NAWASHI
By Graydancer
©2004 Ki Musubi Media
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:
This book would not have been possible without the
support, encouragement, and love of my friends, in alphabetical
order: Alyska, AngieReedGarner, Ashanden, BiFemmeFatale,
ButterflyBleu, Catnapping, CFXJosh, CharlieCopper, DarthCrank,
Debunkshy, Drakenfly, EdwardDain, EvaLux, ExtheSuccubus, FencerT,
FetishMystique, FinickySlut, FloydCollins, Godniar, GoodTexan,
Great_Eye, Heliotrope689, HisSlaveKitty, Hypersimulation,
I_Bleed_Autumn, Innocent_Irony, InstantExpert, Jaded_Dreamer,
Jaspamaster, JeffreyP, JennKitty, JuniperLore, Kate_the_Bear,
Kitnish, Leathermines, LelethFaery, LostLostAgain, LulusPoochie,
Millarca, Mimazu, MissBettieHave, Obafugakum, OneSoul,
Panacea_Disease, ProjectJanel, PurpleNimue, Ralinad, RiggerMortis2,
Samadi, ScathedObsidian, Sekhmetdancing, Surrender, Sylvia101,
TechDragon, Thistles, Tonbi_nawa, TotallyHot, Trouble, Vidgal,
WantonHussy, WordWeaverLynn, and Zeuberwench.
Some of them appear in this novel. Any errors in
their portrayal are theirs, not mine.
Additional thanks go to O-Man of Mystery, the entire
Nanowrimo Project, SharpDressedKim, Shadowfind, Midori, TNGC, and
the Adult Rope Art, Shibaricon, ShibariEnthusiasts, and Advanced
Rope Bondage communities online, for their support, knowledge, and
inspiration.
My wife and my lover, thank you for enduring the
monomaniacal passion.
Probably lots of other people deserve thanks, too,
but they’ll have to wait.
Dedicated to my loves
Genevieve & Cunningminx
I
Sometimes, Brian reflected, fantasies
simply don’t measure up to reality.
For example, when he was thirteen, on his
paper route, he had a fantasy about one of his customers. She was
the mother of a couple of toddlers in an apartment complex, a woman
of Indian ancestry with golden brown skin covering gently sloping
curves of ass and breasts. She had lustrous dark hair down to her
waist, kept bound by one simple band of richly patterned dark green
brocade.
This nod towards her heritage only added to
her exoticism in his eyes, in spite of the jeans and sweatshirts
that she always wore when he came to collect payment for her
subscription. Her eyes were a gentle almond shape the color of dark
coffee that seemed to gaze right through Brian’s young stammering
self. He didn’t see the children clinging to her, or the
barely-livable conditions of the tenement she lived in. Her hair,
skin, and eyes ignited his imagination, fueled by a lifetime of
fantasy books and just starting to take on a decidedly adolescent
twist.
His fantasy really gained focus, however,
when he discovered references to a piece of literature known as the
Kama Sutra, an Indian text of secret and exotic sexual delights
which he didn’t dare actually track down for fear that his parents
would find out about his shameful burgeoning sexuality. But he knew
that it was Indian, and that it had something to do with that stuff
women and men did together but nobody talked about. That “stuff”
had only recently been discovered in “Love & Sex & Growing
Up,” a book at the library that had answered the questions that his
school couldn’t and his parents woudn’t.
The imagery was relatively simple: he would
be at her door, and she would ask him to step inside while she
fetched the money. This time her children would not be clinging to
her leg, pulling her jeans taut around her thighs. This time when
she returned it would not be with money, it would be with some
gauzy silk wrapping her body, and she would smile—a brief curve of
chocolate pink lips punctuated by bright teeth—and she would reach
out and touch him.
He was never specific about exactly where she would
touch him. It didn’t really matter in his mind, because all the
fantasy required was that she know where to touch, and at that
gentle stroke of a finger, say, perhaps, on the hollow just above
his collarbone, his penis would instantaneously engorge with a
solid and undeniable erection.
He would just stand there, in his
fantasy, staring into her eyes, unable to move and not wanting to.
She would smile and tell him about her membership in an ancient
family of Indian mystics, the
Kama
Sutrans
, perhaps, and their knowledge of
all the mysterious ways of pleasure. With a touch, she would
explain, she could make him hard and ready. With another touch, she
would tell him, she could make him explode.
In his fantasy, as he masturbated, eyes
shut tight, late at night in his bed or in the bathroom before a
shower, he would never quite see where her hand would touch him. It
didn’t matter. It wasn’t her touch that he saw. It was the
intensity of her eyes, the half-smile of her mouth, kind and amused
as she reached towards him, and that was the image he held as
sticky ejaculate filled his lotion-covered hand.
Twenty-some years later, he found, that
smile wasn’t nearly as arousing. Perhaps he had been too young to
see it at the time, but the smile was not amused and kind. It was
cruel and dismissive. At least, that was what was on the face of
the Indian woman who stood before him now in the candlelight.
“Are you enjoying yourself, Man?” The tone
with which she spat the word was in stark contrast to the murmured
endearments she’d layered the evening with earlier at the bar.
There she had danced in a low-centered sinuous way that had
attracted his attention amidst the bouncing and stomping crowd. He
moved out into the dance floor and caught her eye at the same time
that his body began reflecting her dance, moving in a complementary
motion to her. She had smiled, that flash of white teeth in the
darkness of her face that had triggered that memory of his
adolescent fantasy. Her eyes had found his, and their gazes drew
their bodies closer, first their arms, then her ass brushing
against his thigh, his shoulder against her back as she turned,
their dance moving from proximate motion into a more definite
flirtation, finally with her legs completely interlocking around
his thigh, his grounded stance holding her pumping hips with ease,
his hands grasping her hips, allowing her arms to fly up in an
semblance of mudras too fast in the dim flickering club light to
see.
Through it all, their eyes had never left
each other. When the music changed again into a less friendly beat,
they had slowly disengaged, and she’d turned, indicating with her
eyes, again, that she’d like him to follow the sweep of her black
hair shimmering down her back. Tied, of course, with a green swatch
of cloth, an embossed pattern flickering in and out of site as the
lights and lasers swept over it.
She’d been soft and
flirtatious in the parking lot, calling him “Dancer.” “Dancer, you
and I, we need to do more. You do…
more
, do you not?” Her voice was
touched with English intonations, lending an erotic shape to the
words purring from the exotic curve of her mouth.
He spoke without thinking,
always best when trying not to spoil a good thing. “I do much more.
As I’m sure you could tell. Where shall we do it?” The puerile part
of his mind cheered (“
Assume the sale! Way
to go!
”) but he managed to shut it out of
his face as he smiled back.
Perhaps he should have realized then that
the wide smile she returned had been more predatory and feral than
eager, but at the time he had been concentrating on not losing that
connection they’d established during the dance.
As he hung there in the door frame, he
wondered if she’d given other signals that she was a psychopath
before they’d made it to her door. He couldn’t think of any. She
had murmured soft blandishments at his dancing skills, her hand on
his thigh as he drove, stroking the spot still warm from her crotch
as she’d ridden him, complimenting the hard muscles of his legs (a
part of him winced at falling for that particular cliché),
expressing delight at the way his hands had held her, hinting that
her hips would enjoy that touch again with fewer clothes in the
way.
When she’d suggested, in the dim
candlelight of her apartment, with half-seen sculptures and a
mandala blurred by the flickering flame on her wall, that he let
her use her new frame (“You don’t mind being a little kinky, do
you?” she’d said, her hands fluttering across the small of his back
as she pressed into him) he’d actually chuckled. Actually let out a
smug, confident laugh, at the idea that he, Brian Stanford, would
be averse to something kinky. He’d assented, of course, planning to
use it as a quid for his pro quo later on, when he would be able to
unwrap those curves, revealing her “all-over-tan” as he’d used to
call it when his ex-wife, a Filipina, would undress, and then he
would wrap her up again in something much more revealing,
restrictive, and, he hoped, to their mutual tastes.
Now, however, hanging there with his shirt
in ribbons, a thin trickle of blood sliding down from his left
clavicle to pool in the hair over his nipple, with the woman’s soft
lips sneering in a (no doubt about it now) feral grimace as she
lifted the knife again, he suspected that their tastes were not so
mutual after all.
He licked his lips, and
tried to keep his voice as reasoned and calm as he could.
“Actually, I’ve never been into blood play. Nothing wrong with it,
when you’re keeping things sanitary”
Please, God, let that knife be sterile
“but it’s just really not been my thing. In fact,” he tried
to let a chuckle, a confident tone belying his growing unease, “I’m
not all that into being a bottom at all. Personally I’m pretty much
entirely of the dominant persuasion.” He hoped that the use of the
terminology common to the kink community would remind her that the
two of them had not negotiated at all, really, beyond his
willingness to have his wrists taken up in the dark leather straps
attached to the wood frame.
Dark?
That annoying voice in his psyche piped up
again.
Dark with what fluids, exactly, do
you think?
She didn’t react as he’d
hoped, with some sort of acknowledgement of the need for rules of
engagement before they went into this sort of edge play
(
in a literal sense, edgy, now, isn’t that
funny?)
. In fact, she didn’t seem to be
possessed of any of the three precepts of kinky play, being insane,
unsafe, and increasingly non-consensual.
Problem was, no negotiation beforehand
meant there was no safeword, no phrase that would let the Top know
that the Bottom was in a place that was not good, that things
needed to stop now. “Red?” he tried, as she drew the knife closer
to his right clavicle. It was a peculiar double-bladed shape, as if
two daggers had been merged with their blade edges perpendicular to
each other, with a large ball on the end of the hilt protruding
from her clenched fist.
“Red! RED!” The common
safeword had no effect on her as she drew a thin and wavy line just
under the line of his bone. It didn’t hurt very much, but
inexorable invasion of his body by the blade and the maliciously
evil smile of the person who wielded it was beginning to fray his
calm.
This, buddy-boy, is headed nowhere
you want to go.
“Red?” she softly
chuckled, looking with satisfaction at the lines of blood slowly
wending their way down his pectoral. “Red is the only color left to
you, Man. You are in Kali’s hands now, and” she drew a deeper line
quick down his sternum, punctuating her statement with a small
puncture wound just under the small bone where his ribs met, “Kali
has no
safewords.
” She hissed the last with the same contemptuous tone as
before, and through his gritted teeth Brian wondered how he’d ever
thought her attractive. As if she could read that in the look on
his face, she laughed again, an ugly percussive brassy sound. “You,
Man, are ruled by your
lingam
, and will go wherever it
leads. Sniffing around anyone whose
yoni
you catch a whiff of… and in
this case, your
lingam
has led you into the arms of Kali. Enjoy it while you
can,
Man
, for
your sacrifice will be the final pleasure you ever
have.”
The hell of it was, his
body
did
seem to
enjoy it. Before she had begun slicing his shirt off of his chest,
she had stroked him, once, just behind his ear, a caress along the
back curve of his skull, her nail suddenly biting into his neck
just at the cervical vertebrae. Brian’s vision had seemed to flash,
and as he shook his head to clear it, he’d realized that his cock
was pushing out the fabric of his slacks in rampant
erection.