Backed Redux - Chapter 31

“Forget what the coffee commercials say,” Seth said as we made breakfast. “I maintain that the best part of waking up is morning sex and going back to sleep.”

After the morning we’d had, I was inclined to agree.

It had been more than two weeks since our initial sexual encounter and there hadn’t been a peep from Seth’s bedroom. Of course, I didn’t dare bring it up or ask for a next time lest I be put on an orgasm embargo. Instead, I’d made my own fun, either by myself or sexting with Chloe and Justin. There hadn’t been time that fit in all our schedules to get together again.

On this day, he’d snuck into my bedroom while it was still dark. Not much of an accomplishment now that the days were growing so short, but it was still earlier than I would have chosen to be awake. Especially on a weekend. I woke with a start to find his hand over my mouth. “I couldn’t sleep,” he said simply. As if that explained everything.

My eyes grew wide as I silently searched him for clues as to his intentions. We both slept naked so it was difficult to hide much, but I could see my baseball ballgag in his other hand. “Not a word,” he said as he saw me notice it. “And I’m going to make sure of it.” Seth removed his hand and I had just enough time to take a deep breath before he placed the gag in my mouth.

“Up on your knees,” he said. “Face the wall and put your hands behind your back.” I did so, kneeling up, and quickly felt handcuffs being snapped onto my wrists. He pulled me back so my butt was on my heels and my back was arched. I moaned as he grabbed and pinched each nipple in turn. He placed a clover clamp on my right nipple then pulled the chain around one of the poles of the headboard and attached the other one to my left nipple. Seth shoved me up against the headboard, my nose and forehead touching the wall.

He then grabbed a fistful of hair and wove a length of rope through it, tying it tight and drawing the extra down my back, securing it around the handcuff chain. The rope allowed very little slack and I was left to stare at the corner where wall met ceiling. I had some leeway if I moved my hands farther up my back but I couldn’t hold that position for long.

I felt Seth’s weight leave the bed and strained to see where he was, what he might be doing. He stood back a couple of feet to admire his handiwork before leaning in for a closer look. “Comfy?” he asked, grinning. I could see him from the corner of my eye, just inches from my ear.

I struggled to talk through the gag. No, I wasn’t fucking comfy. But there was nothing intelligible. I tried to use my eyes to plead with him, but they had no effect. “Shush now,” he said. “You’ll be screaming plenty in a minute.”

His latest toy was a dragontail he’d bought at the Festival, a long, thin strip of leather connected to a whip-like handle. I heard him crack it and flinched, but he hadn’t been aiming to hit me, just scare me. It worked.

The blows fell on my ass lightly at first, and slowly, but Seth quickly moved up in both intensity and volume. I tried to writhe, but the entire setup was an exercise in predicament bondage, and I continued to shriek as much as the gag would allow.

He stopped suddenly, releasing my hair and then my nipples. The relief was short lived, however, as he pulled my body back and pushed my face down on the mattress. He grabbed me by the hips and his now sizable and rock hard cock was in me seconds later. His body slapping against my already burning ass caused the perfect combination of pleasure and pain. I could think of nothing else.

I came, hard, while he was mid-stroke and was glad he hadn’t made me beg for the privilege. 

When he was done, he removed the gag before heading to the bathroom. I stretched my jaw and laid myself down to wait for him. He returned and lay down beside me stroking my hair. “You wore me out, girl,” he said. “Now I need a nap.” He pulled the covers up around us and closed his eyes.

“Sir?” I ventured.

“Shhhh,” he said.

Within minutes, I was back asleep too, on my side with my hands still pinned behind me. I don’t know how long we both slept, but when I opened my eyes, he was already looking over at me. “You do have the key to those, right?” he asked.

“That’s not funny,” I said.

“I laughed,” he said, grinning.

The arm I’d been sleeping on had fallen asleep and I sat up to revive it as he got up and left the room, presumably to find said key. The skin on my ass was screaming, and I looked forward to seeing the damage in the mirror. Strange thing about us masochists, I thought, that we enjoyed our marks so much. They were often like a badge of honor.

“Is this what you want?” he asked as he returned and held up the handcuff key. I had managed to stand up and was stretching as much as I could, even moving my shoulders back and forth in an effort to crack my back. My legs trembled as I tried to find my balance.

“Yes, Sir,” I said.

“I like this look on you though,” he said, still grinning.

“I can’t get much done like this,” I said. “Not even shower or get dressed.”

“Maybe I want to keep you as my very own naked slave girl,” he whispered in my ear.

“I think they would object to that at work,” I said.

“If only you had consented to be a 50s housewife, work wouldn’t be such a problem,” he said.

“I also have to pee,” I told him as I turned around. “Please?”

“Oh alright, there are other things I wanted to try with you today anyway,” he said and then slapped my ass one more time.

“Ow!” I shrieked. “What other things?”

“Not yet – after your shower,” he said as he removed the cuffs. “Now go. Just don’t get dressed when you’re done.”

I stared at him a second, searching for some type of explanation but none was forthcoming. Instead, he shooed me away. When I was done in the shower, I joined him in the living room where he was sitting on the couch watching television. I knelt in front of him.

Seth looked down at me proudly. The “good girl” was implied. But we quickly agreed that food was more important than protocol. As we gathered ingredients for pancakes and bacon and caffeine, he asked what I thought of objectification.

It was a tough subject for me. While it wasn’t something I was eager to do frequently or even regularly, I was still intrigued by it, if only because it was such a broad term and could be interpreted in so many different ways.

“It depends on what you mean,” I said. “I don’t want to be someone’s ashtray or toilet, but I think there are ways it could work.”

Seth looked at me quizzically. “I hadn’t thought of using a person as an ashtray before but now I want to start smoking again so I can do it,” he said.

“When did you smoke?” I asked. I’d never seen it and suddenly wished I had. Maybe it was all the old movies I watched, but it seemed there were certain people who were born to have a cigarette in their hands. The more I pictured it, the more I realized Seth was one of them.

“Long ago and far away,” he said simply.

“Right, well, despite cigars being all the rage lately, I’ve always been partial to being used as a table or footstool myself,” I said.

“Have you ever done it?” he asked.

“Very little,” I said. “I experimented a bit when I first entered the community by being a footstool but never had a chance to try it again.”

“Would you like to change that?” he asked. I did.

I found myself struck again by the odd turns our conversations sometimes took. While they were commonplace enough between us or amongst our kinky friends, I sometimes tried to hear these same conversations from the point of view of an outsider. How bizarre and utterly foreign we must sound. No wonder Alex and Claire didn’t ask more questions. 

“Do you think anyone ever expects to grow up and live this sort of life?” I asked. “I mean, what child says, ‘I’m going to grow up and be someone’s slave’?”

“They may not think in those types of specifics, but you’ve said that you knew you wanted to be tied up even as a little kid,” he said. 

It was true. I’d used my jump rope to tie myself to my swing set before I even knew it was weird. When I got strange looks from my mother, I had retreated to my bedroom and used sheets and pillowcases and eventually pantyhose instead. I’d been too young for it to be sexual at first – I just liked the tightness of it.  

“What about you?” I asked. “Did you always have a dominant personality? Like, even if you didn’t call it that, were you the leader of your friends group and all that?”

Seth thought for a moment, with no real expression that I could read. “I wouldn’t say that,” he said finally.

“No telling your friends what to do then?” I prodded.  

Seth returned to eating his pancakes. When he spoke again, it was softly as if he were reliving something very painful. It had been awhile since I’d seen his walls go up so obviously. “Quite the opposite actually,” he said. Pointing at himself with his fork, he added, “Computer geek, remember?”

I tried again to imagine Seth as a child. It had never been an image that came easily. He was one of those people who seemed to have always been an adult, largely because he rarely talked about his past at all. He’d revealed more during our cross-country drives than he ever had before and not much since.

But trying to imagine him as the stereotypical nerd, skinny and bespectacled, was even harder. He wore contacts now but surely that hadn’t always been the case. “You’re staring again,” he said as he gestured toward my plate. “Eat your breakfast.”

“What were you like at 10?” I pressed.

“I can’t imagine why that’s important,” he said.

“Were you in math club?” I asked. “Hanging out with the other nerds and their calculators just waiting for home computers to catch on?” I laughed a little at the idea. I must have been riding high in the afterglow of great sex, because it wasn’t like me to taunt him like that.

“Drop it, babe,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t trying to make fun of you.”

“You’d hardly be the first,” he said.

Now my heart broke for him. I’d endured plenty of teasing myself, not for anything specific but just because that’s the way kids are. They picked on anything that was different, from a difficult-to-pronounce last name to someone’s natural shyness. But the result was that I had mostly kept to myself and tried to stay off their radar. I hadn’t found any real popularity until I went off to college. And now I seemed to be unfairly taking it out on Seth.

“I’m really sorry – I’d never considered you like that,” I said. “And it’s a little difficult to imagine now.”

“Then maybe you should stop trying,” he said.

“Were you badly bullied?” I asked.

Seth froze for several seconds then took his fork and plate to the sink. “That’s a very modern term,” he said. “Nobody would have called it that then.”

“Whatever you call it, I want to say I’m sorry it happened to you,” I said.

“There are reasons I transformed myself,” he said. “There are reasons I learned to fight. Let’s leave it at that, alright?”

“Of course,” I said quietly.

“Now, clean these up and we’ll see about turning you into a footstool,” he said, then kissed me on the forehead and walked away. I stared after him for several seconds before I could move at all. I stared at the strong, confident man before me and wished that anyone who had ever been cruel to him could see him now. I wanted them to see what I saw and be ashamed of themselves. If we could get them together with the people who had teased or ignored me, all the better.

But when I rejoined him in the living room, he said, “This doesn’t seem like a natural thing to want.”

“Like the rest of what we do is so normal?” I asked. “Trust me, it’s a very powerful thing to literally be under someone else’s foot.”

“I’ve had plenty of people under my boots, doll,” he said. “But I never expected someone to actually want to be there.”

That was chilling. I had to wonder when I would fully come to terms with who he had been vs. who he was trying to be. Hearing him talk about it so bluntly was still jarring. “We don’t have to do it,” I said. “You were the one who brought it up.”

“I did,” he said. “But most of what we do flows out of some sort of need – I’m trying to teach you something or show you a different way of thinking. This doesn’t fit into that.”

I laughed aloud. “And what exactly were you trying to ‘teach’ me earlier this morning?” I asked.

“Well that was just good, clean fun,” he said with a wide smile. “We dominants are allowed to have fun too.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “You must be completely serious at all times or risk losing your dominate card.”

He lunged out of his seat and I barely had a chance to step back before he reached me. But I was closer to the wall than I realized and his hands were around my neck, knocking the wind out of me almost instantly. “Like this?” he said calmly. I nodded wordlessly. I didn’t think he wanted to hurt me, but it felt like he might have shoved me harder than he meant to. “I wouldn’t want to disappoint you.”

I searched his eyes, trying to decipher whether he was still being playful. Again, I couldn’t read him.  I simply shook my head no as he released me and pushed me back toward the couch. “Hands and knees then,” he said. I did as I was told, but he walked away toward my bedroom. He returned a minute later with my thick leather collar and duct tape. As he knelt down next to me, he said, “I’m pretty sure footstools aren’t supposed to talk.”

When he was done gagging me, he sat down on the couch and leaned down close to me with his elbows on his knees. “Also, when I say to let something go, you should do it.”

I made a mental note. So much for there not being a lesson here. He attached the leash and then sat up with it in his hand, apparently to be completely sure I wasn’t going anywhere. He stayed that way, feet on my back, until my phone rang half an hour later.

“Hello,” I heard Seth say. “No, she can’t talk right now. She’s … busy.” He hung up and looked down at me. “Later, you’ll think that was funny,” he said. But not only did I not think it was funny yet, I desperately needed to pee. I gestured toward the bathroom with my head and made as much noise as I could. He got the message.

“I’m pretty sure tables and footstools don’t do that either, but I’ll allow it this once,” he said with a wink. “As long as you crawl there and back.”

I rolled my eyes – once I was away from him, of course – and moved as fast as I could. For someone who had been reluctant to try this type of play, he had adjusted fast. “You’re lucky I didn’t cuff your ankles together too,” he called after me. In the bathroom, I finally had a chance to check out the damage to my ass from earlier in the morning. Sitting was definitely going to be problematic for the next day or so.

When I returned, he said he was going to give my knees a break and had me lie on my stomach instead. The position had its advantages. I even imagined I could fall asleep like that until he put one foot at the base of my neck. “Just so you don’t forget about me,” he said.

I couldn’t possibly.

While down there, however, I found I had plenty of time to think. The sound of the television became dull background noise as my mind wandered to something that had bothered me since the first play party we’d gone to. Angel had referred to me as a slave. Seth and I had used the word a few times since, but only as a joke. I still wasn’t convinced that it fit me.  I had never identified as a slave, never even wanted that title for myself. But I couldn’t help thinking that it was, in essence, what I had become.

I had long ago given up reading online discussions on the differences between being a submissive and a slave. All anyone seemed able to agree on was that slaves had fewer choices. Often it was said that they had given up the right to have any choices. But the discussions were often nauseating and always seemed to end up with someone playing “devil’s advocate” and asking, “but what if he makes you do something illegal?” In my mind, until it came to such matters, the differences were largely academic, as everyone’s dynamic was going to be different no matter how they labeled it.

But the one element that had popped up, again and again, was the notion that a slave was unable to say no, while a submissive could pick and choose which areas they relinquished their control of. So, while Seth hardly micro-managed me, our rules meant that I had essentially given up the right to refuse him anything. Thus far, he hadn’t ordered anything I wanted to refuse.

When Seth released me, I decided to tell him what I’d been thinking about.

“I have something to say first, Lu,” he answered. I nodded and he continued. “I’m sorry about earlier – I overreacted when you joked about having to always be serious.”

I was speechless. “… it’s okay,” I said. “I didn’t really think anything of it.”

“But I nearly lost control with you and that’s not acceptable,” he said.

And this was exactly why he was a good dominant, I thought. “Thank you,” I said sincerely. I was truly touched by the admission and wasn’t sure there was anything else to be said.

“Now what did you want to talk about?” he asked.

I almost couldn’t remember – my focus had shifted, and I was so overwhelmed by his apology that I had to scramble to recall what I’d spent the last hour thinking about. “Do you really think of me as your slave?” I asked finally.

“How else would I think of you?” he asked. He looked genuinely perplexed.

I explained my thought process to him. “Besides, if I’m a slave, wouldn’t you have to be a Master?” I asked. “I’m not comfortable with that word in general and I’m pretty sure I couldn’t refer to you that way.”

“Slow down,” he said. “I hope I’m not pretentious enough to call myself a Master.”

I cut him off there. “Not all Masters are pretentious.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” he said with a shrug. “Would you rather I thought of you as a submissive instead?”

“That’s just it,” I said. “I don’t know. I mean … I am basically a slave in practice, but I only just realized that and I’m not sure how I feel about it.”

“Stop trying to label it and carry on doing it then,” he said. “I don’t care what we call it.” His tone wasn’t nearly as harsh as his words. He honestly didn’t seem to care one way or another and I decided I didn’t either.

“Labels can bite me,” I said.
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“Good girl,” he answered.