Fresh Girls & Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

could, but forced herself to lie still as he caressed her. She had made her decision by coming tonight, understanding fully what would happen to her if she did. Not like the first time, when she could not have known, when she had woken up the next morning in her own bed, drawn back the duvet, and seen what he had done to her body — this man who had touched the back of her hand so gently the night before when they met in the hotel lounge high above the city. “How sad you look,” he had said. “Do you feel like talking?” She would have brushed him off if he had not said that he had once worked as a counsellor; although she had not been in therapy since the break-up of her marriage years ago, she automatically trusted people in the helping professions, saw them as full of wisdom and good intention. Green candles had flickered on the tables and he had let her drink and talk and even cry about the pressures of her job and the hopelessness of her ongoing affair with a married man. “What’s that?” he had said then, grinning at her as she sniffed and wiped her eyes, “Is that a smile? Oh, I think so — right there, look, almost a smile, a little more, perfect!” And as they left for his apartment she had smiled dazzlingly through her tears.
    The next morning she had spent wrapped in her sweater, slumped on her living-room floor in front of the fireplace, in shock. But underneath there had even then pulsed a vein of excitement, remembering the flames reflected in the stranger’s green irises across the table, his oddly full, sensuous mouth. Remembering how at the instant she knew she was incapable of movement in his restraints, she had been stunned by how safe she felt in the absolute darkness of her life given over to another.
    Now he pulled her left arm back past her head, buckling a strap of leather around her wrist. She wrapped her fingers around the bedpost, felt the leather clamping on her other wrist. A momentary silence. Where was he? Standing above her? Was he waiting by the far wall with lamplight on his face, studying her? She tried to turn her wrists but they would not turn inside the restraints.
    Hands gripped her ankles, pulled them down. The slap of leather cuffs against bone, her legs stretched wide. Someone was breathing evenly in the room. She tried to move her limbs and couldn’t. When she turned her head towards her right wrist, pulling at the shoulder, she could feel the tension all the way down her left leg to where her ankle was strapped to the railing. She was spread like a star on the bed, the cool comforter under her and the wind flying across her body.
    Even as the fear increased, she felt a strange relief creeping in, that he was now in control of what would happen to her. She could not be held responsible for anything that happened next.
    She thrust her hips towards the ceiling, pressing her fingers together and trying to slide them back through the cuffs. She knew he liked to see her struggle. He was standing over her, breathing into her hair; she could feel his breath quicken with excitement, warmer than the air from the window. He tugged gently at her chin and then shoved a ball gag into her mouth, like a fist. She choked, panicked, forced herself to relax the muscles of her face. Leather straps ran down her chin and up her forehead; he lifted her head and started to buckle the straps underneath her hair. Pain clenched the base of her jaw as she held the ball between her teeth.
    Someone crying, salt in her mouth and the fabric of the blindfold moist and hot. Something rising from her chest and her shoulders like an ache, something being massaged out of her until gradually a part of her mind grew dark and sleepy, cradled like a baby inside the restraints. A chain was dragged across her stomach, and then she felt the clamps bite into both nipples. He tugged at the chain, it lifted from her body in a silver arc, and her nipples rose to meet his invisible hands. Someone was still crying.