Aqua Domination Read Free Page A

and tipped it out on the floor.
    Straps and ropes and cords, harnesses, helmets, suction devices, belts and gags, vibrators and probes and tubing, clamps and clips and dildos, syringes, brushes, whips and cuffs tumbled out along with three big black beetles. How dirty it all was. How hopeless and sad. Mould, slime, dirt and dust, rust and nastiness. It was sickening that all her orgasms and ordeals, those odysseys of the flesh and spirit, had come to this dismal end.
    Diligently she set to work cleaning some items from David’s collection, and she experienced a series of stirrings and flashbacks as she handled each piece and recalled incidents of suffering and ecstasy. How expert David had once been! He had mesmerised her with his dynamism and skill, she had been his slave – and now he was nothing, nothing at all, and she too was clearly nothing to him. Not, of course, that she cared about him, or about what he thought. Now she was free and strong, she told herself. And there it was again: loneliness.
    Mary cleaned just the items that caught her fancy, and laid them out in a neat row. Then she recalled seeing a bottle of bath foam liquid at the bottom of the cupboard, and she fetched this and poured what was left of it into the slowly filling bath. It was an old bottle that had not been touched for a long time, she observed. David had clearly given up his love of bizarre sex in a foamy bath, his own peculiar combination of fetishes. How could anyone abandon their deepest fantasies and longings so rich and strange? If you give up your own strangeness, what do you have left?
    Serve him right that she had come to disturb him a little. After she left, taking with her some of these items from his collection, he would surely have to think about her sometimes. Yes, one night when he could not sleep and the full moon burned bright against the curtains, he would feel regret that he had lost her beauty and courage.
    Mary sat down on the tiles near the big window in a slanting rectangle of sunlight that felt warm on her naked skin. There she drank her bottle of mineral water and ate two muesli bars, and she watched how intricately the leaves of the trees danced and wavered dark against the blue sky in the passing zephyrs, and she stared at a big glossy blackbird that sat on the fence and looked right back at her, and she thought about how she had just lost her job and her boyfriend Jack both, and so what, and she thought about David and all the insane things he and she had done, and she felt she ought to be very sad and unhappy right then, but instead she saw leaves and sunlight and the blackbird and she knew some kind of happiness, the kind that sneaks up on you without reason after a long period of miserable slow-motion suffering, the kind of unexpected contentment that hits you as the truth. Despite everything. Screw everything. Turn up the defiance.
    Mary felt the time had come to go over to the offensive. She made her selection from the items she had cleaned, and then she put on a strong and broad black plastic belt, fastening its three buckles as tightly as she could, constricting her waist. Next she fitted a beautifully made torment bra of narrow, encircling, interconnected scarlet plastic straps, both strong and intricate, with shiny plastic rings for her nipples. Revelling in her excitement and anxiety, Mary fastened the twelve buckles of the cruel bra as tightly as she could, after pulling her taut nipples with some pleasing difficulty through the rings. How tautly the flesh of her tits bulged between the myriad straps of the bra! Breathing heavily, a sheen of sweat gleaming on her lovely young body, Mary admired herself in the mirror for two minutes, and her long fingers teased her breasts and pussy.
    Fingers fumbling and clumsy with fear and anxious excitement, Mary took a long, thin red cotton cord, and tied the two ends of it to metal rings at the front of her belt so that a loop hung down.
    She took a hot shower and