Rope

I thought we’d never get into rope, really.

Bryce is left-handed in a right-handed world.  He’s always coming home with bruises, or cutting himself in the kitchen.

Or maybe he’s not: when he hurts himself, it’s a big deal to me.

I didn’t expect him to be good at knots.

++

“I can’t do this!”  I said.

“What?” he asked.

“This! This weekend thing!  You have this big plan and you want to give me stuff and have me be happy with whatever it is!”

Later we laughed about it.  OMG! You’re trying to make me happy! TOO MUCH PRESSURE!!

For me, that is really pressure.  As a child, I was often punished for displaying emotions that didn’t go along with whatever agenda an adult was pushing that day, and as an adult I became passionately committed to my own emotional freedom.  When I feel like I’m expected to be happy, or be sad, or have or display any particular emotion, I get pushed back into that panicky, little person at the mercy of bigger people place.

Bryce has managed to arrange for our kids to be with a friend for a weekend…and I can’t handle it.

++

Pork dumplings fix everything.

We’re sitting in Mary Chung’s, an MIT hangout since time immemorial.  I remember the first time I went here — it was in another space across Mass Ave, smaller, darker, with dark red walls and linoleum tables.  I went with a high-school friend who doesn’t speak to me anymore. The space now is airy and bland with light grey walls, but the menu hasn’t changed since 1972, and that’s all that matters.

It isn’t time to go to the japanese baths yet.  ”Why don’t we go to Hubba Hubba?”

Hubba Hubba is our local kink purveyor.

It’s tacky.  It’s tacky and I adore it, the way you adore an old relative who will say any fucking thing to all the bullies in your family and then put their false teeth under the edge of their plate at a restaurant and think that hides it while they try to keep the peas from rolling off the now very tilted plate.

People are always asking me: “Where did you grow up?”  They’re surprised when they hear the answer:  I live less than fifteen miles from where I was born, and except for one short stint, I’ve never lived anywhere else.  ”But you don’t have an accent!” they say.

No, I don’t.  I used to have an extraordinarily thick working-class Boston accent, and I got rid of it to have a career.  I sound like a midwestern television news anchor now.

When I first went to Mary Chung’s, this neighborhood was run-down, and dangerous at night.  I remember passing by Hubba Hubba and not even daring to look at the window.

Now I go in like it’s nothing.  That girl, the one with the thick accent, she’s long gone.

++

Bryce has an unusual superpower.  Call him Mister Regular.

He can go to any shop or restaurant — anywhere, really — only once or twice, and he hypnotizes people into thinking he’s a regular there.

So of course, Hubba Hubba’s owner treats him like a regular.  They hang out by the counter and shoot the shit, talking about remote egg vibrators and how they’re almost single use they’re so flimsily constructed.

I drift around.  Cute panties!  Oh, I love those.  Where’s the things that go ouch?

When Bryce is finished with his discussion I hand him a pair of panties — black boyshorts with little clusters of red cherries on them, while he makes his own purchases.  I’m standing around when I see it.   A little braided hank of rope in the clearance section.

++

Someday I’ll give a presentation and it’ll be a punchline.  ”It spoke to me.  It said ‘Lily, take me hoooome!’”  I’ll even have a little hank of rope like a little mouth, talking.

But it did.  It wanted to go home with me, this rope.  And it wasn’t funny.  It was a little eerie, actually.

I know better than to ignore these things now.  I ran up to Bryce.  ”This too!”

“This too,” he said, indulgently.

++

The japanese baths put salt in the water, making it buoyant.

We both love this place and we don’t want to get kicked out or worse yet, banned.

So when we have sex I brace my hands against the door of the private tub room, and Bryce fucks me from behind while I bite my lip, hard. Harder.

++

Everything’s on YouTube.

My kids have never heard of I Love Lucy, or seen the moon landing, or know about Dr. Martin Luther King.  But YouTube has all that and funny cats.

It also has a video of the basic japanese rope shackle.

++

My first shibari victim is a child’s chair from IKEA.  It screams like a little bitch.  ”I bet you regret those inscrutable instructions now, don’t you, slut!”

++

I show Bryce.  Look! I have subdued a chair!

I buy a book.

I buy some more rope.

++

“Can I borrow that book?”  Bryce says.

++

“I’ll be ready for you at ten-thirty,” Bryce says.

++

He flips the rope around in his hand, twists it.  Instantly a loop is around my wrist, and in seconds it’s tied off to the bed.

Maybe he has more than one superpower.

++

“There’s not enough rope,” Bryce says.

“The supermarket probably isn’t open now, right?”

Bryce looks at his watch.  ”Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

++

I figure what he’s doing isn’t going to be a scene — it’s going to be practice, right?  I ask him if I can listen to something while he practices, and put on a podcast.  I also find a video of a shibari performance — who knew there was such a thing, but there is — people do rope demonstrations in public, to music, as a spectator sport.  My laptop is sitting on my stomach, and if I don’t like the volume levels, too damn bad, because now he’s got two wrists tied off.

++

I forget how we got to the clothespins, but he used all the ones he had left, up and down my torso.

++

It was definitely me who suggested the wax.

++

I haven’t counted, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find that we have twenty candles in the bedroom and use most of them when we’re having sex.  Lighting them is part of the prescene ritual.  There are enough of them that it’s quite easy to read when they’re lit.

They produce plenty of liquid wax.

++

You know, it’s just not the same when you can get away.

++

Now that I can’t get away, the wax is hotter and the clothespins sharper.  It’s better and deeper and although my laptop is still on my stomach — is there wax on it? — wait…is it still there?

Time stops.  Liquid moment pours out.

++

When did he get naked?

“Let me see,” I say.  I lick it.  He pours more wax in a line down my chest, and it rolls down my body onto the tender scar tissue below my ribcage.  It doesn’t feel the same there — it tingles and feels cold and I arch against the ropes, but I don’t care.  I just suck his cock.

Everything feels amazing.