Kill Switch Read online

  “Where’s spontaneity? Surprise? How are you going to push boundaries if everything’s carefully negotiated ahead of time?” Igloo loved when scenes pushed comfort zones, and top or bottom came out the other side having changed their preconceived notions of what was possible or even what they enjoyed.

  “That’s for when you know somebody well. Not when you’re playing with them for the first time.”

  So she’d negotiated both online and in-person with Charlotte, assessed what she was looking for, what experiences she’d had, and what her limits were.

  Charlotte looked around at the other tying pairs, saw people already naked or in underwear. “Should I get undressed?”

  “Let’s talk a little more first,” Igloo said, gesturing to the floor.

  Charlotte kneeled, and Igloo sat cross legged.

  Of course, Igloo was familiar with the concept of negotiation for scenes, and naturally, she and Essie had agreed on what they’d do together during their scenes. But that had taken place in private, evolving organically over months of dating. Negotiating with a stranger was different…and now she felt like she’d forgotten half of everything they’d already discussed. Or maybe she was just really nervous and wanted to postpone the start of play. Well, there was no harm in reviewing things once more.

  “We negotiated, and you’ve been tied before,” Igloo said, “but for safety’s sake, can you tell me what the risks are with rope bondage?”

  “Nerve impingement,” Charlotte said, wiggling her fingers. “If I get tingling, numbness, or other symptoms asymmetrically across my hand, it’s most likely a nerve being pressed on by rope. I’d let you know right away, as I would if I had any other issues, like a difficult time breathing. But fundamentally rope is edge play. Shit happens.”

  Charlotte knew her stuff. That was reassuring. “Safewords?”

  “Red for full stop, Yellow for slowdown and check in with me.” Charlotte paused. “And ‘Oh, fuck!’ is not a safeword.”

  They both smiled at that.

  “If you cry or scream ‘no’, do you want me to treat it as a yellow, or ignore it?”

  “If I want to stop, I’ll use a safeword. Otherwise keep going.”

  “Fine. And impact play is okay while you’re tied up?”

  Charlotte nodded eagerly.

  Igloo paused. She’d been immersed in the kink scene for long enough that now she wondered how vanilla people agreed on what they would do together. What percent of consent problems arose simply because people weren’t comfortable being clinically explicit? She tried to think back to her vanilla days. Had she ever been explicit about what she wanted? Had she even known what she wanted? Sometimes it felt like all she and Essie did was talk about their relationship, their needs, growth opportunities. Wait. She needed to stop thinking about Essie. Charlotte was here now and needed her focus.

  “In messages we exchanged, you said no bruising where it could be seen, no breath play, face slapping, or gags. Am I forgetting anything?”

  Charlotte shook her head.

  Igloo found herself wondering what could she do with Tapestry to help create consent culture for vanillas. Imagine if everyone could be so up front and honest about what they wanted. Ugh. Focus, Igs. She had a hot girl in front of her, and she was thinking about work.

  “Last question. How sexual or not do you want to play? At one end of the spectrum, I tie you like a package, and up you go into the air. Somewhere in the middle, I paint the rope onto you, while holding you close against me, caressing you, fondling you.” Igloo would rather the scene be sexy, but if Charlotte wasn’t ready for that, she could still have fun practicing her rope skills.

  Charlotte had a shy but provocative smile on her face. “And the other end of the spectrum?”

  Igloo swallowed. “Let’s say we’re not going to go there on a first date. We can work that out another time.”

  Charlotte laughed. “Fine. You can touch me as sensually as you want, but no genital contact. You know, for our first date.”

  “Sounds like fun.” Igloo smiled and gestured toward her rope. “Let’s play.”

  Charlotte nodded. She unzipped her boots and took them off, then shrugged out of her skirt and shirt, folding and laying them off to the side. She took her bra off but kept her panties on. She did a gentle warmup, stretching up and over to either side, then folding at waist, and finishing with some twists.

  Igloo watched, admiring Charlotte’s flexibility. That must have taken so much work to develop. While she stretched, Igloo stood and rechecked her rope, cutter, and rap rings.

  She ignored the people gathering around. No one would violate their scene space while they were playing, unless a dungeon monitor had a specific safety concern, but they’d watch from nearby. There were other people tying too, but Igloo had attracted the most onlookers.

  The kink community welcomed a wide diversity of people, but there was always a large contingent of straight white dudes who eroticized lesbian women. She’d learned to tune them out. Most meant no harm, and the community norms welcomed watching other people play. Which, of course, was how everyone learned.

  Igloo stood barefoot, emptied her mind, and felt the qi flow up into her legs, fill her hips, and finally her torso. When the qi spilled down her arms, she lifted the first hank. She let the qi pour into the rope. Holding the bight in one hand, she tossed the rest of the rope off to the side. The bundle unraveled as it skidded across the floor, until she had a long, perfect trail of untangled rope.

  Igloo moved up close, wrapped a leg around Charlotte, and put her arms around Charlotte’s shoulders. The skin on skin contact was wonderful. What would Essie think if she saw this? Be here now, Igs, she told herself.

  Charlotte leaned into the contact and closed her eyes.

  Igloo breathed in Charlotte’s scent, a combination of shampoo and essential oils. It was nice. She’d happily stand here smelling her for the next hour, but that would be pretty awkward.

  Still hugging her, Igloo squared up Charlotte’s arms behind her back, then stepped back. She tied the wrists, then, with her left hand, she wrapped rope around the woman’s shoulder, and drew it across Charlotte’s torso, trailing her fingers softly across that oh-so-fair skin. She felt a slight tremor of need in response, and a warmth spread in her pants.

  She liked the feeling of arousal, but knew it was a momentary thing. The funny thing was, topping was mostly asexual, aside from some random moments of horniness. She’d asked around, and she wasn’t the only top who felt that way. Most enjoyed the feeling of power, the control, the creative expression, the pleasure of connection, the joy of sadism. There’d be a few things here or there that felt overtly sexual. So oddly different as compared to bottoming, when nearly everything felt erotic. She pushed the thoughts away and concentrated on her rope.

  Her movements flowed, a martial art in slow motion. With a long-practiced form, Igloo pulled the rope around itself and reversed its direction for a second wrap around the upper arms. She wasn’t just tying. Anyone could do that. She was dancing with the rope, flowing movements to keep the tension alive, ensuring Charlotte always felt Igloo’s control. Of course, the ropes needed to be aligned correctly with the right frictions and tension to keep them stable. But that alone was not enough to create erotic energy. Every movement heightened the experience: the graze of an erogenous zone, a thumb trailing the neck, the arms, the breasts.

  The difference between merely tying a person versus tying them with intention, connection, and flow was like the difference between functional code and beautiful code. Both could do the job, but only one could stir the heart.

  As she tied, she sensed the state of Charlotte’s body, her breathing, and the tension she held. Charlotte relaxed into the rope, becoming looser, more comforted as the rope hugged her. A stray lock of hair had fallen forward. With her hands tied, she couldn’t reach it. Igloo tucked the hair back behind Charlotte’s ear.

  “Thank you,” Charlotte murmured, with her eyes closed.


  Igloo continued with a hip harness, then a futomomo. Igloo fell out of the zone for a moment, suddenly self-conscious about what she was doing. Was Charlotte enjoying herself or bored? Was she wondering why she had even picked Igloo to play with?

  Fortunately, training kept her going, and soon she lifted Charlotte into the air on a pair of uplines, and her worries fell away. The flow returned, her focus only on her partner and the rope. Somewhere in the distance, she was aware of spectators, others playing around them, but they were inconsequential.

  Charlotte lay horizontally a couple of feet in the air in a side suspension, one of the most endurable positions for the bottom. She was suspended from the rope harness around her upper torso and arms, a hip harness, and a leg wrap, dividing her weight across three points. Igloo added a rope from Charlotte’s free ankle, up to the suspension ring.

  Charlotte’s expression was the blissful, eyes-closed face of someone zoning out in the rope, as it should be.

  Igloo pulled out her riding crop, the special one with the carbon fiber rod that bore as much similarity to a tool used for horseback riding as a Formula 1 race car did to a minivan. She struck Charlotte’s ass, her thighs, eliciting sharp grunts in response. Igloo warmed up with a rapid staccato of soft strikes. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she was thinking about rising endorphin levels, building up a tolerance to pain, but mostly she was operating instinctively.

  She grabbed a handful of Charlotte’s hair, pulled her head back, exposing her neck. Charlotte let out a little gasp in response. She was extraordinarily beautiful then, so vulnerable and trusting.

  Igloo stepped back, gave her a spin and let go. She struck with the crop over and over as Charlotte spun in front of her: tits, fronts of thighs, bottoms of feet, back of thighs, ass, shoulders, varying the strength of each blow automatically according to the body part in front of her. Now her monkey mind was quiet, Igloo’s focus laser-sharp on everything happening in front of her.

  Charlotte thrashed, grunts turning to screams, twisting and turning in the ropes, trying but failing to avoid Igloo’s blows. She screamed so pretty, and every time she did, Igloo felt a twitch in her groin. In between screams, Charlotte laughed with a big smile, a masochist in her happy place, still twisting and trying to fold over herself to protect herself.

  Adrenaline thudded in Igloo’s body, warred with her self-control. Always, always the top was in control, in control of her bottom, in control of herself, but still, her breath came fast and she rode the edge between passion and restraint. She had a terrible curiosity about what would happen if she lost control, if she struck out as much, and as hard, as she wanted, but she kept herself carefully modulated.

  She struck harder, but slower, each slap of the crop accompanied by a scream. Red welts rose from the site of each strike. Charlotte kept spinning, her momentum sustained now by carefully timed blows.

  Igloo dropped the crop and picked up a rattan cane. She let her fingers trail over the crop’s welts, slowed Charlotte’s spin. She came up behind Charlotte and caressed her throat with one hand. Charlotte was breathing heavy, catching up. They were close to some ephemeral high now.

  Igloo palmed Charlotte’s face, pinning her head against Igloo’s thigh. With her other hand, she struck hard blows with the cane on Charlotte’s ass, the flexible rattan building up speed with each blow, accelerating until it hit the flesh with a crack, leaving parallel welts on either side of where the cane struck. Charlotte screamed into Igloo’s hand with each strike, Igloo’s only response to increase the pressure on her head to gently smother the screams against her thigh.

  On the tenth stroke, Igloo dropped the cane, and crouched down to cradle Charlotte’s head and shoulders. Charlotte heaved and thrashed, her eyes rolling back in her head. Igloo waited until Charlotte calmed, a good minute or so.

  “You okay?”

  She smiled weakly. “Yes.”

  “You ready to come down?”

  She nodded. “Please.”

  Igloo lowered Charlotte, line by line, until she was resting on the floor. Then she undid the uplines, and cradled Charlotte in her arms, holding her tight while her breath slowed. Now and then Charlotte would twitch, the way Igloo did after a good orgasm, and Igloo found herself turned on again. She was sopping wet now, and for a brief moment, she imagined carrying Charlotte into her own bed at home, wondered what it would be like to fuck this woman while she was tied up.

  Igloo shook her head to dispel the fantasy. Just keep it to the rope. Don’t freak out the people who were just here for the ride.

  When Charlotte had finally returned to some semblance of normal breathing, she swallowed and said, “Thank you.”

  “Of course,” Igloo said, and she began the long, slow process of untying, making it just as sensual as the putting on of rope had been in the first place.

  She found it ever so strange to be thanked for beating someone, even though she’d said the same thing when she bottomed, even though her very first exposure to BDSM came from someone who thanked her every time she gave him what he wanted.

  He was a short-term fling from the music world, someone she dated mostly to escape the pressure of her high intensity work at Tapestry. One night, sprawled in bed, still sweaty from fucking, he asked to be tied up and forced to beg for sex.

  She wasn’t a prude, far from it, but the notion of a power imbalance in a relationship, in either direction, had caused total repugnance. She said as much to him.

  “You’re not taking power away from me,” he said, lying next to her while she lay curled up, angry. “I’m giving it to you.”

  “It’s abusive,” she said in a forceful but tiny voice. Once, haunted by her past, she would have shrunk physically into a ball and been speechless, but she’d worked so long with Angie that she’d learned to channel that into anger, focus it outward. She was the avenger now, no longer the victim.

  “Consensual kink has as much in common with abuse as practicing judo has with a street mugging,” had been his reply. “Judo and a mugging might look the same on the outside, they might even have the same moves, but one involves two educated, risk-aware, individuals working together to achieve a common goal, and the other is a non-consensual attack on an unprepared bystander.”

  She had had her doubts, and it must have been obvious from her reaction.

  “There’s a saying in the kink world that what disgusts us is what we’re really interested in. Someday you’ll look back and see that this is what you really want.”

  “Never,” she said.

  There must have been something on her face, recalling that old conversation, because now Charlotte was checking in with her. “You okay?”

  Igloo gave her a big smile. “Yeah, totally fine.”

  She removed the final rope from Charlotte, and then gave her one last cuddle. “You good?”

  Charlotte nodded. “That was great. I like your style with the rope. It feels like you’re making art with me.”

  Igloo shrugged. “It’s just rope.”

  “It comes alive when you do it.” Charlotte sat up and began dressing. “I’m going to Deviance next week. Will you be there?”

  “Umm,” Igloo said, suddenly flustered and at a loss for words. She wanted to play with Charlotte again, but she was going to Deviance with Essie. “I’m going with my partner, Essie.”

  Charlotte leaned in close, brushed a breast against Igloo’s arm. “Think we could fit in a scene together?”

  Igloo stared into Charlotte’s eyes, the intimacy of such direct eye contact easier after what they’d shared. Deviance took place in a sex club, which meant that if they did a public scene, they could always move into one of the private rooms afterwards and get as intimate as they wanted. But she’d be there with Essie, and Essie would expect to spend the night with Igloo. How would she manage both?

  “Yeah,” Igloo found herself saying. “That would be fun.”

  She suspected she was supposed to confirm that with Essie first. Essie
would understand, right?

  Chapter 6

  Robin had two hours before her next appointment. It was time for a check-in, especially since home office was antsy about her last report.

  She went into the back restroom, with its lockers and showers, and changed into her running clothes. She tied her athletic shoes, clipped her badge to her belt, and headed out the rear door.

  She ran, a fast pace, one that couldn’t possibly be sustained, a loop back and forth in Southeast Portland. She glanced north toward Tapestry headquarters, then refocused on the road in front of her. Running on a quiet bike throughway street, she veered toward the main avenue. She slowed, then entered a coffee shop, waited a minute, stretching her calves gently in place as she watched out the front window, and then walked toward the restrooms at the back of the shop. She left through the rear door, propped open to the alley behind the shop, and took the heavily treed alley the last two blocks.

  A wooden staircase on the back of an old residence turned commercial building led to a second floor apartment. Opaque corrugated sheeting on the top and sides nominally covered the stairs from the elements, although closer inspection would reveal the supporting frame to be of newer wood than the stairs. The real purpose of the panels was to shield her from view.

  At the top of the stairs, the door opened as she arrived. Inside, Cooper handed her a towel and a bottle of water. “They’re expecting you in ten.”

  Robin sipped the water, then set it down to blot her face dry as she regained her breath. “Thanks.”

  “How are you doing?”

  Cooper wouldn’t mean operationally, since she was submitting daily reports.

  “Busy. It’s a lot of hours.” She wouldn’t talk about the attachments she was forming on the job. She and Cooper would talk about that later, after the upper level briefing. She’d want to hold it together now. Not surface the inevitable emotional entanglements that formed.