After dinner at Fletch’s parents’ house, I didn’t have anything left for anything or anybody. I had him drop me off at my apartment and leave me there. Normally, he and I extended our dates as long as we could. I had not slept over at his place since the first time. An idea had been forming in my head. It was a small idea, but it grew whenever we spent time together.

After I kicked my shoes off, I wished I had gone over to his place. He had a tub. I only had a shower stall and it was very cramped. If I wanted to soak my feet in something, I had a basin I kept under the sink, but that night I was too tired to pamper myself. I went over to the closet door that led to my bed and everything happened so fast.

Before I even registered that someone was in my bed, they had pulled me under them, covered my mouth, and handcuffed me to the iron-wrought headboard. Hearing the clack of metal on metal, I realized I had not been handcuffed with cookies.

“You were supposed to get back to me,” Carver jeered. He pulled a gag from beside him on the bed and wrapped it around my face, pushing it hard into my mouth.

He was so heavy on top of me, with one of my arms pinned to my side and the other in the handcuff, I couldn’t even move.

His hand moved across my body. He was looking for my phone. After a thorough pet, he realized I was still holding it in the hand that was under his knee. It was useless to scream through the gag.

He tossed my phone out the closet door and leaned his face so close to mine, I could see the pores in his nose. “Since you won’t come to me, I’ve come to you.”

Getting off me, he positioned my armchair outside the closet to stare at me. He held a gun in his hand. Convinced he had given me an adequate reason not to scream, he offered gloatingly, “You can take your gag off and we’ll have a conversation.”

I rolled my eyes and removed the gag with my free hand. “Dude, what do you want out of all this? If you think that it’s my normal routine to cart a man away at gunpoint and that’s the kind of woman you want in your life, you have to understand, that isn’t me. The gun I had that night was not a real gun. The handcuffs I used were toys. Fletch was in no real danger ever. I would never put a human being in danger. This handcuff you’ve got around my wrist looks f-ing authentic, as does your gun. Could you stop pointing that thing at me? I’m handcuffed, so I can’t run and I’m willing to talk to you without screaming. Put the gun away!”

He dropped it with a deadpan expression on his face. It fell on the floor with a thud. It was not plastic.

“Is that thing loaded?” I demanded.

“I guess that’s all part of the surprise,” he said, looking bored. “Why didn’t you do the date like I asked you to?”

I sighed noisily from my position on my back. “I hadn’t come up with a plan on how to do it,” I lied because I had planned to ignore him completely. “I needed time to prepare. It took me a week to plan a dinner I made for Fletch. You didn’t give me anywhere near enough time.”

“Yet, I saw Fletch drop you off tonight. By your outfit, you were on a date with him. Why were you on a date with him when you were supposed to be planning a date with me? I told you what I would do to him if you didn’t do what I wanted. Didn’t you take me seriously?”

“You didn’t tell me I had to stop seeing Fletch. I didn’t say I would stop seeing him. Frankly, I’m a little more concerned about what you’re going to do to me in this situation than I am over Fletch’s career.”

“I’m not going to do anything to you other than talk to you. I haven’t got you where I want you yet.”

“Yeah, what do you want?”

“I want you to beg me to do this sort of thing with you.”

His voice was terrible and I felt my insides shudder in fear and disgust. “I am not a BDSM kind of girl.”

“I didn’t think I was into it either until I heard you say my name and haul away a different man. I felt like I had never been to a carnival, a movie theater, or woken up on Christmas morning.” He leaned forward. “I felt like all the experiences in life that are supposed to be highs are actually lows. Work has always been more fun than play until I heard you give my invitation to him.”

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“I can’t change that he was the one I picked up. I can’t change that now, Carver.”

“I love how you say my name.”

“Mr. Criche?” I tried, hoping that would be less interesting to him.

“I may like that more,” he smirked.

I threw my one hand up in exasperation. “Look, this kind of stunt is not going to get me. This kind of stunt is going to make me report you to the police and get an emergency protection order placed on you. Is that what you want?”

“I’ve never had a mugshot. See if you can give me a fat lip and cut my eyebrow before they haul me away, will you? I’ve always thought that would make a good album cover.”

He was completely insane. I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t reach my phone. If I started screaming, he’d just gag me again or point the gun at me until I stopped. After he’d had his fun, would he just leave? How was I going to keep living here if he could get in?

“How did you get in here?” I asked.

“That will have to be another surprise.”

I groaned. “Where do you live?”

“Why? Are you gonna try to break in? A little payback?”

Instantly, I knew I could never do that. It was exactly what he wanted.

“What else are we going to do for our ‘date’?” I air quoted with one hand.

“What would Fletch do?” he suddenly asked.

“He’d play music for me.”

Carver grabbed his phone. “Right. I should have been playing music this whole time. Want to hear the demo for the latest band I signed?”

I wanted to say, ‘Not really,’ but bit my tongue on it.

He started playing a track on his phone, but to me, it didn’t sound like anything. It was music that was so much like everything else I’d ever heard that it didn’t make any impact. At the least, it was okay background music.

“Then what would he do?”

Examining Carver’s face, I realized he did not know anything about the world he was trying to enter. He would probably do anything I asked him to. I did a little prioritizing in my head. My long-term goal was to get him out of my life. My short-term goal was to get him out of my apartment. While I was so powerless, I was going to need to satisfy him.

“He would give me a pedicure,” I lied, thinking of how sore my feet still were. “He hasn’t given me one in two weeks.”

Carver looked stunned. “I’ve never done that for anyone. I don’t know if I know how.”

“Stop being a loser, look up instructions on your phone and I’ll tell you where I keep my supplies.”

All in all, it took him an hour and a half to give me a pedicure according to the directions he’d found. I sent him to find my basin, my exfoliator, my bubble bath, my manicure set, and my lotion. He sat on the floor timing how long my feet had been soaking with his white shirt sleeves rolled up and his legs crossed. It would have been cute if my wrist was not still in the handcuff.

I hoped he would be disgusted by the amount of skin that came off, but he didn’t seem to notice the way I did when I did it myself. I also hoped he would be annoyed at how often I ‘accidentally’ splashed him. But by the time he was doing my nails I had pretty much lost hope that he wouldn’t enjoy every step of the process.

Carver had a great time, even though I thought the idea of giving another human being a pedicure was mildly repulsive. If Fletch had told me he wanted me to give him one for one of our dates, I would have suggested that instead of a pedicure he let me write something on the bottom of his foot with a ballpoint pen to see how much he squirmed and if he could figure out what I was writing. That would have been much more interesting to me.

When Carver put the last coat of polish on my toenails, he happened to glance at his phone and see the time. “I have to go,” he said as he screwed the lid of the topcoat back on. He picked up his gun, his coat and prepared to leave.

“Aren’t you going to undo my handcuffs?”

He blew me a kiss from the open apartment door. “No. I think you can get out of them if you try.”

I screamed that he shouldn’t leave me like that, but he locked the doorknob and closed the door.

Fuming, I sat there stupidly for a few minutes, waiting for the toenail polish to dry. When it was, I pulled out the toe separator and checked out the handcuffs more carefully. They weren’t toys bought from a toyshop, but they weren’t on the same level as the ones Officer Todd wore at his belt. I bet he’d bought them at a love shop and he’d cut the fur muffs off them.

First I tried to squirm out of the cuff. Then I tried to twist the mechanism inside so it would hopefully give way. Neither worked. Annoyed, I tried to reach under my bed. That was where I kept my vandalism supplies and I had a pair of bolt cutters down there. Bending over as far as I could, I still couldn’t reach them.

Angier than I had ever been, I lifted up my whole mattress and kicked it out of my closet. I didn’t have a box spring, so I reached between the slats and pulled out my bolt cutters. I had to work them one side of a link at a time, one-handed, with my feet stuck through the slats and resting on the carpet beneath. If they had been higher quality handcuffs, I wouldn’t have been able to do it.

I was free.

Ripping my apartment apart, I retrieved my phone from under the mattress and called my landlord.

He picked up the phone and I shouted, “I’m having a big problem, Eric!”

He grumbled and then got off his butt.