The Dominant Male

things, enough to draw out a few of the more interesting facts. How, for example, before the tumbling lock was invented for which a gaoler could have a key, a necessary aspect of restraint had been to keep the prisoner’s hands away from clasps and hooks that they could undo by themselves. Hence, Paul had said, there had been a logic behind the apparent cruelty of so many of those arcane devices that one saw line-drawn on history websites and in the cheap compendium to be found on the true-crime shelves.
    Meanwhile, Manda had got the point, she’d thought. She’d felt a burgeoning sense of longing – to be touched, kissed, penetrated. She had craved at least to be allowed to make herself a little wet, but had refrained from venturing the suggestion and instead had made a not half-hearted attempt, as Paul had often suggested, to relish her growing impatience. Besides, at times like that, she liked to speak only when spoken to; she found it comforting. Although, if not consciously, she’d been careful not to tell Paul this.
    Manda was only a small thing. Her brunette bob, more a matter of sporting a convenient and timeless style than giving a nod to Louise Brooks or anyone else in particular, framed her open face with its perky nose, and accentuated the cute bump at the nape of her neck. Her daintily muscular calves straddled the horse, but the tips of her toes remained at least four inches from the floor, however much she wiggled them around. There was enough travel in the lengths of galvanised chain that held her legs close to the vaulting horse to ensure her mulish kicks were brought to a frustrating stop.
    Moreover, and most crucially, lacking any sort of stirrup or platform for her feet, Manda’s entire body weight was borne between her legs, just beneath her most precious and sensitive folds.
    Held as high as they were, her arms did not have the strength to raise her body by way of relief, either. In fact, her upper arms, along with the muscles that overlayed her collarbones, were beginning to feel the strain of being held in that position. The tension therein obliged her to arch her back, creating folds of flesh between her shoulders and beautiful lines that ran from the back of her neck and around the twin globes of her bum, pronounced and slightly parted atop the horse, to reveal the darkened channel and the whorl between them.
    Her neat, C-cup breasts were splayed, raised and taughtened likewise, providing an easy handful for Paul to grasp and kneed with his calloused hands. He stood just behind her, to her left, fully clothed, the easy fit of his jeans and t-shirt seeming to mock her discomfort just as his clothedness mocked her nakedness.
    Similarly, the nonchalant self-possession with which he had moved about the room – to set down, for example, the clothes he had not long stripped her of – had sharpened Manda’s sense of her own immobility. She had wriggled then as if to confirm her state, testing the position into which he had gently but persistently insisted she arrange herself for maximum comfort – ‘for your own good,’ as he’d put it – and felt a delicious shiver of sensation emanate from between her slippery folds, to dissipate across her taughtened belly and down thighs that sat fatly on the stud-fastened edges of the supple leather.
    In its wake had come anticipation – Paul had only got started, and she hadn’t known him to start something like this without knowing how he would finish it – and frustration: the now-familiar sense of not being allowed to touch herself, which meant that her mind grabbed at every sensation, as if catching them on the wing. When full satisfaction came, your senses thus heightened, it could be overwhelming.
    The room was warm. Paul had made sure its two radiators were both kicking out a comfortable ambient temperature in which Manda’s freckled cheeks flushed easily beneath her doe-brown eyes.
    Paul ran the fingers of his right hand along the top of her left arm – a tip-only touch, he was cautious not to weigh down on the manacled limb – round the back of her neck, and gently stroked her scalp and temples through her hair. His pinkie finger stroked the outer edge of her ear. She was quiet, made prey to his voyeuristic desires; her petite and dainty musculature helplessly exposed to his lingering gaze. He spoke softly, leaning closer to her, enunciating clearly in a way he knew could make her blood run.
    ‘You know, Manda, you’ve gotta do