"The asking price is eight hundred dollars."
"Eight hundred? Seems a little steep, don't you think?"
"Are you kidding? At that price, I'm doing you a favor! I should be asking double that!"
A silvery laugh, high and feminine, and then the woman's voice, the one I didn't recognize. "Doing your bank account a favor, I'll warrant. Tell you what. I'll offer you four hundred and fifty dollars, right now, and we'll call it a deal."
I tested the bonds that held my wrists and ankles, keeping silent, as I strained to hear the muted voices through the thin wooden door.
Mark's voice again, sounding incredulous: "Four hundred and fifty dollars? That's highway robbery! I can't take a penny less than seven hundred!"
Yes, this was turning out to be one of the strangest days I'd ever had. And it had started so normally, too!
Mark got up out of bed before I did this morning; I didn't have anything on my schedule until ten o'clock, so I had the rare luxury of sleeping in. I didn't even get up to fix breakfast; by the time I finally crawled out of bed, he'd already left for work. I woke up late, with barely enough time to shower and dress before I had to rush out the door, and stopped dead in the kitchen when I saw that he'd left a note for me, propped up on the table. Usually, that can only mean one thing.
No, wait, better start back a little further. After all, there's a long story to how I ended up in the closet, pressed back amid all the clothes, blindfolded, with my wrists lashed to the bar above me, listening to my boyfriend haggling in the next room.
My name is Kimberly Ann, though to my friends I'm Kiki. I'm 26 years old, I'm a realtor, and the man on the other side of the closet door-the man who stripped me down to my bra and panties, bound me standing spreadeagle in the closet, and whispered in my ear exactly what he has planned for me this evening-is Mark, my boyfriend of the past eight months.
A year ago, I'd have been the last person in the world to suspect I'd ever find myself here, blindfolded and tied up in the closet. A year ago, I was still trying to figure out exactly who I was and what I wanted. I'd had a series of relationships, of course, most of them with decent enough guys, but... They all seemed to end the same way. A year or two into the relationship, I'd end up feeling vaguely bored, a little restless, a little dissatisfied; and from that point, the end was inevitable. It was like having an itch I could never seem to figure out how to scratch.
For a while, I wondered if I might even be a lesbian, but that didn't seem to fit quite right either. I never experimented with a female lover, party out of timidity and partly because I couldn't see myself actually getting it on with another woman. There is a certain irony in that, I'll admit...but that comes later.
In retrospect, the problem should have been obvious, really. My fantasy life has always been rich and varied and very, very strange, at least by the standards of the guys I dated. When I close my eyes and open my legs and let my hands slide over my body, I sometimes imagine myself being kidnapped by a mad scientist who would carry me into his secret laboratory, where he'd strap me to his table. I picture him leaning over me, smiling inscrutably, ignoring my screams and my struggles as he methodically cut my clothes from my body. When he had stripped me naked, he would unfold a set of steel stirrups from the end of his table, and cuff my ankles into them, spreading my legs wide. He'd pull on a long pair of surgical gloves, all the way up to his shoulders, and begin running his hands over the most intimate parts of my body, squeezing my breasts and sliding his gloved fingers inside of me...but detached, dispassionate, as if he were testing me, measuring me up for something. I'd feel myself getting wet, in spite of myself, as he probed and examined me, and see my wetness on his gloves when he withdrew his fingers.
Finally, when he'd spent a considerable amount of time probing and prodding and fondling me, and had satisfied himself that I was a suitable subject, he'd begin bringing out instruments and strange bits of machinery...large cups that fitted tightly over my breasts, with vacuum hoses attached; a startling array of dildos in various shapes and sizes, which he fitted to a large, squat machine that he wheeled into place between my legs; clamp and electrodes with bundles of wires leading off into even stranger machines. All this without saying a single word to me, without acknowledging me at all.
When he was finished setting up the machines, the experiments would begin. With the flick of a switch, the vacuum pumps would come to life, sucking on my breasts; a flick of another switch, and the machine between my legs would whir and hum and vibrate and suddenly thrust a dildo into my wet pussy, over and over again, relentlessly, mechanically. I would scream and cry out and throw myself helplessly against the straps that held me bound securely to the table, unable to stop the relentless assault of the dildo, as the equipment around me monitored and recorded my body's responses. Then, finally, no matter how hard I struggled, I would come, the machine ripping my orgasm from me; he would watch, and take notes in a notebook, as my back arched and my body spasmed in the throes of the unwanted orgasm.
Then he'd press another button and the dildo would withdraw. The front of the machine would rotate, selecting another, and shove it abruptly into me, and the process would begin again; the machine would violate me, thrusting the dildo in and out until it wrested another orgasm from me.
By this point in the fantasy, I'd usually be thoroughly soaked, pushing my fingers into myself or thrusting my hips against my favorite vibrator while I imagined the machine forcing orgasm after orgasm out of me, all under the detached eye of the mad scientist. I would sometimes fantasize that he would keep me there all night, until I was far beyond the point of exhaustion, no longer able to struggle against the machine as it ripped an endless series of orgasms out of my body, as he dutifully recorded every moan and every shudder in his notebook.
But I digress.
I never shared any of my sexual fantasies with my last boyfriend before Mark. It was an ill-fated relationship to begin with; our first argument came when he discovered my collection of vibrators, and tried to convince me to throw them all away because I didn't need them as long as I was with him. Honestly, I will never understand why some men feel so threatened by a few dollars' worth of plastic and some batteries. The final straw came when we were watching a TV show about sex one night; one of the people on the show was talking about bondage, and I thought it sounded like fun, and he thought it sounded like the sort of thing only a sicko or a pervert would like, and that was that.
So after that I determined to change my romantic life. I cut my long, flowing red hair short and spiky; I bought my first leather miniskirt; and I resolved not to date again until I'd found someone with interests and fantasies as weird as mine.
Which, I was sure, would keep me celibate for quite a long time.
Fate, as it turned out, had other plans. I met Mark on an online dating site about three months later. His profile listed "creative sex games" as one of his interests, I asked him about it, and...
Well, maybe that's a story for another time.
His interests and fantasies are as weird as mine, though, no doubt about it. Mark loves little more than inventing elaborate scenarios for us to play. He's become extraordinarily skilled at manipulating my sexual responses, creating sex games that tease and torment both of us so deliciously; every time I think he can't get more wonderfully devious, or push my buttons any more devilishly, he outdoes himself.
Mark can turn anything into a sex game. In fact, when we'd been talking by email and chat for a while and we had started thinking about talking on the phone, even giving me his phone number became a game-one that took an entire exhilarating, frustrating, intensely erotic day and a drive all over town to win.
But that's definitely a story for another time.
The story about how I ended up bound in the closet began early in our relationship. I had told him that I had been so bored with my previous partners that I'd begun to wonder if I was a lesbian, which amused him greatly. He made me change my sexual orientation to "bisexual" on all my online profiles, and would tease me whenever another woman would flirt with me online, running his hands over my body and sliding his fingers between my legs as he made me read their words out loud. It was very dirty and a bit scary and shockingly erotic all at once, and even though I couldn't actually see myself with another woman, the fantasy became a fun game in itself.
This morning started out as an ordinary Friday like any other. Mark was up and out before me, and had long since left by the time I got out of bed. I stumbled into the bathroom, showered, dressed, went into the kitchen to fix myself breakfast...