My thighs were shaking and I could not stop them, and he did not ask me to.
“Hold there.”
He turned me onto my back so my wrists were shut under my own weight, and got his forearm under my hips and lifted them off the bed. “I am going in now.” His hand spread flat on my thigh. “I will be slow for exactly as long as I decide to be slow.”
He went in slowly and then he stopped being slow. There was nothing in the dark but the rope, the ridge of that sheet, the brass shut inside my fist, and the sound he made against my ear, which was the only thing all night he did not announce first.
“Now.”
I came on his cock with my own knots under my back and my mouth open and no cloth anywhere near it. He came after me, quietly, his forehead against my shoulder and one hand fisted in the sheet beside my head.
“Perfect.”
He got his fingers under the lowest wrap. “I am going to open the knots in the exact order I made them.”
He meant backwards, the last knot first, and he said each one by name as it came loose. My right hand had not opened once. He put the glass to my mouth and made me drink all of it, and only then did he take the blindfold off, so the first thing I saw was his face and not the room.
He sat on the edge of the bed with the empty glass and turned it a quarter turn. “I put the shears on that table because a person who cannot see needs the way out first.” The shears had not moved. “You need it before the dark starts and not after.”
“I did the wrists before the chest because the wrists take the fear out of the arms.” He was looking at the coiled rope and not at me.
“The chest wrap is the one that changes how you breathe.” His burned hand turned over once at his side.
“I wanted your arms quiet already when that happened to you.”
“I laid the rope above and below and never across.” He gave the reasons in order. “I wanted my mouth there.” Then the second one, flatter. “Rope in the wrong place goes numb, and numb is not a thing you can agree to in advance.”