We're doing Greek tonight because that's what he felt like preparing. Feta cheese, sliced cherry tomatoes, chopped salad greens, and kalamata olives, sprinkled with ladolemono dressing; spanakopitas; chilled dolmathes; moussaka, the sweet tomato sauce used in its preparation leaving an aftertaste of basil and cinnamon; baklava for dessert. Accompanying this is white wine, a dry, crisp Moscofilero from the Peloponnese (according to the label that I read, since I am not a wine expert enough to be able to identify wine by taste alone). He's made everything from scratch except for the phyllo dough used in the spanakopitas and the baklava; he bought the sheets of dough pre-made in the frozen food aisle of the local grocery store. This is his idea of being lazy. The grape leaves came from wild vines that grew by the banks of a local stream. I helped him gather them.

I love it when he cooks.

"I think I might have overcooked a little," he says at last, "but that's all right, it just means there will be leftovers. Here, have some more moussaka. You're staring at it as if it's the Holy Grail. Are you sure you're getting enough to eat at home?"

"Yes," I lie, and go back to attacking my food.

Some time later I feel his eyes watching me and look up from the second helping of baklava I've been nibbling at.

"Yes, Magister?"

"I'm ready for dessert."

"It was very good baklava. Wait, I thought you already had some."

"I wasn't referring to the baklava," he says with a smile. "Come to bed."

I shiver with anticipation.

Brahms' First Symphony plays on the portable CD player as, legs splayed and shackled to the futon frame, I strain underneath Magister. Every time he bites me on the neck, I shudder, and pull at the manacles that pin my wrists together above my head. When he comes up to devour my mouth, his kiss tastes like wine and spice.

We're not doing lessons or magickal work tonight, so I have my voice back.

"Can you please reposition my wrists?" I ask. "I want to be able to hold you."

"Later. I'd like to keep you fully stretched, for the time being."

He gets up from the futon to rummage in the dresser drawer, eventually pulling up a silvery-looking chain with little black things on the ends of it.

"What's that?"

"Something I hadn't got around to trying out on you yet."

He drapes the chain across my chest and starts fiddling with one of the ends of the chain. I feel it slide onto my left nipple; then he tightens it. He proceeds to do the same thing to my right nipple.

"These are, as you can see, adjustable. They're also a relatively innocuous iteration, as far as nipple clamps go. They have to be screwed manually to be tightened. There's a Japanese style, called clover clamps, that start out tight and get increasingly tighter every time the chain is tugged. Those can be quite nasty. There's also a form of clamps that look like a pair of hairpins that drape over the nipples and are adjusted by sliding an ornament up and down their length; those are very pretty, and they look like easy enough jewelry to wear, but they're tighter than they appear."

"Let me guess. You have a pair of those, too."

I catch him smirking. "I have one of everything. Now then. Let's see how you handle these ones."

He pulls gently. It feels odd; I can't tell if it hurts, feels good, or just feels like pressure. I squint down at them.

"Not much of a response. Hmm. I think these could be tightened somewhat."

This time, after he twists the little adjusters, it hurts, making me gasp and wince.

"Ah. You noticed that. I think we'll go with that setting. Other side, then..."

He bends down to resume ravishing my mouth with his. Although he's supported himself on his arms, his bare chest brushes lightly against mine anyway. I cringe. The music picks that precise moment to hit a crescendo, one of many, and bizarrely, I feel the sound vibrate through the chain. It's beautiful. It hurts. It's some of the most painful beauty I've ever heard.

"Well," he says after he surfaces, "that's interesting. Your chain seems to be resonating with a certain note in the music... The look on your face is quite charming. I wonder what you'll look like if I use something else to make the chain vibrate."

This time, when he returns after fishing through the dresser drawer, he has something I recognize and am familiar with. It's vaguely phallic-shaped, made of plastic, and runs on batteries. The high setting is loud enough, and strong enough, to wake the dead. I am told that this is unusual for this type of vibrator, so the vibrator is a curiosity of sorts. When it's inside me at just the right angle, it gets me off within minutes. When it's placed externally, it either tickles me unpleasantly or makes me grimace in pain and shrink away reflexively, depending on the location.

He almost never uses the low setting, since he has other vibrators for that.

I look at him, aghast. I feel myself going bug-eyed. Oh, no. Please, no. That's just evil. Don't do that.

"No? Have I reached a limit?"

I gulp.

"This is the first time I've put clamps on you. Maybe I should save vibration play using the clamps for another night. You seem anxious."

I'm so glad he doesn't put it on the chain. I don't think I could handle that. He's wearing an amused look. Surely that's enough for me to endure, without the additional torment of wildly vibrating clamps. I have yet to get used to his grin. For the most part, I find his presence profoundly comforting, a source of absolute security and peace, even when I am burning up with arousal and need, even when I am trying not to cringe from blows he gives me with his hands or his horsewhip or a cane or some other implement of destruction, but that smile of his is unsettling. Sometimes I wonder if he practices it in front of a mirror to make sure it achieves maximum effect.

The vibrator plunges into me, a hard plastic presence; I cry out, trying to work it in deeper. Its loud hum blends with the sound of the music coming from the CD player.

The chain, and its clamps, still oscillate in time with the music.

Around my gasps, moans, and grunts, I hear him say, "I should warn you, they hurt more coming off than they did getting put on, when your circulation comes back."

The clamps are off. My nipples are giant, throbbing bruises. My nether regions are a giant, throbbing plain of orgasm from his plowing me. My throat is throbbing, because I have been screaming around a rag he stuffed in my mouth to muffle me, when it became obvious that I was going to make enough noise to disturb the neighbors. I so seldom get to scream like that. It feels positively luxurious to scream, now.

The gag is out. I'm done screaming. I think.

"I want to hold you in my arms, now," I rasp. "Could you reposition me? Please?"

"I think I can manage something," he says as he unhooks the manacles from the eyebolt.

I wrap myself around him, and find his mouth and take it in mine. I want to memorize his lips. I want to devour them. I want to keep them on me forever, if this moment can last forever. I want to always taste his wine-and-cinnamon breath. I want to feel the warmth of his skin under my arms forever, the swollen hardness of his cock forever, as I rock my hips under him. I want this now to be forever mine. Even the soreness in my nipples, and between my legs, even that soreness is something I want to keep. I thrust myself against him, struggling, needing another release.

Eventually, he pulls away to undo my ankle restraints one by one.

"Roll over," he says.

Soon I feel his fingers massage the lubricating oil inside me, and then I feel him enter me from behind, slowly and carefully, and we begin to rock back and forth together, and I am on fire, moaning my need into the bed coverings. But I have managed to grab his forearms. I am still holding him.

The light of the setting sun falling on his freshly washed, naked flesh makes him glow golden. His repose is a breathtakingly beautiful thing. He looks like an ancient and forgotten god, the futon mattress we lie on his altar; I have a sudden irrational desire to wind garlands of ivy and grapes around his head and along his body in tribute, to worship him. I reach out my hand and gently stroke his cheek, his hair, tracing the black and silver strands with my fingertips.

He opens his eyes and smiles sleepily at me.

"May I have your wrist for a minute?" I ask.

Silently, he hands out his wrist.

I untie the scarf that I've been wearing around my wrist for weeks and re-wrap it, this time securing it around both our wrists. "This is how I want to sleep. I want to be bound to you. Do you mind?"

He smiles again, kisses my wrist where it is bound to his, and reaches for me with his free arm. I slide up against him as if we could somehow melt together, and listen to his breathing as it becomes slow and heavy.

"I love you," I whisper, surprised at my words, but realizing the absolute truth of them as I utter them. "I love you. I love you..."

Both Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade are extremely controversial now due to their Nazism. However, Ancilla is set in the mid-1990s when it was not common knowledge that Campbell and Eliade had Nazi sympathies (Campbell) or were card-carrying Nazis (Eliade). Even a professional librarian like "Magister" would not have known. It's amazing what is brought to light, thanks to the internet and online social media. I include them on the reading list, but I'm not going to recommend them.