The second rubber band went around my right thigh, tied snug so it sank into the welt.
He tied my nipple clamps up to the ceiling, with my hair. Elastics, too, I guessed. The first time he pulled on the strings and released them, I screamed thinking he had snapped the clamps right off. But the pain didn’t dissipate, and he did it again. And again. I couldn’t comprehend that anything could hurt so much.
He caned my inner thighs. Tested one cane, thuddier; decided on a medium one, a little whippier. I gritted my teeth and made inelegant noises somewhere between grunts and howls, but I can take a caning like a champ.
My undoing was quick when he started to snap the bands on my thighs. Each bite was ten times worse than the last, chewing into its own welt in the same spot. I yanked my knees together instinctively, keening like a puppy, and he lit into me with the cane. “Keep your legs spread!”
Shaking, I forced myself to spread my knees. Six inches’ difference wasn’t helping anyway. “Please, Sir. I can’t,” I choked through tears.
“You don’t have a choice, little girl.”
I’ve never been in the habit of letting people call me “little girl” (nor, for that matter, of addressing men as “sir” — especially with a capital letter). From this alone you might deduce that we had departed normality, and were rapidly approaching a place where this man’s pleasure was my immediate and only concern. I clung to the paternalism in his address. I wanted to be his good little girl. If he was getting off on using his little girl, it wasn’t meaningless torture: he wasn’t going to kill me and dump my body behind the woodshed. Probably.
More pulling and snapping of the horrible nipple clamps. I sobbed uncontrollably. The stocking-covered hole through which I was breathing was wet, the hood humid. He leaned in to my face with a low murmur of appreciation, like he was feeding on my fear.
His fingers slid between my legs. “You’re wet,” he observed. And he was right: I was dripping on the chair. I could feel it slick on his fingers as he played with my labia. I was in so much pain that being turned on was the last thing that would have occurred to me.
He tied new bands near my knees, and one around my waist. To the last, he fastened one through my legs and arranged it over my now swollen clit. I threw myself into a new round of frantic begging and squirming, which only got me caned for my trouble.
“Let’s play a game,” he said. “You get to pick which band I snap. You have five seconds to choose. You can only pick the same one twice in a row. If you don’t choose, I hit you with the cane. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
I am such a disaster at this protocol business. “Yes, Sir. I understand you, Sir.”
He counted. “Five. Four.”
“Left knee,” I said reluctantly. Pain lanced across the tender, previously unassailed skin.
“Five.”
“Right knee.” I hissed as he snapped it.
“Five.” His voice was steely. Oh God oh God. “Left knee,” I said, knowing it would be awful on the previous mark, but not able to conscience going back to my thighs — or higher. “Oh! Right knee.” He snapped it particularly hard. “Fuck!”
I didn’t last a minute before I couldn’t bring myself to pick a band. Fresh tears were flowing unseen down my cheeks, sticking the tape hood to my face. He caned me across the thigh, counted to five again, struck me again.
“Pick, or I’ll keep caning you.”
“I would rather have the cane,” I sobbed.
He started laying down the cane harder, in sensitive areas — up the length of my thigh, into the crease, laying the tip across that fucking rubber band. Still he wouldn’t stop counting. I grew frantic. “I don’t like this game,” I pleaded.
“Oh, no?” His voice scared me. “Then we can play my game.”
He began snapping all the rubber bands at once, as hard and fast as he could.
I’d gotten myself into this mess weeks ago with flirtatious academic discussions, the sort that I jokingly deride as intellectual masturbation when I’m not, well, masturbating in front of my keyboard. Normally I have the good grace to be embarrassed about my “consensual non-consent” fantasies. That’s because I know the unpretty reality: trying not to choke on my own snot. Beforehand and afterward, it is unbearably exciting, but during, I would rather be somewhere (oh, God, anywhere) else.
Later I would notice I had bruised my arms struggling against the chair. I thought something in my synapses had short-circuited and the top of my head was going to pop off from the pain. When he paused I was babbling, incoherent. “Do you want to play my game?” he asked. “Or your game?”
I couldn’t understand what he meant. It was all his game.
He relented, possibly realizing I was not capable of high-level concepts like differentiating “right”, “left”, and body parts. We’d go over each of the rubber bands in turn and I would ask him to snap them. But I broke down again when we reached my waist. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t!”
His fingers hovered, stretching the elastic, above my clit. “But I want to,” he insisted. “I want to. Don’t you want me to have what I want?”
From somewhere I heard myself say the words he was prompting: “Please, Sir.” And he snapped it, a white pain like flashbulbs going off at the base of my skull, while I cried and cried.
He wound my hands into balls with electrical tape and unlocked them from behind me. “You can,” he said, “take off the nipple clamps now.” I thought this was a very generous assessment of my ability. Sniffling, I felt around them hesitantly with my balled hands. I’d been expecting something metal with a screw; these were long, and I couldn’t find a screw.
“How do I get these off, Sir?”
“Creativity and pluck,” he replied genially.
I was taking too long. He offered to take them off for me, in exchange for ten cane strokes to each thigh. I refused not on grounds of the caning but for fear of how he might choose to remove them.
Then I had my first stroke of luck: my thumb popped out of the tape. “Is this fair?”
“Go ahead.” He sounded amused. “I knew I should have used the leather mitts.”
Wiggling my hands out of the tape, I ran fingertips over my nipples gingerly. The mystery clamps were chopsticks, held together by more rubber bands, so tightly I could barely unwind them. I was not sure I could have pulled them off and left the nipple behind.
He locked my wrists back behind the chair.
“You know what happens now, don’t you?” he asked. He began rolling my nipples lightly between his fingers, hurting me without trying. “Ask me to put them back on.”
I begged. I could feel a fresh, hot flood of tears on my cheeks. “No, Sir, please.”
“But I want to,” he said, like a little kid.
And I cried, because I wanted to give him this but I didn’t have it in me. “I can’t ask you, Sir,” I said, defeated. “But I can’t stop you from doing it.”
One last twist and he released me. “That’s all,” he said. “We’re done.” It seemed like a cue to pull myself together, so I tried to quiet my sobs. It was hard to stop crying. Where I had gone, it was a long way back.
Holding my hair, he dragged me down to my knees. He cut just enough of the hood away that I could open my mouth.
