“You know, there’s a bunch of stuff in the basement that needs packing up.”
“Oh yeah?” Jay rasped.
“Yeah,” Michelle purred. “Why don’t we go down there and take a look?”
Her dress shone as she turned, the shiny material reflecting the light from the windows against the swell of her round ass. The sway of her body rocked Jay into an almost hypnotic trance, following passively as she led him towards the stairs.
She pushed aside the door, and her heels echoed on the steps as she led him down into the basement. From above and behind her, Jay could see further down her dress, and he stumbled on the steps as his eyes fixated on the steady bounce of her latex-covered breasts. Michelle’s smiling face looked back at him.
“Watch your step there, buddy,” she laughed. “I’m the one wearing heels.”
God, she was gorgeous. And she knew it. Reaching the bottom of the stairs, she flicked a switch, and a halogen bulb overhead flickered into life, flooding the basement with light.
Michelle and Eddie had never finished their basement. The wooden studs of the walls looked like bones, draped in arteries of electrical wire. The concrete floor was rough and unfinished, the hot water tank hulking silently in one gloomy corner. A couple of metal shelving units leaned against another wall, piled high with assorted boxes.
A grimy light leaked in through the small window set high in one wall, its pale offering swallowed up by the electrical illumination. But Jay didn’t spend much time looking around at the cobwebs and dust. His attention was drawn to the center of the room.
“What is that?” he spluttered.
Michelle’s heels echoed on the concrete floor as she strutted across the basement, reaching out a hand and running it along the apparatus that had caught Jay’s eye. A sinister-looking black contraption of steel rails and leather padding, like furniture that had been designed by robots who had only read of comfort in books. It looked like something that should be in a museum, or the dungeon of some medieval castle somewhere, not the basement of his friend’s suburban home.
“It’s a bench,” Michelle explained, her fingers trailing along the padded leather as she circled the unusual furniture. “Custom made. Very expensive, and very heavy. That’s why I needed your help. There’s no way I could dismantle this thing and get it out of here myself.”
“You’re getting rid of it?”
Jay approached cautiously, as though the bench might lunge at him at any moment. A variety of straps and chains hung from the metal. Jay had had no idea his friends were so kinky.
Because if the dress hadn’t been clear enough, this bench confirmed it. These two had been getting into some pretty wild sex. His cock throbbed inside his jeans as he tried to ignore it.
“May as well,” Michelle shrugged. “It’s not much fun without anyone to share it with. Do you guys want it?”
“What, me - and Jess? I don’t think so,” Jay chuckled. “That’s not - we’re not - it’s not really our thing.”
“No?”
Michelle’s eyes glittered under the bright light as she came around the bench towards him, her fingertips still whispering over the smooth leather padding as she approached. The dress strained around her as though it could barely contain the seductive curves of her body, as though at any minute it might fall apart, leaving her totally exposed.
“Don’t be so sure. You never know what you might enjoy if you don’t try it.”
“Oh, I’m pretty sure,” Jay joked.
The echo of Michelle’s boots faded out as she stood in front of him again, peering up at him with that same sexy smile that had so disarmed him in the living room. Down here, in her makeshift dungeon, it was even more frightening, even more powerful. Even more exciting.
“Have you tried?” she asked quietly.
“What?” Jay breathed, the nervousness audible in his voice.
“Kinky sex, Jay. S and M. Bondage. That kind of thing.”
“Well - no. But I don’t think-”
Sometimes certain sounds have a quality that somehow surpasses mere volume. Something that leaps straight to the panic center of the human brain, seeming to bypass such mundane channels as the ears or even the air itself, the realm of ordinary sounds.
The crash of breaking glass. The cold click of a revolver. The rattle of handcuffs.
When the mechanism clicked shut and the cold steel encircled his wrist, the words died in Jay’s throat. His heart beat, not fast, but almost impossibly loud. The blood roared in his ears. Michelle’s smiling eyes engulfed him, like a mariner lost in an icy sea, and Jay held his breath as he slipped below the waves.
In the silence, Jay could hear Michelle’s dress creaking as she breathed steadily.
“Now you have,” she grinned.
Jay let out his breath in a rush of air. Raising his hand, he tested the chain that was fastened around his wrist.
Nothing. He was locked to the bench, just as Michelle had intended.