Dang y'all.  (Imagine that with a major "twang," because I wrote it with a "twang.")  I'm onto Chapter 4 and it's been like 2 weeks!?!  And it's really Chapter 5 if you count the dog crate episode.  Right?  Right.

Anyway...I have good news.  This chapter is going to be just a little bit of recap, and then mostly a great big totally fun self bondage scene.  YOU'RE WELCOME readers!  LOL.

First for that little bit of business.  I want to keep my timeline straight because I've already been bouncing around and I'm going to bounce around more.  A lot more.  Chapter 1 had my first inflated air mat bondage session.  That was around 2015.  Chapter 2 bounced backwards to college.  That was 2009.  I would have been 19 years old then.  Chapter 3 jumped up ahead to when the Mia met Mistress Sandy which was 2014, and then even further ahead to where I met Mia on a social media group in 2019.  THIS chapter is going to be when I really started figuring out the awesome potential with the air mat and that was in 2017, so that's 2 years after the first time doing a basic spread eagle on it.  Everyone got it?  Yeah.  I know you got it.

And not the last detail before I get tied up really nice and tight.  Remember back in Chapter 1 when I told you I was a free lance writer and that there'd be more on that later?  Welcome to later.  I wasn't writing fiction.  I wasn't writing reports.  I wasn't writing articles.  Try to think of the MOST boring thing a person can possibly write.  Now something even more boring.  Yep.  It's ever worse than that.  I write (rather, I wrote...more on "wrote" later...) the instructions that come in the box with your self-assembled furniture.  No, I'm not kidding.  They paid me to write, "Insert tab A into Slot 5, blah blah blah, over and over again.  I was in creativity hell, but at least it was writing, right?

OK.  So, the more important part of my job wasn't the words I wrote.  The more important part of the job was understanding how the furniture was held together.  The manufacturers that hired me to do this for them would send me a completed piece along with a separate kit of all the unassembled parts.  Then I would come up with the best, most understandable, with the least chance of waste and spoilage, to put all of it together and come up with a foot stool.  Does it sound better or worse now?  Actually, don't tell me.  Maybe I'll do a poll....

The point of me telling you that was because while I was slowly turning into a mental zombie, I was actually getting really really good at reverse engineering things.  Now, I've always been meticulous about stuff.  But with this cheap furniture, if I was off a step, or if a measurement was 1/4 inch wrong, I wasn't going to finish a project.  And I got paid "by the project."  So it mattered.  And the years I spent doing this, it turns out, made me into a freaking savant when it comes to rigging up self bondage contraptions.  Who knew!?

Sorry that was a bit longer than I planned.  (Michael Scott is saying, "That's what she said," somewhere in a rerun of The Office right now.")  But I'm done with all of that and now we're into the good stuff.  Deep breath.  Here I go.

It was 2017 and I'd been using the air mat for nothing but spread eagles for the two years since I first started using it.  And they were still fine.  I still had my massage wand.  I could add a gag or a blindfold.  But come on....TWO YEARS.  I'd get sick of fried chicken if it's all I ate for two years.  I even set up a TV in front of the mat so I could watch The Office.  But then one fateful day when I was setting up for yet another spread eagle, I set my wind up Christmas light timer for PM instead of AM and the mat started inflating before I had tied a single know.  I sat down crossed legged, kinda bored, and watching the mat expand from the crumpled up, deflated bag looking tarp into the long rigid mat.  And that's when I saw it.  One end of a spool of rope was tied to a handle, as always, but the spool itself was under a duffle bag I set down in the middle of the mat, approximately where I would be prone.  As the mat extended and pulled the tether rope with it, rather than be dragged out with the handle, the spool was unwinding as the rope was being fed through a handle of the duffle bag.  And in a eureka moment, it occurred to me that the mat wasn't just an object I could tie myself too.  It was an engine.  Or better yet, a winch.  Really it was 4 winches.  One for each handle.  And all I needed to do was come up with anchor points, like the handle of the heavy duffle bag, and I could decide what direction the ropes would be pulled and where anything the ropes were tied to would wind up once the mat was inflated.  It'll make more sense here in a second...

Two weeks of daily trial and error later, and I don't know how many tests and measurements and tweaks, I was ready.  I was confident.  I'd done the math perfectly.  I was going to set my Christmas light timer and I was going to be pulled into a totally inescapable reverse prayer, arched hogtie.  I would struggle like an excited little bunny in a bunny trap, and then after 15 minutes, the ropes would all go slack and I'd be a free bunny.  So here's how it worked...

First, I bunched up the mat so instead of being 20 feet long it was piled up in the center of the room.  Picture kind of a flatted bean bag chair.  When the mat inflated and extended, the front set of handles would slide forward about 4 feet from where they were and the rear set of handles would do the same.  That means they'd each pull 4 feet of slack out of my tethers.  That's a lot of slack to work with.

Now for my anchors.  I needed the anchors to be on my body.  I was wearing tight fitting leather cuffs on my ankles and wrists with steel D rings.  Also, I was wearing a leather belt around my waist with a D ring in the back and a crotch rope to hold it steady.  I used a longer leather strap and made a shoulder harness by buckling it so it was a circle and then putting both arms through the circle like the straps of a pack pack.  I used a carabiner to clip the straps together in front so it wouldn't slide out.  Now there were two horizontal straps, one at the base of my neck and one just under my shoulder blades.  Using all of my flexibility, I attached another carabiner between those two straps creating an anchor point high between my shoulder blades.

I had one more anchor point.  I had already secured a thick metal pipe in the ceiling directly above the place on the basement floor where I would be laying on the mat.

Now for the ropes.  Remember, I'd carefully measured how long they needed to be and marked exactly where the knots should go.  I tied ropes to the D Rings on the ankle cuffs.  I fed the ends of both ankle tethers through the D ring in the strap on my waist.  Those ropes then went straight up over the pipe in the ceiling.  From there they went back down to the rear set of handles on the mat bunched up underneath me.  Similarly, I tied ropes to the D rings on the wrist cuffs.  I fed the ends of both of those ropes through the carabiner suspended between my shoulder blades.  Those ropes then also went straight up over the pipe and were tied off to the front set of handles on the mat.  The set up took some time was not very difficult.

Now was the moment of truth.  I started the times and set it off to the side, out of reach.  Five minutes later, the air compressor started to roar.  I felt the mat vibrating as air was being pumped inside and through those thousands of individual air cells that make it more rigid than just a normal sleeping mattress.  Just as I'd seen it do a hundred times, the ends of the mat started to extent toward the front and the back.  I was laying prone on my belly with my feet shoulder width apart and my arms at my sides.  As the rear handles extended backwards, they pulled the ankle tethers out with them.  The rope was pulled over the pipe directly above  me and dragged my ankles directly toward the D ring at my waist.  A full inflation, my legs were bent at the knees and my ankles were stuck 6 inches from my tail bone.  As for my wrists, as the front handles extended, the wrist tethers pulled both wrists from my sides back and up toward the carabiner high between my shoulder blades.  I didn't leave any slack there.  In fact, I'd measured so that my tethers would be about 4 inches too short, resulting in the tethers pulling my upper body up off the mat in a 4 inch back arch.

And that was that.  And I was overjoyed.  I was elated.  I had cracked the code.  I had figured out a self bondage reverse prayers hogtie.  And then I remembered I down to like 12 minutes.  So I struggled.  But you don't have any strength or leverage in a reverse prayer.  I clenched my fists and pulled as hard as I could but I couldn't reverse the course of the tethers locking my wrists into the carabiner a millimeter.  My wrists were absolutely welded in place.  Likewise, try as I might, I could not pull my legs down from their bent position.  The best I could do was tug the belt and the attached crotch rope.

And then I realized that I had forgotten two important items, the massage wand and a gag.  But I didn't let that get me down.  I had 11 more minutes to struggle in the best bondage I'd ever been in.  And after that, I could add those accessories and do it again.  Or even better, come up with some even MORE elaborate.  HEHEHE (like a wicked scoundrel).

So I struggle and sweated and felt like a true damsel in distress for maybe the first time ever.  And I absolutely forgot about the episode of The Office playing on the screen right in front of me....