Nawashi Read online

  NAWASHI

  By Graydancer

  ©2004 Ki Musubi Media

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:

  This book would not have been possible without the support, encouragement, and love of my friends, in alphabetical order: Alyska, AngieReedGarner, Ashanden, BiFemmeFatale, ButterflyBleu, Catnapping, CFXJosh, CharlieCopper, DarthCrank, Debunkshy, Drakenfly, EdwardDain, EvaLux, ExtheSuccubus, FencerT, FetishMystique, FinickySlut, FloydCollins, Godniar, GoodTexan, Great_Eye, Heliotrope689, HisSlaveKitty, Hypersimulation, I_Bleed_Autumn, Innocent_Irony, InstantExpert, Jaded_Dreamer, Jaspamaster, JeffreyP, JennKitty, JuniperLore, Kate_the_Bear, Kitnish, Leathermines, LelethFaery, LostLostAgain, LulusPoochie, Millarca, Mimazu, MissBettieHave, Obafugakum, OneSoul, Panacea_Disease, ProjectJanel, PurpleNimue, Ralinad, RiggerMortis2, Samadi, ScathedObsidian, Sekhmetdancing, Surrender, Sylvia101, TechDragon, Thistles, Tonbi_nawa, TotallyHot, Trouble, Vidgal, WantonHussy, WordWeaverLynn, and Zeuberwench.

  Some of them appear in this novel. Any errors in their portrayal are theirs, not mine.

  Additional thanks go to O-Man of Mystery, the entire Nanowrimo Project, SharpDressedKim, Shadowfind, Midori, TNGC, and the Adult Rope Art, Shibaricon, ShibariEnthusiasts, and Advanced Rope Bondage communities online, for their support, knowledge, and inspiration.

  My wife and my lover, thank you for enduring the monomaniacal passion.

  Probably lots of other people deserve thanks, too, but they’ll have to wait.

  Dedicated to my loves

  Genevieve & Cunningminx

  I

  Sometimes, Brian reflected, fantasies simply don’t measure up to reality.

  For example, when he was thirteen, on his paper route, he had a fantasy about one of his customers. She was the mother of a couple of toddlers in an apartment complex, a woman of Indian ancestry with golden brown skin covering gently sloping curves of ass and breasts. She had lustrous dark hair down to her waist, kept bound by one simple band of richly patterned dark green brocade.

  This nod towards her heritage only added to her exoticism in his eyes, in spite of the jeans and sweatshirts that she always wore when he came to collect payment for her subscription. Her eyes were a gentle almond shape the color of dark coffee that seemed to gaze right through Brian’s young stammering self. He didn’t see the children clinging to her, or the barely-livable conditions of the tenement she lived in. Her hair, skin, and eyes ignited his imagination, fueled by a lifetime of fantasy books and just starting to take on a decidedly adolescent twist.

  His fantasy really gained focus, however, when he discovered references to a piece of literature known as the Kama Sutra, an Indian text of secret and exotic sexual delights which he didn’t dare actually track down for fear that his parents would find out about his shameful burgeoning sexuality. But he knew that it was Indian, and that it had something to do with that stuff women and men did together but nobody talked about. That “stuff” had only recently been discovered in “Love & Sex & Growing Up,” a book at the library that had answered the questions that his school couldn’t and his parents woudn’t.

  The imagery was relatively simple: he would be at her door, and she would ask him to step inside while she fetched the money. This time her children would not be clinging to her leg, pulling her jeans taut around her thighs. This time when she returned it would not be with money, it would be with some gauzy silk wrapping her body, and she would smile—a brief curve of chocolate pink lips punctuated by bright teeth—and she would reach out and touch him.

  He was never specific about exactly where she would touch him. It didn’t really matter in his mind, because all the fantasy required was that she know where to touch, and at that gentle stroke of a finger, say, perhaps, on the hollow just above his collarbone, his penis would instantaneously engorge with a solid and undeniable erection.

  He would just stand there, in his fantasy, staring into her eyes, unable to move and not wanting to. She would smile and tell him about her membership in an ancient family of Indian mystics, the Kama Sutrans, perhaps, and their knowledge of all the mysterious ways of pleasure. With a touch, she would explain, she could make him hard and ready. With another touch, she would tell him, she could make him explode.

  In his fantasy, as he masturbated, eyes shut tight, late at night in his bed or in the bathroom before a shower, he would never quite see where her hand would touch him. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t her touch that he saw. It was the intensity of her eyes, the half-smile of her mouth, kind and amused as she reached towards him, and that was the image he held as sticky ejaculate filled his lotion-covered hand.

  Twenty-some years later, he found, that smile wasn’t nearly as arousing. Perhaps he had been too young to see it at the time, but the smile was not amused and kind. It was cruel and dismissive. At least, that was what was on the face of the Indian woman who stood before him now in the candlelight.

  “Are you enjoying yourself, Man?” The tone with which she spat the word was in stark contrast to the murmured endearments she’d layered the evening with earlier at the bar. There she had danced in a low-centered sinuous way that had attracted his attention amidst the bouncing and stomping crowd. He moved out into the dance floor and caught her eye at the same time that his body began reflecting her dance, moving in a complementary motion to her. She had smiled, that flash of white teeth in the darkness of her face that had triggered that memory of his adolescent fantasy. Her eyes had found his, and their gazes drew their bodies closer, first their arms, then her ass brushing against his thigh, his shoulder against her back as she turned, their dance moving from proximate motion into a more definite flirtation, finally with her legs completely interlocking around his thigh, his grounded stance holding her pumping hips with ease, his hands grasping her hips, allowing her arms to fly up in an semblance of mudras too fast in the dim flickering club light to see.

  Through it all, their eyes had never left each other. When the music changed again into a less friendly beat, they had slowly disengaged, and she’d turned, indicating with her eyes, again, that she’d like him to follow the sweep of her black hair shimmering down her back. Tied, of course, with a green swatch of cloth, an embossed pattern flickering in and out of site as the lights and lasers swept over it.

  She’d been soft and flirtatious in the parking lot, calling him “Dancer.” “Dancer, you and I, we need to do more. You do…more, do you not?” Her voice was touched with English intonations, lending an erotic shape to the words purring from the exotic curve of her mouth.

  He spoke without thinking, always best when trying not to spoil a good thing. “I do much more. As I’m sure you could tell. Where shall we do it?” The puerile part of his mind cheered (“Assume the sale! Way to go!”) but he managed to shut it out of his face as he smiled back.

  Perhaps he should have realized then that the wide smile she returned had been more predatory and feral than eager, but at the time he had been concentrating on not losing that connection they’d established during the dance.

  As he hung there in the door frame, he wondered if she’d given other signals that she was a psychopath before they’d made it to her door. He couldn’t think of any. She had murmured soft blandishments at his dancing skills, her hand on his thigh as he drove, stroking the spot still warm from her crotch as she’d ridden him, complimenting the hard muscles of his legs (a part of him winced at falling for that particular cliché), expressing delight at the way his hands had held her, hinting that her hips would enjoy that touch again with fewer clothes in the way.

  When she’d suggested, in the dim candlelight of her apartment, with half-seen sculptures and a mandala blurred by the flickering flame on her wall, that he let her use her new frame (“You don’t mind being a little kinky, do you?” she’d said, her hands fluttering ac
ross the small of his back as she pressed into him) he’d actually chuckled. Actually let out a smug, confident laugh, at the idea that he, Brian Stanford, would be averse to something kinky. He’d assented, of course, planning to use it as a quid for his pro quo later on, when he would be able to unwrap those curves, revealing her “all-over-tan” as he’d used to call it when his ex-wife, a Filipina, would undress, and then he would wrap her up again in something much more revealing, restrictive, and, he hoped, to their mutual tastes.

  Now, however, hanging there with his shirt in ribbons, a thin trickle of blood sliding down from his left clavicle to pool in the hair over his nipple, with the woman’s soft lips sneering in a (no doubt about it now) feral grimace as she lifted the knife again, he suspected that their tastes were not so mutual after all.

  He licked his lips, and tried to keep his voice as reasoned and calm as he could. “Actually, I’ve never been into blood play. Nothing wrong with it, when you’re keeping things sanitary” Please, God, let that knife be sterile “but it’s just really not been my thing. In fact,” he tried to let a chuckle, a confident tone belying his growing unease, “I’m not all that into being a bottom at all. Personally I’m pretty much entirely of the dominant persuasion.” He hoped that the use of the terminology common to the kink community would remind her that the two of them had not negotiated at all, really, beyond his willingness to have his wrists taken up in the dark leather straps attached to the wood frame. Dark? That annoying voice in his psyche piped up again. Dark with what fluids, exactly, do you think?

  She didn’t react as he’d hoped, with some sort of acknowledgement of the need for rules of engagement before they went into this sort of edge play (in a literal sense, edgy, now, isn’t that funny?) . In fact, she didn’t seem to be possessed of any of the three precepts of kinky play, being insane, unsafe, and increasingly non-consensual.

  Problem was, no negotiation beforehand meant there was no safeword, no phrase that would let the Top know that the Bottom was in a place that was not good, that things needed to stop now. “Red?” he tried, as she drew the knife closer to his right clavicle. It was a peculiar double-bladed shape, as if two daggers had been merged with their blade edges perpendicular to each other, with a large ball on the end of the hilt protruding from her clenched fist.

  “Red! RED!” The common safeword had no effect on her as she drew a thin and wavy line just under the line of his bone. It didn’t hurt very much, but inexorable invasion of his body by the blade and the maliciously evil smile of the person who wielded it was beginning to fray his calm. This, buddy-boy, is headed nowhere you want to go.

  “Red?” she softly chuckled, looking with satisfaction at the lines of blood slowly wending their way down his pectoral. “Red is the only color left to you, Man. You are in Kali’s hands now, and” she drew a deeper line quick down his sternum, punctuating her statement with a small puncture wound just under the small bone where his ribs met, “Kali has no safewords.” She hissed the last with the same contemptuous tone as before, and through his gritted teeth Brian wondered how he’d ever thought her attractive. As if she could read that in the look on his face, she laughed again, an ugly percussive brassy sound. “You, Man, are ruled by your lingam, and will go wherever it leads. Sniffing around anyone whose yoni you catch a whiff of… and in this case, your lingam has led you into the arms of Kali. Enjoy it while you can, Man, for your sacrifice will be the final pleasure you ever have.”

  The hell of it was, his body did seem to enjoy it. Before she had begun slicing his shirt off of his chest, she had stroked him, once, just behind his ear, a caress along the back curve of his skull, her nail suddenly biting into his neck just at the cervical vertebrae. Brian’s vision had seemed to flash, and as he shook his head to clear it, he’d realized that his cock was pushing out the fabric of his slacks in rampant erection.

  That had been two hours ago. Now his shirt was in tatters, his arms were burning from the strain of holding them up, and he was realizing that she wasn’t going to stop with the slicing of his shirt. Hell, she might not stop with the slicing of your skin, buddy boy. But his cock was still visibly excited, starting to ache from the strain of being hard for so long. There was no sexual pleasure, it simply was there, oblivious to the increasing pain and tension in the rest of his body.

  “Look,” he tried again to put a reasonable, and authoritative tone to his voice. “I’ve got to give you lots of credit for edge play. You’ve pushed every limit I have and then some. But regardless of what my body is showing, I’m telling you no. This has to stop, now. I am not consenting to any further play of any kind with you. If you let me loose now, I will not press charges, or even mention it again.”

  He drew a breath. “But if you continue, I will tell you that the full wrath of the law will come down on your beautiful head with a fury that you will not believe. See, I may be kinky, but I’m also the son of a sheriff, and if I turn up” missing he did not say “hurt, they will come after you. And you know how many people saw us at the club… ”

  Brian’s voice trailed off as he saw her predatory smile get wider, and he realized that she was not intimidated. In fact, she was enjoying watching his struggle for self control. As he watched her face, that had seemed so erotically exotic in the club, it became something other than human—less or more he could not say. His arms shook a little from muscle fatigue, and his legs were long past discomfort and into the burning sensation of lactic acid buildup. She drank it all in as she wove the knife in strange patterns thru the air, occasionally flicking close enough to his skin for him to feel the air move as the blade passed by his skin. His head fell forward for a moment, and as he looked down his torso he saw the pattern of small decorative cuts, each ornamented with a line of his blood, and realized that the blade was not actually missing him at all. It was simply so sharp that his skin did not have time to register the pain before it was sliced open. He let out a low moan.

  She laughed, and brought the blade suddenly up to his face, causing him to desperately jerk his head back to avoid losing a piece. She held the blade vertically before him, and drew her own face to within inches of the blade, staring into his eyes around the edges. She was so close that her eyes seemed to merge into a weird cyclopean blur, but Brian didn’t misunderstand the cruel patience there. It was a calm sadism he recognized. He’d felt it himself while playing with others, but always tempered with a clear recognition of his play partners as humans, as people, as friends and usually much more.

  In her eyes, there was none of that. He was simply Man, to her, and that seemed to be little more than a slab of meat to be prepared. Ah, so you’re a FLAY partner, then the little voice contributed, and then gibbered off into his silent subconscious, and he couldn’t help it. He giggled.

  That surprised her, and the predatory look faltered for just a moment, and in that moment, Brian saved his life.

  He felt the tangible weight of her gaze slip, somehow, in much the same way as the balance of an ukemi sparring partner in aikido will begin to falter during the beginning of a throw. The nage- thrower - learns to recognize that moment, that precious moment between when the will of the opponent is suddenly not a factor in the position and destination of their body.

  Once recognized, it merely requires a gentle push to help them lose their balance. And just as Brian had felt her gaze grip him, he felt his laugh send her somehow off kilter, just for a moment, and he went with it, not really understanding how or why or even what it was he pushed with. All the same… he pushed.

  She stumbled back for a moment, still holding the knife up, and shook her head, as if to clear it. “Man… ” she hissed again, but less sure than she had been a moment before. She raised the knife again, beginning to draw patterns in the air in front of him, taking a step closer. The step did not have the graceful aggressiveness of before, however, because she looked again at the Man. And the Man was grinning at her.

  Brian felt fantastic. More than fantastic. In that slight s
hift where his laughter had thrown off his tormentor’s momentum, he had felt the power she’d been wielding somehow flow into him, like a cold infusion of water down his spine, enervating his entire body with a rush of strength and sensation that washed the pain away and replaced it with a calm radiant readiness. Suddenly he was standing balanced and strong, his arms in the wrist restraints seeming to hold the rack up rather than being restrained by it. His his mouth was turned up in a smile, eyes were bright and fastened on hers, and burning with anger.

  His cock was still hard. But it felt as good now as the rest of his body.

  This time it was she who was trying to break the gaze, and could not. The patterns of the blade in the air faltered once, twice, and then her hand fell to her side, as she saw his entire body seeming to grow somehow bigger, drinkig in more of the power that had filled the room, her power. “You can’t… ” she whispered, disbelieving. “The power is Kali’s… you are Man… ”

  “I am Man,” he agreed, his voice resonating low and cold. He looked down again at the cuts on his chest, and she gasped as she saw the cuts she’d inflicted close themselves, all at once, leaving tiny white scars like the brocade pattern of her headband across his white skin. He looked up at her again, and she felt his gaze pushing deeper this time, and with an involuntary wail she dropped the knife and lifted her arms out to either side in a Y-shape, her hands writhing, fingers forming shapes seeming of their own accord, tips meeting and pulling each other in various directions.