Nawashi (4 page)

“
Rope.” Brian said softly.
“I’ve been working with my lovers and rope… shibari, it’s
called.’

Sullivan sighed. “Fuck.
Shoulda known. You couldn’t’ve picked something simple like
spanking, could you? Had to pick something
meditative
and
focused
.” His voice again assumed
the nasal wicked-witch tone. Then his face softened as he looked
again at his arms. “Then again, I bet it wasn’t exactly a choice,
was it?”

Brian nodded. “Yeah. It
was weird—I’ve been kinky pretty much my whole sexual life, maybe
earlier. Been bottom, been sub, been top, tried all sorts of
things—well, as much as I could, life got in the way a lot.”
Ain’t that an understatement, buddy boy?
“But yeah, a couple of months ago… I dunno, I was
with my girlfriend at a fetish conference, and in the marketplace
the only thing I could afford was this rope. Real bondage rope, not
the stuff you get from the hardware store.” He looked down at his
own hands. “Somehow, in my hands, it just felt… right. When I
started using it with my lovers, it became both a means and an end,
functional lingerie, whatever you want to call it… it just felt,
well, right. For me and them.”

“
It’s called a fetish,
bucko. Not in the latex and Skin-Two sense—well, in that sense,
too, sometimes, but I’m talking more about anthropology here.
According to the Study of
Man
,” he grinned at Brian’s wincing
as he twisted the word in the same way Vashte had, “a fetish is any
object or action to which inordinate power is attached. On some
people, having this ink,” he waved a palm over his opposite arm,
shoulder to wrist, “would be nothing more than a decoration, like a
necklace or earring. But it’s my fetish, and that means I can use
it as a conduit for that power we were talking about… ” He
demonstrated by waving his hand in the air again, opening his palm
and blowing out across it towards the man with the
laptop.

Brian could almost see the
turbulence in the air—no, scratch that, he actually
did
see it moving across
the room to where the computer-bound man sat. When it struck him,
his eyes widened, and he looked up again, suddenly, face flushed,
to where Sullivan sat—but the instigator of the disturbance was
feigning innocence, idly looking at his nails.
And in the process, showing off his hands and muscled
forearms to Happy Boy over there…
Brian
thought, and smiled.
Come to think of it,
he’s showing it off to me, too.

“
I thought you weren’t
supposed to play with it, if it’s so dangerous?” Brian wasn’t
criticizing, he was curious.

Sullivan barked out a
laugh. “Are you kidding? That’s what it’s
for
, boy, to be played with! Hell,
it
is
play! Why
do you think all the sex gods are tricksters, starting with Pan?”
He glanced over at the man, and gave a very deliberate wink. The
man licked his lips nervously… and dove back into his laptop, hands
moving twice as fast as before. “There’s just one
problem.”

“
It’s no accident that
your parents, you and your friends,never found out more about sex
than the plumbing. It’s no accident, my friend, that this entire
civilization of ours is kept in the constant tension of being told
sex is bad while at the same time having it thrust in our faces at
every turn.” His tone deepened, and his eyes grew hard. “There are
people who see this power as a threat to their existence, as
something that needs to be quelled and eliminated wherever
possible. They are not nice people. In fact, they are ugly in so
many ways… ” His voice trailed off, and he looked sadly at the
floor, seeming lost in some internal memories.

Brian tried to simply wait
patiently, but as the silence grew longer, the need to break it
with some bit of humor, some lighthearted remark
(
Well, I’ll bite… How ugly ARE
they?
) grew within him. Finally his mouth
opened, but Sullivan’s head snapped up and the eyes that drilled
into him were glistening with tears. Suddenly Brian was very glad
he’d held his tongue.

“
Look, bucko, I don’t have
time—we don’t have time—to turn this into a metaphysical
discussion. So I’ll give you the cliff’s notes. Those that have
have been controlling the have-nots for a helluva long time, ever
since the men—and some women, chauvinism is not biological—threw
Astarte out of her own temple. They figured out that a population
ignorant about its own sexuality would be easy to scare, easy to
corrupt with promises of forbidden pleasure, and best of all would
continue to procreate and replenish the work force with wild
abandon, reinforcing the cycle and keeping things in their
place.”

“’
Pressers?”

“
They, like me, will have
seen your firestorm of power tonight. And make no mistake, boy, you
are one helluva Mage to have been able to wrest that kind of juice
from Vash. Pun intended. Problem is, you’ve got the power of a
nuclear plant combined with the training and self-control of a
rabid jackrabbit, which gives you the life expectancy of a horny
mayfly in an electrical plant. They won’t know where.you are yet,
since I got to you pretty quickly… but they’ll be a-huntin’ now,
for sure.”

“
Hunting?” Brian was
having no trouble understanding the words, it was the concept that
gave him trouble. Sure, things were swinging a bit to the
conservative side right now, but this talk about hunting and vast
conspiracies was a little hard for him to accept. It’s one thing to
be a fan of fantasy, he’d been reading this kind of stuff forever.
But trying to actually work it into reality…

Walking past the front
window of the coffee shop, he saw two young men, looking like
Mormon missionaries. In fact… he squinted, and saw that they had
the typical rectangular black nametags. They
were
Mormons.

But something about them
looked different. These two didn’t have the gawky awkwardness that
Brian associated with the eighteen year old proselytizers he’d
known growing up. These two moved with sure athletic smoothness,
their eyes alert as one peered into the coffeeshop, the other with
his back to the window, taking in the street.
Covering all avenues of attack,
Brian realized.
Or
flight.
. Their haircuts went beyond Beaver
Cleaver conservatism and into the shaved precision of the military.
In fact, they reminded Brian disconcertingly of some Navy Seals
he’d worked with in his Marine days. Scary men.

“
Yeah, I see them,”
Sullivan said quietly. Brian started and looked at the man
nonchalantly sipping his coffee. “They’re sniffing around. Don’t
worry about staring at them; this kind of place always has people
staring at anyone who looks as out of place as they do, and for a
change they won’t take it as an invitation to ask you the Golden
Questions.” He put down his coffee and looked at them as they
entered the building. He looked relaxed, but Brian noticed that his
feet were flat on the floor, and could sense a readiness for some
sort of action that belied the calm exterior.

Brian suddenly
thought
What am I scared of? These are
just missionaries.
Indeed, the men had
reverted to form, both of them seated and talking intently to the
man with the laptop, who had a weird mix of confusion, annoyance,
and titillation on his face.

“
Good. They went for the
scent. That’s our cue. Let’s go, loverboy.” Sullivan continued to
grip Brian’s hand as they began to walk towards the side door of
the coffeeshop. The man with the laptop was looking more and more
flustered as the missionaries leaned closer to him, one of them
resting a hand not-too-softly on his shoulder.

“
This is ridiculous.”
Brian said loudly. “They’re just missionaries. My parents sic them
on me all the time.” Sullivan’s head tilted down towards the floor,
wincing. He shook his head with a heavy sigh. Brian suddenly felt
inexplicably angry. “This is just part of some complicated pickup
line, isn’t it?”

Sullivan brought his head
up, still not looking back.. “Suit yourself,” he said amicably, and
continued to walk towards the door. Brian was taken aback at how
quickly the big man disappeared through the door, and he felt a
little lost. The club, the evening with Vashte, the feeling of the
Power
slipping
,
the sex, the healing process, it all seemed very far away in the
sunny warmth of Mimazu’s coffee shop… but a part of him knew it had
all happened, it was all real. And it knew that there was really no
one to explain it except the man who had just walked out the
door.

“
You’re coming with us.
Now.” And before Brian’s indrawn breath, about to protest, could
even be taken, the other man had grasped his wrist and twisted it
outwards, locking his elbow flat out at the joint. The pain was
incredible, and he lifted on his toes to try to alleviate what felt
like his arm being broken in half at the elbow. A clinical part of
his mind recognized the arm lock as something familiar from his
occasional aikido classes, but those practices were with people
working very, very hard not to damage each other. Brian found that
when your sparring partner didn’t really care about the pain they
caused, it was a very different feeling. All the pretty movements
blew out of his mind in a haze of pain and the very real fear that
his tendons and cartilage were creaking towards oblivion as the
missionary adjusted his grip slightly. Brian’s other arm could only
flop helplessly, as every time he tried to move it the missionary
would increase the torque on his joint and flexed wrist, lifting
Brian further on his toes as he tried to relieve the pressure.
Caught between the grip on his shoulder and the agonizing burn of
his elbow tendons, Brian was feeling very helpless.