I took a deep breath. “Where am I?” I asked, my hands drifting up and feeling around.
“You’re in the Den.”
I could hear him circling me. I tried to follow his footsteps but I couldn’t make out a thing.
“I can’t see anything.”
“You don’t need to. You need only to feel. Can you trust me? Can you let me be your eyes?”
“I’ll try.”
“Good.”
I wrapped my arms around myself.
“Are you cold?”
Could he see me? How? “No. I’m nervous.”
“I’ll take care of that.”
After a few seconds, he was behind me again.
“I’m going to place my hands around your waist, Solange, and I’m going to guide you over to the wall. Will you let me?”
“Okay.”
It was the strangest, warmest sensation, being surrounded by pitch-darkness, his lean body folding around mine; it was like being spooned while standing. I quickly absorbed his body heat as he guided me across what seemed from the echo to be a large room.
Then he stopped. “Put your hands out in front of you. What do you feel?”
At first I thought it was just a wall, but padding around I felt a sort of diagonal beam, which crossed another shooting up in the opposite direction. Along the beams I felt an apparatus of some kind—hoops—soft but firmly formed.
“Can you find the center?” he asked. “Here. Let me help you.”
He took me by the waist again, spinning me around to face him, positioning me against the cross of the two beams. By now I was comfortable with his hands on my waist. I liked the firm and confident way he handled me, even though I hated the term itself: Handled. Man-handled. The term was demeaning, and yet what this man was doing wasn’t demeaning at all. It was … relaxing. He took one of my wrists and with a swift click, locked it in place above my shoulder along the beam.
“Hey, what is this—?”
But before I could get the whole sentence out, he secured my other wrist. I felt his hair gracing my thigh as he bent to do the same to my right ankle. Then the left one was immobilized. The final restraint was an arm-like lever covered in a soft rubber sheath that clicked into place around my waist.
“Are you comfortable, Solange?”
I was completely restrained on a diagonal cross with padded limbs.
“I guess. But I can’t move.”
“Good.”
“What are you going to do to me?”
“Everything you want, nothing you don’t.”
I squirmed, arousal spiraling up my limbs.
“Are the restraints too tight?”
I tested and pulled, still astonished to be in this situation, restrained in a contraption wearing what amounted to a lacy nightie, while a total stranger with a soothingly sexy voice was clearly in charge.