restraint 05

You speak: “You’d really give up everything?”

We watch her rock herself off the bed, arms still tied painfully behind her back. She stares now at the door like a lifeboat, and is probably unaware that she’s making desperate gibbering noises around her gag. Both feet hit the ground and she kicks herself upright.

“I’d do anything for you. Absolutely anything.”

Ten paces. That’s all it’ll take for her to slam against the door and earn her freedom. I’ll have to open it for her, but she’s taken three paces already, with legs made of rubber bands.

“Okay, then.”

Blades unspool on curves of darkness. Your tendrils curve beneath her armpits and halt her progress with razor-edges hovering in front of her shoulders. She lets out a despairing moan, heart-felt, and visibly steels herself to push past the blades; but the moment she touches one the skin parts like overripe peach and her body refuses to go further. There are many arteries running above the armpit.

As she tries to sidestep the deadly wall you look up at me. “Red.” A flicker of something—rejection? anger? sadness?—crosses my face but is ruthlessly crushed and replaced with tight determination. My sub and goddess has requested that the scene end. I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure she is okay.

“Good. You do right. Proud.” I reach past you to delicately remove the hook—it feels core-temperature hot and uncomfortably slick—and you distance the vibrator yourself. My hand squeezes your shoulder but you’re already turning to your prey.

She stands and sobs as you approach, back still turned to you but no longer trying to pass the blades. Her head hangs when you slip your arms around her waist and bring her back into a hug. The stiff vertical line of knots that fixes her rope in place presses scratchily between your breasts.

“I’m not cruel,” you say, though whether to her, me or yourself, I’m not sure. “This is just what I am.”

She sighs when you bite. No matter how many times I watch I will never not be shocked. Your jaw moves like you’re biting into an apple and so you mark her, as profoundly as Judas’s kiss. She is your prey, blood-deep.

She collapses instantly. You taste bitter adrenaline strong on her blood, stirring memories of long hunts running down prey across moors and through deserted nocturnal city streets. So exhausted is she by fear and the draught you’ve already taken that it feels like she wants you to end her. Every strong heartbeat adds to the impression: her very body forces your throat to close around fresh geysers of her essence.

You swell, like a leech, the skin of your immense belly growing imperceptibly tauter. Inside you feel the heat of her. Four, six, eight pints. More than can be sustained. She is dying. The majority of her blood is gurgling inside your purring stomach.

The vaults of your crimson-shining hard palate are the last thing she sees. Like a cathedral, except the stained glass has shattered and cuts her cheeks in two parallel grooves. Your fangs draw more blood by dint of your squeezing her past them. If she says a last word you eat it alongside her.

She goes down warm and obliging. If you are a predator and cannot help your nature, perhaps she has accepted her role as your prey. She affirms it in small ways, with the salt taste of her tears and skin, the way she curls up in your stomach. The way she drowns in your digestive juices, too weak to keep her head above the froth that eats her lungs alive.

You carry her back to the bed with your body and in your hands. I can’t see the weak thrashing you feel inside you: your fat eats that too.

I gesture to your belly from beside you. You nod, and so I kneel to dig my hands deep into your body and mould her, aiding natural digestive processes and helping work air up your throat. Do you realise how sombre you look, despite the aroused flush of blood in your cheeks?

“Raven, are you okay?” My voice is gentle.

You nod, slowly, staring at the wall. Her struggles slow and stop. She has a handful of heartbeats left to tie her soul and body together.

“It seemed too sad. You made me sound like a monster. Is that how you see me?”

You don’t have to look at my face to know I’m struck. You feel it in the way my massaging hands briefly convulse.

“I see you like a power above—”

“—I know you know you’re all prey,” you snap, harsher than you intended but you’re upset. Inside you a hummingbird flutter grows and begins to drown out the systolic function of the consumed heart. “But do you think I’m cruel?”

I pause while I think it over. You’re about to take it for confirmation when I speak again. “Honestly? Hard to answer. I’ve seen you do things. Cause pain. Fear. Could just snap necks quickly then eat.

“In the beginning I wrestled with it. It’s one thing to imagine; another to see someone torn into bites. I had nightmares.

“But… you’re gentle. As well. You’re so… There’s such grace in you. In the end, I thought about Abraham.

“Abraham was tested. Told to sacrifice his son. It looked cruel. Lashed him to a pyre for a burnt offering. Knife raised high. Son crying for mercy. God intervened before the knife came down, but damage was already done. How must the son have felt, seeing the knife move down? How must the father have felt, knowing he could do such a thing?”

You belch softly. The girl’s heart has now failed inside you. Her spirit’s anchor fizzes as it fails.

“But it’s all, all according to a plan. In the story, all of that pain was necessary. Justified. Right.

“So it is with you. You’re no monster. You are cruel and you are merciful and you are savage and you are beautiful. You move like someone with a higher purpose, but that higher purpose takes you through lakes of human flesh. And chickens. You fucking love chickens.” I smirk to myself. “So I don’t ever question what you’re doing. You’re a higher purpose. I’m sorry, that’s how I feel.

“I’m sorry—deeply, truly—that I made you feel cruel. That was me projecting. I was putting words in your mouth, so to speak. Wasn’t my place. Won’t happen again. What you do is hallowed. You are every bit as merciful as you can be. And I love you for it.”

You close your eyes and take in a deep breath. The pressure on your stomach forces Lily’s final breath up your oesophagus. You release it between pursed lips but hold the breath.

Then, where I threatened Lily with an eternity in your guts, you exercise mercy. Her soul is freed into your stomach and then drowned as completely as a candle dropped into a well. You crush her out of sentience and absorb every fragment in a swift and complete annihilation. There is no more Lily. Only ever Raven.

You exhale long and slow. Then give me a weary smile. “Andrew,” you say, gentle, “you’re so full of bullshit.”

That gets a smile from me too. I attend to your belly with renewed vigor, scooping up handfuls of your fat in an attempt to press overstretched stomach lining against softening girl.

“‘To fall in love is to create a religion with a fallible god,’” I quote. You bap me on the shoulder.

“Your god wants ice cream. Fetch her Ben and Jerry’s, and pray for mercy.”