This is my first submission in the BDSM category. I've always toyed around with the notion of trying to submit at least one story in each category, and since the inspiration for this one came out of the blue, I wrote it up quickly for submission. It's light and fun, so if you're looking for heavy BDSM, this one may not be for you.
As always, my stories are complete works of fiction, and all persons are of legal age. Your votes and comments are important to me, so after you read it, please share with me!
It was the week of Thanksgiving, and somehow both me and my wife had managed to get the entire week off. That wasn't so surprising, since we had both worked for the same company in Chicago for 15 years now. That's where we met - a city kid from the St. Paul, Minnesota area and a country girl from west Texas, arriving at the same company on their same first day of work, spending some nervous time as we ate lunch together on orientation day, and hitting it off well enough that we spent some time together later that evening. We were both a little worried about being alone in the big city. Certainly St. Paul wasn't small compared to many places, but Chicago was on an entirely different level. But for Elissa, her only semi-big city experience was her four years attending Texas Tech in Lubbock - which was nothing like Chicago at all.
We bonded over our nervousness in our new location, and before long, we were inseparable. Elissa was probably not a girl I would have considered dating in high school - or perhaps, she wasn't a girl that would have dated me. She seemed fairly straight-laced, bookish and reserved, and although she was very beautiful, I could tell that she hadn't really had a lot of dating experience, preferring to concentrate on her education instead. The fact that she was the valedictorian of her high school class wasn't based upon the small number of students that graduated with her. She was smart enough that she would have been a valedictorian in a much larger school.
I, on the other hand, was not the greatest student, at least until my father passed away the summer before my junior year in high school. I was an only child, and suddenly my mom and I were on our own. She had a heart-to-heart talk with me, and it stuck. From that point on, I began to repair the damage I had done to my education the first two years of high school. I got my grades up enough to be accepted into a community college and did well there, enabling me to transfer to a four-year school and graduate summa cum laude.
Elissa and I were good for each other. We seemed to click in many of the important ways a married couple should. We had planned to have children, but that just wasn't in the cards for us, and while we shared some very intense grief when we found out that news, in many ways it made us even closer together, as if it was just the two of us against the world. After nearly 15 years of marriage, I loved her even more today than I did when we exchanged vows with each other.
Normally when we visited her family in Texas for the holidays, we'd fly into Amarillo, where one of her family members would pick us up. I loved being with her family. After getting to know them, it was easy to see how Elissa turned out like she did. They quickly became my family as well, and even more so after my mom passed away five years ago after losing her battle with breast cancer.
But with the extra time off this year, we decided we'd make the drive ourselves, getting off the interstates and taking a couple of days to travel the back roads of America on our way to her hometown. Having our own car meant that Elissa would be able to show me the area where she grew up. And I knew it would be good for her, because it had been 19 years since she had lived here. I was looking forward to exploring with her.
It was late on the Sunday afternoon before Thanksgiving, and we were on the second day of our trip. We were getting closer to her hometown, and I could tell she was starting to get excited, seeing familiar landmarks she hadn't seen in many years. Her parents still lived on the farm where she grew up, and I'd been there enough times that I knew how to get there on my own. But a few miles before we were supposed to turn on the road to the farm, Elissa grabbed my arm.
"Jason! Turn here - I want to take a detour on the way home!"
I had no idea what we were going to see, but I could tell that she was excited, so I slowed the car quickly and turned right onto the road. We drove for a couple of miles before she pointed at something to me. I looked, and it seemed like it was a brick building with lots of windows. I figured out what she wanted to show me - it was the rural elementary school where she had started her education.
It was clear that the school had been abandoned many years ago. The grass was tall and unkempt around the building, and the gravel driveway was barely visible, covered by weeds. A few of the windows had been broken and covered up with plywood. The structure itself still looked solid, but neglect had created some issues that meant it wasn't fit for people to be inside.
I pulled into the driveway and Elissa bounded out of the car and headed straight toward the school, high-stepping through tall grass and weeds. She was dressed in what she called her "comfort clothes," which meant a simple button-up blouse and a medium-length denim skirt. I worried about her sandal-covered feet and bare legs being poked by stray sticks and burrs, but she didn't seem to mind. I could tell she was on a mission, and when she arrived at her destination, she turned to me with a big grin.
"Jason - come here! It's my first-grade classroom!"
I carefully made my way through the weeds to the window through which she was looking. I could tell the memories of her time here as a student were racing through her mind. I put my hand in hers and she squeezed it hard, as she often did when she was excited. She pointed out to me the approximate location where her desk was and made sure I saw the chalkboard that was still hanging on the wall where she had learned her first math equations and sentence structure.
She turned, and pulling on my arm, said, "C'mon, let's go see the back of the school!"
Elissa was not a big person, but as eagerly as she was pulling me behind her, you couldn't tell. The weeds we walked through to get to her first-grade classroom window were nothing compared to what we faced on the side of the school, but again, she was determined to see what she wanted to see.
When we got to the backside of the building, Elissa stopped suddenly. She dropped my hand and put both of her hands over her mouth. I looked to see what it was that had caught her attention and saw that we were looking at the school's playground. There were several pieces of equipment still standing, although most were in enough disrepair that they could not be used.
It looked like a small kid's dream playground at one time. There were a couple of wooden teeter-totters over an iron pipe frame, but the wood of the seats had been broken after being exposed to the harsh west Texas elements for so long. There was a swing set frame that at one time held six swings. But the swings were long gone, leaving the A-frame iron structure without usage. There was a tall metal slide, mounted on a ladder that looked to be 12-feet tall, but it too had suffered from rain and snow over the years, to the point that the slide itself was rusted, and would never again cradle a child's bottom as he or she slid down.
But none of those things were what caught Elissa's eyes. Instead, she headed straight for the jungle gym, a massive framework of iron bars located in the center of the playground. It had to have been at least twelve feet tall. The bars were held together by brackets so that a series of squares and cubes were created. The bottom layer of the jungle gym was the widest, with each taller layer recessed back until it got to a single cube at the top. We had a jungle gym like this on my elementary school playground, but its size paled in comparison to this monster.
Like a moth drawn to a flame, Elissa slowly walked to the jungle gym. Once there, she took her hand and ran it over one of the iron crossbars. It was obvious that this apparatus held special meaning to her, though being the nerdy, bookish student she was, I could not see her climbing on something like this.
She was still stroking the crossbar when I walked up beside her. She looked at me with a smile on her face and a blush on her cheeks that wasn't there a minute ago. I had no idea what to ask, so I waited until she volunteered.
"I spent a lot of time playing on this jungle gym, Jason."
Still struggling seeing her climbing on a piece of playground equipment that would now be banned from elementary playgrounds, I replied, "I can't see you as someone who would ever climb on one of these things."
She blushed even more, and with her head down, said, "I never did climb on it. This is a little embarrassing, but...well, it seems I spent a lot of my recess time being tied to it."
What the fuck did she just say? Tied to it? What kind of school lets kids tie each other up?
I was speechless, and Elissa could tell that her words shocked me, so she explained, "It's not what you think, Jason. I was not tied against my will. The reality was, I enjoyed it."
I still had nothing to say, but as I looked at Elissa, I could tell her mind had gone back to those simpler times, and she was reenacting those recess periods where she was tied to this very jungle gym.
I had to say something. "What did they use to tie you up? Did you just have random pieces of rope laying around in case someone needed to be tied to the jungle gym?"
Elissa giggled. "No, silly. Rope was plentiful. I know, they were jump ropes, to be used for jumping. But they were also perfect for tying someone up."
She could still see my concern, so she took my hand in hers again. "Jason, relax. It was just the games we played. We were young and we didn't have the experiences one gets growing up in a city with lots to do, so we made up our own games. We'd play Cowboys and Indians, or we'd play Spies, and if we needed an enemy that needed to be tied up to pay for their crimes, I was the one that would always volunteer."
I could see how something like that might happen, because kids always have imaginations for creating games with what they had. What surprised me was her reaction to these long-repressed memories being released in her mind, and the effect it was having on her now, at least 30 years removed from those innocent times. I'd never seen Elissa reacting to anything this way. I could tell she was going back to a place where there wasn't a care in the world, and she and her friends were enjoying the games they played.
