Entwined

From Torg Adventure

I was eighteen years old and a senior in high school that day. I wasn't a cheerleader, I wasn't on the student council, and the only club I was in was the school paper as a staff photographer. The editor, Jerry Brunswyck, assigned me a couple events a week to cover. I also took random photos around the school to submit for filler stories. A hundred digital photos a week, of which a handful made it into the paper. My time was about two hours, and I could put "photojournalist" on my college applications.

I'd been taking pictures since Dad gave me a disposable camera for my tenth birthday. Now, I had a decent digital camera that he bought me as an end of year gift for getting a 3.5 grade point Junior year. That was also the year that Jerry and I had awkward, fumbling sex in the backseat of his mom's car. Three times. Jerry never listened to me about how to get me off, so I took the one piece of advice my mother told me about sex -- "Listen darling, if he doesn't try to get you off, dump him. He ain't worth the time" -- and dumped him. Working for him now was mostly good, only occasionally uncomfortable. Though he sucked at sex, he made a good friend and a decent boss, and was one of those rare guys who could transition to friendship after breaking the sex barrier.

One day at home, Mom asked me to grab all the dirty clothes from my older brother's room. Roger was home from college while he did an internship between his Junior and Senior years. He had stepped into the bathroom for a shower just a minute before. His laptop faced away from the door, and I ignored it until I picked up some towels on that end of the bed. I turned to head out the door, and I stopped dead. The screen had not timed out, and the picture I saw on the screen was entrancing. A lovely nude model was tied up with rope in a very artistic and beautiful way. One arm was raised up with the hand down her back, each finger tied into an intricate mandala-like design that covered her back. Her other hand went low behind the small of her back and formed the foundation of the mandala. The ropes went around her breasts and over her shoulders. I was riveted, examining every aspect of the photo. It was a black-and-white image with excellent lightning. The curves of the woman's body and the rope cutting through made a fascinating counterpoint. This was part of a gallery of photos by this and other photographers. I noted the artist's name.

I heard the water in the shower stop running, and I panicked. I ran out of the room and down the stairs carrying my pile of clothes tightly grasped to my chest. I was breathing rapidly and flushed. I stopped at the bottom of the steps to catch my breath and compose myself. Then I walked very purposely to the clothing chute by the bedroom hallway, shoving them down absentmindedly as the image of the bound woman percolated my brain. The clothes jammed. I pulled clothes out until I could reach down the chute far enough to grab the errant towel that I had pushed into the chute folded. Then I put the rest of the clothes in more carefully.

Once I was done, I went back up to my room. Roger was out of the bathroom and in his bedroom with the door closed. I spent the next hour searching for the photographer's gallery and any other art bondage sites I could find on my laptop. I looked at a couple hundred images and I could feel myself being drawn into a world I had only heard the vaguest info about. The grapevine at school had once spread a rumor about one of the Junior girls liking to get chained and whipped. I had made this impression that only the sick and demented would be interested in bondage. Presented with these beautiful images, I was beginning to see myself taking photos like these.

Somewhere in all of that, I went from a photographer wanting to know how to take such beautiful photos to someone who wanted to be in those photos as well. By the end, when I saw a picture, I started imagining myself in the place of the model. I was so excited, I had to get some relief from my vibrator. Thoughts of being tied while getting fucked filled my head until I screamed into my pillow so Roger wouldn't hear anything.

After that, I spent another hour looking over books and ordering from Amazon. Dad had a free two-day shipping account with Amazon, and Amazon let the rest of us get free shipping since we were in the same household. I loved free shipping -- I'd used it many times before for school and hobbies. By dinner time, I had four books on rope bondage heading my way, along with a shipping tracking number.

That night, I found a forum site on the topic. A series of thumb-tacked posts at the top of the forum answered the main questions of how much rope and what type for a beginner. I went to sleep with another round with the vibe.

At school the next day, I was distracted by thoughts of rope. I daydreamed of walking around school wearing a lovely rope corset I'd seen online under my clothes. Finally, the day was over and I headed to the local hardware store. I bought a hundred feet of quarter-inch braided nylon rope. Just pulling the rope off the roll to measure it got my blood racing. Running it through my hands was a tactile experience that I savored. Twelve buck later, I left the store feeling jazzed. Now I just needed those books. I got home with the rope in my backpack, went upstairs, and hid it under my bed. I wanted no snooping brothers or parents to find it.

The next day was interminable. I didn't make eye contact for fear that everyone knew about my new obsession. I thought if they saw my eyes, they would think I was a pervert. I couldn't get my homework done in study hour because of more daydreaming. When the bell rang, I got home as soon as possible and was hugely disappointed to find it hadn't come. I didn't let Mom know how frantic I was that my package hadn't arrived. I went straight upstairs and checked the tracking number on the UPS website. I shrieked when I saw that the books were at UPS, but that they had arrived too late for delivery. I didn't think I could stand another day, so I grabbed my rope, went back downstairs, and told Mom I was headed to a friend's house till dinner. The UPS was only five miles away, and I got there in record time. I tried not to show my excitement when I picked up the package. I suppressed the urge to dance around once the clerk handed it to me. I walked calmly to the car and just breathed with my eyes closed for five minutes. Then I had to think of what to do.

I wanted to look at the books, and it was an hour before dinner. So, I drove to a local park by a lake and parked as far from other cars as I could. Then I carefully opened the box and took out the books. These were practical how-tos, not art books. Some of the models were svelte, some zaftig, but they all looked happy and turned on. Some of the ties looked impossibly intricate, others seemed pretty simple. But I also ran into my first big hurdle. They were all tied by someone else. Only a couple of the various forms of bondage in the books could be tied on oneself. I searched through all of the books and found a total of four things I could do myself, three of them very simple and basic building blocks of more complex ties. I was petrified. If I wanted to go further, I was going to have to tell someone that I was a pervert! I sat and howled my frustration for a couple minutes before I started the car and drove home for dinner.

That night after dinner, I tried out all the things I could do by myself, mostly on my feet since I needed two hands to tie them. I did each one until it looked just like in the book, then I took photos as well as I could from my vantage point. The feel of the rope on my skin while I tied was great. Dragging the rope almost tickled, but in a very sensual, nearly sexual way. When the rope was tight, I felt more secure in my body, almost like I was protected. The best tie was a very pretty and somewhat complicated foot tie that kind of looked with a spider web between my toes made of rope. That one took ten attempts before I felt good about how it looked. Then I decided to go the extra mile. I painted my toenails with my best red polish. After it dried, I tied my feet up again and took the best photos of the night in both color and black-and-white. I felt better. I felt bold. I felt so bold that I made a profile on the bondage site that had first piqued my interest and posted those pictures. I chose 'AllTiedUp6" as my nickname. I grinned as I looked at my new web page with new brand-new photos of my tied feet.

The next day was a little easier to get through. Each time I got distracted, I looked at my photos on my phone. That calmed me down enough to get through another hour. But by the end of the day, my need for a partner in crime became greater. Feeling the rope on my skin, experiencing the tug of rope against flesh, and the comfort of it all made me know that I was headed in the right direction. I even got some actual homework done, catching up with everything from the day before and most of what was due tomorrow. I headed home after school.

In the car, I took a deep breath. What was I doing? What had happened to me? Why did I become obsessed with rope bondage? In the span of an hour, I had become a freak, a fetish girl. I thought back to that time in Roger's bedroom. I first approached the photo's from the standpoint of a photographer. I marveled at the lighting, the patterns of rope, the beauty of the models and the positions of their bodies. Then I remembered the rush I got when I started imagining myself in the pictures. All my life I had been an Observer, documenting the world, but never becoming part of the world. I had never taken a photo that I was in, mostly because I hated the timers on some cameras. When my brain put my body in the photos, my skin covered by rope, when I became the Subject not the Observer, my universe changed. The catalyst in this monumental transformation of viewpoint was the rope, thus my laser focus on bondage. My artistic soul had latched onto the images of bondage and I knew that I was going to follow through with this to its natural conclusion. Several times in the past, yes, even my relatively short life so far, I had latched on an idea and wrestled it to the ground. When I was seven, after watching a TV show on chemistry that Dad was watching on public television, I spent a year memorizing everything I could about the elements. How many neutrons are in the iron-56 nucleus? 30. What is the half-life of plutonium-239? 24,100 years. My interest in chemistry led me to photography, since the chemistry of film and film development is very interesting. Photography turned me from a scientist to an artist by giving me an instrument to record my viewpoint. Now rope had turned me from an artist to the art itself. I shivered at the realization, my skin remembering how it felt covered in rope.

Before dinner I had some time, so I search again for some kind of social networking site for bondage. One of the first items to come up on Google when I searched for 'rope bondage social networking' was a group in a distant city that had monthly rope workshops. They also had a link to a revelation -- an enormous kinky social network called FetLife.com. Once I delved into FetLife, I was lost. I found several general discussion groups on rope and found more questions and answers that I could have imagined. Everything from what rope to buy to where to take classes. The answers were well-thought out, never skeevy, and infinitely patient. Then there were the photos. Oh, my God! One thing I had missed in my previous investigations was suspension. I saw gorgeous pictures of people suspended from wooden frames by dozens of artistically placed ropes. Then Mom called up the stairs for me to help with dinner.

It took me a minute to recover from the excitement I felt at finding a group of people that included some very experienced in rope and some just like me with questions and doubts and insecurities. I hadn't realized that my breathing had gotten so quick. When I had calmed down, I went downstairs to help with dinner. I put on airs of being a typical high school student, not the deviant I felt I was for my hidden desires. I chatted with Mom about what was happening at school while I put dishes on the table. Dinner was pleasant, Roger enthusiastic about his new job, and I tried to remain engaged with conversation, though I lapsed a few times into my own ruminations in my head. Afterward, I cleaned up, putting the dishes in the dishwasher and leftovers into Tupperware. I went back upstairs. It should be noted that sitting in my room for hours was normal behavior in our household. My mother required us to be present for dinner unless prior arrangements were made, but once eating and chores were done, retiring to my room to watch videos, listen to music, or do my homework was a regular occurrence.

The next thing I looked at was local groups. Most cities had a rope bondage group of some sort, even my unpretentious Midwestern one.

I decided to craft an appeal. It took me an hour and a half to write two paragraphs. I wrote and erased every word at least three times. I pulled up the dictionary on a couple occasions. When I was done, I read what I'd written.

Dear Rope Riggers:

I appeal to the community of rope bondage for help. I want, no, I need to experience this thing that 
is rope bondage, Shibari, Kinbaku, whatever you want to call it. I've tried to do what I can by myself, 
but I just can't do it properly. You really cannot tie yourself up.

I'm looking for someone to take an evening and tie me once. I live near