A Fetish Carol

Sometimes, I can't sleep. Usually it's just discomfort and every day insomnia. But tonight, it was a story. A story that had to be told. Maybe it's the time of year, maybe it's just the way this blog has been developing. Maybe it's just me. But I wanted to share it with you, in the hopes that you'll like it, that maybe, just maybe, the message will resonate with you the way it does with me.

I'm pretty sure this is the longest erotica I've ever written. And I know I could expand on it. But I'm getting tired, so I had to wrap it up.

Enjoy.

A Fetish Carol

Miley was dead; there was no doubt about that.

 They didn't discuss the details any more than they had to. At the funeral, no one mentioned the way she was found. No one mentioned what she had been doing. No one said the words 'asphyxiation' or 'autoerotic' out loud, in any context; not that they were hard to avoid. The closest anyone came were those with dark senses humor, those without respect, who thought themselves clever for advising one another 'don't hold your breath' for one reason or another.

Ethan ignored the jibes, avoided those who would make them. Whatever anyone said, Miley had been his friend. One of his closest. The fact that she had died in such a way was a wake up call for him. It was time to put away the kinks, the deviance, and the explorations of his youth. They weren't childish things, not exactly; they were too adult to be childish. But they were still immature, the experiences, the wild oats to be sewn.

So Ethan put away his leather, threw away the shackles and the whips. He gave the collars to children with pets, hoping that they would lose any meanings they had beyond the mundane. He pulled his life together and focused not on sex, but on work. He told himself that when his eyes lingered on the boots in fall, he was watching the women, not the shoes they wore. He insisted that the urges to worship, to submit, to be beaten, were nothing more than passing fancy. Harsh memories of times gone by, a stage he had grown out of. He forced himself to date only women, and forced himself to live a normal life, never doing anything more adventurous than occasionally allowing the woman on top.

Years passed, and relationships meant nothing to him. He tried, he really tried, but nothing held his attention. Someday, he was sure, he would meet that perfect woman. They would marry, they would have children. A house in the suburbs. Only the dog would wear a collar, would spend the night in a cage. He would know the woman when he met her, and he would court her, woo her, propose to her on bended knee -just the one- and they would marry in a church. Only the babies would wear diapers. Latex would be something condoms were made from, and leather would be used for furniture, not clothing.

That would happen some day. Until then, Ethan was happy to be alone. He was happy. No matter how it looked, no matter what other people might think, he was happy. He was determined to be.

He went to bed early that night, proud that he was finally old enough to not feel guilty for staying in on a Friday night. He settled into his cotton sheets and felt snug, bound in nothing more than blankets.

The clanking of chains woke him up. There was a thud, then a dragging sound. Then a moan. Another thud, more sound of dragging, and another moan. The noise was getting closer.

Then came the pounding on his door. He huddled in bed, not wanting to get up. Whoever it was would go away soon, he was sure of that. But then he heard the moan.

It's not a moan most people, most normal people, would recognize. Most would think it was a moan of pain, of horrid agony. But Ethan knew that moan. He could hear the undertone of pleasure, the tone of joy that came with the pain. He recognized that the begging note of the moan, the plea to make the pain stop, was also a plea to keep going. To push further.

That was a moan he couldn't ignore, no matter how he tried. It was a moan he recognized, one his soul had been making for years, one he had once made himself in that other life.

It took him a moment to recognize her when he came to the door. The eyes were Miley, but he had never seen her that way. The straps of leather dug into her skin, covering only the barest fractions of her. Through her skin were hooks, piercings along the surface that dragged her skin taught. Each hook led to a chain, and each chain held a weight on it. It was the movements of those chains that made the noise. The piercings went through her breasts, through her nipples, her navel, her ears, even her face. Each nostril was pulled tight, and there were hooks beneath her eyes, through her cheeks, and even in her lips. Every movement caused the weights to sway, and every movement tore at her skin. She moaned, in endorphin-soaked pain.

The skin on her stomach, and on her back, was laced together like a corset, ribbons running between the piercings.

Her arms were bound behind her back in a sleeve that laced from wrists to shoulders, pressing her breasts forward, allowing the weights to hang freely.

“Oh my god,” he said, carefully helping her into his apartment. “Miley, are you okay?”

She smiled, as best she was able. It was then that he noticed she wasn't bleeding. All those hooks through her skin, all the little cuts and slices through her skin, and no blood. The torture she was suffering should have left pools of blood beneath her with each step, but there was none.

“I'm great,” she said. Her voice was raspy, and he realized that the collar around her neck, the one pressing spikes into her flesh, was too tight. It was cutting off any air she tried to pull into her lungs. “Never better.”

He laughed. “Never better?” he asked. “You look like you're in agony.”

“I am,” she said. “Delicious agony.”

“But why?”

“I'm dead,” she said. “You were there. You remember.”

“But you were a good person.”

“I was.” She whimpers in pain, then moans a little bit. “That's why I'm walking around like this.”

“I don't understand. You kept your perversions secret. You minded your own business.”

She takes a deep breath, and the chains rattle. She groans. He looks between her legs and is sure he sees a glistening of moisture shining around the padlocks holding her pussy shut. “Masochism,” she says. “That was my business. Bondage was my business. Kink, fetish, hedonism. Those should have been my business.”

Ethan crossed his arms over his chest. “This is starting to sound familiar. Weirdly familiar.”

Miley smiled at him. “Took you long enough,” she said. “My point is that I'm dead now.”

He nodded. “I know. I was there.”

She laughed, then whimpered in pain. “I don't have to be careful anymore,” she says. “I don't have to be safe. I don't have to be sane. I can just indulge. I can just hurt. I can just feel the pain and enjoy it.”

“I don't know why you would want to do this,” he said, shaking his head. “It looks like you're in hell.”

“One man's heaven is another's hell,” she told him. “You were never much of a masochist. For you it was humiliation. For me it was pain. So I spent my life building my chains. Forging them from repression, from regret and from missed opportunities. I can use them now, playing with myself as time passes. I have no more limits. Nothing I can't do.” She sighs, and the chains rattle. “But I'm alone. I do this to myself. Every piercing, every hook, ever chain. I do it all to myself.”

“Why?”

“Because there is no one else, Ethan. I never found the partner of my dreams, never had someone to do it for me. In life, I kept things to myself. I tried to deny it. I thought there was something wrong with me. I hated myself. So now I do all the things I ever wanted, all the things I ever fantasized about. But it's just me. My afterlife is as kinky as it comes, but it's lonely.”

“I suppose this is where you ask me to join you?” he asked. “You know I'm no more dominant than you.”

She shook her head, smiling at the rattle the little weights made, grimacing against the pain. “I'm not here to ask anything,” she said. “I'm here as a warning, to give you a message. I think you already know what's coming, but I have to say it anyway.” She took as deep a breath as the collar would allow. “Tonight, you will be visited by three ghosts,” she said, glaring at him with shining eyes surrounded by bruises. Then she turned her head to the side in confusion and winced at the movement. “Four, I guess,” she said. “I mean, counting me. I'm a ghost. And there are three more.”

“Past, present and future,” he said. “Yeah. I've read the book. Seen the movies. There's just one problem. I'm not a scrooge. Not a miser.”

“Yes you are,” she says. “You'll see. I can't ruin it for you.”

“Why not?”

“You know, I always wondered that too. Would Scrooge have listened to Marley? Could they have saved the whole night's adventure if they'd just talked about it?”

“He wouldn't have believed it.”

“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe it's just that the story would've been too short. I bet Dickens got paid by the word.”

Ethan laughed. “I miss you, Miley.”

“I miss you too,” she said. “I've got so many new scars to show you. So many stories to swap. But I'll wait. Be careful tonight, Ethan. I don't want you to die so soon. I'll be happy to see you, but I won't hold my breath.” She winked at him. He rolled his eyes. “Too soon?” she asked. She smirked at him and gave herself one last shake, then faded away in a screaming moan.

He didn't have to wait long. She arrived with the sound of a cracking whip. “I am the ghost of fetish past!” she said. Then she chuckled, and Ethan recognized the laugh.

“Kara?”

His old friend, his old flame, shrugged. “Close enough,” she said.

“Where have you been?” They'd had a date. Their first, scheduled after Senior prom, where she'd been dumped and where he had realized how much he loved her. They'd planned it, he'd called to see when to pick her up. But there had been no one there. She had disappeared, and he never saw her again.

Come to think of it, the story of Kara would have made more sense as something to show him in the past, rather than as a representative of the ghost.

“I don't know,” she said. “I'm not really Kara. I'm just your memory of her.”

“Why?”

“Because, believe it or not, she is the one you attribute your fetish to. She's your first.”

“But we never did anything.”

“Not out loud,” she said. Then she reached forward with a riding crop and tapped him gently on the head. “But up there,” she said. “Up there we did a lot. Remember the dreams? Remember how you'd tease me, how you'd try to make me mad, because you knew I'd hit you? You pretended to protest when I would just come up and kick you in the leg, but we both knew it was just a joke. Only it was more than a joke. I'm the one who made you realize that you wanted a girl to kick the crap out of you.”

Ethan couldn't argue that. “So is this it? Is this the whole ghost of fetish past schtick? You remind me of the girl who got away, the one who sparked so many of my sexual fantasies?”

She slipped over to stand next to him, laced one leather clad hand through his arm. Her nails were as simple as they'd been in high school, visible in the fingerless leather that made a part of him wish she would make a fist and punch him with it. “No,” she said. “We're just getting started.”

She turned him around, and he found himself standing in the hallways of high school. He saw the girls walking past, the jeans hugging their curves. He couldn't help but notice the boots glimpsing out under the jeans, his eyes darting from one to another as they walked down the hall towards the study hall room.

“Remember the drill,” Kara told him. “No one can see or hear, blah blah blah.”

“Yeah, I've got it.”

The red head was there in study hall. Her long red hair flowed like water down her back, with those two shocks of blonde framing her face. She had doc martens with twenty holes, laced up tight on top of her jeans. Visible for him to see. Visible for him to drool over.

And there he was, sitting halfway across the room, trying not to pay too much attention as the red haired vixen stretched out on the floor, crossed and uncrossed her legs, ran her hand up the length of her boot. She sat in a manly, powerful way, crossing her ankle over her knee, bobbing her foot with a knowing smirk on her face.

She knew he was watching. And she seemed to like it. He'd never noticed that. He'd hoped. But never noticed.

“You were just developing the boot fetish here,” Kara tells him. “You were starting to dream about them, but didn't know why. The first place you went was pain, but then you realized you liked the look of them. The feel of them. The smell of them.

“You sat here in study hall, knowing you could have left school and just gone home. And any time Heather here was absent, that's what you would do. But if she was here, so were you. Sitting there, wrestling with your desires, wondering what would happen if you'd just said something.

“You used to masturbate thinking about this time. You imagined things going differently.” Kara snaps her fingers, and Ethan, the young Ethan, did something he had never actually done. He stood up and walked over to Heather.

“I love your boots,” he said.

She smiled up at him, a disarming smile with a confident look in her eyes. “You love them?” she asked. He nodded. “How much do you love them?”

He shrugged. His courage was starting to fail him.

“Do you love them enough to kiss them?” she asked. She lifted her foot and shook it back and forth in front of him. “If you love the, come kiss them. It's okay,” she said. “I know you want to.”

He bent down to kiss them, pressing his lips to the leather. She pulled her boot away as soon as he had started. “Close the door,” she told him.

He went and pushed the door closed, realizing only then that there was no one else in the room.

“Now come back here and get on your knees,” she said. “Get on your knees and kiss them the way we both know you really want to.”

As young Ethan took her boot reverently in his hand and leaned forward, as his tongue pressed the leather, Kara turned them around again.

Now they were in college. The real Kara was out of his life at this point. She patted him on the arm. “See what could have been?”

He shook his head. “No way that would have happened.”

“No? How can you be sure? So many girls in high school were throwing themselves at you, just waiting for you to give them an opening, waiting for you to admit that you liked the boots they wore. Did you not notice how many of us started wearing boots every day? How many of us bought more and more boots, or how many of us started wearing clothes that showed them off? Did you think that style trend was a coincidence?”

He shook his head again. “That's a lovely fantasy,” he said. “But that's not what happened.”

“No?” Kara shrugged and pushed open a door. A slightly older Ethan was sitting on the carpet. The RA was sitting on her bed, and across from Ethan was Janine. Her hair was strawberry blonde, and she wore a baret that she thought made her look sophisticated. Ethan wasn't saying anything about the hat, though. His eyes were transfixed on the boots. And on the words she had just said.

“I'm more of a sadist myself.” Those six words, those magical six words.

“You remember this,” Kara said. “You weren't even here to hit on Janine. You were hitting on Angela there. Hoping that she would take advantage of her position of power, that she would make you her boy toy, her booty call. Remember?”

“I never said anything.”

Kara shook her head. “No,” she said. “You didn't.” Then she brightened up. “But you did say something to Janine.”

There was a flash of light, and it was just the two of them. They were sitting at a bench on the quad. He was asking her what she meant about being a sadist. He was dancing around the subject, and she was quietly laughing at him. Finally, she broke the ice. “You're submissive, aren't you?” she asked.

He didn't know how to respond. But he didn't have to.

Another flash of light, and they were in his dorm room. He was wearing only boxers, and his hands were tied behind his back with a belt. She was topless as well, using her bra to whip him, smiling every time he flinched. Ethan remembered the sting of hooks on the bra.

Another time, different only in that he was wearing different boxers and she was wearing a shirt. A shirt, shorts, and those same brown boots that hugged her skin just above her ankle. She kicked him, slamming the side of her boot into him like she was passing a soccer ball. He gasped in pain, and she kicked him again.

Then she stopped, putting her boot next to his face. He attacked it with gusto, moaning as he ran his tongue over the leather.

“This was your first time,” Kara said. “Your first pair of boots to lick. She'd draw the treads on your back from an impression she left on your skin when she trampled you. She'd beat you and make you lick her boots while she did. She'd laugh at you for licking and kissing, for worshiping the very boots that were causing you pain.

“And you'd show her, a week later, that you still had the bruises. That the blood blisters she had brought to the surface when she kicked you hadn't gone away. She'd be embarrassed, but you were proud. Proud, but knowing that only she would understand what they were really from. You remember that, right?”

Ethan was smiling. “Those were some wild times,” he said. “But I wasn't good to her. Wasn't good for her. I never loved her.”

Kara nodded. “But she knew that. Should we look at all the times she talked you into scenes, all the times she told you that she knew you didn't feel the way she did? There's a lot of them. Want to see?”

He shook his head.

“Maybe we should just look at the time she wrapped you up in a sheet and tied you down with duct tape. Or the time she wrapped you in saran wrap and teased you until you were willing to do anything for her. Until you let her straddle your face, until you licked her through the three best orgasms she could remember having. Until you started wishing that she'd piss on you afterwards. Remember that?”

“I do.”

“You never did ask her to, did you?” he shook his head. “She would have done it, you know. Would have been excited by it.”

“No.”

Kara sighed. “One last girl,” she said. She turned him around, and there was Illya. The Russian girl who had that natural domme streak, that casual cruelty that turned him on so much. He had broken his cardinal rule for her. She wanted to play, but she was so repressed. So conflicted that she needed to have a few drinks before she was able to do anything.

Once she had a few drinks in her, though, she did anything. Everything. She let him lick her boots, but only after he begged her. She chained him to a support beam while she went out to get food. She dragged him into the bathroom with her because she 'couldn't trust a slave on his own.'

“She pissed on you,” Kara said. “Just the one time, in the shower. You talked her into that.”

Ethan nodded. Smiled at the thought. “It took a lot of work,” he said. “And it was only the one time.”

“She still masturbates thinking about it,” Kara said. “She was ashamed to admit how much she liked it, how badly she wanted to do it again. That's why she stopped talking to you. She was too afraid.

“That's also why Kevin sent her that e-mail. You know the one I mean.” Ethan did. “the one where he called you out by name as her little pet. Where he said that she should keep you in a cage like a dog, should make you piss on the lawn, should train you to be a good puppy. You know that e-mail. It turned you on so much.

“Not nearly as much as it turned her on. She's still got it, you know. Living in New York, finally a doctor, she still has that e-mail. Her husband doesn't know about it. No one does. She has a print out copy, and she carries it with her. She reads it every so often, whenever she needs to get ready to sleep with her husband.

“She thinks about all the things you could have done together. All the things she could have done to you. The things she wanted to do to you.”

“Why are you showing me this?” Ethan asked. “why are you showing me all these times that could have gone further? They were good times. I enjoyed them. Why dwell on what didn't happen?”

Kara kicked him in the shin, the same way she had in high school. The way that had made him wonder if she wanted to kick the crap out of him, if she would have gone out with him if he had let her. “Because I'm the ghost of fetish past,” she said. “I can show you what you did, and what you didn't do. That's my role.”

“But why show me?”

She shrugged. “Ask the next guy.”

She pushed him hard, and he staggered forward, bending over at the waist when he hit his bed. A firm, masculine hand pressed into the back of his neck, and Ethan had to fight down his erection, had to insist that he didn't want his pants to be ripped off. Didn't want to feel the cock slide in. That wasn't who he was, not anymore.

The hand let him go, and laughter filled the room. He turned towards the sound of the voice, and there he was. Tall and masculine, hairy and muscle bound. He wore a leather vest open over his hairy chest, and there were engineer boots visible under his skirt. Yes, skirt. It was a long leather skirt that started at his waist and flowed all the way down.

Everything he wore was leather. The gloves, the hat, the bracers, the boots, and the skirt.

“Guess who,” he said, his voice deep and commanding.

“The ghost of fetish present?”

“It's not exactly a new plot, is it?”

Ethan shrugged. “Works for me,” he said. “I still don't get what I'm supposed to be learning.”

He nodded. “That's okay,” he said. “You don't need to know yet. Come, let's look at what's going on right now.”

The ghost took him first to the homes of each of his girlfriends, one after another. Each of them had found the thing he was looking for. They were married. Three of them were pregnant. They were happy, they were smiling. Moving to suburbs, leading normal lives.

“That's what you said you wanted,” the ghost told him. “You told them that's what you wanted. Clearly it's what they wanted. Look how happy they are.”

“So why didn't they want it with me?”

“You tell me. You said you wanted it. They wanted it. You had chemistry. Why didn't you take that next step? Why didn't you grab it, if it's what you wanted?”

“I-- I don't know.”

“Yes you do,” the ghost said. “Come on. Let me show you one more place.”

The music was the first thing Ethan noticed. Pounding angry music that vibrated through his body. Then the smell hit him. Leather, sweat, and sex. He looked around and saw the boots, the corsets, the whips, the masks, the gloves.

“I know this place,” he said.

“Of course you do,” the ghost told him. “this is the club you used to go to. It's fetish night tomorrow. Tonight, it's a private party. They would have invited you, if you hadn't disappeared from the community. Every so often, they talk about you. Talk about how happy you were, how much fun it was having you crawl around and begging to serve people. There's someone else offering to lick boots, but he doesn't do it the way you did. He doesn't press down the way you did. He's in it for the submission. No pride in his work. It isn't a fetish for him the way it is for you.”

“What is this all about, really?”

“What do you mean?”

Ethan looks around the club. “It's never been like this,” he said. “None of the kink parties I ever went to were like this. This is more like a fantasy, an orgy staged for my benefit. That's what this is, isn't it?”

 “No,” the ghost smiles and looks a little nervous. “Didn't Miley explain it to you? Don't you know what's going on?”

“It's Dickens,” Ethan said. “Christmas Carol. The most copied and parodied of all stories. But you're missing a few important elements. Where's Cratchett? Where's tiny Tim?”

The ghost of fetish present reaches down and spreads his skirt. The boots are there, but there are no legs. Instead, there are two people. One of them is encased in a full body bondage mitt, breathing through a gas mask. The other was naked, twitching as little electrodes jolted through him, making him twitch and moan into a gag that held his mouth open. He was blindfolded, hands tied above his head.

“This is them,” the ghost says. “Look at the smiles on their faces. They don't have much, but they have everything they need. They have the spirit of the holiday.”

“What the fuck are you talking about? How is that the spirit of Christmas?”

“Joy to the world, and all that,” the ghost says. Then he points over his shoulder.

For some reason, the ghost of the future always looks the same. Silent, big cloak like the grim reaper, he points Scrooge to various places, eventually leaving him at a graveyard, threatening to kill the bastard if he doesn't change his ways.

This ghost, the ghost of fetish future, wore a cloak made of leather straps and chains, his face covered in a skin tight mask. He wore a collar, but it was loose. Dozens of leads lead from the collar, helping to form his cloak.

He wore vamp gloves, grabbing Ethan with one and letting the little spikes dig into his flesh. He pulled Ethan over to the first group.

This would be the group going through his possessions. They would talk about what a bastard he was, how glad they were he was dead. That was what was supposed to happen.

But that's not what they were doing. They sat in silence, sifting through nothing. They were waiting, but they were sad. They clearly had nothing to do.

“He didn't have anything?” one of them asked. The other just shook her head.

“I would have thought--”

She shook her head again, then shrugged.

“So he really did get rid of it all?”

“Physically, yeah.”

Ethan turns to the ghost of future fetish. “What does that mean?” he asks. But he knows there won't be any answer.

So they go to the graveyard. To the grave that should have had his name on it. And it did. But all of them did. They all had his name at the top. It was the next line that mattered.

“Ethan's sex drive” read one.

“Ethan's joy” read another.

“Ethan's fulfillment.”

“Ethan's happiness.”

He turned to look at the ghost. “What are you trying to say?” he asked. “Are you saying that I will never be happy? Never fulfilled, never sexual? That I'm going to bury these parts of me?”

The ghost nodded.

And Ethan understood.

“If I don't get back into kink, if I don't let go this stupid notion of normality, I'm going to end up alone, aren't I? I'm going to end up hating my life, completely unfulfilled. It isn't a phase. It isn't just something I did when I was younger. It's part of me.”

His eyes opened. He was laying in bed. The dream was still there, on the edge of his consciousness. “Part of me,” he said.

He ran to the window, looking for a kid to ask what day it was. But he knew what day it was. Saturday. The day of the Fetish Ball. The spirits had done it, all in one night. Just like they were supposed to.

He had time. Time to go and buy what he needed for the night. Time to get the rubber underwear, the bondage pants. The thick collar, the manacles and shackles, the bondage belt, the chest harness, the gags.

And, of course, to get a new pair of boots. A fresh pair, one he could prime before he left.

There was still time to be happy. Still time to accept who he was.

Still time for kink.

“Thanks Miley,” he said, smiling for what seemed like the first time.

Then he was out the door, wallet in hand, heading to a store he hadn't been to in years. He'd driven past it every day, but he hadn't been inside in a while.

In too long.