“Why couldn’t you leave me alone?” she asked him now. “Why did you have to be such a prick about it? Such a bully?”

Never mind. Don’t think about Gerald; think about the cuffs, Two sets of Kreig Security Hand Restraints, size M-17. The M designation for Male; the 17 for the number of notches on the latch-locks.

A sensation of bright heat bloomed in her stomach and chest. Don’t feel that, she told herself, and if you absolutely have to feel it, pretend it’s indigestion.

That was impossible, however. It was hope she felt, and it wouldn’t be denied. The best she could do was balance it with reality, keep reminding herself of her first failed attempt to squeeze out of the cuffs. Yet in spite of her efforts to remember the pain and the failure, what she found herself thinking about was how close-how fucking close-she had come to escape. Another quarter of an inch might have been enough to turn the trick, she had thought then, and a half would have done it for sure. The bony outcrops below her thumbs were a problem, yes, but was she actually going to die on this bed because she was unable to bridge a gap not much wider than her upper lip? Surely not.

Jessie made a strong effort to set these thoughts aside and return her mind to the day Gerald had brought the cuffs home. To how he had held them up with the wordless awe of a jeweler displaying the finest diamond necklace to ever pass through his hands. She had been fairly impressed with them herself, come to that. She remembered how shiny they had been, and how the light from the window had pricked gleams of light off the blued steel of the cuffs and the notched curves of the latch locks which allowed one to adjust the handcuffs to wrists of various sizes.

She’d wanted to know where he had gotten them-it was a matter of simple curiosity, not accusation-but all he would tell her was that one of the courthouse sharpies had helped him out. He dropped her a hazy little half-wink when he said it, as if there were dozens of these shifty fellows drifting through the various halls and ante-chambers of the Cumberland County Courthouse, and he knew them all. In fact, he’d behaved that afternoon as if it had been a couple of Scud missiles he’d scored instead of two pairs of handcuffs.

She had been lying on the bed, dressed in a white lace teddy and matching silk hose, an ensemble which was most definitely almost there, watching him with a mixture of amusement, curiosity, and excitement… but amusement had held the pole position that day, hadn’t it? Yes. Seeing Gerald, who always tried so hard to be Mr Cool, go striding around the room like a horse in heat had struck her as very amusing indeed. His hair had been frizzed up in the wild corkscrews Jessie’s kid brother used to call “chickens,” and he’d still been wearing his black nylon dress-for-success socks. She remembered biting the insides of her cheeks and quite hard, too-to keep her smile from showing.

Mr Cool had been talking faster than an auctioneer at a bankruptcy sale that afternoon. Then, all at once, he had stopped in mid-spiel. An expression of comic surprise had overspread his face.

“Gerald, what’s wrong?” she had asked. “I just realized that I don’t know if you even want to consider this,” he had replied. “I’ve been prattling on and on, I’m just about frothing at the you-know-what, as you can plainly see, and I never once asked you if-”

She had smiled then, partially because she’d gotten very bored with the scarves and hadn’t known how to tell him, but mostly just because it was good to see him excited about sex again. All right, it was maybe a little weird to get turned on by the idea of locking your wife up in handcuffs before going deep-sea diving with the long white pole. So what? It was just between the two of them, wasn’t it, and it was all in fun-really no more than an X-rated comic opera. Gilbert and Sullivan Do Bondage, I’m just a handcuffed lay-dee in the King’s Nay-vee. Besides, there were weirder kinks; Frieda Soames from across the street had once confessed to Jessie (after two drinks before lunch and half a bottle of wine during) that her ex-husband had enjoyed being powdered and diapered.

Biting the insides of her cheeks hadn’t worked the second time, and she had burst out laughing. Gerald had looked at her with his head cocked slightly to the right and a little smile tilting up the left corner of his mouth. It was an expression she had come to know well over the last seventeen years-it meant he was either preparing to be angry or to laugh along with her. It was usually impossible to tell which way he would tip.

“Want to share?” he’d asked.

She hadn’t replied immediately. She stopped laughing instead and fixed him with what she hoped was an expression worthy of the meanest Nazi bitch-goddess ever to grace the cover of a Man’s Adventure magazine. When she felt she had achieved the right degree of icy hauteur, she raised her arms and said five uncalculated words which had brought him leaping across to the bed, obviously dizzy with excitement.

“Get over here, you bastard.”

In no time at all he had been fumbling the cuffs onto her wrists and then attaching them to the bedposts. There were no slats on the headboard in the master bedroom of the Portland house; if he had suffered his heart attack there, she could have slipped the cuffs right off the tops of the posts. As he panted and fussed over the cuffs, one knee rubbing delightfully against her down below while he did it, he talked. And one of the things he had told her was about M and F, and how the latch-locks worked. He had wanted Fs, he told her, because the female cuffs had latch-locks with twenty-three notches instead of seventeen, the number most male cuffs had. More notches meant the female cuffs would close smaller. They were hard to come by, though, and when his courthouse friend had told Gerald he could get him two sets of men’s hand restraints at a very reasonable price, Gerald had jumped at the chance.

“Some women can pull right out of men’s cuffs,” he’d told her, “but you’re fairly big-boned. Besides, I didn’t want to wait. Now… let’s just see…”

He had snapped the cuff on her right wrist, pushing the latchlock in fast at first but slowing down as he approached the end, asking her if he was hurting her as each notch clicked past. It was fine all the way to the last notch, but when he had asked her to try and get out, she hadn’t been able to do so. Her wrist had slipped most of the way through the cuff, all right, and Gerald had told her later that not even that was supposed to happen, but when it bound up along the back of her hand and at the base of her thumb, his comical expression of anxiety had faded.

“I think they’re going to do just fine,” he had said. She remembered that very well, and she remembered what he’d said next even more clearly: “We’re going to have a lot of fun with these.”

With the memory of that day still vivid in the front of her mind, Jessie once again began to apply downward pressure, trying to somehow shrink her hands enough so she could yank them through the cuffs. The pain struck sooner this time, starting not in her hands but in the overtaxed muscles of her shoulders and arms. Jessie squeezed her eyes shut, bore down harder, and tried to shut out the hurt.

Now her hands joined the chorus of outrage, and as she once more approached the outer limit of her muscular leverage and the cuffs began to dig into the scant flesh which covered the backs of her hands, they began to scream. Posterior ligament, she thought, head cocked, lips drawn back in a wide, spitless grin of pain. Posterior ligament, posterior ligament, motherfucking posterior ligament!

Nothing. No give. And she began to suspect-to strongly suspect-that there was more involved than ligaments. There were bones there as well, a couple of pukey little bones running along the outsides of her hands below the lower thumb-joint, a couple of pukey little bones that were probably going to get her killed.