Tina is a friend. "Just" a friend, but a close one. We've known each other almost ten years, since we met in college. We were both involved with other people at the time, though, so us getting together wasn't even a consideration. I even married the girl, but divorced her a few years later. Tina's boyfriend was ancient history a long time ago, but she's never given up on his type- dark, swarthy, a little dangerous-looking, and almost certain to dish out some serious emotional or even physical abuse. In other words, she's into guys who are (a) not good for her, and (b) not like me. I'm a chronic "nice guy." Even though I flirt a lot, I'm considered harmless by pretty much everybody.
That hasn't stopped me from wanting her, though. My attraction to her has always been almost… well, supernatural. It's not that she looks like a model or anything, she's just very pretty in an ordinary way. Especially to me. I've had to stop myself from staring at her all slack-jawed countless times. My eyes just point themselves at her like magnets point north. Even when I was married, Tina never left my fantasies. I never cheated, I was never even really tempted to cheat, but I never forgot about Tina, either. I saw her all the time, too- after college, we moved to the same town, since we'd had the same major and took similar jobs. She's been one of my best friends for a very long time now, and she was an absolute angel during the divorce. I don't know how I'd have survived it at all if I hadn't had her shoulder to cry on from time to time. Sure, I'd wanted more. She was getting too old for this bad-boy bullshit of hers, anyway- I secretly thought she used it as a way to avoid a real commitment, as she'd never married. But all my awkward come-ons somehow got turned into jokes on their way out of my mouth, so nothing happened between us. You'd think that if anything was ever going to happen, it would have been a long time ago.
Actually, something did happen about two or three years back, at a party. We were both drunk- hell, everybody there was drunk- and we were playing silly games and taking stupid dares. You know, if you broke the pattern in the clapping game, you had to moon the room, or if you dropped the card when it got to you on that round of suck-and-blow, you had to kiss somebody's toes. That kind of shit. I don't remember why (my memories of the whole night are pretty fuzzy), but I ended up in the closet with Tina. I held her in my arms and I was kissing her, while being cheered on by well-wishers on the other side of the closet door. She was very polite about it, even obliging, but she was giggling and shaking and not at all serious. To me, it was a dream come true, but to her, it was silly. Kissing, when it's done right, is real communication, and the message she was sending me was: "Oh, Gary, you're a very dear friend indeed, but this is kinda ridiculous. You've had your fun now, and any more of this is really gonna start making me uncomfortable, so lay off, ok?" So, I laid off, and that was that. I switched to whiskey for the rest of the night in a futile attempt to drown my hurt feelings.
But that's all in the past. I still flirt with Tina, and she even flirts back a little, and it's all very friendly and not at all serious, just a part of how we get along. So, when she was at my house the other day to get some boxes to pack up presents she was sending home, I didn't expect any of what happened. It just started, and I didn't stop it, and I'm not sorry. I'd do it again in a heartbeat. We were up in the attic of my house, digging around a few dusty piles of some old stuff, looking for boxes that would fit. And the she found something that I'd forgotten was there. Honest.
"Hey, what's this thing?"
Unfortunately, it was exactly what it looked like- an old weightlifting bench I'd bought at a yard sale and "modified" with some materials conveniently available at the local Home Depot. Bolted to the weightlifting posts, there was an two-by-six board cut horizontally, hinged, and carved into the shape of "stocks" like you'd see in the town square in colonial villages. I'd also attached four thick loops of nylon webbing to the legs at the other end, to hold the subject's knees and feet in place. In short, it was a really, really, really incriminating piece of homemade bondage equipment.
My first reaction was to blush and try to get her to forget about it- but my brain instantly vetoed that idea by (quite correctly) pointing out that it wouldn't work. I'd get no end of playful kidding about it. All our friends would know about it in very short order, too: "Guess what? Gary's a pervert! You should see the thing I found in his attic! I'm just glad I didn't go into his basement… or should I say, his DUNGEON!"
My second instinct got approval from the brain- just be honest, and not be embarrassed about it. When you're ticklish, making a big deal of it will get you tormented. So, when you have a bondage fetish, even a small one like mine, just be casual about it. And after all, it's not like I had this thing on display in the living room. Maybe I could even wrangle out of this situation with HER as the one who'd be embarrassed.
"Oh, that's the 'bondage bench.' I forgot about that thing."
"The BONDAGE BENCH! I don't be-LEIVE it!" She was grinning all over the place, determined to try to make me blush and stammer.
"Sure. Things weren't always bad between me and Julie, y'know. This was just something I threw together to spice it up once-upon-a-time." The whole truth, and nothing but the truth. It's always been a little bit of a turn-on for me to tie a girl up, but I hadn't made a serious habit of it. I asked Julie about it, and she agreed to try it with me. It didn't do anything for her, so the device ended up in the attic after only a couple of sessions.
"Threw it together, my ass, look at this thing, it's absolutely medieval! Your dark obsessions are finally revealed to the world! How much time did you spend on this? The craftsmanship is exquisite! I can see the influence of the late fifteenth-century or early sixteenth-century Bavarian torture-chamber quite clearly!"
"Ha ha. I spent just a few hours on it. The hardest part was fixing the padding around the neck and wrist holes, and even that didn't take too long. C'mon, don't try to tell me you've never experimented with getting tied up before? With some of your old boyfriends, I wouldn't be surprised if they'd chained you naked to the hoods of their cars and driven you around the woods like some deer they'd just shot."
"Oooooh, such a vivid imagination! That must come in handy when you're role-playing out all your S&M fantasies!"
"Then they park in the junkyard, start a fire in an oil barrel and all his friends throw crushed beer cans at you while they smoke crack and take potshots at rats."
"Oh, MASTER GARY," she said, determined not to be outdone, "I beg you to punish me! Strap me down in your bondage-bench and spank me while I squirm helplessly!" She was mocking me, but it turned me on anyway. To make her point even more dramatic, she lay face up on the bench and rested her head and her wrists into the semicircular holes in the base of the stocks. Then she continued in her best Perils-Of-Pauline voice, "You have me at your mercy, Master! Please, please, please, lavish your perverted favors upon this unworthy servant-slut-girl!"
Some dark voice at the base of my skull said: "All you have to do is close the stocks and throw the bolt, and show her you mean business." My arm resisted my better judgement and firmly closed the top half of the stocks even before I knew what I was doing. Tina giggled in delight at the "joke," and continued unabated.
"Oh YES, Master! Secure me firmly lest I escape! You wouldn't want me to get AWAY before you teach me a lesson, would you?"
"Nope," I said simply, as I threw the bolt in place, securing the top of the stocks down so that she couldn't get up now if she wanted to. It was a big, heavy bolt, designed for a barn door or a heavy fence. A simple deadbolt would have sufficed, but I liked the dramatic effect and feel of the big heavy one. And it had a bonus- a loop in the hasp where you could secure it shut with a padlock, like the one I had hanging there for that very purpose! That could wait, though. First, I'd see how far she was willing to go along with it as if it was all in fun. I moved down to the knee straps. From down there, she wouldn't be able to see that I had a painfully huge erection at this point, jutting out like a hammer handle between my pockets.
"Oh, that's right, strap me down! You want you victims positioned correctly for your fiendish deeds, don't you, Master?"
"Yup." Her bluejeaned knees were now strapped apart, on either side of the padded backboard. Her ankles were crossed under the bench, buckled down in the straps and pulled taught. If she'd been naked, this would have spread her pussy lips open juuuuuust a littttttle bit… like it did when I'd strapped Julie into this thing. On an impulse, I discreetly sniffed the air just above Tina's waist, and it was either my imagination, or her sweat (it was a stuffy attic, after all), or I smelled a trace of her juicy excitement.
"Hee Hee. Wow, this thing really works, Gary. I can't move." She really started to struggle now, the bench hopped up and down about an eighth of an inch, making ineffective little thumps as she exerted herself.
"You've been doing your sit-ups, I see. That's a fairly heavy bit of equipment, and you don't have any real leverage in that position," I said. I fitted the padlock into the hasp of the heavy bolt and snapped it shut. Then I walked around her in a circle to inspect my handiwork, taking care to try and keep the-boner-that-ate-Toledo out of her view.
"You DO have a key to that lock, don't you?" There was a touch of genuine concern in her voice.
"I'm pretty sure I've got it somewhere, yeah." The key was on a hook screwed into the bottom of the bench- I'd checked to make sure it was still there before I locked it. But, Tina had no way of knowing that, did she?
"Not funny." She squirmed and thumped some more. "Okay, you can let me out now."
