-I forget exactly why, but for her own reasons, Julanni told me that she could make me helpless with a single shoelace.  A shoelace?  Please.  I am a self-bondage expert.  I’ve never gotten stuck.  Never!  I’ve had to work for it sometimes.  Hard.  One time I spent a couple of hours dragging myself across a room to find a pair of scissors to cut myself free.  It hasn’t always been graceful, but I always find a way.  This would be no different.

As suggested (was it a suggestion or a direction?), I arrive wearing a blue one-piece bathing suit.  My glass of bourbon and the courage that came with it were long gone.  This is not to say that I was frightened.  Julanni has given me no reason to be frightened.  But I am anxious because I respect her.  I know that I’m really dang good at one or two parts of this whole BDSM thing, but she’s like Wikepedia.  And she has a casual “this is so easy” informal way of expressing acts and thoughts and feelings that would make most people blush.  It’s just IMPRESSIVE.  And I’m kind of a fan.  So, I want to impress her, or at least not look stupid.  So, yeah, maybe I’m nervous.  Even a little scared.

I’m smiling and listening and splitting my focus on her eyes and the shoelace in her hands.

“Let's start with the center of the shoelace. And you'll notice this is not a particularly long bootlace, but a regular, flattish shoelace of about sixteen inches in length, and I fold it in half at the center, just to temporarily mark that spot. If you wouldn't mind, for the sake of our experiment, please climb up onto the bed and lie on your belly with your knees slightly parted and your feet in the air.”

I try to move with the same “this is so easy” casual swagger that she has, but I’m sure my body language screamed “EAGER.”  I’m on the bed in a flash.  The mattress is firm, which is good for an escape attempt.  A damsel sinking into a mattress has less leverage to bring to bare when she is trying to pull her hands out of rope loops.  And that’s pretty much got to be what Julanni has in mind.  She’s obviously not going to boxtie my arms with just one shoestring.

“Climbing up onto the mattress with you, I position myself behind you, my knees on either side of your legs as I look down upon the soles of your feet. No, I'm not going to tickle you, but it's a fun idea.”

I’m so used to self-bondage on my inflatable tumbling mat that the small movement of her climbing onto the mattress next to me is enough to give me little excited tremors.  I stare straight ahead and listen.  I wish I’d have paid more attention to how she was dressed when I was facing her.  I can’t see what she’s doing but my mental image would have benefited from that clarity.

“At the center of the shoelace, I wrap it once around your left big toe and tie a simple overhand knot on its underside. I pull your other foot beneath the left so your big toes cross each other, and wrap the shoelace around that toe, this time tying a square knot (a reef knot for you nautical folks).”

Dang she’s smart.  Tying my toes instead of my ankles uses much less of the length of the shoelace.  It will also prevent me from using all of my strength to struggle because I could injure myself pulling against my toes much more easily than my ankles.

Her fingers have a delicate quality to them she maneuvers my feet and toes where she wants them.  I hold my breath when she touches me and only release it when she ties a knot.  I forgo my routine of testing the strength of a tie once I’ve been bound.  I remain still this time and focus on small details.  Two knots.  They’ll be hard to reach.  And a thin shoelace is hard to untie.  No exploitable weakness yet…

“Hands behind you, please. Yes, you guessed it. I'm hogtying you with a shoelace. Think you'll wiggle free? Just wait 'til I finish.”

I cross my wrists behind my back assuming that’s how she’ll want them tied.  Yes Julanni, I really think I will wiggle free.  I squeeze my hands into fists and flex my wrists.  This causes the tendons in my wrists to expand enough to create just a little extra circumference.  Even if she ties my wrists tightly, once I relax those tendons, I’ll have at least a little slack.  And this no arm binding, this is going to be over quickly.  Tee Hee.

“I move my body up against your shins to press your legs down so your heels are against your ass.”

Something just happened.  While I was focusing on my plans instead of on what was going on, Julanni slid into my personal space and rather assertively took control of my lower body.  My toes were already tied together, or course, but in leaning so hard on my legs and folding them down as far as my skeletal structure will allow, the strongest muscles in my body were instantly relieved of all leverage and rendered useless.  Again, this is kind of breathtaking when you aren’t used to being tied up BY another person.  I think I gasped, and I hope she didn’t notice.

“The two loose ends of the shoelace are wrapped a couple times around your thumbs together, then between your thumbs to wind once around the binding wrappings and cinch it tightly. Again, there's a quick square knot, leaving about six inches left of each loose end. Here comes the tricky part.”

And, fuck, I distracted myself again!  While my stupid brain was having a time out, she uncrossed my wrists and repositioned my hands so she could tie my thumbs together.  She never gave a verbal command.  She just manipulated my hands.  Her touch felt like magic on my skin.  Her fingers conveyed the message that my body understood without my mind actually processing.  My hands opened wide for her, obeying without hesitation.

“Grasping your hands, I gently compel them to twist so they are back to back, your palms facing out to the sides and your little fingers farther away from you.”

This last part was textbook.  If you know me, you know I teach use of force classes, including arrest techniques, to police officers.  Unlike in the movies, we teach officers to position a cuffing subject’s hands together, knuckles to knuckles.  This way when the cuffs go on, their fingers are directed out away from the lock, so there’s no chance of them picking them.  This also puts their arms in a semi-hammer lock position where their elbows are bent.  This is called a position of disadvantage, because if they just had straight, dangling arms, even though they’d be locked together at the wrists, they could still swing their connected arms around with enough force to potentially strike an officer while they were being searched.

While I was busy contemplating Julanni’s knowledge of law enforcement compliance techniques, it suddenly occurred to me that my flexed wrist trick wouldn’t amount to jack diddly crap in a thumb tie scenario.  Piss.

“Threading the remaining ends of the shoelace between the backs of your hands, they are wrapped around the base of your little fingers, lashing them together, the final knot at the outside edge of your hands, where your fingers and thumbs now can't reach. And there's no loose shoelace left after that knot.”

Julanni lifts up off of my bound body.  My bent legs rebound the inch or two that the short tether of shoelace will allow.  I’m forced to arch my back considerably now as my hands are rolled up into the almost reverse prayer position needed for her to get my pinkies to touch.  The arch makes me sink deeper into the mattress enough that rolling to either side is impossible now.

My untied fingers can flutter and intertwine but they are essentially useless.  I curl my toes and eight of them do so, but my bound big toes don’t budge.  They’re feeling warm from the reduced circulation already.  This is going to be tricky…

“I've tied a number of people like this, and wished I was a betting person. I would have cleaned up, as I've never seen a person defeat this little tie. I wish I could be there in person to show you.”

I wish so too.  But the mind is powerful.  And for what it’s worth, I’ve experienced your scenario in a manner that may be more relevant than you’d think.  I’ve been imagining every single anatomic implication.  I’ve contemplated how wide my knees have to be to minimize strain on my toes.  I’ve hooked my thumbs and pinkies together behind my back to see where that position would force my tied hands to be positioned.  You probably know this from experience but it’s about halfway up my spine, just below the shoulder blades.  And as flexible as I am, there’s only an inch or two, max, that I can raise or lower them from that most efficient spot.

I’ve also thought about the domination this brief scene imposes.  It’s one thing to be overpowered by a stronger force.  A large man who get hands on me is going to be able to manhandle me.  It’s a compound word that describes what it is, exactly.  Yards and yards of tight rope will render me helpless when properly applied.  Powerful leather straps and thick steal cuffs project power and dominance.  You EXPECT those things to put you in your place and hold you there.

On the other hand, there is something different when you are overpowered by a soft, polite voice.  When your body is moved by a nurturing touch.  When your freedom is taken from you by a sincere desire to share something with you out of a certainty that you’ll appreciate it like she and not a whole lot of others will appreciate it.  This is when your freedom is both taken and given simultaneously.  And it’s sweet like aged bourbon.

As for the escape challenge, well, you know how this is going.  I can barely adjust my body at all even though there is almost no rope on my body.  I can pull my knees in to try to press up and take pressure off of the tether, but as soon as I do, the toe tie becomes painfully tight, and I have to let my knees slide back apart.  I can try to kick my legs down, but as mentioned earlier, I’d injure my toes long before I’d snap the shoelace, if I even had the strength to do so.

The situation with my hands is even worse.  I’m using a lot of shoulder strength to keep my hands rolled up backwards the way that they are.  It’s exhausting.  But if I relax and simply let the shoelace to hold me in its grip, it pinches and cuts into my skin painfully.  It’s interesting that the shoelace is almost more commanding me to hold myself in my bound position than it is physically restraining me.

I’ve spent countless, countless hours in tight, extreme bondage but this is a truly exotic experience.  My body is confused as though it is unaware of the forces at work and why I don’t simply stand up.  The bondage does not have the familiar, comforting embrace of my leather devices.  It’s different.  Typically, I can throw all of my strength into a struggle.  I can crash and stretch and exhaust myself pulling and straining.  The shoelace says “no.”  I may not use my strength.  I may not strain.  I may not roll about.  The shoelace dominates my mind more than my body.  But it is complete dominance, nonetheless.

I only muster a few minutes of token writhing, but I’d given up within seconds.  Julanni was right, again.  She made me helpless with a shoelace, just exactly as she claimed she would.

But that raises another matter.  It’s another matter of dominance.  I showed up here, eagerly, dressed in a bathing suit which I’m still not sure the function of, obeying, desiring only to impress, to please, forgetting to breathe, experiencing tingles and charges, planning sincerely to escape and hoping that I would fail.

Straining to relieve some of the tension on my bound and bent body, I look back in Julanni’s direction in a manner that can only be described as meekly, and speak softly, “I think you win.”  I moisten my lips.  “Now what happens?”