Two and a Half Million to Andromeda

The tension in Nova’s truck was palpable.

Well, it wasn’t tension really. More like a seething, unrequited wrath. Wrath of the magnitude that in ancient times earned it a place among the deadliest of sins.

“When we get home,” she hissed. “Go into the shed, remove your clothes, and get on the bench.”

The shed. Nova had been ordering me around for more than a year now and I’d only been in the shed once, and even that time was just so she could teasily threaten me with what went on there. She'd tied me up dozens of times. Tormented and teased and punished me. But this was different. I remembered what she said the first time: the shed is where you end up when I really mean it. This seems bad.

In my defense, I'd done my best!

We were driving back from one of the regular local BDSM gatherings Nova had introduced me to. When we met she was an experienced domme, my only experience was in my head. But I’d started getting into the swing of things lately, started figuring out how things worked in this community. At least I thought. At least until tonight.

=======

It was a fun party. A lot of old friends from the local kink scene sharing war stories, talking about the crazy world around us, and occasionally finding an excuse to gleefully punish the subs who’d been dragged along.

Another local domme, Artemis, had offered Nova a challenge. A friendly wager between high level professional colleagues and craftswomen.

Each of their subs (yours truly and another faceless, nameless object for these women’s amusement) would be tied standing straight up, back against a post, hands behind the post, roped to the post at the ankles, thighs, stomach, chest, neck, and forehead.

The challenge was simple: each domme would take the other’s sub, and the first one to force an orgasm out of their rival’s slave would be the winner. No reward, no punishment just bragging rights and pride.

As the bet started, Artemis sizes me up like a professional sports scout, or maybe like a lion deciding where a prey animal’s throat is. Regardless, she saw right through me.

“Gonna make this easy on me, Nova’s boy? I’m a good person to bank a favor with.”

No ma’am, sorry, wish I could. I must resist.

“Have it your way. You’re going to lose anyway, and now you’re on my bad side.”

Life just isn’t fair sometimes. She began removing her top, exposing a body of indescribable beauty and sexual appeal. She let me see the oil she poured into her hands and began to warm between them. Her hands began to toy with my cock.

“I know what Nova’s deal is, and that means I know something about you. She’s a tickler, isn’t she?”

As if on cue, we heard a squeal out of Artemis’ poor sub, whose manhood was firmly surrounded by Nova’s grasp, aside from the tip, which she was gleefully feathering. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way, tell me when you’re ready to cooperate” Nova threatened in a way all too familiar to me.

“See,” Artemis snapped me back to reality by beginning a rhythmic, hypnotic, and above all unimaginably pleasurable stroke between my legs, “I’ve always felt you should start with the carrot, not the stick. Well, figuratively speaking at least.” Grin. Biting her lip. Oh no.

“Or in cases of little masochists like you,” she purred, I’ve found that often describing the stick is enough to put the carrot over the top. For instance, if I were describe what I think Nova is going to do to you when you cum here in a moment.”

Her eyes are so hypnotic. The playful malice in them. If I keep looking at them I’m boned. Aw fuck, the only other place to look is at her bare chest, and it’s perfect, and swaying, and inviting, and… I’m trying. I swear I am.

I still hear Artemis’ sub screaming and laughing a few feet away. Or a few miles. A few light years, for how much my universe had just shrunk to me and this creature in my face with her hand between my legs.

“She’s going to tickle you, you know. When you lose. When you cum for me. She’s going to strap you down, recount all your worst spots. When you beg she’ll spit in your mouth, gag you closed, and go to town while you scream. ‘Please stop Nova, I didn’t mean it, she manipulated me, she was just too sexy, too beautiful, she told me how you’d tickle and tickle and tickle and tickl—' oh EUREKA!”

Oh fuck. Ohhh fuck. What just happened? Where am I? Why is everyone clappin… oh. All over the floor. I guess I lost.

"Don't feel too bad sweetie. My next card was this vibrating ring I have on my thumb. You'd have been a puddle." Wow. A true master of her craft? A big fat cheater? I suppose the distinction often blurs.

At any rate, I suddenly have the vaguest sense that a laser beam is boring into my skull. I glance over to Nova, standing next to an exhausted, tormented but un-orgasmed sub. She's looking right at me. Fuck.

============

So now here we were, pulling into Nova’s long, isolated driveway. She parked the car, and sat silently, still seething. I kept my mouth shut, slinked out of the car, and did as she’d commanded. I went to the shed behind the house and removed my clothes. I sat on the wide wooden bench that extended out into the middle of the room, my back against the vertical roof-support post, my legs straight in front of me.

I had no way of measuring the time. Sitting there naked, dreading the future, it could have been five minutes or five centuries. Nova entered. I could barely see in the dark, but her malice was hot enough to register even without seeing her face. She grabbed several coils of rope off the wall and silently went to work.

Nova is a rope expert. Every hitch, every knot, every tension she applies has purpose behind it. No accidents. No coincidences. You feel what she wants you to feel, and what she wanted me to feel can only be described as unquestionable authority. This was bondage that left no room for questions, no room for negotiation, no room for hope. She tied my ankles tightly, cinched both together and then to the board underneath me. The same for my thighs just above the knees. Another rope secured my hips to the vertical post behind me. My wrists were once again together behind the post. A web of rope harnessed around my chest and shoulders glued me firmly to that post. I could wiggle my toes, I could droop my head onto my chest. That was the entire dictionary of available body language.

“You embarrassed me tonight, in front of my friends. That’s not going to happen again. Tonight, we’re going to practice willpower. Endurance. Perseverance.” Oh man.

“I’m going to do things to you. Unbearable things. And you’re going to take them. All of them. Because you don’t have a choice. And when you can't take anymore, you're going to get it anyway. When you'll promise me your soul just to make it stop, it won't. Let’s begin.”

"First, since you apparently enjoy cumming so much that you’d rather have an orgasm than defend my honor, we’ll start with that. I’m going to rub and pet and graze and stimulate you until nothing comes out but dust and despair. And then for quite a while after that." I could smell the massage oil before I felt it. She loved edging me. She loved bringing me right to the brink, whispering evil things to drive me insane, and then... stopping. Laugh, rinse, and repeat. But this was different. This was the opposite of edging. Instead of bringing me to the edge of the cliff, she Spartan-kicked me into the abyss. And then she didn't stop. She used her hands, she used her mouth, she used her tits, she used her feet, she rode. I lost my ability to know numbers long before she was finished, so I can't give an estimate. The orgasms themselves became torturous, there was nothing left to give. But the real torture was the moments after, the hypersensitivity, the feeling of being electrocuted with pleasure.

“Are you sated yet, dummy? Have you had enough? Because I have half a mind to rope a vibrator there and go to bed. Maybe some other time when I'm happier with you. For now, let’s move on to something worse.”

I was barely conscious when the blindfold covered my eyes.

Once again I smelled the massage oil before I felt it drip down my soles. No. Please. I started trying to negotiate, I couldn’t help it, I knew what was coming. We can talk about this! Let’s discuss next steps so we win the competition next time! Teamwork, right?

“I have exactly one response to everything you might even dream of saying tonight: shut the fuck up and SUFFER.”

And suffer I did. There has never been a greater disparity between the nice feeling of a massage and the malevolence dripping out of its purpose. The pleasurable rubs and caresses never let me forget that they spelled doom. Once Nova felt my ticklish flesh was sufficiently lubricated, words can’t convey the suffering that followed.

Nails. Figure eights, random patterns, spiderly patterns up and down, back and forth, to and fro. Under the toes, over and under the balls, tracing the lines. Every scream met with the same word.

“Suffer.”

Wooden skewers. Random pokes and prods that threatened to become painful but settled at horrifically ticklish. Holding a bundle together and dragging them across the flesh. Poking at the webbing between the toes.

“Suffer.”

The worst tool in her arsenal is the spindle. To the untrained eye it’s merely an electric toothbrush with no brush head. But lightly dance that madly rotating, rounded metal prod around my feet and the ropes are the only thing keeping me out of orbit. Nova knew it. She delighted in it. She let me hear it and ruminate on the sound for ages before anything else happened.

Then everything happened at once. She grabbed my nose, when I opened my mouth to protest I felt a wad of cloth go in. Before I could spit it out the adhesive wrap was already around my face twice.

“You’re going to need this, consider biting down on it if it gets too bad. It won't help.”

I felt her practiced vices she calls fingers grab my big toes and push them back toward my ankle ropes, and then I felt the spindle. Across and around, up and down and around the sides, simply poking it somewhere and letting it spin. She was right. I did need it. I screamed myself hoarse against the gag, I laughed and guffawed and begged. Eventually it was downright primal. I tried to thrash, kick, yell all at once. Every ounce of force I could generate for my life.

But I mentioned Nova and her damn ropes. The bindings barely flinched. The wood bench gave a half-hearted creak then settled.

Nova giggled. “Is that all you got big guy? Not sufficiently motivated? I think I'll start this section of the performance over and see if you can do better.”

She did. I couldn’t. By the end all I could do was sob. Eventually it stopped. Eventually. Years later for all I knew.

“Whew. I’m beat. Frankly I’m amazed you’re still conscious. Maybe there’s some willpower in there after all. But that just reinforces how shitty it was to surrender so easily to that woman who barely knows you. I just can’t figure out why you'd do that to me.”

I heard the words, but my brain was far past the ability to understand, let alone contemplate the implications. As I gathered up the smithereens my conscious thought had been blown into over the last hours (decades), my senses began to return.

I could hear Nova rummaging around in the back of the shed. Probably not a good sign.

Blinding light assaulted my eyes as she removed my blindfold. Through the slits of my eyelids I could see the shop light she'd had blazing at me in the pitch black.

“Sorry about that, it’s so dark in this shed and I needed to see every nook and cranny to make sure you felt what I wanted you to feel, but I’ll turn them off soon. You can keep your eyes closed.”

“A while back I had an idea for a training device, and I’ve been waiting for the right context to use it. Well, consider yourself part of the program because tonight’s embarrassment was your enlistment signature. Let’s just see how this fits.”

It looked like a fishbowl, or one of those early astronaut bubble helmets. Just a sphere of glass or clear plastic with a big head-sized hole at the bottom. And there was something inside, but I had no time to examine it before I felt it.

Long, flexible, rods adorned the inside of the helmet. Or maybe they were thin springs. I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t tell because the various bits of fluff and feather and other unidentifiable tickly materials immediately turned my brain off.

They were everywhere. Rubbing my ears and threatening to go inside. Brushing my nostrils, my eye lids, the back of my neck, wisping across my forehead. Who has a fucking ticklish forehead? But these dozens of little doo-dads found every microscopic hair follicle and teased it. Every shift exacerbated the torment. I sighed and gasped and grunted, and tried to be perfectly still.

“How do you like it? Remember that time I held your head down and feathered your ear canals, and you cried? That was such an inspiration for me. So it’s only fitting that you get to be the first subject of the tickle hat. Still working on the name. Maybe you can think of some better ones overnight.”

I’ll be honest dear reader: most of that is what I imagine she said. Her actual words were lost to the ether while I frantically tried to move itchy bits of my face in ways that only made the itching and tickling wors— wait, did she say overnight?

As I began to yell my safeword, then my everlasting allegiance, then a cheap price for my soul into the gag to get her attention, the lights went out.

I still couldn’t see beyond the bowl, and to even open my eyes required me to risk having my eyelashes and lids gently grazed by brushes and feathers, but I couldn’t feel her in the room with me anymore. She actually left me like this. Left me tied to a bench, every flinch and shift and spasm creating a cascade of unbearable tickling sensations. I don’t know how long I lasted. I do know at one point the tears came. Eventually, mercifully, I struggled the evil thing into a position where I could lay my head on my chest and, as long as I stayed perfectly still.... the tickly prongs were just... almost... exactly... bearable.

I thought to myself that I would anything to never be in this hell again. Anything.

Thinking back on it now, I can only conclude that I must have said the last “anything” out loud into the gag. The alternative is too much to think about.

“Anything?” Nova mused from the dark corner, where she’d apparently been enjoying the show. I heard her stand up and saunter over.

“Deal.”

Oh thank God.

“I promise you will never get the tickle hat again, on one condition: all you have to do, is win the fucking rematch. So before I take your new hat off, we're going to spend a few hours training your endurance, perseverance, and willpower.”