An evaluation, he said during the phone interview. An evaluation.

he sits her in a chair.

"you’ve done this before?"

the chair is hard. Wood. She shifts.

"a little. You know. With friends."

she doesn’t understand the difference. She’s thinking of rope that remains loose, rope that forgives. And him fumbling with knots. She doesn’t know what she’s thinking.

and she laughs a bit.

the wrapping of rope. The creeping of a thing about the skin. The wrists behind. The arms, immobile. The passing of seconds. And she doesn’t quite notice everything that she’s losing, the intangible something, and how it drops away.

her clothes. She still has her clothes, she thinks, as a barrier to his hands and his ropes and how he removes, removes. Because each rope leaves her less, and she sheds, laughing again, but higher, tense.

the tightening of bonds about the thigh, so taut as to dig her heel into her skin, teaches her, and he ****** her legs, separating them as far as she can bear. Now he smiles, caresses with his eyes, his hands.

this, she understands, but not the next. Not the gag, the tape. Not his control over her mouth, her eyes. Her cunt. And how his eyes brighten, seeing but not seeing.

an evaluation.

the shoes, she won’t miss. But the blouse, her underwear. And now there’s nothing but the ropes. Nothing. Nothing, because of that intangible something, and how it has gone.

he caresses her labia with the cane. She struggles.

he has moved her body as though she is nothing to him, nothing but her thighs, her openings. He turns her, slaps her, spanks her. He adds to the weight stretching her nipples downward. And the cane. He uses the cane to write a history of her upon her skin.

she wants to laugh. It has always worked before. Maybe she does. Maybe she can’t remember. Maybe she screams.

and now she is . And he laughs. Because her ass is in the air. The heels he makes her wear hurt her feet. These ropes do not forgive. He does not fumble with the knots. And he has taken everything, even that intangible something that she will never know again.

so he fucks her with a dildo on a pole. It finishes her lesson. He spins her face toward his. She reads his eyes.

an evaluation, he said on the phone.

she is on the street now, walking.

an evaluation.

don’t worry, he said before she left. Because she had lingered, because afterward, she had touched the ropes piled on the floor.

he led her to the door.

"don’t worry," he promised her. "it was just the evaluation. You’ll be back."