Author's note: as with much of my work, this cautionary tale bridges the gap between D/s and romance, so please be prepared for a little light power play here and there. My thanks, as always, to Lisa Jones for editorial support; and to Halcyon Flux for encouragement in general and brainstorming those pesky desires in particular. If anyone is wondering what any of this has to do with dead bees, the title is in fact from the Rodgers and Hart songbook. Enjoy ...
*
Bothered
The first time I ever heard the Velvets was - as God is my witness - on a Sunday morning, about nine o'clock, in the summer of eighty-nine. We were crashed out under a duvet on the living room rug at Su and Tom's place, where we had spent a glorious and uncomfortable night attempting not to wake anyone else with our moaning and panting. When Su bought some tea in, Jill instinctively grabbed the duvet to protect her own modesty and left me in the middle of the floor with my tits on display to all and sundry. And that's when I heard it, floating in from the kitchen on the mingled scents of incense, weed, and Earl Grey:
I found a reason
.
I was listening to it again, near on quarter of a century later, hunched in my headphones to drown out the banality of office chatter as I did my best to triple-check my space calculations. Not the Velvets this time, but the sore-throated childlike vulnerability of Cat Power, one chance in several thousand. That was the moment Nigel took me aside and told me that my own reason for living was dying. So of course I dropped everything and ran ran to her, not that she was likely to thank me for ...
She stops and looks at the screen, reaches for the half-pint glass and takes a drink before pressing her right middle finger down on the Delete key and watching moodily as the cursor chases itself all the way back to the top corner of the page.
Fuck's sakes, Lizzie, give it a rest. This is not what your readership - be it ever so numerically humble - wants. More sex, less maudlin introspection. Come on, shake out of it and get to work.
What had we even done under that duvet, can I remember? I suppose I should be able to, how can you forget your first whole night with the girl of your then dreams?
"Hi Liz."
She looks up and smiles her acknowledgement for the kindness in the tone.
"Heather."
Heather goes to the bar and joins that new girl she's been seeing for months now. Heather, of all people, in something that looks suspiciously like a serious relationship. How that would make Martine smile. Stupid thing to think, but she can't help it, any more than an amputee can help wiggling their phantom toes every now and then. She has come here for an hour after work, just to soak up the sounds and smells of the old atmosphere in the hope that it might spark something, but it doesn't help. It just makes her more down than she was before. She unplugs the keyboard from the tablet, packs them both in her bag, and drinks up before heading for the bus stop.
***
Jenna was in no mood to be philosophical about the contradictions, at that moment they just pissed her off. The big thing -
the
most important thing of all - about bondage was the ritual. Even though she had never actually done it, she was as certain of that fact as she was of anything. The irritating, inconvenient, pissy thing about self-bondage was that ritualising it very quickly tipped over into unacceptably pathetic. Dream all you want about the idea of Mistress making you squat and pee in the shower before crawling on hands and knees to Her bed, start doing that malarkey on your lonesome and it's more sad than sexy.
So now she was padding through the close-curtained gloom of her studio flat in a T-shirt just barely long enough for decency if anyone happened to peek in the kitchen window; carbine clips chinking away on her ankle cuffs and her abused nipples making her feel dizzy. She opened the icebox, punched the cube containing the handcuff key from its mould and jiggled it from hand to hand as she carried it back to the foot of the bed. Honestly: safe and sane was all well and good but this was such an insufferably passion-killing slog to arrange.
She worked her way efficiently through the checklist. Key-laden ice cube in the saucer on the card table, in reach of where her hands would be and near enough to the radiator to encourage melting at an acceptable rate. T-shirt off, sit on the bed and shackle her ankles to the spreader bar secured behind the bedhead rails. Ready-lubed dildo up herself, the actual act of insertion neither erotic nor particularly comfortable. Steel cuff over right wrist, double-checking the keyhole was facing the right way. Padded blindfold comfortably down across eyes, blacking out everything. Deep breath, preliminaries over with and time to act decisively. Carefully, working by touch alone, she slipped the nipple clamps off as gently as she could and tossed them aside. Then she lay back, put one hand either side of the central upright rail at the foot of the bedstead and clapped the second cuff over her left wrist.
She was spread across the bed on her back, legs spread uncomfortably wide and vagina invaded by that motionless cock-shaped mass; arms above her head with enough play to thrash helplessly about but far too little to get her hands anywhere near her body. The blood started to come back into her nipples now, stinging and smarting unbearably. She wanted to cup her poor breasts in her hands and soothe them, but she could do nothing but lie spread-eagled in the dark and whimper as they throbbed to match what her cunt was doing around the dildo. Oh God she wanted to be whipped and fucked and have her face sat on while she was helplessly bound in this position.
She slowed her breathing and let the darkness and endorphins take her off to a fantasy world that, appearances to the contrary, was entirely her own. Admittedly she had lifted the precise details from one of her favourite Ellie Malone stories, but only because that had clicked so strongly with the thoughts and fantasies she already had. No, it wasn't anything as superficial as the pose or the toys that she had really taken for inspiration. Instead it was an attitude: those stories were always overtly consensual, tests rather than rapes. Each of Jenna's handcuffs had a quick-release trigger that she could spring with the simplest movement of her opposite thumb.
It wasn't because they were cheap, or because she wasn't capable of devising an absolute failsafe system of timed strict bondage. It was because she wanted to have the freedom to stop whenever she decided. She wanted to make herself wait for the ice to melt, even though it would be easier not to. And so she lay in the dark, and took the pain in her breasts and the discomfort in her hips, as if there really was a demanding but breath-catchingly pretty girl perched beside her on one knee, daring her to impress with her resilience.
*****
Jenna had no intention of crumpling her interview suit in standard class for two and a quarter hours, so instead she stretched out her legs in first and took as much advantage of the complementary toast and drinks as her nervous stomach allowed. Her confidence had taken such a battering recently, she was feeling far more trepidation than the job honestly deserved. It wasn't for the job itself, of course, as much as the opportunity to relocate a couple of hundred miles and put all the poisonous memories behind her. No more going to the old haunts; no more chance of accidentally bumping into each other in the too-small world they still shared; no more caring despite herself about who Molls might be with when they did. Leaving all that behind, without abandoning her career to do it, was a big enough deal to turn her bladder inside out and make her wish she'd had less coffee.
The train rattled slowly through endless points on its way into the heart of a city that she had never visited before, and yet felt weirdly familiar from her reading. She actually found herself thinking, as it rolled over the canal bridge: oh yes, isn't that where ...
There was the curious thing, she was about to meet one of her closest friends, and for the very first time. Everyone else was already on their feet, but she had over an hour to kill and no wish to bustle, so she waited until the carriage was almost empty before standing up and tugging her wheeled case out onto the platform. She took her time strolling to the gates and then followed the tail of the morning commuter mob up into concourse, stopping at the corner of a coffee shop to look around. Her eye went clear over the woman at the first pass, before catching the discrete friendly wave and knowing grin on its way back.
She was mid forties or thereabouts, in a calf-length denim skirt and loose check shirt with unfashionably large sunglasses slipped down the front. She was flustering with a tablet in one of those combination case-cum-keyboard things, slipping it into a well-used leather shoulder bag as she stood up. Her hair was shoulder-length, greying, framing one of those straightforwardly handsome faces that seemed to go with middle-class parents and girls' high school. She didn't, to Jenna's practised gaze, look particularly like a lesbian; any more than she looked remotely like her mental image of Ellie. To be entirely honest, Jenna didn't really have a clue what a pornographer was meant to look like, but she was fairly sure it wasn't that. As she held out her hand, Jenna was overwhelmed by the temptation to say something remarkably silly.
"Elspeth Malone, I presume?"
