The Window

The rule was that she wouldn’t know when.

Iris had told Theo about the fantasy in March, at two in the morning, in the dark, because she couldn’t have said it with the lights on. Taken. Not asked. Grabbed off the street by someone she couldn’t see, driven somewhere she didn’t know, and kept: tied, used, owned, for a whole night, with no say in anything.

She’d expected him to laugh, or worse, to be careful with her for a week. Instead he went very quiet, and then said, “Tell me more.”

It took six weeks of conversations to get there. They wrote it out at the kitchen table on a legal pad, like a lease. Limits: no blood, no marks on her face, nothing on camera. Who: Theo, and one other person, someone she’d already met and trusted, though she wouldn’t know who until it happened. The safeword was lighthouse. If she was gagged, she’d drop the brass bell they’d put in her hand, and everything would stop instantly. She’d chosen the window herself: Any night in October. Don’t tell me which.

She signed the bottom of the page. Theo folded it into his wallet.

That was three weeks ago. It’s now October 24th, and she has spent twenty-four days jumping every time a car slows behind her.

---

Tonight it’s raining, and she’s walking home from the train with her keys laced between her fingers, thinking about nothing more dangerous than leftover pad thai, when a van pulls up beside her and the side door slides open.

She has time to think oh, and that’s all.

An arm closes around her waist from behind, another across her shoulders, and she’s lifted clean off her feet. A hood goes over her head, black cloth that smells of cedar, and the world disappears. She screams, a real scream, because her body doesn’t know about the legal pad, and a gloved hand presses over her mouth through the fabric.

“Quiet,” says a man’s voice, low and calm and unfamiliar. “Or I’ll make you quiet.”

Then she’s inside the van, on her knees on a hard rubber floor, and the door slams, and the van moves. Her wrists are pulled behind her and bound with something soft and strong, rope or cuffs, she can’t tell. Fingers pry her right fist open and press something small and cold into her palm, then fold her fingers shut around it.

The bell.

She knows its shape. She clutches it, and her heart is pounding so hard she can feel it in her throat, and somewhere under the fear, sudden and hot and shameful, she realizes she’s wet.

“Good,” says the voice, close to her ear. “Hold onto that. You’ll need it if you want to go home. You won’t want to.”

---

She loses track of the turns. Twenty minutes, maybe thirty. The van stops. She’s lifted out, carried up steps, through a door into warm air that smells of woodsmoke, and set down on her knees on a floor that feels like wooden boards under thick fabric.

Hands start undressing her.

They don’t hurry, and they don’t ask. Her coat comes off, then her sweater. Her wrists are released only long enough to strip the sweater over her head, hood and all, and then the hood goes straight back on and her wrists are bound again, behind her this time, tighter. Her boots, her jeans, her socks. When fingers hook into the waistband of her underwear she twists away instinctively, and a hand lands hard on her ass, a sharp, ringing slap that makes her yelp.

“No,” says the voice. “You don’t get to decide that anymore.”

The underwear comes off. Then her bra. Then she’s kneeling naked, hooded, wrists bound, bell clenched in her fist, and she can hear at least two people breathing in the room.

Someone fastens a collar around her throat. Heavy leather. A buckle cinched snug, and the cold click of a small padlock.

“That’s to remind you what you are,” says a second voice.

Theo.

Relief and humiliation hit her in the same moment, so hard she sways on her knees. Then a hand closes in her hair through the hood, gently but absolutely, and tips her head back.

“You’re going to be ours tonight,” Theo says. His voice is different, flat and unhurried, a voice she’s never heard him use. “You don’t speak unless you’re told to. You don’t come unless you’re told to. You hold that bell. Nod if you understand.”

She nods. Her thighs are slick.

“Good girl,” says the stranger. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

---

They put her on a padded bench, belly down, her bound wrists clipped to a ring at the far end so her arms are stretched out in front of her. Her knees are spread and strapped to the legs of the bench. She can’t close them. She can’t move at all.

Hands explore her. Two pairs, she can tell; one set is larger, calloused, rougher. They squeeze her breasts where they hang over the edge of the bench, roll her nipples hard between thumb and finger until she gasps into the hood. They stroke down her spine, cup her ass, slide between her spread thighs and find her soaked.

The stranger laughs softly. “Look at that. She’s dripping.”

“She’s been waiting three weeks,” says Theo.

“Three weeks. Poor thing.” Two thick fingers slide inside her without warning, and she cries out and clenches around them. “Tight, too.”

They play with her like a toy. Fingers in and out, slow, then fast, then stopping deep inside her while another hand slaps her ass until it burns. A thumb circles her clit in slow, maddening rings until her hips are bucking against the straps and she’s whining, close, so close, and then the hand goes away entirely and leaves her shuddering.

“Did anyone say you could come?” asks the stranger.

She shakes her head frantically.

“Then don’t.”

They do it again. And again. The rough hand works her clit while Theo’s fingers fill her, curling, pressing, until the pressure builds so high her vision whites out behind the hood, and then both stop at once. She sobs, her whole body straining toward a touch that isn’t coming, her sex clenching helplessly on nothing.

“Please,” she gasps, forgetting.

The slap is instant, a sharp sting across her pussy that makes her scream and then moan.

“You weren’t told to speak,” Theo says. “That’s one.”

She loses count of the edges. Six. Eight. They bring a wand, and its heavy thrumming vibration against her clit is so intense she bucks and wails. They hold it there until she’s teetering, then pull it away, and hold it a half inch from her so she can feel the buzz in the air but not the touch, and she cries in earnest, tears soaking the inside of the hood. Her fingers are white around the bell. She doesn’t drop it. She would rather die than drop it.

---

Then the bench creaks, and someone stands in front of her, and the hood is pulled up just to her nose, so her mouth is free but she still can’t see.

“Open,” says the stranger.

She opens her mouth. He pushes inside, thick and heavy on her tongue, and she takes him, her bound arms stretched out past him, collar tight at her throat. At the same moment Theo moves behind her, and she feels him nudge against her soaked entrance and push into her in one long, deep stroke.

She moans around the cock in her mouth, and the vibration makes the stranger groan.

They use her. There’s no other word for it. Theo’s hands are hard on her hips, thrusting deep and slow and then faster. The stranger’s hand fists in her hair through the hood, setting the pace of her mouth. She’s held, stretched, filled at both ends, nothing to do but take it, and it’s exactly the thing she said in the dark in March. It’s more than that. It’s so much more than she knew how to ask for.

She’s close again almost immediately, and she tries desperately to hold it back.

“She’s close,” the stranger says, breathless. “I can feel her shaking.”

“Not yet,” Theo growls, and slows to almost nothing. He moves inside her so slowly she can feel every inch, holding her right at the edge for so long that her thighs cramp and her whole body is one trembling, pleading nerve.

Then the stranger comes, deep in her throat, with a groan, and pulls back, and the hood drops down again. Theo grips her hips hard, drives into her harder, faster, and says in his own voice, suddenly, the voice she knows:

“Now, Iris. Come for us.”

She explodes. It tears through her in long, violent waves, her back arching, wrists yanking at the ring, her sex pulsing so hard around Theo that he comes with her, buried deep. The noise she makes is raw and endless, and through it all her fist is clenched around the bell, which never makes a sound.

---

Afterwards, they undo everything slowly.

The straps. The wrist cuffs, rubbed and kissed. The bell taken gently out of her cramped fingers. The hood comes off last, and she blinks in warm firelight in a cabin she’s never seen, and the stranger crouching in front of her with a blanket is Gabe, Theo’s oldest friend from college, who she has met perhaps nine times at barbecues, and who is looking at her with real tenderness.

“Hey,” he says. “You okay?”

She laughs, wetly. “You?”

“He asked. I said yes. You said yes too.” He wraps the blanket around her shoulders. “On a legal pad, I’m told.”

Theo pulls her into his lap on the sofa by the fire and holds her while she shakes. Gabe brings water and a plate of cheese and crackers and sits on the floor nearby. Nobody talks for a while. The rain hammers on the roof.

“The collar,” she says eventually, her fingers at her throat. The padlock is still there.

“Key’s on a chain,” Theo says, and lifts it from inside his shirt. “Whenever you want it off.”

She thinks about it. The fire crackles.

“Not yet,” she says, and closes her eyes.