Table of Contents
To SAM
Do not consider painful what is good for you.
—EURIPIDES
Many of us spend our whole lives running from feeling with the mistaken belief that you cannot bear the pain. But you have already borne the pain. What you have not done is feel all you are beyond the pain.
—BARTHOLOMEW
Acknowledgments
I’m forever bound in gratitude to Violet Blue, Eliza Castle, Mike Ostrowski, Barbara Pizio, Thomas S. Roche, Kerri Sharp, Rachel Kramer Bussel, and of course the ever-remarkable Felice Newman and Frédérique Delacoste.
Introduction
Alison Tyler
I’ve always been into bondage. I just didn’t know it at first. Or, at least, I didn’t have the vocabulary to explain the cravings that surged through me. I couldn’t have discerned the letters B/D or S/M from the rest of the ABCs. Yet from the beginning, I understood there was something different about my desires. While friends fantasized about French-kissing the celebrities of their dreams, I imagined being tied up by the stars of mine. And the celebs we admired never seemed to overlap. The tittering teenyboppers in my high school postered their bedroom walls with pictures of pretty boys—Jon Bon Jovi. Sting. Simon Le Bon—while I yearned for men, men who looked like they wouldn’t be put off by the things that turned me on. Older men. Rugged me. Dirty men. My giggling girlfriends nursed crushes on Tom Cruise circa
The Firm.
I kept it quiet that I would rather find myself bound tightly for Gene Hackman, star of the very same movie.
You see, from the start I wanted to be held in place, captured, made to stay still.
My first serious boyfriend understood what I required.
Maybe I was sending out silent signals. Maybe I just look like the sort of girl who needs a bit of old-fashioned discipline in her life. I didn’t have to make the first move. He took charge from our very first date. When he kissed me outside my front door, he anchored me in place by gripping firmly on to my long, midnight-black ponytail and biting hard into my full bottom lip. When he fucked me, he held my slender wrists over my head, so that I couldn’t go anywhere. And when we moved past those innocent first baby bondage steps, he used gleaming metal cuffs, his old leather belts, or diamond-patterned silk thrift-store ties that he owned for no other purpose than keeping me in my place. (He wasn’t exactly a tie-wearing sort of guy.)
Even more important than the toys he owned were the words he possessed. He knew the magic of making me call him Sir or Daddy, as in “Yes, Sir, whatever you say, Sir.” And “Sorry, Daddy. I didn’t mean to be such a bad girl.” He punished me for my endless infractions—and I misbehaved in order to win his wrath. We made a perfect team: kinky and connected.
He read me. He understood. Without me having to ask, he knew.
When we were out in public, he didn’t need words to make me toe the line. He had bindings that kept me in my place and at his side, invisible bindings that others might not have been able to see—but I could. I could feel them as intensely as I could feel his strong hand grasped around my glossy, shoulder-length hair, or his ties tight on my teenage wrists, or his cold metal cuffs binding me to his bed.
The authors in this collection will bind you to their stories with invisible ties, as well. Rakelle Valencia’s “Buckle Fucker” takes you right up onto the back of a bucking bronco before roping you down to a bed for just as powerful a session between the cheap motel sheets. In “Her Beautiful Long
Black Overcoat,”
Clean Sheets
editor Bill Noble visits an S/M club in San Francisco with his girlfriend and her dominant Republican lover, where the tension couldn’t be tighter or the scene more explosive. Elaine Miller gives a whole new meaning to being a team player in the lesbian three-way tale “Be a Good Sport.” The extremely talented Marilyn Jaye Lewis’s powerful foray into the mind of a cheating wife in “Dinner at Eight” will leave you as breathlessly lustful as the wine-swigging main character herself. And Tom Piccirilli’s mesmerizing tale of two lonely singles in “It Ain’t Always Easy” teaches several important lessons—including the fact that you should always know where you left the handcuff key before you begin to play!
From start to finish, these bondage-inspired stories are luscious, naughty, and infinitely sexy. And I promise you this: they’ll definitely have you bound to your chair and begging for more.
Alison Tyler
San Francisco
May 2005
All Tied Down
Ayre Riley
“Let’s try it, Gracie,” Gabriel whispered to me, his face pressed against my long auburn hair, his strong arms holding me tight. “We can stop any time you want. We won’t have to do anything more than that—”
He wanted to tie me down. Just tie me down and fuck me. No chains. No whips. Nothing scary. His voice was both patient and hesitant, as if he were scared that I might not agree, but he needn’t have worried. I’ve always been into playing with new ideas. I had no problem with doing it outdoors, fucking in the back of his shiny black pickup truck after a rock concert at the Greek Amphitheater, going down on him on the aerial ride at the amusement park at the beach, the little blue metal car swinging and swaying with our raucous movements. And even though I’d never told him about my fantasies—well, deep down, I’d always wanted to play a little more kinky. Or a
lot
more kinky. Even if I never told
anyone
, I’d always had these urges that went unfulfilled by all of my past good-guy boyfriends.
“Are you game, Gracie?” Gabriel asked me, his arms
around my trim waist, pulling me even closer to his muscular body in a spoon embrace. “Are you, baby?”
I rolled out of his grip to look over at him, and I realized as I stared at his gentle, yearning expression that I’ve always been with the good guys. You know how some girls always go for the bad boys? The ones who treat them cruelly, who don’t call when they say they will, who don’t act like gentlemen in any manner of speaking? I’ve never fallen for that type. The Mickey Rourke type. The Colin Farrell type. Unlike many of my friends, I never saw the appeal in dating a guy who could only think about racing motorcycles and wearing well-worn leather. I never yearned for rough whiskers and whiskey breath. But in the back of my head, I always wondered,
did it take a bad boy to give me what I craved?
Would it take going in for that sort of sickly twisted relationship in order to get what I needed? I hoped not. That’s all I could do—just hope.
I never mentioned my sexual daydreams to Gabriel. I liked him too much, and I was scared I’d frighten him off if he ever saw the real me, the one I carefully concealed from everyone else: parents, teachers, girlfriends. But now,
he
was the one bringing up the concept. He was the one saying that he wanted to tie me down. Just tie me down and fuck me. Nothing scary. So why not? Why would I say no to something that he promised would bring me great pleasure?
And he was right—it did.
Being tied to the mattress was divine. I lay in the center of the bed, my wrists over my head, my ankles spread wide apart. Gabriel used his own expensive work ties to fasten my trembling limbs, and when I turned my head I saw that for my wrists he’d chosen a tie I’d given him for the previous Valentine’s Day: a navy blue one decorated with miniature crimson hearts. That made me smile and relax. Yes, we were dabbling in bondage, but this was my sweetheart, my one-and-only. Even when tying me down, he played nice.
He took a moment to look at me, and I could tell that he was admiring my naked form bound for his own personal pleasure. When he was ready, he climbed onto the bed and used his tongue to trace pretty pictures up and over my clit. He took his time, moving away from me when I was desperate for him to let me climax. Only giving in when he was good and ready.
But he didn’t want to stop there.
“You liked that, right?” he asked, his sex-glazed mouth so close to my ear that his breath warmed my skin. “Didn’t you, Gracie?”
I nodded, my whole body still alive and tingling with pleasure. “Yeah, I did.” Being bound was even better than I’d pictured; better than I’d fantasized about alone, my fingers moving quickly and making their magic circles up and over my clit, up and over, until it happened. In my head, I hadn’t understood the power of being powerless. Now, I was starting to figure everything out.
“So let’s take things up a notch.”
“Meaning?”
“You tell me, Gracie. What would that mean to you? What visions does that idea conjure up for you?”
I closed my eyes, trying to guess what he expected me to say, trying to read his fantasies solely from the way he was asking the question. What would a good boy like Gabriel fantasize about? What would an all-American guy like my sandy-haired boyfriend think was pushing the edge? Gabriel’s a devoted son with an upstanding job. He’s a man who’s never once forgotten my birthday, or our anniversary, or any special occasion at all. He’s even bought me gifts on St. Patrick’s Day. What would
he
consider kinky? I was already tied down—and he had ravaged me without me being able to do anything about it. Not that I’d wanted to do anything about it. He’d started by kissing my lips, letting me return his passion beat
for beat, and then he’d moved slowly down, working his way along my entire body until he had reached that place between my legs, the place so desperate to feel the wetness of his kisses, and—well, what could be better than that?
“Blindfold,” he suggested, breaking into my thoughts. “A blindfold, Gracie?”
So, yeah, as soon as he said the word, I thought that I should have known to say it myself. I’ve spent many pleasurable hours imagining the appeal in the abandonment of a sense, picturing how it would feel not to know where he was going to go next, what he was going to do, when he was going to fuck me.
“Sure,” I said, trying not to sound as excited as I really was. I didn’t want to spoil the effort he’d put into creating this exotic encounter. Would he possibly think less of me if he knew that sometimes, just
sometimes
, I take one of my expensive silk scarves, the ones I wear when I go to out-of-town conventions, and blindfold myself before allowing myself to come? I close my eyes tightly under the slippery fabric and pretend that Gabriel is the one placing the blindfold over my eyes, that he is the one plunging my world into darkness.
“Really?” Gabriel asked.
“Yeah,” I said slowly, “that would be okay.”
I was still agreeing when he brought the purple velvet blindfold out of the dresser drawer and held it up for me to see before positioning it over my eyes and fastening the back beneath my heavy hair. I had only long enough to realize that he’d gone out and purchased this particular toy for our use, that he’d planned this event for me, that it wasn’t in the least bit spontaneous—and then we started again, with Gabriel kissing me all over, alternating the places he paid attention to and the pressure of his kisses, so I had no concept of what to expect. His mouth was wet and open, and I shivered at every connection of that wet heat with my naked skin.