This idea has been bugging the hell out of me for years now. It's an intended two parter, second half subject to the reception of this one... maybe. I'll probably post the second half either way, but the path of great reception would be nicest.
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Part One
His arms were beginning to ache, and the infuriating part was that he knew it had more to do with the psychological effects, rather than the physical ones, of his position. So, yet again, he reminded himself this wasn't a Stephen King novel, he needn't worry himself crazy trying to find a solution for the seriously fucked up situation his wife had left him in. Laurel had always been particularly scatter-brained, taking desultoriness to almost the level of a disorder, a crazy trait for a surgeon to have; but never had he thought she could forget about him when he was like this. What the hell was she doing anyway? She was probably talking to Mrs. Oderbelle from across the street. He figured she wasn't in the house because he'd heard the front door open and close shortly after she'd gone downstairs for the whipped cream she'd promised, and no amount of shouting her name had reproduced the two sounds he was learning to long for. He'd had three quarters of an hour now to remind himself of how stupid he'd been to agree to have her tie him up.
Once again, he wrenched angrily at the silken restraints that tied him to the bedpost; they again responded by tightening their holds imperceptibly. They hadn't started out especially uncomfortable, and he hadn't been thinking about that as a consequence of the two perfectly rounded, red nipples that Laurel had been feeding him. Her T-shirt had been rucked up beneath her chin and her bra was so thin as to be negligible. She'd got his pants off easily and was rubbing her wet snatch teasingly up and down his left leg she had straddled. Even through the double barrier of her panties and slacks he'd been able to tell how excited his being trussed up like a living sacrifice was making her.
"I'm gonna thank you so good for letting me do this," she'd promised in a sexy whisper. Laurel had one of those husky voices rarely found, but often found seductive, in a woman. One word from his wife of eleven months could send him into a frenzy. Her voice and its power to excite had been a deciding factor in his making an honest woman out of her. He realized he'd let that sexy voice lead him into all manners of evil. Laurel had definitely employed it as a persuasive aid when recruiting his permission for this bondage game. At the time, he'd sure as hell been looking forward to her brand of gratitude.
Looking at things objectively he could find a wry sort of humor in his predicament. Hell, after forty-five minutes of being chained to his bed, waiting for his wife to come home and free him, he couldn't blame the surfeit of giggles threatening to rise up from the depths of his nine year old self and poke fun at his forty-one year old self for the shithole he'd found himself in.
That was... until Aria walked into the room.
*****
This was decidedly awkward. Granted, he was saved from total embarrassment by still being dressed in his underpants, but since there could only be one reason for a man to be tied to a bed by purple silk scarves, he wouldn't say he could walk away totally unaffected. Still, he should feel lucky it was his daughter and not Claire, Laurel's fourteen-year old, who had come upon him like this. It should be slightly less embarrassing shouldn't it?
"Aria, thank God! Where's Laurel?" he asked. He found it odd how he hadn't thought to get angry until his freedom was an imminent promise. But anger and relief warred through him with such a susurrus they blocked out the niggling twinge of doubt lurking in the periphery. Looking back he had to accept, though, that early detection wouldn't have aided him one bit.
"She's at the hospital," Aria said. Her voice was whisper thin, sounding more like that of an eight year old than one nearly twenty. She was standing just inside the bedroom door; her hand still held the knob and she seemed to be leaning on it as though for support. "Mrs. Oderbelle collapsed in her garden." Not only was her voice thin, it somehow sounded as though it was coming from far away; or as though her mind were far away and had left details as to what should come out of her mouth for an explanation.
Matthew felt that niggle of doubt get its bearings now. She wouldn't! He was her father... she wouldn't!
Yet, she had made no move to leave the doorway. "Well, don't just stand there, gimme my hands." He tried to sound calm, like the sound of a man who didn't suddenly fear his own daughter. He wriggled his fingers to get her attention focused on the object of freeing him; an object that had somehow become even more important than it had seemed minutes before. "Aria!" he snapped. She shook her head, and her eyes, which he hadn't noticed had strayed, refocused on him. "Untie me."
She moved forward then, slowly. But she only advanced a few steps before turning around again. She wasn't leaving though, she was closing the door. He watched her keenly as she rested her forehead against the white-painted wood and he noticed her shoulders rising and falling with her deep breaths. It was probably his held breath that allowed him to hear the lock in the door turn over.
*****
Aria's mom had died when she was ten. Cathy had been the graceful swan to her ugly duckling, and her promise that Aria would look just like she did someday had died in the hospital with her. She barely remembered how her mother looked, but the pictures she sometimes found the nerve to look through never showed her the resemblance she longed to see. Her hair too was honey-blonde and her eyes a grey-flecked blue, but the angular structure that had given Cathy model-like cheekbones was superseded on Aria's version by rounded curves, a testament to the left-over baby fat she'd given up hope of ever getting rid of.
Laurel had offered once, when her relationship with Matthew was on more than tenuous grounds, to give Aria a 'super discount' on any work she wanted to have done. At that time, her father had still been hers and he'd saved her from fumbling for an abashed answer by negating the need.
"Aria is perfect just the way she is," he had said, and the glow in his hazel eyes had made her feel as if it were true. Laurel had smiled in acceptance but one look at how the smile quirked behind her wineglass had told Aria that she didn't quite agree.
For that, and all the other one thousand little hints Laurel dropped that made Aria feel inadequate, she couldn't dislike her. They were not cruelly meant; Laurel really did feel like she was helping Aria each time she pointed out how much more like a family they'd look if Aria's breasts were a cup smaller, if her hips were leaner, if her tan was deeper. There had been a moment, after a particularly hurtful comparison between Aria and Claire where Aria felt like asking her why the two of them didn't get boob jobs and eat a loaf of bread or two to look more like her. But, though Laurel and Claire had become a constant fixture in the world that had once belonged solely to her, though she found it increasingly hard to exist beside a perfect image and its teenaged carbon copy, she couldn't begrudge her father his happiness. She would bite her tongue and smile.
She had done so for over a year. She smiled at their engagement party, at their wedding, at their half-anniversary, and she ached with the knowledge that she would be expected to smile at the one year anniversary in little over a month. She felt she had smiled herself into the backseat of her father's life. The extra special trips they used to take together, before Laurel and Claire, were family outings now. Visits to the theatre were planned around what Disney movie was out that week. He had forgotten how he and his little 'grasshoppa' had loved to take in the old Chinese movies; Silver Fox and Jet Li were apparently now replaced by Kung Fu Panda and Bella Swan.
Just two weeks before, when she'd set out to coax him from his latest novel to take her up to Degan's Point for a revival of their long-standing but now defunct tradition of midnight picnics, she'd been almost certain of victory until he'd shocked her by declining. He had to finish this chapter by the end of the week, he'd explained, and with a 250,000 word count for the book, he was looking at a long week already. She would have swallowed that excuse if he hadn't run off to his bedroom the moment Laurel had declared she was turning in just fifteen minutes later. She'd spent the rest of the night alternately stewing and crying over how easily he could neglect her.
It had been a long and bitter descent for her from the happy kid she'd been, even after her mother's passing, to the maybe-woman she was now. She suspected often that if she weren't so apt to forgiveness she wouldn't still love her father so much; not while she knew she was third place in his affections now. Doubly unhealthy to these ideas was her nascent thought that she was somehow responsible. She felt locked in a torturous cycle where her surliness and irascibility drove Matthew away from her and towards the bright and happy Stepford twins, in turn, driving her deeper into her dark moods. Could it all be her fault?
He'd told her just three days ago that she was the perpetrator of all her dark imaginings -- he tended to get quixotic whenever deeply entrenched in an installment of his latest medieval fantasy -- that her resentment towards the changes in their family had caused her to see threats where there were none. She'd been trying to make him see her side of an argument between her and Laurel as to the design of the dress being commissioned for the vow renewal they'd celebrate for their one year anniversary. Aria had felt an unholy anger bubble inside her at the unfairness of the charge of obstinacy for obstinacy's sake that Laurel had thrown at her.
"Look, I didn't make a fuss about the yellow bridesmaids dress; can't I just wear what I want this once?" Her voice had been brittle with suppressed rage. She knew that if he dared, if he even hinted at siding with Laurel's idea of matching fuchsia dresses for her and Claire she would never forgive him. He'd proved himself reliable in calling for a compromise that would see Aria in charge of her own wardrobe for the ceremony and dinner. Aria had felt a jolt of satisfaction he didn't miss when he'd told Laurel she was forgetting that Aria was nineteen and not a kid anymore. He'd been quick to remind her of that fact herself when he'd gone to her room afterwards to talk to her about the incident. He had been -- as she'd recently been conditioned for more callous treatment -- uncommonly kind to her in sticking up for her.
"I know this had been hard for you kiddo..." he'd started, and she'd started to cry. That was when he'd given his bit of renaissance wisdom about her perpetrating her demons or whatever. "Laurel loves you, honey. She's just overeager because she knows she hasn't won you over yet."
That had made her cry more. So it was her fault was it? He'd had her gathered in his arms as he lightly stroked her fair hair. She had sobbed into the white cotton t-shirt he wore accompanied by striped pajama bottoms. He'd taken to wearing a t-shirt since Laurel had moved in as she had taken to wearing his pajama tops. Somewhere between her sobs Aria remembered this, another display of intimacy between her world and the other woman. She had suddenly been desperate to reclaim some of that; all that had once belonged to her... and more.
Heaven knows where she'd had the nerve, she didn't think she'd even had the thought; it had just been instinct that had guided her. She had kissed him... on the lips; through a stream of tears. The type of kiss a daughter should never, ever give her father. At least, that had been her intent. What had happened really was more like a still-birthed attempt at a kiss. She'd hit payload, her lips had touched his and her arms had slithered around his neck, drawing him closer. But what had come of it was a few seconds of startled surrender on his part before he'd stripped her from him and pinned her clinging arms to her side. It blew a hole into her already compromised chest; of the kind that leaves one breathless, painfully on the cusp of crying.
She'd watched him leave her room, not before looking at her as though she were the single most perplexing poundage of oddities he'd ever seen. He hadn't been alone with her since that night; had barely spoken to her. If she were in the living room with any company less than one other breathing body -- Flufflers the cat didn't count -- he would hasten away as surreptitiously as he could. Two days ago when she'd knocked on his study door and asked if she could speak with him he'd given a meager excuse and told her he'd speak with her later; but later never arrived.
And now she was locking the door to his bedroom. She'd had three days to nurture the roiling thoughts and ideas that wreckage of a night had been. Three days in which the inchoate idea that she could win him back by stealing the intimacies he shared with Laurel had taken such deep root it had felt like coming home. She kept envisioning lightning; she'd learned long ago that it didn't just come from the sky, but from the ground as well, and she thought her feelings hadn't just come out of a need to take what Laurel had, but it was her need too, awakened by necessity, and both needs had rushed to meet each other. And this time, he couldn't just walk away.
