Rope has a memory. To taste it was to be told a story, and this time that was a story mostly about h

Rope has a memory. To taste it was to be told a story, and this time that was a story mostly about him. As it chafed against the corners of her mouth, ran her tongue over the fibres and squirmed, a worm in the sun, she listened.

There were frays where he’d tied it in knots, the constriction forcing it to start to break down. The faint flavour of wax from that time he’d pulled the candles out of the cupboard, and she’d very nearly decided to run away. The musk of leather, crawling out of her stuffed mouth and up her nose. He wore gloves, sometimes. It made him look like a hitman. The danger thrilled her.

And then there were the bits of him. His cologne. The rope itself, chosen by him, something somewhere between thick and cutting, coarse and tight. But most of all, the overriding taste that was the narrative backbone of this story, was his actuality, the sweat from his palms that had soaked into the rope, permeated it. 

Anyone else would recoil from it, she was more than sure. Repulsion would well up in their throat like bile, and they’d cast the rope from their mouth, or pull and tug at it desperately if their hands were free. She was not anyone else. She was the person who found that taste an aphrodisiac, the salty musk playing on her tongue like the finest wine. It overwhelmed her. She was lost in it.

He watched her in her rapture, then.