Excerpt from BONDAGE NIGHT by Gabriel Ricard @HmGabeRicard

EXCERPT
FROM
BONDAGE NIGHT
GABRIEL RICARD

Chapter 1
 
By eleven, it was Leo’s turn to try out the cross.

       He had it all worked out in his head. The whole walk over to the little stage, the stripper and the cross itself. This was a comedy. This whole thing was going to be really goddamn funny in either a week or six months. That part was going to depend entirely on what Laura thought tomorrow. She had given him her blessing, but that blessing could just as easily disappear later. Two hours from now, she could change her whole mood, and decide she‘d never agreed to it in the first place.
 
      He looked around the bar for her, no idea of where she had run off to. It was only a half-hour ago that they had been sitting together, but he couldn’t remember where in the bar that had been. The whiskey sours were legion, and they had replaced his short-term memory nicely. He tried to pinpoint the moment when everything around him had gone from the calm before the storm to the actual storm of human activity. This was one of the city’s trendier college bars, very carefully designed to look like a desperate hole in the wall. Bondage Night was just one of their many little functions. Bars were just a profound waste of time and money for him. It was cheaper to get drunk at home. The music was better. 
 
      As he finished his drink and got up, he looked around for Laura again. There was a lot going on outside, and his eyes were having a hard enough time focusing on the room. This wasn’t drunk. Not yet. Not even close. But it was right in the middle of knowing that he was going to be fairly hammered by the time he settled up his tab. The human obstacle course from the bar to the little stage was considerable. He had to struggle to be aware of the seven dollar wells, four dollar beers, and how much he was spending on them. Moving freely was out of the question. Every step felt and probably looked like a bad dance craze on acid. He rested against the back of a chair for a moment, or against the point of being five surprisingly strong drinks into the evening.
 
       The night was going to move with or without him. It seemed important to move along with it. The song playing was pretty good. Off-hand he was pretty sure he hadn’t listened to The Sisters of Mercy in about six years.
 
      Of course, the next song would probably be one of the five Nine Inch Nails songs he didn’t really care for.
 
      He gave a feeble wave when he was close enough to the little stage to be seen by the stripper. Or he thought she was a stripper. He wasn’t actually sure. Bondage Night seemed a little too silly as an actual concept to attract a real dominatrix. He didn’t want to ask her. He couldn’t even remember her name. She had told him earlier. It was a plain name. He remembered that much.
 
       Thankfully, she seemed to remember him, and said something he couldn’t hear over the music.
     
       There was no choice but to guess. “Yeah,” he said, “I’m ready whenever.”
 
      She pointed at something- it took him a second to realize she was talking about his leather jacket. When he and Laura first decided to go to this thing he’d spent a good hour, with Laura taking three, trying to figure out what would look like a legitimate effort to fit in. Even though it was August, the leather jacket seemed like the only way to go. He was hoping for a cool enough evening and was grateful to get one. Once people had started to really pack in the place, it felt a bit warmer, but he was willing to put up with it. He took his jacket off, handing it to the other dancer. He liked the Louise-Brooks-as-an-80’s-drug addict quality of the one working the cross, the one he had been speaking to, but they were both sexy in an out-of-his-league kind of way. Then again, so was Laura. The virtually-non-existent bondage outfits they wore were only reminding him of the old buoyant days, when he could think about these things without the constant companion of paranoia. Laura wasn’t a psychic, but she could play one on TV.
 
      The stripper’s sweat clung to her skin. It was choked, blunt, disconcerting sexuality. It actually looked like it was tightening her skin. Her black bangs were matted against her forehead.
 
      She pointed at his shirt, and said something else he couldn’t hear. Most likely, she was telling him to lose it. That was fine. It made sense. He wasn’t really looking forward to showing off how much weight he had gained in the last few months. He handed the shirt over and killed the introspection. That was one of the constant dangers inherent with drinking. Everything had to be analyzed to death, reanimated, and then questioned again at great length, starting with why it needed to be discussed into oblivion in the first place.
 
    His experience with S/m was just barely diverse enough to pass an evening with the stories he had accumulated. However, he’d never tried one of these bondage cross things. It was just assumed where his legs and arms were supposed to go. The cross itself was metal. It looked shiny and well-cared for. There was an adrenal charge from how chilled it managed to feel on his skin. It was almost impossible to see anything from the right. The world could only be viewed from the left. Still, he looked around for Laura, as the stripper tied him down and then leaned into his ear, clasping the last arm strap.
 
      “How much can you take?”

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