I glare at him and flex my fingers against the mat. I can feel my pulse in my knuckles, in my jaw, in the back of my throat. I want this to start already. I want him to stop talking and do whatever it is that makes people come to him to be tied up like animals.
“Now start doing the fucking thing already.”
“Then let’s begin,” he says, and I catch an amused flicker at the corner of his mouth once again. Faint, fleeting, almostnothing. It feels like I’ve given him a joke and he’s too polite to laugh.
He rises with that same smooth control that’s pissing me off more and more, then gestures for me to shift forward. He moves quietly, while I’m here vibrating, too close from tearing out of my own skin.
“You can keep the shirt on,” he says. “I’ll start with a single column.”
Whatever the fuck that means. I don’t ask.
I feel his hands on my wrist a second later, and that’s when something inside me stutters. My muscles tense automatically, my fingers twitch, instinct flaring because my body’s wired to brace, to respond, to act when touched. But this is not a punch or a slap. It’s not a body pressing down on mine, all sweat and urgency and the need to fuck or bleed or both. It’s nothing like what I’musedto. His fingers move slowly, smooth, guiding my wrist into place, and I can feel how much he isn’t rushing. He’s not groping, not pinning me down, not tearing anything open. He’s justarranging.
It fucks with my head.
The rope comes next, sliding across the skin of my wrist, looping once, then again, pulling tighter and making my breath hitch. He moves with a quiet patience, looping, cinching, tucking the ends, and every motion is exact. I don’t want to feel it, but I do. The pressure. The pull. The heat blooming under the fibers. It’s not pain—fuck, not even close to that. It’s a kind of intimatecontrol,and that’s what makes my jaw clench.
“Too tight?” he asks, and I nearly growl.
“No.”
“You sure? It shouldn’t cut off circulation—”
“I said no.”
He nods, checks one last time, then finishes the knot with a final pull.
Then he leans back.
“That’s it?” I snap, twisting my wrist, testing it. It holds, snug and warm andmaddening.“What the fuck is this, beginner hour? Where’s the kink shit?”
Naoya meets my eyes, and his calm doesn’t waver.
“It’s your start.”
The only reason I don’t punch his face and tear this place down is because my wrist feels good.The rope feels good.I feel the beat of my own blood pulsing beneath it, and part of me wants to know what happens when he uses both arms.
“Do both,” I snap, pissed I have to ask instead of him just doing it.
Naoya doesn’t seem surprised at all. He moves behind me, and I feel his hands on the rope at my wrist again, fingers working the knot with this slow, fluid rhythm.
He grabs my other arm, positions it behind me, and I tense even though I’m trying not to. He presses the arms together, wrist to wrist, and I feel the rope dragging, looping and pulling until both arms are bound, shoved back so tight I can’t move them. It feels claustrophobic, like I’ve been locked into a new body.
My body strains instinctively, half-expecting pain to come next, but all that comes is stillness—tight, breathless,fucking terrifyingstillness. I can’t punch through it, can’t run from it, can’t fuck it out of my system. I can only sit here with my arms folded back like a goddamn puppet and with my chest rising too fast.
He moves away once he’s done. That makes it worse, because now I’m left alone with it—this sensation of being held in placewithout violence and rage—and my brain starts spinning too fast.
Maybe Naoya’s trying to scare me. Maybe this whole thing is a trick, a slow-burn trap to freak me out until I storm out and never come back.
And fuck, it’s working.
Because I’m scared as hell right now. Not of this weird, thin man, but of the fact that I can’t get out of the hold and Iknow that. Know it in a way I never have before. I’ve been tied too many times to count—gang shit, punishment shit, fucked-up threats or games or worse—but never like this. Never this still. Never this precise. Never in a way that made meseriously believe I couldn’t get out.This feels final. It feels like surrender, andI don’t do surrender.
I pull at it just to test. Nothing gives.Nothing.My shoulders strain, the muscles push, but the rope doesn’t move. It doesn’t shift. I can’t find an angle, can’t twist, can’t even shake loose the tension.
It’s perfect.
I hate it.
