Jimmy felt that his life was barreling into the toilet but he also felt powerless to stop it. In less than two years he had lost his wife and then his home in quick succession. Jimmy was no fool. He knew that he alone was responsible for putting his life in reverse. He couldn't blame his wife. She had stood by him as long as she could take it but eventually she had to get away from their marriage. Her husband had simply become too weird and his needs outstripped her ability to meet them.
Their sex life had slowly turned from the traditional to the bizarre. It had all started innocently enough. Jimmy had suggested that they "spice up" their sex lives and when she had agreed he introduced his wife to bondage. Mild, vanilla play with scarves and ties was soon replaced by more substantial leather cuffs, collars and gags. When Jimmy began to use nipple clamps and paddles, all of his wife's internal flashing red lights went off. In very short order their love life came to a screeching halt. While his wife began working on her exit strategy Jimmy, now totally addicted to his sexual control fetish turned to the internet, a seemingly endless source of beautiful women, and not so beautiful women as well. Tied and helpless all, these models- he knew that they weren't actually prisoners- distracted him enough that he felt he no longer needed his wife for release.
He was wrong. Before too long he realized that all of the internet images had one fatal flaw; they were two dimensional. The looks on their faces were forced at best. He needed a real woman to put under control. He was determined to make his wife see that it was her marital duty to please him. That afternoon he left work early to come home to make his case. As he entered his home he knew immediately that his wife had left him. Small, knick-knacky personal items, her favorites, were gone from the living room. When he went upstairs to the bedroom and opened her closet, her clothes, apparently still on their hangers, were gone. In their place were two or three cardboard boxes stuffed with costumes, outfits he had purchased on-line for her, well actually for her to wear and for him to enjoy, but that she had just left behind.
He lifted one of the boxes onto the bed and opened the note attached to it. He read his wife's handwriting. "Jimmy, I can't take it anymore. I have to leave to maintain my own sanity. Clearly, you have lost yours. Get some help. You'll be hearing from my lawyer."
Short and to the point- her style, he thought to himself. Within six months the divorce papers had been signed, and their home was sold. He came out of the marriage with a little over three hundred thousand in assets and a few boxes of smutty outfits and bondage "toys." It was enough for a new start, but this time it would be on a very different path, a new direction. Jimmy stayed in his job at the building supply chain where, after a dozen years with the company, he had risen to an upper middle management position. The next week he began to search for a new place to stay. Normally he might have rented for a while before investing in a place of his own, but he had a plan he wanted to put into effect. He was moving in a new direction.
Jimmy's new home was on a quiet street in a quiet neighborhood in a quite suburb, the kind of place where husbands did home improvement projects on summer weekends. All over the neighborhood very Saturday began and ended with the sound of power tools, especially at Jimmy's. Over the course of the summer Jimmy's cellar underwent a transformation from a 1600 ft. bare bones and windowless concrete foundation complete with central lally columns into Jimmy's private man-cave. First the sound-proofing was installed, double strength all the way around the concrete. Then the interior framing was done. Three small rooms occupied the farthest section of the cellar, setting up against the wall. Fully half of the cellar was devoted to a single main space and a wall leaving a quarter of the space including the stairs to the main level finished in rough pine. On the other side near the stairs lay a well-equipped work space. Overhead, multiple exposed, solid carrying beams ran lengthwise down the cellar. Exterior walls and floors were finished in wood, very substantial. Lighting was elaborate, with movable spotlights and area lighting recessed into the soundproofing above. Utilities like electricity, water and sewage were buried out of sight.
Additional structures were mounted to the walls, in the interior rooms, x-crosses, bolts and rings of every kind mounted to the floor, walls, and the carrying beams. Ropes and chains, paddles and whips, shackles and handcuffs and spreader bars of various lengths were mounted neatly along the walls. The man-cave was complete. All it needed now was and occupant, or maybe two.