Thank you to my beta readers Mal_Bey and 29wordsforsnow for their suggestions and corrections
Real bondage play is best conducted between two partners who know and trust each other and have fully discussed their desires and limits before the session begins. The fantasy of erotica, however, allows us to daydream doing which might be really bad ideas if attempted in real life...
1. The Shop
Rhonda was at the end of a bullshit day. She was in medical equipment purchasing, but that affected only the specific details the bullshit not the overall shape. Those would be familiar to every white-collar worker in the country: the weekly meeting that never begins on time, the e-mail chain that never ends, the memo that never nails down the point, the colleague who never responds, the client who never gives up, your predecessor's fuck-up, your boss' slow motion car crash, the broken printer, the broken coffee machine, the broken promises -- bullshit, all of it, and all of it seeming happening all at once today. For bonus points, she'd also had the extra bullshit resulting from being a woman in a male dominated field, and, while she tried to see the best in people, she couldn't help but wonder if some of the animosity from one of the clients today had been more related to the colour of her skin than the specifics of her job.
It was a bullshit Friday, which, while not necessarily worse than a bullshit Monday, always wound Rhonda up more other days because she was constantly on edge that each fresh load of BS would delay the start of the weekend. So indeed it had proved, with her being hit with the inevitable 4:55 crisis just as she was packing up to go. It was now half-past seven, raining, and she'd forgotten her umbrella. That was annoying but she couldn't count it as bullshit, because it was solely on her. She'd heard Suzanne Charlton say very clearly that it was going to be pissing it down on the breakfast news this morning. They'd even had those fancy computer graphics with the miniature thunderstorms flashing all over the bloody country, and she'd still left without a brolly. Her hair, her smart business clothes and her tights were all half-soaked. Her left leg was completely soaked, her heel having landed badly in a rapidly deepening puddle as she crossed the road.
She scanned the numbers of the buses already waiting to pick up passengers and saw the thirty-seven just as it pulled away. That wasn't so much bullshit as proof that the whole universe had a grudge against her. There was limited spaces under the protection of the bus shelter and she didn't feel much like squeezing in under there for the twenty-five minutes she'd have to wait for the next one. There had to be somewhere drier. She considered her options. There was that All-You-Can-Eat Chinese buffet over the road, although according to her latest diet it was really a Nothing-You-Should-Eat restaurant. She could go round the corner and pick up a few items from the Afro-Caribbean shop. Her cupboards were practically bare, and, if the kids hadn't been staying with her mother, she would have considered it an obligation. But by the time she got there and back, she'd have missed the bus again, no doubt, and be back in exactly the same situation. It would be better to stay closer to the stop. There was a newsagent and she could stand there flipping through the latest celebrity gossip until her brain dribbled out of her ears, but the apparent success of Posh and Beck's relationship was hardly going to make her feel better about her own failed marriage.
Her new Nokia phone beeped. She flipped it open and didn't bother to read past the first line of text from her boss. Whatever he wanted could wait until Monday. What remained of tonight was hers. She half-wished she'd taken Robert from IT Support up on his offer of dinner tonight, but only half-wished. She wasn't ready for anything more than a dinner date and accepting that would have only encouraged him to push harder for everything else. Still, a dry car, followed by a dry restaurant and an even drier white wine sounded good right now.
Then her gaze fell upon the shop. It had always been there, right behind the bus stop and she'd always been curious about it. She'd just never gone in. It wasn't really the sort of place a respectable married woman went. Or a respectable single woman for that matter. Though maybe it was perfectly fine for divorcees, who were never particularly respectable in society's eyes anyway, even when it had been their husbands who had done all the disrespecting in the relationship and who were now shacked up with fitness instructors nearly half their age in Runcorn. Put like that, she decided, and she should definitely go in just to show society who was boss. She could do with a good laugh anyway.
The shop was, on one hand, particularly coy about what was sold there, with its windows painted-over and, on the other, particularly direct about its purpose. A couple of white silhouettes on the black background hinted vaguely at couples that, while not currently sexy, were mere moments away from being so. The name above the door simply said
Sex Shop
.
She took a quick look around her, being happy to give society as a whole the middle finger as long as it didn't include anyone she actually knew, and then darted inside.
No patrons under the age of 18
the sign said, which only really confirmed to Rhonda that she should have come in half a lifetime ago to see what all the fuss was about.
Surprisingly the shop was not actually unpleasant. To be sure, there was some potentially unpleasant stuff on the wall or on the shelves, but in terms of dΓ©cor, it was nice enough. The clientele, while distinctly male and somewhat furtive, didn't actually seem like they belonged on some register. True, some of them were wearing mackintoshes, but these were more wet than dirty and entirely sensible given the weather. She spent a moment by the shop door getting her bearings -- magazines and DVDs on that wall, lingerie and sexy clothing in the middle and sex toys at the back. She resolved then and there that she was walking out with a vibrator, she'd been meaning to get one ever since the separation, but there was no rush. It was mostly a matter of killing time.
The DVDs were a shock. She'd been under the impression that hard-core pornography wasn't allowed in the UK. The girl on the front cover of the first one she picked up managed to tell her she was wrong even with her mouth full. Rhonda flipped the case over. The girl was equally busy on the back as well, entertaining three male performers at the same time. There had been a time in Rhonda's life when this would have looked like fun, now it just looked like the girl was creating unnecessary work for herself. She idly flicked through some of the rest of them. The girls' hair and breast-sizes changed; their vacant smiles didn't. She wandered over to the magazines.
As she did so, one of the gentlemen customers quickly put back a magazine he'd been examining and started to look intently at something else or maybe even anything else. This strategy would have worked in an ordinary newsagents, where he could have pretended he'd been looking at Top Gear magazine all along, but here no one section of the shelf was particularly more respectable than any other and so the new focus of his attention was barely legal.
With an "Excuse me," Rhonda reached past him and pulled the replaced magazine out for a gander. She was feeling playful, but stopped dead when she saw the title,
Big Black Mistresses Monthly
. No wonder he'd been in such a rush to get rid of it - the lady on the front cover even looked quite a lot like her, although, with a cane in her hand and a stilettoed boot resting on the back of a cowering white sub, it looked like the model was having a much better day than Rhonda was. She was struck with a sudden urge to buy it, just in case it contained the secret of this happiness somewhere inside the rest of its contents, although she balked slightly when she saw the price sticker. She looked back at the customer, sizing him up, although he refused to make eye-contact -- late forties, glasses, white and somewhat weedy. Not exactly her type, but as she got older she was increasingly worried that she wasn't her type's type any more, and the idea of her potentially being an object of someone's lust gave her a little thrill.
Taking the magazine with her, she moved over to the clothes. There was a tacky selection of cheap boxed costumes on a shelf on the wall -- sexy nurse, sexy school-teacher, sexy devil that promised that one size fits all -- something Rhonda seriously doubted. Next to that though was a selection of more expensive and heavier duty gear -- leather and latex bodysuits. She pulled out the largest sized item they had and, facing her towards the customer, held it up to her body as though he were her husband and she was choosing a nice floral dress in River Island. He went cross-eyed trying to look and not look at the same time.
She'd been right. This was a laugh.
She put the suit back -- it was clearly an item for a specific occasion that she didn't currently have marked in her calendar. She made a mental note to come back for it if the opportunity ever presented itself and then quickly made another mental note to find out how one made these opportunities. She checked her phone. It was time to grab a vibrator and get out of here before she missed another bus, but then on the way to the sex toy shelf she passed a hanging collection of bondage items -- whips, floggers and paddles. This was a whole new world for her and, despite the pressure of time, she stopped to investigate. She pulled out one of the smaller paddles and tried it softly against her hand. It stung very slightly. She tried again a bit harder. "Fuck." For a moment she drew the attention of all the shop's patrons and even the lady behind the counter looked up from her
Grazia
magazine for a fraction of a second.
Rhonda picked the item up from the floor and put it back. Undeterred, she saw a longer whip hanging in pride of place above everything else. It was about a meter long and had an imitation snake-skin texture and a little diamond shaped tail on the end. If the dress needed an occasion, this very clearly needed practice. She noticed that the gentleman from earlier was still surreptitiously lookeing over at her. Yes, she'd definitely gotten an admirer. She had no idea how to use the whip but she made an imitation cracking noise and motion and then hummed the first few bars of the Indiana Jones theme. She made another snap decision. This would be great for getting rid of her frustration. Even if she had no illicit activities currently in mind, she could still put empty coke cans on her bird bath and practice smacking them off. That might actually be an exercise programme she could keep up for once. Whip and magazine in hand she headed for the last of her purchases.