Best Bondage Erotica 2012 by Rachel Kramer Bussel Page B

heart raced with unfamiliar insecurity. Paolina was the one who’d contacted him on the dating site, who’d asked him out. She’d taken the risk of telling him her erotic preferences and taken him to bed. She’d directly expressed her happiness at their compatibility. She made him moan and cry and come and beg for more. And she was the one who asked for sexual fidelity. How much more proof of her attraction did he need? Why was he terrified she’d come out and perform with some stranger and it’d be passionate and gripping? He’d always seen himself as fairly confident with women—an attractive, easygoing guy, comfortable taking the lead in a relationship even when he preferred sexual submissiveness when the partner was up to it. Wasn’t he still that guy?
    At last the flogging scene ended, and the aptly named Titiletta finished her titillation and took her tits offstage, followed by “Sir,” who was obviously so enamored of his submissive showpiece girlfriend that he could barely keep himself from drooling. But that was their game, and it just reinforced for Nick his awareness of the delightful dance everyone did around preferences and pleasures. Who was he to judge? At the moment, he was wondering if he could steel the courage to do anything with all of these people watching. That Paolina was willing to take the stage and perform was suddenly a new and compelling reason to worship her.
    The twenty minutes between acts—as a huge wooden frame, crisscrossed with white nylon rope, was lowered from above and bolted to the stage—seemed far longer than the hour-plus of flogging as Nick grew increasingly nervous and did the will-I/ won’t-I? dance inside his troubled head. He ruminated in frantic
patterns that didn’t seem logical even as they seemed inevitable. There were three likely outcomes here, he told himself as he looked longingly at the set that was obviously the web for Paolina’s fly. If he did not volunteer, he could secretly observe her with someone else and judge for himself whether fidelity meant to her what it did to him. He dubbed this the doomed-relationship option. A guy who played games like that was fooling himself more than his girlfriend. If he did volunteer, she could fail to see him or choose someone else intentionally. He dubbed this the hopelessly insecure option. He’d make sure she saw him, and why the hell wouldn’t she pick him? She’d asked him, quite directly, several times, to be part of the scene with her. And if she did pick him…he’d have to get on that stage. He swallowed hard. All those people, watching them together. It felt like such a breach of privacy, and yet, wasn’t it just another form of submission, just another way to please Paolina and grow closer to her? There really was no other choice.
    The introduction to Paolina’s act was simple and brief, but it seemed to Nick that the crowd had grown in size and energy as The Spider and the Fly was announced. The lights went down and then came up again in blue, and in the beautiful glow of the now silvery ropes, Paolina took the stage. Her thigh-high boots with their spiked heels clacked, and Nick was entranced, dismissing easily and entirely how he’d judged all the other women for wearing similar footwear. Her catsuit had a webbed design of straps and cutouts, and where it might have looked like Halloween finery on another woman, it was perfection on his Paolina.
    She toyed with a length of rope as she began to speak. “Good evening, everyone. I’m honored to perform for you tonight.” Her voice was soft yet commanding, and Nick was entirely under her spell before she’d truly begun to weave it. “Before I
get to the physical part of the act, I hope you’ll indulge me in a little discourse on spiders.” She casually weaved some ornate form of slipknot and released it. “Is there anything more poetic than the way