15-year old Vanessa looked up at her captor, with as much love as laughter in her eyes, which were big and brown. She had a coffee-and-cream coloured complexion, and masses and masses of curly, long, dark brown hair. She was dressed in a pair of cream-coloured, woolly tights, and a long-sleeved leotard, as yellow as freshly made butter.
She sat against the wall of the gym, her chin resting against her knees. The knees were tied together, as were her ankles. Her wrists had been snugly tied together in front of her shins, like an X.
She had been gagged by a big handkerchief shoved in her mouth, which was held in place by bandages and sticky tape. That meant she was unable to speak. A long rope had been tied around her, forcing her to sit in this rather uncomfortable position.
There were other girls sitting there as well, but they had had to tie each other up. She was the only one that HE personally had tied up, so she was confident it was a job well done. She had already been forced to alert him that some of the other girls were so badly tied up, that they were almost free. He had retied them, and given her an appreciative pat on the head, or a gentle stroke down her cheek, mumbling “Good girl”.
She could tell by the looks she was given by the others, that she wasn’t about to win any popularity contests, of any sort, any time soon, but she didn’t care. She had been tied up by the most handsome man this side of the Atlantic, and that was all she needed at the moment.
She sighed deeply and looked at him again. He was about twice her age, 1 meter 85 tall, and weighed about 80 kilos, she guessed. From what she could see, his body was all muscles, not a gram of fat where it shouldn’t be.
He had blonde hair and green eyes, and his complexion was dark, not by birth as hers was, but from him being out in the sun so much.
He was dressed in a pair of trousers and a shirt, all of it in denim. He had a handkerchief tied around his neck, and a pair of sunglasses, which he had placed on top of his head.
He had introduced himself as “Nick”; a name Vanessa thought was kind of cute, and which suited him.
Suddenly, his cell-phone rang. He answered it, said: “OK, fine. We’re on our way,” switched it off and put it back in his inside pocket, with an elegant flick of the wrist.
He looked carefully at the assembled girls, as if searching for something. His searching eyes finally came across Vanessa. He started walking towards her, flicking open a big jack knife.
He cut the rope around her ankles and the one pressing her knees against her body, leaving her hands tied behind her back, and her knees tied together. He grabbed one of her arms, started gently pulling, and she started hobbling out the door. He leaned towards her, and whispered in her ear:
”What’s the matter with you? Are you in love, or something?”
She breathed in the sweet mixture of his after shave and hair oil coming from behind his ear, and nodded.
“Ooh!” he said. “And who’s the lucky one?”
She looked him deeply in the eyes, as if saying:”You are. You are always the lucky one. And I think you know it.”
He raised an eyebrow, and prepared to say something. He was interrupted by a banged up old car, which stopped in front of them. The trunk was opened and she was pushed inside. The lid closed, and the car started again.
Back at the “Den”, as Nick called it, Vanessa’s gag was removed, but not the rest of her bonds, and she sat down by the table, with the rest of the gang. “Come on, tell me! How much did we get?” she asked.
She started jumping up and down with joy, when she heard how much they had succeeded in stealing this time.
Later that night, when Nick had tied her ankles and wrists to the corners of the bed, blindfolded her and put plugs in her ears, as he always did, she started thinking about when it had started:
She had been 13 at the time; a tiny, self-effacing girl, neither belonging to any of the groups that had formed at school (not even, to her dismay, the chess-club), nor charismatic enough to form her own.
One day, he had stormed in, interrupting an all-girl’s PE-class, much as he done now, tied the girls up, waited for a call, grabbed her arm and hauled her away. Since then, nearly all the clothes in her wardrobe were leotards, both spaghetti-strapped and ¾ -length arms and pantyhose. To be fair, there were some t-shirts, blouses, skirts, knee- as well as ankle-length, shorts and trousers.
The first few months, she had been held purely captive, confined to a cell in the basement of an abandoned house. Gradually, she had started showing Nick and the others, that she was trust-worthy. She had even shown a keen interest in fine-tuning the gang’s plans. Her constant questioning of every little detail, soon made them even more successfully thought out, than they already were.
“As long as I’m a part of your plans,” she had said on more than one occasion, “they simply cannot go wrong!” Vanessa and the boys had started robbing all sorts of gyms, mostly public. Robbing a school-gym, meant introducing her into a new class, and that was always such a long and cumbersome process. Everyone in the room was always tied up, but she was, naturally, always the one being taken hostage. Thus far, they had taken well over a million, they reckoned.
The fact that she spent most of her time tied up, even when not being held “hostage”, was her own idea. Nick had not wanted to keep her tied up, once she had started helping them, but she started nagging him, and the others so much, they kept her that way, just to keep her quiet. Nowadays, she felt very uncomfortable and naked, as soon she had to go anywhere and not have at least one part of her body shackled. To remedy that, Nick had installed handcuffs in the pockets of all her coats and snow-suits. If she wore a skirt, which she almost always did in the spring, summer and autumn, she could at least have her knees cuffed together. That meant she could still walk, but only with small steps.
As the house was quite secluded, Vanessa suggested that Nick maybe could order two of the members to put two poles in the lawn in the back of the house.
Holes were dug, and concrete poured into them, so now the poles were almost impossible to move. Between them, a line was put up.
The line and poles served two purposes, really; one was so they had somewhere to hang their laundry, and the other one was so that Vanessa could be tied to one of the poles, or have a chain run, in a loop, from the a belt around her waist and to the line. That way, she could spend even more time being tied up and, at the same time, get some exercise even when she wasn’t in any gym. Even if she wasn’t doing any exercises, she would still be out in the sun.
As I told you, she had grown so accustomed to being restrained, one way or another, so when she had been forced to go back and live with her family, which had happened a few times, she hated the feeling of not having ropes or chains on her body. She, therefore, always ran back to Nick and the gang, at the first available opportunity.
After having brought her back home several times, her parents relented and let her stay.