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I look at her. She looks at me. The whip hangs loose at her side, coiled and patient, and her chin is up and her jaw is set and her eyes are doing the thing they always did when she’d made a decision and was daring the universe to argue with it. I know that look. I have never once, in the entire catastrophic history of my relationship with June Wilder, successfully argued my way past that look.
My cock is throbbing. My skull is throbbing. My knuckles look like I lost a fight with a belt sander.
On the television, Guy Fieri is standing in the parking lot of a place called Mama T’s Smoke Shack in rural Louisiana, and he’s holding a rack of ribs over his head like it’s the Olympic torch, and he’s screaming something that the closed captioning renders as “THIS IS A RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE,” and I think, yeah. Yeah, it is. Just not the good kind.
“If I let you tie me up again,” I say, and I hate every single word of that sentence, I hate the shape of it in my mouth, I hate that I’m saying it out loud in the presence of another human being, “you have to actually listen to me. You have to hear what I came here to say.”
“You’re not in a position to negotiate.”
“I’m standing up. I’m free. I could come at you.”
“You’re also holding your dick with both hands, and you look like you might cry.”
I look down. I am, at least, holding my dick with both hands. The moisture in my eyes isn’t tears, just repressed rage and frustration.
“Fine. I’ll let you tie me up if you promise to listen to me.”
“Fine,” she says, and she opens the bag from The Love Hole and extracts an assortment of things that make multiple parts of my anatomy throb in anticipatory terror.
“Just one thing,” I say, my eyes locked on a gruesome thing that carries a tag that labels it as “The Happy Maker.”
“Which is?”
“Just keep those toys away from my cock.”
“Fine.”
“And my asshole.”
A long, long moment’s hesitation. I don’t like it. Not at all.
“…fine.”
Chapter Six
June
I am New June.
I am responsible.
I am figuring my shit out.
I am slipping a gimp-style ballgag into my ex-boyfriend’s mouth.
I am ignoring the frustrated glare he is giving me — the glare that speaks louder than words — and I am withdrawing a frilly blindfold embroidered with giant erect cocks from The Love Hole bag and slipping it over his eyes.
I am solving problems.
“There,” I say, as I step back and look down at my handiwork while only a slight shiver of residual fear courses through my body. He’s cuffed, shackled, tied, helpless, and being around him only lightly touches those parts of me that still remember the terror he used to inspire with only a coldly calm word. I gave so much power to him, so much of my life, but now, right now, he’s just a man who’s had his head bashed by a lamp, his dick whipped, and he’s helplessly bound to my radiator; he’s not a problem anymore. He’s just a leather-wrapped, cock-covered decoration. “That’ll hold you.”
With a yawn, I’m reminded that it’s way later than my responsible bedtime, and if I want to get a start on the New June, New Life thing I have going on, I’ll need to get to bed. So I brush my teeth, floss, wash up, apply some skincare from the duffel bag of care left for me by the club’s ol’ ladies, and get back into bed.
I lay there for a while, tossing and turning. My body may be tired, but my mind’s still circling around the asshole chained to my radiator. My mind, and another part of me that’s still drawn to him that I absolutely wish wasn’t still drawn to him.
After fifteen fruitless minutes, I slip out of bed.
“This is all your fault,” I say to him — earning a mmmhph in reply — and I walk to the refrigerator, opening it up. I take out a bottle of Chardonnay — a responsible person’s wine, the stuff adults drink, and not bottom-shelf tequila or cinnamon whiskey with flecks of gold in it — and carry it back to bed with me.
