"Bosom Bondage Buddies" by Brandy Dewinter. Randy and Kelly are happily married but a little overweight. They need the motivation to lose weight, and so they set up sexual incentives. This is a very long story, and I'm not going to try to summarize it here. I will tell you, however, that they did both manage to lose a lot of weight and to maintain that loss.

I have occasionally been critical of bdsm and sex slavery stories because they either (a) are written for an inside audience that doesn't include me or (b) appear to be about severely dysfunctional people who wallow in degradation. The present story avoids both of those pitfalls. To be perfectly honest, the sexual interests of the characters in this story do not overlap much at all with my own inclinations. For example, I have no great urge to see my husband wear pantyhose and I don't want him to shave anywhere except his face. Yet the author presents these and other activities in such a way as to make me believe they are sexy - indeed, I found it arousing to read about activities that I probably would be more inclined to consider ridiculous or even repulsive in real life. This is the mark of a very good writer - the ability to present a story in such a way as to appeal to outsiders as well as insiders.

In addition, it was very clear to me that the people in this story are NORMAL. I suspect that most people who read and practice sexual bondage and cross-dressing are equally normal, but in many stories depicting these themes the characters come across to outsiders as really weird people. When I say that the people in this story are normal, I am NOT saying that I think most readers who enjoy these fantasies are ever likely to go as far in real life as these people do - any more than readers who enjoy more conventional fantasies are likely to imitate the studs and their companions in more conservative stories. Both bondage insiders and outsiders should be pleased to find a story that gives a respectful yet sexy treatment of such characters.

I will repeat that this is a LONG story, and the sex to story ratio is lower than you will find in most stories on this newsgroup. Some readers will consider the ratio to be higher - for example, if you enjoy cross-dressing or have a lingerie fetish yourself, you will be likely to regard as sexy many of the passages that I found to be interesting but unarousing.

This is an excellent story. It felt like a Vickie Tern story without the chicanery and intrigue motifs that Vickie usually employs. It's sort of like having Vickie Tern write her version of the Trinity Trilogy.