Trick

Rachel Adams had put real work into the costume, and she wanted that on the record.

The red lace bustier, laced snug. The little red skirt. Red lace-top stockings that stayed up on their own, no garters, which she had checked twice in the mirror before leaving. And the horns, a pair of scarlet devil horns on a headband, the finishing touch that made the whole thing click. She'd gone out with her girlfriends feeling like the best-dressed little devil on the block.

So when the candy turned out to be what it was, she said so. A lot. At every door. Somebody's single sad lollipop, somebody else's handful of the kind of toffee nobody actually eats. The girls laughed at the first few complaints. By the end of the street they'd stopped laughing, and Rachel had kept going anyway.

It was supposed to be trick or treat. She'd forgotten there were two options.

The trick, when it came, came with a bedroom, a bare mattress with its sheets stripped off, and a lot of rope. Now she was flat on her back across that mattress, not lengthwise the way a person lies on a bed but corner to corner, and the reason she was lying that way was very simple. She couldn't lie any other way.

Her wrists were roped together over her head, and the line ran from them to one corner of the bed frame and was tied off there. At the other end of her, her legs were bound together at the ankles, at the knees, and again around her thighs, and that rope ran to the opposite corner, pulled so tight that her whole body was a straight diagonal line from her fingertips to her stockinged toes. There was no slack. She checked. She checked several times.

And in her mouth, buckled behind her head, was a ball gag with a grinning jack-o'-lantern face on the front.

Somebody had a sense of humor. Rachel did not, at that moment, share it.

The first thing she did was pull. Her arms first, a hard yank toward her chest that went nowhere at all, the rope humming tight against the frame. Then her legs, trying to draw her knees up, which only reminded her that her knees were tied to each other and to everything below them. She pulled again, harder, as if the rope might have been bluffing.

It wasn't.

She said something about that into the pumpkin. It came out as a long, offended groan, and the grinning orange face in front of her lips didn't change its expression one bit.

So she got angry about it. Her fists were roped together but they could still move, and she pounded them down against the mattress, once, twice, again, the springs bouncing under her and the rope snapping her right back into line every time. It felt good for about four seconds. Then it just felt like proof.

There had to be an angle. Rachel was not a person who accepted that there wasn't an angle. She twisted her hips, got a shoulder under her, and heaved herself over onto her side. The ropes let her do it, which was almost worse, because it turned out rolling over changed nothing. Her wrists were still pinned to their corner. Her legs were still hauled to theirs. She was just a stretched-out little devil lying on her side now, instead of on her back.

She kept going. All the way over onto her stomach, face half in the bare mattress, the horns knocked crooked on her head. She tried pulling from there, braced against the bed, thinking maybe the new direction would find some give that the old one hadn't.

It did not find any give.

She groaned again, louder, and rolled back the way she came.

Somewhere in all that rolling, the bustier had started losing its own fight. It had been laced for walking up driveways and holding out a bag, not for this, and every twist tugged the top edge a little lower. By the time she was on her back again, flushed and breathing hard through her nose, her right nipple was peeking out over the red lace.

Rachel looked down at it. She looked at the ropes holding her wrists a very long way from where her hands would need to be to do anything about it. She looked at the ceiling.

Fine.

She tried a smaller approach. Little tugs instead of big ones, wriggling her wrists inside the loops, flexing her ankles against each other, feeling for a knot that had settled wrong or a wrap that had loosened. Her stockinged feet worked at each other uselessly. Every wrap was exactly where it had been put, and whoever had put them there had clearly done this before.

That was the part that started to sink in. Not the rope, exactly. The care. Nobody ties a girl this neatly across a bed for a quick joke.

She wondered, briefly, whether her girlfriends knew. Whether one of them had laughed and said she had it coming. She wondered which house it had been, which door, which bowl of terrible candy she had looked into and said the wrong thing about out loud. She had said a lot of wrong things out loud. It was a long list.

She gave it one more big effort, because she had to. Everything at once: arms, legs, hips, a wrenching twist that nearly took her over onto her side again, a muffled shout into the gag that was mostly vowels. The bed creaked. The rope creaked. Rachel stayed exactly where she was.

When it was over she lay still, chest rising and falling, the pumpkin grinning up at the ceiling on her behalf. Her horns sat crooked on her head. Her stockings had twisted around her calves. Her bustier had given up entirely on its right side, and she had given up trying to care.

From above, she knew exactly what she looked like. A little red devil pinned corner to corner across a bare mattress, wrists stretched to one end of the bed and ankles to the other, a jack-o'-lantern stuffed in her mouth. Somebody's Halloween decoration.

Nobody was coming back with an apology. Nobody was coming back with better candy, either.

Rachel had wanted a treat. What she got was the other one, and it was going to last a lot longer than a lollipop.