I stood in the kitchen, out of sight of the front door, wondering what the pizza delivery guy was thinking at the tanned, curly-haired Greek god in workout shorts who had answered the door. "No that's OK, Mister," I thought the pizza guy would want to say, "Your Apple Pay is no good here. this one's on me. Just seeing your fucking beautiful body for a few seconds is payment enough for me."
Matt returned to the kitchen, slid the pizza box off his hand onto the counter, put his phone down as well, picked up his beer, and moved a step or two closer to me.
"You were saying ...."
I took another deep breath, and said, "I was saying that .... I just wanted you to know that I'm not ...." I threw up my hands, at least as far as I could go while holding a glass of wine. "Oh, Jeez!"
He gently took my wine glass away from me, put it on the counter and moved in even closer. "Just say it."
"I'm into that stuff."
"What stuff?"
"I like being dominated."
"By men?"
"Yes. Not with women. Sex with women, for me, is completely vanilla. I mean, I've had sex with women in different positions, and I've done all kinds of things to stimulate my women partners, but there's never any domination, or anything you would think of as 'kinky,' involved."
"Whereas with men ..." he prodded.
"Whereas with men," I said, taking the cue, "I like -- LIKE is the wrong word. I AM TURNED ON BY -- the other guy being in control."
"How much in control? What are you interested in, specifically?"
"I'm not sure I feel comfortable ...."
"John," he said, putting his hands on my shoulders. "Just SAY it."
"All right: BDSM. Bondage, torture."
"Say more," he said. "What's a typical scene like?"
"When I was a kid, my friends and I would go to the movies, and there'd always be a second feature, a pretty terrible B flick. (I guess that's the definition of a 'B movie.') Most of the time they were westerns, or sword-and-sandal stuff -- Jason and the Argonauts, that sort of thing. My friends would always wait for the point in the picture when the hero and his crew would be invited to a feast at the castle of the (secretly evil) king, and the handmaindens of the court would dance the Dance of the Seven Veils with the Six Holes. I was OK with that, but I was also hoping to see the hero and his crew taken captive by the (suddenly revealed as evil) king, taken to the dungeon, stripped to the waist (They always got stripped to the waist.) and tortured.
"There was one movie I was particulurely turned on by, 'The Sword and the Sorceror.' I'll spare you the whole plot. Suffice it to say that there is an evil guy who takes the throne after arranging to have the beloved king and queen killed. Twenty years later, a young man starts an insurrection because he claims that he is the rightful heir to the throne. Seems his mother, the queen, was about to give birth when she was killed, and the fetus was stolen out of her body and kept alive.
"Midway through the movie, we hear that the evil king's forces have captured the young prince, and the next scene takes place in the dungeon of the castle. The camera follows a voluptuous young woman carrying a tray. She knocks on a heavily barred door, and she's allowed in to the room to bring refreshments to the king. He's there, torturing the prince. The scene is really short. There is only one actual moment of torture, when the head torturer, or whatever he is, takes a glowing hot poker and touches it to one of the prince's nipples. But that's really all you need.
"The prince is chained, standing, spread-eagle. He is wearing nothing but a shredded loin cloth. His body is covered in sweat, and dirt, and bruises, and burns. I use the word 'standing' loosely: He is almost unconscious. His legs have given out underneath him, and he really hanging from the iron cuff on his wrists. His chin rests on his chest, and his long hair, soaked with sweat, is hanging in his face.
"What I saw at that moment was DISPAIR, and that's what turns me on: the idea of being restrained 'against my will' by another man, tortured and sexually abused. That's the ideal scene for me."
Matt was silent for a minute. He looked directly at me, and I stared back at him. He had asked for the details, and now I was going to see how repulsed he would be by them.
"Why do you think you like this stuff?" he asked.
"Oh, seems pretty simple to me," I said. "In my head, sex with women is 'normal,' so it's vanilla. Sex with men is 'abnormal,' but it's OK if I'm 'forced.' And if I'm punished in connection with sexwith a man, that's even more of a turn-on."
He nodded. That seemed to make sense.
"How much experience do you have with this?" he asked, quietly.
"Some. Back in New York, I knew a few guys who were happy to entertain my interests. They each had their own interests, too, of course, so I was introduced to sounding, and the violet wand, and TENS units. There was one guy I saw regularly who was very good -- or, maybe it's more accurate to say that his interests corresponded very well with mine -- until he had to stop because of a change in his 'real' life.
"He was of Asian descent, and I talked with him about the idea that I was a white guy being held in some God-forsaken prison in an Asian country. No one knows I'm there, so I have no hope of being released. Conditions are horrible until, one day, a high-ranking prison official comes to visit. He has all the prisoners stripped and assembled in the courtyard, and he picks a handle of men, including me, who are taken away, put in another area of the prison, fed better, given a real opportunity to exercise. The trade-off is that, every so often, the prison official comes back to the facility, chooses one of the men from his special 'collection,' and has him taken to a specially equipped room for torture and sexual abuse. In the 10 years I knew him, we probably got together 15, maybe 20 times."
"What did he do to you during those sessions?" Matt asked.
"I always started the scene restrained in some way -- hand sheld above my head, hands held behnd me, on the floor with my hands and feet hog-tied, that sort of thing. I was always dressed in some 'prison' outfit -- usually an old ripped pair of khakis and an old t-shirt -- because he liked the idea of stripping me himself. He would play with me some in the house, and then take me out to the garage, where I had set things up so that he could restrain me chained up, standing, spread-eagle, or strapped down to a table, or in a seat, lots of different positions. He would spend something like two hours working on me. At first, it would just be touching -- playing with my nipples and my cock, that sort of thing. But eventually he'd wind up beatng me with a wide leather belt, dripping hot wax on me, placing clips all over my body, torturing my genitals, using his TENS unit on me, and edging me."
"You were restrained throughout? Even when he was just playing with your nipples and your cock?"
"Yes."
"But that gives you pleasure. I'm sure. I saw it." He smiled. "Why would you need to be restrained during that part of the scene?"
"The fantasy in my head is that I'm straight, and that just having a man arouse me through touch is humiliating."
"So, you didn't express pleasure when he did that?"
"No, I moaned with embarrassment, pleaded with him to stop. That's usually when he gagged me. That ...." I paused.
"Yes?"
"That's really important for me."
"What is?"
"The idea that being used by another man, even being brought pleasure by another man, is torture. That part of a scene -- the nipple play, the edging, the finger fucking -- could go on forever, as far as I'm concerned. There was a weird dynamic about pain and pleasure, too. He would punish me -- say, he'd beat me with a leather strap, 50, maybe 100 times -- and then he'd hug me, and I would melt in his arms, pleased with the touch. And then he'd start to stimulated me sexually, and the torture element would begin again."
"And when he inflicted pain," Matt said, "you cried out?"
"Yes. I reacted honestly to the pain, not screaming all the time, like in some S&M videos, only when it really hurt."
"Did he get off? Did he fuck you?"
"No," I said, "although I wouldn't have stopped him as long as he practiced safe sex. Rape is the ultimate torture one man can inflict on another man. He just wasn't into it."
"Did he get you off?"
"No. He did at first, but it's really more of a turn-on for me if I DON'T cum. I'm turned on by the torture, not the pleasure."
"No matter how long he played with you and edged you?"
"No matter how long it lasted."
Matt looked at me wthout talking for a few seconds that felt like hours. Then, he said "Let me think about this a minute, would you?" and he took a piece of now-lukewarm pizza out of the box. He took one bite, and then put it down, brushed the cornmeal off his hands, and said "I've got to make a quick call." He grabbed his phone and left the kitchen.
I stood there for maybe 10 minutes, trying to determine whether I could remove a cold slice of pepperoni from my slice of pizza, leaving a perfect circular void in the cheese. Eventually, Matt came back, with his phone to his ear.
"Yeah," he said. "I will. Thanks, Man. Talk to you soon." He thumbed the call to an end, and put the phone face down on the counter. "Do you remember my friend Aaron?" he asked. He picked up his half-eaten slice of pizza, felt that it was cold, grimmaced, grabbed a plate and threw it and another slice onto the plate and into the microwave.
"I do," I said. When I'd helped Matt and his friends remove all the old materials from the lower level of the house and throw it into the garbage bin, Aaron was one of the two guys other guys. A couple of inches shorter than Matt, but still taller than me -- which made him about 5'10" -- Aaron was broad and muscled, a weightlifter, for sure. You don't get shoulders and arms like his from good genes alone.
"I just called him. Told him about you."
I panicked: "Why??"
"Aaron has a dungeon," Matt said, as plainly as possible. "I wanted to know if he would let me use the space wth you."
"Wait! He's got a DUNGEON?"
Matt smiled. "He bought about 20 acres north of here, with the idea of building his dream house on the property some day. But, for now, he took the little ranch house that sits right smack dab in the middle of the land -- far from the road and the surrounding houses -- and he outfitted it as a dungeon. Took down some walls to open up the space, removed the ceiling in the main room to expose the ceiling joists, hung industrial winches to allow for suspension, the whole deal. He's got a standing frame made out of 4" X 4" posts where someone can be chained standing, spread-eagle; he's got a rack-slash-torture table, he's got a padded horse, and tons and tons of equipment for restraint and punishment."
"Fuck," I said.
"Yeah," Matt said. "So, if you're interested, we can use the space for a scene."
"Jesus, yes," I said. "When?"
"Hold on. One caveat: Aaron wants to join in."
"In what way?"
"He doesn't care. He'd be OK working as my assistant, or as a second subject, being tortured alongside you, or just observing."
"Do I get to choose?" I asked.
"No," Matt replied. "That's up to me. In fact, we should get straight that, if we do this, I make the decisions about everything that happens. You get a safe word, so if we go past what you can take, you get to call a halt to the scene. But that's it. You don't get to ask me to slow down, or ease off, or anything like that. You take whatever I decide to give out, or we're done. Those are your choices."
"I'm in," I said quietly, "as long as we can agree that there's no blood, no scat, no long-lasting marks."
"I'm fine with those rules. Are you sure?"
"I'm sure," I said. "When do we do this?"
"Well," Matt said, "since our wives are gone until the end of the week ...."
"Can it be at night? I took today off to help you move the soil, but I've got to work the rest of the week."
"Absolutely," he said. "Tomorrow night? Wednesday night? Better in the next couple of days, rather than later in the week, just so any marks have time to fade." He grinned.
"Tomorrow night. Is there any possibility ... I mean, how long will the scene last?"
"How long do you want it to last?"
"The longer the better. In fact, one of my fantasies is to be held for a LONG time -- like, 24 hours -- and to be repeatedly tortured and then left to doze off, and then awakened for more torture. That dispair thing."
"Got it," Matt said. "I hear you. Obviously, we can't do 24 hours, but we can do two. After dark tomorrow. Dress in some old jeans or khakis, and the oldest t-shirt you have -- a shirt you won't miss if it gets destroyed -- no shoes or socks, no underwear. Pack a backpack with a change of clothes, including shoes and socks, if you want them.
"Aaron will pick you up. He drives a gray SUV. Be on the lookout for him at ... Does 8:30 work?"
"Yes. I usually talk to my wife about 8."
"So he'll get there at 8:30. When ...."
I interrupted. "I'm usually done with my call by then, but if it runs long ...."
"I'll tell him to wait. As soon as you can, come out -- Don't bring your cell phone -- get in the car, and he'll drive you to the house. At the first opportunity he has after he leaves the neighborhood, he'll tell you to put on a black hood, just so you can't see where you're going. If anything happens during the trip -- if a cop stops you, or something like that -- you'll be able to slip it off.
"Once he arrives at the property, he'll pull in off the road, and then he'll get out and give you leather restraints for your wrists and ankles. You'll put them on, then he'll add shackles to restrict the length of your steps and to keep your arms down at your sides, and he'll drive you all the way in to the house.
"All of the bonds we use -- all of the chains and ties -- will be attached to your restraints with simple spring clips, so truthfully, you'll be able to get yourself out of any situation we put you in. You'll have to just ignore that, and imagine that you are helpless. Understood?"
"Yes."
"He will lead you into the house hooded and shackled, and then I will take over, chaining you however I decide is best. I'll probably leave you there for a few minutes, to allow you to get your head into the game, and then the scene will begin. Understood?"
"Yes."
"Any questions?"
"What will Aaron's role be?"
"He'll assist me. Mostly, he'll observe. If ever I have to move you from one position to another, where I wouldn't be able to control a real prisoner by myself, he'll help to restrain you as we put you in the new position. Anything else?'
"The safe word."
"Ah, yeah. You like to imagine that you don't know your captor, right?"
"Right."
"Then it's simple: If you have to end the scene, say my name. Say 'Matt, I have to stop,' or 'Matt, I can't take any more,' and I'll stop immediatley. It's important, though, that you understand: there is no 'Go a little easier.' There's either 'Keep going' or 'Stop completely.'
"If I decide to gag you, you may not be able to say my name. In that case, start snapping your fingers, and don't stop until I acknowledge that you want to end the scene. The restraints on your wrists and ankles are suspension restraints, so you should be able to be hung by them without losing the ability to snap your fingers. Even so, I will NEVER put you in a position where you are BOTH gagged AND suspended by the wrists. OK?"
"OK," I said. "Thanks."
"How do you feel about all of this?" he asked.
"I'm scared shitless," I said, "but excited."