Nobody Brought a Movie

Raven Lynette had packed for the sleepover the way anyone does. Something comfortable, her pinkest, fleeciest socks, and an appetite for whatever junk food and bad movie Rachel Adams had lined up for the night.

Rachel had lined up a case.

It was heavy enough that she used both hands to set it down, and when the latches popped and the lid came up, Raven leaned in expecting snacks and found steel instead. Handcuffs. Thumb cuffs. Collars, ankle cuffs, a couple of ballgags tucked into the corner. All of it gleaming under the light.

"This is the movie?" Raven asked.

"This is better than the movie," Rachel said.

*[Photo: the open case of metal restraints between them, Raven leaning in to look]*

Rachel liked this part, the show and tell. She lifted things out one at a time and handed them over, watching Raven's face as each piece landed in her palm, colder and heavier than it looked. Raven turned a pair of handcuffs over like she was checking the price tag, then held out her wrists with a little shrug that said why not. Rachel clicked them shut. Raven laughed, rattled them, and immediately wanted to know what the tiny ones were for.

The thumb cuffs went on next. Raven held her hands up in front of her face, thumbs pinned together, wiggling her fingers like she'd discovered a party trick. It was hard not to join in. Rachel picked out a pair of handcuffs for herself and snapped them onto her own wrists, and for a while that was the whole sleepover: two friends clinking around in steel, comparing, swapping, giggling at the noise it all made.

Then Rachel said they should pick out the real set.

*[Photo: Raven showing off her thumb cuffs, Rachel cuffed beside her]*

Raven wasn't sure exactly when the game got rules, only that it had them now. A collar each, metal, closing around her neck with a click she felt all the way down to her collarbones. A ballgag each. Rachel went first, working the ball between her teeth and buckling the strap behind her head, then looked over with her eyebrows up, waiting. Raven didn't want to be the one who backed out. She pushed her own ballgag in and fastened it, and the room got a lot quieter.

Handcuffs again, but behind their backs this time. Then the last step, the one that made Raven's stomach do a small flip. Cuffs locked around their ankles, and each of them folded her legs up and hooked her wrists to her own ankles until she was bent into a hogtie she had put herself in.

Nobody said it was a contest. It was a contest.

*[Photo: both girls side by side, collared, ballgagged and hogtied in their cuffs]*

Rachel struggled like she had a plan. Twisting, testing, rolling onto a hip to change the angle, patient about it. Beside her, Raven was all effort and no strategy, rocking and straining, steel scraping on steel every time she pulled. Both of them were breathing hard around their gags, making the wet, muffled noises ballgags turn every complaint into.

And then, somehow, Rachel's hands were free.

She sat up, rubbing her wrists, and looked over. Raven was exactly where she'd put herself, hands cuffed behind her back, ankles hooked tight, eyes going wide over the ballgag as it dawned on her that the contest was over and she had lost it.

Rachel took a moment just to look. Then her gaze drifted down to Raven's feet, to those pink fleecy socks, and she had an idea.

Raven felt the sock start to slide off before she understood why. Rachel peeled it slowly from her foot and held it up so Raven could see it, and smiled. Then she reached behind Raven's head, unbuckled the ballgag, and eased it out.

Raven got about half a breath and the start of a word before the sock went in. Rachel packed it in with her fingers, fuzzy and warm and far too much of it, until Raven's cheeks rounded out around it. Then came the tape. Clear tape, pulled off the roll in long squealing strips and smoothed across her lips, then around, then around again, layer over layer until the pink showed through the shine like something sealed under glass.

*[Photo: close on Raven's face, pink sock stuffed in, clear tape wrapped over her mouth]*

What Raven thought of all this was honestly hard to read. Her eyes said one thing. The sounds coming through the tape said something else. Her body, twisting in the hogtie, could have been protest or could have been something a lot closer to enjoying it, and Raven herself might not have been able to say which.

Rachel didn't ask. She got her phone out instead.

She circled slowly, crouching, leaning, finding angles. Raven really did look pretty like this, she thought. The steel collar, the cuffs, the pink sock behind the tape, one bare foot and one still in its sock. She took more photos than she needed to.

*[Photo: Rachel standing over Raven, phone up, taking pictures]*

Then she tucked the phone away and announced, perfectly cheerfully, that she was going downstairs to get snacks. It was a sleepover, after all. They should keep it going.

Raven listened to her footsteps on the stairs until she couldn't hear them anymore.

She pulled at her wrists. The cuffs held. She tried rolling onto her hip the way she'd watched Rachel do it, and the hogtie dragged her right back where she started. She made a long, complicated sound into the sock, and nobody answered it.

Somewhere downstairs, there were snacks. Up here, there was Raven, bound and gagged and writhing in steel, slowly working out that unless Rachel came back up and let her go, every one of those salty treats was going to be enjoyed by somebody else.