Cole jerked awake with a groan, feeling his head give a savage pulse of pain as he moved. Cracking his eyes open slowly one by one, he moaned as the bright light of his computer monitor seared into them. What the hell had happened? And why was he sat at his desk?
He tried to get up, but couldn’t move, his hands shoving uselessly at the arms of the chair, but he couldn’t get up. He tried to look down, but something hard pressed into the bottom of his jaw, forcing him to keep his chin up, looking dead ahead at the computer screen. He tried to pivot in his chair, or slid backwards, but bands of tightness around his ankles stopped his feet reaching the floor and no matter how much he threw his body one way or the other, it just would not move. The room started spinning, but the chair didn’t.
He took a deep breath, trying desperately not to panic and trying to get the nausea to subside. He tried to feel what was going on, and from the cold draft playing over his skin came quickly to the realisation that he was totally butt naked, something he hadn’t initially realised as his leather desk chair had warmed up and moulded to his shape. His back was lashed to the chair, bands of rope running around his torso, under his underarms and around his chest. More rope compressed his thighs against the seat of the chair, and his knees had been individually roped to the arms of the chair. He felt a breeze play across his exposed dick and cursed as he tried to automatically close his legs, but the roping held them firmly splayed. His lower legs had been pulled backwards to behind the upright of the chair and roped together at the ankles, so his feet were resting on the plastic wheelbase, and kept well away from contact with the floor.
His hands and forearms were strangely free though. While his elbows were roped to the arms of the chair, that was the only restriction. He tried tugging at the ropes, trying to pull them free, but all the knots had been cunningly placed so he couldn’t reach them, even the ones holding his knees in place were secreted under the chair where he just couldn’t get to them. He tried to reach up to remove whatever it was that was wrapped tightly around his neck and holding it straight, and managed to crane his body forwards enough and reach up far enough to touch it. More leather met his touch, with bones like a corset. As he fumbled with it, he felt a cold kiss to the back of his neck as he felt something heavy move. It felt very square.
A padlock? Really?
There was no way he’d got drunk with his mates and they’d done this to him. It was too well thought out for that, it was almost… meticulously planned. None of his friends had the guile for this. He sat there in stunned silence for a moment, then his ears pricked up as he heard a sound. From downstairs, he could hear the sounds of a TV programme chattering quietly away. That meant one of his roomates had to be home. It wouldn’t be Amy, she would be in the library desperately throwing her essay together, and it wouldn’t be Cliff, the entirety of this week he was in the lab being graded on his experimental chemistry skills.
There was only one of them it could be, and only one of them who could have dreamt something like this up.
“LAURA!” he bellowed. “LAURA!”
There was a pause, then the sound of movement from below, and the creak of the stairs as some-one ascended. Laura casually knocked the door of the bedroom open with the flat of her hand and sauntered into the room.
“You called?” She asked calmly.
“Yeah,” He tried to turn to face her, but was too far away from the desk to be able to push off it. “What the hell, Laura?”
Laura sat calmly down on his bed and hooked her foot through the arm of the chair, turning it to face her. Laura was a slender girl with waves of crinkly dark brown hair. She was currently still in her Harry Potter pyjamas and fluffy green dressing gown, but that didn’t make her look any less serious as her witchy grey-green-gold eyes slowly traversed up and down him, admiring his plight, pausing with consideration in some areas, making mental notes to herself.
“I did wonder how much you’d remember,” Laura said conversationally.
Cole yanked on the ropes to make a point.
“No, I don’t remember you casually roping me up like a bloody ham, what the hell?” He demanded.
“You asked me to do it,” She said serenely.
“I asked you to do this?” he snorted loudly. “No, I didn’t.”
“Yes you did, and you were pretty insistent about it,” She assured him. “I take it you don’t remember stumbling into my room last night and collapsing on my legs?”
“No,” He said slowly.
“And you don’t remember the drunken heart to heart we had at 3 in the morning where you howled your eyes out and told me how you were such a failure and that you’d never get your essay finished in time, and that you had shitloads of work you hadn’t done?” She prompted.
“No… that’s all bullshit, I’m up to date!” He insisted, not quite able to meet her eyes.
She raised an eyebrow.
“That’s not what drunk you said and drunk you seemed very honest,” She said firmly. “He was amazed that I’d already completed and handed in my dissertation and was basically finished for the year 2 weeks ahead of everyone else, and wished that he could be more like me.”
“Drunk me clearly has amnesia then.”
She reached into her pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper.
“I suppose you’re going to tell me that this isn’t your signature?” She demanded.
He looked at the paper.
“I, Cole Seabright, give Laura Cooney full permission to do whatever it takes to get me to complete my assignments and dissertation on time. Signed, C Seabright.”
It was his handwriting, and his signature.
“It doesn’t say that you had to tie me up!” he protested.
“It says ‘whatever it takes’,” She said firmly. “I knew that the moment you woke up, you’d be out drinking and carousing with your mates, and you weren’t going to listen to me. All the same, drunk you made me promise and I keep my promises. So, I had to find a way to prevent you leaving. This seemed the obvious option.”
“There were other ways!”
“Like what? I’m a 5 foot 4 weakling girl and you’re a 6 foot 2 jock! How on earth was I supposed to make you listen to me, when you’ve never paid much attention to verbal arguments and I can’t physically overpower you. Do you really think I could have roped you up if you hadn’t let me?”
Cole couldn’t refute her point there.
“And you had to strip me?”
“You did that,” She said seriously. “You gave me a full drunken strip-tease and despite my insistence, you wouldn’t get dressed again, so naked you remained.”
Cole groaned.
“I didn’t?”
“You did. Complete with singing the stripper at the top of your voice,” Laura said firmly. “Ask Amy to confirm, I could hear her giggling through the wall.”
Cole facepalmed, closing his eyes in horror.
“Did I do anything else?”
“Asides from trying to snog me, no,” Laura said coolly. “We’ll need to have a discussion about that sometime, but in the meantime, back to the matter in hand.”
Cole looked at her.
“You logged me onto your computer last night and I read your draft. It’s utter bullshit and you won’t pass,” She stated calmly. “So, as I was sat scheming last night, I figured that you need to devote some real time to this. As both of our roomies are going to be out, you’ve got a week of time to get it done undisturbed.”
“And I will, so you can let me out and…”
“You can go get hammered and fuck another dance student? Or end up masturbating really loud at 5 am? Nope. Not happening. Drunk you made me promise.”
“I hate drunk me.”
“I think he’s quite sweet actually. It was quite an education considering how much of an arsehole you are normally,” Laura stated practically. “So, here’s my proposal. Your dissertation needs to be completed by Friday. The sooner you finish it, the sooner I’ll let you go.”
“You are not going to keep me tied up for a week.”
Laura blinked at him.
“Wanna bet?” She asked calmly.
He met those witch-like green eyes and saw the serene determination in them, and almost quailed. He tugged at the ropes automatically, but they didn’t give.
“This computer is hooked up to the printer downstairs,” She told him. “I’m going to be sat down there watching my TV and knitting and catching up on the sleep I didn’t get last night. You’re going to print the drafts as you finish them. If I’m satisfied you’ve done enough, I’ll let you go.”
She checked her watch.
“Right, it’s 10 o’clock. I’ll be up at half 12 to give you a bathroom break and lunch. I’ll have a look at what you’ve done then. You can make a good start on it in 2 hours. If I’m not satisfied, I’m going to up the ante and see if I can properly motivate you,” She assured him. “You know my gay mate Kev right? He’s forever trying to get me into the bondage scene and I’m sure he has all manner of toys he’d let me borrow.”
Cole froze.
“You wouldn’t bring him into this.”
Laura looked speculatively at him.
“No, in honour of the sweetie that is drunk Cole, I wouldn’t bring him up here and let him see you like this,” she assured him, then tapped the piece of paper. “But Drunk Cole said that I could do whatever I needed to do, so… there’s no reason I couldn’t use the toys on you myself. Especially as drunk Cole was clearly attracted to me enough to attempt a sneaky snog.”
Cole gaped at her.
“Of all the bedrooms I had to crash into while drunk – why did it have to be yours?” He demanded.
“Fate?” She offered, then checked her watch again. “2 hours. Get to it.”
She turned him back towards the computer and pushed the chair easily towards the computer. He immediately pushed himself away again. She sighed and caught his wrist, adeptly strapping a leather cuff around it and clicking a lock into place.
“What the hell?” he demanded.
He tried to hide his other wrist from her, but she caught it eventually, locking a cuff around that one too. He noticed that there was a slim but robust looking chain hanging from this cuff and within seconds she’d threaded this chain through a metal loop hammered into the top of his desk, then attached it to the other cuff. Cole wrenched on the chain, trying to snap it or make the loop come out of the desk, but neither budged.
“When the hell did you get chance to put that there?” He demanded.
“Last night,” She said calmly. “While trying to stop you serenading me with all of the multiple verses from ‘What Do You Do With A Drunken Sailor’?”
“And apparently what you do with a drunken student is tie him up?” He snapped at her.
“Pretty much,” She said, and then to his huge surprise gave him a broad smile. “If you get the impression that I’m enjoying this, it’s because I am. I really, really am.”
“You’re a cow, you know that?”
She grinned at him.
“I’m also the cow with the keys, so you might want to be nicer to me,” She suggested. “Get writing monkey boy.”
She sashayed out of the room and back down the stairs. Cole wrenched on the chain again, but it held firm. He spent 5 minutes struggling against everything, then sat back in the chair, panting slightly. Okay, options. Escape clearly wasn’t possible, not right now anyway. The ropes might give over time, but Laura would be coming in to check on him, and them, every couple of hours, so he didn’t hold much hope there. So. Rescue?
Laura was right, neither of their roommates would be back until the end of the day at the earliest, and given their current animosity towards him due to his drunken carousing, he wouldn’t put it past them to egg her on a little more. Right, so he’d have to get in contact with one of his friends. The question was, how.
His phone was plugged into the wall on the far side of the room and so totally out of his reach. Laura must have done that as he never used her charging point, and while he was frustrated that she had kept the phone out of his reach, it was kind of sweet she’d put it on charge for him. He looked at the computer, then pulled himself closer, closing his essay without even glancing at it and hitting the Chrome button.
He stared at the t-rex that appeared on the screen, then looked down at the right corner of his computer. He wasn’t connected to the wi-fi. He double-clicked the wi-fi, then typed the password in, only for it to not come up recognised. Of course. She’d changed the damn password. He cursed. Without the internet, he had no way of contacting any of his friends, apart from hoping that one of them would rock up at the house… and 11, that wasn’t likely. He doubted any of them would stir from their rooms before about 4 after the night they’d had.
Cole strained to remember the night before, and mostly came up blank. He gave a soft sigh. He could either knuckle down and get started on his essay, or he could holler until the police came.
He opted for the second choice.
After about 5 solid minutes of him yelling, the door to his bedroom opened again and Laura reappeared, holding a pair of washing up sponges and a roll of duct-tape. Unceremoniously, she grabbed him by the chin and packed the two sponges into his mouth. Cole choked, trying to shove them out, but before he could, she’d wrapped layer over layer of tape over his mouth, going around and around his face and neck to anchor it into place. She smoothed the tape with marked care, then gave him a small reproachful look.
“Oh come on Cole, it’s an essay,” She told him, stroking his hair gently. “Not the end of the world. How about you just knuckle down and get on with it? The sooner you finish it, the sooner I’ll let you go, and you know that’s a promise.”
Cole looked up at her, blinking his eyes up at her, giving her his best puppy dog eyes, but she just gave a low laugh.
“Come on, get on with it,” She told him gently, pushing him back towards his desk and sauntering out of his room, shutting the door behind him.
Cole gave a nasal sigh, then slowly and reluctantly began tapping away at the keyboard.