MEMORY OF ALEX

BY OWENM
memoryofalex@hotmail.com

[ part 4 ]

The heat was oppressive. Not a breath of air came in through the open windows in the house, the air still and silent and just a little hazy, thick and heavy. One time, I had gone into a sauna with my father in a hotel, but I only stayed in there for about a minute before the heat and all that steam made me dizzy and I fled to the delicious feeling of a cool, dry world. Except now, there was no way to get out. Actually, the best choice if I had a sauna right now would be to go in, because it would probably be cooler in there.

I sat on my bed, my knees pulled up to my chest underneath my t-shirt, stretching it out. My arms were wrapped around my legs tightly, my face down, as I rocked back and forth gently. As hot as it was, and as thirsty as I had become from sweating enough to soak my clothes straight through, I didn’t dare get up from the bed for anything. It was as if I had invoked a circle of protection around it. While I was there, I would be safe, but if I left….the thought turned my stomach, and I went back to rocking.

Truth was, I didn’t know what to feel, other than that the whole world was about to cave in on me. I mean, I knew I was in trouble, probably bigger trouble than I had ever been in before. Bigger trouble than I would ever get in again. More than once, the thought had drifted through my head that I could just run away, but the concept of trying to walk around in this heat ended that idea every time it surfaced. I wasn’t quite sure why I was in trouble, what rule I had broken, since there were no rules for what we had done wrong. Somehow, I just knew it.

I’m not sure which was worse, having to wait or having to go and talk to Dad first. That honor had fallen onto Alex. After Dad had left the room, I couldn’t move for the longest time, all the while Alex was squirming around and shouting into his gag. Some of it was surprise, I guess, but a lot of it was that I was scared of how angry Alex would be. I mean, I was obviously the one who had done the tying, but he was the one who had been tied, and in my mind it seemed clear that made me far more guilty than him. It took all the courage I had inside me to pick apart the knot that held the gag in his mouth, but when I did and he spit it out, he didn’t say a word. In fact, he stayed silent the entire time that I untied him, lying still and waiting for me to undo all of the ropes myself instead of helping out like he usually did.

I tried not to look at his face as I finished up, but every now and then I couldn’t help but glance in his eyes. It was strange, because I couldn’t quite tell from them if he was angry or not. I mean, I knew he had to be angry, but at the same time he didn’t look really furious. It only made me even more frightened, because I didn’t understand why. Even after I finished untying him, he laid still for a few moments, long enough for me to get off the bed and push the button to silence the alarm clock. He got up as I sat down on my bed, trying hard not to cry.

“Are you mad at me?” I finally asked in a trembling voice. Alex didn’t answer. Slowly, he got dressed. “I’m really sorry!” I added, knowing that even if I meant it, apologizing would be meaningless. He still said nothing, his silence as loud as if he were screaming at the top of his lungs. I sat there, oblivious to my nudity, wishing he would say something. Anything.

When he was finished getting dressed, he sat down on the edge of his bed, staring off into space. I wished he would scream at me, or even pound on me, I wouldn’t have even cared. He just sat there, completely still, staring. Dad hadn’t come back into the room yet, but I certainly wasn’t going to go and get him.

Then the clock decided to start playing music again. I looked over at it, the sudden noise jolting me in fear. Alex jerked suddenly too, and then got up off the bed. With a single motion, he yanked the clock from the wall and threw it to the ground, smashing it into several pieces.

“Alex,” Dad said quietly. I whirled around. He was standing in the doorway. “Why don’t we go for a walk?” He didn’t sound angry either, which made the whole situation even more confusing, and more frightening. Alex shuffled across the floor, kicking a piece of the dead clock, his head hanging low. They left the room, and I heard the front door close quietly, signaling that they had left the house.

It had taken all the courage I could muster to get off the bed and get dressed. It seemed like a bad idea to still be naked when Dad got back. Still, I dressed faster than I ever had before and was back on my bed instantly. I don’t know how long I’d been sitting there, with the alarm clock smashed and with no other clues that time was even passing besides the buzzing of insects coming from outside.

The sound of the front door opening quietly nearly made me scream. I grabbed the pillow and hugged it tightly as Alex came into the room. I wanted to hide behind the pillow, but I couldn’t help but peek out. His face was blank, fixed in a strange way between numb and stunned. He sat down on the edge of his bed as I watched him, and then spoke in a low, flat voice.

“Dad’s waiting for you outside.”

My stomach leapt into my throat. I couldn’t move. My mouth trembled, wanting to ask Alex a million questions, about how angry Dad was, about how much trouble we were in, about what he was going to do or say to me when I got out there. But I couldn’t make a sound. I just sat there, completely still. Alex didn’t look at me.

“Jake, go outside,” he said softly. I nearly jumped.

“Are we in really big trouble?” I finally spat out, my words thin and shaky. He didn’t answer, lying down on his back with his hands folded behind his head. Wobbly, I got up from the bed and carefully peered out of the bedroom. The front door was open, Dad sitting on the stoop. I looked over at Alex for some kind of strength, but his eyes stayed fixed on the ceiling. With a deep breath, I managed to put one foot in front of the other and slowly shuffle across the house to stand in the open doorway. Dad turned around.

“Come sit down next to me,” he said softly. I shook my head warily, my eyes wide. “Please come sit down. You’re not in trouble, I just need to talk to you.” Still I didn’t move. He sighed and then turned to face sideways. I felt like I was ready to run like a rabbit at the slightest sign of danger.

“I know you’re scared, but you don’t have to be,” he said, his eyes looking friendly at yet sad at the same time. “You haven’t done anything wrong. The only thing I would have been angry about was if you had done something to Alex that he didn’t want, but from everything Alex said it was all his idea.”

“But…then Alex is in….”

“No, honey, Alex isn’t in any trouble,” Dad answered. “Please sit down, I don’t want to have a conversation like this.” He patted the concrete beside him. I took the invitation, sitting down all the way on the other edge of the stoop, poised to flee. “Alex was very clear that none of this was your fault in any way, that you were just doing what he had asked you to do. That is true, right?”

I nodded, confused. None of this made any sense.

“Alex also told me that you’ve been doing this for a few weeks now, pretty much every day.” I nodded again. “Look, honey, I know that no matter how many times I’ve said that you boys can talk to me about anything, I’m not surprised that you kept this a secret from me. I suppose it’s not something you can talk to your father about, is it?”

I shrugged. “I guess,” I mumbled.

“Why?”

I shrugged again. “I dunno. I guess…it’s just that kind of thing.”

He sighed again, and then looked over at me intently. “How much do you know about sex?”

I nearly fell over, blinking several times in shock before my face began to turn red from embarrassment. Why would he pick a time like this to bring up a conversation about…that? Now I was completely confused. None of this made any sense whatsoever. I was so surprised that I actually managed to answer him. “Just that, you know, a man and a woman get together and they…make babies.”

Dad smiled gently. “I suppose that’s what I get for not having the courage to talk to you boys earlier.” He shook his head. “There’s a lot more to sex than making babies. You’ve heard of masturbation?”

I turned even redder and nodded. “At school,” I whispered. “But the guys call it jerking off.”

“You’re not a slow kid, I’m sure you put the connection together that ‘jerking off’ has something to do with sex.” I nodded again, being careful not to look in his direction. “People think about and do all kinds of things when they’re jerking off. Some boys think about girls, and some boys think about other things. Your brother is one of those boys that think about different things, like being tied up.”

My head jerked of it’s own accord, my eyes gluing themselves to his. My head felt like it was about to explode. Again, I managed to speak only because I was so completely surprised. “Alex wanted to be tied up for…for sex?”

“You know, Alex told me you really had no idea why he was asking you to do all those things to him.”

The realization began to seize my brain, things suddenly clicking into place. That’s why he wanted to be naked. That’s why his thing was always hard whenever I tied him up. How come I didn’t figure this out before? But just as soon as it all made sense, it all fell apart in my head and became even more muddled.

“But… but…” I struggled with the words. “But then why did Alex want me to make it hurt all the time? And how could he do it if he was tied up? And…”

Dad shook his head, and I trailed off. “A lot of people who think about being tied up also think about being hurt. Some people want to be hurt just a little, while other people think about getting hurt a lot. Which would you say Alex is more like?”

That was easy. “He wants to get hurt a lot,” I answered, the words coming more easily. “Yesterday he stayed tied up in the closet all day kneeling with his arms stretched above his head and it really must have hurt because I stretched my arms up too…” I turned beet red, not believing that I actually just told that to my father. He just smiled and nodded gently again.

“You don’t have to be ashamed to tell me these things, honey,” he said. “Sex is never anything to be ashamed about, no matter how strange it might seem to talk to me about it. You know, I’m kind of glad this all happened like this, because I had been putting off talking about this kind of stuff with you boys for too long now.”

“I guess I’m kinda glad too,” I answered. “It was getting pretty weird.”

“Were you feeling uncomfortable about doing what Alex was asking of you?”

I shrugged. “I guess. I mean…he just wanted to get hurt more and more and then last night he was talking about wanting to be kidnapped and I was getting really scared. But…” I trailed off. I looked back down at the grass, stubby and wide. Grass down here was all rough, not like the grass I remembered from back in Massachusetts. I didn’t know why I was thinking about grass.

“But what, honey?” Dad asked.

I sighed. “Do you think it’s ok for me to keep doing this stuff with Alex?”

He sighed as well. “That’s a very hard question for me to answer. To be completely honest, there’s a part of me that would rather you two didn’t play these kinds of games together.” He stared off across the grass. “There’s a part of me that wishes that Alex didn’t have these kinds of feelings, that he wasn’t…” Dad’s voice cracked, and for a moment I thought he actually sounded like he was going to cry. I looked over at him with a mixture of curiosity and fear. “But, that doesn’t matter,” he said firmly. “The only thing that matters is if you want to do keep doing these things with Alex. It’s your decision, and Alex’s, whether or not you should continue.” He looked at me intently. “Do you want to?”

I thought for a moment. Did I want to? The whole thing was still terrifying, and even though he had said that Alex wanted to be hurt that didn’t make it any less scary. In fact, it became even more frightening, thinking that Alex actually wanted to get hurt like that. The fact that I was the one who was hurting him just made it worse. But at the same time, there was a strange little feeling down in my stomach, a feeling that as weird as this whole thing had become, there was a part of me that was seized by curiosity. After all, this had to do with the great mystery of sex, and the promise of the secrets that could be revealed captured my imagination and made my fingers tingle with excitement.

I nodded.

“Ok, then,” he said. “You have my official permission to tie up Alex any time that both of you want.” I smiled. Official permission to tie up Alex was a strange thing to have. “I have a couple of rules you have to follow, or I will take this permission away. First, you are never to leave Alex completely alone while he is tied up. You can be in the other room, but you must never leave the house.” I nodded. “Second, I don’t want you to ever tie anything around his neck, or make it hard for him to breathe. That’s how accidents happen.” I nodded again. “Third, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. If you feel uncomfortable about anything Alex asks you to do, you just say no. Understood?”

I nodded again. Dad slid over and put his arm around my shoulder. His face changed a little and became more serious, his voice a little darker. “Alex and I had a very frank discussion about the feelings that he had, about all the things that he wants to ask you to do that he’s been too afraid to bring up.”

“What kind of things?” My stomach did another flip.

Dad was quiet for a moment. “What Alex wants…what he needs is to feel like he’s being taken out of control, like he has no say in the things that happen to him.”

“It’s already like that,” I said. “I don’t untie him no matter what he says until the time is up.”

“I think it’s more to do with your attitude,” Dad said thoughtfully, and then shook his head. “I think Alex should talk to you more about this, he can express what he wants better than I can. In the meantime,” he said, slapping his knees and rising to his feet, “I have something I want to show you.”

I followed him into his bedroom, watching wide eyed as he reached up to the very top shelf in his closet, the one that he could barely reach standing on his toes, pulling down a small cardboard box. He set it on the bed, opening it carefully so that the box flaps obscured what was inside. Gingerly, he took something out of it. I moved forward so that I could get a closer look, but that didn’t help me figure out what it was. It had a smallish black ball that had somehow been attached to a small belt. Dad held it in his hands, looking at it intently for a few moments, before looking up and handing it to me. I took it as if it were a snake ready to strike, holding it by the very tip of the belt at arm’s length.

“What is it?” I whispered.

“It’s a gag,” he answered. I blinked, surprised, and then held it closer so that I could inspect it. Now it made sense, the ball must go in his mouth like the knot from the socks do, and instead of tying it behind his head the belt keeps it on. I looked at it intently, noticing that the ball looked pretty beat up. I wasn’t totally sure, but it looked as though it had teeth marks all over it, as though it had been bitten all over at some point.

But before I could ask about the gag, Dad handed me another strange object, or I guess I should say pair of objects, because there were two of them that were attached together with a chain. They looked like those clips that I had seen the science teacher use to attach a meter to an electrical circuit he had made during a lesson.

“What are these for?”

Dad smiled thinly. “These are clamps. You put these on him, right here,” he said, pointing at my chest. I looked down, dumbfounded.

“How would that help to tie him up?”

“It’s not to tie him up,” Dad corrected me gently. “They hurt when you put them on him. You put them right on his nipples, one on each side.”

I stared wide-eyed at the clamps. In all the times that I had tied Alex up the way that he wanted, so that it hurt, never had it crossed my mind that there were other things besides the way he was tied up that could be used to hurt him the way he wanted to. Instead of pain just being a side-effect, causing pain was the only purpose these little things served. I instantly dropped them, watching as they fell to the floor with a soft clink, backing off two steps without ever letting them leave my sight.

“Maybe that’s too much for you right now,” he said softly, picking them up and putting them back in the box, replacing it on the very top shelf of his closet. “Alex doesn’t know about these things yet, and I’m not going to tell him about any of them because I don’t want him pressuring you to do things you’re not ready to do.” The image of putting those clamps on Alex flashed into my head, and I shuddered. “Not until you’re ready.”

I nodded. I felt like my head was full and I couldn’t stuff anything else in there. Dad motioned for me to sit down on the bed next to him, and I did. “Jake,” he said, his voice cracking again, “I don’t know if Alex has been able to tell you how much what you’ve been doing means to him, but I want you to know that what you’re doing for Alex means more…” He trailed off, and then tousled my hair. “I’m going to catch hell for being so late to work.”

I looked at him with misty eyes and an unsettled stomach. “Do you really have to go?”

He nodded, getting off the bed. “Go and talk to your brother.” I nodded back at him, watching him walk over to our bedroom, standing in the doorway. “Alex, I’m going to work now.” If he answered, I couldn’t hear it. Dad smiled at me as he walked back from the house, closing the door silently behind him. I stayed put on the bed, trying to make sense out of everything that I’d just been told. It seemed impossible.

I didn’t notice that Alex was standing in the doorway to Dad’s bedroom until he coughed. I stared at him. He fidgeted, looking down at the floor.

“Do you wanna skip stones at the lake?”

Without a word, I got up off the bed, signaling my willingness to go along with him, only because it was easier to just go than to say no. The lake was a half-mile walk along a path through the woods that stood behind the house, a nice easy flat walk like everything in this dead flat place. At least it would have been easy if the heat hadn’t been bearing down upon us like a pile of thick woolen blankets from which there was no way to crawl out. We walked in silence, Alex leading, me following a safe twenty paces behind him.

When we reached the lake, we set out to find the right kind of stones along the bank. We hadn’t been down to skip stones since we had started, I remembered with another little shudder, but still there weren’t many good flat ones to be found since we had been regulars down here before that, stripping the banks of every stone that could be successfully flung across the rippling water.

Alex found a good handful long before I had even located two. Without comment, he handed over more than half of his stones to me, dumping them into my cupped hands before turning and expertly flicking the stone across the water. I watched with more than a little envy how his stone gently hopped along the water, leaving tiny rings of ripples to mark the places where it had bounced. Seven. Alex’s record was ten. I had never done more than five. My first throw skipped twice before sinking below the still, dark water.

Alex was more careful with his stones, the result being that even though I had twice as many as he did, he still had two leftover when I was done. He handed me one and then stood in front of the water, his face fixed in concentration, throwing the stone. I counted the rings as it skipped along, my eyes widening as I counted the last set.

“That was eleven,” I said. “It’s a new record.”

He turned and looked at me, his eyes watery. “I’m really sorry.” He kicked at the grass. “I’m sorry for getting you mixed up in all this stuff. It wasn’t fair…fair of me to poison you like that.”

“Poison me?”

He just shook his head. “I’m sorry I lied to you too.”

“You didn’t lie to me,” I said quietly.

He shook his head. “All that stuff about scouts, I just made all that up. I never got tied up at scouts.” He looked back over the water. “I wanted to, but nobody would do it. I tried to get a lot of people to do it, but no one ever would. I lied about why I wanted you to do it too.”

I shrugged. “It’s ok, I guess. I’m not mad.”

“I guess you don’t want to do that stuff anymore, now that you know.” He sounded so sad that I felt like maybe I would start to cry too.

“It’s ok,” I answered. “I don’t care.”

He turned around slowly. “Really? You would still do it even though...even though Dad told you why…” He trailed off.

“Yeah, I guess,” I said slowly. “It’s really important to you.”

His eyes met mine for the briefest moment, and I saw a flash of something there that I had never seen before. It reminded me of the way he had looked at me when he had pulled me up from the ground and helped me gather my books after he had handily dispatched the bullies that had been teasing me, except that it seemed much stronger this time. Not a word needed to be said from there. I skipped my last stone, watching it slip beneath the calm surface after a mere four bounces, and then followed Alex back towards the house.

My eyes didn’t stray from the back of his head the entire time back. I knew why we were heading back, and what would happen to him once we got there. I knew that he was going to be spending a very long and difficult day locked up in the closet, just like he had asked me to do last night. But as we walked, I felt different about it, and the closer we got to home the stronger I began to feel. This was what Alex wanted. I knew that, not only because Dad had told me, but because Alex had shown me that himself. And if this is what he wanted, and if this is what meant so much to him, then I could give it to him. I could do whatever it would take to help out my brother. In those moments, I understood that look that he had given me back at the lake, and my resolve became firm and unwavering.

When we entered the house, Alex went into the bedroom and sat down on the bed in silence. I stood in the doorway, taking a few deep breaths before speaking to him.

“I’m tying you up in the closet again.” He looked up sharply but didn’t say a word. “You’re not getting out until the morning.” His face turned a little white, but he looked down at the floor and nodded. “Take off your clothes and get the ropes.”

I wondered if Alex had as many butterflies in his stomach as I had in mine. For a moment, he didn’t respond, and then he stood up like the Tin Man when he hadn’t been oiled. Jerkily, he pulled his t-shirt over his head as I watched, fascinated. This was the first time I was going to see him naked knowing why we were doing this, and it changed everything. He pulled off his sneakers and socks while I stared, unable to take my eyes away from him. It seemed to change things for him too, because instead of pulling his shorts and underwear down together, he pulled the shorts down and then stood there in his white briefs. I could see his thing sticking straight out even through the fabric, and maybe he could too because he started to turn a little red.

“Do I hafta take off my underwear?” he asked in a small voice.

I hesitated, not used to him asking about something like that. But I didn’t hesitate for long. “Yeah,” I said. “You have to take them off. You have to be naked.”

A look of defeat crossed his face, and slowly he pulled his underwear down to his knees, his eyes fixed on the floor. He let them fall to his ankles and then stepped out of them, his bare body on display in front of me. Only this time, my eyes were riveted on his crotch, on the thing that jutted out from his body, on the way that it looked so much longer than mine, on the way that the tip of it looked all red, on the way that his balls hung down in his sack while mine were still all tight and pulled up to my body. I studied it with an intensity that I had never reserved for something as mundane as a dick, looking at every nuance, every fold while he stood still, his arms at his side.

I eventually came out of my reverie. “Get the ropes,” I said hoarsely, clearing my throat. “And some socks.” Wordlessly, he obeyed, bending down to pull the ropes out from under the bed, leaving me to stare at his butt, the cheeks spread apart just far enough that I could see what his asshole looked like, all pink and kind of puckered up like I imagined mine looked like when I had to kiss some yucky old family member. He straightened up, a mass of rope in his hands, and then pulled a pair of clean socks from his drawer. I was about to tell him to get dirty ones like we usually used, but then the thought crossed my mind. It didn’t matter anymore.

I motioned with my head for him to head out into the living room. He went and opened the closet door, and without a word from me began to methodically empty it out, stacking up the piles of coats and winter things that we would never need while living in this furnace on the floor. The closet was quickly emptied, and then he turned and looked back at me. I took another deep breath.

“Get in,” I said, a little more harshly than I meant to. “On your knees,” I said more gently. He complied, kneeling down facing the back of the closet. I came up behind him, placing the pile of ropes close by so that I could reach them without having to go far. He had already crossed his ankles, and I started to tie his feet together, first tying a tight loop around one ankle and knotting it off before wrapping it around in a figure eight, making sure each wrap was pulled tight so that he wouldn’t even be able to uncross his feet. I knotted it off without a word, and then took another length of rope and began to wrap it around his waist, pulling it very tight so that it couldn’t slip off and knotting it. Using the extra from that, I pulled it down and tied it off to the rope binding his ankles, making sure that it stayed taut.

Straightening up, I looked at Alex, my eyes taking in the same scene that I had witnessed only yesterday. But things looked completely different today. Where yesterday there had been only confusion, today there was clarity, there was purpose, there was meaning behind all these meaningless acts. He squirmed a little, testing the ropes that bound him, that would prevent him from standing up even when his knees would probably start aching beyond anything I could imagine. His butt clenched and unclenched, his shoulders sagging, his arms shaking slightly.

Firmly, I grabbed his left wrist and started to tie the rope around it, knotting one loop off and then wrapping it around at least twenty times until the rope became short enough that it wouldn’t leave too much extra dangling off. I knotted it tightly, tying it off behind his wrist where he wouldn’t be able to reach it. I did the same to his other hand, letting them both fall to his side before standing up behind him. I could see him shaking a little.

“I’m not going to let you out,” I said.

“I know,” he answered.

With only those words exchanged, I grabbed the rope around his left wrist and pulled on it hard, forcing him to straighten out his arm above his head. I threaded it through the bolt on the left side of the closet bar and pulled it tight, forcing his arm to be completely outstretched. I made sure he was up on his knees and that his arm was pulled out completely before tying the rope off to the hook. He whimpered like a kitten as he tried to pull on the rope and found that he couldn’t bend his arm even a little, and then was silent again. I repeated the procedure on his right arm, completing his bindings. He was shaking even harder now.

Again, I let my eyes wander over his nude form, seeing him like I had never seen him before. I looked over his shoulders at his thing, still jutting out in front of him as straight as a flagpole and as hard as steel. My eyes brushed across his skin, the way he had goosebumps even in the sweltering misery, the way the hairs on his arms were all sticking straight up. I watched his big toes move back and forth as he stretched out his feet, looking at the way his calves and thighs showed the slight shape of his muscles in a way that mine didn’t. I stared at his butt, at how it jutted out from the rest of his back, how both sides dimpled as he clenched his cheeks together. I looked at the hollow in the small of his back, the way his shoulders looked a little wider than the rest of his body, how his blond hair rested sloppily on his head.

“Jake,” he whispered. “Please let me go.”

It shook me from my daze. Before I realized what I was about to do, I started to reach for the rope than held his right hand in place, but then I pulled away. My father’s words rang in my ears. What he needs is to feel like he’s being taken out of control, like he has no say in the things that happen to him.

“No.”

“Please,” he said, sounding like he was going to cry. “I don’t want to stay here all day, it already hurts, please untie me.”

I could feel myself wavering, but I still managed to pick up the sock. I pulled it around his eyes and knotted it off behind his head, plunging his world into darkness. He whimpered again, trying to pull his head away while I did it, but tied up like he was there wasn’t much he could do.

“Jake, please!” he said more insistently. “I’m not kidding, let me out.”

I went into Dad’s room and retrieved the gag from where I had left it. Socks weren’t necessary anymore for this. We had something real.

“Open up,” I ordered. He clamped his jaw shut and shook his head. “Open your mouth,” I said more forcefully. He stubbornly refused, his jaw clenched, his head bent forward. There was no way for me to make him open his mouth, I knew that, but my mind started to work in strange ways. “Fine,” I said, sounding like a bad guy from the TV. “For every minute you don’t let me put it in, I’m going to leave you here an extra hour.”

“You can’t, Dad will see…” he said, sounding panicked.

“So?” I tried to make an evil laugh, but it just sounded stupid so I stopped quickly. “Dad already knows about it, so what if he finds you still tied up?” Alex was silent for a moment, and then hung his head forward even more, his shoulders slumping back down. Slowly, he opened his mouth. Without hesitation, I pushed the ball past his lips. His head jerked back in surprise as he realized that it wasn’t the usual pair of socks, but I didn’t comment. I pulled the strap tightly behind his head while he protested, his words muted and muffled, completely unintelligible, and then buckled it in place.

He was completed tied now, bound, gagged, and blindfolded, about to be confined for countless hours in a stifling miserable cell. But I wasn’t done with him yet.

Leaving the closet door open, I grabbed a kitchen chair and dragged it to Dad’s room. Even standing on the chair, I was barely able to feel around in the box perched up on it’s shelf. I wondered about the other things I was feeling in there, wondering if I should take the whole box down and look into it, but my hand ran across the clamps and I yanked them from the box. Leaving the chair there, I went back into the living room and stood behind Alex. He had fallen silent.

“I’ve got another surprise for you,” I said, my voice not harsh at all, but sounding more like I was about to give him a lifetime supply of candy bars. With one hand, I reached down and found his nipple, just barely darker than the rest of his tanned skin. I squeezed it gently between my fingers, making it stick out a little. Alex jerked in surprise and said something that I couldn’t understand. I pried the clamp open with my other hand, and reaching around his neck I maneuvered it into place so that the open clamp was poised right over his chest, and then I let it go.

Alex jerked so hard as it bit down on him that I thought he might actually break the ropes. He shouted into his gag, yanking his arms as hard as he could, trying to twist around and stand up, but the ropes didn’t yield an inch. He kept on shouting as I grabbed his other nipple, trying to wrench himself from my grasp but unable to get any leverage bound as he was. In a short moment, the other clamp was biting down on him. He reared back his head and then screamed, really loudly, loudly enough to actually shake me for a moment. I fell backward onto my butt, staring at him, his chest heaving, his body shaking with the beginning of tears.

“You want it to hurt,” I said, apologetically. He shouted into his gag again. My eyes wide, not wanting to look at him any longer, I pushed the closet door shut with my feet. His shouts were more muffled now, but I could still hear them plainly. Mechanically, I turned on the TV, cranking up the volume until I couldn’t hear him anymore, except for those few times when the TV would fall silent and I could hear his cries and whimpers.

“I’m not letting you out,” I said to myself, trying to sound certain. “I promise.”

I was true to my word.