Hitched in Bed

[A month ago I entered a Writing Battle. They're a website that hosts these strangely compelling competitions with fun little constraints and what not. This is what I wrote for the latest one. I did not win. But I like the foundation of the story and I can confidently say it is no where near done. But I want folks to read it in this raw, rushed, messy form to see how writing starts and, eventually, maybe I'll post the polished version. Please feel free to leave comments with suggestions, likes, dislikes, etc.]

Headlights peer through a fog slithering out of a distant lake. Both are at the end of their journey and both feel they’re too far from home. A man, not too tall, squints harder as the navigation tells him to turn around and find his destination in a field emptier than his stomach. A passenger, a woman, not too short, is drawing lazy circles in the fog with fingers jingling with rings. Only silver. They’d already agreed that it was clearly forward and not back, but neither were willing to silence the robotic Australian barking out of the phone; she’d gotten them so far and sending her to an abyss now just seemed cruel. And this way they didn’t have to talk for fear of interrupting her.

A dock pokes out of the fog and out onto the lake, and docks usually came paired with houses nearby they figure. Silently hope. A sudden transition from black asphalt to dusty gravel and the house stands before them in a clearing in the fog, as if the chimney sucks it in to feed a fire in its belly. The Australian robot deems her job done leaving room for a silence to be broken.

“Lake house rich, huh?”

“Lake house rich,” she says.

“A real lake, too. Not some hole a tractor dug.”

“I think they put a dam in for power, but the lake was still here.”

She stretches around the seat to grab a backpack with lightning bolts printed on the front, stuffed with clothes and tampons, and a jar of honey she stole from his mom the day before. He doesn’t know about it.

“Well, I’ll be right here in a few days. Still Tuesday morning?”

“Still Tuesday morning,” she says.

They kiss and embrace and wish each other a good weekend, telling each other to be safe but have fun and call if they need. She gets out of the car and waves as he does an unnecessarily complicated six-point turn with one hand so he can wave back. She is excited to see her friends and he is excited to eat ice cream on the porch. They’ll probably marry in some indeterminate future.

The house – the mansion – sucking in fog by the dock welcomes its guests with a knocker cast in the shape of a sleeping child, arms clutching a blanket from which hangs the loop to slam against the plate embedded in a polished wooden door of proud, local oak. Gabrielle is the last to arrive and she just walks in, leaving the child to sleep.

Gabrielle is swarmed as she steps across the threshold. Squeezed in a hug, “Girl! How was the drive?” Sloppily kissed, “Still with that loser?” Smacked on the ass, “How long has it been?” Handed a drink, “What a place! Right?” Hands grabbed, “You got the honey?”

Gabrielle says, “Oh fine. He’s nice, you need to come to his restaurant! A week, Steph, just a week. It’s gorgeous, it’s perfect!” She pauses to dig through her bag, shifting skirts and socks to the side, balancing the loaded bottom on her knee until she pulls out the mason jar of golden honey. “Right here! His mom always says it’s the sweetest stuff this side of the Atlantic. She uses her own bees and flowers, it’s super cute.”

Spying the gift table down the hall she walks over and carefully moves aside wrapped boxes and puts the jar of honey amid a collected menagerie of bundles and wrappings and bags. Colours and sizes ranging from the eloquently obtuse to the most petite refined.

Gabrielle turns to interrupt the buzz of excitement building around the gift table, “Alright ladies, shall we get this party started?”

The general buzz of assent moves through laboriously decorated hallways and over carpet old enough to remember distant empires, watched by the approving eyes of ancestors comfortable with their gained obscurity through the yearly-dusted layers of oil touched-up by a Chicago restoration artist. The door they sought stands apart from its neighbours with magenta daisies taped to the corners of the elegant door frame and a “no boys allowed” sign hand-written in a frilly script with a shiny pink metallic marker tacked to the middle of a stately door crafted from a slab of heritage conifer.

“She sleeps?”

"Like the dead."

"If she wakes?"

“It’s under the bed.”

Gabrielle knocks gently and, hearing nothing but a mild shuffle, creaks open the door to let light spill onto the bright red carpet hidden by the darkness of the room. Entourage giggling behind her, she flicks on the light. On top of the red carpet is a vanity, low to the ground and paired with a worn bench, with a mirror nearly covered with home printer photos of boy bands and celebrities with too many accusations to have anyone wasting ink on them any more. Its top is clear, but the stains tease what has lived there until earlier that evening. The curtains are drawn, hiding the fog behind a regal brown shuffling slightly from the air conditioning spewing from the floor vent. But the bed, a wonderfully plush and monumental affair, suggests the entire room, the entire mansion, the entire world, was built around it. That it’s silk sheets and delicately stuffed mattress were floating in chaos before deciding it needed someone to sleep on it to justify such a luxurious existence. Wood artistry beyond description humbly supports the entire affair at a height respectable above the floor while still being accessible to any who might seek audience with the slumbering Somnus. Cait, who in waking would never admit to the glee of being called by such an abbreviation, is enraptured in such an audience. Arms curled around a bundle of blankets, head supported by a pillow imported from a dead country, blanketed in the finest threads that keep her body steadily at the temperature of her beating heart regardless of the air envious to settle on her skin.

Next to her is Joshua, posed like the redeemer with arms stretched hard to his sides and feet arrow-like all tied with hemp requisitioned from a sex shop owned by a retired sailor with a passion for rope unmatched. He is gagged with rubber and his penis hangs limp against his thigh to contrast his nipples stiff in the cold.

A bride asleep and a groom not wholly convinced he isn’t. What man, soon to be married, wouldn’t wish for him to be tied, naked, in a room full of his lover’s best friends?

“Hi Joshua,” Gabrielle sings in a whisper, “I know Cait told you all about this but I just want to double check, make sure you’re okay with all of this and comfortable!”

Joshua glares at her with icy brown eyes.

“Great! We’re going to get stared now. Just a reminder, as soon as we take that gag out if anything you do wakes her up then you lose. Sound good?”

Ice.

“Great! Should we start with the honey?”

Someone behind Gabrielle tip toes out while everyone struggles against the bursting desperation of their giggles while Gabrielle fumbles to get the gag unhooked and out of Joshua’s mouth. She sets it gently under the bed and swipes her hand around to check for the endgame underneath. Feeling it, she stands as the honey is set on the vanity with a box wrapped in a gleaming holiday wrapping paper.

“Sorry, I didn’t have any hen do themed paper,” says the woman who carried the box in.

Unwrapping the cage, Gabrielle says, “That’s okay, we’ll just make sure we put this in the bin first.” Inside the cage, eyes gleaming and nose twitching, is a rat. White with soft tan bubbles floating from head to tail.

The owner of the rat says, “Do you know how hard it was to not feed him for three days?”

Gabrielle ignores this, knowing that Kibbler has gone longer without food at the hands of his forgetful owner, and puts the cage close enough to the supine Joshua that the cold metal blitzes the toned skin on his thigh. Kibbler sways over to sniff the skin being offered to him, whiskers poking through the bars with his pink nose.

While rat and man get familiar Gabrielle pops the lid on the honey, flooding the room with floral notes pulled from insect symphony, pours out enough to fill her hand but not enough to drip on the floor, and shuffles over to the bed. Tipping her hand, she drips honey in a trail from the corners of Joshua’s mouth down to the tufts of hair covering his chest before she bends over and slathers it across his stomach. The room giggles and suppresses squeals, and Gabrielle pours honey straight from the jar into his cavernous bely button. Kibbler has lost interest in the man and watches the honey spread closer to the bars of his cage, just out of tongue’s reach. Pouring the rest into her hand, Gabrielle motions for a towel and, cupping it under testicles and in the bush of his groin, whispers in his ear, “The Greeks used to do this to traitors. Feed honey and milk to someone and then leave them out for the bugs and stuff. We couldn’t feed you anything as we can’t touch you until we took the gag out and the Greg’s would hate to have bugs in here, but Kibbler is very hungry and he loves honey.”

Wiping her hands clean with a damp rag, the rat’s owner pulls the bar to open the cage, letting Kibbler scramble up a sticky thigh. The viscous treat and supple flesh give his needle-like claws plenty of purchase to drag his body up to Joshua’s stomach. They stare at each other. One desperate to move, one desperate to eat. The women in the room stuff their hands in their mouths to futilely keep their glee private. Kibbler licks Joshua’s stomach, Joshua stares at the rat. Kibbler shuffles over to Joshua’s laden bellybutton, Joshua stares. Kibbler laps from the pool of honey, Joshua’s ice is met with the first day of spring. His glare, solidified with a stonewall scowl, softens as the corners of his mouth find civil war against the chin and the crown. His belly spasms and the wars goes to the crown as Joshua is desperate to keep his breath steady. But the tongue, the soft claws, the fur sweeping through honey, it’s too much. It tickles and Cait fell in love with just how ticklish Joshua is.

Gabrielle watches with her own incredulous scowl, having expected the rat to want the flesh just as much as the honey.

“Are you sure the Greeks used this for torture?”

“That’s what the book said,” Gabrielle says while a woman quietly sweeps past her with a new gift-wrapped package.

Pulling the paper apart she holds a gleaming kitchen knife in her hands and says, “I don’t need Greeks to tell me this will work.” She takes the tip of the knife, sharpened by an amateur boyfriend who watched half a YouTube video thinking it would only need to slice tomatoes, and pushed the tip into the crest of Joshua’s bulging bicep. His suppressed laughs grow confused and his eyes shoot open unsure if the rat is finally biting or if he’s discovering the new bounds of ticklish trickery. Desperate not to be too desperate he looks over at the knife tip sunk into his arm and screams the stealthy nose-scream of the hiding victim. Kathleen, a good catholic from a bad city, pulls the knife towards her. Its poorly honed tip skins and tears and skins and tears so blood only weeps from nicks and skin holds firm to create an imprecise ruler across the quaking muscle.

His suppressed laughs turn to a suppressed confused scream. Nose venting air like a cartoon mouse with angry steam. He puled against the knots the horny sailor said would hold. They held and by the grace of Aphrodite got tighter. Kibbler licked honey from the roots of his stomach hair.

“Diva, who sharpened that knife?” Gabrielle asked.

Kathleen, pulled the knife the rest of the way with a pitiful scrape of skin says, “Oh you know,” and then mumbles, “Corey.”

Everyone in the room admonishes her decision to stay with someone who can’t even properly sharpen a knife. Joshua, had he not been distracted, would have joined in too.

“Well, thank you Kath. Go put the knife down for a moment,” says Gabrielle, who turns to look at Cait, “She still sleeps?”

Besides a brief snore in her breathing, she still sleeps.

The group goes out into the hallway to reconvene and plan their next move as the rat continues to gorge himself and Joshua explores the depths of some kind of pain and pleasure.

Gabrielle asks, “Well, what else do we have?”

A general admission of ignorance towards torture and general laziness reveals that no one really had anything else planned. They stand in the hallway, pouting, listening to Kibbler squeal in pleasure as Cait breaks into fog horn snores.

Steph, newly introduced to the group after moving from Vermont, suddenly perks up and says, “Oh! I did this to myself a few days ago, it sucked hot ass. Go grab some hydrogen peroxide.”

Kathleen, desperate for redemption, goes to the bathroom to dig around for it.

Gabrielle asks, “Will it maim or kill him?”

“Do I look maimed or dead?” Steph replies.

Everyone mutters agreement and gathers around the bed with the opaque bottle of concentrated peroxide.

The woman from Vermont uncaps the lid and bends over so her breath mixes delicately with Joshua’s. She peels the lids of his left eye open as his breathing builds to a terrified crescendo. She gives him a gentle kiss and then squirts the liquid in his eye.

A blistering writhing pain rips from seared optic nerve to fragile brain stem and the heaves of his body launch Kibbler into a heap on the floor. Joshua continues to writhe and yank against the ropes stuffing scream after scream down into the pits of his stomach while the party watches with bugging eyes and bated breath. Cait moans, squeezes her eyes and rolls over. Through some awareness left beneath the passions of pain Joshua slowly, painfully, stops his wheeling and pries his eyes open to see Gabrielle holding a shotgun to his nose.

Joshua stops breathing. Gabrielle keeps her eyes on the moaning Cait.

“She sleeps?”

Cait rolls and turns, but sleeps still.

“Like the dead.”

Gabrielle points the gun at the floor and fires.

Cait wakes up with a start and a smile to a breathing sweetheart tied next to her.

Through tired lips she says, “Aw, honey. You did it! And you’re crying? You’re so cute.”