The ropes are the only thing that make me feel alive

I woke with my body like a battlefield. The shibari marks still burned, as if the ropes were still there, biting in, claiming every inch of skin. Red lines that the night had inflamed into violet and black bruises, living shadows spreading across my torso, my arms, my thighs.

My wrists and ankles were swollen and reacted to the slightest brush of the sheet. My neck kept the purple ring from the tie that had stolen my breath, a mark that hurt when I swallowed, the exact memory of measured, controlled, delicious suffocation. My nipples were still throbbing, swollen and bruised from the steel clamps the Master had tightened half a turn every so often for hours, until he wrung tears and pleas out of me. On the inner side of my thighs there were traces of his fingers dug in to the bone, bite marks near my groin, and between my ass cheeks the dull, pounding burn of having had his cock inside me for so long that my hole no longer knew how to close properly.

Every movement was cruelty and promise. Pain pulsed in waves and my body betrayed me: it hardened on its own just remembering it, sending a hot, shameful throb to my groin. I closed my eyes and the scene came back whole, with the brutal clarity of things you cannot forget even if you want to. Jute ropes crossing my chest until they locked it in place, squeezing my nipples until they went purple. My wrists tied behind my back in a perfect takate-kote that forced my spine to arch and pushed my ass out. The silk tie looped twice around my throat and knotted at the back knot, so that every movement of my own strangled me a little more. Him on his knees behind me, his left hand on my hip, his right guiding me toward his cock and making me impale myself, centimeter by centimeter, whispering in my ear, “That’s it, my slut, fuck my cock yourself, swallow it to the root, show me how well this hole opens for you.” I felt again the teeth sinking into my nape, the open palm coming down hard on my right cheek, the wet slap of his hips against mine, the way he tore me open completely when he stopped being patient and fucked me with hard thrusts, without pause, without letting me breathe, until the hot load exploded inside and kept spilling even while he kept moving, until his cum ran down my thigh over the ropes and he made me kneel on the floor and lick it off the parquet while he called me his bitch.

I propped myself up on the sofa. An empty bottle rolled across the floor with a hollow sound. My cock was half-hard against my thigh, heavy, obscene at that hour, mute proof that the body wanted more even though the mind still did not dare admit it.

I pressed one of the marks on my neck until the sting dragged a gasp out of me. Do I really need this? The question drilled into my skull. Part of me wanted more, that brutal catharsis where the world narrows to pure sensation, far from the hatred of Renzo and the black hole he left in my chest.

The other part knew that every session pushed me a little closer to the edge. To a precipice where pain would stop being liberation and become free fall. Salvation or self-destruction. I had no answer. Only the echo of doubt.

Tae was watching me from the doorway, as always. Hungry eyes for secrets, a sick devotion mixed with jealousy he never dared name. He noticed everything: the stiff way I walked, the flashes of pain I tried to hide, how I touched my neck without realizing it.

Who marked you like this, my lord? I could read it on his face, in the way his fingers clenched as if he himself wanted to touch every bruise. He did not ask. Not yet.

“I’m going to headquarters,” he said at last, his voice low, measuring each syllable like someone walking on broken glass. “Personal matters that can’t wait. Do you need anything before I go? Food to help you recover? Or perhaps... something for that pain you think you’re hiding? Today you’re moving like every step is a battle.”

I looked at him coldly, ignoring the subtext dripping from his words.

“Go. And bring me news if there is any. Don’t waste my time with questions that aren’t your concern, Tae. You know I’m not in the mood today.”

He left without arguing, but his gaze lingered a second too long on my neck. When the door closed, the silence of the old theater fell on me like a slab of stone.

***

I went down to the foyer. The old caretaker — the one who watched me grow up, the one who knows too much and says little, the one who witnessed my transformation from broken boy to king of the Syndicate without ever judging me — was cleaning the empty seats with trembling hands.

“I need a secondhand bookstore,” I told him, my voice neutral but impossible to contradict. “In a poor neighborhood, far from the center. Nothing touristy, nothing well known. A discreet place, where nobody asks questions.”

The man looked at me in surprise, but answered with respect, his voice a little unsteady.

“Yes, sir. There’s one in the old quarter, near where I grew up. It’s called ‘Lost Pages.’ Dusty books, some in terrible condition, but with treasures nobody else knows how to appreciate. It’s on a quiet little street. Hardly anyone goes there.”

I thanked him with a curt nod.

“Send me the exact address. And if Tae asks, don’t tell him where I’ve gone. Just that I’ll be back when I’m back. I don’t want explanations or anyone sticking their nose into what’s mine. Understood?”

The caretaker nodded, frightened but loyal.

“Understood, sir. I won’t say a word. Your privacy is sacred here.”

***

I took out the old motorcycle and rode to the decrepit neighborhood, a maze of narrow streets and buildings that smelled of nostalgia and neglect. I parked in a dark alley and went into the bookstore. Crooked shelves, books piled to the ceiling, the air thick with dust and yellowed paper.

The first thing I thought was that he would have gone crazy with happiness there. The sheer number of volumes, the organized chaos that invited you to lose yourself for hours, the worn covers crying out for a hand to stroke them.

And then the voice came. Soft, warm, exactly as I remembered it from our nights, when he was my whole world.

“God... look at this. Ancient treatises, forbidden books. How can so much beauty fit in such an forgotten place? It’s a buried treasure. I could spend days here, touching every page, smelling time in the paper.”

I stood motionless. This time the voice was not accusing. It was pure wonder, like when Jin would get lost in his reading in our apartment and forget the Syndicate for a while.

I turned my head. No one. Only shelves and dust drifting in the dim light.

But the voice kept going, closer now, as if it were walking beside me and brushing my shoulder with its own, the way he used to do.

“You never brought me to a place like this. We always talked about it, remember? Sneaking out one afternoon, alone, without guards, without meetings. Just books and silence. But we never did.”

I closed my eyes for an instant. Guilt tightened in my chest, that knot that never quite comes undone.

“You never asked me to,” I replied softly, almost to myself. “And I would have loved it. Watching you lose yourself here for hours. Seeing your eyes light up with every discovery. Seeing you smile in that way only I knew. I would have given up the whole world for a day like that with you.”

A brief silence. Then the voice, lower, with a note of sadness that cut through me like a slow knife.

“And yet... you came alone. To please your Master. For this you do find time, to look for the books he asked you for. To immerse yourself in a world we shared in dreams and never in reality. Why now? Why for him?”

I opened my eyes. The bookseller was staring at me oddly from the counter. I said nothing. I lowered my voice even further.

“It’s not for him,” I whispered. “It’s to... feel something again. To break this empty shell I became without you.”

The voice grew firmer, wounded, an echo of the arguments from when the Syndicate stole our time.

“It is for him. Because he ordered you to read the Marquis de Sade. Because he promised you more pain, more surrender. And you run to find his books. You never gave me that attention. Not once a quiet afternoon among the shelves. There were always meetings, betrayals, the crown. And me by your side, waiting for the day you’d look at me the way you look at these pages now.”

The hallucination closed my throat. My chest hurt more than any mark on my skin.

“Leave me alone,” I whispered, my voice breaking. “It’s torture seeing you knowing you’re not here. That you’re not coming back. That I lost you because of me. Every time you appear it’s reliving that night, watching you die because of my mistake, because I didn’t protect you. Please... leave me.”

The voice faded slowly and left only silence and dust. I forced myself to keep going. I found the forbidden treatises. And at the back, what I was looking for: the Marquis de Sade books. I had almost all of them sent to the theater. I kept only one, Philosophy in the Bedroom, thin and dense, in the inside pocket of my jacket.

***

I went out and walked to a modest neighborhood café. The same one from my childhood. Scratched tables, the smell of burnt coffee and bread. The girl working there — a neighbor from back then — recognized me and smiled shyly.

“Black coffee. Double.”

I sat at the corner table and opened the book. The pages spoke of raw domination, absolute submission, pleasure ripped out of suffering. Every line echoed in me: bodies surrendered, limits erased, pain transforming into ecstasy. Sade described Eugénie on all fours, with a cock buried in her mouth to the uvula and another drilling into her virgin ass, tearing screams from her that were at once agony and delight, and I could not read without seeing myself in that place, without feeling again the Master’s hard flesh opening me from within, without hearing him whisper, “Swallow it, slut, swallow all of it.”

I hardened at once. My cock grew inside my pants until it brushed the belt, painful, urgent, swollen with blood and memory. I tried to cross my legs, but the friction against the marks intensified everything: the invisible ropes closed again around my chest, my sore nipples stood up against the shirt until I clenched my jaw, my ass throbbed as if the Master’s fingers were still spreading me open from inside. I gasped softly. The pulse in my groin was urgent, treacherous, impossible to ignore. I lowered a hand to my lap discreetly and adjusted my cock a finger’s width upward, a minimal brush against the fabric, and even that contact sent a hot spasm down my back. A sticky thread had already stained my underwear before I had read two more pages. I gripped the book with both hands, breathed deeply, and forced myself to keep reading while my pants turned into a prison and sweat beaded on the back of my neck.

The voice returned, whispering in my ear, this time with a mix of bewilderment and reproach, like those long conversations when he tried to understand me, to pull me out of my shell.

“I don’t understand... Why have you become obsessed with this? With ropes, with another man tying you up and making you suffer. With another man fucking you like you’re nobody. What does that have that we didn’t? We were real. We were love. We were partners in everything. Why pain as a substitute?”

I squeezed my eyes shut. My hand trembled over the page. The coffee steamed forgotten beside me.

“You were my first and only love,” I whispered hoarsely, as if I were speaking to him for real and not to a ghost. “The only one that mattered. The only one who stood by me through every dark decision, the one who knew all of me, the one who saw past the monster. I feel nothing for the Master. He gets on my nerves. He’s arrogant, overbearing, always testing my patience. It’s not desire. It’s not a bond. He’s just... a tool.”

Silence. Then the voice, softer, almost sad, like when he comforted me after a night of blood.

“A tool for what? To forget? To punish yourself?”

“To free myself,” I confessed, and the words came out like a weight I could no longer carry. “When he ties me up, when the pain goes through me, when he fills my mouth and ass and makes me swallow his load, for a moment the empty shell I became without you breaks. As if I could breathe again. As if the emptiness stopped crushing me for a few hours. It’s not for him. It’s because without you there’s nothing left. And this makes me believe there’s still something alive inside, even if it’s only pain.”

The voice fell silent for a moment. Then, wounded, almost a broken whisper:

“You would have preferred to die with me that night, wouldn’t you? Rather than live this.”

I opened my eyes. Tears I did not want to shed burned at the edges.

“I should have died with you,” I admitted, my voice cracking. “Then I wouldn’t be living this hell. Then I wouldn’t be here, my cock hard over a book, looking in another man for the pain that makes me forget I lost you because of me. For not protecting you. For choosing power over you in that fatal instant.”

The hallucination dissolved. The coffee was still in front of me, steaming. I drank it slowly, trying to loosen the knot in my throat.

***

I took out my phone and texted the Master: “My Master, I’m beginning Philosophy in the Bedroom.”

The reply came instantly: “I’m very pleased. Memorize every detail. Think about how you’re going to use every page with me. Don’t make me wait... or I’ll punish you by fucking your mouth until you burst into tears.”

The pulse came back. Harder. My cock gave another jerk against the seam and I had to press my thigh to the table not to let out a moan right there, in front of the girl.

The phone rang again. Tae.

I answered, irritated.

“What do you want now?”

“My lord... you left hours ago. Without an escort. The city is dangerous. Where are you? Should I come get you?”

I laughed under my breath, without warmth.

“I don’t need babysitters. The whole city is afraid of me. Tell me the truth: who’s asking? The organization or your sick devotion?”

Silence. Then the submissive voice.

“You seemed different yesterday. I’m worried. The organization is noticing you’re changing too.”

“Don’t get sentimental. I know I’m losing my mind. And I’ve found a way not to lose it completely. None of your business how.”

I hung up.

***

I went out to smoke, leaning against the wall. The girl was watering plants by the door. I offered her a cigarette. She accepted it. I lit it for her and the flame danced close to her face.

“I’m sorry for the noise in there,” I said.

“At this hour nobody’s bothered, it’s all calm. Another coffee?”

I remembered childhood. Her grandmother’s hot chocolate. The only refuge I ever had.

“No, thanks. I’m leaving anyway.”

I got on the motorcycle. I hesitated. The theater or the Master. The book had left me wanting more: raw domination, total submission, another man’s cock claiming me to the deepest part. The marks pulsed under my clothes as if answering memory on their own. The first time with him came back whole: me on my knees on the marble floor, hands tied behind my back, opening his fly with my teeth because he had ordered me to; his cock coming out hard and thick, bumping my cheek, leaving a trail of pre-cum on my lips; his hand gripping the back of my neck, forcing my mouth wide open, shoving it into the back of my throat without a shred of mercy, fucking me there, not letting me breathe, while I swallowed spit and tears and he called me “my king’s slut.” The salty, thick taste of his cum came back when he emptied himself into my mouth for the first time and told me, in a panting voice, “Swallow it all, don’t waste a single drop, or I’ll drag it out of your ass with whips.” I took out another cigarette and lit it with trembling fingers. The smoke did nothing to clear anything. My cock stayed hard, throbbing inside my pants, and my ass itched in a humiliating way, as if begging to be opened again.

I dropped it to the ground. Crushed it under my boot.

I dialed his number.

“I’m on my way,” I said, hoarse.

The Master answered, satisfied, his voice thick with barely contained desire.

“I’ve been waiting for your call. Come. I’m going to tie you up again, tighter than last night, until the ropes bite into your flesh and you can hardly breathe. I’m going to fuck your mouth until I make you cry, I’m going to fuck your ass until you forget your own name, I’m going to fill you with my cum inside and out as many times as it takes. And this time I won’t stop until you beg me for more, until you ask for it on your knees.”

I started the motorcycle. The engine roared like my own darkness.

The emptiness followed me glued to my back.

But this time I meant to face it with ropes.

And maybe, just maybe, I would find a moment of peace in the middle of the chaos.