Susan lay stretched out on her bed, as her heart began pounding harder and harder. Her mind spun so out of control she could barely grasp and fasten onto any of the thoughts racing by.

What did I do what did I do what did I do??? It all made so much sense at the time, and now it seems so crazy!

And at that moment it became worse. The real significance of Quinn leaving the door unlocked finally sank in.

I didn't need to set up a paddling, Susan screamed at herself. For ANY reason! It was completely unnecessary!

Susan believed strongly that she was correct in her conclusion that she needed to bring the fear factor back into the game, that the power of her orgasms depended on it. But just leaving the door unlocked was enough!

Quinn had not yet said she would do that, at the time Susan had requested her "punishment," but the need to do it was obvious. It was Quinn who had pointed out that the door had to be unlocked for her to get back in, but Susan could easily have realized the same thing on her own. What else was Quinn going to do, take Susan's only apartment key back to Watney with her, without being sure she was going to return tomorrow? She was only coming back if Susan needed help getting loose.

If Susan had seen that before Quinn had, she herself could have asked Quinn to leave the door unlocked, instead of coming up with that whole idea about the paddling. As soon as Quinn had said that about the door, Susan had instantly felt the fear start coursing through her veins, the fear she needed to have. Ordinarily no one would come barging into Susan's apartment uninvited, but they would if they thought she was in trouble, which they might very well do if they heard her making noises during her orgasm that she still felt unsure she could control at will. That's why it scared her. And even without that expectation, Susan's "place of safety" simply didn't feel safe without the ability to protect it from intruders.

And that would have been all it took. Quinn would leave the door unlocked, Susan would feel the same danger she felt during outdoor bondage, due to the possibility of discovery, her sexual response would reach its off-the-scale level, and if she failed to free herself afterward, Quinn would simply walk in tomorrow and let her loose. Painlessly.

But now it wasn't going to go like that.

And then Susan's thoughts veered off in yet another unwelcome direction.

The world was as black as ever behind the blindfold. Susan had been correct in telling herself she didn't really need to see, in order to free herself from her entrapment.

But she hadn't anticipated the psychological needs. Such as the need to know how much time was left. She couldn't see her clock, and as time passed she would not even be able to tell whether it was still nighttime or whether the sun had risen. She had no access to any visual cues related to time. Susan, after unnecessarily creating, all by herself, the danger of being paddled, had then put herself in a world that lacked the one thing most crucial to her mental and emotional well-being under the circumstances: knowledge of how much time had gone by and how much remained. It wasn't that she thought she would require more time than was available. Fourteen hours should be more than sufficient for what she needed to do. But her ability to judge how much time she had left was purely subjective now, and she could easily convince herself she must be close to running out of time when in fact there was plenty left -- two hours could easily feel like fourteen. And then she would panic, would completely lose the ability to work calmly and methodically, as she absolutely had to if she wanted to get out of this.

Susan could feel herself descending towards a loss of bladder control again, and she struggled to put a lid on all thoughts, of any kind. Feel the bed, she told herself. It's soft, it's warm. Don't think, just feel. With her arms and legs spread wide, it was natural for Susan to imagine herself floating on air. She pictured herself a feather, drifting on a light breeze.

She tensed up again as memories of her encounter with Quinn returned. Those thoughts shot her ahead to the future once more, the dread of Quinn returning, taking out the paddle that Susan wouldn't see, only feel, again and again. And again. The one single stroke had been shockingly painful. So what would fifteen of them be like? Ten of them on the backs of her thighs, already aching from being so widely split. And Susan would be utterly unable to stop it, not by moving away, not by begging for mercy...

Susan made herself back up, away from the future, to her most recent interaction with Quinn: that soft pressing of Quinn's lips on her cheek. Susan could still feel the warmth of the place Quinn had kissed. Could still feel the softness.

That reminded Susan of the astonishing fact that Quinn had made love to the very same body that Susan was occupying, not more than a few hours ago -- something Susan had not been aware of at the time, but now she had the memories of it. Very nice memories, of the joining of bodies for mutual pleasure. It was something Susan would never have thought to seek out with another woman, but she had access to Suzy's experience of it. And Suzy had liked it very much.

It worked, for the time being. Susan reminded herself that she did have a way of freeing herself from her bonds, and that there was no reason to believe the paddling would occur. At length she felt calm enough to try to start effecting her escape. She worked within her mind, with at least temporary success, to build a wall against her worries in order to continue maintaining that calm.

Susan could feel the wooden spoon, at present the one single focus of her effort to escape, lying crosswise under her stomach, the bowl of the spoon on her left. She needed to move it up along her body.

It occurred to her it was not going to be nearly as easy in practice as it seemed in theory. Lifting the weight of her body off the spoon, so that she could brush her stomach against it, was nearly impossible, as stretched out as she was.

Both of her feet were lying on their sides on the bed, toes pointed outward. Susan pressed the side of each foot hard into the bed, while at the same time pressing down with her fingers, keeping her body rigid in between, trying to lift herself from both ends. With her teeth clamped down hard on the gag, and grunting with effort, she kept trying as long as she could, until her arms and legs were shaking, and shortly after that they gave out altogether. To say that she collapsed back onto the bed would make it sound as though she had raised herself above it. She hadn't.

Susan whimpered as the fear began billowing inside her once again. She felt her earlier panic beginning to descend on her once more, and fought it off.

She wondered whether there was any way to break the cuffs. At least they were leather, rather than steel. She had looked them over earlier, while she could see. She had already decided, before that, that each cuff had a metal strip underneath the leather, to which the D-ring was attached. There was heavy stitching through the leather along both edges, and she strongly suspected it wasn't just holding the upper and lower layers of leather together. Very likely the steel between the sheets had holes at its edges, which the stitching went through. The cuffs, then, would be as unbreakable as Susan's metal ones. The metal clearly didn't completely encircle her wrist, though. It obviously stopped short of the point, on the back side of her wrist, where the leather split into two straps, secured by two buckles. Located where they were, there was no possible way for her to unbuckle the straps -- nobody's fingers bent that way. But if she could pull hard enough, she thought skeptically, the straps might break.

Gritting her teeth once more on the gag, she pulled her hands back towards her as hard as she could, doing the same with her feet at the same time. Again she kept up the effort until the muscles in her arms and legs were quivering with fatigue, the breath bursting out of her in explosive grunts, until she couldn't maintain the effort any longer. She wondered if focusing all her effort on one hand, her right, would work better. She tried it until, once again, her strength gave out.

Terror flooded through her. I can't do it! she wailed inside. I can't move the spoon, I can't break the cuffs! I have no way out of this! All I can do is lie here for what will seem like days, in a big stretched-out X, while I get thirsty and hungry and my legs hurt more and more -- they already hurt now, and over so many hours it will get so much worse -- and then at the end Quinn is going come in and paddle me and then it's really going to hurt!

At no time would she consider calling out for help, any more than she ever would have on either of her earlier bondage weekends. If she were paddled, the pain would eventually end, the strained and tormented muscles of her legs would heal, the bruises would fade, and even the feeling of powerless humiliation from the paddling would gradually go away. But the unquenchable shame of being the famous Naked Bondage Girl, found by neighbors trapped on her own bed, would stay with her the rest of her life. There was no question that the only choice she could make was to await Quinn's return quietly, swamped by fretting and dread the entire time. Sleep wouldn't be possible, knowing what lay ahead.

And the whole point of asking for the paddling, she told herself, was to improve my sexual response, and now I'm so scared of it I can't even think about masturbating!

Susan moaned as she realized she was about to pee on the bed again.

She caught herself when a sudden thought burst on her. Something she had overlooked during her failed efforts to break the cuffs.

She had been lifting her waist off the bed.

She could see how she'd done it. She saw what leverage she needed.

She took several deep breaths to prepare herself for the effort. Then she pulled upward as hard as she could with her forearms and calf muscles, making her elbows and knees dig downward into the bed. Straining until her whole body shook, she kept, as before, everything in between rigid, down her spine to her hips.

Pulling upward with her ankles made the rope tighten hard through her crotch. She felt the stirring of arousal.

She could feel her hips leave the surface of the bed. She could still feel the spoon, touched lightly by her stomach rather than pressed hard into it.

She strained to back down the bed the distance she could -- probably not more than a centimeter or two, then arched her back, pressing harder against the spoon, and moved her weight back forward again.

She could feel it! The spoon had slid a tiny distance up the bed!

Energized by excitement, she repeated the moves again. And again. After several more cycles, the spoon had moved several inches. It had been below her navel. Now it was above it.

She was out of breath, out of strength. She could feel a sheen of sweat that had broken out as she worked, now starting to roll in droplets down her sides and thighs. I can do this! she exclaimed to herself. I can get out of this! It's just going to take a lot of work.

She began visualizing that work. And hardly noticed when the excitement of accomplishment shifted direction.

Her hips began twitching on their own. She felt the intense tingling, from the rope's attention to her crotch that had been repeated again and again, begin spreading out to the rest of her body. She moaned softly, her hands clenching into fists.

Contracting muscles made her body ripple in waves. The tingling became a fire inside her, taking over every atom of her conscious mind, pushing all other thoughts out. Good. Good. Better! Better! Yes! YESSSSS!!!!!....

As she reminded herself to clamp down on any sounds she might make, the orgasm took over, lifted her, glorified her. Every muscle from her head to her toe wriggled in ecstasy.

Slowly, slowly, her body was returned to her. The orgasm let go, and returned her rational mind to her, washed and cleaned.

The entire surface of the bed was wet from sweat now, almost squishy.

That was it! she thought triumphantly. I got there. I got all the way there.

She sighed in complete satisfaction. And didn't notice when she drifted to sleep.

Susan awoke, feeling blissful. She believed she knew more about herself now, in an important and useful way.

Apparently she had been right, about what she needed -- about what had been missing earlier, and how to restore it. That last orgasm had been every bit as powerful as any she had experienced. Bringing back the fear element had to be the reason.

And the fear now descended on her again. She hadn't yet eliminated the future threat of an excruciating paddling. She had only confirmed that she should be able to avoid it, that she could set herself free on her own. But she hadn't yet completed the work of saving herself. She'd only just started, in fact.

The uncertainty she had dreaded asserted itself. She'd fallen asleep, which she knew she shouldn't do. She'd known she would do it after the orgasm, yet that fact hadn't been important during the throes of sexual need. It was now. She had no way of knowing how long she had been asleep, so she had no idea how much time was left. Her best guess was that she might have slept three hours -- at least she didn't feel as though it was an entire night's worth. After the false start in trying to move the spoon, the ensuing fretting, the discovery of another way, and the timeless time spent building up to orgasm, she thought an hour might have gone by -- she hoped not more than that. That would make it about 11 p.m. when she'd fallen asleep. And then the hypothetical three hours of sleep would bring the time to 2 a.m. Plenty of time remaining -- though not really, at the rate she was going.

She could feel the spoon pressed into her stomach. It hurt a little, from having rested on it in the same position for so long while she slept -- though not as much as her inner thighs, feeling the strain of being split so wide apart for so long, and her butt, still hot and pulsing from the impact of the paddle.

She resumed trying to move the spoon, and found that the muscles in her forearms and calves, so heavily used in the process earlier, were already worryingly tired.

That's nothing, she told herself, my muscles were a lot more tired than that hopping home from the park. She flexed the muscles again, digging her elbows and knees into the yielding mattress, lifted her midsection, brushed against the spoon underneath her, and succeeded in moving it, once more, a little farther up her body.

She rested and examined her progress. The movement of the spoon so far, she realized now, hadn't quite been straight up along her stomach. It had shifted a little distance to her left. The shifting done so far had, by now, moved the bowl of the spoon out from underneath her stomach, which was a relief.

She resumed the labor-intensive process of lifting her body to push the spoon forward.

In a few minutes, she was out of breath, her arm and leg muscles shaking from overuse, and the spoon had barely moved an inch. It wasn't as easy as it had seemed at first.

She rested again, grudgingly, a few minutes -- as she'd foreseen, her complete ignorance of the amount of time remaining built quickly into a fear that very little was -- and resumed the effort once more.

She was sweating profusely again. She was also starting to get thirsty again, and hated the idea that her body was getting rid of water so quickly.

The handle of the spoon was just below her breasts, and now she became aware of a problem. The spoon was turning. It was pivoting slowly around the bowl, which her stomach was no longer in contact with. While the rest of the spoon, its handle, was moving up her body, the bowl had moved a little, but not nearly as far. Worse, the bowl had been pushed still farther to the left -- a couple of inches of the handle nearest the bowl had drifted out from under her. She wanted to move to her left, and drag the bowl back underneath her, but she had almost no ability whatever to shift her stomach to either side. If the spoon kept turning, its entire length would eventually be pushed out of her reach.

Along with that worry, her mind was grappling with the question of what would happen when the spoon reached her breasts. She had no way to lift them completely off the bed, and didn't see how she could move the spoon past them.

She would have to worry about that later, when the time came. At present the problem was whether she could even get the spoon that far.

She decided she had to try to pull the spoon back to the right, to get the bowl back underneath her again. As she lifted herself once more, she twisted as much as she could at her hips and shoulders, trying to swing her body just a little to the left, let it down on the spoon, and sweep it to the right.

She tried it five times, and couldn't detect any movement of the spoon at all.

She resumed trying to move it upward along her body, hoping that she could somehow get the bowl to follow the movement. But she no longer seemed to be in enough contact with the spoon to move it. She thought only about half of the handle was underneath her now.

She could feel the sweat running down her on all sides now, both from exertion and from returning fear. She was having a hard time getting her breath.

She decided to reverse the entire movement, to get the spoon back where it had been at the beginning, hopefully aligned the way it had been, so she could start over and move it more carefully. She pushed backward with her weight on the spoon, trying to turn it clockwise to line up, once again, across her body. Instead, the spoon moved in the direction it was pointed, farther to the left.

Near panic, Susan tried to throw her body to the left, the tiny distance her bonds allowed. She tried to lift herself as she did it, but her strength gave out in mid-movement. To her horror, she felt the end of the handle pushed still farther left.

She tried the same move, again and again, and could feel the tip of the handle touching underneath the left side of her rib cage, but she seemed to have completely lost the ability to move it.

She dropped her head against the bed, sobbing in despair. She wasn't at all surprised to feel her bladder let go yet again, as it did whenever terror overcame her. It hardly seemed to matter. The entire bed was soaked with sweat. What difference did a little more pee make?

Susan couldn't stop thinking of Quinn standing over her, holding the paddle. She wouldn't see when Quinn started the stroke, but she would hear the paddle hissing through the air. Then sudden, fiery pain in her buttock, lingering long after the stroke, only just beginning to subside when the next one came, perhaps on one of her thighs. Unable to escape it, unable to stop it. Almost certainly reflexively shaking her head, earning still more strokes.

She dug her fingernails into the bedsheet, feeling the pain already, knowing her imagination was a pale shadow of what the reality would be like.

With her fingertips making impressions in the mattress, Susan froze suddenly, sucking in a sharp breath.

Could that work?

She knew she couldn't reach the knife, where it was. But could she pull the knife towards her?

Susan and the knife lay on a fitted sheet, it ends sewn together for a snug fit around the corners of the mattress. She probably couldn't make the sheet release its hold on the front right corner. But could she make it yield just a little? Pull the fabric between her hand and the corner just a few inches closer?

The attempt could easily fail. Susan knew that the knife, as Quinn had pointed out, was only inches from the corner. Any attempt to move it could easily backfire, with the knife sliding over the edge and off the bed.

She would have to be very careful. But she had nothing to lose. The spoon was already lost. Aside from this new idea, there was no other way she could retrieve the knife.

She decided to make absolutely sure that was true. Had she given up on the spoon too soon? Pulling the knife towards her had to be a last resort, because if she did lose it over the edge of the bed, it would be too late to try anything else.

Once again, pulling upwards with her aching, exhausted forearm muscles and calves, Susan dug her elbows and knees into the bed, keeping her body between them rigid, lifting it just slightly off the bed. She tried, harder than ever, to shift her weight as far to the left as she could, at most an inch.

Underneath her rib cage, far to the left, she could feel perhaps the last inch of the handle of the spoon. Lowering her weight onto it, relieving the pain in her muscles, she shifted back towards the right, trying to pull the spoon with her. She simply slid off the spoon, failing to move it.

She was reluctant to give up and switch to her new plan, since it was so final. Four more tries, she told herself. That's it.

She didn't make it to the fourth try. On the second, her waning strength couldn't get her high enough, and she nudged against the spoon while still on the bed, pushing it away. On the third attempt, straining as hard as she could, she wasn't able to touch the spoon at all. She had pushed it forever beyond the range of her body.

She lay still, breathing hard, sweating heavily once again. If my last resort doesn't work, she thought, I'll have to go through all the pain of the paddling while I'm desperate for water. On top of all the other pain, before it even starts.

As her breathing returned to normal, her heart rate did not. She had given up hope earlier, then seen it restored. What would it feel like to lose it again?

I'm not giving up, though, she told herself.

At the end of her outstretched arm, she spread out the tips of her thumb and index finger on the cloth and slowly closed them, sliding them together along the cloth, trying to pinch some of the cloth between them.

The fingers only slid, without raising up a ridge of cloth.

She tried again, and again. The sheet fit the apartment's queen-sized bed snugly. It wasn't easy to warp the surface of it.

On the seventh try she managed to get a little cloth pinched between her fingers, but couldn't hold on. She was excited, though, by the near success. Frustrated by the failure.

The same happened on the eighth try. For the ninth, she dug all her fingers, and her thumb across from them, into the mattress as hard as she could, and brought them slowly together, scraping against the cloth along the way. She grunted and wriggled in excitement when she found she had a firm grip on a handful of cloth.

Okay, she warned herself, don't lift it upward. That would make a slope that the knife could easily slide down, to the corner and off the bed. Just pull the cloth towards you. Slowly. If I pull too hard and the end of the cloth loses its hold on the corner of the mattress, it could slingshot the knife past my hand, and it might end up where I can't reach it. And can't see it to be sure what to do next.

Clamping her teeth hard around the gag, she pulled the cloth towards her. She couldn't sense any movement at first. Her fingers ached from the effort. At last the end of the cloth, apparently, must have slid partway up the mattress corner. The wad of cloth gripped in her hand was a few inches closer.

She let go of it and strained to reach out with her hand as far as she could, patting the cloth, hoping to feel the knife. Nothing. Not close enough yet.

It was easy to resume her grip on a fistful of cloth, the way it was bunched up now. She pulled again, until she felt the cloth move slightly nearer again. She let go once more, patted the cloth.

There! She felt the handle of the knife, barely, with the tip of her finger. The ring at the end of the handle should be to the left... A little too far left, it turned out. Out of her reach. She bunched a fistful of cloth in her hand and pulled again.

The sewn end of the cloth suddenly lost its grip on the corner of the mattress. Susan squeaked in alarm. Desperately she patted the surface, trying to find where the knife had ended up. When she twisted her wrist as far left as it would go, her fingers struck the handle, close enough that she could hook her middle finger around it and pull it towards her.

Susan decided she needed to cut through the rope from underneath -- she didn't want the blade to slice through the mattress. After tapping at the knife edge with her finger to make it was sharp-side-up, she started sawing the blade back and forth underneath the rope.

Occasionally she switched from sawing across the rope to scraping the blade along the rope, then resumed sawing. She had to stop several times to shake out her fingers when they would start to cramp.

She nearly cried out in joy when the rope finally broke. She spent a little time resting, while inside her mind she tore up the mental image of being paddled and threw it away. Not going to happen! Not going to happen!

The first thing she wanted to do was get the gag out from between her sore jaws. She unbuckled it one-handed, then the blindfold.

She could see the clock, at last. It was 4:30 a.m. Dawn would be in an hour or so. Quinn would be asleep, but she'd said to call anytime and leave a voicemail.

Susan still couldn't see much in the darkened room, and her bedside lamp was still out of reach for now, but she didn't really need to see anything. Rather than take the time to saw through the rope holding her left hand, she unbuckled the cuff. It came naturally to her to want to preserve the rope undamaged for some future use, and she felt pretty sure it wasn't even hers. Quinn, it seemed, must use the same bondage supplier Susan did -- Susan recalled Quinn didn't seem to have seen Susan's bondage equipment until after Susan was already tied up.

Preparing herself for pain, Susan pushed her upper body up with her arms and settled back onto her widely-spread knees, as her angry thighs screamed protests at her -- they hadn't liked their immoveable position that had been forced on them for hours, but still less did they want to be in a different one. Susan told herself it was going to be another rough couple of days standing up in the library. But at least, she thought in relief, my thighs aren't covered with bruises from the paddle. She untied the rope around her waist and, straining to reach in an awkward position, unbuckled the cuff around her right ankle. The left, of course, was then much easier, and she was free!

She turned on her lamp, and saw Quinn's card on the nightstand. She started to reach for her phone, but ran into the bathroom first and turned on the light. She noticed, to her surprise, that the towel Quinn had used after her shower was now neatly folded on her towel rack rather than tossed on the floor.

She turned her back to the mirror and twisted around to see her butt. There was a large angry red-purple blotch on her left buttock. No cuts, though, as Quinn had promised. Susan hoped it would heal, or at least stop hurting, by next weekend.

She came back out into her room and picked up her phone at last, along with Quinn's card, which said MISTRESS QUINN, along with a phone number, email, and website address.

Susan waited nervously after punching in the phone number, waiting for the call to go through. She was not at all surprised when it went to voicemail.

Susan hated leaving messages almost as much as she hated talking to people live on the phone. She was always sure her message would sound nervous, she'd forget something important, the recipient of the message would laugh on hearing it, and worst of all, Susan's voice would be recorded indefinitely, leaving her mark on the world despite her wish that she would never have to.

When the beep sounded, Susan cleared her throat, wondering why she hadn't done that before the beep. "Qu..." Susan lost her focus, as she often did in this situation, and started over. "Quinn, it's Susan." Out of habit she gave her phone number, despite knowing Quinn must already have it and knowing it would show up on her phone anyway. "I got loose. Obviously." She hesitated, as she felt a sudden urge to say something more personal, which she nearly always avoided and found nearly impossible to do. She went ahead. "I... I really liked meeting you too. Thank you, so much, for tonight. And... I'm looking forward to seeing you again too." Susan, to her astonishment, realized that, for almost the first time in her life, she actually meant that.

She punched the hang up button before she could embarrass herself any further.

To her further amazement, she found herself wishing Quinn had answered the phone. Susan wasn't sure why she felt this, but she realized she had never in her life met someone she found so easy to talk to.