THREE’S COMPANY. A FOURSOME IS AWESOME
Part One
Part One
My best friend in high school was Rachel. She was beautiful and popular, one of the cool chicks who always said the right things and wore the latest fashions, whose hair was always perfect and whose skin never broke out. She got invited to all the best parties; and wherever she went, at school, in the mall, on the beach, she was surrounded by a cloud of admirers and acolytes. Had I the relevant tendencies, I might have had a crush on her.
Although in many ways we were polar opposites, we got on well together. I think Rachel appreciated that I never gave her the superstar treatment, and I liked her because she was... well, Rachel. By the time we were sweet sixteen, our lives were inextricably intertwined. Although we had fun, we took our studies seriously, and we were careful to not get overly distracted by the male sex. We disdained having boyfriends. Our rationale was: Why be content with one apple when you can have the whole tree (or in Rachel’s case, the orchard)? And over time we absorbed a part of each other’s personalities. I became one of the “in-crowd”, and under my influence Rachel became more of a free spirit. I found out recently that she is making a career for herself as a TV presenter, and I take some credit for rounding out her character.
However, there was a fly in the ointment.
The fly was my little brother Alex. He and Rachel developed a love-hate relationship, except without the love. Three years her junior, he was besotted with her, and she did her best to ignore him. Unfortunately, Rachel’s flirty nature meant that at times she came across as a tease, which did nothing to dampen his adolescent passion. So when nothing else worked, she had to put him in his place with some less than flattering words. And like many an obsessive would-be lover spurned, Alex turned his unrequited infatuation into the pursuit of vengeance. He decided that she, and I by association, needed to be taken down a peg or two. Or maybe he just wanted to tie up the prettiest girl in the school and his own recalcitrant big sister.
If you are au fait with my oeuvre (translation – if you’ve read some of my stories), you will be aware that it was my brother who first tied me up, when I was thirteen and he was an annoyingly precocious ten-and-a-half-year-old. Over the next few years there were many more such occasions. Because the family lived a semi-nomadic lifestyle due to our parents’ professional commitments, Alex and I devised some elaborate scenarios. I have been captured by supervillains, pirates, spies, knights, fiends, psychos, savages, aliens and demons. Of course, since then we’ve both moved on; and it’s important it’s important to clarify that there was nothing icky or yucky about our games. It was just that I loved playing the helpless captive, and he enjoyed giving bossy big sis her comeuppance.
Alex learned and mastered the skills of tying up girls with remarkable and suspicious alacrity. I later discovered that he had been researching his craft on internet sites, but he was more creative and resourceful than the average teenage boy. I often thought that if he used his powers for bona fide evil, he’d be building monsters in his underground lab in no time. Yet as it turned out, it was I who, by giving Alex his start in TUGs, created the monster. Sometimes when our parents were away, he would trick me into submitting to a hog-tie or a strappado or a shrimp tie, and then he’d leave me like that for hours, bound and helpless, begging for mercy and pleading for release. I fell for his bluffs, ploys, scams and dodges almost every time. I was a more than willing victim.
Rachel knew about my tie-up games. I had made no secret about them, and a mutual friend of ours, a boy named Jaz, featured in one of the previous episodes I’ve written about. I once asked her if she had ever been tied up and her expression, like she’d just eaten a lemon, warned me that I should drop the subject. Only later did it occur to me that she never actually answered my question.
So I don’t know it if was her first time, that memorable summer afternoon. Two or three days a week, Rachel and I got together for a couple of hours to study after school. We normally did so at my house, because she had a little brother who was even more insufferable than mine. On this occasion, as we were walking together, a storm was brewing on the horizon. The wind had picked up and the two of us were in a silly mood, giggling and cavorting as we tried desperately to juggle carrying our schoolbags, keeping our hair from becoming matted messes and holding down our billowing skirts.
“Nice knickers,” a disturbingly familiar voice came from behind.
Alex trotted up to join us and offered to carry Rachel’s bag.
“Keep moving, pervert,” I growled, but she had already accepted. Yet my little brother’s smug look of self-satisfaction lasted only until I handed over my bag as well. He could hardly refuse and maintain any semblance of integrity, so he took it with a sullen shrug.
When we arrived, Rachel and I intended to change out of our uniforms; but we first went to the kitchen for a snack. While we were there, Alex marched in and demanded his tribute – a sandwich and fresh orange juice. I told him to settle for a glass of milk and a slice of fruit cake. He took our offering with a sniff of displeasure and turned to leave.
“No thanks?” Rachel said.
“Thank you, slaves,” he replied.
Rachel and I lingered for a while in the kitchen, then went into the living room. Alex had gone to his room, but we remained in our uniforms because we didn’t want to go upstairs, for fear of provoking the beast. We kicked off our shoes and settled down on the carpet. I had a slight headache, so instead of focusing immediately on our schoolwork, we gossiped for a while, about the usual stuff – music, clothes, friends, boys. And just as the fog began to lift from my brain and I reached for the books, my brother wandered in and switched on the television.
We objected, but he ignored us and put on a DVD. It was an episode of Wonder Woman, from the 1970s series starring Lynda Carter. Alex and I both loved the show, and this particular instalment was one of our favourites, because Diana Prince gets tied up twice. (For aficionados, it was The Man Who Made Volcanoes.) So instead of retreating immediately to my bedroom as we should have, Rachel and I started to watch.
Now my brother and I have conflicting versions of what happened next. Alex fast-forwarded to get to the good bits, and my recollection is that Rachel got absorbed in the action but began making fun of it. She scoffed at how Diana could end up on two separate occasions bound by characters whom she could have taken down without raising a bead of superheroine sweat. I tried to explain that by surrendering she was demonstrating her power, but that didn’t make much sense in the context. So Alex asserted that maybe she just liked being tied up. Rachel sneered and started getting obnoxious about “the whole flaky bondage thing.” She was being deliberately provocative, but I could not allow such an affront to go unchallenged. Of course, neither of us I caught on that we were being manipulated by an evil genius.
To get a better view of the TV, Rachel had gotten up off the floor and was sitting next to my brother on the sofa. He later claimed that she was flirting, brushing her bare leg against his trousers, but that seems unlikely. In any case, as the closing credits flashed onto the screen, I decided that she needed to be taught a lesson. While she and Alex were arguing about something, I seized her feet and tried to drag her down onto the floor. She yelled and clutched the closest thing, my brother’s arm. He shook off her grip and scampered away as I jumped up and leapt upon her. We wrestled for a moment before rolling off the sofa and tumbling onto the floor.
Although slightly bigger and stronger, instead of fighting me off, Rachel went limp and allowed me to straddle her midsection and press her shoulders to the floor. I think the fall may have knocked the breath out her lungs, as I had landed on top of her. While she was still gasping, I pulled her arms to her side and pinned them there with my knees. I began to administer a well-deserved punitive tickling. Too late, she began to struggle, trying to flip me off her by kicking up her legs and twisting and jerking her body. She was laughing so much her face was flushed bright crimson and her eyes were brimming with tears.
“Help me, Alex!” she squealed.
Not one to ignore a damsel in distress, my brother came up behind me, reached around my waist to grab my wrists and wrenched them behind my back. As I reeled, Rachel pulled her arms free. She rolled sideways and I toppled off her.
Rachel thought the worm had turned; but her manoeuvre had broken Alex’s grip on me. She and I lay for a few seconds next to each other, giggling and trying to catch our breath. I recovered first and pounced. We grappled for a few seconds, but I ended up once more sitting astride her. This time she was on her stomach, and her resistance was feeble. She again called for Alex’s support, but he had disappeared.
Rachel had calmed down and was mumbling something I couldn’t hear when Alex returned from the kitchen. He had a roll of paper masking tape, and he crouched down and held it in front of Rachel’s face. She looked up over her left shoulder, staring up at me wild-eyed; but she said nothing and accepted her fate. Her lips curled into a faint smile.
I grasped her hands and drew them behind her back. I could feel her pulse racing, but all she did was softly moan as Alex handed me the first strip of tape and I wrapped it around her wrists. It took a few pieces to complete the job, and only as I finished did my prisoner began to struggle. I think she had underestimated the strength of the tape and thought she could just separate her arms at will. By the time she recognized the awful truth, it was too late. She wriggled and squirmed. I lost my balance and we tussled again on the carpet; but with her hands bound behind her it was a one-sided battle.
Alex watched us as we scuffled, chuckling loudly as he tore off more strips of tape and stuck them in a neat row to the edge of the coffee table, ready for deployment.
“Nice knickers,” he said for the second time that afternoon, as we continued to roll. I snarled at him, and if he’d continued with “Chick fight!” I would probably have lost it. Instead, he grabbed Rachel’s knees, I took her shoulders, and we flipped her onto her belly once more. She tried to kick her way free, but my brother lay across her legs to keep them still while I taped her ankles. Once that was done, she gave up the effort. We stretched her out lengthways, still on her stomach, and Alex forced a strip of tape over her mouth. She managed to pull her jaws apart, and called down curses upon us, until I clamped them shut and my accomplice applied several more layers.
I lay on the floor next to my captive to study her face. She looked so sweet and innocent and helpless, hair dishevelled, big brown eyes wide and staring, nostrils flaring. She was breathing with a shallow, rapid panting and making pitiful little whimpering noises. She gave me a glare hot enough to melt ice, or cold enough to freeze water – it was hard to tell which.
Alex looked at her and then at me.
“Hog-tie?”
“Good idea.”
Rachel shook her head vigorously, and when I took hold of her ankles she resumed her pointless defiance by trying to keep her legs straight. I was working hard at bending them until Alex began jabbing the backs of her knees with his fingernails. It couldn’t have been painful, but as a reflex she kicked up her heels. We seized her feet and forced them up to her butt, attaching the bindings on her ankles to those on her wrists. She started thrashing about even more, succeeding only in looking demented. I couldn’t overcome the urge to try some tickle torture. She was soon writhing violently and screaming garbled obscenities behind her gag.
When we were finished tormenting her, the poor girl looked quite stupefied. We even began to feel sorry for her; but when I pulled down the hem of her skirt which had ridden up her thighs, she flinched; and when Alex tenderly brushed a few strands of her out of her eyes she cringed. Such disrespect could not go unpunished.
“Blindfold,” Alex announced. He wanted to use the tape, but I vetoed that. Rachel had very nice eyebrows and lashes that she no doubt wanted to keep. Instead, I raced up to my bedroom to fetch one of the black satin scarves that I use in my tie-up sessions. On the spur of the moment, I picked the purple one out of the drawer as well. Back downstairs, I dropped both of them on the floor next to Rachel. Alex gave me a quizzical look, then nodded.
I knelt in front of Rachel and tied the blindfold in place, after which I joined my brother on the sofa to make fun of our captive for having mocked our games. She remained absolutely still and silent, hog-tied at our feet, not wishing to fuel more derision with futile struggling. And when we tired of the needling, I squatted beside her and detached her ankle bindings from her wrists. Thinking it was over, she tried to sit up; but I forced her back down. She made a startled gurgling noise as I lay my body over hers, also on my stomach but at right angles, so that we formed a cross. She groaned as I rested my full weight on her. I wasn’t very heavy, but I was positioned on top of her bound wrists. I put my own hands behind my back.
I didn’t need to say a thing. Alex obligingly bound my wrists with the tape, then my ankles, then my knees and elbows, completing the ensemble with a de rigueur gag and blindfold. Rachel was protesting as best she could, to no avail. She was writhing and twisting beneath my body. We must have looked a treat.
We lay there for maybe an hour. To me that seemed like no time at all, but to Rachel it must have been halfway to eternity. At first my brother amused himself by taking off our socks and playing with our feet. That’s when I regretted this turn of events, because I am dreadfully ticklish, and soon I was howling through my gag. Rachel, helpless beneath me, must have derived some satisfaction from my suffering, at least until it was her turn. However, Alex soon became bored with harassing his prisoners and went back to watching Wonder Woman. That’s why I knew how long we were kept tied up, because it was only when the episode was over that he released us from our ordeal. But of course he wasn’t being merciful – our parents were due home soon, and the spectacle of his sister and her best friend sprawled on the living room carpet, one on top of the other, bound, gagged and blindfolded, would have required some explaining.
As always, I felt more than a twinge of disappointment as he untied me. I was just starting to get into the “zone”. There is something about a long-duration tie-up which appeals to my abnormal psyche. After the flow of adrenaline subsides, there is an enveloping feeling of helplessness and isolation, as tension turns to tedium, which is an exquisite agony because it doesn’t dull the senses but rather heightens every sensation, intensifies every moment. Your world sort of folds in on itself. Your horizon shrinks down to your ropes and gag and blindfold. On the other hand, it must have been excruciating for Rachel, who had a low boredom threshold at the best of times, let alone when immobilized by tape and my overlying body.
To release us, Alex at first lifted me off Rachel and hauled us both into a kneeling position, facing each other. I’m sure he intended to tape our bodies together, because he placed one hand on my back and the other on Rachel’s (I assume) and pushed us together. He quickly gave up and left us to extricate ourselves. I started working at the tape around my wrists. Once I had managed to get a fingernail under the edge and begun scratching away, I would have been able to cut through it in about fifteen minutes. That was too slow for Alex, so he finished the job. He started by removing our blindfolds, and Rachel glared straight into my eyes – it was like gazing into a smouldering pit. But as he was untying my arms and legs, she leaned forward and kissed me. Even though the several layers of tape, I could feel her tongue moving against my lips. The girl was indomitable.
When we were free, she stood up and, mustering as much dignity as she could, slowly smoothed the wrinkles out of her skirt, the creases out of her blouse and the tangles out of her hair. She hadn’t realized that she’d been perspiring and stared perplexed at the tiny beads of moisture dappling the skin of her slender arms and gorgeous legs. She nervously stroked her puckered lips, but out of her pocket came a stick of gloss and all was again well.
“So you’re a virgin?” Alex suddenly blurted out.
“What?” Rachel gave him a look that would have withered tempered steel.
“A... a t-tie-up virgin,” he stuttered. I have rarely seen him fazed like that. She just laughed.
We heard my mother’s car pulling into the driveway.
“Hello, Rachel,” she said as she came into the living room. “Have you girls been studying?” She beheld my brother lurking in the doorway and frowned. “I hope Alex hasn’t been a nuisance.” She also spotted the half-used roll of masking tape sitting on the coffee table, and I think I saw the faintest flicker of a smile.
Rachel and I both shook our heads, in slow, caricatured unison. The situation called for some witty pun but I couldn’t think of any.
There was still time left before the evening set in for some study, but just then my father arrived home and announced that a new line of storms was approaching. I had forgotten about that. Dad offered Rachel a lift home and so ended, in anticlimax, a pivotal episode episode in our friendship. After that we played more tie-up games, and until we went off in opposite directions at the end of our schoolgirl days, we became inseparable. Well, maybe not as inseparable as on that sultry summer afternoon.
I guess I have my Baby Bro to thank for that. Yet having brought his insidious plan to fruition, his attitude towards Rachel changed. He came to the belated conclusion that she was out of his league and thus out of reach. But at least he had his memory of that one brief, shining moment when he got to tie up the girl who haunted his fantasies. If only he’d known that he was soon to live the dream of many a red-blooded teenage boy.