Page 25 of Bound By Words

When I’d taken on Marisa as a sub, she’d been indignant, aiming little barbed comments at me whenever we saw each other at events. Grace had eventually settled down once I’d started playing with her again after a few months, but for someone who insisted on no commitments, she was a possessive person.

Marisa had ended our dynamic immediately upon my return to Boston after the wedding in February. I’d felt relieved to see her moving on, but she’d been close-lipped about her new Dom and her future. Meanwhile, I’d been fixated on my brief time with Kelly and compared every woman I met to her. It didn’t lend well to trying to find a new partner.

Emory had known something was bothering me the last few months, but he’d been traveling more—taking Talia to Europe—and I’d withdrawn into the projects at work. If I could do one thing right, it’d make all the other things seem less stressful.

My mother had been contacting me more, the anniversary of my father’s death looming over all of us, but I’d been avoiding her. It wasn’t fair, and I wasn’t being a good son, but my sister could shoulder her emotional neediness for a while. I was tapped out.

My adolescence had been spent picking her up off the floor after one of her episodes, and I couldn’t handle it with everything else going on right now. I was tired, and I just needed a break.

Nathan: Any instructions?

It took her a few minutes to reply, but I was sure it was so she could keep me on edge.

G: Sensory deprivation scene in reclined suspension. We can discuss logistics when you arrive. I have a scene list drafted. Take a shower before you come.

Knowing she’d be irritated with me later if I did, I didn’t leave her on read for long.

Nathan: Yes, ma’am. Any requests on products?

G: The cedar. That’s a good boy for asking for instructions.

Somehow, even though I knew she was praising me in her text, it still felt condescending, and the shame I’d recently experienced after a scene with her was rearing its head early. That didn’t lend well to me being able to drop into sub-space.

It figured that she always insisted on me showering because she said I smelled like sawdust or sweat or a construction site, but then she wanted me to use products that made me smell like a forest. I knew it was standard protocol before a scene, but she liked to remind me of things I already knew because it kept her in the dominant position of power. I let her do it because we agreed upon it, but it still didn’t feel natural to submit to her completely.

She also wanted me to shave the beard I’d grown out since the wedding, but that wasn’t happening. Grace got to play with my body, and since we seldom kissed and my beard never made contact with her body, she could get over it. Body hair wasn’t in our agreement, and I wasn’t one of her pleasure subs.

Over the next hour, I checked the worksite for progress and noted any potential delays in the schedule, distracted by what I knew was coming later. Grace had been taunting me about my reluctance to vet a new sub. While she acted like she didn’t want to share me, I also think it pleased her that I could flip the switch and bring out my Dominant side with the right partner. She loved it when her partners got attention.

My rigging skills rivaled Emory’s, and she liked that people in the rope community respected me. While Grace thrived on bending people to her will, she loved any attention that made her seem important. Collecting prized pets appeared to be the way she went about it recently. The more clout a person had in their real life, the more she craved the ability to bring them to their knees to serve her. While our relationship wasn’t a traditional dynamic, she still ensured people knew I was involved with her.

I hated to admit it, but if you were into degradation, humiliation, or impact play, Grace was the pinnacle of Dommes. She wasn’t for everyone, but she did know what she was doing. She’d started as a rigger, but now she only rope-played with me. I wasn’t sure if I should be honored that I was the only one she used to keep her rope skills sharp, but that shouldn’t be the reason I gave myself to stay in an arrangement that wasn’t healthy or working for me.

I wasn’t sure if she was the rope top for me anymore, and the more those feelings grew, the more I knew I needed to end it. Emory had been right that Grace was manipulating me, but as long as she kept my inner cravings for restraint at bay, I’d tolerated it.

G: Don’t be late.

Rolling my eyes at the reminder, I left the worksite, locking up my office and telling my foreman I was headed out for the day. I knew he could handle closing down the site. He would do it full-time in a month or so, at least while I was on vacation.

My seniority in the commercial construction company I worked for ensured me four weeks of vacation every year, and I was taking them all at once.

Evan had called me shortly after their wedding, asking if I had any connections in Connecticut. He wanted to build a guest house on their property and had trouble finding someone to manage the exterior construction. The company that had built his house was booked up for months, and he didn’t want to wait a year to get started.

After making some calls, I volunteered to get the building up, letting him hire local contractors to pour the foundation for me a few weeks ago after the ground thawed. He’d have another contractor come after me to complete the interior and carpentry since my time was limited. It’d been almost a decade since I worked on a crew, but my first experience in construction had been building houses for Habitat for Humanity as a teenager.

My grandfather’s residential construction company had been sold several years ago after he died because I didn’t want to leave Boston to take over. But I’d kept some of the equipment and part of his property in Connecticut. My older brother was an accountant and didn’t want to work with his hands, and my sister was a stay-at-home mom with an investment banker for a husband and had likely never held a drill in her life. She’d been Daddy’s little princess, staying inside the house with my mom while my dad taught us boys how to use power tools.

I apprenticed with my grandfather’s company while I was an undergrad. Commercial construction had always appealed to me more, despite his disappointment when I changed directions with my degree in construction management. Part of me wondered what would have happened had I returned home and taken over when he wanted to retire, but I couldn’t imagine leaving my life in the city permanently.

It’d been too hard to think about returning home after he died, especially since it meant I’d be closer to my mother and the family skeletons I’d been trying to avoid—my father’s ghost being one of them. It was too hard to face the company he’d worked for every day of his adult life until his death, especially knowing he’d used it to cover up his second family.

My half-brother was long gone, taking off right after high school, and while it killed my grandfather that he’d never looked back after he’d raised him since he was a toddler, I couldn’t stomach dealing with the proof of my father’s lies.

While I was sure a psychologist would tie my involvement with the kink community to my daddy issues and trauma response, I’d always been fascinated with rope. I was the first in my scout troop to get through the entire knot-tying manual and earn a merit badge, and when I was older, I’d helped a summer camp set up a ropes course for my Eagle project. It didn’t matter what kind of rope it was, I was into it.

In my junior year at university, a casual acquaintance had seen a handmade net hanging on the wall above my bed in my apartment and had introduced me to Shibari. I started with self-tying and didn’t look back. It wasn’t until I met Emory in a community photography class, and we became lab partners, that I began to delve into the local kink community.

Emory had, surprisingly enough, been an instructor at an intro to partner tying workshop I attended when I was twenty, and I’d begged him to mentor me. Initially, he’d hesitated, but we’d been close ever since.

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