I had just moved back to my childhood home in the Midwest after twenty years in Texas. Because the weather is so much more hospitable, I returned to a long forgotten passion for running. It was slow and clumsy going. I was out of shape and unused to the stress and demands of running on asphalt or cracked and broken concrete sidewalk.
Stumbling through the neighborhood I'd once ruled as my childhood kingdom, I stubbed a toe on a square of concrete heaved up by the roots of a giant oak. Lost in daydreams of my youth, my nose hit the pavement before I realized I was falling. It had been a long time since I last experienced a bloody nose.
I pulled off my shirt, wadded it beneath my nose and held my head back, trying to staunch the flow. Not watching where I was going once again, I bumped into a beautiful, black haired young woman who had stepped out of her house to pick up her morning paper and had witnessed my graceless fall. Whether she had come farther down her sidewalk to offer aid, or simply out of curiosity, I never learned. In a voice as soft as eider down, she suggested I follow her inside.
She led me to a small solarium on the back of the house, and had me lie back on the bench of a large piece of home exercise equipment, my feet toward the apparatus and my head leaning back over the edge of the bench. She left and returned shortly with an ice pack wrapped in a towel. Instructing me to stay still, she spoke in a chilling tone, "Now I have to go change. You got blood on my sweatshirt when you ran into me."
When she returned the second time, I was both shocked and pleasantly surprised to see her towering above me clad in a leather bustier, leather thigh high boots, and a studded leather collar. In one hand she held three sets of manacles. In the other a menacing looking cat-o-nine tails.
"This is for your own good," she hissed, as she shackled my hands together beneath the bench. "You must be punished for staining my clothes."
Grabbing my running shorts, she jerked them off my hips and tugged them down my legs. pulling them free, she took first one ankle then the other, and pulling them up high, secured them to the weight machine with the two remaining sets of cuffs, such that my legs and hips were elevated completely off the bench.