Chapter 2: A Rose Finds Her Thorn

The door to my apartment swung open, and Molly washed over the threshold like the briefest of rain showers passing by. I sprayed a hot frying pan with oil, set it back on the heat, and wiped my hands on a dishtowel. By the time I’d turned around, Molly was right up in my personal space.

“Hi, Molly, it’s nice to—”

... and before I knew it, she’d planted a kiss on my lips and danced away into the living room, laughing. I’d been twisting myself in knots all afternoon trying to figure out how to get Molly to talk about what happened and what it meant, and with one kiss it all flew straight out of my head.

“Buh,” I uttered coherently.

“Glad to see I still have that effect on you. This might work after all.”

“Sorry, what might work?”

“I’ll tell you later. Aren’t you going to offer me a drink?”

“Of course. Beer, wine –”

“Tequila?”

That was a first. She’d never asked for a shot before, not before dinner, and it took me a second to respond. “Lime and salt?”

“I bet you’ve got a bottle of something that doesn’t need it.”

“I do indeed.”

In fact, I had several. Molly knew my liquor cabinet well enough, even if we didn’t usually drink out of it. When you work behind a bar and have friends that do the same, you learn what bottles to pick up and where to get them on sale. I didn’t go for the really nice stuff, but I did pour two shots of something that did not, in fact, need lime or salt to be drinkable.

Molly took one out of my hands and clinked the other. “To old friends.”

“Slaínte.”

It had been five weeks since we’d seen each other last, which was longer than usual. Molly had been traveling, my schedule at the restaurant was all over the place, and our calendars just never seemed to line up. Plus, instead of only giving Molly a week to forget to reach out to me about scheduling, I waited a little longer than usual. Okay, it was three weeks. I wasn’t avoiding her, exactly, I just had, y’know, some stuff. On my mind.

“Mind if I change the music?”

“I left the laptop open for you. Try not to go snooping around this time.”

“I’ll just use my phone.”

“That’s probably safer.”

“What, you don’t want a repeat of last month?”

“You know, Molly...”

The subwoofer on my stereo woke up and the first bars of Janelle Monáe’s “Make Me Feel” blasted from my stereo before I could finish the thought. Molly started dancing along, and as was usually the case when that happened, I was transfixed. Watching her move like that was intoxicating. I didn’t snap out of it until she said something.

“Mmmm, what’s for dinner? I’m starving.”

“Fish tacos, but I still need to put most of it together. I’m just about to pan-fry the tortillas. I didn’t want to start the fish until you got here.”

“You spoil me, Nick.”

“I don’t know about that; you’re paying for dinner. How was Chicago?”

“Oh, it was fantastic. Work was work, but we went to the most incredible restaurant on Wednesday night. Nick, you would have absolutely died. You know I love your cooking but—”

“What was the name of the place?”

“Uh, I don’t remember. It sounds like a woman’s name. ‘Ellen’ something?”

“Molly. You went to Alinea?”

“That’s the place! Do you know it?”

“Are you fucking kidding me? It’s the only three-star restaurant in Chicago! Sit,” I said, pushing her backwards into my recliner and grabbing a folding chair. “Tell. Me. Everything.”

It took a while to finish putting dinner together, because I kept getting distracted by Molly’s tales of her adventures with molecular gastronomy. But eventually the fish got fried and the lime crema got put together, and Molly even offered to flip tortillas for me while we talked. By the time we sat down to eat, I was starving. Maybe it was the lurid descriptions of the food at Alinea, or maybe it was the tequila. Either way, we both dove in immediately.

I was finishing up my first taco when Molly changed the subject, with her usual subtle, deft smoothness.

“I have a proposition for you.”

“Hm, does this have something to do with last month?” I said, popping the last bite in my mouth.

“It might,” she said, flashing that warm and mischievous smile I’d known for years, “and I think you’re going to like it.”

“Okay, because I have some—”

“No, wait, let me tell you what it is first, and then I promise you can ask all the questions you want afterwards.”

I thought about it for a good, long second. Molly had pulled her usual conversational tricks on me a couple of times already and I didn’t want to give her the chance to do it again. We needed to talk about what happened last month ... even if I didn’t really know what I wanted to say. But I was also genuinely curious what she had in mind. If I was trying to get a feel for what direction she thought our friendship might be going, maybe it wouldn’t hurt to let her talk it out first?

I nodded at her to continue.

“Okay. God, I’m all excited about this. You know how much I like your writing, right?”

“I don’t think I realized how much until just recently, but, yes.”

“Right. And, I don’t know about you, but you tying me up was more fun than I’ve had in a long time.”

I paused. It was no small thing to admit. But it also felt like we were inching closer to the conversation I really wanted to have, and I didn’t want to slow her down. “Yeah, same.”

“But the thing that really got me was when you pulled it all together. When you said you wanted to tell me a story ... and then you did the things in the story, but to me ... I mean, I don’t have to tell you how much I enjoyed that.” Was she actually blushing? “Nick ... I want to do that again. I want more of that. I want to go through your library and pick more stories to act out. We don’t have to do it all the time, it can just be a fun thing between us, but please, Nick, I don’t want that to be the last time I get to do that.”

Over the years I’d known Molly, I’d built up a fairly thick skin to deal with the constant teasing and prodding. Not only had I gotten comfortable with it, but I’d come to appreciate it as her way of showing affection. But this was different. It wasn’t just that Molly was making herself vulnerable in front of me; we’d supported each other through rough times before. This, though ... this was the first time in ages that we’d even gotten close to talking about us. Maybe it was a crack in the armor. And that meant it was a chance to return the favor, right? To show her, at least in part, how I felt about her? Moment of truth, and all that? Nothing ventured, nothing gained? Early bird gets the worm? Make hay while the—

“Nick?”

Apparently I’d been lost in my own head for too long. Molly waved her hands in front of my face like I’d been staring off into space, which I probably had been.

“Sorry. I ... I want that too, Molly.”

Her face lit up like a sunbeam breaking through the clouds on an overcast afternoon. “Is that a ‘yes’?”

“I mean, yes, it is, but—”

She practically squealed. “Ohmygodohmygodohmygod. Nick. Nick! This is gonna be so good.”

“But, we need to lay some ground rules first.”

Her smile turned the other way around, and the clouds rolled back in.

“You said I could ask questions.”

“I ... did.”

“I need to ask you some stuff.”

“O-okay.”

“When you say you want to act out my stories, what do you actually mean? Like, what we did last time wasn’t really acting out the scene, right? I wasn’t pretending to be, I don’t know, whatever the husband’s name was, Alan or something, and you weren’t pretending to be his wife that was cheating on him. It wasn’t really about the plot of the story, right?”

“Well,” she started slowly, “for me I think it was mostly about the rope work. You’re right, I wasn’t pretending to be the cheating wife and I didn’t want you to punish me. But I wanted you to do the scene like you wrote it. I wanted you to tie me down the same way and to spank me really hard. And you did ... God, you did. I mean, the happy knot on the harness being in the right place and all, that was just a bonus. The whole thing was really good.”

“So that brings me to my next question. After the spanking scene in Where Were You, Alan fucks his wife. You ... I mean, I’d tied a full body harness on you and pulled a rope over your underwear, so it wasn’t exactly—”

She laughed. “No, you pretty clearly weren’t going to get to fuck me.”

“So that’s off the table then.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to.”

“No, I mean, it depends on the story we pick out, right?”

I rubbed my forehead in frustration. “I’m just trying to figure out what this means for our—”

“What if I don’t want this to mean anything?” she said, more forcefully than I was expecting. “What if I want us to go on being friends, having dinner every couple of weeks, and flirting like we always have?”

“But you also want me to drag you off, tie you down to my bed, and spank you ‘til you come.”

“Exactly!”

“And that doesn’t mean anything to you?”

“Of course it does, Nick, it—”

“Look, Molly. I’m not trying to back you into a corner. I’m just trying to figure out what the rules of engagement are. You’ve pitched me this idea, and I want to do it, believe me, I want to, but at the moment you’re holding all the cards and I don’t even know what game we’re playing. You gotta give me something to work with.”

She stared at me for a minute, her face going through a dozen different expressions that I couldn’t name. Two or three times, she started to say something but stopped. Finally, she let out a heavy sigh. “Nick, I ... I’m sorry. You deserve a straight answer and I can’t give you one right now.”

“Why not?”

She didn’t answer; she just got up from the table and walked into the kitchen. For a split second I thought she might leave, and I jumped out of my chair to stop her from going. But then I heard the clank of the shot glasses we’d been drinking out of earlier, and I heard her pull the top off the bottle of tequila. By the time I got to the kitchen she’d already taken a shot. I picked up the bottle and poured one for myself, saluted her with it, and tossed it back. “Can’t have you getting too far ahead of me.” She didn’t laugh, but a wry grimace crossed her face.

I let her chew on it for a minute.

“Come on, Molly. I’m still me. We’re still us. Talk to me.”

“Nick ... I can’t. I’m really bad at this. I don’t have words for this part.”

I didn’t want to laugh, so it came out as sort of a half-cough. “You? You don’t have words?”

“I know. It’s not fair. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, Molly, I just ... I don’t understand.”

Molly sighed, closed her eyes, and leaned back against the kitchen counter. “And I can’t explain it to you right now. I just can’t. I ... have a lot of really fucked up stuff that makes this hard to talk about. And I’m not making this up, I really did have fun last month, and I really do want to it again, tonight even, I just ... this needs to be my show.”

“Your show?”

“I need to be in charge.”

“ ... you call what we did last month ‘being in charge’?”

“Not like that! I mean, it’s gotta be at my pace. On my schedule. I need to pick what we do. I don’t want to push you into doing something you don’t want, but it’s gotta be my thing. What we did was great and I loved it when you picked out a story and did the thing but it was also scary as hell. I want to do it again, but...”

“You need to be in charge.”

“Yeah.”

It wasn’t hard for me to pick apart what she was getting at; I knew her too well. She’d mentioned having trust issues before, usually in the aftermath of whatever romantic partner she’d just dumped, but most of the time she danced around the subject and wouldn’t talk about it directly. I didn’t know what it was about, and I didn’t know where they’d come from, but it wasn’t just her usual conversational gymnastics. Something was buried really deep that made it hard for her to talk about, and I got the sense we weren’t going to dig it up right now.

“Okay.”

“ ... what do you mean, ‘okay’?”

“This can be your show.”

“What, just like that?”

“No, not just like that. I said I wanted to know what game we’re playing and what the rules of engagement are. Well, it sounds like the ‘game’ involves you picking a story and us doing some sort of scene based on what happens in it. I also think I’m hearing that the ‘rules’ won’t be very concrete, and they’re going to change whenever you need them to change. I can’t say I’m super stoked about that, but it sounds like that’s what you need right now.”

“ ... it is.”

“I’m not gonna lie, it’s not everything I wanted to know. And I’m not letting you off the hook completely. But you’ve given me something to work with, and for now, that’s enough.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

She didn’t throw herself at me, she didn’t attack me, she didn’t swallow me up in her arms. But she did look at me with a blend of relief and sadness, and she did slowly put her arms around me, and she did lean in and give me a long hug. And we just stood there for a few minutes, wrapped up in each other.

Somewhere in there, I barely heard her whisper.

“Thank you.”

And, for now, it was enough.

“A Rose Finds Her Thorn? Molly, I don’t even know how to throw a singletail properly.”

“Well you’ve got to learn sometime.”

“Do I?”

She laughed. “Okay, no, not really, and if you don’t know what you’re doing then I’m the wrong person to learn on. My pain tolerance isn’t nearly high enough.”

“Also, I don’t even know where I’d have you stand. I don’t exactly keep a St. Andrew’s cross kicking around my apartment.”

She didn’t answer, but the amused expression on her face told me she had an idea. She charged off to my bedroom, and when I caught up to her she was looking at the ceiling. “Aha!”

“What?”

“I saw it last month. You have a hanging plant,” she said, pointing.

“ ... yes?”

“In your bedroom.”

“So?”

“Nick, nobody hangs plants in their bedroom! Especially right there. Come on, what did we do in here last month? I’m not an idiot. The only question is whether you sank that eyebolt into a stud or not.”

I’m sure I blushed a little, but she wasn’t wrong. “Just don’t tell my landlord,” I said.

“So it’s load-rated for a person?”

“I mean ... I don’t do anything dynamic on it and I’ve never lifted anyone more than a couple of inches over a futon mattress. But it should hold.”

“That’s plenty good enough.”

Molly had apparently been paying more attention than I gave her credit for, because she found my bag of rope and the spreader bar we’d used last time from my usual storage spots. Before I knew it, she’d taken down my hanging plant and rigged up the bar like a trapeze, except both ends of the bar were hanging from a single point. She reached up over her head and grabbed the bar at a slight stretch.

“Now then. Am I right in guessing that you don’t own a good pair of leather cuffs?”

“Er, I do have a pair, but...”

“That’s okay, I brought my own.” She left the room, and came back a moment later with the messenger bag she’d been wearing when she came in. “Oh, and here’s your rope back, too.”

“Did you...” I brought the perfectly-coiled rope up to my face and inhaled. “You washed this. And you re-oiled it afterwards.”

“I promised I’d take care of your rope, didn’t I? Good hemp like that deserves it. And, uh, it needed to be washed after I took it off. Trust me.”

“I certainly do now.”

“Here, hold this.” Molly was still digging in her bag, and handed me a coiled-up singletail whip. “Or take it for a spin if you want.”

I grimaced, but I took the whip from her. “No, thanks. I wouldn’t want to do anything stupid.”

“I’ve owned that thing for a long time and she’s very forgiving. You won’t damage her. But you also don’t have to throw her if you don’t want to. What about floggers?”

“I do own one, and I’m not completely useless with it, but I wouldn’t say I’m good. Depends on how willing you are to put up with me.”

“Same deal,” she said, shaking her head. “If you’re not comfortable throwing a flogger, don’t. I also brought a riding crop for you to use instead, because that seemed more likely to be your speed.”

“Oh! Perfect. That’ll be great. What are those?” She’d pulled a pair of cuffs from her bag, but they weren’t simple straps of leather like the pair I had. They had an elongated part that came up in sort of a half-cone from the side of the cuff, ending with a ring.

“These are suspension cuffs. They’re convenient for this sort of position; I can hang on to the strappy part, and they won’t hurt my wrists even if I hang my entire weight on them. I’ll try not to do that to your ceiling, though.”

“Thank you.”

“And finally, since we’re going for A Rose Finds Her Thorn tonight...”

In the story, our hero Rose visits a BDSM club and hooks up with a guy who blindfolds her and then beats the crap out of her with floggers, a singletail, a paddle, and a bunch of other stuff. After he beats her, he takes her down from the cross, puts clover clamps on her nipples, and then fucks her mouth while she falls deeper and deeper into subspace, eventually getting herself off with her hands. It was one of my first attempts to write that sort of “inside the head” story about a submissive woman, and I’m not totally sure I nailed it.

Regardless, it got me thinking about our earlier conversation, and Molly’s need to be “in charge”. If that was the story she’d picked, what was she really looking for out of this scene? It didn’t seem to bother her that I couldn’t throw a singletail, even though that was pretty central to the action as written. She was clearly willing to switch equipment around to whatever was convenient, or mutually agreeable. Perhaps it was more the general idea of the scene, rather than any specific details. That meant I was likely to have some leeway to do whatever seemed most appropriate. Although it also meant this was likely to be a place where ‘the rules’ could change out from under me, and I was probably going to have to think on my feet.

I was interrupted by Molly taking the whip back and pressing a small bundle of fabric into my hands. She looked into my eyes with her head just slightly down and a gentle smile.

“These are ... for later.”

“Later?”

“Open it.”

I untied the knot in the cloth and opened the bundle. Inside was a pair of clover-style nipple clamps, linked by a chain.

“You can’t use those on me right away; I’ll safeword so fast it’ll make your head spin. If you warm me up enough and I get kinda floaty, then they can be really, really hot. If I’m really in deep, the pain from those things is like a lightning bolt straight to my clit. I don’t know if I’m gonna get there or not, but...”

I smiled. “But they’re for later.”

“Yeah. We good?”

“I think so. You?”

With her typical disregard for ceremony, Molly answered me by grabbing the hem of her black tank top and quickly stripping it off. She didn’t have the largest breasts, and she hadn’t worn a bra tonight, so ditching her shirt left her bare-chested in front of me. It certainly wasn’t the first time I’d seen her topless before, but I got a little thrill out of it anyway. In fact, the thought of pinning her to the wall with those clamps on her nipples and my cock down her throat was suddenly very distracting.

Evidently I was feeling a lot more comfortable this time around. Our conversation from earlier hadn’t gone exactly the way I wanted it to, but being able to air things out a little had helped. Last time, I’d focused on my rope skills in order to avoid worrying about how much intimate contact was okay. Tonight was going to be the opposite; I was looking forward to getting my hands on her, even if impact play wasn’t really my strong suit. It was a different style of intimacy than tying rope, but still one that I enjoyed.

By the time I’d stripped down to an undershirt and boxer-briefs — my preferred outfit for scene play — Molly was in nothing but her panties and a smile, offering me her suspension cuffs. The leather was thin but supple, and the cuffs went easily around her wrists. I grabbed a couple of carabiners from my gear bag, putting them through the rings on the end of the spreader bar and then snapping them onto the cuffs. Molly’s hands were over her head but her arms were at a fairly comfortable angle and she wasn’t stretched out at all.

Molly really was pretty, in the tall, thin, and muscular way, and I’m not ashamed to say that I took a moment to enjoy the view while I was thinking about what to do. Rather than pick up the crop, I walked up behind her and put my hands on her shoulders. I kneaded the muscles there for a second, marveling at how strong she was through her upper back. My hands slipped down to her sides, landing on her hips, and as I grabbed her there I leaned in to very lightly kiss the back of her neck, eliciting a small gasp.