Careful What You Wish For Ch. 01

"I figure we'll start with something that isn't restrictive, just to sort of feel each other out."

"Oo, can you put me in a body harness?"

"Perfect."

I opened my rope bag and looked for a length long enough to do a full harness. Molly hopped onto the bed like a cat diving into a basket full of clean laundry, tossing the blankets off one side and then turning to face me with the grin of a hunter. It was such a predator move that I was knocked off my stride for a second. The chaos in my head threatened to come back as it occurred to me who I was doing this with. But the bundle of rope felt good in my hands, and as I started to uncoil it I remembered that this was my element as much as hers. She might have gotten us here, but I knew how to run this part of the show.

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and dropped into that space in my head that I always went when tying. I fell onto my knees on the bed, gesturing for Molly to put her arms up and sit back on her heels. The voices in my head fell away and I plunged straight into a state of hyperfocus: the texture of the rope, the soft sheets on the bed, Molly's breathing, the slight flush of her skin, images of the harness I wanted to tie, and all the skills and techniques I'd practiced.

Uncoil the rope. Find the midpoint. Make a bight. Put the bight over her spine. One wrap around the torso going under the arms and over the breasts. Pull through the bight and wrap the other way, going under the breasts this time. Take your time; don't let the ropes twist. Pull through the loop in the back, split the tails and go up over the shoulders. Let her put her arms down. Tuck under the wraps in front and pull through.

"How's that so far?"

She'd never stopped smiling. Her eyes had glassed over a bit, but her breathing was calm and even.

"It's great."

"It's gonna get tighter in a minute."

"I certainly hope so."

One loop around the wraps, then a second. Careful not to drag the rope against her skin too fast. And then, ever so slowly, pull tight.

"Still good?"

"Yep."

Lark's head knot right between her breasts to hold the tension. Split the tails again, up over the shoulders to the back, and loop around what's there.

Now the square knots. Takes a while but the look is worth it. Three down the back -- she's got a long torso. Get her up on her knees so you can run the ropes between her legs. Another knot in the middle in just the right spot -- leave that one loose so you can move it around later. Two more up the front. Loop around the chest harness and tie it off.

"You cheeky bastard," she said, as she felt the tension taken up and figured out what I had done.

"You okay if I adjust that so it's in the right place?"

"Please."

Slide a finger under the rope, just above that middle knot where it's resting much too far down. Ignore how wet her underwear is. Tug the rope away from her underwear to make it easier to move the knot. Don't think about how turned on she is. Loosen the two halves of the square, slide one half up so it's resting near her vagina, slide the other half up to match and pull--

Molly gasped and grabbed my shoulder. I looked up, but her eyes were closed and she was holding her breath. An eternity passed while I waited for her to exhale. I slowly pulled my hands away from the knot I'd just tightened and let the rope rest against her skin. It wasn't even a little bit tight... yet.

"You good?"

"Yes. Very. Keep going."

Find the tails where you left them. Have her sit back and lift her arms again. Separate the tails and wrap back and forth, feeding one around each side of her torso, through the gap between the knots in back to make a diamond, then working around to her stomach and doing the same. Leave it loose for now. Tie a sloppy finishing knot just to hold it in place.

"Ready?"

"Do your worst. I wear corsets for fun."

Start at the top of the diamond wraps. Gather up the slack in the line until it's taut. Feed that tension down the line and around her sides to the back. Find that first gap with your hands and pull through until it's a diamond shape. Feed the tension down the line to her front and do it again. Snug the lines each time. Watch that middle knot sneak up, up, up as you pull the lines tighter until it's pressing up against her clit. Retie the finishing knot.

Give her a moment to breathe, to feel the constriction as the rope corset closes around her. Let her get comfortable. Match your breathing to hers; make sure it's not too fast or too shallow.

Take a step back. And enjoy.

Molly's eyes were half-closed, and I'm not sure she noticed that I'd gotten off the bed.

"Molly."

Her eyes fluttered open and she breathed out slowly.

"Do you want to see it?"

"Yes, please."

I extended her my hand and helped her up off the bed. The inside of my closet door had a dressing mirror in it, and I opened the door and turned her to face it.

She was, in a word, stunning.

The red rope I'd chosen contrasted perfectly with her black shirt and panties. The top half of the harness did its job of outlining her breasts and just compressing them a bit, while the diamonds of the lower half were about as good as I'd ever tied them. Not bad, especially for the first time tying someone.

"It's perfect, Nick. I love it." She spun around to try to look at the back in the mirror, which had the effect of sticking her chest out at me. She turned back to me with that gorgeous smile on her face again, threw her arms around my neck and gave me a big hug. "You're every bit as good as I hoped," she whispered.

To this point, my focus had mostly been on the rope work, and despite only wearing a pair of boxer-briefs, I hadn't really popped much of an erection. But now, Molly was giving me a full-body hug while half-dressed and tied up in my rope, and all of that control from earlier started to melt away. My cock, already semi-erect and trapped between us, sprang to full attention when I felt her breath on my ear. I could feel the knots in the rope brush against me -- no, "brush" isn't the right word. She was grinding against me.

"My only question is, what are you going to do to me now?" Her breath was ragged but her words were whisper-quiet. I wanted to tell her exactly what I wanted to do to her, what I'd always wanted to do to her. She had to know how turned on I was. But I had no idea what was on the table at this point. Besides, she was still wearing underwear and I'd tied a rope through her crotch that was going to be too tight to move out of the way any time soon. So I did the only thing I could think to fall back on:

"I'm going to tell you a story."

She gasped. "Really? What kind of story?"

"Something I wrote a while back. It's called Where Were You Last Night?"

"I like your stories," she grinned.

I outlined the plot for her while I gathered some more gear. It was about a guy who discovers his wife has been cheating on him, so he ties her up and spanks the daylights out of her as "punishment", then fucks her. Yeah, I know, it's cheesy as hell and the plot is completely ridiculous, but you've read worse, haven't you? Anyway, as far as I was concerned it was just a roundabout way to offer to tie Molly up some more, and to see... what else... she might be interested in doing.

"So you're saying you want to tie me down to your bed and spank me a bunch?"

"Yeah," I said, trying desperately to sound casual and probably failing. "If you're into it."

"Fuck yes," she said, walking back to the bed and rolling onto her stomach. "Sounds like my lucky day."

And that's how I found myself standing there staring at the gorgeous friend that I'd just tied up and then tied down. Lying there with her eyes turned up to me, smiling that same smile she'd been wearing for most of the evening, I was mesmerized. I'd tied her elbows and wrists together so she could prop up her head and chest. After I'd tied her ankles to the corners of the bedframe, the spreader bar was mostly gratuitous, as was the rope connecting her wrists to the eyebolts hidden in my headboard. Sometimes I just felt the need to complete the illusion of helplessness. And it gave me time to think about what was about to happen.

Tying someone up involves some fairly intimate touch, to be sure, even on top of clothing. But most rope bottoms I've played with are after the feel of the rough surface of the rope, the constriction of the harness, and the feeling of being restrained. They don't object to my hands as I run rope all over their bodies, but that's not really what it's about for them.

Spanking someone, though, is one hundred percent entirely about what your hands are doing to their body. There really isn't any way to dance around that. Molly and I had been more physically intimate over the years than most people who called themselves "friends", but this was going to be a line we hadn't crossed. Still, if that's what she wanted... well, I guess we could figure out what it meant later. So I knelt on the bed and rested my right hand between her shoulder blades. "So, Molly, how many do you want?"

"Oh, you'll know when I'm done."

I ran my left hand up the back of her leg, feeling the slight tightness caused by how far apart her legs were spread. I rubbed the muscles there and let my fingers drift down to her inner thigh, prompting a moan. I could feel the heat and dampness radiating off of her. I cupped her buttcheek and squeezed, switching to my right hand to cup to the other one for another solid squeeze, and then drifting down the opposite leg. Just a friendly hello, before moving on to the warmup.

I kept my arm loose and swung, landing the first slap with my left hand without much force behind it. A series of shorter slaps followed, covering as much ground as possible. Switching hands, I covered her left cheek with my right hand in the same fashion. Back to my left for some more light strikes, then back to my right to match. Molly was vocal enough, humming with appreciation at first and building up to a small yelp or two just before I switched hands. After a few minutes, I could see her skin starting to redden up a bit around the hem of her underwear, and the appreciative noises had changed over to moans.

"Doing okay so f--"

"I swear to God, Nick, if you stop I will fucking kill you."

I chuckled. Guess she was doing okay, then. And obviously it was time to step it up a bit.

The next two shots produced a satisfying crack. Molly groaned and bucked backwards into my hand when I left it there. I paused for a split second and then hit her again in the same two spots. Switching hands and coming more from the side than above, I struck more lightly at the tops of her cheeks a few times, then landed a shot on her upper leg that left a mark. That one needed a twin, of course, so I hit the far leg just as hard, which got an actual "Ow!"

As I stepped up the intensity of my spankings, Molly's reactions got more and more pronounced. She was tensing up her muscles every time I went to hit her. I'd smack her several times in a row until she started to hold her breath, then I'd stop until she exhaled. Any time I let my hand rest on her skin or rub the place I'd just struck, she'd push her butt back into my hand. And then I'd rear back to strike again, and she would draw a breath, clench up, and buck her hips forward into the bed.

At one point I threw my leg over her so I was straddling her but facing the other way. I rested my weight on my left hand and reached back with my right, and saw her push her hips forward again. From this angle I could see the crotchrope flex and tighten up as she did it, and that's when I realized why she was bucking her hips so much. She wasn't trying to instinctively get away from my spanking; she was dropping her weight down onto the knot in the rope that sat under her clit. And every time I hit her, she was grinding herself against it. Sure, she was enjoying the endorphin rush from the spanking, but she was also on the edge of getting herself off at the same time.

As soon as I figured that out, my dick went rock-hard in my underwear. I wanted nothing more than to make her come under me like this.

Instead of hitting her again, I dropped my hand to the fleshiest part of her ass and squeezed, letting my fingers trail down towards her cunt but not touching it. She was starting to soak through her underwear. I felt Molly's groan in her chest almost as much as I heard it from her mouth, and I pulled my hand back to spank her again. I slapped the same spot I'd just left, still landing on the fleshiest part but being less careful about how low my fingers ended up. More intense and less frequent, I switched sides back and forth, trying to strike as deeply as I could into her muscle tissue. I could see her grinding down on the knot constantly now, riding out each shot by sliding forward slightly, and preparing for the next by sliding back.

Picking up the pace again, I turned my attention to her breathing and was rewarded with a delightful set of sounds that started as a low growl, changed to a staccato of grunts, and then to a higher-pitched series of "ah!"s. My hands were starting to sting, but I dialed up the intensity a little further and really started to push her. Molly's voice jumped another octave and she began to sing out with what I assumed was the first wave of an orgasm. Her hamstrings contracted against the ropes holding her ankles out and her glutes tensed up as well as I kept hammering her with my palms, until finally she went taut all over and screamed out her climax.

----------

The door to my apartment slammed shut, and I stood there just staring at it for a minute. After I'd untied the ropes holding her down to the bed, Molly had refused to let me take off the rope harness, promising me she'd take good care of it and bring it back next time she saw me. I definitely enjoyed watching her gingerly bend over to put her jeans back on, and then again to tie her shoes. Her leather jacket didn't do much to hide the red diamond pattern crossing her stomach and chest, but it was dark out and she was driving, so I didn't worry about it too much.

All of which is to say that she definitely walked out of my apartment wearing a tight rope harness and a cat-that-ate-the-canary grin. I threw the deadbolt on the door, went to the kitchen, and poured myself a glass of whiskey.

What the hell had just happened?

Six hours ago, I was prepping dinner for my best friend. Somewhere along the way things had taken a sharp left turn, and instead of our usual pattern of ramping up flirtatious conversation until Molly put a stop to it... this time she just didn't stop. I remembered her taking my hand and leading me away from the dinner table, and then she was lying on my bed in a blood-red harness, coming her brains out while I spanked her. And now she was gone.

It was certainly the most fun I'd had in that bed in some time, but even while it was happening, most of it felt like a dream. Now that the reality was starting to sink in, so were the questions. What changed? What made her decide that after years of dancing around each other, seemingly with no interest on her part of doing anything about it, that tonight was the night she wanted to take me to bed?

It was that damn story.

But that didn't make any sense. There were plenty of good reasons why I never showed her that story or even told her I'd written it. Okay, maybe I hadn't done a very good job of obfuscating the details, and maybe, maybe, I'd let some of those old feelings creep into my writing. Could she tell? Was it that obvious? Never in a million years did I think she would like that story. Why didn't she tell me off and storm out of my apartment? Or call me 'dummy', like she always did, and go back to ignoring any sort of potential attraction?

I picked up my laptop and stopped the music player, which had long since run off the end of the Clash album Molly had cued up. I had too many questions and not enough answers, but maybe I could find some clues in that story. Maybe I'd try to see things through her eyes, somehow. She said it had pushed all of her buttons in the right ways... that surely wasn't enough to explain what had just happened, but maybe there was something else there.

Careful What You Wish For was still open, right where Molly had left it. I started reading.

Shit. She was right; this story was good. Definitely one of my better pieces. The flow was good, the dialogue wasn't too artificial, the characters were believable, the sex... damn. Looking at my own work through a fresh set of eyes got me to turn off my usual "everything I write is crap" filters, but it wasn't answering any of my questions. All it was doing was reminding me of Molly getting herself off on my bed, in my rope, under my hands.

I closed the laptop. Maybe the rest didn't matter right now. Maybe I could figure out what it all meant tomorrow. Maybe we'd talk about it the next time I saw her, whenever that would be. Maybe this was a one-time deal, and we'd go back to being friends just like we always had.

Or maybe the lid wasn't going to fit on that shoebox the same way ever again.