Curio Vignettes 03 Reversal Read Online Free PDF Page B

getting to my knees and palms. The strap of the cuffs twists, drawing my wrists a bit closer, a bit tighter. Now I see the items she’s chosen for tonight’s reversal—the smooth glass dildo and the smallest of my paddles. The last time we used either, my hands wielded them. I’m no stranger to being their target, but the idea tenses me more than it normally might. The city is watching tonight. No human gaze could chance upon me, not in this dim light and not so high above most of the neighboring windows. But Paris is watching. That great brick bully’s twinkling eyes are on me, witnesses to my powerlessness.
    My heart is a rock, my throat a length of cloth wrung dry and taut. A soft, slow hand strokes my back, and I sense Caroly reading my thoughts.
    “It’s a beautiful city.”
    “From afar, perhaps.”
    “It’s your home,” she tells me.
    No, I think. This building is my home. These walls are my entire world some days, the flat my island nation, its rooms familiar provinces, all of it suspended in a cold, chaotic sea—Paris. Paris, with no up or down or left or right, where I’ll be swept away and lost if not tethered, where I’ll drown. My lust withers to limp shame with those electric eyes blinking, staring. Mocking.
    That city is my jailer, but I love my cell so very much.
    I fidget, needing to feel the leather around my wrists. Captivity is as soothing as a blanket to a mind like mine. Paris has a willing prisoner in me. It’s Caroly who keeps digging tunnels, keeps sawing through my bars and inviting me to make my escape. Always her hand, reaching out.
    Everyone else is content simply to visit, to believe I’m happy as I am. To let me believe it. With their help I stayed locked inside for three years. With their help my tender feet grow blistered after two blocks’ journey, it’s been so long since I’ve laced them into shoes. Their love has turned me pale, left my eyes sensitive to the sunlight and made me forget what a garden smells like. They love my costume as much as I do. Only Caroly seems to prefer the naked actor trembling inside.
    She loves me best, I realize. And all at once, I sink with perfect surrender into my body.
    “Okay?” she asks.
    “Yes, I’m okay.” Take me out of my head, I want to beg. Let me suffer this vulnerability in my body, where everything is simpler, where misgivings morph to kinks.
    She shifts behind me, knees nudging my calves apart another inch or two. Her hands stroke my skin in perfect symmetry, seeming to memorize. The fins of my shoulder blades, the chute of my spine, muscles in my back that I can feel but never see. She kneads my hips, my thighs. The briefest, cruelest tease of a touch tells her my cock is still hard—some parts of me won’t be bullied by the disparaging nonsense that haunts my head, at least.
    Her hands round my hips to my ass, circling my flesh, tracing my cleft. I sigh when she grazes that most intimate spot. My arms shake and I drop to my elbows.
    “You like this, don’t you?” The cockiness has left her tone, and she wants reassurance she’s welcome to cross this line, and the next.
    “I do.” Her fingertips stroke up and down between my cheeks. I’ve done this any number of times over the years, with a generous handful of clients. But it’s different tonight. Caroly’s going somewhere I know she never expected she would, and it makes the act feel new to me as well. Everything feels new with her.
    “It’s intense,” I say, “but that’s good. It pulls me out of my head. Without numbing me, I mean.”
    She doesn’t reply, just keeps drawing her fingers up and down.
    Fuck me , I think. Dominate me. Push me so deep inside my own helplessness I find its pitch-black, frozen center; so deep it can’t hurt me anymore. “I’d love for you to do that to me,” I whisper.
    It’s the nudge she needed. She leaves me, shuffling to the other side of the bed, to the side table. I know that in a few breaths she’ll return with