Page 67 of Bitter Burn
He takes hold of me by the chest harness and by the harness around my hips and, with barely a shift of his weight, lifts me from my feet. I’m suddenly facing up toward the ceiling, and before I can panic, I’m laid flat on my back on the mat.
“Stay,” he says, like I’m a bad dog, like I’m Petitcrieu trying to run into the shower with us, and he goes over to the table and gets the silk and the headphones.
I think about this, about how so far there’s been nothing of a trial at all, about how I’ll need to give the guests something to believe that I’ve actually atoned—and if that means I’ll need to fake some kind of agony, I suppose I’ll need to start soon. But the expression on Mark’s face gives me pause as he comes closer, as he kneels on the mat next to me. He’s only bringing over headphones and a blindfold, but he looks like he’s about to brand me with a cherry-red iron, that’s how sober his expression is now.
“Your safeword,” he says, the headphones by his knee, the blindfold in his hands.
“Hyssop,” I say for the benefit of the crowd.
“I’m sorry for this,” he says, his shadow falling over me like a vampire’s. And then the silk is over my eyes.
The crowd is murmuring now—they’ve picked up on Mark’s intensity, the grave look on his face—but I’m not being flogged or made to lick whiskey off the floor. I’m only bound and blindfolded, so what could the devil possibly reveal to his fiends that would warrant that expression? This whole production?
Mark is careful of my hair as he ties the blindfold, going so far as to lift my head so he can create a horizontal part and run the silk through my hair rather than over it. The silk is thick, utterly opaque, and when I try to open my eyes against it, I see absolutely nothing. Not even a crack of light at the bottom. The darkness is as complete as if I were standing at the bottom of the sea.
“So my sweet ones,” I hear Dinah purr, the controlled, dramatic crack of her boots on the stage underscoring the sultry and sinister pitch of her voice. “We have a penitent here who isn’t afraid of pain, who doesn’t have a phobia of dentists or snakes, who hasn’t given us a nice and juicy limit like pet play or crotch torture. What to do? What trial to put her through?”
Mark shifts—a barely perceptible dip in the mat—and then my skin is prickling with the awareness of him. I can smell him too, rain and stone and ionic charge, a storm of a man.
“But our Mark knows his beloved, doesn’t he? He knows what can break her apart without anyone having to break a sweat. He knows that she can’t bear?—”
What I can’t bear, I don’t find out, because the headphones clamp over my ears at that exact moment, closing out all sound as if sound itself had never existed in the first place. All I hear is a perfectly calibrated nothing—the headphones are noise-canceling. I can’t even hear the muffled impressions of Dinah’s speech; I can’t hear if Mark responds, if he’s speaking too. But I do feel his hands come to either side of my bound arms, the drop of warm lips on a furled nipple.
I arch, the awakening need so sudden I can barely even think, but the lips are gone. A nose in my hair—and I can’t even nuzzle into it because of the way my arms are bound—and then he’s gone altogether. His lips, his nose, his hands by my head. The petrichor scent…
Gone.
Okay, I think. This isn’t so bad. I’ve never done sensory deprivation before, but I’ve seen it done, seen the women with their headphones on while gleeful partners wield wand vibrators between their quaking legs. Whatever happens next, I can endure it, and if a wand vibrator is involved, I can probably endure it quite happily.
Except…nothing does happen.
Nothing at all.
I’m tensed at first, waiting. Counting each inhale like a notch carved on the inside of my skull, releasing every exhale like it’ll be cut in two by some unexpected pain. Readiness poises my muscles and fascia, goose bumps stipple my sensitive skin, and I’m like a runner at the starting line, my ears straining for a gunshot I won’t even be able to hear.
The longer it goes on—the nothing—the tighter my muscles get. It’ll be any moment, the something, the interruption, the beginning of Mark’s torture. But without my sight or my hearing, I can’t strain for a signal, any signal at all, and the first drip of panic slides down my spine, a sizzle of nerve endings and a jettison of chemicals into my blood, all without my permission.
I need to calm down. What am I enduring right now that warrants panic? Darkness and quiet? Unending stillness? All the conditions for a good night’s sleep?
Even the ropes, as expertly rigged as they are, are quite comfortable. Not too tight but snug enough that I can feel every inch of them, where they wrap and fold and hitch. Where they delimit the most intimate parts of my body.
It’s pathetic that I’m on the verge of a panic attack—especially because Dinah and Mark and Hugo are here onstage, and Tristan is in the wings watching. I’m not alone. Of course I’m not alone.
But the adrenaline and cortisol are doing their jobs too well, and the world inside my input-deprived mind becomes impossibly, unsurvivably sharp. The noise-canceling headphones are now deafening in their manufactured silence. The darkness is no longer dark but instead composed of pooling, contorting splotches of color, garish and unending. The cool air on my skin abruptly feels like a thousand Wartenberg wheels, unbearable in its vacancy, and the ropes around my arms and wrists mean that I can only move my legs and feet, which I do now as subtly as I can, desperate for any sort of stimulation.
It barely helps.
It is rare—rare on the order of a verified miracle—that my safeword comes to me during a scene and absurd that it should come to me when the scene itself is barely anything at all, and yet I can’t stop thinking the word. Hyssop hyssop hyssop.
Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be clean.
I move my feet a little more, my bare soles rubbing against the mat, and struggle in vain to regulate my breathing.
A tug on my chest and then one on my hips, pulling right from the middle of the harness. I’m…I’m being strung up, I think. The lines fed through the rings above. But no hands touch me or caress me; no lips find my shoulder. There are only the tugs, the pauses for inspection or locking a line, and then there is the first tide of cool air under my back and thighs.
Smoothly, with only a single pause, I’m suspended for the first time in my life. I’m face up, my head supported by my bound hands at the back of my neck, my feet suspended in the air with me, and all of me so well rigged and secure that there’s no slipping, no creeping numbness, only a soft, gentle whisper of pain where the ropes press into my skin. My hair is hanging straight down, as unbound as my body is not, and for a moment—just one—I feel almost otherworldly, a spirit rising from the deep on a cloud of the sweetest, silkiest torment.
The panic hits like a meteor strike.
