Content advisory: BDSM, including bondage and a harsh and bloody caning; sexually suggestive situation (things fade to black before anything involving genitals is mentioned, but the implication is there).

I have the lasagna in the oven, and a tossed salad of mixed spring greens, mint leaves, and pansies chilling in the refrigerator, also a cruet of blackberry-infused oil. It's a little early for blackberries, but fortunately I had some left in the freezer from last summer. A cheesecake made with three different kinds of chocolate waits on the shelf beneath. I've baked a decent, if not overpowering, mixture of ghost pepper sauce and sriracha sauce into it. It sounds weird, but it tastes rather good – you don't actually taste the pepper so much as feel it. It makes your mouth tingle and sting a little bit, and meanwhile, your taste buds get opened up so that you're more aware of the chocolate. A boiled artichoke sits on the counter, meanwhile, kept warm by a covering bowl, next to some lemon-and-garlic butter dipping sauce.

I don't believe in letting my guests go hungry.

"GRUNT: Pigorian Chant" plays on the CD player. I thought it would lighten things up a little while I cooked, while not actually being distracting later on. It sounds just like ordinary Gregorian chant unless you actually look at the lyric sheet – well, aside from the fact that the language used is pig Latin (what else?) Played low, you can't detect anything at all unusual in the chanting.

And now I'm putting the last touches on a foliage arrangement – long-stemmed roses, river birch branches, bamboo, all freshly harvested from my gardens. The plants are finally mature enough to use for cuttings. The cuttings go in a large urn, which I place on the dining table.

I have the house to myself for the weekend. That was a minor miracle, for which I am deeply grateful.

There is a knock at the door. I stop endlessly moving cuttings into new positions to answer it.

It's her, of course.

I take her overnight bag and make more busy work for myself by putting it in the hall closet for her, which takes all of a few seconds. I offer her chilled white wine. I load up the plates with food and put them on the table, which has already been set twice. I am a bundle of nerves and I am probably not good at hiding it. I hope that doesn't ruin things for her. Some people like the illusion of absolute self-assurance, and I have never been good at playing along with that. Acting is not my forte. With me, what you see is what you get.

*

Eating an artichoke properly is a rather involved process. The outside of the artichoke globe is very woody. You start by pulling off a leaf; then you dip the tender part into the butter, and you use your front teeth to strip the tender part of the artichoke leaf from the rest of it. As you work your way inward, the leaves gradually get tenderer until you get to the centre, the heart, which is soft enough to eat in its entirety without doing any stripping.

It can be an extremely sensuous experience.

Having finished our salads and our lasagna, we are down to the artichoke, and about halfway into it, I decide to start feeding her the leaves myself.

I tickle her lips gently with the soft end of an artichoke leaf before letting her nibble off the leaf end. Her lips are buttery. My fingers, too, are getting covered with butter, so after she is done swallowing her leaf, I give her my index finger to lick clean.

She smiles a little, and takes it into her mouth, sucking the butter off. Without being bidden, she does the same thing with my middle finger, then my ring finger, before finally licking the butter off where it has begun to dribble down my wrist.

That's good.

I swallow a large ball of nerves – they threaten to stick in my throat and choke me, but they go down – and bend toward her to sample her lips. They are soft and warm, and taste of flavoured butter, which is delightful, so I start slowly licking off the butter, occasionally biting down to see how she responds. Soft moans. Soft gasps. I move in and circle around her tongue, exploring. She is shaking now. I'll take that.

"This is delicious," I say, "but it distracts from dessert."

"What's dessert?" she asks.

"You."

Her, accompanied by a few other ingredients, to be more specific.

I stand up and take the black silk scarf out of my apron pocket, the scarf I've designated as the blindfold for the evening. It's probably more melodramatic than it needs to be, which is a point in its favour. No, we're not going very far, the living room is right by the dining room table – there isn't enough room to swing a cat in the bedroom, let alone anything else – but a few steps of blindness can be very interesting, and besides, she looks cute blindfolded.

"I need your body to be disrobed. Strip," I murmur, and she gets about halfway done taking off her blouse and skirt before I start to help her anyway, because fumbling with buttons and bra straps gives me an excuse to fumble with a few other things. Oh, well.

*

I managed to get the ropes around both her and the couch in a more or less acceptable manner. The resulting arrangement is more serviceable than aesthetic, because I've never been good with knots and the whole thing is a bit of a jury-rig, really, but that's another advantage to blindfolding people: they don't have to see your unattractive rope arrangements. I had somebody make suggestions on how to improve my ropes once, and proceed to help me get them put in a better system of knots. That was embarrassing. It didn't completely kill the mood, but still...

Speaking of embarrassing, I quickly double-check to make sure I did indeed remember to close all the blinds. There are some things the neighbors really don't need to see.

The arrangement I have set up right now leaves her entire backside exposed from head to toe. It also leaves her head free. My ball gag went missing. I'm hoping it doesn't turn up somewhere truly awkward, like the children's toy bin in the kitchen. This had better not get too noisy.

I did remember to put down dark flat sheets on the couch and on the floor as drop cloths, though.

"How do you feel about flower arrangements?" I ask.

"What?"

"Because you get to help me deconstruct a flower arrangement I made a short while ago. I think you saw it on the table when we sat down to eat. Which part of the arrangement would you like to help me remove first? The roses, the birch branches, or the bamboo stalks?"

She gasps a little. "Oh. You..."

"It all has to come down."

"All of it?"

"All of it."

That was a hiss. I think she just hissed at me. In fact, I'm sure of it.

"Birches. I guess... It's all going to be evil, isn't it?"

I smile. Wait, she can't see that. "Pretty much," I reply. "The birch branches are probably the lesser of evils, though."

"Fine. Birches."

I decide to be nice and use up all the birches right away, and not hard enough to do much more than redden the skin and make a dramatic and scary swishing noise followed by a nice, satisfying thwack. Besides, I don't want to use up my energy on the birches when I'll need it for the other foliage.

*

Things have become a bit messy. After I used up the birch branches, she couldn't decide which implement of destruction to get out of the way next, so we wound up flipping a coin, and bamboo won. It could have been worse – I could have soaked the bamboo stalks in the bathtub before arranging them, rather than just letting them get a little wet from the water in the urn, but bamboo is still bamboo, and there were eight stalks, so I wound up making a lot of welts up and down her back and legs.

My arm is a bit tired. I'm resting it as I sponge her down.

There is a particularly large welt on her upper left buttock; I kiss it and work at it with my tongue before applying the sponge. The response I get is gratifyingly expressive. She moans very prettily.

I haven't heard her scream yet.

"That feels wonderful," she sighs, as the warm sponge gently drips water onto her skin.

"It won't in a minute," I reply. "What, you think I'm moistening your skin just because I want to be nice?"

That wasn't a very polite word she just called me.

I sigh and get my cowhide gauntlets. I'm going to need them. This particular strain of heirloom rose, a climber that likes to reproduce itself aggressively, necessitating frequent pruning, is particularly thorny, especially on the young branches.

"There are six rose branches. I think I'll use them one at a time. They still have their roses on – nicely fragranced, aren't they? – although I doubt that will last for long. Say when."

She doesn't say "when," so much as hisses it, or maybe spits it. Never mind. It's still a "when."

I pick up the first rose branch and lash out at her back with all my might.

*

She actually managed to get through three of the rose branches before safewording, which surprised the hell out of me. I had only expected her to endure one or two blows.

The messiness quotient has increased exponentially. Her back is covered with blood. There is blood on her buttocks and on her legs; there is blood on the drop cloths. There is a little bit of blood on the walls. I'll have to research effective cleaning methods tonight. No, I've never exactly dealt with this problem before.

She's gasping for air. "I need to bite down on something," she pants, "unless you want me to scream at the top of my lungs."

This wasn't a stop, it was a temporary pause? Oh, my stars... I have to kiss her, now. I move around the couch, take her face in my hands, and devour her until she moans, her body writhing against the couch and the ropes.

Ouch.

"No, not me," I snap. "Now how is that going to accomplish anything?"

She chuckles.

"Besides, I need my hands free." A really nasty idea whispers to me. I judge it acceptable. "I have two more rose branches to break on your back."

"Two?"

She's doing the math.

I take one of the remaining rose branches and put it in her mouth. "You did say you needed to bite down on something. You might not want to bite down too hard, though."

It's about to get a little noisy, I think.

*

She did indeed scream. She let the rose branch drop from her mouth when she did it; fancy that. I decided to not re-use the branch, and stuck to using the two rose branches that remained in the urn. I did say I was only going to use two more, and I don't believe in going back on my word. It didn't take very long for the branches to snap, either, although I imagine it felt a lot longer to be on the receiving end than it actually took.

The living room is an utter mess.

She is beautifully, magnificently bloody. I busy myself licking her clean now that I've got her out of the ropes and crumpled on the couch. I'll have to wash her and put actual antiseptic and dressings on afterward, of course, but there is no way I'm going to let the blood go to waste, and she doesn't seem inclined to stop me from feasting on it.

It's sweet, like tangerines, tangerines in a copper bowl.

Intoxicated by her ragged gasps and the taste of her blood, I reach out, grab her face in my hands, and devour her mouth. Sweetness. Moaning. Rocking. She wraps her arms around me, thrusting her tongue into my mouth. It's too much for me; I let my hand slide down to her breast, finding her nipple, massaging it slowly and methodically. Louder moaning.

"If you're not going into shock," I whisper, "I think I'll have you, now."

"No," she replies, hoarsely. "I mean, no, I'm not in shock. I want... I want..."

"It's all right. I get the idea."

I slide further down the couch. There are other parts of her that I think need devouring.

*

Lying next to her in the curtained bed. Eating chocolate hot pepper cheesecake. Drinking limeade to replace lost fluids. Wearing loose nightgowns – she, to provide an extra layer of protection for her bloody welts and keep them from getting scraped by the bed sheets, I because I don't generally sleep in the nude. I've never been fond of the way it feels. I like nude cuddling, but not nude sleeping. No, I have no idea why that is.

"This," she says, "is incredible cheesecake."

I smile. "Thank you. I thought about you almost nonstop while preparing dinner. I really did want to make things you'd like."

"Mmm. Did you enjoy it, yourself?" A wicked smile plays across her face as she reaches across and finds the wet spot between my legs that I'd more or less been trying to ignore for the duration of the evening's activities, making me gasp with shock, then whimper. "I think you did..."

It's going to be a very long night.

Note to readers: In real life, please don't even think about using freshly cut rose branches as canes, unless you've stripped off the bark and thorns. They are unsanitary. Also, there are more extreme than is realistic. Some things are nicer to think about than they are to put into practice.