Bound by Tradition
wasn’t having a very good life and I was finally willing to admit that. I was through with telling myself I was stressed out, burned out…
    His text, after the run, before my first class had even begun— Your problem is that you aren’t committed enough —sent me over the edge. That is, if there was an edge to fall over.
    “I’m not committed enough?” I started laughing hysterically.
    Before that text, I had been dreading facing not only my father but the other students and black belts at the dojo that night. I would feel the full weight of their disappointment and my father’s shame. After the text…
    “Fuck it!”
    Taking second place to Suki Miura was a damn good show. I loved competing against her. There was no shame in that. No reason for disappointment. Sure, I could work harder, develop a deeper understanding of the skill sets…
    Why? As in why bother? Why not just accept that on that day, she was the better competitor?
    Maybe next time I will be or maybe a total stranger will bust onto the scene and blow us both out of the water. I snorted. Wouldn’t that be something?
    A year ago I would have blown off classes and spent the entire day in the dojo after such a failure, but today I didn’t see it as a failure. As the professor walked the class through a PowerPoint, I replayed each move in my head. Hers. And mine. Her kata was flawless…until the ankle wobble in the sai kata. Mine was equally flawless…but still, the scores could have fallen either way, and if I was really honest, really, really honest, her performance was polished, fierce, and primal. Mine was only polished. I showed no passion.
    The students exiting woke me from my mental fog, and I stood to go. I gathered my books and dropped them into my backpack and saw my bright red dildo in the bottom of the bag.
    * * * *
    “Vibrator!”
    He patted his chest, pretending to check for pockets. “Sorry, all out of vibrators. I could—”
    I interrupted whatever he was going to say. “I have a vibrator in my backpack. Get it!”
    He’d tied me to the bed with the handcuffs and a couple of belts. Somewhere in my mind I’d thought he’d release me before retrieving the vibrator from my backpack, but that didn’t happen. When he returned to my side with the backpack and not my vibrator, I was confounded.
    “I’m not comfortable going through your stuff.”
    I snorted, thinking the guy was a freak. He had no problem tying me up or finger fucking me, but he didn’t feel comfortable looking through my bag? “Shiro! Please. Go through my shit. Main compartment. Bottom of the bag. Big red vibrator. You can’t miss it.”
    He rummaged a little and pulled out two pairs of handcuffs, lifting his eyebrow as he questioned, “I thought you had no experience with kink.”
    “I’m not into kink. If I take a stranger to my hotel room, I make him let me handcuff him to the bed before I have sex with him. It’s a safety precaution, like condoms.”
    “And then what? You ride him? You control every second of the situation?”
    “Yes,” I admitted softly. “I control everything.”
    He laughed, dropping the cuffs back into the bag, rummaging deeper. “How’s that working for you today?”
    “Ha-ha. Losing interest here. Just untie me.”
    Shiro pulled the vibrator—molded like a long red penis with a clitoral stimulator shaped like the head of a bull—from the bag. Seeing it, he chuckled.
    “Stop. Just untie me,” I demanded, all humor gone, any desire that I had to orgasm disintegrated. I could feel my face heated with humiliation.
    He moved between my legs, not untying me. He snorted and scuffed his knees against the sheets, pretending to be a charging bull. I got angrier.
    The vibrator made contact with my labia as Shiro pretended to charge.
    I started to tell him to knock it off, to just stop it, but my anger only got me as far as, “St—” before the tip of the dildo sank home and my need came back tenfold. Holding the device solidly

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