A trigger warning. Although the acts in this story are consensual, there are mentions of rape, which could be disturbing to some readers.
*****
Liddy traced her finger over her clitoris, closing her eyes as she sank into her pillows, breathing deeply. Memories of the past weekend, spent naked in a snowy cabin in Vermont alone with Patrick, flooded her mind. She remembered his scruffy beard tickling her face as they kissed, giggling as he sucked melted chocolate from her nipple, crying out as he fucked her, tied to the bed...
She grinned. Their romantic weekend, a treat before Patrick had to go away for several weeks on business, had been a success. Although she was unaccustomed to being alone in their apartment, she didn't feel lonely at all as she relived their foray into her deepest fantasy.
Liddy had always been excited by vulnerability, before she even understood what it meant to feel that way. As a child, she volunteered to be the bad guy in any cops and robbers game, relishing how it felt to be tied to a chair, or to have her wrists clasped in plastic toy handcuffs. An irresponsible babysitter once let her stay up late, unsupervised, and she found herself transfixed by some TV movie where a red-haired woman was kidnapped and chained to a pipe. The tingly, breathy sensations she remembered from that scene made sense when, as a teenager, she realized she enjoyed it when her various boyfriends would pin her down or pull her hair during their sweaty explorations of each others' bodies.
In college, she lost her virginity to the boy next door-literally, they shared a wall of their dorm rooms-and then promptly moved on, searching for something that brought her more of a thrill, once he proved to be interested in little more than receiving blowjobs and fucking her in the missionary position. She bought a vibrator and taught herself to use it (hoping that the boyfriend could hear the buzzing through the wall), and began to seek out dominant men. However, most of the boys she met on campus were only interested in domination in a rape-y, frat boy kind of way. "I want someone to respect me as a woman and fuck me like a whore," she wrote in the online dating profile she eventually turned to. Yet although she received plenty of responses-some from condescending, narcissistic perverts and a rare few from polite, attractive older men-she was too cautious to risk meeting a stranger for sex, especially since she wanted to ask the stranger to restrain her and maybe hurt her. Liddy considered herself a feminist, and struggled to make peace with the paradox of wanting to submit to a man in the bedroom, despite her frustrations with how women were treated in general. Eventually, she gave up searching, hoping that she would one day trust a man enough to totally relinquish control. In the meantime, she resigned herself to exploring her darker fantasies only with her vibrator.
One such fantasy had come true this past weekend. As she reached for the vibe in her bedside table, Liddy relived the events that had brought her to the cabin in the woods. Circling her clit with her fingers as she switched the vibe on, she remembered the first time she met Patrick. She was a year out of college, and they'd matched on tinder after her most recent fling had ended. Patrick was six years older than her, taller than her, and well dressed, with curly brown hair, dark eyes framed with thick lashes, and-her weakness-strong arms. He took her for drinks in a kitchsy themed bar, then to an upscale whiskey bar with a view of the city. They made out on a park bench until Liddy agreed to break her rules and go home with him. She came twice that night, and at least twice every time since; he was the best (albeit vanilla) sex she'd ever had. He was attentive and caring, generous and respectful, and his cock was a thick seven inches, crooked in a way that made blowjobs delightful. They had sex every time they saw each other: on every surface of his apartment, drunk in a public park on a weekday evening, on top of a mountain after a hike. By the second month of their relationship, she was spending more nights at his place than hers, and in a year, she'd moved in officially.
A few months into their relationship, one lazy Sunday morning, Patrick was between Liddy's legs, eating her out. She ran her fingers through his hair, moaning softly as he licked her, writhing slowly against his face.
"Stop moving," he laughed, looking up at her, her juices coating his face from his nose to his chin.
She bit her lip. "Maybe you should tie me down, then."
His face clouded, and Liddy's heart began to beat faster. She trusted him, but Patrick had never expressed an interest in bondage, and although there were elements of domination and submission in their lovemaking, they had never explicitly discussed the dynamic. Patrick wiped his face, and came to join her at the head of his bed, taking her in his arms.
"Is that something you want?" he asked.
When she nodded, he explained that he'd been in a relationship once before with a girl who'd been raped, and she had asked him to hold her down and beat her. At her insistence, she had tried tentatively slapping her ass, which caused her to burst into tears and be inconsolable for the rest of the night. Patrick knew that Liddy had her own demons, and didn't want to provoke them. "I'm only interested in consensual sex," he said.
