Despite all the cultural grandiosity of Florence, Jane and Debby, two American tourists who have been here for two days, already feel bored. Of course, the guys in this city are gorgeous and proactive, but they're just guys. What's the point of traveling across the ocean just to end up with the same uninspiring one-night stands? After lunch, boredom drives them away from the tourist routes and lands them randomly into some unremarkable old alleys where residents still air-dry clothes and sheets outside their windows and amateur opera singing echoes from wall to wall. The two fashionable women look out of place on this empty, sleepy path.
Jane, the older sister in her late 20s, tries to justify the trip. "Well, at least we're having some overdue sister bonding time."
"Lame. I'd prefer some bondage time," says Debby, diving her imagination into some unattainable scenarios. She's a college junior with a beautiful head always in the clouds.
"Not that stupid slave fantasy again. I told you men can't be trusted with power. They can hurt you bad even when your arms and legs are free. If you let them tie you up, you won't come out alive."
"I know the risks. But you know, it's like mountain climbing. It's risky as hell, right? But there're always crazy people who throw themselves at the fucking yetis."
"Those climbers definitely beat you in stupidity. I'll give you that."
"I just feel so restless right now. Here, feel my pulse." Debby extended her wrist to Jane to feel.
"This is weird. Your heart is trying like crazy to pump you up, but your face looks like you're falling asleep."
"Totally normal. This is what happens whenever I'm bored and overfed. Makes me feel lazy outside and restless inside, you know what I mean? I just want something done to me by somebody, anybody, without me having to make an effort."
"Effort is not your thing, I know. My guess? It's the spoiled favorite child syndrome."
"I know I'm spoiled. What're you gonna do? Spank me?"
"You wish... Hey, speaking of which..." At the end of a residential alley, they find themselves in front of a half-open door to a two-storage building seemingly open to the public. A small banner on the door says in both Italian and English, "Andrea's Kink Museum."
"Who puts a kink store next to people's houses? These naughty Italians. And why do they call it a 'museum?'"
"Only one way to find out." Jane pushes open the door.
"What are you doing?" Debby drags Jane's arm backward. "I'm not going in there! It's too awkward to look at dicks with you!"
"Well, do we have better things to do? Do you see an ice cream place around here? You like this stuff, but then you're too afraid to see it up close. That's not healthy."
"If those things are too explicit, they'll kill my fantasy."
"Good! One less thing to worry about."
Debby freezes at the doorway, not going in, but not quite ready to leave. She can't think of a legitimate reason to be afraid of the store, but her sixth sense tells her that something regrettable will happen. And it will.
"OK then, you can wait outside. It won't take me five minutes." Jane walks through the door by herself.
"Wait!" Debby catches up.
The inside is not what the sisters expected. It doesn't look like anything is for sale. No price tags, no counters, and no crowded merchandise. The room is well-lit with a natural-colored chandelier and filled with tasteful classical music. The items displayed on the wall or the shelves are definitely sexual in nature, but there is no sinful atmosphere designed to arouse your desire to buy them.
"This place gives me the creeps. It's too innocent," says Jane. Debby just stands still, a little too distracted to offer any descriptions of her feelings.
"Welcome!" An Italian man in his early 50s walks out from an inner room, holding a duster. He's well-dressed and well-mannered, like a noble's butler. He has wrinkled temples and gray hair, but you can tell that his body hasn't aged much, with little fat on that Renaissance-styled bone structure.
Fearing a potential conversation, Debby uses her normal line in a store, "we're just... browsing."
"I know. You came to the right place for browsing. But the admission is five euros each. Just put the bills in the collection box by the door."
"What?" Jane sounds offended. "We need to pay just to browse this shit?"
The man smiles. "Have you never been to a museum, young lady? You pay to browse. That's how museums survive."
"So, you're not selling this stuff?" asks Debby.
"I'm sorry. I know these are tempting. But they are my life-long collection from around the world. Most of them are difficult to restock. A few Japanese items are a hundred years old."
"In that case..." Jane is ready to politely back away.
"Jane, you have some cash, right?" Debby grabs Jane's purse and starts to search inside.
"Wait, you actually want to pay for this?"
"Just for cultural learning. And you said we had nothing else to do."
Satisfied with the 10 euros slipped into the collection box, the man smiles again. "My name is Andrea. Let me give you a tour. There are a lot of items here, and even more upstairs," he says while casually dusting a sex doll's surface in a caressing motion.
Debby is not surprised that this creepy doll molester is dying to mansplain how female genitals react to his gadgets. Just picturing how he goes through the different modes of a dildo with his low-pitched, accented voice makes her a little light-headed. A solid no. "That won't be necessary, sir. I'm pretty sure they're all self-explanatory."
"Why? For 10 damn euros, I want the full service," says Jane. "If you want privacy like a lady, how about you walk around by yourself and I get the tour?"
"Fine. I'll check out the top floor first." Debby quickly escapes upstairs and leaves Jane with the stranger. She lets out a sigh of relief.
But that relief has lasted a quarter second and soon morphs into a strange feeling of regret. Maybe she should've gone with whatever agenda Andrea had in mind. It's not every day she comes across a place like this, where the host, the toys, the warm air, and the boredom are all tingling and she is one consent away from some kind of sensual humiliation. She even starts to blame her sister. Of course, she wouldn't be able to afford the trip without Jane, but she really wishes she had come here by herself. If Jane weren't around safeguarding her, she might have followed the rehearsed path in her fantasies and surrendered to this strange man and his full room of devices.
Going upstairs only has only made things worse. Compared to the more "normal" lower floor, which is filled with mostly vibrators, dolls, costumes, and sensual pictures and sculptures, the upper floor is more like a literal replication of hell (which shouldn't be surprising since Andrea's deep eye sockets and high cheekbones do remind her of Satan). Half of the floor is for tools that cause pain. Debby naturally avoids looking at them because even imagining how they contact her skin is unbearable. She may be somewhat masochistic, but would never subject herself to pure evilness like tasers or binder clips. She is, however, hopelessly drawn to the other half of the floor, which is reserved for restriction devices.
"This is like heaven!" She has already forgotten about comparing the room to hell just a few seconds ago. She knew from porn that human bodies could be twisted into strange shapes for the sake of pleasure, but now seeing the demonstrations up close makes it much easier to imagine how she'd feel if fastened to those frames herself. Compared to the more "lenient" cages and chains, what fascinates Debby most are the devices that stretch one's limbs to such an extent that movement becomes virtually impossible. They basically turn a human being into a talking, if not gagged, piece of meat, free from all dignity and free will. How wonderful is that?
Some of these devices have complicated topological structures that are hard to figure out. But Andrea was considerate enough to install photographic demonstrations of a real model in each device, pretty much like what a museum would do. Debby wonders whether that lady is still in this house somewhere confined in a cage.
At this moment, Debby hears a burst of sharp laughter from downstairs. Apparently, Jane is appreciating some dirty jokes told by Andrea. "Uh. How can she still have an appetite for jokes in a place like this?"
The two sisters are fairly close and supportive of each other compared to most siblings, but they have lived in different cities since Jane started college seven years ago and often feel that they don't know each other that well. It's especially rare for them to talk about their deep-buried Freudian dark sides. Whenever Debby raised the kink topic, like she did earlier this afternoon, Jane always tried to lecture her out of it. But Debby doesn't believe that Jane is quite as conventional as she sounds. After all, they look almost the same apart from age differences.
After imagining herself in every set of shackles and fetters, a wave of nausea in Debby's stomach forces her to lean on the wall to stabilize herself. She starts to think that she can no longer prevent some twisted events from unfolding despite the presence of her protective sister. Her body is protesting so much that it's poised to win the fight against any social norms.
Finally, Debby hears the footsteps of Jane and Andrea approach. She's running out of time to find a way out of this precarious state.
"Are you OK, Debby?" asks Jane, who can tell from the loss of color on Debby's face that she is in some serious struggle. Jane herself, strangely enough, still talks in a smooth manner like in a normal family gathering.
"No worries. I'm just really humbled by human creativity when it comes to confining women."
"And men, sometimes," corrects Andrea. "So Miss Debby, which one is your favorite?"
Exactly the question Debby wants to answer. She walks over to a simple set of wooden shackles placed vertically and supported by four sturdy legs. "I really like this one." The three thick pieces of wood were cut in a way that when they are stacked on top of each other, they create three circle-shaped holes, a big one with the diameter of an average woman's waist and two smaller ones, higher than the big circle, with a diameter of her forearms. The three pieces are held together by two door axes on the left side and two latches on the right. The prisoner, likely a woman, would be locked in facing downward. Her upper body would be kept horizontal by the three circles, but her legs would keep vertical and stand on the ground. Her breasts would stick out more than usual because of the backwardly stretched arms.
"Good eye," says Andrea. "This one is a classic. Do you mind sharing what you think about it?"
Debby takes a deep breath and tries to speak in a scientific and indifferent tone, "Well, it keeps all the possible openings of a human body at the same altitude, convenient for another person's penetration." She can't believe she hasn't fainted after saying those lines out loud.
"And it's economic," adds Andrea. "Look at how much less space it costs compared to other devices. Since the confined person's feet would be on the ground, it doesn't require a platform to hold the body. Plus, it's simple. Not everyone has the patience to learn all the rope tricks."
