I Tied Him to the Bed and Turned on the Recorder

I’d been thinking for weeks about doing something special for him. The way Darío understood sex had gotten under my skin, and I no longer knew how to enjoy it any other way. Circumstances had never let us be together completely: when we met, I was still working nights at a harbor dive, and he accompanied much older women who paid him for his time. It didn’t last long for him; he stopped “escorting” them just a few weeks after we crossed paths, but I needed months to save up what I needed so I could leave.

I almost asked him to wait for me. I didn’t dare. It was too long for a guy in his twenties, and I didn’t want to bind him to a wait that would turn bitter. The idea in my head was simple: once we both left that life behind, we’d start something clean. A man who had respected me, one I wouldn’t have to hide my past from, or him hide his from me.

The blow came a few weeks later, when he told me there was already another woman in his life. The only good thing was that by then I had also gotten out of that world and found someone. He broke up with his girlfriend, and even so, every time we saw each other again, he rejected my offer to leave everything and start together. I was offering him my whole life. He was offering me the bed, and nothing more.

In bed, though, we were one and the same. We shared the same tastes, the same patience, the same curiosity. We both loved the Kama Sutra, and from him I learned how to tie people up and how to enjoy it. With obsessive care not to leave marks, not to tighten where I shouldn’t. My only ambition was always to give him as much pleasure as possible, and he had the same obsession with me. The problem was the noise. We both made too much; you could hear us in the neighboring rooms.

He was embarrassed by it and couldn’t help himself. He had orgasms as long and as loud as mine, and that embarrassed him to a degree that’s hard to explain. The first few times, his eyes filled with tears afterward, as if he had done something wrong. With me, he eventually lost that modesty, because seeing him so undone made me feel more womanly, and drove me to the edge without even touching me much.

That night I wanted to reverse everything. I’m used to tying him up, but this time I wasn’t looking for a shared game. I wanted his pleasure and only his, to give it to him completely so that afterward he’d drag me to mine. I wanted to empower myself, to become something greater than I was. I thought of Circe, the one who made men tame with a gesture.

I tied his arms in a cross, open over the mattress, but left his legs free because I know how much he likes to move them. The second restraint went around his waist, fastened to the bed frame, so he couldn’t lift his body. The third, the thinnest, circled his neck without tightening and left him pressed to the pillow, unable to turn his head or lift himself to kiss me.

“And now what?” he asked, half laughing, expecting me to lose patience.

I didn’t lose it. That was exactly what I wasn’t going to give him.

I covered his eyes with a blindfold for an instant, just long enough to turn on a small red recorder I hid behind the pillow. Then I uncovered his gaze. He was left there, exposed and unaware that every sound he made was being saved. That was my real mischief, one he couldn’t even imagine.

***

I started slowly, with his cock in my mouth, until he asked me to stop because he couldn’t take any more. Then I moved up over his chest, centimeter by centimeter, until nothing was left between my pussy and his mouth. I felt his tongue moving in circles, slow at first and then desperate, and I let myself be carried to the edge, open, wet, about to break without permission.

I came down before I fell. I wanted to have him inside when I arrived. I lowered myself onto him and guided him in, and he entered without meeting any resistance, all the way in, in one go. I saw in his face the effort not to move, not to meet me. Several times I felt the impulse of his hips wanting to follow my rhythm, but the restraint at his waist stopped him and he ended up surrendering.

He tried to hold me. He couldn’t. He tried to find my breasts with his mouth. That too failed. I was the spider and he the prey, and every attempt he made to touch me only dragged him deeper into the web. I could feel him widening inside me, that brutal excitement that appears when the body stops obeying. I intensified it by leaning in, letting my breasts brush his chest, bringing my mouth close to his.

But I kissed him when I wanted to, not when he needed it. I parted my lips just as he lifted his head, searching for me, and the cord at his neck sent him back to the pillow. The spider eats its prey without hurry.

I started hearing his gasps grow. I was moaning too, but that night I only wanted to hear him. Every sound he made destroyed me and lit me up at the same time. I could feel myself getting wetter and wetter, and the moans from both of us must have been shaking the walls. His breathing turned into words: some tender, others downright filthy, the kind he only says when he loses all control and the next day swears he doesn’t remember.

Once, long before, I told him offhandedly that in the middle of a frenzy he had called me a “whore.” He burst into tears and spent half an hour apologizing to me. That night, though, I had him trapped, and everything he said, stored on that red recorder I later learned to call the tape. And without realizing it, I was falling into his trap too.

When he starts with those whispers, I know his orgasm is close. I matched my rhythm to his. I felt him tense, widen one last time, and I let myself go with him, desperate, squeezing every second out of it. I collapsed beside him and looked for the only sign that tells me I’ve driven him to the limit: his face. It was flushed and shining, his eyes closed and a boyish smile on his lips, the smile of someone dreaming of what he loves. I felt strong. Womanly. Mistress of the night.

He stayed like that for several minutes, breathing in broken bursts, as if the orgasm were still playing through him. I took advantage of that to turn off the recorder and free him from the restraints one by one. We rested pressed together, and slept for a while without speaking.

***

After a shower I took his hand and led him back to the bed. I showed him the red recorder and, without warning, started playback. We stared at each other fixedly. The moment our own gasps began to sound, his breathing went heavy and a shiver ran through me that made my skin pucker. I got wet again just from hearing us, and he was harder than I had ever seen him.

No gesture was needed. He laid me down, climbed on top, and penetrated me again without meeting resistance. He had barely gotten inside before I was already on the edge. I could feel him making an almost inhuman effort not to finish, to hold on while the tape kept playing. The recorded moans mixed with ours, the ones from an hour earlier with those from that very moment, and it was impossible to tell them apart.

We lasted very little. The orgasm left me disoriented, senseless, trembling all over. He remained motionless and silent for fifteen minutes, lost somewhere. When I felt able, with my legs still weak, I went to the computer and copied the recording so I’d never lose it. The tape had defeated us. We hadn’t held out, neither he nor I, for even a single full minute of listening.

For years, that red tape lived with us. Sometimes we dared to play it when we saw each other again. We learned to withstand it a little longer than that first time, but we never managed to get to the end of the recording. We always gave in before, devoured by our own sounds. The tape was born from a specific night, from those minutes when we felt invincible, and that’s why it always tormented us, like a curse made to order.

As I write these lines it’s in front of me. I look at it and I get aroused; I can’t help it. I’m taking advantage of these words to confess to Darío what I do almost every day, because I think about him and that night more than I should. I undress, lie down, turn on the tape, and fast-forward to the exact minute where I hear him gasping and myself moaning.

I stroke my breasts imagining they’re his hands. Then I go lower, and my hand finds me wet already just from listening. I slide my fingers in and turn them into his, his tongue on my clit, his filthy words burning my ear. Everything speeds up, goes fast, too fast, and I end up coming alone again with the tape playing.

Then I stay there staring at it, my hand trembling and wanting to call him, to ask him to come back. But I don’t dare, because I’m certain he’d tell me no. A curse, that’s what the red tape is. The most beautiful of all curses, my favorite object, my fetish.