Maggie comes to on her side, and before her eyes even open all the way, she understands the shape of her own disaster. Her wrists are behind her, wrapped tight, palm against palm, the tape wound so many times it feels like a single rigid band. Her ankles are bound the same way. And there is a wide cinch of tape around her ribs, above and below her chest, pinning her arms in place, pressing into the black leather corset she is somehow wearing.
She does not remember the corset. She does not remember the tape. She does not remember the floor. What she remembers is going to sleep alone in a rented cabin while the storm came in off the ocean, and now she is here, wrapped up like something meant to be kept, and her skirt and underwear are gone. The cold air of the cabin sits right against her bare pussy, and there is nothing she can do about any of it except struggle.
So she struggles. She works her wrists, twisting them, pulling one against the other, and the tape holds with an indifference that makes her breath come faster. It is not rope with its give and its knots. It is tape, layered on itself, fused to itself, and every fight against it only presses it flatter and tighter. The skin of her wrists burns. She kicks her bound legs instead, slamming her heels against the hardwood, and the thud runs through the floor and dies. The corset is cinched brutally tight, her tits pushed full and spilling over the top edge of the leather, and every ragged breath fights the boning and loses.
She rolls onto her stomach to try for her knees, and the leather answers with a low animal creak. Someone laced her into this thing until her waist went small, and the leather grips her now, warm where her body has warmed it, smelling of smoke and tanning and her own sweat working out from underneath. She gets her knees under herself, her bound ankles dragging behind her, and it takes a long clumsy minute of her thighs shaking before the chest bands drag her arms and her balance fails and she goes down hard on her shoulder. The tape takes the impact and holds. Her tits slam against the floor inside the corset and the bruise blooms warm and she hisses through her teeth and starts moving again anyway, because the alternative is to lie still and think, and thinking means this is real.
The window is a black square punched with rain. The ocean throws itself at the rocks below the bluff, over and over, and the whole cabin shudders with each big wave. She screams, once, and it comes out cracked and small, and the wind swallows it. There is no one in the room and no evidence anyone ever was, and that is worse than a face would be. A face she could understand.
She squirms toward the door. This is all she can do, this worming, humiliating crawl, her tits crushed against the boards, her bare thighs dragging, her ass working with every shove of her hips. The leather catches on the wood and releases, catches and releases, and the cold of the floor climbs into her pussy every time she hauls herself forward, the storm damp finding every strip of exposed skin, the small of her back, the tops of her thighs. Her body is doing what her mind refuses, sweating and straining and flushed down her chest and between her legs from the sheer effort of fighting, and she hates it, and she keeps moving.
The door, when she reaches it, is closed against the weather, and the latch is the kind you lift, and she has no hands. She pushes her face against the wood and screams again until her voice cracks, and the wind takes that too. Cold air licks under the door at her ankles and at the wet lips of her pussy, and she shivers so hard the tape creaks.
There has to be something. A knife block, a phone, anything with an edge or a signal. She makes her way toward the counter, over the rug, over the cold patches, her hair stuck to her face. The counter is too high. Her phone sits on it, face down, useless as the moon. She rears up on her knees and tries to reach it with her mouth, and the tape cuts into her chest and her tits ache against the top edge of the corset, and she cannot arch one inch farther because the boning will not let her. She drops, catches herself on her shoulder, tries again, grunting, her thighs slick with sweat, her pussy bare and cold an arm’s length below the thing that would save her. She tries until her back screams and then she collapses, cheek on the floor, staring at the dust under the counter.
So she fights what she can reach. She grinds her wrists against each other until the tape squeaks and her skin stings raw. She twists her shoulders, wrenching at the chest bands, and the tape drags across her tits and the leather creaks and nothing gives one single millimeter. She slams her heels down, she bucks her hips against the floor, she screams into the boards with frustration and fear, her whole body working and working and getting nowhere, the sweat running down inside the corset and down her bare back and between her legs, and then she does it all again, because stopping means thinking.
The storm does not slow. It will not slow for hours, she knows, because she checked the forecast last night in her ordinary life, before whatever this is happened to her. The waves hit the rocks and the cabin groans and the rain drives against the black window, and Maggie lies on the floor in the leather and the tape, breathing smoke and salt and sweat, her chest heaving against the bands that hold her.
She keeps working her wrists. She will not stop. But the tape is patient and layered and fused, and the night outside is long, and the ocean keeps coming, and the cabin holds her like a second binding. There is no one coming. There is only the storm, and the floor, and the slow rough sounds of her own struggle, leather on wood, tape on skin, going on and on into the dark.
