Elastic Heart

The image of a naked woman tied up in ropes stared back at me from the computer screen. It was two thirty in the morning; “Huck” and I had long since stopped talking, and I wasn’t going to call Effie, but I couldn’t sleep. I eyed the woman on the screen, a tingle forming in my lower abdomen that now sat alongside the ever-present nausea.

Sipping my tea, I clicked my trackpad and pulled up the next image. I’d always been interested BDSM—in bondage, to be more specific. People in ropes, gagged and bound, had me very interested.

I thought if I had friends, they would say it was post-traumatic stress. You know, since I was held down and gagged with my own sock when I was raped. I mean, that’s a perfectly okay theory. From the outside, I see how it makes sense. From the inside, my insides, though, I knew it was wrong.

I admired the girls who were tied up.

I was absolutely fascinated by them.

And I always had been.

To me, they represented a place so far away from me it was like Narnia. The women that let themselves be tied up for these photos and videos had absolute trust in the one doing the tying. I couldn’t begin to imagine having that trust again.

Taking another sip of tea, I clicked a different image. The woman was strung up, her legs and arms tied behind her back as she hung a few inches above a bed. She looked to enjoy it. Sure, the images could have been fake, but I didn’t think so. Unsurprisingly, there was a huge community that was big into bondage. Various forums and conventions confirmed what the tingling in my belly was saying: people not only liked it, they got off on it.

I’d been looking into shibari, which was a type of Japanese rope binding. Sure there was a sort of grim beauty to duct tape, but the rope knots and style of the bind of shibari was just so beautiful, and apparently the knots were supposed to hit certain erotic pleasure points as well.

I sighed, imagining myself tied up like the model on the screen. My fantasy was short-lived though. Even just imagining it made my throat constrict and my skin sweat.

I slammed my laptop shut, anger now coursing through my veins. Huck and shibari had been nice, fleeting retreats from my daily life, but I had a mission. My life no longer belonged to me. It belonged to vengeance. Vengeance didn’t get to imagine a happier life. Vengeance only imagined its goal: Morris razed and ruined. Preferably bleeding.

Grabbing my tea off the small nightstand I called a desk, I stood up and walked into the kitchen. Covering the various laminate counters were long scrawls of blue paper.

Operation: Make Morris Pay was now in full swing. First order of business, get a better name for the operation. Second order of business, break into Becca Riley’s house. Becca Riley was Morris’s campaign manager and basically the black, festering heart of the Morris Entity. She was the one who had spun Morris’s rape away from him and onto me. She had made me an alcoholic in the eyes of the public. She had made me a whore.

Becca Riley was a wretched, albeit brilliant, human being. She was bound to have information on Morris and the campaign. I wouldn’t be able to prove my rape or frame Morris without Riley’s files.

While interning for Morris, word spread about Riley’s massive and ancient home. Rumor had it that there was an intricate tunnel system underneath that even Riley didn’t fully understand. For the past few months I’d been petitioning the state for blueprints. Slowly I’d received each puzzle piece and that nigh

t, tea in hand, it all came together.

Under the dim kitchen light, I could clearly see the tunnels outlined on the royal blue paper. It was as if Riley had given me a personalized invitation to her home. It was time for step two. In one week I would enter Becca Riley’s home and steal her files, all while she slept in the other room.

Feeling like shit, having not slept in days, I opened up Secrets. It was t-minus three days until I would infiltrate Becca Riley’s house and I couldn’t stop speaking like a B movie spy, saying shit like “t-minus” and “infiltrate.” Maybe it was the lack of sleep.

Probably.

I only got up off the couch to give Raskol food and let him go to the bathroom. I didn’t eat. I didn’t drink, unless whiskey counted as water now. Despite the intense fatigue I felt, I couldn’t fall asleep. I kept going over the plan in my head, over and over, looking for any loose rocks I might trip on.

I thought about how I had gotten to this place. I thought about Morris. Then I thought further back. I thought about my family. I thought about the broken egg that had hatched me, going as far as to make a cryptic post on Secrets about it. Had I been doomed from the start? I was about to sign out and grab some more “water” when a text bubble popped up.

Conversation with Huck

Huck: “Dandelion, what’s your post about?”

Dandelion: “I was just thinking about my childhood.”

Huck: “Uh-oh.”

Dandelion: “What? You don’t know a thing about my childhood. Maybe it was great and filled with smiley face stickers.”

Huck: “Was it?”

Dandelion: “Half of it was.”

Huck: “That’s nice.”

Dandelion: “Yep.”